Not In Kansas Anymore (18 page)

So that you won't think she's entirely without any judgment in these matters, know that she tests these messages in certain ways. Sometimes when she's driving, she asks to be shown certain combinations of numbers. And she is. Then she demands another proof, and it comes. Or maybe it doesn't. But she only counts the times that it does. She's aware that the forces can't be made to perform like a trained bear.

Once she was driving home talking to a friend on her cell phone. He mentioned that two hawks were flying in a field near him. “Oh, you always get to see the hawks,” she said. “I never do.” When she walked in the door of her house, she looked toward the back deck. A hawk was sitting on the rail.

Joanie, once a super-rational atheist, now lives in an enchanted world.

 

K
ioni was also brought to magic by hardship, but he was never a super-rationalist. How could he have been? A child with such a hard beginning needed more than reason to keep him alive. When he was three years old, he awoke one night, went to the window, and looking out saw that the sky was blood red. He'd never read the New Testament book of Revelation, but it was a scene right out of the Book. He realized later that he'd received the
anointing on that night. The vision told him that his future lay in serving God.

He was always a hard worker, which is a good thing for a future magical person to be because without hard work to back it up, a lot of magic won't be effective, I was told time and time again. He shined shoes, worked in a laundry, and in the summer visited relatives in the South, where he picked cotton. He rode his bike about town from one job to another, leg brace flashing in the sun.

He sang at school and in the church choir. His cousin Pearlie Mae was a staunch churchwoman who took him every week. He came to Jesus and began to preach. After his brief life of crime, he strayed from the fold for a while. Then he went to the Pentecostals and became their kind of saved.

During the next years he and his family moved from one troubled church to another. Kioni would be sent in as the hatchet man, he told me. His early hardships gave him an edge that made him good at the job, but after the blood-letting, the churches were ready for him to move on. Kioni and Marilyn's last church was a tiny congregation in Georgia, in a town that didn't seem to have been disturbed by civil rights even forty years after the fact. That was the low point, or so they thought.

So he moved his family back to Florida and turned to evangelism. That went well. A black Pentecostal preaches as long as the spirit moves and that can be a long time. He dances and shouts, he huffs and he puffs, he sings, he moans, he weeps and whimpers. He thumps that Bible and rocks that pulpit. He pulls down heaven and stomps down hell. It takes a mighty spirit to do it, a rushing wind, a man filled so full of the Holy Ghost that it won't let him stand still. Kioni's clothes were often dripping when the service finally ended. Some weekends he came home with a thousand dollars of love offering in his pockets.

One morning after he'd preached a long night, he found that he could hardly rise from his bed. He was exhausted beyond anything he could remember. His legs twitched and trembled. And he began to hurt. It wasn't long before he couldn't hold up to the preaching anymore. No one knew what was happening to him. Post-polio syndrome was just beginning to show itself. People who believed that they had been totally cured were finding that the disease wasn't through with them yet.

First he needed a cane, then a wheelchair. When the revival money ran out, there was no more. They lost their house. Many people who had once been their friends were now nowhere to be found. Worse even, some were saying that this new affliction was a sign that something wasn't right in Kioni's relationship with God. If he got right with the Lord, the Lord would take care of him, they said. He knew their thinking. He'd told others the same thing. Preached it even. Now it was being preached back at him, and it was a bitter message.

Kioni's license in the Assemblies of God came up for renewal. The fee was $90. He called the central office and told the administrator that he didn't have the $90 for a license. He needed the money to feed his children. He was told that the fee would have to be paid. He replied that he could pay the $90, but the church would then have to help him feed his family. He said the president of the local assemblies replied, “We're not in the social services business.” And that was that, the end of his time as an Assemblies of God minister. Once again, the family had reached the low point. They thought.

Soon he was so weak that he couldn't rise from bed. Marilyn had to help him get to the bathroom even. One day he was lying in so much pain and despair that he couldn't do any more than call out to the Lord. So he did. He called out asking “Why?” basically the same question that the disciples had asked of Jesus before he healed
the man born blind. They asked, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

And as he asked the question, Kioni remembered that Jesus answered, “No one has sinned, neither has this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.” Right there it may sound as if Kioni was on his way back to the Pentecostal church to be risen in glory before the multitudes, but that wasn't what happened. Instead, he kept lying there, but now he was filled with hope.

He began to gain strength. He took his GED test and passed. He enrolled in Brevard Community College. He took a class on comparative religions. The class was taught by a local marvel named Lin Osborne. Kioni's Pentecostal ire was roused many times by the new ideas the professor was teaching, but Dr. Osborne generally kept students like Kioni from fastening onto anything by simply presenting his information, making links between the world's religions, bringing together the ancient myths with current thought, and then letting everyone make their own conclusions.

Kioni began concluding that African religions might be all right to study, maybe even hoodoo. He began to ask about dim memories from his childhood. Hadn't an aunt been some kind of healer? Wasn't there some talk of hoodoo as a way of reaching out for the power that God offers?

Pearlie Mae reminded him that an aunt had cured Jaybird, his cousin who couldn't walk. Jaybird was not much more than a baby when her mother took her to the aunt. The old woman said to dig a deep hole and lower the child into it, feet first. Then pack the sand around the girl until she was buried up to her neck. Leave her there for twenty-four hours, the hoodoo healer said, and then dig her up. She'd be able to walk. And so she could. She walked with a crooked
kind of gait like a bird, which is what earned her the name Jaybird, but she did walk and is walking still.

In the early 1980s, when the Internet was just beginning, Kioni and Cat started exchanging e-mails. He began studying magical texts, became a Rosicrucian, delved into Hermeticism, and a modern hoodoo man was born. His new name came after he prayed that God would reveal his true name. The Bible says that God knows our names before we're born. Kioni had several names in his life. His mother's, his father's, and his cousin's when she adopted him. He wished to know the name God called him. So he asked. And one day when he was sitting on the bank of the Indian River, where he often goes to meditate, a goddess appeared to him in a vision. She told him that his name was Kioni.

“Is that all?” he asked. “What about a first name?”

“Christos Kioni,” she replied.

That was a little hard for Kioni, then known as Ken, to deal with. Christos would be son of Christ. Wasn't that aiming a bit high? No, not at all, she told him. We are all sons and daughters of Christ. So he took the new name and launched a new life.

 

I
was beginning to see why separating magic and religion was such a difficult task. The ways people come to believe in magic were sounding quite religious. One way smacked of advice given by Jesus: become like a little child. Another way was the route of suffering and trial, also a religious favorite. The third bridge from the mundane to the magical is even more religious. I call it the way of the rebellious disciple. I've noticed that a certain type of person, often a young man, pursues spiritual questions with unusual tenacity and fervor. They read every book that promises wisdom, quest for every answer that seems promising, debate every believer, and push
themselves to great extremes. Many go from one religion to the next before finally finding something that seems to fit. Often they are so well versed in different paths and so iconoclastic that they put together various aspects of different faiths to carve their own unique path. My reasons for calling them rebellious is obvious. I call them disciples, even though they may end up following no one system, because they are so inherently and stubbornly dedicated to spiritual matters.

As an aside, individualism is a particularly Western way of questing, according to scholar Joseph Campbell, who traces it back to the Knights of the Round Table. When the knights were sent out to look for the Holy Grail, they were instructed to go forth making their own paths into the forest. Campbell points to this as a mythological call to independent seeking rather than to following a path set out by others. That call to independence defines the Western way of faith and sets it radically apart from the Eastern faiths, in which gurus are more important in finding the right way.

Sam Webster has the kind of intensity and the background often seen in rebellious disciples. He holds a master's of divinity degree from Starr King School for the Ministry, which is part of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley; he was once a Pentecostal, incorporates Buddhism into his practice, and is now a leader in a high magic group called the Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn in the San Francisco Bay Area. Like many other magical people, he has extensive experience in a number of magical systems. His group is set apart from other Golden Dawn groups because it publishes the ceremonies and secrets of the Golden Dawn system of magic. For them the term “open source” is the same manifesto of free information that it is in the computer world. Putting Golden Dawn teachings on the Web was a controversial move that has inspired some amount of enmity, even though anyone who wants to
know Golden Dawn magic can buy copies of its secrets at secondhand bookstores.

Sam's group wants to normalize high magical practice, which they believe could benefit everyone. It would make people happier, more sure of their purpose in life, and more in tune with reality. Golden Dawn's high magic would put them in touch with the Cosmos, the Absolute, the Divine, call it what you will, and engage them in consciously completing the Creation. Sam calls this the Work, short for the Great Work, which Jews call
tikkun olam
, or the healing of the world. Sam and his group of magical mystics believe people have specific work to do while on earth. Conversing with their Holy Guardian Angel, which is the goal of Golden Dawn teachings, helps them to know what they are to do and how to do it.

The Open Source Order descends from a magical group formed in England in 1880. It relied on Masonic and Rosicrucian teachings as well as a mysterious enciphered manuscript that supposedly contained ancient wisdom. Called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the group counted among its members Irish poet W. B. Yeats, the infamous Aleister Crowley, and Irish revolutionary Maud Gonne. The Golden Dawn magical order, like Wicca and Hermeticism, was founded on what appear to be fabrications, or at least misunderstandings.

A Mason named W. Wynn Westcott claimed that he translated the enciphered manuscript, which led him to correspond with a German woman named Anna Sprengel, who was supposedly a member of an ancient Rosicrucian order. Rosicrucians, another magical group with a shadowy past, were a secret magical group that used Hermetic teachings. Sprengel empowered Westcott to establish a similar group. No one but Westcott was ever in touch with Anna Sprengel, and in later years many people came to doubt that she existed. The origin of the enciphered manuscript is also in doubt.
Westcott may have written it himself. The Golden Dawn rose to about eighty members and collapsed in the early part of the twentieth century. Crowley went on to form his own system, which still exists and is now known as the OTO, short for Ordo Templi Orientis.

The Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn includes women, as did the original Golden Dawn, but unlike the original, it does not rely on Christian teachings. Instead, it is distinctly pagan. Sam's reasons for becoming pagan go back to his days as a Pentecostal, when he was a “sock puppet” for Yahweh, as he puts it. Among the gifts of the spirit that Sam possessed was giving prophecies, which are thought to be the direct words of God funneled through a human. As Sam describes it, God would pull part of him out of his body and insert Himself so that he was in God and God was in him. God would enter through the back of his head, take over his mouth, and then say whatever he wanted to the church people. Sam, filled with love, bliss, and total adoration, would remember nothing of what had been said, but he did remember snatches of being in what might be called a realm of the gods. He could sense the presence of the other gods and goddesses, and over time he came to think that they were better than the one he was serving. They all had dark sides, but only Yahweh delighted in setting his followers one against another, Sam said.

“He's quite violent. He enjoys the war amongst his children. He has set three nations against one another, and he has enjoyed that for several thousand years. I do not respect that, and no other kinds of deities have done that,” Sam said. So he decided that he would worship other gods. Giving them his energy and devotion would make them stronger and Yahweh less strong.

“It's the only way to vote,” he said.

The Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn has about thirty members. Among them are an anthropologist, physicians, secretaries,
a bookstore owner, technicians, and computer programmers. As one member pointed out, their membership is as mainstream as a Masonic lodge in some ways. One spring afternoon they allowed me to attend an initiation ceremony for the first level of magical training. Inviting me was so controversial within the group that some people didn't attend the event. Those who did were apprehensive about being mocked but nevertheless eager to talk about what they were doing.