The Geas

The geas is the first real magic I knowingly made.

A geas is a prohibition; sometimes placed by someone else as a curse, sometimes by oneself as a kind of promise. My geas, the geas I speak of here, is of the latter kind: it is a promise to myself, and my future selves, that I would not hurt my body. I made that promise to tame my suicidal ideation, and it worked well. I find it a mixed blessing, as are all geasa.

The geas is a knot at the center of my head. The geas is two strings of words looped each over one another and pulled tight. The geas is a simple statement of fact:

I do not injure myself on purpose.

A statement that I repeated many times, to myself, out loud to others, in my journals and on my social media (the kind where you can say that sort of thing.) A statement I made into a sigil and burned with offerings to those I later realized were the Tessarine and the Calycine.

The nice thing about a geas is that it's self-reinforcing, if it's built right. If you choose words and resonances that will keep, and shape the ritual to make you remember, and tell those around you that you're geased, and how, and from when, the geas won't stop at being a fact that lives in your mind. It will becomes a structure that encompasses concepts and insinuates itself into thoughts. It will become a core part of you, so that breaking it would mean breaking you.

The wording of the geas is very specific. Others may injure me; I may ask them to, even beg them to, and I do. But the geas makes intentional, recreational harm a social activity; it turns the solitary and isolating experience of cutting into the community experience of blood play, or ritual scarification, or however it happens to manifest.

Placing a geas is a serious commitment to oneself. I may, one day, unpick this knot and free myself from the geas, but I'm not sure how I would, and I'm sure I don't want to. Maybe the two are one and the same. Because this geas proscribes only my own actions, not outcomes, it is hard to break on accident, which is the only reason it is in any way safe. Had I chosen, for instance, the obviously aspirational I do not injure myself, I would have broken it many times in the years since, and I don't know what that would have done to my mind. Perhaps it would only have drained the geas of its power. Perhaps.