Lon Milo DuQuette - My Life With The Spirits: The Adventures of a Modern Magician

My Life

With the Spirits

A MAGICAL AUTOBIOGRAHY

Lon Milo DuQuette

First published in 1999 by
Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC
York Beach, ME
With offices at:
368 Congress Street
Boston, MA 02210
www.redwheelweiser.com

Copyright 1999 Lon Milo DuQuette

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red WheeVWeiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
DuQuette, Lon Milo.

My life with the spirits : a magical autobiography /
Lon Milo DuQuette.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-57863-120-3 (pbk: alk. paper)

1. DuQuette, Lon Milo. 2. MagiciansUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
BF1598.D86A3 1999
133.4'092dc21
[B] 99-20559

CIP

Typeset in 11/13 Minion
Cover design by Jody Dark Eagle Breedlove copyright 1999

Printed in Canada

09 08 07 06 05
9 8 7 6 5 4 3

To my son, Jean-Paul Lafayette DuQuette.

Author's note: I have changed the names of many of the individuals who appear in My Life with the Spirits in order to respect and maintain their privacy. I have not, however, attempted to invent or consolidate characters for the sake of literary convenience.

Contents

24 The Curse of Belial
(Never Share a Fiend with a Friend)

List of Illustrations

Prologue: Sons of the Desert

It was thirty-one years ago this morning, February 26, 1967. I was 18 years old and my brother Marc was 24. We sat atop one of the monstrous boulders that are heaped like petrified dinosaur droppings across California's Mojave desert and watched the moon bury itself in the western sands. 180 degrees away, the eastern horizon split in a lewd and blood red invocation of the sun. Shortly before this celestial orgy we shared a mystic feast of far too much LSD and vowed in deadly earnest that we would not return from the wilderness until we were holy men. Daybreak found us shish kebabed to deathskewered through by the sun and moon's perfect oppositionfat on our backs emitting short grunts and giggles.

It would be an understatement to say we were naive, but we were not entirely green behind the psychedelic ears. Between the two of us we had at least two dozen carefully programmed trips under our belts. In our pitiful way we were serious seekers. We followed the set-setting-guide procedures outlined by Drs. Leary and Albert, and crammed the days and weeks between our sessions with healthy doses of Eastern Mysticism and spiritual practices.

Nothing, however, could have prepared us for judgment day at Joshua Tree. By mid-afternoon we had blithely paddled our souls up the river of our genetic ancestry, stood at the very hub of eternity, and stared with wagging jaws down the orbiting spokes of all possible possibilities. It was the most deafening of unspoken truthswe would never leave the desert. Wherever we would go, whatever we would do from that point forward would take place in the desert. Our frenzied hike back to my old VW bus was a stumbling ordeal of Odyssean scale, complete with horrifying labyrinths of dry washes and box-canyons, a blinding sandstorm and the sadistic laughter of the spirits of our own tormented childhoods.

The two-hour drive back to Costa Mesa was uneventful except for occasional highway encounters with desert skeletons returning home from church in their pickup trucks. Once home we immediately sought dark refuge in the smoky coolness of the Buccaneer, the only bar in town that would occasionally ignore the fact that I was a minor and serve me beer. That evening no one dared question my age. I looked a million years old.

The beers didn't help. We were still very high. The zebra-striped walls of the little saloon dripped down to the floor like melting wax, and the pores of the bartender's nose were so big I could walk inside them.

Then, from nowhere, I received a revelationnot a cosmic vision about DNA or the nature of light and time, but a surprisingly normal idea. It became very dear to me that I must marry Constance, my Nebraska high school sweetheart. That's all there was to it. I converted a few dollar bills into coins (an act of tortuous complexity that seemed to require many days) and shuffled to the old black pay phone near the pinball machine. I dosed one eye and plugged the emptiness of Zero with my blue-green fingertip and spun the clicking wheel of fortune. I pleaded with the operator to help me place the call to Nebraska.

Constance answered.

After a few moments of attempting to communicate with my hands, I managed to identify myself. She sounded very happy to hear from me-after all, it was her birthday. I couldn't believe the cosmic coincidence, but concealed the fact that I didn't have a clue it was her birthday. Then I came out and said it.

Would you like to get married? (It was the smartest thing I would ever do.)

After a short pause she said, Yes. (It was the stupidest thing she had ever done.)

We've been married for thirty years.

And what about the Sons of the Desert? Did we really become holy men?

After a violent decade of political radicalism, arrests, alcohol and drug abuse, and two wives, Brother Marc transformed into the very model of an Eastern ascetic. A Sant Mat devotee, a Satsangi of the Radha Soami order, he practices the strict disciplines of that august secta combination of Hindu yoga and Seik mysticism. He wears a huge untrimmed beard and travels each year to the Punjab region of Northern India to labor and meditate at his Master's ashram. Back at home he is a chemical dependence counselor whose clients worship at the altar of his wit and wisdom. He is happily married to a beautiful and saintly womanone of the most gifted psychics in the worldalso a Satsangi.

Yes, I'd say Marc is a holy man, and I am very respectful of the spiritual direction his life has taken. I have no doubts that it is his way. It certainly rescued him from an early grave and his conversion has made Southern California a less dangerous place to live.

My life, on the other hand, took a dramatically different turnso different in fact, that many people, perhaps even my brother, believe my chosen path to be patently evil.

It is true. I have scorned and rejected the faith of my fathers. I invoke and worship strange and terrible gods. I summon devils and hold congress with angels, spirits, and demons; but does it naturally follow that these pursuits are spiritual transgressions that bar me from the fellowship of holy ones? In this little book I search for an answer to that question.

I hope the reader will appreciate the fact that I have departed from the textbook format of some of my earlier works on magick and have nestled a great deal of technical information within narratives of my experiences. The first chapters are filled with much autobiographical material. Please forgive me if such memoirs seem at first irrelevant to the subject of magick. I assure you they are not. I firmly believe that in order for us both to understand what I do it will first be necessary to understand who I am and where I came from.

Magick is an artas much an art as painting or music or dance. To understand and appreciate the artist's portfolio it is helpful, perhaps even essential, to know something of the character and motivations that drive him or her to produce a body of work. I am a practitioner of the black art (or so it has been called for the last two thousand years). I am a spiritual craftsman. I fashion my creations from thought and dream and will. No easel can suffer the subtle burden of such elements. They must be splashed against the canvas of my own soul. It is no more possible to gaze directly upon these objects d'art than it is to look upon the essence of my being. The most that can be done is to study the shadows they cast upon my memory.