Quest Magazine

Fly a Kite

By Betty Bland

Originally printed in the Fall 2009 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Bland, Betty. "Fly a Kite." Quest 97. 4 (Fall 2009): 126.

Theosophical Society - Betty Bland joined the Theosophical Society on April 30, 1970. She helped to establish the Mt. Gilead, North Carolina Study Center. Mrs. Bland served as President of the Theosophical Society of America from 2002 to 2011. One thousand kites in the air at the same time! This was the goal of the Wheaton Sesquicentennial Commission when they put out an all-call for kite flyers from the area to gather in one of the local parks last spring. They were hoping to set a world's record for the most kites flying at once. The winds didn't cooperate, but it was a festive gathering drawing kiters of all sorts together for the grand attempt. Although the count was a mere 800, the event created a myriad of shapes and colors dotting the skies.

Besides the lack of cooperation from the winds (and we live near Chicago, which is known as the Windy City), one reason the event didn't meet its goal may be that our general culture isn't very savvy about kiting. We can find some kites in the stores, but rarely do we see many in the air. This is probably because there is a real art to kite flying, and what may seem like a simple hobby in fact requires a certain level of skill.

Think about all the parts of a simple kite that have to be in balance. First is the framework, which has to be tough, light, balanced, and flexible. It has to be carefully designed, since it is the structure on which all else hangs. Then the wind-resistant covering that holds it all together adds lift, design, and color. Yet even with these details carefully crafted, the kite cannot get off the ground if it does not have a tail to keep it in balance.

These elements of a kite can be likened to the spiritual life. The structure or framework is composed of the familiar Theosophical triad of study, meditation, and service. These are the supporting spines of our practice, without which any effort will fall flat. The study of the Ageless Wisdom, against which we can measure our experience of nature within and without, provides the strength of understanding that can carry us through the winds of fortune.

The more we know about the universe and its laws, the more we begin to see the necessity of an altruistic spirit. A greater understanding of our own nature creates in us an absolute realization of our unity with all. Without this generous and open-hearted attitude, our spiritual kite will not be structurally sound and will finally collapse under the weight of its own self-preoccupation.

Yet study and service alone lack cohesiveness. They require the strong binder of meditation, which holds these elements together in a meaningful way so that they are firmly anchored in our consciousness. Meditation creates the still insight through which our own individuality can unfold its beautiful design. We are like snowflakes: no two are exactly alike. Meditation reaches deeply within to tune into that interior essence so that each one of us is able to express his or her own distinctive character.

With these foundations well in place, we are on our way, but without the covering to provide the lift, we are still earthbound. That covering can be compared to the essential element of inspiration. Study, meditation, and service can be quite consistent, but until the element of inspiration is introduced, our practice can fall flat. This is a part of the beauty and art of building our soul's kite. The sources of inspiration are myriad and unpredictable. For some, it may be Taizechanting or singing the Indian devotional songs known as bhajans; for some it may be the veneration of Jesus, Buddha, Allah, saints from the past, or present-day teachers; for others it may be ringing bells, lighting candles, or praying in a chapel. The colorful practices of the traditions we hold dear call to the depths of our being, resonating with the intrinsic patterns of our individual natures and drawing us toward the heights. These multifaceted practices, which bring inspiration through beauty and devotion when observed in full consciousness and joined within the framework of study, meditation, and service, create an inner structure that will be sensitive to every breath of wind from universal spirit.

The caution to be sounded here is that we all have to realize that the shape and color of our kites are not the only kinds there are or should be.  Besides making this a very boring and regimented world, this would essentially tie our kites down to self-centeredness, pride, and exclusivity. These will never fly!

Finally, the remaining element required for an effective kite is a proper tail to provide balance and steady orientation as the winds blow to and fro. I think we can say that the element that provides this balance is the attempt to live by high ethical standards each and every moment of our daily lives. This consistent development of character steadies our efforts and generates the necessary stability.

All of this we do in preparation, but we never know when the wind will catch us and lift us to the heights. We have to be diligent, trust the wisdom of those who have experience in the flight of spirit, and remain willing to keep trying and learning. If our practice and inspiration are soundly based and our daily lives reflect all that we know, we will be holding our souls aloft in readiness. We will be prepared to catch the smallest breeze.

If we are prepared and ready, the spirit will move us and lift us into the heavens. And if we Theosophists as a group can work together sharing knowledge and helping one another, then we can have an assortment of many-colored kites of consciousness held in readiness so that we can have many more than a thousand spirits joined in heart and breath, dotting the cosmos and shielding humanity.

Build your spiritual kite carefully day by day and hold it ever at ready so that in the twinkling of the universal eye, we will unite as a band of worldwide servers. The many shapes, designs, and colors of our beings united in spirit will offer far more than a spectacle of color or shapes filling the sky: we can be the critical mass to improve, beautify, and, yes, even transform our world.

The Magi's Root

 

By Mitch Horowitz

Theosophical Society - Mitch Horowitz is the editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin and the author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation; from which this article is excerpted. He and his wife are raising two boys in New York City.  Copyright © 2009 by Mitch Horowitz. Published by the arrangement with Bantam, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.Frederick Douglass had no use for fantasies or folklore. Born a slave, he was separated as a young child from his mother—a woman who walked miles from another plantation for the rare occasion of rocking him to sleep or giving him a handmade ginger cake. He grew to be a self-educated teenager determined not to play the role of whipped dog to a cruel overseer. But in January 1834, on the eve of his sixteenth birthday, Douglass found himself delivered into the hands of the worst of them, a Mr. Covey—known as “the breaker of Negroes.”

A few years earlier, Douglass had been a domestic servant in Baltimore. There the burdens of slavery—the hunger, the beatings, the daily humiliations—were at least tempered by the surface civilities of city life. Indeed, his Baltimore mistress had taught him to read, until the lessons were stopped by his master. “If you teach that nigger how to read,” the man told his wife, “there would be no keeping him.” But Douglass discovered ways to keep educating himself through whatever books or newspaper scraps could be found. Soon, however, the Baltimore family rearranged its household, and Douglass was abruptly returned to plantation life. His new master in St. Michaels, Maryland, was suspicious: Could a young man who had tasted city living still work the fields? To be brutally certain, at the start of 1834 he “loaned out” Douglass for a year to Edward Covey—a petty, cruel farmer who used every opportunity to beat his new charge on trumped-up offenses. The beatings became so severe that, by August, Douglass sneaked back to his old St. Michaels master to beg for protection. His plea was rejected—and the youth, still bruised and caked with blood, was turned back to Covey’s farm. Once there, he hid all day and into the night in the woods outside Covey’s fields, not knowing what to do.

The days that followed, however, turned out differently than anyone could have imagined. To the shock of Covey, Douglass did return to the farm—and when beatings came, the youth stood up and fought back. For two hours one morning the men struggled, and Covey could not get the better of him. Embarrassed by his inability to control a teenager who finally said enough, the slave master was forced to back down. For Douglass, it was a moment of inner revolution from which he would never retreat: His act of self-defense had freed him in mind and spirit, leaving him to wait for the opportunity when he would finally be free in body as well. It is one of the most remarkable emancipation narratives in American history.

Yet tucked within the folds of Douglass’s inner revolution there lies another, lesser-known drama. It arises from deep within African–American occult tradition—and it is an episode that Douglass would revise and downplay between the time when his earliest memoirs appeared in 1845 and when he published a more widely read account a decade later. It is a window on magic and slave life. And, to find it, we must return to the darkened woods outside Covey’s farm.

As Douglass hid in the woods on Saturday night, he was discovered by another man in bondage, Sandy Jenkins—someone Doug lass described in his memoirs as “an old adviser.” Sandy, he wrote in 1855, “was not only a religious man, but he professed to believe in a system for which I have no name. He was a genuine African, and had inherited some of the so-called magical powers, said to be possessed by African and eastern nations.”

Sandy Jenkins was a root worker. He practiced an African–American system of magic and folklore that drew deeply upon western and central African religious tradition, Native American herb medicine, and sources as diverse as Jewish Kabbalah and European folklore. It was called hoodoo. White observers would often mistake it for the Afro–Caribbean religion properly called Vodou in Haiti and Voodoo in the American South, particularly in Louisiana, the home to Voodoo’s nineteenth-century high priestess Marie Laveau. Reporters and anthropologists would routinely conflate Voodoo and hoodoo—but the two were very different.

The religion of Voodoo grew from the traditions of the Fon and Yoruba peoples who occupied the West African coastal states. These were the men and women of the “middle passage” who were hurled into slavery throughout America and the Caribbean. In the Fon language, the term vodu meant “deity” or “spirit.” The Fon-Yoruba practices also morphed in the religion of Santería, an Afro–Caribbean (and, today, increasingly American) faith that often associates ancient African gods with Catholic saints. In Santería, for example, the great spirit Babaluaiye, guardian of health and sickness, is frequently associated with Saint Lazarus, a patron to the ill. This is the same “Babalu” that Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz serenaded to the unknowing ears of I Love Lucy audiences.

Hoodoo was not a bastardized Voodoo or Santería; it was something with roots all its own. “The way we tell it,” wrote novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston in her 1935 Mules and Men, “hoodoo started way back there before everything. . . . Nobody can say where it begins or ends.”

In practice, hoodoo draws heavily upon botanical and household items—plants, soaps, minerals, animal parts, perfumes—objects that a displaced people adapted to find their way back to the old rituals and spirits. Sandy Jenkins and other root workers were so named for their virtuosity with herbs and roots, objects believed to hold hidden powers that could be tapped for protection, healing, love, money, and other practical needs. And here we return to the first narrative of Frederick Douglass. He receives advice—and something more—from Sandy in the woods:

He told me, with great solemnity, I must go back to Covey; but that before I went, I must go with him into another part of the woods, where there was a certain root, which, if I would take some of it with me, carrying it always on my right side, would render it impossible for Mr. Covey, or any other white man, to whip me. He said he had carried it for years; and since he had done so, he had never received a blow, and never expected to while he carried it. I at first rejected the idea, that the simple carrying of a root in my pocket would have any such effect as he had said, and was not disposed to take it; but Sandy impressed the necessity with much earnestness, telling me it could do no harm, if it did no good. To please him, I at length took the root, and, according to his direction, carried it upon my right side.

There is no record to bear the matter out, but the object Sandy pressed upon Douglass was very likely a rock-hard, bulbous root known within hoodoo as John the Conqueror, or sometimes High John. John de conker is the pronunciation found in oral records and song. It is the ultimate protective object, used for everything from personal safety to virility, traditionally carried by a man rather than a woman. In the magical tradition of “like bestows like,” the dried root is shaped like a testicle. There is historical conflict over the species of the root: Botanical drawings differ among the catalogs of old hoodoo supply houses. But the most careful observers and practitioners of hoodoo today agree that the likeliest source is the jalap root, which dries into a rough spherical nub.

Armed with what he warily called “the magic root,” Douglass set off for Covey’s farm. Expecting God-only-knew-what fate, he received a strange surprise. It was now Sunday, and Covey—ever the upright Christian—was downright polite. “Now,” wrote Douglass in his first memoir, “this singular conduct of Mr. Covey really made me begin to think that there was something in the root which Sandy had given me.” But on Monday morning, things darkened. Mr. Covey, it seemed, was a Sunday Christian. Once the Lord’s day of rest ended, the devil in him returned. “On this morning,” Douglass continued, “the virtue of the root was fully tested.” Covey grabbed Douglass in the barn, tied his legs with a rope, and prepared to beat him. “Mr. Covey seemed now to think he had me, and could do what he pleased; but at this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolved to fight.” Here began the historic turnaround in Douglass’s life: “I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.”

Ten years later, in 1855, Douglass—now a free man and internationally known as the voice of abolitionism—published his revised and expanded memoir, one that sold an extraordinary 15,000 copies in two months and helped galvanize antislavery feelings. Douglass’s second memoir repeats, yet subtly alters, the episode involving Sandy, Covey, and the root. When grabbed by Covey, Douglass writes, with emphasis in the original: “I now forgot my roots, and remembered my pledge to stand up in my own defense.” In a detail absent from his first memoir, Douglass notes that on the previous day he had made a personal vow to “protect myself to the best of my ability.” Gone now was the observation, “from whence came the spirit I don’t know.” Was Douglass some kind of a half believer in hoodoo, intent on covering his tracks? Not exactly. The greater likelihood is that the same man who served as the moral anchor of the abolitionist movement wanted no one to misunderstand the true nature of his life story: His was an inner triumph, a realization of personhood against inconceivable odds, a transcendence in thought that permitted him to see himself as a man of agency and as an actor possessed of rights under God. Indeed, Douglass—a proponent of education and self-improvement in the deepest senses—would almost certainly have considered hoodoo and folk magic as distractions at best and at worst as chains of delusion. In an 1845 footnote that he also repeated ten years later, Douglass distanced himself from the question of hoodoo and magic: “This superstition”—root work—“is very common among the more ignorant slaves. A slave seldom dies, but that his death is attributed to trickery.”

But in both his earlier and later memoirs, Douglass proved resolute in his unwillingness to slam shut the door on the matter or to qualify the veneration he felt for Sandy. “I saw in Sandy,” Douglass wrote in 1855, “too deep an insight into human nature, with all his superstition, not to have some respect for his advice; and perhaps, too, a slight gleam or shadow of his superstition had fallen upon me.” Sandy, the “clever soul,” the “old adviser,” and the “genuine African,” provided a rare measure of wise counsel in a chaotic and brutal world. His authority was grounded in an occult tradition that no slaveholder could enter. In this way, above all others, was Sandy a man of magic—a medicine man in the most profound sense.

Mitch Horowitz is the editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin and the author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation; from which this article is excerpted. He and his wife are raising two boys in New York City.  Copyright © 2009 by Mitch Horowitz. Published by the arrangement with Bantam, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

 

Devic Consciousness

By Dora Kunz

Originally printed in the Fall 2009 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Kunz, Dora. "Devic Consciousness." Quest  97. 4 (Fall 2009): 152-153.

Theosophical Society - Dora Kunz née Theodora Sophia van Gelder was a Dutch-American writer, psychic, alternative healer, occultist and leader in the Theosophical Society in America.When teaching meditation, I always suggest that we should try to listen to the sounds of the brook, birdsong, or the wind in the trees, for by so doing we open ourselves to the inner harmony of nature. It is the realization of this harmony that brings us in touch with the consciousness of the devas.

Devas should not be thought of merely as spirits which animate nature. They are much more than that, for their consciousness reaches to the heights of buddhi, or direct insight into the archetypal ideas upon which the patterning of physical forms is based. They have a unitary concept of vital energies. Nature spirits, on the other hand, work directly with growing plants, interacting with these and with each other through the devic consciousness.

At Pumpkin Hollow, for instance, working in the garden sensitizes us to the different rhythms of the growing plants, and thereby we gain a sense of relationship not only with the devic consciousness which presides over the land, but also with the archetypal pattern they embody. If you are in harmony with that pattern it permeates you right to your fingertips, and then you can do with your hands what is right and good for the plants. When they are sick or ailing you get a sense of imbalance in their vital energies, and then you instinctively know what to do to correct it.

If you want to become sensitive to plants or trees you have to lose your sense of separateness. Setting aside your ego, you become aware of the vital energies you share with the rest of nature, and feel their rhythm. For example, when listening to the brook you must really listen, without letting ideas or mental images interfere and occupy your mind. It is through the rhythm of pure sound—which is eternal—that you can be genuinely influenced. This is the reason why Buddhists chant the mantra Aum. Through listening, we feel ourselves part of the eternal rhythm, one with the flow of the river. It is like being washed clean of our distractions.

The ways we look at life give us what is called "eye knowledge," seeing things out there, separate from ourselves. This leads us to make judgments based on our reaction to the external aspects of things. We see nothing but the form, which at once either attracts or repels us. Devas, in contrast, perceive life in terms of energies; to them the harmonics and rhythms of nature are most important.

In my own work, I have learned to think of life in the same way, because I perceive disease not as a malfunction of a particular organ, such as the liver, but rather as a loss of synchronicity in the body's vital rhythms.

The development of sensitivity, whereby you can begin to feel at one with the devic consciousness, can start with a personal experiment. Pick out a tree, and acquire a personal relationship with it: go out to the tree and have a really friendly feeling towards it. Learning to be still is a key element in this practice, for without stillness within one cannot listen. Therefore, sit quietly and look around you at the grass, the trees, the bushes. Be still, let go, and feel this sense of harmony.

The experiment will not work unless you can experience the harmony for yourself. Therefore, choose a part of nature that appeals to you, whether it be wind or water, rocks or trees. But it is important that you really listen to the stream—well enough so that you can remember the sound when you are away from it. This focused listening can produce changes in your consciousness.

Such attunement to the rhythms of life is important if you would draw closer to devic consciousness. As we travel about, we see that every landscape has different trees, a different shape, a different rhythm. Try to become sensitive to these, to attune yourself to the rhythm of the consciousness of that particular place. You will find this very interesting, because there is an infinite variety of vital energies at play in nature. They are never static, and they give each place its special character.

The earth is full of vitality, and therefore it is very healing to be in contact with it through one's hands and feet. Long ago in Australia, C. W. Leadbeater used to insist that we children go barefooted. His theory was that there is an exchange of the Earth's magnetism with the chakras, or energy centers, in the feet. At Pumpkin Hollow you can test this for yourself, engaging in a healing exchange with these abundant energies.

Since we do have these centers in the hands, as well as in the feet, we can also be energized by touching a tree, which has a large amount of energy and its own stable pattern. If you are practicing healing, it is a good thing to recommend to patients. Sickness always results in a lack of energy; therefore have the patient touch or lean against a tree. By doing so he will be renewed in energy and calmed by the tree's stabilizing rhythm.

The most basic characteristic in nature is relatedness. Communication between one individual and another takes place wordlessly, through experience. Such practice is a useful training in sensitivity which, rightly used, can be energizing and extremely helpful in many ways.

Letting go of our preconceptions and learning to be still and listen can make a link with the devic consciousness. Because of the nature of that consciousness, this link is at the archetypal level, at the level of unitary concepts. But meditating in a place like Pumpkin Hollow also puts us into contact with the earth and its magnetism on the lowest physical level. Thus there is an energy exchange on several levels at once, and this can create remarkable changes in our own rhythms.

Some of those who come to Pumpkin Hollow are in the midst of emotional conflicts or preoccupied by personal problems, and because they do not let these go, they sometimes are not open to all the benefits Pumpkin Hollow has to offer. But if we can put such things aside for the moment, we will find that there is an enduring state of consciousness beyond any human conflict, and that this permeates the very atmosphere of the place. Pumpkin Hollow offers us an opportunity to contact the wider consciousness in nature, by letting go.

Pain and anger and anxiety are transitory, whereas within the cycling energies in nature there is a pattern of order that is eternal. Therefore, if we can recognize that in spite of our failures we always have access to the order and harmony which lies within, we gain certainty that there is something, some power, which lets us feel whole again.

Frailty and failure are part of the human pattern, but that is the challenge of life. Participation in the experiment in consciousness which I have described lets us experience the inner order within nature and within ourselves. This experience is both healing and holistic, for it puts us in touch with the background of our lives which is beyond frailty and failure—the reality which is eternal.

Shadow Gazing

By John P. O'Grady

Originally printed in the Fall 2009 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: O'Grady, John P. "Shadow Gazing." Quest  97. 4 (Fall 2009): 148-151.

Theosophical Society - John P. O'Grady teaches English at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. "Telling the Bees" is from Grave Goods: Essays of a Peculiar Nature, a new collection of his work to be published by the University of Utah Press, which will include also a number of other articles first published in the Quest.The things of the world, according to reliable sources, are not as they appear. Nor are they otherwise. Little wonder then that so many spiritual traditions warn against the power of "false images." Consider certain venerable photographs in this regard, such as those in the family album or the old yearbook—how they attract and return the interested gaze until the image opens up like a tomb unsealed and the dead come back to life. This is the imagination let loose. The ordinary snapshot becomes a frolicsome illusion, which, if we are not careful, will lead us into delusion.

Illusion and delusion: both words arise from the same Latin root, the verb ludere, "to play." Any photograph can become a playground for the mind. The favorite game here is hide-and-go-seek. You enter through a gateless gate, above which hangs a sign proclaiming, "No Adults Allowed Unless Accompanied by a Child." Ah, but like any designated playground, especially those in larger cities, this place attracts its share of shady characters, figures lurking along the edges where the carousel music fades into a dark stand of cypress.

Enthusiasts in the nineteenth century referred to the process of photography as "shadowcatching." By extension we could say that the act of viewing a photograph is a form of shadowgazing. To lavish attention upon a picture, to muse over it—or over any image, for that matter—is to get beneath its surface and become like a shade oneself, ready to join the troop of Penelope's slain suitors as they descend with their tearless escort through a cavernous expanse along a moldering path to the Land of Dreams. A photograph, says Diane Arbus, is "a secret about a secret." She is simply echoing ancient wisdom. "Believe me," writes Ovid, "an image is more than it appears to be." And St. John of Damascus declares, "Every image is a revelation and representation of something hidden." A photograph is somewhat akin to an abandoned house or a shuttered church, one of those haunted stomping grounds ripe for evocation, a place where you can petition or call forth the fantastic spirits and render the unseen seen. It's a veritable altar of Hades.

We speak of "the consumption of images," little knowing that it is the images that consume us. An image in anybody's head is wild, which is why religious authorities have always cast a wary eye on the mental habitat known as the imagination, doing their best to domesticate its remarkable fauna by herding them into the stockyards of conventional wisdom. Something inherently erotic pulses at the very core of the word "image," as its etymology indicates a "striving after" or a "rushing toward" something, like fire to fuel or lover to beloved. Thus the medieval admonishment to monks was, "It is dangerous to follow your thoughts"—thoughts in this case being images. Similarly, George Fox, founder of the Quakers, wrote: "For following thy thoughts, thou art quickly lost." And Zen lore is chock full of cautionary tales concerning those who fall victim to the "monkey mind," that ornery, craving part of ourselves that leaps recklessly from one image to the next. Parental control software is intended to restrict children's access to images on the Internet, but what is it that monitors the imaginal predilections of adults? Understood in traditional terms, a "muddled thinker" would be one who is drowning in a sea of images, unable to discriminate the good from the bad, the useful from the irrelevant.

Yet wholesale subjugation of the imagination comes at a cost. To do so is to cast ourselves into the desert of surface appearances, refusing to find any meaning in such imaginative activities as poetry, omens, or dreams; we may even cease to dream altogether. These days we have all but forgotten what Aristotle expressed so clearly almost two and a half millennia ago: "Thinking is not possible without phantasms." In other words, ideas themselves are images. Though we today distinguish "thinking" from "imagination," they are, according to ancient sources, one and the same thing. Or to speak more precisely, they are one in the same place. Diotima of Mantinea, the female philosopher who plays an important role in Plato's Symposium, explains to Socrates that the imagination is located "betwixt and between the divine and the mortal," where the mysterious agencies by which the gods communicate with mortals are free to frolic about. Neoplatonic philosophers likewise regarded the imagination as a place. Synesius of Cyrene, for instance, describes it as "the hollow gulf of the universe," abundant with fantastic intermediary places, "partly obscure and partly luminous, wherein the soul has its habitation." To think—that is, to imagine—is not so much something that we do but a realm that we enter. The invention of photography—itself a kind of theurgy or magic applied to an imaginal purpose—simply opened a new portal into this "hollow gulf of the universe."

A tale coming out of down east Maine in the late 1970s concerns a fortune-teller who employed a curious method for conducting his divinations. He was locally known as the "Snapshot Shaman," a nickname as difficult to pronounce as his talent is to believe. Word had it that he was a Zen dropout and failed astrologer who supplemented his meager income by peddling magic mushrooms. He worked out of an old barn somewhere down around Penobscot Bay. His particular gift was the ability to hold conversations with the images of dead people depicted in photographs—not all of them, apparently, for the dead can be choosy—just those who were willing to have a word with him.

As far as he was concerned, the snapshot was nothing less than a gnomic utterance or a tabernacle for tutelary deities. He was once quoted as saying, "The universe fires portents at us like hockey pucks. Unlike most people, I don't bother with keeping a goalie—mine's an open net." He had the knack of being able to slip into an old photograph like a breeze through a keyhole. A rare and undated newspaper interview offers a glimpse into his technique: "I stare at the picture of somebody and wait for the edges to catch fire, you know, in my head. It's like a bonfire in my brain. When it's all over I can see the person standing there, all shimmery, in a pile of ashes. That's when I ask them, 'How you doing?' Maybe they say something or nod their head, but a lot of the time they just keep quiet and stare at me with a kind of muffled look. Every once in a while, one of them will cock a thumb in a certain direction, meaning I should follow them, but I never do that. You just don't know where it might lead."

Even though an anthropologist at the University of Maine wrote a scathing letter to the editor dismissing the Snapshot Shaman's performances as "Halloween hokum," clients flocked to his barn from all over the region, from as far away as northern Aroostook County, bearing treasured photographs of deceased relatives in the hope that this odd man with a curious trick might coax the dearly departed into sharing a few pleasantries if not offering a heads-up on the afterlife. It was a talent that provided him with a bit of renown and a modest living, not as lucrative as, say, lobstering or robbing the vacant houses of rich summer people, but enough to pay the bills.

For a time, things went well for the Snapshot Shaman. But all that changed when a less wholesome clientele began showing up at his barn. These individuals were not interested in having a chat with dead relatives; instead, they desired more sordid truck. Such people were always male and inevitably showed up alone, swathed in an aura of dinginess. They would thrust into the shaman's hands one of those wilted photos picked up from the "instant ancestors" bin at some flea market. "Here," they would say, "this old guy looks like he didn't trust banks. Get him to tell you where he hid his money." Initially, the shaman found that he was able to cajole a few of his shadowy interlocutors into disclosing the location of their long-hidden wealth, though truth be told it never amounted to more than the occasional Indian penny or buffalo nickel. Minor exploits such as these enhanced the shaman's reputation but in the end only served to attract increasingly avaricious customers.

Then one day a dark van pulled up at the shaman's place. According to the lone witness on the scene, a strange man dressed in a soiled Nehru jacket emerged from the windowless van and walked slowly into the barn. He carried with him a large, old, leather-bound book, which he dropped with a resounding gallows thud on the shaman's consultation table. "I brought some people I'd like you to speak with," the man said in a lily-soft voice. That's when the lone witness made a shrewd decision: to hightail it out of there. Thus the record gets a little sketchy from here.

All we know for sure is that, not long after this fateful encounter, the Snapshot Shaman was committed to a mental health institute up in Bangor. Some speculate that he lost his mind after gazing into those photographs, which, they say, turned out to be in an old NYPD mug book. Others insist the shaman had simply eaten one too many a funny mushroom. In any case, he has not been heard from since. Whether he still resides in a Bangor asylum or is huddled away in a lonesome saltbox down on the Maine coast is anybody's guess. What can be said with some assurance is this was a man who trespassed into dangerous territory. He found his way there through the gateway of a photograph but did not proceed with the necessary caution and reverence. In the end, he landed in one of the many dungeons provided by the imagination for feckless prophets and errant fools.

A story such as this suggests that photography ought to be included among the "dark arts" that the Greek philosopher Gorgias condemned as "mistakes of the soul and deceptions of the understanding." Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography, immediately recognized the occult implications of his work: "The most transitory of things, a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of our 'natural magic' and may be fixed forever in the position which it seemed only destined for a single instant to occupy." Like necromancy or shape-shifting, photography can be a dangerous hobby if you actually get the magic to work. Luckily, for most of us it doesn't. But when an accomplished photographic artist such as the wily Walker Evans tells us, "I enjoy the human trick of turning an object into an image," there's cause for concern. The photograph possesses a Medusalike power, which most of the time lies dormant. But should it be aroused, instead of turning us into stone it joins us to the ranks of phantasms. Photography, after all, is a form of latter-day alchemy, all about turning one thing into another. Once such a powerful transforming agent is unleashed, the danger erupts that anything can become anything else. Identity itself is now dissoluble, and we are lost in a house of mirrors. "A sound magician is a mighty god," declares Dr. Faustus in the opening act of Marlowe's tragedy, but let us not forget that at the end of the play this magician is hauled off by a pack of devils.

Over the course of history, sorcerers far less capable than a Walker Evans or a Diane Arbus have been burned at the stake for exploits that, by comparison, seem mere trumpery. When Oliver Wendell Holmes famously described the photograph as "the mirror with a memory," he may well have been alluding to the "perilous mirror" of medieval legend, a false looking glass said to distort and obscure everything it reflected. John of Ruysbroeck, the great Flemish mystic, warns that we "should beware of those deceived persons who—by means of their empty, imageless state and through a bare, simple act of gazing—have found a natural way into God's dwelling." That in itself is a shocking image: the divine mansion overrun with empty-headed squatters. Yet who among us is not deceived when it comes to what's going on in our own minds?

The photograph, like the dream, the omen, or the poem, is not so much a personal creation as it is an imaginative lure, leading finally to the recognition that there is more going on—both out there in the external world and inside our heads—than we have been led to believe. Henry Fox Talbot said that one of the "charms" of a photograph is the inclusion of so many things oblivious to the maker at the time the picture was made, things that are revealed only upon subsequent contemplation. And Minor White, perhaps the most spiritually inclined photographer of the twentieth century, reminds us that the imagination recognizes no property claims. "Unlike other arts," he writes, "photographs can be made so fast that before we dare claim ownership we must study them for hours to make them ours. And even so I lately feel that even my most intimate images are only on loan to me."

We have little control over what goes into our photographs, even less over the images that come into our heads when we gaze upon them. These phantasms catch us up for a while, take possession, and lead us who knows where—into love, despair, heaven, or hell. But in the end, if we are lucky, we fall out of that enchantment back into our ordinary lives, where we might then reflect on where we've been and what we've seen. Before we go striving after the next image.

John P. O'Grady is a writer and astrologer. He is currently working on a book about the erstwhile graveyards of San Francisco. He can be contacted at johnpogrady@comcast.net, and his Web site is http://johnpogrady.com/index.html .

  1. From the Executive Editor - Fall 2009
  2. Pie in the Sky
  3. Quest Magazine
  4. Viewpoint: September 11, 2001

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