My Story

The rain held off long enough for me to make this video at the beach:



I consider myself very fortunate to live so close to this beautiful coast. The golden sands stretch out from the horizon in the East to the West. I have lived here for about 16 or 17 years. I remember my mum setting up her altar in the new house and explaining that she was "pagan" which meant that she worshipped "the earth and the moon and the sun". She bought me a big book called "mind, body, spirit" which was designed to introduce children to spirituality. I was fascinated and set about devouring any books I could get my hands on. Our new house had a "study" room with huge book shelves covering an entire wall and a massive desk for our home computer. Do you remember how the internet was back in the 90s? I would sit there patiently waiting for the dial-up. There was always a drawing pad to scribble on as you waited for websites to load.

It was a beautiful green day in May, when I was walking home from school one day and had a little epiphany. "Pagan" I thought to myself, was simply the worship of Nature, communion with the Earth. "Yes!" I realised, "that's me!" I was just a 12 year old kid, but I decided I would begin a year and a day right there and then, to decide whether Witchcraft was right for me. At that age I had a lot of misconceptions about what Witchcraft was, fed by poorly written websites. As I understood it, Witchcraft was The Old Religion. Everything about it was ancient, carefully preserved despite those big bad Christians who tried to kill all the adherents of Witchcraft during The Burning Times. Lucky for me, the religion had been legalised in 1951, allowing witches to come out of the boom closet and inform the world about this enchanting spirituality.

Those were the kind of silly ideas that I had as a child. When I see other children who are new to Neopaganism and Modern Witchcraft, making the same mistakes I did, I am careful to treat them the same way I would have appreciated being treated at that age. I have not forgotten what it feels like to discover something amazing that you are dying to proclaim from the rooftops! I have not forgotten what it feels like to think that you have come across some special knowledge that most people are ignorant of, and to want to rush out and spread the word. Believe it or not, I printed out leaflets and pushed them through letter boxes, I was so eager to inform everybody about The Old Religion.

I wish somebody had told me to keep an oath of silence, and described to me exactly what I should keep to myself and why. This is why, years later, I created a google account called OathBoundSecrets, to stress the importance of silence. I wanted to help those new comers who are desperately seeking for accurate information, by providing very simple facts, broken down into short videos, that would be easily digested. I wanted to put right the dismay that I felt when I began to unravel a tangle of misinformation. I remember feeling as though I had been lied to, deceived and betrayed. I remember being frustrated and angry at all the frauds and peddlers of deception. Who could I trust? Where could I find the truth? I felt like I wasn't getting the whole picture, something was missing.

This feeling of "something missing" changed when I realised that the truth I was searching for was an experience of awakening. You can't know what the waves are like as they crash on the shore just by reading about it or watching a video, you have to go out there and actually experience it. Photos and verbal descriptions don't do it justice. You need to experience it for yourself.