Notes on the Practice:
Before beginning the operation, formulate your question definitely, and repeat it aloud.
I. The Present: This covers her.
I have never believed in the supernatural use of oracle cards, but I bought them just the same. I wonder in particular about my own reticence, my need to disclaim. The deck was done up skillfully by Jessica Roux, a watercolor artist in Tennessee, and each features a woodland creature in earth tones over descriptions (ex: Inspiration,whose totems are a yellow-dappled salamander and a berry-laden black pepper tree).
I do not believe in magic or witches or even luck, but I am beginning by degrees and against my will to believe in ghosts, even if only in those that compel me to choose sentimental vagaries like Wisdom and Protection as shamanistic chiaroscuro. I most prefer the card labeled Guardianship, which reminds me of the way we keep our partners safe without ownership or reclamation, or even perhaps the more arcane connotations of treasure secreted beneath the breasts of sulfurous dragons.
Divination has been practiced across every continent for as long as human beings have been able to tell stories, but the oracular role is uniquely and historically feminine. In the modern age, of course, tarot and oracle practice has been largely dismissed as a tedious concern of women and marginalized people; those for whom the future holds the most risk are the most dedicated to its revelation.
I am told that the cards must be aligned with the querent; this is accomplished by shuffling, saging, deep breathing. I cannot shuffle and have no herbs but parsley in the fridge, so I land upon a different method: burial. I dig out the remaining zinnia roots from a green plastic planter on the patio, which overlooks the old Italian Irish neighborhood where we live. Our landlady, who is a thousand years old and lives beneath us, has hung up her laundry on the line that runs to the (0,0) of the four quadrants that comprise our neighbors’ plots. Everyone is drying sheets today, the ghost clothes hanging wet in the wind.
The cards must wait for three days and nights, minimum, imitating the resurrection cycle. I forget them there and leave them for eight.
The Celtic Cross spread, developed over centuries but popularized by A. E. Waite in 1910, is comprised of ten cards. I find the PDF of his manuscript on a website that boasts a daily reading from the I Ching and banners that ask, “Does the Full Moon Really Affect the Stock Market?” and “Are There Clues About Ancient Aliens Hidden in the Bible?” I’m curious about my own reaction to these variables, having studied John Cage’s Music of Changes in undergrad. I Ching is “in,” so to speak, fixed in my mind as a valuable and tremendous work of culture, literature, and mysticism. Not so much the King James aliens. But I’m also beginning to question the ways in which I have arrived at determining validity. I do not believe—I do believe—I do not believe—I do.
The first card is set out face-up. It represents the present, the state of mind. Mine is gilded as Productivity, which suits me just fine; the card reveals a lone bee set against a frame of pomegranates. I am allergic to bees; Dad kept a hive in his teens.
The high school where I teach in Westchester keeps its own bees, too, to the delight of our unconventional student body. We specialize in the twice-exceptional, most of whom are on the spectrum. The students take turns diagnosing me. They understand when the rain means migraines means I will teach in the dark. I don’t remember the first time I linked nerve pain to a coming storm, the promise of rain and the pressure that latches onto it, breeding mites in the sulcus behind the frontal lobe of a weather-crazed brain. I do not think this makes me witchy, but it does bring me back to the body and its irritating frailties. The blinds are closed before I even get to the classroom. It is the first academic community where I have felt truly safe, creation the byproduct of trust.
“What are you up to?” my husband asks me when I scrub the burial dirt into the kitchen sink. The cards have begun to spore at the corners.
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
II. The Challenge: This crosses her.
The second card is laid crossways over the first. It shews the nature of the obstacles in the matter. Mine is an exquisite miniature that recalls the botanical detail of Audubon lithographs, a regal black cat with a crest of white at the withers. She is surrounded by lavender, representing Independence. I do not readily grasp the significance. The rows of lavender that lined our driveway required the immense work of cutting before the first frost, accomplished easily by the brutal teeth of a weed-whacker or more painstakingly by hand if we wanted to preserve the soapy blossoms.
It strikes me yet again that I’m a poor interpreter of symbols. Maybe I’m just unsentimental. Lavender is what we put in our shoes in the summer to ward off the smell. Is the challenge that I must be more independent? (Of what? These stories? The Father mythos? The appropriation of grief?) Or less? (From what? My friends? My students?)
If I could paint my own card for the series, then I would be the smallest black squirrel sleeping in the red pine behind my classroom window in Bronxville. His ears are winged with wiry hairs as though mad, electric, and he has planted the back hill with a thousand forgotten acorns. We are a room of writers and thinkers mulling over Cormac McCarthy’s “cold autistic dark” and deciding whether he means us and whether or not we like him saying so. We decide we’re not sure what he means, but we like it anyway, and just outside the window we can watch the strange dark squirrel dodging snowdrifts and the downy compress of needles. Many are the things I’ve buried with no way back, the things I no longer remember.
One student, a linguist headed for Carnegie Mellon, steps into the hall to read the last page of The Road by himself. Here, we’re serious about the right of refusal and the ability to hear the body’s needs. He is pacing down the compressed carpet, caring for a tender heart.
III. The Above: This crowns her, the aim of the querent.
James Dobson died this morning.
The Threads forum has exploded. In 12 hours, I’ve read thousands of posts from Dobson survivors. One wrote of the “deep, howling grief” of survivors; others raised a glass for the “strong-willed children Dobson couldn’t break.” Mostly, we voiced our immense relief.
The full weight of his impact, the damage he caused for millions by advocating for abuse as a means to quell the sinful nature of children as young as a month old, has yet to be quantitatively measured. He used phrases like, “All children are manipulative, and you must break their will.” For my parents, who had experienced only abusive and negligent parenting of their own, books like The Strong-Willed Child and Dare to Discipline were the gold standard of Christian corporal punishment. Dobson fetishized the wooden spoon over a bare ass, and a set script: This hurts me more than it hurts you. Spare the rod and spoil the child. For us, it was a leather strap, usually aimed at my little brother, who was energetic and mischievous. In fourth grade, I had started hiding the “whacker” in the largest drawer in my desk, which had a false back. According to Focus on the Family, as long as the belting was dealt by a calm parent, it did not count as abuse.
This is not to suggest that my parents were especially punitive compared to those evangelicals more sadistically inclined. But when you believe that a child’s will must be broken because they are born into total depravity, you might actually believe that beating your child will save them. For my husband, a gentle autistic soul obsessed with Formula 1 and sourdough bread, this soared to new heights: black eyes, bruised ribs, and a father who was never held accountable. Scott says he was a bad kid.
To add insult to (many, many) injuries, Dobson wrote about the particularly nefarious qualities of young future harlots, claiming that “the natural sex appeal of girls serves as their primary source of bargaining power in the game of life.” The surest way to curb our innate wantonness? Stern male guidance, and virginity whose ownership is passed from father to husband. It’s of little surprise that Jeffrey Epstein himself forwarded Dobson’s parenting advice to his friends as a means of shaping the narrative around abuse and exploitation. Meanwhile, Doug Wilson, longtime Dobson compatriot hailed by POLITICO as “The New Right’s Favorite Pastor,” stated on CNN that “women are the kind of people that people come out of.” He has on multiple occasions condemned abolitionists as “driven by a zealous hatred of the Word of God.”[1] These are the thorny strands of the unholy braid: patriarchy, child abuse, neo-confederalism. They cannot exist without each other.
Some years back, a student—now a physicist—asked for a recommendation. Her mother tried to dissuade me. Sending her to college would be a waste. She’s going to be a wife and mom.
Five years later, I officiated her wedding. Her mother was not invited.
IV. The Below: This is beneath her, her unconscious self.
The nightmares are alive and well.
Scenario: I’m walking the aisles of a nearby nursery, the greenhouse of which is lined by hanging baskets of coconut coir. It’s strangely raked in sharp, steep tiers of cement. I can feel the misters on my face and shoulders, the white noise of customers, and a gardener with a watering wand. I can see the shape of my dead father behind a row of ostentatious purple geraniums, smell ferns and the old coils of gardening hoses. It does not strike me as odd that my father, who died in a plane crash in July of 2001, is there. The only thing that matters is that he is enormously angry. I know that I have failed unutterably to be his daughter. My mother has remarried, and I have not stopped her. I have—tragically, disloyally—believed that he is dead, and I have not sufficiently doubted it. He is angry that I have continued to live, that I have continued to buy geraniums.
Scenario: John Donne strangles me to death while screaming Batter my heart, three-person’d God over an embarrassment of starched ruffles and the warted knuckles of a man who truly means it. Some nights—always in the winter—he stops by for an unwelcome visit, a Jacob Marley at the foot of the bed. Some nights he brings Wigglesworth, who recites “The Day of Doom” while Donne plays the bodhrán. I have no control over these two, but inevitably find myself naked when they arrive. Let’s not dwell on that.
Scenario: Dad sits in a wheelchair at the top of the driveway. I am worried about its steepness. He is shrunken and frail like the brittle morning. He survived the plane crash but wishes he hadn’t. He rubs the back of his neck, and I can see the fragile vertebrae under the collar of the blue plaid shirt. When I tell my mother this dream, she says maybe death is a kind of mercy.
Scenario: My mother has died instead, and we lose the house anyway.
Scenario: My mother has died instead, and my father looks like my husband. They are both angry with me because I am no longer a virgin.
Scenario: The plane crash was a clandestine hoax. There is, of course, no body to speak of. My mother, fully deceived, remarries; Dad visits me in college to tell me that he is still alive and working as a spy. I must keep his secret.
Scenario: The plane crash did not happen, and I am a disappointment to both parents.
V. The Past: This is behind her.
My first volitional sin was disobedience, as I recall. I was not yet in kindergarten. Mom had sewn green cushions for the three barstools in the tiny house on Westwood, the one with the steep driveway and creaky back-porch swing. The stools, though narrow, were a delight to my small body: they could spin and sway and lean.
“Stop that or you’ll fall.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Stop leaning on the stool.”
She turned to the sink, from which the tang of a fresh-cut grapefruit exhaled into the kitchen air. I spun again, short legs dangling against the kickboard.
And that’s it. The earliest memory of trespass. Something clicked in my subconscious, and I was suddenly aware that I had become sin. Worthy of death. That I had wounded the heart of God.
We were raised by duality: the radical empathy of immigrant parents who adopted anyone new to the neighborhood, paired with the bizarre recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance to both the American and Christian flags at AWANA Bible Study beginning at age four. Fox News and Manifest Destiny, paired with books on compassion and global faith traditions. Parents who said I should be a musician or a writer or an engineer and that I commanded the affection of a god who had loved me since eternity but who could also scarcely keep himself from killing me because all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
As a child I became obsessed with confession. I apologized to anyone who would listen. If I didn’t like the color of a stranger’s shoes. Forgive me. Turned the boombox too loud on a Sunday. Forgive me. Didn’t wash my hands thoroughly. Forgive me. Didn’t properly fold my wash towel, took too long in the bath. Forgive me. Once, I ate more than half of the grapefruit I was meant to share with my sister.
For a while I thought I’d found a clever work-around: at the end of the day, I’d offer God a summary and ask forgiveness for everything at once, including everything I’d forgotten about. Mom eventually told me that wasn’t how God worked, and that forgiveness required a penitent spirit willing to part with evil. I stopped being worried about confession and became very worried about contrition.
A primer on sexism in fundamentalist circles: in the Baptist Church, we know that women are primal sinners. Eve, etc., et al. Her desire will be for her husband, and he will rule over her. Everyone is condemned, but there was a special damnation reserved for me, my mother, and my sister. Even though my family didn’t believe this, my church readily did—one of many reasons that my mother was urged to marry only months after the plane crash that killed my dad.
The “umbrella of protection” diagram has been the prevailing illustration of Christian family hierarchy since Bill Gothard started the Institute in Basic Life Principles in the 60s, though the striations to which it refers have been present since at least the so-called Pauline letters, and certainly since Augustine. At the top of the diagram, in the scalloped wings of a blank umbrella: CHRIST. Below, a second, narrower umbrella: HUSBAND. Then: WIFE. Finally, inscribed over the handle: CHILDREN. Gothard was forced to resign in 2014 after thirty-four women came forward with reports of sexual harassment and molestation.
In one congregation, which I attended once as a favor for a friend well after I had left religion as an adult, I was chastised for having married Scott at all after a tortuous sermon entitled “The Masculine Mandate.” As an autistic man, Scott could not be the Godly Leader I would need him to be. I repeated it back, incredulous.
“So you’re saying—”
She interrupted. “But who will intercede on your behalf before the throne of God?”
I said, loudly, “Why would I ever need someone to speak for me?”
VI. The Future: This is before her.
In January of 2017, I sat with a glass of wine in the corner of a dark puffy L-shaped sofa in an Orange County mansion. It was a strange room for me to be in, only a few miles from Saddleback, the megachurch that had recently fundraised over $70M for an expansion project. I’d been asked to join a panel of women to be interviewed by a major Christian magazine. I had no idea why; the other participants were hailed as influential businesswomen, while I was teaching history and literature at a handful of local charter schools. I suspect now that it had some relation to the fact that the article had been pitched as a survey of three generations, and they’d only managed to secure one other millennial.
The assignment was simple: to view the inauguration together and respond. I’d voted third-party in a desperately naive attempt to elide a struggling conscience well on its way out of the Republican Party of my rural hometown and, by extension, my faith. In fact, I’d begun attending virtual Quaker meetings, impressed by their coordinated protection of grieving families beset by the vile slurs of Westboro Baptists. I was looking for something that resembled the revolutionary Jesus—the one who had double-dog-dared religious authorities and thrown tables around the courtyard of the Temple.
I should have known better.
The pressure rose in the room, spastic against my throat as the next leader of the nation took office. Worse, I could hear the women around me congratulate themselves, using phrases like man of God while one of the most odious men in history talked about restoring America to some perceived former greatness.
We passed the mic around the cavernous room while the young journalist scribbled. She was chuckling giddily, clearly unnerved. When I held the mic in my hand, I felt giddy, too. How could it be that so many women—presumably deemed community leaders—worshipped at the unholy bunions of Cheeto Tits?
The Cabernet turned in my stomach. I don’t remember the bulk of the evening; when the article dropped, I was quoted seven times and misidentified. I think I called Trump a felon. The rest of the piece was homophobic and Islamophobic, and I tried to keep people from reading it.
At some point I spoke into the microphone: “I think that sexual assault should preclude you from holding the highest office. I wouldn’t trust him alone in a room with my sister.”
The woman behind me, well into her 70s, gestured at the mic. “Can I have that, please?”
I hadn’t finished, not nearly, but I passed it over my shoulder.
“I want to say,” she began, “I’ve been fasting and praying on it, and the Lord has told me those things never happened.”
And there we have it, I thought. This is how we delude ourselves.
I should have known better. We had been trained all our lives not to trust our own eyes.
In the article, the author repeatedly reiterated that we were a group of women who believed in the same god. The lie was laughably transparent. I wasn’t sure if I could believe at all, let alone pander to a deity so aggressively molded in the shape of white millionaires in Orange County.
VII. The Querant’s Influence: This shews its position or attitude in the circumstances.
The first time I was called a witch was my fourth year as an educator. A Christian administrator at the charter school where I taught reminded me through tight lips that rebellion is as witchcraft, and I was definitely guilty of that, at least—especially when I brought in readings from the US Census Bureau that implied America hadn’t always been the exceptional Bastion of Morality. It did not matter that American imperialism does objectively exist; what mattered was that I was critical of God’s chosen nation in front of attentive AP US History students. The next year, the administrator’s assistant told me that God told her to tell me it was time for me to have a baby. The pronouns of that sentence alone confounded me. When I reported this to the head of school, she admonished me for my lack of faith. I thought, of course, of other unwilling would-be mothers, but mostly of the deeply religious conviction that the fact and timing of my reproduction was never supposed to be my choice.
What I know of witches—which is to say, of rebels—is that they have historically been labeled as such by those for whom such a distinction would prove a demonstrable economic or political advantage. The eruption of January 6th coincided precisely with my lunch break, just before the American History class was due to reconvene. The same administrator called me and instructed me not to talk about the insurrection unless I blamed it on Antifa or Black Lives Matter. I quit two months later, after reporting her to every charter school in my contacts list.
What I know is that I am the sort of woman my church warned me against. As I labor through my thesis at Columbia, chapters taped along the walls of my office, I’m struck by a moment of epiphanic clarity. I write it on a post-it note, then larger, on an index card with blue Sharpie. What if doubt is how I love myself. Scott, with the next cup of coffee in hand, clocks the sentiment on the wall.
“Why are we doubting ourselves?” he asks, motioning with the hot mug. He uses “we” to indicate that I am not alone, even when I am crazily taping index cards to the walls.
“No—not myself.” I barely look up from my notes.
“Then what?” He taps the blue text twice.
“Oh—everything else.”
VIII. The External: This signifies her house—that is, her environment, beyond her control.
What I miss about faith is certainty. I miss intuiting the will of the divine. I miss assuming that the divine will can be intuited, and not just as dictation—but as the source of radical empathy, social center, and anointing. I miss the assumption that at the base of creation is the pull towards restoration. I miss it. It is missing from me.
I do not know how to engage with this moment. It’s 2024 and I’m watching a video on my phone, an interview with a pulmonologist advising protestors on how to mitigate the harms of tear gas. Across the Hudson, Princeton has locked the doors to Morrison Hall. Eighteen hours earlier, the NYPD locked student journalists from the Columbia Daily Spectator in Pulitzer Hall, from where the student radio station continues to broadcast the unfolding brutality. In five days, the school will announce the prizes that bear the hall’s name.
It’s 2024 and Trump has declared that he will be a protector of women if re-elected. Standing on a dais at the Aero Center in Wilmington, North Carolina, he points to the mewling crowd from under a cherry-red hat. Women will be happy, healthy, confident, and free.
I encountered the parable of Hinds’ Feet on High Places primarily as hypnotically colored illustrations. I think the book had gilded edges. I was five or six years old. What I remember is that the young peasant girl named Much-Afraid (a citizen of the city called Much-Trembling) is promised without her consent to be married to a bully named Craven Fear, a known abuser who, in my mind’s eye, resembles Gaston from Beauty and the Beast: all gusto and jawline and sycophantic enablers.
In all but the literal ways, I feel alone, and there are Important Things happening. There is the general unsung death of democracy, the riot gear and strung baton, the headlines that differentiate between but do not explicate passive versus active death and dying. I have recently learned that a Kettle can be more than one thing, that the boiling never ceases.
It’s 2025 and the Department of Homeland Security has just ransacked two student dorms at Columbia. Trump has announced a ransom of $400M in federal grants. I am Much Afraid for my community—for classmates in a private detention center in Louisiana; for A., a trans student headed to college in a deep red state; for E., whose partner’s Green Card does not stop them from activist work; for the future flotillas and protests and ransackings.
It’s 2025 and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has reposted the CNN video interview of Doug Wilson reiterating that “women are the kind of people that people come out of.” In the backlash, Wilson is loudly dubbed a “fringe” voice, rather than a mainstay of American evangelicalism. One of his organizations, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, runs an empire of over 160 “Classical” Christian schools, like the one hosted by the church where I was raised (the Heritage Foundation, with whom he is closely allied, boasts another 900). Some of Wilson’s other claims: heterosexual intercourse should not be equally pleasurable to women, slavery was the height of the African American family, and “Biblical hatred” is a doctrine necessary for the Christian worldview. Marital rape does not exist. Lutheran theologian Nadia Bolz-Weber and feminist Gloria Steinem are “a couple of cunts.”
It’s still 2025 and the rest of the CNN interview includes two pastors who insist that women should not be allowed to vote.
It’s still 2025 and the Trump administration has declared that the Epstein files are a Democratic hoax; that they do not exist; that they do exist, but do not contain his name; that they contain his name, but he was working as an undercover informant for the FBI.
Maybe I am a witch, after all.
On the day Much-Afraid is set to marry Craven Fear, a woman helps her escape to the sanctuary of the mountain. I think her name is also something diminutive and literal like Constance or Temperance or Prudence, and I haven’t looked it up. I don’t care. In my memory, I have named her Toni Morrison, and she says, This way. To the Fight.
IX. Hopes / Fears: Sometimes what we fear is what we truly have been hoping for all along.
I am not yet in middle school when I learn about the Jezebel Spirit. This is, of course, mystical midrash—it does not exist in Scripture (not that its presence there would justify or explicate it). Named after an Old Testament queen associated with corruption and idolatry in the ninth century BCE, it became a byword used for those particularly difficult women: women who ask too many questions, women with a sex drive, women who are unmarried.
In my twenties, I join groups like the Society of Friends, The New Evangelicals, and Ezer Rising, who are teaching deconstruction and decolonization. I post about powerful mentors on Facebook, and a boy from my hometown rebukes me for quoting the Bible “in public.” I am increasingly problematic. I leave and do not look back.
My single most enthusiastic yes is aimed towards the problematic: the disabled, the outspoken, the systemically dismissed, the twice-exceptional, the difficult. A student asks me if she should hide her Jewishness on her college applications; another asks if she should take down her pro-Palestine posts on social media. One worries that her essay is too “firstborn-daughter-eager.” One says she is too cringe. No, no, no, and no. I tell them to keep going.
X. Outcome: This is what will come.
Nota bene: should it happen that the last card is of a dubious nature, from which no final decision can be drawn . . . it may be well to repeat the operation.
This morning, I woke to the whirring of dun house sparrows. It is moving day, and they have fit their furniture in the space between the air conditioner and the window frame. They are expecting, and they busy themselves with painting the nursery, building the crib. All is well.
I am learning slowly to trust my body, after years of backdoor deals to ignore and isolate her. She is made of soft hope and belly anger, but mostly she is anxious to remain undetectable. I wonder if I can trust that worry to teach me what I want and do not want, if she can mentor me in ways of being free and unforgiven.
Scott is mopping the floor after dropping an egg. He is whistling “Oo-De-Lally.” The rain was heavy last night with the grandfather voice of thunder. Today, we feel the breath of soil, of dew and hibiscus. John Donne is dead, “The Day of Doom” packed into my closet with the donation clothes. They do not fit me.
Over a cup of coffee, the revelation: for the first time in a long time, I am not afraid of my sin.
[1] Kristin Du Mez, “Confronting Doug Wilson.”
Elena Bowman is a graduate of the MFA in Writing with a concentration in nonfiction at Columbia University, and a teacher at a school for twice-exceptional children. She was recently named a finalist for the Washington Square Review New Voices Award, The Florida Review Editors’ Choice Award, and the Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize. An essay on C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, and Madeleine L’Engle is forthcoming in Johns Hopkins this summer.
