I began waking up spiritually when I was 23. I’m not super proud to admit it, but it started while I was watching American Horror Story Coven. I dug into AHS because I love all things spooky and while the third season of that show didn’t weave a story I found to be particularly engaging, it did stir up something inside of me that had been sitting untouched for years. The thing is, Coven isn’t even close to one of my favorite seasons of AHS, but watching as the young women in that story began waking up to their powers I saw that as something I wanted, too. Power.
I had always been interested in witchcraft and all things creepy and spooky. I was one of those kids who started a coven with her friends in elementary school, which included initiation rites for new members, ouija board communication and creating spells during recess from the mud and twigs we could find on the playground. However, as the confines of growing up and fitting in came I moved away from those things in my teenage years.
It’s pretty common for children raised as girls to lean into the character of a witch, though often portrayed as a conniving villain in the stories taught to us as children, they are also usually the only women who hold great power in fairy tales. I think many of us are blissfully unaware in childhood just how disempowered women are in society but we remain drawn to the archetype of the witch even at a young age.
So reclaiming my inner child in my early twenties, and fighting for a sense of control in my own life, I was drawn once again to the archetype of the witch, only now I could do more than just play pretend. Or could I?
The Fear That Nags
I was raised in a pretty atheistic household, both my parents coming from a religious upbringing imparted upon me a sense of great disdain for religion, primarily but not exclusively for the Christian church as a whole. We’re very impressionable as young children, the first decade of our lives creating the programming for our foundational beliefs that we’ll carry with us for the rest of our lives (unless we go in and do the work to change that programming). So while neither parent explicitly said, “all religion is bad and stupid” that was the message I was hearing.
In my years as a practitioner I found that so many of my peers came to witchcraft after leaving the church. With this comes a deeply ingrained fear of hell and a nagging belief that practicing witchcraft would send them to its fiery depths when they die. This is a fear within them that rears its ugly head from time to time, striking doubt upon the path that they've chosen for themselves. I’ve always been able to sympathize with this because I too have a pestering fear that stops me in my tracks every so often, but mine was born from atheism.
I came into the world of spirituality and witchcraft having been indoctrinated under a certain disbelief of all belief, creating blockages that were not so different from the ones my friends who were raised under the Christian faith faced. Only I am not afraid of what may happen to my eternal soul, I’m afraid that I’m just playing make believe, that none of this is real and I’m simply a fool with confirmation bias.
This parallel of ingrained beliefs showing up as fears which prevent us from connecting to the spiritual side of witchcraft shows a startling resemblance between two things that are often head to head working to disprove the other: religion and science. While one works with the intangible and the other with the quantifiable, both have a structured set of beliefs that the follower must adhere to. These beliefs, on both sides of the spectrum, are rigid in the fact that what they preach is the undeniable truth.
I can’t comment much further on the “truths” of religion since I don’t have the first hand experiences that would grant me that, but as an former staunch science based atheist I can say without a shred of a doubt that what fortifies them is their belief in the fact that science can, and for the most part already has, explained everything in the universe. The idea of ghosts, spirits and gods is unfathomable because if they did exist we would know it already. The idea of having a soul, being connected energetically to other people, and past lives is utterly false because the science says so.
As much as science believes it is the polar opposite to religion, what it fails to realize is that in order to be something's opposite there must be something that puts you on the same playing field. Look at astrology for instance, oppositional pairs are the zodiac signs that are opposite one another on the zodical wheel. Being placed 180° apart is the farthest two things can be when placed in a circle, and while oppositional signs may seem quite different in their approach to life-Aries vs Libra for example-there are core values and goals which unite them. This is the lens through which I see the battle of science and religion taking place; they believe that they are so radically different without seeing just how similar their values are.
Let’s Define Atheism Real Quick
I do want to take a moment to talk about the nuance of the term and belief system that is atheism. By definition it is simply the belief that there is no god nor gods, so it is possible to be an atheist and still be open to a certain level of spirituality. In fact, in the first few years of my practice I considered myself to be a spiritual atheist. I didn't believe in any gods or deities but I did believe in a certain energetic connection between all things. I believed in past lives and reincarnation, but I believed this was a more chaotic system that isn’t determined by a big man up in the sky. To a certain extent, that is still what I believe.
However, before I was a spiritual atheist I was a science atheist, and science atheists tend to be extremely closed minded. What I now see is how egocentric that belief system is, and I don’t mean that in a particularly rude way, I simply mean that to believe that everything that has been scientifically proven at this point in time is all there is to know is quite myopic. We have not reached the pinnacle of scientific advancement by a long shot if you ask me. I often find myself thinking about how all of us living now will seem prehistoric to the humans who will be alive 100 years from now.
Think about the people who lived 100 years before us. My own grandfather was a teenager before cars were brought into mainstream use, buggies being the common form of high speed transportation for a relatively large portion of his life. Scientific invention and discovery continues to happen at an exponential rate, meaning that the lives we live now will seem positively foreign to the humans of the 22nd century.
How to Overcome Your Inner Science Atheist
There is so much more to learn about human life as well as the vastness of the known universe, and who knows what science may discover in the next few decades that I am here on earth. It’s this kind of thinking that helps me push through when my inner atheist starts making fun of me for my beliefs. I may not know the truth or science behind everything I am exploring, but I will continue to explore it and keep my mind open to the possibilities of what may be true, because to believe that we know everything right now seems like a very silly thing to do.