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Salvation of a Southern Witch

Salvation of a Southern Witch

Last updated on: September 25, 2026 at 5:10 pm by Heron Michelle

Salvation of a Southern Witch 2026-09-25T17:10:05-04:00 Heron Michelle

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I am one of those people who goes way over the top celebrating just about anything. I throw themed parties, decorate with lavish holiday displays, and go all-out creating handmade Halloween costumes. I sing, dance, and laugh too loudly, and both divulge and indulge too much. If ever there are shenanigans to be had, you can be sure I will attend to them directly.

I’m 41 years old now, and when I look back at decades of thoroughly enjoyed antics, I will admit to you right now, in front of the Gods and the entire internet, that I can appear completely ridiculous…compared to a muggle. I’m not everyone’s preferred cup of tea, but I am SO OK with that.

You see, some time ago a secret came busting out of my broom closet, much to the shock and dismay of my conservative family and neighbors. That pointy-hatted truth simply refused to stay politely tucked away. It was a wild, unfettered, jubilant truth—my raison d’être—so why should it stay hidden?

Even though many fine and respectable people thought I’d lost my mind—people for whom I had long bent and subverted my truth in exchange for their acceptance—even though it meant leaving brokenhearted from my long marriage and cherished stay-at-home-mom gig, and even though I would choose not to use my college degree and leave my well-paying profession behind, I eventually took my fundamentalist Christian mother’s advice and let my “little light shine” freely for all to see. She used to say that we Christians were a “peculiar people,” and we should be proud of that.

As it happens, I was even more peculiar than she would have appreciated. That, and witchery is an unstoppable force. Go figure.

A Witch’s Come-to-Goddess Story

Today, I am a public Witch in a deep-fried Southern town, and as a matter of course I do many of the things my mother once told me were “of the Devil.” I own a witchy store downtown, in full view of my conservative neighbors. I teach openly about Modern Paganism in religion classes at local colleges. So far, no lynch mobs have formed, fingers crossed. I am a priestess within a coven I helped found, teaching the occult mysteries year-round to responsible seekers.

On weekends, I offer past-life retrievals, magickal consultations, and tarot readings to clients. I drum until my hands are numb, belly dance around bonfires, adorn beautiful people with mehndi body art at Pagan festivals, and generally enjoy a fabulous, sovereign life of love and happiness. Most days, I will tell you that taking the road less traveled made all the difference—but that is the happy ending.

Gather ’round, my lovelies, and let Mama Heron tell you the backstory: a Witch’s Come-to-Goddess tale. Or, as they say in the Southern Baptist church, allow me to TESTIFY! about my “burning bush” moment, how I was “saved,” and how I eventually accepted my sacred mission to become an agent of Divine Love.

The Witchling Awakens and Completely Misses the Point

I now serve Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, but I was raised in “the fear and admonition of the Lord,” as my evangelical mother regularly said. It never felt right to me to be terrified of God like that, but when you are a child, what Mama says is the gospel truth. What she preached to me was deeply upsetting, to say the least. I had my own truth, things I simply knew, but Mama would squash any talk of that.

I remembered being a man in a past life, dying during World War I, but there was no room for reincarnation within her paradigm. I couldn’t reconcile what I experienced inwardly with what I was being told was possible, and that conflict contributed to a childhood depression the adults around me didn’t know how to address. It went untreated and mostly undiscussed. What could a middle-class white kid from a loving family possibly have to be depressed about?

Eventually, I rejected both the religious teachings of my childhood and my mother’s authority over my soul. For a while, I rejected much of my respect for her along with it, and that sent me into a tailspin. I had rejected what I experienced as the hatefulness, bigotry, and isolation of our church, but what else was there? If I wasn’t a Christian, was I doomed? Within the black-and-white world I had inherited, where everyone was either “with us or against us,” I thought I had only two options: Christian or atheist. In that paradigm, atheism was practically on par with dancing with the Devil.

Yet, if there was no higher purpose to life, why bother?

Around that pivotal time of menarche, I lay wide awake in bed one night while the room seemed particularly moonlit. Clearly, within my own inner dialogue, I finally admitted my worst adolescent fear: There is no God. I am a freak. I am absolutely alone, and this is all pointless. I pronounced it with petulant finality, anger, and self-loathing.

That is when everything went haywire.

The Universe Is Alive

Immediately, my senses were arrested. I lost control of my body and felt pressed into the bed as though the gravity of God Almighty had entered the room. Unable to move, my heart beating wildly and my body flooded with adrenaline, I became hyper-aware. The room seemed ten times brighter, filled with bluish moonlight.

The silence screamed, and my mind rang with the absolute certainty that I was NOT alone and that I DID have a purpose to fulfill. This did not come to me as a voice or even as words, and it offered no clues about an identity or gender. I struggled against the force but could not move, and it would not stop until I acknowledged it directly. Finally, I gave in.

“OK, I hear you! Maybe there is a God!”

As quickly as it began, it was gone.

I was released, and everything returned to normal. Still panting and tingling with adrenaline, I looked around the ordinary room. I moved my fingers and stretched. I sat up and craned around to look through the window into the ordinary darkness. Then my rational mind kicked in, skeptical as ever.

I’m losing it. God did NOT just speak to me.

I lay back down.

I am here to tell you that the whole damn thing happened again, twice as strong.

Once more, I felt taken hostage by my own body and pushed back into the bed. The moonlight intensified as though someone had aimed a floodlight through the window, and this time a voiceless chorus screamed through my…everything. I was a budding clairvoyant, and within the experience came a glimpse of what I understood to be a sacred mission waiting for me many years in the future. The message, basically, was that I needed to prepare myself.

It was only a glimpse, accompanied by the overwhelming certainty that there was some specific purpose awaiting me.

“OK, OK, I believe you!”

Then it was over.

“Hello, I’m Aphrodite” might have made the interpretation easier, but no, apparently that would have been too convenient. Nor did I understand the presence as any one particular deity. Whatever it/he/she/they was, my adolescent vocabulary could only describe it as BIG, INEFFABLE, and POWERFUL.

What I understood was something like:

Shut up and listen, kid: THE UNIVERSE IS ALIVE.

Today, I believe the greatness of Spirit quickened within me at precisely the moment I needed a nudge away from despair. At the time, however, I assumed I had been “called to Christian ministry.” My whole life, I had listened in church while preachers and missionaries took to the pulpit and testified about how God spoke to them and they knew they had to serve Him.

I was horror-struck.

Obviously, I thought, this meant I was supposed to preach the Gospel of Jesus.

So I ran like hell.

I explored just about every forbidden thing my mother had warned me against. I read the banned books. I tried the verboten things. I did not want the job, so in true rebellious-teenager fashion, I answered HELL NO and struck out to find just about any other way of being, come hell or high water.

…but I digress….

From Existential Crisis to Personal Gnosis

This story is actually about another night, years later, when I was nineteen.

It was May of 1993, and I was driving home after my freshman year at Marlboro College in Vermont, returning to Greenville, South Carolina. It had been a difficult first year on my own. My parents separated just as I left for college and moved away from our family home. Hoping to escape the drama, I had chosen to go as far away as my father was willing to finance and subsequently endured my first six-month, snow-entrapped New England winter…at a liberal arts college.

I had crawled out from under my mother’s protective rock in the Bible Belt and landed in progressive New England. It was like being released from captivity in a dark room…onto a foreign planet. I thought I was there for the creative-writing program, but I spent much of my time studying religion, history, and anthropology instead. For the first time, I encountered the Bible within a broader historical context, studied the world’s major religions, and learned about Indigenous cultures and what happened to many of them during the spread of Christianity.

I began asking a question that would alter the course of my life: What did my own ancestors believe before Christianity?

I began exploring the pre-Christian religions of the European cultures from which my family descended, and what I found among the emerging Neo-Pagan traditions felt startlingly familiar. It was like coming home.

By then, I had met a few actual Witches and begun an obsessive study of Goddess religion and Wicca. As the obligatory rite of passage for a Witch of the 1990s, I had read The Spiral Dance, Drawing Down the Moon, and A Witches’ Bible, but I was still confused, reactionary, and searching for another absolute certainty to replace the one I had abandoned.

That was the problem.

I was trying to replace the patriarchal version of WE ARE THE ONLY RIGHT WAY with an older, supposedly matriarchal version of WE ARE THE ONLY RIGHT WAY. Witchcraft would not play that game with me. Its metaphors, mysteries, and non-dogmatic insistence that I seek truth within myself refused to provide the comforting absolutism in which I had been raised. I was still too accustomed to being told what to believe to accept responsibility for determining my own path.

What if my mother found out?

Worse yet, what if I were wrong?

Going Home to No Home

I couldn’t wait to return to South Carolina, where at least I knew the lay of the land. Yet with my parents’ twenty-five-year marriage falling apart and each of us scattered to the four winds, there was no family home waiting for me anymore. That year, I had also fallen deeply into an unhealthy romance and, after six months, barely managed to pry myself from the black hole of partying into which my lover was already disappearing. I cried “uncle” on the harshness of New England and went into full retreat from dreams I had carried for years.

This wasn’t my first heartbreak, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last, but in that moment it felt like the end of the world. I was in deepest mourning, and I didn’t have a clue who I was anymore.

I was nineteen years old, homeless in the existential sense, heartbroken, disillusioned with the religion that had formed me, suspicious of the religions that attracted me, and returning to a hometown that no longer contained my home.

Which brings us to the part where a giant glowing peach saved my life.

Bruce Tuten / Flickr.com / Some Rights Reserved

Roadside Salvation via Giant Glowing Peach

No, I Wasn’t on Drugs

As I drove down Interstate 85 that starry night, somewhere beyond Charlotte and headed south, my mind churned through an anguished plea for answers. Why even bother to keep living, to keep opening myself to loss and anguish? Was life nothing more than a monotonous parade of one day following another, months repeating themselves, seasons grinding onward, while we struggled relentlessly to stay alive until eventually succumbing to nonexistence?

For what purpose?

Why not skip all the bother and simply snuff out?

I was young, grieving, and convinced that I faced a lifetime of battling the forces of entropy and decay for no greater purpose than producing another generation who would continue the same struggle. In short, I was deathly afraid of meaninglessness.

My hands shook on the steering wheel as I seriously considered taking a hard left into a concrete embankment.

Once again, in the middle of an existential crisis, I became hyper-aware—wide open and pinging the Universe for any kind of clue about what I was supposed to do.

Then, beside that black highway, I saw it: The Peachoid.

A giant peach-shaped water tower rises beside Interstate 85 in Gaffney, South Carolina, looking for all the world like an enormous ass glowing in the night. It is a ridiculous spectacle, completely unnecessary to the basic engineering requirements of storing municipal water. It is also fantastic in its shameless, over-the-top expression of civic pride in being peach country.

And something in my mind went: click.

We Decide to Make Life Mean Something

The moment of gnosis that bloomed within me was like a Fourth of July grand finale.

The point, I realized, was that we decide to give life meaning beyond the mundane.

WE DECIDE to celebrate, to make art, and to live beautifully rather than merely functionally. We CHOOSE to throw fabulous parties and revel in the sumptuous delights of existence along the way rather than merely exist. We make wild, juicy, orgasmic love rather than merely procreate.

We gather the tribe and share feasts on holidays rather than merely consuming sustenance. We eat birthday cake. Why?

Why not?!

We mark the key points along the never-ending cycle and make them sacred. Why waste our energy struggling against the cycle when we can celebrate it, flow with it, and glory in the sureness of dawn, springtime, and the arrival of a new babe?

Heron and her Larger-Than-Strictly-Neccessary, Jack-the-Fabulous-Lantern, ready to welcome friends to her Halloween Party

Heron and her Larger-Than-Strictly-Neccessary, Jack-the-Fabulous-Lantern

It occurred to me that life truly was in the details. The effort we put into making life grand and enjoying it could itself be an act of worship. We decide that something is meaningful, then we invest it with attention, effort, symbolism, beauty, memory, and love—and thereby participate in making it meaningful.

Suddenly, all my ridiculousness made perfect sense.

The parties mattered.

The decorations mattered.

The costumes mattered.

The singing too loudly, dancing too freely, eating the cake, gathering the tribe, making art, and lavishing unnecessary beauty upon an otherwise perfectly serviceable water tower all mattered because human beings possess the extraordinary ability to participate in creating meaning.

To Live a Life of Love

The struggle balances the reward; the gain balances the loss; the love balances the fear. Religion, I realized, did not have to be about being “right,” worshiping the correct God, fulfilling inherited obligations, or living in fear of some distant doom. It could be about fulfillment, growth, relationship, beauty, and love.

I could choose how I participated in this life.

Would I devote myself to suffering, fear, and the expectation of punishment, or would I seek love, balance, wonder, and attainment? I could not control everything that happened to me, but I could choose what I cultivated, what I celebrated, what I made sacred, and what meaning I created from the materials life placed in my hands.

I opened my eyes and saw the world differently.

It was ALL Divine, and the Divine was LOVE.

I changed my mind, and the world around me changed with it. I emerged from fear into wonder, and suddenly “God” was everywhere, saturating the world in delight.

I choose to live a life of love.

I make cake and decorate for the holidays. I throw parties, carve enormous jack-o’-lanterns, and wear crazy costumes. I dance, make love, and howl at the Moon, all as acts of worship. What I had sought outside myself, I finally found within, and in that sense I was saved from fear.

My answer to the age-old existential question?

I love; therefore, I am.

Blessed be,

~Heron

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About Heron Michelle

Heron Michelle is a witch, priestess, teacher, artist, and owner of The Sojourner Whole Earth Provisions in Greenville, North Carolina. She is the author of Elemental Witchcraft (Llewellyn Worldwide) and the forthcoming Lunar Witchcraft: A Devotional Guide to the Goddess, Moon Magick & Ritual (Spring 2027). Learn more at HeronMichelle.com. You can read more about the author here.

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