Who I am

I am a professor of philosophy, a writer, teacher, practicing occultist and dedicated pagan. I’ve taught classes for every year of the Salem Witchcraft and Folklore Festival as well as for the Cauldron Black and the Astro Magia Astrological Magic Conference. My new book, Learning from Legendary Practitioners: A Necromantic Journey into History, Myth, and the Practice of Magic will be published by Hadean Press and my previous book True to the Earth: Pagan Political Theology was recently released in a second edition.

I first began pursuing magic and mysticism for the same reason I began studying philosophy. I wanted to know what Reality was and was like, I wanted to get at Truth, and I was deeply dissatisfied with the standard answers (both the Catholicism of my upbringing and the materialist scientism of the dominant culture) that I was being provided with. From a very young age I always had an instinct that existence was richer and stranger than we generally thought. This is not, by the way, to imply that I have found either ultimate Reality or Truth. If anything, it has become clearer to me that the enigmas, questions, and a committed investigation of them, is the most important thing and that final answers or ultimate experiences are not possible or, really, desirable.

Unlike many other occult practitioners I talk to, I didn’t first have unusual – perhaps supernatural – experiences which provoked my interest in the occult. Instead, I became deeply interested in the magical/mystical/miraculous first and later (though not much later) had strange experiences. I was a seeker first and then I began to find stuff. For example, I had repeated encounters with a ghostly black dog that would appear and disappear at will in grade-school. This same figure appeared to me once several years later in high school. But the key, for me, is that I was already committed to being an explorer of the strange and so-called supernatural before I had any experiences that confirmed the fruitfulness of my search for it. But since then, there have been many confirming experiences to be sure.

I’ve always been a solitary practitioner, even when practicing with close friends or my husband as I have frequently had the opportunity to do. But I should be very clear that I have never been an initiated member of any standard society or coven. 

My first steps in magic started very early. I self-initiated into Wicca in grade-school and shifted to other forms of witchcraft and then neo-paganism shortly after. By high-school I was reading Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy along with Regardie’s publication of the foundational texts of the Golden Dawn and every bit and piece of Aleister Crowley I could find along with a collection of grimoires. By the end of high-school I was committed to a heavily Golden Dawn and Thelemic influenced ceremonial magic along with a consistent meditative practice. In high-school a group of friends and myself had established a ceremonial stone circle in some woods near where I grew up and we were engaged in rituals out there throughout high-school and college. It was there that I performed a series of evocations of the spirits and intelligences of each of the seven traditional planets and it was also there where a group of us performed our first evocation of one of the 72 spirits or demons from the Lesser Key of Solomon with all the “burnt fingers” you would expect and the necessity of further rituals later to unravel the messes we had made. It was a very educational experience with, thankfully, little permanent collateral damage.

By the time I entered college I was committed to achieving the Knowledge and Conversation of my Holy Guardian Angel as well as beginning an exploration of the Enochian system of magic which continued for many years with the man who would eventually become my husband. My explorations and experimentations remained largely along the lines of standard Ceremonial Magic and the Victorian magical revival until graduate school where I began an exploration of the so-called Tunnels of Set and Qliphoth along with also becoming actively involved in some of the surviving fragments of the Temple of Psychic Youth (the only magical organization I have ever been technically a member of).

Throughout all these years, no matter how I might identify my practice or occult orientation, I maintained an ongoing relationship with a host of pagan divinities some of whom I would consider patrons, teachers, and very good friends to this day. Following graduate school however my interests shifted in several important ways. First, my commitment to paganism deepened and became much more overt. It seemed clearer and clearer to me that polytheism was the closest I had yet come to what seemed an accurate and affective understanding of the nature of the cosmos. Second, I returned to grimoire work and work with the spirits of the dead and began moving largely away from things such as Qabalah and Enochian magic. Finally, I eventually discovered the work of Jake Stratton-Kent especially his Encyclopedia Goetica, which lined up to an amazing extent with the views I had developed on polytheism and the nature of reality and which I was developing into a book that would soon by published as True to the Earth: Pagan Political Theology by Gods and Radicals Press.

There is a bit of story behind my discovering Jake Stratton-Kent’s work and meeting him soon after. I had been working with a few spirits from the Lesser Key of Solomon and developed something like a patron relationship with one of them. In working with this spirit I requested assistance in becoming a better magician and the next day I discovered the work of Jake Stratton-Kent. Shortly after that I also found myself falling in with a collection of amazing occult practitioners in New York City. I can’t help but think that becoming connected with Jake’s work and involved with a group of folks we came to call the “Diviners Club” in NYC was the outcome of my request to become a better magician. It has certainly had that effect. In general, the recent trend in my practice has been away from highly developed symbolic systems and towards more chthonic and materia based practices with closer resemblances to folk magic and ancient polytheism and goetia.