Merry Meet! And welcome to my little autobiography. Before you begin reading this, I do have just one request. Please explore the rest of this web site before reading this section. I have two reasons for requesting this:
All right. Now that I have gotten that out of the way, let's get down to business. :-)
My legal name is Erickson Adam (my dad named me after the viking, Lief Ericksson; he said it was a "power name"). I was born and raised in a small suberb of Detroit, MI. My parents divorced when I was about two years old, and from then until I was about fifteen, I would live with my dad during the week, then visit my mom on the weekends.
Judging by the way I was raised, it is completely rediculus to assume I would have any predisposition towards Wicca or Paganism whatsoever. My father was (and still is) an atheist, and my mother a born again (and very religious) Christian. Since I always visited my mom on the weekends, just about every sunday morning was spent in a church service of some type. I was baptized into Christianity when I was about twelve. But something was always missing, spiritually, from my life.
For as long as I could remember, magic, and past centuries, when wizards and faries roamed the earth, had enchanted me. I took in moderate interest in stage magic early on, but quickly decided it wasn't worth it. The magic tricks just weren't as enchanting when you found out that one of the people in the audience was an assistant, or that the coin wasn't really invisible, the mirror just makes it look that way.
when I was about nine or ten, I took an interest, along with some friends, in the game Dungeons & Dragons. For me, it was the closest I could ever come to being a real wizard, or slaying an evil dragon. At any rate, me and my friends would often go to the libarary to play, and upon one such visit, I discovered a book entitled "To Ride a Silver Broomstick: New Generation Witchcraft", by someone named Silver Ravenwolf. I thumbed through the book, and much surprise, it detailed actual information about how to cast spells; and more than that, it talked about real life witches!
Well, at this point, I was utterly fascinated, but I had the problem of my faith. Witchcraft, according to the bible, is an act punishable by the death of your mortal body, and eternal torment and damnation in hell. This didn't seem like something worth risking, so I never checked the book out. I did return to read a few pages from it, over the next couple of weeks, but eventually, fear kept me away, and I forgot about the book.
So the years passed, as they tend to do, and life continued for me as normal. I would continue to go to church on Sundsays with my mom, stepfather, and half-brother and sister, and each week, I would dread the encounter a little bit more. It was always the same - go to sunday school, hear a lecture, go to service, sing a song, hear a sermon, sing a song, take communion, sing a song, go home. I was bored out of my mind.
Then, when I was fourteen, some friends of mine had started experimenting with something they called Wicca, it was absolutely fascinating, and captivated me. I tried to shake my interest in it, but couldn't manage to. So in a car ride with my mom and step dad, the topic turned to the bible, and I mentioned that I had remebered seeing a book in the libarary about magic, but it didn't seem satanic or evil. Well, I was quickly and sternly reminded that magic and sorcery is a tool of the devil, and that I should be careful to never go near that book again.
Well, that did it...for a while at least. I stayed away from anything to do with the occult, and while I didn't want to intrude on my friends beliefes, I wasn't about to let myself get involved in Witchcraft.
This was my mindset for about a year. And I watched my friends cast real spells, and preform tarot readings, and everything they did worked. Yet still every sunday in church, I reminded myself that this was not the way for me, no matter how much it seemd to call me. This was just the devil trying to win me over.
But then, something happened. When I was fifteen, my mom moved to Pennsylvania. This meant that I wasn't going to church every sunday, and I wasn't being influenced by Christianity constantly. I let my self begin to get educated on the topic of not just Pagansim, but religion in general. I quickly discovered that there was much more out there. But still, I stayed a follower of Christ.
Until one day in early november, 1996. I had just recently gotten my drivers license, and I had never driven alone before. My boss at the time had needed me to drive his truck out to his house, so he could move another car. I was absolutely petrified. Not only had I never driven this vehicle, I had never even seen it. Plus my driver's training instructor (whom I didn't get along with at all), had told me that he was sure I was going to get into a car and kill someone the first time I tried to drive alone. His words just kept echoing in my head as I turned the ignition. I stopped for a moment to say a prayer to God, asking for help, and my heart felt the same emptiness that it had felt for years now when I prayed.
But then, something came over me. I decided to say a brief, awkward prayer to the Goddess. Instantly, a wave of relief, saftey, and protection came over me. At that moment, the God and the Goddess were just as real as any other person I had ever met. I knew, right then and there, that my days as a Christian were over: I was meant to be a Witch. I arrived safely at my destination, I had my boss drive me back to my house, so I could begin my study.
From that moment on, I engulfed myself in Wicca. I didn't have a computer at the time, and the nearest major book store was half an hour's drive away (bear in mind, I still had no car), so I went to the libarary to study To ride a silver broomstick, and surf the web, looking for Wicca-related web-sites. I discovered a web site called The Craft, which taught me a tremondous amount.