How a documentary filmmaker’s journey into contemporary occult societies became the story of her own quest for a spiritual home.
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Overview
Witches of America is a memoir of Alex Mar’s immersive five-year trip into the occult, as both a journalist and someone searching for her own faith. She explores modern Paganism—from its roots in 1950s England to its present-day American mecca in the San Francisco Bay Area; from a gathering of more than a thousand witches in the Illinois woods to the New Orleans branch of one of the world’s most influential magical societies—and decides to train in a coven herself. With keen intelligence and wit, Mar illuminates the world of witchcraft while grappling in fresh and unexpected ways with the question underlying every faith: Why do we choose to believe in anything at all? Whether evangelical Christian, Pagan priestess, or atheist, each of us craves a system of meaning to give structure to our lives. Sometimes we just find it in unexpected places.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374536435 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 10/11/2016 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 523,544 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Alex Mar is a writer based in New York City, her hometown. Her work has recently appeared in The Believer, the Oxford American, Elle, The New York Times Book Review, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015. Mar is also the director of the documentary feature film American Mystic. Witches of America is her first book.
Table of Contents
1. Stone City
2. Little Witch
3. Naked in the New Forest
4. Keep Your Weapons Peace-Bonded!
5. The Feri Current
6. Diana of the Prairies
7. The Mass
8. The Vetting Process
9. Cycle One
10. Morpheus and the Morrigan
11. Making Priests
12. The Binding
13. Proof; or, The Creeping of Your Skin
14. Coru Cathubodua
15. Three Nights at the Castle
16. The Small Question of Satan
17. Sympathy for the Necromancer
18. And the Crows Will Eat My Eyes
19. Enter the Swamp
Interviews
Barnes & Noble Review Interview with Alex Mar
"Witches are gathering all across California, witches and their apprentices and little children and polyamorous collection of boyfriends and girlfriends. They are gathering for the season of death, the days leading up to the high holiday of Samhain . . . They spill out onto the highways, then fan out, leaving behind their tech ventures and professorships, their accounting firms and bio labs, their yoga studios and bookshops, heading toward covens in so many counties."
The classic Halloween-season figure of the witch — the tall- hatted crone with the flying broomstick, the Weird Sister stirring the cauldron and giving forth poisoned prophecy to a doomed Scot — has long been pushed aside, at least in twenty- first-century America, by the updated and generally more glamorous version that emerged in a spate of late-'90s movies and TV (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Craft, and Charmed) and continues to show up in more recent cable fare (American Horror Story, True Blood).
But while witchcraft can provide emotive metaphors and plot devices alike for pop culture, its current representation onscreen doesn't come any closer to the expansive and manifold worlds of American witchery, paganism and magical practice than a yellowing Broom Hilda strip.
In Witches of America, writer and filmmaker Alex Mar aims for something of a corrective, taking readers with her on an excursion into the visionary, ecstatic, and defiantly antinomian world of covens and magical societies, pagan gatherings and druidic fellowships that exist like a just-hidden set of alternate villages across the country. Some of the people she encounters are visionary, some hedonistic, some secretive, and one or two will leave readers with a distinct chill. All offer a prism through which Mar's kaleidoscopic narrative cycles.
But rather than mounting up a countercultural road trip through occult exotica, Mar offers us a seat on a very different sort of journey — her own quest in search of connection to something else: "When I put my work aside, I have to admit that I am searching — hopefully, and with great reservation — for proof of something larger, whatever its name." The resulting work traces a pilgrimage that eventually leads the writer into experiences of intensity and beauty that defy the stereotypes that cluster around this subject.
Alex Mar sat down with me in her publisher's very un-witchy offices to talk about what makes American witches so particularly interesting. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation. —Bill Tipper
á The Barnes & Noble Review: There are so many interviews and experiences that are woven into Witches of America. How long did it take you to complete this project?
Alex Mar: The material in this book and the relationships in this book actually go back about six years in some cases. Morpheus, who as you know is one of the central characters in the book . . . my relationship with her started with the documentary that I had been working on.
BNR: American Mystic.
AM: Yes. The idea of consciously researching and writing a book started about three and a half years ago. So all in all, a relatively fast process.
BNR: American Mystic focused on three different kind of people from three very different American mystical traditions, one of whom is Morpheus, and she became one of the people that you profile rather deeply in this book.
AM: Yes, exactly. It's funny, because six years ago (just as background) I remember telling people about the film project, and saying, "There's this woman who is one of the central characters, and she's a witch," and the reaction, even from my really savvy friends in New York and California, was, "What on earth does that mean?" A little bit of intimidation or some buying into certain ideas they'd been fed as kids, that we'd all been fed back in the day. But now, over the last year and a half or two years in particular, I would talk about my book with friends or people I'd just met, and they would instead say, "Oh, are they Pagans? Are they Wiccans?" That actually says a lot about something shifting over the last several years, which is really fascinating to see, to get an overview of.
BNR: Quite a lot of the book relates careful and precise descriptions of rituals you attended or were involved in. In the past, you've recorded your subjects on film. For the book, did you take notes during these ceremonies?
AM: I take notes heavily in the middle of all of these experiences, and the notes are very detailed and often feed into sometimes verbatim into passages that are in the book. I do that with my long-form journalism as well. What I discovered, not surprisingly, is that writing about rituals is really challenging for a few reasons. One is the amount of privacy and, in some cases, all-out just complete secrecy around them, so there is a question of access. But how do you capture that situation? You're taking pictures and you're not recording anything. Also, your own experience is going to be completely subjective, by definition. A ritual is potentially an ecstatic situation; it's a group scenario.
BNR: Most of the rituals that you describe in this book, though not all of them, are rituals that you participated in as part of your experience of that particular aspect of Wiccan or pagan or occult life in America. You're going to gatherings. You are spending time with various groups. Then, in two cases really, Feri and with the OTO, you are pursuing initiation really into these traditions.
AM: There is this decision at a certain point to train — I didn't go into this project assuming that would happen. I knew that I wanted to go deeper: I committed to this project with the idea that, in more of a sort of typical journalistic faction, I would kind of be this loose, accessible, relatable framework to this research. "Look at me as a reader. We have something in common. We're both kind of maybe slightly skeptical about all this business. But I'm really level- headed, and let's just check out what's going on because it's very curious." And very quickly, I realized in order to be honest with myself and the reader, I'd have to be a lot more personal in the writing.
BNR: It was almost as if you initially imaged that your contract with the reader would require you to be this skeptic, this anthropologist who would stand aside or guide through and comment, but not get too much of yourself involved.
AM: To not get dirty. [Laughs] A big part of it, too, is that I've never identified myself in any way as a "confessional writer." For me personally, that's a little bit icky. Not in other people's work, but just in terms of how I work. The reality is that writing about faith of any stripe is completely, fundamentally an embarrassing undertaking. There's no way of getting around that. You have to become vulnerable, and talk about these big topics — what you believe in, and your search for meaning in your own life. That stuff is really raw, and there isn't really a fashionable way of doing it. You just have to be kind of willing to talk about where you're coming from, and your own insecurities about those questions.
That was something I wanted to make a part of the book. I just realized that was unavoidable, especially if all of these other people were willing to really share their stories with me. There's a lot of scenarios in this book that are really quite private. Covens worshiping under certain circumstances and different kinds of techniques, blood offerings, and the whole concept of sex magic, and different kinds of rituals that lead to initiation that are very private — and this is not the kind of stuff that people go around sharing with strangers.
BNR: This is a point that I feel is a good idea to make clear — that the book simultaneously does the work I imagine you think it needed to do: Exploding myths about crazy ritual practices.
AM: Hmm.
BNR: You mention blood offerings and sex magic. In a way, I want say to the potential reader of this book: Don't worry, they are real things, but they are also things that are, in a sense, more personal — symbolic on one level and typically, for most of these groups, involved with personal relationships rather than some stereotypical . . .
AM: . . . freaky cult scenario. [Laughs] I appreciate you making that comment.
BNR: But it's an interesting place. A person who is living a rather ordinary life by other standards in an American community, but who goes to do these kinds of things with her coven, would have plenty of good reasons to keep that private, even if what's going on in that realm is really no more shocking or strange than any religious ceremony that we think of as ordinary.
AM: Oh, definitely. I don't know that I would have written this book if I felt that it was somehow only about witchcraft, or paganism. To my mind, I was always setting up to write a book about why any of us choose to believe in anything at all, any system of belief, and that witchcraft is on the same spectrum as Christianity or Judaism or Islam or Buddhism, whatever.
The practices in Witches of America seem a lot more exotic because it's a minority religion, and there's a lot of ideas that come from Hollywood and Pop culture that frighten us when we hear the word "witchcraft" or even the word "ritual." But taking the Sacrament in the Catholic Church is just rife with scary-seeming symbolism, and if you wanted to look at it that way, drinking the blood of Christ and eating his body, the stories of the martyrs. I talk about that a little bit in the book because that's part of my background.
I was regularly in touch with Morpheus in particular. She's incredibly brave, because I must say, she never censored anything that we experienced together, or that she shared with me, or that she knew I had heard her talk about. Really intimate practices. Her one concern ultimately was just, "Gosh, people are going to think that I'm completely whacked-out." I assured her that once the manuscript was more or less complete, people were reading it here at the publishing house, and they just weren't . . . No one was having a dramatic reaction to what I thought was some of the most out-there material, and to me, I really felt that was a huge success, because it meant that the context was there, that you understood this person was a human being who had this government job at one point, and becomes increasingly serious about her spiritual practice, and then starts her own priesthood, and then there are extremely specific kinds of rituals that she conducts so that she can have more of a relationship with her particular goddess, Morgan.
BNR: She moves from being part of one tradition to almost wanting to found or be a new founder of her own vision. With your title in mind, as I was reading her story, that seemed like a pioneering American story, the restlessness and moving forward into her vision.
AM: That was really on my mind the whole time, definitely. I see this as intrinsically an American movement. I think one of the issues that people have with the Pagan community or the witchcraft movement in this country is, if you put aside the baggage that any individual might have with the word "witchcraft,", there is this fundamental discomfort with any kind of religious community or practice that is younger. "Did someone just one day wake up and make this up?"
But there is a beginning to the timeline of any religious movement, even, obviously, Christianity, which, no one needs to say, is the predominant religion in this country.
BNR: To redirect maybe a little: I think what you're getting at is that what makes American witchcraft and paganism and alternative spirituality (to use a fuzzy word, but something to contain all the different subtraditions) specific is that there a belief that you can remake and gather, you can gather up these threads that are there, and fashion something new that's meaningful.
AM: Definitely this sort of all-American sense of self-transformation, your right to realize a new identity for yourself. The example I would give to my own friends along the way: So many times, I met a version of this, where there would be a woman who, let's say, works at Trader Joe's in the Bay Area, and that has certain limitations to what she can make happen in her life or what kind of apartment she can live in or whatever. But on the weekends and on certain sort of personal holidays that are not visible to the rest of America, she's the high priestess of whatever coven, and dresses in robes, and gets together with these other practitioners, and has this entire other world that is elevated and that connects her to something much bigger than herself. There's no middleman.
It's a way to create a complete new, elevated identity for yourself. I don't mean to make it sound superficial either. But I was really touched by the amount of reinvention of the Self that's a big part of this community. There are so many people who I met who are working class or lower middle class, self- taught to a ridiculous degree, in a number of cases. Of course, there are people outside of that paradigm. But I met so many people who fit that description and just had this incredible double life that they found really rewarding, and I also thought was very brave.
BNR: On the subject of that double life, the sense that I got from so many of the portraits in this book is that that doubleness was, in more cases, a satisfying secret than a sense of oppressed being in the closet, as it were.
AM: Mmm.
BNR: Do you think that's accurate?
AM: Are there people in the broom closet?
BNR: In the broom closet.
AM: There are still people in the broom closet, as they put it (which I think it a hilarious way of putting it, and people say it with a straight face). People would say that if they had a government job, or if they worked for a school, or had some kind of job that involved children, there is still this concern that it might affect their employment, for no real reason except just general fears and prejudices.
I did run into some people in certain parts of the South who were very committed to using aliases. One woman agreed to meet with me, but I had to meet with her at a truck stop diner alongside the highway in the middle of the afternoon one day, as a kind of neutral meeting place, before she would agree to let me come to a ritual she was having in her house up in the mountains. Fair enough.
It's a mix. I think there is a real shift right now, as I was describing, over the last several years, that I sort of witnessed, that people now know what the word Pagan means and they're not scared by it, or they hear "Wiccan" and they think more kind of environmentalist than terrifying hag. [Laughs] So there's that.
But also, in terms of the occult practices in the book, I met a number of occultists involved in something that is also something that's quite private. OTO remains somewhat of a secret society, to some degree, depending on the individual and how alternative their public lifestyle is.
BNR: I want to ask you to talk about the two traditions that you went further with. There are groups you visited, gatherings you went to, where you met a lot of people, and outlined what life is like in those circles. But with the Feri and with the OTO, you take us further as readers.
AM: Yes.
BNR: Can you talk a little about Feri, which is the craft practice or craft tradition that you spend more time with in this book? It's a fascinating one in that it's American- grown.
AM: It's actually incredibly thrilling . . . I could not believe someone had not written this book already. I absolutely could not get over this fact. I don't want to put this in overly lofty terms, but there is an aspect of this that's like being around at the moment where Jesus and the Disciples are hanging out, and it's the first hundred years, and everyone is trying to figure out how does this then become codified into a church structure?
Or you could use any other major religion as an example. Because this is that moment. This movement has only been around for maybe sixty years in this country. Now it's becoming much more visible, and you can see how the structure that it's taking and sort of the key players. You can still trace this back to the first people in this country, who were the big movers . . .
BNR: The leaders of the movement often are people who were trained by or related to the people who founded these traditions.
AM: Exactly. So that's totally exciting.
BNR: You do a marvelous job of portraying the founder of Feri. Can you tell us a little about Victor Anderson?
AM: He's fascinating because there's this element of a spiritual savant to his story. This idea that his family ends up in the Northwest, and somehow, surrounded by a collection of Dust Bowl refugees, and there's a mix of ethnicities, and there are migrant farm laborers, and it's this very all-American collection, like a collection of nomads. He claimed that at a very young age, at NINE years old, he was initiated in the woods in Oregon. As a child, he just stumbled into this forest clearing where he encountered a woman who was sitting in a circle, who then supposedly initiated him magically and sexually into what he would later call the Feri tradition.
His background, though, is Christian. His partner, Cora Anderson, had a Baptist family. So it's fascinating to think that there was this Northwest, small-town Christian community veneer, and underneath it you have the beginnings of these covens. He then started training people privately in this magic that grew to become quite ecstatic, with voodoo influences, and became eventually what Morpheus was initiated in later on. The current so-called "grandmaster" of Feri, one of his last serious students, described him to me as being like Yoda. She didn't know how else to explain to her own children what Victor was like as someone to train with. He would just sit in a rocking chair all day, and his disciples would come, and sit at his feet, and he would go on and on, and deliver this stream-of- consciousness about spiritual practices and ideas that he'd acquired over what he thought were many, many lifetimes.
BNR: People have often said the difference between a cult and a religion is basically how long it lasts. I simply mean we have plenty of experience in America with charismatic people who founded spiritual or quasi-spiritual groups around their own belief systems, they get followers, and then something happens to that group, and it often happens because of the power concentrated in the people at its center that takes it apart or leaves people hurt, or does destructive things in a really demonstrable way.
Feri is an interesting example of something that feels like it could have gone in that direction, but maybe because of him or maybe because of something else about it, instead seems to have just continued on, building something that looks like it's very different.
AM: From the stories I've been told and I've read, there's definitely the sense that Victor could be very impatient, and had very strong ideas about what was correct or not, in some cases, but that he and his wife, Cora, lived basically in poverty their entire lives, and relied on the occasional generosity of their students or friends, and their whole idea was to teach spiritual practices to whoever found them and managed to be stubborn enough to kind of convince him to take them on as students.
I think the most important practical form of employment he had was playing the accordion at the local Elks Lodge or something — clearly not a moneymaking venture.
BNR: So maybe the difference between him and a cult leader is that he wasn't interested in taking from other people.
AM: I think that's part of it, yes. I should also say that Cora worked as a nurse or a chef at a hospital, something really simple and modest.
Between the documentary and this book, and some of my shorter-form journalism, I felt like I had to have a way of assessing for myself, when I was in kind of a "cult" scenario. My definition of a cult: It's the three kinds of funny business — funny money, funny sex, and a funny attachment to one individual. That's a very crass way of putting it, but I think that's the deal.
I was very wary of anything, any community that was structured on money, any community that was structured around bringing up . . . earlier I had mentioned sex magic . . . I think it's fine. I was very comfortable with the fact that sexuality is a positive thing in the witchcraft community, but it's not prescriptive. There's no mandate about how this is supposed to go down, and what role sex is supposed to play in any one individual's life. That's very different.
BNR: In the book you cite even circumstances where, if there's a group where someone is accused of misusing their power with initiates or people, that becomes a scandal in and of itself within the community. People in these traditions don't have any real tolerance broadly for that kind of use of power to get sex or what have you.
AM: No. Actually in that section in the book I thought it was important to just give an instance of a scandal within, in that case, the Feri community, because it also says something about a very delicate balance between how to keep practice "oath-bound," like secret oath-bound magical practices; and also to be responsible and ethical and have some awareness of what is actually going on from coven to coven. It's a lot of stridently independent individuals getting together, and there isn't really oversight in some sort of authoritative way, so how do you strike a balance between all of these individual covens and traditions, and the sense that there has to be accountability.
BNR: One of my favorite moments in one of your little notes was at one of the gatherings that you attend. You mentioned this posted sign: "Sometimes participants, excited by the freedoms and possibilities at pagan gatherings, get involved in new sexual relationships without considering how these will impact themselves and existing relationships after the festival ends. Take time to reflect."
AM: [Laughs] Oh my God, I loved it.
BNR: That is the most thoughtful . . .
AM: Totally great, right. That's from pagan spirit gatherings, or gatherings as they call it. That's a couple of thousand pagans in rural Illinois, Midwest central. That gathering really is in the spirit of the sort of late '60s–early '70s ethos. There's got to be a way for us all to get together, enjoy ourselves, be completely free, maybe be a little bit naked, maybe feel, you know, friendly towards each in a new and special way. But, you know, within reason, there's a way . . . Yeah, the wording is so charming.
It was really important to me to have different levels of intimacy in the book. Also, I just wanted to know more. I wanted to get closer, and I felt I'd sort of been keeping things at an arm's length. Some of us go and take part in, like, a ritual, with 400 witches in the Doubletree Hotel in California [at the PanTheaCon conference]. That's one thing, that's one version of an experience. But in a ritual like that, all of those people go home and practice with their own covens, and that's where the real intimacy happens.
BNR: As you got more personal and as you took this journey into this ritual world that is very, very interesting and I want to say very lovingly represented, in terms of both the detail of what you went through, but also the personalities and the people who you become close to in this experience . . . What was that like for you? Was it scary? Was it something you were uncertain about as you were doing it, or did you feel certain, like, "Yes, this is what I should be doing; this is where I want to go."
AM: Well, I felt propelled forward by more than a book project. I am definitely someone who, from a very young age, was always drawn to this sense that there were mysteries out there with an M — the Mysteries, as people say. Not really knowing what that meant. Knowing that I felt uncomfortable in most churches that I was taken to. With the sense that maybe there is something darker and deeper and bigger out there that each individual has a way to access somehow.
I really tried to let myself connect with this much younger version of me, in a way, and to stop censoring that impulse and to be less self-conscious, in a way. I talk about this in the book. I grew up in New York City. Most of my friends are artists of different kinds, agnostics or atheists, and fashionably so in certain circles. Especially in the part of the book where I was living in New Orleans, I basically cut myself off from my actual social circle; from my normal life, if you want to put it that way. It was a pretty dizzying time, and pretty confusing.
One thing that Karina, when I was training with her, would talk about is, it makes sense, especially when you're just starting to explore this stuff more seriously, that things are going to come to the surface. You're actually looking at parts of yourself and your own psychology that most people usually keep at a distance, as a way of getting through your mundane life. The question of what you believe in, who you really are, whether or not there are gods and goddesses — these are things you don't really want to sit around contemplating all day long if your M.O. is being a productive member of society potentially.
So I found it to be a whole new world of stimuli. There was a certain amount of upheaval. It was a really confusing time.
BNR: Not unlike what anyone might experience going on a religious retreat or a pilgrimage. That kind of commitment to that reflective and self-investigative work.
AM: Yes. I think that's true. The other part of it, too, is I was really committed to being honest to the reader, but also being honest with myself about whatever shape this exploration would end up taking — to really be honest with myself about that. Who am I kidding? We all know this. There is a long-standing tradition that's very American of works of memoir, about like the personal journey where you start out confused, and your life is a shambles, and you have all of these existential questions, and then you go on a certain path or you encounter a special community, and you come out the other side with all of these answers, and then you're here as the author to share those answers with the reader in some kind of very satisfying transformative narrative kind of way. Right?
That's just not me. I think most of the time that glosses over all of the personal confusion that goes into these kinds of existential questions, and it doesn't matter whether or not you're a devout Christian or a pagan or what have you. I just think there's a lot more doubt involved in faith.
It was a messy time for me. I think that's reflected in the later chapters, and it's something I tried to be honest about. I also hope that ultimately that's more relatable for some readers. I wrote about being kind of envious of a number of the people I encountered. Someone like Morpheus, for instance. I mean, her conviction is profound. You can bounce a quarter off of it. But yeah . . . I wish that I could just sort of step into that. But it is not that easy. And most of the people in this book have spent a couple of decades in some cases, more than that, practicing and studying. Where they're at, at this point, is hard-earned. But also, maybe some people are meant to just long for that answer and not necessarily find it. I don't know.
BNR: You say that when we have these encounters with something greater than ourselves, that's not something to turn away from. Do you like that is a lesson, or do you think that is something that you did come to understand in a way you hadn't before?
AM: I think part of this whole several-years- long experience helped me to realize that we sometimes put a lot of emphasis on trying to give a name to what gives our lives meaning, and we're sometimes driven by the desire to have, like, an explicit community that reflects that back to us. I think just the fact of being so deeply engaged in asking these questions, that has to be enough.
BNR: Do you wake up a different person at some point?
AM: I think I did with this book. But I think that at a certain point I woke up and said, "Well, I'm an artist." My entire life, every day, is structured around asking these questions, and spending time with people I only barely have any business to be spending intimate time with, and trying hopefully to get at something bigger. Maybe that's just my practice.
—October 28, 2015
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