Gods and Monsters

Erich Kurlander: A Supernatural History of the Third Reich

National Review, October 2, 2017

Adolf Hitler once argued that National Socialism represented “a cool and highly reasoned approach to reality based on the greatest of scientific knowledge and its spiritual expression.” If there are any people foolish enough still to fall for that, they will not enjoy this book. While the enthusiasm of some Nazi leaders, most notoriously Himmler, for the occult has been a staple of pop culture and the more disreputable corners of historical “investigation” for years, this volume shows that many others felt much the same way.

Kurlander depicts a Third Reich in which, despite uneven and often ambiguous efforts to rein them in, seers, magicians, and psychics flourished. Buddha was drafted into the master race, parapsychology “so long as it comported with ‘Nordic-Germanic feeling’” was recognized as legitimate, and the grounds were laid for an “Ario-Germanic” national religion as a syncretic (it wouldn’t all be Wotan) “substitute for Christianity.” Meanwhile, charlatan-historians and charlatan-folklorists hunted for proof that large swathes of Europe were part of an ancestral German homeland, charlatan-archeologists searched for evidence of “the Nordic origins of Asian civilization,” charlatan-doctors worked on monstrous human experiments, and charlatan-scientists struggled to develop weapons designed to draw on mysterious untapped electromagnetic forces. This arsenal was intended to include death rays, sound weapons, and anti-gravity devices — an absurdity and a waste made all the more grotesque by the contrast with the remarkably sophisticated technology successfully deployed by Germany during the war.

If the magical weapons proved harmless, the same cannot be said of the mix of superstition and pseudoscience that ran through the Nazis’ thinking about race, a mix that goes some way to accounting for both the intensity of their anti-Semitism and the meticulousness of the slaughter that followed. “Traditional” anti-Semitism rested on a distrust of difference reinforced by religious and then economic resentment. It generated exclusion, violence, and, as time went by, increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories. But the notion of Jews as perpetual enemies of an advanced “Aryan” race was a fairly new confection, dating back only to the mid 19th century.

Kurlander is an excellent guide to the complex and often conflicting “histories” of the Aryans’ origins, versions of which featured sex with angels, God-men from Tibet, a descent from heaven, moons made of ice crashing into the earth (the weirdly popular “World Ice Theory,” in which Hitler was one of numerous believers), and much more besides. These narratives also incorporated tales of a fall: The original Aryans had been scattered. Their racial integrity had been diluted by intermingling with “lesser breeds.” They had been preyed upon by — whom else? — the Jews, routinely smeared as parasitic and as a disease but also in terms that sometimes appeared to be more than metaphor: Hitler dubbed Jews the children of the devil and believed that forestalling the “Jewish apocalypse was our duty, our God-given mission.”

Kurlander contends that this supernatural dread was genuinely felt by “the Third Reich’s brain trust,” a claim that should be treated with some caution. When it comes to the supernatural, what people believe and what they say they believe are frequently very different — more so, indeed, than they might themselves understand.

When studying the translation of concepts of such malevolence into the deeds that became the Holocaust, it is easy to make the all too common mistake of treating the Nazis as a case apart, as an unparalleled eruption of evil. And, yes, there were aspects of the Third Reich — from the particular horrors it devised to an ideology that was as bizarre as it was sinister — that distinguished it from the other mass-murdering regimes of the last century. But take a step back and the similarities between National Socialism and its totalitarian counterparts on the left quickly become visible.

This is true of their shared “supernatural” dimension. All were essentially millenarian. Communist revolutionaries (nominally philosophical materialists despite a fundamentally mystical view of historical forces) would not have appreciated the connection, but it was there all right — the religious impulse is hard to discard — complete with the promise of a merciless sorting, after which the saved would march to a better world. Untethered to atheism, the Nazis could be more explicitly millenarian, referring to a “thousand-year” Reich. This number has, notes Kurlander (citing another author), “deep biblical overtones,” overtones to which he pays too little attention — a curious misstep in a history of this type, as is his relatively cursory handling of the Nazis’ knotty relationship with Christianity.

As Kurlander makes clear, the Nazis’ racial and occult obsessions did not come out of nowhere. The party that evolved into the National Socialists had roots in the Thule Society, a group formed in early 1918, focused on the occult, anti-Semitism, and, as Germany descended into defeat, politics. Its members sported a swastika in homage to the Aryans’ supposed Indo-European heritage — an important, if counterintuitive, theme that ran through much of esoteric German racism and was associated with the admiration for “Eastern” spirituality of the sort later felt by quite a few leading Nazis. The Thule Society (the name is a reference to a “Nordic” interpretation of the Atlantis myth) had in turn emerged out of a broader Germanic intellectual community that had wallowed in a swamp of Grenzwissenschaft (or “border science,” to give this nonsense — astrology, anthroposophy, “natural” medicine, parapsychology, radiesthesia, theosophy, and all the rest — a kinder name than it deserves), Aryan fantasy, and racial hysteria for decades.

There is no “right” side of history, no law that makes what we call progress inevitable. Other parts of Europe were also doing their bit to let the Enlightenment down. As Kurlander points out, it was a Frenchman, Arthur de Gobineau, who, writing some 40 years before the beginning of the Dreyfus Affair, did much to popularize the idea of a superior Aryan race. Anti-Semitism was far from being solely a Teutonic vice. Kurlander accepts that border science had scant respect for borders but maintains (without satisfactorily explaining why) that Germans were more despairing of the growing ascendancy of scientific materialism than most Europeans, and therefore more prone to succumb to the “re-enchantment” offered by border science. If that was true before 1914, it was even more so after a war that shattered any illusions about modernity — and a defeat that brought humiliation, chaos, and revolution in its wake. As Kurlander tells it, “hundreds of thousands of Germans and Austrians” bought “occult and New Age literature,” read “border scientific journals,” and participated in “astrological and theosophical societies, séances and spiritualist experiments.”

A key element in this collective derangement was the suspicion — still flourishing in the West today — that modern science had torn apart the harmony that had allegedly once existed between man, nature, and the divine, a breach that could be restored by a more spiritual, holistic approach. More often than not, the results — such as “biodynamic” agriculture (a more straightforwardly superstitious variant of organic farming) — were largely innocuous, but the fact that there was a biodynamic “plantation” on the grounds of Auschwitz is a reminder of where the retreat from reason can lead, a lesson that, judging by our own overly relaxed response to resurgent pseudoscience (the anti-vaxxers come to mind) or political attacks on the scientific method, has not been learned.

The dream of restoring a lost whole — even one that had never seen the light of day — was particularly toxic when applied to ethnicity. Imagining a heroic national past (even one with mythic or supernatural undertones) was not confined to Germans, nor was a sense of being a cut above other races, but in Germany, such prejudices were unusually intense. Kurlander never specifies quite why, but the comparatively late (1871) creation of a unified German state — a state then partly unraveled by the Treaty of Versailles — must have increased the pressure on Germans, including, in different ways, their kin in the multiethnic Austria-Hungary of Hitler’s youth or the truncated Austria that was left after World War I, to define who they were. Among the ways they responded was by emphasizing who was not German, most notably the Jews, reviled for the threat they were meant to represent to the unity of the Volk: They were an Other that could have no place in a nation that wished to survive as a nation.

Even if he might occasionally exaggerate the contribution of the specific outlandish beliefs he describes to the catastrophe that unfolded, Kurlander provides a careful, clear-headed, and exhaustive examination of a subject so lurid that it has probably scared away some of the serious research it merits. In remedying that, Kurlander offers a strikingly different and deeply disturbing perspective on the rise and subsequent trajectory of the Third Reich, and, most unsettling of all, on the numinous appeal of its Führer. Hitler both shared and channeled (some contemporaries referred to him as a medium) the discontents of a people so drastically detached from reality that they were seduced by a conjuring trick, albeit one in which the conjurer himself may well have believed. It was a dark magic so potent that it took an apocalypse to break the spell.

Medium, Not Rare

Mark Edward: Psychic Blues - Confessions of a Conflicted Medium

National Review, January 23, 2013 (February 11, 2013 issue)

The tale of the whistleblower generally follows a predictable arc. There is the dreadful misbehavior, and the whistleblower’s shamefaced confession of his part in it. The whistle blows. The wrongdoing ends. The penitent whistleblower moves on to a better life, book contract in hand. That’s not quite how it seems to have worked out in the case of Mark Edward. But there has been a book contract, and the result is Psychic Blues.

Its author, Mr. Edward, is a mentalist (yes, that’s the word) who has set the traps of junkyard superstition for decades, and the gullible, the lonely, the hopeful, and the dim have fallen right in. Amongst other roles, he’s been a dial-a-psychic (with the old Psychic Friends Network, an entity that does not emerge well from this book), a rent-a-psychic, a TV psychic, a party psychic (“somewhere between the popcorn vendor and the mimes”), a Psychic Revivalist (don’t ask), a palmist, an ESP-tester, a runestone cowboy, a banana-reader (oh yes), a nightclub act, a fortuneteller, a graphologist, and the organizer of a hoax involving the possibility of a three-way interspecies dialogue to be arranged by whales between them, us, and the extraterrestrials that are, as you know, now living in our ocean depths. He has held “quick but dramatic psychic readings for attractive single women” and he has read the paw-print of a dog (“Whitney has a lonely side to her personality”). But there’s a problem. As the subtitle of Psychic Blues signals, Edward is a “conflicted medium.” Those paranormal abilities he’s been touting? He believes that he hasn’t any, and nor, for that matter, has anyone else. As for the supernatural, well, “there’s nothing there in the dark.”

Indeed. But these apparently long-held beliefs did nothing to stop Mr. Edward from pursuing a charlatan career, something that is a touch difficult to square with the way he likes “to look in a mirror and see integrity staring back.” Clearly he is not only in the business of deceiving other people.

But he’s a trickster, not a monster. Many of his clients will have treated his readings as a game. Even those who didn’t won’t have got into much trouble with pronouncements that, as Edward describes them, relied on common sense and his own sharp intuitive gifts, or were of a generality so wide, bland, or broadly benign as to be helpful at best and safely opaque at worst. And sometimes people just like to talk. “A sideshow tent,” writes Edward, “is never far from a psychiatrist’s couch; there’s just more sawdust on the floor”; an exaggeration, to be sure, but not by too much.

Edward goes on to claim that he has “consistently opted to tell people what I feel in my gut is what they need to hear.” This is not the most clinically rigorous of approaches, and Edward’s early background (according to the Wikipedian oracle, it included stints in various absurdly named bands and time as a fire-eater) involves nothing in the way of scientific training. Then again, would the study of old Freud’s woo-woo have added much more? Cleverness and empathy can frequently be enough.

Thus he notes that, “as P. T. Barnum once said, there’s a sucker born every minute. And in the 900 business, every minute counts.” But he then throws in tales of occasions where he was a genuine friend, if not a genuine psychic. As Edward fielded call after call from the “lost souls” out there, he had, he maintains, a “long list of 800 help-line referral numbers” covering everything from alcoholism to alien abductions. He tries to direct the savagely abused Trish to a women’s shelter. His session on the line with Ginger Triggs (“another drunk badly slurring her speech”) turns out to be a life-saver. He discovers later that their conversation has been enough to persuade her to put down the loaded gun that (as, naturally, he had failed to divine at the time) she was aiming at her head while they talked. Ginger leaves her abusive husband, tackles her alcoholism, and starts training to be a nurse: “I had saved someone’s life.” Who could have foreseen that?

Enlightenment sorts, as well as the more conventionally devout, will be dismayed by Edward’s neatly drawn description of the mumbo-jumbo America in which he works, a credulous place where a psychomanteum (look it up if you care; trust me, it’s ludicrous) is technology, tarot is wisdom, and a pendulum is a lie-detector. But Homo sapiens is who he is. Edward wonders whether the New Age abracadabra represents a “terminus of rationality” or a return to our roots, a distinction that implies, rather optimistically, that we have left them. However bizarre, beliefs like those he was pushing — and their antecedents and, inevitably, successors — offer the meaning that many folk feel that they need, but cannot find elsewhere. Such beliefs will forever be with us. What matters is whether they are put to good(ish) use or bad.

The odds of the latter markedly increase when there’s a buck involved. In Edward’s trade there is plenty of room for “callous exploitation” of vulnerable prey. He quotes Ambrose Bierce: “Magic is a way of ‘converting superstition into coin.’” And this coin can travel in unexpected directions. Edward argues that it’s the phone company, not the psychic, that does best out of all those late-night sessions on the 900 line, followed by the network’s owner, not the psychic. Edward depicts a tough world in which most of his cohort, a carny crowd really — all “greasepaint and bulls**t” — eke their way through. In a reflection of the hardscrabble existences of those on whom they so often feed, they too can struggle to survive. He describes the skills, tricks, flimflam, and cheating that they deploy to make a living, something made easier by humanity’s willingness to believe just about anything, or, for that matter, to pay for a spooky thrill: “Sweat it out, miss a few details, and the audience is left with no other explanation than that you are the real deal.”

At times, this makes for a fascinating read — and Psychic Blues would make a useful gift for a friend susceptible to circling light-workers — even if it falls far short of the bleak, brilliant brutality of Nightmare Alley, the Truman-era novel (and movie) with which Edward would dearly like his book to be compared. Perhaps it takes fiction to do true justice to fables of the psychic con. And some literary talent: Despite some good lines and better insights, Edward is not much more of a writer than he is a clairvoyant.

He’s also pretty cagey. Like so many of his peers, he has peddled what he knows to be nonsense. Nevertheless he claims that he would never “outright lie” (note that careful “outright”). He never, he declares, claimed “to see spirits,” which makes one think that the séances he has organized (briefly referred to elsewhere in the book) must have been a little dull. Nor has he, he says, tried to cheat his clients by telling them only what he “sensed they wanted to hear.” Given the shenanigans to which he does admit, not least his confession that “hope” is what he sells, more cynical readers may not be entirely convinced.

They may also puzzle over the question of why he really reached for that whistle. The way Edward puts it, he was tired of his double life as both skeptic and seer, and became “committed to letting the psychic cat out of the bag.” This book, complete with a foreword by the Great Debunker, James “The Amazing” Randi himself, is part of that process, but some of those pesky cynics may still be suspicious. Could this conversion be just another routine for a conjurer still — notwithstanding an appearance at Buddy Hackett’s 70th-birthday party — looking to hit the big time?

That said, Edward has paid his skeptic dues. He has been on TV with Penn and Teller, he’s shown up at Skepticamps, he posts at Skepticblog, and he practices guerrilla skepticism, swilling what ought to be lethal quantities of homeopathic remedies and punking the infamous Sylvia Browne, “world-renowned” spiritual teacher, psychic, and author.

But Edward’s road to Damascus may have space for some U-turns. In a recent interview with the New York Times, he confirmed that he was “still involved” in some of his old psychic games. It’s impossible not to think that this particular whistleblower may be playing a decidedly ambiguous tune.

Meanwhile, just last year the septuagenarian Browne published her new book, Afterlives of the Rich and Famous, an update on how things are going for the glitterati on the Other Side — Princess Diana, Elvis, and Heath Ledger the newbie, to name but a few.

The gypsy caravan trundles on. Always has. Always will.

Ghosts in The Machine: Spooky looks at the Met.

Metropolitan Museum of Art: The Perfect Medium

National Review Online, October 31, 2005

I'm not altogether sure that New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is taking its new, entertaining, and utterly charming exhibition dedicated to photography and the occult, entirely seriously. At the launch party for "The Perfect Medium" last month, giggling guests sipped smoke-shrouded potions to woo-woo-woo Theremin tunes, as vast projected images of the séances of a century ago shimmered silver-and-gray against the walls of a great hall that could just, just for a moment, have been in Transylvania. Up beyond the sweep of the Met's Norma Desmond staircase, a cheery crowd thronged past antique photographs of spirits, charlatans, and strange, vaguely unsettling, effluvia. As I peered closely, and myopically, at a mess of tweed and ectoplasm, there was a sudden, startling "boo" in my ear, and a pretty girl who had crept up behind me ran off laughing. As I said, unsettling. As I said, charming.

Unfortunately, the exhibition's catalog is, as such volumes have to be, straight-faced, straight-laced, and saturated in the oddball orthodoxies of the contemporary intelligentsia. With truth, these days, relative, and all opinions valid, it would be too much to expect an establishment such as the Met to say boo to a ghost and it doesn't. In the catalog's foreword the museum's director admits that "controversies over the existence of occult forces cannot be discounted," but he is quick to stress how "the approach of this exhibition is resolutely historical. The curators present the photographs on their own terms, without authoritative comment on their veracity."

Fair, if cowardly, enough, but a chapter entitled "Photography and The Occult" sinks into po-mo ooze: "The traditional question of whether or not to believe in the occult will be set aside...the authors' [Pierre Apraxine and Sophie Schmit] position is precisely that of having no position, or, at least not in so Manichean a form...To transpose such Manicheanism to photography would inevitably mean falling into the rhetoric of proof, or truth or lies, which has been largely discredited in the arena of photography discourse today," something, quite frankly, which does not reflect well on the arena of photography discourse today. Still, if you want a nice snapshot of how postmodernism can be the handmaiden of superstition, there it is. Standing up for evidence, logic and reason is somehow "Manichean", no more valid than the witless embrace of conjuring tricks, disembodied voices and things that go bump in the night. It's a world, um "arena," where proof and truth are reduced to "rhetoric," and, thus, are no more than a debating device stripped of any real meaning.

Thankfully the exhibition, principally dedicated to photographs of the spooky from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is itself free of such idiocies. The images are indeed allowed to stand "on their own terms" and, on their own terms, they fall straight down. They are, quite obviously bogus, balderdash, and baloney, slices of sepia stupidity that are magnificent proof of our species' wonderful curiosity and embarrassing evidence of its hopeless credulity. They were also very much the creations of their own time. After over a century of manipulated images, vanishing commissars and Hollywood magic, we are better at understanding that photography's depiction of reality can often be no more reliable than a half-heard rumor or a whispered campfire tale. One hundred forty years or so ago, we were more trusting in technology, more prepared to believe that the camera could not lie.

And we were wrong to do so. On even a moment's inspection the Met's ghosts, sprites, emanations, and fairies are as ramshackle as they are ridiculous, but all too often they did the trick. The work of the depressingly influential William Mumler, an American photographer operating in the 1860s and 1870s, may include a spectral Abraham Lincoln with his hands resting on the shoulders of Mumler's most famous client, the bereft and crazy Mary Todd Lincoln, but, like the rest of his eerie oeuvre, this insult to John Wilkes Booth was based on crude double exposure (or a variant thereof). Nevertheless, the career of the phantoms' paparazzo flourished for a decade or so, even surviving a trial for fraud (he was acquitted).

Or take a look at the once famous photographs of the Cottingley fairies (1917-20), absurd pictures of wee fey folk frolicking with some schoolgirls in England's Yorkshire countryside. Once you have stopped laughing, ask yourself just why, exactly, the fairies resemble illustrations from magazines. Well, it's elementary, my dear Watson, that's what they were (one of the girls finally confessed in 1981), but to the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a man who dedicated an entire book (The Coming of The Fairies) to the topic, and to many other believers, these fraudulent fairies were the real, fluttering, deal. Fairies were, explained Conan Doyle, a butterfly/human mix, a technically awkward combination that even the great Holmes might have found to be a three-pipe problem.

To be fair, by the 1920s, the possibilities of photographic fakery were no secret to the informed, but this made no difference to Sir Arthur, a convinced spiritualist who was to receive his reward by returning, like Holmes, from the dead (within six hours of his death, the author had popped up in England, moving on later to Vancouver, Paris, New York, Milan and, as ectoplasm, in Winnipeg). Conan Doyle believed what he wanted to believe, and so did his fellow-believers. Photographs could confirm them in their faith, but never overthrow it.

That's a recurrent theme of this exhibition. Yes, back then people were more inclined to give photographs the benefit of the doubt, but again and again we are shown pictures that were demonstrated at the time to be fake, something that did remarkably little to shake the conviction of many spiritualists that the dear departed were just a snapshot away. Even the obvious crudities and photographic inconsistencies could be, and were, explained as a deliberate device of the spirits—apparently they wanted to appear as cut-outs, illustrations, and blurs.

And it wasn't only photographers who egged the susceptible on. The idea that some gifted individual can act as an intermediary between the living and the dead is an idea as old as imbecility, but, after the dramatic appearance of New York State's rapping and tapping Fox sisters in the 1840s, the Victorian era saw a flowering of mediums, only too ready to impress the credulous with mumbo jumbo, materializations, mutterings, Native-American spirit guides (some things never change), transfigurations, grimaces, and tidings from beyond. Some were in it for the money, others for the attention, and a few, poor souls, may have actually believed in what they were doing.

The Met's show includes a fine selection dedicated to those mediums at work. Tables soar, chairs take flight, men in old-fashioned suits levitate, apparitions appear, and ghostly light flashes between outstretched hands. Most striking of all are the visions of ectoplasm snaking out of mouths, nostrils, and other orifices quite unmentionable on a respectable website. These grubby pieces of cotton, giblets, and who knows what were a messy but logical development, manufactured miracles for what was, in essence, a manufactured religion. Like the photographs, like dead Walter's mysterious thumbprint (don't ask), they were evidence. The immaterial had been made material, and in a supposedly more skeptical age, that's what counted. In great part, the enormous popularity of spiritualism in the later 19th century was a response to the threat that science increasingly represented to the certainties of traditional belief. Science had made Doubting Thomases of many, but spiritualism, by purportedly offering definitive proof of an afterlife, enabled its followers to reconcile ancestral faith and eternal superstitions with, they thought, fashionable modernity and the rigors of scientific analysis.

That the science was junk, and the evidence bunk, did not, in the end, matter very much. What counted was that old superstitions had been given a new veneer, and, if that veneer soon warped into a bizarre creed all its own, that's something that ought not to surprise anyone familiar with the nonsense in which mankind has long been prepared to believe—and still is. Any visitor to "The Perfect Medium" tempted to feel superior to the credulous old fogies now making fools of themselves on the walls of the Met should take another look at the metaphysical shambles that surrounds him in our modern America of snake churches, suburban shamans, mainstreet psychics, psychic detectives, pet psychics, psychic hotlines, spirit guides, movie-star scientology, alien abductions, celebrity Kabbalah, Crossing Over, Ghost Hunters, Shirley Maclaine, resentful Wiccans, preachy pagans, and (though I know this won’t be entirely welcome) don't even get me started on Intelligent Design.

Oh yes, "Happy Halloween," one and all...

Spells in the City

National Review Online, October 31, 2003

Be afraid! Halloween is here. 'Tis the season to be sinister, a dank, dark time of poisoned candy, apples laced with razor blades, Jamie Lee Curtis reruns, Richard Nixon masks, feral children asking for "treats," and, in a quiet corner of my local Barnes & Noble, a table piled with books that go bump in the night. Histories of hauntings lurk near volumes on vampires and a stray copy of Living History that seems, well, strangely at home. O.K., O.K., I admit it. I put it there. There are tales of devils and stories of ghosts, depictions of demons, and everywhere, orange, black, and nasty, the pumpkin's evil grin. And don't forget the witchcraft, except it's "Wicca" now, and slicker. The wicked witches of old, warty, cackling, and vile, slinking out of deep, dark woods to cast spells over crops, tiny tots, and the unlucky peasants' luckless livestock have vanished, only to be replaced by even creepier creatures. Heaped like kindling (unfortunate simile, I know), are books by and about those legions of women (and it is mainly women) who have taken to "magick," chanting, drumming, howling at the moon, and delving into the supposed wisdom of a largely invented past.

And, make no mistake; broomstick surfers take themselves very, very seriously these days. The age of lovely Samantha Stephens, sparkling and funny, more martini glass than cauldron, has faded away, replaced in our duller, more earnest era by the likes of Buffy's dour Willow, self-involved, self-important and, although this might be expected in sorceresses who like to chant, drum, and howl at the moon, utterly lacking any sense of the ridiculous.

Even the promisingly named How to Turn Your Ex-Boyfriend into a Toad kit turns out to be for real (well, not the toad bit). Its publishers explain "that everything you need is right here in this fun kit: Use the mirror for a special spell to make yourself irresistible to everyone who sees you; the candles will help you to hot up your sex life and you can use the incense in its special toad holder to find your soul mate."  

Judging by the response of one Amazon.com reviewer (spelling has been changed in the interests of literacy) to the book on which the kit is based, toad holders may be just what the witchdoctor ordered:

This ...is a must-have for all women interested in witchcraft. Although some may see it as selfish, the revenge spells are great too, and they really work! (...Remember, when casting a revenge spell, you cannot inflict on your victim any pain that they have not given to you, so IT'S ONLY FAIR!). The "toad spell" is fantastic! I cast the "bring back my love" spell on my Internet love (who has been distant lately) and the next day he called for the first time!! The "lucky lottery" spell really works too...I can't wait to try every spell!

If mirrors, spells, candles, and toad holders don't catch their attention, younger readers can always pick up "the BIG book for Pagan teens," Silver Ravenwolf's Solitary Witch: The Ultimate Book of Shadows for the New Generation. Ravenwolf, "a Wiccan High Priestess and Clan Head of The Black Forest Family," has written everything, her publisher boasts, "that a teen Witch could want and need between two covers." That could be handy for some, but probably not for those who have already bought Ravenwolf's Teen Witch: Wicca for a New Generation, or her To Ride a Silver Broom: New Generation Witchcraft, or, even, sigh, Silver Ravenwolf's Teen Witch Kit: Everything You Need to Make Magick!. The kit comes complete with "six magickal talismans (including a silver pentacle pendant), salt, and a spell bag," and, "best of all," its box "converts into your own personal altar."

But, for all the Celtic cornpone, Samhain kitsch and olde-tyme gibberish, there are still some reminders that this is a 21st-century magnet for the modern, the mercenary, and the motivated. Deborah Gray, "Australia's good witch," is keen to help these strivers out. Her Spells to Get Ahead Pack: All the Magic You Could Possibly Need in One Witchy Pack is out on display, witchy pack after witchy pack after witchy pack (each complete with "pouches and phials to add power to your charms, plus a special magic crystal") to help "the ambitious girl" in her quest to "be gorgeous, be rich, be avenged, be a winner!" Be avenged? Good witches, clearly, are not what they were.

And as that ambitious girl hops from meeting to meeting, magic crystal in her hand and vengeance in her heart, she won't want to mar her gorgeousness with a musty volume of spells, curses, and spooky old recipes. She'll be more comfortable toting another work from the Barnes & Noble selection, The Pocket Spell Creator: Magickal Reference at Your Fingertips. "There is simply no other book that helps you create, finalize and perfect spells easier or better. And, of course, faster!" It's magick — 24/7 and portable.

And even those who are already familiar with familiars, rites, redes, and scrying will be sure to learn something from A Witch's Book of Answers, FAQ for the broomstick set, a fashionably diverse crowd nowadays with a membership that includes psi-witches, kitchen witches, traditional witches, Gardnerians, Alexandrians, fam-trad witches, fluff-bunny witches, hereditary witches, natural witches and hedgewitches. The advice from its authors, Eileen Holland ("Wiccan priestess [and] solitary eclectic Witch") and the intriguingly monomial "Cerelia," is loopy, but largely benign — if unlikely to win many prizes from General Boykin.

Adding to the merriment, their inclusion of an extract from Cerelia's poem Cycles & Rain is good both for a laugh and as a reminder that the broomstick has landed on one of feminism's wilder shores.

come out to the forest clearings mistletoe and rowan trees if you have the heart who will you find there? women with their menstrual blood flowing down their legs women stamping, women steaming women singing in the rain women winding widdershins and banging tambourines

But don't worry, chaps. Cerelia is quick to reassure us that not every man is "corrupt and evil" (thanks!).

Some of the answers that the book provides are, in a sense, fairly conservative, "it is not possible for a Witch to fly or change into an animal on Earth (except in a psychic sense)", but there's a broadminded nod to Fox Mulder: "It may be possible for Witches to do so in other solar systems." Other revelations include a potential explanation for the recent blackout (if light bulbs burn out and street lights go off when you're nearby, "that's just part of being a Witch"), a hint of schism, "Witches can really get into a snit about...how to dress candles," and more than a little mystery: "chaos magic is big but sloppy."

Mumbo jumbo? Nope, Witchcraft, we read, is "based on science," leading Ms. Holland to the entirely reasonable conclusion that the "universe would fly apart without desire."

There's a lot less certainty when the discussion turns to Gerald Gardner. Gardner, writes Cerelia, "holds the distinction of bringing contemporary Witchcraft to the modern world." Indeed he does. Somewhat awkwardly for those who maintain that Wicca is descended from an ancient cult of the Goddess, this retired British civil servant made most of it up sometime in the 1940s and 1950s. The eccentric Mr. Gardner's pastimes were not confined to witchcraft. He was also a keen naturist and a fan of flagellation. Cerelia grumbles that many of Gardner's "personal likes and fantasies" may have crept into the rites that he developed. Indeed they did. As she notes, the insistence that witches had to be "skyclad" (naked) while practicing their craft was "probably" (probably?) his idea, and her description of the initiation ceremonies in Gardnerian Witchcraft does seem to include a remarkable amount of binding, blindfolding and "whipping with cords."

Interestingly (although you won't learn this from A Witch's Book of Answers), Gardner was also a former disciple of Aleister Crowley, once infamous as "the wickedest man in the world." His mother just preferred to dub him "the Beast." Not unreasonably (well, young Aleister did kill his first cat at the age of eleven) she thought he was the spawn of Satan.

Now, that's what I call a story for Halloween.

Stupid Pet Tricks

National Review Online, September 30, 2003

Even at the best of times there is something about a monkey that mocks our delusions of grandeur, and this was not exactly the best of times. The monkey, burdened with the name of "ET" and the undignified habit of chewing his tail, looked first irritated, then puzzled, then sarcastic, and then, quite frankly, appalled, as a striking sixtysomething Englishwoman peered intently into his cage, called him "sweetie pie," claimed to read his mind, mentioned some personal matters that ET would rather not have had aired on national television and then smothered his hands with kisses. Poor ET had just survived a close encounter with Sonya Fitzpatrick, America's most famous pet psychic. As for Sonya, she knew what was wrong. How could she not? ET had told her. There was a parasite under that much-chewed tail (pointing at, her, well, tailbone, Sonya explained that she could feel the parasite's energy — and the itching — here) that the vet had somehow missed. Her solution? Very dilute, it turned out. Something homeopathic would do the trick, but there was, Sonya warned, another problem. ET was missing his pal. Amazed, ET's keeper explained that the luckless primate had been picked on by most of the other monkeys ("he thinks they are extremely rude," interrupted Sonya sympathetically), and so had been moved to separate quarters. She did, however, remember that ET had got on rather better with one monkey, the accurately but unimaginatively named, Buddy. Sonya's remedy once again came in very small doses — from time to time Buddy should be allowed to come over to visit. Case closed!

And that's how it usually goes on The Pet Psychic, Sonya's TV show, 45 minutes of critter clairvoyance, menagerie miracles, and fauna trauma that stand out as some of the more intriguing viewing on the Animal Planet channel, no mean feat against competition such as Amazing Animal Videos, Animal Cops, Animal Precinct, Emergency Vets, Pet Story, Pet Star, Judge Wapner's Animal Court, and Total Zoo. The Pet Psychic is weirdly compelling watching, a chance to gape at poor dumb creatures and the odd bond they form with Sonya. I'm referring, of course, to the humans that agree to appear on the show alongside their pets, weeping, sniffling, shyly laughing, or revealing too much of their lives — they make a spectacle far more entertaining than anything that our four-legged friends could ever provide.

There's Lisette, for example, flirty in her apartment as she confessed the details of a love life that has, Sonya concludes, thrown her marmoset, Peyton, into jealous turmoil (Peyton fancied Lisette's ex) or the strain on Dawn's face when she revealed that the relationship between her husband and "her soul mate" (Boogie the show horse) had degenerated into outright violence — Boogie had bitten the poor man's backside — leaving Dawn to worry that (to quote the Animal Planet website) that "his actions could prevent him [the horse, not the husband] from performing."

Sometimes, there are life-and-death decisions to be made. "There's something with the bladder," suggests the great psychic, nattily shod in her trademark riding boots and staring intently at Kramer the dog. Indeed there was. Kramer looked humiliated, but embarrassment was the least of his problems. There had been talk that it was time to put this pooch to sleep. Everyone began to sob, while Kramer lay flat on the floor doing his best to imitate a canine corpse.

In the event, Sonya prescribed understanding rather than the needle, but even if the verdict had gone the other way, Kramer would have had nothing to fear. To Sonya, animals aren't dumb even when they are dead. As she explains in her book, What the Animals Tell Me, "animals are spiritual beings. When they die, they do not go off into a void...they go to a place of unearthly beauty [after swimming through "healing waters"], where joy, peace and happiness reign supreme; where memories of pain, care and worries fade into bliss." Later, after, presumably, consulting the angels that await them on that "golden shore," they may choose to reincarnate or, perhaps, just come calling, "understand that they have not left us; they are still with us and they visit us in their energy bodies." One way or another, Kramer will be back.

This may be dodgy theology, but it makes for a happy ending, and a cheerful — if usually tearful — conclusion to the segment of the show dedicated to pets that have "passed into spirit." The messages from the other side are usually upbeat and reassuring. Kerry the spaniel was grateful ("thank you, thank you") for the fact that he was put to sleep, and there was "a tremendous amount of love" coming from Sasha, a sub-Scooby Great Dane, who was "very happy in the spirit world" and quite understood that Maria, her "mum," did not have, ahem, quite enough time for her in her final illness.

Don't worry: The show doesn't only feature conversation with pets that have petered out. As we've seen from the cases of Peyton and Boogie, Sonya, a blend of Dr. Doolittle and Dr. Strange, claims to talk to living animals as well as dead, thanks to her innate telepathic skills (Good news: We all have them!), brought out in her case by profound childhood deafness. As animals, she says, communicate telepathically (Forget Mister Ed or garrulous, unsubtle mynah birds), it was no surprise that they became young Sonya's closest friends. Sadly, a bloody incident involving geese, her father, and Christmas lunch led her to force "a door shut in [her] mind for what [she] thought would be forever."

The door opened again over 40 years later in, rather surprisingly, Houston, with the appearance of first an angel ("large wings...beautiful and gentle face") and then St. Francis, both of who told Sonya that she was going to be working to help animals. It was God's work. And who's going to argue with Him? Not Sonya. She put two and two together and made a TV show, a writing career, and, at a reported $300 per hour, a consultancy business out of her long dormant skills, telepathic or otherwise.

Sonya has plenty of satisfied customers. According to the Animal Planet website she has "helped more than 3,000 clients worldwide in many capacities — to achieve a better understanding of their pets, to solve behavioral problems, and to cure their animal friends of physical ailments." Her show is filled with guests who are astonished by her insights. How did she know that Bill the cat liked to play with a "round thing"?

Hmmm, I grew up with one Clumber spaniel, two unfortunate hamsters, and a budgerigar. Excluding, perhaps, the moment that the budgie was killed by the dog, they were all a remarkably uncommunicative lot, so, on the assumption that the whole thing isn't rigged, my best guess is that Sonya is guessing. Viewers aren't told how The Pet Psychic is edited. The hits are shown, but not, I suspect, the misses. As for those hits, well, Sonya is a highly intuitive woman and thus, despite the occasional odd coincidence, they are probably the product of either luck, carefully vague language, or skilful "cold reading," the old carny technique of questioning the subject (or on this show the subject's "human companion") in a way that throws up the clues needed to come up with some miraculous "insight." TV's John Edward (a well-known human psychic) almost certainly uses the same trick, and it is no surprise to discover that he (and his dogs) have been on Sonya's show for a "meeting of minds."

Most important of all, Sonya benefits from people's willingness to believe in what she has to peddle. There's nothing startling about this. We live in an age where superstition seems set to scupper skepticism. Society's reluctance to assert that anything is false — a product of postmodernism, politeness, and, ironically, the decline of some of the more established churches — has left us prepared to accept that just about any old nonsense could be true, the more exotic the better, particularly when it comes clothed in vaguely "spiritual" dress and builds on the existing beliefs of the more credulous among us.

Sonya's angels and the chatter from beyond the pet cemetery are tailor-made for such an audience, while, like any savvy modern spiritualist, Sonya throws in just enough "scientific" language (all that talk of "energy," and even Einstein rates a mention) for her fans to be able to comfort themselves — falsely — that their regression to the pre-modern is not yet complete. Besides, telepathy is practically a mainstream science in a time of alien abductions, healing crystals, and the Kyoto treaty. Only the most pedantic will want to challenge Ms. Fitzpatrick's claim that a telephone call with a pet's owner may be all that she needs to make that crucial connection.

There will be very few such challenges, for Sonya tells people what they want to hear. Her practical advice on animal care is benign and — once back in the material world — generally pretty sensible. The rest of what she has to say, normally delivered against a backdrop of the sort of soothing, simpering piano music more usually heard in a New Age bookstore, is deeply reassuring for anyone who can't be bothered to think too hard. It's a fashionably humble philosophy (we can learn so much from the simple wisdom of the animal kingdom), but conveniently egocentric, too: Not only do we have hidden powers (it's the telepathy, stupid), but in return for a little kindness (or, in the case of Sasha, benign neglect) our cats, dogs, iguanas, and parrots will love us now, and for all eternity. It's also attractively optimistic. We all get to Heaven. We don't really die. Our pets don't really die.

And even this show is probably good for nine lives.

Strange Brew

National Review, July 12 1999

THERE are no atheists, it is said, in a foxhole, but there may, it seems, be witches. Earlier this year, some soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, the country's largest military base, celebrated the arrival of spring in the way that they, as witches, enjoy. They prayed to the goddess Freya and then leapt over a fire straight into battle with Rep. Bob Barr, the Georgia Republican. In Barr's view, allowing these ceremonies "sets a dangerous precedent that could easily result in all sorts of bizarre practices being supported by the military under the rubric of religion.' What's next? Will armored divisions be forced to travel with sacrificial animals for Satanic rituals?" Democratic congressman Chet Edwards from, riskily, Waco, thinks that's wrong. He is quoted as having "serious differences with the philosophy and practices" of the witches, "but it would be terrible policy to require each installation commander to define what is a religion."

The Army, perhaps remembering the success of earlier pagan militaries (Roman Legions, 300 Spartans, the Mongol Horde), would appear to agree with Edwards. It has worked out an accommodation with the witches, or "Wiccans" as they prefer to be known. Wicca is recognized as a bona fide religion by the Army. Puzzled padres need only turn to the Army chaplain's hand-book. Religious Requirements and Practices of Certain Selected Groups, for guidance on how to deal with recruits who wish to put the war in warlock.

The Army is not alone. Wicca has been recognized as a religion by such authorities as the IRS, Michael Dukakis, and, of course, the courts. In Dettmer v. Landon (1985), the District Court of Virginia noted that Wicca "is clearly a religion for First Amendment purposes," a view that was upheld by the appeals court. That case concerned the right of prisoners to Wiccan ceremonies. More recently, Crystal Seifferly won her legal battle to be allowed to wear her pentacle, a Wiccan symbol, to high school in Michigan. Michael Dukakis? When governor of Massachusetts, he appointed Laurie Cabot the official Witch of Salem.

Which is a safer job than it used to be. In modern America, witchcraft is out of the broom closet and onto the Internet (with over 2,000 websites). The old popular image of Oz's Wicked Witch is melting, melting away, replaced by the sirens of Eastwick, the girls on TV's Charmed, and Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock in Practical Magic. ABC has a hit with Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Even Willow, the sensible one in the, er, cult show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, turns out to be a follower of Wicca. Among teenage girls, there's a Generation Hex, with witches becoming something of a role model.

And Wicca is big business. Its books sell well (the Supermarket Sorceress's Enchanted Evenings offers "75 simple spells from supermarket ingredients"). And many cities and towns can boast a supernatural store or two, even Brookland, Ark. (pop: 1,000), where some locals are protesting the opening of Dagda's Cauldron Occult Shop. But don't worry: If Dagda's not around, there's always mail order (Enchantments, Inc., say) for your Hemlock Bark, Twinkle Toes incense, and Squint Oil ("will bring home a straying mate. Secretly sprinkle on clothes").

How many witches are there in America? Accurate calculations are hard to come by (the Canadians, who like to count these sorts of things, recorded 5,500 "pagans" in their last census), but it is generally estimated that there are around 50,000 Wiccans in the United States, a total that is said to be growing fast.

This might surprise poor Bob Barr. Citing an image of George Washington at prayer, the congressman managed to suggest that witchcraft was somehow un-American. He could not be more wrong. For if ever a religion was tailor-made for a contemporary America in full flight from the Enlightenment and the Founding Fathers, it is Wicca.

It is, first of all, bogus. Its origins, we are told, stretch back to the dawn of time, to an age when men worshipped the Goddess. This explains why so many Wiccans communicate in Hobbitspeak, with olde worlde talk of Athanes, Stangs, Runes, Summerland, and scrying-glass. In fact, much of Wicca has a different source; the ancient and fabled culture that was Britain in the 1950s, where numerous Wiccan rites were thought up by one Gerald Gardner, a retired civil servant with a reported interest in nudism and flagellation. (So Wicca is approximately as old as Kwanzaa.)

But there was only so much that Gardner could do. He did put forward a few principles (such as the idea that anything one does, good or bad, will be repaid threefold), a bit of nature worship, and some "magick" (spelled with a k to distinguish it from the David Copperfield variety). In essence, though, he left his religion as something of a blank slate. Transplanted across the Atlantic, it was perfect for a society that attaches a cachet to "spirituality" but where many people don't want the inconvenience of difficult rules or dogma.

So, no coven has a monopoly on Wiccan truth. If you don't like one proposition, just find another, or set out on your own as a "solitary." To be sure, some more general principles are evolving. Lacking much of a structure, Wicca has proved even more susceptible to the fads and fancies of the late 20th century than its more conventional competitors. It tends to be loopily feminist (if you are a man, don't even think about going to the Circle of Aradia's Goddess Campout) and gushingly environmentalist.

And, temptingly, it is a fantasy so much more exciting than humdrum reality. All those Smiths and Browns and Joneses can reinvent themselves as Mountainwaters, Summerwinds, and Willowsongs. Best of all (this is America), new Wiccans become automatic victims, complete with their own personal holocaust. The old European witch manias have been dubbed the "burning times." Of course, most of those killed were not witches in any sense of the word, but no one seems to mind.

What they do care about is the privileged status this supposed victimhood might give them in our grievance society ("warlock," by the way, is held to be a derogatory term, so be careful). The old witch's cackle is being replaced with the litigant's whine. Bill O'Reilly of Fox News ran into complaints from the Military Pagan Network (an actual group, complete with its own website) when, in discussing the Fort Hood controversy, he insensitively referred to a "Bradley Fighting Broomstick."

Aftcr the recent tempest in a cauldron in Massachusetts, he should have known better. There, the unflattering image of a witch contained in a campaign ad run by Gov. Paul Cellucci helped provoke protests (there were, to be fair, more complex issues involved) by the Witches' League for Public Awareness and the attendance of 75 witches at one of the gubernatorial debates. Still, Cellucci won the election.

Into the Vortex

National Review, Dec 22, 1997

Center for the New Age, Sedona, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

Sedona, Arizona

It was time, explained the man in touch with an angel, to follow the joy and the excitement. I could take the sensible approach and leave by the door or I could choose excitement.

Why not scramble out through the window? Why not choose joy? Because I write for NR, that's why. I used the door.

Besides, he was exaggerating. We were in Sedona. And in Sedona it sometimes seems that there's nothing much that's very sensible. But that's unfair. Roughly halfway between Phoenix and the Grand Canyon, it is a nice little town with plenty of Norman Rockwell trimmings: an Elks lodge, air cadets, even a good diner or two. People come here to retire. At an elevation of 4,500 feet, Sedona enjoys a pleasant climate. It also boasts long meandering canyons, punctuated by massive sandstone outcroppings. Permeated with rust, their colors shift through the day, turning a deep red as the sun sets.

Sedona, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

It is the red rocks that draw the tourist crowds. And not only tourists. Back in the early 1980s there was a revelation. The rocks were exposed. They were not just lumps of rusty sandstone. They were vortices! There had been rumors before. But the full details are reportedly given to a Page Bryant, a psychic, by "Albion," a being. A vortex is a "power spot," a point where you can plug into the earth's electro-magnetic field and boost your own psychic energy. Got it? Many did, and they came to live in Sedona. There have been disappointments, of course. Bell Rock was supposed to float off to Andromeda in 1987. It is still here.

Sedona, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

And so is the New Age community. In force and, some say, backed up by spaceships. Vortex energy is UFO catnip. This is a place where Contact is old news and Men in Black is a home movie. Naturally, a saucer crashed here (in 1994, apparently) but this is no mere Roswell. That town has two paltry UFO museums and some scrub masquerading as a crash site. No aliens have come calling since 1947. Perhaps they prefer Sedona —and not just for the vortices. The Arizona town can offer better scenery and a metaphysical infrastructure that supports more than ufology.

Red Planet Diner, Sedona, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

So, if you want to visit a vortex, there will be someone to help. As an earthling, it is best to go on an inspirational tour. You can circle a medicine wheel, and chant thanks to the Great Spirit. It doesn't matter if you don't know the words. Everyone else seems to. "From Pagan Worship," explained a friendly lady from Indiana, matter-of-fact!y. Souvenirs? Sedona is a spiritual supermarket. There is enough here for the most demanding of metaphysical shoppers. Books, of course, and psychic tchotchkes for every purpose—candles for that meditative moment, crystals for healing, an inner-self manifestation bowl for, er, inner-self manifestation. The approach is ecumenical. You worship it and they will sell it. A statue of Ra? Or a pair of Birkenstocks? No cult is too strange.

Sedona, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

Or need too obscure. In Sedona there's a "lightworker" for every purpose, someone to tell your future and find your past (life, that is). And auras can be photographed (mine was red, slept too near a vortex).

In a way, this is just an updating of an old tradition, nothing more sinister than the old gypsy woman telling fortunes. But the New Age is now. It echoes and reinforces our pancredulity. When everything is OK and people believe that nothing can really be proved one way or the other, that's not much of a challenge. Our entrepreneurial mystics know this. They understand their market. They flatter our self-esteem.

While feeling our pain. The gypsy's caravan has become a clinic. This is a New Age for victims. The hocus-pocus has to "heal." Witches must be Welbys, psychic Kildares tending our inner children. And sorting out our cholesterol, while they are at it. There's a lot to do, but angels apparently can help out. Even the dolphins will have a go.

But, if Flipper flops, don't panic. Sedona is on your side.

Center for the New Age, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford

There's Alpha Body Relaxation Therapy, Aromatherapy, Axiationa! Therapy, Color Therapy, Cranio-Sacral Therapy, Regression Therapy, Reiki Therapy, Trager Therapy, Trigger Point Therapy, Vibration Therapy, and Coning. Coning? Used in Atlantis, apparently. Cotton strips are dipped into an herbal beeswax mix, rolled into a cone, and left to harden. The broad end of the cone is then set on fire. Smoke spirals down the cone and out through its tip, which is in the patient's ear. The idea is to draw physical and emotional debris (which, this patient noted, was black and gooey) out into the cone.

And why not? Atlantean medicine may have had a lot going for it. It is, after all, ancient. And that plays well in the New Age. Science doesn't. The New Age prefers the old ways. Particularly if they can be traced back to cultures where people wore robes or, best of all, were Native Americans. Except for an enlightened few (steps forward, lightworkers!), modern Americans find it difficult to accept this. Or so it is argued. Luddite, elitist, self-importantly self-hating. And where have we heard this tone before? Did anyone say EPA?

Carol Browner would fit in here. As a priestess perhaps, worshiping the Earth (or Gaia, as she is more respectfully known). For the New Age will be feminist. Judging by Sedona, at least, its psychics and its shoppers are mainly female. Women, we learn, are especially caring, intuitive, spiritual; all around better people than another sex I could mention. But then, in an era of soccer matriarchy, this is little more than conventional piety.

To be sure, Sedona can also be guaranteed to see some unconventional piety. But nothing too onerous. At a women's spirituality conference this past fall, there was plenty of ritual and ceremony, but also, as advertisements made clear, a focus on "optional nurturing activities"such as . . . "shopping, napping etc."

Napping? Someone should keep awake in case the Goddess shows up. That's the Goddess to you, figurehead of a supposedly "woman-centered" prehistory. Some say she may be returning to her domain. Far-fetched? Not if you believe that a small town in Arizona is built near the site of a great Lemurian city. Is the Goddess Gaia? Perhaps. But there is another candidate, a woman of great influence. And strange powers. A woman who can communicate with dead First Ladies.

Bill, be very, very careful.

Sedona, 1997 © Andrew Stuttaford