Editor’s Note: I tend to use my coffee breaks to scan through The New York Times, and came across this article by Cintra Wilson on the rise of New Age practices like astrology, tarot and witchcraft, with a particular focus on the latter. Hope you enjoy it. –RA
HANDFULS of articles have been written since the economic downturn on how, during such times of anxiety, business booms for psychics, astrologists and card readers.
Enchantments, the witchcraft store in the East Village, recently moved down the street from where it had been a landmark since 1982. Last year, my friend Nancy bought me one of its customized Solar Blast candles for my birthday. After lighting it, a flurry of life-altering changes suddenly occurred — which was, at least, an amusing coincidence. I developed a more absorbing curiosity when Nancy gave me a second Solar Blast this year, and this one, too, seemed to be a cosmic throw-switch, releasing yet another mother lode of life-changing events.
“Years ago, I had been dumped by my boyfriend and was out of my mind,” Nancy told me as we waited at a cafe for Enchantments to open (a bit later than the posted store hours). “This chick walked up to me at a party and told me she was �drawn’ to my �grief mask.’ ”
I chortled.
“I was in that place where you’ll insinuate yourself on anyone, so I told her my story,” Nancy continued. “She told me that I had to go to Enchantments.
“I said, вЂ?Wait … aren’t they, like, Wiccan?’ And she said, вЂ?Do you want your boyfriend back, or what?’
“I went. First I got a tarot reading from this absolutely stunning witch, with big blue eyes, tons of black hair, a thick Bronx accent and a huge pentagram necklace. I was weeping, and she was so comforting! So maternal! She said, �I am going to give you something very hard core.’ She comes back with this fire engine red candle in the shape of a penis. She carved my name and the guy’s name and our birth signs into it, then anointed it with oils.”
And?
“We ended up getting back together. But briefly. I realized the relationship was hollow and ridiculous. This witch gave me an object to project power on, but what the experience really gave me was the ability to see how much power I had on my own. I didn’t need the guy. I got an idea of how to confront my own pain and darkness, and transform it into something positive.”
Another friend of ours, an actress in her 50s, bought a candle “dressed” to assuage her anxiety about a big acting gig, which she landed. (She soon became the muse of a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, earned several film roles and was finally able to quit her day job. Coincidence?)
Two witches were on duty when we visited the shop: A young man who could be the fraternal twin of Wednesday Addams, who preferred to be known only as Ricky (occultists, it seems, are often cautious about giving their full names); and Kathy, a fetching, gum-chewing platinum blonde in a spiked belt, black jeans and a T-shirt sprayed down the front with escaped glitter.
A financial crash, Kathy agreed, is a good time to be in the occult business: “We’re always asked to do love stuff, but lately, it has been way more about jobs — people looking for work and protection of their monies.”
Nancy and I were shopping for luck for our literary projects.
“If you’re a writer, Mercury is your patron god,” Ricky said. “He’s all about speed, speech and commerce. New York is his city. There’s a big statue of Mercury at Grand Central station.”
Our candles were selected by color, then spoonfuls of powdered incense were burned in the glass candleholders while Kathy and Ricky took out their daggers and carved “magickal seals” into our candles from a guidebook of drawings kept in plastic sleeves in a three-ring binder. Once the candles were carved, they put on latex gloves and rubbed custom oils and glitter into our candles.
“We are so O.C.D. about oils,” Kathy joked. “We get them from, like, 15 different companies” because, she explained, one could have an awesome almond but a peppermint of inferior quality.
I had to ask: “Where do you guys stand on Satan?”
Eyes rolled. The Enchantments store policy is explicit on the Web site: “We DO NOT carry any items dealing with black magick.”
“In nature you see both the light and the dark,” Kathy explained. “In other cultures, they embrace it all. We discourage people from doing certain kinds of spells, like, breaking up other people’s relationships.
Manipulative magic always backfires,” she continued. “Everything you do comes back to you threefold.”
“You don’t want to mess with the order of things,” Ricky said. “Believe me, I know.”
Has increased knowledge of the Craft affected their daily lives?
“It’s great at parties,” Ricky claimed. “Whenever I’m drunk in a bar, I walk up to people and say, вЂ?I bet you’re a Taurus … I can just tell.’ Tauruses always have really nice bags.”
“I feel so held and loved!” said Nancy, who was being crawled all over and kissed by the store’s resident black cat, Medea.
Any success stories, lately?
“A few weeks ago, a bunch of women I made fertility candles for a couple years ago all came in to show me their kids,” Kathy said.
“We each have our talent,” Ricky said, explaining in colorful language that his specialty was helping those in need of sex. Finishing Nancy’s candle, he dropped a red Boy’s Night Out candle into its glass holder with a musky whooff of incense, for a client who buys them every Friday.
A black-clad man with a unicursal hexagram around his neck came in to show Ricky an out-of-print book on Sex Magick. “Hey, I told your thelemite joke the other day!” Ricky said.
“What’s the thelemite joke?” I asked.
“How many thelemites does it take to screw in a light bulb? None! Because Aleister Crowley never left instructions.” (A thelemite, I learned, is a practitioner of “thelemic magic.”)
Our candles, wrapped in paper, were each $20 — a small price to pay, we felt, for the thrill of consorting with unknown forces, and the blessings of Mercury, god of New York. To bastardize Frank Sinatra: Hey! Wicca or Jack Daniel’s … whatever gets you through the winter.
I have lots of witchy/pagan/magickal friends, and I love ’em all. But I am not allowed to use these media for various reasons. One is that what I *reallyreally* want is not amenable to manipulation or symbolic evocation. It wants to come on Direct, like a traintrack built between your eyebrows. Two is that ‘desire’ comes in a number of registers and when invoking one, you never know which register (intensity) is gonna make its way back to you.
I do think its good to know the techniques, just as it is good to read music or Croatian – and my practices may hum along, but I rarely (veryvery rarely) pick up the instrument.