Christian soon tired of the new love, but the aroused one wasn’t ready to quit. When Christian came back asking Shawn for a spell to make his new boyfriend go away, Shawn shook his head.
“I got him for you. You’re going to have to get rid of him.”
Everything has its price. Nothing is free. And good magic is hard to find, as was about to be demonstrated to me yet again.
My first private magical ceremony looked more promising than the public circle. It was a coming-of-age ritual for a Salem girl. Despite my aversion to ceremonies, I love the idea of having sacred, celebratory ways to mark life’s transitions. I’m convinced such ceremonies are one of magic’s great gifts to the modern world.
On the night of the girl’s ceremony, Shawn the Witch was presiding in his living room, which was resonant with Boris Karloff–type music booming from the big-screen TV. Shawn and some of the women witches had long straight hair of a color that can only be called dead-black. Anybody who wanted to smoke in this house was welcome to. There wasn’t a plaster angel or a ceramic fairy in sight. No pink either. An étagère in the dining room was filled with Dolls of the Living Dead: little white-faced ghouls with blood dripping from their mouths; nuns with fangs; sweet curly-haired darlings with white eyes, still in their display boxes.
Shawn Poirier’s group prides itself on being old-fashioned witches, the kind who do magic at the edge of the forest, have people visiting them in the dark of night, and don’t give a flip about lineages. Only, of course, there isn’t a forest anywhere near. Shawn lives in a yellow house in a neighborhood with narrow, car-lined streets, where houses nuzzle the curb so closely that they seem about to topple and stand so near to one another that there’s hardly room for driveways. His is set apart by a giant lighted pentacle in the front window. Many people come to this house for help, the witches assured me. “Every clock in the house is set at a different time,” Shawn said. “That’s because people come at all different times. And every time is right.”
Shawn is a tall, heavy-shouldered, handsome man with a goatee that the devil might envy. He also has a formidable widow’s peak. He always wears black. His accent is East Coast rough, Burt Lancaster just off the docks. As he talked his hands moved languidly through the air, silver rings catching the light. One hand held a cigarette; the other twirled a piece of shoulder-length hair. His delivery is also Lancaster, purring beguilement, right out of The Rainmaker, that lovely tale of loneliness, hope, and chicanery. Once a tongues-speaking Pentecostal, he uses plenty of Bible verses and poetic phrases.
One year, he told me, he went to summer camp and wandered into the forest alone. He met some fairies there and fell asleep, as everyone knows that a person who meets fairies does. They gave him special powers and took something in return. They took his ability to love any other person truly and deeply. So he became a powerful magician, but he’s always lonely. The only reason he is invited to parties is so that he will do magic, he said. Everyone watches him and expects something. Psychic work is his specialty. Sometimes he longs to be nothing more than a regular guy, he told me.
Good magic wasn’t easy to find, even in a town full of witches. On the night of the coming-of-age ceremony for the girl, Shawn, who was wearing dramatically ruffled shirt cuffs that showed his many silver rings off to good advantage, waved his hands about as seven of us stood in a circle, watching with somber expressions. The kid, a nice-looking, clean-cut girl wearing a turtleneck, stood in the center.
First Shawn commanded the spirits, gods, and goddesses to attend us, which made me jumpy. The school of God-summoning I’m from is more the begging brand. Please, please, please, please, Jesus. We are filthy rags before your magnificence. Maybe if you could maybe turn your most glorious countenance toward my most unworthy… but never mind. Call me anything, just call me, as they say. Given what’s been going on with faith, no one could blame divinity—be it a he, a she, or an it—for showing up no matter how the invite is phrased.
So Shawn commanded the forces of the universe, and then he turned his attention to the girl, telling her how she would be strong and fearless, how she would bow to no man and they would all obey her will. I was liking this, and so were the other grown-ups. Then the mother witch announced that she had chosen two other witches to be her child’s godparents. I think she said godparents. Seems like it would have been something with a bit more flash, fairy godparents, maybe, but it wasn’t. In any case, they gave the girl blessings, likened her to some valiant animal, hugged her, and then waited.
When the new godfather witch looked deep into her eyes, she looked back and said, “You have the heart of a jackal.” He smiled a bit feebly. What to say? Jackal isn’t a compliment, even to a witch. It was a bad moment. Nobody spoke.
Finally, she said, “I don’t even know what a jackal is.” The circle laughed. Happy again.
Afterward, Shawn was saying how much the witch family meant to the kid and how many good times they’d had and how much magic they’d done. She said, “Can I go find the cat?”
To me she said, “My dad’s Catholic. I live with him a lot of the time.”
Shawn reminded her that he once did magic for her slumber party. She said, “I don’t remember.”
“Yes,” he said. “You remember.”
“No.”
“The time we levitated your friend?”
“No.”
“Yes. We all gathered around and put our fingers, just the tips of our fingers, under your friend.”
“Oh,” she said.
The witches’ coming-of-age ceremony seemed to indicate that good magic of life-changing import isn’t so easily created. At least not for kids. Adults? Maybe. They are more easily impressed.
My second Salem magical lesson came from a high priestess of the Cabot School of Witchcraft. Laurie Cabot is known as the Official Witch of Salem. Cabot was the first woman in town to adopt black robes, thick black eye makeup, and wildly teased black tresses as everyday attire. She made a vow to the Goddess in the 1970s that she would never take the robes off. People would spit at her as she walked her two daughters to school, according to one story that has made her a local legend. Cabot has been teaching witches how to be magical ever since and has a national reputation for it.
Soon after I arrived I was browsing in a witch shop owned by Laurie Cabot’s daughter. A midthirties woman from New York State came in with her husband and young son. As she was paying for a couple of fairy dolls, the New Yorker mentioned to the talkative clerk that she would like to know more about witchery. The clerk promptly offered to teach her, saying that she had been taught by Laurie Cabot herself and now that she was of high rank, she took a few students each year. She didn’t charge anything, she said, because it was a labor of love.
When the customer left, I told the clerk who I was, and she told me a good story about how her husband had died and how she had fibromyalgia and was in constant pain but wouldn’t give in. Witchcraft kept her going and kept her in contact with her dead husband. His visits were pretty lively, she said, leering a little to let me know he was a ring-tailed hooter, dead or alive. I liked that. So I leered back.
I asked if she would teach me too, and she said she would. I’d have to be willing to return to Salem several times during the year for seasonal rituals, she said. Between rituals, she would send me lessons about the history and the science of magic. In a year and a day, I’d be a real witch.
People flood into Salem all year long for the workshops offered by the Cabot coven mates. I considered myself lucky to have found one who would bring me into the mysteries. She gave me her number, and we agreed to get in contact. About a month later I called. She was eager to begin, but first I’d have to send her $75. I put the check in the mail and bought plane tickets to Salem. She cashed my check, but my witch lessons never arrived.
I later found out that a lot of local witches seem willing to take their chances with the threefold rule, which says they will get back whatever they put out threefold. I
heard dozens of stories about backbiting, cheating, threats, even some illegal behavior. Helen Gifford, a columnist for the Salem Evening News wrote, “Just mention the word [witch] in this city and—poof—a controversy appears.” Money has been at the heart of all the witch wars, she wrote. “When they sell us spiritual counseling for $75 an hour, offer to teach us about their religion for $600, try to hawk pendants and love potions and crystals—are they practicing a serious religion or running a business, which is just like any other business?”
Witch wars are common throughout the magical world. When the witches don’t like something or someone, they might make a witch’s bottle to turn spells back on the sender or even to attack another witch. The bottle is put it in a freezer. A good part of Salem’s witch community has run out of freezer space, one witch quipped.
Maybe my expectations for Salem’s good magic were too high. I’d had higher hopes for the Wiccans than for any other magical group. Anybody who knows anything about them says they are a loving, nature-oriented bunch of gentle people who seek to do only good. Cat says Wicca is Christianity with a goddess. I don’t know that she means it as a compliment, but I took it as one. That upped my expectations even more, but I guess it shouldn’t have. I know quite well that Christians also talk a better game than they are able to live. So do we all perhaps.
7.
Maleficia du Jour: Served Hot, Cold, and Cash before Delivery
Everywhere I looked I found elements of magic that so repelled me that I wanted to give up my search altogether. Hoodoo, as just one example, is full of maleficia. A person can be caused to sicken, suffer, and die in many ways. For instance, bury a photograph with a piece of the victim’s hair. The person will rot away as the items do. Nail a photo of your enemy on a wall, shoot at it with an unloaded gun, cursing as you pull the trigger. Think evil thoughts of the person for the rest of the day. On the third day he will be dead. Put earthworms inside a fish. Fry it and serve it to the victim. In three days her intestines will be full of worms. To make a pregnant woman suffer a long and difficult labor, take a snail from its shell and iron it into her husband’s underwear. The birth will go at a snail’s pace.
How could anything good stand alongside so much aberrant, willfully malicious, behavior? I’m not saying there wasn’t plenty of good to fasten onto in magic. The magical idea that everything is connected, with humans at the center of it all, able to marshal forces that science barely dreams of, is a delicious idea. And not just because of the promised power, although I do like power, but because it means that we aren’t genetic mistakes but part of a whole, a plan with an array of spirits and wonders all around us. The Hermetic assurance that humans have a powerful, exalted place in the eyes of God and a vital role in completing his work is a dazzling call to greatness. Feeling much like those Renaissance magicians must have, I thought, What could we do if we worked within that power? Always supposing that we did it with a pure heart, of course, and that seemed to be the rub. The hearts of many magicians didn’t appear to be so pure, or even striving for it.
Newspapers tell of drug dealers all over the country hiring magic workers to help them. The press only hears about the ones that don’t work out, of course. In one particularly embarrassing failure, a Santeria practitioner in the Bronx was arrested when police charged that she had aided drug dealers by asking her spirits when it was safe to deliver drugs to certain locations. Cops, tracking the dealers from one place to another, had been laughing at her and the spirits for six months.
I talked to a male voodoo practitioner who told me that he might charge $50,000 to protect drug merchants. His deities think what he’s doing is perfectly all right; they approve, in fact. This guy, who works out of Florida, wouldn’t let me use his name. “My customers might not like it,” he said. Another magic worker vouched for his reputation as a man of power but pointed out that his customers would be difficult for me to locate, and probably surly if found. I wondered at the price. Mary Ann Clark, the Santeria priestess in Houston, doesn’t do such work, but the size of the fees didn’t sound improbable to her.
Strange powders and dead animals are so common in the Miami state courthouse that a special voodoo squad goes in to clean them up. In Miami federal court, a prosecuting attorney recently complained that although he doesn’t like restricting anyone’s religion, his cleaning bills were becoming exorbitant because of the Santeria dust regularly sprinkled on his chair.
Some of the best reasons not to do magic are the people who have done it. The promise of power can lead to paranoia and delusions of grandeur. It can also cause people to dwell on avenging slights when they would be better off forgetting them. It can cause people to imagine that others are responsible for bad fortune or illness when in fact they are responsible themselves or no one is responsible. I saw temptations toward all of that in my research, and many people succumbed.
Aleister Crowley, considered by many to be the greatest modern magician, had many extraordinary mystical experiences, among them hand-to-hand combat in the desert with an evil spirit. He called himself the Beast and 666, as a way of identifying himself with the anti-Christ. He accomplished great treks through wilderness and climbed mountains, but he seemed to have little love for his fellow humans. He beat the servants who carried his luggage during his expeditions, refused to help rescue fellow mountain climbers who were in danger of losing their lives, and betrayed almost everyone who loved him. He had grand ideas about himself and all that he would accomplish, but few of them came to pass. He ended his life in poverty, having spent his inheritance and earned little more, and without having achieved the following he expected.
Other magicians have been similarly unlucky. As author Colin Wilson noted, a rapid ascent to fame and power and then a slow descent toward infamy and poverty is a common path. Count Alessandro Cagliostro, a famous eighteenth-century magician, died in prison. Gregory Rasputin, the Russian magus of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, went down in history as the man who wouldn’t die. Assassins poisoned him, shot him, battered him with an iron bar, and dropped him into the river through a hole in the ice before he finally died. Giordano Bruno, a sixteenth-century mage, was burned at the stake. Pascal Beverly Randolph, the nineteenth-century American Rosicrucian and sex magician, killed himself.
Hoodoo docs have suffered too. South Carolinian Roger Pinckney writes of Dr. Bug, who gave young men a potion that would make their hearts flutter and get them out of the World War II draft. When two men died on their way to the draft broad, Dr. Bug was tried and pled guilty. Out on bond, the conjure doc was so disheartened that he took to his bed and died. Dr. Buzzard, the original holder of that name in the Carolina lowlands, also helped men avoid the draft but was never convicted because no one would testify against him. High sheriff Ed McTeer, a white man who did hoodoo rootwork himself, went after Dr. Buzzard and pulled him into court for doctoring without a license—“an occupational hazard of root doctoring,” Pinckney notes. Dr. Buzzard was convicted and fined $300; like his colleague, he was so distressed by the defeat that he retired to bed. Diagnosed with stomach cancer, he died soon afterward.
An English magician during World War II believed himself to be so magically strong that he could walk unharmed through bombs falling during the London blitz. He was wrong, and one of the bombs killed him. A brilliant young Californian aerospace engineer and magician named Jack Parsons was thought by many to be Crowley’s successor. Instead, he was killed during a chemical experiment in 1952.
Some of the tenets of the Nazi and Italian fascist parties were fostered by magical thought, particularly ideas about racial superiority. Heinrich Himmler, head of Hitler’s SS, was said to have used severed heads to communicate with ascended masters. A so-called realm of the dead was underneath the dining hall of the headquarters’ castle, writes Peter Levenda. It included a well in which coats-of-arms that represented leaders of the SS would be burned after they died, and the ashes worshiped. SS members were discouraged from celebrating C
hristmas and attending Christian ceremonies. Instead, they celebrated the winter solstice with sacred fires and invocations of Teutonic deities.
Although once interested in the occult, Hitler later turned violently against all such practice. His deputy führer, Rudolf Hess, continued to believe in the occult and convinced himself that he was destined to talk the British into making peace. A German astrologer working for the British told him that a German-English organization known as The Link was going to overthrow the Churchill government and would meet him in Scotland on October 10, 1941, according to Levenda, with the help of the Duke of Hamilton. Hess, a pilot, flew to Scotland by himself and, decked out in various occult symbols, parachuted into the arms of the Brits, who promptly arrested him.
It wasn’t only people I didn’t know who were talking about scary stuff. The Lucky Mojo Hoodoo Rootwork Hour, a teleconference with Cat and a Florida rootworker named Christos Kioni, was generally about love spells or luck or other positive matters, but not always. Every Wednesday night at nine, I’d dial up, turn off the lights, crawl into bed, and listen in the dark. Sometimes when they talked about dirty tricks people could pull or rootwork’s power to cause mischief, I’d get a shiver. Cat would maybe tell about some old root doc who put foul stuff in a bottle, shook it, hung it up in a tree, and let it swing there for as long as the rope lasted. The object of the work would have aching joints or money troubles or be forced to wander all his days, whatever the conjure doc had ordered up. Only when the rope broke would the work be lifted, and only if the afflicted one had lived a good life. After such a story, I’d sometimes hear other hoodoo workers sigh happily and say, “That’s good. Oh, that’s real good,” like Shakespeare’s witches hanging over the cauldron.
Not In Kansas Anymore Page 11