The Witch of Portobello. Paulo Coelho
owners will go to bed, the servants will return to their quarters, the door will close, and he’ll be out in the street again, waiting for a taxi or a bus to restore him to the mediocrity of his everyday life.
I’m going back, or, rather, part of me is going back to that world where only what we can see, touch and explain makes sense. I want to get back to the world of speeding tickets, people arguing with bank cashiers, eternal complaints about the weather, to horror films and Formula 1 racing. This is the universe I’ll have to live with for the rest of my days. I’ll get married, have children, and the past will become a distant memory, which will, in the end, make me ask myself: How could I have been so blind? How could I have been so ingenuous?
I also know that, at night, another part of me will remain wandering in space, in contact with things as real as the pack of cigarettes and the glass of gin before me now. My soul will dance with Athena’s soul; I’ll be with her while I sleep; I’ll wake up sweating and go into the kitchen for a glass of water. I’ll understand that in order to combat ghosts you must use weapons that form no part of reality. Then, following the advice of my grandmother, I’ll place an open pair of scissors on my bedside table to snip off the end of the dream.
The next day, I’ll look at the scissors with a touch of regret, but I must adapt to living in the world again or risk going mad.
‘No one can manipulate anyone else. In any relationship, both parties know what they’re doing, even if one of them complains later on that they were used.’
That’s what Athena used to say, but she herself behaved quite differently, because she used and manipulated me with no consideration for my feelings. And given that we’re talking about magic here, this makes the accusation an even more serious one; after all, she was my teacher, charged with passing on the sacred mysteries, with awakening the unknown force we all possess. When we venture into that unfamiliar sea, we trust blindly in those who guide us, believing that they know more than we do.
Well, I can guarantee that they don’t. Not Athena, not Edda, nor any of the people I came to know through them. She told me she was learning through teaching, and although, at first, I refused to believe this, later I came to think that perhaps it was true. I realised it was one of her many ways of getting us to drop our guard and surrender to her charm.
People who are on a spiritual quest don’t think, they simply want results. They want to feel powerful and superior to the anonymous masses. They want to be special. Athena played with other people’s feelings in a quite terrifying way.
I understand that she once felt a profound admiration for St Thérèse of Lisieux. I have no interest in the Catholic faith, but, from what I’ve heard, Thérèse experienced a kind of mystical and physical union with God. Athena mentioned once that she would like to share a similar fate. Well, in that case, she should have joined a convent and devoted her life to prayer or to the service of the poor. That would have been much more useful to the world and far less dangerous than using music and rituals to induce in people a kind of intoxicated state that brought them into contact with both the best and the worst of themselves.
I sought her out when I was looking for some meaning to my life, although I didn’t say as much at our first meeting. I should have realised from the start that Athena wasn’t very interested in that; she wanted to live, dance, make love, travel, to gather people around her in order to demonstrate how wise she was, to show off her gifts, to provoke the neighbours, to make the most of all that is profane in us – although she always tried to give a spiritual gloss to that search.
Whenever we met, whether it was to perform some magical ceremony or to meet for a drink, I was conscious of her power. It was so strong I could almost touch it. Initially, I was fascinated and wanted to be like her. But one day, in a bar, she started talking about the ‘Third Rite’, which has to do with sexuality. She did this in the presence of my boyfriend. Her excuse was that she was teaching me something. Her real objective, in my opinion, was to seduce the man I loved.
And, of course, she succeeded.
It isn’t good to speak ill of people who have passed from this life onto the astral plane. However, Athena won’t have to account to me, but to all those forces which she turned to her own benefit, rather than channelling them for the good of humanity and for her own spiritual enlightenment.
The worst thing is that if it hadn’t been for her compulsive exhibitionism, everything we began together could have worked out really well. Had she behaved more discreetly, we would now be fulfilling the mission with which we were entrusted. But she couldn’t control herself; she thought she was the mistress of the truth, capable of overcoming all barriers merely by using her powers of seduction.
And the result? I was left alone. And I can’t leave the work half-finished – I’ll have to continue to the end, even though sometimes I feel very weak and often dispirited.
I’m not surprised that her life ended as it did: she was always flirting with danger. They say that extroverts are unhappier than introverts, and have to compensate for this by constantly proving to themselves how happy and contented and at ease with life they are. In her case, at least, this is absolutely true.
Athena was conscious of her own charisma, and she made all those who loved her suffer.
Including me.
Deidre O’Neill, 37, doctor, known as Edda
If a man we don’t know phones us up one day and talks a little, makes no suggestions, says nothing special, but nevertheless pays us the kind of attention we rarely receive, we’re quite capable of going to bed with him that same night, feeling relatively in love. That’s what we women are like, and there’s nothing wrong with that – it’s the nature of the female to open herself to love easily.
It was this same love that opened me up to my first encounter with the Mother when I was nineteen. Athena was the same age the first time she went into a trance while dancing. But that’s the only thing we had in common – the age of our initiation.
In every other aspect, we were totally and profoundly different, especially in the way we dealt with other people. As her teacher, I always did my best to help her in her inner search. As her friend – although I’m not sure my feelings of friendship were reciprocated – I tried to alert her to the fact that the world wasn’t ready for the kind of transformations she wanted to provoke. I remember spending a few sleepless nights before deciding to allow her to act with total freedom and follow the demands of her heart.
Her greatest problem was that she was a woman of the twenty-second century living in the twenty-first, and making no secret of the fact either. Did she pay a price? She certainly did. But she would have paid a still higher price if she had repressed her true exuberant self. She would have been bitter and frustrated, always concerned about ‘what other people might think’, always saying ‘I’ll just sort these things out, then I’ll devote myself to my dream’, always complaining ‘that the conditions are never quite right’.
Everyone’s looking for the perfect teacher, but although their teachings might be divine, teachers are all too human, and that’s something people find hard to accept. Don’t confuse the teacher with the lesson, the ritual with the ecstasy, the transmitter of the symbol with the symbol itself. The Tradition is linked to our encounter with the forces of life and not with the people who bring this about. But we are weak: we ask the Mother to send us guides, and all she sends are signs to the road we need to follow.
Pity those who seek for shepherds, instead of longing for freedom! An encounter with the superior energy is open to anyone, but remains far from those who shift responsibility onto others. Our time on this Earth is sacred, and we should celebrate every moment.
The importance of this has been completely