I'm back. It's me, Rapunzel. The chick with the crazy parents and the heart problem and the blotch on my forehead and the twin brother who died in childbirth. I'm getting geared up to tell you another story about myself.

But first I need to say a prayer.

Dear Goddess, You Wealthy Anarchist Burning Heaven to the Ground:

Charge me up with Your Death Medicine, that I may die every single day of my life. Trick me into figuring out how to kill my own death.

O Goddess, You Sly Universal Virus with No Fucking Opinion:

Teach me to incinerate my own hype. Not just other people's sorry-ass self-promotion and megalomania, which are so infinitely easy to scourge -- but my own, no matter how elegant and subtle I might imagine it is.

Guide me to drop my act again and again, even the part of my act that is covertly proud of being the kind of wise-guy who drops her act again and again.

Hey Goddess, Who Gives Us So Much Love and Grief Mixed Together That Our Morality is Always on the Verge of Collapsing:

Brainwash me with your freedom so that I never love my own pain more than anyone else's pain

Amen. A-women. Ommmmmmm. And Hallelujah.

I can already feel Vimala cringing. She's my adoptive mom -- not to mention the midwife who delivered me into the world -- and she doesn't like me to die so much.

Especially when my dying requires me to lovingly rebel against the gorgeous system of secret gnosis preserved and nurtured for thousands of years by the mystery school now known as the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail. A task, by the way, which Vimala knows I was born to do, and which she poured all her love and care into me so that I could do.

Vimala, sweet Mommy, you know you want me to say this: As much as I am devoted to every last menstrual meme, as much as I believe the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail and all of its creations are the best antidote to the phallocratic celebration of soul death, I can't bring myself to dramatize our precious treasures with unironic literalism, as if they were the the Sole Truth and the Ultimate Way.

For instance, it's my dharmic duty to announce that when I speak of the phallocratic mentality, I'm not just referring to white men and Republicans. Women and leftwingers and poor people and sexual outlaws, with whom I'm more likely to feel sympatico, are just as likely to be phallocrats.

An example: A certain socialist feminist soul sister whom I'll call Juneau, a fellow shamanatrix with whom I've shared belly laughs and trance-dancing, would turn off her love light towards me the moment she discovered that not only am I staunchly and passionately pro-abortion, but that I also understand and sympathize with all those people who hate and fight abortion. My socialist feminist soul sister couldn't comprehend or accept my belief that both sides are right -- any more than a Catholic priest could.

How does my friend Lamorte put it? "I'm totally opposed to duality."

Everyone who believes in the devil, in other words, IS the devil. There is no enemy. There can be no enemy. I will fight to the death for the right not to believe in or have enemies. IF there could be such a thing as an enemy -- which there can't -- the enemy would be literalism. Fundamentalism. That appalling certainty and arrogant simplicity -- whether found in Islamic zealots or the priesthood of the Cult of Science -- that fosters the belief that MY story is truer than YOUR story. That the truth of MY story sucks all the truth out of YOUR story. That YOUR story cannot possibly have even an ounce of truth. OK, maybe an ounce, but I'll halfheartedly admit that as a debating strategy only so I can disguise the fact that I have utterly dismissed you and renounced forever the possibility of seeing your humanity.

I guess I've just implied that as much as I want to hate literalism, I can't even do that. Which of course leads me to make my next shocking admission about the champion of literalism, phallocracy. Though my passionate commitment to the Drivetime and all it stands for sometimes requires me to act AS IF phallocracy is nothing but an evil poison and AS IF the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail is the safest and most effective antidote, and though my personal temperament resonates intimately with the subtle themes of the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail, I also know with all my heart that the six thousand-year-old experiment known as phallocracy was an inevitable and necessary phase of the evolution of the human race.

Yes, I'm ready for it to be gone now; I want its ugliest creations to die off; I detest its violence and oppression and sickening abuse of the feminine. But I recognize too the beauty of its individuating force, its striving to explore and transcend and expand, its celebration of the rational, analytical mind, and its mysterious struggle to master nature.

I die daily. And saying what I just said about the redemptive features of phallocracy is a decent death for the first part of the day. But it's just for starters. It comes all too naturally. It's easy destruction. Hardly mourned. Good riddance. How about if I dare myself to kill even more lethal treasures; force myself even further into the threshold where dear life rots away and smuggles a message of resurrection back through time?

Do you dare me to tell you more of the story of my life, beauty and truth fans, thereby killing my cherished privacy and self-protecmy sublimated suicide depends for its authority on evolutionary trends that are thousands of years old. They feature an organization whose money and wisdom are making it possible for me to be talking to you right now. This organization, the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail, is so old and vast -- yet so precise and slippery -- that only a fool would try to describe it. It's a hundred organizations in one. A mystery school that's more ancient than the sphinx. A think tank that's so young most of its research is in the future. A media coven. A dream hospital. A gymnasium where mystical athletes hone their physical skills.

Picture a dating service for single mothers, or a secret society of occult astronomers that knew of the planets Uranus and Neptune and Pluto thousands of years before modern astronomers "discovered" them. Imagine a lobbyist for the rights of menstruators, or a ritual theater group that fed ideas to French playwright Antonin Artaud in his dreams. Visualize a gang of sacred janitors, or the world's oldest manufacturer of sacred dolls.

Most of all, beauty and truth fans, picture a hidden sacred city of the imagination -- temples, dream sanctuaries, gymnasiums, theaters, healing spas, love chambers -- kept so secret that it's invisible to all but a very few in every generation. Call this place a thousand names. Call it the College-Whose-Name-Keeps-Changing-and-Whose-Location-Keeps-Expanding, or call it the Sanctuary-Where-the-Thirteen-Perfect-Secrets-from-Before-the -Beginning-of-Time-Are-Kept. Its official name as of today is "Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail," and it has headquarters on all seven continents. Five thousand years ago, it was housed solely on two continents as "Inanna Nannaru," derived from Akkadian words, translated roughly as "Inanna's Nuptial Couch in Heaven." Six thousand years ago: "Tu-ia Gurus," from the Sumerian, loosely meaning "Creation-Juice, Bringer of Good Tidings to the Womb."

Two thousand years ago -- so this story goes -- our mystery school that is always both outside of time and yet entering time at every moment was called Pistis Sophia -- in English "Faithful Wisdom." Its most famous member -- its only famous member -- was Mary Magdalen, visionary consort of Jesus Christ. Not a penitent prostitute, as the Christian church later distorted her in an attempt to undermine the radical implications of their divine marriage. Not an obeisant groupie who mindlessly surrendered her will to the man-god.

On the contrary, beauty and truth fans. Magdalen was Christ's partner, his equal. More than that, she was his joker, his wild card: his secret weapon. They worshiped the divine in each other. So say the ancient texts of our mystery school.

But you need not believe the secret texts to guess the truth. Even the manual of the Christian church itself, as scoured of the truth as it is, strongly hints at Magdalen's majesty. While all the male disciples disappeared during the crucifixion, she was there with Christ. While the twelve male disciples were cowering in defeated chaos, she was the first to find the empty tomb. Jesus appeared to her first after his resurrection; she was the first to be called by him to the mission of apostle.

The Gnostic texts from Nag Hammadi, discovered in 1947, reveal even more of their relationship, which violated all the social norms of their time. She was a confidante, a lover, an Apostle above all the other Apostles. Jesus called her the "Woman Who Knew the All," and said she would rule in the coming Kingdom of Light. Even an early Christian father, Origen, helped propagate these truths, calling her immortal, and maintaining that she had lived since the beginning of time.

The traditions of our ancient order say all this and more: that Mary Magdalen's performance on history's stage was an experiment -- Pistis Sophia's gamble that the phallocracy was ripe for mutation.

That the risk failed is testimony not to Magdalen's inadequacies, but to the virulence of out-of-control masculinity. Magdalen, alas, was too far ahead of her time to succeed in being seen for who she really was. Her archetype was not permitted to imprint itself deeply enough on the collective unconscious. Sadly, the divine feminine barely managed to survive in the dreams of the race through the defanged, depotentized image of the Virgin Mary -- Christ's harmless mommy, not his savvy consort.

From her cave in Provence, twenty years after the death of Christ, Magdalen foresaw that the future Church would suppress her role in the joint revelation. She predicted the Council of Nicaea, which in the year 325 excised from the Bible all texts that told of her complete role. She even prophesied that the spiritual descendants of Peter, the Apostle who had hated and feared her most, would trump up the absurd story of her whoredom, conflating her with Mary of Bethany and three other unnamed women described as sinners and adulterers in various books of the freshly canonical New Testament.

In the last years of her life, Magdalen, knowing that her work with Christ would be foiled and distorted, prepared for a renewal of the experiment at a later time. The records of Pistis Sophia tell us that she wrote of the signs by which future members of our order would know she had reincarnated. These signs were as follows.

1. Her return would come in the last half-century of the second millennium, and she would be born in the astrological sign of the Bull.

2. She would be born "in the place called Holy Cross, in a land blessed by Persephone."

3. She would endure "a living crucifixion that would save her life."

4. She would "be conceived double but be born single." In recording this prophecy, Magdalen added the following words, which are attributed to Jesus in the Gnostic Second Gospel of Mary Magdalen:

When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below and the below like the above, and when you make the male like the female and the female like the male, then you will enter the Kingdom.

5. She would have a signature of the bucrania (or bull skull) in three places on her body: behind the left knee, in the right fold of the labia majora, and in the middle of the forehead.

In 1948, the Pomegranate Grail, which is what the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail was called at that time, began its preparations for the return of the avatar. Members all over the world were put on alert. Much attention was focused on all those places that were literally called "Holy Cross" -- or in Spanish, "Santa Cruz." Pomegranate Grail members congregated around Holy Cross College in Maryland, as well as in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the Canary Islands, and Santa Cruz, California. Of these three, the Californian city aroused greatest excitement because according to one interpretation California was "Kali's land." Kali, in the canon of the Pomegranate Grail, was the Hindu equivalent of Persephone.

In anticipation of her search for the reincarnation of Mary Magdalen, Vimala Nostradamus, one of the thirteen chiefs of the Pomegranate Grail, settled north of Santa Cruz, California, in October of 1949, where she began to build the community that was to serve as the nest for the coming again of Mary Magdalen. Vimala had spent the previous ten years in Pondicherry, India, which at the time was the world headquarters for our order.

I faithfully report these facts to you, beauty and truth fans, because I can say without much exaggeration that my body is made of them. They were fed to me with my childhood meals, sung to me as I fell asleep, repeated to me as I was bathed, by the people who've loved me most and treated me best in life: Vimala and my six other mothers, Artemisia, Dagmar, Cecily, Sibyl, Burgundy, and Indigo. How could I doubt the veracity of these stories, when they come from the same nurturers who've helped make me so strong and healthy and confident?

And yet I have to say that it has always been easier for me to love those big, ancient tales than the implication they have for my personal life. The glory and the mission of Mary Magdalen are myths I have been able to appreciate best when I've tried to pretend that she wasn't me.

But the people who've treated me best and loved me most say that Magdalen is me. I am, according to them, the fulfillment of the prophecy. Their avatar. The reincarnation of the divinity that last inhabited the earthly body of Mary Magdalen -- come again to formulate and disseminate the new covenant of the ancient feminine mysteries, the dispensation for the next cycle of evolution.

And oh by the way, there won't be any next cycle of evolution if I fail to do my job. The prophecies of Magdalen, supplemented by those of her most esteemed interpreters down through the ages, are unambiguous about this. Unless I successfully lead the charge to restore the long-lost balance of male and female, patriarchy will literally exterminate the human species. By what means is irrelevant -- nuclear holocaust, germ warfare or genetic engineering gone astray, global warming or ozone-layer destruction or rain forest depletion. There is only one logical outcome to misogynist culture's evolution, and that is to commit collective suicide.

According to the prophecies, it would almost be too late by the time Magdalen was born again. The patriarchy would be in the final stages of the self-annihilation it mistakes for aggrandizement. Maybe you can begin to guess why I began to impose, at an early age, a buffer of skepticism between me and the role I was supposed to embrace. How many children are told that they have come to Earth to prevent the apocalypse?

At moments like these, I hallucinate the smell of a cedar wood bonfire. Visions of magenta silk flags flash across my inner eye, and tables heaped with gifts for me. These are psychic artifacts from midsummer's eve six weeks after my sixth birthday -- the day of my "crowning" as the avatar. For a long time my recollections of that day were a garbled mass of other people's memories, which I had empathized with so strongly I'd made them my own. With the help of a meditation technique I call anamnesis, I have in recent years recovered what I believe to be my own pure experience.

I awoke crying that morning from a terrible nightmare, which of course I wasn't allowed to forget, since Vimala was there, pouncing from her bed in the next room with her cat-smother love, asking me what I dreamed and scribbling it down in the golden notebook she kept to record every hint of an omen that ever trickled out of me.

I dreamed I was doing somersaults down a long runway, dressed in a flouncy red-and-white polka dot clown suit and big red flipper shoes. Thousands of people were in the audience, but they were totally silent even though I thought I was being wildly funny and entertaining. Then I picked up a violin and began playing the most beautiful but silly music, and the crowd started to boo, and some people walked out. Vimala jumped up on stage from below and stripped off my clown suit and flippers. Underneath I was wearing a long magenta silk dress. From somewhere Vimala produced a ridiculously big and heavy crown that seemed made of lead or iron. It was taller than my entire body, and when she put it on my head I reeled and weaved all over the runway, trying both to prevent it from tumbling off and to keep myself from falling. The audience cheered and whistled and clapped. I broke into huge sobs, which woke me up.

"Did your dream make you sad?" Vimala soothed me, as she kissed my birthmark.

I said nothing, but slumped and wiggled my front tooth, which was hanging loose by a thread of flesh. Although I'd been crying in the dream, I stopped soon after I awoke.

"There's no need to feel sad," Vimala said. "How can you feel sad for even a moment when you are such a very powerful queen of life with so many blessings to give?"

I wanted to cry but I couldn't bring myself to. Instead, I yanked at my tooth.

And then suddenly it was free. Blood geysered down onto my red silk comforter and I started to shake. Vimala instantly removed the sash from her kimono and pressed it against my wound. "Lie back down, wonderful one," she comforted me. "Rest a while. Here, give me that tooth and we will wrap it up for the fairies to come and take tonight."

She climbed under the covers with me and held my head in the crook of her arm. I fell back asleep. When I awoke Vimala was gone. I decided I would lie in bed until she came to summon me. As I wandered back to the memory of my dream, I wanted to cry again and even felt the beginning of a sob erupting in my chest. But by the time it reached my throat, it was forced, a fake. I let it bellow out anyway, and the pathos of it almost ignited a real sob. But that too aborted itself.

As I looked around my giant, pie-piece-shaped bedroom, trying to penetrate the numbness I felt about the signs of luxury I beheld there, I allowed myself to experience, for the millionth time, my oldest, most familiar emotion: a blend of gratitude and guilt for all my blessings.

There in the corner where the curved outer wall of my tower met one wall of this, my "Moon Room," Sibyl had built me an astoundingly authentic play castle, complete with drawbridge, crenellated battlements, and three pint-sized rooms. Inside were all the accessories a child queen could ever hope for, including a treasure chest of jewels, conical hats topped with banners of silk, and a magic mirror.

Beside the castle was my art station, with every kind of clay, paint, and crayons I would ever need to create my masterpieces, along with feathers, leaves, crystals, glue, a small hammer and other tools, pieces of wood and nails -- everything. Beside that was Sibyl's handmade, three-story oak dollhouse, filled with perfectly crafted miniature wood furniture. The entire room was a riot of toys, dolls, books, music, and countless other objects designed to nourish my imagination and overwhelm me with the knowledge that I was the most beloved child who had ever lived.

The emerald green walls -- what could be seen of them through the swarm of toys and props -- had been hand-painted by Artemisia with scenes depicting the thirteen stations of Mary Magdalen (as opposed to the fourteen stations of Jesus). The figure of Magdalen was portrayed by the most successful female characters from fairy tales, including, of course, Rapunzel herself.

And this was just one of my huge rooms on just one floor of the four-story enchanted tower where I lived with Vimala. And in each of six other homes which formed just a part of our larger community -- which seemed for all I could tell to be centered entirely around my happiness -- there was a special room just for me where I could go to stay with my other six adoptive mothers. I had -- and still have -- seven mothers! And each has always doted on me as if I were her only child, even though Sibyl, Cecily, Artemisia, and Burgundy have natural-born children of their own.

My blessings were prodigal, supernal, monstrous. My meals were without exception masterpieces; the recipes came from cuisines as varied as my mothers' ethnic backgrounds. I had a thousand different outfits to wear, a hundred different shoes. My mothers conducted intricate, mysterious rituals at least once every new moon and full moon -- mostly, it seemed, for my benefit -- and streams of interesting women who seemed equally in love with me were constantly visiting on these and other occasions. I was read to, played with, massaged, hugged, and taught by a tag-team of seven smart, psychologically healthy women who never grew bored or impatient with me, because the moment they might be on the verge of submitting to those feelings they handed me over to a fresh substitute.

Not one of my mothers, not even once, ever gave me the slightest suggestion that I should be overawed by my abundance. No one ever manipulated me into behaving the way they wanted by threatening to withhold their love. And yet neither did they spoil me. I was expected to work in the garden, and clean up my toys, and be responsible for my emotions.

The guilt I swam in was apparently my own invention, devised under my own inspiration. Without any direction, as if drawing telepathically on the frustrations of underprivileged people I had never met, I somehow managed to conjure a chronic reflex that combined the feelings of "How can I possibly deserve such wonderful treatment?" and "Thank you so much, beloved Goddess."

Not infrequently, I daydreamed about what it would be like to experience real pain. Having my hands cut off was a good fantasy, fueled by the Grimms' fairy tale about the girl with no hands. I tried, ineffectually, to imagine what it would be like to have my mother die, as Sibyl said hers had when she was a child. At times I felt something like envy for the sorrow and agonies of characters in books.

Maybe this wouldn't have been a problem if my seven mothers had decided to tell me about the experiences in my early life that qualified as tragic. Those traumas -- the loss of my twin brother, my heart surgery, and my biological parents giving me away to Vimala -- had all happened before I could talk, at an age when memory was shaping its records out of materials that could not easily be retrieved later.

By the time I was informed, at age nine, of just how difficult my early life had been, it was too late to erase the imprint. That weird blend of compulsive gratitude and guilt was always there, preventing direct communion with the divine favors forever flowing my way. As a result, I half-wasted my blessings for years. I was caught up in my self-conscious dialogue with them, forever missing the point.

The point being: Don't get all bound up in worrying about the implications of the blessings; just get out there and use them, spread them, multiply them. Respond to them with the same spirit with which they have been given to you.

In light of this failing of mine, beauty and truth fans, the disaster I am about to describe to you may seem forgivable.

I lay in bed that morning for as long as it took to realize that I wasn't going to be able to cry right then. Finally I rose and wandered out of my Moon Room.

From the window that runs the entire length of the Sun Room's outer wall, I watched my seven mothers and other women at work outside, preparing the grounds for the ritual ahead. Each of the other three towers was already festooned with long trains of silk magenta flags. On the circular green at the heart of our community, there were a harp and drums and the tall effigy of Persephone and a cauldron stacked on top of cedar logs and five huge round black marble tables with a silver cup and piles of gifts on every one. More prayer flags had been strung between the myrtle trees, whose branches held feathered serpents and corn dollies and colored eggs and bull skulls and balloons. Around the periphery of the green was a boundary of giant pumpkins, miraculously full-grown here on the first day of summer, as well as ripe tomatoes and pears and fat white candles.

It all looked very festive -- and dismal. As I watched the arrival of women I had never seen -- pilgrims, I had been told, from chapters of the Pomegranate Grail based all over the world, visiting especially for this joyous occasion -- I could feel my entire body tightening into a rigid coil. It was one thing to be queen in the spontaneous play and fairy tales I had always enjoyed with my mothers and the three other children who lived in our community. I could slip in and out of these roles according to my whims, and just as naturally try on the personality of the witch or the king or the dragon or the wise old man. But today that slippery, delicious freedom was to be stolen from me. My face was to be forever locked inside the visage of the remote heroine I had heard so much about.

For as long as I could remember, I had felt everyone -- my mothers and the forty or so other members of the Pomegranate Grail who hung around from time to time -- sneaking looks at me that oozed longing, expectancy, adoration and, the most bizarre of all, worship. It rarely failed to unnerve me, or cause me to flinch (at least inwardly: I learned to hide the outward signs). At times my mind would rationalize that they were mistaken to feel this way, that I was not who they thought I was. At other times, I fantasized that I was not just myself as I experienced myself, but also a stranger who was sort of like an unsprouted seed in me. That last image was the hardest to bear. I often felt as if I were standing beside myself, that there was another version of me, invisible and mute.

Maybe all my loved ones thought they were hiding these "attacks" on me. After all, the blatantly innocent look of wonder that would sometimes possess their faces would usually only emerge when they thought they were out of my direct field of vision. But though the looks themselves always came from sideways and behind, the other signs were laughably obvious. Every gesture that I made, every skill I learned, every goddamn bowel movement I emitted, seemed like a revelation to them, to be noted, named, registered, studied, and celebrated.

At least I had my childhood to escape into. I could always break into a hoppity jig or nonsense song when one of my caretakers-cum-devotees would ask me some absurdly portentous question like "What is the quality in me you would most like to see changed?" or an occult riddle like "Where can Persephone find the stone that the Builders rejected?"

As I gazed down from my Sun Room at all the remarkable women preparing for my special day, I began to mourn. I sensed a growing wordless fear that by tomorrow my childhood would be killed; that I would no longer be able to escape into it.

A few hours later, as the sun neared its highest ascension into the northern hemisphere, I was stripped naked by Vimala and the twelve other chiefs of the Pomegranate Grail -- lovingly and with reverence, of course -- and ritually bathed in the giant cauldron there in front of more than two hundred women and children. As Vimala dunked my head beneath the tepid holy water, I kept my eyes open, trying to stay focused on the two dead bugs I'd spied floating on the surface.

After that, all in attendance lay face down in the grass, ritually turning themselves into stepping stones for me. I did what I had been instructed to do: walked, still naked, across the backs of every adult woman with my full weight, and lightly tapped the backs of the children and babies with my left foot. I enjoyed this. I relished being able to look at everyone without them staring at me. I loved the utter, humid silence being punctuated by the series of grunts from the women I pressed into the grass. I felt like I was a musician playing a new kind of instrument: a field of living bodies, each of which emitted a different tone. A crazy idea occurred to me. If I was now the Queen of Heaven and the Underworld, maybe I had more power than I realized. I decided to see if I could get the grunts to play one of my favorite songs, "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." Amazingly, as soon as I set my mind to it, it seemed to happen. It made me happy for a while.

When this pleasure ended, I was finally allowed to be dressed. Vimala and the twelve other chiefs covered me with a silk magenta robe and slippers. But in trade I had to submit to a greater indignity. Vimala drew my bangs off my forehead and bobby-pinned them to the top of my head, destroying the function I cultivated them for. Now my birthmark was glaringly revealed.

In the best of times, I bought the Pomegranate Grail's party line that this was a beauty mark of messianic distinction. But right now, feeling exposed and humiliated even as I basked in the strange triumph of playing the music of grunting backs, I hated the blotch more than I ever had before. In fact, it was at that moment I decided I would get rid of it, somehow, someday, I didn't know how.

I was guided to sit upon a rose-bedecked throne on a litter that was picked up and held three feet off the ground by four strong women. My valets then circumambulated me very slowly, throne and all, thirteen times counterclockwise and thirteen times clockwise around the entire assemblage. While this excruciating part of the ritual dragged on for what must have been an hour, Vimala and the twelve other chiefs intoned from the holy texts of the Pomegranate Grail, from the most ancient to the most recent. The last section had a particularly spooky part.

Will the patriarchs kill the world? Until today we feared the worst. Until today we staved off their murderous mandates with stealth and sidelong snipes. But no more! No more! Our Queen is among us! Our answer to the destroyers! Preserver of the ancient matrix! Singer of our strength and resurrector of eternity! Praise Her who outwits the global death blow of the cruel fathers!

Finally the reading and the circumambulations stopped. My four valets set me down beneath the myrtle tree where the effigy of Persephone leaned. A group of five singers then droned on with sacred hymns to Persephone for a long time. Their voices were pretty but the melodies were quite boring. As they sang, the thirteen chiefs came up to me one by one and kissed my blotch. When they were done, Vimala crowned me with a half-gold, half-silver headdress.

Darshan followed, a creepy event in which my job was simply to sit and radiate my direct connection to the Goddess while everyone else squatted and stared, soaking up my channeled beneficence.

The awkwardness didn't end but changed form as I oversaw the ritual of the divine feast. After placing my now-magical hands over the bread and salt and wine and flame, I distributed the blessed food to the assembled. Following this mirthless adventure, I opened my gifts interminably, the polite performance of which distracted me from the heavenly music of harp and drum and three singers.

Finally the mood lightened. The real feasting began, with unconsecrated salads and broiled fish and home-baked breads. The bonfire was lit, I let my bangs down, and the dancing began. For a time I was a mere sprout again, not a stiff old queen. I skipped and squealed and tumbled. I grass-stained my ceremonial gown and used my crown to play catch with Parvati, a friend my age, until Vimala stopped me.

But my temporary happiness hatched the miserable panic that had been pregnant in me all day. Without words, yet with unmistakable consciousness, I registered the fact that I had become a living symbol. I no longer belonged to myself; didn't even belong to my seven mothers. I was a possession and creation of the scores of loving, nurturing women who had all day gazed towards me with infinite expectation. I was too young to have this realization, but that's the story of my life.

As the first star burst out over the hill behind Isis Tower, I heard myself thinking a prayer. I didn't understand it for many years, yet the words were unmistakable: "I will never be the queen you want. I will never be the queen you want unless you give me back myself."