In the dream, I was sitting at a table in a place that was a cafe but also a health food and holistic medicine shop. I was sitting across from a friend, reading their tarot cards. I wasn’t speaking loudly, but it was quiet in the cafe, so other people overheard. A woman, who had her two daughters with her--one age 11 or 12, the other around 15 or 16--and had been purchasing something at the counter came storming over to our table. She started yelling at me about how she was a good Christian and she thought it was just terrible that I could practice Black Magic in public, especially because I was exposing her poor, innocent Christian daughters to these heathen ideas. One glance at her daughters showed me that the older one had probably already been exposed to “heathen ideas,” she looked sort of goth/punk, and was looking at my tarot deck with a glint in her eye--she probably had a tarot deck and a book about Wicca or something that she’d bought with babysitting money and hid under her bed. I tried to explain to the angry woman that I wasn’t practicing magic at all, that the tarot was just a tool and that anyone of any faith could use them. She didn’t listen, of course, and screamed that tarot and other forms of divination were tools of Satan. I said that I was a witch and didn’t believe in Satan, and that Satan was really just a perversion of old gods like Pan. Of course that really freaked her out and she got even angrier about me practicing witchcraft in public and “exposing her daughters” to it. I stopped her and said that religious and spiritual freedom is for everyone, not just Christians, and that part of the nature of being out in the world is being exposed to people and ideas different from yourself. I asked if she would be as upset if I were practicing Buddhism in public, or Judaism, or Islam, and exposing her daughters to those faiths. She said that she certainly wouldn’t want her daughters converting to another faith, but that at least Judaism and Islam were “real religions.” (Ah, so she only thought Abrahamic religions were valid!) Our “debate” went on for some time, but nothing I said calmed her down in any way, and I got really tired of her screaming at me and telling me I was a Devil-worshipper with a hellbound soul, so I put a hex on her. Here’s the thing...I didn’t even actually hex her. I just said something dark and cryptic-sounding (but ultimately meaningless) and did it in the most over-the-top Witch way possible (think, the witches in Macbeth), because I knew it would scare her. It worked. She was absolutely terrified, grabbed her daughters by their arms and said “We’re leaving now!” and started stomping off in an angry-scared huff.
And as she passed by my seat, the older daughter slipped me a scrap of paper that had her email address on it and said: “Finally, someone who understands me! I would love if you could teach me about tarot and witchcraft.”
