Which brings me to the next car on this long, bizarre train of thought. If you do any reading on the occult, Alestair Crowley, those sorts of things, you find that in addition to trying to meet God and make gold from base metals, one of the aims of some of these people throughout history has been to call forth demons/beings from another realm or to animate inanimate things (think Golem-- no, not Tolkien's Gollum, but the Golem of Jewish mysticism). Add to this the conversation I had with my doula, who is really into the story of the Sumerian Goddess Inanna as an allegory of childbirth. This idea that you go to another realm, an underworld of sorts, stripped of everything you have or know, go to your absolute limits, and come back changed/reborn. I really felt that this had happened to me when I gave birth to Lily.

Childbirth, when entered into with eyes open and full presence in the experience, is an absolutely life-altering experience. Bringing forth life is pretty damn powerful, and I am not the same. I've gone through this mourning of who/what I was, and now I'm trying to figure out who this different creature that I have become IS. But back to how this relates to mysticism. At the time Lily was born, all I could think of was Alestair Crowley and his grand ceremonies using shit, blood, semen, etc. to try and call forth life. It all just seems a pale comparison to the experience of childbirth, rife with all those bodily fluids as well as pain and transformation. Is Magick really just men trying to replicate what women go through in childbirth? Some cultures decorate women as warriors after they give birth, but our culture doesn't really acknowledge much at all about the transformation of the mother through this experience; it becomes all about the baby in an instant.

I am wondering if there are other women who experience this transformation the way I have, on such a spiritual level. I suppose it's all just a problem of interpretation. Sure, we all swap "war stories" of how our labor went, what happened during the birth, etc., but to me those conversations lack some deeper element. It's something I can't put into words, but something I just *know* about where I went and what I've been through. It's no wonder that some women are treated for PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) after a particularly difficult/invasive birth experience. All the sort of crunchy stuff about natural birth gets at some of it, in terms of "empowerment," but again, to me there is this lurking darker, more powerful element that I can't describe.

What is my point here? I don't know. I'm just grasping at straws trying to explain something that will in all likelihood remain inexplicable and unable to be captured in words. On a surface level it may come of as sort of birthist, feminist rantings, but I see it as much more personal. But it's something I need to try to explain in order to sort out for myself.