The Demon
Who Saved My Life
Their faces and their shapes are terrible and strange.
These devils by my might to angels I will change.
These nameless horrors I address without affright:
On them will I impose my will, the law of light.
Eliphas Levi54
In the 1940s and 1950s, the demon polio was sweeping over the planet, killing and paralyzing over a half million people each year in a nightmarish epidemic that threatened to dwarf the horrors of any world war. Many of its victims were children, and by 1951, when I was three years old, the disease had already claimed the lives of neighborhood boys and girls on all sides of our modest home in Lakewood, California. I can only imagine the terror that seized my parents’ hearts when, only a few months after I took my first steps, I complained of pain in my legs and found it difficult to walk.
To everyone’s relief, I didn’t have polio. But I was diagnosed with a serious bone disease called Perthes hip55 and was immediately immobilized and forbidden to walk or exercise below the waist. In an attempt to chemically mellow me out while lying on my back for the next few years, I was prescribed what were generically called “thyroid pills.” The pills must have worked, because I learned to absolutely wallow in the delights of quiet contemplation and physical inactivity. Unfortunately, the medication did nothing to curb my appetite (or the insecurities of youth) and I quickly fell into what would become a lifelong struggle with my weight.
By the time I was five, I was walking with crutches, and a year or so after that, I was allowed to walk on my own, but no running or jumping was allowed. At the age of fourteen, and after countless x-rays (that are probably responsible for the growth of my superfluous third nipple and the seventh toe on my left foot56), I was pronounced “cured” of Perthes disease, but with an ominous caveat from my doctor, who wrinkled his brow and told my mother I’d better secure a sedentary desk job by the time I was thirty or I’d be crippled for the rest of my life.
A “sedentary” lifestyle sounded great to me. I loved not moving around, and by my late teens, my body’s metabolism was happy just to kick back, relax, and convert my food’s energy almost directly into fat. Things didn’t get really bad, however, until the mid-1980s, when a painful and permanent back injury, a string of comfy desk jobs, my new writing career, and a crippling injury that severed my Achilles tendon encouraged me to surrender completely to the great-tasting demon obesity.
I invoked this gargantuan demon with the following ritual. Each weekday I got up at 3:00 am and wrote until I left for work at 7:30 am. I drank way too much coffee at work. Then I ate too much lunch to ease the coffee jitters. After work I religiously stopped at my neighborhood liquor store and bought two canned martinis, which I knocked back as I drove blissfully around the beautiful Newport Back Bay. Then, after watching a breathtaking sunset over Catalina Island, I arrived home for a great dinner (of which I ate far too much), then fell blissfully asleep on a full stomach.
I knew this cycle of behavior was killing me, but it was the structured rhythm that drove one of the most remarkably productive and creative periods of my entire life. While it lasted, it was damn near heaven. Heaven, however, came at a heavy price. I blew up to 310 pounds and the elephant in the room that nobody was talking about … was me.
That’s not quite true. I would discover that there was someone talking about the elephant in the room—a demon. Actually, the demon was (is) a real person, a mean-spirited and well-read magical blogger who actually had the brash audacity to publish his57 openly hostile opinions about Lon Milo DuQuette.
Naturally, I would like everybody in the world to love me, but I know that’s not going to happen. People who are passionate about magick have very strong opinions about what it all means. Magick is an art, and artists are often odd, eccentric, and antisocial people. I’m used to fielding questions, suggestions, and criticisms from some pretty odd individuals, some of whom have been living far too long in their mother’s basement. However, most people who feel impelled to bring my name into the discussion, even when they disagree with me, are generally gracious and polite.
This guy was a real jerk!
What really hurt, though, was that every hurtful word he wrote about me in his hateful blogs had some measure of truth in it. He was actually seeing me as accurately as he could from where he was standing. Irritating as he was, I developed a perverse liking and respect for the guy.
Somehow he got my private e-mail address and wrote to me directly. It was obvious he wanted to pick a magical fight that he could later blog about. The letter was a thinly disguised probe for a quote—asking me one of those impossible-to-answer pharisee-esque trick questions of philosophy. Not wishing to take the bait and enmesh myself in some emotionally charged argument over the finer points of Qabalah or the objective reality of Satan, I replied as politely and truthfully as I could. I’m sure my response frustrated him to no end, for it gave him no opening to continue an argument.
Then, after a few months of no communication, he dropped all pretense of civility and wrote me a very rude and insulting message. Like a schoolyard bully who has run out of witty excuses to pick a fight with the class nerd, he resorted simply to ridiculing my physical appearance.
He quoted my own words, The only thing I can change with magick is myself, and suggested that if I really believed that, why didn’t I use my magick to evoke the spirits of diet and exercise to change myself from the grotesque, fat, and bloated monster I had allowed myself to grow into?
Now, I’m a pretty thick-skinned guy, but you can probably imagine how much those words hurt and upset me. I found myself hating this fellow with a passion that I’m sure eclipsed his hatred for me a thousand-fold. But then something very odd happened that immediately caused me to stop hating him. I even stopped being mad and irritated by him. I realized that despite the fact that this individual was a pathetic and hate-poisoned bully, he was absolutely right! He wasn’t a lying spirit. He was the angel of truth—the omniscient voice of God.
Constance had for years urged me to heed her informed advice concerning diet and exercise, but did I listen to my angel? No! It took the hateful and unkind words of this asshole—this demon—to finally get the message through this thick skull of mine and snap me out of my suicidal nightmare. I finally admitted to myself that if my sedentary lifestyle and poor eating habits continued, I would soon face the deadly consequences of diabetes, heart disease, and death. The demon blogger opened my eyes to the truth that I could change it all with one profoundly simple magical act.
I only needed do one thing: obey Constance!
She immediately put me on a nutritional supplement program and removed from my diet alcohol, sugar (and things that turn to sugar in the body), most breads, and dairy products. I replaced fried foods and junk with whole grains and ten to twelve servings of fruits and vegetables a day. Almost immediately I started feeling better, sleeping better, and thinking better.
Then I started to walk. At first I could walk only a few yards down the street before the crippling pain in my back sent me howling back into the house. Each day I walked a few steps farther down the street. Then I walked twice a day, each time a little farther. The first day I walked completely around the block, I celebrated with a big glass of Green Magma.
Day after day I walked farther away from home and the pain in my back became more tolerable. Each day I watched my shadow on the sidewalk grow thinner and thinner. After six months on the Saint Constance Health and Beauty Program, I went to the doctor for a long overdue examination and blood work. All my numbers were better than normal—blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol, everything.
My daily routine now includes walking five miles a day (half in the morning, half in the afternoon or evening), a heroic vitamin and nutritional supplement program (which includes mushroom supplements that have corrected my metabolism), and eating whatever Saint Constance prepares for me. I lost 150 pounds and have maintained my weight at 160 pounds for the last three years.
Did I lose 150 pounds with magick?
You’re damn right I did it with magick! And I did it with the divine assistance of an angel who loves me and a perfectly unpleasant demon who hates my guts (only now, it seems he has less to hate). I honor them both and thank them from the bottom of my heart.
54. “The Magician,” translated from Eliphas Levi’s version of the famous hymn. Published in The Equinox, vol. 1, no. 1 (1909, Reprint: York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1992), p. 109.
55. The American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons describes Perthes as “a condition in children characterized by a temporary loss of blood supply to the hip. Without an adequate blood supply, the rounded head of the femur (the ‘ball’ of the ‘ball and socket’ joint of the hip) dies. The area becomes intensely inflamed and irritated. Treatment of Perthes may require periods of immobilization or limitations on usual activities. The long-term prognosis is good in most cases. After 18 months to 2 years of treatment, most children return to normal activities without major limitations.”
56. Just kidding.
57. I have assumed this person was/is a man. At least the various pseudonyms under which this person posts on the Internet suggest it is a man.