Not In Kansas Anymore (13 page)

Bestiality is among the practices Siva supports but doesn't practice himself. I knew that Siva and Cat owned an adorable Portuguese water dog, which looks like a heavy-boned, somewhat short standard poodle. “Do you have sex with your dog?” I asked.

“No,” he answered, but when she humps his leg he doesn't stop her. “If it can be shown that there are animals that want a greater degree of physicality, then I would be in favor of that.”

Oh.

He also has not helped people kill themselves and has not eaten human flesh, except a hangnail or two of his own. He thinks cannibalism might be a better way of respecting the dead than letting them rot in the ground. “My aim is along the line of
Soylent Green
. So we can have the splendiferous experience we all want when we die, and we can chose how we die.”
Soylent Green
was a 1973 movie set in 2022, when food was made from human corpses.

His support of masturbation, sodomy, and bestiality is part of his allegiance to no-growth. The earth is being harmed by the number of humans on it. So the fewer the better. As a measure of his commitment, he had a vasectomy while still a young man.

He puts in many hours each day and far into the night on the computer, cataloging material, linking people with magical information, and entering into discussions in which he jabs at those with opinions he deems too strong or underchallenged. This is part of his dedication. He began his occult life interested in sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, things that at that time were hidden and unknown to him. The dark, transgressive nature of the magical world was its primary draw for him. Two decades later it still is. Only now his sex is restricted to his wife, and in addition to rock 'n' roll he's likely to be listening to the Memphis Jug Band because that's the music his wife likes. At forty-two, Siva may have tamed down some, as most of us do when we get older, but his essential commitments are the same.

He thinks transgressive behavior that is condemned by society is valuable for humans and for the society as a whole. It reminds people that there are values other than those being supported by authority. “It's important to protect the wild, even in people.”

Sometimes his methods shock people; others turn away with no response, and some are compelled to follow up on his thinking. I told him I thought he was strange. He replied that a lot of people did. I wasn't sure how spirituality and his bizarre contentions linked up. The word
spirituality
is being used in so many odd ways that I don't know what it means half the time, I said. To me being a spiritually mature person means behaving in a certain way, I said.

He agreed.

So I challenged him. “What ways?”

“More patient, more engaging, more able to be with things that might be difficult for others, more kind.”

“That's what I think,” I said. When Siva evokes anger and attack, it's part of his discipline to reply gently and with patience. Like Jesus.

At one point in our conversation about spirituality, we began to talk about Buddhism. I said, “They talk about getting rid of the self. I don't need that. I need to find a self.”

And he said, “I do too.”

What was this? I was agreeing with a Satanist about the most basic spiritual questions. Then he told me that he also considers himself a Christian.

One night when he couldn't sleep he picked up a Bible that he kept by his bed and began reading the teachings of Jesus. He came across the story of the young rich man who came to Jesus asking what he ought to do to be a follower. Jesus said sell all your goods and give to the poor. The young man went away saddened. This is one of the most perplexing and hardest Scriptures, I think. I've mentioned it to many stalwarts of the faith, and most of them say Jesus didn't really mean it.

But Siva, who had taken a vow of poverty along with his other vows to Kali and had already given away his clothes, did take the verse seriously and devised a ritual of his own to dedicate himself as a Christian magician, using what he calls the Christ formula. Part of that dedication is to be like Jesus in telling people things they don't want to hear. Also like Jesus, he believes himself to be part of the Great Martyrdom Cult, which is a label he coined himself. Present-day Christians helped him form his ideas about the Great Martyrdom Cult by patiently answering his questions and then attacking him because he didn't agree with them. “It was like they gave me the formula and then gave me the opportunity to use it,” he said.

The Great Martyrdom Cult, which may be a group or individuals who've lived through time, opposes societal repression, rouses
people up, and rescues important parts of human experience by mentioning things and performing actions that society considers abhorrent, as Jesus did. When he ate with publicans and sinners, he was violating some of the most important taboos in Jewish society.

The more I talked to Siva the more I respected the seriousness of his position. He is dedicated to his Internet work and has become renowned and sometimes reviled for it. He limits the amount of time he spends earning money so that he will not forget his more important commitments. His gentleness testifies to his sense of what the spiritual life ought to produce. Once when Cat was telling me about a party where a drunken woman had tried to seduce him, she said, “Siva, tell her that story.”

“You know that I won't,” he said quietly.

“Okay, then. I will,” said Cat, who proceeded to do just that.

At another time I heard him tell of having brought the Curse of Allah down on an unknown person who had stolen his bike. At the same time, he asked that whatever happened to the other person would also happen to him. When Cat questioned him on the idea that he would share the punishment, he said it seemed like the right thing to do.

“You're so tenderhearted,” she said, the same fondness in her voice that I'd first heard when she told me of his blood pact with Satan.

Siva's picture of Jesus wasn't a new one to me. My concepts of who Christ was have changed radically three times in my life. The Jesus I knew as a child was the savior who came to keep us from going to hell. He was concerned with sexual sins, lack of faith, Bible reading, and churchgoing. The Jesus I knew as a young woman was radically different. He was concerned with the poor, incensed by injustice, and censorious of people who made a lot of money and kept it for themselves. The Jesus Siva experiences was one I didn't
meet until I read the writings of Marcus Borg, a professor of religion at Oregon State University.

Siva's story sent me back to Borg's writings. I wanted to know if Jesus and a Satanist really were as akin as Siva said. I had no doubt that Siva offended common morality in all sorts of ways. Was Jesus equally offensive? Borg calls him a subversive sage who undermined conventional wisdom. When he chose to defend the prostitute, befriend the tax collector, and touch the sick, he chose compassion over purity, a serious matter in his culture. Purity meant that one was like God. Impurity meant that one was siding with the unclean or ungodly. Doing that undercut all that the culture depended on to define itself. When Jesus was called Lord, Savior, Messiah, he challenged the Romans and the uneasy balance Jews had with their rulers. When he refused to conduct his healing ministry in a settled, organized way, he challenged the patronage system, which was a critical stabilizing factor for a country with many poor and a tiny number of very rich, writes another scholar, John Dominic Crossan.

So, according to some respected Christian scholars, Jesus challenged power in every way: economically, religiously, and politically. He also let women speak, listened to them, and defended them when they stepped out of line. So add sexually to the ways he challenged power. The threat he represented was so dangerous and repugnant that it got him killed, and nobody spoke up for the idea that he was innocent. When I asked Siva why he acted as he did, he replied that he was speaking truth to power, the same directive that is so often given to Christians.

I'd taken Siva to be the epitome of darkness, and he wouldn't have minded that title a bit, I suspect. But the more he talked about darkness—or as he would put it, the wildness of Satan—the more I agreed that it ought to be protected and the more vital it seemed not just to him but to me and to all of us. I wasn't converting to
Satanism, but I'd finally seen real value in the magical people's refusal to embrace dualism.

As a result, an utterly unexpected change occurred in how I looked at the world and myself in it. I didn't become hedonistic and immoral, as I had feared, at least not any more than I already was. I didn't do fewer good deeds or more bad ones. I didn't use my new perspective to excuse my own bad behavior at all. Doing such things never even occurred to me. Instead, I began to see my good deeds differently. For instance, usually if I was giving away money and liking myself too much for my generosity, or being kind to someone I didn't really like and resenting it, my “evil” feelings would ruin everything and I'd completely discount the idea that my intentions were good. If I tried to do any kind of good and it backfired, I'd blame myself and plunge into mourning and remorse as though I'd known that the bad result was going to happen. I didn't think of it consciously, but I must have reasoned that good and bad are utterly separate and I wanted to be good. So whenever I wasn't purely good, I flipped into feeling completely bad.

Those tendencies made life quite difficult. They caused me to despise my own best efforts. They also contributed to a kind of cynicism that journalists are all too prone toward. My attitude was pretty close to the bad magic that I'd started out trying to defeat. What I mean by that is that my dualistic ideas damned almost everything, like a curse that no amount of courage or goodwill or even virtuous action could dispel. Why? Because the magical people had been right in refusing to separate bad and good as utterly as I did. Good and bad intermingle, and because they do, I could never find the purity I wanted, not in myself and not in anyone else.

Once I accepted that idea, I stopped beating myself up so much. Whenever I tried to do good and something bad came from it in addition to the good, I said to myself,
There's the dark side
. I began to
see the intermingling of light and dark in other situations. When a special occasion that everyone had looked forward to turned out to be a letdown, I thought,
There's the dark side of anticipation
.
That's how it is,
I would think, and,
It's okay
.

It felt as though I had gone from reasoning as a child to being an adult. It gave me a different perspective on Christians, who are so often accused of being hypocrites. There are a million dark sides to the good intentions of spiritual striving. None of them deserve to be excused or accepted, but none of them invalidate the effort either. Good and bad don't cancel each other out. They intermingle. Maybe the best any of us can do is try to increase the amount of good and decrease the bad.

What that meant for my magical investigation was that I no longer felt compelled to make the magical people's behavior and ideas live up to a Judeo-Christian or even a community standard. I hadn't given up the idea that such standards have value, but I had broadened my perspective. I could look at the magical community for what it was: the usual intermingling, a little stranger sometimes, but reliably mixed. Most important, with the help of Cat, Jesus, and Siva, I stopped wanting to bolt every time I saw something that was so ridiculous, evil, or wrongheaded that it seemed to invalidate what the magical people were saying.

“Take the best and leave the rest,” a Spiritualist once told me. I scoffed, thinking that she was trying to excuse her lack of accuracy. Now I realized that her admonition had greater value than I realized. She was saying that you ought to look for the good, you can depend on it, and you ought to claim it. What would happen if we did that, I wondered?

Before we ended our conversations, realizing that Siva knew quite a bit about elves, vampires, fairies, and other magical creatures, I asked him if he knew why people thought themselves to be
such entities. His explanation was the clearest and most reasonable one I heard. He suggested that they might be people, like himself, without a strong personality or sense of ego. Perhaps they hadn't been allowed to role-play enough in their early life. Fastening onto a role of great magical intensity might be a way of finding some self worth being, he said. That made perfect sense. Two people whose lives were most strange and confusing to me fit his theory and were about to give my new perspective on light and dark a good workout.

I
n our first conversation Mistress Tracy, Queen of the Vampires, told me that as a child she liked to wander around jabbing things with a stick.

“Things?” I asked.

“You know how it is. You see something dead and you poke at it,” she said. I didn't know how that was, but I made encouraging sounds and kept listening.

Tracy Devine is a sanguine, or blood-loving, vampire. She is not immortal and not the kind who kills people by biting them on the neck. She doesn't bite people or animals, living or dead. She's vegetarian. The two fangs permanently implanted on her incisors aren't thin enough to pierce skin even when they've been freshly filed, and perhaps she isn't quite savage enough. Vegetarians aren't generally known for their ferocity.

She does like tasting the blood of her lovers. “What's more intimate than that?” she asked.

I went to meet Tracy on a dark September night. When Shawn the Witch and I arrived at her isolated New Hampshire house, orange Halloween lights glowed in the windows. The yard was filled with a hearse and pickup trucks—hers, her boyfriend's, and two others. A magical stone sat at the side of the doorway. It protected the house. Out back were horses, a pig, and geese.

We climbed steps toward the back door, knocked, and were admitted by Tracy's boyfriend, Jeff, a tall young man whose head was shaved except for long silky tufts of black and pink at the top and back of his head. We entered a room decorated with a crepe paper banner of skulls and orange jack-o'-lantern lights. A string of red-veined eyeball lights lay in a tangle on a side table. Through an open bathroom door, I saw a black shower curtain with a skull and crossbones. Most of the dining room was taken over by two huge wood-and-chicken-wire crates for Tracy's dogs: a greyhound rescued from a racetrack and a Doberman. The greyhound had limpid eyes and dark raised scars on its flanks. Pickles the Snake lived upstairs.

A tablecloth imprinted with jack-o'-lanterns covered the table. On a shelf above the table were glass jelly dishes shaped like hens. Tracy collects chicken art as well as bones. It's something we have in common. The chicken art.

Shawn pointed to the end of the living room where a human skeleton hung from the ceiling. Next to it was a rocking horse that Tracy's four-year-old daughter rode. Oddfellows, a Mason-like group, once used the skeleton in ritual ceremonies. Animal bones and skulls also sat around the living room. A brass pot contained what appeared to be human bones—a hand, a femur, and other parts
I couldn't identify. Shawn put the pot on the table and invited me to root around in it. I did. Then I washed my hands.

Tracy is a tattoo artist. Figures, doesn't it? Blood. Pain. Something that lasts forever. The paintings around the house were hers too: Tracy with outspread cape, hovering over a sleeping village; Tracy and Shawn in a medieval town square, a whirlwind around them; Hannibal Lecter in his mask, carrying a girl who might also be Tracy. Hannibal is one of Tracy's heroes. So is Michael Myers, the killer in the Halloween slasher movies. Her daughter has watched all the Halloween movies. She loves Michael Myers so much that she calls him Uncle Michael.

Tracy relishes these examples of dark energies, but it did little good to ask her why. I did, and she almost invariably said, “They're cool.” Her answers didn't speak to the question, but when I applied Siva's ideas about the Great Martyrdom Cult, her life spoke for her. The GMC, you will remember, is made up of people who are impelled to live out roles that oppose society's values. Siva thinks their impetus comes from an unconscious compulsion to serve the balance of light and dark that gives life its wholeness. Psychiatrist and author James Hillman might say they are propelled by their daimon, which was Plato's word for fate, or the soul's imperative. Either way, members of the GMC serve to remind people of those parts of themselves that the community wants to abolish. Jung called it the shadow side. Freud called it the id. Siva likes to call it the depths.

As we continued to talk, Tracy told me that she had little mercy for whores, strippers, and other people who “have no class.” The fictional killers who get rid of them are her heroes because they rid the world of people who don't contribute anything good to it. Michael Myers kills horny little teenagers who shouldn't be out doing nasty things anyway. She's joking, kind of.

One of the attractions of being a vampire or a werewolf, or Mr. Hyde for that matter, is that you don't have to justify dark passions. You can just have them and express them. No shame. No need to restrain your thoughts.

“I like animals,” she said. “It's people I don't like.”
Dumbo
is one of her favorite movies. She always cries when she watches it.

Tracy was wearing a dress that was fitted in the bodice, with a long overdress slit up the front. She wore no makeup that I could see. Her face looked almost scrubbed. She had a high forehead topped by a fringe of very short bangs combed straight down, a pale face, and small teeth, except for the fangs, which were odd but not unattractive, and smaller than I expected. Her hair was fuchsia and black, long and mostly loose, with several small ponytails. Shawn said the ponytails were to curtail the mischief of spirits that might fly into all that long hair.

She often wore a deadpan expression that she used to good effect playing straight man for her own jokes. Her delivery and her accent were a little like Carla from the television show
Cheers
. Shawn said she protects her alabaster skin by carrying a parasol in the sun, preferring darkness, as all vampires do, but Tracy, who has a surprisingly down-to-earth side, wouldn't go along with such glamorization.

“
Look
at me,” she demanded, holding out a pale arm. “I'm just like my dad. He bubbled all up in the sun.”

She is a witch as well as a vampire. Both palms are tattooed with pentacles that she uses to send and receive energy. She also has a pumpkin tattoo. She grows pumpkins in her garden, carving runes and other ancient symbols on them so that as they grow the magic grows. “Then you make a pie, and the magic goes inside of you,” she said.

She also constructs a scarecrow each year that is magic.

“You bring it alive by your actions, and by thinking of it the whole time you're stuffing it and trying not to think of anything else,” she said.

“That's how you do a spell. You're putting life into whatever you're doing, you're breathing life into it. At the end of the spell, you send the energy. It's a scientific fact that energy is matter, and if you concentrate hard enough you can send it.”

“It's the scientific mind-set,” she said, like a kid proving a point. “I watch
Nova
.”

Witches believe everything is alive. When any of the vehicles they own begins to stall, Jeff is wont to begin cursing the machine. Tracy stops him.

“It'll hear you, and then we'll never get home.”

Tracy describes herself as having been a normal kid. In junior high she started to think that she'd like to look like some of her heroes in rock bands. She dyed her hair white and began dressing in leather and metal and in torn clothes. Kids started to call her names. A less determined girl might have conformed. Tracy started wearing even more bizarre clothes.

She was vague about how the vampire phase started. Her attitude paralleled many magical people's. They often say, “It's just something I discovered I was.” Tracy is strict about how a vampire ought to act. No nasty costumes are allowed at her ball. “Sexy is all right, but not gross.” She won't tattoo hookers or strippers. If she's tattooing a guy who starts talking about having gone to a strip joint, she presses harder. She pushes until he hollers.

Here's the part of her story that made me wince: Tracy's daughter is named Carrion. Carrion, as in roadkill. Carrion Abigail. The child's grandmother cried when she heard the name. If you're a
goddess in some mythic tale of cosmic meaning, naming your child Carrion is all right. But New Hampshire isn't Mount Olympus.

There's a photo of Carrion on the table. She's a pretty little blonde. Pink is her favorite color, and she takes dance lessons.

“I didn't name her Carrion because it's dead meat. It's a pretty name. If she doesn't like it, she doesn't have to use it. She can call herself Abby. Or Carrie. Or Carrie Ann. I don't care. Just so long as she's happy,” said Tracy, who usually calls her daughter Boogie because that was the first word that made the baby laugh.

“Do you mean ‘boogie' with one
o
or two?” I asked. “Bogey as in bogeyman or boogie-woogie?”

She shook her head as though to clear it. “Boogie as in your nose. I was getting a boogie out of her nose and she laughed.”

Oh.

“I have a picture to show you,” she said. She went to the back of the house, and when she returned she handed me a black-and-white, eight-by-ten photo of Carrion at about six months old. It's a fall day and the child is naked, sitting on the ground surrounded by fallen leaves. Her legs cover any part of her that might make the photo pornographic. Tracy, the moralist, would never show salacious photos of her child.

The baby is looking directly into the camera. She's smiling. Her skin glows in the light. I looked at the photo for a long time. The leaves are dry enough to crackle. The soft baby flesh seems real enough to be warm.

“Some people look at that photo and never see what's behind her,” Tracy said.

I hadn't seen it. Maybe the brain doesn't want to see all that the eye beholds. Posed behind the baby, nestled into the leaves, was one of the skeletons. Its bony grin was clearly visible.

There was Boogie, the most precious thing in the world to Tracy. Soft and glowing with life. And behind her, behind this little girl named Carrion, was the fate that awaits every living thing.

As a young child, Tracy understood something about the world, something that all of us probably understand and then spend the rest of our lives trying to forget. Poking with a stick at those dead animals, she saw the great mystery and wonder of our short moment here. And she never forgot.

She was smart enough to know that what she had to say wouldn't be listened to in the world at large. She found that out when she dyed her hair white. So she decided to embody her ideal of power and elegance and life that never ends. She decided to live it, to turn herself into a symbol of it. I don't know if she thought about it that way. Probably she just did it.

“Who wouldn't want to be a vampire?” she said. “You're powerful and strong. You're elegant, and people look up to you. You never get sick, and you never die.”

Golden Dawn mage William Butler Yeats might have understood what Tracy was doing. “We cannot understand the truth,” wrote the mage and poet. “We can only embody it.” Shamans of ancient traditions might have also understood. When Black Elk of the Oglala Sioux had a vision of sacred horses, he was told that his tribe must enact the scene in a horse dance. It took energy and time and resources to do it, but they did it because acting out the vision would give it power and help make it reality.

Tracy said it in her own way. “My dad taught me to write my name large.”

He had died of emphysema four years earlier. One of the photos on her wall is of her as a little girl with him. They've caught a fish that's almost as big as she is, and he's holding it up between them.

She gestured toward the shelf in the dining room where his ashes sit. “He wanted me to scatter him, but I haven't been able to yet.” For a minute she seemed about to cry. “That can of ashes used to hold me on his knee.”

Then she gave us a tight little smile and changed the subject.

 

K
en the Quaker Mortician and Myrna the Death Puppet were not quite as strange as Tracy, but they were close. I met Ken for the first time at Shawn the Witch's house during a ceremony.

It was late September, a time the witches call Mabon, which is their Thanksgiving feast and the beginning of the Season of the Witch. We were in the backyard of Shawn the Witch's house. Spooky music was coming from loudspeakers at the house. Shawn's aboveground pool loomed behind us. Flanking an arrangement of pumpkins and hay bales was a chain-link fence. We were the only ones out. The neighbors were inside, watching TV or hiding from us. The night air was cool, and the fire's flitting shadows licked over our faces, bright and then dark.

The ceremony started when Shawn's roommate Teisan handed us each a sprig of lavender to increase our psychic abilities. We rubbed the lavender between our palms, sniffed it, and tossed it into the fire. The harvest was in and death was in the air as all of life prepared for the long winter, Shawn said.

He told us to kneel before the fire and declare some part of ourselves that we wanted to let die. We must drop our masks, he said. He went first.

“Here before my friends and family, I am vulnerable,” he said. He wanted to let his bad temper die. He wanted to let go of his fear.
He wiped his hand over his face like a man in grief. “I am so afraid that I'll be hurt.”

Jen Cosgrove, a neonatal nurse and single parent, talked of a hard year. She was grateful for the lessons and happy to let the year go. Jacqui Newman, who is a hereditary Strega, or Italian witch, wanted money troubles to die and her psychic business to flourish. Teisan wanted to drop the mask of coldness that he wears and show others the vulnerability inside himself. At the end of each confession the speaker sealed the deal by yanking strands of hair and tossing them into the flames. I could hear the hair pop as it let go.

When it came time for me to speak, the circle of figures around me was dark and still. As I sank to my knees before the ceremonial fire, the flames' light was so bright that I squinted. Everything else disappeared. The witches were silent, waiting for me to speak.