Skepticism has somewhat been the order of the day for me since I left the church, and even beforehand. I grew up in a charismatic denomination where everyone solidly believed that God showed off his power in obvious and supernatural ways, as had been done in the New Testament back in the day. I’m talking speaking in tongues and falling over and dancing and crying, and once, we had a lady get so “filled with the Holy Spirit” that she started laughing hysterically for roughly two weeks, all said and done. Mass hysteria wouldn’t be a bad way to describe it. Not necessarily of the “I saw Goody Proctor with the devil” variety, because it doesn’t necessarily feel good to start seeing people with the devil, but it does feel good to give in to a lot of emotional movement and scream and shout and babble and cry and pretend you’re at a Beatles concert, but for Jesus.
For better or for worse, my experiences with the varied hysterias were minimal. I spoke in tongues once, when I was eleven, and then my mom made a huge deal of it (like “period party” sort of huge deal) and I never did it again. I fell over and cried every time I was at church camp because teenagers, but I never experienced it outside of specific circumstances–namely, my parents weren’t around and a lot of other teenagers were. That was enough for me to look at it and say, “mmm, that’s probably not an actual thing outside of an emotional response to specific stimuli,” or at least say that eventually, once I stopped beating myself up for not experiencing it.
When I was still in the church, I wasn’t a skeptic. I believed it with my whole chest and felt like I must have something secretly wrong with me that I wasn’t going into these situations and coming out with some amazing laughing/crying/falling over/whatever experience. Instead, I was mostly bored and overwhelmed with the noise of it all. Maybe it’s the sensory issues or the autism or whatever you want to call it, but I kept my head a lot.
Which has made getting into witchy stuff kind of an interesting struggle. I’m not 100% on what I believe in terms of supernatural anything. Do I think that there’s a lot about this world that we don’t yet understand through science? Sure. Do I think we’ll eventually understand most or all of it? Absolutely. Do I necessarily think that using this crystal or that herb will manifest my will on the world? Shit, if I believed that, I’d be doing a lot more with rocks and plants at election season and would probably be Very Rich right now. Do I think the trappings of witchcraft and witchery are pretty and cool and smell good and are fun to have around? Very much so, especially the shiny rocks that go click clack.
I’m a skeptic. But that doesn’t mean my skepticism doesn’t sometimes get tested.
For example, with my favorite Tarot deck. I call it an asshole because it’s often painfully accurate but in a useless and literal way. A couple of years ago, I did a reading for myself regarding a spine surgery I was preparing for, and the deck spat out the Ten of Swords at me.
As you can see, it’s some dude getting literally stabbed in the back. Ha ha, very funny, you cardboard.
My readings for other people tend to be really accurate, too. Eerily so. I’ve been called on it, and it’s weird. I don’t know what to make of it, from my skeptical mindset. Like… it would be one thing if I were really good at reading people and intuiting from what I see on people’s faces how I should interpret a given card (like, “ah, I see that you look very sad when I pull the Emperor, so I can intuit that you’ve experienced harm at the hands of a powerful man in your life”). That I end up pulling accurate cards that even people who know how to read are like “wtf is this deck” is another. And my skeptical ass doesn’t know what to make of it, because at the end of the day, it’s a deck of playing cards, but SOMEHOW, particularly when it comes to people’s current situation, it’s accurate as fuck, and I don’t know what to do with that.
Or then take this past weekend. I went with some very dear friends to Salem, which is my favorite city of all time (I have an ancestor, incidentally, who was convicted in the trials and very occasionally, I entertain the notion that I am her, reincarnated, because of how drawn I am to that time period and that place, but again: skeptic, so I mostly keep this to myself) (though if anyone ever ends up seeing me as a blue boar, I quit), and I decided that this trip, since we had the money for it, I was going to go ahead and get a psychic reading.
I remain a skeptic, so I warred with myself over it, but the way I saw it, I was supporting a local business, which is always nice, and I was going in with both eyes open, not expecting them to solve my problems or give me the winning lottery numbers (Zoltar the Magnificent at Emporium 32 was there for that) but just to give me some insight into my life, however vague it might be. I saw it as something of a guided therapy session, using pictures to untangle some of my thought processes and hopefully start working out some of the knots that have kept me feeling like I’m in a rut in certain areas of my life.
And because if I’m going to do something, I’m going to fucking do it, I paid for a reading from a vampire psychic. Because sure, you can get a reading from a regular psychic, but I feel like a vampire psychic adds something to the experience, and at the very least, I could get some cool decor ideas.
Which I did. And I’m not going to say the reading was eerily accurate because some parts were just like “that’s pretty easy guesswork.” Like what’s blocking me from moving forward in my spiritual life? I grew up in the church; it’s probably guilt from a powerful male figure. That’s par for the course.
But other things were eerily spot-on, like recognizing that most of my pain is in my ankles (which it has been my entire life), even without me limping in or saying “my ankles really hurt” or anything along those lines. And I don’t know. I’ve never had a creepy accurate card/psychic reading (I’ve had several over the course of my life, usually in times of uncertainty, and they’re almost always a swing and a miss) the way people say they have with me, and I was kind of hoping for that; for, really, anything that could kind of give my skepticism a good run for the money.
I don’t regret going to the vampire psychic, because she was really nice, and the guided meditation/cleansing she did for me did have me feeling nice and relaxed and pain-free for an hour or so afterwards (when everything hurts always, you notice when the pain leaves). And that could’ve been a placebo effect or anything along those lines, but I want to believe.
Which is the hard part. When spirituality looks really beautiful to you and you want to believe in it, but your skeptical mind argues anything magical you might experience into oblivion before you can really let it settle. And I suppose that prevents me from being very susceptible to cults, but it kind of dampens things.
Oh well. I got some coyote foot bones, a rabbit pelt, and some rocks, and that pleases me. I almost got a tattoo, which also pleases me… the getting it, not the almost. But I don’t know. I have all of these things that I want to believe and part of me does believe with my whole heart and whole chest, but I also don’t want to end up misleading myself or being misled again. Religious trauma is one hell of a drug.
My Villain Arc 