Not In Kansas Anymore

by Christine Wicker

  I didn’t count these things as big magic, and maybe not as magic at all, but they had been experiences deep within myself. I often tell myself that I don’t feel what I feel. I say that I’m not angry when I am, that my feelings aren’t hurt when they are, that I’m not jealous when I am. Anytime I experience anything not on my list of acceptable behaviors, I deny that I feel it. What would it be like to simply believe that if I felt something that made it true? I wouldn’t have to put together a committee to back me up or do an experiment to prove it. I wouldn’t have to justify it. I would just have to stand on my own perceptions. Could I do that? Probably not. How many people can?

  I’d had a little taste of magic. I wanted more. Silver Flame, the fairy I’d visited in California, said the outcome of magical workings is a “sacred retort” in response to the intention and actions of humans. I loved that idea. Could I evoke such communication? Maybe, but only if no one was watching. Either I didn’t trust people enough for the magic to work, as in the Wiccan rituals, or I liked them too much and felt exploitive, as with Kioni—which is what brought me to the chaos magicians. Privacy and simplicity are among the virtues of their system. They also are completely independent and iconoclastic.

  Chaos magicians, who have thrown out many rules that other magicians follow, also don’t ask for belief. Open Sourcer Joseph Maxx, who is a noted chaos magician, advised, “If you don’t believe it, do it anyway.” Fake it until you make it. I could do that.

  Some people are afraid of chaos magicians because of their name, because of their interest in the dark side, and because they sometimes strut around in leather and brag about doing nasty things. But I liked that they didn’t care much for secrecy, which always irks me and causes me to suspect there’s nothing to tell. I also liked that they didn’t require a lot of ceremonies and rituals to get started.

  My first magical experiment was to construct what’s called a sigil. It’s a symbol that becomes magical when you charge it by putting energy into it. Some people call sigils doorways to other realms. The idea that a symbol or picture can contain some energy beyond its actual self is an ancient, respected one. It’s somewhat like the idea behind Christian icons, which are “mediums of holy presence,” writes Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker. “Think of icons as visual cell-phone calls from the beyond: you don’t look at them; you receive them, and you respond.”

  The difference, of course, is that the power of sigils comes not from God but from the person who creates them, and they are created for a specific magical purpose, not for worship. The magic book recommended that I do two sigils, one for important magic and one for something trivial, such as seeing a woman with a little white dog.

  My husband was about to leave for a conference in Saudi Arabia. The U.S. State Department had recently issued a warning about the danger of traveling to that country, and the embassy had sent home all non-essential personnel and families. My important magic was to bring my husband home safely. I was also using Cat’s mojo for that. My trivial magic would be to see a woman in a red hat. It was summer, and not many women were wearing red hats.

  I made the sigils, as directed, by writing what I wanted, crossing out the vowels and repeated letters, and then forming a symbol using the letters that were left. When I finished making the symbol, the original letters were completely unintelligible. The sigil is empowered when it is focused on at a critical moment and thus imprinted on the creator’s mind. A critical moment would have to do with energy. For instance, you might charge your mind with the image of the sigil just as you are having an orgasm or just as you’ve exercised to exhaustion. Your intention and energy fuel it. I jogged on my treadmill until I was out of breath and couldn’t run any more. Then I fell on the bed and imagined the sigils.

  Once I’d charged them, I put them away and stopped thinking about them, which is what the book directed me to do. In many magical systems it is important to do the magic and let it go. Often when hoodoo work is done at a crossroads, for instance, the conjurer walks away and does not look back. It is important not to fret the magic, but to let it happen. Joseph says that you want to shift your attention by laughing or distracting yourself so that your consciousness shuts around the sigil and nothing else comes into that opening.

  The book had warned that the magical event might not be exactly as expected. The next day I didn’t think about the woman in the red hat until early afternoon. A friend and I were returning from lunch. She stopped for gas. The pump wasn’t working, so she moved the car up to another one. As I sat waiting I remembered the sigil and realized that I hadn’t seen a woman in a red hat. My friend got back into the car. As we pulled out I glanced at the pumps on the side of the building. An African American woman wearing a dark red scarf with blue flowers was standing next to a car. She was laughing. I couldn’t see what she was laughing at or hear anything being said because the windows were up. Her scarf was rolled and tied so that it made a kind of Aunt Jemima head covering, a do-rag.

  I laughed. I’d expected a different kind of hat and a different shade of red, but I was looking for a red hat just as one appeared as if by magic. Later the Silver Elves said they believed that my consciousness was drawn to the magic at the moment it appeared, which was a good indication that the sigil worked. But I couldn’t decide if a scarf counted. I asked my friend.

  “No,” she said. “A scarf is not a hat.”

  Probably not, or maybe a scarf made into a hat by a black woman seen by another woman doing magic and studying hoodoo was better magic than I’d asked for, personalized just for me. If I wanted to deny it, I could. If I wanted to affirm it, I could. Perfect. All about perception, faith, and hope.

  A shudder of delight mixed with fear went through me. It would be wonderful to believe in something powerful and personal and good, especially if that something could be activated by my actions. All I had to do was choose. Make the correct choice, and this could be true life-changing enchantment. That scared me.

  If I could have claimed it and then laughed it away, I might have, but the more I thought about it, the more bizarre it seemed. For my sigil to have caused the woman in the red hat to appear would have required a long chain of events. She would have to have decided to wear that hat, go to the gas station, and stand outside her car at exactly that time on that day. All the while she would have believed herself completely in control, never knowing that my wish had brought her there. My friend who picked the restaurant would have had to pick one in the same part of town as the gas station. She had to offer to drive and fail to fill her tank with gas. She needed to buy the gas after lunch, not before, at that gas station and pull out at exactly that moment. Maybe the pump had to break at just the right time. Maybe she even had to go to the broken pump first so that the timing was perfect. She too would have been utterly controlled by my magic without either of us knowing it. And for the final step, I had to be looking at that side of the gas station and not the street.

  It would mean that our thoughts and actions, our lives, are connected in a vast web that trembles every time anything—a thought, an emotion, an action—brushes it. Or was it all foreordained even before I did the sigil? Was the whole chain of events, including my wish, inevitable? The more I thought about the woman in the red hat, the more dizzying it was. If I accepted that I’d done real magic, I’d be committing myself to a universe utterly unlike the one I’ve always thought I lived in. I couldn’t do it.

  My husband did return safely from Saudi Arabia. So my big wish was granted. But did it prove anything? No. Not to me. Not that I was complaining.

  Chaos mages also provide simple starting exercises to prepare the mind for magic. Perhaps that was what I needed, preparation. Joseph said he sometimes tells people to start by merely noticing everything they see of a certain color, red or blue maybe. The point is to start people noticing what’s around them. The magical exercise I chose to do first was to walk through my neighborhood looking at everything as though it were occurring only for me, which
some mages say is literally true. That was easy enough and wouldn’t require much effort.

  I was wearing a red jacket as I walked my dogs. One is a terrier mix and the other a black Labrador. I passed a woman wearing a red jacket walking a black dog that looked like a Labrador mix. She was going one way. I was going another.

  I said to myself, She’s on this street dressed like me, walking a dog that looks like mine. I have two dogs. She has one. I have a mixed breed and a Labrador. She has a mixed Labrador. She was skinnier and younger than I was. I asked myself, What does this mean? Maybe it meant that I could get skinnier and younger. No, probably not.

  I saw three black birds flying high in the sky. I said to myself, Three black birds. Just for me. Three is a magical number. The Trinity. The number of Wiccan archetypes: maiden, mother, and crone. The number of days before Jesus rose. Three black birds. What does it mean?

  I saw a tree that had been split by a windstorm. A limb had fallen across a walkway leading to the front door of a house. I said, A broken tree blocking a doorway. Just for me. The entrance is blocked by the fall of a great symbol of life. What does it mean? What does it mean? It means I’m becoming an egotistical nut case.

  Imagining myself as the cause of so many events was exhausting and made me feel silly. So I stopped doing it and turned home. But having honed this new perception, I found it difficult to stop. For the rest of the walk I noticed trees I’d never looked at, animals I wouldn’t have usually seen, shapes and colors and configurations that I’d never been aware of. I didn’t ask what they meant. As I neared my house a half-dozen yellow finches burst out of the bushes in a light-flecked flurry so beautiful I gasped. I did not ask what they meant. Witnessing it was meaning and magic enough.

  Perhaps that seems a cop-out. Open Sourcer Sam Webster might not think so. He might call it high magic. “I’m interested in trying to stay as present to my experience as possible so I hear the world when it’s echoing to me,” he said. That’s especially important because in the magical view the world is not an opponent but rather a support, he said. “The world is what gives rise to me. God or the cosmos has always been there with me, or in biblical terms, I have dwelt in the presence of the Most High every day of my life. I have never known otherwise.”

  I had been changed just the littlest bit by that walk, just as I’d been changed by the uncommonly beautiful light of the candles I’d lighted before going to Salem. It wasn’t much, but I remembered that Joseph said changing oneself is the best magic.

  “It’s the most effective by far,” he said and then gave an example. “If you want to get money, don’t invoke magic money falling from the sky. Invoke your employability to make more money. This works much better.”

  My magical walk had also discombobulated me in a way that none of the other magic had. Merely playing with the idea that I might be the center of the universe, the recipient of constant messages from divinity, made me feel a bit crazy, as though it wouldn’t be hard to tip me over. I’d only done it for about an hour, but I knew that if I kept thinking that way, it would change my brain. If I told myself those things as I walked every day, at the end of a month I would not think in the same way I had before. If I did it for six months, I might not recognize myself. I was so certain of that walk’s power that the thought frightened me. I couldn’t prove that it would change me so radically, but I knew it would.

  Six months later I read a study in Mind, the new Scientific American magazine, that gave substance to my ideas about the malleability of the human mind. Researchers seated a test subject with one hand on a table before him. They also placed a rubber hand on the table. Between the real hand and the rubber hand, they placed a partition so that the test subject could not see his own hand but could see the rubber hand. The researcher then randomly stroked and patted the test subject’s hand at the same time that the rubber hand was stroked and patted. After 20 to 30 seconds, the test subject began to “feel” the touch on the rubber hand. Other researchers discovered that they could produce the same effect without the rubber hand. Merely stroking and tapping the table while stroking and tapping the hidden real hand would cause test subjects to feel that they had been touched when the table was touched. Even more strangely, in other experiments, test subjects reacted with alarm when the table was struck a blow, as though they themselves had been struck.

  The brain works by percentages, authors Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Diane Rogers-Ramachandran wrote in explanation. “As you feel your unseen hand being tapped and stroked and see the table or dummy hand being touched the same way, your brain in effect asks itself, ‘What is the likelihood that these two sets of random sequences [on the hidden hand and on the visible table or dummy] could be identical simply by chance? Nil. Therefore, the other person must be touching me.’”

  The brain makes its decision automatically based only on sensory input. Higher consciousness that might involve logic is never consulted. “Even a lifetime of experience that a table is not part of your body is abandoned in light of the perceptual decision that it is. Your ‘knowing’ that it cannot be so does not negate the illusion,” the authors wrote. The researchers then went on to link this deep ‘knowing’ with people who cling to superstitions even when their logic tells them that such things cannot be true.

  I took the studies as verification that I’d been right to be afraid of the walk’s power. It wouldn’t be difficult to program my brain so that it saw events in a completely different way. If I told myself every day that all events have special meaning for me, soon they would. Conversely, if I lived in a society that told me events are all random and utterly separate from me, I would see them that way. Either way, I would be stroking my brain, giving it example after example of truth, until it took over and began feeding the examples back to me.

  The brain is a powerful and deceptive instrument. Science has demonstrated that again and again, and so has experience. But it is all we’ve got. If we trust it too much, we’re in trouble. If we trust it too little, are we in worse trouble? Will we then trust someone else’s brain? Or a computer? Humans are good at making meaning, which is not to say they are good at finding the truth, wrote Richard A. Friedman in the New York Times. So what to make of this? I’m not sure. But here’s an idea that seems radical and a little frightening to me: if we’re not good at truth and we are good at meaning, maybe those of us who are merely trying to live our lives as best we can would do better to give truth a bit of a rest and pursue meaning.

  Take Kioni, for instance. He saw a figure in the corner of his bedroom and took it to be the Virgin Mary with a message he longed to hear. Was she there? I don’t know, but he was healed whether she was or not. A young man in my dream declared me innocent. I took him for Jesus and was emboldened. A voice spoke to Siva the Satanist. He took it to be Kali, and it began to refer him back to his own best judgment. Twelve-year-old Cat did a rain dance, it rained, and a lonely young girl thought herself powerful. I remembered asking Cat, about astrology, “How can such things happen?” And I remembered her answer: “I don’t know, hon. I don’t know.” And then she had said, “All I know is that they do happen.”

  14.

  Werewolves Just

  Want to Have Fun

  I flew to Kitchener, Canada, to attend the spring gathering of Otherkin, hoping to connect with the elves, who are perhaps the magical world’s most dedicated embodiments of gentleness and light. In Tolkien’s work, they are immortals of great beauty and nobility. In Gael Baudino’s Strands of Starlight, they are called the Fair Ones and live by the rule of love. They worship the Goddess and receive strength and direction from the stars. They refuse to cut trees and are so in tune with animals that they ask permission of their horses before riding them.

  Those are fictional Otherkin, of course. The living Otherkin are a loosely affiliated group of mostly young people who believe themselves to be magical and spiritual creatures: elves, werewolves, dragons, fairies, angels, hobbits. I was fascinated from the first time
I read about them in a Village Voice story by Nick Mamatas, which pointed out that Otherkin believe they age slower than others and heal faster. They feel alien and frequently have an aversion to iron and other new-fangled instruments of progress. Mamatas wrote,

  A number of Otherkin claim that they are especially empathetic toward others, and toward the ebb and flow of the natural world.

  Of course, once upon a time another species was widely believed to have this kind of connectedness: human beings. Before industrialization and urbanization, people depended on their feelings and intuition rather than on shrinks and Oprah. People lived in tune with nature, thanks to a largely agricultural existence, until the Enlightenment and its attendants—calculus, petroleum, and animal vivisection—turned the universe into clockwork, work into wage slavery, and the family into a demographic market segment. Elves are now what people once were, before we all got office jobs, health insurance, and credit card debt, before life became like running across a flaming rope bridge. Thanks to modern society, we’re all Frankenstein’s monster. None of us fit.

  The Otherkin are making a Romantic appeal for a better world and a better life.

  My first impression when walking into the hospitality room of their convention was, yes, these people are different. I felt a little like Han Solo walking into the bar. Tattooed people with dark figures writhing up and down their arms. Pale thin-faced kids with iridescent hair, blue, pink, purple, and green, overlaying rough-textured tresses of the deepest black, frizzing down their backs, falling in heavy wings around their faces or spiking around their heads. Pierced, studded, and clad in lumpy clothes, mostly jeans and black T-shirts. I was by far the oldest person in the room, more than twice as old as many. If anyone was a freak in this group, it was me.

  And yet in the most unobtrusive and sensitive ways, they paid mind to me. One caught my eye, held up his cup, raised his eyebrows, and murmured, “Can I get you some coffee?” Others sidled up to me with a soft “Hi” and then looked away, like friendly deer, too polite to nibble at my pockets but ready to befriend me. These were outcasts, geeks, misfits—their words, not mine. I would have never called them that, but they almost always made that point about themselves within seconds of meeting me.