Sorry for the delay. The past few weeks have been nuts from a novel perspective. I’ve edited two novels with two more to go. While I can flip between writing and/or editing a couple of novels at the same time, I can’t add the blog to the mix. That’s too many different balls to juggle.
Anyways, I’m here now and I’m ready to dive into the matter. I’ll start by saying while I was so deeply involved with astrology, I was obsessed with hauntings. I wanted to believe in ghosts, orbs, crop circles, aliens, tormented spirits, any manner of things that go bump in the night. I never fully got there; but I tried for decades to get convinced. The whole idea is funny to me now because I never liked spooky things like horror movies or anything gory like zombies. But give me a good poltergeist, ghost, or demonic activity story and I wanted to know everything possible about what happened and why. I wanted to understand.
My poison of choice was Hans Holzer’s books and any haunting show/story I could find on television or the internet. Not surprising, I loved the historical hauntings best. I flirted with becoming a paranormal investigator for a couple of years. What stopped me was an innate feeling I was already in too deep. Some part of me balked at the thought that might be the step there was no backtracking from. I also realized I wanted to know about these things – not interact with them. As wide open as I was to the paranormal, I had enough common sense left to know I had far more to lose than I had to gain if I jumped into that lifestyle with both feet, so I didn’t. I chose to pursue my love of hauntings from a safer distance until I stopped believing about twelve years ago.
That’s about the time I started attending church with the intent to find a better life than I’d had for the last thirty years. While I’d like to say when I rededicated my life to Christ, I saw that my past pursuits were evil. That’s a lie. I already knew they went against the faith I still believed in but felt had betrayed me. I still believed in God and Jesus. I didn’t believe the organized church was right for me. I was perfectly happy mixing my Christian and pagan beliefs together with a generous dollop of morality and religion. So, no, returning to my faith didn’t suddenly open eyes that were already open to the error of my ways. The truth is far less exciting. As my mental and emotional health improved, my self perception improved as well. When that happened, I realized how convoluted and detrimental my interests were and walked away. I just didn’t want to dabble any more.
Before that happened, I visited a lot of crazy places never realizing all the insanity I was studying was opening doors to everything I was trying to escape. Whether you believe it or not, dark attracts dark, negative attracts negative, pathetic attracts pathetic, and desperate attracts desperate. You hear that over and over again; but I don’t think it really sinks in for most of us. It didn’t for me.
I was so desperate to find some degree of happiness and self-worth, I didn’t make a move in my romantic life without consulting astrology books, that astrology chart I’d ordered, and monthly horoscopes. That sounds ludicrous to me now; but it made sense back then. With hindsight, if I hadn’t believed so strongly in the reliability of astrology, I would have avoided so many disasters in my life. I can’t say the outcome would have been any better. I was too mentally and emotionally screwed up from abuse and self-hate. However, I know my life would have been different. I like to hope I would have been open to more positive influences.
However, I was married to my beliefs. To illustrate my point, I would have run as far and as fast as possible in the opposite direction the first time I met my brilliant, abusive, white-collar ex-husband when I was twenty-four. Even though I sensed something about him that I didn’t like, I ignored the same internal warning I would have followed before I became so embroiled in my New Age beliefs.
In my defense, this man passed the smell test. He looked good on paper. He had manners. He said and did the right things to lure me in. My family liked him and his family adored me. Added to that, he fit the profile of who I was supposed to marry according to that astrological chart I mentioned in a prior post. He was successful, professional, from a good family, and five years older than me. Everything my future husband was supposed to be. It didn’t hurt he treated me well while we were dating. Six months into the marriage I discovered I’d married an abusive monster it would take me three-and-a-half years to escape. I won’t go into the lurid details since I’ve already done that in prior posts. I will admit it was my cockroach I’ll-be-here-when-you’re-gone survivor attitude that pulled me through that nightmare. The best thing I can say about “Mr. White Collar Monster” is he didn’t let me play around with my New Age crutches. His life was about math, science, and sex. Superstition had no place in his universe. It did in mine both before and after him.
If it seems like I’m flipping back and forth between subjects like astrology, I am. I toyed with different interests at different times in my life. There were a lot of “beliefs” I tried on for size and abandoned. They didn’t work for me. Astrology, ghosts, and the unexplained like aliens and crop circles were fields of study I pursued for most of my life. Tarot cards and psychics were more sporadic studies. Neither lasted very long for specific reasons I’m happy to share.
My first contact with psychics happened when I was eighteen or nineteen years old. My Mom dragged me to a “Christian” psychic because she was having a weird dream over and over again. She saw this woman was coming to town in the local paper and made an appointment. I tagged along for the ride. This woman seemed pleasant and normal. She had strict rules about only doing one reading a year for her clients. The appointment was more like a friendly get together than a consultation. She “saw” a couple of things she shouldn’t have seen like the fact she saw my mother putting out packages and there was something wrong in her chest area. She was right in her abstract way.
My Mom was a rural mail carrier and she eventually died from the breast cancer that hadn’t been diagnosed yet. Added to that, she eventually interpreted my Mom’s dream as a message from her late sister-in-law who’d died from a brain aneurysm in the middle of the night slumped over her baby’s crib years before I was born. Apparently, my aunt wanted my mother to tell her family she was okay and she loved them. This woman not only interpreted my mom’s dream in a plausible manner, she told us my aunt’s name knowing she was off by one letter. According to her “Spirit Guides” my aunt’s name was Ila Mae. Her name was Ida Mae. She was one letter off. I won’t lie to you, I found the whole thing creepy at the time. I don’t think my Mom really knew what to think.
Before she was done, this woman tried to give me a “Spirit Guide.” I didn’t want one. Even back then I wasn’t sure what those were. I was inclined to think they were demons masquerading as angels. That was before she scared the hell out of me with her version of a Spirit Guide who was supposedly a Grand Prix driver who died in a race in France in the 1950’s. I wasn’t comfortable with that idea from the start. I didn’t care if this “guy” came forward in the spiritual realm to offer to be my guide. I didn’t want a guide. When she started telling me things he supposedly said from the other side starting with his admiration for my “golden pillow hair” and escalating to remarks that would have been overt come-ons from a living man, I went from “uncomfortable” to scared witless. To this day, I’m grateful I reacted that way without knowing why. I can honestly tell you if I’d been the bright-eyed, popular girl I was before I was molested, I might have been enticed by something telling me how beautiful I was. As it was, I rebuked that entity and never looked back. I never consulted another psychic until after my mom and my grandmother died when I was wallowing in grief. My advice, based on personal experience, is don’t go there. At best, you’ll be manipulated by well-meaning people being influence by things they don’t understand. At worst, by unscrupulous cons who know exactly what they’re doing.
The last thing I’m going to share is my brush with Tarot Cards. I had a teacher friend I met on my first teaching job. Susan was a talented artist as well as an art teacher. She not only read Tarot cards; but she collected various Tarot sets for their artistic beauty. When my friend taught me how to read Tarot cards, she warned me the more I read them the more I would want to read them. Her answer to that hunger was to put the cards away for a few weeks and not touch them. Instead of scaring me off, that intrigued me. I took to reading Tarots like a fish to water and I was good at it. I did a reading every chance I got until I realized Susan’s warning was true. The more readings I did, the more I wanted to do. I put the cards in a drawer for a while like she advised only to take them out again when I felt it was “safe.” After that situation happened three or four times and I realized the desire to do readings got stronger each time, I decided I was messing with something bigger than I was. I threw the cards away. Truthfully, I threw the cards away twice before I was done with them.
This is the point where I’m going to end this subject. There are a lot more experiences I could recount, some of them a lot more disturbing; but I won’t. I don’t want to relive the experiences. While I never practiced Satanism or any form of witchcraft or dark magic or any of the belief systems many of us consider “bad,” what I did was detrimental enough to my mental, spiritual, and emotional health. I couldn’t see that while I was involved in that lifestyle. Fifteen years out of it, I see clearly now what I didn’t then.
Whether you believe me or not, is up to you. Whether you get anything out of what I write, again, that’s up to you. I can honestly tell you that I don’t believe I would have met, much less married, the “White-Collar Monster” if I hadn’t so immersed in occult practices. I believe what I was doing attracted him to me – dark attracts dark. I also believe I would never have gazed into those flat, black snake-eyes every time he choked or beat me because I resisted him giving me to other men or because I didn’t want to dress trashy in public. Those were his usual reasons; but, honestly, because he felt like it was as good a reason as any to knock me around.
Bluntly, if you’re repeating my mistakes, the best advice I can give you is to walk away. If you’re dabbling with any of the things I did and you’re depressed or suicidal, I can tell you from experience that what you’re doing may not be the cause – but it’s not helping you. It didn’t help me. While returning to my faith is what ultimately straightened my life out, walking away from all the garbage I’d devoured for years is what opened the door to restoration.
Until next time,
Calla
Tori Lennox Author 