Not In Kansas Anymore (10 page)

We've already noted that the Wiccan movement's beginnings are also shrouded in falsehood and misunderstanding. This is true of other magical beginnings as well. As a result, one of the hardest turns to make in understanding magical people—and in understanding many spiritual truths—is coming to grips with the difference between lies, fantasy, and mythical or greater truths. The same might be said of the major religious traditions, and has been said, much to the fury of the more fundamentalist faithful. It is almost as though humans need some grand vision, some story greater than what ordinary life provides, in order to understand mysteries beyond what we see every day. We seem to need symbols and drama to fire our imaginations. A simple rendition of the facts, as true as they may be, simply won't do the job.

Scholar Karen Armstrong sheds some light on this problem and gives us another way to analyze the value of a story when she notes that modern people and ancient people regard spiritual stories very differently. When modern people demand that religious stories be factually true, they are confusing two ways of looking at the world
, logos
and
mythos
.

Modern people, writes Armstrong, tend to look at everything through
logos
, which is the old word for reason, as though that is the
only method of inquiry. But in the premodern world people believed that there was another important type of knowledge that could not be understood through
logos
. It could only be understood through
mythos,
which is something like the deeper meaning found in a poem or a great novel.

Logos
helps us determine practical matters. It guides us in eating, working, and traveling. It governs science. One of the ways our modern dependence on
logos
shows up is that we are utterly unable to credit anything that isn't accessible through
logos,
that isn't factually true and understandable in a factual way.

But when we want to understand the meaning of things, to get at the higher truths, we must use
mythos
. It looks into the deepest regions of our minds, into that which is timeless and unchanging.
Mythos
might have been what my Methodist friend was talking about when she said that of course she didn't believe that vampires are real, but then again, yes, she did. She had some feeling about the value of that old myth, but not being a poet or an ancient seer, she had no words to express it.

In
logos
it is the literal truth of a thing that matters. In
mythos
“what really happened” doesn't matter at all because the kind of truth being sought is beyond facts. Today, as the great stories at the heart of all religions are being discredited because scholars are proving that the stories didn't “really happen,” some people are experiencing a crisis of faith. In the ancient world that doubt would not have arisen. It was
mythos
that mattered most.

If we were to reclaim the old ways, would we have access to a kind of wisdom that human beings need in order to fulfill the highest hopes of their humanity? The magical people appear to think so, or perhaps they believe the old stories are completely factual. Whatever we believe about Hermetic origins, the magical systems did fire the imaginations of some great men.

 

A
mong the geniuses inspired by Hermetic alchemy in the sixteenth century was a queen's counselor named John Dee. A philosopher and Hermetic magician, he linked magical ideas to the newly emerging discipline of science. During a time when mathematics was suspect as a dark art, Dee was renowned throughout Europe for his studies of mathematics, navigation, mechanics, and geography. Without his wisdom, England would have fallen behind in exploration and Britain's empire would have been a much punier realm. His library was the greatest in England. He was, in short, one of England's most learned and respected men.

For a while his magical abilities were also valued. As court astrologer, he selected the day for Queen Elizabeth's coronation, and when an image of the queen was found with a pin stuck in its heart, it was Dee who was asked to reverse any magic turned against her. Many people bragged of the feats he was able to perform, and all was well until Dee began to receive messages from angels. He was convinced that angels had wonderful things to impart and that establishing a connection with them was a holy undertaking.

To do it he needed the help of a rather shady character named Edward Kelley. Kelley received the messages, and Dee wrote them down. Although he never claimed to see or hear the angels himself, Dee believed in them and consulted them in many things, including in his last geographical venture, which was aiding the colonization and conversion of people in Atlantis, his name for America. The angels' messages and language came to be incorporated into what is known as Enochian magic and are used today.

At one point Dee and Kelley claimed that they had turned base metals into a pound of gold. That feat attracted the attention of a Polish royal who financed their experiments with much of his fortune;
he finally gave up, however, after years of having gotten no gold. Dee returned to England, but times and his reputation had changed. He was branded a sorcerer, and his angelic conferences were described as “execrable insanity.” The attacks against him were so severe that his many true achievements were eclipsed.

When witchcraft-conscious James I succeeded Elizabeth, Dee was so anguished by the things said about him that he petitioned the king to try him for sorcery so that he could clear his name. He offered “himself willing, to the punishment of Death: (yea, wither to be stoned to death: or to be buried quicke: or to be burned unmercifully) If by any due, true, and just meanes, the said name of
Conjurer,
or
Caller,
or
Invocator
of Divels, or damned Spirites, can be proved.” Note that he only denied commerce with evil spirits, writes French. He was not tried, but when he was out of the country, a mob did attack his home and burn his library. Dee died at eighty-one, a poor man with a sullied reputation.

Newton, the greatest scientist of them all, was not only a secret alchemist but, “in the breadth of his knowledge and his experimentation, the peerless alchemist of Europe,” writes Gleick. His ability to transmute a magical substance called quicksilver, better known to us by its chemical name mercury, was so successful that he was slowly poisoning himself by smelling and tasting it. The secrecy of alchemy, the code names its practitioners used, and the grandeur of its aims, which were not only to turn base metals into gold but to purify oneself spiritually, fit well with Newton's view of himself as the new Solomon.

The alchemical aspect of Newton's life was well hidden until 1936, when a trunk of his papers was auctioned at Sotheby's in London. Economist John Maynard Keynes, horrified at the thought that three million unread words of Newton's thought might be lost, bought as many of the manuscripts as he could and tracked down
others later. In them he found the father of modern science experimenting and writing in the ancient language of magical thought. Newton wrote of ethereal spirits and used the alchemists' code name for mercury, which was the “serpents.” He often communicated his thoughts in the highly poetic, symbolic, and sexualized way of the alchemists, writes Gleick, so that in referring to his experiments he would talk of male and female semen, of the Serpents around the Caduceus, the Dragons of Flammel, and a secret fire pervading matter. Like magical people of today, Newton believed in a meaningful, connected universe. He rejected the idea of “inanimate brute matter” and instead believed that spirits and forces animate everything and are constantly in relationship.

The manuscripts in the trunk so impressed Keynes that not long before he died he said, “Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.”

 

B
ut inspiring science was not Hermeticism's only triumph. Its contention that humans are part of God and are expected by God to become as God also inspired a new boldness in theology. Hermetic doctrine stated that God created humankind as a part of himself that was sent out into the world to experience and reflect, then return to God, thereby completing the Creator. Through intellect, humans could reach the wisdom of God for themselves without intermediaries. A somewhat similar idea about intermediaries was being spread by a new Christian doctrine called Protestantism, but Hermeticism promised man that he could reach far greater heights than Christianity seemed to aspire to.

John Dee and other religious Hermeticists believed that the breach between Catholicism and Protestantism could be healed and that a religion of love and unity could reign. This would happen through the rediscovered
prisca theologia,
the one true theology that cuts across cultures and was revealed by God to man in the remote past. Such unity of spirit and purpose had been undreamt of until that time. Carl Jung, who studied alchemy, echoed it in his theories of the universal unconscious. Joseph Campbell's studies of similarities in mythological stories bolstered it. Romantic writers were inspired by it when they yearned for and wrote about a return to nobler, more enlightened times.

Philosophy was also affected. Centuries after Dee's death, Hermeticism fed the thought of Hegel. Some believe Hegel actually was a Hermeticist, which is saying something quite controversial because Hegel is one of the greatest philosophers of the modern age, and Hermeticists were followers of magical ideas that came from ancient, shall we say, unenlightened times. Many of Hegel's admirers choke on the idea that he was otherworldly at all. Look him up in the dictionary and you will find that his philosophy is described as a method to make the final truths of religion scientific. The idea that he might have been a practitioner of magic runs thoroughly counter to anything scientific and is deeply offensive to some of his followers. But one scholar, Eric Voegelin, is so convinced of it that he calls Hegel's
Phenomenology of Spirit
a grimoire that “must be recognized as a work of magic—indeed, it is one of the great magic performances.”

Hegel and all philosophers of his and our time have been forced to react to Plato, Aristotle, and another German giant, Kant. Immanuel Kant believed that humans aren't able to think well enough about metaphysical matters to figure out the truth of reality. Hegel took a breathtakingly bold stand against that notion. Surpassing
Plato and Aristotle, who believed that humans are in the process of finding truth, Hegel declared that he had found it. And he seemed to say that if we follow his blueprint, we too can possess it, writes scholar Glenn Alexander Magee. Like the Hermeticists whose work filled his library, he believed that although the events and objects of life appear to be unconnected, they are actually woven together in an unseen pattern of meaning.

One influence on Hegel and on modern Hermetic thought was a shoemaker named Jakob Böhme, who had a mystical vision in 1600 that came to be important in magical development. This vision inspired him to reinterpret Christian ideas in such a way that they fit with Hermetic ideas. He wrote, “You need not ask, Where is God? Hearken, you blind man; you live in God, and God is in you; and if you live holily, then therein you yourself are God.” Furthermore, he believed that since we are natural beings, our contemplation of nature is a mirror. Nature is also the thought of God. So we hold up a mirror to God. “Thus, through our human understanding, God is fully actualized: He achieves self-awareness and closure.”

How did an uneducated shoemaker know such things? Hegel believed, as the Gnostics and as Böhme did, that all knowledge is inside us, part of the great interlinking, waiting to be revealed. From this came Hegel's concept of speculative philosophy, which he also called mystical, and the idea that it takes both imagination, or mystical knowing, and reason to reach the truth, writes Magee.

 

H
igh magic mystified me. It would take a year of study before I would begin to understand what the high magicians were talking about, which might be one reason why my first Wiccan ceremony didn't go too well, but there was also another reason, a more personal one.

T
he first public witches' circle I ever attended was at Salem's Gallows Hill on Halloween night. I didn't have high hopes for it. Wiccan circles are formed to keep bad forces out and to concentrate sacred energy into what they call a cone of power. It was unlikely that I would be around when a ritual summoned the power of the cosmos. If it did, I probably wouldn't notice. Whenever a group starts working itself up, something in me balks. Sometimes I want to emote, but I can't. Once I could.

It was in a Pentecostal church, which is similar to magical groups in that it relies strongly on experience to affirm belief. My aunt is a passionate believer in the Pentecostal way, which includes speaking in tongues. Converting me was among her goals, and one summer it almost happened. The music was rousing, the preaching was strong, and waves of emotion came rolling through the congregation. I was so taken with it all that I urged my parents to come to the church with me.

My dad sat in the pew neither smiling nor frowning, just listening. I watched his face. Then I looked at the preacher, hopping around, banging the lectern, shouting loud enough to make spittle fly. I'd once been tossed whichever way he threw me, but with my dad beside me everything seemed different. I could see how the preacher was doing it. I heard the false notes, the manipulation, the scare tactics, the promises that couldn't be backed up. Stripped to its bones, his sermon left me unmoved, and that's been the case ever since with regard to religion and excessive emotionalism. I just don't do it, can't do it, and don't want to do it.

The Wiccans' march to Gallows Hill on Halloween is a candlelight commemoration of the nineteen alleged witches who died in Salem three hundred years ago. They march through the lovely Old Town part of Salem where brick streets and little shops housed in buildings more than a hundred years old make it easy to imagine that you're living in a time long ago. If magical energy is concentrated by what humans do, Salem ought to be jumping with it.

Not only does the town have a monument to the people who died after the witch trials, all sorts of magic shops, and many, many magical people, but one of its stellar attractions is the Peabody Essex Museum, a multimillion-dollar facility that houses idols, ceremonial costumes, and magical implements brought back from around the world during the 1700s. Not all of the town's best people are entirely happy about the messiness that witches and pagans bring to Salem with their magic, their fortune-telling, and the influx of tourists each year at Halloween. Disputes between the witches and the town establishment were particularly high the year I was there. The differences between the two sides could easily be seen.

Old Town had been all but taken over by costumed witches and wizards, pagans in medieval garb that could sometimes have stood a good washing, and businesspeople capitalizing on the town's spooky
history. Kitschy museums of magic and horror abound, along with fun houses that feature various kinds of gory death. Step inside the cool, high-ceilinged Peabody Essex, where even the air is purified, however, and everything changes dramatically. The blue bloods who volunteer at the museum are immediately evident. The hair is shorter, the women's makeup hardly visible. No raven tresses and kohl-rimmed eyes, and not a tattoo in sight. You might never suspect that both sides of Salem, magical and old money, support magic in their own ways. Inside the museum is historical magic from faraway lands, kept under glass in hushed and well-lighted rooms, while outside new magic with all its tacky contradictions, popular appeal, and flamboyant hucksterism flourishes. The two hardly meet.

For the march to Gallows Hill, I purchased a really great witch's hat, my first ever. It was black, of course, with silver stars, purple ostrich feathers, and a long trail of net. I wore lace-up boots and an ankle-length velvet opera coat with a swirling skirt. I looked so much more dramatic than the real witches that I began to fear I stood out as a poseur. When a hip-looking witch complimented me on my get-up, I said sheepishly, “I don't think the real witches wear this kind of thing.”

“Real witches wear whatever they want to wear,” she said.

But the hem of my coat was catching on the hooks that held my bootlaces so that I had to stop to untangle it every half-block or so. The thin soles of my boots didn't protect my feet from the uneven pavement, and they hurt long before we reached the hill. Eventually we arrived and waited for the circle to form. A little girl standing behind me chattered with excitement.

“Everyone will stand in the circle, and no one can break the circle. If they do, it will be bad. Last year some people did that, and it got real cold. The gods didn't like it,” she said. Luckily this night was warm.

At last the ceremony started. It was, as promised, a taste of eternity. People chanted, waved swords, and sang for so long that I wanted to whimper. My feet throbbed as I shifted from one foot to the other, standing on my toes so my heels wouldn't sink into the soft earth. On and on it went, people in the middle performing their sacred rites, me wishing that some god somewhere, anywhere, would tell them to shut it off. Finally, I sat down, a glum lump of velvet in the dirt. With my big hat and collapsed body, I looked like the Wicked Witch of the West in her last moments. People frowned. I frowned back. Anyone who wanted me up would have to hoist me. Behind me four people lost patience entirely, broke the circle, and left. I longed to do the same. By the end I was shivering and too bored to care about anything. As I limped away the little girl tugged on my velvet sleeve.

“Did you see it? Those people broke the circle and it got cold, just like last year. I told you.”

She was right. A cold wind did come up after the people walked away. Strange. On another night I might have thrown my peaked hat in the air and yelled, “Blessed be,” but I was hungry, my feet hurt, and it was about a mile back to Old Town.

“Yeah, yeah,” I told the kid. “You're right. Gotta go.”

 

W
iccans don't charge for magic, which has shielded them from some of the bad reputation magic has for being the tool of charlatans. Like Christians who would never charge for prayer, they believe charging would be wrong, a bad use for magic. They will, however, charge five dollars for a polished rock, three dollars for a little bag of herbs, and nice-sized prices for contacting spirits through readings. They also charge to teach magic.

Hoodoo docs charge up front. Once when I asked for work from a hoodoo woman in Savannah, she told me that she would
charge $750. A guy on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, the son-in-law of the area's last Dr. Buzzard, now deceased, wanted $500. I wasn't trying to kill anybody. I wasn't even trying to make somebody love me. All I wanted was a little mojo bag to keep me from being so afraid to travel. Finally, I went to Cat, who tch-tched over the prices. Then stopped herself by saying she wouldn't like to criticize what other rootworkers were doing. She suggested that I do the work for myself since I was in the hoodoo class, but I knew rootwork required talent and I was fairly sure I didn't have any. No talent. No experience. No faith. No good mojo. I also liked the thought that she or her staff pray over everything they sell.

“I want you to send me something,” I said.

“What do you want?”

“Whatever works. Send me everything that might help.”

The next week a package arrived in the mail. Inside I found a red flannel mojo bag with an evil eye pinned to it, Safe Travel oil, a seven-day candle dressed with oils, a Saint Christopher icon, and some Psalms to say as I lighted the candle. The supplies cost me $53. Strangely enough, they did make me a little less afraid. For a while I actually felt some equanimity regarding life's perilous nature. I don't know why. Maybe it was because I'd taken steps to help myself instead of rolling over to hideous fate like a dog showing its throat. Or maybe it was the mojo.

Sometimes money isn't enough for serious magic. A hoodoo woman in North Carolina told me she did some work to heal her dog when he was close to death. For it to succeed, she had to give up something she valued highly. So she took her best hiking boots to the trash pile and threw them in. The dog got better.

Mary Ann Clark, a Santeria priestess and doctor of religious studies in Houston, shared stories of two women who were helped by her religion, which is a combination of Yoruban, Bantu, and
Catholic spirituality that developed in Cuba and the Caribbean. One was in danger of having a premature baby. The other was plagued by depression. Both did Santeria rituals and were blessed in the way they wished to be. But they didn't convert to Santeria. If they had such good fortune, I asked, why didn't they?

Perhaps because too much is required, the priestess said. The orishas, or Santeria gods, give, but they may also ask a lot in return. Sometimes they want a live animal sacrifice. Sometimes they require that those who are going to be initiated beg for the money that the ceremony requires.

The Silver Elves told me elvin spirits also like sacrifice, but killing isn't called for. They are more likely to be impressed with sacrifices that parents make for their children, which is not to say elvin spirits are always utterly noble. They also like money. “Money has juice,” said Zardoa Love, the Silver Elf husband.

Cat's shop is filled with offerings of thanks for answered requests. Each benefactor has favorite things. One likes pound cake, another wants rum, another prefers money, and others like cigarettes. Don't ever forget to give the saint or the divinity what you promised, she tells her clients.

Sometimes the fee for magic comes in having to deal with the consequences—the old “be careful what you wish for” problem. Once Christian Day, a friend of Shawn Poirier, the Salem witch, was all hot over a guy. Late one night he came to Shawn for help. Shawn didn't want to do it, but when a friend is desperate and the absinthe is flowing—absinthe is a big drink among magical people—and it's deep in the night, things happen. Out of patience, he finally said they would visit the loved one in his dreams, which is a common magical action. They did, and while there they did some things that anybody would be willing to wake up for. The next day the guy called Christian to say that he'd had some incredible dreams and wanted to go out.

Christian soon tired of the new love, but the aroused one wasn't ready to quit. When Christian came back asking Shawn for a spell to make his new boyfriend go away, Shawn shook his head.

“I got him for you. You're going to have to get rid of him.”

Everything has its price. Nothing is free. And good magic is hard to find, as was about to be demonstrated to me yet again.

 

M
y first private magical ceremony looked more promising than the public circle. It was a coming-of-age ritual for a Salem girl. Despite my aversion to ceremonies, I love the idea of having sacred, celebratory ways to mark life's transitions. I'm convinced such ceremonies are one of magic's great gifts to the modern world.

On the night of the girl's ceremony, Shawn the Witch was presiding in his living room, which was resonant with Boris Karloff–type music booming from the big-screen TV. Shawn and some of the women witches had long straight hair of a color that can only be called dead-black. Anybody who wanted to smoke in this house was welcome to. There wasn't a plaster angel or a ceramic fairy in sight. No pink either. An étagère in the dining room was filled with Dolls of the Living Dead: little white-faced ghouls with blood dripping from their mouths; nuns with fangs; sweet curly-haired darlings with white eyes, still in their display boxes.

Shawn Poirier's group prides itself on being old-fashioned witches, the kind who do magic at the edge of the forest, have people visiting them in the dark of night, and don't give a flip about lineages. Only, of course, there isn't a forest anywhere near. Shawn lives in a yellow house in a neighborhood with narrow, car-lined streets, where houses nuzzle the curb so closely that they seem about to topple and stand so near to one another that there's hardly
room for driveways. His is set apart by a giant lighted pentacle in the front window. Many people come to this house for help, the witches assured me. “Every clock in the house is set at a different time,” Shawn said. “That's because people come at all different times. And every time is right.”

Shawn is a tall, heavy-shouldered, handsome man with a goatee that the devil might envy. He also has a formidable widow's peak. He always wears black. His accent is East Coast rough, Burt Lancaster just off the docks. As he talked his hands moved languidly through the air, silver rings catching the light. One hand held a cigarette; the other twirled a piece of shoulder-length hair. His delivery is also Lancaster, purring beguilement, right out of
The Rainmaker
, that lovely tale of loneliness, hope, and chicanery. Once a tongues-speaking Pentecostal, he uses plenty of Bible verses and poetic phrases.

One year, he told me, he went to summer camp and wandered into the forest alone. He met some fairies there and fell asleep, as everyone knows that a person who meets fairies does. They gave him special powers and took something in return. They took his ability to love any other person truly and deeply. So he became a powerful magician, but he's always lonely. The only reason he is invited to parties is so that he will do magic, he said. Everyone watches him and expects something. Psychic work is his specialty. Sometimes he longs to be nothing more than a regular guy, he told me.

Good magic wasn't easy to find, even in a town full of witches. On the night of the coming-of-age ceremony for the girl, Shawn, who was wearing dramatically ruffled shirt cuffs that showed his many silver rings off to good advantage, waved his hands about as seven of us stood in a circle, watching with somber expressions. The kid, a nice-looking, clean-cut girl wearing a turtleneck, stood in the center.