It started with lunch.
Nothing dramatic. No revelation written in the clouds. Just two new friends, and a quiet comment that slipped past the noise of the restaurant and hit something deep inside me.
We’d only just met, chatting at one of Jettie’s school events—a new friend with a strangely familiar frequency. A few days later, over lunch, he said:“What if I’m the real Mormon? What if all religions are created for you to transcend them? They’re not belief systems. They’re entry points. They’re trying to make you evolve.”
I set my fork down. My heart didn’t race, but it did lean forward.
He had grown up Mormon. I had grown up Baptist. Different pews, same pulpit. The architecture underneath—obedience, certainty, salvation as reward for submission—was the same.
What he said that day made me wonder: What if we didn’t leave the church? What if we fulfilled it?
Because here’s the thing. That idea—that a religion is not something to believe in, but something to move through—is not new to me. That’s Magick. That’s ritual as transformation, not transaction. That’s the tarot deck not as prophecy, but as mirror. That’s the spell not as supernatural tool, but as forcing function for consciousness.
Magick, as I’ve practiced it, never seeks Truth with a capital T—it seeks change. It’s about setting up a symbolic container, stepping inside, and letting it alter you. It’s alchemy, not theology. The same could be said of psychedelics. Of deep art. Of love.
So why have I never thought to include religion in that list?
Maybe because religion, as most of us inherit it, is presented as the destination, not the vehicle. You believe. You obey. You belong. But what if those were only the visible rituals meant to trigger invisible recursion? What if every creed, every sacrament, every myth was a coded koan designed to be broken open by the very mind it seeks to shape?
This isn’t just poetic metaphor. In the hidden rooms of many religions, this idea is explicit:
The Kabbalist reading Torah as labyrinth.
The Sufi spinning to dissolve the self, not decorate it.
The Gnostic whispering, “This world is the trap—and so is the text.”
Even Mormonism has its secret apotheosis: that humans can become gods. That we are in an eternal progression. That sealed behind suburban manners and patriarchal structure is a mythic engine whispering: You are not meant to stay here.
My new friend says he might be the real Mormon. Not because he stayed. But because he transcended.
That makes me wonder:
What if every religion is an initiatory system?
What if the sin isn’t leaving, but staying too long?
What if belief is not the point—but the material?
Magick begins with symbols. You charge them with attention. You act them out. And eventually, if you’re doing it right, the symbol breaks, the mask cracks, and something else emerges: you, transformed.
Religion might work the same way.
It offers you stories.
It gives you roles to play.
It offers ritual, restriction, repetition.
And then one day, maybe, you realize the real ceremony was never the baptism or the prayer. The real ceremony was what it forced you to confront, what it mirrored back at you, and what it left behind when you walked away.
If that’s true, then I am not post-Baptist.
I am a consecrated heretic.
A graduate of the spell.
And if that’s true for Baptist and Mormon alike, then it might be true for all of them. Hindu. Catholic. Buddhist. Born again or never belonged. The question isn’t what you believe. The question is: what did the structure force you to see? What did it burn away? What did it prepare you to become?
And so I leave lunch changed. Not because I was converted, but because I remembered:
Every religion is a spell.
Every spell is meant to be broken.
Not in rebellion—but in revelation.
Not to destroy the sacred. But to become it.