Not In Kansas Anymore

Not In Kansas Anymore
Christine Wicker
HarperCollins
ISBN: 0-06-074115-5
Non-Fiction, American Culture, History
Reviewed by Lee Gooden

Magic is a big part of our lives. It has been the basis for every single culture in the history of the world. There are those that scoff and those that believe, either way magic is vital. We avoid cracks in sidewalks and move mirrors carefully. We look for four leaf clovers and hang horseshoes in our homes upright so the “luck doesn’t run out.” We “knock on wood” and wear lucky clothing. We throw salt over our shoulders and try not to walk under ladders. When a black cat crosses are path we try to shrug off ominous feelings of fear. We have intuitions and consult horoscopes. Some of us have even dialed 1-900 numbers and paid $3.99 a minute (for entertainment purposes only) for advice from a telephone psychic. We take for granted what Carl Jung called synchronicity. Even falling in love has magical and spiritual implications. We pray to a higher being for guidance.
Just in time for the Halloween season Christine Wicker, the author of Lily Dale: The Town That Talks To The Dead and former religion reporter for the Dallas News, latest offering, Not In Kansas Anymore: Dark Arts, Sex Spells, Money Magic, and Other Things Your neighbors Aren’t Telling You is a treasure trove of magic and knowledge that she has meticulously and monumentally researched. Her bibliography sources alone, cites 133 references, ex, Peter French’s 1972 book, John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus, and the more current books like, David Michael Cunningham’s 2003 book, Creating Magickal Entities.
Wicker recognizes how magic or a belief in magic has shaped modern man. Wicker writes -You can call it religion, you can call it spirituality, you can call it magic. Maybe what you call it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you don’t settle for being cut-off, that you take that power, that you demand the completeness of human experience-what we must not do-no matter what scientists tell us-is allow ourselves to be cut off from our own experience of life as it presents itself to us. If we don’t we will have lost the very ground beneath our feet.
Wicker travels through the gambit of modern magic in Not In Kansas Anymore. She explores the neo-vampire culture and how some are still into blood games and other types consider themselves to be psychic energy vampires. She spends time with a self-professed Satanist. She travels to Salem Massachusetts, where she studies the history behind the documented histories of the witch trials, and she participates in rituals with “real” witches. She interviews practitioners of Wicca and explains the Sacred Feminine. Wicker learns Hoodoo from a genuine Hoodoo master and learns how to perform Chaos Magic from a Chaos Magician. She meets a man who claims to be part Elf and part Leprechaun. His child has one elf-like pointed ear and one “normal” ear.
While writing Not In Kansas Anymore, Wicker has not let her magical exploratory change her into a converted acolyte, nor has she turned into a pessimistic Doubting Thomas. Throughout Wicker maintains an open mind and a healthy skeptic’s eye. She doesn’t ridicule or insult her subjects; her questions are polite and intelligent and usually so are her subject’s answers. The most intrusive and debasing questions she reserves for herself. She constantly asks herself if she is having a true magical experience or just coincidence and wish-fulfillment (and if these are interchangeable.) Wicker’s sense of humor, brilliance and curiosity is abundant within her prose, but there is also a sense of emptiness, or perhaps the word is incompleteness that underlies the entirety of her work. She self-effaces and sadly wonders if the failure of magic in her life is actually her failure as a member of modern society to feel magic, let alone recognize it. Not In Kansas Anymore is a must read for those that believe there is a fine line between science and magic that can be straddled and even crossed, because they might just be interchangeable.