When I was young I was afraid of the demonic, not because of my Episcopalian background but because my young and paranoid husband not only believed in them, he was determined, via some spell or other, to raise one! He wasn't planning to do this at our own little cottage, thank Heaven, but with some of his "friends."

During the time he was brooding and planning this project, we began to have cockroaches invade our house, and he did some research and came home with sulphur candles that he'd bought at the drugstore, so he said. He lit them all over the house, and they exuded the most hellish stench. Our cottage seemed (I expound the obvious here) to be overtaken demonically, what with my husband coming his hair down into a point over his forehead and reading The Golden Dawn and talking about his plans, while the house reeked of sulphur.

I began to be terrified and jumpy, unsure if my husband was overtaken already by a demon or whether the babies and I would be--he looked so odd with his pointy hair...

He told me he would be driving down to Atlanta and joining his friends to raise a demon in October. Naturally. I dreaded being alone in the house, with the closets still smelling (and they probably still do) of sulphur...

Close to Halloween, he told me that the plans to cast their spell were off. He didn't explain. I believed everything he said in those days, and I was utterly relieved, because I thought he really could have done it, and maybe brought something unholy home with him.

Now I know that he'd probably made up the entire story.

God, those were dark days. The cockroaches were with us until we moved, and the house still carried its sulphurous odor in deep closets.

I took the children and left him soon afterwards, leaving him and his Golden Dawn books behind in Florida, in a cottage infested with palmetto bugs, which are cockroaches that can fly.

I believe in magic- up to a point. It's my experience that strongly held beliefs can shape one's experience of reality. When I was in Wicca I found that weird, serendipitous and "magical" things were happening all the time. Since I withdrew things have returned to "normal".

Your husband's Golden Dawnery was a pose (all magicians are bullshitters) but not only a pose. He probably did manage to attract those cockroaches to himself.

The strongest countercharm to any spell is to laugh at it. Fanatics of every stripe hate humour because it has the power to blow their "reality" to bits.

My husband had no sense of humor at all. If he told jokes, they were usually tasteless and shocking, which was his intent.

If there are demons, does that mean there is "good" versus "evil"? (Perhaps that is too simplistic.) If so, I hope the good side protects my sad, crazy ex-husband from himself.

I think there are non-human, discarnate entities out there. I reckon they mainly ignore us provided we ignore them.

Some of them may not be terribly kindly disposed towards us, but I doubt that they're "evil" in the full Miltonic sense of the word.

I reckon they mainly ignore us provided we ignore them.


Which brings up a point, the personal god, the god who "walks with me and talks with me while the dew is still on the roses."

I wonder sometimes What I am praying to, because I do pray, often, but I am long past God as a male hovering over my head with a hand to His ear, waiting for my requests (my letters to Santa).

I feel I have wrecked my religious life, in that I think of God now in terms of quantum physics and Jung's acausal events, and I don't have a clue what I'm doing anymore.

I sing in the choir and don't think about it, but when (as now, when my sister-in-law is very ill with ovarian cancer) things get rough, I want a "skin face" to tell me not to worry, so I seek out the Something that's waitinf for me in the garden by the rose bushes. Sometimes I almost believe Something's there and caring about me, and then I think, cynically: oh, really?

I don't have a personal God any more. But I hold on to the belief that the universe is basically kindly and wishes us well. If I'm anything, I think I'm probably a spiritualist.

I'm confident that there's a life after death. And if there isn't, well, I won't know anything about it, will I?

But these days I don't worry about theology. It's too much like chasing one's own tail. All one ever gets from it are bafflement and frustration.