Thursday, February 11, 2021

High Magick: A Guide to the Spiritual Practices That Saved My Life on Death Row by Damien Echols

In prison they don't even let you keep your name. They issue you a number. As far as the State of Arkansas was concerned, Damien Echols did not exist--I was inmate SK-931 (that means I was the 931st person that Arkansas sentenced to death). That level of dehumanization enables all sorts of abuse, and a lot of it so terrible that it sounds fictional in the telling. The entire system is built on humiliation and destruction because it needs the people inside to forget that they're human and for them to feel that they have no recourse whatsoever but to accept whatever comes to them, regardless of the pain involved.

They could damage my aura, but they couldn't take it away. They could seriously hinder my ability to perform magick, but not entirely. They could force all manner of obstacles upon me, but they could not rob me of my ability to shape reality. Every day of my time inside, I lived on a battlefield of wills: the State wanted to destroy me, but I very much wanted to survive, to live, and to thrive. Thankfully, there are times when the battle doesn't go to the strongest or the swiftest, but to the side who has the raw will to endure until the end. So here I am, and I'm here because of these techniques, because of magick, and because of the people who loved and supported me through my time in Hell.

I've been writing a novel set during the Satanic Panic of the 1990's. The protagonist is a teenager who is falsely accused of kidnapping and killing his own infant sister, and--spoiler alert, I guess--is put in jail. While incarcerated he finds that he's unable to write the poetry that was his pastime once; anything he writes he knows might be confiscated by a guard and used against him at trial. So he begins to draw intricate patterns in his notebook instead, forests of tiny squiggles and corkscrews, and in these patterns he finds he can hide secret messages no one else but himself can read.

I was surprised, then, to find Damien Echols, who spent two decades on death row for a murder he didn't commit, and whose story is part of the inspiration for my novel, talk about something similar in his book High Magick: "Many of my tattoos," he writes, "are personalized by a form of writing of my own creation." While inside, Echols created his own alphabet and language, a system of symbols that, in his telling, became a repository for the energy of the universe, tucked safely away where no one else could threaten it. I hear in this the incredible fortitude of a man who spent eight years--eight years--in solitary confinement, unable to talk to anyone but himself. It's no wonder that a system of practical magick that allows him to harness his own innate "energy" came in handy.

I'm not really the audience for High Magick, which is framed as an instruction book for the basic magickal practices that Echols cultivated while on death row. I'm never going to make the "Qabbalistic Cross" or the "Middle Pillar"; I'll never practice the "Lesser Banishing Ritual" that requires one to make six pentagrams around the body while calling on the archangels Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, Uriel, Metatron, and Sandalphon. But I am interested in how these practices helped Echols survive in the most dehumanizing environment possible, and how they allowed him to build a life back after his release.

Real details are few, but when they appear, they are telling and touching. For example, we learn that Echols thinks of his tattoos as a kind of armor, each "sigil" invested with talismanic energy to ward off the terror he had that he would be re-arrested and thrown back in prison. We hear about how he and his wife Lorri would each invest a glass of water with lunar magick at night and save it until the next day, a ritual of togetherness despite their separation. And we learn how important the "blessing" of water was when Echols tells us he used such water to protect his teeth, which were ruined from being hit in the face so often in prison.

I was struck by how similar magick (the k is to distinguish it from parlor tricks) seems to the language of self-help books. The first things Echol teaches in High Magick is the importance of "visualization," which might be borrowed directly from The Secret. Cleansing our auras of harmful energies means something as simple as letting go of that argument we got in with a friend years ago that we still thinking about. It would be easy to mistake much of High Magick for pop-psych bromides, and maybe that's accurate. But you have to give to some respect, even if, like me, you don't believe in it, because it seems to have saved a life.

No comments: