Back In My Day, Part One

I came in at a pivotal time in the history of the Craft, in the liminal space between a publishing boom and the arrival of the mainstream internet. Being initiated in 1994, I found myself “between the worlds” in more ways than one. The book blitz of the early 90s was still very much in play and driving much interest and expansion, but there was also the sense of something coming over the horizon, with talk of “computer bulletin boards” and “newsgroups” of interest to pagans. Along with the fashion for witches and witchcraft in popular culture—from Charmed to The Craft to Buffy’s Willow and Hocus Pocus and more—it was a heady time to be pagan.

Still, I consider myself to be among the last generation of pre-internet pagans. My interest was sparked early on in my childhood thanks to the availability of lurid occult paperbacks left over from the late 60s and early 70s. My parents would haul me along to yard sales and flea markets, where I would rummage happily in bins of musty old books and come up with the bizarre treasures that helped fire my imagination and drive me down the paths I grew up so eager to explore. (Fortunately for me, my parents never censored my reading materials.) Once I was old enough to drive, libraries and bookstores were my natural destinations, and discovering that Actual Occult Bookstores existed within driving distance was utterly thrilling. Probably dangerous, too, since I was a sheltered small-town kid with zero people smarts and a certain amount of naievete-induced fearlessness, but for whatever reason I survived my early explorations unscathed. If I had been something other than a conventionally-unattractive Weird Girl, I might have been less fortunate.

I look back on those days now through the rosy tint of nostalgia and feel a bit sorry for today’s newcomers. I wonder if it can have as much of an impact for them as it did for me, and, I assume, others of my generation. There were always two or three shops in town that catered in some way to the pagan/new age/occult subcultures, and regular visits were a given. Seeing new books and statues and tools in person is a very different sensation from just seeing photos of them online. Finding and ordering from catalogs like the old Abyss Distribution/Azure Green was a furtive delight, as well. I can remember very early pamphlet catalogs from bladesmiths and jewelers and the like, passed from person to person and group to group. I remember the fun of going to festivals and gathers and seeing the vendors’ rows set up, seeing the wares handcrafted by magickal folk for magickal folk. Finding out about those groups and festivals was also a challenge and a risk: flyers put up at the shops, ads placed discreetly in magazines like Green Egg or Circle Network News. Phone calls made and public meetings arranged. Chances were that you came into a study group or Outer Court with only the most rudimentary knowledge of what you were in for; there were, for good or ill, a lot more secrets in those days.

Many of those secrets were passed along as multi-generational and barely legible photocopies. I still have reams of such materials, and I can’t even look at their binders on my shelves without recalling the excitement of receiving them, the clandestine thrill of reading through them, imagining how the authors of them felt as they wrote them and ritualized them and passed them on. I remember the fun of long nights at the copy shop, laboriously photocopying hundreds of pages and collating them to be given to a newly initiated or elevated witch. It was a magickal time.

I cherish these memories. For all the backstabbing and bullshit that inevitably came about (people being people, and people in marginalized and factionalized quasi-religious groups being the worst), I still have so many fond recollections of so many experiences. (I hope that you, Dear Reader, have a few of your own.)

If I were to start actively training and initiating people again, I imagine that it would feel profoundly different. I’d be contacting and screening people via email or social media. Meeting them at restaurants or coffee shops instead of witchy stores, as there are so few of them now that everything can be bought online. They would come already armed with extensive knowledge and fully-formed opinions, thanks to the nearly limitless information available for just a few keystrokes. I could send them links to providers of appropriate robes, cups, athames, jewelry, incense. Share suitable books for them to read from my Kindle library. And once they were initiated, I could pass them 50-plus years’ worth of materials as scanned pdfs on a thumb drive, no photocopiers necessary.

I don’t want to give the impression that the internet had no role in my early years in the Craft. I was initiated in late 1994, and got online in 1997, and it was meeting, online, people of other lines and other trads and exchanging ideas and information with them that got me through some of the most difficult and exasperating experiences of my life to that point. The witch friends I made online in my formative years helped make me into the person and priestess I eventually became. I have to think that coming in when I did, at the confluence of these two approaches, absolutely shaped my development for the better, and I’ll always be grateful that I was lucky enough to have it both ways.

A Time of Reclamation

I used to skate. Not competitively, not at a high level, and not even very consistently, as other demands upon my limited finances and time would invariably come in to displace it, but skate I did, and I loved it, even though I’d go sometimes for months or even years without ever touching the ice. My most recent period of time away was the longest ever, nearly a decade during which I might have occasionally hit a short public session but never went beyond doing slow laps around the rink among the crush of other ice tourists; that ended last summer when I somehow found out that there were adult-only drop-in sessions happening at the rink about a mile or so from my new home.

It turns out that you can lose a lot in a decade. Mentally, I remembered how it felt to do various things, but my muscles had forgotten all they’d learned, and I was miserably adrift. After a couple of awkward attempts, I realized two things: that I wanted not only to get back what I’d lost but to exceed what I’d ever had, and that I’d have to relearn the very basics and build from a strong foundation in order to do so.

And so it is with the Craft.

Spiritually, magickally, I've been in a fallow period for what feels like the longest stretch since I started serious practice. The truth is--and it's a truth that my very bones instinctively recoil from--I'm older now, firmly middle-aged and starting the downward slope toward Old, and with age comes a raft of unpleasant realities like illness and injury and overwork and exhaustion and family issues that devour our time and drain our energy and leave us with very little left over. Faltering and bowing beneath the immediacy of mundane concerns, the spiritual bleeds out almost unnoticed, until at last you realize its absence when you reach for it and can't find it anymore.

When I felt the pull to resume my skating practice, I was fortunate in that there were resources in place to direct me toward my goal. I enrolled in Learn-To-Skate classes under a patient and perceptive coach, and now some seven months later I’ve gone from wobbling uncertainty to starting to feel a measure of control and competence. I’m still only about halfway through the core curriculum of basic skills, but I can track my progress, see and feel those skills sharpening, and see the places to which they might lead me. There is no corresponding method for recovering my Craft; while there are some training programs out there, they’re not my path, so I’m left to my own devices, much as I was when I first began. I have years of study, practice, and experience to draw upon as I start again, flexing disused “muscles” that creak and protest. But where to begin?

• Do something. Anything! The most I’ve managed in months are the simplest of stripped-down ritual observances, hardly more than light-a-candle-burn-some-incense (and sometimes, not even that elaborate). Start with something simple, like a Tarot or other card drawn and contemplated. A quick acknowledgment of the season or phase of the moon. Dust off a deity statue and think for a moment about what She or He represents to you. Start small, but start.

• Meditate. And by that I mean, sit your ass down and apart from all the myriad things constantly clamoring for your attention. Log out of social media. Turn off your phone. Shut down your computer (it probably needs a restart anyway). Throw the TV out the window. In silence and stillness—things so very alien to our daily mundane lives—can you begin to remember what brought you here in the first place, and what still sings in the deep of your mind, drawing you to return.

• Read. Read pagan blogs and news sites to get a bead on what’s happening out there. Read books, old and new. Dig out some of those old favorites that so intrigued and inspired you in the beginning. Read historical and sociological studies of the Craft and contemplate your place within that milieu. Read magickal and occult-themed fiction (see my Recommended reading page for some ideas) and consider the themes presented.

• Study. Grab a how-to like Buckland’s Big Blue (or Huson or Cunningham or Roderick or Ravenwolf) and start working your way through it. Resist the part of you that will sneer at such basic fare, just as you must resist the part of you that’s already telling you that there’s no point to any of this, that you don’t even need the Craft, that it’s all bullshit, whatever; that’s outside programming that you’ve internalized over years of stress and sorrow and struggle, and it serves no positive purpose in your life. Remember that your spiritual and/or magickal practice once served you well before things came along to distract you, before other people worked their mischief to dissuade you. Know that you can get back what you’ve lost or given away or squandered or had stolen, but know also that it won’t come without work.

• Start over slowly. Just as my body had become unaccustomed to the work of skating, and getting all the parts to align properly was frustrating and painful at first, the other parts of me are fighting the painful process of starting over with spiritual discipline. It’s like moving through molasses, fighting a current uphill, pick your metaphor; but it’s worth the struggle, worth the pain, worth the fight, when you remember what you gained from it before: purpose, accomplishment, satisfaction, excitement, power, peace, knowledge, balance, etc.

• Practice. Thinking about skating and reading about skating is inspiring and useful, but I have to actually physically skate in order to make progress. Go back to step one above: Do something! It doesn’t have to be terribly complex; the simpler you start, the less daunting it will be, and the less likely you’ll be to cave in to those seductive voices telling you to junk it all and go back to dicking around on Facebook (believe me, I know those voices all too well). Start small, and build upon it. Develop your practice. Add in disciplines. Strengthen yourself incrementally.

I'm not saying it will be easy and fun (although sometimes, it will certainly be one or both of these things); there will be struggle and stress and you'll hate it and fight yourself and want to quit, but if you keep with it, I promise you that you will start to see and feel results within a short while. Try to cultivate what in Zen Buddhism is called shoshin, "beginner's mind." Look within and find that feeling again, that sense of wonder and mystery and excitement that first led you to this practice in the first place. Open to it, nurture it, and see where it can take you this time; it may lead you to places you'd never even considered the first time around.