The Freestyle Witch.

This whole endeavor started when I got hired at a local botanica, straight out of college--a paper I'd written for a religion class had led me to Starhawk's Dreaming the Dark, which was the first spiritual text that "clicked" after giving up Catholicism at age 13. Upon my hire, I started reading every book in the store, and trying out certain practices, and starting feel a certain warmth in my life that hadn't been there before. My favorite books came from the witchcraft revival of the 70's, as well as the "old-school" texts: Valerie Worth, Marie LaVeau, Tarostar, Anna Riva, Herman Slater. And the chaos writings as well -- Jan Fries, Peter Carroll, Phil Hine. And, to top it off, Neil Gaiman's Sandman (particularly "A Season of Mists").

I loved reading the older witchcraft texts, but found some of it hard to relate to, as back then I lived in an apartment over a rave store, in the noisiest part of town -- nowhere near a quiet grove. But I also found myself diverging from pure chaos magick because despite the "anything goes" mentality, I was still drawn to tools whose roots could be traced back for centuries. Not to mention I was constantly in the botanica atmosphere--watching people in their sixties and seventies come in and ask for things they'd been using long before I was born, and just listening to them talk about "what my grandmother used to do." My job there awakened an affectionate, whispered dialogue as we passed back and forth ever-evolving ways to do "the work." I first began to notice my particular magickal style going off the map back in 1996 while making signs for the NOLA-derived shop products, and the graphic I designed for 7-11 oil came out looking like a streetwear logo.

In studying the occult "classics," I found a lot of overlapping ritual elements between the witchcraft of European pagan descent and voodoo/African traditions(another common ground is that their histories both feature persecution--the former the Inquisition, the latter the North American slave trade.) Often there were practices in one that could easily be adapted to the other, and I collected them in my binder and passed the info on to my customers, who would come back and let me know how it went. I remember all those people, experimenting with different pieces of the puzzle, trying to pick up the spiritual threads of their ancestors, sharing spells and discoveries …the New Orleans flair that shows up in my practice is a cherished holdover from my days at the shop.

Chaos blends nicely with southern conjure, which centers around solving mundane problems: attracting love, money drawing, peace in the home, getting a job, gambling luck, protection from evil. (It could be said that NOLA magick itself is proof that chaos works, originating from the desperation and secrecy that the American slave trade wrought upon the African spiritualities, forcing practices underground and into new forms to adapt to the hostile, Christian-only plantation atmospheres. The cute names such as Follow Me Boy and Fast Luck didn't come later until Marie Laveau's thriving "voodoo" trade.) Contagious magick is especially a strong force here because the majority of the materials are rather inexpensive and easy to come by (especially in the internet age, where you can just order a lot of this stuff online) -- sprinking lodestone sand before your vendor table to draw more customers at a convention, carrying around a flyer from a club you'd like to play someday next to a John the Conqueror root and a guitar pick, wearing a peorth charm anointed with an attracting oil to bring hidden treasures to the surface in flea markets. It just seemed natural to mix up the traditional with the modern.

When I started trying out all this stuff for myself, I was never able to do things "right from the book." There always had to be something in it, straight out of my subconscious, to make it mine. And here's where the "freestyle" part of it comes in -- the dancefloor. The way good DJ's play with beats when they're working a crowd, injecting their personalities and whims into the mix, summoning up songs to direct the night's energies. That magickal trance the new agers are after is also why dancefloors get packed when somebody good is spinning -- and this should be really no surprise at all to the masses who attended raves throughout the 90's for the spiritual high. Going freestyle means going where your instinct leads you, getting creative, and putting ever-expanding twists on things you love, things that have taken you to good places before and you keep trying new ways to get to them again, or find even better ones. Retaining the core of what magick does, but tossing away all the pre-made spells, exact specifications and "doing what the book says," is the same thing that separates a good DJ from someone who just sits and cues up single after single all night. You're always learning, exploring, never letting yourself get stale. It works nicely for those of us, who, while appreciating and practicing meditation, hate sitting still.

Chaos magick does call it liberating to throw all tradition out the window, much to the annoyance of sticklers who insist on certain practices being the "right" ones. And while I do think it's a lot more fun -- and effective -- to go in the directions of your imagination rather than going word-for-word from a book, starting with a basis in tradition does have a distinct advantage: you're starting with something that has a good track record. It wouldn't be in all those spellbooks if it never worked for anybody at all, right? Not to say that you should believe everything that you read, but if it's been documented in books from Europe, Africa, New Orleans, and the dates span literally hundreds of years back, obviously they're on to something. Think about it: magick has been practiced in every country on earth, each tribe or sect operating independently of the others. Native American shamans, British sorcerers, Japanese martial artists, African-derived houngans, Greek oracle priestesses, Aztec blood cultists, Romanian fortune-tellers, Indian Tantric yogis…it's been found everywhere. Somehow, instinct directed people one way or another towards magick.

Using traditional stuff is a respectful nod to all that's gone before, a hello thru the years to some long-ago, faraway sister stirring her pot, softly chanting, and forging a kindred connection in doing the same things she did. Not only does it stop those forgotten rites from falling through the cracks of history to be lost forever, it tends to stop you and make you think through the concrete, the billboards, the crackling electricity, that the earth does still lie under there. It's hard to get in touch with that in a world hell-bent on "progress" and technology, with our gleaming cars and email, but it can only help you to stay in touch with your roots. It's about balance. It's also wise to always keep in mind that once upon a time, lots of people were brutally murdered for doing the same things…