I can trace many of my life choices back to a loved one’s comment made in passing, or to a book lying around the house, or to a television show I once watched. And so I can say, strange as it may sound, that it was actress Raquel Welch who put me on the path to paganism.
We moved to southern California in 1987, when I was just eighteen months old, and some of my first memories are from the four years we spent there: playing hopscotch with a babysitter on the sidewalk outside our little apartment and popping Lemon Heads into my mouth as I watched my dad tinker on a car. After a lifetime in the cold Northeast, my mother began to blossom in the perpetual warmth and sunshine of San Diego and became interested in her health. White bread was swapped out for whole grain, tofu appeared on the dinner table from time to time, and we all started taking daily vitamins. Yoga and long walks became staples in her daily regimen.
At some point during those California years, the book Raquel: The Raquel Welch Total Beauty and Fitness Program arrived in the house. Mostly a collection of black-and-white glamor shots of Raquel from long-ago films and photo shoots, which were beautiful but a little confusing, the book also gave instructions for a complete yoga routine, which inspired me. I wanted to be like my fit mama, so when she wasn’t using the book, I took it into my room and thumbed through the pages, testing my own levels of flexibility and balance.
As I got older and became aware of my body and my weight, I wanted to adopt an exercise regimen of my own. In our North Carolina home, I went in search of that old book, placed it at my bedside, and set an alarm extra-early each morning so I’d have time to run through the entire routine before school. I wanted a tough workout, so I rushed through the practice, working up a sweat in my little bedroom. Eventually I could hold half-moon poses and inversions without needing the wall or a support block. I could bend over backward and easily touch my forehead to my knees in a forward bend. I wanted something harder, something more, so I added running and ate increasingly smaller portions. I became light, fast, and strong. And I was hooked.
I didn’t delve deeper into yoga and its spiritual aspects until years later, but Raquel’s book opened the door to yoga—and to that barnacle of New Age spirituality that drew me over the threshold.
Dreams also started playing a role in my development. These weren’t run-of-the-mill dreams—the stress-induced ones, the flying ones, the I-ate-spicy-food-right-before-bed dreams. This type of dream was powerful and prophetic; they revealed things to me that I firmly believed couldn’t have come from anywhere but the spirit world—dreams of things that later came true in my life or in world events.
Sometimes, a dream would be scary, an apocalyptic dream, filled with death and fire and bones. Those dreams were to be expected. In my New Age beliefs, the End Times figured prominently. However, two of the dreams were downright demonic. Though occurring some years apart, they were connected. In the first, I was in a large shadowy cavern, lit only by torches. Awful haunting music echoed against the walls, and I watched as a well known politician pulled out his eyeball to reveal a secret scroll kept hidden inside his skull. The scroll, when unrolled, contained the names of the damned. Though I didn’t believe in it at the time, I knew I was not in a good place. This was hell.
The music struck me most, so when I heard those same out-of-tune, misshapen notes again, I knew from where it came, which terrified me. During that second time, I am convinced I wasn’t entirely asleep.
Had I been savvier, I would have taken all this as a warning, but no—I kept chasing the dreams anyway, inviting them, wishing for them, praying to the Universe to give me more, more.
After my conversion, I came to learn that dream interpretations can play a legitimate role in our Christian lives. But pursuing dream interpretation didn’t bring me closer to God. I never intended it to. I was beyond the Christian God then, too self-fulfilled to fall into the constraints of an organized religion that didn’t honor and promote my own path to spiritual advancement. With an insatiable hunger for special knowledge, I filled notebooks with the themes and imagery of my dreams and thoughts on what they could mean for me and for the world.
Had someone asked where I thought my dreams originated, I would have replied with certainty, “The Universe!”, which was a synonym, along with the Universal Mind, the Great Spirit, the Force, etc. for the idea that all of creation—every rock, branch, sea slug, human, and spirit—was of the same substance and held the same life force, even if the thing in question was seemingly inanimate. Humans might hold a special rank among creation, but it was all to be respected together with “Brother Rock,” “Sister Polar Bear,” and so on. There was only the “spiritual fabric.”
Little did I know then how this notion of oneness had elements of truth. In the body of Christ, believers are spiritually joined through baptism. In the sense that God created everyone, yes, we are all one. All creatures ultimately find an explanation for why and how they exist in the absolutely simple eternal Being, which is God. Through mystical prayer, we may ascend to greater union with our Creator, made possible through Christ. Not all false beliefs are wrong all the way through. We are attracted to their elements of truth, and this leads us to perilous errors. Instead of rightly seeing, for example, that there must be a simple unified source of all creation, we run the risk of believing that we are it.
Whatever elements of truth were attracting me then, the dreams also gave me what I wanted to get from them—a privileged peek into a blanketed universe. I desired secret knowledge of the physical and spiritual worlds that wouldn’t fade with the stars each morning—a permanent doorway to a realm that remained hidden from the eyes of the spiritually unconscious. This realm would be similar to Neil Gaiman’s book American Gods, with its hidden world beyond the veil that gods and goddesses could slip into, and would seem like our world, but would be different. Spiritual. A place where the godlike could find peace living in a place that optimizes who they were created to be.
But how to do this? How could I extend into waking hours the quality of the feelings and information I received in a dream? How could I be sure that what I dreamed about was accurate, not cluttered by my brain processing the sights and sounds of the previous day? Finally, and perhaps most revealing about my real motivations (which were veiled under the guise of a desire for spiritual enlightenment), it was imperative that the messaging from the Universe continue. Because without such a special power, what was I? I was like everyone else.
Still a young teen, I turned to the Ouija board.
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