Family Secrets

Low Magick: It's All In Your Head ... You Just Have No Idea How Big Your Head Is - Lon Milo DuQuette 2010


Family Secrets

In parts of Melanesia, where matriliny is the rule, magic is inherited from father to son; in Wales it seems that mothers handed it down to sons, while fathers bequeathed it to the daughters. In societies where voluntary secret societies for men play an important role, the association of magicians and the secret society usually overlap.

MARCEL MAUSS,

A GENERAL THEORY OF MAGIC

Some people in the magical community place a great deal of importance on their magical ancestry. This is not surprising because the romance and mythos of our spiritual art is certainly enhanced by the thought that we might in fact be a special breed set apart from ordinary people22 by the very blood in our veins. I believe that in and of itself, this attitude can be harmless enough. After all, who of us wouldn’t like to think that we are (even by tradition) descended from a Merlin or a Morgan La Fey, a Cagliostro or an Aleister Crowley? Taken too seriously, however, such preoccupation with magical bloodlines can easily seduce us into blindly abandoning our common sense and embracing a form of magical elitism as foolish and dangerous as any other name-your-own supremacy.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I fully recognize the fact that a few of us actually have parents who studied and practiced magick or witchcraft, and that they too may have had parents who did the same. For most of us, however, the “magick” we’ve inherited from our parents or grandparents is something less overtly magical than that determined by our family’s participation in generational covens, satanic cults, or secret initiatory societies. In fact, I believe that we can discover more about the magical “blood” of our ancestors by simply examining their lives and characters than we can by analyzing their professed spiritual interests.

I’d wager that if each of us gave it a little thought, we could find the magician in our parents and grandparents and be able to trace that magick (whether for good or ill) to our own lives and personalities. I certainly can. As a matter of fact, if you wish to truly become a wise and well-rounded magician, you will sooner or later have come to terms with both the good and evil locked in the DNA of your own family secrets.

With your permission, I would like to share a couple of stories from my magical family tree. Perhaps you will be able to see some parallels in your own life. If not, you might at least learn a bit more about me.

My mother23 was a fundamentalist Christian who took perverse pride in the fact that she did not know—nor did she care to learn—the history or tenets of Christianity (even her own brand). She did not read (let alone study) the Bible. “Childlike faith” was the sole virtue she boasted would get her into heaven. In her mind, curiosity and education would only open the door to the devil’s wiles and tempt her to doubt the one true way of blind faith that was pounded into her as a child growing up on the unforgiving prairie of western Nebraska. This devotional focus could have been a powerful spiritual tool in her life if it were not for the fact that there was not an object for her devotion. She did not seem particularly devoted to Jesus or interested in the spiritual significance of the passion of his life. She was thoroughly content with the concept that if she unquestioningly believed that he, as an historical character, died on the cross, came back to life three days later, and then he flew up into the sky forty days after that, then she would go to heaven—and everyone who didn’t believe those things would be justly punished in a blazing hell for eternity. Even as a child, I believe she delighted more in the thought of the damnation of unbelievers than in the promise of sweet salvation for believers.

Belief in such doctrines isn’t necessarily cause for criticism or condemnation. Indeed, I’ve known many people that hold very similar religious beliefs—people with loving hearts who possess deep compassion for their families, friends, neighbors, and communities. But with all respect due to the woman who brought me into this dimension, I am sad to report that my mother was not one of these people. For her, this small exercise in intolerant religious absolutism only freed her to focus her entire energies upon the one and only object of her true spiritual devotion—herself.

She was supernaturally psychic and possessed a power of personality so magnetic that it captured and dominated everyone around her. This made her initially attractive to others, and in social environments, very popular. Time after time during her ninety-four-year incarnation, casual acquaintances became her unsuspecting victims, falling voluntarily under her spell only to later find themselves stung, paralyzed and hopelessly entangled in her web of emotional servitude. She was a charismatic dictator who ironically had no master plan other than to create explosions of emotional turmoil in the lives of those around her and then to draw energy from all that turmoil. After thirty-three years of suffering her soul-draining dramas, my father died at the age of sixty-two. Twenty-three years later, the same fate awaited a second husband. Her magick touch would also prove fatal to the health, careers, marriages, and relationships of scores of relatives, friends, and well-meaning strangers.

Ironically, she had (at times) a great sense of humor—and humor is the inheritance from her I most treasure. Humor continues to help me cope with and (hopefully) transmute the darker magick she bequeathed me. Here are a few passages from the eulogy I delivered at her funeral. I may sound a bit disrespectful in the short clip below, but the pastor and congregation of her church certainly didn’t think so. They knew my mother too well. The laughter in the sanctuary was a healthy discharge of emotion for all of us.

FROM: A SON’S EULOGY

Christ Presbyterian Church,

Lakewood, California, January 26, 2008

I’m sure not all mothers are vampires, but mine was. I sucked her milk for less than a year; then she sucked my blood for the next fifty-nine. Up to a point, I think it’s part of the natural order of things. We all live off each other in one way or another. If someone really needs to be nourished with my energy, I’m happy to “bleed” a little for them, but I really resent it when they don’t really “drink” my blood but instead spill it all over the floor. I’m sad to say in her ninety-four years Mom spilled a lot of people’s blood all over the floor.

Please don’t get me wrong. Mom loved people … but she hated all other living things. You’d never catch her petting a dog or stroking a cat. She strove to kill all insects both inside and outside of the house. She didn’t even care too much for flowers because of the chance they might harbor an insect.

You never wanted to take her to a restaurant to which you ever intended to return. She ran waiters and waitresses raggedand if she didn’t like the food, she would often call them to the table, take the food out of her mouth and say, “Honeylook at thiswould you eat that?” She would then try to get them to eat some of it before sending it back. Toward the end of the meal, she always loudly announced (within earshot of the haggard waitress) that she didn’t believe in tipping.

She always stole the napkins.

To say she was strong-willed and self-centered would be a colossal understatement. If I were to use the title of a popular song to describe the character of this amazing person, it would have to be Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”!

As a matter of fact, when she was in her late seventies, she demonstrated how true this was by causing herself and her entire party to be kicked out of a Frank Sinatra concert in Long Beach because she refused to stop loudly chatting with her friends during his performance.

Sadly, I must give her mixed reviews as far as her parenting skills were concerned. She subscribed to the old-school philosophy that states a mother should never whip a child unless she is red-in-the-face in the throes of a violent blind rage and completely out of control. These beatings were perhaps tame compared to some stories of abuse. Once, however, as I struggled to escape a paddling, she missed her mark and hit me in the head with the edge of the wooden paddle. I guess it scared her pretty badly to see me stunned blind and bouncing off the furniture.

But I’m all grown up now … and have forgotten all about it.

Because I was the second-born child, I personally escaped many of the more severe and damaging effects her maternal learning curve visited upon my older brother Marc in the six years of his life before I was born.

But Marc’s all grown up now too … and I’m sure has forgotten all about it …

Yes, Lucinda Myrtle DuQuette was quite a character—strong-willed, charismatic, wicked, and unforgettable. A few months before she died, I wrote her this little poem.

Perhaps we were neighbors.

Perhaps we were kin.

Perhaps we were husband and wife.

Perhaps we were friends.

Perhaps we were foes.

Perhaps we took each other’s life.

No matter the bonds

We bring from the past,

Or what we once were to each other,

Whether parent or spouse,

Sister or brother,

This time around you’re our mother.

So as this part of our lives

Draws near to a close,

And the stage soon will be set for another,

Let’s kiss and let’s laugh, and set fire to the past,

And forgive and forget one another.

My father was a different kind of magician altogether. He was a quiet and moody Scorpio given to bouts of depression. He liked to drink during the years before I was born, but Mom’s willingness to drive to his favorite after-work watering hole and physically pull him off his barstool and out to the car put an end to that. Dad didn’t talk much about his parents and family, other than to say he had one sister and three half-sisters, all older than he. To my knowledge, he never met any of his grandparents. His father came from France; his mother came from England. She’d been married once before and had three girls from that union. Her father was an inspector for Scotland Yard who died during the events of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. The only thing we know about Grandma DuQuette’s mother was a story that I find somewhat unnerving—something that my mother didn’t tell me until a week or so before she died in 2007. I was almost sixty years old when I heard the tale. I now know why she waited.

My father was born and raised in Los Angeles, but had traveled to western Nebraska in the late 1930s to drill exploratory oil wells. He met my mother-to-be (a waitress at a diner) and they married in the little town of Chapel, Nebraska, in 1940. When the newlyweds returned home to California, my father was stunned to discover that while he been away, his father was dead and buried,24 and his mother lay dying in a hospital. When they visited the poor woman, she asked to talk alone with her new daughter-in-law.

She asked my mother-to-be if she planned to have children. When Mom answered in the affirmative, the old woman pleaded with her to reconsider. “Don’t have his children. We are cursed! There is evil in our blood.” She then tearfully confessed that her own mother was a “witch.”

Now, I think here I must pause and point out for this woman born in the late 1800s, the word “witch” did not refer to a person who wholesomely embraced the life-affirming, earth-centered worship of today’s Neopagan movement. Instead, it referred to someone who delighted in doing evil things for evil’s sake.

She then went on to relate how her mother fed on the hate and fear and misery of others—how she would sit on the steps of her London flat and curse passersby, especially pregnant women, then later delight in reports of their miscarriages and deaths during childbirth. She poisoned dogs and cats. She spread vile rumors about neighbors and relatives for no other purpose than that of ruining lives. So hated and feared was she in the neighborhood that no child was allowed to play with her children, and if not for the fact that her husband was a policeman, the family would have been run out of the neighborhood.

None of my father’s four sisters had any children, perhaps warded off by tales of evil blood. My mother, on the other hand, was a different creature altogether. When I asked her if Grandma DuQuette’s warning hadn’t scared her, she coldly answered, “No. Where would you and Marc be if I had listened? I wasn’t going to let that old witch tell me what to do.”

I think in this case Mom’s magick served a very good purpose. It dug its heels in and triumphed over fear and superstition (albeit with a heavy dose of fear and superstition of its own). Even though my father wouldn’t live the luckiest of lives, even though my brother and I have had our share of ups and downs, I don’t believe that any of the DuQuettes who sprang from this strange woman’s loins are cursed with anything more sinister than our own human shortcomings. However, this unsettling story now makes me recall that for my entire childhood, whenever I did something my mother disapproved of, she would shake her finger at me and tell me, in deadly earnest, that I was “possessed with the devil.”

I must also confess that at times I can be possessed by a disturbing, dark, and hateful nature. When I perceive that I’ve been wronged—when someone cuts me off on the freeway, when I hear of or observe the mistreatment of other people or animals or my country or my planet—I become so overwhelmed with the most monstrous bloodcurdling images of what I would do to such people if they were at my mercy in some fantasy torture chamber that I have to use every weapon in my mystical arsenal to force myself back to calm sanity. At times like this, I am mindful of a great-grandmother who poisoned people’s pets and delighted in the news of miscarriages.

For all appearances, this curse skipped my father. In fact, my father was blessed with a most kind and noble character. It was obvious he stayed married to Mom for the welfare and safety of Marc and me. His spirituality was centered upon a simple belief in a generic “Supreme Being” (after all—he was a Freemason25) and in the fundamental goodness of human beings.26 He took the time to instill in his sons a confidence that we could do anything we put our minds to. He taught us the magick of dreams and imagination, and that it was possible to work to make our dreams come true.

Like a good Scorpio Freemason, he taught us by means of magical secrets. So now, after you have patiently endured my ponderous Freudian excursions into my mother’s sorcery, I finally come to the true family secrets the title of this chapter initially promised you.

Dad’s library contained a number of Masonic books, many illustrated with exotic, mystic symbols. When my brother and I asked what they meant, he would only tease us by saying, “It’s a secret. If you want, when you grow up you can try to join the Masons and find out.” He gently instilled in us both an awe and respect for secret knowledge. So when I was faced with the normal problems of growing up, I could go to Dad and he would give me a magick “secret” to dealing with them. These were secrets not to be shared with anyone else—not Mom; not my brother; no one! My brother and I were unaware at the time that the other was also getting his own secrets from Dad. Years after his death we compared notes and discovered that, while similar, each of our “secrets” had been uniquely composed.27

It’s been many years since Dad passed away. I don’t think he would mind if I’d share just a couple of the magical secrets that have helped me throughout the years.

· The first secret was not a secret per se; it was a commandment, a prime directive: “Your name is a magick name. Never change your name or the spelling of your name.” I don’t know why he named me Lon Milo, but one of my earliest memories of Dad was his insistence that he chose my name very carefully, that it was a magick name, and that I was never to change it, never to change the spelling or the capitalization. I continue to obey the prime directive.28

· The Secret to falling asleep at night was the first bona fide secret Dad taught me. It was a two-part secret, very simple (but I could tell no one how I do it). First, I was to say my prayers. Now, Dad was practically an agnostic, and God to him was a generic cosmic abstraction. He did not encourage me to embrace Jesus or the Old Testament Jehovah, or indeed anything other than a supremely good What-It-Is. Nevertheless, it was important that before I go to sleep I should acknowledge Deity and thank it for the blessings of my life and ask for its continued protection, guidance, and blessing upon everything I do. He said the best prayer was one that just came out of my own heart, but if I couldn’t make up a prayer of my own, the Lord’s Prayer would work until I got the hang of it.

After saying my prayer, I was to relax and make up an imaginary adventure (with me as the main character) about anything that pleased me—the more fanciful the better. There was only one rule to this part of the secret: each night’s adventure must include me doing at least one thing that is impossible to do in real life. I had to think of a new impossible act every night. I didn’t know why, but I instinctively knew that this was one of the coolest things in the world you could encourage a kid to do.

· The Secret to stopping nightmares was perhaps the most overtly magical of Dad’s secrets. Like most kids, I had my share of childhood nightmares. One night when I was about seven years old I woke up screaming and crying. It seems a monster had just eaten my brother Marc and that it had hold of my foot. Without turning on the light, Dad came into my room and sat on the bed. He told me everything was okay and that everybody had bad dreams now and again. He encouraged me to lie back down, but I refused to put my head on the same spot on the pillow where the bad dream came from. He then said the most curious thing. “No. You want to go back into the dream and make the monster go away.” He then told me that whenever I am uncomfortable in a dream, I only have to pronounce my own name backwards, “NOL,” and the monster or the problem would disappear. I trusted Dad, so I put my head back on the nightmare pillow and tried to re-create the dreaded moment. Sure enough—I was back in the dream with my foot in the monster’s mouth. I spoke the magick word, NOL! The monster opened its mouth in fear and it dissolved into thin air. I was very impressed with my new secret. I would use it countless times. Furthermore, once I learned I could take control of my dreams, I learned I could “go” places in dreams and even live out some of those “impossible” feats of wonder. This is a skill that is very important to a magician. It is also very important to be able to resolve a problem in its own dimension rather than trying to run away from it by escaping into another.

· The Secret of learning was a simple affirmation that I was to say under my breath as I walked to school each morning: “The Secret of learning is to do the best I can at all times; and always do a little better than I think I can.” I wish I could say this made me a model student, but I cannot. I will say, however, that I can’t begin to imagine how terribly bad a student I could have been without this bit of morning encouragement.

I cannot escape that fact that both my parents were major factors in the equation that produced the magician Lon Milo DuQuette. As Constance and I raised our son, Jean-Paul, I was very mindful of object lessons I learned from my own parents’ strengths and weaknesses. Our unique “family secrets” we’ve passed along to him he now shares in his own way with his own son, and so it goes.

How are things in your family?

[contents]

22 “Muggles,” as J. K. Rowling, creator of the wildly popular Harry Potter books, might call them.

23 Lucinda McConnell-DuQuette-Lees (1913—2007).

24 Dad’s sisters refused to reveal his father’s burial site.

25 In most countries, Freemasons must profess belief in a Supreme Being.

26 Freemasons are also taught that “… a fund of science and industry is implanted in man for the best, most salutary and most beneficent purposes.” This doctrine is in striking opposition to the Christian doctrines of Original Sin and the Total Depravity of Man.

27 Please see appendix 1 for my brother Marc’s own mystical story about Dad.

28 Qabalists might observe that when the letters of my name are replaced with Hebrew letters Lon Milo DuQuette enumerates to 444, and that my initials, LMD, spell the Hebrew letter Lamed.