Not In Kansas Anymore (17 page)

People with a strong sense of their daimon might invent fables that say, “I am not your fact. I will not let what is strange in me, about me, my mystery, be put in a world of fact. I must invent a world that presents a truer illusion of who I am than the social, environmental ‘realities.' Besides, I do not lie or invent: Confabulations occur spontaneously. I cannot be accused of lying, for the stories that come out of me about myself are not quite me speaking.” Hillman gives a number of famous examples.

Henry Ford liked to tell people that he had taken his first watch apart at seven and would sneak out of the house at night, steal the neighbors' watches, bring them home, and repair them. When he re-created his family's farm home, he put a little watchmaker's bench and tools in his bedroom. His sister Margaret didn't remember him slipping out of the house at night and said there had been no bench.

Leonard Bernstein claimed that his childhood was one of complete poverty and that the Boston Latin School he attended from seventh to twelfth grade had no music program. In fact, his family owned two houses, with maids and at times a chauffeur-butler, and he was in the school orchestra, sang in the glee club, and was a piano soloist.

Conductor Leopold Stokowski spoke with a Polish accent although he and both his parents were born in England. Only his
paternal grandfather was Polish-born. He loved to tell the story of getting his first violin at the age of seven from his grandfather. But his grandfather died three years before he was born, and according to his brother and his biographer, no one ever saw him play a violin.

All three men were constructing what Philip Roth calls a counterlife, a fantasy biography. Hillman says that reading a life backward gives us a clue as to why. They told these stories once they had fulfilled the destiny that their daimon ordained for them. Anyone who does that may feel that they were always “themselves” even in childhood and that their stories should reflect that.

“Something in us doesn't want to lay out the facts for fear that they will be taken to be the truth and the only truth,” Hillman writes. Everyone reads his life backward to one degree or another as maturity casts new light on personal history. Mark Twain said that the older he got, the more he remembered things that never happened.

 

K
ioni continued to feel Zora's spirit quite strongly after our trip. She took up residence in his house and went pretty much everywhere with him. Once he hit a patch of dark depression during which he could hardly get himself out of bed. He felt shooting pains all over his body that he suspected came from pins being stuck in a poppet. His energy was so low that he couldn't do work for his customers. He went to the doctor, who gave him a good report, but his symptoms didn't go away. He felt as though he were dying. Candles he was lighting for his personal rootwork were burning dirty, full of soot. He was in despair when he heard Zora say that he ought to bathe with her grave dirt.

“Frankly, I was thinking that I was a little off my rocker; but Cat being a wise Sage, urged me to pay attention to the impression I was getting,” he wrote in an e-mail.

“After several days of prayer and meditation, I was given two initiation rituals I was to perform with Zora's grave dirt. The first ritual was to be done under the waning moon…. Looking at the items Zora instructed me to assemble, I understood the first part of the ritual was to remove some quasi rootwork/voodoo being directed at me. The first part consisted of a strong herb root bath. After stepping from the bath Zora instructed me to rub myself down with her grave dirt! There I stood naked as the day I was born, wet and covered with dirt from my head to the soles of my feet. By the way, the dirt I used had been consecrated on my altar for several weeks and sprinkled with Florida Water—another of Zora's directives.

“After saving some of the previous bath water, I drained our oversize garden tub and filled it again. This time, I placed several scoops of Zora's grave dirt in a stocking and hung it below the faucet. The floral and citrus scent of the Florida Water wafted through the bathroom, transporting me to another time and place. I began to hear drums beating far off in the distance. Caked with Zora's grave dirt, I stepped into the bath again. The Holy Ghost fell on me and I began to speak in tongues as I alternately quoted Scripture and summoned Zora's presence, essence and power. Then I felt a sensation like knives being pulled out of my body. I could hear popping sounds similar to when one cracks their knuckles or pops their bones as we say here in the South.

“Sitting in the warm water, a dream from many years ago flooded to the surface of my mind. In the dream, I was crossing a wide river at the mouth of a beautiful waterfall; however I was not alone. I could see dozens of Africans helping each other cross the raging river by forming a human chain across it. A strong, dark hand took mine guiding me to the next person in the chain until I was standing dripping wet on the opposite shore. We were running to escape capture by the white slave traders.

“Suddenly I shot up out of the tub like a Poseidon anti-ballistic missile. My arms were raised to the heavens and joys flooded from my soul like the water cascading down a waterfall. The drums were louder, or perhaps it was my heart—I don't know. But I do know I heard these words, which cause me to fill with emotion as I share my story. I heard ‘Son of Zulu, welcome home. Son of Zulu, the heavens belong to you.'”

Afterward, Zora instructed him to write down what had happened and to send it to someone trustworthy. When he asked why, she said, “You need to make a record.” He sent it to me. A few days later a member of our hoodoo class wrote the following: “As I learn hoodoo, I also learn more about the spiritual practices in South Africa through my aunt who lives with me (she's a Zulu and believes in the ancestors and teaches me things even though she's Anglican). I ask her questions all the time and she tries to answer them.”

When Kioni read the word
Zulu,
which had never been mentioned in our class, he felt the hair rise on his body. This was the confirmation. This was the reason that Zora had asked him to write down his experience and to send it to someone. His experience wasn't just his imagination. It was real.

Kioni later wrote in a public e-mail, “So, the rootwork done by that certain nefarious person has been removed. I feel pity for this person because I have never done anything to harm anyone, anywhere at anytime in my life.” Then, directing his attention toward the person who had tried to hex him, he wrote, “Jealousy of fellow rootworkers will be your downfall, mark my words. Also, from this day on be warned, I will fight fire with fire. Zora scolded me for not having done so sooner because I suffered needlessly.

“I issue a warning here to all who seek initiation into hoodoo. Make sure you are right in your heart before you begin. If you are committing adultery and fornicating like a dog, you will be in mor
tal danger. If you cheat people in business, you will be deceived in like manner. If you lie, spread rumors and stir up strife online or offline, expect that energy to come back to you triplefold. However, don't expect Zora or the Ancestors to greet you with open arms nor impart to you their knowledge and wisdom. The spirit world is not to be toyed with.
Hoodoo is not a harmless game!
You have been warned.”

T
he magical and the muggle are separated by a river, wide and deep. I could see across, but I couldn't get across, and for a long time I couldn't figure out how other people did. There would come a moment in each interview when I'd squint, shake my head, and ask, “Why? Why do you believe this?” They would try to tell me, and gradually I came to understand some of it. I found four bridges that connect the worlds of the magical and the mundane.

The first bridge is the way of the child. Many people experience magic in childhood. Until the age of puberty, children see the world in what adults would consider quite magical ways. For instance, they recognize no clear dividing line between animate things and non-animate things, according to Piaget. They may agree outwardly with adults who say that animals can't understand and things cannot feel or act, but buried within them is their “true knowledge” of how the world works. Attuned to the spirits within stones and
trees, clouds and wind, animals and toys, children believe that they can find answers to their deepest questions and access hidden forces of great magnitude in the world around them. Some outgrow such ideas; others never let them go. Perhaps the difference lies in the intensity of a child's interaction with magical stories, or maybe it comes from experience.

When Cat Yronwode and her friend did their rainmaking ceremony on that Berkeley rooftop, and the clouds came rolling in over the bay, and the terrible drought was ended, young Cat must have felt incredibly powerful. An older person might have quibbled about the link between Cat's act and the resulting rain, but she was a child who had read books about magic since she was able to read. Those books were as important to her as anything that happened outside them and maybe more real. Her rain dance confirmed the truth of that perception.

As she grew up Cat continued to read, and she remembered almost everything she read. Her husband calls her a polymath, which seems deserved. When she told me about the astrological reading that warned her something bad lay in the future for her first child, I did not doubt her experience. I wondered how she explained it.

“How can planets affect individual humans' lives?” I asked. I knew she would have thought about it and might have an answer that would go on for a long time.

She replied, “I don't know, hon. I don't know. All I know is that they do happen.”

As for magic, she said, “You can influence the course things are going to take. I've seen it.” In addition, there are connections between people and events that have no apparent cause, she said. “You dream about something, and it comes true. I'm just faced with these things happening. They happen. They keep happening, and they are directed.”

For people such as Cat, accepting magic is merely a matter of acknowledging their own experience instead of accepting what others tell them. I suspect one reason more people are quietly opening up to magical and spiritual explanations is that the old verities are not holding. Doctors, scientists, preachers, journalists, and government officials have all told us that they know the truth without a doubt, but they don't, and when we discover that, we are like betrayed children, suspicious of received wisdom ever after. We have all become Doubting Thomases, the disciple who had to touch the nail holes in the risen Christ's palms. We want something we can feel ourselves. There's nothing irrational about the choice. In a world where almost every day brings some new information to contradict facts we would have bet our lives on just yesterday, we fall back on what we've seen with our own eyes, felt in our own hearts. Our new perceptions may be wrong, but at least they are firsthand.

A magician named Daniel told me he picked magic over science in the eleventh grade when talking to his favorite science teacher about a local woman who collected herbs and could heal cuts. He had known the woman for much of his life, and she had taught him about the healing power of plants.

“It was a very eerie thing to see,” he said of her ability to heal cuts, “more so to actually feel if she was working on you. If you had a deep cut, she could hold her hands over it and chant a sort of prayer or bunch of syllables and the bleeding would stop, and it would sort of pull itself back together over the course of ten minutes or so. In another five to ten minutes, if she kept going, it would seal and heal to a light scar.” The science teacher dismissed Daniel's story as impossible and declared it trickery.

“I realized that modern science doesn't actually study all things. Only those that fit within its current theories,” he said. “So I
decided to follow magic rather than science, even if it meant washing dishes for the rest of my life to make ends meet.”

The second bridge to magic is the way of suffering. Those who take this path, adults usually, come to magic after being so knocked down that they need something miraculous to lift them up. If something does, and it could be just some little piece of grace, some moment or message of solace that they would have ignored before, they grab hold. Rationalists will say their new openness is a pitiful kind of coping, but magical people and religious people have long understood that pain and hardship can be ways to reach another consciousness, to forge a new kind of hope that isn't so reliant on whatever fortune may bring.

When they train followers, mages and gurus of all kinds may try to create breakthroughs by putting their students into situations that will thrust them outside everyday routine and thus wake them up. American Indians use vision quests and ordeals. Zen Buddhists use immobility while meditating. Saints have used poverty, hunger, cold, and pain. Russian mystic George Gurdjieff, who settled in the United States, used work. His students would be put to some physically taxing task such as digging in the garden, and he would keep them at it through misery and pain. If they didn't quit even when they felt they couldn't go on, their habitual, predictable ways of being would break down and their subconscious minds would begin to work.

For a woman I'll call Joanie, life itself provided the impetus. She would not have followed a guru or listened for a moment to the idea that she needed waking up. She was perfectly fine, thank you, and her life was perfectly wonderful. When I talked to her, she never used the word
magic
, she used the word
this
, meaning her new belief system. Joanie would never think of herself among the magical people. She's too normal, middle-class, suburban, and self-directed for
that. She takes no classes, does no spells, reads no witch books, and belongs to no magical group. Nevertheless, she is among the most common type of magical person in America today.

If magic hadn't come to Joanie's rescue, her story might have been a sad one indeed. She was married for twenty-seven years to a man she described as her best friend. They met when she was fifteen and he was sixteen. Romance developed slowly, which is, of course, one of the best ways if you're looking for a long-term relationship.

So they married, had a child, established careers, bought a home. There was little in their marriage to quarrel about, and so they didn't. With regard to money, they were especially compatible. They were frugal, never left more than a 15 percent tip, and gave almost nothing to charity. This suited Joanie well since her mother had lived through the Depression and passed on all her fears. When Joanie was a child, her allowance was a nickel, which she saved. Eventually it was raised to a quarter, which she also saved. When she married, those nickels and quarters had grown to $1,200, which she was happy to bring into her marriage as a sort of dowry and testament to who she was. Her husband approved entirely.

When she was a year away from retirement, they worked out all the finances. They would sell their home and buy a condo. With the money left over, they could travel more. They were planning with their usual foresight, agreement, and good sense.

Then one day she noticed that her husband was a bit grumpy. He wasn't a moody man. So when the bad attitude lingered for two weeks, she was somewhat alarmed. One weekend afternoon she invited him to lie down on the bed with her. When he did, she lay beside him, stroking his arm. She mentioned that he seemed out of sorts.

“What's the matter?” she asked.

He didn't answer.

Still stroking his arm, she reassured him. “You know you can tell me anything.”

With those words, which any reader will hear with a shudder of presentiment, Joanie opened the door that would change her life forever.

“Joanie,” he replied, “I love you, but I'm not in love with you anymore.”

Hardly original, but it was sufficient to get his point across.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

He was.

“Is there anything I can do?” she asked.

There wasn't.

“Is there anyone else?”

He said no, but that, of course, was a lie. His girlfriend was a woman about their son's age. They would be married not long after the divorce.

Joanie began crying, took to her bed, and didn't get out for a week. One day she decided to kill herself. She'd read a book by the Hemlock Society: sleeping pills to start the job and a plastic bag over her head to make sure it was finished. When she told her husband of her plan, he said, “Everyone will blame me.” Joanie recalled that reaction, some years later, with only a bit of wryness in her voice.

But luckily she told some friends of her plan. They said they would be right over, and she was to do nothing before they got there. They nursed her through the worst of it and began introducing her to the idea that she could deal with life in her “earthly” self or with her “higher” self. That was the beginning, rather modest, but enough.

I met her a year after her divorce. She was living alone and pretty certain that she'd never marry again. One afternoon we took
a trip to Chicago. On the way back, she began reading the numbers and letters on license plates. “Oh, there's an 8 and 9 and 2,” she would say in a loud, excited voice. And then she would say those numbers meant that angels were in charge of the unity of the earth, or something like that.

Then she might laugh and clap her hands and say, “I see a 2 and a 4 and a 2.” And that would be God, and God doubled, and then God again or some such thing.

I kept driving, looking straight ahead as though she were suffering from some religious form of Tourette's syndrome and the polite thing to do was to ignore her. Once, as I slowed for a light, I glanced over. She was beaming.

“I know it doesn't mean anything to you, but it does to me. To me it's the universe giving me messages. Wonderful messages.” The numbers took their meaning from ancient magic. The idea is that numbers and certain words have great power because they were given to us by God. Other people believe numbers correspond with other essences and set up currents of force. In many magical systems, spells or chants are enhanced if lucky numbers are used; 3 and 7 and 9 are commonly among those.

On the way back from Chicago, when we stopped for ice cream, she told me that she still missed things about her marriage but she wouldn't go back. Losing it had freed her to become who she was meant to be.

“Who's that?” I asked.

It took her a while to answer, and she didn't use this term until later, but basically she told me that she had become an “earth angel,” a conduit for love. She told me a number of things that she now did, from being kind to phone solicitors to telling troubled children about the rule of love. That next day she was scheduled to help a friend whose life had gone out of control because of her bipo
lar disorder. The friend was being evicted because she had let her apartment become so clogged with newspapers and other junk that her landlords considered it a fire hazard. Joanie had hired movers to come in and help. That impressed me greatly because most people run away from the mentally ill. They frighten and annoy us, and they often won't listen to reason.

But the most impressive change was that Joanie doesn't feel the same way she did about money. She now regularly gives large tips. She is also giving away half her retirement income to a needy family. “I'll do that until I die,” she said. “I don't see it ending because I don't see their need ending.”

Her transformation started when she read a book called
Soul Passages
by Gary Zukav. Then she read books by Deepak Chopra, books by Wayne Dyer, books about Kabbalah and Buddhism and new physics. She marked passages with different colors and decorated the margins with exclamation points and hearts and stars. The more she read, the more Joanie began to believe that her higher, or true, self is part of a larger force and that nothing that ever happens to anyone is an accident. In fact, everything that happened to her was working toward her good, the divorce included.

“There's not one person who knows me who hasn't benefited from the divorce,” she said. “It's made me a better person.”

The idea of a higher or true self is common in magic. The English mage Crowley called the higher self “true will.” One of his famous dictums was “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” which sounds pretty scary and often was the way he applied it. But he also said that will must be under love. If he had followed that idea, his own life might have turned out better.

Joanie doesn't think of what she's doing as her will, but she describes it as what she most clearly and passionately wants to do. If she had stayed married, she would have never been allowed to follow
this higher self, she said. The universal force that she sometimes calls God supports and communicates with her in all sorts of ways—through numbers, of course, and through what others call coincidences, but which she realizes are not. “There are no coincidences” is one of the magical world's most commonly repeated statements.

Hawks are also part of the magic. When she sees them, she believes she's receiving an affirmation. She believes they've been sent for her to see them. She believes they know it, and she thanks them.