We headed to a taco place around the corner. Damien walked quickly, something slightly edgy in his energy. Lorri was such an easy person to be with that Damien’s intensity startled me at first. At dinner he explained that his life since his release has largely been devoted to magick. As a kid in Arkansas, he’d daydreamed of becoming a great magician, and being in prison had given him plenty of time to study. His practice derives from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the nineteenth-century mystery cult that counted W. B. Yeats and Bram Stoker as members. Every day, Damien spends several hours performing protective rituals, doing energy work, and invoking the names of angels. He told me that the most adept magicians can transcend time, space, and the rules of physics—not in a metaphorical way, or a karmic-progression-toward-enlightenment-over-many-lifetimes way, but literally: they can travel back to the eleventh century, find a pilgrim dying of thirst in the desert, and become an oasis for him.
All this lofty energy worried me; I could imagine being swamped by it, feeling as though there was no space for me and my small human concerns. Damien knew he wasn’t a simple person to live with. The adaptive strategies he’d developed in prison—his incredible capacity to re-create the universe in his head; his complete immersion in the present moment—made it challenging to negotiate the outside world. He couldn’t remember what he’d done even just the day before—where he’d eaten, what he and Lorri had talked about. More and more, his mind was elsewhere, operating on some other plane.
Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession
Rachel Monroe