I am naturally drawn to spiritual practices. From an early age, I sought the meaning of things, felt the energy in animals, plants, and nature. I created narratives from the barest threads of story elements, understanding the rich interweave of plot and character to create and express meaning. I can say these feelings came upon me naturally, but in truth, it may have come from some early indoctrination I don’t remember. Either way, it’s hard-wired and a part of me. Yet, the journey from then until now took a lot of turns. 

Years of Abomination

I was brought up in a strict, Catholic household. Although I call it “strict,” I know now that strictness is a continuum and that, ultimately, my experience wasn’t that strict. I was carted to church every Sunday, forced to attend Catechism, and had my head filled with traditions, rituals, and stories. I can pin Catholicism as the source of my very romantic ideas about existence, as the Catholic cosmology was installed in a deep way. There was heaven, hell, angels, demons, and an eternal warfare over my protected soul. 

But my soul wasn’t protected. After I left childhood and entered adolescence, my being gay manifested as a deep, abiding wrongness in my mind and emotions. I felt off. I felt wrong. My adolescence and my beginning to be gay happened in the mid- to late-1980s, the time of AIDS/HIV, where this plague first took hold, first made nightly news, and first attracted the condemnation of the Catholics around me.

So, at the time I had begun to feel my gayness exist inside me on some subterranean, unexplained level, I heard that gay men were abominations, plague carriers, and that there was no way they could ever live meaningful, fulfilled, happy lives. I heard these condemnations everywhere I went, every day, for years. 

Yet, the gayness won. And, in the winning, any attachment to Catholicism inside me was destroyed. I saw Catholicism…and, by extension the other Jehovan-based, Abramahic religions of Judaism and Islam…as corrupt institutions designed to control society through intimidation and fear. I had been called an “abomination” for expressing an aspect of my being that was born into me, for not denying my own self to adhere to a doctrine written by humans thousands of years ago, when in my view, the institutions themselves are the abominations. 

Primitive Nature

Fresh from my break with Catholicism and heady in my rebellion, I exited my home, I graduated college, and I moved into my own world. I came to believe that all religion created by man was an artifice, a synthetic overlay of rules, restrictions, and systems of control over basic human experience and belief. I chose to concentrate on the deeper experiences and relieve myself of the rules. I read Primitive Mythology, by Joseph Campbell, The Golden Bough, by James George Frazer, and other such books about mythologies older than Catholicism. I kept to my own overall ethnicity group…that being Cajun, hence, Acadian, hence Gallic Franco, hence Gaulish Celtic…while I researched these practices, but ultimately, I sought out things that were very primitive, before even these societies. I sought out the spirituality of the cavemen to little avail. 

At the time, I met other pagan-minded folks and fell into their spiritual group. I felt accepted, even courted by them, by people who became my life-long friends. But, as their group evolved and expanded, it began to become political and the folk who had deemed themselves “above all that corruption,” themselves became drunk on their own egos, until the weight of their intoxication collapsed  the structure of the group. What followed was in-fighting, broken relationships, admonitions, and again, I was labelled as something akin to an abomination because I didn’t tow the line to where it was expected. 

Age of Reason

What follow was the collapse of my entire social circle and, amid the petty drama, a collapse of my belief system. At the time, it felt that all spiritual groups, all occult practitioners, all systems and processes, would eventually end in utter failure because of human failing. We would always attempt to secure material power over one another and ignore the spiritual connections. It felt inevitable and it felt a total violation of the purpose of seeking the spiritual connection in the first place. 

I distanced myself from the practices and the desire to seek out more than the material world. I can’t say that I embraced atheistic thought because I embraced nothing. Atheism asserted itself as the default. I placed my faith in science and reason and, while i didn’t ignore the spiritual experience I sometimes felt, I didn’t seek them out of try to enhance them either. 

I worked on myself from a psychological standpoint, attended 12-step groups, sought self-control through cognitive therapy ideals, and tried to be open-minded and genuine in my dealings with others. In 12-step groups, I attempted to make friends, but still felt distant. I could never discern whether the failure to connect was a suspicion that kept me from trusting them or if they were another clique I couldn’t crack. When trauma and grief entered my life, as it does with everyone’s life eventually, these people from whom I had sought wisdom and support failed to show up or me in a meaningful way, and so, I broke with them. 

In this time, the feelings of being alone, singular, unique, and disconnected grew to encompass my life, grew to define the spiritual ache in me. While I never felt like I was “missing something,” I felt perennially rejected by all the groups I had ever joined or in which I had invested, whether directly by action of the group, or by passive collapse of the society which grew up around them. Either way, I was alone. 

Radicalized

In 2016, a white supremacist, quasi-fascist, narcissistic con man received enough votes from American citizens to put him into the office of highest executive office of the government. This came to be as a profound disillusionment for a couple of reasons. 

The first is that I once revered the American system of government. I don’t know exactly why I did. In some ways, I think this reverence had been instilled in me by society during my childhood,but I had grown interested in how America developed to the point of reading reference books on the founding fathers and the history of the American colonies (The Americans, by Daniel J.Boorstin). For me, the Trump Presidency represented a failure of the system and a perversion of the ideals of the founding fathers and the Constitution. That it could happen at all hit me hard. 

The second reason involved the development of our society toward acceptance of LGTBTIA persons. We had struggled and won the right to marriage and public opinion seemed to be leaning toward acceptance. Then I had evidence that 61 million Americans voted for xenophobia, homophobia, white supremacy, the overturning of democratic institutions in favor of fascism, and rampant, robber baron-style corruption. The society in which I thought I participated turned out to be overwhelmingly something different. 

We live in an age of terrorism. I have heard of instances of young Muslim men being “radicalized,” somehow filled with religious fervor enough to become a terrorist. I had never understood how that was possible until the election, and then, suddenly, I felt decidedly shoved toward my spiritual pursuits by political events. 

For 50 years, I had been told I was an abomination by Jehovan religious followers and when these same evangelical persons were elected to the US House of Representatives, the US Senate, and now the US Presidency, it turned out to be the “last straw.” 

If I were to be an abomination in name, I would become one in fact and practice. In truth, I don’t think I’m an abomination, but I decided to embrace the name, embrace the darkness I felt within myself, and thus, I began to become a Satanist. 

I had always felt the darkness. I had always been able to look at and process negativity better than others around me. I had always been in touch with the trauma and focused on the damage of others and myself. I strongly felt a calling toward Shamanism since my days exploring primitive spiritual practices, and I knew that the darkness in life was natural and necessary. I knew that it needed to be engaged and dealt, rather than ignored to fester. This is what I chose to engage. I consciously turned this capacity in myself from a curse into a blessing.