My family was pretty lax about religion; we only went through phases of going weekly and for a while I was really into it. So I said, when I was little, that I wanted to be a priest. But hey, look, you're Catholic and female, so that's not happening.

At the same time, I was fascinated with history and, on the other hand, the priest at the time was a bit of a Marianist. I grew up with the 'Mary as the Co-Redemptrix' ideology...which made it very easy to transition into paganism. I thought I was 'getting back to the origin' of religions.

Then I read a bit more. I realized that modern paganism was crap - based on really bad data collection in the 30s and the transcendentalist movements. So I said, 'to hell with this' and was a hardcore atheist. But something was missing. While I was in school it was OK because I realize now that it was because I was in theater.

One day a friend lent me a book - The Satanic Bible. And bam. There it was! A cogent way of putting down the things in my head, and, more importantly, Doctor LaVey realized that HUMANS NEED RITUAL. It doesn't matter what it is, but it's important to us. We need theater, and we need to be able to go outside our normal lives for a bit. Many people do this in non-productive ways - they get involved in TV shows and obsessively follow, or they become fans of something, or think they're dragons. All you need is a time and place to get out of your skin. The more I study anthropology (I'm a PhD student) the more I realize that humans have these inborn desires to escape. So straight atheism couldn't do it.

Finally, and what cinched it, is that I was having problems with some people. Satanism allows magic. You perform magic 'in the theater' as it was. At worst you get it out of your system. At best, it does things you might not logically expect (at first.) A few positive results later, I knew something was working there that wasn't obvious. I became a member of the Church of Satan soon after.

Satanism isn't for everyone, but it definitely fits the version of humanity I see.

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