God has always eluded me. Raised nominally Catholic, my only connection to God was an aversion to church on Sunday mornings. But even as a kid my family didn’t attend church regularly. In Caracas my parents were unwilling to drive across town for the only English service, and barely knew enough Spanish to say “hello” let alone understand the complexities of the local Spanish masses. When we lived in the Middle East, there was a fairly large Catholic expat population, but it was legally barred from building a church. To circumvent the laws, we met in our homes, living rooms transformed into sanctuaries and over-stuffed couches substituting hard-backed pews. Even our priest, Father John, bore an uncanny resemblance to Jesus with his shaggy brown hair, Birkenstock sandals, and comfortably liberal San Fran vibe.
Every Tuesday night, homes across the compound would open wide their doors to Catholic diaspora of Qatar and we’d shuffle in under the cover of darkness. Father John’s support staff consisted of one Filipino woman who made the communion wafers, so members of the congregation stepped in to fill other roles. A rivalry developed between the children to see who would act as altar servers, the higher visibility positions. Competition always reached a boiling point around Easter for the annual pageant. I like to think the year I was cast to play Jesus lingers in the mind of the congregation like a sweet dream.
“How such a young boy was able to portray the agonizing conflict between duty and desire is astounding,” they must have thought as I was nailed to the cross.
“That is most assuredly a young man headed the priesthood. Or show business. Either way, he’s destined for greatness,” another might have murmured to her companion.
“Does Jesus have mascara and Sun-In highlights?” the more astute audience member would have remarked. My love affair with the Catholic Church ended the day I could no longer wear costumes and make-up in celebration of the Lord.
As we grew up, my family went to church less and less. Rather than that comforting point of familiarity each week, church became the occasional torture my parents would drag us to when they were feeling particularly guilty about something. Once we moved to the heavily-Catholic Venezuela, with easy access to mass, we virtually stopped going. My family attended church only when home for the summers and Christmas, and even then it felt like we went only because it was what was expected of us.
I began dabbling. That’s really the only word for it. Primed at a young age to believe in some sort of deity, there was a vacuum of faith when Catholic doctrine was removed.
In my life, I’ve met many people who have been on their own odysseys of faith, people dissatisfied with the religion of their childhood and searching for something new to fill the void. For most, the path takes them in and out of mainstream services, tending to deposit them in either the atheist or agnostic camp. Sometimes they wind up in the ranks of the nondenominational Christian or evangelical mega churches. Rarely, some left-leaning suburbanite decides to dip their toe in the pool of Asian religion to lay claim to Buddhism, rarely knowing little more about the faith than what you can pick up on the back of a take-out menu. My own wandering was atypical from the start.
My eighth grade history teacher assigned a project on the Salem witch trials. In those days, long before the advent of Google and Wikipedia, a research project was a Herculean task weighed down by the Dewey decimal system and dusty card catalogues. Hoping to outsmart all my classmates who would similarly be hunting down the library’s limited history of witchcraft books, I asked my dad to pick up some literature on his next trip to the States.
My father is an amazingly oblivious man; one need only look at my childhood of My Little Ponies and musical theater, and his incongruous disbelief when I eventually came out of the closet. Many a conversation between my brother and I has centered around speculation on my father’s behavior at work. Certainly in order to climb the corporate ladder as high as he did, he must have been intent, laser-like, at work. To be so focused on the task at hand, ready to spring cat-like into the corporate fray must have been utterly exhausting, for my father was anything but present when he was at home. We learned over time that speaking directly to my dad, holding sustained eye contact, was no guarantee he was listening to you. I like to imagine that not unlike a computer, my father cycled into power reserve mode each evening as he clocked out. He retained motor skills enough to navigate traffic home, and nod his head in general assent to what was said, but never enough to function at true capacity. My father, it was assumed, never fully powered back until walking through the office door the next day.
It was this cloud of oblivion that prevented my father from recognizing exactly what he handed off to me in my formative teen years. I try to imagine the scenario of my dad in a bookstore, asking some goateed clerk for assistance. My father, harried and haggard from a trans-Atlantic flight, shuffles into a bookstore. He knows he wants some political or war thriller for himself, and vaguely remembers the requests of his family. Rather than walk the aisles for the correct title, he will grab the first book with an obviously chick-lit cover for my mother, citing ignorance when it is not the right title. He knows I have a grade riding on my request, so can’t simply grab the fist book that strikes him.
The clerk who helps my father is either genuinely incompetent or unabashedly fucking with him. When my dad asks for books on witchcraft, the clerk leads him to the Neo-Pagan section and hands him three primers on Wicca. Somehow the clerk mistakes my father, dressed in a starched business suit and cowboy boots, for a freewheeling soul interested in fostering a connection with Nature and a closer relationship with the Goddess.
Upon arriving back in the Middle East, my father hands out the books like middle-management Santa. My mom attempts to hide her disappointment at getting the wrong book, but she will exact her passive-aggressive revenge in due time. My father hands me my stack of Neo-Pagan lit and my passport into my awkward teen years.
I don’t remember my final grade on the witchcraft project. But I do know I steered that ship in a direction far different than the one envisioned by my teacher. I poured over my new books, entranced by the primal beauty and simplicity of the faith. I was a quick convert to the cause, ready to defend Neo-Paganism to any monotheistic bigot who refused to understand. My project—meant to be on the 1692 trials, mind you—was a one-man show touting commune with nature, divination, and spell crafting. I expounded on the Rule of Three, a Wiccan take on karma, admonishing my peers to be vigilant of the energy put into the Universe, for all would be returned in a multiple of three. And, in a tangential reference to the original impetus of the project, I climbed atop my soapbox to rally a stupefied class: “Never again the Burning Times! Fight religious intolerance!”
I never descended to the depths so common among rebellious youth. I never dressed in all black, nor applied heavy make-up (my days of playing Jesus long behind me). I never allowed my hair to twist into dreads and forswear all products not naturally collected from the forest floor. In the years I studied and practiced Wicca, it was a fiercely guarded secret kept from my parents. My only outward show of defiance was hidden from them. On the rare occasions they’d force me to church, I would gravely trace a Sharpie pentacle over my heart. But even that was impermanent and hidden from view by my Sunday finery.
Online chat rooms and Wiccan forums became my best friend, my only access to information on my new spiritual path. Many were the nights I locked myself into the family computer room to log online and chat with Pagans scattered across the globe. My parents, banging on the locked door, thought I’d simply discovered the joy of porn and masturbation. Sky Dancer in Cincinnati was particularly helpful in identifying magickal herbs commonly found in the kitchen. Wolfsbane Thunderclap of Eugene, Oregon taught me the mystical properties of the trees native to the region. And Persephone Moonbeam showed me how to be most comfortable with my body when worshipping skyclad (read: naked). I wish I’d held onto Persephone’s contact information as the years marched on; rather than grow more comfortable with my body, I’ve developed habits to avoid nudity at all costs—I’m mere months away from showering in slacks and a sweater.
A teenager trapped in a foreign country, my access to the Neo-Pagan community was markedly limited. Not only was I unable to sip a nice honey mead in the forest after a long night Calling Down the Moon, I had no learned coven to take me into their arms and show me the ways of The Craft. All of the books my father brought me praised the value of the solitary practitioner, the witch unable/unwilling to find a group with whom to work. Suddenly, I had a title for my loner status; I wasn’t the ridiculed outcast from mainstream faith, I was a Solitary Practitioner developing my personal connection with the universe without the interference of some heavy-handed middle man in a robe.
I set about securing the necessities for individual worship, a slightly difficult task considering it was all done in secret and done without the benefit of the occult shops dotting American major cities.
Candles were a cinch. Raid the cupboard for Mom’s dinner party tapers, play dumb when questions get asked, and the deal is done. Other tools were slightly more difficult to procure. As a religion that relies heavily on masculine and feminine imagery, my altar (which most would call “a desk” when not draped with my cheap swatch of stars and planets fabric) needed to be adorned with both and athame and a chalice. Anyone with passing knowledge of The Da Vinci Code will recognize the knife and cup as intensely sexual images, especially when one is thrust inside the other.
But I had no way to get my hands on a ceremonial blade. I could scroll through websites, oohing and ahhing over the craftsmanship and heavily bedazzled hilt of some knife sold out of someone’s garage in Missouri. The blurb underneath the picture always promised the blade to have been forged in the fires of Mordor, in the flowing lava of Aunaloa’pekeekee, or tempered in the fiery exhalations of a Welsh dragon. Though the prospect of such a potent blade of mystical origins made my heart race, I couldn’t afford the price tag attached to each knife. Nor could I quite get over the thought that it was virtually impossible for one man in middle America to own dozens of athames of supernatural origin; more than likely this was a weapons-buff with a welding shop and an idea of how to make a little extra cash in the Renaissance Festival off-season.
I faced a similar stumbling block when it came to finding the perfect ceremonial chalice. My options were plentiful, from one guaranteed to have been given by the Lady of the Lake to King Arthur, to the Holy Grail itself (a steal at only $249.99). I could choose from simple polished metal cups, ones hewn from a solid chunk of driftwood, to a classy ornate affair with dragonflies bracing a cup crawling with other jeweled insects. I just couldn’t afford any of them. And try as I might, I couldn’t convince my parents to buy one for me for Yule (which I would call “Christmas” when talking to my Christian overlords).
“Wait, run that by me one more time. You want a what?” my mother asked.
“A dragon-stemmed, hammered gold chalice,” I said matter-of-factly.
“For Christmas you want a cup?”
“A chalice, yes.”
“A chalice, of course. And why exactly do you need a $300 chalice?”
This is where I faltered. Where to begin in convincing my mother that I needed this? How to explain the significance, the symbolic uterus representative of sustaining life? Would my mother ever appreciate the beauty of the exquisitely sculpted, (synthetic) ruby-eyed dragons supporting the vessel hand-crafted by blind gnomes living in seclusion in the Chilean Alps? No. Not a chance in Hell.
“Well,” I continued, “Sometimes I just want to feel fancy at the dinner table.
My mother leveled a cool stare in my direction. “You can be plenty fancy with the cups we already have in this house.”
And so I had to rummage through our kitchen drawers. To my particle board desk/altar I added a pilfered Ginsu knife and plastic cup tossed from a Mardi Gras parade float. I reasoned so long as intent was spiritual, outward appearance was irrelevant. And this train of thought led me to litter my altar with an eclectic collection of seashells, incense burners, and action figures serving unconventional duty as idols; my altar looked more and more like a garage sale with every piece of crap I laid out on it.
Every witch needs a cauldron, a fact any elementary school child can tell you. From Macbeth to The Wizard of Oz, we’ve had the image of hook-nosed crone stooped over a bubbling iron pot seared into our collective imagination. The cauldron is, in fact, a common tool of the witch and as a solitary practitioner I was now tasked with finding one for myself. My mother’s gumbo pot, while the ideal addition to my growing flea market, would have been too easily missed. I had to set my eyes on something smaller, moving out of the ransacked kitchen and into the rarely-visited formal sitting room.
An easily overlooked potpourri holder became my target cauldron. My mother picked up this little pewter accent piece when we lived in Indonesia, where our pewter home décor increased exponentially. Pewter candlestick holders, animal figurines, soon-to-be-cauldrons, my mother hoarded every knick-knack she could find. These pieces glinted sunlight in nearly every room of our house, and for this reason were one to suddenly go missing, it was highly unlikely my mother would notice.
I snuck the pocket size potpourri dish out of the living room under the cover of darkness, a whispered prayer to Hecate (goddess of magic and witchcraft) the only sound as I padded across the rug. Tossing the potpourri in the trash would have given me away the next time my mother tossed something out, so I had no choice but to destroy the aromatic evidence. With my parents asleep one night, I christened my mini-cauldron by igniting the potpourri as it sat on my altar. Though the room freshening properties of potpourri are well-known, very few seem to know of its high flammability and suitability for use as kindling. Instantaneously the entire cauldron was ablaze, flames leaping dangerously high with an eerie whumph, licking eagerly at my ceiling. With no sort of insulation coating the holder, I began to worry nervously about the melting point of pewter. The sides glowed an ominous orange, and I seriously began contemplating how best to mitigate the damage certain to be caused when molten pewter began running down the side of my desk and onto the laminate floor. In addition to being remarkably flammable, potpourri is also strikingly slow-burning. Minutes passed and the flames betrayed no sign of dying down. I waited anxiously for the fire to burn to embers, but the fire seemed to feed on itself and burned with a frightening intensity.
As logical thought fled my mind in a panic, I risked my fingertips and picked up the searing pot. I scuttled to the open window, planning to shake the flaming flower petals into the waiting night. Yowling in pain, the scent of charred flesh wafted up to join the powerful smell of burnt potpourri already looming oppressively in my bedroom. I flung wide the window and waved the burning potpourri pot into the air, watching the flames dance into the night, carried burning away into the darkness.
I spent the remainder of the night with my fingers submerged in an ice bath, soothing the blistered tips. I briefly debated a life of crime, knowing now that my fingerprints were irreparably damaged, yet I knew deep within that the Goddess would frown upon my potential life of crime.
The next day, as my mother stepped into my bedroom to deliver folded laundry, her nostrils flared. “It smells like a bonfire in here” she remarked. I shrugged noncommittally, my swollen, scarlet fingers absently tracing my freshly applied marker pentacle tattoo resting beneath my t-shirt. As my mom handed me my crisply folded boxers, her eyes drifted toward my altar, now stripped of ceremonial cloth and adornments.
She paused. “Was that scorch mark always there?”
