How I Came into Witchcraft

I became interested in Wicca and Neo-Pagan Witchcraft early in 1994, when my mother had just been diagnosed with unlocalizable cancer and given three months to live. When a loved one will shortly die, your feelings about the future are compromised. You want her to live as long as possible, without suffering, but at the same time you feel guilty for wishing the grey pall hanging over everything were lifted. Many will take up a new interest at such times, one which can be projected indefinitely into the future, lending it a little color. That was the immediate cause impelling me to investigate this new-old religion. But the choice of something new was uniquely mine. My brother Jim, for instance, simply resumed smoking. My half siblings began attending St. Matthias, our mother’s Episcopal church. I was attracted to Wicca because it appeared to combine my two main interests, pre-Christian cultures and their polytheistic religions, and exploration and change of awareness.

I came by these two interests at widely different times. As a boy my early enthusiasm for reading was encouraged with a series of “All About” books, as well as a subscription to the Children’s Digest. One book was called The Exploits of Xenophon, 1 a simplified and colorfully illustrated version of the Anabasis, describing the expedition into the interior of the Persian Empire undertaken by a Persian satrap, 2 his native troops, and, at the outset, about 13,000 Greek mercenaries. I loved the pictures in the Household edition, and was fascinated by the accounts of sacrifices and taking the auspices before battle, then the cries of “Zeus Savior!” and “Heracles Captain!” uttered by the Greeks as they charged. The swashbucklling freedom enjoyed by the mercenaries appealed to me in particular, opening horizons on my boyhood that were giddy and glorious. But above all, I was fascinated by the gods and wanted to know what it felt like to really believe in them.

After Xenophon I enjoyed the first ten books of Livy’s history of Rome, dealing with the legends of the regal period of the first seven kings. These were dual-face Loebs, with Latin on one side and English facing it. The fact that separate parts of each volume were designated ‘Book I,’ ‘Book II,’ etc., intrigued me no end. I had no idea at the time that these indicated separate scrolls; I was just charmed by their reddish gold beauty and neat appearance. Additionally, the fact that the library would not lend the Loebs to me personally (I was 11 at the time) but my mother had to check them out instead lent a special feeling of proprietorship to my handling of the little red volumes. I felt I had a secret right to them, unrecognized by society at large.

When I was sixteen, we had moved to West Hollywood and were not far from a branch of the municipal library, built next to a neighborhood plunge. My athletically-inclined and newly-acquired stepsister chalked up laps in the pool while I investigated the library. I had decided, at my ripe age, that I had exhausted all my intellectual interests up till then and felt my way along the shelves, eyes closed, choosing books at random. I only did this twice. The first time I put my hand on Habakari Hankin, by Lewis Bush, an American ex-patriot living in Japan early in the twentieth century. Habakari is Japanese for outhouse, and Hankin was an international connoisseur of outhouses, especially favoring the traditional Japanese design of a stream passing beneath one’s nether extremities. The book was a delightful collection of short stories and sketches which I have virtually forgotten.

For my second selection I worked my way around to the other side of the bookcase and put my hands on A Study of Gurdjieff’s Teaching, by Kenneth Walker. This introduced me to the notion of change of consciousness, something which had never occurred to me in my sixteen tender years. Gurdjieff taught people how to wake up. I had always assumed I was awake already, as most people do; now awareness acquired windows and doors, with the possibility of going through them into an entirely different world. Both interests which would eventually be satisfied by modern witchcraft were now awake in me.

However, these were still intellectual interests. It wasn’t until I turned 22 that a personal crisis led to my finding a way to open the window of awareness, a method which has been my companion ever since in life. It was really quite simple; I simply began attending to background sounds and looking at things usually ignored, especially things seen out of the corners of the eyes. I found these exercises promoted a quiet mind, and from a quiet mind one can proceed to explore the mind itself and whatever it can apprehend.

This was 1968, and Carlos Castaneda’s Teachings of Don Juan had just been published. I have no doubt that it had an influence on my exercises, but it wasn’t until the appearance of his second book, A Separate Reality, in 1972 that I became aware of a connection. The explorations of consciousness in his third book, Journey to Ixtlan, came closest to the trips I was taking with peripheral awareness. Thereafter his later books remained interesting but there was less overlap with my practice.

I had long since ceased to be a believing Christian, and my minor in college, Religious Studies, was leading me into non-mainstream religions. I had had a love affair with modern Vedantic Hinduism since leaving the church in 1963, but the monotheistic emphasis in their books, employed in part as an accommodation to western readers, was beginning to irk me. When I read Walter F. Otto’s The Homeric Gods; the Spiritual Significance of Greek Religion, the notion that polytheism inevitably ‘developed’ into monotheism was exploded for me, and I became intellectually converted to the gods. Thereafter, while I could hold with Brahman, the impersonal Absolute, I rejected his personal aspect, Ishwara. I no longer sought a personal relationship with a supreme being, regarding such, indeed, as a form of presumption. If all proceeded from one source, that source remained impersonal and unapproachable for me. I no longer bother with Brahman, but I still feel that way about Fate or dark matter/energy.

A few years later I made offerings, first to Aphrodite and later to Hermes, both of which were granted in a week’s time. The first led to a relationship with a married lady (it was an open marriage) which I found very liberating. The second was made in error; I needed another job and thought Hermes was the god to ask for employment. In a week’s time I received a windfall which I did not have to repay for ten years. Subsequently, I learned that Hermes governs luck!

By 1994, when I first looked into witchcraft classes and groups, I already had a way of changing consciousness, and I was thoroughly ‘converted’ to polytheistic paganism. All that remained was to find a group to interact with and a paradigm for expressing the energies I was experiencing.

To those who know the difference, however, it will be seen that my preference was for heathen rather than pagan gods. The gods of the ‘barbarians’ living outside the Roman Empire were not immortal; for many peoples (and for the heathen Udmurts who remain to this day), the gods sleep during the winter. They are natural, not supernatural. They simply surpass us in power, wisdom and greatness of soul, but they are not infinite in any sense. Odin will die at Ragnarøk.

I became aware of witchcraft classes and groups operating in my area, and dedicated myself to the Craft (having read some books by the Campanellis and Farrars) at Imbolc, which I celebrated on February 2nd, 1994. 3 My peripheral exercises had quietened my mind and liberated energies I could only characterize as magical. Among other things, I was able to recover viewpoints and flexibilities from early childhood, and even had inklings of far memory. I decided I wanted to make use of this energy in a structured context with others. For that reason I sought out a coven, followed by two or three others when I moved back down to San Diego County.

I found I was able to contribute energy to the raising of the cone of power. Because of my bookishness, ritual circles generally chose me to ward the East, which is associated with air and knowledge. In time I got together with my magical partner Wendy and we founded a coven of our own in Vista. A descendant of that coven is still going strong in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and while I live retired in Norway, I maintain close contacts with them, talk to them on Skype, and will be providing them with a student later this year.

That, briefly, is how I came into witchcraft.

 

Footnotes

1 The Exploits of Xenophon, by Geoffrey Household, Random House, 1955.

2  Provincial governor.

3  My mother passed away at the end of March of that year.