July 26, 2007

• I Am a Witch…..

  

  ….. and have been all my life. Even before I took an active role in researching my abilities, I knew I was different, that I was an outsider. It’s not just a matter of having certain gifts. Even if I had never researched magic, I would still have these gifts and have to deal with them. My parents encouraged it, even if they didn’t know it. Even when I was very young, if the horses got out in the middle of the night when I was visiting my father, he would make me round them up. In a way, my father was probably one of the most influential people in my life, even though I rarely saw him after my parents’ divorce. 

  I’m an empath, a very strong one, as is my mother. I can “talk” to animals, and plants, and get a sense of people within seconds of meeting them. With some people, I can really get inside their heads and predict what they might do and even mirror their thoughts by saying exactly what they were thinking. It doesn’t happen very often though. Mostly it only happens with people I feel completely comfortable with, and I am rarely completely comfortable with anyone. It’s distracting and intrusive to always be aware of my surroundings. I am as aware of my emotional environment as other people are aware of the weather . It can be downright painful in certain situations (Harry Potter night!). But you know, for all that, I wouldn’t give it up. It’s my early warning system, my radar ; it helps me protect myself from those who would take advantage of me or hurt me for the sake of hurting. There are people in the world who are not people… they are malicious and cold-hearted and hurt everyone that they can because they can, because it gives them pleasure. I don’t consider them people and calling them animal would be an insult to the animal kingdoms. Psychologists call them sociopaths and psychopaths, and there are a lot more of them than people think. Just because some of them never kill anyone, doesn’t mean they don’t make it their business to hurt people and twist them all up in the head with their cruelty.

  But I digress. You might say I’m a broad spectrum empath. I sense from all manner of creature, plant and animal. In fact, I use plants as a resource and buffer against the thoughts and emotions of the world. When I go to sleep, I get all kinds of “whispering” in my head that drives me fairly batty. When I was much younger I was insomniac, it was so bad. Now it’s much better, though my room resembles a jungle. If I had more windows, I’d have more plants. When we lived in the city, it was really bad. Now we live in a rural area, and the surrounding countryside is even better, with all its trees and animals. I don’t think I could ever go back to live in a major city. Places like New York city really scare me. I’ve only been there a few times (and never overnight), but I think if I actually lived there, I’d lose what little sanity I have. (People tell me I’m nuts all the time. I don’t mind. Comparatively speaking, I’m far from normal, moreso because I accept my oddities of perception, rather than hiding or dismissing them as so many others do.)

  Along with basic empathy, which is probably my most powerful talent, and my limited telepathy with friends and family, I am also a limited telesthetic. I actually consider this a type of empathy which extends to things, rather than biological creatures. It means, when I touch something I know things about it. It’s not entirely reliable. I think it’s a gift that’s partially blocked, maybe because of something that happened in my childhood… because my dad was one those malicious non-people I mentioned. So on the one hand, living in a house with him for the first few years of my life propbably encouraged my empathy to the point I could modify my behavior to make me invisible to him as a potential target, it also probably crippled my telesthesia because I would have no need and less inclination to know what he had done and to whom. My empathy and my telesthesia pretty much inhibit any desire I might have to touch people. Touching bypasses any shields I might put around myself to keep the world at bay. To say it’s uncomfortable is putting it mildly. It’s like accidently scalding your hand in boiling water, but feeling as if you’ve doused your entire body.

  To a lesser degree, I am precognitive and clairvoyant.  I dream vividly. Sometimes of things that will happen, though they’re usually open to interpretation. I’ve no control over them, and lately I’ve hardly dreamed at all, except in snippets. I’m also a palmist and I read tarot. I say I’m clairvoyant, but what I mean by that is, I’m aware of ghosts. There’s a word for it, psychorrhagy, but it’s out of common usage. Most people just say you’re clairvoyant when you’re aware of ghosts, even though I don’t technically see anything. Every house we’ve ever lived in, right down to the trailer my mother brought me home to, was haunted. My current house has three spirits , two ghosts and something in the attic I think may be an elemental of some kind. I don’t go up there much. It doesn’t welcome the company and tends to come down if it gets disturbed. That’s not fun. It can be a very rude (and smelly) poltergiest.

  It was in researching my natural abilities that I began reading the ancient mythologies and by the time I was eleven, I had decided I would be Pagan, even if there were no more left. This would have been in 1985, which was not the height of Pagan awareness, you must admit. Now just about everyone is aware of the Pagan movement, even if they’re not aware of all the different kinds of Pagans. Wicca is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Paganism. Wicca was the first Pagan religion I encountered in the early 90s, but after my initial exceitement wore off, I moved on. I’m not Wiccan. It’s too restrictive a religion for me. What I am, is a Pantheist. This fits in very well with my empathic abilities. Pantheists believe that all things have spirit and with my empathy, I know all things feel, even if they are not always self-aware.

  It was in becoming Pagan and researching the old ways of mankind that I discovered magic. There were many contributions to my understanding of magic, from my own innate abilities and my researches in folklore and mythology, to past lives, which also made an appearance around age 11. In particular, I had always had a fascination with Egypt, particularly hieroglyphics.  I spent  hours in libraries, copying down any hieroglyphics I could find, and this was long before I began to recall two past lives there, one in which I was a studying to be a scribe. Being a scribe in ancient Egypt was tantamount to being a magician, though I was very young when I died.

  These days, you can walk into any bookstore and find their occult section. And thanks to groundbreakers who refused to stay in the “broomcloset,” Witch is no longer a dirty word. But I took my understanding of magic from mythology, foklore, and fairytales. It was only later that I picked up the finer points of magic from the books made available to me in our politically correct times. The only ciriticism I would give is that some published BOSs encourage people to do only as they say. People are not encouraged to adapt the methods or think for themselves, and that’s bad, IMO. 

  As witch burning is no longer acceptable, and book burning is mostly out of practice, it’s become a lot easier for people like myself to find information on magic. Which is a good thing, because though fantasy novelists support the idea that someone with magical ability who remains untrained is a danger to themselves and others, it really is true. In addition to my other abilities, there’s a talent for which I have no name. I sometimes call it my karmic targeting system. Basically it works like this, don’t tick me off. Seriously. It’s nothing I have control over, but if I become stressed enough, everyone in my general vicinity is in danger of their karma catching up with them, especially whoever ticked me off in the first place. Weird things happen to people who are cruel to me. For instance, several of the people who tormented me in school have come to bad ends. One might argue that their actions and habitual cruelty contributed to their downfall, but statistically just about everyone who has ever treated me badly has come into a bit of bad luck directly after tangling with me, including my dad. He’s dead by the way….cancer, though he probably didn’t even know he had it. He technically drank himself to death in a bar and no one knew he had cancer until the autopsy.

  But I’ve found that by learning magic, I can control my ability somewhat by channeling what happens. I try to make whatever happens to the people who’ve wronged me turn out to be a positive experience, or at least not be detrimental. Like my former fellow supervisor who got another job elsewhere. Everyone’s a winner! Woooo!

  Sigils are a very easy kind of charm, but they require adaptation and creativity. Like all spells, it is a way to focus your will to the task at hand. A sigil can be any symbol which allows you to put yourself in the proper state of mind to achive your goal. Typically, a sigil is created from the first letters of the words that express your goal, dropping any repetative letters. In the case of my former fellow supervisor, the letters were MOGA. Then you attempt to remove all the extra lines until you have a symbol which expresses your will. In attempting to create the symbol, you are repeatedly concentrating on your goal. This energy that you raise is like a spirit (more commonly referred to as a thought-form) which attempts to bring your will to pass. The sigil is like a home for this spirit and reminds you of your will. Everytime you think of it, you continue to contribute to the outcome you have willed. For an extra symbollic measure, I stabbed myself with a pin to remind myself what a pain she was and smeared the sigil with my blood. The blood was a symbol of my pain and would further serve to remind me why I wanted her gone. It’s not something at all necessary to the creation of a sigil, as I obviously did not do it the second time around for my other coworker, but at the time, it seemed like the right thing to do. The magician who cannot adapt and who does not learn to follow their instincts will never amount to much.

  I don’t feel comfortable ending this post without saying that as easy as it is for me to do magic, it can also be dangerous. I don’t do it often because it can be habit forming. If I wanted to, I could do magic all the time. But I think that it would be a very lazy lifestyle. Instead of seeking and striving to reach my goals, I could cast spells to bring what I desired to me, whether it is success, money, love, or something else. That’s lazy, and ultimately unfulfilling. I cast spells to help myself or others, but I try not to do things magically which I could do physically. There is also the old adage, be careful what you wish for, you just might get it. It’s true. I succeeded in getting rid of one problem coworker, and nothing untoward happened. Now I’m working on getting rid of another, at the bequest of several of my coworkers now that they know what I can do. That’s all well and good, but what if whoever replaces him is even worse? So I’m opening up the floodgates of chance every time I tamper with probability. What replaces the current problem may not be better. It will only be different.

  • 2:50 pm
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