Green Elf

I talk in my interviews about how the pandemic slowly led me into the cult. During the pandemic, I started taking a bunch of classes online, many of which were about topics wholly under the New Age umbrella, everything from herbs to numerology to meditation. While not entirely from Catland Books, a now-defunct witch shop based in Brooklyn, many of them were. I made a number of friends through those classes.

One of them was Jade.

Jade was a loud spitfire with a New York accent and a penchant for flipping the bird at anyone who pissed her off. She always had vividly colored hair with different rainbow shades.

She also became one of the members of the cult.

Despite knowing her throughout the pandemic, we hadn’t met in person until the first group retreat. I had arrived early, and Jade came out to talk while Lux set up the Airbnb. I knew her car immediately because it was covered in references to franchises I knew she loved. She was just as vivacious and catching in person as she was online.

It was clear to the cult after the first retreat that Jade and I were the best “horses,” or vessels for channeling.  But it also became clear after the second retreat that some of the deities we worked with preferred one of us over the other. This made for a really rough dynamic between the two of us.

I remember telling Lux in one of our individual sessions just how jealous I was of Jade. It just felt like we were two sides of the same coin. What I had, she lacked. What I lacked, she had. While none of us in the cult seemed to have everything in our lives figured out, Jade at the very least seemed to have her witchcraft figured out. She just trusted the process and her intuition, when I was constantly questioning it.

It got to a point towards the end where it seemed that, in certain situations, Lux was specifically engaging with Jade in a way that hurt me. Even when I had voiced that feeling in our individual sessions in a moment of vulnerability.

Before I left the cult, I worked on a scent that I thought summed up each cult member. We’ve already talked about The Star, but Green Elf was Jade. It doesn’t surprise me that the scent with the color of envy is hers. Originally, I called it Green Elf as a subtle play on her name. Jade is a plant witch (I kill basically every plant that I touch in comparison), so I filled the scent with plants. Her first foray into fragrance was Gap Grass, so I looked up what was used in it, and what clean alternatives to it existed.

I think, though, that my ongoing jealousy of Jade, some of which I feel like was intentionally perpetuated by Lux, was a wedge in what could have been an excellent friendship with someone who really could have understood me on a deeper level. I would have much rather created a close friendship than one based on hostility, and, if anything, I would have loved to see her as the sister she called me.

Jade placed an order for Green Elf on the day it launched and continues to buy the fragrance regularly. I’m happy she likes it.