Metaphysical temptations

Graeme Jefferies is a New Zealand musician with an international cult following for his musical endeavours in 1980s NZ post-punk bands Nocturnal Projections and This Kind Of Punishment, and his subsequent (and still-active) indie outfit The Cakekitchen. In his recently published memoir Time Flowing Backwards (Mosaic Press 2018), Jefferies recounts a curious period in Germany when his life took on a distinctly paranormal bent. Then living in Recklinghausen, Jefferies’s German wife developed an interest in New Age practices courtesy of a friend who introduced her to the use of pendulums as a divination technique. However, this

interest quickly got out of hand for Jefferies as his wife “drifted into a crowd that had more to do with faith healing, ghost healing, and even some aspects of black magic”.

His wife quickly succumbed to the metaphysical temptations of magic and spiritualism, which Jefferies evocatively describes in the following passage: “To this day, I don’t really understand some of the things I saw during her initiations into some of these practices. She had a communication with what she said was her spirit guardian. You could actually see it sometimes. It was unknowable and otherworldly. I can’t really compare it to anything else that’s describable in terms of human language. It certainly wasn’t human. It presented itself as a

form of crystallized light. It could penetrate a three-foot-wide stone wall like it was a pound of butter. It may have been more than just one entity.

“There was no way of really knowing what she was immersing herself in. To this day, I don’t really know what these things really were but she trusted them implicitly. Things were going seriously wrong. The rogues and the vagabonds of the spirit world were not my cup of tea. They could tell you anything. I only wanted to know about Reiki to fix myself up or maybe one of my friends, but these strange creatures of light were becoming really important to [her]”.

The marriage gradually foundered as her behaviour became more and more erratic, leaving Jefferies several times in order

to find herself as a healer, and developing paranoia “about all the things that other astral entities could do”; a talented painter, these fears led her to destroy some of her best work. In these respects, Jefferies’s account can be read as a contemporary reallife version of time-honoured cautionary tales about the dangers of dabbling in the occult. However, Jefferies also provides something of a happy ending, stating that his ex-wife eventually “went on to do really great things in healing and had a lot of success with healing horses. There’s big money in the gee-gees, and she flew all over Europe giving winners a helping hand and made and lost several fortunes along the way” (pp 104-106).

Dean Ballinger

Hamilton, New Zealand