I first saw how far people are going when I was a religion reporter for the Dallas Morning News in the mid-1990s. I went to a little suburban apartment where a dozen people were meeting for a ceremony. They were all tricked out in togas and talked in ways that were either poetic or ridiculous, depending on your sensibility. I didn’t understand them at all, but I was trying. Finally I said, “Let me get this straight. You’re just making it up as you go. You’re taking whatever you like from whatever ancient system you want, mashing it together with whatever else appeals to you, and calling it your religion. Is that right?” Labeling their form of belief a made-up religion would have been an insult worth fighting over to most of the religious people I knew, but these folks looked delighted by my perspicacity.
“That’s it,” they said. “You’ve got it.”
Disillusionment with the answers provided by organized religion is so prevalent and the hunger for spiritual connection is so intense that one out of five Americans identifies as a spiritual seeker. Even many church members call themselves “spiritual not religious.” What they mean is that they won’t be bound by doctrine. They rely on their experience to tell them what is spiritually valid. If something that seems mystical or magical happens, they don’t look to a priest or a rabbi to tell them if it’s all right to think about it. Of the 40 percent of Americans who don’t claim to go to church, only about one-fourth are completely unreligious. That means that the largest spiritual group in America is the unchurched, writes religion scholar Robert C. Fuller.
Even within the churches, emotional, mystical, visionary experience, not doctrine or Scripture, is rapidly becoming the most important element in religious conviction. It’s no accident that Wicca and Charismatic Christianity, at opposite ends of the theological spectrum but both relying on ritual that shakes body and soul, can claim to be the fastest-growing religions in America. Voodoo, Santeria, and other African-based religions that allow followers to be actually possessed by the divinity are also attracting new populations, including Anglos in Miami, New York, Houston, Charlotte, New Orleans, and Philadelphia.
Three of the biggest questions of spiritual belief are Is there Something out there, some force or intelligence, some energy, some creator, some organizer of the physical? Does that Something impinge on us, expect something from us, have a plan for our lives? And can we use this Something for our own purposes, causing it to smile on us, to bless us, to protect us? Religion grapples with all three questions. Magic assumes the first two and concerns itself with the last one.
To repeat the definition of magic I like best: it is the study of the ways in which natural forces, energies, and gods can be compelled or induced to help us. Calling it the technology of the sacred highlights magic’s study of ways to focus such energies. This technology may attract the attention of busy gods through sacred geometry, as the ancient Romans did when they constructed temples filled with geometric symbols; it may provide a road map to higher consciousness, as the Kabbalah does; it may harness the vital forces of herbs, roots, and rocks, as folk magic does; or it may pull down power through ritual, as Wicca does. Or it may be as simple as focusing one’s attention to notice what’s happening. The salesman who believes that making all five lights on the way to work bodes well for the day may not think he believes in magic, but he does.
Some people believe that magical thought dies down and then flares up again, and there’s been lots of speculation about what conditions cause a turn toward magic. But it may be more accurate to say that the elites who write history and study trends swing toward and away from paying attention to magical thinking. Because these elite scholars and writers leave records of their thoughts, it appears that magic ebbs and flows, but perhaps it has only moved out of public sight. Roelof van den Broek and Wouter J. Hanegraaff are among the religious scholars who say that the influence of magical thinking in art, science, literature, and philosophy is a “third current” that has shaped Western culture as profoundly as Greek rationalism and Judeo-Christianity have. Northwestern University historian Richard Kieckhefer calls magic a historical crossroads where religion meets science, where popular culture meets learned culture, and where fiction and reality come together.
At the same time that an increasing number of scholars are studying the historical role of magic, thousands of books are being published about how to do magic. Serious journalistic looks at what today’s magical communities might have to say to us, however, are rare to nonexistent. It is into that void that we will now step.
Part Two
LESSONS IN LIGHT AND DARK
It puzzles me that transcendent intimations, once vouchsafed to spiritual adepts and powerful intellects, now seem available mostly to devotees of dank crankeries.
—HAROLD BLOOM
4.
Looking for Living Dolls, Whack Jobs, and the Lucky Mojo Curio Company
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 n
ew 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.
My 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.”
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.
Not In Kansas Anymore Page 6