by Marin Sardy
Green stone from a creek in Arizona
Red stone from a hill in New Mexico
Plastic figurine, tiger
* * *
—
When I made an altar, it was an improvisation. I would read about the Wiccan holiday at hand and think about what it meant. Once I had a feeling about what I needed to express, I dug around in my small dishes and boxes. Those lay about on dressers and desktops, decorative containers of lacquer or silk. Darting around looking for anything that felt right for what I was trying to say, I would sift through them and grab the things that spoke to me. Next I would build the framework of the altar: I’d choose a cloth, find a centerpiece, decide how many candles to use and where to place the incense. Then I started arranging objects.
Litha, for instance, is the longest day of the year, the summer solstice, when the days are warm and the sun is high. At Litha in 2011, when I looked at my mirrored disk (which I think was made to be a coaster), I thought of the scene in Lawrence of Arabia in which he had to cross the brutal section of desert known as the Sun’s Anvil. In the middle of the disk I placed the plastic tiger figurine—my mother once sent it in the mail for no apparent reason—and felt that this represented me somehow. Then I thought the tiger needed a little help. So I placed the beaded band beneath him, and it seemed like a bridge across the no-man’s-land. But the band was tied to another string of pale green beads, which made me think of life’s soft beginnings, so I let that string lie in a loop at the end of the journey.
The other items fell into place after that. The scratched-up watch was a nod to the passage of time. The bird band and feather suggested the sky, as well as the place I got them from one summer, a part of Alaska where the sun never set. The bouquet of yellow roses, a gift from Will, I repurposed as a centerpiece. After nightfall, once the altar was in place, I held a ceremony and cast a spell that made use of the objects I had chosen.
CONTENTS OF WOODEN BOX WITH RED HEART-SHAPED ROCK ON LID
Business card: Ditch Witch, Erika Wanenmacher
Packets of loose incense powders: Love, Come to Your Senses, Lighten the Load
Roll of extra-soft charcoal
Scented oils: anointing, Kyoto
Feathers: gray jay, parrot, peacock
Leaflet with instructions on how to use your spell, and a definition of magic:
Will is the deliberate, organized direction of intent toward a goal.
Will works in partnership with imagination.
Magic is the art of changing consciousness at will.
Soooo, magic and spells work when clear intent is focused by will and imagination….
Have at it!
Love, Erika
* * *
—
I had rolled into witchcraft casually and was a little surprised by how well it stuck. It began while I was the arts editor at a magazine in Santa Fe, after one of my writers mentioned Erika Wanenmacher, the Ditch Witch—a local sculptor and multimedia artist who, he explained, was also a witch. She called herself a “culture witch” and thought of her artworks as magic spells—the means through which she could change the way people think, and thereby change the world.
I went to the gallery that displayed her work, stared at her impressively original sculptures—a black ceramic representation of herself, nude, with glass eyes embedded in the skin all over her body; a huge metallic marionette head with a screw coming out the top. I felt at once baffled and comforted by them. They seemed to break open the fabric of the world and stitch it back together as something more stubbornly visceral, weird and yet gentle. I thought of her artwork again that December when my friend Emily, who had never mentioned witchcraft to me before, told me she would be doing a Wiccan Yule ritual. I suppose it was why I said, “Oh, we should do it together.”
Most Wiccan sabbats, or solar holidays, turned out to be familiar to me already. Ostara, the spring equinox, sounding so much like Easter. Samhain falling on Halloween. They are said to be based on European pagan holidays that were subsumed by the Church or lingered on in some other form. Yule, which falls on or around December 21, marks the winter solstice and was traditionally a night on which an enormous log was burned. In Emily’s Yule ritual, we lit a smaller, symbolic log. She led me through the simple ceremony, first casting a magic circle around us and invoking the four elements, then lighting candles, explaining the significance of Yule, and calling for a short meditation. At that point, she asked me to name a dream or goal I wanted to set for myself for the coming year.
I could easily state one that was already in its infancy: move to New York, where I hoped to find a different way to write—a way into something more free-range than what I knew. I was also working my way out of my relationship with Will, who was an editor at another magazine, and with whom, it seemed clear one year in, I was already doomed. He was deeply ambivalent about us, and this was compounded by his habit of escaping into drink. Yet I was ruled by a precipitous kind of indecision when it came to him. Lately my life hadn’t been moving forward in any other sense either. The move, I hoped, would bust me loose and launch a new phase of my life.
Soon I was finding templates for spells and ceremonies online, at Wiccan sites full of information about pagan traditions. I wasn’t a careful student. I made altars and rituals almost without thought, winging it, throwing the elements together, letting the basic forms of the ceremonies and the items at hand determine the direction. Sometimes I would make changes on the fly. What came out always made more sense than I had intended. On bad days, when I was so stressed and frustrated I could barely think, I immersed myself entirely in my rituals. I began to notice that the worse I felt, the better my spells were. More original, focused, honest. I began to understand that something enormous was driving me, something subterranean that I couldn’t name.
CONTENTS OF RUSSIAN LACQUER BOX WITH RABBIT LID
2008 quarter, state of Alaska design, grizzly bear with salmon
Silver pendant with star-shaped cutout
Pendant, crystals, shape of the letter M
Pin, shape of a panda
* * *
—
And so I began to symbolically act out my thoughts with my objects, arranging them, burning them, altering them. At its core the need was basic, the need for a way to acknowledge things that had long existed but remained unnamed, things that carried me back to my mother, to when she fell ill and took all of us through the looking glass with her—to when I had to learn how to figure out what was real on my own and decide for myself what I saw and believed. When I was eleven I read Judy Blume’s Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, about a boy who has anxiety problems and whose doctor tells him he has a “nervous stomach.” In a flash of insight, I understood that my chronic nausea was anxiety about my mother’s worsening paranoia and the chaos it created in our lives. But my mother had a way of bluntly disagreeing with everything I said.
I told her, “Mom, I have a nervous stomach.”
“Oh, pooh,” she said. “No, you don’t. Maybe you ate something.”
I argued about it for a while, pointing out that it had been going on for months and that it wasn’t a normal kind of feeling. I knew it got worse when she left town or tore my father’s head out of all the family photos. But she wouldn’t budge. This was the same summer she was checking in my ears to see if anyone had implanted a radio transmitter in my brain. She lived inside an elaborate set of delusions that flattened human beings into chess pawns and rendered little idiosyncratic me irrelevant or, worse, unreal. Often when I was talking to her I began to feel like a nonentity. She was so utterly unable to see me that sometimes I wondered if I was actually there.
I did not yet know the term gaslighting, the name for what was happening to me—that it comes from the 1944 film Gaslight, in w
hich a man attempts to make his wife believe she is going mad by telling her everything she perceives is false. He turns down the gaslights, and when she comments that they’re low he tells her no, they’re the same as always. Then he turns them up and says the same thing. Of course my mother didn’t gaslight me intentionally, but that didn’t weaken its effect.
I coped by escaping. What I remember best about my mother’s house is the time I spent outside of it, in our Anchorage cul-de-sac and an adjacent swath of state-owned forest—floating on a pond in an inflatable rowboat, slapping water lilies with my oar, watching moose stroll through the black spruce on the far shore. Nature, which in Alaska was nearly everywhere. And science, which revealed the order within it. In my freshman year of high school, I read my entire biology textbook, even the chapters that were not assigned, just to see what it said. Just to know.
Twenty years later, I was still trying to make my world cohere. Living in the shadow of Tom’s homelessness, I was often hit by the same terror of those early years, and when it came it took me to another place—one that I took to calling the Bad Place. Some event, a tiff with Will or bad news about Tom, would recall the old feelings and I’d fall into something like a flashback. It was more like reimmersion in a prior self. I was eleven years old again and I felt as I had felt then—that the floor of the world had fallen out from under me. I was like a scuba diver in turbid water, losing track of which way was up. It was pure, a kind of fear that usually only children feel, a fear not only of the loss of oneself or one’s loved ones, but of the very structure of one’s reality.
When this happened, I did whatever I could to get by until it eased up, passed over. And it was in those altered hours, when my mind was not rolling on its usual tracks, that I found myself picking up the objects in my home. A stone I had plucked from an Arizona river. A feather Will’s son brought home from the park. I would roll them in my hands and between my fingers, and at the touch of them my skin would tingle and I would feel pulled back into myself a little bit. I’d become aware of my body again, a little more here and a little less back there. I’d begin to remember that I was going to be okay.
CONTENTS OF WHITE ENAMEL CUP
Two heart-shaped stones painted with nail polish, one maroon, one yellow
Ivory walrus tooth
Figurines, plastic: monkey holding a banana, tiger, golden baby, duckling, panda, pigeon sitting on a trash can
Figurine, glass: white rabbit with broken ear
Pendant, crystal snowflake
Figurine, ceramic: sleeping cat
Coins: Australian, platypus; American, Sacagawea; Mexican, eagle with snake and cactus
Oval rabies tag, heavily worn
Pin with logo for Taos Coyotes hockey team
Amethyst, two chunks
* * *
—
This was the year I practiced Wicca diligently, marking every sabbat with an altar and a ritual, making use of the moon to cast regular spells. Officially, Wicca acknowledges a higher power, and nearly all other witches I have come across believe in some type of deity—making me, an atheist witch, a bit of an oddball. But a spell is not a prayer, and for me the craft was never about a higher power. I was in it for the practice, for the repeated act of interpreting my life through its shrapnel, and for the way this forced me to examine and evaluate that life. I was not asking some greater force to change the world for me. I was changing it for myself.
For a while, I followed the Wiccan calendar carefully, relying on it as the groundwork I needed, and it gave me the freedom I needed as well. Wicca is actually not an ancient religion but a modern one, founded in the twentieth century as a hodgepodge of European pre-Christian traditions—everything from Druidry to folk magic. It is nature-based and has no real center, nor does it have a strict dogma, accepting elements of any pantheist or polytheist tradition. The Wiccan calendar takes nature as its only guide, with the year marked by eight sabbats and twelve or thirteen less important lunar holidays, the esbats—all of which begin at dusk and progress into the night. The only real rule is to practice no black magic—to “harm none.”
I should say here that I do not come from a place where activities like hoarding bones or setting fires are unusual. Alaskans collect pieces of nature almost by accident. My caribou jawbone I found one summer while hiking. It was lying on the forest floor, covered in moss and lichen. My ivory walrus tooth, a coworker pried out of a carcass rotting on a beach. Alaskans collect these fragments and when we do we tend to get metaphorical about them and about such things as life and death. One New Year’s Eve in my early twenties, at our dad’s cabin in Girdwood, my brother and sisters and our friends and I all made paper dolls of ourselves and built a tall man, a kind of Father Time figure, out of two-by-fours. We stood him up in the snow in the backyard and taped clumps of newspaper to him to form a body, and at midnight Tom stood on the balcony and shot Roman candles at him until he went up in flames. Then we threw in our paper dolls as offerings of our past selves to the forces of change. This is the kind of thing people do in Alaska.
When I later moved to Santa Fe I found the same habit of mind among the people I met there. In Santa Fe, art is something people live and breathe, and any gathering is an excuse for all kinds of ceremony and display. Santa Fe even has its own man to burn. Every year during the annual Fiestas, a fifty-foot-tall scowling figure named Zozobra is erected in a downtown park, where citizens gather to collectively watch him meet his end. Zozo is a kind of bogeyman in a bow tie, who gets stuffed with thousands of scraps of paper on which citizens write their “gloom”—sorrows they wish to banish through burning. Zozo is then set ablaze as the crowd chants, “Burn him! Burn him!”
It felt just as obvious to follow the cycles of nature through the Wiccan calendar. When I was growing up in Anchorage, where it never gets dark in the summer and midwinter days last from around 10 A.M. to a little after 3 P.M., the sun was everyone’s obsession. Alaskans spend summer manically fishing, drinking, dancing, climbing, boating, and hiking, often at 2 A.M. Then in the winter, night overtakes you and its mood seeps in, and people wait for the return of the sun. When my father drank his coffee in the mornings after the shortest day of the year had passed, in the pitch dark of 7 A.M., he would open the newspaper to the weather page and read aloud how much sunlight we had gained in the past twenty-four hours. “Six more minutes of daylight, guys!” he would announce, beaming. Winter was a slow climb out of darkness. I can’t remember ever not being aware down to my marrow that the planet is turning.
CONTENTS OF SILK BOX WITH EMBROIDERED CHINESE SYMBOL
Six rings: three silver, three gold
Charm bracelet with six charms: megaphone, cross, heart, ulu, crescent moon, key
* * *
—
I collected my objects haphazardly. I would buy the ones I needed for particular functions—candles, small plates, incense—but the rest I preferred to find, to feel that they had come to me. “This is so witchy,” I’d say of a trinket, and put it in my pocket. Most of the items I used were given to me—gifts or small knickknacks left in my car by road-tripping friends, boyfriends, sisters. One, a strange fragment of rusty iron, actually fell out of the sky and landed on my windowsill. Many were remnants of my childhood before my mother became ill, chance survivors of her repeated purges of possessions, which took place periodically until she had no possessions left.
Who knows how the charm bracelet she gave me when I was four, to which we added a charm every birthday until I was ten, has stayed with me. I don’t remember what kept it safe and close through all these years. I hardly noticed it until it occurred to me that it was perfect spell-casting material—and I was struck by the use of the word charm. The charm bracelet: a kind of spell, a string of talismans for love, success, protection. In some sense I suppose that’s what
my mother meant it to be.
My mother has always been a keeper of small boxes and an appreciator of things miniature. In my childhood she had them around on side tables, piano tops, window ledges, wherever. I never consciously imitated her, but as I grew up I found that I had my own collection of small boxes too, and I needed them because I had things to put in them. Rings I no longer wore but loved too sentimentally to give away. Coins from foreign countries, too pretty to hand off. The broken arrowhead one boyfriend gave me, the nautilus fossil I bought from a camel-trek guide on the trip I took to Morocco with my sister. My “cauldron” was actually a ceramic drinking-chocolate bowl a friend brought back from Oaxaca, which I kept half filled with dirt.
For years I accumulated small objects—things that I found I could never let go when I cleaned out my car or packed up my room to move again. In that time, I lived in six different states and traveled to the Mediterranean, the Sahara, the Himalaya, the Galápagos, the Great Barrier Reef. Deserts, jungles, oceans, glaciers. I knew I’d never be back on the Yukon Delta, where rotting walrus carcasses were part of the scenery. I’d never again see my first boyfriend, who gave me my first heart-shaped rock, picked up from a beach in Chile.
But more than that, what gave my objects their power was that I was once a teenage girl who could find no words for her own life. Who had been unable to speak of her family’s suffering. That I was once a woman in her twenties who watched her brother fall, as her mother had, to schizophrenia. Who, when words failed a second time, turned to colors and shapes and sounds, dyeing her hair blue and playing guitar in rainbow-striped pants and thick black eyeliner and a T-shirt emblazoned with the word asylum.
