Beginnings

I was born in the Bay Area just as the sixties were getting going. My mother was nineteen, my father twenty-nine, and everywhere you looked people were dressed in bright colors, barefoot, giving away flowers, and cooing about love and peace. My mother says you could walk down the street and crazy things would happen. Part of the New Age was new spirituality, and my father, with five planets in Aquarius, was made for the sixties: yoga, astrology, reincarnation, karma. That was the religion of my childhood. My first memory of spiritual training was at the age of three, about 1966, when my parents took me to yoga class. I was the only person in the class who could do some of the more recondite poses. Following the yogi's lead, I pretzeled myself into some crazy asana in my purple swimsuit, and all of the adults laughed indulgently.

My father trained with the American Federation of Astrologers and, when we moved to Texas, appeared on the Hudson and Harrigan morning radio talk show. I later looked up the AFA's basic exam (eight hours long!), and would be hard pressed to pass it, though I can cast a basic chart. Daddy was a genuinely talented astrologer. I remember him drawing up charts on napkins for whoever asked. He could draw a circle with twelve even partitions in a flash. He would check the ephemeris, calculate a bit by hand, and put each planet onto the chart with its position beneath. Slowly the chart would emerge, and as it emerged, he would consider. When the chart was finally complete, he would sit and discourse at length about the person that napkin revealed, down to minutiae. The money was an afterthought. More than anything, my father was a prophet of the New Age. Though a Mexican, he was a gentleman, dignified, college-educated, and a war veteran. People trusted him with those funny sigils, and when the things he said were spot on, and his predictions came true, his business grew rapidly.

Every astrologer I know who casts charts for others will eventually face the issue of how to deliver bad news. People with terminal illnesses would call him and ask when they were going to die. My father was such a softie that he couldn't face it. My uncle Fred had built him a lovely office in the living area of our well-appointed home, where he saw clients. My mother, in the kitchen, could see the faces of those who came to consult the Great Man, and quickly divined that it wouldn't take much for the astrologer to get the women into bed. She turned against it. When his father died, and our world exploded, he let it slip away. In later years he confided as a scientist, he wasn't completely sure how astrology worked. I was aghast—him, a doubter? He was my pillar. Everything he said came true. I didn't care how it worked—I just knew it did. I knew it with my childhood's faith. But I respected his scruples.

I still think that casting a chart by hand is the only way to go if you want to access the energies of a chart. I suspect that it was the lack of computer programs and calculators that gave him the fast, intuitive grasp of character that really good astrologers possess. It was the back-and-forth between math and mysticism that made the energies click into place in his brain. This is what primed his mind for the flash when the map of an incarnation flashed into view, when the comprehension settled over his mind like manna from heaven, and he could really guide people.

When my abuelo died, my father quit his job at Lockheed Martin where he wrote the code that put men on the moon, and we moved to the Mexican neighborhood, a poor and dangerous place where no one had ever heard of astrology or karma. My father became his father, I concluded later. We do crazy things when our parents die. When my father died, for a year I studied to become a physician, perhaps feeling that I could go back in time and save him, or at least prevent the stupid medical mistake that shortened his already dwindling time. I relish the knowledge of science that I gained in that time, but it was an act of grief that shortly wore itself out. My father took five years to recover, and in the end it was my mother kicking him in the backside that brought him back to himself.

The barrio was the place I first called out to God. I made up a prayer that I wish I remembered and recited it every night before bed, something about God being there and asking him for safety and good things. This was my first God, the substitute for a faltering family and the response to a dangerous environment. In retrospect, I can't regret the five years we spent in the barrio. It put me into “fight or flight” on several occasions before the age of ten, priming my nervous system for art and magick, as well as a tendency toward anxiety that I have to guard against. It also made me into a radical conservative. Civility was haphazard. Bad things happened. Being good didn't protect you from evil—neither did being bad. If only adult males controlled themselves, I concluded, the world would be a better place. It was no surprise that I spontaneously joined the Mormon Church at the age of fourteen. I wanted some law and order.

My mother was not very vocal about her spirituality in my youth. I remember her as a lovely, practical woman not taken in by talk of Shangri-la, whose guiding principle in child-rearing was “whatever makes you happy” in a down-to-earth, simple fairness kind of way. She was a good person, and discreet in the face of many trials. There were things about my father I never heard until we went drinking the night of his funeral and it all came out. Turns out he wasn't the saint I didn't think he was.

My abuela was a straight-up Mexican Catholic. My abuelo, the story goes, once tried ceremonial magick. A cold hand squeezed his heart, he released the spirit, and never tried again. He didn't talk about what spirit he summoned or what he was trying to accomplish. It was probably something Solomonic—those books circulated widely in the early decades of the twentieth century. I doubt there was any sort of theurgy involved, which would have prepared and protected him. The story as it was told in the family had nothing to do with God and the Devil, but with a power that he could not control. Early on in my occult career, I painted up a set of Enochian tablets and set them up with the Tablet of Union in the center. Once. They were so powerful that I didn't even speak the words to call in the Watchtowers. I sprayed over them with opaque paint, tossed them in the dumpster, and threw myself into the study of the Tree of Life. Like my abuelo, I knew when I was outclassed. Unlike him, I had a better set of instructional materials in the form of John Michael Greer's tomes on Cabalistic Golden Dawn. It was these volumes—now sadly out of print--that raised me from a pup, and after fifteen years and over ten thousand hours of diligent practice, enabled me to take up my sword and summon spirits. My abuelo would be proud. To this day, I fancy he is one of my most enthusiastic ancestral supporters.

My maternal grandfather had no particular “spirituality” that he ever expressed verbally. His god was in his hands; with a good set of tools, he was a high priest of the physical plane. My grandmother was a Protestant who hated churches, which she considered so full of gossips and busybodies that they got in the way of God. My grandmother agreed with Emily Dickinson: “Some keep the Sabbath going to church;/ I keep it staying at home.”

Puberty is a time when the body prompts us to do big things, constructive or destructive. I valued my brainpower too much to do anything to compromise it, so drugs—and even a lot of early alcohol—were not for me. Crime is mostly a male thing. I didn't want sex until after high school. I knew it only takes once, and the thought of some fumbling boy wrecking my future just incensed me. And the lack of privacy. Shtupping in the car? Ick. And my parents, particularly my father, in on the business by virtue of it going on “under their roof.” No. I wanted a mature sex life: birth control pills, staying the night, enjoying my orgasms. In the 1970s, a girl could still say “no” to sex and not be a complete outcast. In fact, it was the girls who said “yes” too soon who were looked down on, even though a lot of them did. Other big things to do with that energy are Culture and God. Luckily the supporting resources were available in the 1970s. Public schools still had art as part of the curriculum, and churches were not as polarized and focused on culture wars as they are today. So I delayed sex until college, and did God and art instead. I'm a girl--I didn't miss much.