Spiritual Warfare and a Psychic Autobiography

My Psychic Autobiography is long enough to be written into a book. There are a few memorable psychic events however that occurred which shaped not only who I was when I was younger but also who I am now. These cannot really be considered without the physical background in which they happened, because the two work together. In other words, the supernatural is only what we fail to recognize in the physical world, but it exists in conjunction with it, inseparable.

The first time I remember experiencing anything that could be considered possibly psychic or supernatural was when I was in first grade. We had a babysitter that would read normal decks of playing cards. I was fascinated with the idea of finding out the future and that there was an unknown world. This babysitter would read cards every time she came over. She would also read our horoscope and I learned I was Pisces, though I was not quite sure what that meant at the time. That same year, my biological dad had promised me a lot of toys for Christmas, but when I got to his house, the only Christmas presents I got were two ceramic angels that his wife had painted for me. This was not the first in a series of lies; even a small child knows when someone lies to them. I cherished those angels, but was really disappointed in my dad and refused to see him again until I graduated high school. One day, one of the angels literally flew off of the dresser and broke. Since nothing conceivably could have caused that to happen, in my young mind, I decided that God was breakable. I think it was at this time that I began losing faith in a male God, men and humankind in general. This is important to note because I believe that once the door to the occult had opened (by the reading of cards), it allowed supernatural things to enter into my life that, coupled with natural circumstances, affected my thinking and my way of life for the next thirty-three years. Actually, in many positive ways, it still does.

The second time I remember experiencing anything out of the ordinary was in the fourth grade when I was babysitting for a single mother who was a friend of one of my other babysitting parents. As soon as I walked into her house, I felt like I had been there before. Everything was familiar. It felt very surreal, but I kept my head about myself and did a good job babysitting. However, when I had lain down to rest before the mother got home, my eyes stayed wide open and I was both intrigued and scared. When the mother came home, I mentioned the feeling to her that I felt like I had been at her house before. I guess I had also hoped that perhaps my parents knew her and that we had been over to her house before and I just did not remember. The mother laughed at me and she never hired me again. That experience showed me immediately that these things were not discussed with other people.

While there were other psychic things that occurred over the years, I continued to go to church and pretend that they did not happen. Though I was familiar with the supernatural in the context of Christianity through my grandmother and grandfather on my stepfather’s side, their church taught that outside of Christ or Satan, the supernatural did not occur. Other churches that I attended taught that either there was no such thing as the supernatural or psychic power or, that if it did exist, it was evil and un-Godly or nonexistent outside of Biblical times. Later, when I realized that this was a lie, and witchcraft did truly exist, it only added to my overall despise of Christianity.

My great-grandmother died when I was thirteen. I was very close to her. The night of the funeral, she (or at least I thought it was her at the time) came to me in my bedroom with her arms stretched out. I was frightened even though she was very reassuring. The next morning, I heard my aunt telling the rest of the women-folk the same story which had also happened to her the same night. I told them it happened to me too and they smiled, happy that I had experienced it as well. My family is full-blooded German, so I was familiar with certain things like divining rods and symbols for luck and my great-grandmother coming to visit me after she died was not considered out of the ordinary to the women in my family.

I was a social outcast in high school. By the time I was eighteen, we had moved eighty-nine times, in five different states. But, having no one else, I tried to stay close to God, in spite of the fact that I believed he could break. I wanted so desperately for God to be real, and there were times I thought he was. I was trafficked and held as a slave at the age of fifteen when I had run away from home from Colorado to Texas. After I returned home, I was sexually abused by my stepfather until the age of nineteen, when I got married and moved to California. Still, I sought God, using drugs on Saturday night and going to church by myself on Sunday. I had begun using drugs at fifteen in 1979 after returning home from running away. I was scared of needles, so my drug use was limited to marijuana, cocaine and LSD.

Using drugs gave me the ability to have what I thought were visions of the future, some were very dim visions. I lived in a kind of make-believe Utopia but also believed that the world was going to end soon because of nuclear war. Most people my age believed this. I think of this time through around 1985 as the generation that had one foot on a pot plant and the other foot on a satellite dish.

During and right after high school, I attended one church for two years and no one ever spoke to me, yet I kept attending. Going to church was my desperate attempt to hold on to life. It was during this time that I would have visions of the battles that go on in the heavens and I kept getting the feeling that what I was being taught was in the Bible was not true. I knew that everything that I was going through (then and later) was some kind of training. Yet I still lived in the normal world, with a normal job in a normal town in Kansas.

I was also promiscuous and out of control, seeking some personal value while at the same time trying to self-destruct. I quickly learned to use others, especially men, before they used me. After my divorce in 1985, I became the typical California party girl, dancing in night clubs, using cocaine, using men and having fun. I stayed away from anything religious or spiritual and just tried to enjoy the 1980s. However, by 1986, I had begun some transcendental meditation and natural medicines as a way to relax. One night I was in my apartment in California, meditating, I sat up and all the books flew off the bottom shelf. Not remembering the angels at the time, I had not had anything like this happen before. I looked and those books included some Middle-Eastern history books and the Bible. I was confused and put them back on the shelf, unreasonably assuming they had just fallen off or that we had had an earthquake. They flew off the shelf again. That night Kuwait was invaded. I did not even know what a Kuwait was at the time.

The next day, I went to the bookstore in the mall to see what I could find about supernatural things in general. I ran across a cassette tape explaining the history of witchcraft by Raymond Buckland as well as a “how-to” book called The Complete Book of Witchcraft. I pulled the book off the shelf at the bookstore to look at it and every book, from the floor to the ceiling, flew off the shelves. I ran to the other side of the bookstore so no one would know that I was involved. I purchased the book and cassette, knowing I had to explore what was going on. That night, while I was reading, a woman came to the door. She did not state who she was, she just asked if I knew that there were people who would try and pull me away from God using witchcraft to do so. I politely thanked her for her advice and shut the door. This odd visit, with the information I was reading, gave me the understanding that I had been on the wrong path, relying on a male God in a church that did not honor women and Christian men who were abusive. I needed empowerment and Wicca provided that empowerment. I did not look back.

Immediately, I met a woman who was an ethnic belly dancer and who also practiced Wicca. She taught me to belly dance, which I then did professionally, and we became good friends. She introduced me to some very important leaders in the pagan community. I learned Gardnerian Wicca as well as the more ancient Anglo-Saxon, Greek and Nordic traditions. One mentor was an early apprentice of Ray Buckland, who is known for first establishing on a large scale the witchcraft movement in the United States. I am sad to say I never met Buckland. I took this (being taught through succession by the best in the world) as a sign that I was destined for something, for the first time in my life.

I was also taught me the underworld, the darker side, with rituals in Hecate in a very Edgar Allen Poe fashion. My teacher and I parted ways after he begin to get into the neo-Nazi movement, blending it with Norse paganism. One night, several of us were trancing into the past and looking for the future and everyone believed we were in the ancient Norse ways. However, I kept getting visions of this leader’s face laughing at us and I knew that this was not where we were. I came out of the trance and warned everyone, but no one listened. I felt we were being drawn into something that did not honor Goddess love. I left and later I was told by a married couple who had been there that night that he had not only become involved in the neo-Nazi movement, he was actually a leader in it. They were all amazed that I had the ability to see that he was doing something wrong. From that point on, I was considered a high priestess. But, I think this was when I realized that there were actually bad people in the witchcraft traditions, just like in anything.

I worked as a paralegal by day, a folk singer in a smoky bar on Friday nights, hip-hopped on Saturday nights and belly danced on Sunday nights. I thought I was a worldly, well-rounded free spirit, but I now I think that I was simply living in confusion. I had out of body experiences, divination, channeling, rebirthing, color magick and chakras, read tarot, read and spiritually cleaned houses, night travelled, and worked with crystals and herbs, and anything else that came my way. I lived as much of a pure, non-chemical and magical life as possible, involved in the ecological movement. I performed dance-plays and chained myself to trees to protect the forests. I went to pagan festivals, renaissance festivals, Masonic rituals, and lived in the complete covering of Goddess power. The general sign of a good (talented) witch is to be able to “steal” any tradition and use it. I was active in the grassroots movement to have Wicca recognized as a religion in the United States. At the same time, I worked as a paralegal and dated a marine and was one of the two people to begin the National “Support Our Troops” movement during Desert Storm. Prior to that, from 1986 to 1991, I worked underground to gather support for the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. I mention these activities because I did not join these movements completely out of some sense of American patriotism, but out of an ancient warrior sense of fighting for what was right and wrong. Even the work with the Contras before I was involved in witchcraft stemmed from an ancient sense of being a warrior and the odd contrast between injustice and survival of the strongest. The honor in the strong surviving is when their battles are just. When I read Buckland’s book, among others, they really only confirmed what was already developing within me. Perhaps this came from my own need for survival, I do not know. But I had always been fascinated by ancient history and what I thought was the ancient belief system. I was always actually very traditional and did not like technology or the world in which I lived. I was a hippie-chick who lived too late. Through Wicca, I found others that thought like I did and was no longer alone in the world. Men involved in Goddess religions worshipped me simply because I was a woman. I was accepted, cherished and had power.

Witchcraft is about learning how to manipulate nature and everything around one for one’s own benefit. Though the motto was “and it harm none, do what thou will”, there were easy ways to convince myself that what I was doing was for the benefit and love of those I manipulated. The idea was not to manipulate, but the very concept of working within nature to be part of nature, using magick, dictates that this must be done. This is somewhat hard to explain. But there are many Christians who practice witchcraft without the use of physical materials as visionaries.

At some point, I realized that Goddess worship was really no different than Christianity in that it contained the same manipulative, controlling lies, but with a female deity instead of a male one. I had been disillusioned. Most people involved in Goddess worship are people who have been turned away by the Church for various reasons, usually because they do not fit neatly into the pretty box. So, these rejected souls take what they know about Christianity and what they think they know about God and flip it to a feminine reality, e.g., father, son, Holy Spirit – mother, maiden, crone. The ancient and church history I was taught (by very intelligent and educated Ph.D. people) was not accurate but revisionist and I have spent a long time relearning those histories. Though it is claimed that Goddess followers do not have anything against other religions, this is not true. As one gets further into it, one will be convinced or brainwashed into believing a different history that puts pagans and monotheism at odds with each other. Partial truth is twisted. Everyone involved in the occult will eventually spiral down into depression, and I have yet to meet a pagan or Goddess follower who did not eventually get to the depressed state of being. The beliefs are fatalistic. I did eventually come back and learn to trust Jesus and God (though not all of his people) and have been on a quest to learn the truth about what his Word says and I deeply desire to show others how to feel his spirit, so they too can be free.

For a few years, God chose to remove many of my memories about some of the things I learned while in Goddess worship. However, little by little, he has allowed those memories to surface again so that he can put them to his use. It is like taking off the packs of a camel, letting the camel go through the eye of the needle, and then reloading him up with the packs. Now, God gives me the ability to see the supernatural as it is occurring. He has called on me to allow the Holy Spirit to battle certain demonic situations, using me as a vessel to do so.

I first had to go through an exorcising because there was an entity that I had allowed in while channeling that had attached itself to me for years and would not leave. Even after I rededicated myself to Christ, I would be in church and feel myself rise to the ceiling ready to attack and devour fellow parishioners. I knew it was not me, but I was scared to ask for help. One day, I could not take it anymore and God showed me someone in our church that would help. She did.

While there are not demons and entities around every bush or corner, they do exist. God will let me know when they need to be dealt with and most people seem to understand when this is occurring and allow me access to do his work. I very rarely know ahead of time when this is going to happen. One example occurred about three years ago. Parents in our local high school would come up to me for no apparent reason and begin discussing different things that “felt odd” in the school. They wanted me to pray but keep quiet about it. This occurred over several months and no one discussed it with each other, but for some reason, only with me. This is a long story, but basically, there was a portal (for lack of a better word) in the music room that had opened up and was allowing the flow of demonic entities. These entities were wreaking havoc on the music students, the instruments, the band office, the band instructor and the whole school. God allowed me the ability through prayer and the supernatural as well as the natural, to fight these things. As it turns out, this involved a new principal. He and I actually had a spiritual confrontation in the parking lot of the administrative building where his face went blank and he kept telling me, “I don’t know you from Eve” and “you should give me a chance to show you I am your king”. Odd things like that. I claimed Jesus as my king, it ended and by the end of the school year, he left his job. This was in small-town “Mayberry” America.

I know that these things I write above are incredibly strange to most people. I hesitated in writing them at all, but after speaking to my pastor, I felt I should write an honest account of my dealings in the psychic and supernatural world. This is an honest and accurate account, though by no means the whole account. Christians need to understand that when the Bible warns about not becoming involved in activities such as witchcraft, it is not because witchcraft does not exist or because the supernatural is necessarily evil in the traditional sense of that word. It is warned against because these activities, when done without God, are self-centered and/or selfish. It is because they are done for manipulation and control of something or someone else for the eventual benefit of self, whether admittedly or not. It is to be Goddess or God, to be Godlike in nature. It is “thou Will”, not His Will. As human, we are fallible and there are always consequences to our behavior, no matter how well intended our actions. Whereas, when God calls someone to act either in a natural or supernatural manner, he does so for the benefit of others, without manipulation and control, and one’s self does not enter into it. If a Christian does the things that God calls him or her to do, naturally or supernaturally, with any form of selfish intent, then he too is practicing witchcraft. -- Karre.