Personally, I was pulled into the occult at first by my own obsession with controlling my reality. That ended up triggering a whole series of events that basically led to a darker situation for me, which ended up pushing me to buy resources on defensive and protection magick book to improve the situation. In this sense, I was called into the occult through that situation.
Now the reason why I continued studying the occult is its own journey. At first, it was because I was convinced it could give me some control over my life beyond my own mundane means. So I practiced practical magick through the GoM books and similar readings. I did actually get great results through that phase of my occult studies and they really proved to me the power behind magical practice. But eventually I moved into a deeper phase where I started focusing less on the practical results side and more on the directly spiritual side.
For this, I really started quite seriously with Initiation into Hermetics and the rest of Bardon's corpus of works. I would say this marked my entry into pursuing the occult in order to observe the deeper truths of the reality we live in. I have always been keen to understand the deeper truths of things and the occult in particular was the only path to encourage your own unique exploration of spiritual / metaphysical truths. I felt that IIH provided the backbone for this on the practical front with its exercises and relatively freeform view on magical practice. I still keep its practice as a central part of my own spiritual practices, but I usually integrate other possibilities into it.
Where I am now requires me to pursue the occult for 2 reasons: spiritual truth and mundane improvement. I pursue magical studies and acts on the mundane world to protect my family, myself, and my loved ones because I genuinely believe that magick has the power to help me do this in ways not normally possible for me. We live in an exceedingly chaotic and dark time, and I use magick as a way to fight back against this tide. On the spiritual side, I pursue studies into occult and magical practice to further my own relationship with reality and to be more linked with my own version of truth. My connection to the truth empowers me to live my life with a greater purpose than any religion or doctrine could ever give me; it is a truth that I picked for myself.
From a purely curiosity driven perspective, I also just love dissecting rituals and creating new magic to experiment with. There is a rich level of exploration that comes with different magical systems and traditions, which I love to explore like a scientist and to experiment with. The process of exploration, experimentation, and understanding the mechanics of all of these is really its own thrill to me. It's the reason why I try to explore more obscure works and manuscripts if / when I can get my hands on them. But this is secondary to the main purposes I stated above.
