When I was six years old, I woke up to find a large black wolf standing at the side of my bed. The wolf was staring down at me. With a nod of its head, it directed me to get up. Oddly, I felt no fear as it led me out of my bedroom, into the living room, and onto the couch. The wolf spoke in a calm but authoritative voice, explaining that I was part of its tribe—"One of us," it said. Then the wolf led me back to my bedroom window, outside of which was an old stone well. When I looked out, three other wolves surrounded the well. They looked back in my direction. Atop the well, they had presented me the corpse of a slaughtered deer. “This is who you are,” the large black wolf said. Then it disappeared.

Her first relative to ever set foot in America came from Hampshire, England in the 1600s to Massachusetts, only before hightailing it back across the Atlantic under the presumption of being a witch. My great-great-grandmother, Cora, who went through men like wine, was known to sit in her parlor with a Ouija board affixed to her lap, scoffing at the notion that one should never use the spirit board alone . This practice was passed onto me through my mother, who used the Ouija board with her children the way more pious families might gather around the family bible.

Although the industrialization of rural America in the 1950s caused my family to abandon the land for the steel mills, the old ways were passed down and maintained. As a child I was taught to fish, hunt, read the stars, dowse for water , and use pendulums for guidance. Yet compared to my mother’s side of the family, this was nothing.

While I was raised nominally Christian, worshipping in the Methodist churches of rural Indiana, the occult has always been a part of me. My father’s family was part of the Northern European migration of the 1700s, the clans that followed Daniel Boone into the Appalachian Mountains and settled as farmers and hunters. With them they carried the folk magic and superstitions of the old world. Before my father’s passing, I asked him to describe the southern Kentucky community he grew up in. They were “Christians, but with very pagan beliefs. Their bible was the Farmer’s Almanac, and you did things by how the stars and the moon were aligned,” he told me. “The doctrine of Christianity yielded to the land, not the other way around.”

To the outsider, it would be easy to dismiss this vision as nothing more than a false memory, either a recent invention or the rumblings of my six-year-old imagination. But it is the most vivid memory I have of childhood. It happened, as surely as every other tangible, provable event in my life. But it really doesn’t matter if anyone believes me—more than anything else, it shaped who I would become. Today, at the age of 48, I describe myself as a traditional Luciferian witch. But to the casual outside observer, or the Bible-beater, I’m a Satanist.

There were two childhood Oujia board readings in particular that foretold my path. The first was when my mother, sister, and I asked the board what I would be when I grew up. The board said I would be an attorney, something I did not want to be, but became. The other was when my sister dared to ask who was speaking to us. The board carefully spelled out S-A-T-A-N. After freaking the fuck out, as any kids would do, we immediately put the board down. But there was something in me that wanted to continue the conversation.

By the time I attended college at Indiana University in Bloomington, I had settled into paganism and Wicca. Quite literally, the devil was in the details: Much to the horror of my hippy-dippy, white-light coven at the time, I remember making a connection early on between Lucifer and the Horned God of Wicca. Had I simply stayed on this path, things may have been fine. I was happy, even if I appeared aimless. My only worries were what the Tarot and the cycles of nature would have to say.

In the 1980s, the Satanic Panic invaded every living room , with nightly news stories linking Satanism and heavy metal music to a litany of social ills, particularly drug use, child abuse, and murder. I was in middle school at the time when a rather conservative congregation that sat across the street from my grandmother’s house, brought the Satanic Panic to my hometown. Every Wednesday night, a study group focused in on the Devil’s influence in rock’n’roll, something me and my best friend were obsessed with. Of course, their warning backfired. Instead of steering me away from the Devil, I only became more fascinated with the dark arts. I spent my late teens driving around the heavily wooded country roads that surrounded my town, always in search of the best places to either have sex or to park with friends and drink Bud Light, smoke the occasional joint, and blast The Cure, the Dead Kennedys and Metallica. More often than not, the best spots would have some supernatural legend attached to it, be it an abandoned dwelling in the middle of the woods or a local graveyard. I, of course, revelled in the ghost stories surrounding these places.

A girlfriend at the time told me I was like a wildflower, growing along my own path. Except somewhere along the way, I got tired and gave in to what I thought was expected of me. Largely out of economic fear and anxiety (being a wildflower doesn’t pay much), I convinced myself that it was time to put away childish things and become a normal, functioning member of society. I left behind my bell, books, and candles for a more settled life. What I didn’t realize at the time was that these common pursuits were triggering a darker rebellious part of myself that would eventually make itself known in starkly self-destructive terms, following years of suppression and neglect.

Oblivious to this, I turned 30, got married, had two kids, and, after living out-of-state for many years, went back to Indiana for law school. I did all the things that outwardly made of me a productive member of society. Yet inside, I was slowly shutting down, the light inside myself dimming. Having studied philosophy in undergraduate and graduate school, I was used to intellectual freedom of thought and spirited debate in the classroom. I mistakenly thought this skill would help me excel in law school, but I quickly learned that law wasn’t about freedom of thought and intellectual pursuit, but instead fitting your arguments into smaller and smaller boxes of arbitrary and settled legal standards. Just as I was editing and censoring my thoughts to conform with what was appropriate for the courtroom, I was also reducing myself to fit into a role I was not born to play. It didn’t take long to I realize I had made a big mistake, but bills were piling up, and it was too late to back out now without at least getting the degree that would supposedly alleviate that debt. At the end of this ridiculous endeavor awaited divorce, mountains of un-payable student loan debt in the amount of nearly $200,000, life in a city and state I had no desire to be in, and a sense of self that was all but shattered. Normalcy had driven me to spiritual desolation.

In my early 40s, I entered my “dark night of the soul.” I had arrived there as a result of putting my life on cruise control and exchanging the magic within me for dour rationalism and extreme atheism. I took to mindlessly indulging in a variety of excesses to soothe the spiritual void. By the time I finally awoke, my relationships were in shambles, my job as a criminal defense attorney was in jeopardy, and I was facing criminal charges for driving while under the influence of alcohol. I needed a spiritual reset. I needed to go back to zero, but I had no idea how.