About Me
If I'm to be your guide on this little magickal mystery tour, I suppose you should know a little bit about me, my background, and how I fell down the rabbit hole of the occult.
It all started with a crisis of faith.
I started going to church with some friends just after turning sixteen. I had a longing for the supernatural. I'd had some experiences as a kid (I'll go into details later), and had always had this feeling of there being something more out there that I was desperately trying to find, because I felt incomplete without it. I thought I had found it in Christianity. I became a zealot, and threw myself into the theological deep end with a geeky fervor matched only by my love of Star Wars and comic books. I became a youth leader. I volunteered at the church just about every day after school for five years, helping the various pastors with whatever they needed. I spent a few years a volunteer chaplain for the local prison. I went to college to study theology, psychology, and philosophy. There was never a single doubt in my mind that I would spend my life working in ministry full time.
And I did.
For ten years I worked as a full time youth pastor for a large church in Chattanooga, TN, and then as a program director for a Salvation Army Corps in Illinois. The entire time I chaffed under the dogmatic teachings of the church. It didn't matter which denomination, and I researched and tried them all. There were fundamental things in Christianity that always bothered me, but I pushed them away; tried to rationalize and excuse them. The inner politics and nastiness of organized religion didn't help, either. There are a lot of people with really great hearts doing a lot of good in the church. There are also a lot of people who are there for the wrong reasons, and use it as a means to personal power and self gratification at the expense of others. The entirety of it eventually ground me down.
When I got married I "retired" from ministry and became a stay at home dad. Medical issues had already forced me to go on disability and made working a full time job difficult, anyway, but my disillusionment with the church prompted me to just walk away from everything completely. For a few years I convinced myself that my personal belief system was fine, my faith just as strong as ever! I didn't need the church to worship and serve God! So what if I have these doubts that keep nagging at me...
Eventually, those doubts grew into a "wilderness experience," where I was sure that after I struggled with those inner demons I'd emerge much stronger in my faith. However, the doubts didn't go away, they grew. That empty feeling was growing, too. Eventually, I couldn't deny it anymore- I'd lost my faith. I was still absolutely sure that there was more out there, but the God of Christianity and that religion just wasn't it. I was always interested in occult and paranormal topics, even though they were taboo in the church. Eventually, I decided to look into "real magic" and see if there was any legitimacy to it. One of the first things that I came across was an interview with Dr. Dean Radin, who is a parapsychologist that specializes in researching topics like ESP, remote viewing, telepathy, etc. He'd recently come out with a book titled Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe. In Real Magic, Dr. Radin uses repeatable lab experiments and the scientific method to prove magickal and psychic concepts are real. I devoured it in a day, and then downloaded the audiobook and listened to the whole thing again. My mind was blown, and I instantly started picking up every book on magick and the occult that I could find. I read countless Reddit threads an followed up on every book and video recommendation. I found several YouTube channels that were excellent resources and started watching hours and hours of video.
I pulled a complete one-eighty in life and went from a devote Christian pastor to a full-blown Pagan occultist and magickal practitioner. I've spent the last three years of my life doing nothing but researching occult topics and practicing magick. This is a collection of the best information on these topics that I've found for people interested on starting down this path, and the sources where I found them. I genuinely hope that they are a help to you in your own journey into the mystery of magick and the occult.