Last Podcast On The Left
Life After Death: An Interview with Damien Echols & Lorri Davis
Fri, 29 Nov 2024
This week the boys have the honor of sitting down with Damien Echols and his wife Lorri Davis to discuss Damien's time behind bars as one of "The West Memphis Three", how life has changed since his 2011 release, and how finding Magic helped him survive and move past 18 years on death row. For Live Shows, Merch, and More Visit: www.LastPodcastOnTheLeft.comKevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of Last Podcast on the Left ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.
Chapter 1: Who are Damien Echols and Lorri Davis?
Was it ivermectin or brought it all back around? Honestly, like what? When did you notice? Like, I actually I'm OK. Like, I might be OK.
I think it was two things really. One was kind of going back to the satanic panic thing for a minute. When I was in prison, one of the things that allowed me to survive in there was the fact that I didn't even think about being in prison for days at a time. And the reason for that was because I built a life for myself inside there.
I had stuff that I was doing, like immersing myself in to the point where I didn't even think about the fact that I was in prison. And one of those things was Western hermeticism or ceremonial magic. You know, and it was when I was born. Practicing this, by the time I walked out, I was doing it for like eight hours a day sometimes.
And it feels like you're on this adventure where you're constantly having all these experiences and learning stuff. And it's like being on the quest for the Holy Grail to the point where I was content even when I was on death row. Not saying I didn't want out, didn't want my name cleared, didn't want to go home, but I was content even while I was there.
When I walked out of prison, that was one of the things, in addition to reading and losing my short-term memory, it was like I could not do the ritual work that I had been doing for hours a day that had held me together. Suddenly, I could not do it at all. And that was another big contributing factor to the disintegration that I went through.
What really started to stitch me back together was whenever I could slowly start returning to the ritual work and Pulling my attention away from the world on trying to figure out how to operate in the world, bringing my attention just back to doing the ritual work and doing that for hours a day. That was one of the things that started stitching me together.
The other thing was martial arts, karate. Karate and boxing were two huge steps in returning to any state of being normal.
Right from your grave.
It's incredible. I mean, what I'm hearing from you again and again is like, it seems like the word that keeps coming back to me is reality, is that it seems like over your life, the nature of reality has changed so many times.
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Chapter 2: What was the West Memphis Three case?
So I started using Q-tips and I bought paint from other inmates that were like smuggling it in to the prison. And I started doing paintings and even having art shows while I was in prison. So it's like when you're working on magic, it changes every aspect of yourself. You know, like when you're invoking air every day, air,
corresponds to like your intellect, you know, your ability to use logic and reason. And when I was doing that, that was when I woke up one day and I decided, you know what, I want to have the same frames of reference that everybody else has. So I'm going to start, you know, just, I read everything under the sun from Camus to Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Freud.
I started taking psychology classes, sociology classes, German classes. Yeah. you know, all of them.
You really did prison really well. That's a great, this is a great plan.
I gotta ask is, I guess it's kind of a weird thing to ask someone because obviously the worst thing that could happen to anyone other than being the victim of crime is being wrongfully in prison for one. And, uh, But where do you see yourself if this never happens? Are you a better person because of this, like now? Are you a better person now than you think you would have been? Absolutely.
He might have skipped it.
I think he might have skipped the 18 years of death row, but I feel like, I don't know.
You know, that's it's one of those things that to I think to most people, when they look at my life and they look at, you know, things like that, that look like blatantly, obviously horrific things. They they probably think that I had a shitty life, but. Honestly, if somebody told me, you know, I think a lot of people got it worse than I did.
You know, if they told me you can do 18 years in prison or you can work at McDonald's for 18 years, I'd be like, fuck, send me to prison. In a lot of ways, I think I really was fortunate in, you know, it took me out of a situation where, Nobody in my family has an education beyond the ninth grade. When I was born, my mom was 15, my dad was 16.
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