September letter from The Forests of Arduinna

Updates and a re-introduction

This weekend, one of my essays—The Garments of the Goddesses—was featured on Substack Reads thanks to a reader recommendation (thanks Bill Bridges!).

I found out because of a notification on my phone while my husband and I were shopping for groceries, and then soon had to turn off my phone to stop the relentless notifications of new subscribers.

Because of that mention and the subsequent thousands of views, there are many, many more of you subscribing to read me now.

I’m glad you’re all here, and welcome!

Whenever there’s a large influx of new readers, I write a re-introduction letter. I’ve written many of these already, and each time I write one I try to add something new so all the folks who’ve read me for a long time also get to read something I hadn’t written before.

About me

My name’s Rhyd Wildermuth. It’s a funny first name, and not the one my parents randomly picked out for me from a phone book, their eyes closed, the day I was born.¹

The first name I now have, which I’ve used for the last 21 years, also came about in a strange way. It’s from a dream I had where I was in a room of people, and they all kept calling me something else. I got confused, and asked a woman next to me. She seemed pretty confused why I was asking, and then said, “oh! You don’t know your name yet. This is what we all call you later.”

So that morning, I started using that name.

I was born in Appalachia, specifically in Ohio near the West Virginia border. Thus I’m American, though I haven’t lived in the US for over 6 years. Even in the United States, I was quite nomadic, lived on both coasts and also in Florida, so though I’m “from” there I’ve never really actually felt from anywhere there.

One of the things I write about is leftist politics. That’s because I was an anarchist much of my adult life. Much of my writing is quite critical of American ‘leftism’ because of my experiences with it, and also because I’ve seen more sensible kinds of leftist politics in Europe. I’m not an anarchist anymore, but most of my politics can best be described as leftist.

I’m specifically critical of what everyone except for the people it describes calls “Woke” politics. Woke is probably not the right name for it, but “leftism” is not the correct word for it either. Neither capitalism nor class are any part of their critique, but rather lots of new and mostly internet-forged faddish ideas about gender and race without any historical or materialist truth, and they’re often just as nasty about their ideas as the people they claim to oppose.²

Back to my name, because it’s a useful way of explaining something much more important to me than politics. Rhyd means “ford” or “river crossing” in Welsh. It’s a really old Celtic word that appears in similar forms within Gaulish and other continental Celtic languages.

A little after moving to where I live now, Luxembourg, I learned that one of the goddesses of the Treveri, which is the Celtic people who once lived here, is called Ritona. Her name means ‘she of the fords,’ and the Rit- part of her name is what became “rhyd” in Welsh.

I’m a druid, and “co-incidences” of that sort matter a lot to me. Carl Jung called it “synchronicity,” and that’s a better description of it, I think.

This substack is called “From the Forests of Arduinna” because of another goddess related to the place I live, Arduinna. What is now the Ardennes (much of Belgium, all of Luxembourg, and parts of France and Germany) was once called the Silva Ardeunna, “Arduinna’s Forest.” Not far from where I live—about a 20 minute bike ride—is an ancient Celtic ritual site which was likely dedicated to her. Later, the Franks (a Germanic people) rededicated the site to Freyja.

These old things matter to me a lot, and I try to show in my writing why they should matter to others, too. The reason for this isn’t that I’m trying to convert anyone; besides, most of my readers aren’t Pagan, anyway. Instead, it’s because I believe the sacred—in all the countless forms humans have understood it—is probably the only way to re-orient humans back towards a non-destructive relationship to each other and the rest of nature of which we’re only one small part.

I write about this, and about politics, and often about other things, too.

Besides the writing here, I’ve published six books. The most recent of these is Being Pagan, and I explain much more in depth how the sacred transforms our relationships to our bodies, to each other, and to the rest of the living world. You can buy that at this link.

I also teach a course on the book, which is about to start again on 18 September. If this interests you, here’s more information.

My other work is book publishing and editing. I’m the director of a non-profit Pagan publishing organization called Ritona, named after the aforementioned goddess. Our online journal has a Substack that you might enjoy as well.

More about this Substack

I started From The Forests of Arduinna in March of 2021, about a year and a half ago. I usually write eight to ten essays a month, most of which are public. Paid subscribers get to read two paid-only essays each month. These are usually more in-depth essays then others, or more personal, or both. I tend to pick my favorite ones as paid-only, though this isn’t always the case.

I’ll soon also be starting a new podcast series which I’ll be announcing soon, and also will begin recording some of my essays for readers who’d prefer to listen rather than stare at a screen.

I always read every comment from readers, but I’m often not able to reply or react to every comment. Also, I read every email from readers: I love these, and I always reply to them, but I’m often quite slow on my responses.

One thing I’d ask, especially for new subscribers, is that you be as kind and “charitable” in your comments to other commenters. By this I mean please don’t say anything to someone that you wouldn’t want said to yourself. Social media trains people to get angry and be very vile to each other. This is a refuge from all that, and please help me keep it this way.

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Since it can be really overwhelming to figure out what to read if you’ve only recently subscribed, I’ve got a few suggestions for you.

Free essays you might really like

Realists of a Larger Reality

On the problem of leftist utopian-thinking

Not everything that looks like liberation actually is, nor is every political idea which claims to help people actually helpful. Sometimes the left is truly out of touch with reality—with larger reality. Sometimes the theories and frameworks crafted to fight oppression only lead to more oppression, sometimes the “impossible” is actually really impossible. Sometimes, our fantasies make us unrealists of a larger reality.

“A Good Life”

On small-c conservatism

The most brilliant and most disgusting success Capital has ever affected in the modern world is precisely this false dichotomy manifesting through a cultural stance of enlightened urban versus reactionary rural. Cut away at such pretensions and you’ll doubtless find that most oppressed identity groups would actually like the same thing as their supposed enemies. What single black mother in a city would really not like a stable home of her own with a yard or a safe nearby green space for her kids to play in? What trans or queer sex worker wouldn’t trade that life for a living wage at a job and a reliable apartment they didn’t have to worry would disappear at their employer’s or landlord’s whim?

The Mirror in the Abyss

On victimhood, abuse, and reclaiming personal agency

Those were once my own politics, which were actually also my coping mechanisms. I actually didn’t want to be poor, I didn’t want to be in abusive relationships, I didn’t want to suffer so constantly from depression or from the consequences of my ridiculous beliefs about the world. So, adopting a political framework that told me it wasn’t actually my fault was the worst thing I could possibly have done for myself. It was worse than all the abuse, worse than all the poverty, worse than all the suffering, yet nevertheless it felt better than actually looking into the abyss.

All The Woke’s A Stage

On Woke identity-politics and an older version of the story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”

For years, I was fully on the side of these cultural changes and shifts which I now critique. Not only did I support them, but I wrote quite a few essays advocating for many of these ideas, as well as engaging in a few social media crusades to cancel and punish people who questioned the rightness of Woke moral precepts. I still feel bad about some of these things, but rather than discussing my history as a true believer in a religion that now terrifies me, I’d rather talk about how I finally realized we were not actually fighting for liberation or even anything that would make the lives of “oppressed peoples” better.

Paid essays you might really like:

Neurodivergence? Or Alienation?

On the problem of autism and ADHD as identity categories

Of course we have trouble focusing. Of course we have difficulties expressing ourselves to others and understanding the nuance of their emotions. Of course we have the sense that simple life tasks and complex relationships are somehow easier for others than they are for ourselves. Of course it feels like our mental landscape is cluttered and chaotic. Of course we feel like our time gets stolen doing certain things while other more urgent tasks seem to stretch on interminably. We’re living in technologically, economically, and socially alienating societies and accept this all as a default state. Those who seem to adapt better to that alienation must be “normal” or “neurotypical,” while the rest of us are the broken ones who re-narrate our alienation as something unique.

Against the Perfect

On Transhumanism and Gnosticism

In fact, the idea that the body is somehow imperfect, flawed, or otherwise evil didn’t start with capitalism or the industrial age, but much much earlier: in Gnosticism, which took hold of both Christianity and Judaism in the first three centuries of the Western Common Era. Gnosticism is a kind of pantheism or monism, the idea that a singular God or good—or some fragment of that God or good—is in everything. It’s a pretty idea, until you dig further and realize that the God or good within Gnosticism is considered trapped in a corpse prison within the material realm.

To put this all another way, humans are relentlessly rotting carcasses of meat, blood, urine and feces walking about the earth, unaware that they are shambling jail cells for a spark of the divine. That divine spark desperately wants to be freed and re-united with its singular existence, but it cannot until its human host recognizes it is there and gives itself over (as in a kind of willing possession) to its parasitical prisoner.

The Sacred and the Symptom

On abortion and the missing sacred in human relationships

What if we again saw motherhood as truly sacred? I don’t mean this in the faux American Christian way, but rather in the pagan and animist sense. What if motherhood was so sacred that society saw itself obligated to support it? What if not just the act of conceiving and giving birth but continuously mothering a child was seen as such a holy thing that we acknowledged a duty to make sure women who chose to do so never lacked for anything?

And what if we also saw fatherhood as truly sacred? Of course to do so, we’d also have to see the act of sex itself as sacred again, and not just in the monotheist way nor the empty Woke way. The sacred demands things of us, demands ritual and veneration and most terrifying of all duty, obligation, and boundaries. We’ve come to see this all as primitive or reactionary, to see ourselves “liberated” from all the power and consequences flowing out of the very magic of human creation itself.

So we now have sex without obligation, fatherhood without duty, motherhood without support, and no politics yet exists that can do anything else except argue about who’s at fault and who should be elected to fix it all. We cannot talk about the sacred, and increasingly lose the language with which to speak of it.

Final Notes

Again, I’m really glad you are all here, and I hope you feel welcome and like what you find. I’ve been really overwhelmed by all the support for my writing and especially for the really beautiful messages I’ve received from readers about why they read me.

Feel free to introduce yourself by email or in the comments!

And if you’re not yet subscribed, or would like to upgrade to a paid subscription, you can use the button below. Be well!

1. That’s called “bibliomancy,” by the way. And you’ll see I like words like this, and also really love footnotes.

2. I’m currently finishing edits on a manuscript about this for a UK publisher.