prologue:

an introductory section at the beginning of a literary work (book, play, poem) that sets the stage, provides essential background, introduces themes, or foreshadows events, often featuring events that happen before the main story but connect to it.

When I was around the age of 7, my mom had just come back from a spiritual retreat; your humdrum flavour of ego annihilation and moving towards the divine. She came into the kitchen as the story goes, sat down with my brother and I and asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. My brother confidently said “I want to be president!”. And true to form, my brother has had a political career from the age of 19 (and one in student politics even before that). Some breaths later my mom turned to me and asked, “what do you want to be when you grow up?”. “A porn star!” I said confidently and with great exuberance. Later that day, my mom went into her room and called one of her best friends, Leah, to ask for her advice. Leah said to her: “Carrie, if Maat wants to be a porn star - she’s going to end up running the whole industry!”

Why write a book about sex, and love, and God?

Well, I never quite reached my childhood dream of becoming a porn star. However, I’ve worked as a cam girl and professional dominatrix. I’ve trained as a somatic sex and relationship coach with the Somatica Institute and I have been involved in the world of intimacy education since 2020. I’ve been initiated through two sex magick cults (quite the feat by the age of 25, if you ask me), and I’ve created and happily run two successful businesses centred around sexuality, love and relating. In my practice, I also commonly teach about astrology, magick, ritual and ancestral work. My greatest joy and fascination has always centred around sex, love, spirituality and magick, and the threads that weave these seemingly disparate worlds together.

The first book I ever read about magick was a book of love spells. I was 6 or 7 at the time, and my witchy aunt Heidi had started to bestow her generous gifts upon me. It was a small book, no bigger than an A4 paper folded into quarters, and it was small enough to tuck away in a place where no one would find it. It was thin, too, yet packing a punch, and it was perfect for me. This is where I first learned about the plants, and words, and enchantments that could bring love to me. Things like how to offer peonies to Venus as you invoke more benevolent love, or how to enchant a lipstick to make yourself endlessly alluring to your new lover. There were also spells for tending to a broken heart, and releasing old disappointment in order to open yourself up to new love again.

Concurrently, by the age of 7, I had already begun to drink the romantic fantasy kool aid. My favourite movies were romantic comedies or romantic dramedies, as I liked to call them. Long before puberty, my heart had learned to form around the longing for love and the completeness of finding ‘the one’. For as long as I can remember, I have sought love outside of myself, as a mystical entity that is waiting just around corner, and I have found myself disappointed in what I have found time and time again; disappointed that I am not infinitely filled up by my lover, that I am not eternally satiated by their love, but rather momentarily fulfilled and then left to return to the underlying feelings I was running away from in my attempts at union. I have been gravely disappointed that romantic love, in all of its infinite promises, has not saved me from my suffering.

In my quest for love, I cast love spells and fantasised about crush after crush and drew up lists of my perfect person. The qualities that they would embody, how I would feel around them and how they would make me feel, and how perfect our life would be together. I felt like my life would start, and also end, when I finally encountered this person, because it is hard to dream about what comes after-ever-after besides eternal and unending happiness. I would be shocked by the accuracy of these spells when they did work, especially as I was in my teenage years, when I would bump into someone in a bookstore, or on the stairs of my college campus, or in a strange and miraculous magickal way i.e through a set of wild and wonderful synchronicities that would make me think: “they must be the one”.

I would feel the familiar butterflies in my stomach, the jittery feelings in my body, the constant obsessive thoughts and “I just can’t stop thinking about them” feelings that I have now come to identify as obsession and infatuation, and the dangerous feeling of being ‘in love’ that I try to steer clear from at least in this stage of my recovery. I have always had the gift of finding and ‘manifesting’ love, especially the fleeting romantic sort.

I had a pretty hippie childhood, being raised by my American activist mother, and I was an energetically sensitive child, and I have been working with energy healers - but one in particular - from the time I was 6. 

I remember her offering me one of my earliest lessons on magick, one which the fairytales will offer too: “Be careful what you wish for.” I always knew, and I was always told, that when you ask the universe for something, when you ask for self-love, or purpose, or even your one true love, the universe doesn’t bring that to you in a neat and easy package or just say “here, here you go! Here is your one true love!”.

Instead, the universe brings your hearts deepest desires to you wrapped in layers of “what the fuck is this shit?!”. It is only through the unwrapping of that gift, through gently pulling back the layers of strange packaging that you have been given with curiosity and an openness to reveal what is truly inside, that you will find the alchemical gold. When we ask for something, the universe, or the cosmos, or God (whatever you like to say!) often gives it to you by way of a quest; by way of a challenge that ultimately allows you to ‘win’ your gift and to prove yourself a worthy magickian and hero. When we are able to unwrap that gift, we pull back its layers in order to find the tender core of our heart’s deepest longings that lie within this very moment. If only I knew that all of my longing for love and romance as a child held within it my deep longing for ecstatic union with God.

The first love spell that I remember working was when I was 17. I sat down one Friday, a Venus day, to sit and create a list of my ideal partner. I wrote down his qualities, what he would be interested and curious about and the traits I wanted him to have. Unsurprisingly, but to my great delight, within a week, while on a date with someone else, I bumped into the person who would become my next partner. I would often marvel at how he had the very same characteristics that I had named on my list, almost to a T. And he would joke, without knowing the truth in his humor, that I had “cast a spell” on him. Despite the spell working, the relationship still ended, as many relationships do.

Pluto, the planet of the underworld, has been stationed in my 5th house for most of my life. Pluto, Hades in Greek mythology, brings about intense transformation through revealing that which is unconscious; that which we have cast into the shadows (we’ll get to that more later!). Pluto also brings about initiation through intense and often painful experiences that ultimately fill our lives with more complexity and richness. Pluto invites us to move beyond the world of duality to truly know God, and Pluto’s flavour of initiation often carries the most intense flavours of God; the ones that we would usually look at and say “yuck! I don’t want that! Take it back!”.

In astrology, the 5th house is the house of pleasure and of creativity; it is the house of romance and love. Since the age of 10, I have keenly felt the impacts of this astrological transit; unknowingly at first, and consciously as I come to the end of this rodeo and Pluto moves into Aquarius to beckon in a new age. Hades has been dancing in my dalliances, my romances, my most intimate relationships, allowing me to be Persephone, taken over and under, and ultimately being made more whole for it. But fuck, it hurts. Nevertheless, I am grateful to have been initiated into the mysteries of love and pleasure by the Lord of the Underworld himself, and this book is owed in large part to him.

When I started to dream about this book and it began to make its presence known to me, I didn’t actually know what it would be about. I knew I needed to write a book, but was it a novel? A memoir? Non-fiction or fiction? I have so many different interests that it can become hard to pinpoint just one sometimes.

But I’ve always wanted to write a book about love. Ever since reading bell hooks’ all about love and studying attachment theory in college I have been absolutely obsessed with the topic. I am writing this book because I would like to share what I have learned through my initiation into the path of love and pleasure with you, dear reader. Love and pleasure have been such great sources of suffering for me and they have been my initiation. I am not unique in this way. Love initiates us. Love also invites us to see our deepest wounds. Love is the knife that cuts us open and the balm, needle and thread that sews us back together again. “I am divided for the sake of love, for the chance of union” in the words of the magickian Aleister Crowley. I am writing this book for the open hearted lovers, the devotional lovers who are looking to make love their path to salvation, and are interested in the depths of what that means. In truth, many of us do not know love. We know the romantic fantasy, and we know what has been fed to us by the media and our parents and our community, but we do not know love. My hope is that after reading these words you will feel one step closer to the knowledge of how to cultivate love.

I am writing this book because I have a deep desire to transform the world, and create more loving relationships between humans and the rest of our world. I am writing this book because magick is relational, it is a force that weaves us all together; and I am writing this book for a new generation of magickians who are forming their practice and are seeking liberation - as magickians always do - through the path and work of love. May it be so.