We Never Tend Alone

Paganism, Politics, and what ashes are good for.

A friend recently lamented that many of his favorite Pagan writers hadn’t been writing so much about Paganism anymore. Instead, they’d come to focus much more on political matters, getting drawn into the chaos of crumbling civilization and current strife, rather than the gods.

“I hope one day you’ll have time to write more about the gods again,” he’d said to me, “instead of all the politics.”

I’ve been thinking especially on his lament lately, and finding that he’s quite correct. Despite the much vaunted (and feared) “Pagan return,” there’s not nearly as much written about the gods lately — including by me — and many of us have been caught up for too long in larger political struggles that cannot be resolved through writing.

It wasn’t like this ten years ago. Back then, a rather thriving informal community of people writing about gods, magic, and Pagan practices had arisen. Large pagan events and countless smaller ones were organized yearly, sometimes so many of them that you could book out every weekend of your summer with an event (assuming you could afford the travel). At that time, there were also several Pagan news sites, quite a few journals, a respectable number of independent publishers, and many, many places to write online, some of which even paid.

Everything felt quite heady and exciting back then, though there were certainly tensions within the various Pagan and neopagan groups. Especially, a new movement called devotional polytheism has arisen, and it often caused a bit of havoc.

To understand what that movement was and why it caused problems, you’ll need some background on the different understandings of gods in neopagan belief. First of all, though, it’s important to understand why I use both the terms “Pagan” and “neopagan,” and what I mean by each. I use Pagan as a broad term in these contexts to refer to all the various cosmologies and practices generally derived from ancient European animism. By neopagan, on the other hand, I’m referring to uniquely modern interpretations of these beliefs for which no ancient precedent can be found.

So, heathenism in its various form, the various Slavic, Celtic, and similar reconstruction movements (Rodnovery, for example), and any other attempts to restore veneration for gods and spirits within an animist framework would all be Pagan — but not neopagan. Conversely, chaos magic, most of Wicca, and all the stuff you’ll find on “WitchTok” is neopagan, and I also include it in the more broad category of Paganism (even if I’d often prefer not to).

The core distinction between these two categories rests in how each sees the gods and spirits. For the neopagan strands of Paganism, gods and spirits are understood mostly as symbols, metaphors, “archetypes,” or egregores: human-created things which nevertheless have power and influence. No small part of this is influenced by the interpretations of Carl Jung, who proposed that gods were unconscious forms which nevertheless shaped our reality as if they were real. Also, New Age spiritual ideas abound in neopaganism, including the idea of channeling “positive energy” and “manifesting good things.”

For neopagans, then, the gods are considered forms through which an individual’s desires can become manifest, but they aren’t really considered or treated as independent beings with their own desires, intentions, and wills. There’s no ancient precedent for this perspective; it’s a wholly-new idea. Thus, the “neo-” part of neopagan.

This kind of view was (and probably still is) the dominant perspective in American Paganism, because it also follows along the same trajectory that Christianity has followed in the US. “Liberal” mainstream Protestant sects (non-evangelicals) in America often treat the Christian god in the same way that neopagans treat their gods. For those Protestants, Christ and the Holy Spirit and the virgin birth are all really powerful metaphors, and praying can cause great change in the world, but the Christian god isn’t really treated like an independent or actually-existing being.

That’s how such denominations are able so easily to re-interpret and reject ancient scriptural prohibitions and admonitions to fit modern political sensibilities. It’s also why the more liberal sects are constantly losing members. Liberal interpretations of the Christian god have the inevitable effect of de-sacralizing Christianity, stripping it of its mysteries, its powers, and its magics. All that’s left is something one does to feel good, and there are many more readily available means of getting that same feeling without waking up early on a Sunday morning.

This same de-sacralizing affects neopaganism. Scroll through the #witchtok or #instawitch hashtags and you’ll see quite quickly that witchcraft, spirits, and gods are to most English-speaking neopagans an aesthetic, rather than actually-existing things. Gods, if ever mentioned, are merely ingredients in spells, or powerful symbols to hang around your neck. The same is evident in most blogs and mass-market Pagan books, especially in the United States.

Now, it should be obvious there’s another influence acting upon all this, which is the general de-sacralizing force of capitalism, and especially the aesthetic transformation process of capitalist social media. Paganism is hardly the only victim of this, as the same process has occurred to radical political beliefs. Judging only from what you might read on X/Twitter and Tumblr, you could be fooled into thinking that the United States and the United Kingdom both have massive anarchist and socialist movements mere moments away from enacting revolutionary change. Except, of course, there’s no actual physical reality to this: it’s all just aesthetics, people talking about change but never engaging in any of the work to make that happen.

That’s because the sacred core of belief is missing in those movements, just as the sacred core of Christianity is missing in liberal Protestant interpretations and the sacred core of Paganism is missing in neopaganism. Nothing is demanded of the adherent except to interpret the world as he or she feels fit, and those interpretations become the sacred core instead. Anything can mean whatever you’d like it to mean, and the human condition becomes a lifelong work of finding a satisfying aesthetic for your own life.

To be clear, this process is not recent, but it’s absolutely been accelerating. Paganism had already seen these changes occur early on: paganism and witchcraft were increasingly seen as “lifestyles,” rather than cosmologies, and corporations had quickly identified these movements as lucrative markets.

This, though, is what made the devotional polytheism movement so initially disruptive. In fact, it’s best to see devotional polytheism as a reaction to the larger process of de-sacralization, an insurgent revolt against the aesthetization of the gods.

So, what exactly is devotional polytheism? For that answer, it’s probably easiest just to describe my own practices.

I speak daily to quite a few gods and spirits. Here are the names of the gods, in the order in which I met them and the order in which I address them: Brigid, Brân, Arianrhod, Ceridwen, Odin, Dionysos, Gwyn Ap Nudd, Lugh, Inanna, Ritona, Freya, Arduinna, Epona, Thunor, Diana, Artemis, Apollo, Aphrodite, Athena, and Melek Taûs. This list keeps growing, expanding the litanies I speak in the morning and evenings.

It is not just to gods whom I speak, either, but also specific spirits and specific ancestors with whom I have relationships. Many of these spirits are also physical entities and places, as for example the stream which runs past my house. Some of them are collectives of spirits whom I don’t know by individual name. Some are specific ancestors, while others are unnamed. And I also maintain a shrine for the house spirit of this home.

It’s probably also worth mentioning that not every god I mentioned is considered by others to be a god, and that some of these names might seem redundant to some. For instance, Arduinna, Diana, and Artemis are often considered the same goddess by some, though not by me. And Brân is considered by some scholars not to have been a god, but he most definitely is for me. Devotional polytheists tend to favor their actual experiences with a being over what Western academics insist to be true.

The “devotional” part of devotional polytheism requires some elaboration. I’m devoted to those gods, much the same way that I’m devoted to my husband and my friends. They’re part of my daily life, frequent presences the way that some humans are. When they need something or want to tell me something, I make time to listen and attempt to provide what they need within my capabilities. Not as a servant, nor anything like a pet owner, but rather as a friend and co-conspirator.

There are other gods and spirits I might sometimes talk to — for instance, Hermes — but I don’t have enough of a relationship with them to call it devotional. This is quite a lot like the rest of my life. Just as there are people I’m fond of yet don’t see very often, there are gods and spirits I’m fond of but we’re not very close and that’s okay.

The comparisons I make between human relationships and relationships with gods isn’t just metaphorical. In fact, I think the only way I can possibly describe these interactions is by referencing friendships and family, because that’s how I see it.

Not every single person who defines themself as a devotional polytheist would necessarily describe their practice this way. Some notable exceptions are those who insist that gods demand obedience and submission from humans; for such people, treating them like friends and family sounds quite irreverent. Personally, I suspect such folks have inherited a little more from monotheism’s conception of an all-powerful and vengeful god than they’d ever admit. Or, maybe the gods they talk to like to remind them how powerful they are in order to humble their human friend’s inflated egos. Or maybe it’s just one of those mysteries I’ll never understand, and that’s okay, too.

Anthropologically, at least, my own way of interacting with gods and spirits is a lot closer to current and ancient animist relationships with their gods and spirits. I’m currently reading Marshall Sahlins’ final book, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: An Anthropology of Most of Humanity, and it’s full of references to this kind of relating. In some of the studies he cites, people groups spend just as much time speaking to spirits as they do to other humans, and importantly, they made no significant distinction between these conversations.

Spirits (or what Sahlins names as “metahumans”) in most societies except monotheist ones are literally active members of those societies. They have each their own desires, preferences, needs, and prejudices, and their human counterparts constantly negotiate with them as they do with fellow humans. It’s a bit like what G.K. Chesterton meant when he referred to Tradition as a “democracy of the dead:”

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

Devotional polytheists came up with a way of individually interacting with gods and spirits that is very close to how most of humanity interacts and has interacted with them. That such a thing was even possible shouldn’t be surprising, since, as Sahlins shows, this mode is the default human interaction in what he calls “most of humanity.” However, it did fly directly in the face of both the academic position on gods and the more mainstream de-sacralized views.

The academic position is that we can only at best “reconstruct” ancient rituals, and Pagans who adopted this view often call themselves reconstructionists. For them, the only way to interact with gods was to re-assemble rituals and practices from incomplete historical and archeological records. While this had the positive benefit of encouraging Pagans to read academic research about actually-existing practices, it also filtered everything through a Western Secular-Christian academic narrative. In this narrative, religious rituals and religion itself were created exclusively by humans, without any real input from the beings interacted with in those rituals. And, because Christianity claimed to have fully eradicated all traces of Pagan beliefs and practices from Europe, there is at minimum a 1000 year gap between the last pagan practices and the new ones.

The academic position — at least before Sahlins — ignores how most of humanity has gone about interacting with spirits. For the vast majority of animist societies, religious rituals are co-created by the spirits, based on what they desire and what they need. In Shinto, for example, the kami ask for certain things from the living humans who share the land with them. They can be offended if those things are not honored, but they can also be reasoned with if their demands are considered too burdensome. Ritual veneration of the kami is thus the result of negotiation, and negotiation requires more than one party.

So, if neopagans are guilty of treating the gods as mere aesthetic or as symbolic containers to channel desires, reconstructionists are just as guilty of treating the gods as static relics gathering dust in museums. Reconstructionism forgets something crucial: if gods and spirits are living beings with agency and communication, it’s perfectly reasonable to assume they’d tell those who seek them out how they’d like to be addressed, what gifts they might enjoy, and what kinds of things they aren’t fond of.

Now, I didn’t choose to be a devotional polytheist, and it’s anyway only a label. By this, I mean I didn’t flip through a catalog of Pagan subcategories and select the one I liked the most. Instead, I was thrust into it the way a boat is thrust onto a shore after a storm. Call it a “storm of gods” and you get to something pretty accurate. I still don’t really understand how it all happened, how it was that one month the gods were all really cool ideas to me and the next month they were almost oppressively present.

Fortunately, I quickly met others who had remarkably similar experiences, and also received a book by one of them. That book deserves mention, because the person who wrote it — Judith O’Grady — is also one of the ancestral spirits I speak to daily (the only one not related to me by blood). Originally called God-Speaking and republished now as Gods-Speaking, I’d found Judith’s explanation of her own experiences with gods to be precisely my own, as well.

We were both, as she called it in her book and other writing, “gods-bothered.” The gods bothered us in the oldest senses of the word. They confused us, vexed us, bewildered us, and especially deafened us with what Judith called an “ethereal clang.” But they also bothered about us, and they noticed we bothered about them, and all these these various meanings can just as easily describe all the beautiful and difficult trouble being in love with a person causes us.

Reading her book and talking to others like her changed everything for me, and I soon became part of a loose network of other devotional polytheists writing about our experiences, meeting in groups, and organizing conferences. Those were heady and beautiful days during which the idea of “re-enchantment” didn’t make much sense because life was so enchanted already.

Now, whether you’re a Pagan or not, you may be wondering why you haven’t heard much (or at all) about devotional polytheism. After all, if it’s as close to actually-existing animism as I suggest it is, and if its way of interacting with the gods makes so much sense, one might think it would have become more dominant within Paganism.

There’s a story here that few of my long-time readers are certainly familiar with. And it’s the cause of my friend’s lament that I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, that so many gods-bothered sorts have instead gotten swept up in political writing rather than devotional writing.

Back when I became one of the gods-bothered, I was also an anarchist. More specifically, I was an American anarchist, and this was just about the time that social justice identity politics and the panic about fascism were becoming an obsession for everyone on the left. These were also the days of Richard Spencer and the Alt-Right, the beginnings of the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, and also the height of Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

Along with a friend, a fellow anarchist who deserves absolutely no blame for the mistakes I made, I’d started a Pagan journal and publisher called Gods&Radicals. At that time, we published three articles a week on Paganism, anti-capitalism, and anarchist politics. At the beginning, the topics of the articles were well-balanced, but as the political strife in the United States increased, our articles began leaning more towards the second half of our namesake and less towards the first half.

To be clear, we were not the only leftist political Pagans around, but we were by far the most influential and the most radical. The others were more mainstream liberal, or were focused primarily on political issues. For instance, the now-defunct group Heathens United Against Racism primarily focused on purging heathen groups of anything its unaccountable leader saw as too “folkish.” Other groups tried to merge Democratic party values with a witchy aesthetic, describing voting for Hillary Clinton as an act of “ballot box magic.” Some such groups also urged public prayers to Athena or Columbia (a made-up goddess, a personification of the United States) to “save democracy” from Donald Trump. There were even highly-publicized rituals at now-closed occult shops meant to hex Trump … with carrots.

Of all those left-leaning groups, Gods&Radicals was the only one to survive the political chaos sweeping America, probably because I and its co-founder left the United States entirely. That’s not to say we were unscathed, though. We were targeted repeatedly by both right-leaning critics and left-leaning rivals, we had writers investigated by the FBI for their political activities, and the reach of all our social media accounts was throttled after multiple anonymous reports.

Now, to be clear, leftist politics wasn’t the only kind of politics shaping American Paganism. Heathenism generally tends to attract more conservative people because of its focus on family kinship, community stability, and rural life. None of that’s bad — in fact, it’s much closer to ancient Pagan and indigenous beliefs about community than neopagan beliefs. Unfortunately, not all the conservatives in Heathenism let things remain at that. Some were absolutely blood-and-soil types, believing gods to be part of the “epigenetic” inheritance of people groups. Reconstructionist groups also focused quite heavily on ethnic identities, even supposedly anti-racist groups. I recall particularly a group of Celtic Reconstructionists, including left-leaning figures, attacking a Jewish writer I published for her “transgression” of writing about an Irish goddess without being Irish herself.

And unfortunately, devotional polytheism had its own characters. Three of these were people I had originally counted as friends and helpful mentors early on. One of them turned out to be reckless alcoholic with delusions of being once held in a CIA site. Another of them increasingly played with Nazi imagery in that half-joking way where you could never really tell if he’s trying to shock you or if he actually means it. And a third began to sound more and more like a fundamentalist Christian: insisting that gods demanded obedience and subservience, while relentlessly castigating others for their lack of submission. Alt-right ideas especially seemed to take hold in the cosmologies of others, especially a fanatic fear of the “Islamification” of America and Europe and the need to return to “traditional” values.

On all sides, Pagan belief was being shaped, influenced, transformed, and colonized by the political strife of those years. If it were possible to have escaped it, I’m not sure any of us would have known how.

We all fucked up, but I think I fucked up a little bit more than others.

How? Well:

This is where our demagogue enters the tale. His name is Rhyd Wildermuth, and he’s a Pagan anarchist Marxist—yes, I have trouble parsing that one, too. Late last month, he put up an anonymous screed on a website he manages—he later acknowledged it as his—purporting to warn the Neopagan community about the threat of what he calls the New Right. Care to guess which parts of the Neopagan community he called out as potential vectors for New Right subversion?

Got it in one.  It’s the groups that deviate from the eclectic Pagan mainstream: initiatory traditions such as Druidry, Hermeticism, and British traditional witchcraft on the one hand, and Reconstructionist and devotional polytheism on the other. 

Those paragraphs are from the most eloquent and biting critique of me written by anyone. Read by tens of thousands of people, distributed so widely on social networks that I couldn’t log into any of them for days without seeing it at the top of my feed, I’d been thoroughly excoriated for mistakes I’d not yet realised I’d made.

The author, John Michael Greer, was responding to a supplemental piece I’d written for an essay by an Antifa activist’s essay, both of which I’d published on Gods&Radicals. The original article was about August Sol Invictus, a far-right politician in the US who used the fasces in his campaign materials, called for eugenics policies, and sacrificed a goat to initiate his election campaign.

Because that initial essay assumed readers were familiar with the Alt-Right, and because I suspected many wouldn’t be, I’d created the supplement. In it, I described its ideas, and also explained how some of them (such as natural hierarchies, submission to superiors, and a fanatic fear of Islamification) also appeared in some Pagan groups

What came after I published those essays was quite an internet storm. Despite clearly stating that the presence of far right ideas within a group didn’t mean the group itself was therefore far right, many concluded I’d called all devotional polytheists, occultists, and traditional groups “fascist.” One group bought the URL of my name and began publishing smear pieces about me. Others accused me of being a “Marxist infiltrator” into Paganism. A few issued proclamations that I was obviously an “enemy of the gods” and even wrote cursing prayers directed at me. And as mentioned, John Michael Greer, whom I was then and am still now rather fond of, called me a “Marxist demagogue” and predicted that neo-paganism would soon be overrun by witch hunts against people “on my list.”

Of course, I had no list, nor a “hidden agenda,” as Greer then suggested. Nor was I an “infiltrator,” or part of some larger Cultural Marxist conspiracy to destroy authentic relationships to the gods, as a few others suggested. Instead, I was just as swept up in the same political storms in the United States as everyone else was, trying to get my bearings, and landing on some strange shores.

Greer’s “A Wind That Tastes of Ashes” was published eight years ago, though the events leading up to its writing occurred in the months prior. As you’ve probably noticed, he and I have a cordial relationship currently — I interviewed him for my podcast, The Re/al/ign, and I also wrote the primary endorsement for the re-release of his important book, A World Full of Gods. Also, as I’ve said, I was rather fond of him then and still am, and I often go back to read that essay whenever I need to remind myself what artful criticism sounds like.

I think he was just as swept up in the political chaos of the time as I was, which explains some of his uncharacteristically unreasonable predictions. However, he was quite correct about something else, which I think was his larger point anyway.

His primary argument, one he’d also made elsewhere, was that the same neoliberal de-sacralizing trend that was destroying mainstream Protestant Christianity would do the same thing to what he called “eclectic Paganism.”

Organization in eclectic Paganism is egalitarian in theory and charismatic in practice—what this means is that formal organization is minimal, and it’s up to aspiring Pagan leaders amass as large a personal following as their talents for showmanship, leadership, and politics allow.  Membership is usually just a matter of showing up, though scraps of initiatory ritual appear now and then as a legacy from the past, and members move easily between one tradition and another. At its best, to borrow an acronym from Starhawk’s writings, it’s EIEIO: “eclectic, improvisational, ecstatic, inspired, organic,” features it shares with most other popular religious movements.  At its worst, it’s make-believe and faux-medieval dress-up games, festooned with some of the worst poetry in the history of English literature.

Especially important is his point about Pagan leaders amassing personal followings, because this is the same mechanism that has led to the social media “influencer-activist.” Especially in leftist politics, but really in any every other form of politics and also in religious and subcultural movements, opinions and beliefs are shaped not by organic human discussions but by constantly-competing charismatic online figures.

Crucially, at the very same time that the influence of social media increased, actually-existing organizations, institutions, and real-life gatherings and events started to disappear. This process occurred everywhere, but it hit American Paganism quite hard, with many things either disappearing or becoming mere shells of what they once were.

The primary pagan news journal, The Wild Hunt, lost most of its sponsorship, readership, and writers between 2016 and 2017, especially after publishing a positive articles about a pagan far-right politican and the Unite The Right rally. Not long after, the largest Pagan conference in the world closed down after 26 years. Many smaller conferences and gatherings (including Many Gods West, which I co-founded) also closed, while a series of revelations about sexual misconduct by charismatic leaders destroyed groups that had just previously seen large growth.

Many promising projects, independent publishers, bookstores, and in-person networks have disappeared since then. Tragically, the strong networks of devotional polytheists have all but disappeared. I think, though, that what I wrote was only an accelerant on a fire that was already going to spark. Many leaders had indeed let far-right political ideas shape their religious practices, while a few were all-out charlatans hoping no one would look too deeply into their actually-existing lives.

Still, my mistake was not doing enough to build back what was being destroyed. Also, by lending my support to the social justice side of the politicization of Pagan groups, I shielded some left-identified figures who accumulated quite a bit of unwarranted and unaccountable power. It then came as no surprise to me that some of them went on to denounce me as “far right” and even “fascist,” long after those terms had any real meaning.

What happened to Paganism in America is identical to what happened to other groups, political or otherwise. Herbalist and alternative-medicine communities, for example, saw countless conflicts, call-outs, false accusations, and cancellations targeting individuals, groups, publishers, teaching institutions, and conferences. These implosions can be seen even more clearly in what many writers have described as the death of “the millennial left,” the moment of history between 2015 and 2020 which corresponds to the same period I’ve been discussing for Paganism:

All told, the millennial left existed in a plausibly political form for just five years. It began in 2015 and it ended in 2020. It peaked the year it was born, and it declined continuously throughout its lifespan, becoming less and less plausible every year.

The “millennial left” is best seen as a moment, not a movement. It was a moment everyone mistook virtual politics for actual politics, social media struggle for flesh-and-blood struggle, and the fleeting power of social capital over the real power of capital itself. The world could be changed just by tweeting about it, assuming you’d successfully convinced everyone not to read other people’s tweets.

I think that’s the real context for what happened to Paganism. Just as for political groups left and right, Pagan groups — including devotional polytheists — had spent more time talking about what they were doing than actually doing anything. Aesthetically-pleasing websites and massive social media groups abounded, but people were meeting together less and less often. The “leaders” of these movements were just the popular individuals who’d gotten good at manipulating algorithms, undermining rivals, and making themselves sound more powerful than they really were. And because the internet took the place of physical communities and organized gatherings, there was no way of holding anyone to account.

Also, once you logged off, you were alone. This is crucial, because though I said that the way devotional polytheists relate to their gods is almost exactly like the way animists did and do, there’s one important difference. Animist peoples relate together to the gods and spirits, not just as individuals. Most of their rituals and rites are communal, and only very rarely are they solitary. Even when individuals do interact alone, they are interacting within a larger society which understands, supports, and prescribes those interactions. The “solitary practitioner” and the hermit is a rarity, not a rule.

There’s a cause for real optimism, though. Everyone everywhere seems finally to understand that the internet is a non-place, and that social media is making us all hate each other and ourselves. It causes us to be swept up in concerns that are not ours, taken in by preferences and prejudices shaped by algorithms rather than experience. Worst of all, though, it separates us from engagement with the world and the people (human and other-than-human) around us. We become fearful of each other, while also deluded by those who claim to be more than they really are.

No culture — whether political, religious, or artistic — can exist without actually-existing interactions between people in actually-existing places, and the internet is not a place. What we think of as Pagan online culture isn’t culture at all, just as online politics isn’t politics and online pornography isn’t sex.

The alienation the internet causes is only getting worse now, especially as social media companies increase their hold over what we are allowed to see and what we will never see. When the Commons were enclosed during the birth of capitalism, people lost not just the means of material production but also cultural reproduction. Capitalism hasn’t stopped enclosing, and we only help the process along when we accept its paltry alternatives.

We were all swept up in the algorithms, but I think that moment is finally past. Paganism — like politics, and especially like life itself — is not lived online, but rather in the terrifyingly beautiful immediacy of the real around us. The ashes on the wind have settled, and fires are quite good for making the earth fertile. Something’s growing again, and though we won’t know what it will become until it becomes, we can tend it. And we’ve never had to tend alone.