Letter from The Forests of Arduinna
An update and welcome to new readers
Hi!
A lot of new people just subscribed to my writing here at From The Forests of Arduinna, and when this happens I like to re-introduce myself to folks, the way you might do when a lot of people all arrive to a party you’ve been hosting.
So hello! And thanks for coming.
First off, I’m Rhyd Wildermuth. I’m 44, almost 45. Among many other things, I’m a druid, a theorist, and a writer, and I’ll tell more about that.
I practice druidry, which for me means a particular kind of relationship to the land where I live. I’m in the forests a lot, talking to things no one else usually talks to, learning from it, and generally making sure things are okay with everything else living here. Everything else also takes care of me, and really I’m getting the better end of the deal.
I’m a theorist, which means I think a lot about ideological and political things. I’m fascinated by the way unexamined ideas get a hold of us and practically possess us. Those ideas shape the way we act in sometimes very destructive ways, and I’m interested in how that happens, how those ideas came about, and how to unravel these problems.
And I’m a writer. I write a lot, and often. I’ve published six books and have a seventh on its way next year. I write here and also at A Beautiful Resistance, which is the online journal for a publisher that I run called Gods&Radicals Press/ Ritona.
About From The Forests of Arduinna
I started this early in 2021 because I wanted a new place to do a kind of new writing about certain things that didn’t fit well in the other places I write. It’s been wildly successful, and I suspect I’ll be writing this for quite some time.
The name is a reference to where I live, and also to a goddess. I live in the Ardennes, which is an ancient forest that extends from north-eastern France, across much of Belgium and all of Luxembourg, and into parts of western Germany (west of the Rhine). The Ardennes takes its name from Arduinna, which was the name both of the goddess of these forests and also the forest itself.
Besides really being in love with this land, I used this name because the land itself is shaping the way I understand the world. Land does that, though we don’t normally recognise this relationship. Also, wasting a lot of time on social media instead of being in the land around you greatly diminishes this kind of relationship, which is one of the many reasons I stopped reading social media in August of this year.
What I write about here
I write about several topics that might seem separate and unrelated, yet for me they are all quite intertwined.
The majority of my writing here is about ‘the woke,’ or more specifically the ideological mess that has been called variously intersectionality, social justice, anti-racism, Antifa, and many other names. None of those names accurately describe the entire ideological formation, so I use ‘woke’ as a shorthand.
I used to fully believe in this ideology, especially when I lived in the United States. It has a lot of really good intentions and some good ideas, but it’s not working. Though it’s often seen as a leftist tendency, there’s nothing traditionally leftist about it. If anything, it’s a deeply neoliberal tendency, and despite occasionally claiming to be against capitalism nevertheless strengthens capitalist political power. It also repeats the very same things it claims to be against. For instance, it reduces people to essentialist identity categories (race, gender, etc) and merely tries to reverse hierarchies rather than dismantling them.
My politics can be described as leftist, but I might not mean what you think I mean by this. I care primarily about the end of industrial capitalism and its destruction of the natural world, as well as the end of its influence on social relations. State communism doesn’t interest me (it merely just changes ownership of the industrial machine), and neither does the kind of techno-optimism of the ‘Green New Deal.’ And though I was an anarchist for most of my life, witnessing what has become of anarchism in the United States is so gut-wrenchingly tragic (and horrifying) that I don’t use that term at all anymore.
I don’t just write about politics, by the way. I also write about the body and its relationship to ideology and politics. A lot of our social relations are affected by our alienation from the body, and the gym work I now do has taught me a lot about this.
I also write about pagan subjects. I’m a Pagan, which also means something a little different from maybe what you think it does. It’s a specific (and in many ways default) way of relating to the world and ourselves, favoring natural rhythms of time over machine time and understanding humans as only one part of a vast tapestry of existence.
If you want to know lots about that, Being Pagan, my latest book, is on that subject. It was just published, and is available in print, digital, or Kindle. I also instruct a course based on the book, which will occur again in February.
I’ve also written other books. The one before the latest is called The Provisioner, and it’s a fantasy. I’ve a sequel to it coming soon, and also another fantasy manuscript in the works.
Before that book, I wrote All That Is Sacred is Profaned: A Pagan Guide to Marxism. It’s a short and straighforward book written to explain Marxist ideas without any of the academic obfuscation you usually see. It’s also written from an animist perspective, since Marxist materialism and animism have a lot more in common than most leftists ever notice.
And before those, I published three collections of essays, journals, and poems: Witches in a Crumbling Empire, A Kindness of Ravens, and Your Face is a Forest. You can actually purchase all six books together for $55 US (separately they’d cost $80 US). If you’d like that, selected “Author Package” on the order form for Being Pagan.
I was asked by a publisher in London to write a book about the woke ideology, and that’s my next book. Its planned release is late 2022.
About Subscription levels
I write really frequent public essays here, about 8-10 every month. Free subscriptions give you access to all of these. Starting in January, I will write two monthly dispatches that are available only to paid subscribers.
Besides giving me enough income to devote my time to writing (thank you!), paid subscriptions give you access to videos that I make in my Druid Journal series. I make 2-4 of these a month, and I film these from cool and beautiful places near my home. Archives of older videos from this series are available to everyone here.
Also, paid subscribers also get access to essays I write elsewhere which are otherwise behind paywalls. I will also be posting occasional excerpts of my manuscript in progress, and paid supporters also get exclusive access to these.
If you would like to become a paid subscriber, you can use this button below. Please note that the rates will increase 1 January, so doing so before then locks in lower rates.
How to Contact Me
I love corresponding with readers, even though I rarely have as much time as I would like to do so. And I’m always interested in hearing from you.
If you are a free or paid subscriber, you can always reply to an email version of any essay and that sends a direct email to me. Or, you can email me at aulnaissance@gmail.com.
I don’t read social media anymore, so though my essays are automatically posted onto Facebook and Twitter, I’ll never see comments on them there. Nor do I see direct messages sent through either of those platforms, so if you would like me to actually see what you wrote, comment directly on the post on this site.
Recommended Essays
If you’re new here (welcome!) and are curious where to start on my previous essays, here are some of my favorite or most popular pieces (not always the same thing).
Here Be Monsters
About the time I went on a date with a guy who said he was a bat, and also about how woke ideology has become so far removed from the material world that it feels more like role playing than politics.
The Singular God of the Woke
Religion and politics are rarely as separate as we like to pretend to be. This essay is an initial foray into the religious dimension of the woke ideology.
Culture Shock and Kyle Rittenhouse
Since moving to Europe and also no longer reading social media, I’ve learned a lot about the way our political opinions are shaped by national culture and reinforced through media interventions. This essay is about that, and also about crying in a French grocery store.
All The Woke’s A Stage
How an ancient version of the story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes” explains a core mechanism of woke social relations.
Be well, and thanks so much for reading my words!