White Magic

by Elissa Washuta

  Something was different with Carl: I could listen to his thoughts and speak them back to him. We stared into each other’s eyes, making a psychic rope. We knew we had to keep our bodies together as much as possible. Otherwise, our halves might pull apart again. I had never felt this way before; until a year earlier, I had never felt much at all for very long because I could mostly submerge myself through intoxication.

  This meeting was fated. This was my other half. The intensity of my desire made me believe the divine had paired us, and I told him so. It had never been safe to tell a man I believed in something greater than myself—greater than him. It takes safety to dream: to play house in my mind, to build us a little life in the future, to believe we are living in magic and can use it to make us happy.

  I had to go away for a week, and soon after, Carl had to go away for three. We never returned to each other, not really. Every day, I change my mind about whether he’s my missing half or whether I just want him to be.

  DREAM DOOR

  Mark Twain was drawn to the British Society for Psychical Research, an organization seeking to reckon with paranormal concepts countering contemporary scientific principles, because of a dream. Twenty-four years earlier, Samuel Clemens dreamed of his younger brother’s body in a coffin balanced across two chairs, the body covered by a bunch of white roses and one red one. Days later, in Samuel’s waking world, a steamboat boiler explosion killed his brother. When Samuel approached the casket, he saw it balanced across two chairs. A nurse approached to adorn it with roses, mostly white, one red.

  In 1891, after working with the society for several years, Twain published an essay in Harper’s on what he called “mental telegraphy,” known to most as telepathy, offering anecdotal evidence of correspondents sending “crossed letters” to each another (equivalent to today’s text that arrives as the recipient is texting the sender), writers and inventors coming upon ideas simultaneously and separately, and Twain’s knowledge that he would run into a friend on the street before doing so. Over distances, he wrote, one mind develops an idea and another receives it. “We are always mentioning people, and in that very instant they appear before us. We laugh, and say, ‘Speak of the devil,’ and so forth, and there we drop it, considering it an ‘accident.’ It is a cheap and convenient way of disposing of a grave and very puzzling mystery. The fact is it does seem to happen too often to be an accident.”

  I don’t remember the first time I found myself thinking a full sentence, out of nowhere, seconds before the person in front of me said that exact sentence. I do remember the moment, sitting in the back of my dad’s truck, driving through our woods at night, I began to fear that my family could hear my thoughts. I thought I could hear other people’s, which seemed like something the nuns would have called the work of Satan. I tried to close my mind-ears.

  DOOR IN MY MOTHER

  Eclipses occur when the sun, moon, and earth align. During a total solar eclipse, like the one happening around the time I was born, the moon passes between the earth and the sun, completely covering the sun when observed from a narrow strip of earth known as the path of totality.

  By the time I was born, the bodies had moved out of alignment, but astrologically, the eclipse’s effects were still in place to shape the life ahead of me. Eclipses energize events. Days later, the effect would be less potent, but I was likely affected by energy that lingered.

  According to astrologer Charles Jayne, solar eclipses near the time of a person’s birth “can be expected to inflate one’s individuality, purpose, and drive.” Bill Meridian, a student of Jayne’s, adds, “While these individuals possess these strong qualities, they also shared a burden. They proved to be part of collective destinies. Their fate was beyond their control. They could not control or deflect the events in their lives … These folks are swept up in the collective energy of the eclipse.”

  On my birthday, another three-body alignment was in effect: a conjunction of the moon, Venus, and Jupiter. After the sun, these are the three brightest celestial bodies in our sky. They are known as benefics, having favorable influence. Their meeting in a natal chart is a blessing.

  At the time of my birth, no planets were stationed retrograde. Most of the time—92 percent, actually—at least one planet appears to travel backward through the sky. For those of us born with all planets direct, the world feels fast, unpredictable, and intensified, and we are driven to conquer it.

  None of this is nearly as rare as a comet’s visit, but I choose to believe it to be auspicious. It is significant because it is mine.

  A DOOR IS A SYMBOL

  Astrology, tarot, and witchcraft are symbol-heavy systems, with archetypes foundational to the divine communication and understanding they facilitate. Carl Jung wrote, “The archetype is a disposition to produce over and over again the same, or similar mythic conceptions” and identified archetypal images like the witch, hero, and magician that exist as patterns or motifs within the collective unconscious. The images take form through repetition across individual psyches.

  Astrology is based on a belief that planets have archetypal significance, a place in cosmic and mythic narratives that influences individual lives. Much of our astrological understanding comes from stories of the deities for whom the planets are named.

  I came to tarot before astrology, maybe because the clarity of the archetypes was a way in, and as a literary person, I was predisposed to think in motifs. The major arcana features a series of archetypal figures, layered with symbolic resonance: THE MAGICIAN. THE DEVIL. DEATH.

  Astrology Twitter introduced me to the Sabian Symbols, a long list of phrases (mostly images), one for each zodiac degree. They were recorded in 1925 by astrologer Marc Edmund Jones and clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler, who collected visions that came to her as Jones offered 360 face-down cards from a shuffled stack, each marked with a zodiac sign and number. Jones thought Wheeler had a psychic connection to an ancient Mesopotamian alchemist. Why he wanted to conduct this “experiment,” I don’t know.

  Some of the symbols resonate with me: a drowning man rescued; a serpent coiling near a man and a woman; the gate to the garden of desire; a canoe approaching safety through dangerous waters; miners emerging from a mine; a conversation by telepathy; the Great Stone Face. Others are strange: rabbits dressed in clothes and on parade; a man formally dressed and a deer with its horns folded; a rabbit metamorphosed into a fairy; a triangle with wings. Nine symbols feature “Indians”: an Indian chief demanding recognition; an Indian woman pleading to the chief for the lives of her children; Indians rowing a canoe and dancing a war dance.

  Symbols are problems when they reduce what shouldn’t be reduced, placing significance not in what something is, but in what it brings up beyond itself. Some things are actual, though. Symbols are flat, without dimensions or depth, glimpsed on the way to finding meaning. Maybe there is danger in the reduction. But the mystery is so much bigger than me, like a constellation, every piece of it rendered to a speck I can connect with invisible lines.

  BEFORE ASKING A QUESTION, REMEMBER

  The thesaurus says enigma is considered to be a synonym for riddle, but an enigma is not a riddle. An enigma is something baffling, difficult to explain, or a mystery. It cannot be solved. The Latin aenigma comes from the Greek αἴνιγμα, which is from αἰνίσσεσθαι, “to speak in riddles.” I make problems when I hold the mystery in my hands and think it’s asking to be solved instead of the opposite.

  DOORS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE RABBIT HOLE

  My Catholic picture books made me think heaven was a town built on a layer of stratocumulus clouds, which disappointed me, because I wanted a heaven like the garden on the other side of the door in Alice’s wonderland. I considered myself the true owner of the library’s copy of Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, nesting in its puffy white VHS case until I could bring it home again. I studied Alice as she crept through the black woods and sat in disoriented defeat among the mome raths. I watched her shrink and grow. I was looking
for the garden, too. Our lawn violets never spoke. There had to be a door somewhere, but I couldn’t even find a rabbit hole to fall down. In the woods, I turned over rocks, looking for the underworld, always fearing I’d find a nest of snakes instead.

  Once I could read, I worked through the book enough times to memorize parts. Maybe my woods were already wonderland. Maybe my cat would dissolve into a hanging grin. At school, when boys played games that ended with the loser having to kiss me without my invitation, I understood I was stuck somewhere, like Alice: “There were doors all round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again.”

  In the Disney adaptation, Alice faces only one door. It is locked, and has a talking face. “You did give me quite a turn!” the door puns, and makes sure we get the joke: “Rather good, what? Doorknob, turn?” Alice peers through the keyhole mouth at the garden. In my recollection of the movie, the viewer sees what she sees. I can picture it: fountains, hedges, rosebushes, topiaries.

  But I imagined the image. Alice doesn’t look through a door-portal until the film is nearly over. She’s been crying in the woods, singing to the creatures gathered to gawk at her pain, saying to herself, “It would be so nice if something would make sense for a change!” when the Cheshire Cat, a puff of purple around a crescent moon of teeth, tells her there’s a way out. He makes a door appear in a tree trunk. Alice steps in to meet the tyrant queen in her garden. I should have seen this as a cautionary tale: the girl thinks she’s looking for something that makes sense, but the deeper she pushes, the closer she gets to the seat of senseless violence in the world.

  DOOR IN MY MOTHER

  Early colonizers of the Americas believed the devil lived here, having been banished from Europe through religious effort. Europeans believed Native peoples worshipped gods that served Satan. Sixteenth-century Spanish colonizers executed a Guachichil woman whose people resisted conquest. She lived in a place occupied by Tlaxcalan and Tarascan converts to Christianity, and she tried to persuade them to rebel against Spanish rule by threatening them with black magic. The Spanish, fearing a loss of control, charged her with witchcraft and killed her immediately. Alison Games recounts this in Witchcraft in Early North America, writing that “witches were not only rebels against godly order (as they were throughout Europe), but also armed rebels bent on overthrowing established governments.” Revolts were blamed on the devil. The settlers became obsessed with witches.

  But I didn’t know about any of this when I was four, as my parents read to me from my favorite picture books, Patricia Coombs’s Dorrie the Little Witch series. Every book begins the same: “This is Dorrie. She is a witch. A little witch.” Some arrangement of introductory details follows: her room is messy, her socks mismatched. She has a cat named Gink and a mother known as the Big Witch. Dorrie strives and fails to be good; the Big Witch is important and busy. Left alone to figure out how to behave, Dorrie often ends up in the secret room where her mother makes magic. She fumbles with spells, coming up with her own elixirs after failing to find them in the Big Witch’s book of magic.

  I don’t know whether I understood that world to be pretend. My mother was a big witch, too: important, a role model, and a healer, in a way, a nurse with national recognition and local renown. But I was left alone only when I wanted to be. It was my mother and father who read me the books.

  I mixed every liquid hair product in my parents’ bathroom cabinet, hoping to come up with the spell Dorrie sought to ease the constriction of adult reality’s force upon the glittering cloud of childhood. I held out hope for finding a book of magic that might have what I needed.

  My schoolbooks held only dead ends: a rule for every known thing, and every thing was a known thing, except for the things the church knew to be unknown, like the mechanism God uses to turn bread into his body or what that even means since the Communion host doesn’t seem like anything but an unusual cracker melting on the tongue.

  But there was something existing in my house—not a being like God or Satan, but something potent and present as a gas. In the hallway, surrounded by the bedroom and bathroom doors, I felt I wasn’t alone. Belief in ghosts seemed to fall under superstition, which was sinful as a subcategory of idolatry, so I didn’t let myself think of the women in the large old photo hanging in our house’s hallway as anything but ink on framed paper. The standing woman smiled and the sitting woman did not. Their hair was gathered tight behind their heads and their skin was cloaked in black cloth. My mom said they were my great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother, granddaughter and daughter of Tumulth, but this was impossible. I had never smiled at anyone as if my eyes were jaws and I had never sat with my sadness as if it were a second nervous system. They wore black, like witches, but they couldn’t be, because all witches were white.

  They knew something, though.

  I decided to read every book in the library, looking for instructions I could use. The books I found weren’t about witches—they were about otherworld travelers. In The Castle in the Attic by Elizabeth Winthrop, a boy uses a magic token to turn people into miniatures who can pass through a toy castle into another world. Lynne Reid Banks wrote about similar magic five years earlier in The Indian in the Cupboard, but I didn’t take to that book, probably not because it features a white boy who plays God with a tiny Iroquois man—I was used to that—but because I wanted to travel to the otherworlds, not have their residents come to me.

  In Anne Lindbergh’s Travel Far, Pay No Fare, two children use a magic bookmark to go into the worlds of books. Inside one, a woman says, “Houses aren’t the only things with windows. Time and space may well have them too.” I collected library bookmarks and tried every one, hoping to travel across the threshold of the page. I even made my own, carefully lettered with the words from the book: Travel far, / Pay no fare, / Let a story / Take you there!

  I couldn’t get it to work, so I reread the book periodically, looking for a missed step in the instructions. I found my answer in A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. The journey between worlds was a tesseract, travel in the fifth dimension, possible only by the thoroughly initiated, which I was not. “Playing with time and space is a dangerous game,” says the protagonist’s father. “It’s a frightening as well as an exciting thing to discover that matter and energy are the same thing, that size is an illusion, and that time is a material substance. We can know this, but it’s far more than we can understand with our puny little brains.”

  All these books illuminated small pieces of the same set of principles. There were too many connections for the magic not to be real. The books never taught me to travel to other worlds, so I began to wonder whether I could manipulate this one.

  DREAM DOOR

  I think dreams are riddles because they need to be solved. I am sure dreams are enigmas because they really can’t be. After I read The Battle for the Castle, Winthrop’s sequel to The Castle in the Attic, in which the hero and his friend defend their castle from attack by large rats, I began dreaming I was in a besieged castle. I never dream I’m naked, flying, or falling. In my nightmares, I don’t have long before the people outside the walls come to kill me.

  ELEPHANT HOUSE DOOR

  I was prepared to see books as riddles long before high school teachers taught me the mode of literary study I’d have to unlearn, searching texts for the single correct interpretation coded in symbols and subtext. In one of my favorite childhood books, there really was a solution. The Eleventh Hour: A Curious Mystery is a picture book by Graeme Base in which an elephant named Horace throws a party for his eleventh birthday. He invites ten animal friends to his house, plans eleven games, and prepares a feast to be served at eleven o’clock. But the guests arrive to the banquet hall to find the food already eaten. Readers are tasked with identifying the thief using “a little close observation and some simple deduction.” The solution is in a seale
d section at the book’s end, following a warning: “Do not turn this page until you have tried your hardest to unravel the Mystery—for the getting of wisdom is no match for the thrill of the chase, and those who choose the longer road shall reap their reward!”

  Clues are encoded in basic cryptography in every illustration: WATCH THE CLOCKS lettered into the wrought iron of the property’s entry gate, RED HERRING spelled out on fallen tennis balls, PUT NO TRUST IN HIDDEN CODES AND MESSAGES decoded from symbols substituted for letters, a verse visible when the book is held up to a mirror: Yea, all who seek take heed forsooth—For everyone has told the truth! Technically, that is factual. But someone is lying, of course, by omission.

  The Eleventh Hour, I Spy, Where’s Waldo?, Magic Eye: I wanted all books to make me feel the way these did when my whole body and brain lurched with the click of visual recognition. I still do. I want the whole world to make me feel it.

  DOOR IN MY MOTHER

  My uterine lining first bled out when I was twelve. The red was brighter than I’d expected, the liquid more voluminous than any that had poured from my cut flesh. I pulled up my pants, walked down the hall, and decided not to say a word about it. Everything was going to change, like the nuns said. I was carnal now and would be tempted. The devil would track me by the stink of my woman blood.

  But my mother was more powerful than the devil, with more goodness than he had wickedness. Mom had made me buttered macaroni—my favorite, but I could hardly eat. “Sweetums,” she said, “did you get your period?”

  CAVE DOOR

  I memorized the hell facts the nuns told me I’d need to know for the test:

  Hell is an underworld where sinner souls sink into punishment.