Mystical Manipulator...

I got out of a high control, pagan-druidic group after 21 years involvement.  

The group, at times called ‘Circle’ or ‘The Sisterhood’, focused on the eight festivals of the Celtic year. from Samhain to Beltaine, Equinox and Solstices and the cross quarter festivals of Lammas and Imbolc. We met every Monday evening to light our altars and honour the goddess, celebrated every full and dark moon by fasting and holding ceremonies late into the night in fields, woodland or back yards.

I travelled extensively with the group, to Egypt, the USA, Jordan, Denmark, wherever the leader, who dubbed herself ‘Lady’, decided the goddess wanted us to go.

When I joined I was a broke, 21 year old student in the middle of my art degree. My best friend had started doing secretive, ceremonial work with this mysterious group and was evasive about what was involved when I tried to question her. Why wasn’t she eating today? Who were these new friends she seemed so enthralled by?

My questions were met with vagaries and an encouragement just to come along and meet Lady. Apparently, this Lady had seen a photograph of me and liked my energy. I was flattered. Of course I went along.

The first time I met Lady she both love bombed and devalued me in a single stroke. Here was someone who could see my potential - and oh! What incredible potential it was! - and all the things standing in the way of it; namely me.

She invoked and channelled the goddess at my first ever Monday meeting, which was a high honour apparently given that I hadn’t made a commitment to join Circle yet.

In that candle lit room in the dead of night, with the incense filling the air, I became convinced that Lady really could invoke this Celtic goddess. Her eyes became fathomless deep and her face lit up, achingly familiar and infinitely sweet. It made me feel like there was something that I only half remembered but had longed for my whole life. I was hooked. I wanted to bathe in that light of her recognition forever.

I paid Lady thousands of pounds to travel with her, maxing out my overdraft, using up my student loans and borrowing from my parents. I took a year out of uni in order to travel with Lady who told me one day as we raced over sand dunes in the Sinai that I would be the best invoker out of everyone in the group, if only i would stop being so lazy and commit more fully to the work.

For years after finally finishing my degree, the very same degree I was heavily criticised for returning to complete, I worked in temp jobs, unable to save money or, ironically, spend it on myself. I was always travelling, always expected to attend, always in my overdraft and always out of my comfort zone.

I missed out on family gatherings, an uncles funeral, friends parties, nights out and all the riotous, messy growth that goes on in your early 20s. The foundations I laid down in the sisterhood disrupted everything else -  I couldn’t pursue a career or maintain friendships outside of circle, the demands of the group and the need for secrecy were such that a wall grew around me, dissociating and isolating me from my life. A life I both longed for and felt ashamed of wanting.

I decided eventually to do a teaching qualification because I knew that supply teachers earned more in a day than most temporary office workers could. Ostensibly, my reasoning was that this would allow me to work less, for more money and be able to travel more with Lady. But deep down I had had enough of a temporary life lived out of a bag. I wanted a home, I wanted deep roots and connections that weren’t prescribed by the doctrines of the group. Most of all I wanted my life for me.

But even though I left the life of constant travel and high drama, I continued to do the work for another 14 years. As I settled down and started a family I traveled less and did the ceremonial work with others who were in a similar boat. Still committed to every Monday, every moon, every festival in a spiral of lessening effort and increasing guilt.

I felt divided, with one foot out the door and a heart still longing for connection. I felt like the outsider everywhere, at baby groups, in the staffroom, among friends who couldn’t know if, or why I was fasting or what I did with this covert group of women.

I felt resentful and exhausted and guilty all the time. guilty for feeling resentful, guilty if I did something half-assed, guilty because I’d seen other women have to put their families second and I didn’t want to do that.

I realised, finally, that the constant rumination; the back and forth of wanting to leave but never feeling able, was like a split that was depleting my resources all the more.

I felt like an outsider in a group that made me an outsider in my own life and, in spite of the assertion that we were sisters, connected on a web of interdependence and responsibility, when I really needed someone, I was alone.

And so, one night in early April, I sat on my bed as the full moon rose…and did nothing.

I did nothing to celebrate or honour her. I didn’t put on my cape, I didn’t light incense or chant to clear the space, I didn’t make a special infusion of herbs to pour into a chalice and gaze at her reflected image searching for answers.

Instead I sat tight and still, my arms wrapped around my knees, my shoulders tensed up to my ears. I sat still and let the feelings of shame and guilt encroach from under the bed like that phantom hand we all feared as children. And I let it be.

I kept repeating ‘I’m leaving, I’m leaving’ quietly to myself until I could finally settle to sleep.

And when I woke in the morning it was done.

I didn’t know at the time that this was what integrity looked like - knowing something was wrong and following through finally - it just felt bleak and lonely. I felt afraid that something terrible would befall me or my family. In many ways I was still afraid of that childish phantom hand for a long time after.

At the beginning it all seemed kind of cut and dry. I saw a counsellor, trying to determine for myself if this had been a cult. I spoke to other ex members, many of whom I hadn’t spoken to in years. I tried joining local groups of volunteers in order to connect with the people around me. Some of these things were too soon - a robotic reflex rather than anything organic or real, but I genuinely didn’t know what do do with myself.

I’d find myself sobbing on my bedroom floor, or having a panic attack at work and not know who to reach out to, how to explain what was going on. I didn’t have the words, I didn’t know what to say when my friend, who was still in the group at the time asked ‘Well, if you were so unhappy why didn’t you leave sooner?’

But there are so many reasons we stay. Leaving takes the kind of courage that doesn’t feel like courage at all. Instead, it feels like whatever we have been indoctrinated to believe we will be if we don’t do as we are told.

I felt frightened and lonely and scared of what my ‘sisters’ would think of me, but I wanted me more. I wanted to give myself the grace of not pushing against myself all the time and listen. Who was that person that didn’t want to do this and why didn’t she have the right to be heard?
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It’s been almost a year since I left. I have days when I’m so full of regret that I didn’t leave sooner that I can almost taste it. Why didn’t I seize my life with both hands and refuse to be told what to do like I wanted to all those times, for so many years?

But I realised the other day that ruminating like this is another way of being stuck.

My power is here.

It’s in this moment that I choose to tell my story.

It is forgiving myself enough to be able to make space for all the things I want to do with my life now - whether that’s getting up at 5am to get in a freezing cold sea or lying slack jawed on the sofa, watching Netflix.

Someone pointed out to me that one of the ultimate acts of defiance in any cult is doing nothing - not doing acts of service, attending meetings, working all hours, trying to leap that endlessly raised bar of expectation. Our value is infinite and without measure.

Most of all, it is ours and ours alone.

~Siobhan