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who’d lost the hair to have headaches or go crazy.
    Bad magic makes the newspaper all the time. In the town where I live, four friends on their way to a family reunion were killed. A man crossed the center line in his car, going the wrong way, and hit them head on. The next day a friend was quoted as saying, “There were a lot of bad signs before they left.”
    A father whose son had been killed in the war on Iraq remembered their last conversation. “He told me this was his last mission before he comes home, and I told him not to say that,” the father said. “I didn’t like those words, ‘his last mission,’ and I told him to call me when he gets back.
    â€œBut he will not call me now.”
    I thought, how terrible that we poor humans, so menaced through all our lives, feel not only helpless but as though some chance remark, innocently released into the air, might draw bad fortune, like Tolkien’s eye of Sauron, piteously searching for us through the night.
    Sometimes bad magic is disguised as good magic. A plane crashes, and the guy who missed the plane because his car had a flat tells reporters that God saw fit to save him. If you put a God-tagline on it, it’s more acceptable, but it’s still magic. The reporters are thinking, What did God have against all those other schmucks? but they don’t ask that question. They would be insulting God, ruining a nice story, and disillusioning thousands of readers who think there’sa good chance God or intuition or whatever might do the same for them. Editors do not like that kind of reporter.
    But the worst thing is that people seem all too ready to believe the bad magic and much less able to trust the positive. I did hear positive magic stories, but watch the quality of this one and you’ll get an idea of the fix we’re in. Whenever one of my Catholic friends loses anything, she prays to Saint Anthony and she always finds it. So one day her cousin called her to say that she had lost a diamond earring. She knew it was in the bedroom, but she had been looking for hours and she couldn’t find it.
    â€œPray to Saint Anthony,” my friend said. “It always works.”
    The woman did pray to the saint of lost things. Then she started looking again. She flipped the top bedsheet up in the air, and out flew the earring. My friend laughed as she told the story and said, “But the trouble now is that she will think that Saint Anthony found the earring for her.”
    â€œDidn’t he?”
    â€œNo, of course not.”
    â€œI thought you believed in it.”
    â€œOf course I don’t,” she said, laughing more.
    â€œThen why did you tell her to do it?”
    â€œBecause it always works.”
    Is that religion or magic? Does it matter? Is there a difference?
    One Christmas a Philadelphia lawyer listened to a few of my stories over wine and cookies and then said, “Aren’t you afraid?”
    I replied solemnly, pausing between each word so that she would not miss my inference, “No. I am not afraid. I do not believe in it.”
    She looked a bit abashed, which isn’t an easy thing to make a Philadelphia lawyer do. What was she frightened of? Nothing, I’d bet. And everything. All the things that may lurk just outside the light. She had plenty of company. Never once did anyone in themundane world say of my magical investigation, “Wow. You’ll find out how to assemble good spirits.” Or, “You’ll attract good fortune.” Or even anything as crass as, “You’ll win the lottery.” They predicted no good fortune. But plenty of bad.
    As talk of bad magic kept popping up all around me, I realized that I had lied to the Philadelphia lawyer. I too was captive to such thoughts, and I did not know how to undo the spell. Many of us believe that innocent actions can bring evil crashing down upon us: too much good fortune, ignoring the