T.J. the witch: the early years

Ok, so in my last blog, I gave a quick history of my religious background, & how I left the church & eventually found The Craft. Tonight, I plan to go a little more in depth on my first delving into magick. By the way, you may have noticed that I am spelling magick with a K at the end. For those of you who do not know, this is a common method among contemporary witchy authors to differentiate between stage & slight-of-hand magic, like what we have here in Vegas, & true mystical workings & spells. Now certainly not all authors of the craft use this distinction, being of the opinion that if you have gotten even one paragraph into their book, you will probably know that they are not talking about stage entertainment. But considering my current location, I felt that it was a good distinction to make.

So, T.J. the witch: the early years. Well as I said in my last blog, I was a Mormon until I was 21 years old, was excommunicated, & then started going to the Metropolitan Community Church for a time. I think I was with them for roughly 6-8 months, maybe a little longer, before I really began to realize that I just could not do the Christian thing anymore. So I started looking into the practice of real magick. Now I had been interested in magick & magic, for most of my childhood. I loved watching movies like “Clash of the Titans”, “Excalibur”, most of the Disney animated movies, “Sleeping Beauty” being my favorite, & probably my favorite movie of all time, an obscure number called “Krull”. My real passion though, was in books. I have read nearly all of the “Dragon Riders of Pern” series by Anne McCaffery, & Terry Brooks’  “Shannara” series, Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” & “The Lord of the Rings”, “The Mists of Avalon” by Marian Zimmer Bradley, the entire Harry Potter series, & I think you get the idea.

So as you can see, my mind was already primed for the world of magick. The problem however was that I had no idea where to begin an in depth study of it. I did not know anyone whom I knew to be pagan, so I couldn’t ask anyone for help. But I did have access to the bookstore & the internet, so that’s where I began. I already knew by this time that I wanted to study druidry. I knew that I had Celtic heritage, & thought that it would be best to go back to my familial roots.

What I learned about druidry is that it is a nature based religion. The druids honored the sun & the moon, & kept track of the seasons, celebrating 8 major holy days referred to as sabbats. These occurred at the equinoxes & solstices, & the mid points between them. The druids were at the same time polytheistic & monotheistic in that while they did believe in multiple gods, they also believed that there was a single unifying creative force behind the gods as well. Most of them were tribal deities particular to specific groups of people, with only a few being pan-Celtic.  

Also in the Celtic world view, they did not subscribe to the quadratic, alchemic elemental system of earth, air, fire, & water. Rather they saw the world as being split into the three realms of land, sea, & sky, with fire being a living thing & representing the living spirit that burns within all forms of creation. This is a view that I myself have adopted. Something else that I find interesting is that, like most ancient & modern cultures, the Celts understood there to be at least three worlds, namely the “real” world of physical being, an underworld, & an upper world. Now what I find interesting is that all three had their own realms of land, sea, & sky, & I believe that this has something to do, at least in part, with the saying of “As above, so below”.

The druids were capable of powerful magicks, including, but not limited to, weather control, shape shifting, flight, teleportation, invisibility, various curses, healing, etc. Now a lot of this is related to shamanic practices, & so I believe that stories regarding flight, shape shifting, & teleportation are not to be taken literally. Rather, I believe that the druid in question would enter a shamanic trance & experience these things on a spiritual level, as opposed to a physical one. This is in no way meant to diminish the act however, as it is possible to experience all of these things while in a shamanic trance, & , more importantly, if the trance is strong enough, not only could other people be able to perceive the event without themselves having to be in a trance as well, but the druid may also be able to affect a situation as if he or she WERE actually there physically.  

These are the things that stood out to me the most while learning about the ancient druids, but I still have a long way to go before I’ll be able to do much of this stuff. Unfortunately, when I was first studying the ancient Celtic culture, I was obsessed with doing everything exactly as the druids did it. That in & of itself is not necessarily a bad thing, but what was unfortunate is that I learned that it is now impossible to do. Because the Celts were primarily a tribal nation that actively enjoyed fighting amongst themselves just for the fun of it, they were never able to unite as a solid military, & thus were virtually wiped out. The Romans destroyed them as a people, until only Britain remained as a sizeable Celtic settlement. Then the Catholic Church sought to destroy their culture, believing it to be evil, & to replace it with Christianity.

As a result of all this, very little of the old religion still remains. What few druids who survived either went into hiding, or simply stopped practicing their beliefs openly, & so today, we have almost nothing to go on other than scant archeological evidence, & a few documents that are suspect due to their age &/or authors.

What all this meant to me at the time was that it was pointless to continue with my druidic studies, because I wouldn’t be able to do things as they did. I would say that I was foolish to stop, but I now realize that it was a good thing because it led me down a path that helped me come back to druidry at a time when I would finally be READY to follow it.

I think I’ll leave it here for tonight. I realize that I ended up talking more about WHAT I learned, rather than HOW I learned it, which was my original intention, so that will be the subject of my next blog. Then later I will go into my journey down the more general path of witchcraft, before getting into what I’m doing with my spiritual life today, & then decide what to blog about from there. So for now, good night, & may the blessings of the gods & the non-gods be upon you!

A Little About ME

Hi everyone! I decided to start out by telling you all a little about myself concerning my magickal background. On the one hand, I sometimes wish that I had been born into the craft. On the other however, I’m also glad that I wasn’t. You see, I believe that everything a person goes through in life helps to make them who they are today, & therefore wishing that you could go back & change something is not necessarily a good idea, as it might change who you are. Now if you don’t like who you are, then that might be understandable, but I do like who I am & so I would change nothing, even though some of the changes might have made my life easier.

In any case, as I said, I did not grow up in the craft. In fact, I grew up in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, in other words Mormon. Until the age of 21, I was completely devoted to the church, & even went on a mission. That didn’t last very long however, because the feelings of homosexuality that I had had since I was 12 finally won out, & I decided that it was time to come home. I did not leave the church at first though. Rather I went through a church sponsored “reparative therapy” program for the male homosexual. In a very small nutshell, what they explained to me was that I was having homosexual feelings because my mom & dad had split up before I was 3, & I was raised by my grandparents, of whom my grandmother took a dominant role in my life & my grandfather was mostly in the background (which is how they raised my mother & aunt by the way). Basically, I was craving male attention because I had an over dominant mother figure & an absentee father figure in my life & therefore never developed the proper male bonds that are supposedly required for a boy to grow up well adjusted, (by the way, it’s supposedly the reverse that creates lesbians).

Now at the time of course, this all made sense to me, & I graduated the program with flying colors, apparently cured. But then the bane of Christianity settled into my brain; I began thinking logically about all this. I will grant that this scenario may very well explain a very few cases of homosexuality, but it by no means explains them all, & certainly flies in the face of all the evidence from the natural world that sexuality is something that a creature is born with, not something that it chooses.

So what does all of this have to do with my experience with witchcraft? Well, after I accepted the fact that I was gay & that was that, I began to act out on those desires. As I did have respect for my church leaders & did not want to lead them on, I confessed to my bishop not only what I had done, but that I also had no intention of repenting for it, & this was the official reason for my excommunication from the church, though I’m sure the fact that it was with another man didn’t exactly help my case lol.

Now I know I have presented this as sort of an “ah-ha” kind of revelation that solved all my personal problems; but the truth is I was, religiously speaking, a complete mess. There I was, freshly excommunicated from the church that I had consciously devoted 13 years of my life to, & I had no idea what to do or what to believe. I was angry and confused, feeling betrayed not only by my friends, but also by God. Why, if he loved me so much, would he condemn me for feelings I had no control over? & if not him, why did his followers? I wasn’t quite ready just yet to give up completely on Christianity though, & began to attend the Metropolitan Community Church, which while not geared SPECIFICALLY to gays & lesbians; they certainly make up the grand majority of its congregation & clergy. This only lasted a few months though, before I realized that it was still missing something that I was searching for.

This is when I began to get deeply interested in paganism & witchcraft. I left the MCC because, again thinking logically, I couldn’t understand how it was ok for this group of people to worship Jesus, when most other Christian sects said that homosexuality was an abomination to God. It also didn’t make sense to me that if there was only one god, then why were there so many different Christian sects to begin with? It just didn’t add up for me, so I began to look into other forms of religion & spirituality.

Now, from the time I was a little boy, I had been fascinated by the religious beliefs of many ancient cultures, especially Greco-roman & Celtic Britain, & I already had a love affair with Irish culture through its music. The political intrigue of the Greek pantheon, the dazzling tales of the Arthurian legends, held me spellbound for hours. But my favorite character by far, was Merlin the wizard. I began to study this figure in greater detail, & in so doing I started coming across books that talked about genuine witchcraft. I started learning the real legends behind Merlin, Arthur, & the ancient gods & goddesses of the Celtic people. I also learned about druids, & it was here that I started my new spiritual path.

I have always loved & respected the world of nature, & thinking back on it now, it is no surprise to me that it was nature that finally convinced me that being gay was not a bad thing. The druids were also lovers of the natural world, & they looked to it to help them understand the world around them. They respected the land, the sea, & the sky, & all the things that lived in them. Much of their magical practices were based on what they learned from their observances of the natural world, & how they translated that into their understanding of the spiritual world. All of this fascinated me to no end, & eventually I joined a druid group based here in Vegas.

I was with them for about a year or 2, but became disillusioned with its leaders & felt it was time to move on. Shortly after that I came across a group that was centered not so much on druidry, but on Celtic based witchcraft. I was with them for over 3 years, eventually becoming an ordained high priest in their tradition, & a minister in the Covenant of the Goddess, the largest single pagan group in the country. Today I run my own grove, which is centered around green witchcraft, that is, magic specifically geared towards using the energies of herbs, trees, & other plants, as well as stones, candles & other things that I will get into in later blogs. I haven’t forgotten my love of druidry however, & plan to join a British based group called the Order of Bards, Ovates, and Druids just as soon as I get enough money to get their mail order course.

So that’s it for now. I hope you guys enjoyed this history of my pre-pagan life. As the title says, future blogs will be devoted to my personal experiences with witchcraft, magick, & paganism in general, as well as opinions, classes, & likely rants about the pagan world as well. But for now, blessed be, & may the gods preserve the craft!