My guest blog from Pagansworld.org - A Pop Culture Nightmare’s Journey to Paganism…

Everyone has an event that changes their perception of the world.  Be it a death in the family, war or an older sister chasing bullies with a broom, everyone goes through this process.


I had two, and oddly enough, they both had to do with my mother.  That never happens to anyone else, right?
The first started off simply enough.  I was in the car with my mum; I pulled out a book and began to read.  I was about seven years old and I had just discovered my love of reading.  I read anything with the voraciousness of a starving line backer.  Shakespeare, Blume, King, pretty much anything not nailed down.  The book I was reading that day was “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.” The simple, innocent Christian allegory was fabulous, until my overly zealous Roman Catholic, Latin service mum saw the title, THE TITLE, and threw it out of the car window.  She then proceeded to run over it, not ,once but twice, with the car.  She then looked at me, with mildly validated eyes and said, “That will drive the devil out of it.”


The second was a film protest.  The evil film “Monty Python’s The Life of Bryan” came out when I was eight.  I wasn’t the big movie nut yet, that started at 12 when I saw “Some Like It Hot” and “The Misfits” in a double feature at the Byrd Theatre.  However, even at that age, I knew something was special about “Bryan”.  My mum never let me play on the sidewalks in Richmond City.  That night, she had bought me a new hula hoop and great comic books to handout to passers by.  I loved these comics, which I later found out were called Tracts.  I gave them out happily until one of the older kids told us about the movie and how funny it was.  I walked up to my Mum, not understanding why she would be so against a comedy.  She looked down at me and in her fervor shouted, “It’s blasphemous.” The like-minded non-thinkers shouted in approval.  I asked her what that meant and she explained that anything against God was blasphemous and evil.


I looked at her and asked innocently, “Have you seen it?” “I would never watch such FILTH.”
I decided at that moment never to judge anything until I had experienced it for myself.  I also decided to actually pay attention to the world.  I read even more and lived even more.  At thirteen, I decided to start down my current path of The Craft.  I thank my mother now for the moments of insanity she shared with me.  They shaped me into the wacky Witch you see before you now.
“Always look on the bright side of life…”
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