Kimberly Steele

When I was sixteen, heartbroken from my first failed romantic relationship, I turned to witchcraft with desperate hopes that I would gain the coolness and perspective of a sage adult.  My relationship with religion had always been complicated despite having an average suburban upbringing and average attendance at the local church.  I was confirmed in the usual way.  Truth be told, I never much felt adoration for the Christian god except for when we sang his music.  The music wasn’t enough to hold my interest.  At sixteen, frightened of my increasing hypnogogia and suicidally depressed, I dived into Gardnerian Wicca. 

In my opinion, Gardner is the type of occultist who is like a broken clock: he’s right twice a day and wrong the rest of the time.  His version of Wicca is more empty pomp and circumstance than substance — his rituals weren’t all that user-friendly to the sole practitioner, his explanations of what magic is and does were completely obtuse, and his frantic need to grant authenticity to his brand of witchcraft undermined its intention as a revival religion, which I would presume to be reviving a religion, to state the obvious.  I got myself a Tarot deck and it was the Thoth deck.  I love the Thoth deck to this day and I’m grateful for my early study of it, however, because of it I jumped from the frying pan into the fire.  I started delving into the works of Aleister Crowley.  Crowley, like Gardner, had no practical advice for other occultists and, like a bad music teacher, assumed every student was starting out with a basic working knowledge of the field's principles.  Crowley also was simply an awful person.  He’s a man who started out with everything in life: good looks, wealth, intelligence.  He squandered all of it, most likely molested children, and died broke and friendless in a fleabag rent-a-room.  His reputation as the “evilest man in the world” is somewhat of a joke, because shouldn’t a thoroughly evil man have bottomless sources of wealth and power?  Nevertheless, to dismiss Crowley’s labors, especially his magnum opus (the Thoth tarot deck) is to skip over a secret key to a vast storehouse of knowledge.  I bumbled through my late teenage and early college years, gaining a reputation among Christian paranoids at my city university because I dared display my esoteric books on an open shelf.  Yes, a small but rabid Christian constituent in my dorm tried to stop me from displaying 777 and Tarot: Mirror of the Soul.  Christians can be real asshats, and they don’t do their waning religion any favors by acting in such a fashion.

By the time I was leaving my 20s and college behind, I came to a watershed.  I was on anti-depressants because at seventeen, I voluntarily started taking antidepressants so I would stop thinking so seriously about killing myself.  As an adult, I decided the drugs had done their job.  My psychiatrist, a vacuous, incompetent, rich, comfortably numb boob, insisted I was nuts and that I would have to be on tricyclic antidepressants for the rest of my life.  This conflicted directly with me becoming an adult, and at the time depression was considered a pre-existing condition which could prevent me from getting health insurance.  I fired my shrink and weaned myself off of antidepressants.  My hypnogogia waned along with my antidepressant dosage, and it felt natural to stop thinking so much about Crowley, Tarot, and magical rituals that didn’t seem to do much of anything, let alone improve my life.  

By 30, I was atheist.  I still had hypnogogia and encountered odd things while in that state; I just chalked it up to the undiscovered scientific truth of inter dimensional bleed.  I still did magic, meaning, I threw my intentions in certain directions and uncanny stuff happened as a result.  Like any good atheist, I was a solipsist, trusting that I was God of my own mind and no other forces could possibly be at work there.  I condemned all forms of belief in God as various manifestations of the fear of death.  I ignored any and all beings who tried to talk to me; hidden deep down was the fear that my shrink was right, that I was crazy and soon enough the voices would prove I was insane.  I was gleefully nihilistic in my atheism.  Though I suppose it bothers some atheists that death is a one-way trip into a permanent void, that didn’t bother me at all.  In fact, I wrote my first novel, Forever Fifteen, as a look into the horror of being forced to exist in the flesh for a thousand years or more.  The protagonist, Lucy, longs for the black, permanent void of death, as boring as that may seem.  I have always loved tedium and the atheist version of what happens after death is about as tedious and boring as can be.  

Oddly, my atheist self also wrote a decidedly non-atheist music album, the Dream of Flight, which is an entire, programmatic album about what I only now belatedly understand to be the astral plane.  Occultists see human existence as the simultaneous manifestation of the soul or Individuality on approximately seven planes ranging from the lightest, the spiritual plane, to the densest, the material plane.  The astral plane, otherwise known as the plane of emotions and daily and nightly dreams, is somewhere in the middle.  Despite having written an album about dreams that talked about “bringing a whole world to life” via the dream world, I puttered on, quoting Christopher Hitchens and Bertrand Russell and not believing there was any such thing as a disembodied spirit, non-corporeal being, or god. 

Fast forward to around age thirty-seven, when I went vegan for the animals.  Veganism gets accused of being a religion for good reasons, one of which is that it takes tremendous will power and dedication to ignore opposing forces who would have you conform to their animal-eating and abusing ways. People in our anti-religious culture believe that sort of dedication can only come from belief in a higher power, but I would argue that humans are naturally religious and if the Christian god cannot fill spiritual needs, actually living ones values as a vegan rushes into that spiritual void.  Most vegans I know are atheists who suffer from the binary delusion of either having to have one God (usually the Christian god) or no god at all (atheism).  Most are not willing to hear (at least in my opinion) they’re both wrong.  When I went vegan, suddenly all that bilge I used to spew as an ova-lacto vegetarian about not wanting to take on the energy of suffering and sad animals by eating them actually made sense.  When you go vegan, the weight you lose is mainly spiritual.  I was one of the lucky people whose health benefitted from going vegan — it helped that I already cooked most of my own meals and didn’t subsist on junk food — however, the feeling of clarity and purity that happened when I stopped eating animals and their secretions was one I wouldn’t trade even if being vegan gave me cancer, so there’s that.  

Around the same time, my absolute hatred of the suburbs and car obsession led me to an author-blogger named James Howard Kunstler.  Kunstler is devastatingly witty and because of this, I became a constant fan of his podcast and writings.  Every now and then, he featured a guy on his podcast named John Michael Greer.  I began to read John Michael Greer’s blog The Archdruid Report, which ostensibly was not about Druids or their religion but about the same subjects as Kunstler wrote about: peak oil, people, and politics.  I quietly ignored Greer’s “other” blog, The Well of Galabes, which was about magic.  As an atheist, I hardly cared about woo-woo interests I had abandoned along with antidepressant drugs and childhood.  I’m not sure at what point I decided to read Greer’s other blog or the many books he had written at that time about magic, but I did.  Unlike so many religious people, Greer was high on the reliability meter and low on the hypocrisy and narcissism meters.  I read the Well of Galabes and just like the Archdruid Report, it contained pragmatic, well-rounded perspectives about the world, and it made its points about religion with no obvious or subversive aims to convert the reader.  When Greer brought Archdruid Report and Well of Galabes to an end, he began a new blog called Ecosophia, I followed it eagerly.  Comments on Greer’s blogs were always lively and fun, with many smart people throwing around provocative and intriguing ideas.  The Greer essays that gave me the most to think about were The Next Ten Billion Years, which over time got me to rethink my belief in short term human extinction: yes, that’s what Extinction Rebellion is blathering on about.  I no longer believe the human race is going to cause the end of a livable climate in the next 300 years, and I think the reasons why I used to believe that would happen is because the thought allowed me the luxury of thinking nothing I do matters.  Once he was on Ecosophia, Greer wrote an essay people had been asking for about reincarnation.  If there is a such thing as a life-changing essay, I believe Greer’s A Few Notes on Reincarnation was it for me.  That particular essay explained mysteries about my own experience and also helped me to understand the chaotic world around me.  I started considering the possibility that I was the reincarnation of a chain of people behind me and that I had many more human lifetimes to go.  I became nascently aware of realities I had considered impossible as an atheist.  

At this point, I started looking into Druidry, because as a long time writer of Celtic-sounding music and long haired tree-hugger, I figured, why not?  Druidry (and other magical paths) required three things on a daily basis:

1. Discursive meditation, which is not the mind-emptying Eastern kind but rather a disciplined form of rational thinking invented in the ancient West. 

2. Divination, which I already had some experience in via Tarot cards. 

3. The Sphere of Protection, an approximately 20 minute bit of solo performance that involved memorizing a script of invoking and banishing elemental forces (once you’ve got the elements down, you graduate and assign a pantheon of existing gods to each part of the ritual) designed to shape and master one’s thoughts and actions via unseen forms of energy.

I have no problem committing to a daily routine — as a highly-functioning autistic, routines are my bread and butter.  I began the Sphere of Protection on January 1, 2018 and did it every day without fail. The SoP has always felt helpful even when I was bumbling through it, barely memorized and doing it without a pantheon.  By about six months in, I chose to assign the Druid god pantheon because for me, John Michael Greer’s system outlined in The Druid Magic Handbook was the appropriate fit.  I would often be so overcome with emotion during certain elements that I would cry.  After the SoP would be discursive meditation, which I prefer to do while writing in a journal as it allows me to jot down thoughts as they occur.  I first started doing a daily three card Tarot divination, which gave me much insight into the old Thoth deck, however, I changed to Ogham as it is part of the Druid Magic Handbook course of study.  

The last two years have been the oddest and best of my entire life.  I now consider myself deeply religious.  I pray every day and I highly believe I am in near constant communication with deities and spirits.  Furthermore, I believe I may have always been talking to the non-corporeal entities without realizing it.  I think many people who talk to themselves don’t understand they’re actually not talking to themselves but a non-corporeal entity.  All I know is that the interactions I have with non-corporeal entities are of a far higher quality than they were when I was first experimenting with Wicca, and that’s due to the SoP and the discernment that accompanies discursive meditation. 

I’m not sure what we are to the gods we are working with.  As far as I can tell, they are super-beings who were wisely worshipped by the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Indians, and Chinese and if you’re sensitive and kind to them, and if you ask them politely and respectfully, they just might mentor you and give you their excellent advice.  However, if you’re disrespectful and you do stupid human things like:

A. Arrogantly presume they can’t possibly exist because Jesus/Allah says you’ll burn in hell

B. Use and wear their name for a pair of overpriced sneakers

C. Curse them for not helping your lazy, regressive butt to win the Lotto 

You can expect to have a bad time, or at the very least, you can expect the gods not to care about you.  If an annoying hamster was biting my ankles, shouting at me in a high, squeaky voice to make it King of Hamsterland, I’d probably ignore it too, despite my soft spot for hamsters.  

In my two years of becoming religious, I became calmer, stronger, and more sanguine about everything in my life.  I have begun to understand that limits are the key to a happy life and that our culture has an insane disregard for them, most likely because of the absurd amount of petroleum wealth we have enjoyed for the last 200 odd years.  I became far more detached from money, that is to say, I began to look at it as valuable in terms of keeping me clothed and fed, and as far as having loads more than that, I have seen the benefits of rejecting the infinite perversions and complications that come of having too much.  I have come to understand why throwing your unexamined bad intentions around inevitably drags you into being a crappy person with rotten luck, no matter how much you insist you are one of the Blessed & Good People.  I have made the affirmation that I am a better person tomorrow than I was today, if only by the slightest amount.  

In this strange dialogue with gods, I have apologized for my pathological fondness for dad jokes (I simply must be reincarnated as a father, because I have WAY too many dad jokes to work out of my system) and I have heard birds singing in the middle of the night in winter, which is also known as clairaudience.  I have had conversations with dead people before they moved on to the next cycle of reincarnation.  I have discovered my past life as a traveling musician in an era of bards and my past life as an alcoholic Scottish laird.  I have felt my tensions drain away as I walked through a forest where the beings patiently wait for me to visit.  I had the privilege of talking to a few Greek gods (they seem to be the same as the Roman ones, for what it’s worth) as I arrange melodies and harmonies I’ve composed to flesh out the Orphic Hymns. What a fantastic journey it has been.  I certainly look forward to the remainder.