Brida

"And the Tradition of the Sun placed in the world, for everyone to see, the sign that someone is their Soul Mate: a particular light in the eye."

"I've seen lots of different kinds of light in lots of people's eyes," Brida said. "Today, for example, I saw your eyes shining. That's what everyone looks for."

"She's forgotten her prayer," thought the Magus. "She thinks she's different from everyone else. She's incapable of recognizing what God is generous enough to show her."

"I don't understand eyes," she insisted. "Tell me instead how people discover their Soul Mate through the Tradition of the Moon."

The Magus turned to her, his eyes cold and expressionless.

"You're sad," she said, "and you're sad because I'm still incapable of learning through the simple things. What you don't understand is that people suffer, they search and search for love, not knowing that they're fulfilling the divine mission of finding their Soul Mate. You forget--because you're a wise man and don't think about what it's like for ordinary people--that I carry millennia of disappointment within me, and I can no longer learn certain things through the simple things of life."

The Magus remained impassive.

"A point of light," he said. "A point of light above the left shoulder of your Soul Mate. That is how it is in the Tradition of the Moon."

"I have to leave," she said, hoping that he would ask her to stay. She liked being there. He had answered her question.

The Magus, however, got up and accompanied her to the door.

"I'm going to learn everything that you know," she said. "I'm going to discover how to see that point of light."

The Magus waited until Brida had gone down the stairs. There was a bus to Dublin in the next half hour, so there was no need for him to worry about her. Then he went out into the garden and performed the ritual he performed every night. He was used to doing it, but sometimes he found it hard to achieve the necessary concentration. Tonight he was particularly distracted.

When the ritual was over, he sat down on the doorstep and looked up at the sky. He thought about Brida. He could see her on the bus, with the point of light above her left shoulder and which, because she was his Soul Mate, only he could see. He thought how eager she must be to conclude a search that had started the day she was born. He thought how cold and distant she had been when they arrived at his house, and that this was a good sign. It meant she was confused about her own feelings. She was defending herself from something she couldn't understand.

He thought, too, somewhat fearfully, that she was in love.

"Everyone finds their Soul Mate, Brida," he said out loud to the plants in his garden, but deep down, he sensed that he, too, d

espite all his years in the Tradition, still needed to reinforce his faith, and that he was really talking to himself.

"At some point in our lives, we all meet our Soul Mate and recognize him or her," he went on. "If I were not a Magus and couldn't see the point of light above your left shoulder, it would take a little longer for me to accept you, but you would fight for me, and one day I would see the special light in your eyes. However, the fact is I am a Magus, and it's up to me to fight for you, so that all my knowledge is transformed into wisdom."

He sat for a long time contemplating the night and thinking about Brida traveling back to Dublin on the bus. It was colder than usual. Summer would soon be over.

"There are no risks in Love, as you'll find out for yourself. People have been searching for and finding each other for thousands of years."

Suddenly, he realized that he might be wrong. There was always a risk, a single risk: that one person might meet with more than one Soul Mate in the same incarnation, as had happened millennia before.

Winter and Spring

Over the next two months, Wicca initiated Brida into the first mysteries of witchcraft. According to her, women could learn these things more quickly than men, because each month they experienced in their own bodies the complete cycle of nature: birth, life, and death, the "Cycle of the Moon" as she called it.

Brida had to buy a new notebook and record in it any psychical experiences she'd had since her first meeting with Wicca. The notebook always had to be kept up-to-date and must bear on its cover a five-pointed star, which associated everything written in it with the Tradition of the Moon. Wicca told her that all witches owned such a book, known as a Book of Shadows, in homage to their sisters who had died during the four hundred years that the witch hunt lasted.

"Why do I need to do all this?"

"We have to awaken the Gift. Without it, you will know only the Minor Mysteries. The Gift is your way of serving the world."

Brida had to reserve one relatively unused corner of her house for a kind of miniature oratory in which a candle should be kept burning day and night. The candle, according to the Tradition of the Moon, was the symbol of the four elements and contained within itself the earth of the wick, the water of the paraffin, the fire that burned, and the air that allowed the fire to burn. The candle was also important as a way of reminding her that she had a mission to fulfill and that she was engaged on that mission. Only the candle should be visible; everything else should be hidden away on a shelf or in a drawer. From the Middle Ages on, the Tradition of the Moon had demanded that witches surround their activities with absolute secrecy, for there were several prophecies warning that Darkness would return at the end of the millennium.

Whenever Brida came home and saw the candle flame, she felt a strange, almost sacred responsibility.

Wicca told her that she must always pay attention to the sound of the world. "You can hear it wherever you are," she said. "It's a noise that never stops, which is there on mountaintops, in cities, in the sky, and at the bottom of the ocean. This noise--which is like a vibration--is the Soul of the World transforming itself and traveling toward the light. Any witch must be keenly aware of this, because she is an important part of that journey."

Wicca also explained that the Ancients spoke to our world through symbols. Even if no one was listening, even if the language of symbols had been forgotten by almost everyone, the Ancients never ceased talking.

"Are they beings like us?" Brida asked one day.