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I didn't like the Goddess-God ritual I did with Chris a little while ago. It was nice and powerful, but it downgraded the role of the god. It made him the pathetic, obsequious lapdog of the goddess and I believe them to be equals. They are the same thing, after all. Masculine and feminine are both necessary in Nature. Sorry, rambling.
Fine, let's do this. I cannot promise I won't have to talk about it again--I know I have mentioned it before--but consider this the definitive present overview of Chris.
There is no plainer way to say this than to inform you, Dear Younger Thomm, that Chris is a pedophile. He is not an exclusive pedophile, just a violator of vulnerable women, a category into which teenagers often fall. He was not averse to raping them, a concept which reads as ghastly. Paganism gave him a cover and access to victims. You, dear boy, served much the same purpose. All he ever saw in you was likely that.
You wanted to find holiness in others and mistook age and a good story for that. Chris said that he had been in the Navy, grievously injured in South America, and that a shaman had healed him then took him in as a prophesied apprentice. With even the slightest retrospect, that is ludicrous, but you wanted to believe things like that happened in this world. He might have stolen the foundation of this from Carlos Castaneda or a fantasy novel.
Chris, at the very lowest cusp of his faults, was a self-aggrandizing liar. The other things he did flowed from that. How can you be a serial rapist if you are honest, at least with yourself?
He looked like how one would picture the stereotype of a molester: stout and awkward, with the short mustache of a cartoon pedophile. A sweaty Oliver Hardy hiding his hard-on, with close-cropped hair.
Chris will rape two of your friends. One, he might have met anyway. The Pagan community is a small one and you were not his only in-road to its younger members. The other, you were the one to make introductions because you thought the idea of a reiki-practicing shaman was exciting. You were unaware that he had raped your friends, possibly more than once. Neither told you until you announced that Chris had been arrested. They didn't owe you this information. I'm not sure what you would have done about it at the time, though the answer now is obvious.
You will carry the guilt that he used you this way and the shame that you didn't know better. He always made you uneasy, but you tried to write this off as his being older and supposedly more spiritually advanced than you. He would organize rituals in the mountains, far away from the mundane world. He always wanted to push people a little farther than they wanted in ritual, which now is a red flag. Still, it was thrilling on paper.
He may be in small part why you spent years uncomfortable in rituals, but he does not deserve sole credit for that.
For reasons to which you still don't agree, you were the head of the Mid-Hudson Pagan Network from the age of seventeen until your mid-twenties. (I will get to this another time.) You insisted that you were not their leader, being barely more than a child forced into this position because you started an email list. They wanted a leader too much to acknowledge that you were not one.
Chris came to the meetings in the back room of a Denny's. He did aura and tarot readings there on occasion. He once gave you an aura reading where he claimed that all your chakras were pushed up one, meaning that you had no root chakra and your crown chakra was a halo above your head. Whatever this might have meant, you can safely take it for another lie.
He was much older than you, at least in his thirties, which should have warned you away. What value does a sixteen-year-old otherwise have to a grown man? You are now 39 and you cannot fathom wanting to hang out alone with teenagers if there is not a paycheck attached (and another responsible adult present), let alone practice witchcraft with them.
You will attend his wedding a few years after you met him. He romanced a kind woman with a young daughter. He never touched the daughter as far as you know and think. She was beneath the threshold of his tastes. It was a nice wedding, in which they involved the daughter because he was not only joining only his new wife but her daughter in making a family.
He seemed successful. With his then-fiancee, he rented a rustic house on a hill soon after you met him (before that, it was a small apartment). After the marriage, he had another house with a fire pit in the backyard. He worked in the mental health field, taking care of developmentally disabled adults. He seemed put-together.
I don't know to what extent he loved his wife and to what she provided him cover for his sins. I'm not sure how much it matters in general. You will meet other predators and the proportions will perplex you. How much, in short, was ever real and how much a facade, a secret identity, to obscure what they are? To be sure, the person who committed the crimes was their actual self. What they put on top of this identity was costuming.
Chris had a public photo account of women who modeled for him. It may have been explicit that these were nude photographs, but I am uncertain. I do not think his wife would have been thrilled with that fact, though she knew that he was a photographer. Of course, this account also served as a catalog of women whom he had raped. These were his trophies. Not all, but enough that it came off as bragging, enough that the prosecutor used these against him in the trial. Once that happened, all the photos on the site were replaced with gray squares, then taken down.
In prison, he converted to emphatic Christianity, denouncing his self-proclaimed shamanism and putting the blame for his crimes on Paganism. It was cynical and hollow, but this isn't a surprise. Christianity was only his latest ploy, this to gain leniency and pretend he cared about forgiveness.
I have not checked for years whether he is still in prison. Outside taking responsibility for his many crimes, particularly against teenagers, there is no rehabilitation. I imagine he could behave himself behind bars and that might be enough to charm a parole board. If released, he should be marked down as the highest level of sex offender, but it is hard to say that would be enough to keep him away from future victims.