Rhyd Wildermuth

This essay is part of my recurring series The Mysteria, which is also the name of a book I am writing. Normally, essays in this series are for paid subscribers only, but I’ve decided to make this one free for everyone. If you’d like to support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber of my substack, or you can also buy me a coffee. “Oh, they’re gonna be a handful, those two. One’s…

More than a decade ago in an urban west coast condo, I found myself unexpectedly sitting in a gay men’s heart circle. I’d been invited on a date, and this was part of it, but he’d really not been clear about it. Even less clear had been the specific topic for the circle: non-monogamy. He, myself, and eight other men were to sit quietly, passing a baton to each other while divulging our deepest…

Utopian Socialism and the Wolf-Killer Utopian Socialism posits that the people are not enlightened enough to know what it is they need. Thus, enlightened technocrats must reshape society in order to shift their behavior, re-educating them so that they’ll finally believe the right things. Though there have been no farmer protests in Luxembourg this year, grocery stores have had empty shelves…

An equinox meditation. It’s the vernal equinox. Today’s the start of spring in the Gregorian calendar that everyone now uses, though it was mid-spring in other European calendars. Funny thing about calendars and climate change: for many, many years, the Gregorian telling of things seemed to make most sense. Increasingly now, the older one does. It’s definitely feeling like mid-spring here, and…

Yesterday, I spoke on the phone with a writer whose words I’ve read and worked with for several years, yet whose speaking voice I’d never heard until that call. I couldn’t stop smiling during that conversation, noting in bemusement the vast difference between what I’d imagined his voice to sound like and what it actually sounded like. The gap between my imagining and the real was quite amusing,…

This long essay is part of my ongoing series, The Mysteria, and is also part of the research I’m doing for a book of the same name. These essays deal with the way that Christianity shaped many of the chaotic political situations we are in now and led to the birth of capitalism, while also examining the buried history of demonology, magic, and the occult woven through actual Christian practice.…

Magic transforms the world, but only once it has first transformed the self. Every few months or so, and especially after I receive a sudden surge of new subscribers, I write a re-introduction. Though I’ve had readers tell me they really appreciate these, I’ve noticed these re-introductions are just as helpful — if not even more — for me. Each time, I write something different about myself, and…

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…

Also posted at From The Forests of Arduinna As I write this, an esoteric symbol awakened by fascist German ritualists is flashing subliminally across hundreds of thousands—probably millions—of handheld screens. “Liked” and “shared” by liberals and conservatives alike, the photographs bearing that symbol, the Black Sun, depict innocent, compassionate, and smiling fair-haired men and women…

the only revolutionary and the only revolution I trust is the one that looks around at its companions, surveys the distance, and says in love, “hey—I think we’ve gone far enough. Let’s go home now.”

(originally posted at From The Forests of Arduinna, which is where I now do most of my writing. Sign up for free there to get these essays in your email inbox). A reader asked me last week if I still believe in revolution. I answered that question briefly, but it really deserves a longer response. As I write this, I’m sipping coffee while staring out upon the bare branches of an oak just…

Polytheistic Pluralism And Sacred Cows

Also published at From The Forests of Arduinna and A Beautiful Resistance. This essay also available as a downloadable and printable PDF (A4 paper size). Years ago I spoke at several esoteric conferences focused on the revival and continuance of polytheism. I even co-organized one just such conference, the second ever to occur in the United States. I’m a polytheist, which means I recognise the…

Recent audio and an essay

I wanted to let you know about a few other things which were just made public, places you can hear me speak or read my words. The Elements of Man First of all, my essay “The Elements of Man: a Mythic Framework for Masculinity” has just been made public at ABEAUTIFULRESISTANCE.COM. It was first published at Another World, the supporters’ journal for Gods&Radicals Press. That essay is written…

This essay was first posted at From The Forests of Arduinna, Subscribe there to get these in your email inbox!) In my head there are scores of essays needing to be written. In my life, there are limited hours to write them. One of those essays—towards which this will be a paltry and haphazard attempt—is on the religious nature of the woke madness possessing what we once called The…

The Most Terrible Secret

Perhaps the most terrible secret I have ever learned is that we are alone fully responsible for our own joy. I know this probably sounds like “white light” bullshit, especially if you consider yourself a radical or a leftist. Even more so if you’ve been on the internet for too long and seen the memes like this: The “White Light” movement, or “white light spirituality,” stems from a philosophy…

A conversation with Gordon White

This weekend I had the great fun of speaking with Gordon White (of Rune Soup, author of Star.Ships). We talked about politics-as-religion (they’re the same thing), identity politics’ divorce from external reality, the problems with CRT (especially its pro-capitalist foundation), the complete mess that US anarchism is, plus lots of Ursula K Le Guin and the magical potential of the pre-left. I…

A Plague of Gods: Cultural Appropriation and the Resurgent Left Sacred

Originally published on Another World. Also available as a pdf download. A little over six years ago now, I received a demand which asked me to use my influence and the publishing platform I founded to help denounce someone. I read the demand with curiosity and a bit of worry. The message stated in rather vague language that the sender had been asked by “the indigenous community” to help stamp…

This dispatch was also published at From The Forests of Arduinna. Subscribe there for free to get these in your inbox. As I’ve mentioned repeatedly in these dispatches, I’ve come to a place where I find myself rejecting ideological overlays in favor of more pragmatic and embodied understandings of the world. I’ll admit I’ve had a leg-up in this understanding. I’ve been working with a Tantric…