Low Magick by Lon DuQuette (the reading strategies book TXT) 📕

My father was born and raised in Los Angeles, but had traveled to western Nebraska in the late 1930s to drill exploratory oil wells. He met my mother-to-be (a waitress at a diner) and they married in the little town of Chapel, Nebraska, in 1940. When the newlyweds returned home to California, my father was stunned to discover that while he been away, his father was dead and buried,24 and his mother lay dying in a hospital. When they visited the poor woman, she asked to talk alone with her new daughter-in-law.

She asked my mother-to-be if she planned to have children. When Mom answered in the affirmative, the old woman pleaded with her to reconsider. “Don’t have his children. We are cursed! There is evil in our blood.” She then tearfully confessed that her own mother was a “witch.”

Now, I think here I must pause and point out for this woman born in the late 1800s, the word “witch” did not refer to a person who wholesomely embraced the life-affirming, earth-centered worship of today’s Neopagan movement. Instead, it referred to someone who delighted in doing evil things for evil’s sake.

She then went on to relate how her mother fed on the hate and fear and misery of others—how she would sit on the steps of her London flat and curse passersby, especially pregnant women, then later delight in reports of their miscarriages and deaths during childbirth. She poisoned dogs and cats. She spread vile rumors about neighbors and relatives for no other purpose than that of ruining lives. So hated and feared was she in the neighborhood that no child was allowed to play with her children, and if not for the fact that her husband was a policeman, the family would have been run out of the neighborhood.

None of my father’s four sisters had any children, perhaps warded off by tales of evil blood. My mother, on the other hand, was a different creature altogether. When I asked her if Grandma DuQuette’s warning hadn’t scared her, she coldly answered, “No. Where would you and Marc be if I had listened? I wasn’t going to let that old witch tell me what to do.”

I think in this case Mom’s magick served a very good purpose. It dug its heels in and triumphed over fear and superstition (albeit with a heavy dose of fear and superstition of its own). Even though my father wouldn’t live the luckiest of lives, even though my brother and I have had our share of ups and downs, I don’t believe that any of the DuQuettes who sprang from this strange woman’s loins are cursed with anything more sinister than our own human shortcomings. However, this unsettling story now makes me recall that for my entire childhood, whenever I did something my mother disapproved of, she would shake her finger at me and tell me, in deadly earnest, that I was “possessed with the devil.”

I must also confess that at times I can be possessed by a disturbing, dark, and hateful nature. When I perceive that I’ve been wronged—when someone cuts me off on the freeway, when I hear of or observe the mistreatment of other people or animals or my country or my planet—I become so overwhelmed with the most monstrous bloodcurdling images of what I would do to such people if they were at my mercy in some fantasy torture chamber that I have to use every weapon in my mystical arsenal to force myself back to calm sanity. At times like this, I am mindful of a great-grandmother who poisoned people’s pets and delighted in the news of miscarriages.

For all appearances, this curse skipped my father. In fact, my father was blessed with a most kind and noble character. It was obvious he stayed married to Mom for the welfare and safety of Marc and me. His spirituality was centered upon a simple belief in a generic “Supreme Being” (after all—he was a Freemason25) and in the fundamental goodness of human beings.26 He took the time to instill in his sons a confidence that we could do anything we put our minds to. He taught us the magick of dreams and imagination, and that it was possible to work to make our dreams come true.

Like a good Scorpio Freemason, he taught us by means of magical secrets. So now, after you have patiently endured my ponderous Freudian excursions into my mother’s sorcery, I finally come to the true family secrets the title of this chapter initially promised you.

Dad’s library contained a number of Masonic books, many illustrated with exotic, mystic symbols. When my brother and I asked what they meant, he would only tease us by saying, “It’s a secret. If you want, when you grow up you can try to join the Masons and find out.” He gently instilled in us both an awe and respect for secret knowledge. So when I was faced with the normal problems of growing up, I could go to Dad and he would give me a magick “secret” to dealing with them. These were secrets not to be shared with anyone else—not Mom; not my brother; no one! My brother and I were unaware at the time that the other was also getting his own secrets from Dad. Years after his death we compared notes and discovered that, while similar, each of our “secrets” had been uniquely composed.27

It’s been many years since Dad passed away. I don’t think he would mind if I’d share just a couple of the magical secrets that have helped me throughout the years.

The first secret was not a secret per se; it was a commandment, a prime directive: “Your name is a magick name. Never change your name or the spelling of your name.” I don’t know why he named me Lon Milo, but one of my earliest memories of Dad was his insistence that he chose