Mostly my prison days seem like something that happened lifetimes ago, and they rarely cross my mind. That’s all the past, and I don’t live looking backward. More often than not, I’m far more excited about what’s ahead of me. I often feel this overwhelming sense that something good is coming for me. Something amazing. That said, I’ll probably remember the first talisman I ever made for the rest of my life.

In prison, a “shakedown” is when anywhere from two to ten guards come to your cell and turn your whole world into a broken jumble on the floor. Sometimes there is a side dish of physical brutality if you’re one of the few they pick out to rough up that day. When I was incarcerated, a shakedown would happen an average of once a month. It was a source of constant stress and anxiety, a kind of psychological torture. It was during one of these shakedowns that I made my first talisman.

I could see the guards making their way down the tier. I knew it was going to take them at least an hour to get to me. I sat on my bunk and picked up my coffee cup and a pen. I turned the coffee cup upside down on a piece of white paper and traced around the lip of it in order to make a perfect circle. Once I had the circle, I flipped open Donald Michael Kraig’s Modern Magick. In it was a lesson on all different ways to create a talisman. The method that piqued my interest the most was one employed by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. To do it, you used an illustration they had created of a rose. Each petal of the rose held a letter of the alphabet. You drew a line from letter to letter of the word you were spelling, until you end up with a sigil, a squiggly line that represents the word. I chose the word “protection.” I used this Rose Cross diagram to draw this squiggly line in the center of the circle I’d drawn using the coffee cup. And then, just because I still had some time before they got to me, and I wanted to use it to put as much energy into creating the talisman as possible, I began writing “protect me from all guards” around the edge of the circle in a coded magickal alphabet.

I chose to charge the talisman with the energy of the element of fire. I hadn’t started my nonstop daily angel invocations yet—they still smacked too much of Christianity to me, and I had too many childhood memories of fundamentalists. At that time, I worked almost exclusively with elemental energy. There was nothing religious to my mind about earth, air, fire, and water.

I focused my attention on the energy center in the center of my chest, doing the charging practices you have been reading about. Once I felt like the energy and my concentration had peaked, I released all of the chi to flow from the heart center down my arms, out of my hands, and into the talisman. As the light saturated the talisman, I saw it in my mind as being filled with intense red light, since red is the color of fire. I had time to go through this process twice more before the guards got to my cell, and I tried to put as much energy as possible into it. You could actually do this hundreds of times, creating an incredibly powerful artifact, if you had the time and inclination to do so.

When I finished, I closed the talisman up inside the book I’d been using and left it lying on the concrete slab that served as a bed. When the guards came into my cell, there were five of them—a sergeant and four underlings. The underlings all waited for a cue from the sergeant to see how much damage he wanted them to do. The sergeant sat down on my bunk and began looking through a copy of GQ magazine someone had sent me. “I saw y’all on the news again the other day,” he said to me. “Folks are saying y’all are going to get out soon. That true?”

I honestly didn’t know which answer he wanted to hear, yes or no. “From your mouth to God’s ear,” was what I finally said to him.

“I hope you sue these motherfuckers for millions,” he said. Then he stood up and nodded for the underlings to get out. They all left without touching a single thing.

After that, I used sigils and talismans a lot. Eventually I’d end up having them tattooed over large parts of my body, so that I could wear them as a permanent shield.