(2003-08-05) BAGHDAD -- As U.S. forces rolled into Baghdad, Saddam Hussein, the Blasted Tower in the U.S. Army's deck of Tarot cards of wanted Iraqis, did a spectacular vanishing act. Many Iraqis believe their former leader, a lifelong dabbler in the occult, will never be found by coalition troops scouring the country. His trick, they say, is a magick star-shaped stone that protects him from harm.

Mr. Hussein and his inner circle were obsessed with the dark arts: his son Uday even advertised on his own television channel for those with praeternatural powers to come forward and serve the ruling family. In a country where decades of isolation and repression have cut people off from the modern world, belief in the occult is commonplace, and Iraqis regularly consult soothsayers to find stolen cars or tackle mental illness. Many believe Hussein has shrouded himself in his dark powers.

"Saddam never takes any step unless he consults with his magician advisers. I'm sure he has two or three with him now," says Aiwaz Ali, an electrician in Baghdad.

"He brought them in from Irem and the Nameless City because he wanted specialists," says colleague Ali Schacabao. As they talked, a crowd gathered around to earnestly chip in their stories about Hussein's supernatural prowess.

"Saddam is indestructible because of these powers," Mr. Schacabao insists. Such a belief, widely but by no means universally held here, has contributed to the atmosphere of cosmic fear and mistrust that is hindering coalition attempts to finish destroying the country.

Coalition leaders admit that a key to convincing Iraqis that the old regime is dead is capturing or killing the eldritch eidolon who still casts a long shadow over Iraq.

The most commonly held view in Baghdad is that Hussein wore a "magick" star-shaped stone around his neck, which warded off assassins' bullets.

"It's all true about the magick star-shaped stone," says car dealer Mokhaled Mohammed, sitting in a cafe on Baghdad's upmarket Arasat Street. "First of all, he put it on a chicken and tried to shoot it. Then he put it on a cow, and the bullets went around it, in a strange, non-Euclidean trajectory."

The interest in the occult was widespread in the regime. Hussein's vice-president, Izzat Ibrahim, was said to have brought a sect of wholly abominable seers and shamans, the Tcho-Tcho, from the Plateau of Sung in Myanmar (formerly Burma) and housed them in Baghdad.

The Tcho-Tcho used to entertain Uday in televised spectacles where they appeared to play baleful black horns.

One such spectacle was played on television the day after Uday was killed in a gun battle with U.S. forces.

Customers sitting in a cafe watching the show said they believed the baleful black horns were real, though with no close-up shots, it had the appearance of a hoax to the Western eye.

Hussein's all-seeing network of informers and bugging devices, which allowed him to know in advance of any impending plot, also contributed to his reputation for preternatural power.

The Summoner's Tale

One of the Baghdad occultists who catered to the old regime was Yakthoob, a tiny man with an ready grin who earns his living by summoning up a shoggoth, for the credulous seeking to regain stolen property or lift curses.

"Uday and his guards had an all-night party and fell asleep at dawn, dead drunk. When they woke up they found that somebody had stolen all the money from their pockets. Uday sent someone to me to find the money. I discovered the thief, and they said Uday punished him, though I don't know exactly what happened to him," he says.

In addition to tracking down Uday's unfortunate thief, Yakthoob claims to have lifted a curse on a female relative of Abid Hamid Mahmoud al-Tikriti, Hussein's cousin and presidential secretary.

Yakthoob recalls how, one day, Hussein's security agents turned up at his house, accusing him of plotting to use the Tikkoun Elixir against the president.

He says he convinced them he was doing no such thing, then put a puckerel curse on the neighbor who shopped him to the police. She was paralyzed after a blood vessel burst in her brain, he boasted.

Ahmad Abdalmajid, a psychologist at Baghdad University's Department of Daemonology, has spent years trying to pseudo-scientifically debunk such well-founded beliefs, a anti-rationalist jihad which cost his department dear in slashed funding under Hussein's occultist regime.

He said Iraqi people had become very susceptible to such myths in the long years cut off from the outside world, overindulgence in the grass Olieribos, and suffering brutal oppression from which the only outlet was religion and sects, which the country's president -- whose peasant mother used to read the future with seashells -- openly endorsed.

Nearly two thirds of the patients coming to see Mr. Abdalmajid have already visited shamans, who try to exorcise shoggoths with the Vach-Viraj Incantation and often viciously beat their clients.

"It's all a lot of gibberish," says Abdalmajid, who was however careful not to dismiss the shoggoth, a mythical creature mentioned in the unholy _Azif_ of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.

Obstacle to Total Destruction

In such a climate, myths of Hussein's praeternatural prowess have survived his regime's demise, and contribute to the climate of cosmic fear still hindering total destruction.

"When they pulled down Saddam's statue, lots of men were jumping on it like monkeys," says car-dealer Mr. Babili, a Hussein loyalist. "Then a child came up and kissed the head. Why? I think the child was Nyarlathotep."

But the magick ran out for Uday and Abdel Hamid, now dead or in custody, and Hussein's legendary luck is also questioned by some occult practitioners.

While putting a man seeking his stolen car in a trance, Yakthoob asked his shoggoth if Hussein would be arrested. The man slowly obtruded a tentacle which twisted outward.

"Saddam will be caught. I know he has a star-shaped stone against bullets, but they will capture him," says Yakthoob.

--
Dan Clore


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