My spiritual emptiness began to weigh on me and my previous experiences, still unexplained by logic alone, kept nagging at me that there was something more to it all. I decided to begin my own personal quest for Truth, outside tradition and to simply follow my heart. This would be the beginning of ever stranger but more effective experience and spiritual growth.

Since traditional religion had not worked for me personally, I decided to begin with something more closely related to heritage that was a bit older, something I’ve always been interested in knowing more about because of my childhood dreams. I began to study Norse mythology and Teutonic magic. The first discovery I made was in relation to symbolism and how there were parallels even between these ancient mythologies and things I was more familiar with in the Old Testament. For instance, I intuited that “water” referred to Wisdom, specifically where related to spiritual wisdom. I remember having discussions with my brother about interpreting Revelations symbolically instead and how it seemed to make more sense. Ironically, a program came on during these days and we were delighted to see an interview with Joseph Campbell saying much the same things that we had begun to believe ourselves in relation to mythic symbols and religious teachings. Thus, this became my first strongest influence that shaped things to come. I remember during this time dreaming about a golden female spider that spun me into a sort of cocoon in bed as a show of love, affection, and protection. This made absolutely no sense to me but I wrote a short poem about it because it seemed so strange. Another dream I had during this time was about the Norse man from my dreams in a scenario he showed me once related to when they were with the Celts where a ritual was performed before the Crusaders came to fight them. However, in the dream it took on the shape of the Norse myths and Ragnaroc was upon them, only their Ragnaroc was the coming of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in which this act would somehow take the power of magic from these people and affectively give it to the Catholic Church by attracting the belief of the people. Also, the ritual was performed in such a manner that there was a young boy on a sacrificial stone. He was not killed but his hand was bled. Somehow this gave the man performing the ritual the ability to see both past and future through some sort of tunnel that was effectively related to DNA. In the dream, a primal force came from the dark recesses of the past and actually came out of the boy’s blood. It attacked the man, drinking his blood, and ran off in to the night. When I awoke, I had the sense that this could be related to the vampire myths and might make an interesting novel or trilogy. I actually attempted a few times to write a book about it but could never get it to work out properly.

Shortly after these events, I met my wife and sharing similar beliefs and desiring similar approaches, we both explored various areas of occult literature. I spent time reading Joseph Campbell, studying German runes, learning about ancient Germanic tribal beliefs and cosmology, reading Norse mythology, and studying ancient German tribal history. Though I also have strong Irish heritage connections, I had left this to be studied in more depth at a later date. During this time, my wife focused on Irish studies as well as other personal interests. Soon, we both became interested in modern neo-paganism and Goddess spirituality. I also became interested in Jungian psychology. I also became interested in actually reading about some of the scientific studies that appealed to me. Being a bit of a tech-head with science fiction and cyber-fiction interests I began reading things like Kevin Kelly’s “Out of Control” which discusses evolutionary systems both biological and not. Soon, my focus became more psychological and technological in relation to explaining phenomena. I basically perceived all things ‘magical’ as simply psychological in origin and did not subscribe to any fanciful beliefs. I would even argue with other pagans that ‘the gods and goddesses’ are NOT entities but simply archetypal in origin and were mere constructs of consciousness. I subscribed to Jung’s Collective theories of consciousness but didn’t see anything mystical about it.