My journey into the world of witchcraft, druidry, heathenry, and
neopagan spirituality has a lot of different origins. I grew up in a
very conservative household; my father was a Southern Baptist minister.
I know just from other households that "raised in an evangelical
household" is a familiar refrain for many neopagans, but mine is
probably a little different in some ways. The religious traditions I
was raised with never really chafed too much for me like they tend to do
for a lot of preachers' kids (but then, to be fair, my father was never
exactly a typical preacher).
My
childhood was mostly a happy one; my parents raised us in a religious
house, but I never really felt like I was forced into it. Going to
church on Sunday was, to me, just... a normal thing that people did. My
mother was always there to nurture the creative passions that I had
from a young age, and my father always raised me to think for myself
(growing up in the 1990s, we had a shelf with the complete World Book Encyclopedia,
and when I would ask my dad a question, a lot of times even if he knew
the answer, he wouldn't tell me - instead, he'd point to the
encyclopedia shelf and say, "look it up"). It wasn't until I came into
adulthood and interacted with other people whose childhoods were very
different from mine that I came to realize just how much of a gift that
was.
In high school, I was in the marching band, where I made
friends with a guy named Robert. He was very odd (and I say that
lovingly) compared to most of the students I knew; he was openly gay, he
wore a pentacle around his neck, and when the band used to huddle in to
say the Lord's Prayer (just something we did before we performed), he
politely stood off to the side and didn't participate. None of those
things were at all typical in the little Appalachian town where I lived,
but even as a (at the time) devout Christian, I never liked the way
people talked to him and about him. Instead of lecturing him about
sinfulness like so many people did, I asked him questions because of the
curiosity that had been instilled in me from an early age. "Do you
really think those cards tell the future?" "Isn't the pentagram a symbol
of satanism?" "What does 'Wicca' even mean?" He was never ruffled by
the sometimes-cringy way I would put those questions to him; he just
smiled and patiently answered, never pushing me to learn anything more
than I wanted to learn. I'm not going to say that that's when I became a
pagan, but I think that's where the earliest seeds of it were planted
for me.
The first real turning point was a few years after
graduation, when I was in college. I met my life partner (of 17 years
now) there; through one set of circumstances and another, we ended up
living together. We weren't married, and the people of the church began
to look at us differently. Not openly, not outwardly, but it's a small
town where gossip gets around, and I worked at a job where I interacted
with the townspeople regularly. I found myself just saying "nah, I
don't think I'm going to bother going this Sunday; I'll just do a Bible
reading for myself instead." I found myself doing that more and more
often until eventually, I came to realize that organized Christianity
simply wasn't fulfilling for me anymore. For the first time, I really
stopped to examine my beliefs, and although I couldn't admit (even to
myself) that I wasn't really a "true believer" anymore, I really had
fallen away from the church. I broke with it completely once they
forced my father to make a choice between the church and his own family
(my brother had recently come out as gay). My father made the right
choice and chose his family, and for me, that was the end of any real
obligation I felt to the church. Over time, I just became agnostic -
ambivalent about God, a big fan of Jesus, not a big fan of his fan
club.
That's basically how things sat for about 10 years or so,
but throughout that time I came to realize that that wasn't enough for
me. As I became enmeshed in the queer, colorful, eclectic culture of
the furry fandom, I met people from all different walks of life,
including many neopagans. As I worked with and for furries as an
illustrator, I frequently found myself drawing the Kemetic (ancient
Egyptian) god Anubis when I found time to do personal work. At first,
Anubis was merely a muse - but the more I drew him, the more I came to
realize that there was a sort of reverence that I felt any time
those good ideas came to me, even when they were erotic (or even
outright kinky, in some cases). It felt strange to realize that the
unorthodox pedestal that I had put Anubis on was, in many ways, my main
ingress route into this form of spirituality, but in a way, it makes
sense: being an artist is what I am. It stands to reason that the
things that most resonate with me on a spiritual level are the things
that connect to my vocation.
Long story short, Anubis became more
than merely a source of artistic inspiration. I began to realize that I
felt a connection between Anubis and the part of me that had been so
long neglected: the spiritual part that needs there to be something more than
just this meat-suit I have to pilot. It's not that I suddenly believed
in the gods in a literal metaphysical sense of physical beings living
in the heavens or some other astral plane and granting wishes and
prayers; it's more that I realized that spirituality - the longing to
feel connected to some concept that is greater than ourselves -
is a fundamental part of the human experience. Christianity wasn't fulfilling it for me; there was too much duplicity, too many injustices, and too much judgment and condemnation committed in the name of someone whose entire teaching was based on things like "blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth," and "judge not, that you not be judged." At the same time, pure scientific inquiry wasn't working on its own either; science fascinates me, but the answers that science gives for the "meaning of life" stuff are rarely satisfying. I needed more, but my mind had been so conditioned to the skepticism of scientific thought. Then my brother shared this excerpt with me from Stephen Fry's book, Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined, and it changed my perspective completely:
Let's face it, even today we cannot understand or explain much of what drives us. Take love for example. To say "she fell in love" is to describe a mystery. One might as well say, "Eros pierced her heart with his arrow," as "gametes fizzed, hormones seethed, psychological affinities and sexual connections were made" ... the gods in Greek myth represent human motives and drives that are still mysterious to us. Might as well call them a god as an impulse or a complex. To personify them is a rather smart way - not of managing them perhaps, but of giving shape, dimensions, and character to the uncontrollable and unfathomable forces that control us. Do "superego" and "id' reveal any more about our inner selves than Apollo and Dionysus? Evolutionary behavioralism and ethology may tell us more about who and how we are as a scientific fact, but the poetic concentration of our traits into the personalities of gods, demons, and monsters are easier for some of us dull-witted ones to hold in our heads than the abstractions of science. Myth can be a kind of human algebra which makes it easier to manipulate truths about ourselves. Symbols and rituals are not toys and games to be dispensed with on our arrival at adulthood, they are tools we will always need. They complement our scientific impulse; they do not stand in opposition to it.
Then, last summer, I traveled to New England to visit family. I had already been considering dabbling in neopaganism for a long time, as Anubis routinely filled my thoughts, but when I was in New England (which has many thriving neopagan communities), I actually began to take it seriously and stopped wondering with the "what if I...?" questions. I bought a Lenormand deck and a tarot deck (I had already been dabbling with divination through various tarot websites and apps), and a nice leather journal, along with a few crystals and other bits and bobs. It felt strange at first, but my family (who, by now, had also abandoned evangelicalism completely) encouraged me. I got home and began to check out every book I could find in the library on witchcraft, magic, druidry, and other neopagan practices.
What I ultimately discovered, and what ultimately led me into this spiritual journey, was the realization that to at least some degree, we all need to feel connected to something greater than ourselves. For most of human history, that "something" has been religion. Once I came to be at peace with the fact that all religions are completely made up, it wasn't much of a step to say "I can tailor-make a religious practice for myself and connect with like-minded people who've used many of the same building blocks." As the Wiccan Rede proclaims: "An ye harm none, do what ye will." I don't have to believe, in my heart of hearts, that there's a place I go when I die where my heart is put on a literal scale and weighed - but I can believe and revere the idea that balance of the heart and mind is sacred and central to joy. I don't have to believe that a man with a red beard is literally in the sky striking thunderbolts with a physical hammer to believe and revere the fact that the wildness of nature is governed by the same primal forces that make our hearts beat and make the electrical impulses in our brains register as thoughts. But having those visualizations helps me connect with those concepts on a philosophical level that the cold pages of a science textbook simply can't. At the end of the day, even adults need space where they can play pretend. It's a clearinghouse for the thoughts that we struggle with, and there's comfort in that. Just as importantly, there is structure in that, which is something that a scatterbrained person like me can't really live without. In the year since I've started that journey, I've learned a lot, and I can only imagine that more is to come as I find new ways to commune with nature and connect with the people closest to me.
Blessed be.
