The Early Days – Sheta

Alanora has inspired me by telling her story, and I realized I’ve never told the beginnings of my own story with Meridjet. Pretty much everyone knows how it started, but I’ve never expounded upon that. I guess I should do so now.

First, The Backstory

For those who haven’t heard the beginning, I will retell it. I was born in 1961 (no, I’m not telling my life story ), and that makes me 49 years old. I was raised in a mostly secular family, though we did the usual Protestant church stuff when I was little. I learned about the religion but never embraced it. I was always different, seeking a philosophy that was less judgmental and that was, well, deeper. I tried to get more involved in Christian spiritual matters but it didn’t work out well. I had strange experiences with spirits, psychic phenomena, and so on from the time I was 5.

I got my first tarot deck for my 12^th birthday. When I was 14, I got heavily into Ouija boards. I spent two years thoroughly addicted to them, getting the usual spirits who think they’re helping by telling you whatever you want to hear. Strange things happened on a number of occasions, but those are stories for another day. When I was 16, I ordered a book on witchcraft from the classified section of Rolling Stone magazine. It was a book by the Frosts, and it said that to do witchcraft I’d either need a dedicated room that I’d scrubbed down with sea salt, or else I’d have to run around my house, outside, naked. I had no idea whether these were hard and fast rules, so that sort of ended my dabbling in witchcraft for a while, since I was unable to do either a room or naked yelling outdoors.

Fast forward to 1984. Still no internet, so any research I did on the paranormal or alternative spirituality was via the library, and the pickings were slim. I bought a book at a library sale on Eckankar, and it inspired a lot of thought. This was the same year I met Xanquela, who will play an important part in this story. He and I would sit around my room in the house I rented with three lesbians and talk about the ideas in the book. A few months later, I gave away everything I owned (something I regret at times, due to loss of heirlooms) and Xanquela and I took off to live in a tent. I had this idea that I had to unencumber myself from the trappings of the material world so that I could find the essence of who I was. It didn’t work out so well, since it was February and we didn’t have much money at all. Instead of finding who I was, I was fully focused on survival.

After that was over, Xanquela and I went our separate ways until 1986 when we moved to Athens, Georgia. I got into the New Age movement there, and also began to learn about magick in a more serious manner. For a while in the late 80s and very early 90s, I called myself Wiccan because at the time that was the acceptable word for “witch.” (It wasn’t until a 3 or 4 years ago that calling oneself “Wiccan” was cause for argument if one was not self-initiated.) Then in 1992, Xanquela and I met up again to move to Seattle. I was newly divorced with a small child. A year later, I renewed my use of the Ouija board, making several of my own. I’d used it off and on over the years, but this time I had a new focus.

I’d been doing intensive hypnosis work with a friend, Marlene, who was a “Certified Hypnotherapist,” which in Seattle means you’re trained to do hypnosis but haven’t been to college to become anything remotely resembling a therapist. It’s along the lines of becoming a so-called “Reiki master,” as in anyone can do it, usually for free, and it doesn’t mean you’re qualified to be treating people in any true medical capacity. But from her I learned to perform self-hypnosis more or less via osmosis, and it was very effective when she wasn’t around. I used my newly-honed ability to reach “alpha” consciousness on the board, working on it alone. When one works on a Ouija or other talking board alone, the planchette does not move of its own accord (unless your name is Regan and you’re one step shy of projectile puking pea soup in a movie); it’s just a tool to hear with. I was using little boards slightly smaller than a regular sheet of paper, and was using a ring as the planchette. I’d move it in circles and listen, and in this way I contacted my guides.

The first guide I met was named Tamra. He told me he was once a Sufi priest. (It wasn’t until many years later that I learned that “Tamra” is the word in Arabic for “date.” This was something of a confirmation for me.) I would talk to my friend Marlene on the phone and ask him questions for her. One night when Xanquela was visiting, I felt Tamra nudge me, let go of my consciousness, and trance-channeled him for an entire night. I remember nothing of what was said, and it didn’t occur to me until much later to ask Xanquela about it. By then he didn’t remember either. But it remains my one experience with trance channeling as I’ve never been able to convince Meridjet to have a go at it. He tells me, “I’m here to be with you, not to displace you.”

Xanquela (who is gay) and I started rooming together again in the early winter of 1993, and we began to use the board to talk to another guide I’d contacted, who called himself Henry. We were using the board together; initially I had contacted Henry alone, primarily regarding a very interesting past life regression I’d done with Marlene. The lifetime I saw involved living among the Cheyenne in the late 1800s, and much of it I was able to confirm later through independent research. (Not my existence specifically; birth records were pretty scant in those days and it’s not as easy to verify past life existence as many books lead you to believe.) My name was “She·ta·kae,” with guttural stops between the syllables. I heard this name spoken to me in a whisper by my husband in that life, and it remains the one time I’ve ever clearly heard a foreign language in either a regression or a channeling session. It was spoken to me so tenderly that I thought it meant “I love you.” I was later able to confirm that a great many female names in Cheyenne end in “kae,” but I have never been able to confirm the word’s existence or its meaning. Henry told me that it meant “Blackbird,” and that my name was synonymous with “long summer pest.” Heh. This later became Shetakaey, and, eventually, Sheta Kaey. Moving on.

Xanquela and I reached Henry on the board together with no difficulty, a feat I’ve never seen happen so readily after one speaks to a spirit on a board alone. We had very recently discovered the Qabala via the book The Witches Tarot by Ellen Cannon Reed, a simple look at Qabala from a more Wiccan perspective. It fired me up in a big way, and we set off to do some serious pathworking by the seat of our pants. We had no idea what we were doing, and Henry more or less led the way. We were starting with the paths on the tree rather than the sephiroth, because that was what that particular book had to offer. (It’s difficult to sort it all out in my mind now, because I want to insert events concerning the sephiroth themselves which didn’t occur until the following summer when we moved into a house.) All I can remember for sure was that we were playing a lot of word association games, and we would stay up for days at a time chasing the elusive epiphanies that were to accompany the spiritual experiences of each sephirah. Mel (Xanquela) missed a lot of work at those times. We actually stayed up for five straight days once. And the epiphanies were powerful. Very powerful. I always reached them first, then Mel. I would go into white-out trances, speaking in rhyming circlets while unaware that I was speaking. At these times I would shake with the energies washing over me, trembling in ecstasy. Once, approaching the sphere of Geburah, where the spiritual experience is the Vision of Power, I suddenly realized that I had to give up my power in order to truly own it. I offered it up to “God” (for lack of a better word), and it instantly slammed back into me tenfold. It was all quite amazing. Henry was proving to be anything but a frivolous spirit, leading us very effectively to each goal.

Next chapter – Meeting Meridjet

I’m going to write it right now.