July from From The Forests of Arduinna

The monthly update of all my writing

After a few weeks of stifling heat earlier this month, the weather has finally turned mild enough for my mind to work again. Regardless, both my husband and I noted that the dryness of the earth and the dryness of the mind felt intertwined.

I struggled to write this month. I’ve also taken up my gym work, and though training is a really good way to balance out necessarily sedentary nature of writing, I’ll admit that the very last thing I ever want to do after working out is look at a screen.

Still, I guess I published a lot this month anyway. Also, I worked a lot on the edits of my manuscript, thought there’s a lot more to do.

Before getting to the digest itself, I have a few brief updates.

First of all, the digital book sale at A Beautiful Resistance ends 1 August, so you still have a bit of time left to pick up some of my books (and others) for cheap.

Secondly, my course on Being Pagan will begin again 18 September, 2022. This is a reschedule, two weeks later than the previous announcement, because I will need some more time to finish my manuscript and to finish some editing work on someone else’s project. If you are a ‘founding’ supporter of From The Forests of Arduinna, you can take this course for free (email me and I’ll set you up).

Third, as I mentioned before, I’ll soon be starting a podcast. My intention is to pick a fascinating writer every month and discuss politics, the sacred, and other interesting things. I’ve got a list in my head of some people I’d love to talk to, but I’d love to hear from my readers here whom they would love to hear. Drop a comment at the end to let me know your dream guests.

What I wrote in July at From The Forests of Arduinna

This month I wrote seven posts and one short update post. Two of the essays I wrote were for paid subscribers and the others were for everyone.

10 July: The Demon and the Genius (free)

This essay is quite a long one, and was actually almost twice the original length before I published it. The other half will eventually appear in another essay next month. It’s one of two essays this month that are notes towards an “ecology of spirits,” by which I mean an exploration of the relationship between humans and spirits and its influence on politics:

Ressentiment seems to me best described as a spirit, or as that essay stated, “demonology is a necessary mode of social explanation.” It is the corruption of which Pope Francis speaks that comes upon a person who is stalled, who hesitates, who does not risk, and then no longer understands that they’ve actively chosen such decisions. The “angels” there to help “push us” were for the Greeks the eadaemon, helpful demons. For the Romans, they were the actual spirit of the person, assigned to them at birth and accompanying them to the grave. We might now call this merely the “will” or “agency,” but it’s all really the same thing.

The Demon and the Genius

13 July: What Do The Woke Believe (free)

This is an excerpted and excised chapter from the original manuscript I submitted to the publisher. It no longer fits in the larger narrative style of the book, and it was anyway my least favorite bit of it all. Regardless, it’s quite dense with information about Woke Ideology and helpful for those confused about what exactly is being believed and especially about the constant shifts in terminology:

We need to consider one other important problem regarding the concepts which form the foundation of Woke Ideology. Often, there is a significant difference between the way these concepts are understood traditionally and the way they function in social justice discourse. For example, take the idea of “white supremacy.” Traditionally, white supremacy referred to a fringe political ideology that argued for full dominance by white people of all cultural, political, and economic institutions within a country, and also to the belief that whites should have such dominance because of some sort of inherent superiority of “the white race” over other race. Now, however, white supremacy also refers to something completely different. An academic or an activist aligned with Woke Ideology might use the term to describe the default situation in the United State, the United Kingdom, Australia, or Europe now, and also say something along the lines of “white supremacy is the cause of all social inequality.”

What Do The Woke Believe?

19 July: Against the Perfect (paid)

Another very long essay, this time on Trans-humanism and its relationship to Gnosticism.

Seeing that much of the policing apparatus of the Church was developed to combat Gnosticism, you could be forgiven for assuming that a Pagan druid might have some degree of sympathy for that religious tendency. I don’t, however. The modern capitalist age, the technological era, the Machine, or however you want to call it was only possible because of the core tenets of Gnosticism.

Against the Perfect

21 July: Let’s Just Talk About The Weather

This was my favorite post ever, because I got to read you.

So please, let’s talk about the weather. Tell me of the weather where you are, which is telling me how you feel. Or tell me of a memory of joy, and what the weather said to you in that happyness.

Let's Just Talk About The Weather

24 July: Horror At The Heart Circle (free)

This was this month’s recommendation post, where I tell you who else I am reading and who you might like to read. Also, I tell a story about being trapped in a polyamourous heart circle from hell:

While he spoke and others in the circle snapped their fingers, I watched the guy to his right slowly go pale and then wilt. I thought perhaps the soy hummus had not agreed with him, so nauseous he looked. I felt sick for him, and wondered when the first man’s interminable “vulnerability” would finally end.

Horror at the Heart Circle

26 July: Social Disease (paid)

This is about gay sex, sorta. More specifically, it’s a perhaps over-cautious attempt to discuss the problem of sexual morality and the left’s inability to speak about practical concerns and material conditions, ceding all of that to the right. Two days after writing it, I read an account from one of the early gay activists who was at Stonewall and then looked into the original platform of the group he was part of. One of the points was to build a strong moral culture for homosexuals, which follows along with what early German gay activists sought during Weimar. I wonder what might have happened had they succeeded, and how many more gay men might still be alive.

The problem, however, is that sexual activity is absolutely within the realm of human moral, ethical, and pragmatic reasoning. Social groups create frameworks around sexual practices and behaviors for very good reasons, reasons that do not have anything to do with Michel Foucault’s theories about biopower. We should also here remember that Foucault, who was well-known for his own sexual athleticism, died of AIDS.

Social Disease

29 July: Realists of a Larger Reality (free)

This essay was also published at A Beautiful Resistance, and it’s one of my more artful pieces of writing. There’s a larger point I’m trying to make that I maybe got too timid about because I knew it would be more widely read, a point I instead make in my upcoming book.

To be a “realist of a larger reality” is not just to dream of something different than what is, nor to be lost in the spectacle or the world of representations. Instead, it’s to see the scene presented to you as well as what created the scene, to see not just the Instagram picture but the camera by which it was taken, the person holding the camera, the staging and posing beforehand and the discarded shots afterwards. It’s also to see the social media network itself, the influence of “influencers” and the algorithms that determine which images you see and which ones you never do. It’s to see the effects of these representations on the way we see ourselves and each other. It’s to see the profit motive behind the corporations which own, shape, and control the way we represent the world and which limit our ability to see what else is possible. And it’s especially to see how we rarely find moments of escape from all this.

Being “a realist of a larger reality” requires all this, but it most of all requires that, in our faithfulness to that larger reality, we refuse to be lost in the world of images and representation, and especially we must make sure that our larger reality has an internal consistency and coherence.

Realists of a Larger Reality

This month’s question

I am thinking about offering ‘trial subscriptions’ for readers. Many other substacks do this, but I have to admit it feels gimmicky. Personally, I’m not the sort who usually signs up for trial offers because I know I’ll completely forget that I did so and then get confused why I’m getting billed for things.

On the other hand, I know I’m weird and very flighty when it comes to such things, while others are less so. And I know some people would really rather not risk paying for something unless they have a better idea of what they might be getting. I offered this once already this month, and a lot of people signed up for it, so maybe it’s something people really want. But I also don’t want people to feel like they’re being trapped into subscribing.

So, this month’s poll question is for free subscribers specifically. Would you like that I offer free trials? Keep in mind, this involves substack collecting payment information first, and then you can cancel before the end of the seven days to not be billed if you don’t want to continue. During the free trial you can read the entire archive of paid posts also, but again, you have to manually cancel if you don’t want to continue.