As I heard a hundred tales and more, I also began to see magic everywhere, planted deep in the stuff of everyday life and flourishing. Britney Spears appeared on the cover of Entertainment Weekly wearing a red Kabbalah cord on her wrist. Paris Hilton had one, and so did Madonna, who adopted the name Esther to go along with her new faith in Jewish mysticism. The cords, which deflect the evil eye, were so popular that the Kabbalah Centre, where the stars go for instruction, tried to patent the string, sold for $26 to $36. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office declined that application.
Go into any large bookstore in America and you’ll find several books on regional ghosts and haunted places. Ghost hunters and ghost busters work all over the country. E-Bay sells haunted dolls and teddy bears. One week’s auction offered a haunted tuning fork, a haunted milking stool, a haunted gravestone rubbing, a haunted blanket, and a haunted bathtub.
Magic also penetrates our lives in ways that are quite mundane. It’s at the car repair shop when the engine stops pinging as soon as the mechanic appears and begins to ping again only when you pull out onto the street. It’s in the beauty salons when hair that spikes about your head like a scarecrow’s coiffure turns supple and silky on the day of the appointment. It’s at the restaurant when diners arrive only after the waiter sits down with his own plate and smokers’ food comes only after they’ve lit up.
You’ve heard of voodoo economics perhaps? Money magic is the most pervasive of all. Of course it would be, since money itself is the ultimate magic, a piece of paper that can do everything. Everyone wants good money magic, a way to win the lottery, gambling luck, an unexpected check in the mail, but the money magic of everyday life is more often bad. Win some money, get a bonus, have a little inheritance, and a major appliance will go out, the kid will get sick, a tire will go flat. Once you’re as poor as you were before the money arrived, life returns to normal. It’s as though there’s some kind of balance sheet that makes sure we stay at exactly the same level of prosperity all the time.
These are matters of life’s proceeding that hardly need to be commented on. They’re so common that they show up in jokes, and no one looks bewildered or wonders what’s being talked about. Trot out all the scientists you want, arm them with a million statistics. It won’t do any good. We know these things.
I often heard people talking about inanimate objects as though they were alive and powerful. This can opener never works for me, someone might say, or the bus always comes early when I’m running late. Or I always have to kick the machine before it will start. Or this computer only works for Mark—it hates the rest of us. Or it never rains when you’ve got an umbrella. No one is serious, you say? Maybe not, or maybe they’re whistling in the dark. It doesn’t matter which because language creates reality. What we name is what we notice, and that’s another argument for the inherent strength of magic. We’ve been programmed to ignore as much of it as we can, and still it pops up.
Theater people are notorious for their magical beliefs. Take Macbeth, for example. According to lore, witches who were displeased with Will Shakespeare’s treatment of them in Macbeth cursed the play, and ever since it has been bad luck to mention the name Macbeth or quote from the play while in the theater. Instead, it is called The Scottish Play. Absurd? Here are just a few of the misfortunes that have occurred around The Play. In its first performance, Shakespeare was forced to play Lady Macbeth when the boy who was to have had the part died of a fever. In 1672 an actor playing Macbeth is said to have substituted a real dagger for the fake and killed the actor playing Duncan as the audience watched. In 1775 Sarah Siddons, playing Lady Macbeth, was nearly attacked by a disapproving audience, and in 1926 the actress Sybil Thorndike was nearly strangled. A riot during an 1849 performance in New York City was spurred by a mass demonstration in favor of an American actor involved in a feud with the British actor playing Macbeth. Twenty-three people died. During a performance in 1953 Charlton Heston’s tights were accidentally soaked in kerosene, caught fire, and burned him badly. This is merely a sampling of the misfortune around the play.
Now take a look at the magic of sports. Baseball players spit into their hands before picking up a bat. Bowlers wear the same clothes for as long as a winning streak lasts. Rodeo riders put the right foot in the stirrup first. Tennis players avoid holding two balls when serving. Michael Jordan wore shorts from his alma mater, the University of North Carolina, under his uniform. Hall of Famer Wade Boggs would eat only chicken the day of a game. If these things seem silly, forbid the players their magic and see how seriously they take it. Little Leaguers learn such thinking from coaches and parents, who might be expected to oppose such gross superstition but in fact go right along with it.
Sports fans are even worse. When the Red Sox were in the World Series, I heard a new story of magical influence every day. One story made it to the New York Times and was written by a science writer who believed that the Sox could win only if he ignored their games. He called it obeying his lizard brain, meaning, I supposed, that he was reverting to something prehuman in himself, but he was wrong. Relying on magic is utterly human.
People are quick to believe that a losing player or team is jinxed. The New Orleans Superdome has been exorcised a number of times by voodoo queens and nuns. Fans also turn to magic for help in winning. The Brits, the Swiss, the Dutch, and the Australians stick pins in voodoo dolls to help their teams win at soccer and rugby. When the Philadelphia Eagles were in the playoffs for the Super Bowl in 2005, the Philadelphia Inquirer put out a hex sign to go on televisions during the game and a magical chant from a Wiccan priestess that was to send good energy. When the Eagles and the Patriots were ready to face off, a journalist in the suburbs consulted a voodoo “witch doctor” and a Druid priest in New Orleans, and the Internet’s religion magazine, Beliefnet.com, republished a column with seven rites to make the Super Bowl America’s national pagan midwinter rite.
Magic also lives in the homes of America. I heard dozens of tales about ghosts flitting around in houses, most often seen, sometimes heard, and other times merely experienced as a cold feeling or objects that moved about in strange ways. Whole families sometimes accept the existence of these apparitions—human and animal. People are also quick to believe certain houses are haunted in malevolent ways. Think that’s not true? Try to sell a house where someone has been murdered.
And who upholds this kind of nonrational thinking? The family, of course. Parents begin teaching their children the importance of enchantment before the babes have left their cradles. The most beloved holidays are replete with magical trappings: the Christmas tree, the Easter egg, the Valentine Cupid, the Halloween witch. Almost all holidays have pagan progenitors, and most people know it, but that doesn’t diminish their enthusiasm one whit.
The first stories parents tell their little ones are of magical enchantments, fantasy tales in which witches cast spells and orphan girls have fairy godmothers. They are wise to tell such tales early and often, according to some of civilization’s best thinkers. Myths are so vital to citizens of a republic that they ought to be the beginning of literary education, Plato believed. Myths and fairy tales are “models for human behavior” that give meaning and value to life, said Mircea Eliade, whose studies of such stories are classic works. Children deprived of fairy tales may be stunted in psychological development so that becoming secure, well-functioning adults is much more difficult, according to psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, who believed the stories speak a language that matches children’s inner worlds better than any realistic story ever could. From the lessons of fairy tales they learn to deal with their fears and aggressions. In unconscious, deep-seated ways, they learn that life will have hard challenges that they can triumph over and that shrinking from such difficulties will restrict life to less than it ought to be, wrote Bettelheim. Good wins in the end, effort is rewarded, and evil is punished—if not by other humans, then through magical laws that support right decisions and valiant efforts. All those lessons give childr
en a sense that life will work out well for them, that it is destined to.
“Our positive feelings give us the strength to develop our rationality; only hope for the future can sustain us in the adversities we unavoidably encounter,” Bettelheim wrote. People who don’t get enough fairy tales in their childhood are likely to revert to magical thinking as teens or young adults in an attempt to get the psychic balance and sense of purpose that these stories impart to the unconscious mind.
Could that be why so many people are taking up magic now? Maybe. The good doctor had another theory. He thought that in times of great stress and insecurity people revert to the kind of magical thinking that is common in childhood and primitive cultures. For him, quite obviously, belief in any kind of divinity or force that benefits humankind is deviant, childlike thinking.
Philosopher and psychologist William James wasn’t so sure about that. He suspected that powers and forces not yet acknowledged by science might be active on the earth. He thought that belief in things greater than ourselves could have definite benefits, especially for those he called the sick-minded, among whom he counted himself.
The healthy-minded person looks at life with optimism and is able to hold his own against the ills of the world, clearly understanding himself to be separate from most of them and able to chart his own course, said James. Following Bettelheim’s thinking, we might say that the healthy-minded person has internalized the heroes and demons of the magical (or unconscious) world and found his place among the strong, the beautiful, and the wise. Whether his actions and attributes actually place him in such company isn’t nearly as important as whether he thinks they do, because it is his belief in himself that makes him healthy and effective.
James’s sick-minded person, on the other hand, needs the second birth promised by religious life. He is depressive, fearful, too sensitive, morbidly fixated on illness, death, and failure. He needs a new outlook so that he can forge through life with hope and confidence. He looks for something outside himself, some transformation. It is for him that religion may be vitally important—and a true path toward fulfillment as a human being—says James. As we shall see in the stories that follow, the same might be said of magic, especially in a time when the authority and truth of religion are under siege.
Parents are also wise in telling their children magical stories because such stories introduce children to enchantment, a state of being that serves us in all sorts of practical ways. Without enchantment, it’s hard to create, hard to learn, and hard to have the kind of hope that keeps life fresh. It is even hard to do science.
Sociologist Mark A. Schneider defines enchantment as encountering events or objects “so peculiar and so beyond our present understanding as to leave us convinced that were they to be understood, our image of how the world operates would be radically transformed.” Adults seek to be enchanted by things that are real and “at the same time uncanny, weird, mysterious, or awesome.” That sense of mystery and awe compels students to learn and scientists to experiment. It caused me to keep looking at the magical community even when I wanted to look away.
To become enchanted is a valuable skill, more essential than it has ever been before. To understand the inner truth of a person who is radically different from you, to penetrate a belief that seems preposterous, to grasp a faith that violates everything you’ve held dear, you must become enchanted. It’s the only way. It’s not difficult. Look into the wide eyes of a laughing baby, let yourself fall into that innocence, and for a breathless moment you can be taken over. People are enchanted every day—by a baby, by a flower, or by the sound of their own voice speaking ideas they didn’t know they had. But to become enchanted by that which frightens or repels you—that’s less common and perhaps even more vital.
We’ve never needed that type of enchantment more than we do right now. We live in a time when we are being asked to encounter, appreciate, and accept people and ideas that are utterly foreign to us. We are told that we must stop labeling the stranger as strange, as odd, as less than we are. The fate of our world, stocked with bigger and bigger bombs each day, may depend on it. The happy habit of declaring ourselves the “true” people and labeling outsiders the “other,” of calling our ways good and other ways evil, has been with us since we crawled out of the cave. Now we are being forced to consider and to accept or reject more and more people with ideas and values that are completely contrary to what we have always believed. The demands are coming faster and faster in human relations, in religion, and in science.
It’s no accident that scientists are on the frontiers of the new. They seek to be enchanted often—but only briefly, Schneider writes. As soon as they understand what has enchanted them, its power is explained and therefore taken away. For them, that is the victory. They have proven that the enchanting thing is as mundane as everything else in the world. Like anything else that has been dissected, it is then dead. The great benefit of dissection is that anything is much more useful once its parts are understood and can be manipulated for other uses.
One of the most poignant stories of how science giveth and science taketh away comes from Georgia’s Sapelo Island, among a people called the Geechee. They were an isolated people, and thus disenchantment came later for them than for others. It started when scientists with the Marine Institute of the University of Georgia came to the island and became friendly enough with the local people to learn their lore, according to God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man. The Geechee told them about a ball of light sometimes seen in the swamps called the jack-o’-lantern and about a spirit called the hag that visited people during the night.
“The scientists took away all the mystical, magical things about the jack-o’-lantern by saying that what we saw as a floating ball of light was something that naturally occurs over a low-lying damp area,” wrote Cornelia Walker Bailey. “What caused that glowing effect was gas, they said, and that’s what we’d been looking at. It was never a jack-o’-lantern at all. And we said, ‘Aah, that’s what it is.’
“Once the scientists explained it, nobody ever saw a jack-o’-lantern again. Because once you put magic to a spotlight it disappears. When you explain it away it goes away. It’s never there anymore. So Cousin Charles Walker, who got hopelessly lost following that mysterious ball of light when I was a kid, was the last person on Sapelo ever to see the jack-o’-lantern.
“Then the scientists explained away the hag, the one that sometimes would fly from Raccoon Bluff to Lumber Landing and Shell Hammock and ride three people all in one night, and then the old people would say, ‘That hag was busy last night.’
“That was probably a case of poor blood circulation, the scientists said. Your blood was circulating in your body poorly. ‘Who the hell they think they are?’ Grandma said. ‘What do they know about the hag?’
“The teachers at school also started telling us there wasn’t any such thing as the hag, and the kids my age looked at each other and said, ‘Gosh, everybody is saying the same thing. There’s no such thing as the hag.’ While all those thoughts were whirling around in our heads, the hag went, ‘Uh-oh. Time to go. Too many people coming over,’ and it flew away. All of a sudden, the hag didn’t come visit anymore. Nobody had the sensation of being in bed and waking up with this heavy weight on top of you, being ridden all night by a mysterious hag and being so tired in the morning you couldn’t move. It was just gone.
“But where did the hag go? Did it fly off somewhere where there was less modern know-how? Was the hag ever coming back? And did that many people have poor blood circulation? Adults and children alike?
“Soon the old people said, ‘Chile, I remember when the hag would come ride me all the time. Things sure change.’ It was the beginning of the end of magic as we knew it on Sapelo and nothing would ever be the same.”
Most of us can mourn that loss with the Geechee people and, at the same time, agree that there wasn’t really a hag or a jack-o’-lantern. Right? They’re better off now. Right?
&nb
sp; But the scientists aren’t just changing the Geechees’ perceptions of the world; they’re changing ours too. Author Russell Shorto claims that we have a little scientist living within us who is constantly keeping tabs on the rationality of ideas, testing and weighing to make sure that whatever we accept fits the scientific model. Every time science explains a little more of the world to us, we incorporate that knowledge and use it to process events around us. Some of the most exciting new research on the brain tells us that what we perceive to be happening around us and to us, even what we remember about our past, may not be true at all.
As William James noted, science is “callously indifferent” to the experiences that make up the lives of most people. Life is personal and romantic, he wrote. Premonitions, apparitions, omens, visions, dreams, answers to prayers, miracles, and other “unnatural” events are woven into our lives in ways that are almost below our consciousness. Because human beings are helplessly committed to making meaning out of what happens to us, and these things do happen to us, it’s hard for us to resist the sense that “events may happen for their personal significance,” as James put it. Forswearing such connections may not be to our benefit at all. To accept that transcendence is imaginary, that epiphany is delusional, is to accept a state of spiritual impoverishment that hasn’t been required of any other human beings.
We do not want to be irrational. That would be among the worst of modern sins, but the corporeal and the ethereal are often indivisibly mixed in our experience. We know, also from our experience, that the rational, measured-out, logical model is not always sufficient when dealing with life’s realities. This insufficiency can sometimes have a lofty spiritual import and sometimes be quite practical and everyday. Enchantment is an example. Any husband who has given his wife a quick solution for her problems only to see her become angrier knows this. “I need you to listen to me,” she may say. She doesn’t want a rational formula to ease her distress. She won’t be happier if he gives her statistics on how many other women feel as she does. She wants him to become enchanted, to enter so deeply into her distress that his view of the world is changed and the insult of easy answers is no longer possible. Enchantment always causes complications. He is wise to resist, as she is equally wise to press for a true connection and nothing less.
Not In Kansas Anymore Page 3