Delta Rae’s Arcana of Light & Dark
As a child I remember how easy it was to believe I could control the wind. That I could speak to animals and know the future before it happened. I felt the magic of the world and I felt effortlessly one with it.
Then around 9 years old I remember lying in bed, listening to classical music and crying myself to sleep. Every night for nearly a year. I was grieving. The vision of the world in my mind was pure magic, and my small heart was breaking as I felt my oneness with it retreat deeper into memory, farther from my waking life and dreams, as reality hounded me to grow up and harden against the wellspring of infinite possibility.
I lost some years. I was lost in the myth of limited reality. The myth that magic wasn’t meant for me anymore. Those were dark times when I was still young. The value of life and what I loved was hard to feel. I was searching. I dropped out of high school, certain the ache couldn’t be satisfied by following a prescribed path. What I wanted was my magic back.
I went to college early, in freedom from time, to find that which I had lost. While I still felt depression at my back, I sought to relearn my magic through studying the closest thing in my estimation. Religious Studies, with an emphasis on Ancient Mediterranean Religion and early Christian thought. A long-winded cover for an integrated study of paganism, Greek and Nordic myth, Kabbalah, gnosticism, astrology, alchemy, and what my favorite Italian professor called “Enthusiasm.”
I took courses on the Iliad, the Bible, the Jewish messiah, Buddhism, heretics and witch history, mapped my birth chart and those of my family and friends, studied old art and symbols for hidden alchemical messages, read epic poems of the Sami people, and listened to monks chant in the centuries old church beneath the church, under a mosaic of the twelve signs of the zodiac. I followed the path back home, with more questions, surely, but without feeling I’d found more than glimpses of what had once been my own power.
But there, waiting for me on the other side of my graduation, were my two brothers asking nonchalantly if I wanted to start a band. Having majored in something useless in the world of money, and being only 19, the invitation to move to North Carolina, where my family was born, and make music, something that connected me to the imaginary world of my memory, seemed auspicious. And so it has been.
Delta Rae, a name from my mother’s own trove of creative magic, has borne me deeper along in my quest than any books or study, the magic I long for being present in every lyric, note, and performance, in the closeness with my immediate family and total strangers, the oneness returns to me through this beautiful gift of music and community over and over again.
Here we are, on the brink of our next endeavor, to share The Light, our incarnation of an immortal force of the universe. Yet before the album was even recorded, I sensed a connection in these forthcoming songs and the ancient symbols I’d spent time with in school. I dug out my favorite tarot deck, my old school notebooks, and began to align song and card, until The Light and The Dark were so clearly laid before me as the Major Arcana of the Tarot, that I was no longer the source of the idea, just a shepherd for what was Destiny’s will.
So now, we offer to any other seekers in the world, Delta Rae’s Arcana of Light & Dark. I hope as we unveil these reimagined tools of self reflection, that they and the songs they embody, can help you feel the magic you hold, that is one with everything, The Light and The Dark, the forces that never die.
