From “Attempted Christian” to Dedicatant Seeker
February13
Because I had been raised Christian it was very hard to view relgion as anything BUT Christianity. I didn’t have the exposure to other forms of spirituality or relgion, and everything that didn’t fit into the small box that was labelled “Christian Faith” was assumed to be evil, wrong, misguided, tempation, or demonic.
Which made for a very hard decision on my part, especially as a 16 year old girl…
What is a child to do, when they have only ever been exposed to the idea that religion=christianity and no religion=satanism? Well… if they are like me, they start to do some RESEARCH into what religion IS and what different views of religion are out there.
I certainly have never been the kind of person to take things at “face value” after all… since I had learned that different christian denominations had different ideas and practices, I had some inkling that there might be other ideas out there that were not “christ-centered”. I had heard and learned a little about Judiaism, and knew that it was not Christianity… and so I started there…
From the Judaic-Christo-Islamic religions on…
My first step into the exploration of all things religious was to look where I had found interest before, GREEK MYTHOLOGY. I had been exposed to mythology of different cultures in school in the “see how pathetic and backward they were, trying to explain their lives without true religion and civilzation” mentality that was the general upbringing in my youth.
From there I realized that almost all cultures had myths, and these myths had been useful to those cultures (and in some cases still were) in explaining the world around us. And even more, I realized that the BIBLE was just another set of myths and legends, passed down as wisdom from the ages as to how to live our lives to please the dieties, and that their explaination was no better or worse than the explainations from other religions.
And, seeing THAT, I started to explore into how different cultures have viewed the divine, and how cultures, especially those that I feel a connection with (Irish, Scottish, English) have sought out spiritual answers from both Christianity and outside of it.
I learned about the mythology of the pre-Christian Irish, Scottish and English cultures. I learned about the Dieties and the Druids and the different ways in which they served their Gods. I learned about ley lines and sceances and tarot cards and oujia/spirit boards and the things that were most commonly assumed to be occult and new age expressions of spirituality. And I realized that there was more to spirituality than the set of religion.
Tarot studies
I have always been intrigued by the tarot cards, it was just until I was about 18 years old I didn’t not feel that I was allowed to own them myself. But really, the “gateway” for me into the previously unknown world of the Pagan was my introduction to tarot reading and tarot studies.
It was through a book that was NEAR the tarot section that really changed my view on occult practices and how they could be actually integrated into a spiritual path/religion.
It was in that book that I first learned the term “Wiccan” as a reference to a specific person’s spiritual path. It was that book that started me off discovering what it was to be Pagan, to actually LOOK at the things around me that I did connect to, to walk down a path less likely to be taken (at that time) and to really explore what it was that I believed and FELT when it came to spirituality and worship.
Walking the “Wiccan” Path…
Now, I was only 18 when I realized that there was more out there, that the connection I had to the woods and how disconnected I was to the “traditional” types of religion, and how many different ways there were to worship the Old Gods.
And I started to look further and deeper into Wicca. I was young, I was disconnected from traditional religion, I was not able to find other Wiccans to commune with, and certainly there were no public “covens” to join and so I learned, like many other young people unable to get into communities, from books.
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The problem with writing an informational entry is that it doesn’t leave anything direct to respond to. It’s very interesting, but mostly my reaction is “what next?”