In Motherboard, an article written by Damien Echols about how meditation and magic kept him sane and healthy while being falsely imprisoned for 18 years, of which nine of them were spent in solitary confinement 24 hours a day in a super maximum security unit prison.

My name is Damien Echols, and in 1993 I was arrested for three counts of capital murder in the town of West Memphis, Arkansas. Nine months later I was sentenced to death, and spent almost 19 years on death row before being released in 2011 when new evidence came to light.

Prison is a dark and stagnant place. It's filled with the most cold, horrendous energy you can imagine. It feels like a kind of psychic filth that penetrates into your very soul.

Much of magick is about is learning to change states of consciousness at will. I learned to use meditation and ritual as shields. They prevented the hellish energy of prison from changing me and making me more like the people all around me—people who had given up on even trying to be human.

This is a story about how I kept my sanity.

Featured image: Damien Echols at Tucker Max prison in 1996. Photography by Grove Pashley in the New York Post.