Full Circle
When I was very young, I felt that there was a certain energy about natural places and elements that I could not experience in the bounds of churchyards, or listening to mass in church. Also, from a very early age, I had dreams which defied explanation. Frightening visages that I couldn’t understand. I forgot about them after a while. I made communion, but when it came to confirmation, I felt terribly ill because I knew it was not what I was destined for, and after discussions with my parents and the priest, who convinced my parents to leave my faith in my hands alone, I left the Catholic Church.
In high school a few friends of mine first introduced me to Wicca as it is understood today. I practiced for a while, but soon felt something pulling at me, directing me to look in more refined ways for the soothing call of twilight nightsongs. In the last ten years I have been developing a nasty habit of clinging to half-realized ideologies that don’t sit right with me. All of this has been building up towards a climactic deconstruction for a long time now. In 2005 that is exactly what happened. I studied religion and magic from an anthropological perspective, in which I took part in a serious analysis of personal religious and spiritual reality broken down into sections, and applied it with those of other people in the class project to form a religion. This new religion was based on aspects of everyone’s experiences, thoughts and concerns. At the end of it all, the end result was a sort of consecration – the kind which can only be described as losing one’s faith and yet being the better for it.
After that, everything else that I have done has become more basic, primeval forms of reverence for greater things. Perceiving the ultimate force of creation, what is sometimes called God, the universe, or the All became much clearer. I was better able to see the similarities in the spiritualities that cross over different regions. At that point I met a Cuban artist, whose work was based on fetishism and its role in Santeria. She helped me to remember the past, just from conversations. I was able to remember my childhood in Miami – my earliest exposure to Wicca through my brother’s first wife, the Santeria shoppes filled with musky incense, milagros, lit candles and brassy instrumentation. I compared it to my fascination with Bruxeria , Voodoo, European folk craft or witchcraft. Suddenly I was starting to make the connections. Whatever the means or methods of people who subscribe to older ways, or old ways combined with religions – the prime effect was still the same. It was a connection between one’s self and manifestations of the divine. It made me wonder if perhaps this progression was my destiny. Either way I had come full circle.
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