ADULT Magazine Issue Two
September 2014
By Durga Chew-Bose
Cloistered halfway between Avenues B and C on 6th Street in Alphabet City is a densely green and winding community garden that, in an aerial photograph of the acre-sized lot, would look something like a childhood board game—like an East Village Candy Land with a cedar pagoda and grape arbor, a stone grotto and a koi fish pond instead of a Chocolate Swamp, and on this May morning, pink peony shrubs so generously in bloom that they look pleated and poufed from tissue paper. “I’m taking you to the most special place,” says Lexa Rosean, unlocking the gate. “I need to find pockets of things like this, because you need to work to make the city worth living in.”
Having met Roséan, a Wiccan high priestess and neo-Gardnerian Minoan witch, and Rosie, her half-Beagle, half-Pekingese “Peegle,” outside their apartment and tagged along to a pet store for Rosie’s morning treat, then to Tompkins Square Park where Rosie ran around with Dolly, a scraggly rescue with a sprouting Mohawk, I soon follow them to the garden, down a pathway, and up a short flight of steps to what Roséan calls the “treehouse.” It’s an indoor space cooled by outdoor shade and imbued with the dewy damp freshness which calls to mind those first and last mornings that bookend summer. As she and I sit on the balcony, Rosie plopping herself on a cushioned bench inside, the only sign of Manhattan’s dissonant grind is an occasional car horn and the echo of children playing in a nearby schoolyard.
Pockets of things, emptied and arranged as if on an altar. I’m spellbound.
Where does one begin with a witch doctor psychic? Roséan was born in Miami, lived peripatetically as a child, and was raised by what she terms “born-again Jews.” Impatient to shed the faith after being excommunicated by a council of Rabbis for being gay, she moved to New York in the ‘80s to attend Yeshiva University. In a profile published in the Jewish Week in 1999, Roséan is quoted as saying, “I’d been feeling on the outs with Orthodoxy, where I could be only a wife or a mother. What attracted me to witchcraft was that I could be a seductress, a warrior, a poet.”
Before her enrollment at Yeshiva, there was no Drama major at the college. Roséan fought to establish one; it still exists today. As part of her inaugurated studies, Roséan interned at the Actors Studio, where she studied with Lee Strasberg and Shelley Winters. It was during this time that Roséan’s childhood predilection for what we might call “the craft” came back. “I was interested in [Wicca] as soon as I could read,” she says. She came by it honestly. “My mother was born with a caul, which means the sac doesn’t break, so the baby is sort of born with a veil,” says Roséan. “These children are considered to be special or have some psychic ability. My mother was absolutely psychic, but she didn’t pursue it. She had the gift though. She knew things.”
In the mid ‘80s, Roséan undertook an arduous three-year training process under the tutelage of Lady Rhea, known as the Witch Queen of New York. At Magickal Childe, a store on West 19th street that functioned as a hub for the Neo-Pagan New York community from the ’70s well into the ‘90s, Roséan immersed herself in the occult. “When I was younger I would walk down the street and just get hit with stuff—feelings about strangers—and it was overwhelming, and it messed me up,” she says as the sun breaches a patch of clouds, highlighting her cropped, copper-hued hair. “I’m very sensitive. So I learned from my high priestesses to shut that down. I had to.” If her language sounds therapeutical, it’s not a coincidence; Roséan is getting her Masters in in Mental Health Counseling, and although the alloy of her craft and counseling is, she confesses, “a delicate issue,” it’s rarer than she believes it should be. “Freud at the end of his life regretted that he didn’t study the Occult,” she says. “But he was really pushing to legitimize psychoanalysis, and he had to distance himself from the Occult in order to do that.”
As a priestess and therapist in New York, Roséan’s most common spells have to do not only with love and money, but also with real estate. She does a lot of apartment hunting-related incantations. “I’ve also done a lot of spells for fertility,” she adds, smiling, her lips a thin pleat widening from cheek to cheek. When I ask if she’s noticed a sudden growth in the regional popularity of occultishness, pop culturally speaking, she nods. “In the ‘90s when witches became popular it was scary to me, like, ‘Oh we’re popular now, what happens after,” she says. “But now [the resurgence of interest] feels more grounded. Look, the earth is in trouble. Wicca, the witches, it’s about the earth religion. The earth mother, the goddess; it’s very connected with ecology and women. Although men of course are also part of this. I never like to leave the men out.”
“Are you ever tempted to leave the men out?” I ask.
“No.”
“Have you ever been?”
“When I was young, very young, early 20s, oh yeah. I wanted to leave the men out. But you can’t. I reached a point when it was about the ying and the yang. The masculine and feminine in each of us. There’s a God and a Goddess.”
Since it’s the beginning of May, Roséan has just returned from the Beltane festivities upstate, celebrating the first of the month—a time between the spring equinox and summer solstice—with traditional Gaelic May Day things (maypoles, bright ribbons, bonfires). “You know, when I was a young pagan, we didn’t have that,” she says. “I think all of my contemporaries and those younger than me went out and had families and now there are a bunch of pagan teenagers running around. It’s pretty terrific.”
Roséan looks down at the garden where now many people have gathered, sitting on benches or spotting a pair of turtles settled on a rock in the pond. But mostly, everyone is admiring the flowers that are big and full in bloom. “Libidinal energy—it’s this time of year. May is the sexiest time of the year!” she exclaims. “This is the time the God and the Goddess are of equal strength and power. They’re mating and that’s the idea of all the birth and all the flowers.” Then, she grins. “I like the word randy better than horny. It’s such a nice word. Randy! This is the randy time!” she whoops. “I feel like New Yorkers sometimes forget about sex because there’s such a money stress, but you know, for me, especially as I get older, the sexual energy is the life force energy. Caring for this garden is a life force energy. Caring for Rosie is a life force energy. That’s the number one thing.”
Cloistered halfway between Avenues B and C on 6th Street in Alphabet City is a densely green and winding community garden that, in an aerial photograph of the acre-sized lot, would look something like a childhood board game—like an East Village Candy Land with a cedar pagoda and grape arbor, a stone grotto and a koi fish pond instead of a Chocolate Swamp, and on this May morning, pink peony shrubs so generously in bloom that they look pleated and poufed from tissue paper. “I’m taking you to the most special place,” says Lexa Rosean, unlocking the gate. “I need to find pockets of things like this, because you need to work to make the city worth living in.”
Having met Roséan, a Wiccan high priestess and neo-Gardnerian Minoan witch, and Rosie, her half-Beagle, half-Pekingese “Peegle,” outside their apartment and tagged along to a pet store for Rosie’s morning treat, then to Tompkins Square Park where Rosie ran around with Dolly, a scraggly rescue with a sprouting Mohawk, I soon follow them to the garden, down a pathway, and up a short flight of steps to what Roséan calls the “treehouse.” It’s an indoor space cooled by outdoor shade and imbued with the dewy damp freshness which calls to mind those first and last mornings that bookend summer. As she and I sit on the balcony, Rosie plopping herself on a cushioned bench inside, the only sign of Manhattan’s dissonant grind is an occasional car horn and the echo of children playing in a nearby schoolyard.
Pockets of things, emptied and arranged as if on an altar. I’m spellbound.
Where does one begin with a witch doctor psychic? Roséan was born in Miami, lived peripatetically as a child, and was raised by what she terms “born-again Jews.” Impatient to shed the faith after being excommunicated by a council of Rabbis for being gay, she moved to New York in the ‘80s to attend Yeshiva University. In a profile published in the Jewish Week in 1999, Roséan is quoted as saying, “I’d been feeling on the outs with Orthodoxy, where I could be only a wife or a mother. What attracted me to witchcraft was that I could be a seductress, a warrior, a poet.”
Before her enrollment at Yeshiva, there was no Drama major at the college. Roséan fought to establish one; it still exists today. As part of her inaugurated studies, Roséan interned at the Actors Studio, where she studied with Lee Strasberg and Shelley Winters. It was during this time that Roséan’s childhood predilection for what we might call “the craft” came back. “I was interested in [Wicca] as soon as I could read,” she says. She came by it honestly. “My mother was born with a caul, which means the sac doesn’t break, so the baby is sort of born with a veil,” says Roséan. “These children are considered to be special or have some psychic ability. My mother was absolutely psychic, but she didn’t pursue it. She had the gift though. She knew things.”
In the mid ‘80s, Roséan undertook an arduous three-year training process under the tutelage of Lady Rhea, known as the Witch Queen of New York. At Magickal Childe, a store on West 19th street that functioned as a hub for the Neo-Pagan New York community from the ’70s well into the ‘90s, Roséan immersed herself in the occult. “When I was younger I would walk down the street and just get hit with stuff—feelings about strangers—and it was overwhelming, and it messed me up,” she says as the sun breaches a patch of clouds, highlighting her cropped, copper-hued hair. “I’m very sensitive. So I learned from my high priestesses to shut that down. I had to.” If her language sounds therapeutical, it’s not a coincidence; Roséan is getting her Masters in in Mental Health Counseling, and although the alloy of her craft and counseling is, she confesses, “a delicate issue,” it’s rarer than she believes it should be. “Freud at the end of his life regretted that he didn’t study the Occult,” she says. “But he was really pushing to legitimize psychoanalysis, and he had to distance himself from the Occult in order to do that.”
As a priestess and therapist in New York, Roséan’s most common spells have to do not only with love and money, but also with real estate. She does a lot of apartment hunting-related incantations. “I’ve also done a lot of spells for fertility,” she adds, smiling, her lips a thin pleat widening from cheek to cheek. When I ask if she’s noticed a sudden growth in the regional popularity of occultishness, pop culturally speaking, she nods. “In the ‘90s when witches became popular it was scary to me, like, ‘Oh we’re popular now, what happens after,” she says. “But now [the resurgence of interest] feels more grounded. Look, the earth is in trouble. Wicca, the witches, it’s about the earth religion. The earth mother, the goddess; it’s very connected with ecology and women. Although men of course are also part of this. I never like to leave the men out.”
“Are you ever tempted to leave the men out?” I ask.
“No.”
“Have you ever been?”
“When I was young, very young, early 20s, oh yeah. I wanted to leave the men out. But you can’t. I reached a point when it was about the ying and the yang. The masculine and feminine in each of us. There’s a God and a Goddess.”
Since it’s the beginning of May, Roséan has just returned from the Beltane festivities upstate, celebrating the first of the month—a time between the spring equinox and summer solstice—with traditional Gaelic May Day things (maypoles, bright ribbons, bonfires). “You know, when I was a young pagan, we didn’t have that,” she says. “I think all of my contemporaries and those younger than me went out and had families and now there are a bunch of pagan teenagers running around. It’s pretty terrific.”
Roséan looks down at the garden where now many people have gathered, sitting on benches or spotting a pair of turtles settled on a rock in the pond. But mostly, everyone is admiring the flowers that are big and full in bloom. “Libidinal energy—it’s this time of year. May is the sexiest time of the year!” she exclaims. “This is the time the God and the Goddess are of equal strength and power. They’re mating and that’s the idea of all the birth and all the flowers.” Then, she grins. “I like the word randy better than horny. It’s such a nice word. Randy! This is the randy time!” she whoops. “I feel like New Yorkers sometimes forget about sex because there’s such a money stress, but you know, for me, especially as I get older, the sexual energy is the life force energy. Caring for this garden is a life force energy. Caring for Rosie is a life force energy. That’s the number one thing.”