Not In Kansas Anymore

by Christine Wicker

  Another early magical tool was the chain letter, which became popular among the Pennsylvania Dutch and by 1725 had an English version. This letter, which was supposedly written by Jesus, promised that those who carried it could not be damaged by guns or swords, but anyone who did not copy and pass it on would be cursed by the Christian church. Chain letters with promises and curses are still common, of course, with the Internet having given them a whole new life. Spell books that purported to teach good magic and instructed readers on how to contact and control various spirits were passed down within families. One such collection, called Der Lange Verborgene Freund (The Long-Lost Friend), was compiled in 1819 and 150 years later was still being carried into battle by recruits from Pennsylvania who went to Vietnam.

  Religion and magical thinking are so intertwined that scholars still argue over where the dividing line is. Some Puritans would open the Bible to a random page and cite the first verse their eyes fell on as a way of getting divine guidance about their eternal fate. Many spells and invocations ended with “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” In some instances the Bible was also used to determine criminal guilt or innocence.

  Today the Bible is often used in magical workings by people who claim it’s the best spell book ever written. Christo-magic is common in Pentecostal and Holiness traditions, although they would not call it magic. Saint magic is popular among Catholics. Hoodoo, an African American magical system that also calls on Jesus and the saints, is outside-the-church Christo-magic.

  Even when they oppose magic, religious crusaders sometimes aid it. Their fierce opposition gives magical workings publicity, credibility, and a fearsome cachet that they would never otherwise have. Early Dutch and German American traditions told of grimoires—magical books so powerful that people who started reading them would become entangled in the words like flies in a web. The book would hold them fast unless they began to read it backwards to the place where they first started or until a Christian healer released them. The idea surfaced again during the American Satanism scares of the 1970s and 1980s when anti-cult investigators were so frightened of occult books that they warned it might be dangerous to read them and recommended synopses or overviews as safe substitutes.

  Religion and magic have always intermingled and at the same time repelled each other. Religion tends toward supplication, whereas magic sets forces into operation, commands, and demands. It relies on the power of objects, of symbols, of numbers, of words, and of human will. It empowers human experience over doctrine. Religious people wait on God; magical people push. Magic cuts out the clergy, dispensing with their role, usurping their power. And instead of telling people that they should not want what they do want, magic tries to help them get it.

  In the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists helped further push Americans away from depending on religious authority as the only avenue for supernatural power when they put forth three main metaphysical doctrines: “(1) the immanence of God, (2) the fundamental correspondence between the various levels of the universe, and (3) the possibility of ‘influx’ from higher to lower metaphysical levels.”

  “As above, so below,” is one of the most commonly quoted magical tenets, and once again the idea that God might be within or immanent meant for the Transcendentalists that there was no reason to look to religious authorities. Divine power could be tapped into by anyone who realized it was there and knew how to gain access to it. Walt Whitman was a journalist of little renown until he read Emerson, who fired him up with visions of such magnificence that he became a poet of considerable mysticism. He wrote in his typically robust and earthy style in Song of Myself:

  Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from,

  The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,

  This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

  Between 1875 and 1900, American religion struggled to deal with urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and the depredations of science on traditional faith verities. At the same time, Americans were hearing about religions outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, something that hadn’t happened before in a widespread way. The Transcendentalist writer James Freeman Clarke published a book called Ten Great Religions that went through twenty-one printings. In 1892 the World Parliament of Religions attracted 150,000 visitors to exhibits about the world’s religions. These religions introduced magical concepts that had been quelled within orthodox Christian circles, encouraged dissent from orthodox Christian views, and helped people look within themselves for answers.

  Historian Arthur Schlesinger labeled this time “the critical point in American religion.” Liberals and conservatives split, as they have today, and people who considered themselves spiritual but not religious could be seen as a definite group for the first time. Philosopher and psychologist William James was among them. James dabbled in occult matters and was convinced that human consciousness has continuity with a wider spiritual universe. The ideas of philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Schelling also influenced those who rejected Christianity and tilted toward a magical worldview. During this same time, Spiritualism, the religion founded on the idea that the dead can be contacted, was catching on all over the United States and Europe. One Catholic group estimated their numbers at 11 million—an overestimate probably, but an indication of how big the movement seemed.

  On the eve of the twentieth century, as many as 40 percent of American men were involved in fraternal organizations, mostly Masonic, that constructed and performed elaborate mystical ceremonies. A group of Freemasons called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn formed in Britain to recast Masonic ceremonies into magical workings. Among their members were upper-class, well-educated Brits. The poet William Butler Yeats was one of them.

  The American fin de siècle surge of magical practice came forth in a variety of ways. Anton Messmer’s practice of animal magnetism to heal people was spreading. Paschal Beverly Randolph, a free man of color, taught and wrote about magic techniques that included sex magic. And Madame Helen Blavatsky, who believed she was being directed by mahatmas who had lived in Tibet, founded her Theosophical Society in New York in 1875. Her Isis Unveiled is still in print, and at 500,000 copies still selling.

  In the common culture, magic also flourished. When treasure hunting swept the country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, magicians, conjurers, fortune-tellers, and clairvoyants were often asked to consult peep-stones, which were crystals placed inside the seer’s hat. The clairvoyant would put his face into the hat and sometimes stay that way for hours before emerging with a message. Almost every New England town still had a witch or wizard. The owners of trading ships often consulted astrologers or fortune-tellers before setting sail. Countermagic was also commonly employed. If cream refused to thicken, a hot rod thrust into the churn was thought to undo the bewitchment by burning the witch. Witch bottles filled with urine and heated in a pan were used to hex those who had placed spells on others.

  When I was a child, I didn’t know anyone who lived by signs and omens. I never heard a single person call upon angels for a parking place. Nobody talked of encountering spirits of the dead. Nobody looked for meaning in coincidental events. Nobody talked about what they were meant to do, meaning meant by the universe or by some kind of contract they’d chosen before being born. Nobody said, “Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it,” as though we were living in a fairy tale where the mere utterance of foolish desires had the power to damn us.

  I come from the children of poor people, sometimes poorly educated, but we didn’t spread superstition. When we heard it, we laughed. We called it baloney or hogwash. To do anything else would have been ignorant, and that is something we never wanted to be. My family was trying as hard as we could to enter the prosperous, reasonable world that had so long been closed to our kind, but even as we struggled that world was changing. What w
e would have called childish imagining was taking hold. The latest resurgence of American magic started in the counterculture of the 1960s. By the end of the 1970s, it was already going mainstream.

  In 1975, literary and cultural critic George Steiner declared that in terms of money spent, literature produced, and people involved, our culture was the most superstitious and irrational of any “since the decline of the Middle Ages and, perhaps, even since the time of the crises in the Hellenistic world.” In that same year, historian Theodore Roszak found himself going to parties where he frequently heard tales that “stretch one’s powers of amazement.” Somewhat to his own astonishment, he wasn’t rejecting them. “One listens through them to hear still another intimation of astounding possibilities, a shared conviction which allows one to say, ‘Yes, you feel it too, don’t you? That we are at the turning point, the kairos, where the orders of reality shift and the impossible happens as naturally as the changing of the seasons.’” Some of those tale tellers became New Agers, and if that had been all there was to the spread of magical thought, magic might not be so important today.

  In the 1980s, magic went even more mass culture. A deluge of self-help programs and positive-thinking seminars that could have been taken straight from the philosophies of the ancient magi began a fundamental shift in our concepts of who we are and what our relationship to reality is. Most people didn’t make the connection to magic, of course, but the gospel of positive thinking says that a person’s intentions, his will, and his inner reality can change what happens around him. That’s purely magical.

  Such thinking seemed utterly pie in the sky to me when I first began to hear it. I remember arguing vehemently with a cheerful salesman who was flirting with me one night. Our budding love affair never left the bar because I was so contemptuous of his soft-brained thinking. You can’t think your way to success, I told him. You have to work your way there, against great odds, with constant awareness of your weaknesses and frailties. In fact, believing you will triumph is the surest way not to, I believed, although I was too canny to say that outright. I was Calvinist to the core, completely out of step with my times. What I didn’t realize in my dismal pride was that I was operating out of the selfsame magical idea, but at the opposite end of it. I believed only in bad magic. To him optimistic thoughts were empowering; to me they were dangerous.

  Next, magical thinking showed up in the explosion of self-help programs. The idea that progress is always possible is very American and is often linked to Puritanism, but the modern strain is built on a different base than the older versions. With the new kind of self-help we’re still trying harder, but it’s no longer because we’re God’s unworthy creatures. It’s because we’re uncovering our inherent potential, our inner wisdom. We’re becoming all we were meant to be. That’s magical. Every bit of that is magical thinking. Magical theory, unlike doctrines that stress the inadequacy and weaknesses of humankind, teaches that people have strength and knowledge within them that is hidden and must be uncovered by their own efforts.

  Magical ideas have also gone mainstream in more obvious ways. Today half or more of Americans believe in psychic or spiritual healing and extrasensory perception. One-third believe in haunted houses, possession by the devil, ghosts, telepathy, extraterrestrial beings who’ve visited the earth, and clairvoyance. All these numbers are higher than they were in the 1990s. Belief in astrology is also up. In the 1930s only 6 percent of people believed in it: in 1985 the number was 47 percent. Some of the change can be attributed to near-death experiences, which have increased as medical technology has been able to bring more and more people back from the edge of death. According to Gallup, 8 to 13 million Americans report having had such an experience. Of people who come close to death, 34 to 40 percent report otherworldly experiences. People who aren’t dying when they’re expected to are also exerting influence that might be considered magical; 55 percent of doctors report that they have seen results in their patients that they consider miracles.

  Magical ideas are also getting new respect from social researchers. A recent study found that 65 percent of kids have an invisible friend, a doll, a stuffed animal, or another object that they consider a living friend. Many keep these friends long after they stop admitting it to their parents, and they often have multiple friends. The researchers were surprised by the number of forms that such friends take. Some are tiny, whereas others are huge; some are ancient; and some are human, whereas others are not. Researchers were also surprised to find that the kids who have imaginary playmates are often popular, well-adjusted kids with plenty of human friends. One researcher wondered if magical friends help children in real life by giving them safe ways to practice their reactions, think out their feelings, and communicate their emotions.

  Today magical, mystical beliefs are so strong in the general population that some people believe a great magical renaissance is beginning. I heard two magical explanations for why that might be so. One was from magician and psychologist Robert Masters, who writes that five hundred years ago, when Christians were making a great business of torturing and killing anyone who didn’t agree with them, the old gods and all their friends—elves, fairies, gnomes, angels, and so on—decided to withdraw from the world. In the year 2000, they agreed, they would come back and check out the situation. If the climate seemed more hospitable, they might stick around. Some of the entities reneged on their agreement and started drifting in early, which is the reason goddess worship took off in the latter years of the twentieth century, Masters believes.

  Another explanation came from a channeler in North Carolina who has been giving messages for a group of spiritual adepts for many years. These wise spiritual beings say that a window between the worlds opened in the year 2000 and will stay open for fourteen years or so. Whatever consciousness humans grab on to during that time will be what they’ll have to work with for a long, long time, say the masters.

  But it isn’t only magical people who see a shift toward the nonrational. Scholars see it too. Two historians, one from Alabama and one from Brigham Young University, wrote a scholarly book about the history of Western magic called Magic, Mystery, and Science. The new theories of physics and the trends of postmodernism are shifting toward a new era for occult practice, write Dan Burton and David Grandy. “We hope this book will help readers prepare for that era,” says the last sentence of their introduction.

  What’s going on?

  Globalization. Immigration. The collapse of faith in science. The migration of Eastern religions to the West. And maybe something else, something more personal, more basic and utterly unscientific. Maybe soul hunger is to blame.

  Sociologist Max Weber believed that the world was being deadened by scientific notions. “As intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the world’s processes become disenchanted, lose their magical significance, and henceforth simply ‘are’ and ‘happen’ but no longer signify anything,” he wrote. “Science elevated us far beyond anyone’s dreams and at the same time demoted us. We went from being the glorious reason for creation to being a side product of mindless accidents.”

  Mathematician Blaise Pascal saw a universe of “eternal silence” coming in the seventeenth century, and he was filled with dread:

  When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.

  We’ve gone further than Pascal could have imagined. A few months before his death in 2004, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, promised a reporter from the New York Times that his research into consciousness and the brain would lead to the death of the soul. “The view of ourselves as ‘perso
ns’ is just as erroneous as the view that the Sun goes about the Earth.” He predicted that “this sort of language will disappear in a few hundred years. In the fullness of time, educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death.” His co-researcher, Christof Koch, had some doubts about whether human beings, already “cast out of the world of meaning,” were ready for such elucidation.

  I suspect that Crick, like so many other scientists, completely misunderstood the inclinations of people who want mystery and meaning in their lives. While his research might lead the rest of us to give up hope for our souls, magical and spiritual people won’t, but neither will they fight science. They embrace science, even as they give it their own spin. When scientists proved that life evolved from a long chain of being, they said, “How could anything so complicated have occurred without a guiding spirit? Impossible.” When scientists showed that the brains of people with spiritual leanings and visionary experiences behave differently from the brains of people without such ideas, the magical people said, “We knew it. The brain is hard-wired to pick up the hidden knowledge that’s all around us. We must recover our abilities.” When the new physics told of light that changes from waves to particles depending on the observer, they said, “See. Everything is connected.”

  Widespread disappointment with organized religion also plays a role in the resurgence of magical thought. A recent survey showed that half of Americans believe “that churches and synagogues have lost the real spiritual part of religion.” One out of every three adults believes that “people have God within them, so churches aren’t necessary.”

  Daniel Maguire, a former Catholic priest who is a professor of ethics at Marquette University, goes so far as to say that belief in the great faiths is collapsing. People are looking for something to replace them, much as they did in the first century as Christianity began to rout paganism. Now it seems to be the other way around. Sociologist Elizabeth Puttick believes that three faiths are competing for hegemony in America: Christianity, Buddhism, and paganism. As former professor of world religions Lin Osborne has said, “People are doing exactly what they ought to be doing. They’re creating their own mythologies.” By that, he means that they are finding and sometimes making up their own grand stories about what life means and how we ought to act in it. It’s happening even within the churches, where 55 percent of people say they entertain some occult belief: trance channeling, astrology, reincarnation, or fortune-telling.