Not In Kansas Anymore

by Christine Wicker

  Cat was also a good first choice in my search for good magic because she was pointed toward all that is idealistic and noble-minded before she was even born, and, at the same time, no one in her life was anywhere as noble as they could have been. She calls herself a red-diaper baby because her parents were ardent Socialists. Her father was an artist who went to work in the shipyards to avoid being drafted. He faked being an engineer and was soon employed as one. His obit called him a petroleum engineer although he never finished high school. Her mother, who came from Munich in 1932 fleeing Hitler, is now in her eighties and writes horror stories. One is about a town where all the people except one woman are turning into dogs. The woman notices that everyone’s teeth are getting longer.

  Her father left the family when Cat was five. He sometimes invited her to visit, but he never took off work. Instead, he locked Cat in the house. She had learned some Russian at the Berkeley elementary school she attended, and she knew sign language. So when her father left, she escaped and went about town pretending to be a deaf-mute Russian. If she saw dead birds, she picked them up, then skinned and mounted them. An odd child.

  Her mother was a librarian at U.C.L.A. and her parents owned an antiquarian bookstore. One of the library patrons was Aldous Huxley. He was so blind that Cat’s job was to make sure that when he signed for his books the paper was under his pen. She followed Henry Miller about the shop and went home to play with his dog Skippy. Her first social protest was when she was in the sixth grade, against Woolworth’s refusal to let blacks eat at its lunch counter.

  Some of her magical books were those collected by her German grandfather. One, which she still owns, is a collection of German folk customs and magical beliefs. The pictures so enthralled her that she begged her mother to translate. They struck a deal. Cat would baby-sit her sister for fifty cents an hour, and her mother would translate the book for fifty cents an hour.

  Cat has been so lonely at times in her life that even now as she’s going to sleep she sometimes hears a sentence that makes her sigh with despair: Nobody likes you. If it comes out of nowhere, and it usually does, she suspects that it’s part of a magical attack. She might get up and do something to counter it, such as lighting a candle or making some brushing motions with her hands. At the least, she repositions her body. If you don’t do that, the thought will sink in unimpeded and take root, she said. You never want to let that happen.

  I liked Cat’s story. Magical attacks aren’t in my experience, but bad thoughts are. It seems to me that I can recall every mistake I’ve ever made, every embarrassment I’ve ever suffered, every failure to be kind or generous or smart enough. When such memories worm their way into my perfectly happy life, they feel like an attack. So. Cat’s tips on how to ward off such thoughts were more than I could have hoped for: an easy cure for the bad magic in my mind. I’d use them, and if they worked, I might believe in magic.

  Magical attacks are pretty mainstream in hoodoo thought. One of the saddest I read was about a man who did some little thing that displeased a conjure woman. She was a thin-skinned old bat who scared all the children. So she “threw down” on the guy, said that he would never have another home and would wander for the rest of his days. His house burned down the next week, and he never was able to get another. He went from friends to relatives to living at the side of the road until the day he died. Mean old biddy. Somebody should have put a roach in her food.

  Cat’s exposure to hoodoo began early but in an indirect way. Her parents hoped that their child would become completely American. To that end they gave her three record albums for her fifth birthday. One was Dust Bowl Ballads by Woody Guthrie, and another was Negro Folk Songs and Spirituals by Leadbelly, and the third was The American Songbag by Carl Sandburg, which was mostly murder ballads. Those gifts began her lifelong love of rural American music and led her inevitably to one of America’s great gifts to music, the blues.

  Hoodoo is a big part of the blues. Ma Rainey’s “Black Dust Blues,” for instance, is about a woman who is angry because Ma stole her man. “Lord, I was out one morning, found black dust all round my door,” begins the song. The singer starts to get thin and has trouble with her feet. “Black dust in my window, black dust on my porch mat…./Black dust’s got me walking on all fours like a cat.” This song deals with what’s called “throwin’ down” on someone. In African magic, the feet are thought to be a particularly vulnerable place for evil to enter. So “laying a trick” might involve throwing magical powder where someone would walk over it. Socks or shoes might be sprinkled with hoodoo dust. In a love spell, socks might be tied together.

  In the “Aunt Caroline Dyer Blues,” the Memphis Jug Band sang of a famous Arkansas conjure woman:

  Aunt Caroline Dye she told me,

  “Son, you don’t have to live so rough,

  I’m going to fix you up a mojo, oh Lord,

  so you can strut your stuff.”

  She may be promising him good luck, but gambling hands are among the most popular mojos. So she might be telling him that he will be able to win with her help.

  Spells to attract love are common in hoodoo, but in this one, recorded in 1928, the spurned woman seems out for revenge. Jim Towel sang,

  A gal for me had a great infatuation

  She wanted me to marry, but she had no situation

  When I refused, she near went wild,

  Says, “I’m bound to hoodoo that child”

  She went and got a rabbit foot, she buried it wit’ a frog

  Right in the hollow of an old burnt log.

  Right on the road where I had to walk along

  Ever since then my head’s been wrong.

  One of the most famous hoodoo-blues stories is told about the great guitarist Robert Johnson, who was said to have met the devil at the crossroads and sold his soul in return for his talent with the guitar. When Johnson was poisoned after drinking from an open bottle being passed around a bar, he’d broken one of the primary rules of hoodoo, which is never drink from an opened container. A woman who wanted to gain love and control a man by exciting his passion beyond all reason might have put some menstrual blood in the drink. An enemy might have put any manner of potion inside: a charm that could make snake eggs hatch in his belly, a powder that would cause him to go mad, an extract that would make his legs swell up and cause his hands to shake. But in Johnson’s case, breaking the open bottle rule had even more dire results. According to the story, a jealous husband had poisoned the drink. Johnson died that day.

  There are two problems with that story about the crossroads. One is that it didn’t happen to Robert Johnson, Cat told me. It happened to a guy named Tommy Johnson, and who knows who he was? Not many people, which calls into question the whole deal about making pacts with the devil. The second problem is that hoodoo pacts with the devil don’t involve selling your soul and going to hell. During a crossroads ritual, a black man does appear. Some people call him the devil, but most people in hoodoo call him the god of the crossroads. He usually grants a physical skill and taking it does not mean that the person’s soul is going to be damned.

  It was music that led Cat to the first conjure shop she ever visited. Shops in Berkeley didn’t carry the music she liked, so one day when she was not yet a teenager she took the bus to Oakland, where there were many African American shops. She went into one and began to look at small bottles with strange labels. She was particularly intrigued by one called Essence of Bend Over floor wash. The name made her want to laugh, but she was too polite for that. So she asked the shopkeeper what it was. It’s something that people put in their mop water to help sweeten other people’s temperaments, he said.

  “Why would anybody want to do that?” she asked.

  “Well, some people work for other people.”

  She wanted to buy some, but he shook his head.

  “No. You’re a young person. You want magnetic sand. You want to attract attention.” And so she bought some and used it to attract the attention o
f a boy she wanted.

  When she was fourteen, Cat heard a deejay say that a rain dance was needed to make the California drought end. So she pulled out her magic books, enlisted the aid of a friend, went up on the roof of her house, and did a magical ceremony for rain.

  “While we were up there, I swear to God, the clouds came in over the bay. This white fog came right over our house, and I thought, My God, this really works,” she said.

  Cat left home while still a teenager. Like thousands of other young girls in the 1960s, she became a street hippie. She worked carnivals doing various tricks, metal bending, fortune-telling. She learned plenty of ways to make magical beliefs work for selfish ends. She learned to do what’s called cold reading, which means that the psychic is working from a script and from good guesses about human nature. Cat eventually learned such little-known facts as that most men of middle age have had at least one life-threatening accident. Most beautiful women have never been sure of their beauty. Most people believe they’re smarter than their bosses. Many women have one breast larger than the other. She could have made good money doing cold reading, but she didn’t want to make her money that way. She learned candle scams, which involve making a candle smoke excessively so that the client thinks some bad luck needs to be protected against, and pigeon drops, which involve getting the customer to bring money that is switched to blank paper before it’s given back. But she never did those things.

  She learned astrology. When her first child was born, she did the baby’s chart, which indicated that some kind of terrible trouble was ahead. The baby died of sudden infant death syndrome. Experiences like that, where she could see something unpleasant in the chart but was helpless to do anything about it, caused her to back away from astrology.

  She did all the things that hippies did then—took drugs, had lots of sex with various people. She was arrested for growing marijuana and spent three months in jail. For a number of years she lived in a Missouri commune called the Garden of Joy Blues, which had no running water or electricity. She loved science fiction and comic books and folk magic. A lot of magic was going on during the 1960s among people who liked science fiction and comic books. Cat was among the groups of magicians and neo-pagans who laid the foundations for the burgeoning of magic that began then and continues today.

  As it had one hundred years ago, an influx of Eastern religious ideas helped open people’s minds to new ideas, but fantasy literature of all kinds would also play a part that has only grown with time. One that fired the imaginations of millions, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, was published in paperback in 1965. Within a year American college kids were wearing T-shirts that said FRODO LIVES and GO GO GANDALF. What developed within the magical community came from something of a misunderstanding, a pattern we see again and again in the beginnings of magical groups.

  Tolkien was a devout Catholic who loved ancient mythology and hoped that his rendition of a great mythical world and the battles fought there between good and evil would return such stories to adult consideration. Although his stories don’t mention deities or have any theological system, they demonstrate Christian teachings and virtue in heroic terms. For many years he described his great trilogy as simply a story, not a sermon, not a lesson.

  But by the end of his life he was defending against what he feared was a new paganism that had caught fire among his fans. His fears have since been realized. The influence of his work among neo-pagans and magicians has spread far beyond anything he might have imagined. Many people who believe themselves to be otherworldly creatures began thinking about such things while reading Tolkien. His books also spurred others to write fantasy and science fiction, which fed into games and fan clubs, which inspired more magical activity. Ursula Le Guin and Marion Zimmer Bradley created make-believe worlds that others took seriously in the real world. Vampires had Anne Rice and a host of other authors. H. P. Lovecraft also captured the imaginations of readers.

  Magical people often talk of their favorite authors as spurs to imagination and fictional characters as models that open them to possibilities. Some believe fiction is more than that. Writers and other artists are communicating with the universal unconscious to create new myths, they believe. Belief, ritual, prayers, evocations, even the retelling of stories activate unseen forces that are perceived only on the unconscious level at first. Artists bring these very real beings and potentialities into the light where human attention and intent vitalize them.

  Cat had many good magic stories to tell me. To improve her singing she once did a crossroad working, which is a spell that’s done at the juncture of two roads. She wanted to be in a black gospel group, the competition was tough, and she didn’t have the voice for it. After she went to the crossroads, her singing was better, and she got into the group. She once undid a hex that had caused her to sicken. She did a New Year’s prosperity spell that increased her hoodoo business 150 percent. It took months of talking and listening to her before I heard these stories because she rarely brags about the magical events she has brought about. One time she did boast a bit and it cost her.

  A visitor to the shop began telling stories of his good fortune through magical means. She chimed in with her own. As soon as he left she realized she had bragged about magic, which wasn’t good. The punishment fell on her Mojo Car, a 1994 teal blue Ford Escort station wagon covered inside and out with thousands of sacred, magical, and lucky figures: Godzilla, Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Buddha, the Statue of Liberty, Glinda the Good Witch.

  She and her husband, whom she calls her Lord of Cars because she doesn’t drive, were cruising through town when a woman paused to stare at the Mojo Car, and at just that moment the engine blew. The woman came over to apologize.

  “I admired it too much. I’m so sorry.”

  Despite all the magic Cat could bring about, she wasn’t immune to the kind of bad magic that the rest of us fear. In fact, she believed it more wholeheartedly than we mundanes, and it got her, just like it would get anyone else, which was not at all what I’d hoped to find.

  If I hadn’t offended Cat Yronwode during our first meeting, I might never have heard the best magic story of them all. I’d offended her by asking her if she really believed in hoodoo. She was so obviously well read and analytical. She wasn’t the least bit flighty or ookie-wookie-spookie, which made me wonder if she really believed these outlandish tales of magical power. I meant no offense, but sometimes being a reporter and being offensive can’t be pulled apart, no matter how politely you phrase the question. Later she complained that I’d implied she was a charlatan, but at the time she replied mildly, “I know that it has worked for me.”

  As an example, she told me that she had done magical work to bring her husband to her. She used lodestones, which are magnetized pieces of magnetite, often used in love work because they attract each other, and she prayed to the Hindu god Siva one April. Before the month was out a man named Tyagi Nagasiva, nicknamed Siva, who lived on Ironwood Drive in San Jose, called to say he wanted to visit. Because she had prayed to Siva and a man named Siva showed up, and because the street Ironwood is pronounced like her last name, Yronwode, Cat felt she had received magical signs affirming that he was the one. So they married. That was five years ago, and they are married still.

  This was exactly the kind of good magic a lot of folks could use. She had the evidence to back up her claim that it worked—a good husband—and I agreed with her that the result was unusual, so rare and wonderful that it was indeed good magic. I believed magic brought them together, not only because they were so suited but because she summoned him, didn’t go out and get him, just waited for him to arrive. They knew each other vaguely through the Internet but had never met, never talked on the phone even. During that first conversation she worked up his astrological chart as he talked and decided that having sex with him might be a good idea.

  When she did the spells, Cat was edging up on fifty. She was not a woman who would go out of her way to have a facelift, work out at
the gym, or wear provocative clothes to attract a man. All she would do was to be absolutely herself, which is the best way, of course, but not always appreciated in dating situations. She had two boyfriends, but she was ready to trade them in for one husband. She lived in a small town, worked much of the time, had ideas that weren’t shared by a whole lot of people, and was strong-willed enough to give most men the trembles. Siva is also fourteen years younger than she is. A number of the magical women I met had younger consorts, something you don’t see much in the mundane world, and all of them were nice-looking guys.

  Siva is a tall, thin man with plentiful facial hair, which is exactly the type of man Cat likes. They have a neo-Tantric relationship, which means they consider their relationship a sacred part of worship. He calls himself her devotee. Each morning Cat and Siva begin the day by telling each other their dreams and then praying to each other, either by having sex, which they regard as prayer, or by facing one another on a prayer rug. That they should be always kind to one another and honest is part of their practice. That they be monogamous is part of what she insisted upon. He reveres her as the Goddess and likes to call her Sri Catyananda. Part of his dedication is to be of service to Cat doing humble tasks: dusting the house, carrying feedbags for the chickens, putting out cat food for Kitty Boy Floyd, the half-wild cat who visits only long enough to eat.

  Siva doesn’t own a Laz-E-Boy, doesn’t watch sports, and doesn’t drink a lot of beer. He also knows a lot about computers. Cat having nabbed him was magic worth considering. It went beyond mere luck and beyond coincidence. Seemed pretty peachy to me.

  Then Cat mentioned Siva’s blood pact with Satan. She said it fondly, as though having such a pact made him only more adorable. So much for peachy. A magical person would have been interested in exploring why this man of such dark energy would be the answer to her prayers, but I was not even close to magical yet. I wanted good magic, not bad. If Siva was a follower of the dark side, that was bad, end of discussion, which meant I missed my first chance to move beyond the simple notions of good and bad that were helping to hold me in place. I would see Siva again, however, and the lesson would still be pending.