I thought I Was Spiritual, Really I Was an Atheist Practising Witchcraft
Broke, sick and in the middle of the pandemic, I bought a course on practical magick. A serious illness left me defeated and this was the only logical response remaining to my life circumstances. Doctors could not tell me what was wrong or simply refused to believe I was ill. I raged against the fact that at 25, my body had stopped working. This course promised I could get rich really quickly as well as get everything else I ever desired. To me money meant I could heal myself. The NHS had very little treatment options for my illness and I wanted to fully heal through holistic treatment, this was going to be expensive.
Magick is powerful, seductive and very fucking real. It is used to manifest results in the real world like attaining love, sex, money and power. The method behind it says that to achieve results, you must unite your conscious and unconscious desires. Our unconscious desires are our shadow: everything we have repressed in ourselves since birth. Our conscious desires are the dreams we claim; ie “I want a loving partner, and a well paid job.”
Our unconscious desires are more primal, irrational and taboo, but no less powerful than those we acknowledge. They are like “I enjoy having no boundaries and getting taken advantage of so I can feel righteous indignation in my victimhood” or “I like being rejected because deep down I am scared of reciprocal intimacy”. It is hard to admit these things to ourselves because to acknowledge these beliefs breaks down our ego and means we lose part of our identity.
Trying to cure my illness and becoming spiritual in the process led me to doing many weird things: cutting my hand and smearing blood over a ten pence piece as part of a ritual, burning frog poison into my skin that induced an hour of vomiting and diarrhoea, and buying a book on Demon Magick with the intention of conjuring demons to win back a boy who rejected me. Demon Magick was too much for my mum even though she is a homoeopath.
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I was also part of an online forum that regularly held guided meditations where everyone on the zoom call would masturbate together, camera’s off. Thank god! This was officially too much for me.
As I started to read the book on demons, there was something stopping me from enacting the magick. The book spoke about how you could curse someone you didn’t like through getting a demon to cause death that looked like natural causes. During a slightly less dramatic breathwork ceremony I came to the rational conclusion that making a deal with demonic forces to manipulate someone into falling in love with me was effectively insane and an esoteric form of stalking.
I started to question the ethics of my practice and the idea that I should get every single thing that I want out of life, even when life had taken those things away, probably for a reason unbeknownst to me and my tiny human psyche. I now believe there is a more sophisticated fabric of reality, a bigger picture we are meant to remain unaware of, so bending reality to one’s will might lead to some bad karma.
People in my life who claimed to be atheist, flinched at the idea of Demon Magick. This was interesting to me; it turns out even atheists are scared of selling their soul to the devil. How can you be scared of something that you claim does not exist? Atheists are telling on themselves with this reaction. It suggests they have an unconscious belief that there are forces bigger than them which contradicts their conscious belief.
However, attempting to dive into demonology is how I found out I was an atheist. I wondered why I had no fear in trying this when other people around me questioned it. I truly believed anything unsettling I could come up against was a repressed part of my psyche: I realised I was not scared of demons because really, I did not believe in God or Spirits or demons. I only believed in getting my way.
Spirituality, for me, was aligned with my desires, like making lots of money and getting whomever I wanted to fall in love with me. Of course, this is not really spiritual, this is foolish. I got £7k from a money magick ritual. I am still broke. I did some love magick and a man that broke my heart came back into my life. I did not want him in the end.
“I wanted anything that would make me feel good, powerful and like I had a sense of control over my life, because I felt life had been taken from me through sickness and trauma, and I was unable to live the conventional life I actually craved. "
It is not to say that spirituality can’t help us attain abundance and love. I believe it can. But the things I wanted to attain came from my shadow. I believed I was not worthy of love or success without changing the entire composition of reality. A pretty hefty unconscious belief to hold.
I developed a God complex believing I could outsmart reality. I wanted anything that would make me feel good, powerful and like I had a sense of control over my life, because I felt life had been taken from me through sickness and trauma, and I was unable to live the conventional life I actually craved.
Unsuprisingling spirituality is not about trying to win back the affection of a man from hinge and selling my soul to the devil in the process. However, the things I learnt from practising magick were about how to get in touch with my body and my life force, to understand that every moment is a gift. All these things came from me - not from bargaining with demons. For me, now, spirituality is full acceptance of what really is. As Scout Reina Wiley stated, “Reality is non consensual”. Therefore the real magick is in the acceptance of it, not resistance to it.
Words: Alice Briselden - Waters
