Not In Kansas Anymore

by Christine Wicker

  I am not a vampire, a witch, a fairy, a wizard, an elf, a werewolf, an angel, or a devil. Two years ago I hardly knew such entities existed outside fiction and religious texts. I am also not a victim, I hope, although that is less certain. I am a journalist, one who is quick to go purse-lipped at anything that seems too airy.

  I was in Salem, Massachusetts, chasing magic, specifically good magic. I’d picked Salem to start because this town, whose very name conjures religious intolerance and shame, has been reclaimed by witches and other members of the magical community. Three thousand are said to live here, so many that it calls itself the Witch Capital of the World. The (Good) Witch Capital, of course. Nowadays, all the witches are good, or say they are—a big brag, that one. I’ll deal with it later.

  As this tale of magic in America begins, I must reassure some of you and dash the hopes of others by confessing that as I began this investigation I believed in nothing except disaster. I had great spiritual faith in my youth, but it went away. Since then I’ve moved in and out of traditional belief, mostly out, so far out that people who have deep faith in anything generally mystify me. I think, You’re so alien. Or on my softer days, Aren’t you just the dearest thing? Wouldn’t it be lovely if you were right?

  For a good portion of my life I’ve worked as a reporter of religion. You might think such disbelief would have hurt my work. It hasn’t because, first of all, many religious people don’t have deep faith either. Poor dears, times are so hard on the faithful that some of them are as bad off as I am. They’re merely holding on tighter.

  And second, reporters are meant to be observers who do not comment. People with big, strange, life-altering faith fascinate me, no matter how odd a turn that faith takes. I admire them, love them even, for being what I can never be. I am incontrovertibly ordinary, which may be why the more unlike me people of faith are, the more convinced I am that they have something deeply important to tell me. Once I tried to convince my editor to let me follow the travels of a guy dressed like Jesus. He was walking across Texas shouldering a big cross on wheels.

  “He’s a nut,” the editor said.

  “He’s not. He’s not,” I said, defensive already. “I’ve talked to him, and he’s perfectly sane. What he’s doing makes complete sense if you, uh…if you think like he does.” The end of that sentence sounded weak even to my ears, so I said it extra loud. But you see, it wasn’t weak. I’d uttered exactly the right point and then been ashamed of it, which is often my way. Thinking like someone else thinks is the only way to understand people radically different from you, but my editor didn’t want a reporter who thought like a guy carrying a cross across Texas.

  “Forget him,” she said, fearing that I was already halfway toward going native, a term journalists use for reporters who lose themselves too completely among sources. I’ve done that sometimes.

  I didn’t intend to do it again, although there would be temptation. I started my investigation into magic for purely intellectual reasons. I planned to write about it as a social trend. I was going to write about “them,” which is how journalists best like to work. The old joke about the reporter who shows up to say, “Let’s you and him fight,” has truth in it.

  As a reporter of religion, I knew that a great change was going on in modern faith. I believed looking at magic would open a window into why it was happening and how. Forty years ago, when the current occult revival was beginning to gain strength, the wisest thinkers in the land predicted that faith in the supernatural was shriveling and would soon die back to insignificance. The scientific worldview demanded such a shift. Who could possibly withstand it? Organized religion, mystical meanderings, and magical ideas could not hold up against scientific ideas that were so self-evidently true, or so they reasoned.

  But the wise ones were wrong. Instead, such thinking—call it what you will, religious, spiritual, mystical, irrational—has tightened its grip in astonishing ways. This development has been most obvious among the ultraconservative. A portion of their constituency has bullied and preached and agitated and murdered its way into the headlines—always for the love of God, of course. But the drift toward an ancient belief in the—how shall I put it?—more active forms of Deity has also penetrated religious groups that don’t often make the headlines. Wiccans and Pentecostals are both often cited as the fastest-growing faiths in America. Middle-aged witches are scattered through the hinterlands, and little witches can be found in high schools and colleges all over the country. Healers who use various kinds of energy do a brisk business among middle-class groups.

  Some Pentecostal preachers are so familiar with evil spirits that they have names for them and a hierarchy of rankings. Sightings of the Holy Mother Mary are rising all over the world. Some are in visions; so many are images on foodstuffs that there’s been a boom-let on e-Bay items, including a Lay’s Smokey Bacon potato chip and a grilled-cheese sandwich that appear to represent her.

  Millions of Americans are turning to magic, mysticism, and mythos—some in ways that radically set them apart, others merely to augment more mainstream beliefs. A Methodist friend who graduated from college with three majors and a Phi Beta Kappa and recently put a voodoo flag on her wall is an example of the latter. She mentioned that she was also fascinated by vampires.

  “You don’t believe vampires are real, do you?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” she said. “But maybe. Yes. Sort of.”

  People with, shall we say, expanded kinds of awareness are quietly blending among us, cobbling together spiritual lives that are more freewheeling than anything ever seen before. Quietly, quietly, with a minimum of fuss, they are reenchanting the world—their worlds anyway. The waitress wears a pentacle under her blouse. The computer geek next door is a conjure doc. The mom down the street tells fortunes. Soldiers chant toward gods of war. Nurses send healing power through their hands. You have to know what to look for. You have to search them out, ask the right questions, notice the right signs, but they are there, here, everywhere around us. Deep into the night, with only the blue glow of computer screens lighting their faces, they send streams of energy one to another, small town to inner city, Amsterdam to Houston to San Juan, virtual meets magical and melds.

  Reaching back to ancient lore, these otherwise average folk summon wonder and mystery and meaning into their lives. They believe humans can change events with their thoughts. They believe progress is possible, probable in fact. They believe all of life is intricately connected—with the earth, the planets, the stars, and other life. They believe in magic. What does that mean? At its most basic level, it means that there is a stream of power, life, energy, intelligence, spirit, call it what you will, that courses through the universe. Magical practice is the attempt to notice, to understand, to channel, and to control that force. It is a method of connecting with the unseen, or as the anthropologist Tanya M. Luhrmann wrote, “a technology of the sacred.” Someone else called it a physical prayer. Or as some Wiccans put it, magic is a form of positive thinking, hypercharged, wonderfully optimistic.

  Aren’t they just the dearest things? Wouldn’t it be lovely if they were right?

  For thousands of years most human beings shared such an enchanted worldview. For the past four hundred years it has been steadily abandoned, turned into the occult, which means the hidden—or as one writer says, the rejected—knowledge. But as modern America fills up with astrologers, psychics, magicians, wizards, witches, hoodoo workers, and their many customers, the hidden is coming into light. Ancient occult ideas are radically changing how Americans think about themselves, and most of us don’t even know it’s happening.

  This move toward occult thinking is more amorphous than the faiths that reporters are able to write easily about. It has no doctrine, little organization, few moral codes. It gets no official sanction and is sometimes bizarre beyond comprehension. It marshals no martyrs, wages no wars (at least not the kind most of us know about), and yet it has elements that are more ancient even than the bi
g religions, older than history itself. It offers breathtaking possibilities and soul-shaking dangers.

  In twenty years of reporting the actions of human beings, probing their reasons for acting oddly, and watching the effects of their behavior, I’ve become convinced that when a good number of people start to do something that makes no sense to the society at large, when they cling to it for a long time and increasing numbers of people take it up, they’re on to something. Usually it’s something that’s percolating through the unconscious. The rest of us feel it too, but we suppress it. It’s often the outcasts, the iconoclasts, the hyper-religious, the young people, sometimes middle-aged women, those who have the least to lose because they don’t have much in the first place, who feel the new currents and ride them farthest. Most of us don’t listen to these people because they act strange and look goofy. They often say offensive, dopey things in clichéd ways. I am as put off by such behavior as most comfortably situated, middle-class people are. I believe, nevertheless, that the magical people have something to tell us and I want to hear it.

  2.

  Eat Only Chicken the Day of the Game

  I don’t believe in magic, of course. Hardly anybody does, but we all live by it. It permeates our lives every day, and we wouldn’t give it up for all the science on earth. Most of us can’t. We can’t because we aren’t aware of how completely we live within its thrall. Who can break a bond they don’t know exists?

  My first magical lesson came when I was five. I was playing with the crippled girl who lived down the street. We didn’t like each other much, but being the only children in the neighborhood, we made do with each other in a grudging, bickering way. At one point in our play she took two bananas off the kitchen counter and told me to pick the one I wanted. I wanted the bigger one. I knew I shouldn’t take the big banana. To take it from a crippled girl would be especially bad. But I wanted it. So I took it.

  At this point, in defense of myself, I’d like to mention that I was cross-eyed. I’m not saying that cross-eyed trumps crippled, and to be completely truthful, it wasn’t much of a factor in my case—morally speaking, I mean—because I didn’t know I was cross-eyed. No one had mentioned it, and I wasn’t an observant child.

  I might have forgotten about the bananas by now except that mine had a big brown soft spot in it that ran all the way down the side. About two inches of my banana was edible. Her banana was perfect, and she ate it while I watched. If I had been generous, she would have been eating the rotten banana.

  I knew what this meant. Somebody was watching, keeping score. It was God maybe. Who it was didn’t matter. What mattered was that I got the message. I never have taken the big banana again. I’ve never taken the biggest piece of chicken or the last scoop of mashed potatoes or the cookie with the most chocolate chips. I’ve never pushed anybody aside at the bargain table. I say to myself that I don’t care as much about such things. I don’t want them as much as other people do, but that’s not the truth. The truth is that I am still ruled by the bad magic of the big banana.

  I was smart enough not to tell anybody in my family about it. If I had, they would have given me the horselaugh and brayed, “Taught you a lesson, huh?” I didn’t call this experience magical even to myself, but it clearly was, just as magical as that bad witch who wasn’t invited to the party and got so mad that she cursed poor little Sleeping Beauty.

  It was a curse for sure. Luckily the big banana curse was a minor, manageable spell, evoked by my behavior and not by a capricious universe. The behavior it evoked dovetailed well with my Christian upbringing. But the lesson of the banana was deeper even than Christian teachings because it didn’t have to be taught. It had been experienced, and it seemed to affirm something basic in the fabric of reality. It didn’t, of course. But it seemed to.

  Life went on. My eye got fixed, sort of. The doctors call it satisfactory. It turns outward a little instead of inward a lot. It hasn’t been much of a handicap, as far as I know, and it has helped me some. I understand outsiders in a way that not everybody does. Or I try to. Not because I’m smarter or more sensitive, but I know how it feels to be among those who can be summed up with one word of physical attribute. There are lots of them—cross-eyed, fat, crippled, bald, weak-chinned, spastic, crazy—and knowing what that feels like makes me listen harder. Or try to. If I wanted to make it a joke, I’d say I look at the world askance. Nobody who knows me would disagree with that.

  I grew up. I became a big-city newspaper reporter, which is not a hopeful or fanciful or magical profession. If anybody had asked me two years ago to describe the age we live in, I’d have painted a picture right in line with what the world’s wise thinkers expected of me, except that it would be utterly dismal.

  I’d have said science is our true God. I’d have said that we live in a world of marvels gone stale, adrift in an empty cosmos. We hear no voices but our own. We believe no omens, listen to no oracles. If otherworldly visions come to us, we close our eyes. And we never, ever think that we might have some great task, noble destiny, or grand calling. Such thoughts are generally believed to indicate a need for medication.

  That’s how lots of people would describe life, but if an extraterrestrial were to watch these nonbelievers as they go about their lives, it would become quite clear that they do believe in much more than a material, soulless world. I first began to know about these hidden beliefs because I wrote a book on Lily Dale, a western New York community of Spiritualists where people have been talking to the dead for five generations. I wrote the book because I thought people with such extravagant ideas were rare, an oddity, something strange that would excite wonder. What a chucklehead.

  Whether the dead talk back is a matter of contention, of course. I was careful about that, not wanting to be branded a crazy. But it didn’t matter. In writing the book, I’d been transformed. I’d become a person who could be told things. People all over the country started coming up to me in bookstores, at meetings, during parties to tell me stories they didn’t usually share with strangers.

  They’d often start by glancing to each side. They would shrug as if they weren’t to be held responsible for what was coming. Then they’d say, “I don’t know what this means,” or, “I’m just going to tell you what happened.” One by one they came, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers. Few would have described themselves as believers in magic.

  Once, for instance, I was in a Bible Belt state with a group of women who raise charitable funds for children’s hospitals. I talked about my book on the town that talks to the dead. When the talk turned to spirituality, heads nodded about the room as several women attested to their strong belief in Jesus Christ as their own personal, living savior and to their complete reliance on the Bible as the direct word of God, suitable for any occasion. I thought, Oh, boy. I hope they don’t go to praying and try to save me. I hadn’t needed to worry. They finished dessert, and then they lined up to tell me things.

  “My mother read tea leaves all her life. If a relative was about to die, she always knew it,” said one. Another told me that her husband had second sight. His whole family had witnessed it.

  The eighty-year-old former president of the group reached into her bosom to pull out a silver cross with a little charm next to it.

  “Know what this is?” she asked.

  “It’s the evil eye,” I said. According to magical theory, the eye on her charm would stare down the evil eye if it were directed toward her.

  “Evil eye. That’s right. I’m Greek. All the Greeks wear them. Even the children.”

  A blond woman of middle years asked, “Have you ever known anyone who had the evil eye put on them?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, someone put it on my daughter,” she said.

  The daughter was about eighteen months old. She and her family were strolling along a New Jersey beachfront boardwalk when a man approached them. He was an actor from a fun house and was dressed in a monk’s robe. He had a rope around his w
aist. From it hung a cross, which he was twirling.

  “Oh, what a beautiful child,” he said, looking intently at their daughter. Then he began to follow the family, continuing to stare at the little girl.

  The man’s focus was so strange and his tone so eerie that the father turned the child’s stroller around and began pushing it away from the man, faster and faster until the family was practically running to escape. That night the child fell ill. She had a high fever and began throwing up. The next day she was still sick and crying constantly. A child who had always loved men, now she wouldn’t go to any of the men in the family. The mother’s sister had been on the boardwalk when the actor approached, and she was troubled by his actions. She called their aunt, who was of Polish heritage.

  “He’s put the evil eye on her,” the aunt said. “You’ll have to remove it.” The mother’s sister was to take four straws from a broom and throw them over her shoulder into the corners of the room as she said a litany of Polish words. She was then to take a fifth straw, burn it with a wooden match, and drop it into a glass of water. They were to give the baby a spoonful of water from the glass.

  “Make sure you do exactly what I told you,” she said, “and don’t let anyone who doesn’t believe be in the room when you do this.”

  The mother, who didn’t know Polish, was so frightened that she would foul up and kill her daughter that she couldn’t do the spell. So her sister did it. The baby fell asleep immediately and slept four hours. When she awoke, the fever was gone and so was her fear of men.

  “Are you telling me the truth?” I demanded. But I knew she was. She was as wholesome as Thanksgiving dinner and probably sat in the front pew of the Baptist church every Sunday.

  Kids upchucking in the night and then getting better the next day isn’t all that unusual, but I didn’t say so because she knew that already and my saying it would have missed the point. The point of the story was that evil is alive, and good can defeat it in magical ways. It’s a good story, and the last part makes it better. No one told the little girl about that night, and she was too young to remember, but for the rest of her childhood she feared men in monk’s robes and would cry whenever she saw them.