well, can I say that religion first led me to paganism... and I still celebrate certain aspects like Our Lady of Guadalupe

also, my feminist studies probably made me feel more solidly based in paganism

but personally, I find "home" with everyplace that I am at...

also, I would say that books like the Tao of Physics connect me in a personal way from my mundane life and the spiritual

I've technically been a Pagan since I was born, as my mother was a Spiritualist. It was only on Sundays when she would pack us into the car and take us to the local Episcopal church so the neighbors wouldn't talk. Now I tell people that I was raised EpiscoPagan.

What really drew me to my current path was the dual nature of the God and Goddess. It seems so much more in balance than the traditional christian view of a single male god. It was like looking at a coin and seeing just the "Heads" side without acknowledging the "Tails". Like honoring Ying without Yang. It just didn't work for me.

~PaganPaul (who is also in Washington DC)

Very early. Both my parents were agnostics and encouraged any and all spiritual exploration. My grandfather was from Crete and he was always encouraging me to read the
"myths" and study the Old Ones. Later, when I was 11 or so, I read The Truth About Witchcraft by Holzer. Here were these folks believing in the same Gods as I was!
I dedicated myself to the Goddess when I was 12 and She has been with me ever since...
with a few digressions (Catholicism, Quaker, Taoism, Buddhism, Nietzsche).
Wondeful question and thanks for asking.
Bright blessings,
Hekateus

Meh, I guess I'll come out of hiding...

I was raised in a rural area, and used to live on a small farm. From an early age I was taught things like reading the weather (I'm still pretty accurate about some things weather related), and pretty much in a science based environment; never really took part in church or organized religion in any way. (I tried doing the whole "look, I can be a good little 'insert flavor of Christianity here' like my friends were for a little bit, but it didn't work...)

Around the time of my highschool graduation, I read an article in a magazine about a girl who was on trial for wearing a pentacle at school, and she said she was wiccan; as I've always been a supporter of alternative causes, I decided to see what was up with the "Wicca" thing... Also, like most people, I had a few issues with mainstream society, and some of the practices of the church (I'll spare all of ya the details), but I found that paganism, and the theory of kharma were things I could not only grasp, but made sense to me. Like, that's how in my little world, things should be...

Fast forward a couple of months, and I'm reading books, doing web searches, etc. and I realize everything jived with my ethics and belief structure. Then, the most amazing thing happens... I find out like 75% of my newest college best friends are all pagans; i thought I won the lottery! (No wonder they didn't think I was so weird...) Since then, I've done a lot of learning, and I no longer claim to be (even remotely) wiccan, but I still do consider myself pagan, and I think I'm more at one with the world around me. It's been an interesting ride to date, but it's one I would never change, and am so glad I decided to look into.

Back to my regular lurking...

As a child I was enchanted by natue on one side and the old Hammer Hooror films on the other. I cant rteally tell you why, but the combination opened a door to an alternative view to life and her mysteries to me. I have always felt the the Gods were visiting me both in the waking world and the dreamtime. I LOVE life and thats why paganism has drawn me in.

I became a sort of self-taught Pagan when I was in my early 20's - I'd just always had a fascination with the subject (probably influenced a bit by earlier having attended a local Spiritualist church for a while). I just read heaps of books and explored it on my own.

Paganism came to have the greatest meaning to me when I found myself single after the painful breakup of a 5-year relationship. Instead of feeling completely bereft and at sea, I used the healing cradle of Paganism to break my fall, and comforted myself on lonely nights by doing rituals and spells. It really, really helped - particularly when I found I could bring things into my life I wanted (including boys if I wanted!), and aid endeavours I was going through (for example, at work, growing things in the garden, even getting more out of my workouts)! It was fun and enhanced every aspect of my life, but I also respected the principles deeply as well and gave back what it gave to me.

I guess you could say being Wiccan gave me a sense of personal power wheras I'd previously hinged my identity on my relationship. I remember feeling completely at peace alone in the house having a bath by myself, completely just being with me - loving myself, and not feeling lonely. That was an amazing time of personal growth.

Sadly since that particularly intense time of worship I've let the whole thing slide and fallen into tthe trap of not taking care of my spiritual side, predictably when new relationships came along.

But I'm married now and not prepared to go forever never experiencing that joy and freedom and wholeness I felt back then. So here I am, to remind myself.

When soul awakens to Nature, feminism, and political corruption..the Goddess met..

I read the Bible. Seriously, I did.

As a child, I had no idea that the implicit pantheism and rigorous logic I'd learned from my father had no place in the Christian world. My mother took me to Presbyterian Sunday school. As a small child, I learned to set aside my own memories of a past life that my Sunday school teacher said couldn't have happened. But they didn't go away. They haunted me.

As a young teenager, I set about reading the Bible because I wanted to know the Truth. What the Universe really was. I didn't learn it. When I went off to college (at 17), I continued, taking classes in the Bible and in philosophy. And I got more and more disturbed by what I learned. Little by little, I was learning that I was not a Christian, had never really been, and could never be. And the realization was seriously upsetting to me.

A little exposure to feminist thinking in college gave me a kick out of my confusion and onto a Pagan path. It's not my nature to take ideas wholesale, though, so I never quite adopted an existing path. I wandered through Wicca, Asatru, and CAW, among many others. I read a lot of books and went to lots of meetings in those years.

There were a few specifics that kept me Pagan. One is my then-recent understanding of the Bible. I came to the inexorable conclusion that if the book were not a complete lie, I had been worshiping an evil god. The second was the recognition that my childhood memories no longer made me "wrong." Not even if they had faded, and were now memories of memories.

Wow, so many of you found it young. I am so jealous! I was well on my way to discovering Wicca when I took a class in college called Science vs. Pseudoscience. It killed all my belief in anything that can't be touched or measured by standard scientific methods.

I was basically agnostic for about 13 years, then I dated a man who has been Wiccan for most of his adult life. When he started telling me about his religion I felt like I was coming home.

It was the best feeling in the world to realize that all the things I thought were important other folks out there thought were important as well. So since that time (about 3 years ago) I have set out on a spiritual quest to learn about this wonderful world of Wicca!!! It has been quite a ride so far!!!

WW

I was sixteen, a junior in high school, and dating a wiccan. He taught me a little bit, not much about the concept of duality, but more like positive thought to heal and such. I was raised southern Baptist, my parents didn’t go to church, but the rest of the family pushed me to attend and go to church-camp and what not. I finally decided, after long frustrating my elders with my questioning what I had been taught about the bible, that Christianity was not me. About that time, my boyfriend introduces me to his wiccan “teacher”, which ultimately brought the demise of our relationship. (She wasn’t so much a teacher, as an old and creepy dark witch preying on young impressionable boys) But, I struggled on, to learn more, and it has been a 14 year solitary path. After I broke contact with the teacher, I did my own research, bought several very enlightening books, and came around to a new way of thinking. I believe that the concept of paganism has always been in my heart, I just wasn’t aware for the longest time that is was OK to deviate from the programming I received in my childhood. It wasn’t the best initiation in to paganism; there was a lot of unpleasantness, confusion and heartache. But, it also brought clarity and a better understanding of what I truly believe in my soul.

Sorry so late guys. But My mother is a hard core holyroller. I just had find something to call my own. I hated the fact that any religion could tell me that I was less that any man. Or that a killer could go to heaven before a soul that never hurt any one, as long as they excepted Jesus frist. So I did exactly what my mother had taught me. I studied many religions and was guided to the Goddess. She just seemed to make since. Then while I was studing other cultures I found her in just about everyone. I was about 13 when the Goddess became my only course of spiritual study. Now I'll be 40 soon and my mother has come to except the fact that I believe differently than she. When I was about 20, I had the nerve to tell her that I was a practicing Witch, after the yelling and commotion I asked her "did it not say in the bible that God was neither male nor female and did it not also say that he was known by many names. Then why could he not be a Goddess to me. " To let my actions speak for me and not to judge me by the misbeliefs of her religion. Many times I have shown my mother historical facts about my chosen plath and she has softened. She still prays that God will save me and I tell her "She already has"!!

My first spiritual views occurred either in preschool or at the same age in Sunday School. (It occurred in the same room in the same building, so it is hard to say.) I was at the sandbox, after having been doing some drawing earlier. It didn't occur to me to doubt the existence of God or the Devil, but a different thought occurred to me. The two of them were like sides of the same coin. Forever locked in balance. As neither side could ever win, both are fighting battles that can never be one. I wanted nothing to do with either one.

At a later point, this evolved to a point that I had a clear aim for the afterlife: As I wanted nothing to do with either heaven or hell, my goal was to be a ghost and wander the earth forever. I later had a dream in which I was in hell, riding an amusement park ride over and over again. There were long periods of time waiting in line, waiting for the ride. In the dream, I knew it was possible to get out of hell, if only you knew how. When I awoke my periodic thoughts of suicide stopped cold, as when I died I wanted to make sure I avoided either option, and I thought I needed more knowledge before I made the journey.

While I was busy being agnostic, my mother was trying to raise us as good Christians. Around the point where my parents became separated, I was invited to go to a Christian youth conference of some sort. My mother's brother-in-law (Mr. C.) was taking some kids from his school, and my father's brother (Mr. B.) would be doing the music there. I decided to go. Skipping the details, before I was home, I had been "saved" with the assistance of my uncle (Mr. C). I was 14.

It turned out to be an important turning point in my spiritual development. Important enough that years after I became pagan I thanked that uncle.

You see, I was a *very* bad Christian. First, I didn't believe in evil. I thought anything that could be called evil could more accurately be called confused. Second, I thought as a Christian it was my /duty/ to question the faith, so that I would better understand it.

I thought that if the Bible says you should pray for your enemies and Satan was the enemy of all Christians all Christians should be praying for the salvation of Satan -- something virtually no Christian does, and something which actually offends some of them. I thought that if everyone is raised from the dead and is immortal and there's a final battle between Good and Evil... The *only* type of battle it can be would be that of words and ideas. Both sides are immortal, so any other sort of battle would be pointless.

I was also a pantheistic Christian. This was backed up by the Bible. If God is in all powerful and in all places at all times, then perhaps God was actually *in* all things and places... Only the fact that I went to churches that were "non-denominational" or otherwise open to variations of the Christian meme allowed these thoughts to exist without external parties complaining.

Then things started breaking down, as far as Christianity was concerned.

It turns out that in the Bible there is a story which, among other things, includes the Holy Spirit talking to people who were neither Christian nor Jew. To me, this fit reasonably well with the pantheist approach. This also fit reasonably with the complaints of Jesus about those that follow the letter of the law without understanding that which is behind it.

With a pantheist view of God, and without believing in evil, there was one problem answered. If Hell, by definition (in the Bible), is outside of God's presence, then it simply can never exist except as an individual's refusal to acknowledge the ever-present existence of the Divine.

This led to my feeling that an understanding of God could occur without the Bible, and without Jesus.

This clearly points to people of all faiths who do the right thing as all being equivalent. They're all acting with respect to what they view as right and correct. As there is no Hell, everyone is going to Heaven unless they explicitly deny that which is good and right in their lives.

I then had a dream in which some Norse deities were looking for a magic rag that had belonged to a handmaiden of one of the Goddesses, but which had become lost. They very clearly weren't evil. I expanded my idea to be, "God is in all things, including other deities."

That idea of divinity then remained, while the importance of Christianity degraded further to the point it was no longer important. My beliefs not changing, I realized I could no longer describe myself as a Christian. I had become, in my words, a Pantheistic Polytheist.

From that point things progressed relatively smoothly. However, I no longer self-identify with that label. As this was a description of how I came to paganism, I'll stop there. :)

Ever since early childhood I've read alot. After my parents bought an encyclopedia (World Book!), I must have ended up reading it from front cover A to back cover Z over the years before I left for college. Anyway, at some point, well before becoming a teenager, I discovered Greek and Norse myths at my town library. I read every book I could find on the Greek gods after that. I branched out too. I have Native American blood through my father and began to look for Native American myths and lore. I should probably also credit the fairytales we all learn as children. The were a great influence on me as far as making me aware of the possibility of magick. (And somewhat of a bad influence on me in the realm of what to expect in romantic relationships!) It wasn't until I was 26 or so that I finally came across a book on Witchcraft (Raymond Buckland's) when it got all tied up together in a beautiful bow.

Kenneth