"Ave, Regina Caelorum"
“But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars— they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.”
Revelation 21:8
A little more than 28 years ago, when Saturn was last where it was, I was sobbing on the floor in a small and cheap Florida duplex. Sounds were coming from the radio that I couldn’t understand, breaking through my mind, chanting from a world that couldn’t possibly exist, yet I knew it must.
I was pressed against the wall next to the table where the radio sat, crying, feeling as if something chained within me was screaming against its bonds.
Two years after sobbing on the floor in that Florida duplex, I was crying again, this time alone in a dorm room on the north shore of Boston. I guess I cried a lot back then. Of course I still cry, but I had many more reasons to cry back then than I do now.
That time, I was shuddering, my whole body quaking, convulsing from I can only name as terror. I was afraid, but “afraid” isn’t strong enough a word. Terror doesn’t even quite feel sufficient. If there were a word that meant both “terror” and “horror” and also a third thing, then that’s how I felt.
It was the middle of my second year of Christian college, and everyone now knew I was gay. That day, the day I was crying, I had been called in by my scholarship advisor. He was an obese middle-aged man with narcolepsy who’d fall asleep mid-sentence. He had several doctorates attached to his name, was also a minister, and was really, really stern—at least when he was awake.
“God’s word is clear abouuuuuttt…” he started, and then powered down.
This happened all the time, and we were all used to it. In the late 80’s, there was a children’s toy called Teddy Ruxpin that moved and mimicked speaking along to audio cassette tapes. Because it was actually just a cassette player, when it powered down and closed its eyes, the voice slowed down, rather than just stopped. When it powered up, it was the same in reverse.
My advisor’s battery had powered down. Sometimes this was just a few seconds, but other times he’d be asleep for quite a few minutes. His words would trail off, and then suddenly start again as if nothing had happened. I waited, awkwardly.
And then he powered up again.
“…hhhhhooomosexuals. They are abominations and go to the lake of fire.” He kept going, powering down and then back up several times before he’d finally finished what he’d had to say. I’d be going to hell, along with all the other enemies of God. And I’d also lose my scholarship.
That wasn’t why I was crying later in my dorm room, though. I was crying because I’d finally found that song I’d heard on the radio two years before. The song broke through me, shattering everything I thought about myself.
And there was someone inside the song.
II.
I met Diana in Trier a few weeks ago, though I’m sure I’d met her before.
Meeting gods can be an incredibly uncomfortable thing, and it doesn’t get any easier the more of them you’ve met. Another gods-bothered person once described the problem as “getting a reputation,” that once you start conversations with some of them, the others figure out you’re the sort who talks to them and they start talking, too.
I think that’s not quite right, though. It’s more like as with trees or animals. People who see animals and trees as background—if they even see them at all—aren’t concerned with their worlds or what they might be on about. Become the sort of person who befriends dogs or alders and you become also the sort of person who notices when there’s a dog or an alder who’d like some attention.
In other words, animals and trees exist to certain people. They “world” them into their world, let them into their perceptions, and they interact with them. For others, such things are just landscape and background noise, indistinguishable from all the other things composing the world to which they give no attention or notice.
Gods are like that, too. Start noticing gods, start talking to them, and suddenly you find it’s quite hard to not notice them, not talk to them. So when you meet another one, you hear a voice say “hello” and of course it would be quite rude to not say hello back. But then next thing you know, you’re in a conversation, and what that god is saying changes everything else about you.
I “pray” quite often, though that word always feels wrong to describe what I’m doing. Twice a day at least, before a lit candle upon a shrine arrayed with pine cones and alder catkins, years worth of collected fallen raven and crow feathers, a coin, old dried leaves, bits of sacred paper, a shell, broken shards of pottery, and a small bowl of water. There were 14 gods I talked to each time, and now with Diana there are fifteen. “Hail to you” I say to Brighid, Bran, Arianrod, Ceridwen. Then to Odin, Dionysos, Gwyn ap Nudd, Lugh. Again, to Inanna, Freya, Ritona, Arduinna, Epona, and Thunor.
And now also to Diana.
And then I talk, mostly thanking them. I thank them for the same thing each time, and then for other things, and then I just talk. When we’re done, I talk briefly to others, to the ancestors for whom that bowl of water is filled, to the spirit of this land.
Maybe that seems a lot, especially for those who only talk to one god or to none at all. It hardly feels like a lot, but rather an abundance. It is the same for someone who has a large number of close friends or a large, thriving family: no such person would feel it all “too much.”
And now there is also Diana, but this feels a bit different, because I’m pretty sure I’d met her in that song I’d heard.
III.
The greatest army arrayed by the Catholic church in their counter-reformation attempts against Calvin and Luther were the Jesuits, and the greatest weapon of the Jesuits was Mary.
Thus it was that, in the 16th and early 17th centuries, the newly-formed religious order spread across Europe and into far-flung lands to revive faith in their one universal church and the one-god by whose sign that church conquered. Everywhere they went, they urged the local believers to build bulwarks against the faithlessness of the Protestants.
Relics of those bulwarks litter the landscape here in the Ardennes. Just a short walk from my home, up a hill easily climbed, at the base of a tree which began its life centuries before Europeans began colonizing the Americas, is an example of their primary military tactic. It’s a shrine to Mary, Queen of Heaven. Not far from her are others, and still others. No village I’ve yet visited in this land is absent a Marian shrine.
If anything, the Counter-Reformation was a renaissance for Mary. To fight the Protestants undermining their authority and reducing their tithe-base, missionary Jesuits urged the rehabilitation of old Marian shrines and convinced wealthy lords to fund the construction of new ones. In 1569, Pope Pius V enshrined the Rosary prayer into official church doctrine, and two years later urged all of Catholic Europe to pray it against the Ottoman Turks to protect Venice from the Muslims.
When the Christian forces won, their victory was attributed to the faithful’s prayers to Mary.
Of course, the Mary of the Bible never worked miracles, nor was she a bloodthirsty slaughterer of Turks. No signs and wonders are attributed to her, and the beliefs that she was “assumed” into heaven immediately upon death, or that she lived a sinless life, have no scriptural basis. Despite that, it is dogma in both Catholic and Orthodox belief that Mary’s sinlessness and her role as the womb for Christ led her to be resurrected into heaven before her body could decay.
There is only one line from the Bible that offers any potential scriptural evidence for Mary’s assumption or dormition, penned by the raving madman of Patmos. In the same visions in which he consigned the “sexually immoral” into eternal torment, he also saw a “great sign” appear in the heavens, that of
“a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet,
and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.”
She was with child, he continues, and that child was to rule all the nations with an “iron fist.” A dragon appears and fights against her, seeking to eat her child. The dragon is Satan, we’re told, but the earth and angels protect her while he instead seeks “to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.”
It takes a lot of contortion to rewrite John of Patmos’s queen of heaven as Mary. More often she’s seen as the Church itself, the “mother” of believers. Yet regardless, “Mary, Queen of Heaven” is everywhere to be found on altars and shrines throughout Europe.
Statues and paintings of the Reginae Caelorum, “the Queen of Heaven,” are perhaps the most common depiction of Mary, at least in the Ardennes. In some instances she is depicted without her crown of stars, but in all cases she has “the moon under her feet,” which is how you know it’s a queen of heaven Mary rather than another.
That moon? Well, of course Protestants would like to have none of this. Their common accusation against the Catholics then—and now—is that they are “Mary-worshippers,” and much has been written to show that Marian cults were very thinly-veiled pagan continuations. In particular, it’s very easy to find convincing Protestant arguments that specific iterations of Marian veneration, especially that of “Mary, Queen of Heaven,” are Romish church attempts at evocatio and interpretatio. And they’re particularly obsessed with that crescent moon, as they probably should be.
IV.
The threat of hell is perhaps the most brilliant form of human control any religion has ever come up with.
I knew I was an abomination quite early. I was a homosexual, a fornicator, bound to the lake of eternal fire. Of course, this realization made me even more fervent in my faith, more eager to be a servant of the One-God. I had been “saved,” at least according to the evangelical formula. Accept Jesus into your heart, confess that you are sinner, believe in his promise of salvation, and you will be saved.
None of that changed my desire for men, though. Nor did my attempted correspondence with a gay conversion “ministry,” whose founder wrote rather lurid letters to me describing his previous sexual depravities from which the saving grace of Jesus Christ had finally liberated him.
I got quite suicidal. I no longer have the journals I kept during my adolescence, but I recall much of what I wrote. I kept begging God to make me straight, to take away this horrid and evil desire, to rescue me from the fate the pastor of my church relentlessly reminded us was due such people as myself.
There’s one sermon I remember quite clearly. There was a guest speaker beforehand, a woman claiming to be well-versed in the horrors of west coast sexual depravity. She explained to us what could be seen daily in the overflowing hospitals of San Francisco.
“Because they are fornicators who reject God’s plan for sexual union with women,” she preached, “they harm themselves and each other.”
“Men lying with men as they should do with women,” she continued, “cannot experience sexual satisfaction. So they reach their arms into each other through the anus in order to squeeze their victim’s liver and even lungs. And this is why the hospitals are so full of homosexuals with punctured lungs and crushed livers, dying from internal bleeding.”
I went home after and cried, terrified. I didn’t want to be in the hospital from a punctured lung. I didn’t want to squeeze a man’s liver from the inside. I didn’t want to burn forever in a lake of sulfur.
I just wanted to love and be loved.
V.
The Roman Empire had three primary tactics for dealing with the gods of others. The first one—slaughtering all the worshippers of that foreign god—wasn’t very successful. Besides requiring a lot of effort and also reducing potential economic gains—since dead people cannot pay taxes—attempting to root out belief in something often has the opposite effect. People tend to believe harder and more fervently when they are being threatened for that belief.
The other two tactics—intrepretatio and evocatio—were much more useful.
Interpretatio is the better known of those, and the most easily explained. When Rome encountered the gods of the people they conquered, they relabeled those gods as their own, “interpreting” or “translating” foreign deities into their imperial system. It’s a bit like a corporate re-branding of a local product, the way McDonald’s in each country offers some version of a local sandwich along with their pantheon of signature burgers. Thus, especially in Gaul, museums are full of statues of Celtic gods bearing two names, such as “Apollo Maponus,” “Minerva Brigantia,” and even “Diana Arduinna.”
Evocatio, on the other hand, is a bit more strange. Rather than merely re-interpreting the gods of others, a general, advised by imperial priests and possessing the emperor’s authority, could make an offer to the god protecting a foreign city and its people. In return for withdrawing its protection of the people Rome desired to conquer, the god was offered a chance to become part of the imperial religion itself.
The ritual of evocatio is attested to have happened at least twice, though there is some historical evidence that it happened many more times. The two certain evocatio rituals were both performed for goddesses. The first target was the Etruscan goddess Uni, whom was later named Juno Regina (Juno the Queen). The second was soon after, targeting the Tunisian goddess Tanit. She then became Juno Caelestis, “Juno of Heaven.”
This is how Juno became Caelestis Reginae, “The Heavenly Queen.” It’s probably thus not difficult to see why the Protestants, so eager as they always have been to purge Christianity of its pagan beliefs, are particularly unhappy with Maria, Regina Caelorum.
They have other reasons to be unhappy with her, though, as it was she—rather than any of the other Marys—who seemed to inspire the most faith in the old Church. She was not just the mother of God, but also a queen in her own right, royalty, a ruler of heaven itself. She seemed to give legitimacy to the Catholic kings, since they bowed before a greater queen and her attendant servant, the Church.
There’s no shortage of apocalyptic retellings about this relationship on the side of the Protestants. Some wrote the Queen of Heaven to be the whore of Babylon instead, and the Church her false prophet enacting signs and wonders. The most serious charge of all, though, is that she was a pagan goddess herself.
VI.
There’s a goddess in the New Testament, by the way. She’s the only other god besides the One-God to merit mention, and she’s haunted the Christians ever since.
Writing at least 60 years after the death of Jesus, the author of the Acts of the Apostles tells us that Paul and the followers of his new cult created quite a stir in the city of Ephesus. According to that author’s account, so many were converted to the new religion that a sacred craftsman, a silversmith, raised a mob against Paul’s fanatics. Only a calm-minded town leader prevailed to keep the peace.
“And when the townclerk had appeased the people, he said, Ye men of Ephesus, what man is there that knoweth not how that the city of the Ephesians is a worshipper of the great goddess Diana, and of the image which fell down from Jupiter?” Acts 19: 27
It’s a lot like a goddess to sneak into the holy writ of another religion like that, to become immortalized forever in Christian scripture as the great goddess of the city of the Ephesians.
Her temple in Ephesus fell at the beginning of the 4th century. Christian hagiography claims it was on account of John Chrysostom’s “golden tongue,” though all the other sources—including John’s pagan tutor—speak of violent Christian mobs pillaging the temples and attacking the priests and worshipers.
There’s little difference really in these explanations, as the best way to whip up violent mobs is to have a golden tongue. Regardless your preferred explanation, her temple was torn down, and a cross set upon its foundation, inscribed triumphantly against “the delusive image of the demon Artemis.”
But the “demon” seemed never to have gone away. Some five hundred years later, a monk, born in a village far from Ephesus and just a short bike ride from my home, railed against the continued worship of Diana. In a text full of frothing fanaticism, Regino of Prüm decries “some wicked women,” who:
“… have given themselves back to Satan and been seduced by illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and openly profess that, in the hours of night, they ride upon certain beasts with Diana, the goddess of pagans, and an innumerable multitude of women, and in the silence of the dead of the night to fly over vast spaces of earth, and obey her commands as of their lady, and are summoned to her service on certain nights. But if only they alone perished in their faithlessness, without drawing many other people into the destruction of infidelity! For an innumerable multitude, deceived by this false opinion, believe this to be true, and so believing, wander from the right faith and return to the error of the pagans when they think that there is any of divinity or power except the one God. Because of this, the priests in all their churches should preach with all insistence to the people that they may know this to be in every way false, and that such phantasms are sent by the devil who deludes them in dreams…”
In the next century we read a rather long and delicious list of these “folk customs” in the form of a “correctional” questionnaire by Burchard of Worms, beginning with:
Hast thou observed the traditions of the pagans, which, as if by hereditary right, with the assistance of the devil, fathers have ever left to their sons even to these days, that is, that thou shouldst worship the elements, the moon or the sun or the course of the stars, the new moon or the eclipse of the moon; that thou shouldst be able by thy shouts or by thy aid to restore her splendor, or these elements [be able] to succor thee, or that thou shouldst have power with them--or hast thou observed the new moon for building a house or making marriages?
“By thy shouts or by thy aid restore her splendor” is a reference to a peculiarly persistent folk custom regarding the moon during eclipses. At least up to and during the reign of Charlemagne, monks, priests, and bishops continued to complain of the loud shouts, the blowing of horns, the shattering of pottery, the beating of drums, and the braying like animals coming from peasants during a lunar eclipse. A continuation of Roman rites to Selene and Diana and likely much, much older, the Christians believed the purpose of all this noise was to “restore her splendor,” or in other words, bring back the moon after an eclipse.
VII.
In 1948, the poet Robert Graves published The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. Influenced in no small part by Margaret Murray’s 1921 The Witch Cult In Western Europe, Graves attempted to find in European myth hints of a singular goddess cult which Christianity had displaced. For Graves and Murray, as well as the highly derivative work of Gerald Gardner after them, evidence abounded that pagan beliefs persisted despite the relentless and violent persecution by the Christians.
It’s all quite a pretty idea, one upon which the wholly-modern religious frameworks of Wicca and neopaganism were founded. As an antidote to the political and cultural crises which had torn apart Europe during the lives of these three thinkers, there’s a particular hopeful beauty in the notion that, against all the modern alienation and mass slaughter, the Christianity which fueled the furnaces of factories and war had never fully eradicated an older way of being.
It was specifically the denunciations by the Christians which inspired Charles Leland, Margaret Murray, Robert Graves, and Gerald Gardner to look for evidence of a widespread and ancient witch cult. We’re told later by Ronald Hutton—a man who made his career through refuting them—that not only did not such witch cult exist, but by the time these words were written, worship of Diana and any other goddess or god had fully died out.
Hutton’s view is that all the learned bishops, priests, and monks who wrote against such heresies were a lot more like that woman at my church. Just as she’d never actually seen what she claimed to have seen, nor were the hospitals of San Francisco actually full of gay men with punctured lungs, they’d never seen these rites nor were they really happening. They were all fabrications from their imagination and misunderstood rumors.
For Hutton, the witch cult hypothesis is merely the hearers mistaking the propaganda as truth. However, Hutton tends to throw out everything the Christians said, missing the underlying truth buried in the propaganda.
Consider that woman’s account again. The hospitals of San Francisco were for a time full of dying homosexuals. Also, there is indeed a sexual practice (one heterosexuals also engage in, though it’s more common with homosexuals) that involves inserting a hand and even part of an arm into a rectum. No, it doesn’t result in punctured lungs or crushed livers (it’s not actually possible), and no, that’s not why so many homosexuals were dying.
In other words, something was actually happening, but the Christians narrated it according to their own perverse imaginations. Hutton’s wholesale rejection of the propaganda of these accounts nevertheless accepts the much larger Christian propaganda: that Christianity had fully conquered and eradicated pagan beliefs in Europe. In other words, he assumes the basic foundation of the Christian progress narrative is true.
That view, which is the Western view in general, narrates the history of humanity as a progression from darkness (pre-Christian times) to a time of enlightenment (the arrival of the “Christ”). Before the transcendent, evolutionary moment of Jesus’s resurrection, only a select few in a desert knew the truth of the world’s creation. All the rest of the world foolishly and primitively believed in spirits and multiple gods and goddesses. Then, a rebellious, enlightened sect of that select few (the first “Enlightenment”) began to transform the rest of the world, bringing light where there was only darkness. Everyone in the empire they took over—and all the peoples of the continent of Europe after that empire collapsed—were convinced and completely purged themselves of their earlier darkness, leaving only meaningless statues and empty cultural habits to point to once was.
Graves, Murray, Gardner, and to some extent Frazier before them tried to suggest otherwise. But like rebellious teenagers who try to escape their Christian upbringing by becoming “satanists,” they were merely inverting the narrative and ended up collapsing all the goddesses into one goddess. In that way, they made the same mistake as the Christians who labeled every “false” goddess they saw by the only name their scriptures gave them, that “great goddess Diana.”
What Christian monotheism did that Jewish monotheism had been unable to do was to enfold much of what people believed about the divine into a singular being. Almost singular, anyway, as that singular is also triune thanks to a neat trick the Pythagorean cults bequeathed to the early church fathers. Yet despite his three-in-one existence, Christianity couldn’t take hold without leaving some room for a subordinated semi-divine Theotokos, someone to at least keep the women folk busy.
And they were certainly busy, and still are. The centuries-old Marian shrines in this village and the even older ones nearby are all tended by women. The women who tend these shrines leave offerings, light candles, speak prayers, lovingly clean and adorn the statues of Maria Regina, Maria Caelestis.
Of course, sometimes a village druid also offers up some prayers there of his own.
VIII.
As the political, economic, and especially cultural power of the Reformers grew, a debate about music arose within the leaders of the Catholic counter-reformation. At that time, a certain new form of choral singing had arose, particularly credited to the Italian composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.
Palestrina composed liturgical works in the form now called “old church polyphony.” Breaking from the very long tradition of plain song or Gregorian chant, in which all the voices sing in unison, Palestrina began orchestrating sacred music in a way that the singers themselves became multiple instruments.
Opinions of the cardinals and bishops were deeply divided over this new form of music. While none could deny its beauty, polyphony presented a political crisis for the Church at a time that reformers accused Rome of making God too complicated for common folk.
It also created a theological crisis, since the Church’s role as unifier of the faithful was seen as hinging upon a singular universalizing belief that reduced difference. Polyphony seemed to show another path. Multiple voices could sing multiple songs, yet in that multiplicity and difference produce something even more profound than a singular truth.
For a sense of this problem, consider Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s description of polyphony which Dougald Hine highlights in a recent essay:
Polyphony is music in which autonomous melodies intertwine. In Western music, the madrigal and the fugue are examples of polyphony. These forms seem archaic and strange to many modern listeners because they were superseded by music in which a unified rhythm and melody holds the composition together. In the classical music that displaced baroque, unity was the goal; this was “progress”…
Those who saw the value in polyphony won out over the purists for a little while, at least partially because Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina produced a rather haunting and beautiful mass (Missa Papae Marcelli, the Pope Marcellus Mass) to defend polyphony against the traditionalists. Polyphony also fit very well into the Jesuit’s war against the reformers because its power over listeners invoked the same profound sense of mystery which they saw as key to reviving belief.
Before Palestrina had written that mass, a much more haunting composition of polyphony had been written during the very brief English counter-reformation. Under Queen Mary (Mary Tudor, or “Bloody Mary” as the Protestants would have it), the English composer William Mundy wrote the piece I was referring to earlier in this essay, Vox Patris Caelestis.
“The voice of the father from heaven,” the lyrics begin. A pastiche of several different Biblical texts—especially the Song of Solomon—the song is an erotic adoration of the Queen of Heaven on her assumption.
Come forth from your mortal body, clothed in raiment of gold, my dear-heart, surrounded by the rainbow of heavenly glory.
Come to me, your most dear lover, for I have loved you above all others, and I will bestow upon you my kingdom, for I have long desired your beauty.
To listen to that piece is to hear something—and someone—else than the God of the Christians. That is what—and who—I heard listening to it the first time, and each time after.
IX.
The older I get, and the more gods and goddesses I meet, the more I’m convinced the accusations of the Protestants were correct. There are many Marys, and at least one of them was someone else. That Mary is indeed Biblical, but she went by another name when the author of the Acts of the Apostles wrote of her.
How’d she get there? I think again the Protestants aren’t so far from the truth of the matter. Idolatry, goddess worship, all those charges speak to an accurate sense that she’s not part of the “pure” doctrine or original intentions of the early church fathers.
She shouldn’t be there, and yet she is, and she cannot easily be gotten rid of.
Who she is actually is a complicated matter, but one made a bit simpler when we remember that some Dianas (and yes, there were many) were virgin goddesses of childbirth. And in Rome itself, Diana was often conflated with Selene, a goddess of the moon depicted with a crescent moon. The earliest depictions of Selene show the moon as a crown on her head, sometimes appearing as horns; later, Diana took over those roles and her bow became the crescent.
That doesn’t mean that Mary, Queen of Heaven is Diana, nor the other way around. That’s not how gods work. Unlike the static eternal one-god, they change, shift, and take on new lives just as humans and forests do.
There is an older Diana laughing behind those Christian garments, dirtier, smelling of mushrooms and boar musk, lurking about in the forests here. She’s the Diana that Regino of Prüm was so upset about.
She’s also the same one upon whose temple St. Paul’s Cathedral in London was built.
On that latter matter, here’s how Melinda Reidinger recounts its history in her upcoming book, The White Deer:
Christians later rededicated the site of the old temple to St. Paul, a fanatic who made a special priority of suppressing worship of Diana after his religious conversion. Later, the structure grew into St. Paul’s Cathedral, which was known for various relics connected with St. Helena (which offers echoes of the life-giving deer goddess known as Ilona, Elen, and variations thereof). Curiously, the lore of this cathedral has persistently reflected Dianic themes and distinctive customs associated with deer and hunting. For example, hunters would lay carcasses of deer they had killed on the cathedral stairs, and several deer-themed hunting festivals were documented. On Candlemas (February 2), on the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul (January 25), and on the feast of the Commemoration of St. Paul (June 30), deer—either bucks or does, depending on the day—would be led to the cathedral’s west door. Clergy wearing crowns of roses and robes embroidered with bucks or does to match the sacrificial victim were waiting, and the deer were killed. Huntsmen blew their horns, and the deer’s head, fixed on a pole, was solemnly taken to the high altar.
Guess what? William Mundy, the composer of Vox Patris Caelestis, wrote it while vicar chorale of St. Paul’s. In other words, the polyphonic piece which pulled me out of Christianity was written and performed upon the site of a former temple of Diana.
Not only did that song pull me out of Christianity, but it also helped me first understand there would be no lake of fire awaiting people like me. That lake is only mentioned at the very end of the New Testament, in the book of Revelations. John of Patmos, who mostly likely was not John the Evangelist and likely never actually met Jesus, consigns no small number of people to his imagined eternal torment. He’s also the only scriptural source of the woman “clothed with the sun, and the moon at her feet,” again not seen as Mary theotokos until much later.
There’s a deep sadistic delight in his consignments, one that even as a faithful Christian I noticed uncomfortably. Blood crushed from people in winepresses after being “harvested” can sound very satisfying when written about people you don’t like. Imagining everyone who doesn’t believe as you do or those who feel more free about their sexual desires into eternal sulphurous torment, whether you’re a modern incel or a bitter old prophet at the turn of the first century, can really help entrench your ressentiment.
That’s why Revelations was the book of the bible most cited at me when I decided I’d let myself desire whom I chose, not whom I was allowed to desire It's the one you'll still hear cited most by those for whom religion cannot just be a belief but must also be a bludgeon.
Yet despite the vindictive sadism of John of Patmos's words, it's hard not to smile about him. Just as the author of The Acts inadvertently enshrined Diana forever into the New Testament, John of Patmos, writing to purify the church of the pagan world and their goddesses, accidentally let one of those goddesses back in.
Ave, Regina Caelorum.
Rhyd Wildermuth
Rhyd Wildermuth is a druid, theorist, and writer living in the Ardennes. He writes at From The Forests of Arduinna and is the director of publishing for Ritona. He is the author of Being Pagan: A Guide to Re-enchant Your Life.
He is also the author of the collection The Secret of Crossings, just released from Ritona Press