Not In Kansas Anymore by Christine Wicker Read Free Book Online Page B

Yale and Harvard graduates, continued to practice the art in New England until the 1830s. In 1773, Massachusetts judge Samuel Danforth offered Benjamin Franklin a piece of the Philosopher’s Stone, which was supposed to turn base metals into gold. Franklin wasn’t interested. He, George Washington, and other founding fathers were Freemasons, an organization that used magical symbolism and initiation ceremonies aimed at individual transformation.
    In the 1740s, in Pennsylvania’s utopian commune of Ephrata, patients were promised 5,557 years of life through medical alchemy. In 1765, a broadside against the Stamp Act claimed that a hex had been put on the Philadelphia commissioner handling the stamps. Ifhe continued to distribute them, he would endure rheumatism, pox, and gout, claimed the pamphlet’s author.
    Not only did God-fearing, churchgoing Puritans use magic and pass it down to their children, often with no sense that they were doing anything wrong, but Puritan doctrine itself unwittingly fostered such practices. The Reverend Jonathan Edwards, one of America’s earliest theological geniuses, believed that God’s “emanations” were like celestial light that transformed those who received it and made them capable of perceiving “images or shadows of divine things” all about them in nature. Magical people, who were often called “cunning folk” in those days, have similar ideas about the omnipresence of divine things, the ability of humans to discern them, and the need for some special talent or spiritual gift or training in order for these things to be revealed.
    Edwards, who is best known today for his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” also had some part in the First Great Awakening, which swept through America in the early and middle part of the 1700s. This advent of revivalist preaching, with its emphasis on personal, ecstatic experience, seated the proof of divine presence firmly inside the individual, empowering experience in a way that would continue to grow within American religious life. “The Great Awakening popularized a rhetoric of liberty, a conviction that true authority rested in personal conscience rather than in established authority,” writes Fuller.
    The Puritans had another idea that made magic attractive. Nobody could ever know if they were predestined to be saved or to burn in hell. Even being concerned about your eternal fate could mean that you weren’t among the elect. God was in charge but distant. This kept the Puritans in a constant state of insecurity.
    Today, also, God is distant and salvation is shaky. As one scholar has quipped, science has taken God away and given us an ape as hisreplacement. We too are insecure. The Puritans’ problem was too little information. Ours may be too much. Magic was an antidote, then and now. It can reveal the future and protect from calamity. It can discern and disarm an enemy. It can bring punishment to evildoers and good fortune to the adept. It can connect humans with divine will and wisdom. If it works, of course, which is a whole other issue.
    Much of the magic in America was brought from Europe and Africa. Later, other forms of magic came with Asian immigrants. Native Americans, of course, had their own forms, and the new arrivals often blended Old Country magic with whatever they learned from the Indians. America itself was thought to be a magical land. The magician John Dee called it Atlantis.
    Immigrants also brought magical tools with them. Divining rods probably came with early German immigrants, and by the 1790s European Americans everywhere were using them to locate water, ore, buried treasure, and lost items. Americans are still divining, or dousing, or water witching, as it’s often called. So many people use sticks or wires to find things in the earth that classes are taught all over the country.
    Another early magical tool was the chain letter, which