We are each born into a world that isn’t yet ours. Others have worlded the earth for us, decided what to include and what to exclude from all the possibilities and potentials of human expression and activity. We are taught and told what the world is, what is possible and what is impossible, and for most of our childhood we accept this as objective truth.
The beautiful problem, the crisis moment, comes when we begin to understand a certain sound those who teach us about the world make as they do so. “That’s just the way it is,” they say, and then sadly sigh. And in that sadness and that sighing we begin to understand that the magical, enchanted existence of childhood will one day end and we, too, will sigh in sadness. Like them, we’ll become defeated, depressed, and most of all disenchanted, killing off — or at least deeply burying — the most hopeful parts of ourselves in order to just survive the world.
As you probably already know, I’m the director of publishing and co-owner of Sul Books. That’s a UK publishing house formed from three imprints: Gods&Radicals Press, RITONA, and Sphinx, the latter formerly part of Aeon Books.
Of all the jobs I’ve had in my life, this is by far the most fulfilling. It’s rare, I understand, to find a profession that not only feels really good to do, but also constantly fascinates you. I love reading, and I love writing, and I love helping other people write. As a publisher, I get to do all those things, and as much as I want.
I got started in publishing long before any of these imprints were born. In my early 20s, living in a collective house in Seattle, I started a short-run journal called Earl Grey is Dead. It was quite a small journal, a little bit better-quality than a “zine” (it was printed, not photocopied) but far less polished than anything I publish now.
Earl Grey is Dead collected poems, short stories, and essays from friends, and I sold it in a few coffee shops and a leftist bookstore in the city. Each of its four issues did much better than I’d imagined they would, selling each of the 250 copies I produced. And it was a delight to make that, but publishing requires money, some sense of how to make more of it, and quite a lot of time. And I had little of any of those things back then.
Earl Grey is Dead had a subtitle, or something like that, appearing on the back cover of each issue: “Fuck their world; let’s make our own.” I was at that time an anarchist, or more specifically an autonomist (I’m still that, by the way), informed equally by Situationist theory, ecofeminism, anti-globalization, and my own peculiar mix of esoteric and pagan beliefs. So, perhaps it’s obvious what I meant by the tagline, but it’s worth telling you more.
I believed then, and I fiercely believe even more now, that each of us has both the power and the obligation to make our worlds. That’s not to say that we can actually change the laws of gravity or the material basis of reality, of course (I’m too much of a Marxist to believe such a thing). Just because we say something is true doesn’t mean it is, therefore, true. But this also goes for what other people say about truth, as well.
Another way of putting this is that we “world” the earth, a phrase I first read from the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty in his book, Provincializing Europe1.
One historicizes only insofar as one belongs to a mode of being in the world that is aligned with the principle of “disenchantment of the universe,” which underlies knowledge in the social sciences …. But “disenchantment” is not the only principle by which we world the earth. The supernatural can inhabit the world in these other modes of worlding, and not always as a problem or result of conscious belief or ideas.
Chakrabarty wrote that in the context of something the poet and occultist William Butler Yeats had learned after talking with an old woman about fairies about faeries:
The point is made in an anecdote about the poet W. B. Yeats, whose interest in fairies and other nonhuman beings of Irish folk tales is well known. I tell the story as it has been told to me by my friend David Lloyd:
One day, in the period of his extensive researches on Irish folklore in rural Connemara, William Butler Yeats discovered a treasure. The treasure was a certain Mrs. Connolly who had the most magnificent repertoire of fairy stories that W.B. had ever come across. He sat with her in her little cottage from morning to dusk, listening and recording her stories, her proverbs and her lore. As twilight drew on, he had to leave and he stood up, still dazed by all that he had heard. Mrs. Connolly stood at the door as he left, and just as he reached the gate he turned back to her and said quietly, “One more question Mrs. Connolly, if I may. Do you believe in the fairies?” Mrs. Connolly threw her head back and laughed.
“Oh, not at all Mr. Yeats, not at all.” W.B. paused, turned away and slouched off down the lane. Then he heard Mrs. Connolly’s voice coming after him down the lane: “But they’re there, Mr. Yeats, they’re there.”
As old Mrs Connolly knew, and as we social scientists often forget, gods and spirits are not dependent on human beliefs for their own existence; what brings them to presence are our practices. They are parts of the different ways of being through which we make the present manifold; it is precisely the disjunctures in the present that allow us to be with them.
We are each born into a world that isn’t yet ours. Others have worlded the earth for us, decided what to include and what to exclude from all the possibilities and potentials of human expression and activity. We are taught and told what the world is, what is possible, and what is impossible, and for most of our childhood, we accept this as objective truth.
The beautiful problem, the crisis moment, comes when we begin to understand a certain sound those who teach us about the world make as they do so. “That’s just the way it is,” they say, and then sadly sigh. And in that sadness and that sighing we begin to understand that the magical, enchanted existence of childhood will one day end, and we, too, will sigh in sadness. Like them, we’ll become defeated, depressed, and most of all disenchanted, killing off — or at least deeply burying — the most hopeful parts of ourselves in order to just survive the world.
I published Earl Grey is Dead during the height of the anti-globalization movement. Thus, those familiar with those heady, fierce, and dream-filled times probably recognise in “Fuck their world; let’s make our own” an obvious echo of the dominant slogan of those years: “Another World is Possible.” As I was not just an autonomist but also already a pagan, you’ll then probably understand why I’d developed the habit of rewriting that slogan to “An Other World is Possible.”
That “Other” World is precisely what Charkrabarty was on about in the quote I cited. The disenchanted world of the West, about which I’ve devoted tens of thousands of words to interrogating in my series The Mysteria, has never been the only world. Also, it’s not even the only world in the West, no matter how much the dominant worlders of Western capitalist societies insist.
Consider how, at the very same time the European enlightenment was declaring the world void of gods, there were simultaneously tens of millions of Europeans praying to the Christian god and participating in “superstitious” religious rituals (the catholic mass, lighting candles at saint shrines and sacred fountains). It took centuries for those people to get the message that their god never actually existed, but there are still many of them who, regardless, don’t care what they said.
Go back just a hundred or two hundred years before those enlightened proclamations, and you see something even more startling. People — including the clergy themselves — believed not just in the Christian god, but also in magic and an entire order of “intermediary spirits,” neither of which fit well into what we now think of as acceptable Christian doctrine. Their world was a lot bigger, more complex, and far more populous than the world the West currently believes to exist.
Return again to what Chakrabarty said in relation to Mrs Connolly’s paradoxical statement that she didn’t believe in fairies — but they’re there regardless:
As old Mrs Connolly knew, … gods and spirits are not dependent on human beliefs for their own existence; what brings them to presence are our practices.
In other words, the world isn’t dependent on our beliefs about it. That means that the human process of worlding, also, isn’t dependent on belief, but rather only on what we actually do.
This is quite the opposite of how much of current “leftist” thought tries to approach questions of identity, justice, and reality. I opened the first edition of my book Here Be Monsters: How to Fight Capitalism Instead of Each Other with an account of a man I went on a date who told me he was really a bat. For him, and also for anyone who would accept such a declaration from someone, believing it to be true therefore made it true.
Just like gods and spirits, though, bats and humans are things that exist independent of our beliefs in them. All those things have their own realities and exist for themselves. Thus, what we say about them or whether or not we believe in them has no effect on their existence nor their traits.
Again, worlding is what we do and is not dependent on what we believe. This makes the question not “what is true?” but rather “what do we include?” We already live in a world full of gods and spirits, but for the disenchanted mind, these are so distant in the background and so excluded from our consciousness that we can say “they don’t exist” without any feeling of falsehood.
But what we’re really saying is, “I don’t include them in my worlding.” What we do world into our lives instead is often quite depressing, though, and it’s why so many of us sigh in sadness when we say “that’s just how it is.” Jobs we hate, homes we cannot afford, endless alienation, constant anxiety, and a relentless forced march from birth to death: this is the material reality of a disenchanted world.
That’s not our world, though, or it definitely doesn’t need to be. This is why that anti-globalization slogan, “Another/An Other world is Possible,” struck so deeply in the hearts of millions. That’s also why we fall over ourselves in excitement when a politician or a political movement reminds us that “the way it is” was decided by someone else. Thus, the allure of populist leaders of all political formations: they tell us things don’t have to be this way and remind us that something else is possible.
The difficulty, as we’ve seen, is that when a single person or a small group of people promise the power to change the world, it will always just be their own worlding. Rarely — if ever — does a political movement promise to give to each of us the power to world the earth ourselves. If they did, though, they’d be just as false as when they promise to make the world better, because worlding is something each of us already has the power (and importantly, the obligation) to do.
That’s why I’m still an autonomist. The responsibility to change our material conditions falls on each of us, and it’s one of the truly inalienable things about being human. When we let others decide what our world is, we’ve abdicated the throne of our souls and allowed others to sit there instead. The greatest crime (or, even, “sin”) ever committed is not when someone encloses our world, but rather when we allow them to do so.
That’s why we sadly sigh when we say “that’s just how it is.” We know it can be otherwise, and we also know it is otherwise. But at some point, we gave up and gave in, opting for another’s worlding rather than the hard and beautiful work of our own worlding.
It doesn’t need to be this way. In fact, it isn’t this way, no matter how much we’re told it is. That’s their world, which we’ve mistaken for ours.
And as I said, fuck their world.
Let’s make our own.
Publishing News
Sul Books has published sixteen books this year, with another three to be announced before the end of 2025. Also, we’ve added another person to our staff, published two new courses, and have already scheduled twenty-four new books for 2026.
Especially, we now publish a lot of esoteric and occult fiction. This has long been a dream of mine, since fiction is especially crucial in the process of learning how to world. In one of her books, Ursula K. LeGuin said something like, “I’m lying to you, which is the only way to tell you the truth.” That’s what all good story and myth is, a “lie” that tells you something truer about the world than fact or nonfiction can tell you.
Our two best-selling titles for 2025 have been fiction books, The Carnelian Moon by John Michael Greer and Fimbulwinter by
. The Carnelian Moon is the third installment of Greer’s popular Ariel Moravec Occult Detective series (there’s a fourth one coming in spring of 2025). Fimbulwinter is Ross’s debut novel, a fast and fun tale of two ski bums caught up in a conspiracy of the Norse gods.
Two other titles from the first half of 2025 are absolutely also worth your attention. Those are Duncan Barford’s The Going Down and
’s A Demonology of Desires. Both are highly magical texts, not just works of fiction, and those looking for accurate descriptions of the enchanted world I describe will find what they’re seeking.
Ariel Moravec isn’t our only occult detective at Sul Books, by the way. Next week, you’ll get to meet Drake, an enigmatic figure somewhere between Sherlock Holmes and Gandalf. The first book in that series, The Elucidations of Drake, is a fantastic read which, like Greer’s series, functions also as a primer on magic. And next month will see the release of our very first horror novel, To Keep Silent, by Thomas Sachs (
on Substack). If you’re like me and prefer occult horror over slashers, I think you’ll really enjoy this.
Support our worlding
If you like our work at Sul Books as much as I do, and you’ve the means to support our worlding, there are a few ways you can do this.
For those who want to learn more and take advantage of our growing list of courses, our All Course Pass allows you to do that while supporting our many instructors.
We also continue to offer our Permanent Supporter membership. Those who support us in this way get all the benefits of the All Course Pass as well as free shipping on all purchases and access to each and every digital edition of every book (almost one hundred titles).
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Information about all these ways of supporting can be found at the button below:
And here’s a preview of some of the many, many titles we’ll be releasing in 2026:
Fiction:
The Sea Goddess, by Ian Robertson
Hotel Mirabelle and the Wonderful Wheelchair Company, by Valerie Sinason
Nothing Happened, by Paul Williams
The House of Crows, by John Michael Greer
Shadow on Darkling Edge, by Jools Warner
Ygamagha, by Radus & Mareto
Swarm Box, by
The Walls of Jericho, by Ronald Ruskin
Other-Song, by Rhyd Wildermuth
Patient Chemistry, by Ben Sessa
Nonfiction:
1978, by Cornelia Benavidez
Anti-Militarists at War, by Christopher Scott Thompson (GR)
Caryatids, by Melinda Reidinger
On My Way To Wisdom, by Alison Miller
Archdruid Report, volumes 1-10, by John Michael Greer
Here Be Monsters (updated edition), by Rhyd Wildermuth
Oh fuck, thanks for the medicine. I'm a poet and a practising druid but also very alienated most of the time. I can't quite chime with the way things are (to your previous essay's point) so I tried hard to make my own rhyme - literally and metaphorically. Trouble is I'm addicted to taking things personally so really suffer needlessly a lot.
I guess I need to pick and choose as to what I let sit in my head - maybe practice makes perfect?
Anyway, thanks for your writing. It makes a difference.
Who gets to say what the “main stream” is? Everything exciting happens outside of someone else’s main stream.