The Distraction of Ra, Disappointment of Apollo

What was a spiritual seeker to do having rejected the church at an early age?  It's a common question, asked by many who never had a religious faith and many who lost their faith.  Outside of God, where is meaning?  Philosophers ask it - Nietzsche found meaning, others found none.  My faith at that time said "There is a sacred beyond appearances.  But it's not to be found in a church."

I'd been reading books on spirituality and the occult from time to time for a few years.  Now my reading and collecting became more enthusiastic.  By the time I was eighteen and converted to a personally held Christian faith I had over 1000 books on themes related to the occult, the new age, spirituality, world religions and philosophy.  Most of them I hadn't read.  Nearly all I threw out or sold: my new Christian faith urged me to cleanse my life of all these supposedly unclean, evil things.

Where was a young person to go, having decided Christianity to be based on a false story but having a yearning for something beyond this world?  I looked into lots of things.  Vedic wisdom.  Meditation.  Astral projection.  Yoga.  Cartomancy, chiromancy, lots of mancies!  Many other little obsessions.  And magic.

There's not a lot of old ritual magic that a young person can do in the comfort of their own bedroom.  The Golden Dawn rituals aren't designed for a few square feet of space, or to be performed as a solo endeavour.  But there's some ritual, proper ritual - not the books of invented "spells" that are now so common on the spirituality shelves of bookshops.  I've forgotten most of what I ever read about magic but remember part of a ritual that I tried each day for a while.  Not for too long, nothing seemed to come of it, so I moved on to other things:



In sadness, turned from a religion without meaning,
I turned, turned, turned again.
Where is hope, truth, peace?
Where is that God, that promised life?

I turned, incense burning, held tight in hand, widdershins turning.
Give me reason    -     Hail Ra
Give me purpose     -      Hail Mithras
Take my dark agony      -      Hail Apollo
Light bringers come      -    I welcome thee
I turned, turn, calling      -      Into the light of my life

Turning, burning;
        felt my fall, called, pulled by dreaming.
Turning, turning;
        from empty God to godly life
Hail Ra, Mithras, Apollo, I welcome thee,
Turning in holy ritual, come, come, light beings come.

You came, if you came, in silence.
I heard.
Nothing.

In sadness, turned, lost again,
Spinning, direction free,
Turned, turned again.