Tag: Witchcraft

When I first moved to Los Angeles in 2010 I ended up in the Ojai Hot Springs with some representatives of the “Spooky New Age Chick Community” I’ve referred to in other pieces. Somebody wanted to go check out the Krotona Institute of Theosophy and after a quick tour of the grounds we ended up in the bookshop. I wasn’t expecting to see anything that interested me but my eye landed on an affordable paperback edition of the Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis Regis or The Lesser Key of Solomon.

I hadn’t actually read the book before and it would end up having a profound effect on my life and the way in which I would come to view the world. My spiritual history is too rocky and complicated to detail here but I had been self identifying as a Witch for several years at this point. I had briefly looked into Wicca when a girl that I had a crush on in ninth grade had told me she was a practitioner. My impression was basically that if I wanted to practice a religion that was cobbled together from a mish-mash of Pagan traditions it would be easier to just become a Christian.

When Magic did become an important part of my life it was kind of like improvised music – I didn’t really have specific source material or role models, I was making it up as I went along. In a way I think it had always been a part of my life: I was named after a mythical bard whose parents were a Giant and a Faerie woman who had been enchanted by a Druid. My dreams were bringing me directly into supernatural landscapes where I made contact with supernatural entities.

I was reading Greek, Norse and many other types of mythology from a young age, I was very influenced by an illustrated copy of Dante’s The Divine Comedy that my mother bought me in third grade and adolescence brought on works by John Crowley, Neil Gaiman and other writers from the Vertigo imprint. Magical Thinking and Magical Ideation were part of my internal life but at the same time I wouldn’t have necessarily said that Magic was a thing I “practiced”. The things that brought Magic out of my head and into the physical world around me were LSD and an aesthetic enthusiasm for Folk Magic shops I saw around Chicago called Botanicas.

While I wasn’t working from any kind of concrete guide I realized from the very beginning that there were rules. I didn’t think that it was a good idea to try to use Magic to get anything specific or to make anybody specific change their feelings or behavior in any way. It wasn’t that I didn’t think these things were possible but rather that I didn’t think they were ethical. Another factor is that both sides of my family had instilled in me an insuppressible instinct for thrift and I knew that these types of Magic would simply not be cost effective.

Many practitioners of Magic talk about the importance of “intention” but for most of my practice I basically felt the opposite. If I wasn’t trying to do anything specific it didn’t seem like I should have any specific intention. While I recognize that Magic is fundamentally a tool in my case I was using it for ambience. Older readers will probably remember a form of Christmas Tinsel that I just learned is called Hair Tinsel. It comes in little y-shaped pieces that you can just kind of throw at the tree and they will hook onto the pine needles and put a little shine or glitter wherever they land.

This is the part where I have to admit that I was mostly attracted to and had a passion for Dark Magic. To many people Dark Magic is not and never will be a thing that is okay to do for any reason whatsoever. I figured that if I wasn’t actually pursuing power or trying to harm anybody it could be rationalized. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that it was something I was going to do no matter what so I needed to do it as safely and ethically as possible. I know that for many people this is still all going to sound incredibly irresponsible.

I wrote a song that I came to understand as a curse and performed it over and over again – first in Living Hell and afterwards as Bleak End at Bernie’s. It wasn’t aimed at anybody in particular but was rather a general invocation for suffering, darkness and chaos. Not that I wanted there to be more of these things or that I wanted to upset the balance of the universe in their favor – it was more that I saw these things as indelible and necessary and had felt inspired to serve as a conduit for them:

“Give me blood

Give me loss

Victory at hopeless cost

Wicked shelter

Vicious burden

Let the loose ends twist and tangle”

I had been accumulating amulets and talismans around my neck and somewhere in America a Thrift Store offered up a laminated circular badge with the words “WORLD’S WORST MAGICIAN”. I had been dressing like a cartoon witch, Baroque vampire or an assassin in an Elizabethan Play so the label was coming off a tad more suspect than it would have been perceived on someone with a top hat and sequined bow tie. People would ask me whether it was supposed to mean that I was inept or that I was evil and whether it referred to stage magic or Magic Magic.

The answer to these questions was invariably “both”.

While visiting New Orleans I brought a folding table down to Jackson Square and set up shop by the Palm Readers and Fortune Tellers. A piece of poster board advertised “BAD MAGIC” with bad luck charms, poison your dreams and unfortunate consequences offered on the underlying bullet list. I mostly got dirty looks and people asking me if I was serious or if it was a hidden camera prank show; a few people just wanted pictures as I had gone all out on a particularly colorful witch costume. One Midwestern Tourist actually took me up on it and asked for a bad luck charm. An improvised ceremony centered on wrapping burning hair around breaking twigs transferred the negative energies into a penny.

I told her to keep it in her left pocket until the next truly awful thing in her life happened after which she should throw it away. In a roundabout way I was actually trying to be helpful; we’ve all got bad luck on the horizon with or without a charm but she had a vessel to isolate and dispose of it once it had manifested. It was the most purpose-driven act of my Dark Magic career and the only one for which I received compensation. I told her to pay what she wanted and I can’t remember what she decided on.

The Lesser Key of Solomon changed everything for me. It reformed me and it gave me structure. I began to realize that the Dark Magic could be isolated within characters that I wrote musicals around and performed for brief interludes on stage instead of allowing it to permeate every aspect of my personal life. I didn’t mind talking about Astrology with friends who were interested in it but it had never exactly clicked for me. Classical Astrology was completely different. The supernatural had always presented as chaotic and lawless but I suddenly understood a system of Order presided over by Planetary Daemons and Archangels.

There is Magic in the art of Urban Planning but not all cities are equally occult. Washington D.C. stands out among the cities I have first hand experience of as the most obvious example of this. Streets are laid out in specific shapes for specific reasons and literal Temples are erected for the worship of ancestors and ideas. Los Angeles is a close second. My brother-in-law had given me a heavy beach cruiser bicycle that I inundated with talismans and used to travel at least thirty miles throughout the city on a daily basis.

Los Angeles plays a very specific role in the formation of myths and dreams within the American psyche that would not be possible without the use of Magic. The very name Hollywood refers to principles and practices the Druids had used to organize their world by nurturing spiritual power within sacred groves of trees. Of course Los Angeles is also home to The Magic Castle, the foremost destination for learning, performing and watching legerdemain and the Arts of Illusion.

With my new paperback grimoire as key and legend I was beginning to construct a system of personal wards and sigils informed by my own perambulations through the city. I lived near it’s center on Crenshaw and Washington and worked in a private tutoring center in Fox Hills next to the Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery. I tried to explore as much of the city as possible but was establishing patterns between Griffith Park, Exposition Park, the La Brea Tar Pits, Culver City and a course that connected my home and place of employment along the consecrated waters of Ballona Creek.

On the corner of West Slauson Avenue and Heatherdale Drive I came upon a collection of buildings I would come to know as The Temple of Mars. An oddly shaped and upwardly sloped patch of asphalt contained a closed down shop with stairs leading to the gravel roof and ritual platform, a wall presumably built for enclosing dumpsters and a double sided billboard. The structures were painted in a bright, martial shade of red and the marquee declaimed “NO WEAPON FORMED AGAINST ME SHALL PROSPER ISAIAH 54:17” to the East and West.

I always presumed that this complex had been most recently used as some kind of church but outside of the Biblical quote there wasn’t actually any evidence for that conclusion. From a utilitarian standpoint it seemed best appointed for a tiny used car dealership. For the two years that I lived in Los Angeles and worked on Slauson it would sit entirely vacant except for brief periods around the Winter Solstice when it was used to sell Christmas Trees.

I should add that it was used by me to conduct secret rituals under cover of night but the property’s owner had not been informed of this particular function and would have most likely not approved.

My years in Los Angeles were among the most creative and outwardly social of my life. I ended up on two complete U.S. tours as Bleak End at Bernie’s and in a short lived band called Dealbreaker but I was also hitting a festival circuit where I explored the theatrical. The solo musicals Castle Freak and Diving God and an Industrial setting of the major soliloquies from Hamlet I called The Chameleon’s Dish. I was happy to be in a good place to harness the creative energy which I believe to have originated from within my fundamental biological drive for partnership.

I came from what would be called an “intact household” which only means that my parents were married and remained so their entire lives. While I don’t idealize this arrangement or disparage other ones in my parents’ case it did seem to be the correct one. The only reason that I mention this is that it most likely played a role in the formation of my romantic perspectives on relationships. I had always dreamed of being married when I was older and in my earliest crushes I would fantasize about the names and personalities of mine and my crush-object’s future children.

I strongly believe in the serial monogamy model for adult romantic relationships and mostly had either closure or civil associations with my previous partners. There was an experience at the end of 2009 that I will get into in other pieces that had left me feeling vulnerable until some time in 2012. I had had a frustrating two years for relationships and it was beginning to erode certain aspects of how I saw myself. There was a woman who I knew socially and was attracted to but hadn’t necessarily thought about in that particular context. One night a show was ending near her home and she asked me:

“Do you have any diseases? I feel like having sex.”

While I’m not opposed to casual sexual interactions the crassness of the proposal and the other things I was experiencing left me feeling wounded. I talked to her about it soon afterwards and she told me that she was acting out of an impression of what men generally find exciting and desirable. She wasn’t expecting me to respond emotionally and in a way that seemed more feminine. We decided to try things afterwards because there was still mutual attraction and it seemed that we better understood each other.

I appreciated that she wore really nice lingerie for the encounter but we ended up not being compatible in that fashion. Touch did not convey intimacy between us but rather left us feeling isolated. She said that when I touched her she “felt like a canyon” – my experience was similar although I wouldn’t have phrased it in the exact same way.

All of this led to me decamping to The Temple of Mars in early 2012 when Venus was bright in the evening sky to perform the most intentional ceremony of my Magical career. I prayed to the planet Venus in the East and toward each of the other Cardinal Directions to manifest stable partnership for the rest of my life.

I carried a Library of Congress Tape Recorder for the Blind everywhere I went so I could listen to music on it’s rechargeable nickel-cadmium battery while I was riding my bicycle. The other elements of the ritual consisted of playing the version of Prologue/Anvil of Crom from the 1982 Conan the Barbarian soundtrack with the spoken monologue and using a cube of camphor to light a knife on fire and hold it aloft as an offering to the heavens…

By the end of the year the tape player had offered itself up as a sacrifice when a car hit me from behind on my bicycle and I was with the woman I have been essentially married to for the last ten years and plan to spend the remainder of my days with.

It is of course debatable as to whether or not the two things are directly related. The secret of every Rainmaker and Weather Magician is that sooner or later it always rains. Questions of Belief and Faith have never been particularly important to me in terms of Spirituality. We shape our world and are shaped by it and nothing happens differently than the way it did in this best of all possible worlds…

When I lived in Chicago I used to go to services at the Christian Science Reading Room because of the way the futuristic building had been designed to amplify the pipe organ. From the outside it looks like an inverted speaker cone and features a small cactus garden. The first time I went to a service the Speaker read some writings by Mary Baker Eddy on the definition of the term “Spirit” in the context of that religion.

On that particular day the words spoke to me but it has been difficult in the interim to relocate the exact passage. Ultimately it was an attempt to use words to create a rough approximation of something that is fundamentally indescribable, much like the familiar story of several blind men describing an elephant. I don’t think it was about the particular words so much as that Spirit was something I felt the Presence of that day.

In my own life these moments are rare and therefore extremely valuable to me. I spent a little over a year as a practicing Catholic but I don’t think that was so much about the power of Spirit as it was about the power of Ritual. There is no way to really know when or if I will have the opportunity to feel the Grace and Presence of Spirit in the future.

I’ve written this last sentence and erased it five or six times now and I think I have to accept that nothing will sound right here.

I can’t describe that kind of state when I’m not in it and if I were in it I probably wouldn’t be able to put it into words.

I’m just going to stop here.