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When Occult Power Failed: A Former Witch’s Journey Into the Greater Power of God
10/8/20268 min read
After participating in an intense Samhain ritual, I walked into church convinced that I had crossed into a higher level of spiritual power. The night had been filled with ceremony, symbols, invocations, and an atmosphere I regarded as unmistakably supernatural. I believed I understood forces that ordinary Christians feared or dismissed. In my mind, ritual knowledge had made me strong, discerning, and untouchable. I did not enter the church as someone seeking help. I entered as someone who thought she possessed authority.
That confidence did not survive the service. As I sat among the congregation, something within me began to unravel. The resistance I had carried so proudly collapsed with startling speed. I could no longer maintain the composed, defiant posture I had brought through the doors. Instead, I felt exposed, confronted, and unable to hide behind my experience. The practices that had once seemed to give me control offered no protection in that moment. My certainty gave way to tears, surrender, and an awareness that I could not explain through the categories I had previously trusted.
I understood the encounter as more than an emotional reaction to music, preaching, or the unfamiliar setting. From my perspective, it revealed a direct contrast between the power I had pursued and the authority I encountered in God. I had believed that occult experience could make me spiritually formidable, yet it had not prepared me for the transforming force of genuine surrender. The church did not confirm my supposed superiority; it exposed my helplessness and began to challenge the foundations of my identity.
This testimony is therefore not an abstract argument about competing beliefs. It is the account of a person who entered believing she was powerful and left recognizing that ritual skill, spiritual confidence, and perceived supernatural authority could not compare with the greater power of God. What I had called strength had depended on control. What I encountered called me toward truth, humility, and transformation.
My earliest religious influence came through the Episcopal Church, where my parents raised me. Church services introduced me to Bible stories, prayers, and Christian ideas about God, morality, and the continuing struggle between good and evil. I learned that the world contained both visible and invisible dimensions, although the unseen realm was presented primarily through scripture and religious teaching. These lessons gave me an initial framework for understanding right and wrong, while also making spiritual questions feel significant from an early age.
At home, however, my grandmother passed down stories that offered a very different perspective. She often spoke about Great-Aunt Gracie, a reverend in a spiritualist church who reportedly conducted tarot readings and warned people against seeking supernatural knowledge recklessly. One story concerned a man who ignored a tarot warning and later died in a freak accident. I did not know whether the account was literally true, but it stirred both fear and fascination. The possibility that cards could reveal danger, and that disregarding such knowledge might carry consequences, made the supernatural seem immediate rather than merely legendary.
My own childhood experiences added another layer to these competing influences. At times, I saw what seemed to be an imaginary friend reflected in a vanity mirror. As a child, I accepted the presence without possessing the language to explain it. Much later, after studying witchcraft, I interpreted those encounters as possible contact with a spirit guide. Looking back, the church teachings, my grandmother’s spiritualist stories, and the mirror experiences formed a complicated spiritual landscape. Together, they encouraged me to believe that the unseen world was real and that opposing forces—one associated with divine goodness and the other with hidden or supernatural power—were competing for my attention.
At first, fear was the dominant response to anything associated with the unseen. As a child, I listened to warnings about spirits, curses, and powers that could not be controlled. Family stories gave those warnings a personal weight. They suggested that the supernatural was not a distant idea from old books, but something woven into our history. I did not understand what these accounts meant, yet I sensed that they carried danger and mystery.
Church offered a different vocabulary. I heard that God was holy, powerful, and able to protect those who trusted Him. Yet the supernatural accounts surrounding my family seemed more immediate and secretive. They described encounters, signs, and hidden knowledge without giving me a way to reconcile them with the Christian teaching I received. This tension unsettled me. Faith spoke of surrender and obedience; the stories I heard suggested that people could gain access, influence, and protection through forbidden means.
As I grew older, fear gradually changed into curiosity. I began asking whether the practices I had heard about were merely superstition or methods for contacting genuine spiritual forces. The questions were not academic. They were tied to identity, especially my desire to understand why some people appeared spiritually vulnerable while others claimed authority. I also wanted control: over fear, over uncertainty, and over the feeling that unseen powers might act upon my life.
Exposure to spiritualist stories made occult practice feel compelling rather than irrelevant. The more I encountered accounts of rituals and divination, the more I imagined that direct exploration could provide answers. I did not regard witchcraft as harmless entertainment; I came to believe it involved real spiritual forces and could grant knowledge, authority, and protection. That belief shaped my understanding of identity and control. It laid the foundation for later choices, as the search for understanding became a pursuit of power.
My teenage years unfolded within a culture that celebrated peace, love, marijuana, and experimentation. Spiritual questions were present, but they were often treated as private curiosities or as invitations to explore whatever seemed meaningful. I was searching without understanding what I was seeking. One day, a teacher read one of my poems and then spoke to me about the gospel. Before I left, she gave me a Christian tract. I recited the prayer printed on its pages, repeating the words as instructed, but I did not truly understand them. Nothing in me had yet surrendered to their meaning, and I had not spiritually embraced the God they described.
Not long afterward, I smoked marijuana while walking with a friend. As we passed a church, a sign caught my attention: “Jesus saves, Jesus heals.” Almost immediately, panic seized me. Fear seemed to close around my chest until breathing became difficult. I felt as though I were suffocating, while an unseen force pulled me toward a dark abyss. The experience was more than ordinary nervousness; it felt immediate, overwhelming, and terrifyingly real. I could not reason my way out of it. My friend stayed with me, spoke calmly, and helped me regain control. Gradually, the terror loosened its grip, and I was able to breathe normally again.
I did not interpret that moment as an invitation to draw nearer to God. Instead, it frightened me because it suggested that God and the supernatural might actually be active in the world. Until then, God had been an abstract, distant figure—an idea associated with religion, poetry, or someone else’s beliefs. Afterward, I could no longer keep Him safely removed from ordinary life. I believed He might intervene directly in a person’s experience, even without permission or warning. That realization did not produce faith in me; it produced apprehension. Yet it also marked a turning point, because God had become, in my understanding, unavoidably real.
The encounter during her teenage years left an imprint that could not be dismissed as imagination. She did not turn away from the supernatural because she regarded it as unreal; she turned away because she believed it was frighteningly real. What had once appeared mysterious or compelling now seemed dangerous, capable of exerting influence beyond her understanding and control. This realization produced more than intellectual uncertainty. It created a lasting sense of vulnerability, as though unseen forces might reach into ordinary life without warning.
In response, she tried to build distance from everything associated with spiritual power. She pursued the possibility of an ordinary existence shaped by familiar routines, practical decisions, and visible realities. A grounded life promised safety because it seemed less exposed to the unseen world that had unsettled her. By concentrating on normal experiences and avoiding subjects that recalled her earlier involvement, she hoped the fear would eventually lose its hold. Withdrawal appeared to offer a form of freedom: if she stopped engaging with supernatural matters, perhaps they would no longer occupy her thoughts.
Yet this effort contained a deep paradox. She wanted to escape spiritual influence, but her fear continued to direct her attention toward spiritual power. Avoidance did not erase the questions formed in childhood or explain what she had experienced as a teenager. Instead, it left those questions unresolved beneath the surface of daily life. The search for an ordinary identity was therefore not simply a rejection of belief; it was an emotional struggle shaped by fear, vulnerability, and a longing for safety. She was not merely weighing competing ideas. She was trying to find a place where she could feel secure. This period became an important transition in her testimony, because running from the supernatural could provide temporary distance but could not settle the deeper issues that would eventually lead her back to an explicitly Christian understanding of faith.
Attending the Jesus Crusade at Giants Stadium marked a decisive change in the narrator’s spiritual journey. The gathering was unlike anything she had previously experienced. Music, testimony, and collective prayer filled the stadium with an energy that seemed both joyful and reverent. People lifted their voices without embarrassment, worshiping with an openness that conveyed deep conviction. Rather than encountering faith as a private theory, she witnessed a living community expressing confidence in the presence and power of God.
Moved by what she heard and felt, she prayed the sinner’s prayer. The moment represented more than an emotional response to a large religious event. She was sincerely asking for forgiveness, release from her past, and direction for the future. Soon afterward, she joined a church, where regular worship and fellowship gave structure to her new commitment. For the first time, she believed she had found a Christian community in which she could belong and a spiritual identity that did not depend on the occult practices she had once pursued.
Within this new setting, she met the man who would become her husband. Their relationship appeared to confirm the hope that her life was being reordered by faith. Marriage seemed likely to provide companionship, accountability, and a shared purpose centered on glorifying God. She imagined a home shaped by prayer, service, and devotion, where family life could become a sanctuary from confusion and instability. The future appeared not merely promising but spiritually meaningful.
Her expectations were genuine. She did not approach marriage cynically or treat conversion as a temporary experiment; she wanted redemption to influence every part of her life. In hindsight, however, the apparent security of that period carries a more complicated meaning, since the marriage would later deteriorate. That later pain does not erase the authenticity of her early hope. At the time, she believed worship, church fellowship, and a God-centered home would offer lasting stability. Her desire was simple and profound: to belong to God, to build a faithful family, and to live in a way that reflected the new beginning she believed she had received.
Conversion did not bring the narrator into a life untouched by pain. Having believed she had left occult darkness behind and begun a God-centered life, she now faced a crisis inside her home. At first, her husband seemed caring and attentive, offering the kind of companionship that could make marriage feel secure. Over time, however, his behavior deteriorated, and the household’s stability began to erode. The account presents this change without resolving its causes or suggesting that conversion itself had promised an easy domestic life. Instead, it places the narrator’s new faith alongside circumstances she could not simply control.
Material pressures made the breakdown tangible. Bills went unpaid, and utilities were shut off, leaving the narrator and her children to experience instability in basic parts of daily life. These were not minor inconveniences in a family’s routine: they affected the predictability and security on which children and adults depend. The testimony describes a home in which financial obligations were not being met and essential services could no longer be taken for granted. It does not provide grounds to add details about what happened next, or to explain the husband’s conduct beyond the deterioration it records. The crisis is serious in what is stated, without embellishment.
For the narrator, this suffering tested what faith meant after conversion. Belief in God did not guarantee a painless marriage, reliable finances, or protection from every consequence of another person’s choices. Spiritual endurance, in this account, is not a claim that hardship is harmless; it is the effort to remain grounded in faith while facing realities that cannot be controlled. The broader testimony points to a distinction between divine power and an easy life: God’s power is not measured by the absence of hardship. Her journey therefore continues beyond conversion, as she confronts suffering and responsibility and considers what divine protection means amid circumstances she cannot command.