Asking about the baby priestess

Last spring I wrote you about the time before we were married, when Wife (then a Dedicant in her coven) promised to Cerridwen that "I will bear a daughter and raise her to be a priestess for you." It didn't work out, although at least once Wife tried to bear this daughter and bore Son 2 instead. Because of the circumstances around Son 2's conception and birth, which seemed to suggest some divine intervention, we both wondered whether that let Wife off the hook as far as her promise was concerned.

Well, this afternoon I was looking through an old notebook of mine, and I found the answer.

From time to time I wrote down notes after a Full Moon ceremony, partly to record what worked or didn't work but mostly to record whatever conversation I had with the Goddess in Aspect. I was really inconsistent about this, and sometimes the discussion really wasn't anything worth immortalizing. But I have a few of these jotted down in my notebook from years past. And one of those conversations is on exactly this topic.

The date was February 27, 2002. Son 1 was five years old. Son 2 was three. The first post of this blog was still almost six years in the future. Wife had a number of topics that were troubling her, and she gave me a list of five questions to ask Cerridwen after I had invoked her. In the end I didn't get to all five questions; but one of the most important ones was that Wife had been seeing visions and dreams of a little girl, and wanted to know why. She felt like she was being told to bear the girl, but she also believed already that it would be medically impossible. So what was going on?

I'll skip the parts that don't pertain, and cut straight to the point where I ask the Lady (who is at that point using Wife's body and speaking with her lips and her voice) about the little girl. Whenever I did this, I always referred to Wife in the third person as "your priestess," to reinforce the distinction that Wife and the Lady were two separate entities.

Hosea: Your priestess keeps seeing visions of a little girl. Who is she and why is she important?

Lady: She promised her to me long ago.

Hosea: She offered to fulfill that promise a while ago, and she bore Son 2—I mean, T–, as he is known among the Wise.*

Lady: He was my choice.

Hosea: Does he have a role to play with you?

Lady: He knows.**

Hosea: But can your priestess bear a healthy child at this point, with her sickness?

Lady: I can make it happen.

Hosea: Why is the girl important?

Lady: She is the Heiress.

Hosea: Of what?

Lady: Of many generations.

Hosea: And after her?

Lady: [shakes her head]

Hosea: What do you mean?

Lady: Do not look so far ahead.

At this point we had been talking for several minutes, and Wife usually found it hard to maintain the trance state for that long. Also, very verbal Aspects generally faded quickly. (That said, there were a few over the years that were exceptionally chatty. These were mostly the ones I wrote down.) So I figured it was time to wrap up. I skipped a couple of Wife's less important questions and asked one of a more general nature.

Hosea: Is there anything else you want me or your priestess to know?

Lady: She must bear the girl. It is her destiny.

After the ceremony was over, Wife and I discussed it for a bit. Wife said the Lady's words scared her: she was afraid she might bear a healthy girl and then die. I argued that this would leave me to teach the girl, and I was in no way qualified to train her to be a Wiccan priestess. So if the gods were going to pull off one medical miracle by letting the pregnancy succeed, surely they could arrange a second one by keeping Wife alive afterwards. (In retrospect Wife is still alive now, but she became progressively an ever-worse mother. So a third child would have made things even more difficult.) Wife went on to describe the child as a girl with one foot in this plane of existence and the other foot permanently in another plane: no different from any other little girl on a day-to-day basis, except that sometimes she'd do things that looked completely crazy.

In any event, I guess this dialogue with the Lady settles the question whether Son 2 let Wife off the hook of her promise. No. Not at all.

And the little girl was never born.*** So I guess that leaves us with John Michael Greer's remarks about what to expect, in case you make a promise to a god and then don't carry it out:

You'll keep it. If not in this lifetime, then in another, and the grief will just keep on piling up until you do so. No, the smoking crater of the person's life is no coincidence. That's what happens when you break a promise to a god.

Oh dear.

__________

* "As he is known among the Wise" was the standard formula used in Wife's coven to identify someone's magical name. On reflection, I figure maybe it's not a good idea to list Son 2's actual magical name, even though he never uses it these days and probably thinks the whole business is foolishness. 

** I'm not sure what She meant by this. 

*** Note that even if Wife had gotten pregnant at that time—and her doctors were telling her that pregnancy could well mean a stroke—there is in principle no guarantee that the child would be a girl. Wife thought our second child would be a girl, and was wrong.