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The Secret Lives of Crones is probably my favorite book of any I’ve written. It’s a big, two-part
novel about big issues—aging and death, the way our society treats its
senior citizens, women’s friendships, the powers of love, the rebirth of
the Goddess and Her ancient religion, the theory and practice of magic.
It’s about the untidy mysteries of human life.
The novel as a whole consists of a prologue and twenty-six braided stories (chapters). This is twenty-seven chapters in all, 27 being a magic number (3 x 3 x 3). Except for the prologue and chapter 25, the action is set in Anaheim, California, in 1989-90 and takes place over about a year and a half. Anaheim is a real city, and many of the incidents, places, and people are drawn from real life. Among the characters in The Secret Lives of Crones are old women and men, young women and men, dead people, at least two immortals, a talking cat, a dragon, and mythological powers gone mad in the modern world. Because the current manuscript is nearly 750 pages long, my literary agent has divided the novel into Book 1 and Book 2 to make it more accessible to acquisitions editors.
The prologue is set in Neolithic Old Europe. Because the shaman and the elders of a small town near the Danube River and the Black Sea are troubled but don’t know why, they ask for a “showing.” Their totem, the heron, gives them a Shakespearean dumb show in which their black Mother Goddess gives birth to a son who destroys her. This is so shocking that the shaman blinds herself. While the shaman is walking the starry paths (visiting inner worlds), the elders send messengers out to find out what is happening. One group comes back to report that horsemen from the Asian steppes have destroyed a major city and are heading west. To save her people’s lives, the shaman sends them all away. Here’s the end of the prologue.
The first light is just touching the land when the people gather. They have packed everything they can carry. Everything else, they have buried. Or simply abandoned. The keepers of the oral histories hold their talking sticks and stores of incised bones, the craftspeople carry great bundles of supplies they know they will require … somewhere else. The hunters and farmers bring their implements with them. Everyone brings sacred objects and household goods. Even the oldest ones and the youngest children carry a clay horse, a whistle, a bird, a set of loom weights, as much as arms and backs can bear.
Six or seven of the younger men have insisted that they will stand and do what they can to defend the town, though no one can imagine what defense might entail. If they are successful, they will send word by the winged ones for the people to come home. Young and old, with bulging packs and bundles and staffs to support them, the people stand and look around, not comprehending, but trusting their shaman and their elders.
“My people.” She stands several paces in front of the milling group. “These men who ride out of their high and desolate places will destroy everything they touch. They may build, but they know nothing of renewal.
She bows her head. “We depart, and we shall never return, not as long as our mountains stand and our river flows. From this day on, we will forever be separated from each other.” Though her people are weeping, she holds herself impassive. “Your elders will lead you. And this boy—he knows more than he realizes, and he will grow into holiness with the land. He will grow in other lands.” She hands the green-eyed boy her staff of office, then steps out of the reach of the hands reaching for her.
“No, no, no. I’m too old. Too lame to lead you anywhere. Too blind to see the ways you must take. I must make my own way into unknown places.”
She takes another small step away from her people, then turns. “Travel quickly. Go into the darkest, wildest places, into the brambles and thorns. They will shelter and protect you. Follow the secret paths and, when you must, create new ones.
“And always remember who you are. Who you have been. When you begin to forget—tell the old stories. Make up new stories to help you recall who you have been since time before time. Settle in the wild places no one else wants, and never become tame. And when you come to the new cities, even when you help to build new cities, disguise and protect yourselves. Hide and remember.
“Hear a new truth. The Great Mother Herself will be forced to hide from those who are coming. She will seem to disappear while they grow strong, but someday She will return. Although our children and their children, perhaps to the thousandth generation, must live in the new world that has forgotten Her, they must never forget. She will return.”
The shaman faces her people for the last time. “Now—go!”
And so the people depart. They turn their backs on the rising sun and on their old town, and though many of them look back through tears and some of them look forward through tears, they begin their long journey.
Finally, small and naked, with only her inner sight and a large, shadowy bird above her to show her the new ways, the shaman walks slowly into the forest.
We will meet this shaman again after she has walked across all of Europe.
Most of the rest of the novel is set in Anaheim in the Reagan-Bush era (1989-90). Just as the invaders galloped off the Russian steppes and destroyed the cities of Old Europe, now is the neighborhood where Herta Melos and Emma Clare Culbertson and their friends live being invaded by gangs. Herta was born in a tiny village in Romania; the grandmothers there sent her whole generation away just before the Nazi invasion. Emma Clare's ancestors lived in the Scottish highlands, where at least one was burned for witchcraft, and another settled in the Ozarks. Her grandmother, Mammy Annis, was the witchwoman/wisewoman of the Ozark town from which Emma Clare and her daughter, Julia, ran away. In the first chapter, after Herta and her daughter, Milly, are menaced on the street by skinheads, Milly persuades the old women to do some magic to protect the neighborhood. Here’s the end of their ritual of protection.
“Dancing only in the grace of our minds,” said Emma Clare’s daughter, Julia, “and rising only in the strength of our souls, we cast our magic circle. We are sisters linked with the sisters of ancient days and ways. Touched by all who may keep the old ways, we are linked by belief and by life as old as our precious blue planet.”
From the four directions now came the voices of invocation.
"Watchers in the dawn, we summon you to our work. From the fiery places of the east, lend us your powers of destruction and purification. Quicken our magic tonight."
Janie [Milly's preteen daughter] felt, or thought she could see, an emerging spark in one corner of the room, a tiny thread of rising energy.
"Watchers at noon, we summon you to our work. From the watery places of the south, lend us your courage and the flow of change. Quicken our magic tonight."
Another rising, another stirring of energy coming into the circle.
"Watchers at dusk, we summon you to our work. From the windy places of the west, lend us your wisdom and knowledge. Quicken our magic tonight."
A thrusting of subliminal movement from another corner.
"Watchers at midnight, we summon you to our work. From the silent places of the north, lend us your strength of purpose and manifestation. Quicken our magic tonight."
Now the four spoke in chorus, their voices growing with the force that was moving around the circle.
"Watchers above, we summon you to our work. From the starry paths upon which you dance, lend us your far-seeing wisdom. Quicken our magic tonight.
"Watchers below, we summon you to our work. From the dark and hidden worlds that wait beneath us, lend us your powers of fertility and rebirth. Quicken our magic tonight."
Evohe! The air was tingling now and a palpable energy was circling around the room. Time is present. Power is here.
As the invocations echoed back from beyond the walls of Herta’s ordinary living room, four of the women lit the indigo candles, their flames dancing and redoubling in the gathering energies. Herta folded her hands at her heart and nodded her head in an ancient gesture of greeting.
“We call on the power of the Old Trinity,” said Emma Clare from across the circle. “The real one. The Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. We invoke the powers of innocence, of experience, and of wisdom. Girls, let’s chant ’er up now!”
And softly and slowly, with gradually increasing volume, the thirteen began their chant, wordless at first, simple humming and age-old sounds. Then drawn-out vowels were added, and some women added Names, and others added Words and Calls in languages little used in modern times. Accompanied by Julia and Margaretta on doumbeks and Brooke on a frame drum, the women chanted, and soon the energies they were drawing up began to coalesce in their circle. The force of the chant grew, the sounds whirling, snaking, rushing in a shimmering vortex in the center of the modest living room.
As the chanting and drumming grew to their howling, screeching climax, Herta stood up. She reached out with both hands as it to grasp the power, and she focused it on the covered basket on the teacart before her.
The chant peaked, an orgasmic release of energy skirring around the circle, an incandescent elemental energy—
There! Herta caught the almost visible power in her hands and flung it into the basket with all the force she and the circle now embodied.
“It is done.”
Silence now.
Breathing heavily, some of them still swaying, the women sat for many moments with their eyes closed. Herta sat with closed eyes, too, feeling the energy return to ground, feeling it flow back to its source.
“Girls,” she said at last, “we have empowered our guardian.”
The women looked at her, then at the teacart. They were about to be shown what Herta had drawn from her mother’s second old book, the book they had opened only a few times before. The last time—twenty years earlier, in the days of an undeclared war across the Pacific—they had created a different kind of protection. They had built a shield that would bring their sons and daughters home from Vietnam, safe and whole. One who had come home was Milly’s husband.
“As you all know, under the full moon in Cancer, I prepared a small nest in a box. I built it upon agate and jasper for strength and protection, upon petrified wood for transformation and great age, upon obsidian for grounded fire. I lined this small nest with the molted skin of a snake for rebirth, with bears’ claws and sharks’ teeth for ferocity, with owls’ feathers for swift and silent flight. I prepared this nest for three fresh eggs, laid on the day of the dark moon. One egg I painted white, one red, the third, black. Now we will see which egg will hatch. And what hatches. We have birthed our avenger.”
She gestured toward the teacart. “Listen.”
They heard pecking and scratching, the splintering of an eggshell, the familiar sounds of hatching. And then unfamiliar sounds … a harsh bark, a cough, a rough hiss.
Herta lifted the large oval basket that covered the nest. “Look.”
There it lay, a box lined with gold cloth that cradled a bed of stones and a nest lined with snakeskin and claws and teeth and feathers. Two of the eggs lay intact, unfertilized, unhatched. But the black shell lay in pieces.
And sitting on the edge of the nest was a small, green, four-footed animal, its pale golden wings still plastered damply against its scaly sides. Its golden eyes were barely open.
“Our guardian. A creature as old as the heavens, as fierce as the fiery powers of earth.”
“Draco,” said Cairo. “The dragon. Symbol in the eldest times of the pole star.”
“The dragon,” said Brooke, “is older than humankind. And contrary to the teachings of men, it is not an evil creature. It is not an adversary that must be slain. The dragon is the all-powerful guardian of wisdom. Here is our far-seeing, fierce-flying avenger.”
The dragon, already grown to the size of a housecat, was stretching its wings and walking around on the teacart. It hissed and practiced its roar.
“And this partic’lar dragon,” said Emma Clare, “has absorbed our anger and our calls for justice. We fed it with our rage and nursed it with our hunger for order. Now it wants ta get about its work.”
“Milly, Brooke,” said Herta, “open the window. It’s time for our guardian to leave its nest.”
The two younger women pulled the curtains aside, raised the shade, and opened the window that overlooked the troubled street. At a nod from Herta, the dragon experimentally flapped its wings and remembered how to fly. It rose and circled the room three times above the women’s heads, squawking, growing larger and more aggressive before their eyes. Then, with a final roar, it flew neatly out the window. They watched it disappear into the clouds. After a few minutes, Brooke closed the window and lowered the shade, and Milly let the curtains fall back into place.
“We won’t see our dragon again,” said Herta. “It will grow to its full legendary size and do its work with a single-minded fury. We can be confident that this dragon will guard our neighborhood.”
“And,” said Julia, “it will be a hound of hell for those who create a hell on earth. Anaheim will be unaware of its presence, at least most people will, though some may suspect that there’s something just a little bit strange going on here.”
“Well, hell,” growled Bertha, “that ain’t unusual. Not when you live within a coupla miles of Disneyland.”
“But these gangs, these skinheads, all these troublemakers,” said Sophie, “they’ll know its power. They’ll see its shadow. They’ll feel its claws.”
Maude seemed to be gazing at the broken black shell in the nest. “Oh,” she said softly, “we’ll see this dragon again. Yes, in thunder and lightning, it’ll come to protect us from a threat more terrible than these skinhead gangs. I see wreckage. And beginnings growing out of endings.”
In Book 2, the circle of crones is threatened by three apparently dotty old women from Minneapolis, Hazel, Olive, and Myrtle Wintergreen. Except they’re not dotty old women. They’re the Norns, and they’ve gone mad in the modern world. They’ve come to Anaheim either to join or take over the circle … or maybe just to nudge the fates of the women along their proper paths. There is a weather war, Norns against crones, and it's worse than a hurricane. The novel opened with a diaspora; as the old song goes, “Will the circle be unbroken”?
I’m planning to come back into this site from time to time and change the excerpts from this book. There’s a very strange chapter where one of the crones and their familiar, a talking cat named Madame Blavatsky (yes, she really is the reincarnation of the the author of The Secret Doctrine), destroy a psychic fair. People who’ve read it tell me it’s hilarious. In another chapter, one of the women does menopause, and it's not pretty. Another chapter is the love story of two people in their eighties (with a sex scene), another, the love of an intellectual college professor and the Green Man.
I sure hope a publisher accepts this book. I'd love to be able to say--right now--BUY THIS BOOK.