Insights, stories, and essays on politics, culture, and the sacred at the end of empire.

I’m Rhyd Wildermuth, a druid, an autonomous Marxist, and a theorist of the sacred and the political.

From The Forests of Arduinna is where you’ll find most of my writing on the internet. The name of this Substack comes from the place where I live, the Ardennes. Once known as the Arduenna Silva, all these forests were once seen as belonging to, being the home of, and also being the goddess Arduinna. That’s how I see it, still.

I write about paganism, but much of my readership isn’t Pagan. I write about leftism, and again much of my readership isn’t leftist, either. Mostly I write about the sacred, about how our modern politics cannot account for it. I also write about how Woke Ideology and other identitarianisms are symptoms of our alienation from the sacred and also from each other.

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Signing up as a free or a paying subscriber guarantees you’ll get my essays in your email inbox. I write between 8 to 10 essays each month, most of them free.

Paid subscribers get to read at least two (and often more) essays each month that aren’t available to free subscribers. These essays are often more in-depth and more personal than others, and they are also sometimes excerpts of books I’m writing or essays published behind paywalls elsewhere. They also get access to the full archive of paid essays.

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