Enchantment frightens us for good reason. Whether it’s enchantment of the ordinary kind or the magical kind, it may very well change us, and we may not be able to return to our old selves, to our old certainties and our easy understandings. Magical people seem to fear that less than the rest of us. They want to be enchanted and are quite willing to be changed forever as they go deeper and deeper into realms beyond everyday understanding. Most of us wouldn’t mind a little more magic ourselves, if we could slip in and out of it. We too want to leave the drab realities of work-a-day life, to experience the transcendent, to revel in endless possibility. But most of us have lost any belief in good magic. All that’s left is a vague sense that evil is afoot and ready to draw nearer. The only magic most of us believe in is the scary stuff.
Many of the magical stories I heard as I traveled featured friendly visitors, spirits of the known dead coming back to comfort the living, happy coincidences, and fortunate omens, but a surprising number were of malevolent spooks and eerie happenings. Two acquaintances told me they suspected their suburban houses of harboring a bad spirit. Both have teenage daughters, traditional attractors of such beings. Two sisters told of the night when a cold, controlling being came into a hotel room, demanding that one of them go with him; the other sister held on to her sibling and refused to give in to him. A pretty young divorcée talked of the night she awoke to feel that something had crept into bed with her. She felt a hand smooth her hair and she saw the bedcovers move.
A woman whose background was born-again Christian told of reading a book on voodoo until deep in the night. She fell asleep and then awoke to see half-human, half-animal figures roaming about on the landing outside her bedroom door. She had never seen or imagined such beings. The book had not included them.
“I was not asleep,” she said. “I was completely awake. I know I was because I reached out to touch the wall beside me.”
“What did you do about the creatures?” I asked, knowing that she had left the religious assurances of childhood beliefs far behind.
“I called on the blood of Jesus,” she said, her voice going high with emotion.
“Good idea,” I said. Old habits die hard, which is sometimes for the best.
Then she went to sleep, and the next morning she told her husband.
“Those sound like lwa,” he said, referring to voodoo spirits; he then described what she had seen. The next week she saw a voodoo exhibit that also pictured exactly the figures she had seen. She put the voodoo book away and hasn’t read anything like it since.
I heard about black women who burned the hair left in their brushes and a Jewish woman who wrapped such hair in toilet paper, taped it up, and flushed it down the commode. They feared that if the hair wasn’t disposed of properly, birds would find it and build nests, which would cause those who’d lost the hair to have headaches or go crazy.
Bad magic makes the newspaper all the time. In the town where I live, four friends on their way to a family reunion were killed. A man crossed the center line in his car, going the wrong way, and hit them head on. The next day a friend was quoted as saying, “There were a lot of bad signs before they left.”
A father whose son had been killed in the war on Iraq remembered their last conversation. “He told me this was his last mission before he comes home, and I told him not to say that,” the father said. “I didn’t like those words, ‘his last mission,’ and I told him to call me when he gets back.
“But he will not call me now.”
I thought, how terrible that we poor humans, so menaced through all our lives, feel not only helpless but as though some chance remark, innocently released into the air, might draw bad fortune, like Tolkien’s eye of Sauron, piteously searching for us through the night.
Sometimes bad magic is disguised as good magic. A plane crashes, and the guy who missed the plane because his car had a flat tells reporters that God saw fit to save him. If you put a God-tagline on it, it’s more acceptable, but it’s still magic. The reporters are thinking, What did God have against all those other schmucks? but they don’t ask that question. They would be insulting God, ruining a nice story, and disillusioning thousands of readers who think there’s a good chance God or intuition or whatever might do the same for them. Editors do not like that kind of reporter.
But the worst thing is that people seem all too ready to believe the bad magic and much less able to trust the positive. I did hear positive magic stories, but watch the quality of this one and you’ll get an idea of the fix we’re in. Whenever one of my Catholic friends loses anything, she prays to Saint Anthony and she always finds it. So one day her cousin called her to say that she had lost a diamond earring. She knew it was in the bedroom, but she had been looking for hours and she couldn’t find it.
“Pray to Saint Anthony,” my friend said. “It always works.”
The woman did pray to the saint of lost things. Then she started looking again. She flipped the top bedsheet up in the air, and out flew the earring. My friend laughed as she told the story and said, “But the trouble now is that she will think that Saint Anthony found the earring for her.”
“Didn’t he?”
“No, of course not.”
“I thought you believed in it.”
“Of course I don’t,” she said, laughing more.
“Then why did you tell her to do it?”
“Because it always works.”
Is that religion or magic? Does it matter? Is there a difference?
One Christmas a Philadelphia lawyer listened to a few of my stories over wine and cookies and then said, “Aren’t you afraid?”
I replied solemnly, pausing between each word so that she would not miss my inference, “No. I am not afraid. I do not believe in it.”
She looked a bit abashed, which isn’t an easy thing to make a Philadelphia lawyer do. What was she frightened of? Nothing, I’d bet. And everything. All the things that may lurk just outside the light. She had plenty of company. Never once did anyone in the mundane world say of my magical investigation, “Wow. You’ll find out how to assemble good spirits.” Or, “You’ll attract good fortune.” Or even anything as crass as, “You’ll win the lottery.” They predicted no good fortune. But plenty of bad.
As talk of bad magic kept popping up all around me, I realized that I had lied to the Philadelphia lawyer. I too was captive to such thoughts, and I did not know how to undo the spell. Many of us believe that innocent actions can bring evil crashing down upon us: too much good fortune, ignoring the “signs,” a wish or a brag unwisely spoken. We can toss off a psychic’s promise of good fortune, but let the fortune-teller predict death, and a chill will fall over us. It is as though we’re trapped in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale that is grim indeed.
Good magic does descend on us in a willy-nilly fashion, in occasional visitations, in blessings that we desperately try to connect with a certain color or pair of socks or food that we’ve eaten, but it can’t be counted upon. It can’t be controlled. It does not rush to our aid when we say certain words. It exists mainly in the world of fantasy, in holiday tales and children’s books. Most of us have lost any hope of being able to summon a force for good. We don’t even try. We’d be afraid to. At least, the celebrities with their red wrist cords to deflect envy and the women wearing evil eye charms have an antidote for the bad magic aimed at them. The rest of us duck and dodge.
I am about as fearful as a person can be and still get out of bed every morning. You’ve heard of the coward who died a thousand deaths? That’s me and not only me. Everyone I’ve loved, pets included, has also died many times. Died, been buried, and well grieved at least a dozen times a week. It only takes a second or two. I can go right on peeling potatoes, mopping the floor, snipping the heads off withered dahlias. I’ve been doing it so long that I don’t pause for more than a mumble or two.
My husband says he’s going to the store for milk. He’s dead from a car that crossed the line. He’s taking the dog for a noonday w
alk. If they’re not back in twenty minutes, heat stroke has killed the Lab. He’s too heavy to carry home, so my husband is sitting on the curb next to the dog’s body wishing I’d think of them and bring the car. I’d like to encourage my friends to visit, but they won’t survive the trip. The only safe people are the ones I don’t like.
As for myself, staying home cuts the odds in my favor, but anything could get me. Cancer, stroke, toxic tomatoes. The other day I was standing at the top of the stairs with my back to them and I thought, What if I backed up and fell down the stairs. It might kill me. So I didn’t. But I could have. One absentminded moment and I’d be gone. I’ve had some absentminded moments. Who wouldn’t with all the death that’s floating around?
I can’t easily accept the idea that my thoughts change reality. My thoughts are all too dreary, which only goes to show just how big a lie I told the Philadelphia lawyer. I needed the magical people far more than I wanted to admit. They are the only ones who still have a technology of the sacred that can summon good magic and forestall bad magic. The rest of us don’t even believe it can be done. They not only think it can be done but think it can be done better and better. I quite obviously hadn’t absorbed the lessons of fairy tales well enough to believe myself safe in the world. If I wanted to be free of my irrational fears, maybe some irrational magic, a little of the dog that bit me, would be the solution. I needed some irrational belief in the good, the kind of belief that Bettelheim said healthy adults absorbed from childhood fairy tales. I couldn’t go back to childhood, but I could go forward into magic. Hard-core magical people believe without doubt that the power of magic is available to us and that others can learn to use it. Luckily, they were just the people I was going to see.
3.
America the Magical,
I Sing of Thee
That I should be surprised to find so many Americans talking about magic had something to do with my own background. I was raised Southern Baptist in the days when it was a fairly mild, stripped-down version of Protestantism, long before Christians became millionaires writing about gentle Jesus coming back to napalm unbelievers. If anyone in our church had whispered such bloody fantasies with such loving detail, we’d have slid to the other end of the pew and piled our songbooks up as a barrier.
My surprise also has something to do with my ignorance of America’s occult history. I thought magical thinking was way, way in the past, back in Egyptian days, back to the Romans, important to the Celts, but after that it began to die. In fact, belief in magic has always been around. It just hasn’t always made the history books. Until the 1970s, few historians paid it much attention. The European and Salem witch trials are the exception, and it took a lot of killings for that to happen. But witch trials are only part of the story. Dabbling in the occult was, is, and always has been as American as the Pilgrim Fathers, more so even. In 1776, only 22 percent of the colonists in Massachusetts were Puritans, and even the Puritans practiced magic.
“Colonial Americans were, in fact, more likely to turn to magical or occult techniques in their effort to avail themselves of superhuman power than they were to Christian rituals or prayer,” writes religion scholar Robert C. Fuller. Most of them practiced a variety of magical practices such as astrology, divination, fortune-telling, and folk medicine.
Church membership at the start of the Revolution was 17 percent, a figure so low that some scholars suggest that schoolroom pictures of early American Puritans going to church ought to be joined by paintings of drunken revelers. Seen together, they would give a more accurate understanding of America’s heritage. Boston’s taverns were probably fuller on Saturday night than its churches on Sunday morning.
When Frenchman J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur wrote about America in the late 1700s, he called religious indifference an American trait, along with selfishness, industry, litigiousness, and good living. The further inland he traveled, the less religious he found Americans to be. Even Christians didn’t let their faith curb their opinions; “general indulgence leaves everyone to think for themselves in spiritual matters,” resulting in what he called a “strange religious medley.” Much the same might be said today.
People who came to America then, as now, were dreamers, adventurers, oddballs, and freethinkers. Many of the early settlers were criminals. They were people stout enough to believe that they could prevail against the wilds with nothing more than force of will. Some were joiners, but many were not. In short, they were perfectly constituted for transgressive thinking, and magic has often been that.
As early as 1690, the Reverend Cotton Mather complained that Puritan Massachusetts was plagued by “little sorceries.” People used whatever was at hand—sieves, keys, peas, nails, and horseshoes—to tell the future and to keep enemies at bay. Salem’s witch trials began when adolescent girls put an egg in a glass of water, a popular way of divining that Increase Mather, father of the more famous Cotton, had warned against in 1684. A 1760 booklet called Mother Bunch’s Closet directed young girls to summon their future husbands by writing, “Come in, my dear, and do not fear,” on a slip of paper, putting the paper in a pea pod, and laying the pod under the door. The next person who entered would be the husband. “Dumb suppers,” at which no human was allowed to speak, were held on Halloween night to show the faces of future husbands and to summon spirits of the dead. Mirrors might be used, as they sometimes are today, for seeing the future spouse and for bringing back the dead.
The highly placed also practiced occultism. John Winthrop Jr., the governor of colonial Connecticut and an alchemist, owned magical books from the library of Elizabethan England’s great magus and mathematician John Dee. Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale College, was an alchemist. Other alchemists, mostly Yale and Harvard graduates, continued to practice the art in New England until the 1830s. In 1773, Massachusetts judge Samuel Danforth offered Benjamin Franklin a piece of the Philosopher’s Stone, which was supposed to turn base metals into gold. Franklin wasn’t interested. He, George Washington, and other founding fathers were Freemasons, an organization that used magical symbolism and initiation ceremonies aimed at individual transformation.
In the 1740s, in Pennsylvania’s utopian commune of Ephrata, patients were promised 5,557 years of life through medical alchemy. In 1765, a broadside against the Stamp Act claimed that a hex had been put on the Philadelphia commissioner handling the stamps. If he continued to distribute them, he would endure rheumatism, pox, and gout, claimed the pamphlet’s author.
Not only did God-fearing, churchgoing Puritans use magic and pass it down to their children, often with no sense that they were doing anything wrong, but Puritan doctrine itself unwittingly fostered such practices. The Reverend Jonathan Edwards, one of America’s earliest theological geniuses, believed that God’s “emanations” were like celestial light that transformed those who received it and made them capable of perceiving “images or shadows of divine things” all about them in nature. Magical people, who were often called “cunning folk” in those days, have similar ideas about the omnipresence of divine things, the ability of humans to discern them, and the need for some special talent or spiritual gift or training in order for these things to be revealed.
Edwards, who is best known today for his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” also had some part in the First Great Awakening, which swept through America in the early and middle part of the 1700s. This advent of revivalist preaching, with its emphasis on personal, ecstatic experience, seated the proof of divine presence firmly inside the individual, empowering experience in a way that would continue to grow within American religious life. “The Great Awakening popularized a rhetoric of liberty, a conviction that true authority rested in personal conscience rather than in established authority,” writes Fuller.
The Puritans had another idea that made magic attractive. Nobody could ever know if they were predestined to be saved or to burn in hell. Even being concerned about your eternal fate could mean that you weren’t among the
elect. God was in charge but distant. This kept the Puritans in a constant state of insecurity.
Today, also, God is distant and salvation is shaky. As one scholar has quipped, science has taken God away and given us an ape as his replacement. We too are insecure. The Puritans’ problem was too little information. Ours may be too much. Magic was an antidote, then and now. It can reveal the future and protect from calamity. It can discern and disarm an enemy. It can bring punishment to evildoers and good fortune to the adept. It can connect humans with divine will and wisdom. If it works, of course, which is a whole other issue.
Much of the magic in America was brought from Europe and Africa. Later, other forms of magic came with Asian immigrants. Native Americans, of course, had their own forms, and the new arrivals often blended Old Country magic with whatever they learned from the Indians. America itself was thought to be a magical land. The magician John Dee called it Atlantis.
Immigrants also brought magical tools with them. Divining rods probably came with early German immigrants, and by the 1790s European Americans everywhere were using them to locate water, ore, buried treasure, and lost items. Americans are still divining, or dousing, or water witching, as it’s often called. So many people use sticks or wires to find things in the earth that classes are taught all over the country.
Not In Kansas Anymore Page 4
