Not In Kansas Anymore

by Christine Wicker

  Many people define magic as the infamous ceremonial magician Aleister Crowley did. He said it is “the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will,” which makes magic much more than a spell or ceremonial invocation. His definition is often favored because it allows ordinary physical efforts to be counted as magical acts, and most magical practitioners agree that doing a magical working without any real-world action to back it up may have little impact. They often see magic as a way of bolstering the effect of other efforts. If you want a job, do the magic, Cat tells her customers, but you’ll still have to go out and look for a job. Don’t expect one to fall from the ceiling. It might, but don’t count on it.

  I too like Crowley’s definition for its broadness. “Causing change in conformity with will” expands magic so that we can question whether what seems mundane actually is. It allows the idea that all sorts of actions can be magical if we have the will to believe they are so. To think that magic is merely something purchased in a spell kit is to undersell it.

  To me, magic is a way of thinking, a method of experiencing reality, of changing reality even, that Newtonian science won’t allow. It’s the belief that human thoughts, rituals, and symbolic actions can affect the physical world. It’s an openness to events outside of human comprehension. For most magical practitioners a whole constellation of ideas goes with that. There’s future-telling. Often there’s a belief in multiple gods, in synchronicity, in a life plan or a contract that was made before birth. There’s talk with the dead and with those who haven’t ever lived, angels, higher intelligences, astral masters. The idea that otherworldly spirits can be directed to do things that help humans is common. Some magical people believe not only that they can call upon magical forces but that they are actually magical themselves.

  When I met the Silver Elves, a fifty-something couple who may be modern America’s most legendary elves and have been known as such for thirty years, I mentioned that my psychiatrist neighbor had given me a diagnosis of people who think they are elves or fairies or vampires or werewolves, or anybody else who thinks they can do real magic.

  “Schizotypal?” asked Zardoa, the husband.

  “That’s it.”

  “We fit that description perfectly,” he said. “Except in one way. “We aren’t unhappy, and our lives work perfectly well.”

  They have two grown children, who are gainfully employed and apparently well adjusted. The Silver Elves themselves teach computer workshops at the local community college and are getting advanced degrees in depth psychology.

  “Do people you work with know that you’re elves?” I asked.

  “Oh yes. They know,” said the wife, whose name is Silver Flame. “When they introduce us, they always say, ‘This is Zardoa and Silver Flame. They think they’re elves.’ That’s how they put it. That we ‘think’ we’re elves.” She laughed, a perfectly normal female laugh without even a hint of silvery bells in it.

  I don’t know why I thought I had to explain my position on magic to Cat Yronwode. I could have saved my breath because she didn’t buy it.

  “You’re not an agnostic. You’re a well-mannered atheist,” she said.

  I didn’t care for that description. I’d rather float around in the gray areas of life, moving with the current, sitting on the fence, watching everyone else, and saying little to nothing. Atheist sounded so harsh. So definite. Atheist blew my cover.

  But she was right. I was looking for good magic only because I didn’t like the hold that bad magic had on me. I wanted to dispel that cloud—even though I could hardly admit that there was one. I wanted to say to all of us bad magic believers, “Just stop it. You’re being ridiculous.”

  I was firm on the difference between good and bad magic. Good magic is magic that helps, and bad magic is magic that hurts. Coming from a Judeo-Christian perspective, the distinction seemed clear. Good is good and bad is bad, and never the twain shall meet. The difference is as clear as God and Satan, heaven and hell, east and west. I didn’t expect problems with anything as basic as that, and if I’d confined myself to Wiccans, there wouldn’t have been any problems. But magical people outside the Wiccan community often didn’t share my ideas about what is good and what is evil. In fact, my entire notion of good versus bad, which theologians like to call dualism, was about to come under fierce attack. Many magical people utter the word dualism with the utmost scorn. They believe instead that good and bad are all part of a whole, equally valuable even. The gods themselves are combinations of good and ill, I was told.

  I picked hoodoo to start my magical search because it is based in a real living community with traceable roots and is an eminently practical form of magic. It employs African folk medicine and magical beliefs, mixed with Native American and sometimes European magical ideas and charms. It uses plants, oils, and roots along with other usually natural elements in mixtures that are thought to have power when put together with the proper intent. Christian Bible verses and prayers are often employed. Candles play a part, and so do written names and clothing or bodily elements such as fingernails or hair. Even footprints are used in hoodoo magic: some spells call for a footprint to be scooped up or sprinkled with magical mixtures.

  Hoodoo often employs small flannel bags called mojo bags, tobies, tricks, or lucky hands, filled with herbs and other objects. The magical practice of hoodoo may also be called conjure, rootwork, or simply root.

  Even though hoodoo has been practiced for hundreds of years throughout the South, it is shrouded in mystery. Few people outside the African American community know about it, and many of them don’t know much. Anthropologists often have been stymied when trying to track down hoodoo docs. If you find them, said one white researcher, who didn’t have much luck, you’ll be doing a service for the community of knowledge.

  I also liked hoodoo as a first place to look at magic because it isn’t trendy. It isn’t New Age. It has a long history handed down from person to person. Although it has elements of religion, it isn’t a religion. It is as purely magical as a practice can get, and it isn’t practiced only by leather-wearing kids with studs in their tongues. Hoodoo also has an earthy, grounded quality that comes from its having once been the sole recourse of powerless people with desperate needs. One of the first uses of hoodoo was by slaves who wanted kinder treatment from overseers and owners. If any magic really worked, I told myself, this would be it.

  It was lucky that Cat Yronwode was one of the first magical people I encountered. We had a lot in common. She is bookish. I am bookish. She spent her childhood reading magical texts. I spent mine reading fairy tales. We both loved those books with the wholehearted passion of lonely children. She was an only child for most of her childhood; so was I. Neither of us was popular with our schoolmates. Cat’s vision was too poor for her to enter into most of the games children play. I hated recess more than any other time of the day. I read so much that my family longed to banish my books. Today they hide magazines and put away the cereal boxes so I won’t spend breakfast reading instead of talking to them.

  One more thing we have in common: Cat’s cross-eyed. I could not see that her eyes, such a deep brown they looked black, weren’t straight by looking at them, but she said they were, and I might not be the best judge. Bookish, unpopular, odd, cross-eyed.

  What’s not to like?

  Cat knew plenty about magic, which was lucky, because in my first readings about magic I’d picked up some hint of the depravity that so many nonmagical people had warned me about. Magic that uses sexual acts is an important part of many practices because sexual energy is mysterious, powerful, and often thought of as part of the life force that courses through the universe. Some of the sex magic is raunchy stuff, by my standards, but magical people, being mostly broad-minded types, are often loath to declare anything out of bounds. Cat has no such problems, an attitude so rare and refreshing within magical circles that it endeared her to me immediately.

  I was horrified, for instance, to find that
people still follow the English magician Aleister Crowley, who used his lovers, male and female, but especially female, as receptacles that could help him with magic and then be cast away. His first wife became an alcoholic and was committed to a mental institution after their marriage. He beat one of his consorts so badly that the bones around her eye were shattered. He deserted his children. One man died of enteric fever while at Crowley’s estate undergoing bizarre rites that included cutting himself with a razor, killing a cat, and drinking its blood. Another of his male disciples committed suicide.

  I was also puzzled by the popularity of Gerald Gardner, who founded modern Wicca in the 1940s. To me he seemed like a mendacious old guy with strong sadomasochistic interests who figured out a way to have lots of naked young women about and call it religion. Cat felt much the same way about those guys.

  Many magical ceremonies use the act of sex to raise energy. People in some of the magical religions raise energy with animal sacrifice. Others use chants, prayer, meditation, dancing, ritual, and sex. One of the highest Wiccan rituals, called Drawing Down the Moon, may involve public intercourse between a priest and priestess and include what’s called the fivefold kiss, which starts at the feet and moves up the body. Some ceremonies also include tying people up and hitting them with whips.

  Living in the suburbs of Milwaukee, not exactly the epicenter of cool, I was somewhat defensive about my feelings toward sex magic. I am apt to be called prim by those of a more libertine bent. I’m touchy about that. I don’t have any trouble with people’s feet or private parts being kissed or with people running about naked or with people putting sex together with the sacred. Even scourging has a long tradition among religious people seeking to transcend ordinary consciousness. But I’m squeamish about public sex and pain being paired with spirituality, especially when men are making the rules. I know that fertility is a big part of goddess worship, and that goddess worship is often a big part of magic, and that temple prostitutes were common in polytheistic religions, but men were making the rules then too. It’s been my experience that anytime men start telling women how sex ought to be, women don’t do well.

  Once when Cat attended a ceremony of the Ordo Templi Orientis, or OTO, which is the group that follows Crowley’s teachings, she objected to the high priestess being nude while everyone else was dressed. What they called a ritual was nothing more than a Baphomet titty show, she said. Baphomet, Crowley’s magical name, is an idol sometimes said to represent the devil. When they tried to get Cat to eat what they called a Cake of Light during their Gnostic mass, she wouldn’t do it. Their Cake of Light had sexual fluids mixed in, and she didn’t want to eat one. The discussion got pretty heated before it was all over. They said she shouldn’t have participated in their private ritual if she wasn’t going to finish it. They urged her to give up her scruples, but Cat didn’t budge. I liked that. Nobody would call Cat prim. Her website mentions that she likes having slow sacred sex, that she hopes to have it at least twice a week, and that she’s a steady roller, which is not a term I’d heard before but it’s not hard to guess what she means. Cat’s website also has some tips on how to have good sex, magical and mundane.

  You have to know what you’re looking for or you won’t find the Lucky Mojo Curio Company. There is no sign on the street, only a dense wall of bushes. The edges of the long drive are marked with posts that have abalone shells nailed on them, facing outward. Their silvery surfaces gleam like pie pans when headlights hit them. Stray too far to one side or the other and the high screech of rose thorns on car paint will warn you off.

  The shop is a four-room cottage shaded by a vine-covered porch. The vegetation around it is so thick and tall that the cottage seems to squat, swaddled in the earth’s bounty. Inside the cool front room, the shop’s curious objects, herbs, magical implements, oils, and images of gods, saints, and goddesses seem dusky and richly hued. Large glass jars of powders, roots, and dried plants stand on high shelves at the back of the room. A golden dragon sits at the front of the shop, a life-sized wizard stands next to the door, and a hundred-year-old skeleton resides in a wooden toe-pincher coffin at the back. Bright Nepalese temple skirts rim the ceiling. The shop is so mysterious and the handmade labels on the products are so beautiful that Disney ordered hundreds of products for the voodoo queen scene in Pirates of the Caribbean II, and producers for Skeleton Key, a movie about hoodoo starring Kate Hudson, paid Cat to recreate her shop on their set.

  The shop’s five female employees spend their days behind a long counter mixing and stirring, plucking a pinch of this and a spoonful of that from the hundreds of bags, boxes, and jars about the shop. The smell of herbs and incense gets into the skin of anyone who stays too long. If you order Cat’s products, the smell of the shop concentrates inside the shipping box so that when the package is opened, magical fragrances rise into the air, dispersing like the spells they bring with them. The murmur of female voices is sometimes broken by the shrill ring of a telephone or accompanied by the sound of Cat singing the blues. Every candle, mojo bag, or talisman that goes out of the shop is prayed over.

  She seemed more like a little Talmudic scholar than the wild conjure woman I’d expected. Her manner was quieter and her mien more serious than I would have guessed. Wearing a long dress and a canvas apron stained from much work, she came toward me smiling. She wears her brown hair as she has for more than forty years, hanging straight, parted down the middle so that the wings of it fall far into her face, narrowing it. She claims to be five-foot-three but seemed shorter, possibly because she wears flat shoes or maybe because she was often bent over reading something to me from a book. When she reads, she often puts her face close to the book, which sometimes causes her hair to fall forward like a child’s. She weighs what she has all her adult life, 110 pounds, which makes her pleasantly proportioned, neither matronly nor anorexic. She dyes her hair but never wears makeup.

  Her accent is crisp Californian, but her pace is lazy, as though she spent a good bit of time down South, not enough to drawl, just enough to talk easy. Conversation with her is not for the prudish. Talk of vaginas and penises, the various things that might be done with them, the fluids that come out of them, and the problems that might befall them are matters that she treats with perfect candor, which is a good thing for a conjure woman, since her clients are mostly women and their problems often involve love.

  Cat’s shop was also a good first choice for my investigation into magic because it is crawling with good magic. She has oils for luck in gambling, powders for winning in court cases, tricks to attract money, ways of ensuring protection, mojo hands for reversing hexes, and magic for a hundred other practical needs and just causes. Protection spells are big, money and jobs are often sought. But love is the big one—everybody wants love, and it’s harder to get than money.

  For that reason, Cat stocks a good number of male and female genitalia toward the back of the shop. She has vulva candles, plump and pouty, and penises in various colors. Penises seem better represented, perhaps because making them function or keeping them from functioning in too many other places is often a concern of hoodoo customers. The candles get “dressed,” which is to say rubbed or anointed, with various oils and may have strings bound around them in ways that are supposed to keep the object of the work under a lover’s control. Watching how they burn and what the wax does is important.

  Encouraging the life force is important not only in magic but in many religions. So there are plenty of magical objects for sex spells. From India come linga or penis stones of the god Siva. These river rocks have red-brown marks at the tip, which represent his love-making with a goddess during her menstrual period. Cat has twenty-three penis amulets from Thailand, including a tiger on a penis and a bunnylike animal penis. She wore a necklace of penis amulets when she married her current husband. Raccoon penis bones hang on a rack in plastic sacks. Stored among the giant glass jars, High John the Conqueror roots resemble testicles and are thought to help restore sexual n
ature, increase power, and attract luck. They are among the most sought after plants in African American magic. The root is named after a legendary hero who helped slaves endure by playing tricks, making them laugh, and showing them a way to prevail when it didn’t seem possible.

  During World War II, author and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston wrote an essay offering the root’s power to the country at large. “We offer you our hope bringer, High John de Conquer,” she wrote. So “if the news from overseas reads bad…listen hard for John…. You will know then, that no matter how bad things look now, it will be worse for those who seek to oppress us. Even if your hair comes yellow, and your eyes are blue, John De Conquer will be working for you.”

  When a woman calls asking for help to bring a lover back, Cat asks questions first. How long has he been gone? Do you know where he lives? Have you had a period since he left? she might ask. If not, the magic has a better chance of working. If it has been two years and they were together four, Cat says, forget it. These are all commonsense matters. As improbable as it might seem, common sense does play a role in good magic, but the lovelorn rarely take Cat’s advice. So when the case seems hopeless, she compromises and tells the customer, “I’ll sell you products for three weeks, and then you’re going to want to come back and want to do it for three months, and then when it doesn’t work, come back and I’ll tell you how to get over him.”

  Cat wouldn’t tell me how much her business earns, but customers order from all over the world. About 85 percent of her customers are black. I signed up for her Internet hoodoo class, which has more than four hundred students, about 50 percent white. She now has a second class and about five new students a week join. When she first began writing about hoodoo on the Internet, people didn’t know what she was talking about. Now her site gets eleven thousand unique visitors a day.