Another World, August 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
Rhyd Wildermuth’s popular course on Being Pagan will begin again 18 September, 2022. If you would like to take this course as part of your member benefit, please email us at distro@abeautifulresistance.com
Other News
We’ll soon 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!
Interested in writing for Another World or for A Beautiful Resistance? We’d love to publish your work! Email us at rhyd@abeautifulresistance.com (for Another World) or editor@godsandradicals.org (for A Beautiful Resistance).
In this month’s Another World
We F°cked Up Church
Our second essay from newly-added writer, R.G. Miga:
This is where we are. Even if the literal floodwaters don’t come for us, the rushing currents of cultural and political instability will leave almost all of us washed out of our comfortable materialist worldviews. In an ironic inversion of a too-familiar problem, the citizens of the most fortified countries on the planet are falling victim to the psychic trauma of a disordered world, adrift within their own borders—"internally displaced,” in the anodyne parlance of geopolitics. Spiritually dispossessed. Shocked to be told that, sorry, the maps haven’t been updated yet; the place you’re trying to go doesn’t exist anymore, and all that money you have doesn’t spend like it once did.
The twenty-third edition of the Pagan Music List, featuring songs related to Lugnasadh and Lugh.
From Rhyd Wildermuth, a discussion of gnosticism and trans-humanism through a Pagan lens:
What if we again saw motherhood as truly sacred? I don’t mean this in the faux American Christian way, but rather in the pagan and animist sense. What if motherhood was so sacred that society saw itself obligated to support it? What if not just the act of conceiving and giving birth but continuously mothering a child was seen as such a holy thing that we acknowledged a duty to make sure women who chose to do so never lacked for anything?
And what if we also saw fatherhood as truly sacred? Of course to do so, we’d also have to see the act of sex itself as sacred again, and not just in the monotheist way nor the empty Woke way. The sacred demands things of us, demands ritual and veneration and most terrifying of all duty, obligation, and boundaries. We’ve come to see this all as primitive or reactionary, to see ourselves “liberated” from all the power and consequences flowing out of the very magic of human creation itself.
So we now have sex without obligation, fatherhood without duty, motherhood without support, and no politics yet exists that can do anything else except argue about who’s at fault and who should be elected to fix it all. We cannot talk about the sacred, and increasingly lose the language with which to speak of it.