How Do You Spell, Skeptic?

[Please remem­ber my dis­claimers and rules if you’d like to engage this post here or in any of my social media spaces.] 

I am a poly­the­ist pagan and I work with The Mor­ri­g­an. This is my sto­ry of being called by Her. 

You can go back to the last part, Death And Awak­en­ing, here. 

Or you can go all the way back to where the Jour­ney Begins. 

In about mid-June of 2020, it had become clear that what I was going through was best explained by a mag­i­cal awak­en­ing. 

To be hon­est, how­ev­er, I was still hold­ing pret­ty hard to my skep­ti­cism at that point. Spir­i­tu­al awak­en­ings hap­pen in every spir­i­tu­al prac­tice (even includ­ing athe­ism) and are most­ly just a psy­cho­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­non. Even when they hap­pen spon­ta­neous­ly (which was­n’t exact­ly true because in my case, it was trig­gered by all the death that was hap­pen­ing around me), they’re real­ly no more than a pro­found emo­tion­al expe­ri­ence that can lead to a deep­er inner calm. A spir­i­tu­al awak­en­ing does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have to be numi­nous, and it cer­tain­ly does­n’t have to be super­nat­ur­al. Some­times things just get knocked loose.

The prob­lem was that a “spir­i­tu­al awak­en­ing” was­n’t quite cov­er­ing every­thing I was going through, and I did­n’t have a lot of answers. The dreams of black birds and shroud­ed women were get­ting weird­er and weird­er, and my inabil­i­ty to han­dle crowds was start­ing to make even things like shop­ping acute­ly uncom­fort­able. 

I’m a pret­ty open-mind­ed per­son, and I had plen­ty of alter­na­tive friends who do every­thing from shop­ping at Whole Foods for sup­ple­ments to acupunc­ture to full prac­tic­ing witch­es. I most­ly thought their prac­tices meant a lot to them and respect­ed that as long as they weren’t run­ning around try­ing to get me to believe in it, but I did­n’t real­ly spend much time think­ing it might actu­al­ly be true. I thought what I thought about most woo-woo sys­tems. That they worked because the peo­ple thought they worked, and because giv­ing them pow­er cre­at­ed brain hacks and focus and feed­back loops of atten­tion. It did­n’t have to be super­nat­ur­al to be incred­i­bly pow­er­ful. 

Nonethe­less, I was in unchart­ed waters, so I began to ask around for some advice.

The advice I got ran the gamut from mat­ter-of-fact­ly declar­ing, “Oh, that’s just your third eye open­ing in your sixth chakra” to, “Have you tried cast­ing a spell?” 

Need­less to say, I was prob­a­bly need­ing to be EASED into the whole idea of a mag­ic awak­en­ing just a lit­tle more gen­tly. I’ve nev­er loved how appro­pria­tive white peo­ple talk­ing about chakras has felt to me so I ran scream­ing from that, but even the stuff about cast­ing spells felt just a bit too off the rails. I don’t know what I thought they were going to say, but…you know…not THAT. 

At this point (almost exact­ly halfway through June 2020), I was not ready to “cast a spell.” I was still call­ing it “set­ting an inten­tion” and focus­ing my entire­ly-mun­dane-and-not-at-all-mag­i­cal ener­gy upon it. Sure, I lit a can­dle, but it was just to help me focus my atten­tion. Sure, I was using my willpow­er to change the world around me, but I did­n’t try to do any­thing more super­nat­ur­al than get­ting over some­one who’d kind of bro­ken my heart a month ear­li­er. 

As I pic­tured the emo­tion­al teth­ers between us being cut by a big pair of scis­sors, it was like my heartache sim­ply shut off. I felt noth­ing but a calm friend­ly affec­tion towards them. 

Still, the altered state of con­scious­ness remained. My body crack­led with fre­net­ic ener­gy. My mind hummed. My heart pound­ed in the base of my throat. I got two hours of sleep that night, and felt like I’d tak­en a fist­ful of amphet­a­mines. It was two days before my body calmed down enough to get a good night’s sleep—two days of ener­gy puls­ing through me from that one spe—um…setting of inten­tion.

Now there were a lot of things I could say at that moment as a skeptic…as an atheist…as an artist who deals in imagery and metaphor…and as a stu­dent of human psy­chol­o­gy. I knew noth­ing had hap­pened that was nec­es­sar­i­ly com­plete­ly out­side the realm of the pos­si­ble. Our minds can psych us out. Our visu­al­iza­tions can have pow­er. Our rit­u­al can cre­ate res­o­nance. 

But there was one thing I noticed, and there was no get­ting around it.

It had worked. 

It had WORKED!

I cared about this per­son, but I was no longer heart­bro­ken. I wished them the best, but I no longer felt my chest squeeze at the thought of them. My blood pres­sure no longer leapt at the sight of their name. Magic….worked. Maybe because of a bunch of not-super­nat­ur­al mech­a­nisms, but it had absolute­ly worked. I knew, in that moment, that I had touched some fron­tier of human poten­tial, and that with­out a doubt, I was going to have to try it again.

That sum­mer was rife with experiences…and I’ll write more of them here in future posts, but one les­son I took from this expe­ri­ence was that, whether or not there was some con­vo­lut­ed, com­pli­cat­ed, but per­fect­ly ratio­nal expla­na­tion for the way “mag­ic” worked, it had pow­er if I treat­ed it like it had pow­er, and it worked if I treat­ed it like it was real. 

A lot more hap­pened in June and July, and I’ll write more about that in future posts. I grap­pled with how much I “believed” every day (and had a bit of an athe­ist cri­sis of “faith” if I’m being hon­est). I tried to fit what was hap­pen­ing into skep­ti­cal lan­guage and acknowl­edge that I was­n’t actu­al­ly doing any­thing that did­n’t make sense out­side of a good ses­sion of visu­al­iza­tion, self-hyp­no­sis, and inten­tion focus. But as the sum­mer went on, the dreams got more and more intense, and some­times fright­en­ing. I did­n’t know what was hap­pen­ing or where the edges of this new­found pow­er were, but one thing was becom­ing clear­er and clear­er to me. 

Some­thing was try­ing to get my atten­tion.

Next: Spaghet­ti At The Wall

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