Reprinted with permission from “Sacred Contracts” by Caroline Myss, Ph.D.

 

Sometime after I met and cast the Archetypal Wheel for Mickey Magic, the person with whom I’ll conclude this chapter, I came across a story that bears a remarkable parallel to his life. Perhaps it’s worth mentioning here if only as evidence that an incredible story like Mickey’s is neither inconceivable nor unprecedented.

 

In eleventh- and twelfth-century Tibet, some three hundred years after Buddhism was originally brought to that mountain kingdom by a master teacher and magician from India called Padma Sarnbhava, the man known as Milarepa was born into a prosperous family. He was apparently destined for a comfortable and conventional life, but when he was seven years old, his father became gravely ill. Realizing that he would not recover, the patriarch gathered his family for a last meeting. After getting his relatives to promise that they would take care of his estate until Milarepa and his sister came of age, he died. An evil aunt and uncle nonetheless took the money and land entrusted to them and used it for themselves, forcing Milarepa, his sister, and his mother to work as servants. Their relatives treated them badly and often beat them.

 

At his mother’s urging Milarepa mastered black magic, studying with a lama skilled in the art of mantra and learning to cast spells that gave him the power to send hailstorms. He then used this power to direct a storm at the house where the evil aunt and uncle were holding a large family gathering. The house collapsed, and thirty-five people were killed; the hailstorm also descended on the village and destroyed the harvest. Milarepa’s mother was delighted with his magical feats, but Milarepa himself was torn by pangs of conscience at having caused so much death and destruction. Fearing that the only result of his action would be rebirth in a realm of Hell for him and his mother, he determined to counteract his negative acts by becoming a buddha. Milarepa spent long years in an excruciating course of study and practice with the great Tibetan Buddhist master Marpa. With the same determination and skill that had made him a master of black magic, Milarepa went on to become the greatest yogi in the history of Tibet.

 

In recognition of Milarepa’s reversal of fortune, Marpa gave him a new name: the Gentleman of Great Magic. The parallels between this legend, which is accepted as gospel truth by millions of Buddhists around the world, and Mickey’s life will become clear.

 

I first met Mickey at a workshop in Mexico, where he had been imprisoned some twenty years earlier on drug-smuggling charges. He had since turned his life around and become a successful professional magician. In addition to the Prostitute, Victim, Saboteur, and Wounded Child, Mickey’s archetypal companions include the Magician, Rebel, Thief (Robin Hood), Knight, Storyteller, Actor, Hermit, and Healer After working with him for some time, I found it difficult to separate the combined forces of Mickey’s archetypes because they work so closely as a team. Mickey first met almost every one of his archetypal patterns in its shadow presentation, only to have the spiritual aspects of all of them appear to him in a single epiphany while he was being beaten in prison. Rather than examine each archetype/house pairing separately as I have done with Maeve and Byron, I’ll just tell Mickey’s story. 

 

As a child growing up in Chicago, Mickey had been constantly abused by his father, who beat him regularly until he bled. Mickey interpreted the presence of his Wounded Child archetype in the tenth house as indicating that, given the severe and emotionally toxic environment of his youth, his psyche was almost completely formed by wounds. That this archetype represented his highest potential was an almost perfect spiritual alignment, because Mickey is now dedicated to helping “wounded children” with his magic, teaching them above all else that hope and self-esteem are two of the highest forms of divine magic ever provided by the heavens.

 

To survive his brutal childhood, Mickey left home after his family moved to the West Coast, and by age nineteen he had become deeply enmeshed in the drug culture of Santa Cruz. When Mickey speaks about his life from this point onward, he uses two primary voices: the Thief and the Magician/Trickster. Mickey’s Thief archetype landed in the first house representing his persona, and given that he had carved out his identity as both a drug dealer and a Magician at an early age, the Thief as the archetype representing his ego could not be more accurate.

 

As for the Magician/Trickster, which landed in his house of spirituality, Mickey developed his remarkable talent and immediately used its shadow aspect for tricks that served his drug-trafficking occupation. Eventually, however; the Magician in him became his strongest spiritual guide, inspiring his own transformation and leading to his dedication to working with magic to entertain children as well as to inspire hope in children who need healing.

 

His parents drank and smoked, but Mickey instead became a habitual user of marijuana and occasionally of cocaine. “I didn’t want to be addicts like them,” he joked. “I needed to find an addiction of my own.” As he was working his way into the drug culture, he met a locally famous magician and clown named Hocus Pocus (Carl Hansen), who had his own TV program on a local station. Mickey first heard the distinctive Danish-accented voice of Hocus Pocus as he was doing impromptu magic ticks for kids on the street. Mickey figured out the sleights-of-hand, practiced them in front of a mirror until he got them right, and then approached Hocus Pocus to show him what he had figured out. The magician was impressed by Mickey’s skill and enthusiasm-and by his tact in not revealing his knowledge in public-and took him on as an apprentice magician for the next five years.

 

At the same time he was learning to be a professional magician, Mickey was also apprenticing as a drug smuggler and thief. Beginning as a “stateside” dealer working mainly to support his own daily habit, he graduated to working on the Mexican side so that he would be able to oversee the planting and harvesting of the prime marijuana crop.

 

In this endeavor Mickey’s shadow Magician archetype became his greatest ally along with his Prostitute, aligned to his fifth house. One aspect of life that is ruled by the fifth house is creativity, not to mention luck. For Mickey and his occupation, both were essential. In the small mountain villages of Oaxaca where the best marijuana crops were grown, none of the locals had ever seen a magician, and they took his mystifying feats for the work of a brujo, as the local shaman or wizard was known. Mickey’s sleight-of-hand amazed both the children and the adults in the community, and in return they helped him and his drug crew form a network to acquire the best drugs and learn the best routes for moving them out of the country. He sold his talent, a common manifestation of the Prostitute archetype.

The ironic part of Mickey’s Magician life was that the locals, who assumed that he was an American shaman, believed that he also had the ability to heal. “Suddenly these people were bringing their sick family members to me,” he said. “I didn’t know what to do, but I couldn’t afford to make these people angry by turning them away. My partners told me to do what those TV evangelists do-just lay your hands on them. So I did, and then these people started healing! I couldn’t figure it out, but I just kept doing it. I think it was some sort of rehearsal for what I’m doing now. Mickey’s Healer archetype rests in hi twelfth house, which rules the unconscious. The last gift Mickey would ever have identified during this time in his life was a healing ability, since he knew he was a user of people as well as substances. Yet underneath his rebellious drug-culture psyche was a spirit in the process of maturation. In spite of the choices he made, his shadow Magician, Wounded Child, Victim, and all of the rest of his companions remained on the course of his mission.

In his late twenties Mickey was busted for drug running and put into a Mexican prison. During the three years he was incarcerated, he turned to prayer for comfort and began practicing yoga. In this setting Mickey encountered the Hermit within him, the archetype that rules his second house, life values. Having spent much of his time alone during his years of incarceration, he now comments, “I was never alone before, and at first it bothered me. But then I got used to it, and because I was alone, I had time to think. I prayed a lot, and I know this is going to sound weird, but I became a vegetarian. In Mexican prisons people buy their food. It’s not like here.” The food served by the state was so poor that Mickey threw in with some vegetarian inmates who grew their own produce in the prison yards. “I decided to change my diet,” he said. “My values about everything changed while I was in prison.”

 

When Mickey described these three years, I could not help but think of Saint John of the Cross, who wrote some of his most exquisite sacred poetry during his incarceration by Church officials in a prison in Toledo, Spain. Mickey was in a spiritual sanctuary, symbolically speaking, and in keeping with the true power of such places (regardless of their location-prison or paradise), he entered into a process of spiritual transformation. Eventually his spiritual life would become what he valued the most.

 

In prison the local guards were intrigued with his magical abilities and would make him perform tricks on demand, sometimes waking him up in the middle of the night with the butt end of a rifle. “Brujo! Truco!” they called, demanding the wizard perform a trick. Mickey’s natural Trickster nature inspired him to make an arrangement with a fellow inmate to assist him in performing a bizarre bit of legerdemain that he hoped would scare the superstitious guards for good. It was 1971, and this particular inmate, who was clearly ahead of his time, had his penis pierced through the foreskin with a safety pin. The next time the guards demanded Mickey do some magic for them, he alerted his companion, then showed the guards a safety pin, which he put in his hand and made disappear. At that moment, cued by a signal from Mickey, his accomplice began to scream wildly at the other end of the large common cell where they were housed. When the guards rushed over to see what was the matter, the man pulled down his pants to reveal the safety pin penetrating his penis. “They ran like hell when they saw that,” Mickey said. And they never bothered him again.

 

But the guards were the least of Mickey’s problems. As one of only fourteen American prisoners, he had to fight for survival among the 3,500 other inmates, most of whom belonged to gangs. “They were always after us, trying to get us in fights or something,” he said. “I mean, they hated us guys. It’s easy to feel like a victim, because I was a victim.” Not surprisingly, Mickey’s Victim archetype in his sixth house completely manifested in his occupation, because it was precisely his occupation that had put him into prison. During his third year in prison a riot broke out that proved to be the largest Mexican prison riot of the time.

 

I saw people being killed all around me, Mickey said. “I saw people being beaten to death and burned alive.” After the week-long riot was quelled, Mickey and the Americans were transferred to another prison, where they planned an escape that included a promise that, if caught, they would tell the guards that everyone else had gone to rendezvous in Puerto Vallarta.