The Path of a Christian Witch Read Online Free PDF Page B

head?”
    She looked back at me knowingly, smiling. “It i s all in your head.”
    I felt an immense sense of relief flow through me at that moment. Why did I feel so free? She had just confirmed my worst fear! She’d just said that I was making it all up. It made no sense!
    Ha! There was the key: it made no sense .
    We live in a world of logic. The Age of Enlightenment has drilled into us the glory of science and the scientific method. In such a world, there is little room for subjective things. Such things have been relegated to the realm of fantasy or psychopathology. All my formal education has been in the biological sciences, and I believe in the rigor of the scientific method. It is, however, a very poor tool to evaluate non-tangible phenomena. Logic falls quite short in matters of faith and occult exploration.
    So, here was the realization of that glorious day:
    It is not because it is in your head that it is not real.
    Magic taught me the power of imagination, the most underrated of human abilities. I’m not simply talking about the ability to build tales of valiant knights and mythic creatures. The faculty of imagination is much more than that. The word stems from the word image. It is the ability to produce an image where there was none before. I am talking here about the pure process of creation, not merely the mechanical process of putting together existing pieces in order to produce something new. At this level of processing, words become inadequate, and the only way we may hope to obtain some kind of understanding is through archetypal images floating through our intuition—a dawning of consciousness that we can’t really express. A gnosis.
    With the advent of exciting new developments in the field of physics, the combination of imagination and logic is yielding great results. A new era of imaginative consciousness is dawning, and with it the acknowledgment of our magical practices. The bottom line is this: imagination is not fake, it is not wishful thinking. Imagination is powerful beyond our wildest dreams. It is the source of all creation, the source of all magic. And we were born with it.
    We are the center of the universe. The world is created and re-created every instant through our beliefs and our intent.
The kingdom of God is inside you, and it is outside of you . . .
Split the wood and I am there. Turn the stone, and you will find me.
    —The Gospel of Thomas (part of the Nag Hammadi library)
    The Fool’s Way
    I climbed up the stairs two at a time to the third-floor studio where our classes were held. Walking into the building was part of the ritual. The smells of incense and oils and the particular wave of vibrating heat always washed over me, marking the transition from the world outside to the world inside. Something was different today. I could also smell challenge in the air. My shoulders shot back, my senses sharpened . . . What would happen to us?
    I drew back the curtain that served as the entryway to our sacred space, and I saw three long tables draped with long white sheets. I could see vague outlines of objects underneath. My classmates were seated. We looked at each other knowingly. Our teachers were seated, looking well pleased. Bad sign. We’d had other classes like this, where we’d had to protect ourselves against assault, protect others, test our energy. One of my classmates retreated to her bubble to focus. Another was jittery, stealing furtive looks. What challenge would await us today?
    “There are fourteen hidden objects on these tables,” my teacher said. “Take a paper and a pencil. For each one, we ask you to sense the energy of the object and to report your observations.”
    All right. We took different positions at the table to be able to work comfortably. Our warden stood tall in a corner, protecting us clumsy younglings from drawing too much attention to ourselves from eager predators on the outside. I felt safe. I approached the first object. I saw my friends