it made me wander what’s your story tho? what brought you here?
The threads that have become the currents of my initiation were with me from as far back as I can remember. You could call the sum total of these threads (and the way they've played out across my life) my Wyrd.
As I grew up, some of those threads developed, some faded into latency and I (unconsciously) attempted to understand them using the languages and symbols which I was handed by society. That meant attempting to interpret what was going on by trying to "fit" myself into universal ideas (as opposed to tribal or individual ideas). I converted to Greek Orthodoxy as a young teenager and had many unitive, "mystical" experiences, probably because the energy that would later propel me down the Left Hand Path was being sublimated. It "worked" for a while and I do look back on that time as one of innocence.
But, as my grandmother would say, "what is there will out"; Wyrd cannot be denied, it will either have its way or you'll go mad trying to stop it from having its way. The seams, slowly, started to come apart. In my mid-teens, I turned to modern witchcraft, another universal system albeit one which in a very "safe", timid way honoured the Need for initiation. I spent a couple of years straddling Orthodoxy and witchcraft but I realised that I was driven to go much, much further than Orthodoxy would permit and than witchcraft seemed to be interested in.
As I reached eighteen, my desire to Become was so strong, it was almost physically painful. A few days after my eighteenth birthday, I attended an evening of "evaluation" at a (well regarded) Rosicrucian lodge. I nearly gave up all hope on human life. I found a group of much older people who did have some theoretical knowledge of classical occultism and who were comfortable in life but whose smallness (manifested in endless petty infighting, spoiled behaviour and mistrust of/fear of/inability to deal with strength) not only prevented them from becoming "adepts" (meaning their titles weren't worth the paper they were printed on) but, actually, left them worse off than any average person you'd encounter on the street. For reasons that seemed clear to me at the time, I stayed with that lodge for a few months until the order's "Supreme Magus" visited one evening. Looking at it's greatest "success", I realised that this group had nothing to offer me and the authorities who recommended it weren't worth listening to either. I wondered what else in "the occult" hadn't been worth listening to.
It's hard to explain how desperately strong was my desire to Become at that time; I had been
the responsible, calm schoolboy but my ability to even hold myself together to function day to day was becoming strained. That, coupled with my Rosicrucian disappointment, came to a head the evening of the Supreme Magus' visit. I went home and, across a night of incredible psychological turmoil and fear, I reasoned with myself "You're trying to cure your deepest dis-ease with too weak a medicine. You need to go to the extremes. Yes, it's frightening and confusing but you cannot stay in this place and, if it goes wrong, you'll have to learn to swim fast. Come on now; one last roll of the dice". In the early hours of the morning, I emailed a very, very well known Left Hand Path group, fell to sleep and had a vivid dream where I saw my Future Self as a black-robed Adept.
I had a reply from the LHP school and, two weeks later, across a Sunday afternoon, I met their representative. I went along to that meeting expecting the worst. Instead, I met a Master. A very powerful exchange of energies occurred in that meeting and that was the start of my turn to the Left Hand Path. Apropos your question on "why" the Left Hand Path; that Master told me the old tantric adage: "those best suited to the Left Hand Path rarely go near it, those least suited to it pursue it with gusto". The implication was that my having to reach a point of desperation before even contemplating the LHP was a good sign. I joined the school and those teachings, fuelled by my desire, caused rapid progress. The human dimension still needed tending to though and a large amount of work has had to go into healing myself of traumas, challenging myself, trying out different forms of magic, (re-)educating myself, etc. After a few years, internal dramas would occur in that school too (in fairness, at least these weren't petty dramas) which led to mass expulsions/resignations and new pastures for me, but still refining and perfecting the threads that I had learnt were the real source of magic and change.
