lordkalkin

I just realized that sometime this summer marks ten years since I started studying magick. I was 14, about to start my freshman year of high school, and I read some trashy Llewlyn book about dragon magick. I've moved on a great deal from there, but ten years is a good long time to have been studying the occult. For one, everything I knew came from either my mother or books. I wouldn't be online until after I turned 17, so it was about three years before I got any exposure to the internet community of neopagans, occultists, and other magick-users. I suppose in a way that puts me on the tail end of the last generation to discover Neo-paganism in all its forms without the aid of the internet.

I also put a bit of value in the fact that I was pretty young when I started messing with the occult. It seems like in high school, most people test the boundaries of their parents' paradigm, see how it and other paradigms fit on them. Those experiences are sort of foundational to the way we handle the world. Granted, we also test our boundaries as toddlers, but the middle teenage years is the first time we do it with any sophistication, any inkling that we'll be adults someday (or think we already are and the world just needs to recognize it). During those years, I was fooling around with various flavours of Wicca and witchcraft, and although I don't believe the same things now, what I do believe is influenced greatly by my experiences at that time. I often point out that my dodge of the Platonist-Aristotelian dichotomy is likely due to the fact that I read the Tao Te Ching when I was 15, before I knew what it meant to be either a Platonist or an Aristotelian, and before I had any exposure to the content of their philosophies. I credit my experience of the Tao with my ability to handle non-cognitive paradoxes, and my perspective on logic as a tool, not a description of the way we think. It may have also had a subversive impact on my ideas about the establishment, but I think I was meddling with some of that before I read the Tao.

Perhaps the main effect of my getting into the occult when I did was its persistence in my life. Magick always comes back to me. I've rejected it and all Neo-paganisms at various points, but I always find myself interested in the occult again. I'm not a Neo-pagan now (in fact, I'm more of a critic of the fluffy bunnies), and my religious beliefs have fluxed more than a little. However, the magick is consistent, the search for enlightenment. When I accepted that fact a few years ago, I got my pentagram tattoo. The pentagram represents magick, and the circle takes the form of an ourobouros to represent the way magick comes back into my life even when I think I've kicked it out.

Enough for now, I've got reading to do.