In my first lengthy post in this thread, I shared events that lead to me having to continuously manage the risks of being outed at work for nearly a four year period. Now I’d like to share a second story where I was unknowingly outed by a High Priestess for being some kind of a paranormal troublemaker. Fortunately for me, I didn’t have to stick around in my home town of San Diego for even one week after finding this info out. So here again, I seemed to have skirted dealing with any results of a spiritual outing.
As many things seem to do, this story also ties into other separate events I’ve posted earlier in other threads on the PNF.net.
As part of my spiritually misguided learning, I decided to study Wicca through which I hoped to better understand my seriously psychic self. This journey took four concurrent paths in order to totally immerse myself in Wiccan studies; two of those four paths are relevant to this story. One path had me searching out and attending open circle rituals every month for nearly a year-and-a-half all across San Diego county. This gave me some great exposure to a wide variety of people, religious beliefs, as well as the dynamics of coven versus solo practices. At the same time, as a second tactic, I enrolled in a six week long organized Wiccan study class lead by a coven High Priestess.
I’ve only told this story to two persons before and in both cases I used the exact name of the shop where the classes were held. Telling this here for the first time, I don’t know exactly what the right, tactful name is for this kind of shop but I’m going to guess it is “magick store” - it’s the kind of shop that sells paranormal paraphernalia like herbs, spiritual books, candles, jewelry, inspired art, etc. I promise not to recount six weeks of events in this post but I will share a couple of points to make sense of this story’s ending. I arrived at the advertised magick shop about 30 minutes prior to the start time for the first class. While waiting in the shop for the instructor (a.k.a., a coven High Priestess), I purchased some materials appropriate for the class and kept an eye open for other attendees who might show up. At the appointed start time, the shop was really still very sparsely populated but a middle-aged woman called out across the shop for anyone interested in the class to gather with her. Me and two other men stepped up. She greeted us and said she’d wait for a few more minutes to see who else would join in. After about 15 minutes she announced that without greater participation she couldn’t afford to give the for-small-fee class. The three of us guys whined and begged her enough that she caved in and agreed to do the class under the pretense that “the unique opportunity for exposure to energies of an all male group might be especially interesting to her.”
In the first class, the Priestess gave us a printed instruction sheet which included our first chant or meditation to study. It was fire element inspired. At the start of the second class, we did some review of the prior session’s fire element inspired learning and she asked me to recite the chant she shared. I started speaking it out loud and fewer than two full sentences in to it she abruptly stopped me and asked me to start over which I did. This time she stopped me by slamming her hands on the table and exclaiming that what I was quoting is NOT what she gave us to memorize. I apologized but told her that it is the same material as I could clearly hear her voice speaking the chant - how else would I know it. She said, “No” for a third time and the guy to my right told me I was wrong too and started quoting a different chant. What he said was different but equally familiar to me. The Priestess apparently wasn’t done with admonishing me yet because she interrupted him and exclaimed that the chant I was quoting was one she had written for exclusive use by the members of her own coven and that she would never have revealed same outside of her coven. So I shrank into my chair and let the class progress knowing that I had in fact still been correct in what I stated.
Other emotion laden things like that happened at later class sessions too. But to keep to the point, let me share that the instructor also offered up other products for additional purchase. I really liked an essential oils blend she did and purchased some twice during the six weeks. She had shared her personal phone number with all of us. So when I ran out of oil a few weeks after the class ended, I tried to contact her to buy some more. I tried to reach her by phone several times per week on different days of the week and at different times of the day. All I ever got was her voicemail and never a returned call. After several weeks of failed attempts, I assume she was away on a sabbatical and waited a few weeks before trying again. However, when I eventually tried again I got the same level of failure to connect and I finally gave up.
Eight months later, my SO and I decided to move to Florida at the request of our employer. Here is where this story intersects, in time sequence, my prior post in this same thread. Knowing that this would be an immense life change for me - moving 3,000 miles to another state, taking a promotion at work, buying a new home, and finally moving in with my SO. So many stressful changes all at once. I decided to seek out spiritual guidance in the form of a reading. I remembered how fondly I enjoyed the full moon circle ritual I attended many months earlier which was lead by a specific solo practicing witch. I had been so impressed by the welcoming circle she cast and also by the way others attending that night seemed similarly comfortable with her ritual. So I searched her out and found her at a magick shop (different from the one I took the classes at). I made an appointment with her for a private, personal reading.
At the reading I hit her up with the predictable questions and concerns about the stressors and changes I just listed above. She recalled my attendance at her circle sometime in the prior 12 months, so she asked me about how my spiritual path was progressing. I recounted many of the things I’d done and accomplished in the months since that circle ritual. Eventually I got around to sharing with her the Wicca class I took that prior summer. And I explained how I was disturbed by the fact that try as I might, with sincere desires, I could not reach the teaching Priestess in the few months immediately after the class ended. This is when the witch doing my reading said, “Yes, we are aware of what happened during that class. We know that you were studying with Katherine (the Priestess’ real first name) and we know that she became afraid of you because of the events that happened in that class. We also know that Katherine is very jealous of your psychic gifts. That’s why she wouldn’t return your calls.”
First off, I never mentioned the name of that other Priestess during that reading nor am I aware that I shared any subtle clues about who the Priestess was nor even where the class took place. And second I was shocked by the repeated use of the word “we” by this solo practitioner. I was so shocked that all I could do for the next 15 minutes was sit and listen - I was so immersed in her sharing that I never even asked her “who ‘we’ are?”.
It was clear enough to me that Katherine had pretty significantly outed and smeared my character within some part of San Diego’s spiritual community. The reading witch further told me that my spiritual energy - unrelated to my gender, sexual identity, or sexual preference - is very nearly all masculine with almost no traces of feminine energy. She told me that most forms of Wicca are female dominated and my spiritual energy can be incompatible with some of those traditions. She told me too that even without attempting to do so, my energies overwhelmed those Wicca classes and the same would be likely to occur again if I continued to focus exclusively on Wicca. She suggested I give up on Wicca and look instead to other male dominated pagan religions.
