The Beginning

I was thinking last night about how I wound up here.

I’ve been asked quite a bit who I studied under, what sect I am part of, what my religion is, how I started, as a Lilithian.

And the truth is, all of those questions rest on presuppositions that I have never really considered, and occasionally struggle to squeeze myself into merely in the hopes of finding people to converse with — not because I have ever felt they relate to me.

It’s the presupposition that I ever arrived anywhere at all. And the truth is, I didn’t.

How did I start this path?

I don’t know that I did start.

Did it start with the third sad satori, the one that finally stuck, spiking through my soul and starting to awaken me after finding myself left alone on the road of the Northerner yet again?

Did it start with my forays in and out of a vacuous popular witch and occult culture in my 20’s, always feeling a hollowness that failed to capture what I sought?

Did it start with the defiant teenager embarking alone and unprotected in foreign places, fearing no arrows on naked skin and willing to pay any price for freedom?

Did it start with the name and the force that pounded at the edges of my dreams and my wonder, fueling my guilty nighttime research and reading at the start of adolescence?

Did it start with a young girl dreaming of Mother in her throne of dying galaxies, absorbed by lilies and ticking with counts of 3’s, with a voice that boomed from her tiny body with startling weight when under threat?

Did it start?

I’m not sure.

To me, it has felt more that it has simply been, and I have merely flitted around from place to place trying to find others who “are” in the same way I am. And this is just a name, a way of observing reality, a claustrophobic constant embrace with the Abyss, that has always been entangled in the fabric of what I am, in some way.

I studied under the onslaught of time, many false starts, stupid mistakes, and 20 years of curiosity that never responded to any degree of denial.

I am not part of any sect, as none will have me. I am too much a student of transcendence for the popular Western iteration of the Left-Hand Path. I am too much a questioner of the light for Gnostics. And I am too much an unapologetic embracer of the nature of destruction for Neopagans.

I am not sure whether I am religious or whether I simply am. The question of the nature of divinity doesn’t interest me. Whether my matron is Jungian psychology or supernatural, it doesn’t matter in the least to me. It still is, regardless of the stuff of its substance. It has always been, whatever I have called myself. I did my first dedication while devoutly referring to myself as an atheist.

Whatever I have called myself never changed anything. And at this point I know it never will, just as I could lie about my hair color, but the roots will always come back truthfully. My practice is as much a product of surrender as it is of choice.

Whatever I call myself today is more a product of how I find myself in society, than it is anything to do with who or what I am. These days, I often call myself a demonolator mostly because that is how others treat me, and I find myself in the same position of practicing relatively quietly rather than bothering to correct their assumptions, as demonolators often do if they prefer to simply be left the hell alone occasionally — pun intended. But truthfully, we are as far apart from each other as I am from any other group.

And once in a while, I run into others who “are” in the same way I am. We are almost never calling ourselves the same things, or living similar lives. But we “are.”

I hope this place will find those with curiosity, those who love study, those walking flexible and diverse paths, or perhaps even those who “are” of something different than me (I think all the archetypes have their students — after all, they’re archetypes for a reason), yet feel an understanding of Lilith could assist them in their way of being.

But I also hope this place will find those who “are” of a Lilithian path and are struggling in the light pollution that obscures their way, whatever they call themselves, wherever they are in the bullish-child to lonely-satori spectrum at this moment of their lives.

I don’t know if there was a beginning.

There is just a constant process of arriving.

– Caretaker