Initiated Read online

  Initially, following Mariella’s instructions, I was grouchy with the Surinamese. They would command me, “Woman! Bring me my tea.” I would respond, “My name is not woman!” When I tried to play my The Cure tapes instead of the reggae that was constantly on rotation, they’d shout, “Woman! This is not music!” Then they would joke with each other and place bets on whether or not I would play Bob Marley, because that was the only reggae white people knew or could understand. Usually, they were right; I was about to play Bob Marley. Now I want to go back and shake myself. It was their hangout; why should I get to commandeer the stereo? It was a Rastafarian coffee shop.

  Lion, a twenty-three-year-old Jamaican with dreads down to his waist, who always wore a knit beret in the colors of the Jamaican flag, would sit at the bar sketching. For work, he drew caricatures of tourists on the Damrak, but he’d come into the Oude Kerk on his breaks and sometimes he would draw my portrait and tell me not to worry what the other guys said. “Bob Marley was popular for a reason,” he’d grin at me with a sleepy smile.

  After a while it was too exhausting to be en garde all the time. I was too cold. I started to be gentle with all the customers, especially the Surinamese drug dealers. We started choosing the music collectively, and I trusted them to tend to their own business with the drugs in the bathroom. When they called me woman, I’d just tell them my name was Amanda. Almost immediately, the vibe at De Oude Kerk changed. The clients were kind back to me. I would pass them on the street on my way home late at night and they’d shout, “Hey! Rasta baby!!”

  I teach a class now on psychic self-defense, and one of its most important principles I learned in De Oude Kerk: Be on good terms with the other beings in your environment. When you speak sharply to a person, you make them your enemy. Kindness is a powerful ward and can help you learn many secrets.

  Once on good terms with the Surinamese, they taught me about reggae. They spoke to me of the complex post-Colonial politics of Holland and the best place to get gado-gado, a vegetable and rice dish slathered in lemony peanut sauce. Empathy is a spell that creates intimacy and connection, a free exchange of information. Protection spells are sometimes necessary, but their objective is to keep things out. Create peace, and protection becomes less necessary.

  One afternoon while at work, I leaned against the wall describing to Lion the kind of bike I wanted. Because of their popularity, bikes weren’t even that expensive in Amsterdam, but they were still more than I could afford, and I never had time to go look for one because I was always working. I wanted one with a basket and a bell like the old women I saw pedaling through the city with their black socks pulled up to their knees and their square-toed shoes. I wanted a cushiony seat and wide handlebars. Thick tires were a necessity, too, since the tram lines for the streetcars engraved shallow trenches in the streets; narrow tires could easily slip inside them and get caught. I’d seen more than one cyclist skid out and eat it that way. Just as I finished describing to Lion my perfect bike, a man pushed open the shop door. With his right hand he wheeled in a bike with a basket and a bell, wide handlebars, and fat tires. “Does anyone need a bike?” the man shouted into the room.

  “How much?” I asked him.

  “Ten guilders.” At the time ten guilders was equivalent to about $8. Sold.

  Beaming, I wheeled my bike behind the counter. “Lady, you are powerful.” Lion smiled at me. “Remind me not to cross you.”

  The bike was the color of key-lime pie, a Soviet model from the 1980s, sturdy and simple, with thick tires and a padded seat. Probably it had been well loved by some babushka back in the motherland. It was not unusual, I later learned, to have a junkie offer you a cheap stolen bike in Amsterdam. But the fact that it arrived moments after I said I wanted one seemed like a loving sign from a benevolent universe.

  Once I had my bike, I took my first opportunity to travel to Zone 2 to scout out the School for New Dance Development, the sacred heart of my European pilgrimage. The dancer at the party in San Francisco had given me the cross streets; I figured I’d be able to find it from there. But the closer to my destination I drew, the more confusingly residential the neighborhood became. Finally, I came upon a house, like every other house on the street, tall and narrow, made of brick, ordinary except for a small handwritten sign in the window that said SNDO and a big padlock on the door to keep out the squatters.

  Wiping a circle of grime off the window, I pressed my face up against the glass. An empty room, no furniture, no signs of use. It had an aura of vacancy about it that told me it hadn’t seen use for months, if not years. As far as I knew, the SNDO was no more, and from the cramped room and the condition of the building, it looked like it had never been much to begin with.

  I kept feeling like someone was going to pop out from behind a bush and yell “Surprise! Just kidding, it’s right here!” And then gesture across the street to a grand and beautiful studio that would welcome me and pull me into a class right then and there. Instead, I just walked around until it was time to go to work, where I answered the pot-inspired quandaries of the tourists with a disinterested shrug.

  I wasn’t ready to give up yet though. I knew the Magician had sent me to Amsterdam for a reason. But I was sick of sleeping in crowded youth hostels full of snoring travelers hacking their winter coughs and stumbling into the dorm room drunk at 4:00 a.m. I wanted to get my own apartment, or at least a room somewhere. But there was no Craigslist then; there was barely an Internet. Still clinging to my witchy roots, I decided to ask the spirits for help.

  One afternoon, when all my fellow travelers had left the dorm to go explore the city, I pulled out my notebook and called for the guidance of a spirit. O! Reader. I did this the incorrect way. I should’ve grounded, centered, and shielded first. I should’ve called on a spirit I’d worked with before. I should’ve been more clear about what I wanted. But I did none of these things. I was still a baby witch then, inexperienced and cavalier. My practice was intuitive and unstructured. And…it worked.

  I closed my eyes and let the spirit move my hand across the paper in a practice the Surrealists, occult aficionados that they were, called “Automatic Writing.” To do it, you close your eyes and ask a question, then let your hand wander across the page, pen in hand scribbling as it wills. Almost immediately, I started getting results, my pen scratching and circling. Finally, the movement stopped. I opened my eyes expecting a great revelation. All I saw was a bunch of chicken scratches, spirals, hatch marks, and just one word—Clifton—written over and over again in a halting, childish hand. It meant nothing to me.

  The next day at work, I again described my dilemma to Lion. Lion didn’t know of any rooms for rent. I think he lived with his family. As we were discussing, enter yet another man standing in the doorway of De Oude Kerk, his neck looped with a dozen gold chains, wearing a red and white nylon tracksuit. “I have a room for rent,” he announced to no one in particular. Lion looked at me with his eyebrows raised. “I think I’m a little afraid of you now,” he told me.

  The gold-chained one introduced himself as Mustafa. He had a strange warble to his voice as if it was difficult for him to get his mouth around the words. Mustafa did not inspire a great deal of confidence. But even though he fronted like a movie gangster with the gold chains and the loping walk, he didn’t seem dangerous, just a little defeated and sad. When I asked for more information, he told me the place was a two-room apartment in the southeast and that I would have it all to myself for 350 guilders a month. Because it came just after I announced my need, I thought I should at least have a look at it. My bike was a true gift from heaven; I hoped I’d feel the same way about my new apartment.

  The next morning, I called the number Mustafa had given me to schedule the appointment. An elderly woman with a thick Caribbean accent answered the phone. “This is Mrs. Clifton,” she said. Clifton was Mustafa’s surname. I took the apartment.

  One thing I’ve long since learned about magic is that just because you’re receiving sign
s and messages, just because you’re experiencing synchronicity, doesn’t mean you’re supposed to take every opportunity that comes your way because of it.

  Both magic and synchronicity thrive in situations of uncertainty. Like a frozen river, in times of stability nothing can move. When facing a period of strife, the good news is that you’re likely to have a lot of what I call magical heat: a surplus of magical coincidences and connections. When things are stable and your life is settled, there’s less room for the magic to maneuver. When your situation is volatile, anything can happen, and too, it’s at those times that we’re most inclined to look to signs for help. The more we pay attention, the more meaningful coincidences appear. Problem is, the more stressed we are, the more likely it is that that troubled energy will be reflected back at us. Our magical field is influenced by the state of our psyche. If you’re upset, your magic is liable to manifest opportunities and relationships that just bring you more chaos. As a witch matures, she comes to understand that meditation is her most important practice because it stabilizes her mind and makes her more peaceful. Ironically, the more stable and happy you are, the less you need magic to attain your desires, but also, the more likely it will be that your magic achieves the intended results.

  The room I rented from Mr. Clifton was on the fourth floor of what was essentially a derelict housing project in the southeastern part of the city. Whenever I came home, Mustafa would try to sell me one of the radios or television sets he had lying out on the tarmac in front of the building. He was a hustler, but his hustling wasn’t getting him very far. Whenever he offered me a television or a radio, he did it with an air of futility. He knew I wouldn’t buy it, probably no one would, but at least he was trying.

  In fact, the whole building the Clifton spirit had led me to was full of desperate people. Across the hall from me was a couple I heard but never saw. Since they spoke Dutch, I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but I knew whatever it was, it wasn’t good. They were constantly fighting. The woman would cry and the man would yell. One day I came home to find a hole punched through their door.

  The doors were flimsy. Mine had a chain lock, which locked only from the inside. I couldn’t lock it when I left. There was no handle on the door; you could see into my room through the little circle where the handle was supposed to be. Eventually a French girl stole my sleeping bag. Though the windows were double paned, the place was drafty, cracked floor boards rife with splinters. And there was no toilet. Instead, there was a dirty industrial sink in the hall. I could pee in a pot and empty it there.

  But the worst, and most deadly, thing about my new apartment was that it had no heat. It was the coldest winter they’d had in the Netherlands in twenty years. I’d ride home at 2:00 a.m. after De Oude Kerk closed, in temperatures 20 degrees below zero, navigating frozen canals where in the day Dutch folks would smile and swirl on ice skates, looping around the city. At night, the canals would exude a soft mist, and I’d go out to the middle and lie there, staring up into the low dark sky, feeling the enormity of life resting on top of me.

  I was never not cold. I didn’t have proper clothes. I would layer on every article of clothing I had, skirts and dresses over jeans, sweaters on top of that. I’d wear knit caps and wrap scarves around them like a turban, and then throw a second scarf over that as a shawl to cover my neck and shoulders. When I went to work, I’d cling like a barnacle to the heater running behind the counter at De Oude Kerk.

  “Woman! Where are you from?” the Surinamese drug dealers would question me.

  “California,” I’d say with a shrug.

  “Oh, we thought maybe West Africa,” they’d respond, baffling me. Eventually, I found out they asked because of the way I was dressed: layers and layers of clothes, like the Herrero women of Namibia in their Victorian petticoats and shawls and aprons and turbans galore. That, and because of my name, Amanda, which sounds like the freedom chant, “Amandla!” shouted at protest rallies across the south and west of the African continent. “Who named you that?” the Surinamese would ask me. “My mother,” I’d respond. And they’d look at each other, confused.

  When my shift ended, I’d go home and strap my Walkman beneath my bra and dance in my freezing apartment until I was sweaty and panting. I’d dry off and then race into bed, hoping my internal heat would last. I’d pile everything I owned on top of the thin mattress I used as a bed: all my clothes, blankets, my sleeping bag, cardboard. Then I’d sleep under the mattress to try and keep warm. Lips blue, I would shiver, teeth chattering the whole night. Sometimes I’d chant the witch chants I remembered from my childhood, the words cording out across oceans, across continents, to my mother, to my familiars:

  Hoof and Horn

  Hoof and Horn

  All that die shall be reborn

  Corn and grain

  Corn and grain

  All that fall shall rise again

  We all come from the Goddess

  And to her we shall return

  Like a drop of rain

  Rolling down to the ocean4

  It got so bad that I couldn’t empty my chamber pot. By the time I woke up, my pee would be frozen solid. I’d have to heat it on my hot plate in order to dump it out. I had the belief that I should be able to endure anything. That to get what I wanted, I must withstand the worst. My culture had trained me to believe that the greater your sacrifice, the greater your virtue. The chants I used to soothe myself were a thumb, frostbitten and red, skewered into a dam about to burst. If I pulled my thumb out, if I stopped chanting, the dam would collapse. I’d be swept away in the freezing waters of poverty and despair.

  Magic improves your odds, but it doesn’t erase the odds. We still live in the material universe and we must obey its laws. Just because magical practitioners don’t always get exactly what they want, exactly when they want it, doesn’t prove that magic is pointless. Getting what you want is not the only reason to practice magic.

  If magic worked, cynics might argue, then the voodoo priests of Haiti would be leading their rites in an unsullied tropical paradise, rather than the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. If magic worked, then the Winti ceremonies of the Surinamese, with their perfumed gifts to the ancestors and their possession rites, would’ve landed them in jungle palaces, lounging poolside as they smoked fresh tinqs Colombian, rather than hawking ecstasy to tourists whose fancy backpacks cost more than a month’s rent of their apartments. If magic worked, the Eastern Orthodox women trafficked to Amsterdam from Belarus could smash the glass of their Red Light prisons with a simple prayer whispered to the Virgin. If magic worked, then the American Instagram witch making Delphinium potions to heal her sexual trauma could focus her efforts on her art instead of just scratching her way back to baseline mental health.

  Though magic does often bring us the things we desire, satisfying our cravings is not magic’s primary purpose. Magic connects people to their roots, to their spiritual ancestors and allies, to the hundreds of thousands of beings who have gone before them experiencing similar struggles. A creative act, magic brings richness to your life. When you’re cold and alone, your chants might be all you have to keep you alive. Even when it feels like all of civilization has conspired in its effort to take it from you, magic gives you hope, magic gives you pleasure, and most importantly, magic helps you remember you have power, even if you can’t see a way to use it yet. The fact that magic connects people to their power is the main reason most systems of oppression attempt to ban it.

  New Year’s Eve, 1996. Alone, I wandered to the Leidseplein, one of Amsterdam’s biggest public squares, where I planned to perform a spell. I knew that at the stroke of midnight, all the celebrants would release an explosion of energy and goodwill. In an ideal world, witches practice their spells in nature, beneath canopies of leaves and moonlight, where the power comes not from the people, but from the rocks and the stones and the wind and the trees. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and the enthusiasm of the people of Amsterda
m was all I had.

  Teeth chattering, swathed in head scarves and my thin wool jacket, I headed to the center of the square where spidery leafless trees decked in fairy lights held circle around the perimeter. Snowflake Christmas decorations arced over the narrow streets, channeling revelers into the plaza. Sounds of whistling, a distant drumbeat. The crowd became denser and denser. As midnight approached, I stood at the center of the throng and faced each of the four directions. I turned to the north, closed my eyes, and visualized the ice giants and the steppenwolves, fierce eyes blazing. “Great Ones. Guardians. Spirits of the North. Come. Be here with me.” I whispered the invocation and turned clockwise to my right, calling in the spirits of the East, South, and West, naming their qualities, singing their praises, asking their favor.

  10-9-8-7-6…As the countdown to 1997 approached, I stood, palms pressed together before me as the crowd seethed and sobbed. A girl in a puffy down parka and knit cap pressed mittened hands against the cheeks of her boyfriend, preparing for their kiss. Drunken Brits stumbled together arm in arm like sailors, bellowing their football chants. A queer party crew in their feathers and rainbow streaks of eyeshadow bounced and pranced near an illegal fire guarded by grim police officers in gaudy yellow jackets. My intention for the spell was simple: I wanted comfort. I wanted a protector. I wanted someone to look me in the eyes and tell me everything was going to be okay.

  Note that it didn’t even occur to me to ask for a solution to my problems or the confidence to solve them. I believed a solution could only come through someone else, so that’s what I asked for. And as any scientist will tell you, the question you ask largely determines the outcome of your experiment.