Witches, Druids, and Christians - OH MY!
By Brooke West
I will admit the Twilight books, and Betsy the Vampire books grace the shelves in my home office. They are my guilty pleasure, much like an afternoon fishing on the river would be for some or a half a cheesecake gobbled with a spoon by the ambient light of the open refrigerator is for others. There are Christians out there that will gasp and point a finger and say I can’t really be a Christian if I read those kinds of things. I have no conviction about it one way or the other and believe me; I’ve done some soul searching about it. Because, in a day when vampires are the new black and our society is fascinated by shiny things with an occult edge, I am reminded of my own very personal fall.
I’ve always been drawn to the dark side, which is weird considering the environment I grew up in. In the ‘70s, my parents were part of a community household (read: hippy commune) in Wichita, Kansas that was patterned after the one Church of the Redeemer started in Houston. The time they spent there rooted them in the church and instilled a servant’s heart and attitude in them. After I was born, we moved back to Missouri and they soon found a church home to start serving in. During my formative years, if the church doors were open, we were there.
From my early teen years the occult was in my periphery. There was a tiny group of my schoolmates that had become like minded over the short time we had been friends. There were late night pizza parties that found us hovering over an Ouija board. I knew according to the beliefs and values I had been brought up with, that this kind of thing was wrong. In fact my inner core screamed it to me. WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! CALL YOUR MOTHER AND GO HOME! Of course I didn’t do that; I wanted to talk to Jack more. Jack being the ‘spirit’ we called on the most. I, to this day, don’t know that we actually contacted anyone. I didn’t even put much stock in it at the time. But I so desperately wanted it to be true. I wanted to talk to someone on the other side. I wanted him to whisper that I was special, actually descended from royalty, maybe. Or that I had lived some other fantastic life, where I was rich, oh and maybe famous, yes, that would be good! Or that I, somewhere in a past life, had met some kind of tragic end and I was separated from the man that was to be my fate and, (wait it gets better) that the man that loved me was still there waiting for me on the other side and that we would be reunited and centuries of wrong would be righted and world peace would ensue, and…. OK. Here’s something you need to know about me if you haven’t guessed yet. I am almost entirely a hopeless romantic, and I love a good mystery, and I have a wicked active imagination. I will chase myself down any kind and number of weird rabbit holes and before I know it I’ve built an entire universe around me. Also, I might be a little self-centered and narcissistic. But I digress…
When we weren’t working at our after school jobs, you could find the four or five of us lurking around the local occult bookstore. It’s just a book store, I rationalized. But I kept hidden from any prying parental eyes any books I bought. Books with smiling women stirring love potions, or illustrations of men in pointy hats under a full moon spewing out an incantation on the covers went into the hiding space in my closet. It was all just bunk anyway, right? You couldn’t actually BUY Eye of Newt, right? I mean how weird would THAT be? You couldn’t speak a spirits name into the wind and have it arrive, that’s just fairy tale stuff. Right? RIGHT? Right. See? This is just interesting stuff that I’m studying, and pouring my time into, because it’s just fun and harmless. Besides, I’m a Christian. I go to church…all the time. So I’m, like, totally safe and stuff… Uh huh.
I don’t think I ever really resented all that time we put in at church until my youth group exploded in an extremely violent and emotional way. Barbed accusations of every variation were flying at will. Lies and speculation were being spread throughout the church about this kid or that. People that had been my best friends, people I had trusted- including my pastor, suddenly abandoned me and I felt God had too.
Luckily, I had my school friends to fall back on.
It started out with a pewter dragon holding a small amethyst. “Do you know how to charge this?” the woman at the counter asked me. ‘Charge what? I thought, ‘What? It takes batteries? Is there a tiny plug in? Does it glow?’ The saleswoman apparently read all these thoughts as they flashed across my face. She passed a flier across the counter to me. “Come and learn.” And then she smiled one of those creepy smiles that says: ‘I know you, I have your number’. I didn’t go that particular seminar, where, as the flyer assured me, I would learn how to charge my crystals for healing, or to bring fame, or to draw lost loves home… Uh. Huh.
My friends turned me on to Edgar Cayce, who had been dead for years by the time I was handed a book about him. I was beyond intrigued. Here was a Sunday school teacher of all things, doing the work of a medium and psychic. He was giving people a more spiritual look at world around them, offering a closer walk with God, right? How could that be wrong? I began to ponder how he straddled the line between God fearing and God failing. (In my opinion, a God fearing man went to church believed Christ died for our sins, was the only son of God, helped his neighbors, never drank, never cursed, was nice to his children and was so clean he almost squeaked. He drove a 1953 Ford Crestline and was tall and trim and smelled like Brut. I don’t know why. A God failing man was one that actually believed all that hoodoo about mystics and psychics and read his horoscope every day and believed that the Tarot never lied. I didn’t have the physical imagery of this person, sorry.)
Fast forward a few years. I have married the first service man of my age that I have ever met. I have, quite literally run off and married, across state lines, without my parent’s knowledge or consent. In a flurry of activity I was whisked halfway across the nation and set up in my very first apartment. Since my husband was in the Navy, and since the Navy does most of their work out at sea, very soon after my arrival in Virginia I found myself alone. No friends, no job, no parents. It would be no stretch to say I went ‘a little nuts’ until I found a job, the grocery store and a Laundromat. And then things fell into place rather quickly.
To this day I relate better to guys than girls. Girls, in my experience, are mean and two faced and see you as competition, yet guys rarely mind having a girl tag along behind them because a pretty face in their entourage says to potential mates, ‘see? I’m sensitive and non-threatening because this cool girl hangs out with me’. It’s not a great theory…but it’s mine.
So it was that at the Laundromat, I became fast friends with a group of guys (more Navy) who were fun and rowdy and also leaned toward the darker things in life. Since we were all underage (I myself was only 19) and without funds (my full time job barely covered rent and my husband hadn’t given me access to his bank before he left for six months) there weren’t a lot of places to hang out. The owner of the Laundromat let us hang out as long as we liked, and used that to his advantage by having us mind the store (unpaid of course) while he ran errands. In those late night bull session with these guys whom I loved like brothers, topics like Wicca and Druids, astral projection and moon rituals were frequent. Again I was intrigued. I was a thousand miles from my parents. I didn’t have to get up every Sunday and go to some church that would only wound me. I didn’t have to hide anything from these guys. I immersed myself in what they were teaching me.
When my husband came back from being at sea, it was clear we were on two separate paths. I no longer wanted to be a wife. I wanted to be free to hang out with my buddies and he no longer wanted a wife anyway. However, in the months that followed, before we could get our divorce straightened out he became so violent and abusive I literally thought he was going to kill me. My buddies, being the great stand up guys they were immediately moved me out of my apartment and in with them. That night, in the backyard, one of them taught me a binding spell. Ok. Really? You expect me to believe this? Sure I wanted to believe that there was something out there that could protect me from the big bad ugly that my husband had become… but God never crossed my mind. Let alone, say, the police.
Under that full moon, I stood in a circle of my buddies in robes while we chanted and did our thing. And guess what? It didn’t work. He showed up the next afternoon spiting hate and discontent and threatening to burn down the house. BECAUSE: ‘That’s what you do to witches!’
Witches? Was that what we were? I thought we were just talking about creepy, scary, odd things. Witch. Hmmm. I had always wanted to dress up like a witch for Halloween and my mother would never let me. I always had to be a clown, or Mary mother of Jesus or Poochi. I could be a witch now. But a real one. Kind of. I still very much believed that I was a Christian, I still believed Jesus was the son of God, and that he died for the grievous sins I was committing every day. I joked with my guys that I was the only born-again witch in existence!
I was important in the house. The only girl with twelve guys. Thirteen. The exact number of a coven. They gave me more books to study. We held our own version of church. Different ceremonies with different moons, different times for beginning and ending things, weird teas brewing in one of the four coffee pots, and all the time there was reading and searching and studying, and trying to stay alive. I had quit my job by that time and didn’t leave the house much as my ex-husband would show up drunk and with a posse at odd times. He didn’t want me back, but he didn’t want anyone else to have me either. Least of all these guys.
I was kind of the den mother of this rag tag group of guys. We lived our “religion” each of us thinking we had the best version of truth. I became a master at Tarot card reading and eventually even made a few dollars doing it for people around our apartment complex. I apprenticed under a woman (from yet another New Age bookstore) to chart people with regards to their astrological signs (a mega-all-inclusive horoscope reading, if you will). I dabbled in palm reading but it all just looked like lines to me. The east coast if full of things for young witches to do, there’s even a brochure- I had no idea (being from a relatively small, bible belted community) that such things even existed! We went to festivals, joined committees, and went to large rituals that joined with other covens. We dabbled in almost everything we could find that had a mysterious cloak around it. And all that time that voice was still screaming away inside me “THIS IS WRONG AND YOU KNOW IT!” but I kept ignoring it. I was having fun.
And then: the end. Our group started breaking up. Some guys were done with their service, so they just packed up and left. No good byes, they were just gone. The rest of us started fighting. I had started dating one of the, let’s just call them ring leaders, Daniel*. “I can’t keep us together anymore. It’s all falling apart. We’re out of here before something bad happens,” he told me one night. Two weeks later he got his discharge from the military and we were headed to the opposite coast.
I don’t know if dark forces were gunning for me or maybe God’s forces were. But that was the most difficult trip I have ever made in my life. We broke down in three separate U-Haul trucks a total of five times. And instead of praying to God to help us find our way, we rang our little bells and consulted our cards and finally limped across the Washington State boarder. We weren’t there more than a week before another coven had been established. Some were Daniel’s old friends, some were people that lived in our apartment building. It amazed me that where ever I went the supernatural found me! I reasoned that I must be on the right path.
In the great northwest, I learned about earth spirits and how we are all connected to Gaia. I’m sad to say, I was really starting to buy into all of this. To the point where I was recruiting my friends. It was like a really bad version of Amway.
“I have something really neat I want to show you. No, I don’t want to talk about it on the phone, but I’m really excited about it and I think it will be a great fit for you! No, you don’t have to sell a thing. We’re having a meeting Thursday night; I’d love for you to come. Great, see you there!”
God was starting to work in me. His voice getting louder and louder. Then things started falling apart again. Not surprisingly, events that transpired on the West Coast led me home to Missouri and Daniel followed. He still clung to his paganism, but I was tired of it. My heart wasn’t in it anymore. I was a woman without a country. I certainly didn’t want to go back to my parent’s church. It was that explosion that set the chain of events that led me here in the first place! Besides, they wouldn’t have me anyway, right? Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live, and all that. Besides, I would probably burst into flames as soon as I walked in the door. I felt like the biggest sinner on the planet.
Finally, because I was home and living in my parent’s basement, and because they expected me to I started going back to church, if only to keep peace in the house. Bracing myself for the glares, and the condemnation that I would likely get from the other members I went and sat in a far corner and never made eye contact with anyone. To their credit, not one nasty word was ever even uttered in my direction. But that didn’t mean like I felt any connection there. I still felt like I was running from God, even though the little voice inside me was trying to tell me that church felt right. I still flipped through my books about Wicca and the practical workbooks; I still wrote in my little journal that I called a grimoire. I was confused. Daniel was confused too. Finally, he could no longer take my search for God so we parted ways.
I drove past the bookstore that had been a safe haven in high school and I knew what I had to do. I went home and packed up every last book, shred of paper, every last rock, gem and crystal… and I destroyed them. These things that had been my life for the last seven years. These things that I let replace my common sense.
The next Sunday, was Halloween. (Halloween has always been my favorite holiday, and not even for any occult reason but because of the magic of the night. The pure excitement of kids running out of the house to trick or treat is palpable; the smells of an autumn night, I love it. ) So when the pastor gave the invitation at the end of the service, I raised my eyes to his and rededicated my life to Christ.
The irony of all that time I spent searching for something more, is enough to make me scream. God, the lover of my heart, my protector, my healer, the one that desires me, deserves my praise and adoration, does not require me to jump through ritualistic hoops, He was there the entire time.
I have distinct memories and scars from my walk in the dark. God is an amazing healer, and when I rededicated my life, God wiped my slate clean. Literally. Today, I could no more tell you about your astrological sign than I could tell what you had for breakfast on Thursday of last week. So it saddens me when I see my Facebook friends posting their daily horoscope, or their daily Tarot card. ‘It’s harmless. It doesn’t mean anything.’ Wrong. As Christians we are to set the example. The bible tells us we are not to consult with psychics and mediums. What does it say to the world when we, as Christians, post these things? It says, well it MUST be permissible. Very much like I thought that if a Sunday school teacher could live in both worlds (which he most certainly did not, I assure you) then I could too. It only takes a crack in some people to open them to the horrors of the occult and before they know it, they’re hooked. I’ve been told by people I respected that they just read their horoscope as a game. Really? Kind of a dangerous game to play, I believe. Why don’t you read your bible instead, I suggest. Why is THAT suggestion the ludicrous one? I don’t understand it, I never will.
For me, mystery and intrigue still lie around every corner. Every family still has some devastating secret. The skeletons in the ancestral wardrobe are legion. There is movie quality drama unfolding behind every drawn curtain. This is my happy place: the warm rabbit holes of my ridiculous imagination. This place, that once was my safe harbor and probably saved my sanity though the horrors that I subjected myself to. This amazing gift from God, where he routinely makes an appearance and where my daydreams turn into a personal conversation with my Creator. Not surprisingly, in my imagination? God is bit Goth.
*Some names were changed for privacy reasons.
This morning, right on cue the dog started snarling, growling and barking up a storm. Mail must be here, I thought. But Greg is gone and getting the mail is his job. (I do not like mail boxes. When I go they are always teeming with bills and late notices. When he goes, there are nifty new books. I’m beginning to think he and the mailman are in cahoots.) So I sent the kid. Wouldn’t you know it? He came in with a package in one hand…and a fist full of bills in the other. Rats, so close.
, in which Bono discusses his thoughts on Jesus. Being a big U2 fan, Greg liked the fact that Bono alludes to the famous ‘lunatic, liar, or Lord’ quote by C.S. Lewis from 
I find it extremely difficult to review memoirs because with a few keystrokes you either appear to approve or disapprove of someone’s life experiences. How pretentious is that? However, given the task at hand, I’ll do my best and hope I appropriately convey how much this book meant to me.
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