Every once in a while, there’s hullabaloo around someone in the broad spectrum occult and metaphysical community turning their tail on their practice and running back to church renouncing everything from the occult. I see it happen time and time again and I often wonder why but deep down I know why and I’m going to share my personal thoughts because while I am practicing occultist, I also by cultural heritage am a reconnecting Byzantine Catholic and Slavic Pagan. Those are part of my cultural heritage and thereby being incorporated into my spiritual life.
For me, it’s not one or the other -- it’s not I’m a Byzantine Catholic or I’m a Slavic Pagan or I’m a Demonolater or I’m a witch or I’m a occultist. They all are related for me and a lot of people don’t see that and divide it into 'I’m a church gal' or 'I’m a witch' and you can be both even without being a Christian witch because even though I’m a Byzantine Catholic, I do not categorize myself as a Christian witch so some of it comes down to the nomenclature of how people to choose to define themselves.
Many people have an evolved past the duality of choice in that you are either a member of mainstream religions or you’re a witch. Often when we see fellow practitioners running back to church, I usually assume it is because they probably had a bad experience of either a spell going wrong or being cursed by someone in the community or a bad experience with a spirit. I work with a demonic and there’s entire fields of occult practices that are summoning the demon demanding for a thing then threatening them with archangels and banishing them and well you’re kind of being rude to a spirit because some think human ego trumps the divine.
How did I end up reconnecting with Byzantine Catholicism? I was baptized and confirmed into the Eastern Rite which is very different than other types of Christian denominations even Roman Catholicism is fairly different even though they’re still Catholicism. There’s something about the Byzantine Rite that just speaks to me on a very deep level that I can’t really explain. It’s connected to my soul and it’s beautiful and there is nothing more divine than a liturgy in Old Church Slavonic. For me, It’s about my connection with the self and with the ancestral traditions and cultural heritage. I do not feel like I need to choose one of the other as they are part of who I am as a person and I’m a multifaceted dynamic individual that doesn’t always have to rely on binary dualities to define myself.
Back to the topic at hand, there was a tarot reader and content creator where they renounced all occult practices declaring that 'tarot demonic' and ran straight back to the church. I don’t know the whole story but I suspect as above, they probably had a bad experience or in some cases they could’ve been a grifter , but it always kind of shakes the community when people do that and if you trust someone and then all of a sudden they turn on their heels go all this is all this is awful. Since we are here again... we have someone using demonic as a pejorative. I’m going to suggest reading Elaine Pagels: 'The Origins of Satan: How Early Christians Demonized Jews, Heretics, and Pagans' because when we were calling things 'demonic' or 'satanic' as a slur, those are deeply rooted and racism, antisemitism, and early Christian spiritual and cultural erasure of other populations so before you slap 'oh my God, this is so demonic' on literally anything. You are using slurs that again are coded in racism, antisemitism, and cultural and spiritual erasure.
As part of my ongoing healing process, I healed through my religious trauma and I’m not going to church every Sunday, I tend to watch the livestreams of liturgical services from my local familial churches. Being able to heal through my religious trauma, opened the door for me to reconnect with Byzantine Catholicism. Am I betraying my occult spirituality? No! I am not betraying my clients and customers either. I’m not rejecting my little corner of the occult saying 'oh no demons or demonic' or 'Satan is satanic' because why would I?
At the end of the day, your spiritual journey is up to you and it may shift at times but things these things are not mutually exclusive from one another. You can work with them multiple currents if that suits you needs cause I mean a lot of people are multi ethnic now so you might have different backgrounds. Mine is going to be more heavily in the Eastern Rite Catholicism and Slavic paganism maybe a little bit of Norse paganism, but that is because it’s part and parcel of who I am as a legacy of my ancestry. I’m not gonna go dabble in things that are not of my cultural heritage at this point now I might work with different current, so I’m a demonolater, but I also might do some traditional witchcraft. I might do some folk magic. I might do chaos magic I might do a Enochian magic-- so there are other areas I haven't explored yet such as the Qabalah or Qlippoth or Thelema and so on and so forth.
My advice is it is to explore all aspects of your spirituality, but don’t feel like you need to choose one over another. It's okay to leave, but perhaps consider not doing so middle fingers blazing that its all "demonic" renouncing all previous spiritual bonds -- if you decide to go back to church, you don’t need to make a big stink about it and renounce your faith in all of that you can incorporate it into who you are because there’s no there’s nothing that says you can’t and if there is, it was written by human ego. All of this is human ego manifestation. Move beyond that and you will be fine.