First Degree
I took initiation First Degree Wiccan Witch, few years after I first came upon the movement on the magazine rack in a Hippie store, general goods in a cheap-rent Boston suburb, neighborhood on the bumpy Orange tram line.
Near the store, up the block, poor Girlfriend & I sublet a room with a strange Communist couple with a shoestring band.
That’s where I came upon new free-soul Witchcraft wonderfully smiling on the full-color cover of Green Egg magazine, and in those pages found a liberation proposed.
Us two in that Hippie general store that day for Girlfriend’s springtime shoes, for a beautiful Boston Harbor picnic, me feeling shadow-heroic for her sake, a soul-restoring escape from poor city life to birds and sun and air.
I think it was next quarterly Green Egg issue decided me, autumn issue, summer’s end, Halloween, All Spirits Eve. I remember grabbing it and reading and nodding. Seemed to confirm my first massively gargantuanly favorable impression, a few months before, of this new Pagan thing.
This was a good idea. Where did it come from? From inmost sighs of enthusiastic human hearts. Thinking all I’d strained to learn of human hearts, this surely could do useful work for them.
This whole new concept was deep with knowledge, knowledge of human nature I had struggled toward. And if pursued with courage toward its stated ends, it smells, looks, swaggers and brags just like,
An American subversive revolutionary justice escape attempt with startling chance of success by digging out previously unknown tunnel. For this thing seemed brilliant,
seemed a brilliant hobo bag of brilliant dodges, answering, if pursued with courage,
Answering hopefully a hard Hard Problem… Us being humans living in America’s Dead Soul. Just before, I had struggled years nursing robbed and orphaned human souls thru years as wartime army medic.
So after that, next few years, I’m shopping for next mind-exploding educational experience, after my initial mind-exploding Tarot Instructor certificate. And what seemed next in order of difficulty had to be a mind-exploding Initatrix somewhere !!
And then… Single man sad, saw an ad, don’t remember where, called, arrived unpretentious city-edge house.
There interviewed, cooked food, hammered nails, slept downstairs, cuddle cuddle H. upstairs some, Chants and prayers, incense and candles,
Weeks of discussion and rehearsal.
Then Surprise! Motel beyond the edge of town.
Yes, It was a small inexpensive motel room, windows blanketed because police. And all the furniture of the small day-rent room after dark entered silently from three cars! One of which person’s blindfolded! Person roughly shoved about for considerable time in adjacent woods!
Piled up against the walls! Furniture’s piled against the walls! Impinging all around the cheap rug.
But all of that, all completely hidden from me. Dim shadow realm to my wide-open cloaked eyes, beyond the realm of touch. Until finally, finally, the extravagant black silk scarf blindfold comes off, whisked off, and there the incredible-carnage
motel room and we grin and set to repairs.
As final act at the very end of ceremony, when all of us had returned there from distant parts, and all prayers said, all candle flames pinched, Me unmasked and welcomed to purported family.
Furniture was piled up .. to make a tiny space of floor and rug to, .. with our rehearsed stern determined efforts carefully adapted out of paperback Wicca pattern books, .. available to everyone by mail, or if conveniently located near you, small specialty stores.
That newly opened space become… Somehow an expansive Magic Forest glade,
well stocked with wonders, and sufficient to The task that we were Setting Off Into The Magic Mythic Woods upon…
To make a Witch! A proper Witch!! With my Initiatrix properly a bit insane
but okay and the best available.
A small motel room in a small motel, by a small road in a small town, just outside the city limits of a small city, in New Hampshire, .. One of the numerous small cities of New England USA, .. After the Viet Nam War slightly, .. as was definitely the very early 1980’s, USA.
And to this day I proudly claim I am a Witch made in that glade that late evening,
and in visions revisit there from time to time, Proper Witch, besides Elder, Druid, poet, painter other stuff. But turned Pagan now in old age entirely. That is, grown way more Anarchist than Wiccans averaged back then in that day.
Anarchist enough tho, we were then. To wit.. Besides being a poor mere newly hatched just First Degree Priest, .. according to well regarded Wicca pattern books, .. I had also there in the mythic glade become something else..
One more click on my slightly-mad iniatrix’s slow-moving Lady’s-Done-Initiations Counting Clicker!
Another sprinkled head and kissed lips, kissed breast, four elemental points,
and Great Queen’s star drawn in flame on the clear body, and psychic mind VASTLY enlarged from before. Jung’s Shamanic Break done !! In minutes both opened and grown shut in a woven reality of symbols.
I was become purported family and a click she could openly claim among all our colleagues. This Strong Mad Woman hoping to attain someday, per the most accepted Wicca pattern books, attain the public right to claim 3rd Degree High Priestess rank.
Were we a market, a confidence market? No, it was consensus process in a movement utterly dispersed across a continent, across a wide thickly patrolled landscape.
Her maybe, effectively as if by popular acclaim, if her counter rose way up to high
publicly accepted standard.. She to thereby advance from current mere slightly-demented 2nd Degree High Priestess, to slightly-demented 3rd Degree High Priestess. Universal scourge of political ambition solved! Paranoid grandiloquence, or whatever problem was, anarchistically contained !!
And also, You understand, all of our Wicca rules of order, commonly accepted for what-to-do-now, or the rules most-accepted at the time, these rules were kept by us like this…
We preached to each other that our mutual peace was duty of our sworn and sacred priesthood.
+ End of “First Degree” +
Stone Riley Druid Classroom 
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