In previous stages of my life, I was almost exclusively a solitary practitioner. I met with other witches and magicians, learned what I could from them, socialized where I could. I had my coffee house group, back in high school. There was the WPA (back before it became the Cauldron). I’ve attended public rituals of various kinds off and on, even tried to teach a few times. But mostly, it’s just been me, myself, and I.
In the last two years, I’ve done more groupwork than in all the previous fourteen years of magical practice combined. I’ve done public rituals that actually worked, joined a practice group that almost became a coven before it fell apart, tried to show a few things to a pack of young people at school. And all throughout it all, I have maintained a regular and powerful practice with my partner, Aradia.
Before all else, keeping a magical practice with your lover is every bit as powerful, transformative, and awe-inspiring as it’s supposed to be. It is more intimate than all but the very best sex, and the synchronicity it builds makes everything else better, more harmonious.
You see a lot written about that synchronicity. It’s mostly pretty fantastic and romanticized: empathic links bordering on mindreading, unity of will that precludes disagreements, mind-blowing mutual orgasms, prescient knowledge of where the other is and what they’re doing. If these extremes are possible, though, Aradia and I haven’t reached them, nor have any couple I know of.
What the myth leaves out is even more to the point. The empathic bond that can create a closed circuit of escalating glee can just as readily bring both partners spiraling downward in the middle of say, a panic attack, or at the end of a bad day. We’ve experienced both varieties. “Is this headache mine or yours?” is a conversation that Aradia and I have actually had. We get sympathetic foot and leg pains.
We’ve shared dreams a few times. The incident that exemplifies the oddities of our synchronicity was that once, when I was having a fried chicken craving that had been twice thwarted by nasty, dried failures, she dreamed of going on a fruitless quest for rich, juicy fried chicken. She also has more dreams that are completely, random, and nonsensical than she ever had before knowing me.
We appear frequently in one-another’s tarot spreads. When we have plans together for an evening, that usually shows up as well – a couple of weeks ago, for example, we both drew the Princess of Disks on a night we had already planned to see Pasiphae to do tarot readings for her.
None of these things have shown up in any sources that I’ve ever encountered. Which is interesting, because I don’t believe for a moment that our experience is isolated or unique. More research is required, I suppose.