Satanist, Muslim, Witch, Enlightenment Occultist: Complicated Spiritual Upbringing

Photo by

My spiritual upbringing was very complicated. When my parents divorced, it became a mysteriously significant force in my life.

It happened suddenly. My brother and I came home from school one afternoon and there was a new television in the living room. As we marveled at its glossy and fat beauty, my mother came into the room and cheered, with a bright and eager smile: “Satan got us this TV!”

We looked at each other, communicated some secret thing with our eyes, and started cheering too.

“Hail Satan!” She said.

“Hail Satan!” We echoed, throwing up our hands and bowing to the television the way that we had seen in the movies.

Later that night, my brother and I spoke about it in bed. I was seven and he was eleven but, even as young as we were, we knew that something was really strange about it. We decided to roll with it because it was interesting and, after our parents’ recent divorce, we wanted something in our lives to distract from an evolving household dynamic.

My introduction to spirituality and religion had come a year earlier in the form of my…