Polytheistic Monasticism as a Homecoming
Photos by the author.
1. Working in the Water Country
In autumn 2019 I abandoned my spiritual vocation as an awenydd (1) for a career in the environmental sector on the joint basis of having felt I had lost my inspiration and upon my reading of a series of signs from the land and my Gods.
Whilst working on fictional stories about my local Iron Age tribe, the Setantii, ‘the Dwellers in the Water Country,’ I accidentally killed a common darter dragonfly when I was cycling to Brockholes, a wetland nature reserve owned by the Lancashire Wildlife Trust (LWT). This led me to believe I should be paying more attention to the land and doing physical work to conserve and save our wetlands, rather than merely writing about them.
I took up conservation volunteering with LWT and gained a voluntary conservation internship at Brockholes. Whilst completing it I was offered temporary paid work with LWT planting cottongrass on Little Woolden Moss, one of the Manchester Mosslands (2) which have been drained and damaged by peat extraction over the last few centuries.
When I asked my patron God, Gwyn ap Nudd, what I should offer to the spirits of the place when I arrived there, he simply showed me a cottongrass plug plant. My planting work was to be an offering both for Him and for Them.
From mid-February until mid-April in 2021 I worked full time planting cottongrass on Little Woolden Moss in all weathers including extremes of cold, wind and rain. This led to me being offered a Greater Manchester Wetland Traineeship on the Manchester Mosslands, which I took, believing it to be a continuation of fulfilling Gwyn’s ‘showing’ that I should plant cottongrass.
My traineeship was immensely fulfilling. I learnt about the whole process of peatland restoration from initial surveys to bunding and re-wetting, growing and planting peatland plants, and monitoring the outcomes throughout the works.
I did well with all the practical and survey work, and with writing blog posts and giving a talk about the prehistoric archaeology of the Manchester Mosslands. However, I struggled when I got to the higher level task of project management due to limitations with my autism. This is because I don’t have good people skills (due to my inability to interpret body language and facial expressions or to ‘read between the lines’ in person or in emails) and, rather than thriving under pressure, I have meltdowns when faced with multiple stresses.
Another problem was that the Manchester Mosslands were a 30-mile drive from my house. The journey took an hour and I felt guilty about the fact I was working in carbon capture whilst generating a massive carbon footprint.
2. “I want to come home”
When I was on holiday from my traineeship over Christmas last year and enjoying gathering and writing about local mosses, an unconscious prayer to my Gods and local spirits slipped from my lips: “I want to come home.”
The first sign of the nature of this homecoming was seeing a tiny money spider on a patch of moss on the gatepost of Longton Brickcroft Nature Reserve on New Year’s Eve. I misread it as a portent of ‘a mossy and spidery New Year’ and thought it signalled that when my traineeship ended I would gain an Assistant Project Officer role on the mosslands and continue to develop my plans for setting up surveys of spiders as indicators of the health of peat bogs during the restoration process.
The meaning was clarified when no suitable position on the mosslands came up and I applied for and gained instead a Graduate Ecologist job at Ecology Services Ltd, in Longton, which was a three-mile bike ride from my house. It had signalled I would gain work much closer to home and I noted that the etymological root of the term ‘ecology’ is the Greek oikos ‘house’ or ‘home’.
Sadly, although I had the chance to work with the friendliest and most professional team I have ever met, my Graduate Ecologist position didn’t work out. This was, again, due to a combination of ethical and personal issues.
The job involved carrying out ecological surveys ranging from bat and great crested newt surveys for local house owners, farmers and waste water treatment works to larger scale ecological impact assessments for developments in Greater Manchester and Cheshire. There was a lot of travel - to sites up to 60 miles away. One project involved a housing development on a former mossland and another on an area of green belt.
The irregular hours, night work, long drives to sites and high levels of pressure didn’t suit me as an autistic person who has a need for a regular routine and is good at doing one task well but not at multitasking. I got overwhelmed and had several meltdowns and ended up suffering from burn out.
I realised that I had made a mistake in taking a job on the basis of it being local and offering financial security without asking advice from my Gods, from whom I had grown distant, merely going through the motions of my devotions.
As my struggles got worse and my mental health deteriorated, I began to pray in earnest. I apologised for not making myself available to listen to Their advice. I prayed for help and direction, for understanding of where I’d gone wrong, for the strength to get through this difficult period in my life. Throughout this process, I felt a desperate need for retreat and sanctuary.
3. “Sanctuary, please give me sanctuary”
When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I suffered from anxiety and depression and struggled with insomnia. I remember walking home from a drunken night out in Preston to my hometown of Penwortham at around 4am, at dawn, during the summer. The alcohol was wearing off, the horrors of the hangover and all the dark thoughts that came with it were descending.
Unable to sleep or focus on anything of worth, I felt utterly alone and outside human space and time. As I paused at Penwortham Methodist Church, the words, “Sanctuary, please give me sanctuary!” in the manner of Quasimodo’s mother at the door of Notre Dame Cathedral in the Disney film screamed in my mind. I desperately wanted to go in, to throw myself on my knees before a greater power and with Them to find peace from the thoughts of not belonging and fears of failure that were preying on me. Yet I knew, from church parade with Brownies, that Yahweh was not my God, that I could not match up to His commandments, that I was filled with sins, that I could not meet His demand for obedience. That I would only be met by His stony, cold silence.
Still, I haunted churches and derelict monasteries, drawn to what was forever out of reach, sought religious experiences instead through alcohol, drugs, dancing.
It wasn’t until I was thirty that I met the God who would accept me in all my messiness. Gwyn ap Nudd, a Brythonic God of the dead, of the mad, of poets. He is the chaos of the Wild Hunt and, at a first glimpse, as far from sanctuary as anyone can get, but He is also the calm at the heart of the storm.
Gwyn was there for me through my recent meltdowns and burnout. From Him, I received the gnosis I had gone wrong in abandoning my spiritual vocation as an awenydd and that my true strength lies in devotional creativity. During this process, I rediscovered my inspiration through returning to an old writing project. This led to me leaving my ecology job to return to my calling.
My need for sanctuary and retreat during and after my failure to succeed in an environmental career led me back to my earlier monastic leanings.
4. Polytheistic Monasticism
For much of my life I have been fascinated by monks and nuns and what is going on in their minds and souls in relation to divinity behind closed walls.
Since meeting Gwyn I have longed to devote my full life to honouring and serving Him yet found it impossible because Brythonic polytheism is not formally recognised as a religion let alone one with churches or monasteries.
Polytheistic Monasticism is a relatively new movement. Whilst Pagan and Druidic groups practising monasticism such as the Gnostic Celtic Church Monastery and Order of the Horae have existed for a number of years (3) it has only recently started coming into being as a movement in itself. I was drawn to it around 2018 and in 2019 served as admin for the Polytheistic Monasticism discussion forum created by Danica Swanson and Weeping Crow (4).
During that period, I ended up departing due to me not feeling monastic enough. I felt my path as an awenydd, which involved sharing poetry both in physical and online communities, was incompatible with traditional forms of monasticism which demand solitude and conflate self-expression with ego (5).
The movement found its voice in March 2022 with the anthology Polytheistic Monasticism. Herein we find the following definition by editor Janet Munin:
‘Monastics are those who take solemn vows to live centred on their relationship with one or more Holy Power. Anything which impedes or compromises that relationship is left behind or minimised as much as possible. They are renunciates, offering up wealth, social status, a conventional career, and family life on the altar of devotion.’
The launch of this book, which I wrote an endorsement for, coincided with the return of my desire for sanctuary and my soul’s yearning for a monastic life.
5. Building the Monastery of Annwn
In a discussion with Gwyn, I spoke of my fears about my monastic leanings being at odds with His nature as a wild God, particularly in relation to His demonisation as a ruler of Annwn and its spirits under Christianity.
His reply was that I must ‘build the Monastery of Annwn’ and that something beautiful and paradoxical would be born from the union of contraries.
I founded the Monastery of Annwn in April 2022 as ‘a virtual space and place of sanctuary for those who worship and serve the Gods and Goddesses of Annwn’.
The Monastery forms a hub for the worship of deities who have been demonised throughout centuries of Christianity because they are associated with Annwn, ‘the Deep’, the Brythonic Otherworld/Underworld. It provides a safe space for monastic devotees (7) of these Gods to come together not only for devotions and festivals but for mutual support.
Beyond the context of Polytheistic Monasticism, creating such spaces is important in terms of providing spiritual nourishment for those of us struggling to survive in a world that is experienced as overwhelming and hostile.
This may be due to neurodivergence or to feeling ‘othered’ by a society which teaches us to measure our personal worth and success by ideals such as the accumulation of material wealth and popularity on social media rather than learning to listen to our inner voice and the voices of the land and our Gods.
The monastery provides a respite from the stresses and pressures of the modern world so our relationship with the Gods and each other can be nurtured.
Since its founding, a number of people have joined. We have a website and online forum and have formulated ‘the Rule of the Heart’, ‘Our Nine Vows’, and our ‘New Moon Prayer’. We also run a monthly meditation group focusing on reading Brythonic texts in a lectio divina style.
Along with four other monastic devotees, I took initial vows as a nun of Annwn in October 2022. Our vows focus on positives (such as abiding by the values of devotion and inspiration, keeping a morning and evening devotional practice, and making time for deepening our relationships with the Gods and Goddesses of Annwn) rather than repressive ‘should nots’.
The only vow which involves some form of renunciation is ‘to live simply and sustainably’. The act of living in relationship with the Annuvian Deities means giving up things that are detrimental to deep thought and to the land and Annwn as its living underworld, such as excessive consumption of material goods (such as food, clothes and fuel) and digital information and entertainment.
Those of who made our vows consecrated our personal spaces (for me my bedroom which is the entirety of my living space - bed, wardrobe, book case, altars, writing desk) as cells of the Monastery of Annwn. This is our first step in taking the monastery from a virtual space and making it a physical reality.
Polytheistic monasticism has brought me home from an environmental career with too much travel, to my monastic cell in which I pray and write before the altars of my Gods and care for my garden and local green space.
In a world opposed to depth and otherness, I have succeeded in creating a small place of sanctuary for myself and others in devotion to the Annuvian Gods, wherein we can safely share our spiritual experiences and inspiration.
This is only possible because of living off savings from former jobs and support from my parents, who provide bed and board in return for housework and gardening, as well as a small income from Patreon supporters and book sales.
I am aware I won’t be able to live without returning to a ‘proper’ day job forever, yet I know I will always have my place of sanctuary to come home to.
I’m hoping this gift from my Gods will continue to be a gift for others who worship the Deities of Annwn and share similar needs and aspirations, and that it might inspire Pagans and Polytheists from other traditions to create similar spaces.
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(1)‘Person inspired’ in the Brythonic tradition.
(2) ‘Moss’ or ‘mossland’ is a northern English term for a lowland raised peat bog.
(3) I’ve been unable to find founding dates but the Gnostic Celtic Church was founded in 2010. I’m unsure about the monastery.
(4) This forum sadly shut down but was replaced by the Cloister in September 2022 - https://cloister.bone.blue/
(5) Christian and Buddhist.
(6) ‘The Deep’ - the Brythonic Otherworld.
(7) A gender neutral term for monks and nuns.
Lorna Smithers
is a poet and author based in Penwortham, Lancashire, North West England. She writes about her local landscape and her spiritual path as an awenydd and Brythonic polytheist devoted to Gwyn ap Nudd. Her three books: Enchanting the Shadowlands, The Broken Cauldron, and Gatherer of Souls are published by the Ritona imprint of Gods & Radicals Press. Her blog posts can be found at 'From Peneverdant' - https://lornasmithers.wordpress.com'