The Unraveling: How We Criminalized Family

There’s a photograph I don’t have. It was never taken.

In it, my grandmother stands beside the young pilot she loved, her hand resting on the secret swelling in her belly, both of them laughing at some private joke only lovers share. He’s in uniform. She’s wearing that blue dress she told me about once, in a rare moment of softness. They’re planning their wedding, imagining the child they’ll raise together, dreaming of a future the war is about to steal.

That photograph doesn’t exist because he never came home. And in the space where that life should have unfolded, where love should have grown into family, into lineage, into the passing down of something sacred, a wound opened instead. A wound that would echo through my bloodline for generations, shapeshifting with each iteration but never quite healing.

When I draw the lens back far enough, I can see it now: the pattern. Not just in my family, but in millions of families across the world. A great unraveling that began long before we had names for it, that accelerated through wars and movements and technological revolutions, until we arrived here, at a moment in history where we have somehow criminalized the very concept of family itself.

But here’s what the mystics have always known, what they’ve hidden in plain sight across every culture and every age: This too is the game. This forgetting. This unraveling. This chaos we’re living through.

The Universe has always played with us this way, scattering pieces of sacred wisdom like breadcrumbs through time, hiding them in religious parables, ancient myths, societal traditions, rituals that lost their meaning but kept their form. Each generation gets a puzzle, a treasure hunt, a mystery school disguised as ordinary life. And the prerequisite for finding each piece? Transmutation. Experience. The willingness to be broken open so the light can get in.

The puzzle pieces of our time are the hidden secrets of love.

And we, you, me, my children, my grandchildren, every soul navigating this dark age, we must find enough pieces within ourselves and within the collective around us to see the Agape love burning like a candle flame out of the current chaos.

This is the spell. Not a curse to break, but a mystery to complete.

Find all of the pieces.

The First Section of the Puzzle: The Spell Was Cast Long Before the Wars

If you trace the threads back far enough, you’ll find the spell was already being woven before the World Wars shattered the old paradigms. The mystics of every tradition warned about this, the Kali Yuga, the Age of Iron, the End Times, not as punishment but as part of the great cycle. The descent into forgetting that precedes remembering.

The Industrial Revolution had already begun severing people from the land, from their ancestral rhythms, from the extended family structures that had held humanity for millennia. People moved to cities. Nuclear families replaced tribal ones. Elders were no longer the keepers of wisdom, they became obsolete, tucked away, & forgotten.

First puzzle piece found: We forgot that wisdom lives in lineage, that the old ones carry medicine we desperately need.

But the wars, oh, the wars accelerated everything.

My grandmother’s generation came of age in a world being torn apart. The men left. The women discovered they could work, could manage, could survive without the structures they’d been told were immutable. And when the men returned, those who returned, they came back changed. Haunted. Seeking the familiar world they’d left behind, only to find it had transformed in their absence.

My grandmother didn’t just lose her pilot in the war. She lost the future she’d imagined. And when survival required her to marry a man she didn’t love, a damaged veteran with his own ghosts, his own wounds, another piece of the puzzle revealed itself.

Second puzzle piece found: When we choose from necessity instead of love, we create bloodlines of hunger. The children raised in loveless homes spend their lives starving for something they’ve never tasted.

“We had no love between us,” she whispered to me once, near the end of her life. “Just… necessity.”

Necessity. The most unmagical word in the human language. And yet, what if even this was part of the teaching? What if necessity itself is showing us what happens when we forget the sacred nature of choice?

The Second Section of the Puzzle: Children Who Never Witness Love Don’t Know What to Look For

My mother was born from that necessity. Raised in a home where affection was absent, where her stepbrothers returned from their own wars carrying fresh demons, where her father drowned his pain in alcohol and her mother became a ghost drifting through rooms.

The ancients knew this truth and encoded it everywhere, in fairy tales where curses pass through bloodlines, in Greek myths where the sins of fathers destroy their children, in Buddhist teachings about the wheel of samsara. Children who never witness love don’t know what to look for when they grow up. They mistake intensity for passion. Control for care. They either repeat what they’ve seen or rebel violently against it, but either way, they’re still dancing to the same cursed music.

Third puzzle piece found: The wound becomes the compass. We navigate toward the familiar, mistaking recognition for destiny.

My mother rebelled. She threw herself into the counterculture of the 1960s, desperate to escape her mother’s life. The feminism of that era promised liberation, and it should have. Women deserved equality, deserved autonomy, deserved to be seen as fully human.

But here’s the dark alchemy of trauma, the shadow teaching the mystics always included in their mystery schools: even liberation can become bondage when wielded by wounded hands.

The movement that should have freed my mother became, in her damaged grip, just another weapon against connection. Men became the enemy. Marriage became a cage. Motherhood, the very condition that had trapped her mother, became something to rage against.

She tried to abort me three times. Street procedures. Nearly died.

I don’t tell you this for shock value. I tell you because this is the fourth puzzle piece, and it’s the hardest one to hold: When we forget that love exists, when we’ve been so thoroughly convinced that connection is dangerous, we start making choices that sever the threads connecting us to past and future both. We become agents of our own unraveling.

My mother survived those attempts. So did I. But the resentment, that lived on, transmitted through every interaction, every moment of grudging care, every reminder that I was not wanted.

The Gnostics called this archonic interference, forces that feed on separation, that whisper in our ears that we’re alone, that love is a lie, that safety comes only through isolation. Every mystery tradition has a name for it. Every wisdom keeper warned us.

Forth puzzle piece found: The forces that want us separated are real, but they can only work through our wounds. They need our unconsciousness to operate.

The Third Section of the Puzzle: The Machine Learns to Feed on Our Wounds

While these personal dramas played out in millions of homes, something else was happening. The market that great unfeeling algorithm, that mechanical god we built to serve us but which learned to use us instead was learning to optimize for our collective trauma.

The Hermetic principle: As above, so below. As within, so without. Our inner fragmentation manifested as outer systems designed to keep us fragmented.

Think about it: If people valued family, the machine would sell us family values. But wounded people? Isolated people? People who’ve been taught that connection is dangerous?

We’re the most profitable demographic that ever existed.

Fifth puzzle piece found: The external world mirrors our internal state. The systems that separate us exist because separation already lives inside us.

The market pivoted beautifully. It sold women that empowerment is through consumption, and you don’t need a man, you just need this product. It sold men escape, and that women are dangerous, but this entertainment/substance/distraction is safe. Ultimately, the market sold both genders the myth of self-sufficiency, of not needing anyone, and claiming independence as the highest virtue.

And with each advertisement, each sitcom showing dysfunction as comedy, each news story amplifying the worst of human behavior, each movie romanticizing isolation or dramatizing domestic violence, the spell grew stronger.

The propaganda became self-fulfilling prophecy. Women learned to see men as threats or ATMs. Men learned to see women as manipulators or madonnas. Both learned to see children as catastrophically expensive anchors that would destroy their freedom, their careers, their carefully curated lives.

My generation, we were small. Not because of some natural demographic shift, but because our mothers chose not to have us. Defiance and abortion became acts of liberation. The birth rate plummeted. And those of us who were born? We grew up in a world of latchkey kids, empty houses, parents who were physically present but emotionally absent, scrambling to achieve the independence that was supposed to make them happy but somehow never did.

Sixth puzzle piece found: When a generation refuses to birth the next, it’s not just about population, it’s about a collective losing faith in the future, in love, in the possibility that life could be different.

We raised ourselves. On television families that looked nothing like ours. On the unspoken understanding that we were somehow too much, too expensive, too demanding, too limiting to our parents’ self-actualization.

The Kabbalists teach about the breaking of the vessels, how sometimes things must shatter completely before they can be made whole. The alchemists knew about the nigredo, the blackening, the descent into chaos that precedes transformation. Every mystical tradition holds this piece of the puzzle.

Seventh puzzle piece found: The breaking is part of the making. This darkness we’re in, it’s not the end. It’s the chrysalis.

The Fourth Section of the Puzzle: My Chapter in the Spell, My Role in the Mystery

I grew up marinating in abuse. Not the dramatic kind you see in movies, the everyday kind. The absence of tenderness. The constant message that love was conditional, scarce, something you had to earn and could easily lose.

So of course I replicated it in my own relationships. Of course I did. The wounded recognize each other across crowded rooms. We’re drawn together like magnets, mistaking familiarity for fate, our nervous systems humming with recognition: Yes, this feeling, this is what love feels like.

Except it wasn’t love. It was trauma bonding. It was two damaged people trying to fill their wounds with each other’s presence, each demanding the other heal what only inner work could mend.

Eighth puzzle piece found: We cannot heal through another person. We can only heal through ourselves, and then, if we’re lucky, share that healing with another.

I became a single mother to save myself and my children. And I don’t regret that choice, getting out was necessary, was survival. But I also have to hold the truth that in saving us, I also passed on the pattern. My children grew up without their father. Without witnessing a healthy partnership. Without seeing what it looks like when two people navigate conflict with respect, when they celebrate each other’s growth, when they choose each other day after day not from necessity but from genuine love.

The Buddhist concept of right action, knowing that even our attempts to do good can create new karma, new consequences we didn’t intend. The Christian idea of original sin, not as punishment but as recognition that we inherit wounds and pass them forward even when we’re trying not to.

Nineth puzzle piece found: Consciousness doesn’t guarantee we won’t cause harm. It just means we can see the harm, name it, take responsibility for it, and choose differently going forward.

I’ve done the therapy. God, I’ve done so much therapy. I’ve worked on myself, become conscious of the patterns, broken the codependency, learned to stand in my own power. I’ve had brave, difficult conversations with my children about where I went wrong, about my love for them, about how the generational trauma wasn’t their fault but became their inheritance anyway.

And yet, the pattern persists.

One of my sons married a woman who also fled from her family of origin. Now it’s just us: him, his wife, my other children, my grandchildren, and me. A little island of chosen family trying to do things differently, but isolated. Cut off. Alone against a world that seems increasingly hostile to the very concept of sticking together.

Tenth puzzle piece found: Even when we do the work, even when we become conscious, we still live in a world shaped by unconsciousness. Healing is both personal and collective, we need both to truly transform.

My other children are navigating a dating landscape that feels post-apocalyptic. They encounter people from the newest generation, descendants of three, four generations of people who forgot about love, and these young people are lost. They hate family, hate government, hate faith, hate the idea of children, hate work, hate structure. They’re not just cynical; they’re bewildered. They have no template for what the world could look like if we actually loved each other.

The Hopi prophecy speaks of a time when we’ll have to choose between two paths, one that leads to continuation, one to dissolution. Every indigenous tradition has a version of this teaching: there comes a moment when the collective must decide what it values, what it will carry forward, what it will let die.

Eleventh puzzle piece found: We are living in that prophesied moment. The choice is happening now, in millions of individual decisions about whether to risk love, whether to have children, whether to believe the future can be different than the past.

My children want love. They want children. But they’re terrified. Terrified of the economy, of climate chaos, of repeating my mistakes, of bringing children into a world this broken. Terrified of becoming single parents themselves, of their children growing up without fathers the way they did.

And I don’t know how to promise them it will be different. Because I tried dating again after all that inner work, and it was like speaking a language no one else remembered. The men I met were either still wounded and unconscious, or they’d closed themselves off entirely, too hurt, too disappointed, too tired to risk being vulnerable again.

So I stopped. I decided to focus on my children, my grandchildren, on being the conscious elder I never had.

But late at night, I wonder: Is my bloodline ending with me? Will my children choose not to have children? Will they decide the risk is too great, the world too hostile, the odds of finding healthy partnership too slim?

Twelfth puzzle piece found: Sometimes the deepest service we can offer is simply witnessing the pain, holding space for the uncertainty, refusing to offer false promises while still holding the possibility that love exists.

The Fifth Section of the Puzzle: The Pattern Revealed, The Mystery Illuminated

When I step back and look at the full tapestry, my grandmother, my mother, me, my children, I can see how elegantly the game works.

Each generation’s wound creates the next generation’s lesson. My grandmother’s forced marriage created my mother’s classroom in lovelessness. Her daughter’s rebellion and resentment created my curriculum in abuse. My traumatized relationships created my children’s initiation into father-wounds. And now my children face their own koan: how do you choose love when you’ve never seen it modeled, when the world around you says it’s foolish, when the odds seem impossibly stacked against you?

The Taoist masters would recognize this, the way things cycle back on themselves, how the ending contains the beginning, how every crisis is an opportunity for return.

Thirteenth puzzle piece found: The pattern isn’t just perpetuating itself, it’s teaching us. Each iteration reveals more about what love is NOT, clearing away the illusions so we can finally see what love IS.

The spell doesn’t need enforcement. It’s self-perpetuating. Each generation passes down slightly less, less connection, less trust, less willingness to risk vulnerability, less memory of what healthy love even looks like.

And all the while, the machine keeps humming. The market keeps selling us products to fill the void. The institutions keep creating policies that make family formation more difficult, more expensive, more legally precarious. The media keeps showing us the worst of humanity, keeps amplifying division, keeps reminding us that other people are dangerous.

We’ve criminalized family not through explicit law (though family courts certainly try), but through a thousand small cultural shifts that make connection seem foolish, marriage seem like a trap, children seem like an impossible burden, and multigenerational bonds seem like oppressive entanglements rather than sacred inheritances.

But the mystics, oh, the mystics saw this coming. They encoded the antidote in their teachings, scattered the cure throughout history like seeds that would sprout when the soil was ready.

Fourteenth puzzle piece found: The criminalization of family is the final lesson before remembering. When connection itself becomes forbidden, we’re forced to ask: Why? What are we so afraid of? And in asking, we begin to remember what we lost.

The Sixth Section of the Puzzle: The Magic We Forgot, The Wisdom Preserved

Here’s what the mystery schools have always known, what the Sufis and the Christian mystics and the Buddhist masters and the indigenous wisdom keepers have been trying to tell us through every parable and practice:

Love is not what we’ve been taught.

The Greeks had four words for love, Eros, Philia, Storge, Agape, because they understood love isn’t one thing. It’s a spectrum, a practice, a state of being. And Agape, that’s the secret hidden at the heart of every spiritual tradition. Unconditional love. Divine love. The love that holds all things.

Fifteenth puzzle piece found: Love is not transaction. Not what you can get from another person. Not security or status or pleasure or service. Love is wanting another soul to flourish.

This is what I’ve learned, what I’m trying to teach my children, what I’m whispering to my grandchildren like an ancient incantation that might complete the mystery:

Love is wanting to witness another’s becoming. Wanting to share space with them while they discover who they are and what brings them alive. Love is being in awe of another person’s existence and letting them be in awe of yours.

It’s not about influencing or controlling or changing or managing each other. It’s about transparency. Naturalness. Being off-guard and undefended. Having fun together through the chaos and beauty and grief and joy of being alive.

Sixteenth puzzle piece found: When it’s real, compassion comes naturally. You don’t learn it in therapy. You don’t practice it from worksheets. It just arises when you genuinely care about another person’s wellbeing as much as your own.

That’s Agape. That’s the love that transcends the wounds, that completes the mystery, that remembers what we’re here for.

And it’s not just romantic love. It’s love for your children, your parents, your siblings, your friends, your community, your land, your ancestors, your descendants not yet born.

It’s the love that makes us want to continue. To have children not because they’ll take care of us or carry on our name, but because we want to share this beautiful, terrible world with them. Because we want to witness who they’ll become. Because passing down what we’ve learned, the hard-won wisdom and the half-remembered magic, is how humanity evolves.

Seventeenth puzzle piece found: Love is the reason for existence itself. Not romantic love, not familial love, not any specific form, but Love as the fundamental force, the creative principle, the reason consciousness bothered to incarnate at all.

The Seventh Section of the Puzzle: Two Roads Forward, One Destination

The I Ching teaches that crisis and opportunity are written with the same character. The Hermetic tradition speaks of solve et coagula, dissolve and coagulate, break down and rebuild. Every wisdom tradition holds this truth:

There are always two paths forward from chaos.

The first is harsh: Systems collapse. The economy crumbles. The safety nets dissolve. And suddenly, whether we like it or not, we need each other to survive. Pride gets stripped away. Petty grievances become luxuries we can’t afford. We remember that humans are communal animals, that we literally cannot make it alone, that our survival depends on cooperation and mutual care.

It’s a brutal way to remember. But the Phoenix must burn before it rises. The seed must split open in the dark earth before it can grow toward light.

Eighteenth puzzle piece found: Sometimes grace comes disguised as crisis. Sometimes we only remember what matters when everything else is stripped away.

The second path is softer but requires more courage: We choose our humanity now. Before we’re forced to. We decide to show up for each other even though we’re scared, even though we’ve been hurt, even though the programming tells us connection is dangerous.

Men stand up and say: I want to protect and provide not because it makes me superior, but because it’s how I express love. I want to be present for my children. I want to build something meaningful with a partner.

Women stand up and say: I am worthy. I have gifts to offer, not just in the marketplace, but in nurturing, teaching, guiding. And as a woman I want partnership, not competition. I want to build something sacred, not just a career.

And together, they say: We’re going to try this differently. We’re going to heal our wounds so our children don’t inherit them. We’re going to model healthy love even though we never saw it ourselves. And as a whole we are going to choose each other, again and again, not from necessity but from genuine desire to share this life.

Ninetieth puzzle piece found: Conscious choice is the highest magic. When we choose love knowing full well we could be hurt, when we choose connection knowing it might fail, when we choose to continue the lineage knowing the world is broken, that’s when we become co-creators with the Divine.

Both paths lead to the same destination: Remembering. Remembering that we belong to each other. That family, blood and chosen, is how we experience the Divine in human form. That love is not just an emotion but a practice, a commitment, a sacred art.

The Final Section of the Puzzle: The Spell Breaks When We Remember We’re Magic

My grandmother never got to have that photograph. But I have one, my children and grandchildren, all together, laughing at something one of the kids said. Real laughter. Easy affection.

It’s not perfect. We’re all still healing. We’re all still figuring out how to love without the wounds dictating terms.

But it’s different than what came before. And that difference, however small, is how mysteries complete themselves. Not all at once. Not dramatically. But through thousands of small choices to do things differently, to love anyway, to risk connection even though it’s terrifying.

Twentieth puzzle piece found: The game the Universe gave us, it’s not about finding every piece perfectly. It’s about finding enough pieces to see the pattern, to glimpse the truth, to remember who we are and why we’re here.

If you’re reading this, you’re part of the mystery school too. You’re one of the souls who looked at the generational pattern and said: Not me. Not my children. This stops here.

You’re gathering your own puzzle pieces. Finding them in your own wounds, your own relationships, your own moments of grace and failure. Each piece you find, each transmutation you undergo, each experience that cracks you open, brings the collective closer to remembering.

Twenty-First puzzle piece found: We’re not solving this alone. Every person who does their inner work, who chooses love despite the programming, who risks connection despite the wounds, they’re adding to the collective field, making it easier for the next person to remember.

Our family lines don’t have to end in isolation and fear. We can choose differently. We can remember what our ancestors knew before the wars, before the machines, and before the propaganda convinced us that love was the enemy.

As family we can come home to each other.

The market will keep selling separation. The institutions will keep optimizing for profit over people. The media will keep amplifying our worst impulses.

But we, we can choose magic instead.

We can choose to see each other as sacred. To honor the bonds of family, & blood. We can choose to celebrate continuity alongside growth. And to pass down not just trauma but also wisdom, not just wounds but also wonder.

The final puzzle piece, the one that completes the picture: Love was never actually lost. We just forgot how to see it. The Agape flame has been burning through every dark age, waiting for enough souls to remember that connection is our nature, that family is how we practice the Divine, that love, true love, is the whole point of being here.

The mystics preserved it for us. Every tradition, every time, every culture, they all held pieces of the truth. Inside rituals that lost their meaning but kept their form. In myths that seemed like fairy tales but were actually instructions. In traditions that appeared outdated but were actually timeless.

The spell was never about forgetting forever. It was about the journey back to remembering.

And you, reading this now, gathering your own pieces, doing your own work—you are the magic that breaks the spell.

Not through force. Not through perfection. But simply by choosing, again and again, to believe that love exists. Taking that risk of connection. Showing up for each other. Willing to pass the wisdom forward even when the world says it’s foolish.

The candle flame of Agape love is burning through the chaos. Can you see it? It’s been there all along, hidden in plain sight, waiting for us to gather enough pieces to recognize it.

The game continues. The mystery deepens. The love remains.

Find all the pieces.

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Blessed be.

High Priestess Agape Covens

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