{Excerpt #7, journal of a sacred whore.}

The convent where I grew up in Sussex was of the Discalced Carmelite Order number 11 [1]. In addition to raising me with the vital minerals and vitamins of curiosity, feminism, and laughter, the Sisters passed on an underground esoteric teaching, when they deemed it was time for my illumination. Within the OCDXI exists a secret historical lineage only allowed to be transmitted orally so as to secure and obscure the location of the written gospels that give witness to this history. I’ll not disgrace the sanctity of the Order by giving pen to any part of those teachings, not here nor anywhere. I’ll simply name that they pointed me rightly in the direction by which I became initiate of Magdalene. You’ll not find accurate material published on any of these, for none was ever put to papyrus nor pixel and none shall be.

What I can inlay into ink & paper, however, is relevant to the healing process of my current clientelle. These teachings are shared amongst obscure sects of practicing Carmelites, held sacred in the ethics of the OCD. While largely unpublicized and therefore widely misunderstood, they are not secreted in the manner of those gospels guarded by OCDXI, so they remain sacrosanct when discussed plainly. And they were the first given to me by the Sisters who raised me, offering the utmost compassion to weave into the world of my early childhood.

I speak of the one widely known as the Virgin Mother.

One interesting thing about the Virgin Birth narrative is that it focuses so completely on paternal parentage. Almost as if the foundations of patriarchy were already set, already heavily invested in writing the story, no?

As such, they were highly obsessed with naming the paternal parentage of said savior, as if the Mother’s blood which flowed within were of no consequence. The practice of naming paternity as the deciding factor of lineage, that was of a patriarchal order concerned with passing property and titles down to the male heirs. Noted: at the time, it was legal practice to stone a woman who conceived out of wedlock. Execution was punishment for rape, for adultery, for incest, all treated the same. Recognize: the violence was to protect the paternal lineage and therefore property rights & titles passed down in a patriarchal political order. Indeed. And that order had in its conditioning a belief system in which a woman was “possessed” by the father, as if taken, occupied, conquered, by the seed of the masculine participant in procreation [2]. That whole nonsense, utterly engulfed in rape culture, was an idea of woman as receptacle, in a terror borne of rape used as a weapon of warfare.

That Jesus had the blood of the Mother running in his veins, this makes for a very different cosmology and a very different narrative of what the fuck went down there.

If you will set aside, for a just moment, the question of consensual conception (I know, you’re surprised I’m willing to do this, but stay with me here:) then you still have the ongoing consent required for Mary to actually carry that fetus to term. And I don’t just mean rational, intellectual agreement, or egoic willingness. I am specifically pointing out the embodied consciousness required to incubate a creature in the Womb [3]. It requires the physical molecules of the ever-renewing Body of Nature to continually re-affirm and resource the growing fetus. It could change its Mind at any moment. And, in this case, this version of Consent has gone highly underestimated for a long time: the value of participation of the pregnant Mother. Fed directly by what is Earth.

So it follows that the patriarchal narrative deeply discounted the fact that this Child was made as equally of its Mother as it was of its Father. You know, like all creatures born of conception, immaculate or otherwise. For all the lofty, highbrow, cerebral deification of the paternity of that One, we can recognize the simple fact, even in the mythos of the neochristian bible, that the Virgin Mother carried that child to term. Which means she fed it with her Body. Her Breath. Her Choice.

Jesus is as much a result of “immaculate” insemination as he is of a woman’s holy earthen right to choose. [4]

And so, if we’re willing to undo the spell of patriarchy, we are also willing to see Mary’s gifts as they actually were, rather than how that marketing campaign has painted them. Which is to say, her choices made possible an experience of the Divine in human form. But not because she was overtaken by some holy coercion. Because she fucking chose to have that child. As she could have legitimately, and divinely, chosen not to.

And. Her choice was as much about self-preservation as it was about devotion. Both of those, to be sure, are expressions of Love. Read: her willingness to carry that child to term was an act of courage & resolve. A testament to her own faith, as well as to the support systems she had in place. Midwives, sisters, friends, communities of women practicing red-tent level sacred rites: they gave her support, and it honored the Choice she made.

And. Unlike the modern re-interpretations: that Mother, as earthen embodied Love, retained sovereignty over her sexual Nature. Her fertility. Her experience of pregnancy and birth. Her lineage.

So. In the devoted, compassionate tutelage of a circle of Sisters of the OCDXI, it was made clear to me by the time I came of age: your sexuality, humanborn soul, is about more than procreation. It is an expression of divinity incarnate, a temple where you get to practice the holysacred rite of Choice.

True to their devotion, the Sisters taught me honesty from day one. And they were truthful with me about my own origins; they told me everything they knew about my own Mother and her Choices.

My Mother came to the convent five months pregnant, multiply traumatized by an unsuccessful abortion, an unwanted pregnancy, and the rape that implanted the almost-aborted, i.e. “me.” The rapist was never found—some frat party drunks used my mother as a receptacle for their disowned Shame. She told the Sisters very little about what happened, and the little she told them was full of holes. She had been to a party. She was walking home late. There were three males behind her. They whacked her head. Broken bottles. No one else around. She went to the police. But this was the 70s. They didn’t help at all. They gave her some bandages for the welt on her head, told her she was drunk. She told the Sisters that she wound up hating those officers even more than the rapists, whom she never saw again but whom she saw conjured into every male face.

The Sisters told me my Mother had always been an extremely intelligent, gentle, adventuresome, and dreamy young lady. She had been coming to study with the Carmelites steadily for a few years, having finally ventured out beyond the traditions set by her strict widower father, an Italian immigrant with whom she loyally attended daily Mass, even after she left for college. As a teenager, she was always bringing interesting little bird-like questions to the Sisters (“What happened to the book of Mary? And Martha?” “Who translated Leviticus and why has no one added a cultural disclaimer?” “Do you know where Jesus went during the years that he’s missing from the Bible?” “If wasting seed is a sin, should I stop eating sunflower seeds? I really like them. What if I plant just as many sunflowers as I eat?”) Her irrepressible curiosity and honest nature were growing her into an intelligent, contemplative adult. And then—poof!—one day everything changed.

This was true for my mother, this irrevocable change, and it has been so for many, many, many human beings before and since.

My mother killed herself in the convent just three nights into my life.

Much as I didn’t understand and don’t still, I understand this.

I grew up wanting to kill those rapists whose souls the Sisters prayed for, kill them all, kill every last one; the whole convent recognized this and raised me according to their principles of mercy, hope, unconditional forgiveness, and everlasting love. The way I saw it as a child, they had total faith, complete and utter unwavering faith, and it hadn’t saved my mother: not from rape nor from death. In the belief system they honored, my mother’s free spirit was imprisoned in purgatory while the rapists were free to roam the Earth in a hell of their own making, free to share that hell with any of us at any time. I failed to see the eschatological justice in this.

Faith had not yet provided a world in which these things didn’t happen; this the Sisters acknowledged. The closest thing they could do was raise its child and raise me right. They were clear on one thing: the convent was given this child so that they could contribute to the healing of suffering. Jesus was One Child, they said. And so was I. So they let me be who I was, let me talk the confessional right foggy with homicidal ideation, let me hold the reality of horrible injustice and distressing imbalance, let me find my way into myself from the ugly turmoil of my origins.

Looking back, I suppose they had their way. I haven’t killed a single rapist, to my knowledge. But I have killed what makes them rapists. I have killed rape. I’ve gotten my hands round it, looked it in its flinching eye, and wrung its neck, many times over. Smiling. And I will kill it over and over, I will hold its funeral services over and over, I will celebrate its passing over and over and over. The world that is rising out of post-patriarchal-paralysis will not know of this thing we’ve come to call “rape.” The new era will have no such word, conceive of no such action. The future is made of Consent, which is created in the Liberation of every single element of the living body of Earth.

Everything we do to another, we do to ourselves. Those who do not hate themselves do not commit acts of hatred to another.

Simple, it seems. But twisted, and treacherous. Human beings have become insane with our writhing and flailing and dodging the Truth of our Presence. We wail to know the Divine but we won’t answer the door when It calls on us, won’t adore Its etchings on the canvass of our skin, won’t take the time to paint Its portrait. Neurotic flock we are, scrambling in self-righteous circles when we’ve got God in all directions, God in the lungs and gills, God in the hot and cold, God in the waking and the dreaming.

So, being of and with the world’s era, I grew up with many of the same hidden challenges, the same typical drawbacks conditioned in colonized infrastructure. Even as I began to garner the blessing of knowing where I was going and what I was creating, I still lacked insight about the next stepping stone. As happens quite often, I knew where I wanted to go; what I didn’t yet know was how to get there. By the time that I left for University, I set about getting to the next step by asking a lot of questions upon the step where I stood. Who exactly are all these rapists and what are they actually thinking? What do they eat, where do they shit, what do their faces look like when they’re sleeping? What is the state of the world in which we live if there are people who get their rocks off specifically on taking something that is not given? What creates this malfunction, and what could I do to destroy it?

What happens when the thermostat of the culture is set to almost a full hundred degrees, the same temperature as our holysacred bodies, but the rules those bodies are asked to uphold include keeping butter from melting and keeping the sheets from staining? What happens when our lofty intellectual and spiritual pursuits leave no space and give no mention to the Sacred Animal Nature of Sexuality? What happens when the outright repression of sexual motivations is so well-explained as to be made superior to that “defeat,” that “giving in to the flesh” that is called a sin by pope and politician alike? What if that “sin” is then sensationalized into a dissociative ego trip that always misses the mark no matter how many times the bull’s eye is whacked? What if the body of consciousness is over-analyzed and under-loved, over-sexed and under-touched, over-easy and under-done? What happens then?

People begin to confuse “want” and “need,” going crazy with an internal battle and an impossible barricade. And we lose touch with ourselves. And we give up. And we go on killing sprees, whether inside or outside of our sovereign bodies.

My mother was a casualty of the sex war. I will not be. My mother was a casualty of sexual violence, and she was not the only one. As a living being sharing the blood of my mother and the blood of a rapist, I choose to end this war. In the name of the Mother’s holy right to Choose, I choose this.

Genetic marvel stepping beyond the given roles of Attacker and Victim, I am mutating the gene pool. At my confessional, the conversation does not end with Wrong and Wronged. This religion is ancient, resurrected, and open for business. Separation is not employed here as a tool of penitence, avoidance, or convenience. The Godflesh of Holy Animalia shall not be revoked of its sacred sovereignty, its right to unveil Divinity through every breathing molecule of existence.

Whatever has come to pass, we are made of the Earth saving itself. And I am made to adore the Earth.

I am an initiate of OCDXI, a Priestess of Magdalene, and a Sacred Whore of Babylawn. The tears of my pilgrims unsalt the Earth of a new era.

I choose it because I can.

This war ends with me.

**

1. OCDXI. That’s funny. Really. Fucking. Funny. Only the most dedicated esoteric symbolism hacks are gonna get that fucking joke. That makes it funnier.
2. Notable poetry from the science of genetics: that worldview basically comes down to putting value only on Y chromosomes… which is funny, because everyone has the X. Everyone. Some have more than one. So the Old World Order was built upon specifically assigning value to that which only some of us have, rather than that which is in all of us. Interesting. Special. Transparent as fuck.
3. Or Egg.
4. I support Mary’s right to choose.