I spent 1917 in a series of anonymous seaside cottages, bunking with proper socialites so that I might press their gowns and wash their teacups. The daughters of London lords taught me to summon Baphomet, and I taught them to hex each other’s tea. They had not been sent to learn such low-brow spellcraft, but the convenience of sympathetic magic wormed its way into their drawing room studies.
I think of those girls now, in their white frocks and tidy pompadours, and wonder if any survived. You must forgive their mothers and fathers for sending them to such ungodly study. In those times, young women of means had only marriage to aspire to, and the War had already devoured so many eligible bachelors. A certain kind of free-thinking parent might send a bright young woman to learn the ways of the occult, ensuring her independence and safety by way of the will and the mind only. And of those noble qualities, these girls were greatly blessed.
And a certain kind of schoolmistress might take pity on an orphan girl like me and wish to save her from the indignities of the streets and the men that congregate there. She might, from good intent and kindness, give the child a too-large maid’s uniform and a bed of straw in the lean-to, seeing nothing but the girl’s sweetness and little of the girl’s cunning, created by generations of village witchery.
To say I did not mean to create… it… would be untrue. To say I did not intend its effects would be more accurate. If a young lady spoke snidely to me, I would turn a quick hex as my great-aunt had taught me. Then fearfully thinking of my parish priest and his dire warnings, I would throw the ugly, ephemeral thing in the corner of our bunkhouse where its bright red light would dwindle as I watched.
But the hexes did not die as I believed. Rather, these dying embers of vengeance and spite congregated and grew under the floorboards. If I had attended the lectures with the students, perhaps I would have guarded against this. Instead, I scrubbed their garments outside the open windows of their classrooms, catching half-phrases and incomplete diatribes.
What did the hexenbeast do, I wonder, all those years? As I grew into a bewitching woman with ever-increasing power and none of the constraints of nobility, what was it doing? Did it travel to far-off lands to feed off the mad and the shell-shocked? Did it don rolled stockings and long beads and dance the Charleston, driving starlets to suicide and automobile accidents? Did it stalk the refugees of the Dust Bowl, blowing the Black Blizzards into the minds of poor farmers’ wives?
Did it dare enter Germany during its dark years? France? Spain?
I cannot bring myself to think of it. I know its excesses fed me, though I did not understand at the time and thought my allure and financial power to be wholly self-made. And in a way, I was correct, for I made that hexenbeast, that tulpa.
Away for so many decades, the tulpa has now returned to its creator. It lurks behind the grandfather clock, ostensibly doing little but ‘breathing” in my earshot. It does this deliberately and unnecessarily, as it has no organs or breathing apparatus. It waits for a command but I’ve grown so old–so very old–that I don’t recall what I must tell it, my indecision dooming it to an eternity of bated breath. It is a pitiable creature, but there is nothing to be done, save to ignore it.
Over the past several months, those young ladies at the summer cottages troubled me. I had a mind to use the power of this “Information Age” to look them up, old as I am. I stopped after the fifth girl I could recall. None had survived past age forty. One of particular beauty and cruelty had died in a madhouse as it caught fire. If others are still alive, I do not want to know of them.
The surf crashes below my house, the sky a permanent gray. I have learned, of course, that there is no God, only spirits more good than evil. They will not speak to me now, not with that creature constantly near. Therefore, I have no one to confess to, and no one to absolve me. I have thought of suicide, but my tulpa’s presence feeds my vitality and I start to wonder if perhaps I cannot die and if this is the eternal state of my existence.
And if that is true, without direction, we will remain together in this fearful stasis forever.
I must give it a task. Cautiously, I offer innocuous but challenging activities. Its breathing does not change. It does not respond until out of desperation I shout, “Make a proud and lovely girl hang herself! There! Is that what you want, you loathsome thing? To feed on the vibrant and healthy?”
Yes, my mistress, it hisses. Thank you, my mistress.
***
Music influence: Oingo Boingo’s “Insanity.” While I think the radio edit totally mangled the song (a black magic song if I ever heard one), the creepy video successfully depicts the festering underbelly* of religion, politics, and social norms. Stop-motion video just lends itself to creepiness. It’s hard to know how to classify this song. Oingo Boingo‘s often known as a New Wave band, but this is practically gothic.
Photo Credit: “The Vampire” is by Philip Burne-Jones, 1897
