June 21, 2008
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While I was still writing my Voice column, but just after I had started working for The New York Times, I kept noticing this attractive woman on the uptown subway. She was impeccably dressed with white gloves, like Lewis Carroll’s White Rabbit, and she seemed a little demure. I was too shy to approach her directly and sought advice from the readers of my column about how to meet her. As soon as the column appeared I saw her again and, seizing the moment, asked her if she read the Voice, but in any case to read page two of the current issue because I had written about her. Next time we met, the ice broken, we began a friendship that endured 40 years, and contributed enormously to my life even though it ended so dishearteningly. Elizabeth Pepper was a witch, one of that wise breed filled with earth lore who for centuries have known all about natural forces, herbs, homeopathic cures, animals, food and drink, sacred rituals and mystic incantations. For a while I was not especially conscious of this aspect of her, beguiled by the knowledge that she was art director of Gourmet magazine. For several successive years she served as den mother in the various places that Neil Hickey and I shared each summer with a shifting group of people.
In the Sixties, though, Betty began to contribute a regular pagan column to my paper, Other Scenes, and eventually this led to her starting The Witches Almanac, which she described as “a compendium of ancient lore and legend--the indispensable guide and delightful companion for adept, occultist, witch and mortal alike". And for this compendium of wiccan knowledge, arcane secrets, astrological portents and ageless advice for sound living, I was invited to be co-editor. In practice that meant becoming the sorcerer's apprentice and learning about magic through visiting the "magical" sites of 18 countries to produce three books, in addition to my editorial duties for the annual. The almanac was never advertised, and never written about outside the craft, with Betty taking the view that “those who need it will find it”. Apparently they did, because in some years it sold as many as 50,000 copies although she constantly pleaded poverty and paid me randomly and meagerly. My friend Sasha kept urging, “It’s flying out of the stores up here; have her give you an accounting”. I was never able to persuade her to give me any figures, and let it go. The scope of magic is endless and composed of pretty much anything that seems to have no logical explanation. It has origins--and true believers—in every country, and touches on everything from Egyptian scarabs to Scottish selkies along with a million other manifestations. I noted that in Australia a growing awareness of the fact that the Aborigines regard Ayers Rock to be a sacred mountain, had prompted the return of hundreds of stones taken from the famous 1,140ft high site by acquisitive tourists. They claimed to be fearful of the bad luck it might bring--or had already brought. While I was there, the Anangu tribe, the Rock's official guardians, announced that they would use the stones to build a memorial celebrating the 20th anniversary of the rock being returned to the Aboriginal race, while simultaneously regaining its original name, Uluru. Some of the packages--sent from all over the world--contained little more than gravel or soil, others contained rocks as big as 75lbs, but were always accompanied by similar apologies: "Please return to Uluru--six years bad luck is enough". Graeme Calmar, chairman of the local Ananga community, commented: "A lot of people want a piece of the place because they know how great it is. But they haven't realized the true significance of the power of Uluru". In Greece, pagans had been infuriating the Orthodox church by petitioning for official recognition and the right to worship Zeus and other Hellenic gods at traditional sacred sites including the Parthenon. The pagans' spiritual leader, Panayiotis Martinis, claimed that there were 100,000 adherents who maintain the rites of Olympus, many of whom were contemptuous of the (state) church. Who were these early Christians? scoffed one. "They were the great unwashed, they had no athletics, no culture, and only one book: the Bible". To many pagans, animals were especially thought to possess some (magical?) instinct lacking in most humans. A London doctor, Rupert Sheldrake, did some research to bolster his theory that pets--and especially cats--had some telepathic means of knowing they were about to be taken to the vet. Almost all the doctors reported that appointments had been cancelled because near the hour of the appointment the pets mysteriously disappeared for a while. "Some people say their dogs know when they are going to be taken for a walk, even at unusual times and even when they are in a different room, out of sight and hearing" Dr. Sheldrake reports. "If domestic animals are telepathic with their human owners, it seems likely that they are telepathic with each other in the wild". These were the sort of subjects that I discussed in the column Today and Tomorrow which occupied the first few pages of every almanac. In addition to astrological and weather predictions, a typical issue might carry, among other things, a piece separating truth from legend about King Arthur or the Yeti, locate the sites of ancient gods on the Cyclades islands of Greece, explain the ancient Egyptians' concept of the world and reprint stories by Aesop, Moschus (BC 150) or the Brothers Grimm. Paganism has a huge following, larger probably than any of the established religions and certainly older. For thousands of years before even Christianity, people worshipped the sun which they saw correctly as the source of heat, light and life itself.
The short-lived Roman emperor Julian, a devotee of the sun god Mithras, said he believed light bore the same relation to things visible as truth to things intelligible. "Are you alone insensible of the splendor that follows the Sun? Are you alone ignorant that Summer and Winter are produced by Him and that all things are alone vivified and alone germinate from Him?" But with Julian's murder in 365 AD during a military campaign in Persia, his chosen religion also all-but disappeared. "If Christianity had been arrested in its growth" wrote the French philosopher Renan, "the western world would have been Mithraic". Worshipping the sun, and its mirror image the moon, is for millions of people more passive than active, being more often an alternative to prevailing orthodox beliefs. Many atheists or agnostics might be willing to accept that they are really pagans. At any rate, my involvement with Betty and the almanac led me inevitably into this quest for magic. Every human being has a quest, it seems, but very few realize it and even fewer discover what their personal quest is before they are captivated by it. It has its classical counterpart, of course, in the alchemist's search for the Philosopher's Stone, Jason's pursuit of the Golden Fleece or the lifelong quest by so many medieval knights for the Holy Grail. All these things, as psychologists have pointed out, are nothing less than inner searches for oneself, clothed in the semblance of outer, worldly activity. The quest, in fact, conscious or otherwise, forms the central structure of our lives and it is only when we detect its pattern that we are able to channel it effectively. When we vacillate, change course haphazardly or shoot off wildly in ten directions at once, it suggests that maybe our internal compass is skewed. And it is at those times that we are most vulnerable to something (or somebody else's) pattern. What caused my musing along these lines was my growing realization in the 1970s that, like most of my friends, I seemed to feel the need for a guru. There were so many questions to ask about life's meaning and one's place in the scheme of things and as we get older we begin to realize how little we know and how much we want to know. There are no answers, only questions, it has been said, and when you pass thirty, and then forty the questions come thick and fast. So where could I seek for the wisdom for which I yearned? Many of my friends apparently thought it could be provided by one or another wise teacher, and clearly there was no shortage of such candidates, many with Indian or Oriental names and unverifiable credentials.
Somehow I didn't see myself sitting at somebody's feet or undergoing the discipline of a commune or ashram. Being somewhat glib, excessively articulate and a shade too dominating (Leo) to make a good disciple, I have always found it hard to accept counsel, much less direction. And while I knew there were many fine spiritual teachers around who might be able to instill in me the tranquility and self-acceptance that a frenetic New York lifestyle had mostly smothered, I also suspected that there were too many poseurs who were hardly as all-wise and all-knowing as their adherents claimed. It became obvious then, that no single person was going to provide my answers for me--or even stimulate me with new questions--and it was just at this point that my life changed direction. When the pupil is ready, the teacher will appear. For some years I had been working with Betty on the almanac, but in a perfunctory sort of way, more as an editorial adviser and contributor than a full-fledged partner. My travel writing led me to such places as Delphi and Delos in Greece; the Nazca Lines of Peru; Malta's spooky temples; Stonehenge and the pyramids of both Mexico and Egypt. And my immersion in the alternate culture exposed me to such activities as tarot, gardening by the moon's phases and ouija boards. Involved though I was, not only with revising my travel books but also with the bustling New York art world and what was left of radical 'underground' publishing scene, suddenly it seemed everything appeared to be pointing to a new project: a travel book about so-called "magical" sites. So many of these ancient power centers still retained their mystery and an ability to fire the imagination: the lost land of Lyonesse, Italy's Lake Nemi, Loch Ness, Ireland's Tara, the Brocken in Germany. Every country had dozens of such places and Europe alone could surely provide enough for several books. It would be a snap, I thought. I would read everything I could find about these places, inspect them with a relatively skeptical reporter's eye and write what was known about them today. Then, the job done, I would move onto something else. How naive! I was already trapped. It is impossible, I quickly discovered, to dabble in magic without being captivated by its spell. The very word is a potent one and if you doubt this try introducing it casually into the conversation at any time among almost any group of people. You will sometimes get the impression that people are trying not to believe in it. The contract Betty and I had signed with Harper & Row (and in England with Weidenfeld) for Magical and Mystical Sites, was exhilarating: a chance to visit every legendary centre of power in Europe with a reportorial eye and report what I found. My friends were divided in their advice. "It's all rubbish" was one verdict; others would caution me about what might happen to me if I didn't tread carefully. It seemed to be a good idea to try and steer down the middle, searching always for "evidence" but not necessarily being perturbed if faith were needed instead. I also felt intuitively that just as those around me seemed to be seeking a guru of some sort, my own questions and answers were going to be found in magic. Betty and I, had been doing the almanac for a few years already, usually with Amber and I living for a month or two in a house in the woods nearby, and so my role as sorcerer's apprentice was by now well established. And here was wisdom infinite, how would one ever tire of learning from this source?
So now that I was all fired up to plunge in to the book, off I went to see James (the Amazing) Randi in some excitement. He'd valiantly let me join him answering calls on his all-night WOR show a couple of times so I felt we were sort of friends. To my chagrin he too, thought it was all rubbish. "Any magical thing you can show me, I can duplicate" he declared. I was aghast. Could be there only stage magic? "Well", I said, "there have to be some things that are just un-explainable". Randy shook his head as if I was a hopeless case. I brought up the subject of his bete noir Ruri Geller, the notorious spoon bender. "The thing I don't understand" I said, "is how he manages to bend those hard-steel Medeco keys. Everybody knows they're impossible to bend". "Do you have one?" Randy asked. "I took my house key out of my pocket, a Medeco key, and handed it over. I tried to pay close attention but somehow he diverted me and, In a matter of seconds, he handed it back--bent. He wouldn't tell me how he did it but I later discovered that the answer is to bend the key against a little piece of even harder metal which the magician conceals in his palm. (He now tells me that my explanation is “a typical journalistic one” but declines to elucidate further). The whole thing made me realize that there are two wings of magic--as, I suppose of everything--and the only place they overlap is illusion. Misdirection is the stage magician's major tool and it can be used in real life with relative ease. Let's say, for example, you were at a small party and you didn't want people to note your departure, even if they would soon become aware of your absence. Then you either wait for, or create, a diversion. The best example would be a natural one: the arrival of somebody else providing you with the chance to slip away unnoticed. In real magic it would all happen in a way for which there would be no logical explanation. You may recall that when I was telling you about Warhol earlier, I talked about how Andy had made everybody realize that the potential for a piece of honest, dedicated creativity lay dormant in just about every person on this planet. Well, that's true about magic, too, as can be seen in many aspects, not the least of which is dowsing. Lead any neophyte to a likely field, and after placing a hazel wand or other twig in his/her hand encourage aimless wandering. As likely as not the twig's subsequent motions will indicate water. This may not happen the first time but interestingly enough a dowser becomes more successful with practice. What other skills lay dormant inside us that may have been in use long ago? In fact, what exactly is magic? Is it even possible to define it? The Encyclopedia Britannica devotes five or six thousand words to this task and when you have ploughed through it you remain bewildered. It begins:
So to start off, I took the broad view that magic was almost anything for which there didn't seem to be a rational, logical explanation. And when I'd finished (although I'll never 'finish') I was of the opinion that magic was mostly to do with the manipulation-- the collecting and redirecting--of energy. Some people claim to be able to do it, but nowhere is there "proof" of such achievements although there is plenty of, shall we say, circumstantial evidence. What became increasingly absorbing was the way that everything I researched seem to lead inevitably to something else. There were always more questions. I had found my "guru"…. I placed an ad in London's Time Out for an assistant "to help a writer research travel and magic" and told all callers to come to my Notting Hill studio any time between 10am and 10pm the following Thursday, with the hardly surprising result that I sparked a daylong party. One woman came wearing a sweater an earlier arrival had actually knitted (and sold, in bulk, to a London clothes store); another claimed her father was Queen Elizabeth's secretary. (It turned out to be true; he was a senior Civil Service official appointed to be the Queen's advisor). All my visitors chatted to each other, took turns making tea, went out to fetch cakes and came back. The party lasted all day.
One woman said she's always been interested in white horses--and were they magical? I said why didn't she do me a day's research in the library and find out? She asked what a day was, and I said six or seven hours would do fine and I'd pay her about fifty bucks. I hired a few others on the same basis, thus encouraging people to be remunerated for investigating something that personally interested them. Over the years I've found this system works pretty well because you're checking out several people's capabilities at the same time and at relatively little expense. Martha Zenfell impressed me the most. She'd recently arrived in Europe, aged 21, from New Orleans, drawn by the reputation of 'swinging London' and the Beatles. I told her of my assignment but first of all, I explained, I planned to go to Cannes and do a pirate gossip paper. She said she'd come. I liked Sally (the one whose father worked for the queen) and she said she'd come, too. Much of the magical research for Magical and Mystical Sites and the book that followed it, A Guide to Occult Britain, was done in a section of the University of London Library known as the Harry Price collection. Price was a notorious if somewhat unscrupulous "ghost hunter" much beloved by Fleet Street papers in the 1930s when he used to take his equipment to reputedly haunted houses and report on his experiences. During the course of his life's work he accumulated 14,000 books about every conceivable aspect of magic from pagan history and mysticism to dowsing, spiritualism, archaeology, charlatanism, optical illusions, fire walking and the Indian rope trick, all of which he willed to the university. The collection was kept in a special locked room to which I gained access through its curator, Alan Wesencraft, who would let me in along with my notepads, blanket, thermos and sandwiches. I would take a bottle to pee in (the nearest toilet was down three flights of stairs) and stay there for eight hours at a stretch, enthralled by Louis Lavater's 1572 Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Night (which is credited with giving Shakespeare the idea for Hamlet). The library had three copies of Reginald Scot's 1584 Discoverie of Witchcraft which had somehow escaped King James I's furious injunction that all copies be destroyed by the public hangman, and there was a 1576 edition of Malleus Malificarium, written by the sadistic monks Jakob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, which gave detailed instructions for the interrogation and torture of suspects, The library's oldest volume was Johannes Angeli's Astrolabium Planum (Venice, 1494), an early work about astrology containing 300 woodcuts illustrating costumes and costumes of the period. The whole place was an absolute joy and I was sorry when I had finished my own books and no longer had an excuse to spend time there. The one book I regret not spending more time with was a century-old collection explaining how most magical tricks were performed. Unfortunately I failed to note the title.
In later years, Betty sent me to the British Museum rare book collection to locate a 15th century book published in Cologne and containing some woodcuts about nature. She needed these for the collection of quotations on which we were also working A Book of Days. I already possessed a reader's pass for the library but this was something special, a request that required one to go to the rear room, deposit ID as security and not to move from the assigned seat. When the book arrived, its tattered leather cover bound with red string, I opened it reverently and found…….the pages uncut. Was I the first person to read this book in the 500 years since it was published? An exciting thought, although even I did not actually read it, because it was in German. To get copies of the woodcuts it was necessary to fill in a form listing what was required: there are no copying machines in the British Museum's library. In due course, the copies arrived in the mail. Did the library cut the pages? I never had the nerve to ask. The first time I had attended the Cannes Film festival was with Amber and we enjoyed all the free movies and parties, but a plan was brewing in my head. Noticing that there were 600 mailboxes devoted to the international press, it occurred to me that this was a captive audience it would be easy to reach. So the following year, my marriage over, here I was with Sally and Martha, ensconced in an inexpensive double room in the Majestic Hotel. with one us hiding under the sheets each morning as two breakfasts were delivered (although the hotel treated the whole business with suitably French aplomb). With the aid of a wonderful London printer, Mike Tickner camped out in a tent at the edge of town we produced a daily scandal sheet, In the Cannes.
The lady reporters roamed the festival daily, interviewing people they found interesting, gathering gossip, writing capsule reviews and reporting the events of what, for some people, was a nonstop, two-week party. By evening we had gathered in our hotel room to condense our collective reports into 30-150 word items which we typed on stencils and delivered to Michael to run off on his portable printing equipment. The page heads were pre-printed in color: Cafe Confidential, Cruisin' La Croisette, Carlton Cliches, Cannes-Id-Camera, Cote D'Or Capers, Today's Top Ten --the kind of all-purpose categories into which we could slot a non-interview with the pompously self-important Robert Altman or articles accusing Ken Russell of practicing black magic as easily as a report of big-hearted Sam Arkoff's lavish party or a naked Edie Williams posing on a macho motorcycle while inviting Jean-Paul Belmondo to costar in her new porno movie ("It's the only way I'll ever get to fuck him" panted Edie). Rex Reed provided us with our lead story on three separate days; Eleanor Perry and London Evening Standard film critic Alexander Walker tipped us off to various items; the team of (Victor) Bockris and (Andrew) Wylie; pitched in with comment; and a host of generous supporters bought us drinks and lunches partly in tribute to our working at our own expense. (The glossy Cannes' trade dailies, were, of course, loaded with advertising). We asked Deep Throat producer Gerard Damiano why porn was necessary: GD: "To give people hard-ons! Most people cannot face their own sexuality; of all human functions sex is the most important and yet the most restricted. Pornography is in fact unnecessary and unimportant, it is only when you try to restrict it that it becomes important." and we asked Tony Curtis about Marilyn Monroe: TC: "A very unhappy and frustrated woman. She didn't hide the fact that she was a woman and therefore became an object of scorn and ridicule; this happens to all beautiful people". We carried a light-hearted piece on mumping , the prevalent practice of stiffing people for your drinks ("you scarcely dare to blink", wailed one victim) reported the feud between Italian star (and Festival juror) Monica Vitti and her ex-lover Antonioni, and seemed to be the only paper interested in talking to Martin Scorsese whose Mean Streets was making its debut at the Directors' Fortnight. Its pr gal said she hated our rag and declined to cooperate with us. Each day our lady reporters would hand out a new issue and collect information for the next. A typewriter, of course, was adequate for typesetting. For "pirate papers" it gives an impressive look of immediacy. The following year we were even better organized, having arranged with a local printer to produce each day's edition for around $150, roughly 15c per copy, which would have worked it fine if we'd ever sold any advertising--which we were enjoying ourselves too much to do. As it was, with Jim Buckley's help, we got out seven of the 13 daily issues we had scheduled. And then, having run his ads for his own film, he caved, declining to finance the remaining issues. The operation was simplicity itself with the 17" x 12" blank sheets preprinted with the logo and some of the department heads and the daily copy pasted in the blank spaces on a master copy. Then the pages were rerun through the press and folded three times to produce a pocket-sized paper about 4" x 6", logo on the front and color heads (red one day, green the next) appearing atop the next two unfolds. For a running daily feature I picked up an out-of-print book about breaking into the movies by Anita Loos, obtaining her telephoned permission to use it, and I assiduously scoured the world's movie ‘zines for bits of gossip to stockpile. As it happened most of these weren't needed because of the vast amount of copy generated by the festival itself in addition to the rich lode of graphics and features to be gleaned from film magazines of half a century ago. The most important lesson I learned from this Cannes experience was how relatively cheap and easy it is for an efficient team to publish "instant newspapers" virtually anywhere. Back in New York, Michael Goldstein turned down my offer to write a column for the Soho Weekly News but granted my request for a free three-line ad in the classifieds with which I proposed to run "a magical treasure hunt". There was no announcement and no sure evidence that anybody actually noticed it, but the ad ran every week, always signed 'Leprechaun' and giving instructions to check out various hinted-at hiding places. One was in one of those deposit slots in an abandoned bank on Lexington Avenue, half surrounded by scaffolding prior to its demolition. There I had placed a matchbook with my phone number. Nobody called, although when I checked the matchbook had gone. Then, over the course of several weeks, I instructed readers to take an old key and boil it in salt water, sleeping with it under the pillow for the three weekends prior to the full moon at which time they were to take it to Sheridan Square and deposit it at the lowest point they could find not actually on the ground. This, I promised, would change their fortunes for the better.
The fortunes of the Soho Weekly News itself however, failed to improve. London press lord Vere Harmsworth was stupid, or ill-advised enough to keep pouring money into what soon became clear was an obvious loser. Apart from the paper having no real identity, no focus and thus no particular reason for existence, this absentee Fleet Street landlord was so dumb that he sent an editor from London to direct it--a man with no experience of New York to run a paper in what was indubitably the hippest city in the world. (It was a mistake unequalled until Tina Brown's New Yorker imported London columnist Alex Chancellor to write about Manhattan and the newcomer turned in a 'scoop' about a Christmas tree going up in Rockefeller Center). Despite the millions invested in it, SWN 's circulation never got much above a pathetic 15,000 and alienated many of its readers. I sent a few unsolicited items to the columnist Robert Sam Anson, a Vietnam vet, and received in reply: "I don't know you and having perused a few of your tracts have no interest in knowing you.. If you have any bright ideas in future, I suggest you keep them to yourself or better still take them up with the friendly people in white coats at Bellevue. I trust this makes my position clear". Sure killer, whatever you say.
THE FABLED QUEEN OF SHEBA may or may not have existed, after all her era was 3,000 years ago in a remote desert kingdom on the trade route between India and Africa which, as part of Yemen, is not much more accessible today. But now that global attention has brought a new focus to the Arabian peninsula, speculation about the queen has resurfaced. Her memory was evoked in a recent British Museum show, Treasures of Ancient Yemen, and a visiting British writer Peter Conrad found her Muslim name Bilquis decorating everything from the first class airport lounge to a pharmacy in the Yemeni capital of Sana. What is claimed to be one of her temples, Mahram Bilquis, has been unearthed at Marib in the western desert. Bilquis means "half human/half spirit", and even today Yemenis believe that Sheba was born from one of the unpredictable whirlwinds called djinns or genies. The ancient legends of Sheba's visit bearing gifts of frankincense and myrrh for Solomon (who mistrusted her as a sorceress) were recounted in a tale by Flaubert, an oratorio by Handel and operas by Gounod and Goldmark. In King Vidor's 1959 film, Solomon and Sheba, the major roles were played by Yul Brynner and Gina Lollobrigida.
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