Starting a Cult in My Backyard

If you were my neighbor from 1997-1999, you may have noticed one or more of the following things:

- a pack of gawky pre-teen girls waving broomsticks in a vaguely threatening way

- that same pack of girls, wearing artistically reassembled bedsheets and doing a form of ecstatic dancing vaguely reminiscent of the shakers

- candlelit midnight ceremonies, chanted in a language that fell somewhere on the unlikely spectrum between Japanese and Irish Gaelic

- Frequent visits from the pizza delivery guy.

All of these were (directly or indirectly) related to the rites and rituals of an imaginary country that I made up in the 5th grade. It gathered steam and recruits over a three or four year period, until it was our own little micro culture with language, traditional dress, and a religious calendar.

The group of girls who joined the game were all in that strange liminal space of the middle school years— that time when the fervor that once fueled imaginative play has not yet effectively transferred to eyebrow tweezing, leg shaving, bra-shopping and makeup application. It was the twilight of our childhood, and I think we felt the ground growing cold under our feet. Our feelings about the complex nature of the world we were stepping into were sublimated into this world we would soon have to leave behind.



Our kingdom was a matriarchy. Magic was a matter of course; not spells and wands and razzle-dazzle but a disciplined way of interacting with the natural world and its possibilities. The broomsticks were part of a staving martial art practiced only for defense— there was an internal police force but no offensive army.

I had a recurring nightmare during these years that I was looking out my kitchen window on a flowering mushroom cloud, in a world that had gone totally silent. In the dream, in that moment after the world had stopped and before everything I knew would disintegrate into dust, I turned to my mother and said simply, "I couldn't stop it." The kingdom I escaped to when I woke up was agrarian by choice. They had the resources and the intelligence to develop technology, and chose not to. They sailed wooden ships into the horizon and painted the eyes of beautiful women on their giant hulls.

It was a little like a cult, looking back. But it was kinder than the indoctrination that we would face in the years to come. In the Tioreh ceremony pictured above, we swore allegiance to a country that cannot be located on a map. I still carry two passports in my wallet and one in my heart... and sometimes wonder if I will always be caught wandering between three countries and two worlds.