Once you have started out on the Path, even if you stop partway, you will have triggered a psychic “chain reaction” of sorts that will continue even if you don’t want it to.

This sequence of poems is based on the meditative practices centred around a journey my spiritual mentor, Jayne Johnson, undertook for me. In this journey, I was taken to an island and instructed to meditate within a ruined clochán.

What I call “vinyl paganism” means consciously choosing technologies that allow us to slow down, pay attention, be present in place and in our bodies, and let the more-than-human world speak to us in its own way.

What is it about a wooded country lane on a warm, still morning? Perhaps it calls to that part of us that craves something new and familiar all at once. Fool vibes.

The gulls have been awake for hours already, if they ever slept at all, their calls loud and abrasive in the dark of the winter morning. They suit this place. Their cries ring out, triumphant in the face of winter, or perhaps relishing in it. This is their place after all.

To be pagan is nothing more and nothing less than to be fully human, fully human in a more-than-human world. The alienating forces of civilization—including Christianity, yes, but also capitalism, industrialism, the Enlightenment, and patriarchy—have divided us from ourselves, from each other, and from the more-than-human world. The work of being pagan today, then, is to reclaim our humanity.

The original heresy is the belief that the earth is not our home, that our real life is somewhere else—whether in heaven or a future technotopia. We embrace this heresy to make sense of that nagging feeling that something is wrong with the world itself. But the real reason we feel this way is because civilization alienates us from everything that makes us human.

“One of the most difficult questions for anyone to ask is, ‘Have you had thoughts of ending your life?’”

For most people there’s male and female, masculine and feminine. We’re used to duality as a way of seeing the world: Plato, Descartes, Manichaeanism, all taught us that the ways of the world are easily divided into two – night and day, good and bad, mind over matter, mythos and logos.

“By focusing on the unwinnable debate between faith and reason, both Christians and atheists have agreed to ask the same questions – thus missing the potential for a type of religion that asks different questions in the first place.”

With this lack of names, of tradition, of relationship, how can we speak of moss?

At the time of writing this article, the #witchtok on Tiktok has more views than #biden, the current president of the United States. This is quite clearly a shocking development, one that those who worked in metaphysical stores in the 1990s never would’ve anticipated.

Every day, it seemed, I had to watch the people around me destroy plants and animals with a determination I seldom see humans apply to anything else.

“My paganism has passed through several stages: an early attempt to create my own mythology followed by many years of devotion to Celtic deities, a fascination with mysticism, and my ongoing involvement in pagan radicalism. It seems like a good time to take stock of where I’ve been, and of how I ended up where I am today.”

Our eyes are wild. Our hair is unbound. We are aware of the enormity of the task that lies before us, and we are quite prepared to do our part. We are the witchcraft. And we shall overcome.

There will be no final victory, nor defeat. There is only the endless repetitive revolutions of the gyre, which are destined to grow, contract, and begin again in moments of discord and strife.

We are currently seeing the limits inherent in the types of understanding gained through rationality and technics. While there may have been a moment when it could be reasonably argued that new developments in the intellectual products of humanity were oriented towards the improvement of human life, there can now be no doubt that these have facilitated greater levels of immiseration and despair than ever before imagined.

As the ravages of Empire play out, cultural recovery may become our goal again in the future — and we may find ourselves by choice or necessity living in small localized kinship groups once again, looking to our own ancestral traditions for a template to survival.

It isn't like Pantheacon dying is going to make three wolf moon t-shirts go away. Or books offering native spirituality as a product.

“The Doors of the Soul can be used in meditations dedicated to healing, raising or lowering magical energy at will, and inducing different emotions by focusing the mind on different parts of the body.”