What first got you into occultism?

[Aeternus]

Yh ,my user name is to honor Him for initiating me, in the dream I was lying in sarcophagus and he was moving around me repeating some strange chant in a language I couldn't understand, was scared at first and try screaming Jesus but i couldn't, it felt like sleep paralysis,. Until whwn he was done and I was able to wake up from the dream

Well, he is the God of Knowledge, the Moon, Magic and Wisdom so, it kind of makes sense of why it all happened in a dream and sleeping. It's a truly profound experience indeed.

Ave Lord Thoth

 

[Tonytee93]

Reading about Zen / Alan Watts as a teenager, then Kerouac, then Crowley, then R.A.W.

 

[grimmM]

For me it was growing up in a religious cult. No spooky exp just a need to see what was so "evil".

 

[BBMage]

I was sick and the doctors couldn't help. I ended up finding a mystery school and got better using the tools. I didn't think I would be interested in the occult until I saw the effects. I just kept studying and practicing after that.

 

[Lagomorph Ablaze]

When I was a little child, about 6 years old, we went to seey grandparents. They lived in an old house with an attic, where rarely anyone would ever go. But that day they were doing some clean up and I accidentally found an old book of old pagan slavic spells. I didn't think much of it, but it intrigued me enough so I secretly kept it. I forgot about it and about one year later when I got bullied in school I tried one of the spells on the bully and he just didn't show up. For a whole week. Later I learned he got nearly killed by a car in a freak accident, like something from Final Destination. That's when I got convinced this shit's real and I made a vow to myself to never ever use it to harm anyone and to only use magic for my own internal evolution.

 

[Yusuf al-Ghurabi Bey]

A friend of mine in high school had a copy of Cavendish's Black Arts, and of Liber IV. This was in the eighties, when getting this stuff was a little more challenging. I'd grown up in a super-fundie evangelical church that didn't take, but the bleak materialism that seemed like the only other alternative wasn't much more appealing as a world-view. That led me into Thelemic-adjacent magic, and wicca and neo-paganism, and then into chaos magic and heathenry, and eventually into the graeco-egyptian/Alexandrian goetism and theurgy, chaos runework, and Hekatean sorcery that's my current vibe.
It helped that I was north of Boston, so I had access to Salem's bookstores and Seventh Star Books in Cambridge.