Plagues and Gods

Some updates...

I usually write at least a short essay for you here before inundating you with links to my other recent works, but currently there are so many of these that I’ve decided to dedicate this entire dispatch to them.

(But, if you were pulled into this because of the title and really want to read about plagues, go check out some of the fascinating stuff around the lab-leak hypothesis. As you probably know, Facebook and Google both banned any posts addressing it last year, but Facebook has rescinded this measure now that the US Government is “looking into it.” Start with Glenn Greenwald’s latest dispatch here.)

I’m well, by the way. Fantastic, even. Much of my non-work time has been devoted to gardening and the gym the last few weeks. And I’ll have another dispatch for you soon.

In the meantime, here’s what I’ve been up to:

Being Pagan (course offering)

As you maybe know, I’m instructing a course called Being Pagan. The first iteration of that course, starting late June, filled up 7 weeks before its start date. Which is awesome, but I also got a flood of emails from people asking to be waitlisted, so I’ve scheduled a second offering in early October. Enrollment just opened.

Being Pagan: Connecting to Pagan Time

“Being Pagan” is also the name of my next book, for which I am currently writing the manuscript. An excerpt from the first chapter, which deals with connecting to pagan and animist conceptions of time, has just been released on Another World. It’s primarily about the moon:

Rather than some mere astronomical oddity or mere backdrop in the sky, the moon for humans has always been an ancient and ever-present guide to our lives. This is not an esoteric statement, though the moon also has been associated with occult and spiritual knowledge in many cultures as well. The moon has been our light, our lamp in the darkness. It has also been our calendar, our clock, the primary way by which we measured the passing of time and the cycles of nature long before we divided our days into hours and used numbers to date our lives and activities.

That essay (5K words) is available at Another World, and will also be posted on my Patreon for supporters. It will be published publicly in September.

A Plague of Gods: Cultural Appropriation & The Resurgent Left Sacred

Originally published for Another World and Patreon supporters, my in-depth essay on cultural appropriation (8K words) is now public at A Beautiful Resistance or at RhydWildermuth.com. It’s already been read and shared quite a lot, unsurprisingly considering how ridiculous the recent conversations about race and culture have gone.

This current understanding of cultural appropriation presents several problems and can lead to something even more dangerous than the harm it attempts to present.

First of all, the concept is no longer rooted (if it ever previously was) in a historical understanding of how cultures are formed, how they change, and how they are delineated. This leads to the second problem, which is that arguments about who should and who should not be allowed to wear, eat, believe, worship, or practice things enforce notions of cultural, racial, and ethnic separatism that mirror nationalist and monotheist fears about miscegenation, cultural mixing, and foreign pollution. Third, despite attempting to fight imperialist colonial forms of oppression, the concept now reproduces a uniquely Western capitalist framework in which even sacred cultural forms--just like air, water, and other parts of the world previously exempt from economic logic—are subject to the logic of Neoliberal privatization and commodification.

You can read this essay publicly (or download it as a pdf for later reading) here.

Druid Journals

I’ve also published two new video journals in my Druid Journal series.

#42 discusses my experience gardening and how it taught me about being pagan and especially about the masculine and feminine aspects of human activities.

#43 is about the loss of still-existing ancestral traditions in Europe, something that was brought heavily to my mind by my partner’s 78 year old mother who was mourning the death of certain village rituals here.

Both videos are currently available only to Patreon supporters, but will be made public in a few months. Episodes up to 35 will become public this weekend.

Empires Crumble (!)

Maybe you know, but my friend Alley Valkyrie and I did a podcast for two years called Empires Crumble. We did a pause for 7 months and are now back. You can listen to the audio or watch the video right now either at Another World or on the Patreon for Empires Crumble or my own. Next week, you’ll be able to hear the audio everywhere (or at least on Spotify, Soundcloud, iTunes, and Stitcher).

Other stuff

I’m currently editing two new releases by other people (and will be editing three more before the year is done—oof).

I can announce the first of these, Reclaiming Food by Emma Katheryn. It’s a cookbook, and not one of those bourgeois sorts that demand ingredients you’ll never use again, but a basic “core skills” cookbook for the preponderance of people for whom cooking is a complete mystery. I’m pretty proud of the cover, by the way (I think my graphic design skills are now kinda passable).

(Click on the image to get taken to the pre-sale page for it.)