The hell with them. Freedom of religion was an absolute and basic right in the Corps, even back in boot camp. Lots of the other men and women in the MIEU were Wiccan, World of the Goddess, or pagan of various other stripes, and he knew he could have found others to join him in this ritual.
But he wanted to do this one solo, just him and the universe. Normally, he would have performed it inwardly, a simulation within the noumenal world, but with the net down he was left to do it in the phenomenal world instead. His father hadn’t allowed him to use the Sony-TI 12000 for Wiccan rites either, so he’d learned how to do it the traditional way, with athame blade and imagination. He’d found as private a corner as he could, off on the south edge of the open compound area they were now calling “the grinder,” an out-of-the-way spot for the ritual that would make this patch of ground sacred space.
“Brothers and sisters of the north, spirits of earth, spirits of practical things, of daily life…hail, and welcome…”
He completed the imagined circle of blue fire, a perimeter around him now sealed by four pentagrams. Stooping, he touched the ground with the point of his blade.
“Great Mother…Goddess…Maiden, Mother, and Crone, I invite you to this circle. Be here now.”
In many Wiccan traditions the Goddess represented Gaia, the spirit of Earth herself. Could she find her way across the light-years? Or did Ishtar have its own goddess spirit? The thought stirred sudden inspiration, and he added, “Goddess of ancient Sumeria and Babylon, Goddess who is called Inanna, Astarte, and Ishtar…Goddess of Love and Goddess of Battles, hail and welcome.”
Standing, he raised his blade high. The gas giant Marduk hung vast and banded in the west. “God of Light, God of the Sun, known as Utu, Shamash, and Marduk, be here now. Hail and welcome.” He wasn’t entirely sure that Marduk could properly be linked mythologically with the earlier Mesopotamian gods of the sun, but it didn’t matter. It was the idea behind the words that mattered.
He closed his eyes and imagined Ishtar and Marduk, queen and consort, standing within his circle within a blaze of radiant light. A small but rational part of his mind noted that those deities likely had their origins with the An colonists in ancient Sumer ten thousand years ago. Most of the oldest Sumerian gods, it seemed—Utu and Enki, Ea and An and Nanna—had been real beings, or at least personalized composites drawn from actual encounters between early proto-Sumerian nomads and the Anunnaki, “Those Who Came from Heaven to Earth.”
Not that this mattered either. Humankind had long ago refashioned all of the gods in its own image. He doubted that the modern Ahannu would recognize what he called upon now.
More disturbing, the rational part of him thought, was the idea of a twenty-second-century high-tech Marine invoking spirits in a ritual two centuries old, one drawn, it was claimed, from beliefs and practices thousands of years older—older even than the starfaring gods of ancient Sumeria.
He pushed the intruding thought aside, focusing instead on the inner pacing of the solitary ritual, on the metaphors that allowed him to tap deep, deep into his own unconscious, to draw on the guidance, the symbols, the energy residing there. Religion, the religious impulse, whatever its outward trappings and whatever its origin, was undeniably as much a part of humankind as language, politics, or even breathing.
“By the earth that is her body, by the air that is her breath, by the fire of her bright spirit, by the living waters of her womb, this circle is cast.”
He opened his eyes, turning them toward a momentarily clear, crystalline blue-green twilight sky alive with pale auroras and the banded beauty of ringed Marduk. A meteor flared briefly at the zenith. “I stand now between the worlds.”
He smiled at that. In a sense, he was between the worlds. But more…he might be light-years from Earth, but the connection he sought with the divine was something he carried within himself, the god and goddess both parts of his own being. The deities he called to this place were not so distant after all. They were a part of his own noumenal world, as opposed to the phenomenal world of sight, sound, and matter.
Facing east once more, he concentrated on raising inner energy for the working he had in mind. He heard laughter and opened his eyes. Yeah…he was being watched. A group of Marines offloading supplies from a cargo LM nearby were taking a break, and several were watching his ritual. Let them. This was his time, his sacred space, and their laughter meant nothing.
The spiritual feeding of the men and women of 1 MIEU was an undertaking nearly as complex and as daunting as feeding them physically. There were a number of chaplains with the MIEU, all of them tasked with multiple spiritual duties. Captain Walters, for instance, served as priest for both the Catholics and the counter-Catholics, as well as the Episcopalians—a reconciliation of viewpoints that, Garroway thought, must require a fascinating set of mental gymnastics. Lieutenant Steve Prescott was chaplain for the less fundamentalist Protestants, the Church of Light, the Spiritualists, the Taoists, the Neo-Arians, and several other faiths, while a staff sergeant from C Company named Blandings took care of the fundy sects, Four-Squares, Baptists, and Pentecostals. There were two rabbis for the Jews, two imams for the Muslims, a priest for the Hindus, and a young lieutenant named Cynthia Maillard who watched out for the spiritual needs of the pagans, the Native American shamanic traditions, the Mithraists, and five different ancient astronaut sects. He’d heard somewhere that there were all of sixty-five different faiths represented among the MIEU’s personnel complement, not counting the atheists, agnostics, and personal faiths. Arguably, the only major religion not represented were any of the radical Anist sects. While the Corps was enjoined by law not to discriminate on the basis of religious belief, people who believed that the An were literal gods or that humankind was intended to be a slave race were not the best recruits for a Marine deployment to an Ahannu world.