I just realized that I really didn’t know what Alien Steve
has been studying. We spoke often in my second winter here, but not that much
since then. And even when we did talk a lot, we were mostly discussing
identity, belonging, and what it was like for him to be an alien, not mundane
matters like school. So, today I asked him.
“I’m an alchemist,” he told me, as if I should have known. I
should say that ‘alchemist,’ as we use the term here, doesn’t necessarily have
anything to do with turning lead into gold. Instead, it’s about transforming
the self so as to effect practical change in the world. Something like that.
“But you’re not working with Greg, are you?” Greg, as you
may recall, is the alchemist on staff.
“No,” he told me. “I mean, I’ve talked with him. He’s helped
me, some. But I’m working with Joy on magic and spirituality. They’re the only
two areas I need.”
“But I didn’t think Joy was an alchemist.”
“She’s not, not especially, anyway. But there are alchemical
dimensions to her magical practice.”
“Why alchemy?”
“Why not? What else is an alien going to do?”
“Ok, what does that mean?” I was confused.
“I’m different,” he told me, grinning a little. “Different
people are disruptive by definition. Think about a dance, like a group dance,
like square dancing? If there’s somebody in the dance, just one person, who is
doing something different than anybody else, then the entire pattern changes.
Do you see?”
“I suppose so.” I was imagining, not a dance, but a traffic
pattern—somebody drives the wrong way and everyone swerves around and crashes.
“So, the question is, how do I insert myself in a system to
effect the change I want?”
“How do you?”
“Be very careful about what I compromise about and what I
don’t.”
“Oh?”
“Consider; Frederick Douglas became free, without
compromise, before he even ran away from slavery. And he helped free all the
slaves. Mahatma Gandhi also made himself free, without compromise, and helped
free India. If you don’t move, everyone else has to.”
“I bet you don’t include Jesus on your list,” I teased him.
Jesus was the first person I thought of adding to the list, but Alien Steve is
slightly hostile to Christianity.”
“I’m not sure he existed.”
Steve is pagan, but with the subject up in my mind I
remembered that he’s specifically Jewish pagan.
“Hey, you just had a holiday, didn’t you?” I asked.
“Rosh Hashanah. No really my thing, religiously speaking,”
he told me. “I did go home to my parents’ for a big dinner.”
“Are they ok with your being pagan?”
“They don’t care. They’re both atheists.”
“Huh,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else.
Then—“hey, there are a lot of Jewish people here, aren’t there?” There aren’t a
lot who identify as Jewish now, though
Steve does, are nine or ten students, plus Aaron, who were raised Jewish and
sometimes show up at campus Seders and such. That’s about ten percent of the
student body, which is much higher than the national average. “Is that odd? I
thought most neopagans used to be Christian.”
“No, it’s the other way around. Most of Christianity used to
be pagan. The rest was Jewish.”
“I knew that part. I mean now. Individuals. The holidays are
so similar, it just seems weird to me, Jewish pagans.”
“It shouldn’t. European magic has deep ties to European
Jewry.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Remember Nicholas Flamel?”
“Was he real? And Jewish?” Nicholas Flamel, you may recall,
was one of the couple who created the Sorcerer’s Stone in the Harry Potter
book.
“Real, yes, Jewish, no. He was something like a clerk, but
he endowed a couple of churches and hospitals and things. How did he do that,
if he didn’t have some unusual way of making gold? He claimed to have created
the philosopher’s stone. But when he was first figuring out alchemy, the first
thing he did was to go to Spain to look for a Jewish scholar who could teach
him the Qabalah. The first thing that
occurred to him.”
“Huh.”
“I mean, if you think about it, we, too, are different and
so change the world.”
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