The advice from tarot and other belief systems freed her mind from preset patterns and traditional thinking; it prompted her to consider problems from fresh angles. She believed the universe had its own force, and was an extension of that force.
Let’s get to know the Yoko who exists outside of the heavy shadow of the fab four and dismissive eyerolls of the rock n roll crowd. The one who said "Music, words, and silence - they are all spells. They carry energy, they change perception."
The one who said: "Everyday life is full of rituals. When you do them consciously, when you perform them with intention, they become magic."
Listen now, transcript below
As promised, HERE is Jess Hundley's interview with Yoko.
TRANSCRIPT
Listen, I’m no stranger to name calling, having my visions and ideas mocked. I’ve been critiqued and jeered at because of my art, appearance, my personality. And I’m proud to say that none of that ever really stopped me for too long. When I’m in the flow, the wind that gets knocked out of me pushes into my sails and drives me further. I’m willing to take the heat if that’s the price of freedom. When I got married I didn’t change my name. This identity, the one I’m sitting inside now, was hard fought. My mother has had three last names, her father’s and two husbands’, and the idea of changing ownership just never resonated with my feminist ethos. Of course there are a million reasons why you might want to change your name, and I support all of them, but me, I’m Amy Torok, I’m Amy T. And I always will be. In name and vision. I’m a witch. I don’t care what they say.
Now take that idea and times it by a million.
How does a conceptual artist from an affluent family in Japan become, for a moment, the most hated woman in music, if not the world? Well… one of the first steps is to call her a Witch. Then use her name as shorthand to describe music WAGs who stick their noses into boy bands and ruin them. I’ve been called a Yoko myself.
Cara Kulwicki wrote “Yoko Ono’s name is tossed around as an insult, sometimes “jokingly,” sometimes really and truly hatefully. Any woman who dates a male band member and expects to be treated like a person, or any woman who is seen to in some way cause a change in a male artist of any kind, is particularly at risk of being called “Yoko.” To a lesser extent, so is any woman who expects to be given equal consideration as her partner and her partner’s friends friends. Why is it an insult, exactly? Well, because “everyone” hates Yoko Ono. She’s a mentally unbalanced, scheming, money-grubbing, castrating bitch. Oh, and she broke up the Beatles. Or so they say.”
As rumors swirled around her that she had enchanted or hypnotized a Beatle with a black magic love spell that made him powerless against her will, Yoko somehow managed to stay the course as artist, activist, and disrupter, and shocked the world by declaring, “Yes, I’m a witch.”
Through it all, and this is maybe her most amazing achievement, she remained Yoko Ono, in name, in vision, in character.
Literally ALL of Yoko’s art is an invitation, a provocation, and a spell. She asks us to imagine worlds without borders, without war, no heaven, no hell, no rules that tell us who gets to be heard and who must remain silent, rules about what constitutes music and art…. For decades, the media reduced her to a punchline, a scapegoat for the rage of men who couldn’t bear the sight of a woman who dared to be visionary. But Yoko refused to be silenced.
She carried the scars of war and displacement, and turned them into instruction pieces, tiny rituals of transformation. She taught us that art could be a whispered command, a chance to rewire consciousness: “Breathe. Count the stars. Listen to the sound of the earth turning.” Not just songs, sculptures, poems or installations, all the pieces of Yoko Ono’s oeuvre were, are, invitations to magic. She has always been an oracle in her own right, using her voice, her body, her art, as portals to liberation through imagination. Yoko reminds us that vulnerability is power, that joy can be a revolutionary act, that peace is not passive but ferocious. That War Is Over (if we want it).
She said: "I think that all women are witches, in the sense that a witch is a magical being. And a wizard, which is a male version of a witch, is kind of revered, and people respect wizards. But a witch, my god, we have to burn them. It’s the male chauvinistic society that we’re living in for the longest time, 3,000 years or whatever. And so I just wanted to point out the fact that men and women are magical beings. We are very blessed that way, so I’m just bringing that out. Don’t be scared of witches, because we are good witches, and you should appreciate our magical power.”
Pitchfork, February 12, 2007.
Despite all of her magical works, artistic engagement of all six senses, despite her obsession with the esoteric, consulting psychics, numerologists and astrologers before making any moves, shuffling tarot cards at business meetings, perhaps what makes Yoko the most witchy is her persecution. Fear, superstition, and social control have intersected with racism and misogyny throughout history. Accusations of Witchcraft, trials and executions often followed unexplained illness, crop failures, livestock deaths, or any sudden misfortunes. Marginalized or non-conforming women - widows, healers, outspoken women - were at highest risk. And in this history, we find Yoko: the woman who broke up the world’s most beloved band. The woman who poisoned the Beatles’ apple.
But the fact is, The Beatles were on a slow trajectory toward fragmentation before Yoko, driven by creative divergence, business disputes, and personal growth. Yoko’s arrival didn’t start the unraveling, but John Lennon’s insistence that Yoko be involved in HIS creative process gave the other Beatles someone, something on whom to focus their growing disdain for each other, and for the band that formed their identities.
And yet, none of that fragmentation comes up when we talk about the Beatles’ breakup. We blame Yoko, forgetting that she was an established and respected artist before she ever met John. That she was a visionary, and it was her creative spirit that attracted him to her in the first place.
I’m gonna go on a bit of a tangent here so bear with me: there’s a clip you can watch on youtube of John Lennon playing music with Chuck Berry, a man often hailed as the inventor of rock n roll. Yoko is doing background vocals, and I admit, her famous or infamous primal, guttural screeching feels at odds with the classic chugga chugga of the birth of rock n roll. The clip went viral because of Chuck Berry’s face as he reacts to Yoko’s singing. Yoko is again the punchline. Yoko is a joke, and Chuck Berry is a victim of Yoko’s caterwaul. But yall, Chuck Berry has been accused of assaulting a woman at a New York hotel, was sued by female staff at his restaurant for putting hidden cameras in the women’s bathroom. BUT He had a statue devoted to him in Missouri. And John too had a history of violence and bad behaviour. But in the archive of history, it’s Yoko who is the villain in this story. Because she dared to experiment in the face of sacrosanct, antique rocknroll.
When we talk about Yoko’s ‘caterwauling’ we leave out something important. Yoko can sing, she proves it on albums like Double Fantasy where her voice rings out clear and true. She chose to make her guttural noises as an expression of pain, suffering, war, and desire - keening and howling and silence. It’s not like John Cage (whom Yoko’s gang called JC - John Cage, Jesus Christ, a deity of the avant-garde) made musical pieces of silence and destruction because he couldn’t play piano. He was a skilled and gifted pianist who chose to make confrontational art instead. Same goes for Nam June Paik. Or Marcel Duchamp, who was an excellent painter, but instead hung a urinal on a wall. Yoko was formally trained in Japanese singing, but said, “I took and morphed my vocalization consciously from Kabuki and Noh.” It wasn’t ineptitude. It was a choice.
I click a short clip of the Chuck Berry incident that was posted just one year ago. It has 2 million views and 2 thousand comments.
The comments on the video aren't surprising.
“There are three musical legends in this video: Lennon, Berry, and the guy who unplugged Yoko's microphone.”
“The lack of self-awareness and disrespect by that woman is remarkable.”
“I'm starting to think John hired someone to kill him.”
“60 years of bashing Yoko Ono is not near enough.”
“Rule #1: Never bring your wife or girlfriend into the studio”
And of course the ever present: “The wrong person got shot.”
Again, I can’t imagine the fortitude required to continue in the face of such vitriol, still coming. “60 years of bashing Yoko Ono is not near enough.” Maybe I would change my name, shrink back into the hedges, make myself small - but Yoko remained Yoko Ono. in name, in vision, in character. Make no mistake, Yoko Ono is a witch, but it’s her commitment to identity, vision and imagination that, for me, warrants her place in the Missing Witches pantheon. Yoko Ono remains Yoko Ono.
So for today, and I say this as a fan and lover of the Beatles, fuck all this rocknroll boys club no cock no rock youtube noise. Let’s get to know the Yoko who exists outside of the heavy shadow of the fab four, and dismissive eyerolls of the rock n roll crowd. The one who said "Music, words, and silence - they are all spells. They carry energy, they change perception."
The one who said: "Everyday life is full of rituals. When you do them consciously, when you perform them with intention, they become magic."
The one who sang:
Yes, i'm a witch
I'm a bitch
I don't care what you say
My voice is real
My voice speaks truth
I don't fit in your ways
I'm not gonna die for you
You might as well face the truth
I'm gonna stick around for quite awhile
We're gonna say
We're gonna try
We're gonna try it our way
We've been repressed
We've been depressed
Suppression all the way
We're not gonna die for you
We're not seeking vengeance
But we're not gonna kill ourselves for your convenience
Each time we don't say what we wanna say, we're dying
Each time we close our minds to how we feel, we're dying
Each time we gotta do what we wanna do, we're living
Each time we're open to what we see and hear, we're living
Of these lyrics, Jessica Hundley wrote: Yoko Ono wrote these words in 1974, bristling at media backlash over her relationship with John Lennon, targeting her righteous indignation at the press, at the patriarchy, at the brittle unyielding edifice of the cultural establishment. Ono was and remains a witch - defiant, powerful, a magickal being, manifesting the spell of creative action. By her very existence she defies stereotype. By proclaiming herself a witch, she transforms a legacy of persecution into an expression of empowerment. (LoE Witchcraft p9)
Yoko Ono was born in Tokyo in 1933, straight into a life of contradictions. Wealth and devastation, tradition and dislocation. And this was a kind of aesthetic that she carried throughout her life. For his 40th birthday, Yoko gave John a homemade tie that she had knitted herself, plus a 25k dollar wristwatch… Her father was a banker, her mother, an artist. During the Second World War, she and her family fled to the countryside as Tokyo burned. She remembers hunger, remembers trading her family’s possessions for food, remembers lying on the ground as bombs fell, staring at the sky and imagining she could pull the clouds down like curtains. Out of devastation, she learned the witch’s first lesson: when reality collapses, imagination becomes survival.
In Nagano, Yoko was with her younger brother Kei and she felt responsible for him.”We were starving, my brother looking extremely sad. I remember thinking why don’t we make a menu that would really make us feel good.
Yoko told Kei, “ how about starting with ice cream “she went on “lying on our backs, looking up at the sky through an opening in the roof. We exchanged menus in the air and used our powers of visualization to survive. “
“We made those menus. We imagined the food,” Kei said “that was my sister‘s first conceptual art piece."
And so it was that young Yoko found the medium for her art: imagination.
The artist and musician Laurie Anderson observed “Yoko had this revolutionary idea that art happens mainly in your head, which is where her work manifest and art historian and curator Rico told me he said “she is a conceptual artist who said ‘you don’t need an object or material to create art. Basically all you need is your mind. You can construct a painting in your head. In your mind, you can create an event.’ It was a new concept of what art could be and who could make it.”
It was Witchcraft.
In 1952, Yoko’s father’s work carried the family back to the United States where they had been, for a time, before the war. Yoko arrived in New York and enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College, a place alive with philosophy, literature, and avant-garde whispers.
In New York, Yoko would carry that memory of bombs and imaginary ice cream forward. The war had taught her that everything can vanish, that the ground beneath your feet is never certain. But she also learned that the invisible is powerful. Thought, breath, and vision were tools as real as stone, sounds, words and paint.
New York in the 1950s had its own high magic: jazz clubs, Beat poets, painters and thinkers tearing open and reconstructing reality. Yoko stepped into this electric current, carrying with her the scars of war, the discipline of survival, and the power of imagination. In classrooms and lofts, she began to translate her visions into instructions, her dreams into art, her voice into a tool of expression and invocation.
For Yoko, New York was another portal, and it was there that Yoko began to formalize her imaginative weaving of the creative spells that would make her famous.
Yoko was there when artist George Maciunus chose the name Fluxus for a fledgling communal art project, and in fact, her makeshift loft gallery helped inspire and foster the movement. She was already practicing what Fluxus preached - turning life into ritual, art into instruction, imagination into event.
Fluxus became an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers, and poets who valued process over product, and experience over definition, and rejected cold, sterile galleries in favour of events, happenings, and experimentation. Fluxus is famous in the avant garde world, artists like the aforementioned John Cage and Nam June Paik…Until I started researching for this episode, I didn’t even know Yoko was a member. Like the world wanted me to think she didn’t exist until John Lennon plucked her from obscurity.
Anyway. With Fluxus in the early 1960s, Yoko found a kind of constellation of artists like her, bent on dissolving the boundaries between art and life. Fluxus was a revolution against the rigidity of art institutions. Its artists sought to strip art of its preciousness and return it to the everyday, to laughter, to breath. To imagination.
Yoko’s loft in New York became one of the epicentres. She opened her space to concerts, happenings, performances that blurred music, poetry, silence, and chance. Here, John Cage, La Monte Young, and the Fluxus circle gathered with Yoko at the center, weaving her delicate webs. Her “instruction pieces” fit seamlessly into this ethos: art as event, art as ritual, art as suggestion. “Imagine pulling the sky down. Imagine painting with your breath.” The invitation was magic.
Fluxus celebrated impermanence, and Yoko embraced it with a witch’s gaze. Her works asked participants not to consume but to transform. To sit with emptiness and dissatisfaction. To notice beauty in the mundane, pull clouds from teh sky. To contribute to and participate in the spell of possibility. In Fluxus, Yoko found her kin, but more than that - she sharpened her own practice of art as invocation, as opening, as a doorway into the unseen.
Inspired by the Dada manifesto by Tristan Tzara, Maciunas wrote a manifesto for Fluxus. The movements mission: “purge the world of bourgeois, sickness, intellectual professional, and commercialized culture. Purge the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, illusionist, art, mathematical art. Purge the world of Europeanism! “Fluxus wood “promote a revolutionary flood and tied in art. Promote living art, anti-art, promote non-art reality to be grasped by all people’s not only critics, dilettante and professional professionals.”
None of the other members signed it though. Maybe a manifesto felt too permanent, too contractual.
This feels like a good time to just straight up list some of Yoko’s major artworks from the 1960s. Just to take this moment to really cast a light on them, and consider how many of the concepts are de rigeur in today’s artworld, what a trailblazer Yoko was:
Painting to be Stepped On 1960 - a conceptual piece inviting viewers to walk on the painting, challenging place and reverence.
Bag Piece 1964 - participants interact from inside a cloth bag, an experiment in identity and ego
Play It By Trust 1966 - a white chess set where both sides are white, symbolizing the futility of conflict
Film No. 4 (Bottoms) 1966 - closeups of naked walking bums, “To get to know people from the bottom up”
While much ink has been spilled and many biographies exist, if you really want to get to know the inner workings of Yoko, I suggest picking up Grapefruit (a collection of her instructional pieces in book form) to truly get into her state of mind. She calls them instructions, but the Witch in you will recognize them as mini spells of consciousness, and perspective - tools to, as Genesis P-Orrige commanded, ‘seize the means of perception.’
“EARTH PIECE
Listen to the sound of the earth turning.
1963 spring”
“TUNAFISH SANDWICH PIECE
Imagine one thousand suns in the
sky at the same time.
Let them shine for one hour.
Then, let them gradually melt
Into the sky.
Make one tunafish sandwich and eat.
1964 spring”
Many of the pieces reflected her inner turmoil. “Voice piece for soprano” from 1961 red:
Scream
- against the wind
- against the wall
- against they sky
“Blood piece” from 1960 read:
Use your blood to paint.
Keep painting until you faint. (a)
Keep painting until you die. (b)
It was Yoko’s second husband, Tony Cox who suggested the Grapefruit book, turning years of instructional art and poetry into a book. But his motives were real world. It’s hard to sell art that exists only in the mind.
Yes, Yoko was married twice before John. And truly, Yoko's three marriages almost appear as stages in a lifelong experimental ritual of becoming, each entwined with a phase of her art and exploration.
With Toshi Ichiyanagi, the young avant-garde composer, Yoko leaned into the experimental musical ferment of postwar New York.
Her second marriage, to Anthony Cox, was a time of films, staged happenings. These were those Fluxus years, years of opening herself to the world, asking strangers to cut her clothing away in Cut Piece, daring vulnerability to be the medium of transformation. It’s worth noting that Cut piece pre-dates Marina Abromovich’s admittedly more harrowing version Rhythm 0 by ten years.
Then came John Lennon. With John, Yoko expanded her magic from galleries to global rituals: Bed-Ins for Peace, songs as spells, performance as protest.
Three marriages, three initiations. Each a portal. Each a spell. And after each, Yoko found herself alone again. She said of the dissolution of her first two marriages, “better to be alone than to feel like I can’t breathe.” Through it all, Yoko remained Yoko Ono. in name, in vision, in character.
When she lost John though, it was both. She was alone, and she couldn't breathe.
Imagine your spouse, your soulmate, the love of your life is gunned down on the doorstep of your home, right in front of you, close enough for the blood to spatter at your feet. And while the world mourns, stationing themselves outside your window, singing songs that are a constant reminder of what you’ve lost, you’re also receiving death threats: I’m gonna finish what Mark David Chapman started. You’re next… Just imagine your staff is stealing your secrets and objects from your home, threatening to go public with clandestine recordings of private moments, in pursuit of a quick buck. You need constant security details. You’re in the depths of grief, and your life is in danger. Would you be able to handle it? Would you change your name or shrink your vision?
Yoko didn’t. Sure she grieved, she stayed in bed for a while, but through it all, she remained Yoko Ono.
"Amid all this, Yoko decided on a title for a solo album she was working on: It's Alright (I See Rainbows). If she said it, maybe it would come to be. She fully believed that we can create reality by picturing it, meditating on it, and saying it aloud to the universe. She was desperate to change the 'negative energy' around her into 'positive energy' and believed - had to believe - it was possible." (DS)
I mean, she must be able to make her own positive energy, because she certainly wasn’t getting it from the world at large. John and Yoko were both married when they met and fell in love, so Homewrecker was one of the first insults hurled at her by the press and Beatlemaniacs. Already Yoko had become one of the world’s most hated women. And it only got worse from there. John insisted that Yoko be present during recording sessions at Abbey Road where the Beatles tracked their hits. It was all John’s idea. He sings about not wanting to be away from her for even a single hour. Nonetheless, once again, everyone blamed Yoko. An intruder. A Witch who had put John Lennon under her spell.
George Martin (The Beatles’ producer) heavily implied that Yoko was psychically sabotaging the Beatles recording sessions. He said that this “other person” was affecting them with “their” thoughts -“even if they weren’t spoken” – and that these thoughts were “impinging on what we were doing.”
But maybe George Martin wasn’t exactly wrong… Yoko was a Witch who moved in the medium of the mind. Even if she wasn’t doing it on purpose, just the presence of an energy as strong as Yoko’s would have upset that delicate balance.
John and Yoko viewed marriage as a ritual that was important to both of them. A ceremony of love and commitment to each other and to a shared vision of creativity infiltrating all things, including activism.
"Immediately after the wedding, Yoko and John focused their attention outward. In March 1969, the war in Vietnam was raging. In America and England, massive anti-war protests were being held. Along with matches, protesters held sit-ins. Yoko came up with a twist on the sit-in: She and John would stage a bed-in - a "Bed-In For Peace." They knew that their marriage was big news, so they decided to use thier honeymoon to protest the war in Vietnam. It was performance art that "came directly from Yoko," John said, with the purpose of "getting people talking about peace on the front pages of the newspapers." (DS)
"For us, it was the only way," Yoko said. "We can't go out in Trafalgar Square because it would create a riot. We can't lead a parade or a march because of all the autograph hunters. We had to find our own way of doing it, and for now bed-ins seemed the most logical way. We think the bed-in can me effective." (DS)
As a Montrealer myself, I’ve visited the Queen Elizabeth hotel where the bed in took place. The door of room 1742 still bears a plaque in John and Yoko’s honour. At the time they were mocked, naturally, but succeeded in making Peace a part of the gossip-hunters' conversation. At a press conference John said, “Yoko and I are quite willing to be the world’s clowns if by doing so it will do some good.”
But being the world’s clowns had its drawbacks.
As time went on, Yoko pre-assessed everyone who might come into her and John’s lives, nannies, groundkeepers, journalists, even mega mogul David Geffen, with a combination of astrology, tarot and numerology. If the reading wasn’t right, if the timing was off or the cards predicted a bad outcome, the answer was No.
David Sheff's book YOKO: A BIOGRAPHY was my primary resource for this episode, because it's the most recent Yoko biography, and because he an Yoko were friends, so the book amounts to a love Letter. I'm not above criticism wrote, and I don't think Yoko is either, but I think she's had quite enough criticism for now.
David wrote:
"Yoko had always been drawn to the occult, and she regularly consulted astrologers, numerologists, tarot card readers, palm readers, witches, and other mystics and seers. Her friend Tadanori Yokoo said she was always interested in 'un-scientific things'. He said, "For her it was something really important. Something invisible, something incredible. To believe in something that you can't see is a core principle of her art.' Yoko believed in magic. Things were 'meant to be'. She read about spirituality, reincarnation, 'separate realities' and how to use one's psychic powers. She could be alarmed by bad signs and bolstered by good ones. She believed in positive affirmations. When something went well, she said 'Thank you' three times out loud 'to the universe'. When I asked why she'd consulted the stars and nymerology she said, "Because it's a larger force than us, in a way. And I was dealing with that, not made-made forces." Also she relied on those systems a way to, "free my brain, think about problems from different angles[...] I knew I didn't have the power to stop the dangerous things that the lawyers would try to do. The only power I had was to manage to move the date of the meeting to when the moon was void astrologically - not in line with the earth. If you have a meeting when the moon is void, everything you decide will later be annulled. I said Well we have to meet on this particular day because it's the only one available to me, and we met and they decided on a lot of things I couldn't stop, and later, those decisions were annulled.' While doing business, Yoko consulted her tarot card readers, numerologists, astrologers and other psychics multiple times a day. Some of those who knew her well claimed she relied blindly on their business advice, while others maintained that she used them to disorient her adversaries. Both were true. She believed, but the advice from tarot and other belief systems also freed her mind from preset patterns and traditional thinking; it prompted her to consider problems from fresh angles. She believed the universe had its own force, and was an extension of that force. She felt more comfortable making business moves knowing she was channelling a force bigger than herself."
And she agonized, pulled and torn between justifiable mistrust and a desire to live out her values. And I think we can all relate. Being bogged down by resentment and fear can drastically impact our ability to go out into the world with love and courage.
After John’s murder, her occult obsessions became desperate. She shuffled a deck of Tarot cards constantly, not so much divination as a nervous habit.
"Yoko's belief in the paranormal made her ripe for exploitation. She had regularly consulted psychics when John was alive, but after the murder, in a continual state of distress, she turned to dozens of people who claimed to be in touch with and connected to "larger forces." Her reliance on psychics came from a desperate attempt to find answers about what had happened and to protect herself from the very real threats.
She paid mediums to hold séances during which she attempted to communicate with John—and she believed some were successful.
The psychic whose phone he bugged would talk to Yoko, hang up, and call Yoko's other psychics. They used the information they exchanged to make their readings and advice consistent and therefore more believable. "They'd get their stories straight," Sam said. "They were disgusting. I wanted to get rid of them."
Sam played Yoko a week's worth of the psychic's calls with her cohorts. Yoko heard the psychics talking after they consulted with her, sharing stories. Sam thought he'd succeeded-"I thought it was a job well done" —but later he realized she'd continued to consult the psychics behind his back.
Everyone close to Yoko witnessed her obsession with tarot cards.
Whether she was in her office or in a recording studio or in the kitchen talking with friends, in person or on the phone, she constantly shuffled a deck of cards.
After John was killed, others asked her-and she asked herself:
Why had none of the psychics anticipated John's death and protected him? Yoko obsessed over this, concluding, she told me, "There were premonitions and warnings." One tarot card reader warned Yoko, "[John] sleeps in blood," a vision that chilled her. She followed his and other psychics' advice to protect him. "It wasn't enough," Yoko said.
"The forces against us were too powerful." In 2010, she said, "There is within me this feeling of guilt because I couldn't stop [John's murder]." Sam loathed her obsession with the supernatural and, especially, her reliance on psychics. "I would always tell her, 'So why don't they play the lottery if they can predict the future? Why do they live in this shitty house? Why don't they have a car? I mean, if they see everything..' It's just so pathetic. But I come from a more practical world." He recalled a psychic giving a group reading in Palm Beach."Everybody was always a princess, a queen, a pharaoh in their past life, you know. I never met somebody who was a normal person in a past life."
Sam saw some of the psychics manipulating her by issuing scary warnings of the tragedies that would befall Yoko and Sean and insisting that they—and only they-could prevent the calamities. And though he continually tried to convince her that the psychics were frauds, he also understood why she believed. "She was so insecure, she felt so alone, that she wanted some help for herself," he said. Yoko was desperate to feel safe.
One psychic who had Yoko's ear "was upsetting her-inflaming her paranoia," according to Sam. "I got to the point that I couldn't stomach it anymore, so I had [the psychic's] phone bugged."" (DS)
Yoko was suspicious of everyone. But can you blame her?? If Yoko became cold or hard during that time, it was because multiple tell all books were being planned by people she had trusted. The whole world felt against her, and the death threats and vitriolic telegrams continued to roll in.
"The world, Sean knew, was chaotic and scary for her. "It had been true on one level when my dad was alive-they were followed by the FBI; Nixon was trying to deport them and their phones were tapped; there were screaming fans and weird people writing them disturbing letters-and then my dad was killed by a fan and it was even more chaotic and scary. I do think spirituality was something she clung to because it gave her a sense of control and some power during an overwhelming time."
It was hard for Sean, though. "It felt like she was dealing with trauma that she couldn't deal with by distracting herself with tarot and psychics. I didn't like seeing her that way. It felt like it came from a part of her that was out of control and overwhelmed."" (DS)
I think all we Witches can relate to this. We have to contend with the possibility that our healing practices, divination or belief in the other-worldly might amount to escapism, a distraction from chaos we know we have no hope of controlling. We all need a sense of power during hard times, but we definitely can’t just hand that power over to anyone or anything that might become like a personal cult - obsessive repetitive card pulls or unquestioning obedience to a psychic guru. In the depths of Yoko’s grief, though, magic was a coping mechanism that helped her come out on the other side. I can’t begrudge anyone that.
And if we’re to take another lesson from Yoko, it’s this: cope. Cope however you can, but make sure that those coping mechanisms aren’t at odds with who you know yourself to be. Keep your coping, but keep your name and keep your vision.
Her husband was murdered in 1980, and Yoko Ono has made it through the past 45 years by continuing to follow her visions, keep John’s legacy alive, speak out for peace, for women and children and the earth and all creatures. She has spoken at UN conferences, and shaken her ass on the stages of gritty rock clubs. Yes, she licensed Instant Karma to Nike for an ad, and people were upset, but what we maybe didn’t know is that Yoko donated the proceeds, all 800 thousand dollars, to the United Negro College Fund. And she saw it as another piece of John’s legacy - getting his music and message into ears that might not have heard it.
"In March 1992, Yoko released Onobox, a box set that included more than a hundred songs on six CDs. Some called it a vanity project, but it did exactly what she'd hoped it would: It made people look at her body of work anew.
A sticker on the box set asked listeners to "Smash your preconceptions!" The collection was the musical equivalent of an art retrospective that spanned her career to that point. It showed how much her work had evolved but also how consistent she'd been in the themes she'd tackled and styles she'd explored in albums from Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band through Starpeace. Disc 6 included A Story, the album she'd made during her separation from John that had never been released. The six CDs contained both whimsy-lighthearted love songs— and political statements about feminism, sexism, class, violence, and peace. The songs were also forceful illustrations of the way Yoko channeled her emotions through her music." (DS)
Into the 21st century Yoko continues to weave spells across sound, words, light, and spirit. With Rising, she returned to music beside her son Sean. She seeded the LennonOno Grant for Peace, sending blessings and resources to those who carried the torch of justice. In Reykjavík, in 2007, she raised the Imagine Peace Tower, an eternal column of light, a beacon stitched into the earth. With Arising, she invited women to speak out about their lives.
She has collaborated with The Flaming Lips, Cat Power, Peaches, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon and many more, DJs that remixed her work and brought Yoko to the top of the dance charts, sampled by Wu Tang’s RZA. And in a world where kids asked their parents, “Who’s the old guy on stage with Kanye and Rhianna at the Grammy’s?” the old guy being Paul McCartney, Yoko has remained, forever and always Yoko Ono, creeping her way slowly out from under the Beatles shadow and into the light of her own legacy. And in time the chorus will change from Yoko Broke up the Beatles to, as one t-shirt maker’s creation states: John Lennon Broke Up Fluxus
Museums and galleries worldwide unfurl her prolific history in exhibitions that treat her art as living ritual. In 2024, she was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal for lifetime achievement in the arts, recognizing her influence over many decades. She was never just Mrs John Lennon. She has always been Yoko Ono.
On her 80th birthday, The Houston Press ran a piece titled: Yoko Ono Turns 80, Still Weird As Hell.
In Jess’s interview with Yoko, Yoko said “It begins on a very day-to-day level, of knowing yourself. Knowing that you are powerful, inside. Power is not something we should be afraid of. Power is great, power is energy. And in terms of energy, the most important energy is human spiritual energy and when I say spiritual, I feel like I have to be very careful, I don’t mean religious, I mean the energy of the mind, the energy that exists within us. If you’re able to tap into that energy, then you’re part of the network and really, your power is absolutely limitless.”
Yoko won’t be with us forever. While specific details about her condition are not publicly disclosed, it’s been widely speculated that Yoko has been living with dementia. She is currently 92 years old and has significantly reduced her public appearances. She has been observed using a wheelchair and rumours swirl that she now requires round-the-clock care.
And as Yoko approaches her reunion with John on the other side, it’s even more important to solidify her legacy. Her contributions to the worlds of magic and the avant garde as a virtuoso in the medium of human imagination cannot be allowed to be outweighed by YouTube comments, misogyny and obstinate fear of change.
John Lennon sang: The goddess really smiled upon our love, dear Yoko.
And I truly hope, as time passes, that future history will centre Yoko, that the goddess will smile upon her, and all of us Witches.
Yoko will always be a beacon inspiring us to make our declarations, to stay true to our ideas and imaginations, no matter what the critics say, to conjure better worlds, and make our dreams come true with the singing of tra la la la la
Let’s take up Yoko’s charge: Smash our preconceptions. Stay weird as hell. Give Peace a chance. Do magic. Be a witch. Be a bitch. Be the villain in someone's story. Don't care what they say. Your power is absolutely limitless.
Imagine one thousand suns in the
sky at the same time.
Let them shine for one hour.
Then, let them gradually melt
Into the sky.
Make one tunafish sandwich and eat.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Tra lalalala
