Free Not In Kansas Anymore by Christine Wicker

all five lights on the way to work bodes well for the day may not think he believes in magic, but he does.
    Some people believe that magical thought dies down and then flares up again, and there’s been lots of speculation about what conditions cause a turn toward magic. But it may be more accurate to say that the elites who write history and study trends swing toward and away from paying attention to magical thinking. Because theseelite scholars and writers leave records of their thoughts, it appears that magic ebbs and flows, but perhaps it has only moved out of public sight. Roelof van den Broek and Wouter J. Hanegraaff are among the religious scholars who say that the influence of magical thinking in art, science, literature, and philosophy is a “third current” that has shaped Western culture as profoundly as Greek rationalism and Judeo-Christianity have. Northwestern University historian Richard Kieckhefer calls magic a historical crossroads where religion meets science, where popular culture meets learned culture, and where fiction and reality come together.
    At the same time that an increasing number of scholars are studying the historical role of magic, thousands of books are being published about how to do magic. Serious journalistic looks at what today’s magical communities might have to say to us, however, are rare to nonexistent. It is into that void that we will now step.

Part Two
LESSONS IN LIGHT AND DARK
    It puzzles me that transcendent intimations, once vouchsafed to spiritual adepts and powerful intellects, now seem available mostly to devotees of dank crankeries.
    â€” HAROLD BLOOM
    4.
Looking for Living Dolls, Whack Jobs, and the Lucky Mojo Curio Company
    A first order of business was to decide how I would approach my inquiry. I would have to deal with my skepticism, quiet the little scientist within me, or I would never get anywhere. It was altogether too easy to explain away even the strangest of the magical people. Take the vampires as an example. Nobody can say how big this community of mostly young people is, but it is international, numbers in at least the thousands, and appears to be growing. Some consider themselves to be actual vampires who need human blood, but the majority seem to be interested in taking other people’s energy.
    When one young psychic vampire told me how he discovered his dark nature, I drew up a list of signs. If you always wear sunglasses when you go outside, if you prefer being up at night to being active during the day, if you have low energy and depression, ifyou’re often ravenously hungry and you like your steaks bloody rare, you might be a vampire.
    You might also be a typical American teenager, but never mind that for now.
    Believing himself a vampire, he thought that he needed other people’s blood to live. Later he came to understand that it wasn’t blood that he needed but life energy. He could get that energy by being in crowds, at parties, in church rituals—anyplace where people were gathered. If strong emotions were being generated, that was even better. He could also get the energy he needed through touching people in a conscious way.
    Psychologize that description and you have a young person who can’t relate well to others. He’s alone a lot, and that makes him more depressed. He realizes that he can make himself feel better by being around other people. But relationships that involve talking are difficult. So he avoids those. Soon he realizes that merely being in a crowd can buoy him up. Being in a crowded bar, in a mall, at a sports event, can make him feel more alive. If he concentrates his attention on one person, he feels even better. He interprets this as having fed off their energy.
    That might be true, or it might be that he has merely stopped thinking of himself so constantly and that is a relief. Fueled by fantasy fiction and computer games, inspired by visions of vampires who were dangerous and