I've been lying, beauty and truth fans. I've been riffing. What I described last time was my "menarche" from the standpoint of my smotheringly loving mothers alone.

But it wasn't real as far as I was concerned. By all the precepts of the Pomegranate Grail itself, it was a hypocritical fraud.

The more I thought about it, the more enraged I became. The so-called guardians of the ancient mystery school had committed a profane crime against their so-called avatar. They had desecrated the sacred meaning of my rite of passage into womanhood.

Let me explain.

From the time I was a young child, the figure of Persephone was at the heart of my spiritual training. She was like Jehovah for the Jews, Ahura-Mazda for the Zoroastrians. The Goddess, I was told, expresses Herself in countless names and forms, but the stories of Persephone were most important for this age and my mission. (Mary Magdalen was Her word made flesh, Her Jesus or Buddha, but that's another story.)

It wasn't until I was almost eight years old, while sitting in class on a spring day, that Vimala first shared the shocking news about my idol: Most of the people in the outside world knew only one tale about Persephone, and it was a terrible lie! According to this abomination, my Queen was a naive young girl picking narcissus flowers in a meadow when a big ugly brute of a demon-god named Pluto kidnapped Her, dragged Her down to his hellish kingdom through a hole in the ground, and made Her his prisoner-wife.

I burst into tears on the spot. I felt what a devout Catholic girl might feel if a foul tramp spit on her silver crucifix. The story wasn't true, I knew, but the fact that everyone believed it was devastating. Vimala's intention in introducing me to this sacrilege was pedagogical. It was the formal beginning of her teachings about the loathsome sins of the fathers. The myths that I'd been raised on, she told me once I regained my composure, were the authentic and original ones. Persephone had reigned as the Queen of the Underworld eons before the patriarchy concocted the idiotic Pluto and superimposed his violent myth over the beautiful truth.

Not that She had been Queen since time began. When the world was still young -- so said the teachings of the Pomegranate Grail -- the realm of Tartarus had no ruler. The souls of the dead dwelt there listlessly, in ignorance and without guidance, waiting to be reborn. Meanwhile, in the brightly lit world above, Persephone was a maiden like me, steadily growing in wisdom as She mastered the skills She would need to serve as Queen. "When you're ready to seek the wilder, stranger path," Her mother Demeter told Her, "the shades will rejoice. You will be their Redeemer."

As Her body grew and changed shape, Her longing for mystery deepened, as did Her courage to claim the power that awaited Her. And when Her drive to know the depths matched Her power to navigate them, She menstruated for the first time. Awakened both to fertility and death, She began Her quest, beginning Her descent at a shrine inside a mountain near the city of Clitor, where the River Styx, the menstrual blood of Mother Earth, originates.

Now here's the key: She went willingly into the underworld, and under Her own power. She abducted Herself. She was not a resistant pawn dragged below to serve the agenda of a controlling monster. Unlike myself. Unlike my own experience of first menstruation.

With hair-raising similarities to the hapless Persephone of the patriarchal story, I had been kidnapped. Taken against my will. Forced to do the bidding and obey the timing of a tyrant with intricate plans for my destiny. Was it any consolation that my ravager wasn't a Big Bad Daddy but my sweet generous mommies?

No. It was worse. It was a violation which ensured that any escape I made, any retribution I exacted, would arouse tremendous guilt in me. Nevertheless, I began plotting my strategy within days of the morning my blood first flowed.

My initial task was to remind myself of the lessons the still small voice had taught me when I first decided to prevent menstruation those many years ago. What lay behind my impulse to rebel was not merely juvenile pettiness. The stakes were much higher. I could not become the avatar unless I did it in my own way. And the ritual by which Vimala and company forcibly induced my first menstruation had reasserted their right and power to make me their puppet.

One menstrual period later, in early February, I formulated a plan to reclaim my independence and save my soul; that is to say, to kidnap myself; to slip into the underworld from a position of strength and under my own power.

I was in the menstrual hut, officially known as Persephone's Sanctuary, which is in the building closest to my home. It was just my second visit to the sacred precinct. Until my blood first flowed a month before, the place had been off-limits, as it was to all who had never menstruated -- even the avatar.

It was after 11 p.m. I was in the large square adytum which occupies the heart of the top floor. Most of the other menstruators or post-menopausal crones were either meditating in the soundproofed chambers that line the west wall or already engaged in their dream incubation quests on the floor below. I had a strong psychic impression about the nature of the quest that Cecily was on. She was reaching out in the astral realms to her friend Priscilla, who lay in a coma in an Oakland hospital room. She was trying to coax Priscilla either to depart to the land of death or return to the living, but not stay stuck in between.

Also creeping into the corner of my awareness was the sound of a djembe drum rhythmically beating in the music room. Tuning in to the intention behind it, I sensed Calley. I fantasized or telepathically perceived (at that time, I didn't always know the difference) that she had launched herself on a shamanic journey not just through space but time. I felt her seeking out her Iroquois ancestors, hoping to sit with them as they practiced the dream-guessing rite, whose aim was to guess the dreamer's ondinnonk--the secret wish of the soul revealed in a dream. The murmur of a strange and beautiful word circulated at the periphery of my inner hearing: qaumanEq. "What does that mean?" I asked Calley with my thoughts. "Shamanlight of the brain," said a voice that sounded like hers.

I forcibly turned my attention away from Calley and Cecily and all the other souls filling up the Menstrual Temple with their passionate night-time pilgrimages. It was good to know that my solitude here in the adytum was in no danger of being interrupted.

I reclined in a black leather chair near the central shrine. The stars shone clearly through the skylight above me. The sound in my headphones was a cassette called "Primordial Picnic," by a local Santa Cruz band, Midnight Sex Picnic. Talk about music to menstruate by. Sly, vulnerable, unpredictable, melodic, the band was looping me through emotions that I'd never felt before but nonetheless recognized as if I were returning to a home I'd forgotten I had.

When the song "Stronger Than Love" came on, I had a sobbing meltdown. I knew the singer meant it to be a message to the demanding woman he loved, but my still small voice was singing it to my seven mothers.

I made it all up

None of it was true

I made it all up just to please you

I gave it all away

None of it was mine

I gave it all away to try to reach you

And I never fought in Beirut or Danang

Never killed anyone to impress you

I did not save the world

I hope you'll understand

It's not easy to prove that I love you

Stronger than love

I'll change myself for you

Stronger than love

There's nothing that I wouldn't do for you

I'll turn into an animal

Drive myself crazy

Light up like a bomb just to heal you

I'll sail submarines across the line of death

I'll give up my God just to heal you

Now I'm reading your mind

And I know you're behind

the freedom I feel to surrender

And it's stronger than love

more exotic than trust

I will prove that my love has no limits

Stronger than love

I'll change myself for you

Stronger than love

There's nothing that I wouldn't do for you

Stronger than love

I will explode for you

Thunder and lightning

fire and ice

money and fighting

all over the earth for you

Nothing is too good for you

Every day of my life for years I had stretched and twisted and pushed myself to become the perfect master my mothers yearned for me to be. At an age when most children were learning to tie their shoes, I was doing four hours of exercises a week to train my perceptions to be sharp and my memory photographic. When other kids were trying to decide whether Santa Claus was real or not, I was using meditation to build a sacred chamber in my brain that would literally house the Goddess Persephone and give me the power to commune with the fourth dimension on command. Every assignment my mothers had given me, I struggled to fulfill. Every time they criticized me for being less loving or discerning than I could have been, I worked to improve. I knew -- I had been told over and over again -- that it was all for a good cause, that I was being forged into a vessel of redemption for the entire human race. But why then did I feel more loyal and devoted to my mothers than to the human race?

In return for my service to their all-consuming cause, I had only asked my mothers for three things in all the years I was growing up. First, that I be allowed to have friends from outside the community. This they ultimately agreed to, though not without much dispute. Second, that I be allowed to form my own opinions about books written by "patriarchal criminals" before being bombarded with the Pomegranate Grail's official position on them. To this they eventually acceded as well.

My third request was hopeless, I feared, from the start. I wanted to hide or expunge the hideous brown birthmark in the shape of a bull skull that adorned the middle of my forehead. My mothers turned me down every time I brought it up, sometimes with a curt "never," on other occasions allowing for a discussion that made me hope it would one day be negotiable.

In the early years, I didn't know anything about how it might be possible; I just wanted it gone. But eventually I came to understand that there were people known as plastic surgeons who specialized in fixing problems exactly like mine.

When I was fourteen, I made an appointment with a dermatologist in Santa Cruz and hitchhiked there without informing my moms. I came back armed with information about how easy it would be to fulfill my desire.

Once she got over her horror at my sneaky behavior, Vimala said what she had always said: "Your mark is a blessing. It's the seal of an awesome ancient prophecy. It's the living proof that you are the avatar."

"But it's ugly," I said with uncharacteristic simplicity. "I hate it."

"We will not disturb the magic. We will honor it as a sign of your covenant with the Goddess. Your life's sacred journey requires you to honor your gift. The case is closed."

But there on my second sojourn in the menstrual hut, as I rewound the tape by Midnight Sex Picnic and listened again to "Stronger Than Love," the case opened back up again. The news arrived from a place so deep in me it felt as if I were touching the center of the Earth. It was delivered by a triumphant, bellowing, laughing version of my still small voice. "Scouring away your birthmark," it announced, "is the radical act of separation that will serve as your self-abduction."

Shock mixed with vindication. I had no doubt that I had just been given a blessing of the first order -- a difficult, radical blessing, perhaps, that would be hurtful to people I loved. But a blessing nonetheless. Responding with a beam of gratitude in the direction of my still small voice, I promised to obey. By whatever means necessary, I vowed to obliterate my accursed stain as soon as I possibly could.

Close by, as familiar as my breath, I felt the shimmering endorsement of Rumbler. "Yes," he vibrated excitedly but humbly, as if not wanting to upstage my still small voice. "Yes yes yes yes yes yes."

I set to work two days later. My first task was to get a new, improved birth certificate. I had always looked older than my actual age, and I could pass for nineteen even then, a few months short of my seventeenth birthday. But I couldn't take the chance that my mature appearance would be sufficient to convince a plastic surgeon I'd reached the age of consent.

On a drizzly Valentine's Day, I drove to see my buddy Lena, a hippie punk chick who lived in downtown Santa Cruz. As a non-member of the Pomegranate Grail community, she was not high on the list of friends my mothers approved of, but on the other hand they didn't actively discourage me from seeing her.

Lena had a catalogue from an anarchist supply house in Washington state. It was full of helpful products and tips about how to avoid or cheat the government, declare yourself empress of an uninhabited island, or hunt small game with your bare hands after the apocalypse. There were also a few pages of contacts that promised assistance in acquiring a fake ID.

Lena didn't press me about why I was in the market for an earlier birthdate. She was content to accept my generic statement that it would be a handy thing to have. She agreed to let me use her address when I sent away for the stuff, and when I drove back to her pad two weeks later, a pile of pamphlets and books awaited me. I chose two from this group and mailed out my applications and fees. Within a couple of weeks I had received two extremely realistic birth certificates, one from Oklahoma and one from South Dakota, each with a birthdate fifteen months prior to my actual birthdate. I'd completed step number one successfully.

The second element of my plan was to decide what distant city I would run away to. There was no way I could pull it off while remaining at the Sanctuary. And staying in Santa Cruz would make it too easy for my mothers to track me down.

I narrowed the choice down to three places: Santa Monica to the south and Santa Rosa and Marin County to the north. I'd been to all three on trips with Vimala and some of the other mothers, and had a good feeling about each of them.

In Bookshop Santa Cruz I bought maps of each area. At the public library I found phone books from each area and xeroxed copies of the Yellow Pages listings for plastic surgeons, hotels, and boarding houses.

I didn't want to make my long-distance calls from the Sanctuary, since that would leave clues about my ultimate whereabouts on the phone bills. So I got a load of change and used the pay phone in front of the library. After an hour, I'd made my decision: San Rafael, the main city in Marin. There was a budget motel there which I had passed during my previous visits. It was on Lincoln Street, not too far from the main drag.

Many of Marin's plastic surgeons seemed to have congregated in nearby Greenbrae, a few miles away via bus. I called three of them and each indicated a willingness to take my case.

None of the receptionists would discuss specifics with me, but I knew from my earlier research that annihilating the repulsive brown stain would take at least a couple of surgeries six weeks apart. They would be followed by another few weeks' recuperation before the final step: sanding down the scar.

I was going to have to relocate for a minimum of ten weeks. Expenses for food and lodging, added to the cost of the surgery, could run as much as five thousand dollars. To be safe, I decided I needed at least six thousand dollars.

The next problem was how to raise such a sum. The million-dollar trust fund that Vimala and company allegedly had going for me wouldn't be available any time soon. Though my moms usually bought me anything I asked for, they gave me a mere one hundred fifty dollars a week in spending money. That wouldn't accumulate very fast even if I did become amazingly frugal.

No way was I going to get a job. Could I sell some of my belongings at a flea market? "Get a fine collection of genuine Goddess prayer cloths here, just five bucks apiece." That seemed tawdry. Same with the idea of hocking my belongings at a pawn shop. Too bad no one outside my little community knew I was a shining avatar and the reincarnation of Mary Magdalen. If they did, I could have hawked my doodles or old shoes for exorbitant sums.

I was tempted to surreptitiously start my "ministry" years ahead of schedule. The gospel according to my mothers was that the world wouldn't be ready for me and vice versa until I was twenty-five. But maybe in the meantime I could somehow figure out a way to get paid for doing psychic readings and healings. Besides the fact that charging money for my gifts was a big no-no, however, there was also the problem of where I would conduct my business. Bringing clients out to the Sanctuary was not a possibility. I could see about renting an office down in Santa Cruz, but my availability for appointments would be severely limited. With all my lessons, exercises, rituals, and duties, my moms had me on an extremely rigorous schedule which afforded me precious few breaks.

A brilliantly perverse solution to the fund-raising problem bubbled up in me one evening in early March. Wouldn't you know it was during my next four-day vacation in the menstrual hut? I'm sure it was no accident that I was having my first bout with severe cramps at the time. It was almost as if my plan emerged as revenge against the pain in my womb. As if I could punish it by allowing my fantasies to turn extra nasty. The weird thing was that I could have asked my mothers for herbs to alleviate the agony, but refrained. I didn't want to be deprived of my motivating power.

I was reclining in the same black leather chair in which I'd conjured up my epiphany a month earlier. Midnight had passed, and no one else was around. It was impossible to feel dreamy and meditative, however, since my insides were being meatgrindered through an electrified driftnet made of razor-sharp wires. Instead I stared at the altar in the center of the adytum and practiced cursing all the holy objects residing there.

"You goddamn fucking piece of shit," I prayed in the direction of the magic mirror, in which it was said you could divine the flaws in your soul you needed most to correct if you hoped to die well. Gazing straight at the precious figurine of a pregnant goddess, a sixty-five-hundred-year-old artifact recovered near Pazardzik, Bulgaria, I hissed, "You bull-cocksucking, snake shit-licking, pig-fucking whore."

Words like these had never passed through my lips before, though I'd rehearsed them mentally from time to time after discovering a book on the anthropology of obscenities some years back.

I reached out and grabbed the deck of consecrated antique Tarot cards from their stand next to the mask of Persephone. The legends of the Pomegranate Grail asserted that they were created by Artemisia Gentileschi, a seventeenth-century Italian painter who was also a member of our order. I rifled through the deck until I found the Death card. I spit on it. "You limp-dicked eater of Goddess farts," I told the dancing skeleton depicted there beneath my pool of saliva.

Replacing the deck on the altar, I seized my next victim: the Pomegranate Grail itself. My mothers firmly believed this silver cup to be the very vessel which Mary Magdalen used in the menstrual eucharist rites she established in the south of France twelve years after she fled there following Jesus' crucifixion. And oh by the way, it was also alleged to be the container with which Christ served his disciples at the Last Supper.

Though I wanted to believe in the authenticity of the tales attached to this artifact, I had my doubts. Having read extensively about the Grail, I was well aware that there were many other claimants to the title of the cup used at the Last Supper.

As usual, it came down to herstory versus history; to my ancient order's version of the course civilization had taken as opposed to everyone else's version. Outside the membership of the Pomegranate Grail, there was probably not a Biblical scholar or archaeologist alive who would keep a straight face upon hearing the legends my mothers attributed to our sacred artifact. It looked old enough, for all I knew. But the scenes configured in relief on the side of the bowl were dramatically at odds with most conceptions of Christ's message.

The vessel was about eight inches in diameter and five inches high. There were four panels around the outside circumference, each separated by the figure of a pomegranate cut open to reveal myriad seeds inside. The image on two panels was of two snakes intertwined around an equal-armed cross with a rose at the center. The other two showed a man and woman in states of union. In one panel they were copulating in a seated position. In the other, they were fused, like hermaphroditic Siamese twins, and standing in a cauldron that appeared to be a larger version of the cup itself.

Back in January, when I first examined this object -- which had been off-limits to me until my menarche -- I was surprised. Why did one of the Pomegranate Grail's most sacred relics portray a man in such a prominent role? I don't mean to imply that my ancient order hated everything male. While my education placed a strong emphasis on the crimes of the patriarchy, I was always taught to adore and embody the beautiful qualities of the masculine archetype. My mothers insisted that in the glorious past, male and female lived in harmonious balance, bringing out the best in each other -- and that they would one day be restored to that sublime symbiosis. In the meantime, it was up to us women to embody the beauty of both genders.

Still, I wasn't fully prepared for the shock of seeing the couples portrayed on the Grail. And yet that was only a prelude to the next unexpected revelation. Back in January, on my first day back in class after my maiden voyage in the menstrual hut, my mothers had unveiled a staggering secret about the nature of my work. I was here on Earth not just to redeem the menstrual mysteries, they informed me. It was also my task to regenerate the mythic template of hierosgamos: sacred marriage.

There was a catch to this glorious assignment, however. I was to forever remain a virgin--not in the contemporary sense of the word, as in sexually innocent, but rather in its ancient meaning: complete unto oneself.

"You will never marry," Vimala told me with an unctuous calm that I was sure belied the nervousness she must be harboring.

"I'm supposed to spread the gospel of hierosgamos without ever being married?" I protested, disbelieving.

"You must be the husband and the wife," Vimala proclaimed quietly. "To compensate for the egregious imbalance unleashed when patriarchy expunged Magdalen's role in the new covenant." The next moment was a crucifixion, an intersection of joy and anguish. My heart filled with the bountiful image of Rumbler. I immediately guessed that my clandestine bond with him in the Televisionarium -- a bond Vimala knew nothing about -- was the sublime solution to her grotesque puzzle. Yet another part of me feigned ignorance of this secret and raged at Vimala's unfairness. "How dare she curse me like this?!" I fumed.

It was the ultimate insult in my mothers' drive to make me their puppet.

As I reclined now in the menstrual hut and seethed over these memories, cramps ripping at my center of gravity, I gazed down at the Pomegranate Grail in my hands. Sweet blasphemy welled up in me. "I ought to masturbate you with the devil's dildo," I murmured to the cup, "you slime-collecting, twat-mocking, garbage-worshiping scuzzbucket."

I took the thing and put it on the end of my stockinged left foot. I twirled it around a few times, then kicked it up in the direction of my head. It landed on top perfectly, as if I'd been rehearsing for days. I jumped up and broke into a temple dance. It, too, was blasphemous. Here it was two and a half weeks before the spring equinox, and I was doing a dance that was forbidden to be done at any time but the feast of Samhain, October 31.

I skulked. I waggled like a demented snake. I mimed sliding down a fire pole into the infernal regions. Only once did my two-thousand-year-old silver hat fling itself off, and I caught it before it smacked the ground.

Finally I strode up to the altar and gazed into the magic mirror.

"Mirror, mirror, on the shrine:

"Speak, you bastard,

"Give me an apocalyptic sign."

The bowl was crowning me in such a way that it half-covered my big brown birthmark. I jerked my head down so that the whole ugly thing showed, then jerked it up to turn me into a beautiful woman without a flaw.

And that's when the brilliantly perverse solution flew into my evil mind. Adrenaline shot through me as my mind conjured a future event. I would sell the slime-collecting, twat-mocking, garbage-worshiping scuzzbucket. I would locate a collector of antiquities who'd be so glad to get it that he wouldn't ask many questions. Thus would I raise the small fortune I needed to run away and free my forehead of its shame. Thus would I once and for all show the ancient order of the Pomegranate Grail that I was its boss, not the other way around.

At 2 in the morning, I sneaked out of the menstrual hut down the outside stairs -- being careful to prop the door open using a thick book -- and made my way to my bedroom in the Magdalen Tower fifty yards away. There I retrieved my camera and returned to capture the relic on film.