Damien Echols - High Magick: A Guide to the Spiritual Practices That Saved My Life on Death Row

For Eddie Vedder

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T here are few things in this world that would exist without the work, effort, and contribution of many people, and this book is no exception.

First and foremost, Id like to thank my wife, Lorri. There would have been no way for me to finish this work without you being the foundation and support that holds me up. Id also like to thank the Sounds True family for opening up to me and taking me in. You guys have fulfilled a lifelong dream for me and relit the fire inside me. Thank you, Tami Simon, for having faith in me. Thank you to Kriste Peoples for making a scary process significantly less so, and for serving as the midwife who coaxed this work out of me and into the light of day. Thank you to Robert Lee, my editor, for having patience with my scatterbrained writing method and for making my ranting more coherent and giving order to my chaos.

Thank you to Michele Anthony, my sister and family. Not sure Id still be around without your love and support. You will always smell like Christmas to me.

Thank you to Johnny Depp for walking with me when I decided I needed to go back to Arkansas to ask them to stop the executions of potentially innocent men by the state. The demons didnt loom quite so threateningly with you by my side.

Thank you to Eddie Vedder for the continued love you have surrounded me with both in prison and out. You are the best family that I could have hoped for in this world.

Lastly, by no means did I invent magick. I walk in the footsteps of some of the greatest magicians in history: Israel Regardie, Aleister Crowley, John Michael Greer, Donald Michael Kraig, Dorothy Morrison, Silver Ravenwolf, and Stephen Mace. You filled my mind with vision, my heart with hope, and my soul with the thrill of knowing what is possible. Thank you.

FOREWORD

W e connected by books.

Beyond the case of the West Memphis Three. Beyond the predicament.

Damien would give his wife Lorri a selection of books he had read and pass them on to me. I have many a volume with the name Damien Echols written on the inside of the spine. I always marveled at the wide range of subject matter and how a person on death row was able to provide me with so many novels I had never heard of before. Not only did I know Damien as an innocent man, but an educated one, as well.

On the rare occasion we could set up a phone call, it would start with how he was doing. We would discuss the case a bit, hopefully with some progress to report. Talk music, maybe. But then back to books always books. It was always infinitely frustrating when a robotic, programmed voice would uncaringly interrupt our call to say, You have thirty seconds. It is virtually impossible to wrap up a deep conversation or thought in that limited amount of time. Yet another forced inconvenience that felt like torture.

When Damien was finally released in the summer of 2011, he bestowed upon me his well-worn prison ID badge. It had a wryly-placed sticker of Jack Skellingtons head positioned on top of Damiens face. He also presented me with a small paperback book, Llewellyns Astrological Pocket Planner a moon-phase journal of sorts. The once-empty boxes of dates and days were now filled to the borders with handwritten hieroglyphics a record of his daily prison life in the form of complex symbols and notes.

Damien explained his system to me. The markings were there to document the number of times he had completed his self-prescribed rituals meditations and energy work he used to protect himself against the negative energy of the people and place he was in. He was relentless. Knowing what a fragile state he was in the majority of the time, it is clear that these disciplines and practices played a key role in Damien being able to save his own life. It was survival. And the way this man took on that task required a mental toughness beyond what most of us can fathom.

He read. He studied. He ran in place for miles until his feet bled through his socks. Then he meditated. And read some more. All the while documenting.

The book you are now holding is a product of his journey and the rituals he used to persevere. Channeling pain, injustice, and incomprehensible brutality into a work filled with power and positivity is a gift he has made for us all.

Im looking back at this journal and seeing each daily entry dense with code and mysterious, mystical information. Im looking at his last entry from August 18th the last day of over 18 years in an 8 10 cell. And I look at the empty unwritten fields of rectangles representing his future days of freedom. And though they are blank, I realize that he didnt stop his defined rituals. Just that his real writing has now begun.

Eddie Vedder

Seattle, WA, 2018

PREFACE

My Story

F or those of you who dont know me or who have never heard my story, I want to start with a little background information about me and my journey. Although this is a book of practices meant to help you in whatever way you see fit, its also a travelogue of sorts, which means its full of details and detours that feel important to offer you on your own journey with magick. If you want a more thorough personal story, please read Life After Death and Yours for Eternity its all in there. Anyway, for now, heres a summary to help you get to know me a little better before we dive into learning and practicing magick:

I grew up extremely poor. On a regular basis, my family couldnt afford food, new clothes, electricity, running water, heat you name it. In the winter we froze and in the summer we burned. I was rarely clean and often hungry. On the one hand, you could say that my upbringing prepared me for the trials to come, but its no way for a kid to grow up, as too many children around the world well know. My parents just kids themselves didnt seem to have any goals other than to make it through another day. They didnt push me to better myself or do well in school, and I eventually dropped out just as they had. Even before that, I knew there had to be more to life something higher and more meaningful but I wasnt sure what it was.

The only thing to read around our house were those cheap tabloids you see in line at the grocery store: the ones with headlines like Half-Goat, Half-Boy Haunts the Banks of the Mississippi. I felt dirty and degraded just looking at them. If youve ever picked one up, you know they have all these crazy ads at the back, and it was there that I came across an ad for a book on magick. Not just any book, but one that promised all the secrets of magick that had ever been recorded. I cant describe the impact that had on me as a kid. To find out that magick wasnt just something from a bygone age, that it wasnt an arcane art lost in the sands of time, filled me with an unusual sense of hope and excitement. Magick was out there in the world, and I could learn and practice it! That realization was like a bomb going off inside me. From that moment on, I pursued magick as if my life depended on it (and, in fact, later it did).

I never got that book, no matter how much I begged. When youre struggling to survive, you dont have money to waste on things like books. Fortunately, libraries are free, and part of my way of coping with the degrading conditions of my childhood was to go to libraries and escape into the world of books. Horror novels had been my favorite genre, and I loved anything written by Stephen King. So, in the library, I began my study of magick and learned about the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an organization devoted to the study of metaphysics and all sorts of occult topics. More about them later.