The Televisionary Oracle (21 page)

I
’ve been lying, beauty and truth fans. I’ve been riffing. What I described last time was my “menarche” from the standpoint of my smotheringly loving mothers alone.

But it wasn’t real as far as I was concerned. By all the precepts of the Pomegranate Grail itself, it was a hypocritical fraud.

The more I thought about it, the more enraged I became. The so-called guardians of the ancient mystery school had committed a profane crime against their so-called avatar. They had desecrated the sacred meaning of my rite of passage into womanhood.

Let me explain.

From the time I was a young child, the figure of Persephone was at the heart of my spiritual training. She was like Jehovah for the Jews, Ahura-Mazda for the Zoroastrians. The Goddess, I was told, expresses Herself in countless names and forms, but the stories of Persephone were most important for this age and my mission. (Mary Magdalen was Her word made flesh, Her Jesus or Buddha, but that’s another story.)

It wasn’t until I was almost eight years old, while sitting in class on a spring day, that Vimala first shared the shocking news about my idol: Most of the people in the outside world knew only one tale about Persephone, and it was a terrible lie! According to this abomination, my Queen was a naive young girl picking narcissus flowers in a meadow when a big ugly brute of a demon-god named Pluto kidnapped Her, dragged Her down to his hellish kingdom through a hole in the ground, and made Her his prisoner-wife.

I burst into tears on the spot. I felt what a devout Catholic girl might feel if a foul tramp spit on her silver crucifix. The story wasn’t true, I knew, but the fact that everyone believed it was devastating.

Vimala’s intention in introducing me to this sacrilege was pedagogical. It was the formal beginning of her teachings about the loathsome sins of the fathers. The myths that I’d been raised on, she told me once I regained my composure, were the authentic and original ones. Persephone had reigned as the Queen of the Underworld eons before the patriarchy concocted the idiotic Pluto and superimposed his violent myth over the beautiful truth.

Not that She had been Queen since time began. When the world was still young—so said the teachings of the Pomegranate Grail—the realm of Tartarus had no ruler. The souls of the dead dwelt there listlessly, in ignorance and without guidance, waiting to be reborn. Meanwhile, in the brightly lit world above, Persephone was a maiden like me, steadily growing in wisdom as She mastered the skills She would need to serve as Queen. “When you’re ready to seek the wilder, stranger path,” Her mother Demeter told Her, “the shades will rejoice. You will be their Redeemer.”

As Her body grew and changed shape, Her longing for mystery deepened, as did Her courage to claim the power that awaited Her. And when Her drive to know the depths matched Her power to navigate them, She menstruated for the first time. Awakened both to fertility and death, She began Her quest, beginning Her descent at a shrine inside a mountain near the city of Clitor, where the River Styx, the menstrual blood of Mother Earth, originates.

Now here’s the key: She went willingly into the underworld, and under Her own power.
She abducted Herself
. She was not a resistant pawn dragged below to serve the agenda of a controlling monster.

Unlike myself. Unlike my own experience of first menstruation.

With hair-raising similarities to the hapless Persephone of the patriarchal story, I had been kidnapped. Taken against my will. Forced to do the bidding and obey the timing of a tyrant with intricate plans for my destiny. Was it any consolation that my ravager wasn’t a Big Bad Daddy but my sweet generous mommies?

No. It was worse. It was a violation which ensured that any escape I made, any retribution I exacted, would arouse tremendous guilt in
me. Nevertheless, I began plotting my strategy within days of the morning my blood first flowed.

My initial task was to remind myself of the lessons the still small voice had taught me when I first decided to prevent menstruation those many years ago. What lay behind my impulse to rebel was not merely juvenile pettiness. The stakes were much higher. I could not become the avatar unless I did it in my own way. And the ritual by which Vimala and company forcibly induced my first menstruation had reasserted their right and power to make me their puppet.

One menstrual period later, in early February, I formulated a plan to reclaim my independence and save my soul; that is to say, to
kidnap myself
; to slip into the underworld from a position of strength and under my own power.

I was in the menstrual hut, officially known as Persephone’s Sanctuary, which is in the building closest to my home. It was just my second visit to the sacred precinct. Until my blood first flowed a month before, the place had been off-limits, as it was to all who had never menstruated—even the avatar.

It was after 11
P.M
. I was in the large square adytum which occupies the heart of the top floor. Most of the other menstruators or postmenopausal crones were either meditating in the soundproofed chambers that line the west wall or already engaged in their dream incubation quests on the floor below. I had a strong psychic impression about the nature of the quest that Cecily was on. She was reaching out in the astral realms to her friend Priscilla, who lay in a coma in an Oakland hospital room. She was trying to coax Priscilla either to depart to the land of death or return to the living, but not stay stuck in between.

Also creeping into the corner of my awareness was the sound of a djembe drum rhythmically beating in the music room. Tuning in to the intention behind it, I sensed Calley. I fantasized or telepathically perceived (at that time, I didn’t always know the difference) that she had launched herself on a shamanic journey not just through space but time. I felt her seeking out her Iroquois ancestors, hoping to sit with them as they practiced the dream-guessing rite, whose aim was to guess the dreamer’s
ondinnonk
—the secret wish of the soul revealed in a dream. The murmur of a strange and beautiful word circulated at
the periphery of my inner hearing:
qaumanEq
. “What does that mean?” I asked Calley with my thoughts. “Shamanlight of the brain,” said a voice that sounded like hers.

I forcibly turned my attention away from Calley and Cecily and all the other souls filling up the Menstrual Temple with their passionate night-time pilgrimages. It was good to know that my solitude here in the adytum was in no danger of being interrupted.

I reclined in a black leather chair near the central shrine. The stars shone clearly through the skylight above me. The sound in my headphones was a cassette called “Primordial Picnic,” by a local Santa Cruz band, Midnight Sex Picnic. Talk about music to menstruate by. Sly, vulnerable, unpredictable, melodic, the band was looping me through emotions that I’d never felt before but nonetheless recognized as if I were returning to a home I’d forgotten I had.

When the song “Stronger Than Love” came on, I had a sobbing meltdown. I knew the singer meant it to be a message to the demanding woman he loved, but my still small voice was singing it to my seven mothers.

Every day of my life for years I had stretched and twisted and pushed myself to become the perfect master my mothers yearned for me to be. At an age when most children were learning to tie their shoes, I was doing four hours of exercises a week to train my perceptions to be sharp and my memory photographic. When other kids were trying to decide whether Santa Claus was real or not, I was using meditation to build a sacred chamber in my brain that would literally house the Goddess Persephone and give me the power to commune with the fourth dimension on command. Every assignment my mothers had given me, I struggled to fulfill. Every time they criticized me for being less loving or discerning than I could have been, I worked to improve. I knew—I had been told over and over again—that it was all for a good cause, that I was being forged into a vessel of redemption for the entire human race. But why then did I feel more loyal and devoted to my mothers than to the human race?

In return for my service to their all-consuming cause, I had only asked my mothers for three things in all the years I was growing up. First, that I be allowed to have friends from outside the community. This they ultimately agreed to, though not without much dispute. Second, that I be allowed to form my own opinions about books written by “patriarchal criminals” before being bombarded with the Pomegranate Grail’s official position on them. To this they eventually acceded as well.

My third request was hopeless, I feared, from the start. I wanted to hide or expunge the hideous brown birthmark in the shape of a bull skull that adorned the middle of my forehead. My mothers turned me down every time I brought it up, sometimes with a curt “never,” on other occasions allowing for a discussion that made me hope it would one day be negotiable.

In the early years, I didn’t know anything about how it might be possible; I just wanted it gone. But eventually I came to understand that there were people known as plastic surgeons who specialized in fixing problems exactly like mine.

When I was fourteen, I made an appointment with a dermatologist in Santa Cruz and hitchhiked there without informing my moms. I came back armed with information about how easy it would be to fulfill my desire.

Once she got over her horror at my sneaky behavior, Vimala said what she had always said: “Your mark is a blessing. It’s the seal of an awesome ancient prophecy. It’s the living proof that you are the avatar.”

“But it’s ugly,” I said with uncharacteristic simplicity. “I hate it.”

“We will not disturb the magic. We will honor it as a sign of your covenant with the Goddess. Your life’s sacred journey requires you to honor your gift. The case is closed.”

But there on my second sojourn in the menstrual hut, as I rewound the tape by Midnight Sex Picnic and listened again to “Stronger Than Love,” the case opened back up again. The news arrived from a place so deep in me it felt as if I were touching the center of the Earth. It was delivered by a triumphant, bellowing, laughing version of my still small voice. “Scouring away your birthmark,” it announced, “is the radical act of separation that will serve as your self-abduction.”

Shock mixed with vindication. I had no doubt that I had just been
given a blessing of the first order—a difficult, radical blessing, perhaps, that would be hurtful to people I loved. But a blessing nonetheless. Responding with a beam of gratitude in the direction of my still small voice, I promised to obey. By whatever means necessary, I vowed to obliterate my accursed stain as soon as I possibly could.

Close by, as familiar as my breath, I felt the shimmering endorsement of Rumbler. “Yes,” he vibrated excitedly but humbly, as if not wanting to upstage my still small voice. “Yes yes yes yes yes yes.”

I set to work two days later. My first task was to get a new, improved birth certificate. I had always looked older than my actual age, and I could pass for nineteen even then, a few months short of my seventeenth birthday. But I couldn’t take the chance that my mature appearance would be sufficient to convince a plastic surgeon I’d reached the age of consent.

On a drizzly Valentine’s Day, I drove to see my buddy Lena, a hippie punk chick who lived in downtown Santa Cruz. As a non-member of the Pomegranate Grail community, she was not high on the list of friends my mothers approved of, but on the other hand they didn’t actively discourage me from seeing her.

Lena had a catalogue from an anarchist supply house in Washington state. It was full of helpful products and tips about how to avoid or cheat the government, declare yourself empress of an uninhabited island, or hunt small game with your bare hands after the apocalypse. There were also a few pages of contacts that promised assistance in acquiring a fake ID.

Lena didn’t press me about why I was in the market for an earlier birthdate. She was content to accept my generic statement that it would be a handy thing to have. She agreed to let me use her address when I sent away for the stuff, and when I drove back to her pad two weeks later, a pile of pamphlets and books awaited me. I chose two from this group and mailed out my applications and fees. Within a couple of weeks I had received two extremely realistic birth certificates, one from Oklahoma and one from South Dakota, each with a birthdate fifteen months prior to my actual birthdate. I’d completed step number one successfully.

The second element of my plan was to decide what distant city I
would run away to. There was no way I could pull it off while remaining at the Sanctuary. And staying in Santa Cruz would make it too easy for my mothers to track me down.

I narrowed the choice down to three places: Santa Monica to the south and Santa Rosa and Marin County to the north. I’d been to all three on trips with Vimala and some of the other mothers, and had a good feeling about each of them.