Brida

"Wicca really is an excellent Teacher," he thought again. "She works very fast." Soon all the auras, the energy vibrations that surround each physical body, would be vibrating as one. And then the second part of the ritual could begin.

He looked to left and right and finally located the point of light. He decided to surprise her and approached without a sound.

"Brida," he said.

His Soul Mate turned around.

"She's gone for a walk," a young man said politely.

For a moment that seemed to last forever, the Magus looked at the man standing before him.

"You must be the Magus that Brida has told me so much about," said Lorens. "Join us. She won't be long."

But Brida was already there. She was standing opposite the two men, breathing hard, eyes wide.

From the other side of the fire, the Magus sensed someone watching. He knew that look; it would not be able to see the points of light, because only Soul Mates could recognize each other, but it was a deep and ancient look, one that knew the Tradition of the Moon, and the hearts of men and women.

The Magus turned and faced Wicca. She smiled at him from the other side of the fire--in a fraction of a second she had understood everything.

Brida also had her eyes fixed on the Magus. They were alight with pleasure. He had come.

"I'd like to introduce you to Lorens," she said. The party suddenly seemed like fun, and she no longer needed any explanations.

The Magus was still in that altered state of consciousness. He saw Brida's aura rapidly changing and moving toward the color that Wicca had chosen. She was pleased and happy that he had come, and anything he said or did could so easily ruin her Initiation that night. He must, at all costs, control his feelings.

"Pleased to meet you," he said to Lorens. "How about pouring me a glass of wine?"

Lorens smiled and held out the bottle.

"Welcome to the group," he said. "I'm sure you'll enjoy the party."

Wicca looked away and gave a sigh of relief. Brida had noticed nothing. She was a good student, and Wicca would have been loath to remove her from that night's initiation ceremony because she had failed to take the simplest step of all, by not joining in with the general good cheer.

"And he can take care of himself." The Magus had years of work and discipline behind him. He would be capable of keeping his feelings in check, long enough at least to replace those feelings with something else. She respected his hard work and his stubbornness, and felt slightly afraid of his immense power.

She chatted with a few of the other guests but couldn't quite get over her surprise at what she'd just seen. So that was why he'd paid so much attention to Brida, who was, after all, a witch like any other witch who had spent various incarnations learning the Tradition of the Moon.

Brida was his Soul Mate.

"My feminine intuition clearly isn't working very well." She had imagined everything, except that most obvious of reasons. She consoled herself by thinking that at least the result of all her curiosity had been a positive one: it was the path chosen by God to enable her to rediscover her student.

The Magus spotted someone he knew in the crowd and excused himself for a moment to go and speak to him. Brida was euphoric, enjoying his presence there beside her, but she felt it best to let him leave. Her feminine intuition was telling her that it was best if he and Lorens didn't spend too much time together; they might become friends, and when two men are in love with the same woman, it's better that they hate each other than that they become friends. Because, if that happened, she would end up losing them both.

She looked at the people around the fire, and suddenly she felt like dancing, too. She asked Lorens to join her; he hesitated for a second, but then took courage and said yes. People were still spinning around and clapping, drinking wine, and beating out a rhythm on the empty wine bottles with sticks and keys. Whenever she danced past the Magus, he smiled and raised his glass to her. This was one of the best nights of her life.

Wicca joined the circle of dancers, where everyone was feeling relaxed and happy. The guests, who had been rather anxious about what might happen and worried about what they might see, had now entered fully into the spirit of the night. Spring had arrived, and they needed to celebrate, to fill their souls with faith in future sunlit days, and forget as quickly as possible the gray evenings and lonely nights spent at home.

The clapping grew louder, and now it was Wicca setting the rhythm. It was an insistent, regular rhythm. Everyone's eyes were fixed on the fire. No one was cold; it was as if summer had arrived already. The people around the fire began to take off their sweaters.

"Let's sing!" said Wicca. She sang a simple two-verse song several times, and soon everyone was singing with her. A few people recognized it as a witches' mantra where what mattered was the sound of the words, not the meaning. It was the sound of union with the Gifts; and those endowed with magic vision--like the Magus and the other Teachers present--could see the filaments of light joining various people.

Lorens eventually grew bored with the dancing and went to join the "musicians." Others moved away from the fire, some because they were tired and others because Wicca had asked them to help keep the rhythm going. Only the Initiates noticed what was happening, that the party was beginning to enter sacred territory. Very soon, the only people dancing around the fire were the women from the Tradition of the Moon and the witches who were to be initiated that night.

Even Wicca's male students stopped dancing; the initiation ritual for the men was different and took place on a different date. What was turning and turning in the astral plane immediately above the fire was female energy, the energy of transformation. So it had been since time immemorial.

Brida began to feel very hot. It couldn't be the wine, because she'd drunk very little. It was probably the flames from the fire. She had a great desire to take off her blouse, but she felt embarrassed, an embarrassment that gradually lost all meaning as she clapped and sang that simple song and danced around the fire. Her eyes were now fixed on the flames, and the world seemed less and less important; it was a feeling very similar to the one she'd experienced when the tarot cards had revealed themselves to her for the first time.

"I'm going into a trance," she thought. "But so what? This party's fun!'