Not In Kansas Anymore (6 page)

A
first order of business was to decide how I would approach my inquiry. I would have to deal with my skepticism, quiet the little scientist within me, or I would never get anywhere. It was altogether too easy to explain away even the strangest of the magical people. Take the vampires as an example. Nobody can say how big this community of mostly young people is, but it is international, numbers in at least the thousands, and appears to be growing. Some consider themselves to be actual vampires who need human blood, but the majority seem to be interested in taking other people's energy.

When one young psychic vampire told me how he discovered his dark nature, I drew up a list of signs. If you always wear sunglasses when you go outside, if you prefer being up at night to being active during the day, if you have low energy and depression, if
you're often ravenously hungry and you like your steaks bloody rare, you might be a vampire.

You might also be a typical American teenager, but never mind that for now.

Believing himself a vampire, he thought that he needed other people's blood to live. Later he came to understand that it wasn't blood that he needed but life energy. He could get that energy by being in crowds, at parties, in church rituals—anyplace where people were gathered. If strong emotions were being generated, that was even better. He could also get the energy he needed through touching people in a conscious way.

Psychologize that description and you have a young person who can't relate well to others. He's alone a lot, and that makes him more depressed. He realizes that he can make himself feel better by being around other people. But relationships that involve talking are difficult. So he avoids those. Soon he realizes that merely being in a crowd can buoy him up. Being in a crowded bar, in a mall, at a sports event, can make him feel more alive. If he concentrates his attention on one person, he feels even better. He interprets this as having fed off their energy.

That might be true, or it might be that he has merely stopped thinking of himself so constantly and that is a relief. Fueled by fantasy fiction and computer games, inspired by visions of vampires who were dangerous and fascinating, he can call himself a loser or an immortal vampire. He chooses vampire. He concentrates on that, thinks about it a lot, has dreams about it, meditates, and has imaginary experiences, which he interprets as past life memories. He is affirmed, knows who he is, and knows how to live. Soon he looks on the Internet. He finds other people who feel the same way. They band together, exchange stories, spin theories, and form a group.

Now let's apply sociology. These are odd times we live in. Reacting in odd ways to the loneliness of a society without real community, one in which extended families don't live together and the banalities of television and rock music substitute for human interaction, wouldn't be that unusual.

It makes a neat package. End of story.

So why wasn't I content? I liked being so smart. It made me feel good to have figured it all out, but a person can be too smart for her own good. I'd taken the vampire's story, categorized it, labeled it, and minimized it. I'd done to the vampire what all of us have learned to do to ourselves and to almost any new idea that comes along. Whenever we don't think the way everyone else does, or see what everyone else sees or believe what everyone believes, we reason it away.

It isn't a bad technique, unless the technique starts running the technician. Anybody who does that enough can find that she has stopped heeding her own feelings and stopped believing her own experiences unless they can be fitted into a mold. And once she does that, there's no ground under her feet. Pretty soon it doesn't matter what new information comes in, she's got a slot all ready for it and she never learns a thing but what she already knew.

I'd seen it happen to lots of people. To myself maybe.

By demythologizing the magical people, I'd satisfied the little scientist within myself, but in truth it had been too easy. From the beginning of my investigations into magical culture, I'd sensed that the people I was talking to were behaving within an enchantment I wasn't part of.

For instance, I was told that Salem witch Shawn Poirier could enchant dolls so that they moved. Several of Shawn's friends told me that one. He had enchanted the dolls in the window of a shop called
the Crystal Moon. “Sometimes I sit on that bench outside and just watch them move. Try it out,” one of the witches said.

I was eager to do that. In the world of magic, you hear lots of stories that lots of people are willing to swear by, but it's pretty rare that you get to see something done that can't be called coincidence. If those dolls moved, I'd relocate to Salem and start studying the Craft.

The next day when the shop was closed, I went to the bench that faces the window and sat down. There were dolls in the window, fairy creatures hanging from strings. Maybe one or two of them moved, and maybe Shawn was the reason, but I suspected a current of air. None of them blinked or moved their little glass heads while I was looking. It wasn't magic enough for me. I felt a little silly at having been so excited.

Who would this be magic enough for? And then I remembered that the man who had most fervently assured me the dolls moved was the fiancé of the shop's owner. He was crazy in love with her, had been since they were teenagers. She'd been married twice before, and he had mooned after her through those marriages and his own. She was a witch. So now he was a witch. They both credited a love spell with bringing them together. That's the kind of man who would sit and watch these dolls swing on their strings and be enchanted. A man bedazzled already.

Another time, a Salem magician told me that an early lesson for his magical students was learning how to blow up clouds. They would stand looking at the sky and pick a cloud to focus on. Not a big cloud, because that would require more power than they had at first. Pick a thin, wispy cloud, he advised them, and send all your energy to disperse it. It's amazing how often those clouds just fly away, he said. I later heard that this is a common practice among student magicians.

I didn't say much about that story, but everything I thought was insulting. Wispy clouds disperse all the time. Even big clouds do. They are insubstantial, drifting with the wind, always moving. They disperse whether you look at 'em or don't look at 'em. The reason I didn't say much was that my interpretation was so obvious that I knew it wouldn't do any good to point it out. He wasn't an idiot. He and his wife run a magical shop and seem to be staying in business. He was well read, had a good vocabulary, was well spoken and apparently sane. So what was going on? Somehow he was analyzing this event in a way that was utterly unlike my own analysis. They all were doing that.

The outer facts of the magical people's lives, the verifiable ones, often made little sense to me. The outer facts of Shawn's group were summed up by Penn Jillette in a
Penn & Teller
broadcast titled succinctly “Bullshit!” After Shawn and his friends, dressed up in witchy gear, sneered at the camera, waved their hands about, and told their life theories, Penn was again succinct. “Whack jobs,” he called them, so pleased with his mean-spirited fun that he was practically snorting.

Nobody watching could blame Penn for his assessment based on the observable facts. That's the outer truth of it, and that might be all there is to any of the magical people. But Penn was also giving his audience another message, an inner truth that they could not fail to understand. His ridicule warned listeners that they had better stick to what he and his kind would allow them to believe, or he would have the same kind of snorting fun with them.

Shawn told me that he and his friends hadn't known they were going to be on
Penn & Teller
. But considering everything, he thought they came off pretty well. If someone can call you a whack job on national television and you can feel pretty good about that, maybe you are magic.

 

M
y introductions to magic sometimes came in somewhat mysterious ways, which is only to be expected, I guess. One hot summer day when I was in Memphis flogging my book at one of those little tables that sits at the front of the bookstore, a woman came up to me.

“I was in here last week,” she said. “I saw this book, and it seemed like I was supposed to have it. Then I saw the sign that said you were going to be here, and I thought that I had to meet you.”

“Is this the way you live your life?” I asked, grinning to show that I was a friendly smart aleck.

“Well, yes. It is.” Someone interrupted us then, and she walked away. When I looked for her again, I saw that she was standing in another aisle waiting for my attention.

“Who are you?” I asked.

A writer, she said, writing a novel about a woman who uses hoodoo on her lover.

“Hoodoo?”

Not voodoo, which is a religion. Hoodoo, which is an African American magical system that was brought over during slave days and is making a comeback with blacks and attracting whites around the country, she said. A lot of black people won't talk about it. They call it “that stuff,” or “that mess,” as in, “I don't fool with that mess.”

“But ask them if you can have some of their hair,” said the woman, who was African American herself. “They'll say, ‘No way. I am not giving you a piece of my hair.'”

We laughed.

“I'd like to know more about hoodoo.”

It's difficult to get black conjure docs to talk about what they do, she said, especially to a white person, which I am. Practitioners of
hoodoo aren't likely to be arrested anymore, but memories of a time when hoodoo could land you in jail are still alive. It's hard to even find such people. White people are beginning to learn the old ways, however, and they will talk. She told me about Catherine Yronwode, pronounced Ironwood, a Jewish woman in Forestville, California, who runs a mail-order supply company called the Lucky Mojo Curio Company.

“You ought to contact her,” said the woman.

The next week I was in San Francisco, ninety miles from Forestville. I had a free day. A rental car agency near my hotel was advertising cars for $19 a day, unlimited mileage. So I called Lucky Mojo. A man answered and said to come on out.

When I got to the rental counter, it turned out that all the $19 cars were gone, but I could have one for $35. It was almost twice what I expected to pay. That is often the case in the magical world.

I took it anyway.

“I guess you could say I'm an agnostic about magic. I don't believe in it, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't be true,” I told Catherine Yronwode, when we met. It was important to mention my position as an open-minded nonbeliever. Open-minded because otherwise she wouldn't talk to me. Nonbeliever because then she couldn't hex me. I'd read that only people who believe in bad magic can be afflicted by it, a fact that I later mentioned in a carefully offhand way to Catherine. She laughed and said, “Oh yes. I call that the Alice Defense, after Alice in Wonderland, who was being attacked by cards but didn't think it was happening because everyone knows that cards can't attack people.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, feeling testy on that point. “If hoodoo works so well, why are white people still on top? Seems like they would have had all sorts of bad conjure thrown at them. They've sure deserved it.”

“Well, I don't know,” she said slowly. Catherine, who is most often called Cat, can get ruffled, but not over what you might think. “Maybe people want different things.”

She never asked whether I believed or not. None of the magic people did. They don't even like the word
belief
. “I don't
believe
magic works,” they invariably told me. “I know it works. From experience.” Ah yes, experience. Hadn't they been told that experience isn't to be trusted until the scientists verify it? Perhaps not, or perhaps being a whack job makes you exempt.

Magical people are not much interested in proof. They don't set up double-blind controls. They don't compare the number of times a magical act succeeds to the number of times it doesn't. “Magic will never be proved,” one witch told me. To magical people doing it is more important than testing it, and for them the evidence comes with the doing. If I huffed and puffed until the evidence of their magic was blown away, they rarely did more than shrug. Most are too smart to argue the point. They know the world of disenchantment runs on different rules. To understand what they mean is as difficult for a mundane as it would be for a suburban dentist to think like a medieval magi.

Many people define magic as the infamous ceremonial magician Aleister Crowley did. He said it is “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will,” which makes magic much more than a spell or ceremonial invocation. His definition is often favored because it allows ordinary physical efforts to be counted as magical acts, and most magical practitioners agree that doing a magical working without any real-world action to back it up may have little impact. They often see magic as a way of bolstering the effect of other efforts. If you want a job, do the magic, Cat tells her customers, but you'll still have to go out and look for a job. Don't expect one to fall from the ceiling. It might, but don't count on it.

I too like Crowley's definition for its broadness. “Causing change in conformity with will” expands magic so that we can question whether what seems mundane actually is. It allows the idea that all sorts of actions can be magical if we have the will to believe they are so. To think that magic is merely something purchased in a spell kit is to undersell it.

To me, magic is a way of thinking, a method of experiencing reality, of changing reality even, that Newtonian science won't allow. It's the belief that human thoughts, rituals, and symbolic actions can affect the physical world. It's an openness to events outside of human comprehension. For most magical practitioners a whole constellation of ideas goes with that. There's future-telling. Often there's a belief in multiple gods, in synchronicity, in a life plan or a contract that was made before birth. There's talk with the dead and with those who haven't ever lived, angels, higher intelligences, astral masters. The idea that otherworldly spirits can be directed to do things that help humans is common. Some magical people believe not only that they can call upon magical forces but that they are actually magical themselves.