Heya, Bre, a Blessed Beltane to you, my love. 

Not much to report from this end of the cycle.  Then again, you always could see through a lie.  Dead giveaway, you know when I show up here with a bottle of your favorite blush, I have something on my mind.  Gerard Bertrand Rose, a year aged, as you like it.  I can still hear you say, “A rose wine has to be consumed young, unlike that barbaric merlot stuff you like so much.”  Salty woman, I miss you.

            Be glad you’re where you’re at since I’m not sure how the country’s going to turn out.  Lately, it’s been talks of impeachments, tariffs, ecological decay, romaine lettuce recalls and the re-emergence of every stinking prejudice hiding under the rocks since before you went to join the Goddess.  Two steps forward while you were alive, a colossal bipartisan regression since.  Try to teach these self-righteous clowns the concept of the Tree of Life, they’d only invent a chainsaw thicker and faster to cut it down with.

            I hope you’ll understand why I brought paper cups today.  I know, barbaric.  I meant to bring the chalices and the athames, Bre, you know me.  It’s Beltane, and well, doing this ritual used to be glorious when we would raise our energies together.  Dipping a dagger tip into a vessel of mead to simulate the consummation we used to share on this day is mere allegory.  Our sex magick was Rosicrucianism at its most potent.  By the gods, this loneliness is sometimes more than I can bear, Bre.  We still had an easy thirty years, forty maybe.

You know why I’m here, babe.

Do as thou will, the precept goes in the Wiccan Rede, finished by…

Yes, I know damn well what you’re going to say.  Aleister Crowley was probably edited quicker than any of us who came after his time on the earth.

But harm none.

Yet what if the harm is being done in reverse, Bre?  What if a purge-minded moral majority seeks to reach for something beyond censure?  What if our followers have gone down for our faith, not so much as martyrs, but as condemned deemed guilty of biblical heresy?  

What if we’re living a modern-day Salem or Valais, Trier, Pendle, Salzburg, Dauphiné or Eichstätt?  What if an entire underground united under Kramer’s witch phobia doctrine of the Malleus Maleficarum existed, seeking a reform of religious fundamentalism so brutal they make the Jihadists appear sympathetic?  

What if I told you Bre, I not only found such a thing existed, but was irrefutably responsible for your death and many of our brothers and sisters under the God and Goddess?  The Thelemic Cosmology would stand in need of reformation itself under a Gnostic Mass more interested in self-preservation than self-realization.  

A new season of carnage is being reaped by a collective Witchfinder General of an ambiguous millennium.  Racism perseveres.  Hatred is, as ever, in fashion.  Genocide exists today under shelled out mortar by hands as single-mindedly evil as Matthew Hopkins in the 1640s.  You don’t have to be a witch to be persecuted nowadays.  It just so happens to be a witch lately buys you a quicker ticket out of this degraded world.

Nuit and Hadit look upon me as a defiler or a vindicator, but I have broken the cardinal law.  I have harmed, and I harmed many.

Yet true will, my love, is righting the wrongs cast against you and your loved ones, when you’ve lived your life in silent defiance of the conventional, obeying a scruple set by sharing only with like minds in the interest of concord.  When you harm none while doing “what ye will,” and the harm comes to you?  Where is the right, much less the morality in that?

Let the Goddess judge the crusted blood beneath my fingernails as she will.  Let her shun me or encompass me for my acts of vengeance.  I have tainted our scriptures.  I have turned our values inside out.  I have employed dark designs I’d sworn against before you and before the Lord and Lady on my Dedication.  

I only know how much I loved you, Bre, and how much I loved our coven. Finding all of you roped to the trees in our wooded sanctum and your charred remains capturing your agonized death throes left their scars on me.  I’m still mortified the bastards had the stomachs to tether you.  In my sleep, I have heard the outlying cries of outrage from our ancestors similarly burned, butchered and hung.  For it to happen again three centuries later, no lemon candle of comfort, no cider of content can assuage what’s been happening to our kind.  

We want to practice amongst our own in peace.  We cast no judgments towards others lest we be judged ourselves, and yet…

Try to see things from my position, Bre.  Please understand why I’ve been giving beloved Sekhmet a rare-cooked ribeye with a dry jalapeno rub once a week as an offering and I opened the Danvers 2018 pinot grigio you and I were going to drink on our 20^th anniversary.  Sekhmet prefers a deep red, but my offering sufficed, Blessed Be.  My intent seemed to win her over, though I did have to promise her some malbec the other day.  Pairs better with a bloody steak, I get that.

Sekhmet is as offended as I am there’s been no real effort to bring these neo-Inquisitors to justice.  Land of the free, home of the brave, equality for those under the cross.  Woe be to you under the pentacle.

 I’ve exchanged energies with the goddess on the astral.  Ptah wasn’t even pissed.  Sekhmet revealed her true self outside of her lioness avatar and…well, you know.  You were always right, Bre.  When the Lord and Lady want to couple with us mortals, it’s not to satiate the same base impulses we have as humans.  

I thought of you the entire time, regardless, never fear.  Sekhmet hardly took offense since I was able to give her tribute.   My first “tribute” in more than a year since I just haven’t wanted to.  Not since you died.

Sekhmet’s reciprocation means you can finally know peace.  

True peace, my love, because it’s done.

It’s finally done.

I got the ones who did it, even if they were mere cogs in a grander hate machine growing hardier by the day.  The tolerance we used to know in this country, regardless of race, religion or sexuality, you and I both used to marvel at it, even if it was hardly perfect.  Unbridled acceptance was never a full norm and doubtful ever will be.  Yet who in any of our worlds with our unspoken treaties could know it was all a mask waiting to be ripped off by one or two outspoken crusaders?  

This is now the world we know, Bre, and I pray every night if we are to come back, we come through Yggdrasil to find Ladon granting us passage to truly be free and rid of the proverbial apple thieves who would destroy our genesis.  May Gaia, along with Isis, find it in their glory to unite us accordingly once again, despite the violence I have wrought.   

You know, Nephthys was hanging around as well during my last visualization with Sekhmet, so I split my last oatmeal stout for her silent counsel.  Her mere presence is one of many reminders Egypt hasn’t abandoned me.  Our patroness of hops seemed pleased to be acknowledged, coming to me in vision when I called upon Isis before Sekhmet.  Poor Nephthys is the forgotten one of our pantheons.  Set’s doing, no doubt.

The mother goddess was apparently busy even on a micro full moon night.  I figure Khonsu was likewise detained.  Remember how we used to call upon him during an elliptic orbit supermoon for spell work and grouse to one another and inside our respective books of shadows when our attempts at high magick fell flat?  

I have erred, Bre, trying to rectify that delicate balance between Maleficium and Beneficium.  Like divine Sekhmet herself, embracing that dichotomy which both separates and celebrates unyielding decimator from sacred healer.  Like I deserve to have such presumption.  All I know is when she’d returned to cat form after our union, Sekhmet tackled me gently and licked my face all around, as a mater would grooming her cub.  The great warrior prepared me for this.

She was all I could think of, though it was all for you, Bre, along with Erik, Susannah, Elijah, Mandy and Luellen, when I confronted the brutes in their element.  Knife in hand, sweat in palm, the tart, acidic taste of bile gorging inside my throat.  Fear masquerading as righteousness, ordained by the ethereal.  I turned into an animal-man hybrid howling with each plunge I took, their screams outdoing my own.  I could only hope the zealots suffered greater than you, though I doubt it.  Only the comforting appearance of Anpu, you know, Anubis, assured me I was more heathen than outright monster.  

You always lobbied for Hathor and Mafdet aside from Maat more than Sekhmet.  You’ll be happy to know I was holding Maat’s representative ostrich feather you gave me for our eighth anniversary in meditation.  A good thing, too, as horrid visions of Osiris’ maimed and carved body flung from all directions with wispy vapor trails like Tenebrae.  Nephthys morphed into Isis in my vision and back again, as she no doubt did in that fateful ruse to mate with Osiris.  I saw her holding their infant child of infidelity who became Lord of the dead.  When morphing into his adult jackal form next to his mother, I remember asking Anpu, as friends will, how he feels about his place in the grand scheme of divinity.

You know we can’t hear them speak outright, but I’m confident I heard Anpu whisper “The whole thing is beyond us all at this point. My father is my father.  My mother is my mother.  I am he who I am meant to be.”

Last night, however, when the deed was done, I think Anpu shook his head in disappointment at me.  On repeat, like he was the father, and I was the son who’d not only done wrong, I’d betrayed him.  With blood-stained hands, arms and cheeks, I prayed to Anpu to withhold the weighing of heart against plume and to Thoth to stay his recording scrawl, since I can say with all confidence, I will meet them very soon.  

Once again, I can’t be certain, but I believe my dearest connection to the gods warned my continued thirst for vengeance would only cost me an inevitable date with Ammit the Devourer.  

In other words, I am to lay down the sword and find solace in righting the immediate wrong.  Like I should dare balk at the wisdom of a god.  Hell, I will go Anpu one step further and trust in his and Thoth’s compassion.

Here, darling, let me open the wine, since it’s a twist cap instead of cork.  I can hear you nattering at me right now, asking why I left the damn corkscrew at home.  It doesn’t really matter, does it?  I mean, not now, right?  No use dwelling on semantics when I can get the job done with my own hands, like they did in a VFW hall around the hilt of a knife.  The only blasphemy came from my slaughtering the pitiless murderers amid prayer to their own sovereign.

No, my love, I opened the bottle before coming here to our place of sacrosanctity, so let us toast to a sweet and satiating revenge.  Plus, the acceptance of finality, a holy if sometimes painful road meeting its due end. 

I burned sandalwood for Sekhmet this morning just to show her I was in earnest about my commitment to her.  She, and her panther sister bade me their thanks for taking care of our cats, Perla and Arya.  Without words, I just knew.  They will know the comfort and incense of a new home long before they too go to see Bast, Anpu before her.  I have seen to it.  Another witchy family, though it took our babies such a long time getting used to you being gone.  Now they’ll have to experience loss once again.     

Today is so hard, Bre.  It’s not just the union of our flesh on Beltane and Mabon I loved so much; it was our shared spirit of renewal and growth.  We scried the wonders brought by King Djinn and his fire salamanders, much better at it than either of us ruminating with a crystal ball.  Had we the divination to see the events which took you from this life, Bre, I would’ve sought Sekhmet’s aid a long time ago.

 Summer solstice isn’t far away, and it’s been quite the rainy season since the last equinox.  I think of making love to you when we were still in college to The Cure’s “Prayers for Rain” or the Sisters of Mercy’s “Flood.”  Whenever I play The Cure anymore, it’s always the Pornography album, and you of all people know what mood that gloomy, arcane album puts me in.  Though Sekhmet’s let me know she’s keener, aesthetically, with the tremolo manipulations on My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless.  

It was tough enough getting through Samhain alone this year.  You’ll have no idea, especially if you rejoin the natural cycle ahead of me, what it feels like to place your spouse amongst the honored dead, turning off the porch light and the living room lamps but leaving the bedroom window open on Halloween.  You saw me crying during Samhain, no doubt.  I drew little solace from drawing The Sorcerer card in my own solitary oracle that night.  I’m afraid of what Crowley’s tarot has to say to me now.

I will ride a thousand Duats at Ra’s side, to see if I ever spot you. Assuming Anpu and Thoth understand my final gesture in this life.  Atonement.  Riddance, perhaps.  

I will do as I will in this final toast together, Bre.  Yours is symbolic, mine comes from a poisoned well of botulinum.

I harm no one but my own self now and I hope the passing of sand’s time leads me to the ka of the Nile.  Hail, Sekhmet, daughter of Ra.  Hail, Anpu, you are more brother than deity to me.  Hail, all the old gods of the desert, for I hope to be delivered to you through the reeds of the sekhet-aaru, Blessed Be.

Osiris, I commend myself to you and hope a more permissive world exists for Breanna and I to frolic and worship as freethinkers and idealists once again.

[Ray Van Horn, Jr. is a veteran journalist and the author of Revolution Calling and Coming of Rage, released through Raw Earth Ink.  Ray spent 16 years covering music and film for outlets such as Blabbermouth, AMP, Pit, Dee Snider’s House of Hair, Music Dish, DVD Review, Horror News.net, Fangoria Musick, Metal Maniacs, Noisecreep, Unrestrained, Impose, Caustic Truths, Pitriff and many others.  Ray contributed essays to Neil Daniels’ music biographies on Iron Maiden and ZZ Top.  Ray’s blog, “The Metal Minute” won Metal Hammer magazine’s “Best Personal Blog” award.  Ray also wrote NHL game analysis for The Hockey Nut and other sports articles for Kid Shtick.  He was a beat reporter and photographer for The Emmitsburg Dispatch and The Northern News.   He was host of the forum “Comic Books” at ReadWave and the 1999 winner of Quantum Muse’s fiction contest.  Ray wrote serialized superhero fiction for Cyber Age Adventures from 1999 to 2001.  His fiction and essays have appeared at Akashic Books, Atomic Flyswatter, The Rubbertop Review, Story Bytes and New Noise, plus the anthologies Axes of Evil and Axes of Evil II.  Ray was recently interviewed at and a guest contributor for Horror Tree.]