Feri, Consciousness & Transformation by Marcella Salisbury

When I first started studying Feri, I remember my teacher saying a few memorable things. At the time they gave me pause; they sounded a little sinister, and I didn't understand, then, just what he meant. He said, "Feri tends to breed very eccentric people." He also said, "Feri is not a nice path. If you try to resist it, it can tear you to pieces." He said, too, that Feri is a path of radical, ecstatic transformation, and I thought, Transformation? Into what? Radical transformation, no less! Was I sure I wanted that? Did I want to risk being torn to pieces if I didn't want it?

Now, two years and an Empowerment later, I'm beginning to understand it. In a sense, I've changed a lot. In another, I haven't changed at all; I'm simply becoming myself again.

I grew up in a liberal household during the Reagan/Bush era, listening to my father curse the evil Republicans. I was taught to pay attention to what was happening in the world around me, to question authority, and to listen to my conscience. I was also taught to seek a relationship with the Divine. Now, the Divine that I currently interact with is not, I think, what my father, a liberal American Muslim, had in mind. Nor do I think he counted on me turning out quite so distrustful of authority and the status quo, and so cynical about 'the system.' And I don't know that he ever made any real connection between the two. Be that as it may, my life as an activist started very early. I went to anti-nuclear protests at the age of eight or nine, carrying homemade signs. I wrote environmental and anti-war letters to President Carter when I was seven. It continued all the way through the beginning of my twenties: writing letters for Amnesty International and other organizations, adopting a vegetarian lifestyle at the age of sixteen, marching in numerous demonstrations, gathering signatures for petitions, and finally, getting arrested at the age of 20 for trespassing at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site.

I don't want to tout my actions as a banner of activism. Others have done infinitely more. Somewhere around the age of 21, I lost steam. Personal crises, identity confusion, and other things, overwhelmed me and I dropped the protests, the letter writing, and the groups, one by one. I felt burnt out. Nothing seemed to change, no matter what I did. And I was getting a lot of criticism for being so opinionated. People didn't like that I had such strong convictions and was willing to voice them. So after a while I stopped voicing them quite so much or so loudly. On a certain level, I felt ashamed to be known as weird, as a 'neo-hippy,' as someone who cared.

What has rekindled that flame which for so long was only smoldering is Feri. All of my convictions and passions never left me; they only died low for a while. But since I began studying Feri two years ago, and especially since my Empowerment last Winter Solstice, the flames have begun to rise again. The awareness, the grief, the outrage are constantly with me and demand to be translated into action. So after a seven-year sabbatical, I have begun picking up my activities again. Not just writing letters and going to meetings, but also smaller, simpler things, like buying organic even though I'm poor. Because I don't just see the food anymore. I see the soil it grew in, and if that soil was poisoned I see the poison washing into the lakes and rivers and the water we drink. I see the underpaid laborers in the fields breathing in the pesticides and the toxins drifting over the nearby schools and playgrounds. I see the rain, which once washed us clean, burning the skin of the planet. I see the life force (or lack of it) in the vegetables and fruits and grains I eat. And I think the credit for this vision must be given to the Deities.

The Deities and the Divine are the living, breathing planet around us, the wind and clouds, the plants and animals, the rivers and lakes, the five sacred elements, and they are also us (and more than all that, of course). Both the way of Feri and new scientific thought like Quantum Physics teach us that not only are we all made of exactly the same basic stuff, but that even by looking at something we, quite literally, change it. We know this on an intellectual level, but what Feri has done has caused me to feel it on such a cellular and spiritual level that this connection is in my consciousness and my emotions every minute of the day now. The threads of my body, mind, and soul are woven into the whole cloth of the Universe and I could not tear myself free even if I wanted to. None of us can. And when others try, we all bleed.

I think of it as an awakening. My soul has begun to become more awake again. The Deities touched me in a powerful, painful, fiery, ecstatic way (some of them, more than just touching me, have actually given me a few hard kicks!), and told me that if I want to live I can no longer be silent. I think that if I tried, they'd keep burning me until I finally did scream, or I died. As Gabriel warned, they would tear me to pieces. But that's all right. I need to scream about it.

How can I not scream when our Gods and Goddesses, and we ourselves, are being exploited, poisoned and destroyed in the name of corporate profit? When corporations have more rights and more money than some democratic governments, and can forcefully shove their poison down our throats and into our stomachs and lungs? When criminals force us to pay them millions of dollars for the forests they stole from us, just to keep them from massacring the old sacred trees? If we are true witches, true Feris, we must scream. And do more than scream. We are immensely powerful. We all have our different and legitimate ways of screaming, of working the energy, and of protesting. Some of us are louder and more overtly political than others. But I think we all feel it and we all work it.

It hurts so much, sometimes I can hardly bear it. And then it is repaid tenfold with moments of deep and transformational ecstasy when the beauty and sacredness of the world floods into me (for me this relates to the Sex point of the Iron Pentacle, the physical sensation of joining with the world) and the pleasure of being alive is almost as hard to bear as the pain. It's a spiritual (sometimes even a physical) orgasm. The real trick, though, lies in translating that ecstasy and pain into real action, despite the demands of our jobs and our relationships and the day-to-day effort of survival. And for me, especially, it's finding ways to make all aspects of my life into action for change, whether large or small.

Some of the changes I want to make will take years, maybe decades, to accomplish, and some are instantaneous, but they all matter. To me, prayer is action, whether 'mundane' or magical. I'd love to go get arrested again for a cause, put my body between the exploiters and the planet, and I hope someday soon I will be able to, but as I need to work full time I'm not sure when, exactly, that will be. So I start small. Eating organic food. Buying my clothes at second-hand stores instead of the mall so I'm not supporting sweat shops. Writing letters and attending local issue meetings. Speaking my mind, and just not caring anymore if it bothers anyone. And of course, working magic. If all this makes me eccentric, well, so be it. I like being eccentric, and I don't care anymore what people think. That anyone might even have an opinion about it makes me laugh, in fact. Losing my self-consciousness about others' opinions is just another one of the changes that Feri has wrought in me.

So with Beltane approaching, let us open ourselves up to the ecstasy and pain of living in this beautiful, sacred, wondrous, and tortured world. Let us take strength from the returning light and the upwelling of energy and use it to transform desecration into reverence, greed into wonder, and hatred into healing. I think in a way we can act as lenses to focus and magnify the energy that flows through us, and spread it outward to touch others. With our individual voices and actions, the choices we make, the magic we work both on the sabbats and every day, even when we work alone we are part of a growing community of people who are waking up and working this transformation. It's a huge job. No wonder I don't know where to start.

But now, I realize, I have started. We all have, just by choosing to follow this path. I know for me there's no way to turn back any more. Even if I wanted to, even if I didn't want to take it all the way, I couldn't turn back. The changes that have happened in me are irreversible, and what's more, I see them changing the people around me, too. So when I'm in the grips of desperation and hopelessness about what is happening to us and our planet, I focus on that and I remember that even just by looking at the world with awareness and consciousness, I'm transforming it all the time.

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