Black people in New York City. He believes Black Magic exists in our closeness and access to God. But why should we have such special access? Pastor Jamison believes the reason is our desperation. We believe because we’re desperate. Where the tangible world has given us pain and dead ends, we have turned to the supernatural.

It may be that all the workers of magic and sorcery were differently gendered, at least when seen in the light of their much better documented cousins in the circumpolar cultures of the last three hundred years. In much of Siberia, for example, it has been argued many times that ‘shaman’ (or its equivalent) constitutes a gender in itself.

It’s when they belong to outsiders that they become suspect and are likely to be relegated as magic—and therefore crazy, wrong, stupid, or impossible. The ritual cleansing of a person through the application of special water, or the transformation of wine into blood before a room of onlookers isn’t dismissed as magic because these particular