Fianna's World "High Weirdness and Covenplay," Part 3 of 3

In which weirdness gets weirder, the witches try to save me and I finally figure out how to save myself.

Hello Everyone!

This the last installment of Fianna’s World. You can find Part 1 here, Part 2, “The Vision,” here. I really appreciate you following me down this particular rabbithole, and I promise the light does appear at the end of the tunnel. At the end of Part 2, I had first introduced you to Doc Holga at the failed dinner party. She was the head of a local coven of self-styled witches, and we pick up with her now as we race none too fast toward a new world.

As always, I appreciate your comments!

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My fate is in my own hands. Sandy Brown Jensen, Prismacolor on black craft paper.

High Weirdness and Covenplay

Bill started seeing Doc Holga professionally for acupuncture treatments. They saw eye to eye about all kinds of whackadoodle ideas, including our local fleet of flying saucers, the current rash of attacks by aliens snatching people and putting crystals in their foreheads, and the presence of attached entities in Bill’s gut.

Doc Holga and Nurse Randi and Bill were all conspiracy theorists of the first order. I was as disinterested in all that then as I am now but with less ability to filter the weirdness that was all around me. Sometimes in the middle of one of these confabulations, I would stop and gasp for air; I felt like I was drowning.

These two women were also on an outer orbit of Sunrise Ranch, as were the couple dozen other people Bill and I started to hang out with. Not because I was compatible with them but because we had Sunday morning services in common to fuel a week’s worth of rehash. By which I don’t mean any intelligent conversation worthy of a person who called him or herself an Emissary of Divine Light. It was more like MacBeth’s three witches cackling over the toxic cauldron muttering, “Boil, boil, trouble and toil.” But those three were pikers compared to the gossip, the rants, the blusters, diatribes, the fuming and haranguing, blathering, blethering, babbling, malicious meddling, scandalmongering defamatory calumny, drivel, gab, gabble, jabber, tattle, prattle, wiggle-waggle gibberish and please! Let me tell you what I really think.

If January 1989 began ominously with finding a black widow spider in my bed, January and February 1990 had their own portent of sticky times ahead. On Jan. 17, our Emissary world spoking out from Sunrise Ranch at the center, reeled with the arrest of one of our close-in own for seven accounts of sex with a minor. Joey Mandela, husband of Tara Redstone, apparently had been doing “spiritual” sexual awakening rituals with young boys in the area.

After he was arrested, Tara Redstone had the apartment in their home where the deeds had happened available for rent. Bill had sold my sister’s home, and it was time for us to move out, and for some reason, we thought this apartment, so recently the geographic location of so much pain, would be just right for us. Certainly, the price was right. So we moved up to 7000 feet into a small daylight basement apartment with a great view out over Rattlesnake Lake. I assure you, I pay much more attention to signs and portents these days as a cautious rationalist.

On February 16, 1990, just a month later, the Loveland molasses factory exploded, and the streets ran first hot with molasses then brittle as the freezing temperatures froze it where it flowed. Brer Rabbit wouldn’t’ve dreamed of a better Tar Baby. People drove cars into it and didn’t drive out. They tried to walk across it and had to be rescued by firemen with blowtorches to melt their shoes out of the molasses. Everything about my two years in Colorado was like that molasses spill--at the center was a black morass, and everything I threw at it stuck and froze.

Bill just got sicker, but it was some kind of cycling illness that let him up then threw him down. On my May birthday 1990, he took me out to lunch in a lovely outdoor restaurant in Fort Collins. The sun was shining, and May roses cascaded out of colorful pots hung from an adobe wall. A fountain whited out the noise from the street. Bill wanted me to have a special day, but the demon chose that moment to reach up and grab him under. Bill put his head down on the table and said, “Order anything you want.”

My heart broke for him, broke for the good, kind and generous person I knew him--or part of him, or one of him--to be. Worst birthday ever. But sometimes compassion kills. I thought I could help Bill on so many, many occasions, but whenever I reached out a hand, nothing ever useful came of it. It just was not my battle to help fight. Once, toward the end, he said, “Sandy, I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up.”

And then with a clarity that suddenly cut across all the illness, all the manic craziness, all the despair and confusion, his old voice spoke to me directly soul to soul, “Sandy, save yourself.”

When I think of those frightening, complicated days in Colorado, my mind often turns to the age-old problem of evil. And when I think of evil, I remember a first hand account from a survivor of Jonestown I met one time. This woman, who had loved the community life of The People’s Temple in both California and in Guyana, tried to explain to me how Jim Jones had become increasingly possessed by some malevolent entity, which she called a demon. “Look at the videos of him,” she told me, “You can see his flickering tongue. That’s how you know demons.” And I looked, and I saw that uncontrolled tongue flicking like a heat-seeking pit viper had got inside him.

“The day before the suicides,” she continued, “a black cloud of evil came in from the jungle and settled over Jonestown. When it left late the next day, 900 people were dead.”

“You mean a real cloud? What made you think it was evil?”

“It was freakish. The clouds just suddenly blew in and started blowing everything around. Children started crying. We looked at each other in fear. That wind brought in the evil.”

Other survivors commented on this wind. “That freakish storm and the mood seemed ominous. ‘I felt evil itself blow into Jonestown when that storm hit,’ recalls Tim Carter, one of the few settlers to survive that day,” in an interview with Tim Reiterman, who covered Jonestown for the San Francisco Examiner.

I thought about that and about the sorcerer’s mist that had killed Fianna on the Ides of March 1991. “So you think evil can exist external from humans?”

“Yes,” she replied with absolute conviction. “It is a free floating force of nature.”

Another young man who by the grace of circumstances did not go to Guyana, remembers the first time he met Jim Jones. “As I approached [Jones], he bent over and extended his hand to shake mine. At the time our hands made contact--as he was bent over--I could see his eyes over the top of his dark sunglasses. What I saw scared the daylights out of me, and I jerked my hand back. There was something very strange and frightening about what I both saw and felt...what I sensed was pure evil.” This is not the intellectualization or psychologization of evil; it is the atavistic encounter.

The term “hidden complex” is not sufficient for me to explain this primal recognition of malevolent darkness, yes, of evil, in another person. And by “evil,” I mean with the power and intent to do deathly harm to others. I am not even thinking or speaking of morality here, or jurisprudence, religion or situational ethics; I mean something more pre-rational, savage.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

There is a field: I’ll meet you there.

This is Rumi’s invitation, and encounters with atavistic evil can best be remembered, described, and mulled over out there in that field.

I don’t not believe evil can gather in the forest and be drawn in and down by the dark attractor of a deranged and dangerous nutjob like Jim Jones. As an educated, perhaps over-educated rationalist, science, psychology, intuition and experience twist and turn in my mind like a Rubik’s cube constantly trying to solve itself. I understand with part of my education that demons are unresolved, unconscious complexes that need to be consciously integrated into the individuating wholeness of the self. I’ve read about the Shadow and about projection, and I only partially believe all that because of what happened to me one night.

Bill was so sick most of the time that we had long ceased to be lovers. But one night he was on an uptick, which meant he was really turning on the Irish seductive charm. As we were lying side by side in that twilight post-coital state of half wakefulness, I became aware that a shadow figure, a full grown man was slipping sideways out of Bill’s body and entering mine, not sexually, but laterally, like the full insertion of one figure lengthwise into another. It was like two figures standing in front of a mirror, then stepping together and becoming one, and that second figure emerged out of Bill and moved into me.

I was wide awake now. I jumped up off the bed. Bill was now also awake and trying to make sense out of what was happening.

I opened my mouth to scream, but instead of my own voice, an old, slow, guttural voice came out. It twisted my face into a shape I had never made before.

Thirty years later, I looked up “demonic possession” in Wikipedia to read the list of features. One of them is, “drastic changes in vocal intonation and facial structure.” That’s exactly what I’m talking about.

This is a stupid and dangerous thought, I know, but now I sort of wish I had had the emotional maturity or shamanic training to endure this visitation, to interrogate it, and then to exorcise it, if that is the right word. Could I have removed it from Bill forever, moved it out of him and through me and along out into the universe? Would it have remained itself or could I have transformed it into a being of light? I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about.

In reality, I found the presence, the voice, the whateverthehell it was, unacceptable, unendurable, 100% not an optional experience for me. By force of a will I didn’t know I had, I denied this moment. My own voice overrode the terrifying drone of the demonic voice. I screamed and screamed. I jumped up and down and shook my arms and hand violently as if shaking off snakes. “No!” I yelled. “This is NOT alright with me! Out! Out! Out! Out!”

Not a minute later, I felt whateverthehell it was move out of my mind, free up my body, and I was my calm self again.

I remember Bill said in the most shocked voice ever, “You know this means we can never have sex again,” and we never did.

One theory I have always had about Bill is that he was cursed not only by a parasite when he was in Guatemala in the Peace Corps for four years, but that he was cursed by a powerful witch--and there are plenty of those there to this day. By his own account, he went, as we say, “native” during those years. He told me he went off the Peace Corps script entirely, that he lived in a village that was flooded by a hurricane. He told of being involved in saving people from trees, from uprooted huts floating by. He said that during the emergency he became the de facto mayor of the little village, going on raids to gather supplies. His descriptions of this chaotic time in his life always sounded permeated with the local witchcraft culture. They sounded lawless, chaotic, like a time when he could have had the shaman’s bone pointed at him and some demonic spirit driven into him while he was under the influence of the concoctions he said they mixed up out of the local jungle flora almost nightly.

Or maybe my speculations are all bullshit, man. But I am now sixty-six years old, looking back at a vulnerable time in my life when something very strange happened to me that I can neither explain nor forget. I find myself groping for language to explain how I felt when my life was brushed by some dark wing, and how I felt it reached out and took Fianna’s life in that witch’s mist in the hollow of the road. All these threads tangled together--leaving my cloistered seminary community, the death of our beloved leader, the implosion at Sunrise Ranch as that vacuum rushed to be filled, the vicious snake pit of gossip that surrounded it, Crazy Doc Holga and Crazier Nurse Randi with their flying saucers, crystal implants, and alien evisceration of cows.

The culminating event came after Fianna’s death when I couldn’t leave the house without Bill threatening to slash his wrists in the bathtub. He was a crazy bastard, but at that time and in that space, he was MY crazy bastard, and we clung together in the grieving depression after Fianna’s death.

I got a call from Crazy Doc Holga to come have a visit with her one evening at 7:00 pm. This meant driving down off the mountain at dusk, leaving Bill along with whatever razor blades he had stashed away under a garden rock like an alcoholic might hide bottles in the garage, but she was insistent. It was the Emissary naivete in me that thought all Emissaries had to be friends. I didn’t have the vocabulary of no at that time. I was reluctant, but I went.

Cheryl Renee Long, “The Road to the Ranch.” Prismacolor on black craft paper.

When I drove up to the ranch, I saw several other cars parked, which surprised me because she had been clear this was just the two of us. I was greeted by Crazy Nurse Randi in full witch regalia--the long, tye-dyed dress, the dangling crystal necklaces--crystals no doubt mined from the foreheads of her clients and claimed in lieu of payment. She began smudging me with sweetgrass and white sage before I even got in the door. This was the first time I realized I had fetched up in the company of witches.

In the living room circled around either side of the fireplace was the whole coven, all in full regalia. Some wore the horns of Venus, others held staffs dripping with stones and bones. Hands and wrists flashed with amulets and charms. The witches meant business, and the business was me.

Crazy Doc Holga was in charge, in full High Priestess mode. I was brought into the circle, and she laid a crystal wand on my shoulder and said, “There is a place for you here. Now you must come away and be here.”

As if on cue, all the witches joined hands, closed their eyes and started pulsing in toward me, holding me in a tight circle and then pulsing away and then in again, all the while chanting, “Come away, come away, come away.”

The pulsing and chanting made me dizzy and disoriented. “Here? Where? Away from what?”

“It has come to our attention that Bill is in toxic possession of a demon that is destroying him. You must flee far from him. We have taken the dog so that you might be free.”

“Wait. What? You took Fianna?”

But this wasn't to be a rational conversation. The pulsing stopped but they continued to sway and hum as one by one each woman “spoke her truth” to me. They were all into enigmatic coven-speak, but I gathered they were trying to speak on my behalf and against Bill, who had done a lot of work around the ranch and I knew considered himself more of a friend than I did. The different speeches sometimes sounded encouraging, at other times scary. One woman would praise me, another would praise Bill, then another would say we were both toxic to each other.

I was trying to interpret the many messages through the haze of white sage smoke, the humming and mazy motion of the swaying skirts. Why I even stayed there I don’t know. I wouldn’t stand for any of that dangerous play acting for a moment now, but I knew each of these women in their daily life guises, and it just didn’t occur to me that this was not friendly, that I should walk away.

What they thought they were doing was an intervention to separate Bill and me. This was an all-lesbian coven, and Crazy Doc was recruiting me in her own inimitable way to come live with her and Crazy Nurse Randi here at the Crazy Ranch. I have no real idea to this day what Crazy Doc meant when she said they had taken Fianna away, but I finally literally broke out of the circle and ran to my car, driving miles up the curving mountainside with yet more terrified tears streaming down my cheeks. Had they put their witch’s curse on the mist that killed Fianna, and had that curse been meant for me? I felt--and was--utterly and completely betrayed by this circle of so-called Emissary women friends. I hadn’t been in town long enough to be truly close to any of them, but I hadn’t had any other support system, either. They had been it.

When I got home, I got out of the Jeep and walked out to look over moonlit Rattlesnake Lake far before. The rattlesnakes, those so-called friends, had struck.

I had plenty to think about as I stared down at those dark waters far below. My own culpability was that perhaps I had stayed too long at the fair; that is, perhaps twenty years wrapped in the wonderful cotton batting of seminary life had been a little too long for my internal growth. Nothing had toughened me up, let me experience and come to grips with the darkness in the world. After all, we were called Emissaries of Divine Light.

In that quiet moment, I felt a strong, distinct energy move up out of the ground and into my feet, rippling up my spine and through the crown of my head--not the attaching entity experience with Bill, but a powerful wave of personal strength I could feel was both of and not of myself. It had a message for me that I heard loud and clear. “Leave this place or someone else will die.”

Getting out of Colorado with Bill resisting the move every inch of the way and with no help from anyone--for I never spoke to any member of the coven ever again--was like crawling over glass, but I absolutely did it.

Am I still angry at these women all these years later? Certainly that is the emotion my memory rides on. And yes, I think they deserve my anger for presuming they could reach in and yank me out of my life. But I am most angry at myself for not knowing where my own boundaries were. I was living in a dream of a fenceless West where Emissaries were ALL ONE. I was in my thirties with the sunny idealism of the rural teen I had once been. I didn’t know I would need a vocabulary of evil once I left the protective surround of the Glen Ivy Community, but willy-nilly, I got my education in weirdness.

My sister Cheryl, by this time re-located to Eugene, Oregon, sent me an envelope with a half dozen or more college catalogs in it. I spread them out on the coffee table. The Lane Community College catalog had a picture of a cherry tree in blossom on the cover. I tapped it and said, “I’m going to work there.” And I have just retired from Lane CC after a twenty-five year teaching career.

The turquoise tin with Fianna’s ashes went with me. One day in August 1991, Cheryl and I went to the beach with the specific intent of releasing the ashes into the ocean.

We found a place to park and began the one-mile walk across the dunes to the beach. As we came over the rise of a dune of golden sand, suddenly our ears were full of the sound of happy dogs. To our astonishment, team after team of sled dogs pulling sand sledges swept by--fifty or sixty dogs in training for the Iditarod Great Sled Race up in Alaska. I saw one team of all black Huskies rush by, eager to take the lead. If Fianna’s spirit was still anywhere near me or the little tin of ashes, she certainly jumped out and joined in the joyous race of dog teams. They rushed by us yapping and laughing, the mushers urging them on, the sledges bouncing and careening in the loose yellow sand.

I opened the tin and spread the ashes in their enthusiastic wake.

“Farewell, Fianna.”

Epilogue: Two years later, I had met my now husband Peter Jensen and we married in 1994. I haven’t seen Bill in literally decades, but I understand from a friend of a friend that he lives in a foster care home where they allow him to keep his seven rescue cats. It is only now so many years later, reaching deep into that distant past that I find the compassion for Bill that he deserves. Whatever he has is a disease. I didn't really understand that then. All I knew is that I had to save myself, and I did.