Columns | Rites of Passage

I Spent Years Searching for Magic—I Found God Instead

I wanted to outrun the Nothing. And there was nothing I would not have sacrificed—friendships, relationships, the blood from the heel of my foot—to get it.

This is Rites of Passage, a monthly column by Tara Isabella Burton on faith, magic, and searching for meaning in mystical narratives.

I almost sold my soul, once, although I did not fully realize it at the time. I was twenty-five, and living outside Trieste, a mournful old Habsburg port city on the border between Italy and Slovenia. My life was falling apart, for reasons that were ostensibly romantic but in all honesty more spiritual. Brexit had just happened. Trump was about to. It felt like a good time to blow things up.

I thought I had reasons, although they weren’t very good ones. I was unhappy. That was most of it. I was unhappy because instead of going to study mime in Paris, I had accepted funding to stay in grad school—which was both my own fault and entirely the correct decision. And I was unhappy because I felt entitled to the kind of grand-romantic-narratives of misadventures and fatal passions, which I was also too afraid to pursue, most of the time, and too tongue-tied to fight for, when I did. I was unhappy because I was twenty-five and had never once had the courage to dye my hair, or even cut it because my mother had told me it probably wouldn’t look nice if I did.

I was unhappy because I was a coward, and I knew it. I wanted the kind of life that upended me. And I was too afraid to do anything that would upend. I spent most of my twenties on a precipice, feeling sorry for myself: incapable of stepping backwards, incapable of falling.

I’d come to Trieste, for the first time, when I was sixteen, with my first-ever boyfriend—back when I thought that my life would be like a novel, because I thought all adults’ lives were like that. And I’d kept coming back, for a decade thereafter, whenever I needed my life to be more like myth and less like life. I wanted magic. The kind of magic that transforms. Frogs into princes. Women into trees. Loneliness into poetry.

Trieste was a liminal, crossroads place. It was not beautiful, exactly, but full of Habsburg nostalgists and strange but friendly middle-aged occultists, who would draw Hermetic sigils on the back of notepaper for me, and explain that I had been preternaturally chosen to bring Trieste to public prominence because I was the great-granddaughter of the travel writer Sir Richard Francis Burton, who once lived there. (I am in no way related to Sir Richard Francis Burton, but this he refused to believe.)

Trieste is the sort of place you go if you want to transmogrify your life. Most of the bad decisions I’ve made, I’ve made in Trieste.

A friend came to visit me there, right in the middle of my breakdown. She was in a comparable place, emotionally, as I recall, although it is likely that I, in my solipsism, collapsed any distinctions between us. I can’t speak for her. What I remember is this: We sat right on the Adriatic, where the piazza drops straight into the sea. We watched the sunset. We talked about what being unafraid of passion might look like. We decided. We would become maenads.

I believed in forces that had no names. I bargained with them and expected to win.

The original maenads were the followers of Dionysius: god of wine, but also of mysteries, but also of torn animal pelts, of blood, of madness, of a certain kind of chosen fatality. Maenads means “the raving ones,” and because they are mad, and wine-drenched, and followers of a dark god, it also means they are unafraid of anything.

That is what we meant when we said maenad. Women who tore into life. Women whose blood flowed. Women who did not stop themselves from raving.

So we consecrated ourselves to maenad-hood. We went out of the borgo teresiana—the quarter designed by the Empress Maria-Theresa, back in the Habsburg days—to the local New Age shop on one of the city’s few modern-feeling streets, and bought candles and incense and an art nouveau Tarot card desk inspired by the work of Alphonse Mucha. We took a bus thirty minutes north to Duino, where the poet Rainer Maria Rilke had composed his Duino Elegies, walking along the limestone Carso cliffs, as a guest of the local Princess.

We made preparations for the consecration. I cut my hair. I dyed it a slightly more strawberry color that was a vague shade closer to the red I actually wanted—or at least, I thought I dyed it. My friend hardly noticed a change. We got a copy of Rilke’s Duino Elegies. We got dressed up. I wore a pink tulle evening dress, and then we hiked down from below the castle ramparts to a secret beach that everyone in town called the “Princess’s Beach,” which involved rambling through brambles and thorns and down an unpaved mountain path and then jumping into the Adriatic and swimming across a very small bay. We put our supplies in a bag and we swam with it aloft, and then, at last, when we reached the beach at sundown, we lit our candles and we read our poetry and we laid out our Tarot cards and we declared that we would be, that we were, maenads at last.

It got cold and it got dark and it turns out it is much easier to jump down a mountain cliff into the Adriatic in the late afternoon than it is to scramble, barefoot, back-up, by moonlight. The rocks of the cliffside cut up our feet. We called it blood sacrifice. I tore my dress on the thorns, climbing upwards, and stained it with blackberry juice that looked like blood also, and by the time we made it back to the main road we had missed our bus and so we remained, soaked and bedraggled, for a half-hour outside the shuttered Mickey Mouse Café, doing more Tarot readings.

It turns out you’re not supposed to get your hair wet right after you dye it. The next morning, I was once again completely blonde.

Nevertheless, I was a maenad. I had consecrated myself to the exhilaration of free-fall. I had made some Bad Decisions. I had made them sound like myth. I would make more. I lived for decisions that made my life feel like myths. I lived for moments that felt like bloodshed on a rock.

*

I am not saying that magic is real. Who knows if magic is real? I am saying, only, that for most of my life I had two options: a world that was enchanted, and one that was not, and the one that was enchanted was the only one I could bear to live in. I was—as it happens—in graduate school for theology, and would have called myself some kind of anodyne Episcopalian, but at my core I was thoroughly pagan. I believed in forces that had no names. I bargained with them and expected to win.

I wanted magic. I didn’t think too much about meaning. Or at least, as long as everything meant something, the specifics didn’t seem to matter. Basil could mean love. Thursdays could mean power. The full moon purity. Why not?

The alternative was that nothing meant anything at all.

I wanted to make a sachet of various herbs and contain my heartbreak within it. I wanted a world that would turn with my whispers.

I often cast miniature spells, made bargains with myself. If I only do this, then this will happen. From time to time, I cast explicit ones.

I had been—like everyone else—a teenage Wiccan, but how much magic I practiced, over the years, varied with my stance on nothingness. There were years that I read Tarot obsessively, and years where I didn’t ask the cards any questions at all. There were years that I set up altars in my dorm rooms and years where I never bothered, years where I felt nothing, years where the world seemed too bereft of significance to bother.

You want unlimited power? Be prepared to become someone you don’t recognize. Be prepared to bet your soul.

I did not like those years.

The occult years, on the other hand? These were the years that I raged and wailed and called down innumerable forces from the heavens.

The year I became a maenad, I did a lot of things that seemed brave at the time. I took clandestine flights for men. Men took clandestine flights for me. I fell in and out and in and out of various obsessions. I went to the opera two or three times a week. The operas I saw were full of maenads. Most of the time I went to the opera, I was too drunk to stay awake for longer than the first act. I missed a lot of good opera.

I finally dyed my hair. I cut it short. I dyed it darker.

I started reading Tarot, often. At parties. For money. Mostly for myself. If I didn’t get an answer I liked, I would ask the same question, over and over, shuffling the cards and demanding to see that the Bad Ideas I had were actually Good.

I got a second deck, with Klimt on it, at a witchcraft store in the East Village, on New Year’s Eve—shortly after one crisis ended, right as another began—and I did a reading and got the Ten of Swords, which is the card you get when everything is supposed to collapse around you. Everything did.

I got what I bargained for, in the end. All the things that cast a spell on a person’s life. Passion. Heartbreak. Blood. A life that felt novelistic. I made as many bad decisions in New York as I had in Trieste. I went on many dates, and could tell stories about most of them. Someone wrote me a novel’s worth of love letters. I wrote back. I took a lot of travel-writing assignments, because going somewhere felt better than standing still. I went to Persepolis. I went back to Trieste. Someone else confessed his desire to run away with me via WhatsApp the moment I arrived in Jerusalem. I did not run away with him. I finished grad school. I drank a lot. I hurt a lot of people. It’s not a good story, actually.

I kept waiting for the Ten of Swords to come true. I hit rock bottom, and then rock bottom, and then rock bottom, and with each abasement came a combination of despair and relief—is this the Ten of Swords? Is this as low as I can go? Is this how far I can push myself?

Is that—as Peggy Lee sings—all there is?

*

In Euripides’ The Bacchae, the maenads are exciting, until they’re not. They rave—and you can almost forget, watching them, that there are real people, among the bacchae, whom raving hurts. There are people whom raving kills.

The king Pentheus spies on the maenads, as they perform their rites, and one of them turns out to be his mother Agave, only she does not recognize him, and she and her fellow maenads tear him to pieces in their raving.

I have seen many productions of The Bacchae and I have never seen one that did not make you really want to sympathize with the maenads, and with Dionysius, deep down, because Pentheus is such a dullard. I have never seen one that does not wink at the audience, and say come on, being a maenad is more exciting than being an old fuddy-duddy, than being bourgeois, than being boring.

And yet you have to wonder what Agave feels, when she wakes up, having murdered her son. You have to wonder what Pentheus feels, when his mother is murdering him.

Most productions gloss over that part.

According to every magical system there is, according to every folktale and fairy tale and ceremonial guide and grandmother, you have to give up something to get something.

You want unlimited power? You want passion? You want freedom? You want to really feel things? You want a world that is bigger and better and truer and more significant than the one you’re living in, right now? Be prepared to give up something to get it. Be prepared to become someone you don’t recognize. Be prepared to bet your soul.

The odd thing about becoming a maenad—as opposed to making a Faustian bargain, say—is that you’re not risking your soul for anything concrete. You’re not asking for riches or worldly power or for one specific person to love you. You’re risking your soul to feel something, to feel the certainty that the world is enchanted, to know that magic exists at all. 

I wanted to outrun the Nothing. There was nothing I would not have sacrificed—friendships, relationships, the blood from the heel of my foot—to get it.

I sacrificed all of myself. I emptied myself out. I hit bottom, in a thousand different ways, and got what I wanted, in a thousand more, and then, somewhere in the middle of my seeking a vague and generic sense of Poetry, I found a specific one.

One rooted not in a vague sense that magic was real and that the world could at any time be an enchanted one, but in a concrete sense that at one particular place, at one particular time, the laws of nature had been suspended.

Which is to say: I became a Christian. That is a different story, and a longer one, but suffice it to say that at some point, in my late-mid twenties or my early-late twenties or whatever you want to call it, I stopped running, and when I stopped running, I found myself sitting eyes downcast in a midtown church with stained glass windows and Gothic arches and incense and magnificent voices proclaiming the glory of whatever poetry was pointing toward.

I found myself meeting people who were not interesting, but kind. People whose kindness made them interesting. I found myself thinking of myself not as a character in some Campbellian hero’s journey—the center of a mythic narrative about myself—but as part of a body of believers: all of us, together, part of a story that transcended us all.

The faith I found proclaimed a sanctified world, and a redeemed one—an enchanted world, if you want to call it that—but one where meanings were concrete. It offered me not just a sense of emotional intensity, but a direction in which to channel it. It contained magic not for the sake of magic, but rather miracle for the sake of goodness. God died and came back from the dead not because magic was real, but because love was stronger than an unmagical world.

Where everything pointed to this one thing, which is that at some point God was made man, and died, and came back from the dead—which is an utterly absurd thing to say if you are not Christian, and even if you are. Fridays mean that Christ died and Christ is risen and that Christ will come again. So does rose quartz. So does a full moon.

It is a story not just about Not-Nothing, but about Something. It is a story not just about the possibility of a world with meaning in it, but a story about a world where the meaning is, quite specifically, and utterly fully, love. It is a world that is predicated upon the love of a creator who has built a good world, and who—when sin afflicts it—comes into that world, in all his vulnerability, in all his mortality to save it. Love birthed the world; love redeems it; love sanctifies it. Our very humanity, our very existence, is contingent upon it.

In this new kingdom, the old rules of magic are broken, that fairytale arbitrage, because grace means that whatever debt you owe dark forces has already been paid in full. Jesus has died for your sins, and that means that the old bargains are invalid.

Magic broke me down. It made me a maenad. Faith... made me a human being, again.

Maybe you have mortgaged your soul, some summer, without meaning to, but it has been won for you already. You get it back again.

One of the many odd things about Christianity is that it trades not in grand narratives but in their subversion. Christ the king comes into Jerusalem on an ass. An ass! This unprepossessing carpenter from Nazareth (can anything good come out of Nazareth, people ask) who confuses the hell out of everyone around him is actually the promised Messiah. He has a Passion and a death and then a few days later he’s alive, because death doesn’t matter, because death has been defeated, because the way you think the story is going to end isn’t the story at all. Also, you never get to be comfortably, certain of Not-Nothing, ever again. You never get to be certain of anything. Blessed are those who have not seen and believe.

The claims magic made on me—grandiose, vague, extravagant—were incompatible with the person I was becoming, who I wanted to be. The person who learns to love not just The Story, but also the human being telling it, and the parts of the story the human being is not ready to tell, just yet.

Magic is, I know, different things to different people. I know people for whom magic, witchcraft, paganism, are integral parts of their spirituality, people for whom magic is about building something, not tearing it down.

For me, though, my maenad-hood, my relationship with magic, my vision of unencumbered passion, was as much a liminal space as my imaginary precipice, as Trieste. It was better, maybe, than the Nothing I was so terrified of. But it wasn’t going towards anything, either. I wanted a world that meant something, but I didn’t know what it meant, or what that something was, or who I wanted to be, at the other end of it, except not myself.

Magic broke me down. It made me a maenad. Faith—not a not-nothing but finally, blessedly, a Something—made me a human being, again.

There are many stories about such changes, in myths.

*

Last summer, I took my tarot cards back to Trieste, where I had bought them. I took the bus, to Duino, to the secret beach, under the castle where the Princess’s family still lives. The path is closed now—a kid broke his leg, someone told me, trying to climb down—but you can still go part of the way to the water. I took my cards halfway down the hill and then I tied them together with twine and then I threw them back into the sea where we had first consecrated them.

I kept only one. Not to use for divination, but as a reminder of who I had been, and what I had done.

I kept the first card in the Major Arcana: the Fool. The innocent with the white rose, at the beginning of his journey. The one who does not know anything, yet, and yet steps out anyway, onto a pathway he has not charted, and which he does not see.