Liminal

L IMINAL
A Note From the Editor
Jacques Gamelin, Surgite mortui venite ad Judicium, (1779).
This is a time of uncertainty. Civil and political unrest, both
domestically and abroad is broadcast constantly. It often feels as
though there’s no respite from the constant disputation we find
ourselves thrust into. What do we do when those we ask for help
become instigators of more divisiveness? Throughout human
history, during times of uncertainty, the gods and spirits have
provided solace and comfort.
Our daily life demands we spend so much time fixated on such
small sections of our experience. Our developed society keep us
separated from our ancestral roots. Often unbeknownst to us, the
help our forerunners asked for from the other side, we practice in
kind to this day. It is in our blood, bones, and souls to
seek answers outside of our observable reality.
In this issue we will look at how people have, and continue to, ask
for help from beyond what our senses can detect. Help that continues
to alter and inform how we interact with the world around us:
Funerary carvings on the Northwest Coast, war ravaged communities
asking spirits for help in their daily lives, a dance emulating death, a
desperate Victorian appeal to the spirits to reconnect with lost loved
ones, trading one’s soul to malevolent forces for ultimate knowledge,
using magic and stigma from the past to reshape modern politics.
There is an appeal to things that can only be viewed in our
minds, things that only speak to us in our dreams, or when altered
by substance or grief, reverie, rejoice, or reflection. Answers that are
derived from a necessity to cope, to honor, to mourn, to understand,
to change. All of these articles speak to our innate desire to seek
answers outside of what we can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch.
We hope this collection of articles and experiences from people
around the world, who use different means to seek those answers, is
both inviting and challenging. The rituals and experiences described
in this publication have derived from the human condition, and
as such bear further examination. Like our ancestors, we’re living
in a world of stone, wood, and water, with another, hidden world
just out of focus. We hope this issue helps pull that into focus.
Enjoy

2017
A UTUMN
C o n t e n t s
1
Totem
Poles: Heraldic Columns of the Northwest Coast
Robin K. Wright
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27
The Politics of Muslim Magic
Dawn Perlmutter
Butoh: Dance of Darkness
Margarett Loke
35
The Psychology of Spiritualism: Science and Seances
David Derbyshire
43
Faust: A Pact With The Devil
Jessica Bomarito and Russel Whitaker
57
Witch’s Resurgence: Feminism, Protest, And Politics
Brittany Leitner and WITCH PDX

Totem Poles:
Heraldic Columns
of the Northwest
Coast
Essay by Robin K. Wright
Gyáa'aang is the Haida language word for the tall red cedar
poles carved with images from family histories on the
northern Northwest Coast. These heraldic columns have
come to be called “totem poles.” John Wallace, a Haida
pole carver, told Viola Garfield that the translation of the
word gyáa' aang is “man stands up straight,” a descriptive
rather than literal translation. The term “totem pole” is
not a native Northwest Coast phrase. In fact, the use of
the term “totem” to refer to the Northwest Coast images
of family crests or emblems is not strictly accurate. The
word “totem” itself derives from an Ojibwa word, “ototeman,”
and “totemism” in anthropological terms refers
to the belief that a kin group is descended from a certain
animal and treats it with special care, refraining from eating
or hunting it. The figures carved on Northwest Coast
poles generally represent ancestors and supernatural
beings that were once encountered by the ancestors of
the lineage, who thereby acquired the right to represent
them as crests, symbols of their identity, and records of
their history. Southern Coast Salish territories
Several different types of these monumental poles
include: tall house frontal poles placed against the house
front, often serving as doorways of houses with the
entrance through a hole at the bottom; carved interior
house posts that support roof beams; free standing memorial
poles placed in front of houses to honor deceased
chiefs; and mortuary poles made to house the coffins
of important people in a niche at the top. Tall multiple-figure
poles were first made only by the northern
Northwest Coast Haida, Tlingit, and Tsimshian peoples
in Southeast Alaska and British Columbia. Large human
welcome figures and interior house posts were made by
the Kwakwaka’wakw and Nuu-chah-nulth people further
south, and the Coast Salish people in Southern British
Columbia and western Washington also carved large
human figures representing ancestors and spirit helpers
on interior house posts and as grave monuments.
The Haida from the Queen Charlotte Islands in
British Columbia and Dall and Prince of Wales Islands
in Southeast Alaska have oral histories that indicate the
tradition of carving poles is a very ancient one among
their people. The very first drawing of a carved house
frontal pole on the Northwest Coast was made by John
Bartlett in the Haida village of Dadens on North Island in
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1791. Viola Garfield recorded a story from John
Wallace in Hydaburg, Alaska, in 1941 that tells
about the supernatural being who first taught
human beings to carve poles at North Island
Totem Poles, Part 1
Many Years ago the Haidas used to live at
North Island. It stormed for many days and the
people ran out of food. They couldn’t go out
and hunt or go fishing on account of the storm.
One day it cleared up and all the people
moved to the West Side to fish for halibut. All
the people left excepting the chief’s sister. The
chief’s sister was very old. The chief said she
wouldn’t have any more children, so he wanted
to leave her behind in the village alone so that
she would starve and not eat up needed food.
He gave orders to the people to put out their
fires before they left so his sister would have
no fire. This her grandchild heard, so she got
a clam shell and put coals in it and buried it
for her grandmother. This she told her while
no one was around. After everyone left the
woman went after the clam shell and started
her fire with the coals.
After she started her fire she looked up in
the sky and asked for help. While she still stood
on the beach she saw an eagle coming toward
her with something in his beak. He dropped it
down to the old lady. It was a red cod. The second
day the eagle brought a halibut, the third
day a seal and the fourth day a porpoise. Before
the old lady could get the porpoise a bear came
down and took it. The eagle brought her many
things and the bear would get it before she
could. She got tired of it and asked for a child
to protect her. Long time ago they used to be
afraid to say anything carelessly about the air. It
was just like believing in God now.
That night the old woman felt her left
leg itch all night. Toward morning she felt a
head, then she realized that she was having a
baby. She was afraid it would run away so she
grabbed its legs.
The child learned to talk in a month and in
six months he was a big boy. One night the boy
dreamed of a man. This man was showing the
boy how to make a bow and arrow in his dream.
He told the boy to make one so he could kill
the bear that was taking the old woman’s food.
When he woke up the next morning he started
to make the bow and arrow. When the bear
came out again he killed it.
The next night he had another dream. The
man came again and this time his finger and
toe nails were painted with human faces and
his chest and whole body were tattooed. He
told the boy that when they went to bed the
next night neither he nor the old lady should
open their eyes until they were sure the sun
was up, no matter how much noise they heard.
The next night as soon as they went to bed
they heard loud noises which lasted all night.
When they thought the sun was up they
opened their eyes. They were in a large house.
It was carved inside and when they went outside
there were three totems on the front and
the front of the house was carved. There was
one totem on each corner of the house and
one in the center by the door. Those were the
first totems ever seen. They couldn’t believe
their eyes when they looked at the house.
The next day they found a large whale on
the beach. They cooked every bit of it and put
it in square boxes, the old fashioned oil or
grease boxes.
In the meantime the chief began to think of
his sister and sent a slave back to bury her body,
for he thought she had starved by this time.
When the woman slave landed on the beach
she was surprised to see a big house in the old
deserted village. She was also surprised to find
the little boy living with the old woman.
The chief’s sister took her in and fed her, but
told her not to save any of the food that she
gave her. The slave disobeyed and hid a piece of
seal meat in her blanket. When she got home in
the evening all were in bed, but there was a little
fire left. She fed the piece of seal meat to the
baby. After the child was through she threw the
left over meat in the fire and it burned brightly.
The chief asked her what it was and she then
told them about the carved house full of food.
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The next day all the people went over to North
Island to see the old woman.
The chief dressed his nieces and they painted
their faces for he wanted the boy to marry
one of them. Only the girl who had left the
coals was not painted. She was considered too
poor to marry the wealthy chief’s nephew.
They came into shore and the young man
wanted only to marry the girl who had saved his
mother. That is the end.
Only the best artists were commissioned to
carve the monumental heraldic poles that were
placed in front of and inside northern Northwest
Coast houses proclaiming the identity, status,
and history of the noble people who owned
them. In ancient times, few noble families could
afford to commission these sculptures, but
during the nineteenth century the number and
size of poles increased dramatically due to a
variety of factors, including the increased wealth
brought by the fur trade, improved availability of
iron tools, and the dynamic social and political
environment characterized by new wealth,
population loss, family relocations, and chiefly rivalries.
The use of the multi-figure poles spread
rapidly along the coast to the Nuxalk (Bella
Coola), Heiltsuk (Bella Bella), Kwakwaka’wakw
(Kwakiutl), and Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootkan)
peoples. Historic photographs taken in the late
nineteenth century on the northern Northwest
Coast, especially at Haida villages on the Queen
Charlotte Islands and in Southeast Alaska, show
the famous “forests of totem poles” in front of
the houses.
However, by the end of the 1800s, after
over a hundred years of contact with people
of European descent, explorers, fur traders,
missionaries, government agents, colonists and
anthropologists, most of these totem poles
were gone from the northern Northwest Coast.
In the late 1800s most tribes ceased to carve
these monumental poles when the potlatch,
the ceremony held when poles were raised,
was made illegal in Canada. Nevertheless,
some families, especially the Kwakwaka’wakw
people at the north end of Vancouver Island,
continued to potlatch in secret. They carved
and raised poles and made many masks to use
at these ceremonies. During this time, Indian
agents and missionaries discouraged the carving
of new poles and the associated ceremonial
activities, and people began to move from
their old clan houses into single-family frame
houses located near fish canneries, lumber
mills, and trading posts. Very few old poles still
stand in their original locations today. Many of
the poles were taken or sold to museums and
collectors around the world, others were allowed
to decay, or cut down and chopped up.
Ironically, it was during this same late
nineteenth period when old poles were disappearing
from Native villages and the people
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were not allowed to raise new ones, that
totem poles became a powerful symbol of the
Northwest Coast to outsiders, largely through
the tourist industry which brought many
visitors to the Northwest Coast on steam ships
in the 1880s and 1890s. At this time Native
artists began to carve small model poles for
sale as souvenirs to tourists. Full-sized totem
poles were brought to large international
expositions such as the Centennial Exposition
in Philadelphia in 1876, the World’s Columbia
Exposition in Chicago in 1893. John Brady,
the governor of Alaska, acquired several
Tlingit and Haida poles in Southeast Alaska
that were exhibited at the World’s Fair in St.
Louis in 1904, and later at the Lewis and Clark
Exposition in Portland in 1905. Most of these
poles were later returned to Sitka, Alaska,
where they were erected in a public “Totem
Park” that was established as a national monument
in 1910.
Totem Poles, Part 2
In 1899, a group of Seattle businessmen took
a trip to Southeast Alaska and stopped in the
Tlingit village of Tongass. They assumed that
the village had been abandoned and proceeded
to remove a large pole that was taken back
to Seattle and erected in Pioneer Square. In
fact, the Tongass people were just away at
their fishing camps, and when they returned,
they were unhappy to find the pole stolen. The
thieves had been observed, and their actions
were reported to Governor Brady in Alaska.
The Tongass people asked for the return of the
pole or payment for it. After lengthy negotiations,
a payment was made, but the pole
remained in Seattle. This pole was damaged
by fire in Pioneer Square in 1938, and a replica
was carved by a group of Tlingit carvers from
Ketchikan as part of a Civilian Conservation
Corps project. This replica pole still stands in
Pioneer Square in Seattle today.
Poles were often “copied,” that is, new
versions were commissioned when new houses
were built, or when members of the family
married and moved to other villages. An earlier
copy of this Tongass pole had been raised by
David Hunt in front of his house at Fort Rupert,
British Columbia, in honor of his grandmother.
He was the grandson of Anisalaga, Mary
Ebbetts Hunt, of the Ga.nax.ádi Raven clan,
a Tlingit noble woman who was one of the
original owners of the pole in Tongass. She
married Robert Hunt, a Hudson’s Bay Company
trader at Fort Simpson, and later moved with
Top: Totem pole in Pioneer Square, Seattle (1910). Middle: Chilkat dancers (19th century). Right: Tribal elder (19th century).
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him to Fort Rupert. The original pole was
raised around 1870 in Tongass as a memorial
to Anisalaga’s mother. The pole commissioned
by David Hunt was carved by Charlie James in
the Kwakwaka’wakw style, but with the same
figures that were on the Tongass Tlingit pole.
Mary Ebbetts Hunt explained the meaning
of the figures on this pole to her son, George
Hunt. At the top is the Raven with the moon
in his mouth. This figure identifies the owners
of the pole as Ravens and relates the story of
how Raven stole the sun, moon and stars from
a rich man who kept them hidden in a box (See
also: Jay Miller’s essay “Alaskan Tlingit and
Tsimshian”.) Below the raven is a woman with
a frog. They represent the story of a Ga.nax.
ádi woman who teased a frog and was carried
away to the frog town where she married and
had two frog children. She escaped by sending
her two sons back to the house of her father
to fetch a bone for the piercing of skin. They
had her father break a dam in order to drain
the lake where the frog village was located,
killing all of the frogs except her two sons. The
figures at the bottom of the pole all relate to
another Raven story. Below the frog is Mink,
Raven, then a whale with its head pointing
downward. At the bottom is the Chief of all
Birds. Raven took Mink along as his companion,
and they were swallowed by a whale who
took them across the water as a favor. The
whale invited them to cut pieces from his blubber
for food, asking only that they avoid his
heart. The whale drifted ashore at Rose Spit
on Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands).
The people outside cut a hole for them to
escape, and Mink jumped out all covered with
oil. He rolled in rotten wood, giving his fur the
appearance it has today, and Raven did the
same thing. Raven and Mink walked around
Haida Gwaii and found a big house. Inside
lived a man with a bird beak who was the Chief
of all Birds. Raven considered himself the
Chief of all Ravens, and the Chief of all Birds
was not pleased with him, and so he turned
him into the ordinary Raven we know today. In
order to be sure of the meaning of the figures
carved on Northwest Coast poles, it is necessary
to know what the owner’s history is. There
are other versions of similar stories that are
used by different Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian
families on their own poles, each being the
property of different lineages. Often, people
misinterpret the figures on poles when they do
not know the history of the pole.
Haida Skolka’s totem pole
The Haida Chief Skulka had a house frontal
pole in Howkan, Alaska with a European figure
on the top. This is one of several Haida poles
from Southeast Alaska that included figures of
Europeans. Much speculation has occurred as
to the meaning of these figures. This bearded
figure wears a military uniform with epaulets,
buttons, and pockets. Above him, an eagle
with its head to the side, grasps a branch with
leaves in its talons. This eagle looks like the
American eagles that grasp olive branches
on American silver coins from the late 1800s.
Two small “watchmen” figures flank the eagle.
These small human figures wearing hats are
often placed at the top of Haida poles, and are
said to have served as watchmen to warn the
house owners of approaching danger. Below
the European figure is a feathered bird sitting
on the head of a bear-like figure holding a
seal-like figure. When visiting Howkan in
the early 1880s, E. R. Scidmore apparently
“Many of the poles were taken or sold
to museums and collectors around the
world, others were allowed to decay, or
cut down and chopped up.”
Left: Chilkat dancers. Right: A Chilkat villager in front of a long house.
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Top: Native coastal village (19th century). Bottom-left: Totem pole in Pioneer Square, Seattle (1912). Native village, Ketchikan, AK.
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interviewed Skulka, and he explained to her
that these images told the story of one of his
ancestors:
...who was a famous woman of the Eagle
clan. She went out for salmon eggs one day,
and when she drew up her canoe on the beach
upon her return, she had several baskets filled.
Not seeing her two little children, she called
to them, but they ran and hid. Later she called
them again, and they answered her from the
woods with the voices of crows. Her worst
fears were realized when she found that a white
man, “a Boston man,” had carried them off in a
ship. These two orphans never returned to their
people. Such is the simple kidnapping story
that has been handed down in Skolka’s family
for generations, and this whiskered face on the
totem pole is said to be almost the only instance
of a Boston man attaining immortality in these
picture-writings.
The details of this story may have been
forgotten by the 1940s, when a different explanation
of this pole was given to Viola Garfield by
John Wallace. He said that the two human figures
on the top were from Skulka’s wife’s father.
The eagle was from Skulka’s wife’s uncle’s line,
and that they simply chose to use the “white
eagle instead of the old carving.” He identified
the European figure as a White Russian from
Sitka, perhaps the first white person seen by the
Haidas. The bird was identified as an Owl from
Skulka’s clan. This crest was acquired by Skulka’s
family when his ancestors were out getting fish.
It was getting dark and Owl called out to make
night, so they took him for a crest and the man
was changed into an owl. The owl on the pole
has feathers and human hands, showing that he
had not fully changed into an owl. At the bottom
is a brown bear. A different explanation was also
recorded by Viola Garfield, which says that the
“Russian” was put on the pole because Russians
took the land away from the Indians and did not
pay them. The eagle stands on the Russian’s
head to hold them down until the land is paid
for. Whether the European figure represents a
“Boston Man” or a “Russian,” it is probable that
it was put on this pole as a “ridicule” figure proclaiming
that a debt had not been paid, either
for the stolen children or the stolen land.
Top: Haida Gawaii village (2011) Bottom: Pacific coast.
Kwakiutl totem poles and house of
Nimpkish Chief Tlah-Co-Glass
During the 1930s, the U.S. Federal government
funded the creation of several “Totem Parks” in
Southeast Alaska and hired Native carvers to
move several old poles from their village sites
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and carve replicas that were erected in these
parks, located in Saxman, Ketchikan, Klawak,
and Hydaburg, Alaska. As the prominence of the
totem pole as a symbol of the Northwest Coast
spread, their use also spread to neighboring
tribes, and during the late twentieth century,
many southern Northwest Coast tribes have adopted
the form of the northern carved poles to
their own use. In some cases, totem poles have
been used as symbols of all North American
Native peoples, and indeed, Cherokee, Ojibwa,
and Seminole carvers have produced small
model totem poles for sale all across North
America, despite the fact that there was no
ancient tradition for this art form among their
people. Many non-native souvenir factories have
also mass produced model totem poles for the
souvenir industry, both in North America and
Japan. These small mass produced models are
often based on the form of just one or two original
poles. Many of the model poles that have a
thunderbird with outstretched wings at the top
standing on the head of a grizzly bear are based
on two Kwakwaka’wakw house posts from the
Nimpkish village of Alert Bay, British Columbia.
It was not until 1951 that the anti-potlatch law
was dropped. After this time, Native people in
Canada could openly potlatch, and many new
big houses were constructed for community
ceremonial use, with fully carved house posts
and tall poles in front. Museums in Vancouver
and Victoria, British Columbia, hired Native
carvers to create new poles for their totem
parks in the 1950s and 1960s. Carvers such
as Ellen Neel and Mungo Martin worked to
educate the public about the art form of totem
poles by carving high quality model poles for
sale, and replicas of old poles for museums. In
recent years, Northwest Coast carvers have
been commissioned to carve full-sized poles
for many museums, corporations, and private
collectors, world-wide. Today, Native people
throughout the Northwest Coast are carrying
on their traditions by raising new poles to honor
deceased relatives and celebrate family histories
and important events in their lives.
Left: Ketchican, AK (mid 1900s). Right: Modern interpretation of a traditional totem pole.
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“In order to be sure of the meaning
of the figures carved on Northwest
Coast poles, it is necessary to know
what the owner’s history is.”
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Butoh:
Dance of Darkness
Margarett Loke
The New York Times Magazine. (Nov. 1, 1987)
Butoh is not for the frail. The avant-garde dance form that today is Japan’s most startling
cultural export does not aim to charm. Instead, it sets out to assault the senses. The
hallmarks of this theater of protest include full body paint (white or dark or gold), near or
complete nudity, shaved heads, grotesque costumes, clawed hands, rolled-up eyes and
mouths opened in silent screams.
There are about 30 soloists and dance companies, most of them based in Tokyo, that
share the Butoh aesthetic. To take audiences on a backward journey to primordial states
of being, for example, the five-man troupe known as Sankai Juku (resembling anonymous,
alien beings, with their heads shaved and their bodies painted a uniform white) used to be
lowered by ropes from high above the stage, their fetus-like bodies gradually unfolding.
In an even darker vein, in Min Tanaka’s ‘’Homage to Kandinsky’’ two men and two women
shuffle across a darkened stage, clutching one another’s sleeves, their mouths open, their
red-rimmed eyes rolling. Min Tanaka emerges, and he is set upon by the two women, now
clad only in oversized men’s shoes.
If the Butoh message is sometimes bewildering, the visual impact is raw and direct - as
the photographer Ethan Hoffman discovered when he attended his first Butoh performance
in 1984. Hoffman, who divides his time between Tokyo and New York, went on to
photograph many of the major figures in Butoh.
This work, titled ‘’Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul,’’ will be seen at New York’s Burden
Gallery, beginning Thursday and ending Dec. 5. Min Tanaka, three of whose dance pieces
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are in the exhibition, will perform
at the opening. A book of the
photographs will be published by
Aperture next month. Neither the
exhibition nor the book will contain
explanatory captions, only the titles
of the dance pieces. ‘’I would like
people to look at the exhibition and
the book as one performance,’’ says
Hoffman.
When Ethan Hoffman first
went with a friend to a cramped
underground Tokyo club called
Plan B for a performance of Min
Tanaka’s ‘’Homage to Kandinsky,’’
he became very nervous.
‘’It was frightening and exhilarating
at the same time,’’ he recalls.
‘’You sat on the floor. You couldn’t
move because there were people
almost on top of you. The dancers
were 10 feet away and there were
only two spotlights. I didn’t react on
an intellectual level. Most things I
react to intellectually, but I just felt
emotionally overwhelmed by what I
saw. I felt as though I’d taken some
hallucinogenic drug.’’
Shortly thereafter, Hoffman
began a three-year journey of
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discovery into this distinctly
Japanese dance theater, one that
bears little resemblance to such
traditional theatrical forms as Noh
or Kabuki. He telephoned the grand
old man of Butoh, Kazuo Ohno, to
set up a photographic session. The
dancer, then 78 years old, invited
the photographer to his studio. ‘’He
danced for four hours,’’ remembers
Hoffman. ‘’Then he cooked dinner
for me.’’
In the late 1950’s, Ohno and a
young avant-garde dancer from
the rural north, Tatsumi Hijikata,
had pioneered a dance theater
that became known as Butoh.
(Hijikata called his performance
style Ankoku Butoh, or ‘’dance
of darkness and gloom.’’ Two
Japanese characters make up the
word ‘’butoh’’: ‘’bu’’ for dance, ‘’toh’’
for step.) Hijikata briefly collaborated
with Ohno, whose work
reflects the influences of German
Expressionism and Christianity. But
the younger dancer developed a
radically different style during the
late 1960’s and the first half of the
70’s. Hijikata, who died of cancer
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early last year at the age of 57, in many ways
eclipsed Ohno in the effect his highly provocative
medium of protest has had on dancers. A lean
and agile man who wore his long hair loosely
rolled up in a bun, Hijikata was influenced early
in his career by Dadaism and Surrealism and
inspired by the dictum of Antonin Artaud, the
French experimental-theater director, to make
theater that was crude. After this initial phase,
however, the rural culture of his youth became
the dominant influence.
Hijikata and Ohno shared the unmistakable
Butoh characteristic: subversiveness. Both
had seen their country devastated by war. In a
culture distinguished for its visual harmony, the
two dancers highlighted ugliness, replacing the
conventional Japanese social mask of reticence
and understatement with one of anguish and
even terror. Ohno, who is now 81, in one of his
signature performances is dressed in a thriftshop
gown and hat, his face painted white, his
teeth blackened, mascara smeared around his
eyes. Every movement of his face and body
exquisitely improvised, he looks like a woman
caught between memory and madness.
Hijikata’s butoh has been taken up by a second
generation of dancers, who include Uno Man.
Ethan Hoffman opens his phovtographic performance
with a dance work by Uno titled ‘’21,000
Leagues’’ (shown on page 40). To Hoffman, the
work symbolizes birth - a recurring Butoh theme.
Ashikawa (face chalk white, teeth blackened)
grimacing in a dance titled ‘’Intimacy
Plays Its Trump.’’ ‘’Butoh can be very
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frightening,’’ says Hoffman. ‘’I wanted to grab
people immediately.’’ The dancer’s own teeth
have been pulled, and she has found that by
removing her false ones, she can achieve more
varied facial expression. In true Hijikata fashion,
after her finale, Ashikawa has been known
to stick out her tongue instead of bowing.
Aping the improvisational nature of much of
Butoh, Hoffman worked with several of the performers
in devising new settings for existing
works or creating new works altogether. ‘’The
North Sea,’’ a large outdoor piece performed
by Akaji Maro’s group, Dai Rakuda Kan, is such
an original work
A frightening presence on stage, Maro
in ‘’real life,’’ as Ethan Hoffman found, is a
man with a magnetic personality and a keen
sense of humor who usually wears a dark gray
kimono and the affected look of a gangster. He
is also very accessible. At his 10-day summer
workshop last year, he set aside two days to
work on the creation and the photographing of
the ‘’North Sea’’ piece.
Maro’s dancers supplement their income by
working in nightclubs and taking part in cabaret
acts that are a cross between Butoh and striptease.
With Japanese audiences for Butoh performances
much smaller than they are in the West,
says Hoffman, such moonlighting is necessary. Min
Tanaka, on the other hand, has a working farm in
Hakushu - a two-hour drive from downtown Tokyo
- for his dancers and students. The farm, complete
with chickens, vegetables and rice fields, provides
jobs, food and a creative environment.
About half of the dance pieces in the exhibition
were photographed as they were performed
on stage, mostly in Tokyo theaters. One
such work is ‘’Foundation of Love Butoh,’’ which
is one of the last major pieces Hijikata did with
Min Tanaka. Tanaka strikes postures and adopts
facial expressions that are strongly reminiscent
of the novelist Yukio Mishima, who was a close
friend of Hijikata’s and one of the first supporters
of his heretical dance form.
The only dance performance that was photographed
outside Japan is the well-publicized
outdoor ‘’hanging event’’ by the Sankai Juku
troupe. Two years ago in Seattle, as four dancers
were slowly lowered from the top of a six-story
building by ropes at their ankles, one of the
ropes broke and a dancer fell to his death. The
group, which is currently on a three-month, 24-
city tour of North America, no longer stages the
hanging performance.
The exhibition ends with a troupe member,
in a long white gown, kneeling, head bowed, his
hands raised as though in benediction. Which is
what proponents of Butoh always point out - that
for all its darkness and emphasis on death, Butoh
is life-affirming.
liminal 16

17
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The Psychology of
Spiritualism: Science
and Seances
David Derbyshire
As the evenings get darker and the first hint of winter hangs in the air, the western world
enters the season of the dead. It begins with Halloween, continues with All Saints’ and All
Souls’ days, runs through Bonfire Night — the evening where the English burn effigies of historical
terrorists — and ends with Remembrance Day. And through it all, Britain’s mediums
enjoy one of their busiest times of the year.
People who claim to contact the spirit world provoke extreme reactions. For some, mediums
offer comfort and mystery in a dull world. For others they are fraudsters or unwitting
fakes, exploiting the vulnerable and bereaved. But to a small group of psychologists, the
rituals of the seance and the medium are opening up insights into the mind, shedding light
on the power of suggestion and even questioning the nature of free will.
Humanity has been attempting to commune with the dead since ancient times. As far
back as Leviticus, the Old Testament God actively forbade people to seek out mediums.
Interest peaked in the 19th century, a time when religion and rationality were clashing like
never before. In an era of unprecedented scientific discovery, some churchgoers began to
seek evidence for their beliefs.
Salvation came from two American sisters, 11-year-old Kate and 14-year-old Margaret Fox.
liminal 18

Above: A seance, as depicted in the 1922 film Dr. Mabuse the Gambler. Right: a portrait of a grieving woman (late 19th century).
On 31 March 1848, the girls announced they were
going to contact the spirit world. To the astonishment
of their parents they got a reply. That
night, the Fox sisters chatted to a ghost haunting
their New York State home, using a code of one
tap for yes, two gaps for no. Word spread and
soon the girls were demonstrating their skills to
400 locals in the town hall.
Within months a new religion had emerged
— spiritualism — a mixture of liberal, nonconformist
values and fireside chats with dead
people. Spiritualism attracted some of the great
thinkers of the day — including biologist Alfred
Russel Wallace and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who
spent his latter years promoting spiritualism in
between knocking out Sherlock Holmes stories.
Even the admission of the Fox sisters in 1888
that they had faked it all failed to crush the
movement. Today spiritualism thrives in more
than 350 churches in Britain.
The tricks and techniques used by mediums
have been exposed many times by people such
as James Randi, Derren Brown and Jon Dennis,
creator of the Bad Psychics website.
Last week I spent 40 minutes with a telephone
spiritualist who passed on messages from
four dead people. Like all mediums, she was
skilled at cold reading — the use of probable
guesses and picking up of cues to steer her in
the right direction. If she hit a dud — the suggestion
that she was in the presence of a 40-yearold
uncle of mine — she quickly widened it out.
The 40-year-old became an older person who
felt young at heart. And then someone who was
more of an uncle figure. She was also skilled at
the Barnum effect — the use of statements that
tend to be true for everyone.
Among dozens of guesses and misses, there
was just one hit — the correct name of a dead
relative. Their relation to me was utterly wrong,
as were details of their health. But the name was
right and, even though it was a common name
among that person’s generation, it was a briefly
chilling moment.
Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist
and magician, says my response to this lucky
guess is typical. People tend to remember the
correct details in a seance but overlook statements
or events that provide no evidence of
paranormal powers.
Wiseman’s work has also shown that we are
all extremely susceptible to the power of suggestion.
With colleague Andy Nyman, co-creator
of Derren Brown’s television illusions, Wiseman
19
liminal

“As far back as Leviticus, the Old
Testament God actively forbade
people to seek out mediums.”
liminal 20

An exposition Harry Houdini conducted debunking spiritualism (1909).
used contemporary descriptions of Victorian seances
to recreate an encounter with spirits in a another explanation.”
Once you think it’s a spirit you don’t look for
disused prison. Over eight seances involving 152 During the seance, Nyman, taking the role
people, volunteers sat around a table in the dark of the medium, announced that the spirit would
holding hands while luminous painted bells, balls raise the table. Soon afterwards he encouraged
and maracas moved before their eyes. Surveyed the spirit by saying “lift the table higher” and
afterwards, a fifth of the volunteers believed they “the table is moving now”. Two weeks later a
had witnessed the paranormal.
third of the participants recalled wrongly that
“These things are often very simple,” says the table had moved.
Wiseman, author of Paranormality. “We had a “Suggestion builds over time. If you ask
man creeping around with a stick. We thought people immediately after the event it is not so
when we read the original accounts of how effective. You don’t want to solidify the memory
seances were carried out that they wouldn’t fool immediately after the event,” says Wiseman. The
anyone. We were wrong. A lot this is do with trappings of the seance increase its success.
framing. Once you think you have an explanation
for an event you don’t have any other ones. disrupting the trickery. Darkness
Holding hands prevents participants from
increases
sensitivity to sound and movement and makes
people more scared — which may, Wiseman says,
increase susceptibility.
The seance can be explained by stage magic
and human frailty. But what about phenomena
such as table tipping and Ouija boards?
Table tipping, or turning, has gone out of
fashion but is easy to replicate with four or more
people, a small table, dim lights and a relaxed
atmosphere. The group place hands on the
table and wait. After 40 minutes or so the table
should start to move. It soon appears to have
a mind of its own, sliding, swaying and even
pinning people to the walls.
The reason why household furniture can
appear to be possessed was exposed more
than 160 years ago by Michael Faraday, the
discoverer of the link between magnetism and
electricity. In 1852 Faraday was fascinated by
the new craze of table tipping — and whether
people or spirits were responsible. So he took
bundles of cardboard roughly the size of a table
top and glued them weakly together. Each sheet
got progressively smaller from top to bottom,
allowing Faraday to mark their original positions
on the card above with a pencil. He then placed
the cards on a table and asked volunteers to put
their hands on the cards and let the spirits move
the table to the left.
Ouija boards were debunked by psychologist
Joseph Jastrow in the 1890s. This experiment allowed
Faraday to see what was moving the table.
If it was spirits, the table top would slide out the
cards from the bottom up. But if the participants
were doing it, the top cards would be the first
to move. By examining the position of the pencil
marks Faraday showed that people, not spirits,
moved the table. He had demonstrated the
ideomotor response, the movement of muscles
independent of deliberate thought. This also
explains table tipping’s sophisticated big brother,
the Ouija board.
In a Ouija seance participants place fingers
on a glass on a table surrounded by letters and
watch as it eerily moves — and occasionally spells
out words. Psychologist Susan Blackmore is best
known as the proponent of memes, but early
in her career she was a parapsychologist. At
Oxford she ran the student Psychical Research
Society, carrying out experiments using Ouija
boards. Time and again the glass spelled words
and sentences. Her confidence began to be
shaken when she modified the board.
“We turned the letters upside down because
surely spirits should see the letters underneath,”
says Blackmore, now a skeptic. “And of course it
21
liminal

spelt out rubbish. It cannot work unless all the
people can see what is going on.”
The ideomotor effect is also at play with the
glass. “With a Oujia board, your arm is getting
tired and your ability to judge the location of
your finger is compromised,” says Blackmore.
“When the glass moves you naturally adjust your
movements and go along with the glass. To start
with it moves hesitantly, but after a while as soon
as it starts moving everyone’s hand follows.’
But what about the glass’s ability to spell?
That was investigated by the American psychologist
Joseph Jastrow in the 1890s. He used a device
called the automatograph made of two glass
plates separated by brass balls. Any involuntary
movement of hands placed on the top plate
causes it to move. The movement is recorded by
a pencil attached to the device.
When Jastrow asked volunteers to imagine
looking at an object in the room the automatograph
revealed that their hands involuntarily
moved in that direction. Just visualising the door
was enough for the hands to drift towards it.
And that’s what’s happening with a Ouija
board. If the participants look at a particular
letter — because they expect it to follow next —
they unwittingly nudge the glass towards it.
If the Ouija board has shed light on unwitting
movement, then another technique, channeling
of spirits, has questioned free will.
Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner, who
died this year, is best known for his work on
the rebound effect. Tell someone not to think
about white bears and they immediately think
about white bears. The more we try to actively
suppress a thought, the less likely we are to
succeed. But he also investigated automatic
writing, where people claim to write without
being aware what they are doing.
The most famous automatic writer was Pearl
Curran, an American who knocked out more
than 5,000 poems, novels and plays while
claiming to be channeling the spirit of Patience
Worth, a 17th-century Englishwoman.
Automatic writing has traditionally been explained
as the action of the subconscious mind.
But Wegner argued that the reason lay in the
illusion of free will. Most people have a sense of
their inner you — the conscious self that makes
decisions about day-to-day life. According to
Wegner this sense is an illusion. There’s evidence
to back up this seemingly unlikely idea.
In the 1960s, neurophysiologist William
Grey Walter got volunteers to operate a slide
projector while their brain was monitored with
electrodes. The participants were told to press
Top: A girl using a Ouija board (early 1900s). Bottom: A woman mimicking tarot reading (late 1800s)
liminal 22

a button to change slides. But the button was a
fake — the projector was controlled by electrical
activity in the brain. The startled volunteers
found that the slide machine was predicting
their decisions. A fraction of a second before
they decided to press the button, the part of
the brain responsible for hand movement burst
into activity and — through the electrodes —
moved the slide on.
Grey Walter showed that there was a
fraction of a second delay between the brain
making a decision and someone being aware
that they were making a decision.
In the 1980s, Benjamin Libert of the
University of California , San Francisco, made
a similar discovery after attaching volunteers
to electrical monitors and sitting them in front
of a screen displaying a dot in a circle. The
participants were told to flex their wrists whenever
they liked, and report the position of the
dots at the moment they made the decision to
flex. Again, there was a surge in brain activity a
fraction of a second before the volunteers were
aware they were making a decision.
Wegner’s solution was that our deliberate,
thinking brain — the inner me that makes decisions
— is an illusion. Instead, the brain does two
things when it makes a decision to raise an arm.
First it passes a message to the part in charge
of creating the conscious inner you. Second, it
delays the signal going to the arm by a fraction
of a second. This delay generates the illusion
that the conscious mind has made a decision.
Wegner argued that automatic writing
occurs when something goes wrong with this
process. The brain sends the signal to the arm
to write — but fails to alert the inner you.
There’s something a little ironic about his
conclusion. The early spiritualists believed
they were shedding light on the transition of
the human spirit from the physical body to
the afterlife. Wegner suggests that it’s not just
the distinction between mind and body that is
false, but the whole concept of the “conscious”
decision-making mind is just another piece of
trickery played by the brain.
And meanwhile, 150 years after Faraday
showed that table tipping was hokum, we continue
to frighten one another in the dark.
‘What is remarkable is that the stuff written
in books 100 years ago still works,’ says Richard
Wiseman. ‘If you think of all the technology
and science and education and yet a group of
people sitting in the dark can scare the living
daylights out of themselve s.’
“...Once you think it’s a spirit you
don’t look for another explanation.”
Top: A portrait of a man and spirit (early 1900s). Bottom: A photograph parodying a haunting (late 1800s)
23
liminal

Top right: A Ouija board, used to communicate with spirits (early 1900s). Top left: A portrait of the Fox sisters, who helped bring
spiritualism into popularity. Bottom: Spirits lifting a table at the scene of a seance.
liminal 24

25
liminal

The Politics of
Muslim Magic
Dawn Perlmutter
“Saudi Woman Beheaded for Witchcraft” read media headlines around the world on
December 13, 2011. News reports described how a 60-year-old woman was executed
after being convicted of practicing witchcraft on the basis of such evidence as books on
witchcraft, veils, and glass bottles full of an “unknown liquid used for sorcery.” Yet the
majority of news accounts implied that the woman was a victim of persecution by the
Saudi government; as one of Amnesty International’s directors declared: “The charge of
sorcery has often been used in Saudi Arabia to punish people, generally after unfair trials,
for exercising their right to freedom of speech or religion.”
Ali Sabat, seen here with two of his children, was the host of a Lebanese satellite television
program that provided psychic advice for Arab callers. He was sentenced to death
by a Saudi court while on pilgrimage there “because he had practiced ‘sorcery’ publicly …
before millions of viewers.” As a result of international pressure, he received a last minute
reprieve with his sentence reduced to fifteen years in prison.
No Western reporters seemed to consider that the victim was actually practicing
witchcraft, or why witchcraft is considered by the desert kingdom a crime punishable by
death. In the West, there is a societal need to place this seemingly inexplicable incident
in an understandable context such as the violation of human rights rather than examining
this Islamic tradition that includes the belief, practice, and prohibition of magic.
In fact, the practice of what can be termed Islamic magic is prevalent throughout the
Muslim world, manifested in the theological concept of jinn, inhabiting the entire sphere
liminal 26

of the Muslim occult. Furthermore, magical
beliefs can constitute an existential and political
threat to Islamic religious leaders, provoking
severe punishments and strict prohibitions of
any practice not sanctioned by their authority.
Conversely, political leaders, including Iran’s
president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Taliban
leader Mullah Omar, and Pakistani president
Asif Ali Zardari, have employed magical beliefs
to advance their political agendas.
Islamic Witch Hunts
Belief in witchcraft, sorcery, magic, ghosts,
and demons is widespread and pervasive
throughout the Muslim world. Magical beliefs
are expressed in the wearing of amulets,
consulting spiritual healers and fortunetellers,
shrine worship, exorcisms, animal sacrifice, and
numerous customs and rituals that provide
protection from the evil eye, demons, and jinn.
Fears associated with these beliefs range from
hauntings and curses to illness, poverty, and
everyday misfortunes. Supernatural practices
that are intended to bring good fortune, health,
increased status, honor, and power also abound.
Magical beliefs are not relegated to rural or
poverty-stricken areas. On the contrary, they are
observable in every segment of society regardless
of socioeconomic status.
One of the more popular customs is fortunetelling,
which is different from the Western
practice, which is usually relegated to the status
of a carnival act and specific to predicting
the future. Generally, the practice of fortunetelling
in the Middle East focuses more on
spiritual protection and family counseling than
prediction and prophecy. In addition to reading
cards, dice, palms, and coffee grounds, activities
include selling amulets to ward off evil spirits
and providing advice for marital problems. In
Afghanistan, fortunetellers operate out of small
shops or outside of mosques and shrines across
Left: The scene of an animal sacrifice. Right: An illustration from the Book of Wonders
27
liminal

the country but are rarely consulted to portend
the future; most often their clients are women
or the elderly seeking guidance for problems
affecting their families. In Iran, fortunetelling has
become increasingly popular, and people of all
ages turn to fortunetellers in search of happiness
and security.In Pakistan, fortunetelling and
belief in astrology is so widespread that practitioners
appear on morning television shows.
All magical practices are denounced as
un-Islamic by clerics. Although they condemn
fortunetelling, the practice is not punished as
severely as witchcraft and sorcery. This is likely
due to the fact that fortunetelling is viewed
as using magic to acquire unseen knowledge
while sorcery is viewed as intentionally practicing
malevolent or black magic. Recently, in
Afghanistan, Gaza, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia,
stricter laws, arrests, and executions have
resulted in efforts to deter magical practices. In
January 2008, Afghan religious elders banned
dozens of traditional fortunetellers in Mazar-i-
Sharif from the area near the Hazrat Ali shrine.
In 2010, the Islamist group Hamas, ruling the
Gaza Strip, conducted a campaign against
witchcraft in the area, arresting 150 women,
who were then forced to sign confessions and
statements renouncing the practice. According
to Hamas “the activities of these women
represent a real social danger, also because
they risk ‘breaking up families,’ causing divorce
and frittering away of money. Sometimes their
activities also have criminal repercussions.” In
addition to the arrests, Hamas placed large
anti-witchcraft posters at mosques, universities,
and government offices warning women against
magical practices and providing information to
Gaza residents wishing to accuse their neighbors
of the crime. In August 2010, the campaign
escalated to violence when a 62-year-old woman
known as a traditional healer was murdered in
front of her house by unidentified men after
she was accused by her neighbors of practicing
witchcraft. In January 2012, Hamas declared the
profession of fortunetelling illegal and “forced
142 fortune-tellers to sign written statements
averring that they would stop trying to predict
the future and sell trinkets that are supposed to
offer personal protection.”
In Egypt, Khalil Fadel, a prominent Egyptian
psychiatrist, claimed that many Egyptians,
including the highly-educated, were spending
large amounts of money on sorcery and
superstition and warned that growing superstition
among Egyptians was threatening the
country’s national security, dependent as it
was on the mental health of the nation. Under
current law, people alleged to be sorcerers can
be arrested in Egypt for fraud, but now that the
Muslim Brotherhood has come to power and is
drafting new legislation, it is conceivable that
soon witchcraft could be designated a crime of
apostasy, punishable by death.
liminal 28

In April 2009, Bahrain passed strict sorcery
laws after x-rays revealed packages containing
hair, nails, and blood were being shipped there;
witchcraft and sorcery are now criminal offences
that can result in fines or prison, followed by
deportation.
Neighboring Saudi Arabia enforces the most
severe penalties for designated magical crimes.
The threat of black magic is taken so seriously
there that, in May 2009, an anti-witchcraft unit
was created to combat it, along with traditional
healing and fortunetelling, and placed under the
control of the Committee for the Promotion of
Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPV), which
employs Saudi Arabia’s religious police, the
mutaween. “On the CPV’s website, a hotline encourages
citizens across the kingdom to report
cases of sorcery to local officials for immediate
treatment.” Nine specialized centers were set
up in large cities to deal with practitioners of
black magic.
A large segment of the “witches” arrested by
the CPV were Africans and Indonesians as black
magic is often attributed to foreign workers,
particularly maids. In September 2011, hundreds
of Saudi women complained when the Shura
Council (an advisory body) granted permission
for Moroccan women, internationally reputed
by Muslims as masters of black magic, to work
as maids in Saudi households. The wives claimed
it was “tantamount to allowing the use of black
magic in their homes to steal their husbands …
the issue was not lacking trust in their husbands,
but their men were powerless to ward off spells.”
Foreign domestic workers in the kingdom are
accused of sorcery regularly either due to their
traditional practices or because Saudi men,
facing charges of sexual harassment, want to
discredit their accusers.
Nor is prosecution for witchcraft in Saudi
Arabia restricted to women. In 2010, Ali Sabat,
host of a Lebanese satellite television program
that provided psychic advice for callers from
around the Arab world, was imprisoned while on
the hajj pilgrimage. In a closed court hearing with
no representation, he was sentenced to death
“because he had practiced ‘sorcery’ publicly for
several years before millions of viewers.” As a
result of international pressure, he received a last
minute reprieve, and his sentence was eventually
reduced to fifteen years in prison.
Others had no such luck. There have
been several executions for similar crimes: In
September 2011, a Sudanese man was beheaded
for the crime of witchcraft and sorcery, having
been caught in a sting operation set in motion
29
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“...fortunetelling is viewed
as using magic to acquire
unseen knowledge while
sorcery is viewed as
intentionally practicing
malevolent or black magic.”
by the religious police and then convicted in a
closed trial. In April 2011, thirty officers from the
CPV attended a three-day training workshop in
the Eastern Province to investigate black magic
crimes. The anti-witchcraft unit’s specialized
training apparently also involved learning
Qur’anic healing rituals to destroy the effects of
black magic. There are detailed Islamic treatises
on neutralizing black magic that include entire
exorcism rites and purification rituals for the
destruction of amulets and other magical items.
Thus the irony results that neutralizing the
effects of spells also constitutes magical practices,
albeit legalized ones.
In brief, there are sorcerers, fortunetellers,
and traditional healers throughout the Muslim
world; many are in violation of interpretations of
the Shari’a (Islamic law), and in some countries,
that is punishable by death. European witch
hunts ended when the scientific revolution and
the Enlightenment brought empirical reason to
the fore, and rationality eventually replaced the
West’s superstitious world-views. The Islamic
view of sorcery and witchcraft is significantly
different. In contemporary Islamic witch hunts,
there is an accepted, long-established, theologically-sanctioned
supernatural tradition. Although
science was cultivated in Muslim lands during
Islam’s Golden Age, witch hunts never ceased because
the Enlightenment’s rationalist ideologies
did not replace the Islamic magical world-view.
Rather, Islamic witch hunts have evolved into a
combination of primal ritual and modern technology
where videos of exorcisms and beheadings
are available on the Internet.
Jinn and the Muslim Occult
To fully comprehend contemporary witch hunts
and the prevalence of magical beliefs in the
Muslim world, it is necessary to understand the
concept of jinn. Jinn provide Islamic explanations
for evil, illness, health, wealth, and position in
society as well as all mundane and inexplicable
phenomena in between. The word jinn (also
written as jinnee, djinn, djinni, genii or genie) is
derived from the Arabic root j-n-n meaning to
hide or be hidden, similar to the Latin origins of
the word “occult” (hidden).
Left: Pages from the Book of Wonders.
Below: The ceiling of a mosque in Saudi Arabia.
liminal 30

In the West, occult practices are marginalized
and relegated to pagan traditions or the
mystical aspects of religious traditions. In Islam,
however, jinn are an integral part of Islamic
theology. According to the Qur’an, God created
humans from clay, angels from light, and jinn
from smokeless fire: “Although belief in jinn is
not one of the five pillars of Islam, one can’t be
Muslim if he/she doesn’t have faith in their existence.
… Indeed, the Qur’anic message itself is
addressed to both humans and jinn, considered
the only two intelligent species on earth.” While
frequently described as angels and demons,
jinn are actually a third category—complex,
intermediary beings who, similar to humans,
have free will and can embrace goodness or
evil. Like humans, they are required to worship
God and will be judged on the Day of Judgment
according to their deeds.
Evil jinn are referred to as shayatin, or devils,
and Iblis (Satan) is their chief. They can take
the form of humans or animals with many of
the fears associated with Islamic purification
rites expressed in the symbolic attributes of
the jinn. For example, in Islam, dogs, urine,
feces, and blood are intrinsically impure, and
jinn are known to shape-shift to dogs, accept
impure animal sacrifice, and dwell in bathrooms,
graveyards, and other unclean places. Muslims
believe that evil jinn are spiritual entities that
can enter and possess people and exercise
supernatural influence over them. Women
are considered to be more vulnerable to jinn
because they are thought to be weaker in their
faith and impure several days of the month.
While jinn have been relegated to fantasy
characters in the West, to countless believing
Muslims, there is no doubt that they exist. An
August 2009 Gallup poll, for example, found
that 89 percent of Pakistanis respondents surveyed,
believed in jinn. Witches, sorcerers, and
fortunetellers are all believed to be under the
guidance of jinn and are sometimes referred to
as “jinn catchers.”
Jinn are intrinsically intertwined with the
practice of both licit Qur’anic magic and illicit
black magic (sihir). Black magic is considered
to be worked by those who have learned to
summon evil jinn to serve them while Qur’anic
magic invokes the guidance of God to exorcise
the demons. Even spiritual healers with good
intentions who do not employ Qur’anic healing
methods can be designated as witches and
sorcerers: In Saudi Arabia, only qualified individuals,
usually natives designated by the religious
authorities, are allowed to practice Qur’anic
treatment methods; most of those arrested and
beheaded for sorcery and witchcraft tend to be
foreigners regardless of whether or not they
were practicing Qur’anic medicine.
Despite regulations, an entire industry of
professional exorcists who perform Qur’anic
healing has arisen to meet demand throughout
the Middle East and among Western
Muslims with exorcists openly advertising
on the Internet, using Facebook and Twitter,
Bottom: A scene from 1001 Arabian Nights. Right: An illustration of the city of brass.
31
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and posting thousands of videos on YouTube
demonstrating healing techniques and publicizing
actual exorcisms. Qur’anicHealers.com, a division
of Spiritual Superpower Inc., for example,
has a Paypal account, contact information for
Qur’anic healers in twelve countries and a post
office box in Artesia, California.
Clerics, police, and politicians carefully negotiate
the political, religious, legal, moral, and
ethical issues that arise from dealing with this
world of spirits with each country having its own
laws to regulate various practices. For example,
although exorcists are not prohibited in Gaza,
Hamas considers most of them con artists,
claiming to have exposed thirty cases of fraud
in 2010: “We caught some suspects red-handed
… using magic to separate married couples …
It was all an act of deception and exploitation.
Some people handed over fortunes, and one
woman gave all her jewelry to one of these
exorcists.”
Abusive, quasi-medical practices have also
been committed in the name of Qur’anic magic.
Despite the fact that there are hospitals with
psychiatric sections in Afghanistan, a common
practice there is to chain the mentally ill to
shrines for forty days to ritually exorcise the
jinn “possessing” them. Patients are fed a strict
diet of bread and black pepper, do not have a
change of clothing, and sleep on the ground.
Those who do not survive the treatments are
buried in earthen mounds around the shrine.
While doctors in Muslim lands recognize
physical and mental illnesses, some are inclined
to attribute inexplicable cases to possession.
And although there are mullahs and religious
scholars reportedly against these practices, the
custom continues. There is no doubt that clerics
believe in the powers of jinn; they would no
more question the existence of jinn than they
would the Qur’an.
The Politics of Magic
Jinn can represent an existential and political
threat to religious leaders. Religious clerics condemn
or actively ban illicit spiritual healing not
because of the atrocities that have been committed,
or because people are being defrauded,
or even out of a conviction to save people’s
souls from evil but out of fear that jinn exist and
can be induced to subvert their authority.
At the same time, some leaders have used
the belief in jinn to further their political
agendas. Sheikh Ahmed Namir, a cleric and
Hamas leader, perpetuates anti-Semitic tropes,
claiming that economic hardship and psychological
traumas in the Gaza Strip have encouraged
liminal 32

Top: A picture from Constantinople, 1862. Bottom: Images from the Book of Wonders.
33
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evil Christian and Jewish jinn to possess
Palestinians. Palestinian stories of jinn possession
are full of classic anti-Semitic propaganda
and symbolism; in one case of “possession,” for
example, the attempted murder of a child by her
mother was blamed on “sixty-seven Jewish jinn,”
transforming the ancient blood libel accusation
into a new and bizarre form. Not surprisingly,
exorcizing Jewish jinn has become a growing
business in Gaza:
Sheikh Abu Khaled, a Palestinian exorcist,
said the number of possessed Muslims has more
than tripled: “I suspect that Jewish magicians
send jinns to us here in Gaza. In fact, most of my
patients are possessed with Jewish jinns.”
Some leaders allude to possessing supernatural
powers in order to self-aggrandize but this
can also backfire. Iranian president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad told followers in 2005 that he
“was surrounded by a halo of light during a
speech to the U.N. General Assembly, in which
the foreign leaders in the hall were transfixed,
unable to blink for a half hour.” But in May 2011,
Ahmadinejad’s supernatural “powers” resulted in
the arrests of two dozen of his aides, charged by
opposing religious clerics with practicing black
magic and invoking jinn. While most Western
reporters scoffed at the story of imprisoned
exorcists, The Wall Street Journal interviewed a
renowned Iranian sorcerer, Seyed Sadigh, who
claimed that dozens of Iran’s top government
officials consult him on matters of national security
and that he used jinn to infiltrate Israeli and
U.S. intelligence agencies: “Mr. Sadigh says he
doesn’t waste jinn powers on trivial matters such
as love and money. Rather, he contacts jinn who
can help out on matters of national security and
the regime’s political stability. His regular roll
call includes jinn who work for … the Mossad,
and for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.”
It would appear that the accusations of
sorcery were the result of a power struggle between
the president and the country’s supreme
leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i, making this both
an actual and political witch hunt. The primary
target of the arrests was Ahmadinejad’s chief of
staff Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei whose “alternative
Messianic version of Islam … includes
aspects of the occult and a more limited role
for clerics.” Not surprisingly, Sadigh reinforced
this notion, declaring, “I have information that
Ahmadinejad is under a spell, and they are now
trying to cast one on Supreme Leader Ayatollah
Seyed Ali Khamene’i to obey them blindly.”
Sadigh the sorcerer negotiates the politics of
magic like a pro, changing allegiances to align
himself with whoever seems to be on top and
selling his services to him. Perhaps the real
power behind the Iranian government resides
with the jinn catchers.
Mullah Omar, the Pashtun founder of the
Taliban, is widely perceived as magically protected.
Laying claim to the Afghan tradition of
charismatic mullahs with supernatural powers,
Omar adopted the same strategy, removing a
cloak, believed by many Afghans to having been
Despite regulations, an entire industry
of professional exorcists who perform
Qur’anic healing has arisen to meet
demand throughout the Middle East
and among Western Muslims
Left: Aladdin meeting the Genie. Right: King Suleiman killing a demon.
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Top left: Fortune telling in Constantinople (mid 19th century). Top right: Aladdin and the genie. Bottom: An illustration of a Middle Eastern city (19th century).
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Shaharazad from 1001 Arabian Nights
worn by the prophet Muhammad, from a shrine
in Kandahar and wearing it openly. Since legend
decreed that the chest holding the cloak could
only be opened when touched by a true leader
of the Muslims, wearing it gave him the status
of an Afghan hero endowed with extraordinary
mystical powers. When Kabul fell to his forces,
his supernatural status was confirmed.
Knowing that the Pashtun emphasize dreams
as a form of revelation, Omar cultivated the idea
that God spoke to him through his dreams and
claimed that he based his most crucial policy
decisions on them.
Whether to appease a superstitious people
or out of sincerely-held belief, Pakistani president
Asif Ali Zardari sacrifices a black goat nearly
every day to ward off the evil eye and provide
protection from black magic. He, along with
Ahmadinejad and Mullah Omar, understands
that knowledge of local customs, jinn, and
magical practices has significant political value.
A superstitious population presents numerous
opportunities to communicate fear, apprehension,
or awe and to exert influence.
Knowledge of local myths, customs, and magical
beliefs can present unique opportunities for
diplomacy as well as warfare, but Westerners do
not know how to deal with belief in supernatural
phenomena, continually applying a rational,
scientific approach to cultures that engage
in magical thinking and refusing to acknowledge
the political significance of these beliefs.
Currently, U.S. policymakers cannot even publicly
acknowledge that acts of terrorism are based
on Islamist religious ideologies, much less give
credence to jinn.
U.S. leaders tend to attribute the root causes
of violence to secular, social, and economic
factors such as poverty, illness, illiteracy, and
hunger. This has resulted in a strategy to win
the hearts and minds of the people by providing
food, shelter, education, and medicine.
These operations have consistently failed
because Islamic religious and political leaders
understand that their people primarily view
the root cause of their difficulties as a spiritual
problem. Instead of freedom, they foster faith.
The Islamic strategy is to win souls by providing
supernatural protection, via God or jinn.
Hearts and minds will then follow.
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Witch’s Resurgence:
Feminism, Protest, And
Politics
Brittany Leitner and WITCH PDX
The current US presidency and political climate has mobilized citizen activists in unprecedented
numbers. The rise of witch activism certainly has historical precedent, although
today’s iteration, with its emphasis on social media as a means of disseminating and
enacting magick, has interesting implications for enacting and mobilizing activism. That
many self-identified witches are anti-fascist isn’t surprising, given their history as a persecuted
group. As such, it’s logical that witches would be resistant to oppressive regimes.
Many spiritual communities have traditionally mobilized against fascism, oppression, and
inequality. For example, parishes offering sanctuary to draft dodgers in the 1960s and
Syrian refuges in recent years, or providing shelter to the homeless in winter months.
Witches themselves are political, concerned with balance, ethics, equality, ecology, and
living in harmony with nature. The Wiccan Reclaiming tradition expressly links spirituality to
politics, making the connection between Reclaiming practitioners and activists clear. Witches
also commonly share anti-oppressive ideologies with leftist activists: anti-fascist, feminist,
anti-oppression, anti-racist, anti-capitalist and anti-censorship. If social media is any indication,
millennials in particular are embracing not only Pagan spirituality, but also political messages.
It probably doesn’t hurt that the aesthetics of witchcraft — from fashion to the accouterments
of Pagan spiritual practice — translate well to visual expression as in social media.
Feminist activism has found a natural home in the modern iteration of witchcraft,
especially as practiced by a generation with sophisticated social media skills. Social
media has contributed to the rise of witch activism, who is a fixture on Tumblr, Instagram
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and even Facebook. Each platform is used
differently and lends itself to a different
mechanism for activism. Tumblr works well for
spells, manifestos, and information sharing
— posts are generally image-heavy or short
text meant to be prolifically re-blogged (or
“tumbled”) through user’s personal sites.
This profligate sharing is ideal for magical
purposes, as the reach of individual posts is
practically limitless and the site is well-used
by millennial witches. Tumblr, Instagram, and
Snapchat are all ideal for sharing images of
political actions, but also spells, grimoires, virtual
books of shadow, and of course images — witches
evidently love to share their altars with one
another and the world! Facebook is the standby
for organizing groups and events, and is valuable
for the cross-generational witch community, as
its users skew older than on the newer platforms
(like Instagram and Snapchat). Notably, posts
on Snapchat disappear after a period of time,
which has implications for the sharing of
The WITCH PDX website encourages many
covens in different cities to take action now.
If the points on the next page speak to you,
consider joining a WITCH group in your city,
or even starting one of your own.
secret messages or images for occultists and
witches. The sharing of images and ideas makes
witches’ political beliefs much more visible.
Today, the most prominent examples
of modern witch activism are probably
W.I.T.C.H.pdx (which references a previous
W.I.T.C.H. movement from the 1960s), the
Yerba Mala Collective, and the mass hexings
in recent months since the US election in
the fall of 2016. The hexings are particularly
interesting; although print media reported
on the events, the dissemination of the event,
including directions for carrying out a binding
spell, were propagated through social media.
In the ‘60s, W.I.T.C.H., which stands for
Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy
from Hell, was the driving force behind the
women’s liberation movement. Staged acts
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Guerrilla theater
The term “guerrilla theater”
refers to a type of public
protest of social or political
oppression, carried out
in a theatrical way. Past
WITCHes have done things
like left fingernail clippings
throughout buildings, and
publicly burned clothing
tied to feminine oppression,
such as bras and dish rags.
The goal is to “spook” and
“intimidate,” but also to
make a strong statement.
Guerrilla theater protests
occur in direct response
to events that go against
the WITCHes main beliefs
about equality.
Stance on men
Robin Morgan has famously
said I’ve never been a man
hater, though I’ve been
pretty damn furious with
men, many times. When I
get angry at a man or at
men, it’s because I think
they’re capable of change. If
I didn’t, I wouldn’t waste my
anger on them.
WITCHes aren’t anti-men;
they are anti-patriarchy.
Men who support
women’s rights are certainly
people WITCHes can get
down with. She continued:
The smart men at least
have always tried to give
lip service to feminism.
It’s harder to put it into
practice because it means
giving up power and
nobody — male or female
— likes to give up power.
Ideology
You cannot be in a coven
if you don’t have intersectional
members. Queer
members and women of
color are not only encouraged,
but required.
A few core values on
the WITCH PDX website
include anti-fascism,
support for sex workers,
environmental protection,
disability justice, gender
self-determination and
immigrants’ rights.
Basically, there is no
hate unless it’s directed at
the white norm patriarchy.
Covens/Chapters
If you wish to start a coven
in your city, you must follow
the above rules of all
witches, and have no more
than 13 members. However,
anyone is free to join and
start their own group of
WITCHes. Refinery 29 noted
that covens are the new “girl
squad,” which is great news
to anyone who’s over the
Taylor Swift label that refers
to girls gathering together
to... hang? Shop?
Covens are for political
action! If you’re down
to end white supremacy
with your girls, maybe a
coven is more your style.
Hexes
WITCHes are known for
their “hexes.” In mystical
books and movies, this
means casting spells and
using supernatural powers.
But in real life, WITCH
hexes are a bit different.
In 1968, WITCH
members, including Robin
Morgan, placed a “hex” on
the New York Stock Exchange.
They snuck around
the building at around 4
am and put crazy glue into
the locks and seals of the
doors of the building. The
next day, the Dow Jones
Average dropped noticeably
by five points, and the
WITCHes took credit.
liminal 40

such as protesting pageants and bridal fairs,
and creating “hexes” on various institutions of
oppression, were led by WITCH veterans like
Robin Morgan. Recently, given the oppression
of feminist values driven by the largely male,
largely white Trump administration, the
themes of WITCH are resurfacing. WITCH
has a few rules: 1. You must be anonymous;
2. You must be intersectional; 3. You must
differentiate your group with the name of
your city. The Portland chapter has already
begun veiled protests, holding signs that read
statements like, “White silence is violence.”
As neoliberal ideologies spread across the
globe, people are feeling more anxious and
helpless in the face of fascism. Witchcraft can
be a wonderful antidote to those feelings. As
witch collective Yerba Mala points out, “‘witch’
is a non-consumer category, which makes witches
entities that can transcend the capitalist
hetero-patriarchy in unique ways.” Witches
are historically persecuted and maligned, and
often anonymous in public spaces. Why is witch
activism so appealing to occultists? As noted,
spiritual communities have a long tradition of
activism; from sheltering Vietnam draft dodgers
to providing shelter for the homeless, feeding
the hungry… and of course, using occult strategies
for dismantling systems of oppression.
W.I.T.C.H.pdx
Historically, the most famous North American
witch activism collective was W.I.T.C.H., the
wonderfully named “Women’s International
Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell”, which gained
notoriety in the late 1960s. The group comprised
feminist activists who felt that radical
feminist ideology, with its emphasis on patriarchy,
had settled on too narrow of a focus. They
were anti-capitalist and felt the concerns of the
working class were at least as important as the
feminism of the second wave.
The original W.I.T.C.H. collective added an
element of theatre to activism, using costumes
and surrealist public protests in their political
work. The modern iteration, W.I.T.C.H.pdx,
makes manifest its debt to the earlier collective.
W.I.T.C.H.pdx is an activist group from Portland
whose mandate is starkly antifascist, anti-Trump
and anti-oppressive. Still, their public face
incorporates ironic and playful elements: using
costumes to maintain anonymity, a tongue-incheck
use of the stereotype of the witch as
a black-clad woman with a tall pointy hat and
broom. In addition to their mandate and history,
their website includes resources on how to start
your own local W.I.T.C.H. group that centers
the voices of people of color and transgender
witches. From the W.I.T.C.H.pdx website: WE
USE ANONYMITY AS A TOOL TO DISMANTLE
THE WHITE SUPREMACIST PATRIARCHY
The figure of the witch is a powerful symbol.
Though most iconic in the popular imagination
as a dramatic silhouette with a pointed hat and
black garments, a witch can be anyone. Witches
are not just from Europe, and don’t just practice
Wicca. We exist in a broad range of cultures
and traditions (and in fact, black and indigenous
witches have historically been persecuted
by witch hunts more than anyone else.)
We are everywhere. We are your sisters,
your neighbors, your teachers, your bartenders,
your mechanics, your check-out
clerks, your drivers and your nurses.
Yerba Mala Collective
Yerba Mala Collective is another active witch
activist group with an online presence that preserves
anonymity. Their members speak to press
outlets about queerness and feminist politics, in
addition to providing resources for other individuals
or groups to hex the US president they
call only “DT.” Their vision is expressed in a zine
linked via Google Docs, which they encourage
witches to disseminate for revolutionary purpose.
It’s hard to deny that “DT” has been a
remarkable catalyst for increased metaphysical
and occult activism. There have been multiple
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“... although print media
reported on the events, the
dissemination of the event,
including directions for
carrying out a binding spell,
were propagated through
social media.”
mass binding spells, informal calls to action for
witches to deploy their energies to prevent
further harm; harm in the form of restrictive and
punitive immigration laws, sanctions on safe legal
abortions, antipathy towards Black Lives Matter,
and the present and terrifying rise of extreme
right ideology. This type of activist work has only
become more necessary as we witness a modern
resurgence of white supremacy and Nazism.
The binding spells and hexes against Trump
and his supporters challenge the traditional
witches Rede — both to do no harm but also to
avoid enacting magick that affects other people.
Many activist witches believe that the magical
work against Trump is a justifiable breach of the
Rede: The Yerba Mala Collective explains that
fascist ideology “rides a current” of malevolent
intent and action, and to disrupt the current,
witches must enact the opposite energetic response.
Yerba Mala’s Tumblr page has some fascinating
resources for activist witches, from a poetic
manifesto (Concisely titled, “Our Vendetta:
Witches vs. Fascists.”) to an antifascist spell book,
to a coloring book featuring mantras that can
mobilize antifascist energies and sentiment.
The recent mass hexings of Trump are
great examples of how witch activism can be
mobilized to effect political change. Singer
Lana Del Rey has been public and vocal about
her antipathy towards Trump, declaring her
use of magick to combat the rise of alt right
sentiment globally. Del Rey tweeted to her
followers about dates for optimal binding
spell deployment against Trump “At the
stroke of midnight Feb 24, March 26, April 24,
May 23. Ingredients can be found online.”
Antifa and witchcraft: Natural allies
Witches and activism go together extraordinarily
well, and there are parallels between
antifa and witch activism. Antifa refers to
anti-fascist activists, loosely connected and associated,
with a shared agenda of dismantling
fascism. Antifa rhetoric endorses nonviolence,
but makes exception for property crimes
(which are seen as essentially anti-capitalist),
and also endeavors to avert atrocities such as
the holocaust or slavery. Antifa first mobilized
in the 1930s against Nazi Germany, and are
again active against the rise of white supremacy
and anti-black and anti-Jewish sentiment
and violence.
Antifa don’t believe in the police, and instead
take matters into their own hands with demon-
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strations, political rallies, and direct actions.
Again, although generally non-violent, they
assume a “by any means necessary” approach
in the face of right-wing extremism to dismantle
oppressive forces.
There are parallels here to witch activists, who
are willing to break the first rule of witchcraft, the
Rede — usually a variation of “And harm none, do
what ye will.” The binding spells performed on
Trump are controversial among some witches,
but are generally seen as being in service of the
greater good for the greatest number of people.
The antifascist spell book by Yerba Mala offers an
edited version of the Wiccan Rede that reflects
the moral relativism necessitated by the current
threat of fascism: witches should “do what thou
wilt” as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else —
with the exception of fascists.
We are living in strange times, leading people
to participate in movements (like the current
anti-fascist struggle) that they thought were long
redundant. Citizens must remain engaged and
vigilant against oppressive forces not only from
the far-right, but also within their own communities.
Spiritual communities tend to be uniquely
comprised of people concerned with balance,
spiritual wellness, ethics and equality. It’s logical
that these communities create and foster activists,
and also help sustain activists. Witch collectives
and online communities can be wonderfully
sustaining and validating for occult activists.
The spiritual work of the witch can be isolating.
At the same time, spiritual work is personal,
and allows people to engage meaningfully with
political issues that might otherwise foster feelings
of despair and helplessness. The ideology
of witchcraft empowers the individual, not only
to manifest their own will, but to believe that our
collective will can change things in the world.
These ideas are important in a time when it’s so
easy for people to feel isolated and impotent
against forces of evil.
As neoliberal ideologies spread
across the globe, people are
feeling more anxious and
helpless in the face of fascism.
Witchcraft can be a wonderful
antidote to those feelings.
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WITCH PDX Manifesto
For centuries, the dominant culture has
persecuted anyone who dares to be different.
The gentle healers, the midwives, the queers,
the loners, the wise elders, the pagans,
the foreigners, the wild women. Dissent is
threatening to the status quo, especially when
it’s shrouded in unfamiliar customs and the
mysterious sacred feminine. Those who seek
to oppress and suppress us have always called
us ‘witches’ to silence us. Now, we step out of
the shadows, embracing this word and all it
stands for. A witch is a fearsome creature,
inspiring terror and awe, channeling a
primal, visceral energy in the name of peace,
progress, justice and harmony. A witch is a
conduit for transformation. A witch taps into
the power within and harnesses the power
without in service of a better world. A single
witch is a dangerous outlier. A coven is a
force to be reckoned with. An international
circle of witches is unstoppable. Together,
we are W.I.T.C.H. (Witches’ international
troublemaker conspiracy from hell).Reviving
the spirit and intentions of the 1960s organization
of the same name. We aim to use our
power to fight injustice in all its intersectional
forms, and help dismantle the white supremacist
patriarchal system that perpetrates it.
The new generation of W.I.T.C.H. Conjures
our collective rage, joy, grief, strength, determination
and ferocity into a force for change.
We will not conform. We will not obey. We
will not be silent. We use anonymity as a tool
to dismantle the white supremacist patriarchy
The figure of the witch is a powerful
symbol. Though most iconic in the popular
imagination as a dramatic silhouette with
a pointed hat and black garments, a witch
can be anyone. Witches are not just from
Europe, and don’t just practice Wicca.
We exist in a broad range of cultures and
traditions (and in fact, black and indigenous
witches have historically been persecuted
by witch hunts more than anyone else.)
We are everywhere. We are your sisters,
your neighbors, your teachers, your bartenders,
your mechanics, your check-out
clerks, your drivers and your nurses.
Our costume is theatrical, instantly
recognizable and unifying, reflecting the
millions of witches who came before us and
the legions of us who exist today. For every
black-veiled witch in a pointed hat you may
see holding signs on street corners or per-
45 liminal

forming rituals in public squares, there are
vast numbers of anonymous witches, solitary
or working in covens, sending their energies
into the swirling mass from which we draw
our inspiration and motivation. We have
always been here. We will always be here.
WHY W.I.T.C.H.?
W.I.T.C.H. began as a feminist activism project
in 1968, and though it was only around
for a few years in its original form, its legacy
lives on. We pick back up the mantle of our
forebears and adapt their purpose and spirit
to the modern era. For us, that means retaining
their desire to dismantle the patriarchy
and fight for justice using the symbol and innate
power of the witch, while being inclusive
to all genders and centering intersectionality
and anti-oppression as our core values.
W.I.T.C.H. can stand for any number of
things: it can mean ‘Witches’ International
Troublemaker Conspiracy From Hell,’ riffing
off the original group’s name, ‘Witches Invoking
Transformative Channels of Healing,’
‘Women Inspired to Tear down Constructs
of Hate’ – shapeshifting along with us.
W.I.T.C.H. PDX officially formed in November
2016 in response to oppression and injustice
throughout the world and in our own
city. We have since inspired dozens of other
independently operating W.I.T.C.H. chapters
to emerge nationwide, and remain dedicated
to working within the Portland area.
In addition to the original W.I.T.C.H., we
draw from a wealth of activism and radical
thought in our region, including the Riot
Grrrl movement and Black Lives Matter.
Our city has a history of marginalizing
and displacing people of color, and Oregon
as a whole has a violently racist past and
a large population of white supremacists.
There are a lot of things to work on right
here. We’re hoping to help effect change
in our own community and inspire people
to do the same, wherever they may live.
A STATEMENT FROM THE
ORIGINAL W.I.T.C.H.:
“You don’t have to call yourself a witch to be
a W.I.T.C.H. — Woman Imagining Theoretically
Creative Happenings, but you should
dress up like one, be in a coven, with no more
than 13 others, though anonymous ones,
who as a group, should never commodify
their craft, always aspire to do good, have
fun and move on. W.I.T.C.H. actions are
usually the most fun those involved have ever
had and raise their consciousness about the
worthiest things they strive for throughout
their lives. Good W.I.T.C.H. Crafting and
Creating, is very serious and not serious at
all and inspired by women everywhere. It
should be something that women care about
that men are not addressing, that does good
for everyone and you do it in a way that’s
fun. Guerrilla Girls could be W.I.T.C.H.
because they never say who they are. So the
possibility of putting on unifying masks to
do good, have that spirit. Regarding the
communal ownership of revolutionary magic:
the important difference between movements
and institutions is Revolutions catalyze and
Institutions stabilize. W.I.T.C.H. Craft is
non-proprietary, anonymous and not just
resistant to proscription and prescription,
but POOF! whatever magical power it had
is destroyed and destructive when claimed
as definitive. SPOOF, however, survives
healthily!” – W.I.T.C.H., October 31st, 2016
SUPPORT W.I.T.C.H.
Follow W.I.T.C.H. on Twitter @witchpdx for
opportunities to support their efforts, and
keep an eye out for them around Portland!
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