White Magic

by Elissa Washuta

  It may be a cave, a pit, an abyss, or a lake of fire and sulfur.

  It may be darkness.

  Nobody knows where it is.

  Hell is the hole the wicked fall into forever.

  If hell was darkness, I wanted hell. As a girl tearing photos of rock stars from magazines and folding the pages into rectangles I carried in my backpack, imagining the breath-balmy nights of my adulthood, I was more afraid of heaven, a place devoid of the tingle of temptation, a place where the lights never go off.

  Hell sounded like Crystal Cave, near where my dad grew up, a deep, pool-dappled cavern blooming with calcite crystals and dripping with stalactites; the lowest point is called the Devil’s Den. At the gift shop, I bought a box of crystals so I could start growing a cave in my room. In a photo of the first wedding performed in Crystal Cave in 1919, the groom’s black suit blends into the void. With her white gown and hard eyes, the bride is a medium ready for a séance. White bouquets burst around them like tongues of the hottest flame.

  I wanted a love that would rouse the dead. Maybe the devil, then, was the beloved I’d been looking for.

  DOOR TO HELL

  Despite my eight years of Catholic school, I have only a vague sense of who Satan is. I know he is a bad angel. The Bible says:

  War broke out in heaven; Michael and his angels battled against the dragon. The dragon and its angels fought back, but they did not prevail and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. The huge dragon, the ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, who deceived the whole world, was thrown down to earth, and its angels were thrown down with it. (Revelation 12:7–9)

  The Catholic Encyclopedia asks, “And in the first place what was the nature of the sin of the rebel angels?” but I can’t answer. Apparently, neither can many theologians, though they think it must have been that Lucifer wanted to be equal to God. Wanting to be like God is not a sin on its own; the sin came when Lucifer wanted the same miracle-making supernatural power of the divine. The Catholic Encyclopedia calls this “a species of spiritual lust.”

  What is spirituality if not lust? Spirit is a kind of vigor, lust nothing more than potent want. I lived without spiritual lust for a long time, believing life was nothing more than the reality I could easily access—workweeks, overdrafts, men pushing their dicks into my mouth, liquor to rinse. But then I saw a small rip in the cloth of the real. I wanted to go through that rip, a portal. Go toward the light of the Lord, the nuns said. The only light I knew was hot, just like my lust, and anyway, how could such pure, potent want be evil? The nuns said Satan came in through our fear. I was not afraid of my lust.

  Lucifer, in Latin, means “light bringer.” Lucifer is the Latin word for the planet Venus in its appearance as the morning star. Lucifer made its way to the devil through translations and interpretations of the Bible. Now, the name Lucifer is attached to the angel whose luminescence led to his fall. Why go toward the light when you’re made of it?

  Trying to understand where Satan was coming from isn’t exactly a good look, but I feel driven to understand how an angel who only wanted more could be the highest tempter, the source of all evil. Into a verse in the Book of Wisdom is tucked this aside: “by the envy of the devil, death entered the world.” I can’t follow the maze of theological corridors to an understanding of sin, evil, and the motivation to tempt. I leave that in my childhood.

  He gets in through temptation, the nuns said. Temptation and doubt.

  Maybe I want him to, I thought but didn’t say.

  FAKE MARK TWAIN’S INDEX-O-VATOR

  The first clay sequence animators crafted when beginning work on The Adventures of Mark Twain was “The Diary of Adam and Eve,” based on Twain’s short stories. I knew the story of Adam and Eve from an illustrated book about their loss of paradise, but I liked them better in clay because animated Adam and Eve forgot about their absent God. Among trees spangled with heart-shaped leaves, bulbous mounds of otherworldly flora, and rainbow jungle thick enough to obscure the world beyond Eden, Adam and Eve regard each other. Adam resents the intrusion; Eve yearns to know this strange creature evading her.

  She’s such a bother that he decides to escape, but she finds him. When Eve builds a house abutting his, he erects a fence between their yards. She takes it out. He restores it. Over and over, they do this until Adam storms into his house. When he slams the door, she turns, and we see her sad face.

  Sitting in front of a stream, Eve looks at her reflection.

  I go to the water when I need someone to talk to. It is a good friend to me and my only one. It talks when I talk. It is sad when I am sad. And it comforts me with sympathy.

  Later, she serves tea to a cluster of beasts.

  He is avoiding me and seems to wish I would not talk to him. So I made friends with the animals.

  I’ve watched this sequence so many times I have to remind myself the memory is made of clay, not of my own past. I have never been to Eden.

  “The Mysterious Stranger” appears in a break in the Adam and Eve story. In the immediately preceding segment, a snake in sunglasses tempts Eve to eat the apple. Paradise darkens. The pond dries to reveal a fish skeleton, a parrot becomes a crow, the animals bare their teeth, trees die, and a beast swallows the unicorn Adam loves.

  At this rupture point, the children meet Satan. This placement makes sense: I had forgotten, somehow, that Satan is the snake, and that in the Bible version, after Eve eats the apple, God tells her, “I will intensify your toil in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Yet your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” This part of Genesis didn’t make it to Claymation.

  I never understood why Adam and Eve were forbidden from eating the apple. If the snake had told me, as he tells Eve in Genesis, “God knows well that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, who know good and evil,” I would have found this credible, and I would have eaten the apple skin to core. Wanting to know what God intended as mystery, I pore over my astrological natal chart, looking for the future.

  The Satan thing is long behind us by the time The Adventures of Mark Twain returns to the Adam and Eve story. Twain reintroduces the story by saying, “How deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam and Eve. They brought death into the world.”

  We see them in their banishment, clothed in fur. Adam has decided she’s a companion and he would be lonely and depressed without her, now that Eden is gone. After she proves herself useful, discovering fire, Adam decides, “I was mistaken about her in the beginning. Perhaps it is better to live outside the garden with her than inside without her.”

  Eve reflects, “Why do I love him? I guess just because he is a man, and because he is mine.”

  BEDROOM DOOR, OPEN

  Sometimes I forget about Carl, but his absence from my thinking never lasts. I wonder what love is and whether I’ve ever really felt it. In overlaying two natal charts, one can see the aspects between two people’s planets; some aspects show feelings that can resemble love, like the hook of early infatuation or the vortical pull of karma. Other aspects show the potential for longevity. But only potential: a chart is like the outline of a story. I just wish ours would tell me the point of this feeling, too ugly to be love but too potent to be nothing. I can’t forget him because then I’d have no occasion to even wonder about love.

  LOCKED DOOR TO THE UNDERWORLD

  According to some of the witches who love Lilith, she was Adam’s ungovernable first wife, the woman created before Eve. Some Jewish texts depict her as a woman who left Adam after refusing to lie beneath him, the wife of Satan, destroyer of angels, and a flying demon. Witch internet wants to trace her back to the ancient Sumerian epic poem The Descent of Inanna, placing Lilith as Inanna’s maid, but scholars have rejected this connection.

  Lilith’s name is applied to three items in astrology: Asteroid Lilith, located in the belt between Mars and Jupiter; Dark Moon Lilith, supposedly a second moon of the earth, though
it doesn’t actually seem to exist; and Black Moon Lilith (the one most commonly referred to by astrologers), not a body but a mathematical point in the space between the earth and its moon.

  All the astrological Liliths have something to do with the feminine. I can’t keep track. I’m more interested in Inanna, Queen of Heaven, who descended to the underworld to visit her sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Dead. As depicted in The Epic of Gilgamesh, Ereshkigal’s husband has died; Inanna was responsible. The underworld entrance is the point of no return, but Inanna thinks she can leave when she’s ready, and she approaches wearing the finery of a queen. At every gate of the underworld, she has to remove a piece of her outfit: her turban, her necklace, the twin egg-shaped beads at her breast, her breastplate, her golden ring, her measuring rod and line, her robe. Over and over, she is told not to open her mouth against the rules of the underworld.

  She arrives naked and approaches her sister’s throne. The judges of the underworld give her the look of death, shout at her, and turn her into a corpse. They hang her on a hook to rot, a piece of meat.

  When Inanna doesn’t return to heaven after three days, her minister, with help from a deity, sends two figures to rescue Inanna’s corpse and revive her. They find Ereshkigal in the pains of labor, delivering a baby whose father is dead. The figures make her feel better, and in return, she’ll give them whatever they want. They want Inanna’s corpse.

  The demons follow Inanna out of the underworld. She can’t return to heaven without making a sacrifice. Someone has to return in her place: not her loyal minister, she says, who retrieved her. Not her beautician, not her sons. But her husband, Dumuzid—Inanna sees him on his throne, lavishly dressed, entertained by girls. She gives him the look of death and tells the demons to take him.

  Dumuzid’s sister wants to go to the underworld instead, so Inanna lets her take his place for half the year. When he’s gone, Inanna’s powers fade. When he returns, so does her power.

  DOOR TO HELL

  The oldest known knock-knock joke appears in Macbeth. A hungover porter talks to himself, listening to knocks at the door, imagining himself standing at hell’s gate: “Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there, i’ / th’ name of Beelzebub?” (2.3.3–4).

  Who’s there, he imagines: a farmer who hoarded his crops, hoping for a famine as occasion to extort the hungry, and hanged himself when it never came; an “equivocator” who, in essence, lied in court about his Catholicism by giving vague responses to Protestant inquisitors to avoid persecution; a tailor whose offense is unclear to me, but “Here you may roast your goose” reads like a punch line. As the knocking persists, the porter drops the joke: “But this place is / too cold for hell. I’ll devil-porter it no further. I had / thought to have let in some of all professions that go / the primrose way to th’ everlasting bonfire” (2.3.16–19).

  I would stroll to hell on a path covered in flowers. Actually, I’d stroll to hell on a path covered in used condoms, empty Crown Royal bottles, and lipstick-smeared cigarette butts. I’d stroll to hell through a puddle of my own blood, through vomit, through the pre-cum of a man I’m afraid will punch me in the face like he punched the wall if I shove him off me. Knock knock, who’s there? It’s him again, at my bedroom door because my roommate let him in. Knock, knock, knock! Now it’s my college ex-boyfriend at the window, drunk and earnest, but he has to leave because there’s a man inside my apartment with a switchblade in his hand and a gun in his glove box. Knock, knock, knock! It’s my friend at the hotel bathroom door. He’s still sobbing, but he thinks he’s ready to stop groping me. Knock. Never at quiet. I’m in hell, but when the devil approaches, I freeze.

  As I’ve chased Satan down the internet rabbit hole, I’ve learned that many Satanists don’t believe in Satan, except as an antiauthoritarian symbol. The Satanic Temple’s FAQ says its members don’t believe in evil but denounce undue suffering, defend personal sovereignty, and reject tyranny. “Ours is the literary Satan best exemplified by Milton and the Romantic Satanists, from Blake to Shelley, to Anatole France.” Satanism, they claim, does what a religion should: “It provides a narrative structure by which we contextualize our lives and works.”

  My Satan is a cinematic Satan, an as-told-to Satan I kept alive in my religion class notebook, a Google-fed Satan. I’m told Milton made Satan familiar, but I wouldn’t know. The only part of Paradise Lost I remember is the one about

  Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death,

  A Universe of death, which God by curse

  Created evil, for evil only good,

  Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds,

  Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things,

  Abominable, inutterable, and worse

  Than Fables yet have feign’d, or fear conceiv’d,

  because I grew up in a place of rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, and dens, a five-minute drive from Shades of Death Road. That place remains an intact heaven in my memory, a moss-covered land of the living where three-inch mushrooms spring up overnight. I don’t need to die to reach it, don’t need to choose a door I can never step back through; I only need to drive across Pennsylvania, through mountain tunnels and across river bridges, over a mangled crust. When I drive alone, I remember the things I don’t think about when I manage to find distraction in anything else, and I realize I don’t need Milton’s Satan because I’ve met the guy myself.

  FORBIDDEN DOOR

  I didn’t think I was looking for the devil, but nothing has ever looked as exquisite as Claymation Satan, seen through a doorway, standing in the blossoms he made. In my twenties, far away from home and unprotected, I thought I was looking for a boyfriend, but goodness can be so hard to discern. God and Satan seem similar: temperamental, powerful, invisible, everywhere. I didn’t want to be looking for a man to rule me, but I’d been taught to strive to be close to God, so at twenty-four, I began dating a man who soon put the fear of God into me. I met Henry at a bar. He was an electric car engineer, boat owner, and board sports enthusiast; we had nothing in common, but I don’t remember caring. He didn’t seem to like me, but he did want me around. I don’t know whether I liked him. That wouldn’t have mattered to me. Our relationship was exciting at first, scary later, feelings that are not so different in the gut, which I never listened to anyway.

  Henry and I had been dating for a year when I had my tarot read for the first time. My friend Elissa (same name, same sign, same life’s work) pulled three cards: past, present, future. I gasped when she flipped over the card for my present: THE DEVIL.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” she said.

  The card features a beast with the body of a man, feet of a harpy, horns of a ram, and wings of a bat. He scowls. His hairy legs are spread. They looked like Henry’s always did when we were in his bed and he was about to grab the back of my head and push my face down onto his dick.

  I said, “It just looks familiar, is all.”

  DOOR TO HELL

  In a 2014 issue of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ magazine The Watchtower, an unnamed author begins the article “Should We Fear Satan?” with this:

  It is very hard to detect. Colorless and odorless, it may catch its victims unawares. Perhaps over half of all deaths by poisoning worldwide may be traced to this single culprit: carbon monoxide. However, there is no need to panic. There are ways to detect that gas and to protect yourself. Many people wisely install warning monitors and then carefully heed any alarms.

  Like carbon monoxide, Satan is invisible, very hard for humans to detect, and extremely dangerous. But God has not left us without help.

  The article says we can choose God or Satan. I think it’s a trick. I refuse to make a choice. I will not go through a door. I know exactly where hell is, because the nuns always told me hell is not a faraway place: hell is everywhere.

  FORBIDDEN DOOR

  I’m told I should try to avoid abusive men by making a list of the qualities I seek in a potential partner. I once made such
a list, but a man that good isn’t real, and anyway, I’m looking for a portal to another world. Henry stood at the door to hell, and I never asked him a question. Early on, he asked me one: “Are you afraid of me?” I wasn’t. “You should be,” he said. This was fine. I remembered God saying the same thing.

  Two months after my tarot reading, Henry, with his roughed-up hands attached to big CrossFit arms, covered my mouth and pinched my nose while I slept. I’d known it was coming. “You were snoring,” he said when I woke trying to suck air out of his palm. He sounded like a movie killer. His face was a flat white mask lit by the double moon that watched from the sky and the lake reflecting it. After that, when I stayed over, I slept in his second bedroom, in the twin bed stacked with snow pants and jackets. The night I stepped on his expensive snowboarding goggles, I thought he really would kill me. I came into this world with a lake and expected to go out with one.

  I took up smoking again. Most nights, I drank until I passed out. I ate foods he told me not to eat because he wanted me skinny. I stopped going to the unaffordable CrossFit gym he pushed me to sign up for, where I’d once coughed up blood and still kept going. I made myself repulsive to him. I didn’t mean to. But something inside me wanted to live. I couldn’t make myself end things with him; this, I thought, was reality. There was nothing better for me.

  He broke up with me weeks after the smothering. I don’t remember why. I was drunk.

  DREAM DOOR

  In a book of spells, I read that the best way to protect oneself from psychic sleep attack is to keep a jar of water on the nightstand and empty it every morning. The only way I know to protect from physical sleep attack is to sleep alone, or to avoid sleep. The first time I slept next to a man, when I was twenty, I woke up under the full weight of his body and the breaching press of his dick into a space that had never seemed like an entryway.

  For nearly ten years after, I slept next to men with the help of psych meds that knocked me out. Slept like the dead. Went to dreamless nowhere.