The first person I ever met who shared my interest in magic and the occult was a young man I\u2019ll call Shire.\u00a0 We were sixteen, maybe fifteen years old when we our curiosity blossomed into outright experimentation.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember, now, what his framework was, but I was already identifying as Pagan.\u00a0 I came from a generic Protestant background, more informed by the Boy Scouts and television than by any churching; his mother was a hardcore White Light New Ager.\u00a0 Our experiments began with the most basic elemental conjuration you can imagine: holding our hands over candles and bowls of tap water, trying to absorb and tune to Elemental Fire and Water.\u00a0 He was more sensitive; I was better at focusing and projecting power.<\/p>\n
Like most young men with an interest in the occult, especially in the Midwest of the early 1990s, I exhibited a certain paranoia:\u00a0 I was convinced that there were spiritual forces arrayed against me, and I focused much of my time and attention on the creation of protection spells and psychic shields, and on developing ways to penetrate or circumvent them.\u00a0 To this day, I remain one of the most skilled magicians I know (at least in meatspace) when it comes to building and dismantling magical protections.<\/p>\n
My first shields were formed by visualizing myself in a suit of armor.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know where I got this idea.\u00a0 This was before I owned any books beside the \u201cSimonomicon\u201d, so if I didn\u2019t come up with it on my own, I must have gotten it off of one of the message boards I was frequenting in those days.\u00a0 Because I was a serious geek back in the day, my armor looked something like this:<\/p>\n
My earliest magical attacks were \u201cswords\u201d I held in my hands, soon replaced by a knife-like formation that I would throw.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The first person I ever met who shared my interest in magic and the occult was a young man I\u2019ll call Shire.\u00a0 We were sixteen, maybe fifteen years old when we our curiosity blossomed into outright experimentation.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember, now, what his framework was, but I was already identifying as Pagan.\u00a0 I came from … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[258],"class_list":["post-921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-witchcraft","tag-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-eR","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/921\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}