I have considered myself a Pagan and a Witch since I was at least 8 years old. Here's a little bit about my background, my spiritual search, why I am a Pagan, why a Witch, and now why Canaaite Pagan. I have had a spiritual sense ever since i was very small. My immediate family is rather anti-religion, so i was raised with no religious training or education, as well as little sense that any one religion was better than another. As a child I was drawn to Paganism because it honored the female and the feminine as sacred, something the monotheisms that dominate Western culture and much of the rest of the world do not do institutionally, with their male prophets and religious leaders.
Females figure only peripherally, usually as subservient appendages of potent men.
I was more or less a classical Greek Pagan, since that was the kind about which I knew most. I read what i could, but all of it seemed tainted by an intolerant and misunderstanding Christian perspective. Knowing little of Hinduism and the other places in the world where people continue to practice their indigenous religions, by the early 1960's i assumed there were no more Pagans and began to search for an existing religion that i could stand. At first i read about Western religions, various flavors of Christianity, none of which were even tolerable except for the Unitarian-Universalists who had just joined forces at that time and were much more narrow than they are today. At least Judaism didn't have Christ, but there were many things about it that were unsatisfactory.