Not in Kansas Anymore: A Curious Tale of How Magic Is Transforming America by Christine Wicker

From Barnes & Noble

In Lilly Dale, Christine Wicker introduced readers to an upstate New York haven for occultists. In Not in Kansas Anymore, she explores the hidden world of magical activities throughout the country. With an itinerary that would set Harry Potter's head spinning, she visits hoodoo conjurers, voodoo priestesses, self-proclaimed wizards, practicing witches, and even a few vampires and elves.

From the Publisher

Magic has stepped out of the movies, morphed from the pages of fairy tales, and taken root in the modern mind. Soccer moms are getting voodoo head washings in their backyards, young U.S. soldiers send chants toward pagan gods of war, and a seem-ingly normal family has determined that they are in fact elves. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are turning toward the supernatural in new ways, blending the ancient and the modern for a hyper-charged spirituality. They are reaching back in time to powers that have sustained the human imagina-tion for thousands of years.

For many of us, magic is taking hold in less obvious ways. Almost unconsciously we find ourselves noting mysterious synchronicities that point to a plan for our lives. We are heeding premonitions, marking good omens, scrutinizing our dreams, and interpreting visions as direct communications. Thinking we might be called crazy, most of us never utter a word to anyone.

But others of us are bolder. The community of Wiccans, witches, and pagans is growing faster than any other religious group in America. Voodoo, hoodoo, and Santeria are attracting middle-class believers across the country.

National bestselling author and award-winning religion reporter Christine Wicker leaves no talisman unturned in her hunt to find what's authentic and what's not in America's burgeoning magical reality. Her investigation leads her from the voodoo temples of New Orleans to the witches' covens of Salem to a graveyard in north Florida as she probes the secrets of an underground society and learns lessons she never dreamed could be taught.

Her new teachers are an odd crew: Myrna the Death Puppet, Tracy, Queen of theVampires, and Siva, a tenderhearted satanist, along with people who truly believe they are fairies, werewolves, and dragons. The reporter in Wicker listens harder than she ever has, and she doesn't let herself roll her eyes -- not even once. What she learns repels her, challenges her, and then changes her in ways she never could have imagined.

And if you let it, it might change you, too.

The Washington Post - Anne Ursu

The book's subtitle is A Curious Tale of How Magic Is Transforming America, but the tale really amounts to how magic transformed Wicker. That's not necessarily an uninteresting project, but the book cannot decide whether it is a "serious journalistic look" or a personal journey; as a result, it ends up being neither. A book about magic should challenge your notions of what is possible, tickle your sense of wonder—leave you…confronted with the hard limits of your philosophy. And while Wicker's book certainly has these moments, they're too distilled to enchant us.

Publishers Weekly

Apparently vampires not only exist but are alive, well, and possibly living in your home town. It's also likely that the spirit of novelist Zora Neale Hurston is in North Carolina giving magical people very specific instructions about what to do with her grave dirt. At least this is what Wicker suggests with a lot of wit, a serious dash of journalistic curiosity, and always respect for even the strange and unbelievable characters she encountered as she journeyed across America in search of all things magical. A former religion reporter for the Dallas Morning News and author of several books including Lily Dale: The True Story of the Town that Talks to the Dead, Wicker tries to sort out the difference between religion and magic, and examines the many varieties of magical experience found across America. Wicker is many things for readers--a memoirist, a reporter, a narrator of fascinating stories and well-written dialogue and, not least, a humorist. Readers will find themselves unable to put this book down, absorbed in the story Wicker has to tell that is as much filled with laugh-out-loud moments as it is with insights into a topic that continues to fascinate both Muggles and magicians alike. (Oct.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Wicker, one-time religion reporter for the Dallas Morning News, previously scored a best seller with Lily Dale, an investigation into an upstate New York town ruled by psychics. Her follow-up is a strikingly similar first-person narrative, wherein the healthily skeptical reporter attempts to gain entr e into an American subculture. In this case, it's the realm of magic practitioners-vampires, Wiccas, werewolves, and rootworkers who believe they can shape their lives through spells, rituals, and concentration. Wicker attends a witches' circle in Salem, MA, and witnesses the conjuring of writer Zora Neale Hurston's spirit in Florida; the more experience she accumulates, the more it becomes apparent that magic isn't about "reality" as much as faith-a simple but moving discovery. In fact, this book is more a spiritual memoir than a journalistic study, wherein Wicker reaffirms her right to find meaning in everyday life. Yet with the exception of the closing pages, she uses a staunch, often grating reportorial approach that plays up the "facts" in the face of her own, more important magical encounters. Still, this will find an eager audience among closeted New Agers and aspiring spiritual seekers. For public libraries.-Heather McCormack, Library Journal Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Reporter's investigation finds that modern witchcraft, occult practices and mystical lifestyles are reflective of spirituality repressed by the march of science against faith. Wicker, formerly the religion reporter for the Dallas Morning News, tells how her bestseller, Lily Dale (2003), about a town that has "talked" to its dead for decades, opened the door to multiple, intimate contacts with Americans who seem average in most ways except for their active participation in "magic." She claims she had no trouble finding "wizards and vampires, Satanists and voodoo priestesses, high magicians and conjurers of the black arts" all over the U.S. Defining belief in magic as a conviction that powers beyond humankind can be obtained and controlled for one's benefit, the author also points out that Judeo-Christian beliefs do not necessarily exclude it (e.g., Santer'a, Pentecostal rites). After arguing that a majority of people do, in fact, incorporate magic into their lives in the form of persistent superstitions that often become unconscious acts, the author embarks on an extended tour of the occult-everything from Wiccan covens (in Salem, Mass., natch) and voodoo ceremonies in graveyards to vampire fests and hex shops retailing mojos and kits for casting spells. A reporter's seasoned skepticism leavens some of the more bizarre events; she notes, for example, that rituals incorporating sex acts in which men are in charge generally do not bode well for women. Eventually, though, a series of personal revelations culminates in an epiphany she has while taking Communion at Westminster Abbey. Wicker returns to her own faith and credits magic with helping her do so. "What we must not do-no matter whatthe scientists tell us-is allow ourselves to be cut off from our own experience of life as it presents itself." She adds that it was "no accident" that "Jesus showed up in my dreams during the days when I was most avidly pursuing magic."Entertaining adventures in esoterica, with some serious side effects.

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Chapter One

The Waitress Wears a Pentacle

Two brawny men with tattoos had just allowed me to enter the Vampire and Victims Ball when young Nichole, a divorced mother of two who makes her living as a hairdresser, greeted me with a moan. I'd met the newbie witch some months ago during a gathering of her Salem coven. This night she was looking lovely in a nun's habit. On her forehead, as though branded there, was the blackened image of a crucifix. From her pallor, I gathered that she was supposed to be a dead nun.

Mock-swooning against me, she asked in a whisper, "Is this really me in here?"

A weighty question, particularly when asked by a witch posing as a Bride of Christ. I had hardly an instant to ponder before a redhaired woman in a backless evening gown interrupted.

"Are you beating people?" she asked.

"Yes. I think I am," Nichole answered. Crucifixes were popular that evening. A large wooden one had been set up in the back room so that partyers could be tied to it and lashed.

"Do you know how?" the red-haired woman asked.

Nichole shook her wimpled head.

"Come with me."

The room was dark and the music sounded like African drumming. A witch named Christian Day wandered by to flick his tongue and roll his eyes in what seemed to be a parody of a silent-movie vamp. A totally bald vampire with Spock ears was appropriately stern. A handsome young swain in a frock coat and a high-collared satin shirt looked beautifully sulky. A pasty-faced vamp with a top hat, long white hair, and dark glasses was thin-lipped as hetook his blond bride in his arms. On her bosom were two fake puncture marks and a dribble of blood, also fake.

Real vampires, as opposed to those who only dress up as vamps, come in two main types: those who drink blood, called sanguine, and those who feast on other people's energy, called psi, or psychic. For psi vampires, parties raise energy, which makes them good places to feed. For blood vamps, a drop or two was certain to be spilled before the sun rose.

I had come to this costume party looking for magic, not the tricks of conjurers but the real stuff, the kind of magic that bends reality to a wizard's will. I'd been warned that it is dangerous to fool with people who believe they can do magical things—people such as wizards and vampires, Satanists and voodoo priestesses, high magicians and conjurers of the black arts. I had no trouble finding such people. They exist in considerable numbers, and not just in California. They're in Cleveland and Rochester, Milwaukee and Dallas, Orlando and Chapel Hill. They're all over the South. And in New York City, of course. Everything is in New York City. I wasn't warned by magical people themselves, who were often as eager to protest their goodness as fresh-dunked Baptists. It was the mundanes who issued dire predictions. Mundanes are how ordinary people are often described by those in the magical community. Sometimes, borrowing from the Harry Potter books, they're called muggles.

They're power-hungry, the mundanes said of the magical people.They're immoral, people said, and they're scary. Playing with the dark arts could plunge me into evil. I'd be pulled toward depravity, they said. Blasphemy would begin to seem like truth, bad like good, God like Satan. It had happened to people through the centuries, they said. And they were right. All that did happen.

Others greeted my enterprise with derision. You'll be on a journey, they said, but don't expect to arrive at the heart of darkness. The epicenter of silly will be more like it. And they were right too. All the warnings proved true, and yet as Hamlet put it, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." I was soon to find that magic is not only of ancient and illustrious pedigree, not merely an astonishingly alive and widespread way of thinking, but also a valuable, even irreplaceable, part of human experience.

Across the ballroom I saw a dapper gent in shiny white-and-black shoes wearing sharply creased black pants, a sport coat, and a yellow-and-navy tie. His hair was closely cropped and swept back from a pale forehead. He stood stiffly without smiling as though feeling timid.

"Are you a vampire or a victim?" I asked, making small talk. I couldn't have known at such an early moment, almost at the very beginning of my investigation, but I had asked the only question that truly matters. I should have listened more closely as he answered, pressed him further. Instead, I took him for a flake, which he was, of course, and yet also the envoy of truth, as I would find to be the case again and again.

"Do I look like a victim?" he asked, smiling in a way that didn't show his teeth. This was not a good sign.

"Well . . . ," I said, stalling.

"Are you a victim?" he asked too calmly.

Still his smile showed no teeth.

"I don't want to say."

"You have to choose."

Tied to the physical, deaf to the eternal, riveted by my own shortcomings, I was thinking only of what a bad choice I'd made when choosing a partner for chat. This guy was faking timidity to lure someone over. If I said victim, he was likely to start gnawing my neck. If I said vampire, he would demand proof. I hadn't fangs enough to back that pretension. Spotting an angel across the room and eager to shift Dapper Gent's attention, I said, "That takes some nerve in this crowd."

"Why do you say that?" he asked. "An angel and a devil are only a breath away."