I was a neopagan (fucking moron) in the 1990's. The Internet was fresh and exciting then, with a million or so people on it who actually sought one another out. It was a fun time, with no proliferation of video cameras to ruin future dignity, thank God. As stupid as I am now, me in the past was just intolerable.

It's OK. when I think back to some of my earliest experiences online in the 90s, in chat rooms, I cringe at some of the things I typed to complete strangers. I was a troll and didn't even know it. I think we should all be forgiven for the 90s.

My mom was a neopagan. She didn't self-identify as "a witch", not to my knowledge at least, but she was HEAVILY into the New Age scene, and had connections to most of the various woo-woo groups running around upper New England during the 80s and 90s. She lived on a Rainbow Family commune for a little while, ran her own New Age publishing company, edited a bunch of eco-extremist newsletters (the kind which routinely claimed that whales have psychic powers), worked as the personal secretary / PR director to an internationally known Wampanoag Elder for almost a decade, and thought she could polymorph into various animals with the aid of magic spells. I went to my first spoon-bending seminar at the age of six, my first perpetual energy demonstration at age seven, and was the first kid on my block to have an official set of Zener ESP testing cards. I got in trouble once for showing the neighborhood kids my mom's sacrificial altar and athame dagger (it wasn't actually used for BLOOD sacrifices, but ma didn't think the other trailer park families would appreciate the distinction) and my bedtime stories, she'd usually read me passages from the Mabinogen... in medieval Welsh. This one time, a cult leader friend of mom's (an old fat lady who claimed to be the reincarnation of an Atlantean sorceror-priestess), after being told by a psychic that mom was going to go all Judas and narc her out to the Feds, tried to have my family murdered.

The net result of all this was that, by the time I was old enough to actually self-identify as a religious and/or subcultural group, I was completely jaded and fed the fuck up with everything New Age. The fact that my dad was a Dawkins-loving curmudgeon and dues-paid member of the Skeptics Society helped, too. I've been a lot of horrible, horrible things in my life - an otherkin, a prep school kid, a socialist, a watcher of Family Guy - but not a neopagan.

The main prerequisite for being a wiccan, or young girl who learned about wicca on the internet, is to buy some criminally overpriced crap that some old bat has "charged" with magical powers and then surround yourself with random symbols and rocks that you attribute random meanings to.