He rolled his eyes. “We’re all conspiracy people. It just depends which one you believe in.”
“Listen, I don’t want to criticize your beliefs,” I said, holding up a hand. “I really don’t. But I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in the devil or demons or angels or any of it. But I do believe that people think they’ve seen angels. Just like in the nineties when everyone was seeing aliens around every corner. I think those people believed in what they thought they were seeing.”
“I’m sorry, but what the hell are you talking about? Aliens?”
“Yeah. In olden times people read their holy books and then they saw angels or djinn or whatever supernatural beings were prominent in the texts they were consuming. Then in the nineties everyone was watchingThe X-Filesand they all started seeing aliens. Really, if I’m being honest, I think these sightings are all part and parcel of the same thing.”
He balked. “Did you just compare the Bible toThe X-Files?”
“Yeah, that was rude. Sorry. I just mean popular media influences the collective unconscious.”
“You think that angels and aliens are the same thing?”
“Yes, but only in the sense that I believe that krakens andleviathans are the same thing. None of it is real, of course, but when someone sees something that’s not there, you can’t say for sure exactly what it is that they’re not seeing.”
He smiled. “One can’t argue with that, I suppose.”
“But I do think that they might think they see the same thing as someone else because of other shared external cultural influences. I think they’re having hallucinations that follow a pattern dictated by the era.”
“No.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, but that sounds crazy to me.”
“It’s not crazy. It’s not even my theory. But it makes sense. Sometimes people get lost. Who can blame them? They get lost and they look for answers. They long for transcendence, and that transcendence shows up in the form of an angel or an alien—some external force that’s going to show them that there’s more to this life than what we’ve got in front of us. So they hallucinate these otherworldly beings out of a very human desire for deliverance and hope.”
“You really think that the angel that appeared to the Virgin Mary and the little green men who abduct people and probe them on their spaceships are the same thing?”
“Yeah. That’s my best guess. It’s a shit thing to say to someone who’s religious, though, so feel free to tell me to piss off if you want. I get it.”
He looked down at his pencil. “So what about now?”
“What about it?”
“Like you say, we live in uncertain times, frightening times. Why aren’t people seeing angels and demons and aliens around every corner?”
I bit my lip. “Because I think there’s something much more dangerous going on.”
“What’s that?”
“I mean, the conspiracy theory thing you mentioned. There’s something weird going on with it, right? They started popping up like mad the last few years. And it’s not just from one walk of life. You have people on every possible side of the political aisle, from all walks of life, people who normally would never agree on anything, and suddenly tons of them are convinced of these conspiracy theories. I mean, don’t you think that’s weird?”
He shifted in his chair, and from the change in his body language, I got the sense that the conversation was making him uncomfortable. “Yeah. What do you think it all means?”
“I don’t know. It’s just that the world seems especially chaotic and violent to me lately, like basic human decency has gone out the window. Most days I think I’m imagining it, but some nights I wake up with this certainty that it’s real, almost like there’s this slow leak of evil drifting out into the world tainting everything it touches.”
An easy lupine grin spread across his lips, and suddenly I felt a little flushed. “Lucky we’re in the middle of nowhere, then, isn’t it?”
Vaguely unnerved, I changed the topic after that. Soon we found ourselves discussing recent novels we’d enjoyed. He asked me a lot about my time in New York, and I told him everything about my grad school friends, my terrible ex-boyfriend, and my favorite professors at NYU.
I was careful, though, not to tell him too much about myself. I was never making that mistake again.
1.5THE HORNED GOD
The first recorded instance of the continuance of the worship of the Horned God in Britain is in 1303, when the Bishop of Coventry was accused before the Pope of doing homage to the Devil in the form of a sheep. The fact that a man in so high a position as a bishop could be accused of practicing the Old Religion shows that the cult of the Horned God was far from being dead, and that it was in all probability still the chief worship of the bulk of the people.
—MARGARETMURRAY,THEGOD OF THEWITCHES
The next morning, after my coffee, I wandered down to the apothecary garden and found Aspen at work in the culinary section, the fresh woody scents of rosemary and mint rising on the breeze.
“Good morning, you,” she said with a bright smile. She wiped her hands on her overalls. “Would you like a cup of tea? I was just about to make one.”
