Sundry Notes, April

A few short notes

I. Unconscious material from the Otherworld

A few months ago, I mentioned that I’ll soon begin training to be a Jungian coach, and I also referenced my “synchronicity” related to a scarab beetle that had infested one of my overwintering plants.

That training starts next week, and I’m quite thrilled. Not just because it weaves together quite a few threads of my life, but also because I’m really tired of killing scarabs.

Since that announcement, there’s been a near-biblical plague of them. Turns out, they’d infested the soil of four damianas, three moringas (two of which they killed by eating the roots), two moon flower vines (one of which might not survive), and a jiaogulan.

What that’s meant is that, almost daily, I’ve found at least one scarab beetle flitting about on a windowsill. Worse have been the weekly day after I water the plants thoroughly: there’d then be between four and ten scarabs to deal with.

I hate killing things, especially bugs. Not out of some sentimental attachment to them, nor because of my generally pacifist outlook on life. No. I just find it kinda disgusting to do so. And I cannot set them free, because that would just make it harder to keep fragile plants alive next winter. I have to kill them, but gods is this fucking unpleasant.

It’s quite easy to see why the Egyptians saw the scarab as a symbol of rebirth. The adults dig themselves into the soil and lay eggs where we cannot see them. Those eggs hatch into larvae that look nothing like the adults, and then, two years later, they emerge as if “reborn.”

This plague of scarabs, though, has been more like all the graves of a cemetery bursting open with the unquiet dead.

What’s been happening in my soul as they emerge isn’t new to me, as I experienced something similar while growing mandrake. As the plants grew, weird emotions I didn’t like to look at kept surfacing, and it was really not comfortable. It felt constantly like something was stirring just beneath the ground of my own life, buried truths that I kept below the surface because I thought them too fragile to see the light of day.

Unlike the mandrake though, which really does prefer to stay underground (and is said to “scream” when you uproot it, which does happen, actually, but the scream isn’t heard by your ears), this constant procession of scarabs has been more like unconscious material you’d really rather not keep buried. And that’s resulted in stuff like me finally writing about my father, or no longer suppressing my anger about unfair situations, and especially acknowledging how much of a coward I really am when it comes to defending myself and my understanding of the world.

(Yeah, I’m a coward. Maybe you don’t think so. I get told I’m brave, but I’m really not.)

All these things come up every time I find another scarab. As I said, there’s been over a hundred of them since February, and I’ve been working to accelerate their process of emergence in order to also accelerate mine. I’m pretty sure there aren’t many left now.

My soul feels lighter, at least; parts of it feel harder in places that should never have been soft, other parts more flexible in places that should never have been rigid. As with those plants, it turns out it’s a lot easier to thrive without so many things gnawing at your roots.

II. A Shift in Focus

When I first started From the Forests of Arduinna, a lot of my writing was directed towards pushing back against the left’s shift towards identity frameworks and away from actual anti-capitalist analysis. Of course, I and others lost that battle, and there’s now nothing I can honestly point to and say, “this is a leftism I will support.”

That’s hardly a catastrophe, though. Like all other things, I think the left needed to die in order to be reborn as something else. It needed to destroy itself in this way so the rest of us could understand its crucial failure: the refusal to build independent power.

What I mean is this. The left long ago stopped trying to do the real work of building and maintaining in-person worker organizations and physical spaces. Everything became virtual, but an “on-line” activist calling for a protest on social media will never have the same kind of power as local leftist sports clubs, infoshops, and union halls getting their members out on the streets.

Without actual physical power, there’s nothing to challenge the capitalists or the state. But also, this means the left also had nothing to point to and say, “This is the kind of world we’re building, want to help?”

So the left died, and something else — better, I believe — will take its place. And I’m much more interested in finding out what that can look like and helping make it happen than I am in worrying over the undead corpse of the left still shambling about.

What this means is that I’m going to direct more of my writing towards building that kind of power, starting with reclaiming our own power. Another word for this is autonomy, meaning “self-rule.” Long ago, both anarchist and communist strands of leftism saw this as the core starting point, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find many who even remember this was a thing at all.

I think you probably already know why this is rather urgent. We’ve all become so reliant on the way that the empire called capitalism distributes resources that we’ll suffer quite severely when it starts to crumble. This leads us to a position where we are all but forced to try to keep it from falling apart, and thus we are trapped into sustaining its nightmarish existence.

Remembering that we don’t need capitalism for the things that make life beautiful, meaningful, and possible should be the first goal of whatever is reborn from the death of the left, and the key to helping people remember is returning to them their agency and autonomy. That will be much more of a focus of my writing then, and also of my coaching work when it begins this summer.

Of course, I’ll still write about gods and magic and the otherworld, because that’s anyway how I learned what more was possible. In fact, I suspect this is really how we all ultimately learn this, and that’s why capitalism has sought for so long to make us believe there’s nothing else besides it.

III. Some Publishing News

Related to what I just wrote, I wanted to tell you something quite exciting. We’ll begin publishing new books through Gods&Radicals Press this year.

Gods&Radicals Press was the very first imprint I started more than ten years ago, and it was originally a bit of a catch-all for all the books we published. Later, I started Ritona, which had more of a focus on pagan-specific books, and now that Sul Books exists, most of our books come out either under the Sul Books imprint or our fiction imprint, Sphinx. That’s left Gods&Radicals Press to sit a bit idle for the last few years, meaning we haven’t put out books on the same topics that we used to.

My longtime co-editor, Mirna, has agreed to take over publishing and editorial work for it later this year. We’ll soon make a formal announcement and call for open submissions. Especially, we’ll be looking for short guides and primers, similar to titles like Solidarity Networks, A People’s Guide to Tarot, Reclaiming Ourselves, and Five Principles of Green Witchcraft. These are all wildly popular, but we’ve not been able to focus on soliciting similar works because of our shift to fiction. Now that Mirna will be at its head, I’m certain we’ll see some great things coming out.

Also regarding formal announcements, there are quite a few books coming out in the next six months that are really, really good, and I’m currently trying to make my way through more manuscript submissions. And though it’s not yet available for pre-order, I wanted to direct you to the author of one upcoming book, Cameron Steele. We’ll be publishing a profoundly beautiful collection of her essays themed around the tarot and her experience with cancer that speak to far more about life, the otherworld, and the ways of the heart than you might expect.

As I said, it’s not yet been announced for pre-sale, but until then, if you’re not following Cameron’s writing, I really, really recommend it. You can find her here: