The winding path from Forest Child to Cynical Sorcerer
I’m an Apostate from more faiths than most people likely practice throughout their entire lives. When I was a child, I was never forced to go to a Christian church. My parents were both raised in typical American families, my Mom being Southern Baptist, and my dad from an independent Church of Christ. I actually asked to attend a few services to see if I had an affinity for it. I didn’t. I read a lot of mythology and fantasy as a child, and I fervently believed in magic. By age 14 I was practicing my own form of animism. I left offerings in the woods for the nature spirits, and asked for their favor and assistance. I had been given a set of Runes, along with a photocopy of a guide book. I added divination and the creation of runic talismans and bindrunes to my budding practice. A year later, I acquired a 300 baud modem for my Tandy CoCo 2. I started using dial-up BBSes in my hometown. Through this medium, I discovered that there were a number of local pagans. I was thrilled to learn that I was not alone. Besides online correspondence, I eventually met several of these new friends in meatspace. At this time I was also just starting to be active in the SCA. Through this group, I met even more like-minded folk, including those that referred to themselves as Wiccans. I participated in my first formal group ritual at age 17. By age 18, I had read books by Ray Buckland, Scott Cunningham, Ed Fitch, Lois Bourne, and Laurie Cabot. I performed a self-initiation, and began to consider myself a Wiccan. I began to observe the standard sabbats and esbats.
As I entered college, I acquired my first mainframe accounts. These provided me with Bitnet and internet access. This allowed me to use IRC and Usenet. This access widened my horizons beyond my wildest expectations. I also discovered that the library at Indiana State had a surprisingly deep collection of occult books, including some rare volumes by Frater Achad and others. I began to spend every spare moment taking notes in the reference section, sometimes long into the night. In my Sophomore year in 1991, I met a former Wiccan who had converted to what he referred to as Odinism. I had grown up reading mythology and playing D&D, but I had never considered actually worshipping the Norse gods. My new friend gave me a copy of Rites of Odin by Ed Fitch. After reading it, I decided to leave my Wiccan practice and Profess Tyr as my patron. It helped bolster my decision when my own Wiccan mentor at the time also decided to convert.
Two years later, I graduated and moved to Indianapolis. My partner, who was a Wiccan when I met her (through the SCA), had also converted to what I now knew as Asatru. We networked within the local pagan community, and eventually found other Asatruar. We formed a Kindred, and then participated in the foundation of the Indiana Asatru Council. I became a Godman and Elder-in-Training in the Ring of Troth. At this time I also became an ordained minister through the ULC, since the Troth didn’t have ordination authority. Over the next five years I continued to practice Asatru, meeting many others from all across the United States via state and regional Althings. In 1998 things took a turn. I divorced my wife and quit the Kindred that we had helped found. I withdrew from my public-facing religious work. Although I still continued to work with the Runes, and with the later Icelandic sorcery that I had learned, I ceased to perform blots.
In 1999, something completely unexpected happened. I saw the film The Matrix. Soon after, I saw Stigmata. Through these films, I was introduced to some of the precepts of Gnosticism. I had first learned of the movement during my reference reading, but I really knew little of it. I had been growing increasingly disaffected with Asatru, and this faith grabbed me very quickly. I immersed myself in the Gnostic Gospels, while simultaneously going down the proverbial rabbit hole of Postmodern philosophy. Besides the historical materials, I was reading everything from Elaine Pagels to Jean Baudrillard to Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis. I tried very hard to find a spark of faith in everything that I was absorbing. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I found the literature inspiring, and works like Thunder: Perfect Mind to be profound, but I couldn’t find the divine here. I was greatly disappointed in this outcome, but I was still happy with all of the new information that I had been exposed to. During that fin de siècle era, I came across a wide variety of philosophers, critics, and weirdos of every stripe.
It was now 2002. I stopped trying to force Gnosticism on myself and went a little meta. I arrived at the conclusion that the Gods, any Gods, just weren’t for me. I didn’t stop believing in them, I just realized that I had never been happy trying to worship them. So I stopped. But I still felt compelled to practice magic. That need seemed to be completely separate from my belief that a divine or spiritual power was putting their thumb on the scale of reality on my behalf. Faced with my lack of faith, but belief in magic, I decided that I would practice Chaos Magic. I had known some Chaotes online in college, and had met one in person, and had the idea that it was a non-theistic paradigm, but I knew nothing else. So I did what I do. I read everything by everyone I joined online Chaos forums, and started doing frequent magical workings. The more I experienced, the more this path seemed to fit me. In 2004, I joined the Dead Chaosist’s Society (eventually re-named the Tribe of the Fifth Aeon) forum on chaosmagic.com. This became my online home for the next several years. A lot of concepts that ended up being part of my practice (even to this day) and have been discussed in my books had their beginnings in discussions held on T5A. That same year, I attended my first large metaphysical event since I left Asatru, ‘Ancient Ways’ in Chicago. At that event I met a number of other Chaotes and attended their talks. It was at that event that I scrawled the page of notes that eventually became Quantum Sorcery.
Throughout my Chaos Magic practice over the years, online activity has still played an important role in several directions that I’ve gone. I don’t remember when I first encountered the DKMU via the deathbylollipops.com forum, but I do know that it was in 2011 that I performed my first LS tag operation and declared myself a Marauder. I’ve contributed a trove of material to the DKMU corpus over my years of working with the Egregores. Until recently, I spent a great deal of time on the DKMU Discord, but as many of my cohort have drifted off, so have I. Now I find myself interacting mainly through Substack.
I currently employ a syncretic paradigm that incorporates aspects of nearly every magical system that I’ve ever worked with. I style myself as a sorcerer. It’s not a grandiose title, but it suits me. I work mostly with my partner and occasionally with small groups of friends, either online or in-person. I think strange thoughts and inject them into the communal bitstream. If I’m fortunate, you read them. Good on you for that, by the way.
6/4/2026