Satisfacción con el trabajo

increasingly that I didn’t know what to expect from what I had

“called up.” Because o f my years o f study, I have rarely needed outside advice to deal with psychic or occult phenomena, but now I found m yself casting around for some sort o f know l­

edgeable human resource. I found it closer to home than I expected, in the form o f an occult supply shop that was almost an institution in the area— the “House o f Hermetic.”

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This was a nondescript (on the outside) but sizable store that catered to the occult and witchcraft community in the Hollywood area with books, candles fresh herbs and hand-blended incenses.

I sought out one o f the owners o f the place and told him what had been happening to me. I didn’t go into great detail, but I did mention that I had experienced what may have been “poltergeist phenomena.” He had no problem with the story at all and implied that he had heard that sort o f thing before. As well as Wicca and related practices, the store also catered to the local Santeria community, and he told me that he thought I might be having spontaneous contacts with the Orishas.

I think that I have made plain that at this point I didn’t know what Santeria was, and for all I knew, an Orisha was a kind o f fish.

He pointed out several books to me— especially the invaluable book Santeria by Migene Gonzalez-Wippler— made a few suggestions about how to behave toward the situation, and I left with my purchases.

After doing some reading, I constructed a crude altar— crude because I still hardly knew what colors or images to use— and began efforts to talk to “it.”

I will refer to this phenomenon/concept/spirit simply as “it”

both because o f the ambiguities involved in any kind o f spirit manifestation, and because I was still groping in the dark. And the only method o f communication that “it” would respond to was the pendulum I had used originally.

Through the same sort o f painstaking questioning described earlier, “it” communicated that it wanted a very specific altar arrangement and some tools that I did not possess. I was told that it required the figure of a head (see the section on Eleggua) and a set o f divinatory tools called obi (instructions for this also later).

The statue was not so problematical as the obi, since traditionally these were four lobes o f cola nut. I don’t know what your supermarket carries, but to this day I have been unable to find this item in Los Angeles. Sometimes four pieces o f fresh coconut are used as a substitute, but keeping a divination tool in the refrigerator didn’t appeal to me.

Not only did “it” tell me what to get, but where to get it.

There were several large import stores in various parts o f the area in which I lived, but to visit all o f them would take all day,

Urban Voodoo 43 so I asked “it” in which specific place I could find what I needed.

Not only was it correct, but on visiting the other stores over the course o f the next week or so I saw that indeed the one I was directed to was the only one that carried what I needed. This sort o f thing was to become commonplace.

I obtained a carved African head, with an extremely high forehead, rather like a UFOnaut from Kenya. Not only was this symbolically appropriate in my mind, but it was the only such bust that they had. I looked for shells as a substitute for the cola nut, since this is also a traditional divinatory tool, but found none. What I did find— and still use— were beads o f flattened black glass o f the sort put in aquariums or in arrangements o f dried flowers.

In the seances with “it” that followed, I was instructed how to anoint the figure with perfumes (a practice I later discovered was common in Greek paganism) and how to use the obi. Two things are interesting here. The “spirit” flatly refused to communicate through tarot cards or the I Ching, both o f which I had used for almost twenty years. I asked m yself that if I was communicating with a part o f my unconscious as some occultists theorize (or dogmatically state) why did “it” not use these? Why speak to me through an African system I had no knowledge o f “It” refused to have anything to do with this material for almost six months— as though it needed to learn. Secondly, I was to discover that the magicians o f traditional peoples frequently walked o ff into the wilderness and returned with rituals, the power to heal, foretell the future, etc. with no access to books or teachers, but being instructed directly by the spirits.

Experiences like those described above, combined with recurring dreams, became so intense that I returned to the occult store to get a referral to a Santeria center where I could receive initiation. I felt so emotionally compelled by the experience that I was willing to present myself, your basic W.A.S.P., to a group o f strangers in an alien ethnic subculture and ask to join the club, if—and I am not being facetious— we could even speak the same language. He told me that a Santera ( Santeria priestess) was a regular customer and he would ask her advice. He was kind enough to follow through on his promise, and he took the trouble to call me at work with her response.

Her reply, roughly paraphrased, was: “Tell the white boy not to do it.” I was rather surprised, not to say disappointed, but in years to come I was to find a few good reasons for her response.

Despite the way it sounds these reasons were, for the most part, not based on race. She fully encouraged me to practice the magic on my own, but the Santeria community itself, even assuming I could have penetrated it at that state o f my knowledge, was highly political and not altogether benign. They both felt I was too naive to get involved— and in time I came to agree.

In the meantime, in mundane life, I became part o f a mass firing from an organization that, at the time, did not seem long for this world. I was far from happy, but not immediately worried because my savings, severance pay, and unemployment award were quite healthy. But not only were these the Reagan Prosperity years— when so many people fell out o f the middle- class— but we were in the middle o f the longest writer’s guild strike in Hollywood history, so my other industry contacts were useless. They were laid off too!