Brida

It was card number 23. A king of clubs.

‘Good protection,’ she said. ‘From a strong, powerful man with dark hair.’

Her boyfriend was neither strong nor powerful, and the Magus’s hair was grey.

‘Don’t think about his physical appearance,’ said Wicca, as if she had read her thoughts. ‘Think of your Soulmate.’

‘What do you mean “Soulmate”?’ Brida was surprised. The woman inspired a strange respect, different from the respect she had felt for the Magus or for the bookseller.

Wicca did not answer the question. She again shuffled the cards, and again spread them in that same disorderly manner on the table, except that this time the cards were face up. The card in the middle of that apparent confusion was card number 11. A woman forcing open the mouth of a lion.

Wicca picked up the card and asked Brida to hold it. Brida did so, although without knowing quite what was required of her.

‘In previous incarnations, your stronger side was always a woman,’ Wicca said.

‘What do you mean by “Soulmate”?’ Brida asked again. It was the first time she had challenged the woman, but it was, nonetheless, a very timid challenge.

Wicca remained silent for a moment. A suspicion crossed her mind – for some reason the Magus had not taught the girl about Soulmates. ‘Nonsense,’ she said to herself and brushed the thought aside.

‘The Soulmate is the first thing people learn about when they want to follow the Tradition of the Moon,’ she said. ‘Only by understanding the Soulmate can we understand how knowledge can be transmitted over time.’

As Wicca continued her explanation, Brida remained silent, feeling anxious.

‘We are eternal because we are all manifestations of God,’ Wicca said. ‘That is why we go through many lives and many deaths, emerging out of some unknown place and going towards another equally unknown place. You must get used to the fact that there are many things in magic which are not and never will be explained. God decided to do certain things in a certain way and why He did this is a secret known only to Him.’

‘The Dark Night of Faith,’ thought Brida. So it existed in the Tradition of the Moon as well.

‘The fact is that this happens,’ Wicca went on. ‘And when people think of reincarnation, they always come up against a very difficult question: if, in the beginning, there were so few people on the face of the Earth, and now there are so many, where did all those new souls come from?’

Brida held her breath. She had asked herself this question many times.

‘The answer is simple,’ said Wicca, after pausing to savour the young woman’s eager silence. ‘In certain reincarnations, we divide into two. Our souls divide as do crystals and stars, cells and plants.

‘Our soul divides in two, and those new souls are in turn transformed into two and so, within a few generations, we are scattered over a large part of Earth.’

‘And does only one of those parts know who it is?’ asked Brida. She had many questions to ask, but she wanted to ask them one at a time, and this seemed the most important.

‘We form part of what the alchemists call the Anima mundi, the Soul of the World,’ said Wicca, without replying to the question. ‘The truth is that if the Anima mundi were merely to keep dividing, it would keep growing, but it would also become gradually weaker. That is why, as well as dividing into two, we also find ourselves. And that process of finding ourselves is called Love. Because when a soul divides, it always divides into a male part and a female part.

‘That’s how the Book of Genesis explains it: the soul of Adam was split in two, and Eve was born out of him.’

Wicca stopped suddenly and sat looking at the cards scattered on the table.

‘There are many cards,’ she said, ‘but they’re all part of the same deck. In order to understand their message, we need them all, all are equally important. So it is with souls. Human beings are all interlinked, like the cards in this deck.

‘In each life, we feel a mysterious obligation to find at least one of those Soulmates. The Greater Love that separated them feels pleased with the Love that brings them together again.’

‘But how will I know who my Soulmate is?’ Brida felt that this was one of the most important questions she had ever asked in her life.

Wicca laughed. She had already asked herself that question and with the same eager anxiety as the young woman opposite her. You could tell your Soulmate by the light in their eyes, and since time began, that has been how people have recognised their true love. The Tradition of the Moon used a different process: a kind of vision that showed a point of light above the left shoulder of your Soulmate. But she wouldn’t tell the girl that just yet; she might one day learn to see that point of light, or she might not. She would get her answer soon enough.

‘By taking risks,’ she said to Brida. ‘By risking failure, disappointment, disillusion, but never ceasing in your search for Love. As long as you keep looking, you will triumph in the end.’

Brida remembered the Magus saying something similar when he spoke about the path of magic. ‘Perhaps it’s all the same thing,’ she thought.

Wicca started picking up the cards from the table, and Brida sensed that her time was nearly up. Yet there was one other question to ask.

‘Is it possible to meet more than one Soulmate in each life?’

‘Yes,’ thought Wicca with a certain bitterness. And when that happens, the heart is divided, and the result is pain and suffering. Yes, we can meet three or four Soulmates, because we are many and we are scattered. The young woman was asking the right questions, but she had to avoid answering them.

‘The essence of Creation is one and one alone,’ she said. ‘And that essence is called Love. Love is the force that brings us back together, in order to condense the experience dispersed in many lives and many parts of the world.

‘We are responsible for the whole Earth because we do not know where they might be, those Soulmates we were from the beginning of time. If they are well, then we, too, will be happy. If they are not well, we will suffer, however unconsciously, a portion of their pain. Above all, though, we are responsible for reencountering, at least once in every incarnation, the Soulmate who is sure to cross our path. Even if it is only for a matter of moments, because those moments bring with them a Love so intense that it justifies the rest of our days.’

The dog barked in the kitchen. Wicca finished picking up the cards and looked again at Brida.

‘We can also allow our Soulmate to pass us by, without accepting him or her, or even noticing. Then we will need another incarnation in order to find that Soulmate. And because of our selfishness, we will be condemned to the worst torture humankind ever invented for itself: loneliness.’

Wicca got up and showed Brida to the door.

‘You didn’t come here to find out about your Soulmate,’ she said, before saying goodbye. ‘You have a Gift, and once I know what that Gift is, I might be able to teach you the Tradition of the Moon.’

Brida felt very special. She needed to feel this, for the woman inspired a respect she had felt for very few other people.

‘I’ll do my best. I want to learn the Tradition of the Moon.’

‘Because,’ she thought, ‘the Tradition of the Moon doesn’t require you to spend the night alone in a dark forest.’

‘Now listen to me,’ said Wicca sternly. ‘Every day from today, at an hour of your choosing, sit down alone at a table and spread the tarot deck as I did, completely at random. Don’t try to understand anything. Simply study the cards. They will teach you all you need to know for the moment.’

‘It’s like the Tradition of the Sun: me teaching myself again,’ thought Brida as she went down the stairs. And only when she was on the bus did she realise that the woman had spoken of a Gift. But she could talk about that at their next meeting.

For a whole week (#ulink_b633a7db-4b1e-5984-84f4-95f33e6fdcbd), Brida devoted half an hour a day to spreading the tarot cards on the table in the living room. She went to bed at ten o’clock and set the alarm for one in the morning. She would get up, make a quick cup of coffee, and sit down to contemplate the cards, trying to decipher their hidden language.

The first night, she was very excited. Brida was convinced that Wicca had taught her some kind of secret ritual and so she tried to spread the cards in exactly the same way, expecting some occult message to be revealed. After half an hour, apart from a few minor visions, which she felt were merely the fruits of her imagination, nothing of any great note had happened.

She did the same thing on the second night. Wicca had said that the cards would tell their own story and, to judge by the courses Brida had attended, it was a very ancient story indeed, dating back more than three thousand years, to a time when mankind was closer to the original wisdom.

‘The pictures seem so simple,’ she thought. A woman forcing open the mouth of a lion, a cart pulled by two mysterious animals, a man sitting before a table covered with sundry objects. She had been taught that the deck was a book, a book in which the Divine Wisdom had noted down the main changes that take place during our journey through life. But its author, knowing that humanity learned more easily from vice than from virtue, had arranged for this sacred book to be transmitted across the generations in the form of a game. The deck was an invention of the gods.

‘It can’t be that simple,’ thought Brida, every time she spread the cards on the table. She had been taught complicated methods, elaborate systems, and those cards arranged in no particular order began to have a troubling effect on her reasoning. On the third night, she threw the cards down angrily on the floor. For a moment, she thought that this angry reaction might have some magical inspiration behind it, but the results were equally unsatisfactory, just a few indefinable intuitions, which, again, she dismissed as mere imaginings.

At the same time, the idea of her Soulmate didn’t leave her for a moment. At first, she felt as if she were going back to her adolescence, to dreams of an enchanted prince crossing mountains and valleys in search of his lady of the glass slipper or in order to awaken a sleeping beauty with a kiss. ‘Finding your Soulmate is something that only happens in fairy tales,’ she told herself, half-joking. Fairy tales had been her first experience of the magical universe that she was now so eager to enter, and more than once she had wondered why people ended up distancing themselves from that world, knowing the immense joy that childhood had brought to their lives.

‘Perhaps because they weren’t content with feeling joy.’ She found the idea slightly absurd, but nevertheless recorded it in her diary as a ‘creative’ thought.

After spending a week obsessed with the idea of the Soulmate, Brida became gripped by a terrifying feeling: what if she chose the wrong man? On the eighth night, when she woke again to carry out her vain contemplation of the tarot cards, she decided to invite her boyfriend out to supper the following night.