Damien Echols is best known for the worst years of his life. On March 19, 1994, Echols was sentenced to death for the gruesome murder of three grade-school boys in West Memphis, Arkansas. He was 19. (His two purported accomplices, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley, Jr.âalso teenagersâwere both sentenced to life in prison.) The trial, which relied heavily on âevidenceâ of Echolsâ love of witchcraft, Satanism, and Metallica, became a national sensation and came to define the eraâs so-called Satanic Panic.
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Echols spent nearly 18 years on death row. Due largely to the publicity of the HBO documentary Paradise Lost and its two sequels, the cause to free the âWest Memphis Threeâ (as the boys became known) gathered steam and high-profile advocates like Eddie Vedder, Peter Jackson, and Johnny Depp. New DNA evidence only piled onto the growing consensus that the original trial was a botch job (and an actual witch hunt), and in August 2011 the three convicted men were released from prison by entering an Alford plea, a strange legal loophole that allows freedom in exchange for a formal admission of guilt.
It was Echolsâ interest in Aleister Crowley and âceremonial magickâ that inflamed the Bible-thumping, Satanic-Panicked southerners who threw him in prison to dieâŚbut it was that same magick (Echols spells it with a âkâ to distinguish it from âlowâ magic of performers like Criss Angel) that he claims, in a new book, saved his life. High Magick is a beginnerâs guide to the spiritual practices and philosophy to which Echols, now 43, has devoted himself since those dark days. Heâs currently on a book tour, and will be at the Regent on November 15, in conversation with the Dixie Chicksâ Natalie Maines (another famous supporter while he was in prison). On November 16, heâll be signing books at Amoeba Records in Hollywood.
Can you pinpoint when your interest in magick began?
I was no older than probably 7. I didnât even comprehend what magick really was back then, but I came across the word the very first time when I was a child, living with my grandmother. She used to read these old, horrible tabloidsâthe really old-school ones, not the ones about celebrities getting divorces, but the ones that every week there was something on the cover like âHalf Alligator, Half Man Found Along the Banks of the Mississippi.â I remember seeing in the back of one this ad that said something like, âWant to learn magick or the secrets of the universe? Send $5.95 off to this address and weâll rush you this book.â I remember going to my grandmother and being like, âCan we please get this?â I donât know what it was, but as soon as I saw it it was like it lit something in me like a fuse. I thought: if you could dedicate your life to thisâeven though at that time I still didnât know exactly what âthisâ wasâwhy would anything else matter?
I didnât really come in contact with actual practices, rituals, meditations until I was in my teenage years. This would have been around the time that Wicca and paganism started to make a comeback, and you started being able to walk into stores like Borders and Barnes & Noble and see the really classic books on witchcraft, like Bucklandâs Complete Book of Witchcraft and Scott Cunninghamâs work. I started to read through those and do some of the stuff, but it still didnât scratch an itch. I kept having this feeling, like thereâs got to be something more. Time and time again, whether it was Wicca in the late â80s and early â90s, or The Secret in the early 2000s, whatever it is, they focus on manifestation, manifestation, manifestation. Itâs all about materialism in a certain way, whether itâs focusing on teaching you how to manifest the life you want to have or a parking spot when you need one. What I eventually discovered was that these things are all just really, really watered-down versions of ceremonial magick, or high magick. Theyâre just a tiny sliver of that world.
What is âhigh magick,â in your definition?
Magick is, for all intents and purposes, the western path to enlightenment. I always compare it to eastern traditions like Buddhism and Hinduism and Daoism, because they sort of have the same goal. Magick, in its highest forms, is very, very similar to Dzogchen in Tibetan Buddhism. It was a native form of magick that they did there, and then whenever Buddhism came into Tibet the two mingled together. In Dzogchen they say that enlightenment, what we think of as enlightenment, is not the end of the path. Thatâs a mark along the path. It is in ceremonial magick what we call achieving solar consciousness, where you live constantly in the present moment. You donât dwell in the past, you donât dwell in the future. You are here, you are experiencing lifeâwhich is what weâre here to do. If the only reason that we were existing in this world was to reunite with a spirit, or become one with the universe, then we never would have come here in the first place, because we were all those things before we were born. Part of the path that goes along after enlightenment is, what they call in Dzogchen âbuilding the rainbow body.â In ceremonial magick, we call it the light body.
There is a very physical aspect to all of this stuff, and itâs connected to your nervous system. If youâve ever looked at pictures of the Dzogchen lamas, after they die they continue this practice, and you will see the body start to shrink over a period of about seven days. Theyâll get so small that some of them are basically just a head and a few bones leftâand theyâll put them on a shrine, and they stay there as a religious artifact. If you carry this process to its absolute fulfillment, its absolute end, there would be nothing left within seven days after you die except hair and nailsâthe only parts of you that are not connected to your nervous system. All of this stuff does have a very real, vital, physical component. I didnât get into the in-depth aspects of it, the really hardcore spiritual alchemy parts of it, until I was in prison. And that would have started slowly, when I was in my early 20s.
What led to that?
At first, in prison, I would practice it for three weeks, and then I wouldnât do it again for six months. I wasted a lot of time. After Iâd been there for several years, I received ordination in the Rinzai tradition of Japanese Buddhism, and I sat zazen meditation for several years. I felt like I really wasnât getting a lot of out it, and I kind of think, when I look back on it now, itâs because itâs geared towards the Eastern psycheâitâs part of their culture from the time theyâre born, and itâs not to us. Whereas ceremonial magick is uniquely western. The form that I practice originated in Europe, so it is part and parcel of our psyche. Even if you want nothing to do with Christianityâsay youâre a complete atheist, say you donât believe in it at allâit is still part of your psyche. Especially if you grew up in a part of the country like I did, where there are literally places you can come to a four-way stop and there are churches on all four corners.
While I was in prison, maybe four years before I got out, I decided: I am going to dedicate every single waking moment to these practices. By the time I got out, I was doing it for up to eight hours a day. One day I bent over to tie my shoe and I had this epiphany that was like a bomb going off in my head. I realized, Oh my God, I am actually in the present moment. Everything that I tried to accomplish with all those years of zen, I just experienced after three or four months of ceremonial magick. That first taste of it showed me this works. Aleister Crowley said, âLet success be thy proof.â And thatâs exactly what that was.
What are some of the most common misconceptions about high magick?
Number one: people donât realize what high magick even is. The reason I call it âhigh magickâ is to differentiate it from low magic. Low magic is the stuff which deals only with manifesting things in some way. Practical magic. High magick is all about spiritualism. The other misconception would be that itâs something dark or scary. I think that comes from two different places. One is just the smear campaign from the Catholic church that started all the way back with the Knights Templar, and goes up until now, because they didnât want competition. And the other thing is, sadly enough, people themselves who claim to be magicians or witches or whatever. You have all the âInstagram witchesâ now that are more concerned with if their jewelry looks dark and spooky than they are with actually doing these practices.
Why do you believe it saved your life?
I always tell people, if youâre only going to do one single practice, the one you should do is the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. One of the reasons itâs so important is because it establishes emotional equilibrium. What youâre doing is sort of clearing yourself out. Think about it like a cup of water. If you leave a cup of water sitting long enough, it starts to develop stagnation, debrisâit starts to get gunk in it. Now, if you turn a faucet on in the sink and just hold that cup under that running faucet until the waterâs flowing over, for hours or days or however long it takes, eventually youâre going to end up with a cup of clean water again, without ever washing it out or anything. Doing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram does kind of the exact same thing. Youâre focusing on pushing old energy out, and bringing new energy in, which is symbolized by four different archangels: we use Raphael the Archangel of Air, Gabriel the Archangel of Water, Michael the Archangel of Fire, and Uriel the Archangel of Earth. You are then taking that new energy directly into your energy systemâit gets absorbed.
I was in a situation where I was in tremendous psychological stress, anxietyânot even to mention the physical aspects like sleep deprivation, solitary confinement for almost a decade, almost no human touch, stuff like that. Physical aspects aside, the emotional aspects were devastating. Anything that fucks you up emotionally is eventually going to manifest physically. When I get really, really stressed out and anxious, Iâll start getting things like sores inside my mouth.
Weâre all meant for something slightly different, to fulfill some slightly different role than anyone else. For me, my will, what I was supposed to do, was magick.
If I had not had these practices to keep my emotions equilibrated, I honestly would not have made it. This would have crippled me and devastated me even more than it did already. I would see people in there dying slowly. Guys would come in and they would just sit there, doing nothing, waiting to die, staring at a TV watching a football game to kill a day, whatever it wasâslowly stagnating, deteriorating by the day. Because they didnât have a life. Once they came in there, they didnât have anything else to focus on to keep them going, keep them alive.
Magick was what I focused on. In there and out here, it is what my life is dedicated toâitâs the lynchpin of my life that everything else revolves around. And as crazy as it sounds, there were times when I would not even think about the fact that I was in prison for days at a time. When I would get ready to go to bed at night, exhausted, I would still feel like I hadnât gone quite as far as I wanted to, that I want to do this technique one more time, or this ritual for one hour more. I would, honest to God, jump out of bed in the morning excited to start a new day of doing this again.
Do you believe, despite the hellishness of your time in prison, that being there actually pointed you toward magick?
Absolutely. People now think that I had a horrible life. They look back on 20 years in prison for something I didnât do, facing deathâthe physical torture, the mental trauma, the emotional destruction. Donât get me wrong: all those things were there. But the only time that I even think about prison anymore is when somebody asks me about it. Thatâs it. For me, itâs almost like an insignificant sidebar of my life. My life is magick. It always has been, God willing, always will be.
I come in contact with people who tell me horrendous stories of things theyâve been through, or depression that theyâre suffering, despair theyâre experiencing, and theyâre like: âWell, how did you get through that?â I tell people there are two causes of depression. One is some sort of chemical imbalance, and the only thing thatâs going to remedy that is medication, exercise, adjusting your diet, things of that nature. The other cause is not doing in magick what we call your will, or what they call in Buddhism your dharma. That means: what you were put here to do. We say that the universe is not going to waste energy replicating people like cookie-cutter images that are all meant for the same thing. Weâre all meant for something slightly different, to fulfill some slightly different role than anyone else.
For me, my will, what I was supposed to do, was magick. Once I dedicated myself to that wholeheartedly, I never really had to think about those things again, despair and all that stuff. Theyâd come in, theyâd do something to me, Iâd get right back up and Iâd go right back to my practice. Once you know what your will is, and you dedicate yourself to it as much as you possibly can, youâre going to be a hell of a lot happier.
You grew up in what I imagine is deep Trump country now. Do you feel like you understand what fuels that tribeâs outlook?
I think itâs incredibly simple. I think itâs the same thing that inspires most tribesâ outlook. You can live from one of two energy wavelengthsâonly two. Love or fear. Plain and simple. Even when you look at things that donât seem like one of those, if you trace them back far enough itâs still fear. When a dog is barking at you, that dogâs not madâthat dog is scared. All these people are scared that somebodyâs going to take something from them, whether itâs an immigrant thatâs coming in to take their job, or the governmentâs going to take their gun. It all comes down to fear.
Do you think whatâs happening right now, with Trump and this fear-based negativity, is ultimately good for our country, that itâs bringing a rot to the surface that we can then identify and deal with? Or are you worried about our trajectory?
No. To be honest, I donât watch the news, I donât keep up with any of itâjust because, like I said, the more you focus on that stuff, the more miserable youâre going to be. Especially when itâs stuff that thereâs nothing you can do about whatsoever. Like, say, another mass shooting. It doesnât matter if you sit there for four hours watching this footage over and over and over on the newsâŚthereâs nothing you can do about that, other than obsess over it and get depressed and despair and angry, and start talking about it with other people and enraging each other. I honestly would rather focus on something productive. You cannot create a new reality by fighting against what you hate. The only way you can do that is by building up what you love.
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