My Santa Fe Adventure - Part 2

This is part two of a three part biography about the time when I lived in Santa Fe. Continuing with my discussion about the New Age community and its foibles that I encountered back in 1990's.

New Age groups and perspectives were very dominant within the limited population of occultists in town. As a witch and ritual magician, I couldn’t have been more unusual or scary if I tried. My perspectives would either be misconstrued or treated as if I were some kind of perversely evil person. Two events that I remember seemed to really highlight the contrast between myself, a very serious insular occult practitioner with years of experience, and the fluffy, arrogant, naive, and superficial adherents of the New Age that seemed to flourish in that town.

A friend of mine who belonged to the Albuquerque Golden Dawn temple (and had to travel the 130 miles round trip to attend meetings) decided that he would sponsor a group discussion on angels and angelology in town to see if he could identify any interesting local individuals or groups. The discussion group was to last several sessions, but it only occurred once. I was invited to attend this group discussion, but others learned about it through the local occult book store. Those who attended were quite a mix of different spiritual perspectives, but I was probably the truly black sheep in attendance, or more accurately, the wolf in sheep’s clothing. My friend started the discussion and then requested that each individual sequentially in the circle of attendees talk about their experiences with angels and state what they believed about them. Since I was sitting on the left side of my friend, I was the last one to speak. However, what I heard everyone talking about was the most fuzzy, warm and diluted sort of religious nonsense that I have ever heard. It was the very sort of insipid things that many were reading and raving about in various New Age circles at the time. According to these folks, angels were beautiful, wholly good, friendly, helpful, guiding, child-like and sweet, as if the folks there were describing the chubby baby-like cherubs seen in various paintings and sculptures of the 18th and 19th centuries.

It was all much too sweet and cute for my tastes, and I found myself disgusted, bored and brooding about how I was wasting my time listening to these people. Almost all of the attendees were middle aged or older women, and all of them were obviously very proper Christians with some minor New Age leanings. When the discussion finally came to me, I stunned everyone by talking about how frightful, awesome and terrible many angels were to human sensibilities. I regaled them about the fierce Seraphim and Kerubim, armed with swords and spears, and that they fought wars, killed enemies and warded the Hebrew God from the profane. I also said that if anyone ever had a real encounter with a supernatural being like an angel, that they would probably shit their pants unless they were properly prepared. Of course, what I had to say was highly objectionable to all (except my friend, who was holding himself from laughing out loud), and they looked at me with loathing and outrage as if I had crawled out of some crypt from the bowels of Hell itself. Needless to say, they hurriedly left soon after I had said my piece, giving me pitying and hurt looks, and I am sure that I was the talk of their social circle for a long while, though I doubt if any of it was positive.

Another strange situation showed me how the New Age community was ravenously appropriating Native American shamanism into their practices, although without the usual care and sensitivity that such appropriations should require.

There was a household of women who had put together a supposed “pagan” New Age temple of the Goddess, and it was run by a matronly woman who had moved to Santa Fe from Dallas, Texas. She kind of reminded me of a Tammy Fey of the New Age community, overly made up and highly pretentious. She and her adult daughter (who was something of a hottie) espoused supposedly pagan sentiments about the Earth Mother and the Great Goddess, and they had gathered together a large social group, consisting mostly of women and couples, to practice a kind of New Age shamanism. I found her and her group to be mostly unschooled and spiritually superficial, but they seemed an earnest and nice enough group of people. Since there was little else that was going on in this vein in Santa Fe, I decided to accept their invitation to one of their gatherings. I should have known in advance what was really going on, because in order to attend this gathering, I had to pay $120 to help defray the expenses. The money collected was used to purchase a quantity of ground up magick mushrooms and XTC tablets, which were taken together to simulate the experience of mushrooms and ayahuasca. Of course, it wasn’t at all the same, and also, none of the important Native American practices and beliefs were incorporated into this event. It was, in a word, a New Age drug party, using some pretty powerful drugs to facilitate the breaking of social boundaries and inducing some kind of ecstatic release.

I had fancied maybe getting to have sex with the matron’s calmly daughter, but of course, that didn’t happen because there were too many people there (and she wasn’t interested). I brought my flute and entertained everyone with my music, but after a time, I found myself more interested in going deep within myself to fully experience the powerful influences of the drugs. Supposedly, that kind of antisocial behavior went against other people’s interest in taking combined baths, naked massages, getting “touchy and feely” and invading each other’s space. (The daughter managed to evade most of these attentions as well, but with better grace than I was allotted.) I endured the long session of being drugged out of my mind, which lasted the whole evening, and then in the early morning, without any apologies to those who acted so concerned about my social reticence (even though they didn’t know me), I got into my car and made my way carefully home to crash and reflect. I had a much better time once I was home and alone with my drug addled thoughts and feelings.

Afterwards, I politely told the matron that I wasn’t interested in any future gatherings and quickly disconnected from her and her group. I later heard that one of her sessions had ended in disaster when a young woman who was attending had passed out and died from taking the combination of drugs. She supposedly had an allergic reaction to the XTC and it killed her. Her death may have occurred because she was taking other medications and forgot to tell anyone, or perhaps due to some preexisting health condition - who knows. That event not only terminated the group’s activities, but likely put the matron and her drug procurer (and others) into jail for awhile.

I wasn’t surprised by anything that had happened because I felt that they were too inclusive, unknowledgeable of what they were doing, and that sooner or later, someone would have an adverse reaction to the combination of drugs. It proved to me that what you don’t know can kill you, and that a loose amalgamation of New Age naivety, illicit spiritual appropriation and a lack of spiritual discipline can be highly disastrous.  My periodic loneliness made me reach out to groups and individuals that I wouldn’t have normally bothered to contact, and such attempts only showed me that I, like Tigger in Winnie the Pooh, was the only one of my kind in town. However, unlike Tigger, I wasn’t happy about that fact.    

As a single man, I also made many attempts to find a lover, but they usually fell short, too. The one girlfriend that I did acquire (after living in Santa Fe for over two years) was also living with a flamingo guitar player who had been one of the local town drunks, now rehabilitated. He had the reputation of being quite a jealous and violent man, so we had to engage in our clandestine relationship at times when he was otherwise disposed. (This duplicity went on for a year or so until her lover finally got angry at her reticence to marry him, and left her when he found a suitable Trust Fund Brat.) She was one of the better known local belly dancers in town and was introduced to me by some mutual friends. She lived many miles north of town on a small ranch (exemplifying the term ‘land rich and money poor’), and we would discretely meet up at my place in town. 

We seldom went out, since too many knew her and would ask questions about me, so our relationship had some pretty severe boundaries. I taught her some rudimentary magick and initiated her into witchcraft, while she entertained our more carnal interests. She was quite a beautiful woman, but was also high strung, willful, emotionally volatile, stubborn and independently minded, even though she sought and did receive some financial support from me. That relationship lasted until I moved away from town some years later, although she never seemed interested in making me her primary relationship. I was always, and conveniently, the “other” man in her life. I later found out that this situation is rather typical of Santa Fe since there is a dearth of potential mates outside of the Hispanic and gay communities.

As for my career, I had the wonderful opportunity to work for a woman named Jo who ultimately guided and helped me to change the entire direction of my career. Through her I got the training I needed to transform myself from a mainframe programer and business analyst to a decision support analyst, UNIX programmer and database administrator. I learned the arcane art of data warehousing and I have continued to expand on that knowledge and capability all of the years since that time. It was a brilliant career move for me, since it meant that I wouldn’t likely experience any kind of downsizing or employment interruption due to the later fad of off-shoring technology jobs, which started to happen only a few years later. 

My area of expertise was in government health services (such as Medicaid and Medicare) in combination with my knowledge of developing, building and maintaining data warehouses that served as the source systems for all credible reporting, analytics, fraud and abuse detection, and policy management. This was obviously a level of expertise that couldn’t be exported to some DBA in India or China, since such policies didn’t exist anywhere in the world except in this country. Therefore, I had a certain amount of job security because of what my boss did to push my career in a certain direction.

Jo also was something of an occultist, and was steeped in the study of the Fourth Way, which consisted of the writings and practices of Gurdjieff and his followers (such as Bennet and Ouspensky). She managed to find a very important group in Santa Fe that actually practiced what the Fourth Way followers called the “Work,” so her move was spiritually fortuitous. Having a boss who was also an occultist was also very helpful, and I relaxed my typical discretion and reticence concerning my own studies and practices. This would come back to haunt me later on, but luckily it never caused me to lose a job promotion or get terminated. Later on, I would resume that discretion, but that single period of relaxing my boundaries did cost me something of my anonymity for a while.

(To be continued..)

Frater Barrabbas

My Santa Fe Adventure - Part 1

 Santa Fe is a very strange place to live and function as a magician and a witch - I know because I lived there for five years. While the New Age, Eastern traditions and Native American shamanism (as well as Native American religions) are well represented in this tiny town, the wiccan and pagan communities are barely in existence. There were only around 67,000 people living in Santa Fe when I lived there, and most of them were either Catholic, New Thought or Protestant Christians. Tibetan Buddhism had a large presence there as well, but paganism had probably a population of less than 50 individuals. I am speaking about Santa Fe in 1994, when I moved there, but it hasn’t changed very much in regards to paganism and witchcraft since I last visited (November 2011). It’s also a tough place to live if you are single and heterosexual, not to mention untenable if you happen to be a witch and sorcerer. Hispanic and Native American women that I met there found my involvement in the occult to be disturbing and highly off-putting.

Odd is a word that pretty much describes Santa Fe. All of its buildings are made of adobe and limited to four stories, so there are no large glass office buildings there, even though it is the state capitol. It’s also a very old town (est. 1610), probably rivaling St. Augustine, FL for the oldest town in the U.S. The original town consisted of two or three blocks on either side of the central plaza, bordered on the south by a small creek (Agua Fria), which is dry most of the year.

Santa Fe is located on a flat rocky plane just below the Sangre de Cristo mountains with an elevation of seven thousand feet; its altitude poses problems to visitors and newcomers alike. Cooking becomes more difficult and so does the consumption of alcohol. It was not unusual for a lady tourist to pass out at a restaurant or bar after drinking only two of her usual margarita cocktails. Doing anything physical was also much more taxing to someone not acclimated to the high elevation. It was also dry and hot in the summer (with cool mountain breezes in the shade), and somewhat damp and cold in the winter time; but overall, the temperatures were quite mild when compared to my birthplace (Wisconsin). One thing that I can say is that the quality of light during the day was quite remarkable, having a kind of a startling brilliant yellowish or amber hue offset by the bluest of skies. Sunsets and sunrises were also unusually remarkable due to the constant dusty atmosphere. I also found that the smell of the place was quite remarkable, too. The combination of sage, juniper and mesquite made the breezes off of the high chaparral foothills after a brief afternoon rainstorm smell like a romantic incense concoction, as if someone lit incense in preparation for some southwestern religious liturgy.

Traveling to Santa Fe by air usually required that the traveler land in Albuquerque and then travel the seventy miles north over three large escarpments to finally arrive in Santa Fe. This is because the airport in Santa Fe is quite small and ill-equipped to handle large airlines. The journey up and over these escarpments makes the drive quite scenic, since the traveler has to drive not only the geographic distance between these two points, but the journey also increases the altitude by two thousand feet. The last escarpment is the tallest and most intimidating (especially when it snows), and coming over the ridge and into the valley where the town is located illustrates to the traveler how well adobe blends into the rest of the landscape. Adobe buildings make Santa Fe fairly invisible from the heights during the day, and it only begins to reveal itself when the traveler exits the turnpike and drives into town. All of the buildings in the town and the surrounding area consist of various shades of tan, brown, beige and dun, which matches the color of the surrounding earth and rock. 

There are patches of green, but these are interrupted by sun baked boulders, red clay and rocky tables. While there are trees in the areas where there is water (such as around arroyos, wells or creeks), the greater share of vegetation consists of stunted and twisted juniper and mesquite bushes, along with an abundance of sage, jimson, and various other kinds of hardy thorn bushes. All of these plants are quite tough and able to withstand the periodic droughts that plague the area. Most of the water comes from the mountain runoff of melting snow, which tumbles down the creeks and arroyos and seeps into the sparse aquifers. Santa Fe is often a dry and dusty location, except during the winter and the monsoon season in June.

My reasons for moving to this exotic place was two-fold: I had an opportunity to advance my career by joining the team that would work as the front line for the company’s fiscal agency contract with the State of New Mexico, and it seemed like a really cool place to move. I knew next to nothing about Santa Fe other than it’s reputation for being weird, and New Mexico was called (in tourist books) the Land of Enchantment. Perhaps if I had known a lot more about what Santa Fe was like (and what life was going to be like living in that sparse pagan community), I might have decided not to move there. However, the opportunity was too good to pass up, and as it turned out, the move profoundly changed my career in a very positive way. As for my magickal career, it began a long period of spiritual isolation that continued even when I moved from that place five years later.

I got the news that I had been selected to be part of the team in May of 1994, and took a trip out there with my fellow teammates to meet with the client in June, and also to begin looking for a place to live. I discovered that houses were very expensive, the rents were high and the apartments small, due in large part to the fact that the standard of living was much higher in Santa Fe than in Tallahassee, and that Indian reservations surrounded the city, making available living space a premium expense. I settled for an apartment in the Zia Vista apartment complex off of Zia Road, which was both smaller and more expensive than my lovely townhouse in Tallahassee. The only saving grace was that my small apartment had a large master bedroom with an adjoining bathroom. There were mirrored closet doors on either side of the short hallway between the bathroom and the bedroom, so I had, in effect, a built-in system to trap and thwart spirits from entering the room where I would perform my ablutions. The room was large enough to accommodate my magickal needs, but the rest of the apartment was small. I had a futon couch in the tiny second bedroom, and the living room and dining room were crowded around the kitchen. This place became my humble home for the next five years.

Perhaps I could have found a better place to live if I had spent more time looking, and the particular irony is that many people have lived in the Zia Vista apartments as their first temporary residence. It was located on the southeast side of town, and was conveniently close to the road into town and that most of the stores I would need in order to live were nearby. Unlike Tallahassee, having a vehicle was very important, since nearly everything was distant and spread out, requiring a car to get around. There was also no effective transit system in the town, other than taxis and tour buses.

In July, I packed my things up in my Tallahassee townhouse, with some hired help, and everything was put on a truck and carted away. The Tallahassee pagan community must have finally found some value in me, since they even gave me a large going away party. (Or maybe they were just happy that I was finally leaving.) It would be the last community connection that I would experience and enjoy for years to come. What faced me now was a kind of hermetic based isolation, where I would have little or no contact with the pagan community where I lived. I rationalized that this new kind of lifestyle was necessary because I thought that it would better suit the kind of magick that I was now working. This new magick was deeper and much more intense than what I had been working in the past, and it monopolized my time away from work. I found that I had only a small amount of free time and less interest in what was going on in the occult community. In Santa Fe this attitude was probably defensible, but later, it seemed more of a trap than an important regimen of my magickal practice.

However, I felt that I had enough of living in the south for time being, but ironically, I would return there again several years later. While I lived in Santa Fe I would seek to develop my new system of magick based on Archeomancy and also attempt to develop my skills as a writer. I was still in the process of writing my first book on magick, called “Pyramid of Powers,” and actually, I had made a lot of progress on that writing project. A year after I moved to Santa Fe, I would complete the three volume book project that I started in Tallahassee and seek to find someone who could help me edit it. My objective was to publish this book so I could advertise the magickal order that I had helped to found.

Another odd thing about Santa Fe is the larger than usual population of artists, musicians, New Age spiritual leaders and others who are living in that town. When I did go to some social gatherings, which was rare, I was amazed that I found myself to be one of the few individuals who had a regular job and a real career. Many of the rest of those whom I met had odd jobs to help them survive, but were pursuing their true vocation as artists, which evidently didn’t pay very much. I did meet some very creative people, and even some world class artists, musicians, dancers, writers and many various New Age prophets and teachers. I also met a breed of people that I had never met before, and that was the “Trust Fund Brat.” This is the kind of person who has far more spending power than the average working stiff (such as myself), but who has no sense of the practical value of money or its singular importance, having gotten it without having worked for it.

Of all the people that I have ever met, the Trust Fund Brat seemed like the least practical or down to earth person on the planet. They were filled up with their own personal importance and had grand visions of what they were going to do. They also had the bad habit of always insisting on getting their way and knew that money could help them achieve that objective. Since there were many artists and others in town who just scraped by, these same folks availed themselves to be bought by those who had money. I saw a number of bizarre and dysfunctional relationships between Trust Fund Brats and their human pets. That pampered human pet was often some pretentious and mediocre starving artist who, through his or her moneyed significant other, gave the false impression of success and artistic savvy. These rude couples would ultimately make nearly any social affair tedious and poisonous. I also met some very eccentric and ostentatiously wealthy people whose origin was from California or the East Coast. They had decided to move to Santa Fe because of its supposed charming ambiance. These rich folks would build an expensive adobe mansion outside of town and reside there periodically during the summer months. Some of them were kind, generous and genteel, others were just rich, rude and totally obnoxious.

I also ran into self-made men and women who were the salt of the earth, and whose tenacious drive to survive and thrive in an inhospitable economic climate was a wonder to behold. I truly admired these rugged individuals, who seemed to possess the qualities that the first settlers might have had when they came to this part of the country as wanderers, traders, hunters or explorers. I had many interesting conversations with these earthy, rugged individuals, and they were far more interesting and fascinating to me than the puffed up Trust Fund Brats or the condescending and ostentatious wealthy expatriates. Yet I was an odd addition to this population, and didn’t seem to fit in wherever I traveled. I loved the country, but I was distinctly separate from it, as if in a permanent state of being a visitor or observer. I was intoxicated by the ambiance of Santa Fe, but found myself unable to relate to most of the people that I met. That is how I lived my life for five years in Santa Fe, but it was not without its charming qualities, captivating scenic vistas or moments of pure mystical awe. The land around this town was incredibly beautiful, but I found most of the people to be at odds with that beauty, except those who were really connected to the earth.

After discovering the local pagan community, or what little of it there was in Santa Fe, I met an odd middle aged women named Shann. We became friends because we both didn’t fit in the local pagan community. I found that community to be stunted and weak, sort of like the Juniper trees that grew in abundance out in the hills. There were a couple of individuals that I liked, but mostly I found them to be at the beginning stages of learning their craft, which meant that I was too advanced to function as any kind of teacher or spiritual leader. I suppose I could have tried to organize a group, but it seemed like it would require a lot of work, and I wasn’t interested in pursuing that path.

Shann was an outcast because she had problems with the inherent hierarchy of a traditional witchcraft coven and had spoken her mind far too often. So Shann had gotten kicked out of the only functioning coven in the area, but I liked her wit and her wicked sense of humor. She was a competent seamstress, artisan and purveyor of oddities, but I suppose that her real income was derived by selling pot and magic mushrooms to the local hippy population. She was also involved in the local middle eastern dancing community, and provided some of them with their costumes. I hired her to sew up some new robes for myself, and also through her, met most of my friends. She lived a sparse and economically precarious existence, and I suspect that she was disappointed that I wasn’t interested in her romantically.

The local occult book store was the Ark, located in an alley that was so narrow that it could barely support parking on one side of the road and traffic on the other (it was, therefore, a torturously one-way road, one of many in that town). The Ark was in many ways a weather vane on the alternative spiritual community in the town. Eastern systems of spirituality, as well as those based on the New Age or Native American spirituality were well represented with all kinds of stock. As for paganism, witchcraft, magick or the many forms of Western spirituality, there were some books and materials, but not very much. However, the Ark did sponsor some interesting events and was a center for anyone who wanted to contact individuals of like mind.

(During my most recent trip to Santa Fe, I visited the Ark and found it be slowly falling into decay, and the stock was of a poorer quality and greatly diminished. So it would seem that most forms of alternative spirituality have hit some hard times in that town. All traces of pagan or wiccan based books or materials were completely missing, perhaps representing that such interests had reached a new low point. One might speculate that the decline of the Ark might be due to the recent recession, but I found that other shops and stores doing quite well, representing that the buying power of the 1% had not diminished at all during this time. There had even been quite a bit of recent building in the area, showing that the recession had affected some, but not others.)

I can recall attending a lecture that the Ark sponsored at a large public auditorium presented by Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, the author of several books on the Qabalah. That was back in October 1994, during a bitterly cold autumn rainy evening in Santa Fe. I don’t remember much of Halevi’s lecture, other than he was a strong proponent of the exclusively Jewish reclamation of that discipline. I also distinguished myself by asking him a question at the end of the lecture based on what Gershom Scholem had written about the Qabalah; that forms of gnosticism and magic were very much a part of its practices and discipline and were excluded only much later on. Halevi sternly denied that any occultism or magic ever had anything to do with the true Qabalah, a statement which would have astonished many of the academics of the time, including Scholem, had he been alive to hear it. As a good attendee, I didn’t contradict Mr. Halevi or argue with him, but it did unfortunately turn me off to his teachings and remained in my mind as a bitter experience. I came to the conclusion that Halevi was very biased and sectarian, which I found to be remarkable for anyone who was supposedly mystically inclined.

While living in Santa Fe, I attended some remarkable concerts, dance exhibitions and other interesting presentations. There was always something going on to suit the pallet of the afficionado of the obscure and the exotic. Shann and a few of her friends made certain that I knew about these social venues, and there were also some large block parties, effete gatherings at someone’s mansion or other events that I was able to secure an invitation. I was always seeking to connect with someone or to find new friends. Most of my attempts at expanding my social world met with dismal failure. I was just too different and set in my insular ways to be able to connect with any groups.

While some folks I have met have always raved about the Burning Man gathering that occurs in the southwest, there is another similar festival that is held right in Santa Fe, and has been going on since the 1920's. In September, the tourist season abates somewhat before the ski season begins, so the town’s temporary population drops down considerably, and local folks can actually find a parking place or go out to eat without having to deal with the crowds of tourists. In a sense, the local population gets their town back for a few months, and to celebrate this event, they hold an annual fiesta. September is also the month supposedly when the town was re-colonized by the Spanish conquistadors in 1692, after having been temporarily kicked out by the native inhabitants for 12 years.

So the town has two events to celebrate, and this celebration is called the Fiesta de Santa Fe. I imagine if you were an Indian, the parade of horse mounted conquistadors dressed in Spanish colonial outfits is rather offensive, but no one seems to mind. The highlight of that fiesta is when the town gathers at Ft. Marcy park to burn a giant effigy of old man gloom, called El Zozobra, a fifty foot spooky looking marionette. The event is marked by a whole retinue of odd costumed characters, such as the fire witch, the gloomies (children dressed up like ghosts), who dance before the moaning and menacing effigy. At the climax of the ritual, the marionette (who has movable arms and glowing eyes), is put to the torch of the fire witch along with scraps of paper and other items collected to represent town members' personal gloom. It is a very magical theatric event, and one that I have personally experienced more than once while I lived there.

(To be continued..)

Frater Barrabbas