When I was a small child, seven years old at the latest, I quickly suspected that the Tooth Fairy wasn’t real after seeing the discrepancy between my friends’ financial payout in exchange for their teeth compared to mine; one of them got $50 and a fairy-sized handwritten thank-you note, and I copped a whopping $2 in exchange for the utter horror of having pieces of myself falling off my body.  After I'd confirmed that the fairy wasn't real with Mum, and interrogating her about the alleged existence of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, the entire Pantheon of childhood deities fell - hard, with a broken heart - as did my entire concept of the mystical nature of life, and the whole idea of “God” ~ if they didn't exist; neither did “he”.  I became somewhat cynical, decidedly Atheistic, and definitely skeptical of anything even slightly woo-woo.

I drifted in an ever rigid and mightily dull landscape of the mundane. I summarised our collective existence as “monkeys on a space-rock” and ridiculed the lunacy of spirituality (while still seeking it; unconsciously, of course). All I could identify of myself was that I was a voracious consumer of information, learning just about everything about anything that piqued my interest, and eventually; that I was determined to be happy. After 25 years of what I'll sum-up as utter boredom and aimlessness - trying to survive in a place where you apparently have to pay just to live (ghastly) - studying courses that I thought might be *just* interesting enough to sustain me until I eventually die (thank-god), and enjoying the relentless and specific horrors of an accidental career in hospitality; I fatefully picked up a comic book called Promethea written by my favourite Author, Alan Moore. 

[One thing you must understand at this point is that I was *determined* not to be foolish enough to ever buy into anything *silly*. But Alan Moore is highly intelligent, writes with a certain depth and nuance, and is most importantly highly critical of tyranny and Authoritarianism; his spirituality slipped right under my radar. I believe he was truly the only person who could have the weight, ingenuity, and complexity to affect me so deeply at the time.]

While reading this story, essentially encapsulating the nature of Magick and the Universe from Moore's glorious perspective, I experienced (sober as a judge) what I liken to a lightning bolt hitting my soul. With tears streaming down my face for reasons I couldn't determine, I suddenly saw the cogs and gears of the Universe.  I saw how it all flows together in this beautiful fractal nature, one event inciting another and another. I saw how it seemed chaotic only when you're looking from a smaller perspective, and how it was really like the ultimate clockwork, everything in its rightful place. There was a sentience to it all, like an infinite consciousness firing off synapses. And then, just as it arrived, it was gone again. What the heck now? I had to know more, and so began my new journey of self discovery within the occult world..

To wind back the clock a little here, it's pertinent to know that one of the personal Philosophies I created while I was still a teenager was this: