Content warning: references to occult practice, satanism, and self-harm.
Early Formation
I was born into a Protestant family in Northern Ireland in the late 80s — a place where faith, identity and history were often braided together in ways that didn’t feel easy to separate.
Christianity, as I first encountered it, didn’t feel like something alive. It felt like something inherited. A landscape shaped by tension and tribalism — part belief, part belonging, part backdrop to conflict. Religion felt fragmented and external — something people pledged allegiance to or were tied to by accident of birth. Not something that moved or changed them.
I hated going to Sunday school at my Presbyterian church. Separated from my grandparents, taken to a small room and made to memorise questions and answers by rote for the meager reward of a gold star.
I remember believing in God. I also remember, very young, being alone, angry, and saying out loud that I hated him — even though I didn’t fully understand what I meant at the time.
The First Door That Opened
In my mid-20s, I became a practising occultist, but not in a rigid or traditional sense — it was eclectic from the beginning.
If I had to trace it back to something, I’d say the first spark was reading Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. That book was like a code that opened the door to a way of thinking that treated belief and reality itself as something flexible — something you could adopt, test, and reshape.
From there, I moved into more structured material — including texts associated with the order of Aurum Solis — and eventually was initiated into a Thelemic organisation where I practised ceremonial magick.
Mapping Hidden Territories
What followed was a kind of widening map.
Like many in Ireland, I was also aware of older cultural and mythological threads — Celtic stories, folklore, and a sense of pre-Christian spiritual heritage. I worked with and followed different deities at different stages — figures like the Morrigan and Cernunnos.
I also spent time around various pagan and Wiccan groups, and explored different frameworks and symbolic systems.
Mostly, though, my practice was solitary. That was part of the draw. No institution, no permission structure. I could build something that felt like my own internal cosmology. It gave me a blueprint I could be the architect of, a structure of goal-setting and directive action that I’d never really had before.
At first, that felt like freedom. Like stepping out of someone else’s map and drawing my own.
Systems Within Systems
My practice evolved and expanded into a wide range of systems: qabalah, hermeticism, chaos magick.
Eventually, my focus drifted toward left-hand path (LHP) philosophy — especially forms of ‘atheistic’ Satanism and Luciferian thought that emphasised autonomy, self-deification, and the breaking of inherited limits.
I was never a literal believer in the way people often assume. I had convinced myself these deities or entities weren’t real. My approach was closer to what some practitioners call ‘rational’ or ‘naturalistic’ occultism — influenced by scepticism, psychology, and the idea that these systems can be used as tools rather than taken as objective truth. I became involved with currents that framed themselves as more grounded or intellectual — attempts to strip occultism of superstition while keeping its methods.
At the time, that distinction felt important. It made everything feel contained. Controlled. Intentional.
But over time, something in the controlled structure began to loosen.
When the Map Starts to Fold
The deeper I went, the more internally fragmented I became. What had started as self-development gradually turned into something else. I became increasingly detached.
Eventually, I fell into severe depression. I was self-harming. And instead of stepping back, I doubled down — intensifying practice, constructing rituals, pushing further into internal chaos. I was under the belief that this was part of the path, because within left-hand path ideology, that’s often how it’s framed — that struggle, pushing past limits and transcending dependence on anything outside yourself is progress.
So instead of stopping, I went deeper. Until it reached a point where it couldn’t be ignored any more.
I ended up in A&E after cutting myself.
That was the moment where something broke through the momentum of it all. The realisation that whatever path I was on, it wasn’t leading to where I thought it was.
And I knew I had to stop.
After the Break
A few years later, something shifted in a way I didn’t expect or plan.
I came to the realisation that Christ is true, that God is real, and that I am loved by Him. Eventually, that led to baptism into Orthodoxy — something I’ll return to in later posts.
Why I’m Writing This
The purpose of this blog is to document and reflect on those years of my life in order to process, understand, and make sense of what I put myself through. I will be going into greater detail about these practices, acknowledging what I learned from them, but also being clear about the cost, harm and long-term impact they had on my mind, my life, and my sense of reality.
I also want to speak to those who might recognise themselves in parts of this — people moving through occult or esoteric systems, drawn by the promise of empowerment, but quietly wondering why their mental health doesn’t improve, why insight feels just out of reach, or why the promises of ritual magick and manifestation never quite translate into lasting fulfilment.
Not as an accusation.
Just as recognition, an acknowledgement of the pain — and the realisation that an antidote exists.
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