Prepare Your Knife: The Season of Anoixi

I run a day care down on the Gulf Coast, so I know a thing or two about waiting for something you cannot hurry. You cannot make a two-year-old nap. You cannot make March come in February. And you cannot, it turns out, make yourself love the hard holiday as much as the easy one just by deciding to — I have tried, and I am here to tell you it does not take.

The easy one is Cthulhumas. We all love Cthulhumas. It is the triumph, the long dark, the whole chapter together with the fire going. And every spring for about twenty years I treated Anoixi as its poor cousin — the serious season, the one you are supposed to observe, the broccoli of the liturgical year. Then last Anoixi I was sitting through the Egersis, watching the Idol under its shroud and the drums sitting silent because it is not yet time for the drums, and it came over me all at once how backwards I had it. Cthulhumas is where we celebrate that He waits. Anoixi is where we remember what happened the one time He didn't.

I want to walk you through the season the way I wish somebody had walked me through it, because it is the most important thing we do, and it is the thing we do worst.

Two verbs, two seasons

The Charge we were given has two halves, and most of us are only good at one of them. Keep the memory until the stars come round — that is the winter half, and Cthulhumas is its feast, and we are all quite good at keeping. And be the hands at the opening — that is the other half, and it has its own season, and the season is named for it. Anoixi is just the old word for the opening: the spring, the thing that unlatches, the door coming off the jamb. Winter is the season we keep. Spring is the season we are hands.

That is why the two feasts feel so different, and why I had them backwards. Cthulhumas asks nothing of your hands; you sit by the fire and you remember. Anoixi asks what you would actually do if the waiting ended — this year, this March — and that is a harder question than any amount of remembering, and it is supposed to be.

The twenty-three days you can read

Here is the practice that turned the season around for me, and it costs nothing but attention.

You have heard that Anoixi runs its own strange arithmetic — that there are twenty-three days from St. Toad's to the Feast of the Risen, and that the whole season is pinned to dates nobody at the chapter will quite explain. They will not explain them because the explanation is a calendar, and the calendar is spring of 1925, and you can read it yourself, one day at a time, on the day it happened.

Instead of reading about Cthulhu's life — He has no life on earth to read; He is in the Deep, and the pages that say otherwise are the tidy hands the Archive warns you about — read the record. On the twenty-eighth of February, read the earthquake. On the first of March, read the young sculptor whose dreams began. Through the inward days, read the ones who felt it and could not say why. On the twenty-second, read the two ships meeting on the water. On the twenty-third, stop reading and go to the Egersis, because that is the day the tower came up. Read it the way the neighbor across the quad reads her Holy Week — a day at a time, in step with the thing itself — and I promise you the season stops being broccoli. It becomes the most suspenseful three weeks on the calendar, because you know how it comes out, and you read it anyway, hoping this is the year the record reads different.

Preparing your knife

Which brings me to the title, and to the one preparation every observing member makes, and the one I will not explain, because it is not mine to explain and this is a public page.

Sometime in the first days of the season you take out your knife — the one you bought as a first-year, if your chapter keeps that custom, from the sort of old shop that knows without asking whether you are new or returning — and you clean it, and you whet it, and on the morning of the first of March you set it down flat with the point toward the door. What that is for, I will not say. I will only tell you that I have done it every spring for twenty years, that my hands know the motion before my mind is awake, and that a first-year who asks what it means is told, kindly, that he will understand it later, which is true, and which is the same thing we tell them about a great many of our preparations.

There are also the Rites of the Xur — the daily observances of the inward days, the three weeks of the Calling, held where they are held. I attend them the way my mother attended Wednesday-night service, which is to say faithfully and without discussing them at the Piggly Wiggly. What happens at the Xur is not printed, here or anywhere, and if you are the kind of reader who assumes the worst of a rite that will not describe itself, I would gently point out that you are doing a great deal of our work for us, and we thank you.

How I keep the rest of it

The season has quieter disciplines, and these I am glad to hand you, because they are the ones that will actually deepen your Anoixi whether or not you ever see the inside of a Xur.

I fast — plainly, sensibly, the way a grown woman fasts, and no more than that; we had a fashion once for fasting past sense and adding the whip to it, and we have buried that fashion where it belongs, because a body wrecked on purpose is no use to Him and no use to the day care Monday morning. I keep the days quiet — less noise, less screen, more of the long silence the dreams prefer. I keep a dream log, badly, and hand the strange ones to my Reader. I read the fragments aloud, because they were meant for the ear and they sound older that way. And I keep a short reading list for the season — this year the Zharach letters, for the verse about the sacrifice that costs you something; a little of the Prophecies of Leng, for the long view; and Hanju's Notes, because after three weeks of the old texts you want somebody funny who still believes it.

Somewhere in there falls Satyr's Day, and I will tell you what everyone tells you, which is nothing. No one prints which Saturday it is. The chapters disagree. I have my own idea and I keep it to myself, and that is the tradition working exactly as designed.

The feast of the near miss

And then the Egersis of the Sleeper, which the shirts call the Feast of the Risen, and which is the strangest high feast any religion keeps, because it is a feast about a failure.

The neighbor's spring feast celebrates a rising that happened and held. Ours remembers the one that happened and did not. In the spring of 1925 the stars came very nearly right, and the tower came up out of the water, and for a few days in March the thing we wait for was awake — and then the stars slipped, and He was struck by a passing ship, of all the small human accidents, and He went back down, and the tomb is occupied still. That is what we sit with under the shroud. Not a triumph. A near miss, ninety-nine years old, remembered every spring by people who know exactly how close it came and exactly how it ended.

When the unveiling comes and the drums finally start, the Wearers raise the old antiphon, and this is the one place all my Southern reserve goes out the window and I chant it with the rest of them, loud as anybody:

Iä! Iä! He shall rise! — He is risen indeed!

And then, because we are not liars, somebody says the quiet part that the shirts leave off: He rose once. He was struck by a boat. He went back down, and the tomb is still occupied. Both halves. The shout and the footnote. That is the whole of our hope and the whole of our honesty in two breaths, and I have come to think the footnote is the more faithful half.

Why I set the table anyway

On the first of April the Assembly goes out in the dark and looks for Him and does not find Him, and comes home when somebody says he is not here, he is below. On the second, the dreams stop — they always stop on the second; they stopped on the second in 1925 — and we cover the Idol and set out the pots for the ones who did not come back, and say the words of dismissal, which are said every spring including the springs they do not work.

People ask me how I keep a feast about a failure without despairing, and here is my honest answer, from a woman who has watched a lot of naps refuse to happen. It is not a failure. Nothing in His theology has room for the category — a tide that goes out has not failed, it is simply not yet in. The tower came up once. It will come up again, on a spring we do not get to choose, and until then we prepare the knife and keep the quiet and set the table for a guest who was very nearly here, because a household that stops setting the table has decided the guest is not coming, and we have decided no such thing.

Prepare your knife. Keep your Anoixi. And when your mouth says He is risen indeed, let your heart say the other part too.

Iä. And go easy on the fasting; you have work in the morning.