Tami Simon: This program is brought to you by SoundsTrue.com. At SoundsTrue.com, you can find hundreds of downloadable audio learning programs plus books, music, videos, and online courses and events. At soundstrue.com, we think about of ourselves as a trusted partner on the spiritual journey offering diverse, in-depth, and life-changing wisdom. Soundstrue.com. Many voices, one journey. You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Damien Echols, wrongly convicted of the murder of three boys in West Memphis, Arkansas.
Damien Echols was sentenced to prison where he spent more than 18 years on death row before DNA evidence led to his release in 2011. Damien’s imprisonment and unfair treatment by the justice system caught the attention of several celebrities, such as Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, Patty Smith, the Dixie Chicks, and film producer Peter Jackson, who campaigned for Echols’ release and full pardon. Several films have documented the story including Jackson’s highly acclaimed West of Memphis. During his incarceration, rather than giving in to anger or bitterness, Damien saw his time in prison as an opportunity to deepen his practice of hermetic magick.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Damien and I spoke about how he maintained the integrity of his soul in prison including suffering brutal beatings at the hands of the prison guards and spending more than 10 years in solitary confinement. We also talked about his recent coming out, if you will, as a magician and what it means to him to follow in a contemporary way the Western Hermetic path of magic. Damien led us in a guided practice of magick that he calls the Middle Pillar.
And we discussed magick and manifestation and how Damien practiced magick up to eight hours a day while he was in prison and how he learned through trial and error the techniques he teaches today. Here’s my conversation with a very unusual and gifted teacher, Damien Echols.
Damien, I first heard about you through our mutual friend, Seane Corn, who has created with Sounds True an instructional DVD series called The Yoga of Awakening. She said to me, “Tami, you really need to bring Damien Echols onto Insights at the Edge.” Here we are. To begin, welcome, and thank you for making the time for this conversation.
DE: Thank you for having me.
TS: Now, if some of our listeners are like me, they might not be familiar with you and the story of how you were wrongly imprisoned for almost two decades and then finally released. I wonder here at the beginning—and I imagine this might be a hard thing to do—but if you could just give our listeners a brief introduction to how you were wrongly imprisoned for close to two decades and then released.
DE: A brief introduction would be that this took place in 1993. I was 18 years old. Me and two other teenagers were arrested and convicted of three counts of murder in a small town called West Memphis in Arkansas. Three eight-year-old boys were murdered. The police alleged that it was part of satanic cult activity. It was an extreme right wing fundamentalist town way out in the middle of nowhere. We did not fit in at all, especially me, listening to things like heavy metal music and my love of ceremonial magick and all these things that just didn’t fly well in a small conservative town during what we now call the satanic panic, which is when you had cases all over the country where people were being accused of doing all sorts of things that we now know is absolutely ludicrous and insane. It was alleged that there was a huge underground satanic cult that pretty much went from coast to coast.
I got swept up into that and ended up spending 18 years and 76 days on death row.
Back in ’93 they could not do the same kind of DNA testing that they can do now. It’s progressed a great deal through the years. They finally did DNA testing on my case and found that the DNA at the crime scene did not match me or the other two people that they had convicted of the crime. I was released in 2011, so I’ve been out a little over five years now.
TS: The main thrust, if you will, of what I want to talk to you about is how you were able to stay even somewhat sane. How you were able to maintain the health of your soul, if you will, through such an ordeal.
DE: I think really what it all comes down to, I’ve loved Western Hermeticism, what we call magick spelled with a K, M-A-G-I-C-K, ever since I was a child. I grew up in a very poverty-stricken—right next door to illiterate—family. I don’t believe people in my family read much of anything other than tabloids. When I was a kid growing up we always had tabloids in the house. I don’t mean like the things that get into celebrities’ business. I mean the things like “bat boy found in cave” and “half alligator, half man thing found by the Mississippi River”. My grandmother used to have those in the house all the time.
I can remember picking up one of those, not too long after I first learned how to read, and seeing an ad in the back of one of these things that said something like,
“Want to change your life? Learn magick. Send $9.95 and we’ll send you this book.” The minute I saw that, it was like something ignited inside me. I thought, this is the purpose of my life. This is the biggest thing. It’s what means everything to me. That only grew as the years progressed.
Whenever I say magick spelled with a K, what that means is it’s like an amalgamation of gnostic Christianity and esoteric Judaism and a lot of energy circulation practices from ancient Daoism. The form of magick that is near and dear to my heart is put together by an order of magicians in England in the late 1800s. They were called the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. You had people like the poet W.B. Yeats, Pamela Coleman Smith who was the artist who painted the pictures that we now think of when we think of tarot, like the archetype of the tarot. She created those and she was a member of the Golden Dawn. Also, the infamous Aleister Crowley, he is the one that everybody thinks of, but at one point he was a member of the Golden Dawn.
What they set out to do is look at every spiritual tradition in the world and strip away the dogma and get down to the core practices, you know, the breathing practices, the visualization practices, the energy circulation practices and find what works, why it works, how it works, and how we can make it even stronger. That was the branch of magick that I fell in love with more and more as time went on. That’s what I would practice in prison. By the time I got out of prison I was doing some of these techniques and exercises up to seven hours a day. I had to find something to focus on other than the prison itself.
It was something that became the core of my everyday life. From the moment I got up until the time I went to bed, I devoted myself entirely 100% to that spiritual practice. That’s what kept me from going insane. It gave me something to focus on other than the pain I was experiencing. By pain I mean physical, mental, emotional. Every kind of pain you can possibly imagine. That’s what you’re experiencing in an environment like that.
TS: I read in one of the interviews that you gave that while you were in prison that you were occasionally beaten so badly that you pissed blood. I was like, that was very graphic for me to imagine that. Okay. Here you are, you’re talking about magick practices from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Can you give me a sense, here you are in prison. Just help me understand exactly the kind of practice you would be doing in prison.
DE: Okay. For example, most people these days are familiar with the chakra system in the Eastern traditions. It’s the energy centers running down the center line of your body. We’re familiar at least marginally with what they represent. There is a technique in ceremonial magick that’s very, very similar to chakra exercises, only you’re using only five energy centers. They’re located in slightly different parts of the body, are slightly different colors, and they usually have Hebrew mantras associated with them instead of Indian mantras.
You focus on these energy centers, and to the full extent of your ability what your goal is, is to awaken them. To energize them to their highest possible point. The way we do that is through visualization, breathing. When we breathe, one of the things that I figured out through magick that I learned gradually is that everything that happens on the material level of reality also happens on the energetic level of reality. Whenever we’re breathing in oxygen on the physical level, we’re also taking in something that there’s a name for in pretty much every culture in the world except ours.
The Chinese call it Qi. The Japanese call it Ki. The Hebrews call it ruach. The Indians call it prana. We’re the only ones that don’t have a name for it. That’s what you’re working with when you’re doing this exercise. You’re visualizing—the visualization acts as the steering wheel.
It’s what programs the Qi, the energy that you’re breathing in. Then you breathe in the energy itself in order to awaken the energy energy centers inside our bodies that have gone sort of dormant because we haven’t used them since birth for the most part.
TS: Interestingly, there is I think a lot of understanding and respect for working with the chakras or working even with Qi Gong and Daoist healing practices. As soon as you introduce a word like magick, and even put the K on it, okay, magick with a K. There’s a sense of, come on, this is a little, I think in the culture at large. I’m not saying this is valid. Part of what I want to understand, because honestly I think you’re the first person, and I think I’ve done close to 400 interviews now for this Insights at the Edge series, who’s talked about magick really in quite this way. It makes me curious why is this form of spiritual practice which sounds like as you’re describing it a chakra visualization practice, why is it considered suspect do you think?
DE: I think it’s pretty much because of Western culture. We’ve been programmed through really crappy horror movies and through right-wing religious dogma that this is evil.
Most people don’t even really understand what magick is. They hear the word and automatically they have all these preconceived notions and ideas. So much so that in a way it’s made it dangerous. Not as much in every place in the US, but where I grew up in the Bible Belt, it’s a dangerous thing to even use that word. As a matter of fact, I had stopped using it up until I met Seane Corn. For me what I learned is I guess I had been so traumatized. These people have literally tried to murder me for my love of magick.
I got to the point where I would not even say that word because I realized on one end of the spectrum, people hear you say it and they just think you’re a flake or a weirdo. On the other end of the spectrum they think you’re downright dangerous. When I started doing is substituting words what meant basically the same thing but didn’t have all the same automatic negative connotations. For example I would do classes and I would say, what I was teaching is hermetic Reiki. When people hear Reiki, they don’t have the same preconceived ideas or jolt of fear that they receive when they ever they magick, even though you’re doing the exact same techniques, you’re just coming at them from a Western concept and philosophy versus an Eastern one.
Then when Seane came to me one day, I lived in Salem, Massachusetts at the time. She came to me and we spent all day long sitting in my office talking. Basically the crux, when she left that office, of what she had said to me was, “You’ve got to reclaim what you love and what you are. You can’t let these people take that from you. They can’t try to kill you for this anymore.” From that day on I came out, and I was, honestly I was very nervous about it. I did a class with Seane here in New York where I live now.
It was the first time I ever came out on the stage and said, “I’m a magician.” When I said that I broke out in a cold sweat and my hands were shaking just because of the PTSD that was associated with everything in that aspect of my life. From that day on it started to get easier and easier and easier until I’ve reached a point in my life where I think, you know what, if people think I’m a flake, let them think a flake. I know what works for me. I know this saved my life. It’s what I’ll continue with.
TS: Are there certain principles, if you will, philosophical principles that form the basis of a path of magick?
DE: I think each tradition has variations of their own. It would be like giving a general overview of say Christianity, because you have so many different sects and they all have different tenets and things like that. I think when you get down to the core of it, all the different traditions of magick, I think they revolve around—first off, magick is not a religion. It’s a practice. A religion is when you’re worshiping something. A lot of times you’re not, it’s a very uninvolved process. You go to church on Sunday, you get out, you don’t even think about it again until you go the next week and you just look at somebody talk for an hour. Magick is not about worship. Magick is about change.
What you’re doing, whatever you’re taking in this energy, this Qi, this Ki, whatever you want to call it, you are literally taking divinity into your energy centers. You are consciously and elaborately making an effort to do what Catholics do whenever they receive the Eucharist, which at that moment they believe that they aren’t receiving a symbolic piece of Christ. There are literally ingesting the body of Christ. I think that material understanding, people who saw certain magical practices maybe and didn’t fully comprehend what they were seeing.
That’s literally what you’re doing when you’re doing magick. The point of magick is to every single day ingest a little more divinity. Whatever you want to call it. God, the divine mind, the source that everything came from and to which everything will one day return. The point of magick is to take more and more and more of that into you every day so that you become a little more like divinity, if that makes sense. It’s kind of long-winded.
TS: No, I don’t think it’s long-winded at all. I think it’s beautiful. One of the things that I find so remarkable about you is that after being wrongly imprisoned, truly a victim, that you feel like such an empowered person. One of my questions is do you feel bitter or angry? Those are different. Bitter and angry are different. How has your practice of magick helped you work with that? I would just imagine so much anger.
DE: I don’t really think I’m bitter or angry. However, I don’t want that to be confused with scarred. I think I am very scarred. I think I’m very traumatized. I think it caused a lot of really, really deep rooted injuries to my energy system, to my psyche, to my soul, if you will, that I’ve been working on since I’ve gotten out and I will probably continue to work on for the rest of my life in order to try to heal myself. Really, a great deal of it when you’re doing magic, one of the things you start doing like in Chinese Daoism is you’re circulating energy through, and I hate to use this word because it sounds so flaky and new age-y but you are circulating energy through your aura.
Anytime we experience trauma, what happens is our energy system is damaged in some way. When we say that we’ve got a broken heart, you’ve literally got a broken heart. It’s just the energy level of your heart that’s been wounded instead of the actual physical level. That doesn’t make it any less painful. Whenever you’re circulating this energy, one of the roles of that is to repair and heal gradually over time the damaged spots within your aura.
Instead of going into something like say, a therapy situation, where you talk about your problem, this is more of a turning very deep inward and focusing on the root cause of the problem, which is the energy damage that was done from whatever you experienced. On a daily basis, ever since I’ve gotten out, that’s one of the things that I worked on. I worked on it even when I was in. This constant refining of energy and trying to patch, repair, and soothe the parts of my energy system that have been damaged so that I can live a more normal life.
TS: Damien, I wonder if you’d be willing, and I’m going to ask you something here. If not, that’s okay, but I’m going to see, which is I think a lot of people are familiar if you say something like mindfulness is a path. Can you give me an introductory practice? The teacher goes ahead and says, “Okay, we’re going to go ahead and begin by feeling the sensation of breathing at the tip of the nose.” Okay. If I were to say to you, and this is the favor. Help me know what an introductory magick practice is. Could you actually guide us through it? If you would be willing right here and now to do that, to give people a sense of this merging with divinity or whatever language you want to use for it.
DE: Absolutely. I could give you a short abbreviated version of the two core foundations. Whenever I teach classes on magic, the two core practices I teach number one is called the Middle Pillar Exercise, which is what I was describing a while ago that’s similar to the chakras. When using the Middle Pillar Exercise, what it does, it’s like doing calisthenics, calisthenics that gradually make you able to perceive and work with subtle energies more and more as time progresses. You’re building up your strength in that area. The other technique is called the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, or the LBRP for short. What the LBRP does, it acts very much like a process like saging or using sweet grass to cleanse an area outside yourself. Whenever you’re doing the Middle Pillar, you’re working with internal energies. Whenever you’re doing the LBRP, you’re working with outer energies. What I usually, the first thing I start to teach in the class is the Middle Pillar exercise. That’s what I’ll go through right now. I’ll do it exactly as I would do it in a class.
TS: Wonderful.
DE: Stand with your eyes closed and picture yourself at the very center of the universe. There are stars all around you as far as you can see in every direction. Cast your attention up to the very top of the universe, if such a thing existed. At the very top of the universe, you see a blindingly white, brilliant white light. You know that this light is the source from which all things came and to which all things will one day return. Focus on it for a second. As you inhale, envision a shaft of light descend from that light all the way down through the universe until it reaches the very top of your head. Right at the crown of your head, envision it as a straw of light. Once it reaches the crown of your head, it forms a white sphere of energy about 12 inches in diameter, sitting right on your cranium. Always has been and always will be connected to divinity. It’s the purest part of your conscious mind.
As we inhale, we’re going to envision it glow even brighter. Inhale, hold it, and exhale. The air goes out but the energy stays in. It’s glowing even brighter than it was before. The mantra that’s associated with this energy center is Ehyeh. In Hebrew, Ehyeh means I am. It’s what the burning bush said to Moses whenever he said, “Who are you?” The bush said Ehyeh. What that means is actually a little more involved than what it got translated to in English. In English it simply means I am. In the original language, the connotation is I am all. I am everything. I am the source from which all came and to which all will return.
We’re going to vibrate that mantra. Whenever we vibrate it, we’re going to see the sphere of light at the top of our head vibrate with the mantra. Whenever you do it, it will sound like this. Ehyeh. When you do it, try to feel as much tactile sensation at the spot of your body where the light is as you possibly can. Feel the vibration in your cranium. Focus on that white sphere of light at the top of your head. As you inhale, see that shaft of light continue down from that sphere down through the center of your head all the way into the middle of your throat.
Right in the center of your throat, it forms a pearl gray sphere of energy, the same size and shape as the one at the top of your head. It’s right about where your voice box is. Just let your attention rest in your throat. Don’t try to force it. Don’t strain, just let your attention rest gently in your throat. Where your attention goes, that’s where your energy is going to flow. We’re going to do the same thing we did with the sphere in our crown. We’re going to inhale and see it glow even brighter gray. Inhale, hold it, and exhale. The air goes out but the energy stays in.
What this sphere in our throat represents is the divine feminine. Everything has two halves—the yin and the yang. Whenever we speak of the divine mother or the feminine aspect of divinity, that’s what this sphere represents. It represents the embodiment of that energy. The mantra associated with it is Jehovah Elohim. Jehovah in Hebrew just means God, the divine. Elohim means feminine or female. It’s the female aspect of divinity. When you vibrate the mantra, you want to feel it in your throat as much as you possibly can. It will sound like this. Jehovah Elohim.
Now focus on that gray sphere of energy in your throat. As you inhale, see that shaft of light, that straw, continue down from your throat into the center of your chest. There right in the center of your chest right where your heart is, it forms a gold sphere of energy, the same size and shape as the other two. It looks like the sun at noon sitting right where your heart is. We’re going to do the same thing. As we inhale we’re going to see it glow even brighter. Make it glow as bright as you can possibly make it glow with every inhalation. Inhale and see it glow brighter. Hold and exhale. The air goes out but the energy stays in.
The mantra associated with this sphere is the longest one. It’s Jehovah Eloah Vadaop. What that translates to roughly is Lord God of wisdom. What this center represents is the aspect of ourselves that transforms knowledge into wisdom. Knowledge is something we take in in a million different ways every day. We take it in through books we read. We take it in through conversations with other people. We take it in through experiences. It’s just surface level intellectual knowledge until through the process of alchemy it becomes combined with divinity and then transmutes into wisdom.
Wisdom is something you know on a soul level, not something you know on an intellectual level. That’s what this mantra is referring to. Whenever you do it, it’ll sound like this. Jehovah Eloah Vadaop. A lot of people in the beginning are nervous about forgetting a syllable, mispronouncing the word, leaving part of it out. Don’t be. The main most important part of this exercise is your intention. As long as your intention is for this to work, it’ll work. As long as you focus on it, that’s where your energy is going to flow. All you have to do is have just the slightest bit of faith that it will work, and it will work.
Focus on that gold center in your chest. As you inhale, see the shaft of light continue down from that gold energy center in your chest down through your abdomen down through your stomach until it reaches the center of your pelvis. Right in the middle of your pelvis it forms another sphere of energy the same size and shape as the previous ones. Only this one is purple in color. We’re going to do the same thing. As we inhale we’re going to see it glow even brighter purple. Make it glow as bright as we possibly can. Inhale, hold it, and exhale. The air goes out but the energy stays in.
Let your attention rest in your pelvic area. Just feel what that part of your body feels like. Feel your pants, your clothes against that part of your body. The mantra associated with this sphere of energy is Shaddai El Kai. What this sphere of energy represents, what it presides over, is our unconscious, our subconscious. The deeper parts of ourselves that are always at work. Our dreams, the ability to prophesize, all of those things are symbols of this sphere of energy, this level of reality. Whenever you do the vibration, it will sound like this. Shaddai El Kai. Just try to feel the vibration in your pelvis, not just in your throat, not just in your chest. Now focus on that purple sphere of energy at your pelvis.
As you inhale, see the shaft of light continue down through your legs into your feet. There circling your feet it forms another sphere of energy. This one, as oxymoronic as it may sound, is a brilliant black light, completely circling your feet. We’re going to do the same thing we did previously. As we inhale, we’re going to see this shaft of light glow even brighter black because we are breathing Qi into it. Inhale and see it glow even brighter and more vivid. Hold it. Exhale. The air goes out but the energy stays in.
Now the mantra, what this sphere of energy represents is the hard-core physical world, is our physical bodies, the vehicle through which we move through the physical realm. The mantra associated with it is nai Ha Aretz. Adonai means lord in Hebrew. Ha Aretz means of the earth. Lord of the earth. That’s you, that’s us. That represents the fact that we were meant to be co-creators of reality, not merely to sit and passively accept whatever comes our way.
When you hear the Lord’s Prayer in the Bible when it says ‘thy kingdom come, thy will be done as earth as it is in heaven’, that’s this sphere of energy. It’s our job with every day, every passing day to make this sphere, this level of reality, a little more like heaven. We are the lords of this earth. When you do this vibration it will sound like this. Adonai Ha Aretz. Try to feel the vibration in your feet as you do it. Now focus on that black sphere of energy at your feet. As you inhale, see that shaft of light continue down through your feet all the way down into the very center of the earth.
At the very center of the earth, you see another giant sphere of energy. Brilliant and green. The shaft of light descending from your feet connects to it. This giant green sphere of energy is the Qi of Earth itself. It’s what we refer to as mother nature. Now you’re connected by the straw of light that passes right through the center of your body with the Qi of heaven above you and the Qi of earth below you. Just reflect on that for a second.
This time as you inhale, see that shaft of light that descends down through the center of your body glow even more vivid and more bright. Make it as bright as you can possibly glow. Inhale and see that shaft of light glow even brighter. Hold it. Exhale. The air goes out but the energy stays in. Now open your eyes and look around you. Normally at that point in the meditation I would have people in the room clap their hands, stomp their feet, take a deep breath. Anything that they feel more firmly grounds them back in their physical body.
TS: Damien, thank you so much. I’m so glad I asked you to teach that to us.
And now back to Insights at the Edge.
I’m imagining you doing these practices now in a prison environment. I know you spent 10+ years in solitary confinement and that you were on death row. What I’m curious about is did you have any support for what you were doing? Here you’re guiding us through it. You’re making it easy. How are you doing this on your own in that environment?
DE: Oh, a lot of it was trial and error. I did have many teachers over the years while I was in prison. For example, I received ordination in the Rinzai Zen tradition of Japanese Buddhism. It was the same tradition that used to train the samurai in ancient Japan. I actually had a Zen master that would travel back and forth from Japan to death row in Arkansas to teach me. I had a Tibetan lama that used to come into the prison, and same thing. She taught me. She basically, one of the things that she passed onto me and some of the other guys on death row was a technique called Phowa.
What Phowa does is in essence gets you ready to die. It’s the practice of forcing your consciousness out, the essence of your life force out through the top of your head at the moment that you die in chances of, as Tibetan Buddhists believe, obtaining a higher birth in the next life and being able to continue on with your practice. I had several Western teachers who actually taught me ceremonial magick. One was a man named Stephen Mace who’s written several books. Shaping Formless Fire among others is a good place to start.
A lot of it also was just trial and error. Just for example, one of the things you mentioned a while ago that I’ve been beaten. One of the times that I was beaten, it caused a lot of damage to my teeth. In prison, there’s no caps, there’s no crowns, there’s no root canals, any of that. Your choices are live in pain or let them pull your teeth out. I didn’t want to live without teeth so I had to find some way of coping with this horrendous pain. One of the techniques that I started doing was breathing Qi directly into my teeth. Breathing energy directly into my teeth.
When I first started doing it, after a few minutes the pain started to completely fade away. It was like a miracle that happened. I wasn’t in pain anymore. That worked for a while. I would just have to do that for a few minutes a day and the pain would go for days at a time. Then what happened gradually over time is I had to do it longer and the pain would diminish for lesser periods of time. It eventually reached a point where I was having to do it constantly and it was only barely keeping the pain at bay anymore.
Then all of a sudden I had this huge epiphany, this huge realization that everything on that energetic level mirrors everything on the physical level. On the physical level, you don’t just inhale forever. You have to eventually exhale. You don’t just drink water forever. Eventually you have to go pee. There’s this in and out process, this flow. It’s the same thing on that energetic level of life. For a year trying to heal the damage, the pain in my teeth, I had taken all this energy in but I hadn’t released anything.
When I had this epiphany, I did a grounding exercise. While I was using breath work, I envisioned the pain flooding out through that straw of light that we were just visualizing, that channel of light flooding out through that down into the earth and being transmuted into something more beneficial. When I did that, the pain, I felt it for the last time just go. It never came back.
A lot of it, even though I had physical teachers, there comes a point whenever you—like I said, the point of magick is to constantly ingest more of divinity. Eventually you reach a point where the divinity itself starts to teach you, starts to guide you. Not in a way, people want it to be like the clouds are going to part and lightning strikes and they hear the voice of God speak, it’s not like that. It’s not like that. It’s like a still small voice somewhere inside you, but it’s still nonetheless powerful for how small it is.
TS: Here you are in this incredibly violent and corrupt, dare I say, environment in terms of in your writing in your book, Life After Death, which is a memoir about your life and also includes a lot of writing about your prison experiences. It’s clear how corrupt many of the guards are and many of the practices in prison. Here you are breathing and you’re breathing all of this light into this central channel, the middle pillar as you refer to it. How did you deal with that contrast? Here you’re bathing in divine light, and then opening your eyes to a beating. That contrast must’ve been so strange, painful, and terrible.
DE: You know, I didn’t even focus on the contrast. A lot of it was, this sounds contradictory when you’re talking about a spiritual practice, but a lot of it was fear driven. I would look around me at the guards, at the type of people that I was witnessing that were doing this sort of thing. The thought of becoming one of those types of people horrified me. The type of energy they put out, I thought of it almost as secondhand smoke. You’re still absorbing it on some level even when you don’t realize it. It’s having some effect on you. The thought of that quite honestly terrified me. I would do everything I could not to focus on it.
I think of it as Daniel in the lion’s den. When Daniel’s in the lion’s den, he’s not looking at the lions, he’s looking up. I keep a giant picture of this hanging right next to my bed. Daniel was looking up at the light. He pays no attention to those lions whatsoever. He knows as long as he keeps his gaze on that light, he’s going to be all right. The minute he takes it off and starts focusing on the lions, that’s when things are going to get bad. That’s what I did. I focused on my practice, I focused on my magick, and I did everything I could not to look at the lions around me. There’s times of course when it slips. That’s always going to be the case. As long as we’re here in this physical realm, that’s always going to be the case, you slip. It’s just like with Zen. All you can do is keep bringing your attention back, over and over and over, to what you’re supposed to be focused on.
TS: Now, I think when a lot of people hear the word magick, they also think of something like, I’m going to magically invoke what I want to create in my life. I’m going to get the kind of money I want or the partner I want, that kind of thing. I’m curious, you mentioned this word co-creating as we got down into the black root of our being when we were in the black orb that was also light. I’m curious, how do you see magick and manifestation?
DE: It is absolutely and completely intertwined, enmeshed, and linked. I think the difference in Western ceremonial magick and Eastern traditions is very slight but very important. Eastern traditions seek more to escape the will of what they call Samsara, life in the material world. The goal is to transcend that, to leave it behind and never enter this realm again. The magician on the other hand doesn’t see this realm as anything to escape. He sees it as just another aspect of divinity. It’s still energy. It’s just a slower vibrating energy. The magician doesn’t seek to escape the will of Samsara, he seeks to master it, control it, use it to his own advantage.
The way you do that, it’s become really popular now—things you hear out there like The Secret. The Secret is like a really watered-down version, not to take anything away from it. If you use it and it works for you, fine, great, 100%. What The Secret is, they’ve taken in modern times so many aspects of magick and split them all up so we don’t focus on magick as a whole. We don’t call it that. We just focus on one particular aspect, whether it be manifesting something as in using The Secret. Or whether it be reading tarot cards or astrology or energy circulation practices. It’s become okay to take one thing and split it off and focus on that, but not focus on the trunk as a whole.
TS: My question has to do with manifestation and using magick. I guess really what I’m curious about in this relationship is like, do you feel you’ve used your magical practices to help get you out of prison? Do you think that it was part of your release?
DE: Absolutely.
TS: How do you see that was part of your release?
DE: Okay. When we did the Middle Pillar a while ago and you’re working with the energy and bringing it inside your body, whenever you’re attempting to manifest something, when you’re attempting to shape your reality, you’re doing the same thing. You’re doing the same work. That’s an extended practice of the Middle Pillar. There’s a practice where you fill these spheres up with energy and then push that energy, program it with an intent, and let it go to do its job.
When I tell people, for example say you’re doing it for prosperity. Say you have a bill that you can’t afford to pay and you start doing magick and you say this bill is completely paid. I’m debt-free. That’s what you program the energy for. It’s not like you’re going to wake up the next day and there’s going to be a shoebox full of money sitting at the foot of your bed. It always happens, magick always follows the path of least resistance. More likely what happens is you get a call from someone that you haven’t heard from in a while and they say, “Hey, I got this project that somebody approached me about. I thought you would be perfect for this.” It just so happens that it’s the amount of money you needed to pay the bill. It always follows the path of least resistance. It always looks like coincidence.
In the beginning you’re always going to say, “Yeah, but would it have happened anyway if I hadn’t have done the magick? Am I just playing mind games with myself?
It’s just mental masturbation.” What happens is every single time you do it, you see that it never lets you down. It doesn’t always happen the way you think it’s going to happen. It doesn’t always happen the way you want it to happen. It happens in a way that’s going to be for your highest good as long as you phrase it that way. Whenever I got out of prison, the year before I got out, my wife and I both started doing this practice together.
We said, “Okay, we’re going to do from now on for an hour a day is we are going to bring in as much of this energy as we can.” There’s another element to magick that sounds even more flaky and new age to some people, but we work with angelic intelligences a lot. Angels to us represent certain kinds of energy. We said, “Every day for an hour we’re going to take in as much of this energy as we can and we’re going to invoke as many angels as we can and we’re going to program them with this task. We’re going to say may I be home, free from prison, living happily with Lorri. Let it come about in a way that brings harm to none and is for the good of all and in no way let this reverse or bring upon us any curse.” We did that and said that every single day for an hour. Within one year I was out of prison.
TS: First of all, I don’t think it sounds flaky that you worked with angelic intelligences. I just want to make a statement here, Damien, which is I’m fully in support of you being loud, out, and proud as a magician. Yay.
DE: Thank you.
TS: Yay.
DE: Thank you.
TS: I’m quite interested to know more, you mentioned Lorri, your wife. In reading about your story, I think one of the things that touched me the most was how the two of you met and fell in love and that you were actually married to each other never having touched each other previously to your ceremony. It shows a different dimension of love, if you will, to the way I think we often think about it in our society, so much of it being driven by our sex life together and all these other things. There’s such a purity to your love story. First of all, if you could just share a little bit about your inside view of your love story.
DE: Okay. I went to prison, I went to death row in 1993. Lorri and I met in 1996. I had been in for three years at that point. We’ve been together since 1996. We got married in 1999. She lived in New York at the time and she saw the very first documentary that was made about my case. It was produced by HBO. It was called Paradise Lost. They screened it here in New York, and the directors were there to answer questions afterwards. She saw the documentary and said she couldn’t get it out of her head. It stuck in her mind. She went home and a few days later wrote to me.
From the very first letter that I received from her, I knew that this person was going to mark a huge change in my life. I knew that this person was completely and absolutely unlike anyone I’d ever known before. It was almost—just overwhelming. I think I actually started to die inside by that point. She forced me to come back to life. Breathed love into me again. We had to speak to each other. She would fly from New York to Arkansas to the prison. We would have to sit and talk to each other through an inch-thick plane of bulletproof glass. We didn’t even get to touch from 1996 until 1999 when we married. The very first time we ever physically touched was on our wedding day.
She is the main reason that I’m alive right now. She did more work on my case than the investigators, the attorneys, and everyone else put together. She was the one whenever we were trying to find a DNA match that was out digging through people’s garbage for cigarette butts. At one point we couldn’t even afford to pay legal fees anymore. She actually took out two personal loans just to pay legal fees. If it wasn’t for her, I would be dead right now. I would be six feet underground.
TS: There’s this beautiful image that you write about that in the beginning of your relationship, towards the beginning that you would blow through the screen at the bottom of the glass in order to feel each other’s breath.
DE: Yeah, I think what I always compare it to is they say that when a person receives brain damage of some sort, a lot of times the brain will start to try to form new connections, start to grow new dendrites in order to try to compensate for the areas of the brain that are damaged. That’s, as crazy as it sounds, that’s what I compare our relationship to. We didn’t have the things that most people out here have to rely on. We couldn’t go to the movies together at night. We couldn’t sleep in the same bed together at night. We couldn’t have dinner together. We couldn’t have sex together. We had to find ways around those things in order to form connections. There were things like that like just blowing through the screen to feel each other’s breath.
There were also times when we did what we called making moon water. What we would do, both of us on the night of the full moon is we would take a glass of water and set it up in the window sills so that the moon would reflect in this water. We would do that at the same time and then we would take the glass out of the window, set it over to the side. Every night at the same time we would both take a drink of that water. Every single night so that in that moment, we both knew that we were together. We were both doing the exact same thing at the exact same time and that no matter how many walls or how many miles there were in between us, in that moment, we were together and that there was nothing that anybody could do about it.
TS: That’s beautiful.
DE: Thank you.
TS: Now, Damien, you’ve been out of prison as you mentioned for approximately five years. I wonder what has been, if you will, the best things about being free and what’s been the hardest?
DE: The best things I guess are the things that, like I was saying I didn’t have, I now do have. I sleep in the same bed with Lorri every night. I eat ice cream. I get to look up at the stars. I can walk in the rain. I can sleep when I want to sleep. I can eat when I want to eat. I don’t live in fear of maybe being beaten to death every night.
TS: That sounds like a really good thing.
DE: It is. The worst part is not only was I in prison for almost 20 years, I was in solitary confinement for nearly a decade. I literally went from solitary confinement one day to being on the streets of Manhattan the next day. Being reintroduced into human society was a complete and absolute overload. When I went into prison, I got out in 2011, and the last time I’d seen a computer was 1986. It was basically a giant glorified typewriter for rich people that didn’t do much of anything. Now everyone uses the Internet. Everyone’s using their cell phones. Everyone has debit cards. To me, all of that stuff was brand-new.
Not only that, but I had to learn things like how to chitchat or make small talk, because you don’t do that in prison. There’s no chitchat. If you are saying something to someone, you say exactly what’s on your mind, exactly what you’re thinking, exactly what you’re feeling. There’s no small talk in prison. Even learning little things like that was completely and absolutely overwhelming.
Like I said a while ago, the PTSD, I have severe Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder to the point that I can barely even remember the first year that I was out of prison, just because I was so psychologically and emotionally devastated. I’ve been out about five years and gradually it’s gotten better and better and better as time has went on. Is it completely better? No. No, I’ve still got a lot of work to do. But it’s a hell of a lot better than it was five years ago.
TS: Damien, I have maybe a strange question for you. As somebody who has been such a deep student of Western magick and also spirituality in general, I’m curious how you—someone in your position—has come to view the teaching on karma, and if you will, your view of your own karma. What could it be, the karma of this person to be wrongfully imprisoned and then some very famous people came to your aid after seeing the movie that you mentioned, Paradise Lost. Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Johnny Depp, producer Peter Jackson. What a bizarre, interesting, karmic life, if you will, you’ve had. How do you make sense of the teaching on karma and the karma of your life in particular?
DE: I don’t know about karma but I always say with magick, like I said a while ago, it doesn’t always happen in the way you think it’s going to happen. It does work. When I was a child, I used to say, “One day I want to be the greatest magician who’s ever lived.” So, I say magick said, “Okay, then you can sit in the cell for the next 20 years and do nothing but practice.” We think we’re asking for something that’s going to be glamorous and amazing and sparkling and bedazzling when in reality, spiritual work is grimy, gritty, and hard. I was given a crash course and put in a situation where it forced me to come closer to what I wanted to be.
I tell people it’s like the reason we do energy work on ourselves and not other people is because a lot of times there can be blowback like that. I remember Seane, Seane Corn
was telling me at one point, she learned over the years gradually when she was talking to divinity to end all her prayers by saying, “And bring it to me gently.” She said she realized the same thing—that sometimes divinity will shove you face first through a brick wall to get you to where you think you want to go. If that’s what you’re asking for, that’s what it gives you. It’s not always in a gentle way.
I tell people the reason we do energy work on ourselves instead of other people, imagine you have a guy that wants to be in a love relationship. He sees a woman across the street from him and he thinks she’s the greatest thing since sliced bread. He goes inside and he starts dedicating himself every day to doing energy work saying, “I want to be in a relationship with this woman.” One day he goes out and he gets hit by a train and both his arms and legs get cut off because he doesn’t realize that she has some sort of secret amputee fetish and now she’s going to see him and think he’s pretty great too.
Whereas he could have circumvented all this pain and suffering and everything else if he would have just put it up in a more general way and trusted the universe to bring him a proper, healthy, loving relationship instead of trying to signify and direct everything to exactly what he wanted it to be. I think, in a way, that’s what happened to me. I don’t know if that’s karma or if it was just one of those weird ways of giving me what I wanted, which was to have a life that was full of magick. That’s what happened. In a lot of ways, as crazy as it sounds, I guess I’m thankful not for the pain that I experienced but I’m thankful for what that pain forced me to learn.
TS: Damien, if someone’s listening to our conversation and they feel, you know, Damien turned towards merging with his divinity. He didn’t focus on the terrible guards—at least most of the time—and the pain they might inflict. He stayed focused on his light field if you will, on his inner shield. I find myself, this person who’s listening, who says, “I find myself falling into habitual depressions or patterns of darkness. I don’t seem to have the willpower to save do these kinds of practices on a regular basis.” What would you say to that person?
DE: I would say you have to make yourself even when you don’t want to. It really is just like working out. Working out isn’t always fun. When you go to the gym and you’re lifting more weight this week than you lifted last week, it hurts. It’s a strain. It’s a struggle. It’s not always an entirely pleasant sensation. It pays off. What happens is over time if you force yourself through that initial reluctance, which a lot of times what it is, is ego battling you. Ego doesn’t want to change. Ego is finding something in your current situation that is feeding it in some sort of way and it doesn’t want to change. Let go of that or grow out of it. A lot of that initial hesitation is due to ego.
If you make yourself do it anyway day after day after day, it becomes just like working out does. It becomes a habit. That habit will carry you through the times when you think “I don’t want to do this anymore, I don’t want to have to do this meditation again. I’d rather sit on my butt and watch Jerry Springer today.” The habit will
not let you stop doing it. I think also there comes a time whenever you see, once you’ve done it for long enough and you see the amazing, incredible effect that it has on your life, you should become excited about it. You reach a point where you can’t wait to do it again, to start the next day off, to get out of bed and do the spiritual practice. You just have to force yourself through that initial reluctance. It’s not easy. Nothing in this world worth having is ever going to be easy. What I can tell you is that it’s worth it. If you pursue it, it is worth it.
TS: I just have one final question for you. Our program’s called Insights at the Edge, and I’m curious to know as a magician, Damien, what your edge is in terms of you growing and maturing and evolving in the path of magic. What’s the next step for you?
DE: The next step that I would like to take is I started a social awareness campaign with two other artists that I work with on a regular basis. We call it magick revolution. What we wanted to do is make some effort, make some step no matter how small, towards letting the world know what magick truly is and what it’s not. To erase a lot of the preconceived ideas and notions that people hold, show them what it actually is, and let the world see that it is an incredibly rich and fulfilling spiritual tradition that rivals any of the Eastern traditions in beauty. That it’s something that can make your life absolutely incredible, that can change you in profound ways that you never are the same once you delve into, and you never want to be the same. You just want to keep advancing and moving forward.
We want to bring those techniques that I practiced in my darkest hour when I had nothing else to turn to and that saved my sanity and saved my life to introduce those to people who may not be in as dire situations or circumstances, but still have things in their lives that they’re uncomfortable with, that they want to change, and show them how to use them. That’s the next step for me is just—I guess spreading education about magick and spreading the techniques of magick to people who will love them and cherish them as much as I have. And I don’t think it’s for everyone. I think we all resonate to different frequencies. For some people it’s going to be yoga, for some people it’s going to be Buddhism, for some people it’s going to be Christianity. I want to be able to speak to the people who are receptive to magick and who will love it and embrace it in the same way that I did.
TS: I would love for Sounds True to be part of the magick revolution with you. Thank you, Damien. Thank you for being a guest on Insights at the Edge. I’ve been speaking with Damien Echols. He’s the author of the book Life After Death, which is a memoir about his life and time in prison and also the book called Yours For Eternity: A Love Story on Death Row in which his 13-year correspondence with Lorri Davis is chronicled. Many of the letters are chronicled. Damien, you are a great magician. Thank you. Thank you for being with me.
DE: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
TS: SoundsTrue.com, many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
