Black Friday Magick

The name of the shop was Lady of the Lake, in Idyllwild, CA.

I knew that this must be the place for me first by the smell of it. Nag Champa on top, followed by the bright-colored mega sticks of incense marked “Rain” in electric blue and “Goddess” in gold and “Money” in dollar green. As big as cattails, these could be had at the rate of five for a dollar. Beside the incense: crystals. Behind panes of glass: cheap pewter and silver pendants in the shapes of the pentagram, Thor’s hammer, the crescent moon. Lined up along the floor: cauldrons from the size of coffee cups to the kind you could use to cook for a whole coven. Most importantly: bookshelves lining every wall. I’d come and look at books, sometimes sitting on the floor to thumb through them, nearly every day as a teenage witch. I’d always buy at least some incense as a gesture of respect. I heard the same CDs on rotation: Enya, Loreena McKennit, and Pure Moods.

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Hard to admit that a retail establishment was the closest thing I had to a temple, but there it was. I knew that if I wanted that Witching feeling, that Lady of the Lake was where I could always find it. Every one of those books I was reading on their floor, sometimes buying and taking home, told me I didn’t need tools. All the tools of Witchcraft were within me. But the tools were still for sale, and made me feel like I was taking steps toward becoming the kind of practitioner I wanted to be. I was writing and casting my first spells, spattering my backpack with wax and trying to use the compass of my will to guide me. I was without community and almost totally out of luck.

Lady of the Lake could see a kid like me coming a mile away. When I bought my first pentagram, the clerk cut me a length of black silk cord three feet long, “so you can hide it under your shirt when you need to.” I got my first ritual knife as a gift, paying a penny for it to slip the old curse. What money I could spare I spent on books. It was in the bookshelves that I could most efficiently convince myself that this was a holy place. Libraries had always been my sanctuaries and this was nearly the same.

The real holy place, those books told me, was the wild. The woods of that isolated mountain town that surrounded the house where I wasn’t on the lease, and the store where Enya was telling me to sail away, sail away, sail away, as if that were an option. But living as I was on the edge of homelessness, I looked at those woods not as a magical portal to the divine but to the hard reality of failure. I didn’t want to be outside. I wanted to be safe, inside, included and sheltered for every minute that I could get. I wanted a church, a monastery, a convent where I could present myself as an overgrown foundling to the Pagan sisters who lived within and trade all this piety for something better than a punch card that would make my tenth book free.

But our religion lacks those spaces, and for the most part the kind of community resources to benefit a homeless teenager. I might not have been much better off as a Christian in the same position, but I would have at least had the church as a place to begin. As a baby Witch, all I had was my will and the daring to use it. That, and a store that would let me soak in the promise of enlightenment in a clean, well-lighted place, so long as I eventually bought something.

In a consumer culture, in this season of consumption, I find myself returning to the places I have known where I could go when I didn’t have a covenstead. These retail temples weren’t enough, but they were better than nothing.

Before I left Idyllwild, I made it to the other side of the counter for a year. I worked at Lady of the Lake, wrapping customers’ purchases in purple tissue paper and writing order slips in purple ink. I had a few moments in that minimum-wage job that I treasure to this day. The best of them happened just before I had to move off the mountain.

A man came in with his daughter riding up on his shoulders. They ducked through the door and I kept an eye on them as they moved through the store, listening to the little girl ooh and aahh at the statues of gods and mermaids and fairies. It was usually easy to tell a tourist from a practitioner, but I couldn’t figure these two out. It was clearly the girl’s choice to come in, but at seven or eight years old I wasn’t sure whether she just loved fantasy stories or if it would turn out to be something more.

Finally, they came to stand at the counter. The little girl pointed to a short, very sharp bootknife in the case. “That one,” she said firmly.

“I can hand it to you,” I told the father, since I wasn’t allowed to sell knives to a minor. “Whether you hand it to her is your business.”

He understood. He handed the child the knife and she immediately raised it up, powerful and sure of herself.

The father beamed. He said, “tell the lady what you want it for.”

The kid fixed me with a serious look and asked, “do you know what an athame is?”

I smiled. I told her I did. I did my temple duty, and sold it to her.

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