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

however, that I do not believe that being so consecrated imbues me (or anyone else) with extraordinary spiritual merit or magical power. Like anyone else on this planet, any virtues or magical powers I may or may not possess are borne of the caprice of my inherited destiny and my own efforts toward spiritual evolution. They are certainly not the result of being touched by a long string of guys who were originally touched by Peter the Idiot. Sister Martha’s spiritual worldview, on the other hand, obliges her to believe otherwise.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s how events unfolded.

It began with a conversation my brother Marc had while giving a healing treatment to his Reiki instructor. For reasons even Marc cannot explain, he is a naturally powerful healer. (Please see appendix 1 for more background information on Marc’s unique ability.) I tease him that his chi98 basket is broken and he spills the subtle energy everywhere he goes. Be that as it may, whenever his teacher falls ill, Marc is the only practitioner he allows to work on him. During the course of the treatment, Marc’s teacher mentioned that his sister is a Dominican nun (Sister Martha) and that she is the principal of Our Lady of Sorrows high school in a nearby city. It is one of the oldest Catholic girls’ school in the state. She had recently complained to him how psychically unhealthy the old school building seemed to “feel” and asked him if he knew someone who might come in and give the building a good spiritual cleansing. He told his sister-the-Sister that he did indeed know someone whom he believed radiated an extraordinary amount of good energy and recommend she contact Marc.99

Sister Martha called Marc and he agreed to come and give the school a good once-over. Several nights later, he was left alone in the building for the entire night. He systematically walked through and “cleansed” each room on every floor. It was nearly dawn before he finished. Sister Martha contacted him several days later and thanked him, adding that the building “felt” much better. That seemed to be that, and Marc didn’t hear from Sister Martha until she called him again, a little over a year and a half later, to tell him something terrible was happening at the school.

She went on to describe a string of misfortunes and tragedies that had befallen the staff, faculty members, and their families in the last thirty days. It started with a car crash in which a young administrative assistant and her baby were burned to death. A few days later, a teacher, a man in his late forties, announced he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He died within a week. The maintenance man severed a finger. The accountant fell and broke her hip.

The staff was soon talking of a curse, and the more they talked, the worse things got. Every day brought a new and terrifying event: a broken bone, breast amputation, unexpected illness, murder or suicide in the family. To add to the litany of personal tragedies, the school building itself was starting to “act” strangely. Teachers arrived in the mornings to find desks moved and papers strewn on the floor. A fluorescent light tube in a classroom ceiling burst, scattering shards of glass upon the heads of students. The entire administration had become paralyzed with fear. In whispered conversations in the teacher’s lounge, they crystallized their collective terror and superstitiously personified the horrible chain of events as an attack by the devil himself.

For the students, the most horrifying and traumatic event occurred just hours before Sister Martha phoned my brother. Sister Catherine, the school’s most beloved and popular teacher, a vibrant young woman in her mid-twenties with no known health issues, collapsed in her classroom and died in the throes of a grotesque and violent seizure before the eyes of her terrified pupils.

Sister Martha was truly frightened and admitted frankly that she believed there was an evil presence in the school that needed to be exorcized. Marc confessed that exorcisms were a bit out of his line but said that his brother was a ceremonial magician and a consecrated Gnostic bishop who had participated in several exorcisms in the past. Sister Martha asked Marc to please contact me and see if we might be able to come to the school that night.

Marc called me and repeated as much as he could. As you might imagine, this was something that interested me very much. I asked him to call Sister Martha and tell her we would both come and meet with her, and, if agreeable, stay the night in the building.

I hung up the phone and I sat for a moment wondering what I had gotten myself into. How would I go about exorcising a school building? What was it exactly that I’d be exorcising? It’s my firm conviction that all schools are haunted, especially high schools which, even under the most ideal circumstances, are seething swamps of chaotic sexual energy created by decades of confused and tormented adolescents. Hell! I still haunt the halls of my old high school and junior high! In dreams and nightmares, I find myself running late to a class, unable to remember the time of day or room number. Sometimes I find myself climbing the stairs or trapped somehow between the walls of unremembered hallways. High schools are ghost traps—even for the living!

How much more intense the energy must be in a very old Catholic girls’ high school where year after year, decade after decade, its spooky icon-festooned chambers are crammed with hundreds of girls all undergoing the mystifying metamorphosis into womanhood—all generating the immense and unpredictable psychokinetic energy that accompanies the uniquely female mystery of the first issue of blood. It is with good reason that, when investigating hauntings and paranormal phenomena, the first question the professional investigator asks is, “Is there a menstruating girl or woman in the house?” The premise of Stephen King’s novel