“I’m going to help you,” Sky said again.

Then Izzy smelled the narcotic mix of resin, honey, and white roses. Falling into the deepening violet light, she wondered what it would be like for all her thoughts to stop.

◆◆◆

Izzy opened her eyes. More time had passed. The sky hung, dark-amethyst now, over the garden.

“Why do we worship Isis?” a woman’s voice asked. Sky’s voice again.

Izzy realized that she had not moved for some time, that she could hardly move.

Jeb, dressed in black, stood beside Sky. The group had gathered by the waterfall. The night was colder now and clear. Izzy still lay, clothed in white satin, on the divan.

Over her hovered a man with the face of a bird—a falcon?—and another jackal-faced man. A cow woman with horns, a wet, black nose, a round, pink tongue hanging lasciviously from the cleft of her mouth. Her heavy head bobbed like a puppet’s, and her arms were painted with flowers. A tall man, who resembled some animal with long furry ears and a snout, stood in the shadows.

“Why would the ancients follow her?” Sky asked. “A woman? A beautiful woman who could make love magic, vegetal magic, make plants grow, who could weave baskets and linen, make the waters rise and the evening star shine, who devoted her life to her husband, the king; a woman who gathered her beloved’s bones and gave him immortality. Who wouldn’t want that? And then she was abolished, sent away, underground. There she lived on and now we look to her again, in times of such great need.

“The girls and women raped and murdered. The guns shooting down our Black men in cold blood on the streets. Shooting our children in classrooms! The refusal to regulate these weapons. Nature rebelling. Ice melting, animals dying. It’s like the apocalypse, truly. But did the goddess ever really leave? How many people go to psychics and hear, ‘You were an Egyptian king or queen reincarnated?’ Why not a plumber? Why not a beggar?” Laughter frothed like the waterfall hitting the pool. “No, an Egyptian king or queen. That’s the message, over and over again. Because, within, we all are these Egyptian kings and queens, descendants of the gods and goddesses.

“And what are we doing here tonight?” Sky asked. “Trying to get you to assimilate the deities, to appreciate the feminine, to honor and restore her, so that the masculine, the powerful, good, kind-hearted king, can be restored to the throne as well.” Sky raised her hand, beckoning, and the cow-woman stepped forward.

“Hathor, will you recite the invocation?” Sky asked.

The woman began to speak.

Re-membering Deities

Isis and Osiris, they were twins.

They loved each other even in the womb.

His brother Set chopped off Osiris’s limbs.

She turned to falcon, raised him from the tomb.

From Isis’s womb the child named Horus came.