Follow my blog Friday

The Domestic Pagan is hosting a weekly feature called Follow My Blog Friday. It sounds like another kind of blog hop, although this one has a weekly theme that you can write about and then link back to.

This week's question is: How did you first get interested in Wicca, witchcraft, or paganism?

My story will probably be very familiar to "recovering Catholics" like myself.  When my grandfather died in 1996 (I was 14) I decided that I didn't believe in God anymore.  I spent most of high school as an atheist/agnostic.  Of course, my parents forced me to go to church this whole time to give me a "foundation"- whatever the hell that means.  By senior year I had seen movies that approached god/the divine from a non-Judeo-Christian standpoint (like The Craft.  Oh stop laughing, I'll bet lots of you got interested in Wicca because of that movie, or similarly cheesy witchcraft shows like Charmed ;).  I started to feel that maybe there was something out there, like The Great Spirit or Gaia.  In college, free from my parents' religious reigns, I started poking around the web and the library for information on alternative religions, and found Wicca.  I started journaling in a book of shadows, meditating, and celebrating the sabbats in small ways.

I got more into Wicca when I transferred to the University of Delaware and joined a club for pagan students called "Students of the Earth" (as opposed to "Students 4 the Earth," the environmental club on campus.  We got lots of confused people in our meetings).  Many of my closest friends in college were in this club (sadly, we don't really keep in touch anymore except via Facebook).  Two of these folks introduced me to the Assembly of the Sacred Wheel, the Wiccan tradition to which they belonged and to which I now belong.  I experienced my first cast circle in the club, studied Cunningham's Guide to the Solitary Practitioner, which we dubbed "Wicca 101, and had lots of deep conversations about magick and spirituality.  Students of the Earth and my introduction to the Assembly is the reason I have become heavily invested in my spirituality over the year.

Here's the participants in this week's Follow My Blog Friday.  Please go check them out!  When you're done reading, you should totally join the hop and write you own post answering this week's question, and then go on over The Domestic Pagan and add your blog post with the linky tool.