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WTH Was I Gonna Type Here?
Mar. 30th, 2009 06:19 pm
I was going to type something profound & amazing, I just know I was... but I can't remember what it was now.
Oh... wait, now I amember.
How I Discovered Magic for Fun & Profit.
When I was living w/my cousin Penny, I spent an inordinate amount of time in libraries. Books filled my world. I have come to love how libraries smell, how books smell, how used bookstores smell. That dusty musty sweet aroma of books. Yes, I know it's a mold & damages those books, but Gods... it's nectar to my nose.
While in those libraries, I only favored a few sections. Sci-Fi/Fantasy & Horror, of course. The books about animals - biology/zoology, books about medicinal herbs... and the occult section. California libraries in the mid-80s were havens for occult sections. I used to feel like I was getting away with something every time I checked out a book on witchcraft or Voodoo. In the Glendora library I got my introduction to the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, Cunningham, Buckland, Gardner, Dion Fortune, A. E. Waite, Eliphas Levi and so many other famous & infamous occultists, witches & Pagan writers. In this time, I began thinking of myself as a witch - not yet Wiccan, not quite Pagan, but definitely a witch. I also got my first glimpse of the Necronomicon, and yes, at 10, I believed it was real and thought that the books by H. P. Lovecraft that my mom had owned hinted at the mysterious powers of the Necronomicon instead of just being written by the same guy. Don't judge me too harshly - I was 10. Penny barely tolerated me coming home w/books about unicorns & vampires, but some of the witchcraft books blended in with school books (especially if I kept them in brown paper bookcovers...) & Stephen King books.
At the time, living w/Penny, I didn't really have a space of my own. Glendora is also not close to any wooded areas & I avoided the parks for the most part. The minor chants and knots and charms I played with I kept on me, tucked away. If living with my parents & Jody taught me nothing else it is unwise to keep cows tongues rotting away quietly in a desk drawer or dark corner of a closet. I didn't talk to anyone about my obsession with magic and witchcraft. For one, I really didn't have anyone to discuss it with - and some of my only friends in jr. high were Mormon.
When I moved to Tennessee to live with my aunt and uncle, many opportunities fell into place. It felt like Someone had done it on purpose. My aunt & uncle had a nice house - I had my own room separated from the rest of the bedrooms. It had a door that opened onto the porch & the windows opened into the back yard. My aunt & uncle's back yard was just fucking huge. You literally could not see the back fence line from the back house windows (of course, having a big-ass shed & a huge apple tree halfway across the yard helped that). It was bordered on three sides by thickets of brush & old trees & moss & vines. There was a little footpath leading from the side of the house through the yard & the back thicket & a lot of kids used it as a shortcut walking to & from school, but that was during the day. You couldn't see any of the neighboring houses & they couldn't see my aunt & uncle's place. We don't have yards like that here in Vegas, and even suburban Californian yards are tailored & trimmed (& usually have a pool). My uncle kept a garden in one back corner, full of tomatoes & beans & okra. There was poke & poison ivy & pecan trees in the thickets. On the opposite side of the yard was a trellis - my uncle didn't mess with it, and I don't know exactly why it was back there. It had hops & grapevines growing on it, but the grapes were small & bitter - the birds usually got the grapes or they turned to bitter raisins. But this trellis shielded even more of that corner of the yard from the house, & even in winter it was fully covered with tangled dry leaves and vines. At night - there were a couple of floodlights on the house, but the yard was pitch black. Even better, though, from day one I was given an allowance. Things may not have been the best with my aunt and uncle, and it was 99% my fault that things got nasty towards the end, but in the two years I lived with them I came to love the back yard.
The only problem to my continuing my pursuit of witchcraft was the local libraries. The occult sections of small town libraries around Memphis were woefully inadequate. Actually, the Frazier library was just inadequate. It was about as big as a 7-11 & the kids' section took up half of it. But I had an allowance & there were a couple of used bookstores within walking distance, and my aunt usually went to the mall once a week and an outlet mall (which I loathed, except for the World Bazaar where I got all my candles & incense) once a month or so. I scrounged books wherever I went. Since I was little, I had always had penpals and I continued that hobby in Memphis. Along with the few friends I kept in touch with, my new interest in heavy metal opened up a new source of pen-pals... and with heavy metal came fellow witches. I had a book exchange network that spanned the globe. Sometimes people wanted their books back, sometimes they said pass them on & sometimes they were gifts. When I left my aunt & uncle I had two enormous boxes of books that were shipped to Vegas, mostly full of occult & magic books. My aunt never seemed to care, or notice, what book I was reading. I remember sitting on the couch in the den reading Sarah Morrison's The Modern Witch's Spellbook & my aunt sitting in her rocking chair watching t.v. next to me. My uncle had a lot of Theosophist & spiritualist books as it was - Allan Cardec, Edgar Cayce, that kind of thing, along with his Bahai books & philosophers like Ouspensky & Gurdjiev. Because of my uncle, I also spent a lot of time at the University of Tennessee, in its library and lecture halls, and the Bahai meeting house was owned by bibliophiles who liked it when the kids wanted to sit & read instead of running around like maniacs.
I could work magic in my room - quiet little candle spells, burning a miniscule amount of incense as an offering. I had a modicum of privacy, but I still kept things quiet - especially when it came to leaving the house at night. The backyard became my proving ground. I would go back to the trellis - my days were spent clearing the grass out behind it, cleaning away rocks & sticks & dead leaves, making sure a lit candle (or candles) couldn't be seen from any vantage point, making sure the path from house to trellis was relatively clear so I could walk easily & quietly. I was so diligent and methodical. I was working under the notion that if one thing was out of place a spell could blow up in my face, tho.
Of course, even with Jody being a true Satanist, and for all my reading & studying... for all my care & diligence about gathering ingredients (some of which I am not proud of - someone lost a chicken) and making sure the timing was right... my first true ritual, carried out in the black of night, was an attempt to summon Satan so I could ask him to make me play guitar like Jimmy Page. Obviously, I am not currently a rock star.
Oh... wait, now I amember.
How I Discovered Magic for Fun & Profit.
When I was living w/my cousin Penny, I spent an inordinate amount of time in libraries. Books filled my world. I have come to love how libraries smell, how books smell, how used bookstores smell. That dusty musty sweet aroma of books. Yes, I know it's a mold & damages those books, but Gods... it's nectar to my nose.
While in those libraries, I only favored a few sections. Sci-Fi/Fantasy & Horror, of course. The books about animals - biology/zoology, books about medicinal herbs... and the occult section. California libraries in the mid-80s were havens for occult sections. I used to feel like I was getting away with something every time I checked out a book on witchcraft or Voodoo. In the Glendora library I got my introduction to the Golden Dawn, Aleister Crowley, Cunningham, Buckland, Gardner, Dion Fortune, A. E. Waite, Eliphas Levi and so many other famous & infamous occultists, witches & Pagan writers. In this time, I began thinking of myself as a witch - not yet Wiccan, not quite Pagan, but definitely a witch. I also got my first glimpse of the Necronomicon, and yes, at 10, I believed it was real and thought that the books by H. P. Lovecraft that my mom had owned hinted at the mysterious powers of the Necronomicon instead of just being written by the same guy. Don't judge me too harshly - I was 10. Penny barely tolerated me coming home w/books about unicorns & vampires, but some of the witchcraft books blended in with school books (especially if I kept them in brown paper bookcovers...) & Stephen King books.
At the time, living w/Penny, I didn't really have a space of my own. Glendora is also not close to any wooded areas & I avoided the parks for the most part. The minor chants and knots and charms I played with I kept on me, tucked away. If living with my parents & Jody taught me nothing else it is unwise to keep cows tongues rotting away quietly in a desk drawer or dark corner of a closet. I didn't talk to anyone about my obsession with magic and witchcraft. For one, I really didn't have anyone to discuss it with - and some of my only friends in jr. high were Mormon.
When I moved to Tennessee to live with my aunt and uncle, many opportunities fell into place. It felt like Someone had done it on purpose. My aunt & uncle had a nice house - I had my own room separated from the rest of the bedrooms. It had a door that opened onto the porch & the windows opened into the back yard. My aunt & uncle's back yard was just fucking huge. You literally could not see the back fence line from the back house windows (of course, having a big-ass shed & a huge apple tree halfway across the yard helped that). It was bordered on three sides by thickets of brush & old trees & moss & vines. There was a little footpath leading from the side of the house through the yard & the back thicket & a lot of kids used it as a shortcut walking to & from school, but that was during the day. You couldn't see any of the neighboring houses & they couldn't see my aunt & uncle's place. We don't have yards like that here in Vegas, and even suburban Californian yards are tailored & trimmed (& usually have a pool). My uncle kept a garden in one back corner, full of tomatoes & beans & okra. There was poke & poison ivy & pecan trees in the thickets. On the opposite side of the yard was a trellis - my uncle didn't mess with it, and I don't know exactly why it was back there. It had hops & grapevines growing on it, but the grapes were small & bitter - the birds usually got the grapes or they turned to bitter raisins. But this trellis shielded even more of that corner of the yard from the house, & even in winter it was fully covered with tangled dry leaves and vines. At night - there were a couple of floodlights on the house, but the yard was pitch black. Even better, though, from day one I was given an allowance. Things may not have been the best with my aunt and uncle, and it was 99% my fault that things got nasty towards the end, but in the two years I lived with them I came to love the back yard.
The only problem to my continuing my pursuit of witchcraft was the local libraries. The occult sections of small town libraries around Memphis were woefully inadequate. Actually, the Frazier library was just inadequate. It was about as big as a 7-11 & the kids' section took up half of it. But I had an allowance & there were a couple of used bookstores within walking distance, and my aunt usually went to the mall once a week and an outlet mall (which I loathed, except for the World Bazaar where I got all my candles & incense) once a month or so. I scrounged books wherever I went. Since I was little, I had always had penpals and I continued that hobby in Memphis. Along with the few friends I kept in touch with, my new interest in heavy metal opened up a new source of pen-pals... and with heavy metal came fellow witches. I had a book exchange network that spanned the globe. Sometimes people wanted their books back, sometimes they said pass them on & sometimes they were gifts. When I left my aunt & uncle I had two enormous boxes of books that were shipped to Vegas, mostly full of occult & magic books. My aunt never seemed to care, or notice, what book I was reading. I remember sitting on the couch in the den reading Sarah Morrison's The Modern Witch's Spellbook & my aunt sitting in her rocking chair watching t.v. next to me. My uncle had a lot of Theosophist & spiritualist books as it was - Allan Cardec, Edgar Cayce, that kind of thing, along with his Bahai books & philosophers like Ouspensky & Gurdjiev. Because of my uncle, I also spent a lot of time at the University of Tennessee, in its library and lecture halls, and the Bahai meeting house was owned by bibliophiles who liked it when the kids wanted to sit & read instead of running around like maniacs.
I could work magic in my room - quiet little candle spells, burning a miniscule amount of incense as an offering. I had a modicum of privacy, but I still kept things quiet - especially when it came to leaving the house at night. The backyard became my proving ground. I would go back to the trellis - my days were spent clearing the grass out behind it, cleaning away rocks & sticks & dead leaves, making sure a lit candle (or candles) couldn't be seen from any vantage point, making sure the path from house to trellis was relatively clear so I could walk easily & quietly. I was so diligent and methodical. I was working under the notion that if one thing was out of place a spell could blow up in my face, tho.
Of course, even with Jody being a true Satanist, and for all my reading & studying... for all my care & diligence about gathering ingredients (some of which I am not proud of - someone lost a chicken) and making sure the timing was right... my first true ritual, carried out in the black of night, was an attempt to summon Satan so I could ask him to make me play guitar like Jimmy Page. Obviously, I am not currently a rock star.
