Not In Kansas Anymore (11 page)

First Shawn commanded the spirits, gods, and goddesses to attend us, which made me jumpy. The school of God-summoning
I'm from is more the begging brand.
Please, please, please, please, Jesus. We are filthy rags before your magnificence. Maybe if you could maybe turn your most glorious countenance toward my most unworthy…
but never mind. Call me anything, just call me, as they say. Given what's been going on with faith, no one could blame divinity—be it a he, a she, or an it—for showing up no matter how the invite is phrased.

So Shawn commanded the forces of the universe, and then he turned his attention to the girl, telling her how she would be strong and fearless, how she would bow to no man and they would all obey her will. I was liking this, and so were the other grown-ups. Then the mother witch announced that she had chosen two other witches to be her child's godparents. I think she said godparents. Seems like it would have been something with a bit more flash, fairy godparents, maybe, but it wasn't. In any case, they gave the girl blessings, likened her to some valiant animal, hugged her, and then waited.

When the new godfather witch looked deep into her eyes, she looked back and said, “You have the heart of a jackal.” He smiled a bit feebly. What to say? Jackal isn't a compliment, even to a witch. It was a bad moment. Nobody spoke.

Finally, she said, “I don't even know what a jackal is.” The circle laughed. Happy again.

Afterward, Shawn was saying how much the witch family meant to the kid and how many good times they'd had and how much magic they'd done. She said, “Can I go find the cat?”

To me she said, “My dad's Catholic. I live with him a lot of the time.”

Shawn reminded her that he once did magic for her slumber party. She said, “I don't remember.”

“Yes,” he said. “You remember.”

“No.”

“The time we levitated your friend?”

“No.”

“Yes. We all gathered around and put our fingers, just the tips of our fingers, under your friend.”

“Oh,” she said.

The witches' coming-of-age ceremony seemed to indicate that good magic of life-changing import isn't so easily created. At least not for kids. Adults? Maybe. They are more easily impressed.

My second Salem magical lesson came from a high priestess of the Cabot School of Witchcraft. Laurie Cabot is known as the Official Witch of Salem. Cabot was the first woman in town to adopt black robes, thick black eye makeup, and wildly teased black tresses as everyday attire. She made a vow to the Goddess in the 1970s that she would never take the robes off. People would spit at her as she walked her two daughters to school, according to one story that has made her a local legend. Cabot has been teaching witches how to be magical ever since and has a national reputation for it.

Soon after I arrived I was browsing in a witch shop owned by Laurie Cabot's daughter. A midthirties woman from New York State came in with her husband and young son. As she was paying for a couple of fairy dolls, the New Yorker mentioned to the talkative clerk that she would like to know more about witchery. The clerk promptly offered to teach her, saying that she had been taught by Laurie Cabot herself and now that she was of high rank, she took a few students each year. She didn't charge anything, she said, because it was a labor of love.

When the customer left, I told the clerk who I was, and she told me a good story about how her husband had died and how she had fibromyalgia and was in constant pain but wouldn't give in. Witchcraft kept her going and kept her in contact with her dead husband. His visits were pretty lively, she said, leering a little to let me know he was a ring-tailed hooter, dead or alive. I liked that. So I leered back.

I asked if she would teach me too, and she said she would. I'd have to be willing to return to Salem several times during the year for seasonal rituals, she said. Between rituals, she would send me lessons about the history and the science of magic. In a year and a day, I'd be a real witch.

People flood into Salem all year long for the workshops offered by the Cabot coven mates. I considered myself lucky to have found one who would bring me into the mysteries. She gave me her number, and we agreed to get in contact. About a month later I called. She was eager to begin, but first I'd have to send her $75. I put the check in the mail and bought plane tickets to Salem. She cashed my check, but my witch lessons never arrived.

I later found out that a lot of local witches seem willing to take their chances with the threefold rule, which says they will get back whatever they put out threefold. I heard dozens of stories about backbiting, cheating, threats, even some illegal behavior. Helen Gifford, a columnist for the
Salem Evening News
wrote, “Just mention the word [
witch
] in this city and—poof—a controversy appears.” Money has been at the heart of all the witch wars, she wrote. “When they sell us spiritual counseling for $75 an hour, offer to teach us about their religion for $600, try to hawk pendants and love potions and crystals—are they practicing a serious religion or running a business, which is just like any other business?”

Witch wars are common throughout the magical world. When the witches don't like something or someone, they might make a witch's bottle to turn spells back on the sender or even to attack another witch. The bottle is put it in a freezer. A good part of Salem's witch community has run out of freezer space, one witch quipped.

Maybe my expectations for Salem's good magic were too high. I'd had higher hopes for the Wiccans than for any other magical
group. Anybody who knows anything about them says they are a loving, nature-oriented bunch of gentle people who seek to do only good. Cat says Wicca is Christianity with a goddess. I don't know that she means it as a compliment, but I took it as one. That upped my expectations even more, but I guess it shouldn't have. I know quite well that Christians also talk a better game than they are able to live. So do we all perhaps.

E
verywhere I looked I found elements of magic that so repelled me that I wanted to give up my search altogether. Hoodoo, as just one example, is full of
maleficia
. A person can be caused to sicken, suffer, and die in many ways. For instance, bury a photograph with a piece of the victim's hair. The person will rot away as the items do. Nail a photo of your enemy on a wall, shoot at it with an unloaded gun, cursing as you pull the trigger. Think evil thoughts of the person for the rest of the day. On the third day he will be dead. Put earthworms inside a fish. Fry it and serve it to the victim. In three days her intestines will be full of worms. To make a pregnant woman suffer a long and difficult labor, take a snail from its shell and iron it into her husband's underwear. The birth will go at a snail's pace.

How could anything good stand alongside so much aberrant, willfully malicious, behavior? I'm not saying there wasn't plenty of good to fasten onto in magic. The magical idea that everything is connected, with humans at the center of it all, able to marshal forces
that science barely dreams of, is a delicious idea. And not just because of the promised power, although I do like power, but because it means that we aren't genetic mistakes but part of a whole, a plan with an array of spirits and wonders all around us. The Hermetic assurance that humans have a powerful, exalted place in the eyes of God and a vital role in completing his work is a dazzling call to greatness. Feeling much like those Renaissance magicians must have, I thought,
What could we do if we worked within that power?
Always supposing that we did it with a pure heart, of course, and that seemed to be the rub. The hearts of many magicians didn't appear to be so pure, or even striving for it.

Newspapers tell of drug dealers all over the country hiring magic workers to help them. The press only hears about the ones that don't work out, of course. In one particularly embarrassing failure, a Santeria practitioner in the Bronx was arrested when police charged that she had aided drug dealers by asking her spirits when it was safe to deliver drugs to certain locations. Cops, tracking the dealers from one place to another, had been laughing at her and the spirits for six months.

I talked to a male voodoo practitioner who told me that he might charge $50,000 to protect drug merchants. His deities think what he's doing is perfectly all right; they approve, in fact. This guy, who works out of Florida, wouldn't let me use his name. “My customers might not like it,” he said. Another magic worker vouched for his reputation as a man of power but pointed out that his customers would be difficult for me to locate, and probably surly if found. I wondered at the price. Mary Ann Clark, the Santeria priestess in Houston, doesn't do such work, but the size of the fees didn't sound improbable to her.

Strange powders and dead animals are so common in the Miami state courthouse that a special voodoo squad goes in to clean them
up. In Miami federal court, a prosecuting attorney recently complained that although he doesn't like restricting anyone's religion, his cleaning bills were becoming exorbitant because of the Santeria dust regularly sprinkled on his chair.

Some of the best reasons not to do magic are the people who have done it. The promise of power can lead to paranoia and delusions of grandeur. It can also cause people to dwell on avenging slights when they would be better off forgetting them. It can cause people to imagine that others are responsible for bad fortune or illness when in fact they are responsible themselves or no one is responsible. I saw temptations toward all of that in my research, and many people succumbed.

Aleister Crowley, considered by many to be the greatest modern magician, had many extraordinary mystical experiences, among them hand-to-hand combat in the desert with an evil spirit. He called himself the Beast and 666, as a way of identifying himself with the anti-Christ. He accomplished great treks through wilderness and climbed mountains, but he seemed to have little love for his fellow humans. He beat the servants who carried his luggage during his expeditions, refused to help rescue fellow mountain climbers who were in danger of losing their lives, and betrayed almost everyone who loved him. He had grand ideas about himself and all that he would accomplish, but few of them came to pass. He ended his life in poverty, having spent his inheritance and earned little more, and without having achieved the following he expected.

Other magicians have been similarly unlucky. As author Colin Wilson noted, a rapid ascent to fame and power and then a slow descent toward infamy and poverty is a common path. Count Alessandro Cagliostro, a famous eighteenth-century magician, died in prison. Gregory Rasputin, the Russian magus of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, went down in history as
the man who wouldn't die. Assassins poisoned him, shot him, battered him with an iron bar, and dropped him into the river through a hole in the ice before he finally died. Giordano Bruno, a sixteenth-century mage, was burned at the stake. Pascal Beverly Randolph, the nineteenth-century American Rosicrucian and sex magician, killed himself.

Hoodoo docs have suffered too. South Carolinian Roger Pinckney writes of Dr. Bug, who gave young men a potion that would make their hearts flutter and get them out of the World War II draft. When two men died on their way to the draft broad, Dr. Bug was tried and pled guilty. Out on bond, the conjure doc was so disheartened that he took to his bed and died. Dr. Buzzard, the original holder of that name in the Carolina lowlands, also helped men avoid the draft but was never convicted because no one would testify against him. High sheriff Ed McTeer, a white man who did hoodoo rootwork himself, went after Dr. Buzzard and pulled him into court for doctoring without a license—“an occupational hazard of root doctoring,” Pinckney notes. Dr. Buzzard was convicted and fined $300; like his colleague, he was so distressed by the defeat that he retired to bed. Diagnosed with stomach cancer, he died soon afterward.

An English magician during World War II believed himself to be so magically strong that he could walk unharmed through bombs falling during the London blitz. He was wrong, and one of the bombs killed him. A brilliant young Californian aerospace engineer and magician named Jack Parsons was thought by many to be Crowley's successor. Instead, he was killed during a chemical experiment in 1952.

Some of the tenets of the Nazi and Italian fascist parties were fostered by magical thought, particularly ideas about racial superiority. Heinrich Himmler, head of Hitler's SS, was said to have used severed heads to communicate with ascended masters. A so-called
realm of the dead was underneath the dining hall of the headquarters' castle, writes Peter Levenda. It included a well in which coats-of-arms that represented leaders of the SS would be burned after they died, and the ashes worshiped. SS members were discouraged from celebrating Christmas and attending Christian ceremonies. Instead, they celebrated the winter solstice with sacred fires and invocations of Teutonic deities.

Although once interested in the occult, Hitler later turned violently against all such practice. His deputy führer, Rudolf Hess, continued to believe in the occult and convinced himself that he was destined to talk the British into making peace. A German astrologer working for the British told him that a German-English organization known as The Link was going to overthrow the Churchill government and would meet him in Scotland on October 10, 1941, according to Levenda, with the help of the Duke of Hamilton. Hess, a pilot, flew to Scotland by himself and, decked out in various occult symbols, parachuted into the arms of the Brits, who promptly arrested him.

 

I
t wasn't only people I didn't know who were talking about scary stuff.
The Lucky Mojo Hoodoo Rootwork Hour,
a teleconference with Cat and a Florida rootworker named Christos Kioni, was generally about love spells or luck or other positive matters, but not always. Every Wednesday night at nine, I'd dial up, turn off the lights, crawl into bed, and listen in the dark. Sometimes when they talked about dirty tricks people could pull or rootwork's power to cause mischief, I'd get a shiver. Cat would maybe tell about some old root doc who put foul stuff in a bottle, shook it, hung it up in a tree, and let it swing there for as long as the rope lasted. The object of the work would have aching joints or money troubles or be forced to wander all his days, whatever the conjure doc had ordered
up. Only when the rope broke would the work be lifted, and only if the afflicted one had lived a good life. After such a story, I'd sometimes hear other hoodoo workers sigh happily and say, “That's good. Oh, that's real good,” like Shakespeare's witches hanging over the cauldron.

The first time I called into
The Lucky Mojo Hoodoo Rootwork Hour
, I listened through headphones while cleaning the miniblinds in my study. As I dusted, climbing on the desk, crawling over furniture, I may have huffed a little. The next week everybody was talking about the heavy breather who had freaked them all out. Maybe somebody was doing bad work on the class, someone said. Enemies were certainly about—other conjurers jealous of their success or angry Christians.

Or maybe somebody too dumb to mute the phone, Cat's co-host Christos Kioni offered. I should have confessed, but I resisted knowing the truth. The evil lurking at the edge of space had probably just been me, out of shape, clumsy, trying to get a little housework done. I hoped no one had put out a curse on the heavy breather.

Cat doesn't always censure what others might call black magic. One of the students in our online hoodoo class told of having evoked spirits to deal with an official who menaced his family. The work involved sacrifices of chickens and was aimed toward the official's car. Not long thereafter, the official had an automobile accident that disabled her. She gave up her job, and the threat to the family went away. Others in the class congratulated the student on such a strong result. When one student suggested that trafficking with such spirits might be dangerous, Cat's response was “Some people like to play on the wild side. To each his [or her] own.” A few days later, however, she noted in a separate post that those who seek to benefit others are the rootworkers who grow strongest.

Her shop is filled with supplies that can put a hex on anyone. She stocks graveyard dirt, which scares plenty of people. Needlessly,
she might say, since African Americans think of spirits as benevolent, and the most common use for the dirt is to connect with protective spirits. Graveyard dirt is also combined with other ingredients, such as sulfur and ground-up vermin, to make goofer dirt. It's bad stuff that can be used in spells that aim to kill people. She also has black candles. I was shocked that she stocked such items.

“I won't kill anyone,” she said. “I've had people ask me to, and I tell them, ‘If you want someone killed, you'll have to do it yourself.'” She doesn't do any work for others anymore, but she sells supplies and advises people.

“What about black magic?” I asked, and then began to clarify. “Not black. I mean dark. I mean harmful magic. Bad magic. You know what I mean.” Trying not to sound racist was twisting me in knots.

She nodded. “I know what you mean.”

“Okay. I'm trying to ask if you have any problem with that.”

“I trust that it's justified,” she said mildly.

The word
justified
is important in hoodoo conjure work. Rootworkers often say Psalms and other Bible verses over their work. But in their prayers for power and destruction, they always remember to say, “If this be justified, Lord, let it come to pass.” Then it's the Lord's call, and the rest of us are merely his instruments, which is a cozy place to be. It beats going to war in the name of God or killing because God has been insulted or bombing school buses because his temple has been defiled or any of the other reasons I'd heard for abusing others in the name of God. The hoodoo method, setting natural forces into motion and then appealing to God for a decision on whether it's a go or not, is a bit like prayer with a barb.

The conjurers also may refuse work that they don't think is justified, and some who refuse to do any bad work at all are called “lady-hearted.” But what's bad and what's not is always up to interpretation. I suspect that if they're convinced someone is being
unjustly punished or wronged, even lady-hearted workers might feel free to help. The St. Helena Island hoodoo doc told me that a large part of his work was for people in prison. The original Dr. Buzzard, generations back, also specialized in jailhouse work. He was said to have a flock of buzzards at his command that would descend on the jail and free prisoners.

To determine what's justified, conjurers listen to the person asking for the work. They also often do some form of divination. It might be Tarot or I Ching or throwing the bones. I don't know whether divination works, but I do know that listening to one side of any story may not tell you what's justified. Hearing both sides always complicates up the situation. I never talked to or heard of hoodoo docs seeking the other side of a story. They rely on their judgment, divination, and the discretion of Jesus. Maybe those three tests are enough. One more test when a hex is in question comes from Luisah Teish, a priestess of the Yoruba Lucumi tradition, which is another name for Santeria. “Hexing is appropriate when you seek to stop an abusive action for which you would be willing to receive the same punishment if you committed the same crime.”

Conjure docs often favor turning bad magic back on the sender as a way to deal with enemies. That punishes whoever bears them ill will without hurting those who they suspect but who might be innocent. A North Carolina rootworker, Adele, told me that she does reverse work once a year that's aimed at anyone who seeks to harm her. Then she watches to see what happens. Sometimes people she hasn't suspected have car wrecks. One man's house burned down. Not only were they punished, but she then knew who was working against her.