Honestly, I feel like I was a Pagan before I ever knew what the word meant! I was raised in a family of non-practicing Protestants. We didn’t attend church and there was never much talk about religion.
As a kid, though, I was a bit dorky and liked to be on my own with my books. One of my favorite things was collecting information in spiral notebooks, much of the info coming from a set of World Book Encyclopedias. One of my favorite notebooks was the one I kept on Greek and Roman gods and goddesses when I was probably about 9 or 10 (my most favorite was the one that contained the full chronological order of the life of John Lennon, starting with the birth of his parents…. yeah, I was weird). I also kept one on herbs (at that time it was culinary uses and a bit of herbal folklore, things I’m still learning and writing about today!)
Most of the places we lived while I was growing up were close to the woods, and I spent a lot of hours wandering about them. I also spent quite a bit of time ( before 4th grade when we moved away from the area) in a graveyard that was down the street. These were the places that I felt most at peace in.
Between 5th and 6th grade, I had back surgery, and couldn’t take gym for a year. I got “stuck” in the school library, which was like heaven on earth. I started reading through the non-fiction section and found the books on the Salem Witch trials. Out came another spiral, and I started collecting the names and information on those accused of witchcraft.
When I was twelve, in 1982 (shush), my sister gave me my very first deck of tarot cards.
It wasn’t until much later when I discovered there was a name for all the things I’d been doing my whole life. Finding out about Paganism and witchcraft was like coming home. It gave me a name and a focus for all the things that I love and was interested in. I started reading about Wicca at first, but found it didn’t quite fit my needs and went on the kitchen witchery, which fit so much better. Eventually, I realized what I was doing was more than just in the kitchen, so I slapped a “domestic” witchery label on myself, and that’s been a perfect fit ever since!
wow, mrs b. that is awesome. i did kinda the same thing when i was younger. i went to an elementary school with 33 kids total, K thru 4th grade. i was advanced in my reading and curiousity i guess. i used to read my grandparents encyclopedias from the 50's all the time. somewhere along the way, i got interested in mythology, so my 3rd grade teacher would get LP's from the university and let me sit in the library with these massive headphones and listen to all the greek/roman myths. i used to write everything down, too, copying books into notebooks so i could always keep them, made up my own myths, and had a notebook of questions i thought up over the summer for my teacher to answer when school started. neat how we kinda have something in common!
It's so funny, I've heard this story a hundred times since I started telling my own- it's nearly always the same!! I never knew there was a name for what I believed, a philosophy that could begin to encompass how I saw the world. Thankfully we've all found eachother and we're home!
Philomena is correct. So many of our stories are nearly identical, arne't they?
Along with the rest of the folks above, I too find your story a very familiar one. I was raised Protestant (Baptist/United Methodist, for the most part), but the older I got and the more I read and learned, the less Christianity fulfilled my needs. Eventually stumbling across Neo Paganism was a bit like finding the impossibly perfect pair of shoes (my different sized feet are a bit like my spirituality: they don't really fit any given mold): it fits!As for that age thing, I turned 13 in 1972, so don't feel so bad!
Also, I'm envious of you growing up near woods. I grew up in a suburb of Los Angeles and anywhere there were forests and woods was always where I wanted to go on vacation. :-p
Except for the back surgery (poor kid!), I could almost have written this post myself! I did much the same– I would've lived in the library if they had let me, and I started building little altars to Athene and Artemis when I was 8, after I got hold of my (Episcopalian) dad's copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology. I didn't "become" a Pagan, I just discovered that there was a name for what I was!
I love that feeling of homecoming.