Julie Lopez says she was walking in “darkness” until her father’s horrific suicide snapped her and her family out of generations of witchcraft and into relationships with Jesus.
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“I basically come from five generations of [witchcraft],” she recently told CBN’s Faithwire. “I think it actually goes [further back], but … it ends in me. I cut that generational course.”
Lopez, who is now a Christian working to help others discover the Lord’s voice, explained what practicing witchcraft looked like for her and her family.
“Witchcraft is, basically, when you are controlling and manipulating people … through rituals and through things,” she said, noting that there are different types of practices.
While some believe they are practicing “white magic” — a supposedly “good” tradition — she said there’s no such thing as safe or appropriate magic. This white magic often takes the form of healing rituals and other such methods.
The opposite, which is black magic, looks quite different.
Watch Lopez discuss her incredible journey out of witchcraft:
“Black witchcraft [is] more about manipulating people, sacrifices, and doing certain things to have our way,” Lopez said. “Witchcraft is always going to try to make you think that you have the power.”
She likened this dynamic to what New Age practices promise people: Control to declare and “manifest” things into existence. Lopez said witchcraft makes people feel they’re the only ones with power.
Lopez’s foray into the occult started when she was a toddler, as she recalls being very young when she was first involved in a ritual she didn’t quite understand. As she grew up, she had dreams that scared her as well as visions — and when she was 12, her training in witchcraft officially began.
“I was introduced to this concept of, ‘You need to be careful with the things that you declare. You need to start declaring positive things. You can change your atmosphere,’” she said. “It was apparently all good, [but] as I always say, it doesn’t matter if it’s white or black witchcraft; what is important is: who is the source? Who is guiding this experience?”
Lopez now believes it was demons guiding her, regardless of the type of magic she was pursuing.
Her family used both white and black witchcraft, with Lopez being introduced to the latter around age 15. Much of the activity she engaged in was with the help of a so-called spirit guide, which she also now believes was demonic, though it didn’t present that way.
“They don’t come to you as demons … they come to you as … angels and they proclaim that they’re angels of light,” Lopez said. “And so you think, ‘Oh, wow, I have an angel.’ Or they come as people, so they don’t project as demons, because, if people that were involved in witchcraft will see them as actually what they are, they will run from it.”
Lopez described making time in the evenings to spend with her spirit guide; she said she would invoke him until she could interact with him.
“I used to just feel his presence coming in the room,” she said.
Over time, Lopez began to cut herself, which eventually turned to suicidal inclinations. The intensity of the spiritual anguish led her to feel as though she should ultimately become the sacrifice, she said.
“I went like really deep, really dark … they were asking me to do bigger things, and, by that point, it was like, ‘Cut yourself.’ And I was just cutting myself,” she said. “I was kind of trying to cut myself to give them blood and wanted my life to be like a sacrifice for this. So, I, I felt at some point — I never shared this — but, ‘At some point, I have to be the sacrifice. I have to die. I need to do it.’”
Tragically, death eventually did strike the family. Lopez faced the ultimate horror when her father committed suicide. She believes the witchcraft led to his death — and to the familial chaos that followed.
“After my dad committed suicide, because of all the witchcraft and everything that we were doing, my family got destroyed,” she said. “Each one of us took a different route.”
Her mother, terribly rocked by all that unfolded, pledged to stop doing witchcraft. She repented, clung to the Bible, and changed her life. Another relative reportedly resorted to drugs, as chaos and pain ensued.
But Lopez initially struggled. She was angry and confused, though she eventually started attending church and learned there was another way to live.
She became emotional discussing one of the first times she attended a service.
“I was excited and I didn’t even know why,” she said. “It was like I knew that I was going to encounter something that [would] change my life. Every time that I tell the story, I feel like crying because it was so special. … It was a small church, but as soon as I entered into that place, it was like an atmosphere that I never felt in my life.”
Lopez said she suddenly experienced the “feeling of freedom” and found the love of Jesus. While she struggled with spiritual warfare throughout the process, she said she was eventually freed of her ties to the demonic, which still tormented her for a time after her conversion to Christianity.
“I went through a process of deliverance from this thing,” she said.
Despite being a Christian for over 10 years, Lopez didn’t start sharing her experience until last year. For a long time, she said she felt her story was “too dark,” and she felt shame and embarrassment, but God changed her heart and prompted her to speak out.
“It wasn’t until last year that the Lord told me, ‘You need to [start] sharing in your testimony,’” Lopez said. “And when I shared it for the first time, I saw the impact that it had on other people.”
Today, Lopez said she and her family are “restored” and “set free.”
Find out more about her story here.
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