Another World, June 2022
Welcome to our many new supporting members! If you have any questions about your supporters’ benefits, please email us at distro@abeautifulresistance.com.
Upcoming Courses
The start date of Alley Valkyrie’s Land: Loss&Reconnection was rescheduled to 26 June. If you would like to take this course as part of your member benefit, please email us at distro@abeautifulresistance.com
Other News
We’ve also announced the upcoming publication of Courting The Wild Queen, by poet, herbalist, and mystic Seán Pádraig O'Donoghue. The pre-order is now open, and please note that your member benefit can apply to all orders, even to pre-orders. For more information on the release, see this link.
We’ll soon also be announcing the publication date of The White Deer, by Melinda Redinger. This will also be our first publication in multiple editions, including a fine edition. More information coming soon!
In this month’s Another World
The May Queen
An excerpt from Seán Pádraig O'Donoghue’s upcoming release, Courting the Wild Queen
Righteousness presumes a single truth and a single correct response to that truth. It begins with an image of perfection against which we measure ourselves and a narrowing path toward its attainment. That path is lined with the thorns and briers of our own judgment that cut into our flesh if we stray, as inevitably we do. When we feel the first cut of thorn into flesh, we begin to dissociate, no longer trusting our bodies, and seeking instead the abstract maps in the left frontal cortices of our brains to lead us. And they lead us into the tangle of thorns again and again, because none of those maps resemble anything akin to the fluid realities of the living world.
The thorn is also the ward that protects the Otherworld from the incursion of this particular form of madness. The lone Hawthorn stands atop the Hollow Hill barring the entry of those who would bring their cruel morality. Victor Anderson described their ways as “kinder...and less civilized.” Those who dwell beneath have seen the iron chains that we place around our own hearts, the desires become the iron sword by which we impose our visions of righteousness on each other, and the iron plough with which we impose our straight-rowed monocrop vision on the body of the Earth.
It is common in our culture, when reflecting on the atrocities of the past few millennia, to ask how people could be so devoid of morality as to commit genocide and ecocide over and over again—however, the problem is not a lack of morality, but an excess of moral rigidity and moral fervor.
A special edition reviewing the new album from Runahild and new singles from Eluveitie and Faun.
On the spectacle nature of mass killings, from Rhyd Wildermuth.
For the other 96.3% of people murdered in the United States, we might ask why their deaths mean less only because they were killed alongside no more than two other people. Why should the overwhelming number of children murdered by parents, or by other children, by strangers, in indiscriminate gang shootings, or even by themselves in suicide be counted as less important than the very small number of children killed in mass events?
Perhaps it is precisely the idea of “mass” itself which causes us to become morbidly fascinated with such rare events to the exclusion of the many, many, many other murders in the United States. In a mass killing, you are killed because you are part of a mass. The murderer doesn’t know you, doesn’t care to, and you will not have known them. You are merely a member a faceless body to them, as well as to the journalists and media companies circling your corpse after you have died, and to all those who will hear of your death through mass media. Though your death—unlike all the vast preponderance of other murdered people—will make national news headlines, you will still be merely a statistic, not a human in relationship with others.
Of all the proffered explanations for the high murder rate in the United States and its occasional mass events, the one I suspect comes closest to scratching at the truth of the matter is that of societal breakdown. Nations with similarly high murder rates such as Ukraine and those with much higher rates (much of South America and of Africa) all have comparably unstable societies. Many (but not all) are previous sites of colonial conquest and displaced populations through mass migration or forced slavery, with notoriously corrupt governments and excessive gaps between the highest classes and the lowest classes. They also lack stable religious and cultural traditions and histories, interrupted by external or internal aggression.