My grandmother sent us to catch a frog when I was about 13. Down to the riverbank we went, me and my cousins, tingling with the unease endemic to being assigned a task you don’t quite understand. In those days we used to catch frogs for the sport of it, and cruelly inflate them and turn them into balloons, but the activity earned us rebuke from our elders. Why my grandma — who always warned us against the practice and often enforced the prohibition with a stick — suddenly insisted upon the forbidden activity was unclear. Her son, my uncle, was 35 and still unmarried. This, apparently, required intervention from higher powers at the expense of a common frog. We were conscripted to provide the goods for a ritual. The frog was placed beneath my uncle’s pillow without his knowledge and we waited to see if he would dream of his future bride. Over breakfast, grandma probed him casually. She asked whether he’d dreamed anything interesting the night before. My uncle first couldn’t recall exactly what his dream had been about — he had been drinking with his pals earlier that evening, you see. This irritated her, a communist woman and the wife of the kolkhoz chairman, well versed in interrogations. She pressed for answers like a good government inquisitor, insisting he jog his memory. Under pressure, my uncle said he may have seen a snake or a reptile of some sort. The laughter that followed is what I remember best. Soon thereafter my uncle was roped into an arranged marriage and my grandma’s lifelong struggle with her daughter-in-law began. For the rest of her life, she called her daughter-in-law a “serpent.” Recently the serpent slithered up from the murky recesses of my childhood memories, summoned by an invitation I received from friends in Washington, DC. “Sip and See Your Future,” the subject line read. A tarot card reader was selling us the opportunity to glimpse our romantic futures. Back home in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, Turkish coffee fortune telling was a common activity. We would drink our coffee thick and sweet, turn the cup upside down on the saucer, wait for it to cool, then press our thumbs into the dark deposit and read the shapes and patterns left behind. That is how we passed the time. And there were other such methods. The women I knew growing up had elaborate rituals for seeing their future husbands. They would tie a ring to a thread with a small cross, drop it in water, then hold it up to a mirror, hoping to see the face of a future spouse in the reflection. Or they would eat salty bread baked by a happily married woman before bed, believing their soulmate would appear in their dreams. Men used the occult differently. Among teenage boys, there was a widespread belief that if you smeared lizard blood on your eyeglasses, you could see through girls’ clothing. And there were supernatural strategies that were equally useful to everyone. Students believed that placing a snake’s tongue under your pillow the night before an exam would make you dream the test questions. (What is it about human nature that tricks us into believing that hunting down and cutting out a snake’s tongue is easier than studying for a test?) I never imagined that this sort of superstitious thinking would follow me to America, or that I would find myself in Washington, DC, about to have my cards read. After all, I had left all that nonsense behind: the bad coffee, the bargaining with fate, the superstitions of a collapsing Soviet experiment. I had moved to America, to the rational capital of the world, where people made decisions based on evidence. Right? The Pew Research Center, that ultra-American oracle, published a survey in 2024 that found that 30% of American adults consult astrology, tarot cards, or fortune tellers at least once a year. Women are nearly twice as likely as men to engage in such practices (35% versus 18%). Among women aged 18 to 49, the numbers are higher: 43% say they believe in astrology and 46% consult it at least annually. The revival of this brand of spirituality and of witchcraft is often explained as a consequence of declining traditional religion. In 1972, just 5% of Americans described themselves as religiously unaffiliated. Today that figure stands at roughly 30%. Churches weakened, but the need for meaning did not. At the same time, marriage, friendship, and sex have all become less common. In 1960, 59% of Americans aged 18 to 29 were married; by 2010, that number had dropped to 20%. The median age of a first marriage has risen by about seven years since 1960. But hope springs eternal, doesn’t it? Maybe tarot would succeed where Hinge had failed. Even a rational person prefers magic to uncertainty. We knew this all too well in the former Soviet Union. Communism was intended to create a new man, a rational, scientific man who would not dabble in magic or religion. Occultism and witchcraft were criminalized. Fortune tellers, often accused of “anti-state activity,” were prosecuted. Faith, it turns out, is harder to kill than Romanovs. In 1989, as the Soviet Union unraveled, a psychotherapist named Anatoly Kashpirovsky appeared on state television, staring into the camera and performing mass hypnosis to calm a panicked population. An estimated 87% of viewers tuned in, streets emptied, and people insisted they were healed while Kashpirovsky conveniently called for renewed faith in the government and communism itself. The Soviet state, supposedly built on rejecting spirituality, spent its final days broadcasting mass hypnosis to save itself. Across fifteen newly independent republics, as the old order dissolved, people turned to anything that promised salvation, including magic and sorcery. When one of my relatives left his wife for another woman, his family knew why immediately: she had cast a spell on him. How else to explain it? They searched and found the evidence: clothes and
Capital Magic
