Digital book sale
It’s almost the seventh year anniversary of our first publication! To celebrate, we’ve reduced the price on all digital editions of our books, and we are also offering the digital version of A Pagan Anti-Capitalist Primer and another book, All That Is Sacred is Profaned, for free!
ALL digital books are now on sale until 1 August, 2022.
Save between 33% and 50% on every digital (pdf) title. No discount code required.
To order, add the books you would like to your cart. To check out, go to the cart icon at the top left on desktop versions of the site or at the bottom of the pull-down menu on mobile browsers.
Tip: to find out more about each book, click the order form link.
To get A Pagan Anti-Capitalist Primer and All That Is Sacred Is Profaned for free, add those to your cart before check-out. No other purchase is necessary.
Latest Releases
Courting The Wild Queen
(This is for the digital edition. For the print edition, see this link)
RITONA Press is thrilled to announce the upcoming release of Courting The Wild Queen, by poet, herbalist, and mystic Seán Pádraig O'Donoghue.
“Just as a god might be the mind that arises from a forest, a river, a planet or a cluster of galaxies, so too each person’s consciousness is a collective consciousness born of the matter and energy that make up our beings.”
Courting The Wild Queen is a deeply poetic exploration of the ancient and modern world through the mythic and the ecological. Mycelium networks spreading their tangled threads of meaning beneath the forest floor reveal to the reader our own tapestries of meaning, while the ancient lore of Irish Kings and Queens of Land unveil the lost—but recoverable—centres of human existence.
Being Pagan, by Rhyd Wildermuth
A Guide to Re-Enchant Your Life
(This is for the digital edition. For the print edition, see this link.)
“To be pagan is to be connected to the land in a way that stands outside of—and often in opposition to—the concerns of the urban and of Empire. Even though the official histories of humanity always focus on them, empires and the cities they form are mere temporary interruptions to a more organic and mostly unwritten history of human life.
It is a history of relationship to land, of connection to it, of life lived in relative harmony with the nature of which humans are but one small part. It is not just a history, however, but a still-living reality for much of the world, and one we can still connect to and become part of.”
In a world of uncertainty, political upheaval, climate change, and endless consumerism, in alienated societies bereft of meaning and connection to nature or community, what does it mean to be Pagan?
From druid, theorist, and writer Rhyd Wildermuth comes Being Pagan, a guide to re-enchant your world. Exploring the meaning of pagan connection—to time, to land, to body, to nature, and to Other—through history, personal experiences, and myth, Wildermuth offers simple yet profound guidance for anyone searching for a deeper way to live.
The Book of Onei, by Christopher Scott Thompson
(This is for the digital edition. For the print edition, see this link)
An Antinomian Dream Grimoire
“The Book of Onei is not The Book,” my father once said. I remember him still, walking beside me on that sunless beach—but was it before he had died, or after? “The Book of Onei is only a guide, a book of riddles that don’t always lead to any answers, a book of truths within lies. I have been to Onei many times, but I have never been to any of the cities or nations mentioned in the Book of Onei, nor have I seen their ruins, nor met their citizens. As far as I can tell they do not exist, and most likely they never existed—not even in Onei.”
“Then what is the Book of Onei?” I asked him. “Is it just a fraud?”
“The Book of Onei is both a key and a lock,” he said. His face was haunted, as if he always listened and always waited—perhaps for a footfall. “Those stories mean something, but I do not know what. The Book of Onei hints at something, but I am afraid to ask.”
From Christopher Scott Thompson (author of Pagan Anarchism and If In Ruins We Must Live) comes The Book of Onei, an antinomian dream grimoire.
The Book of Onei is a rare work of myth that is simultaneously fantasy and a ritual guide to your own dreaming.
If In Ruins We Must Live, by Christopher Scott Thompson
Poems
(This is for the digital edition. For the print edition, see this link.)
Sorcerers of coal and oil,
We invoked, they came.
Never mind the prayers and praises,
Last-ditch rages, guilt and blame.
Gods as deaf as us have gathered:
Storm and flame and wind.
Now the gates of Ys are opened.
Now the ocean rushes in.
From Christopher Scott Thompson (author of Pagan Anarchism) comes a collection of mystic poetry for the punk, the rebel, the witch, and the dreamer.
In his poetic works, myth-soaked urban alleys lead to ancient ritual sites of awakening gods, while the spirits of fallen rebels whisper their secrets into the dwellers of post-apocalyptic landscapes.
Reclaiming Food, by Emma Kathryn
Core recipes and Cooking Skills for Reclaiming Your Food Security
(This is for the digital edition. For the print edition, see this link)
From Emma Kathryn (author of Reclaiming Ourselves and instructor of Becoming Wild—The Tools of Resistance) comes a uniquely useful and simple guide to something many of us have forgotten we can do for ourselves: cooking.
In her much-loved straightforward and playful manner, Emma Kathryn explains the basics of cooking and pantry management, and offers scores of recipes that can be modified and expanded to create countless other dishes, all with the goal of helping the reader become more independent from commercial food production, more secure in their food budgets, and more grounded in their relationship with nature and the earth.
Baedd & Other Poems, by Twm Gwynne
This is the digital version. For the print edition, see this link.
“From here, I can taste the falling waters
In the air.”
Gods&Radicals Press is thrilled to offer Baedd & Other Poems, our first poetry chapbook through our mystic and esoteric imprint, Ritona.
From poet and writer Twm Gwynne (published in A Beautiful Resistance) comes a short collection of profound poetry inspired by raw life, deep nature, and the spirit in all things.
“Twm’s subtle grasp of the profound power in simple words manifests in poems that startle and linger long after you’ve read them.”
—Rhyd Wildermuth
Most Popular Titles
Five Principles of Green Witchcraft
(This is for the digital edition. For the print edition, see this link)
Gods&Radicals Press is thrilled to re-publish Asa West’s popular booklet, Five Principles of Green Witchcraft.
In an era of climate change and late capitalism, when everything sacred is paved over or commodified, how do you attune yourself to the rhythms of nature? How do you listen for—and hear—the language of the land on which you live? How do you push your magical practice beyond rote rituals into true communion with the spirits around you?
This short book explores green witchcraft through the lens of five principles:
1. The Forest Speaks with One Voice (unity)
2. Twilight Precedes Starlight (liminality)
3. Witchcraft Lives in the Body (embodiment)
4. The Witch Always Pays Her Coin (reciprocity)
5. The Goddess Reveals Herself in Silence (silence)
Originally published as a wildly popular and sold-out zine, Gods&Radicals Press now offers Five Principles of Green Witchcraft by special arrangement with the author.
Pagan Anarchism
(This is for the digital edition. For the print edition, see this link)
Our newest offering by poet, anarchist, and Pagan Christopher Scott Thompson, Pagan Anarchism explores the history of anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist movements and discovers alongside them a fierce Pagan rebellion against the State.
Witchpunks, rebels, magicians, and revolutionaries will find this book both a compelling history and an inspiring manifesto.
Solidarity Networks & Emergency Survival
A Practical Guide For Surviving The Collapse Of Empire With Others
Digital edition. For print edition, go here.
54 pages, 4in x 6in
Gods&Radicals Press is pleased to offer two of our most-viewed practical essays, updated and expanded in print form.
Solidarity Networks (viewed over 20,000 times online) presents a concrete guide for organizing with others for mutual solidarity and safety. What Solidarity Networks are, what they are not, and step-by-step instructions on how to form one with your friends are all explained in clear language.
Emergency Survival (read over 15,000 times online) is an expanded and updated guide written by an emergency service planner and instructor with 15 years experience, lays out in plain language the basic skills needed for preparing for crisis situations.
Unlike many guides for survival, however, both essays together focus not on individualism but on mutual aid and solidarity. Rather than the loner apocalyptic fantasies mass media feeds us, these comprise “A Practical Guide For Surviving The Collapse of Empire With Others.”
Witches in a Crumbling Empire
(This is for the digital edition. For the print edition, see this link)
“The Empire under which we all suffer, under which we are all ruled, was born upon the factory floor and upon the witch’s stake. But in the char of those burnings and the soot from those smokestacks we can see its impending death…”
Beauty stolen in a tavern of a Scottish port. A dead Cathar’s caress as a man waits for bootsteps that will drag him away. Rain-drenched grief over iron bridges. Plastic fairies littering an ancient stone circle. Sex amongst bones and the howls of the Hunter.
A new collection of essays, mystic prose, and poems from Gods&Radicals co-founder Rhyd Wildermuth, including the expanded and previously un-released text of his speech, “Witches In a Crumbling Empire.”
Witches In A Crumbling Empire weaves together love, resistance, and magic into a ritual not to hold up the pillars of Empire as they fall, but to dance as they collapse.
True To The Earth
Reclaiming Ourselves
This is the digital version. For the print version, go here.
In this time of economic, social, and environmental collapse, we cannot rely on governments or leaders to guide us through the chaos. Yet this is no reason for despair, because these crises open old doors we thought rusted shut and old paths we thought too overgrown to ever find again.
Reclaiming Ourselves is a guide to those paths and a key to those doors.
With her clear and welcoming writing, Emma Kathryn presents an accessible and insightful map to rediscovering what we have always been capable of: reclaiming our relationship to ourselves, to our bodies, to the land around us, to healing, to food, to community, and to spirituality. Easily adaptable for any circumstance, her practical advice and tips on becoming more secure in this difficult world and her discussions of the struggles many of us face in reconnecting to ourselves feel like the words of a kind friend reminding us we will be okay.
Reclaiming Ourselves, by Emma Kathryn, is an ideal book for everyone seeking strength and connection to not only survive but thrive and be a light for others in these dark times.
Specifications: 130 pages, 5.25x8, B&W interior
All That Is Sacred Is Profaned (free!)
This is the DIGITAL edition. For the PRINT EDITION, go here.
132 pages
How does capitalism work (and why isn’t it working)? How do the rich use race and gender strife to divide and control the poor? What was life like before Capitalism, and what might it be like after? And what’s the relationship between Marx’s ideas about alienation and the Pagan desire to re-enchant the world?
All That Is Sacred Is Profaned is the text from Rhyd Wildermuth’s popular introductory course on Marxism, now available in print. Written for those without privileged academic experience and those too busy trying to survive to read economic theory, this book uses real-world examples to explain how capitalism operates, why it came about, and how it might be stopped.
All That Is Sacred Is Profaned isn’t just an economic or political text. Instead, Pagan and druid Rhyd Wildermuth teases out the intersections between Marx’s ideas and the core worldviews of animism and Paganism: the magical transformation of the world through labor, the inspirited nature of the things we humans create and trade, and the sacred aspects of the world crushed beneath the demands of profit.
All That Is Sacred Is Profaned in arranged in five sections:
Chapter One: What Capitalism is (and isn’t), and how it has come to control the way we see the world and each other
Chapter Two: How Capitalism works (and doesn’t), and why owners are always at odds with the people who work for them.
Chapter Three: Why Capitalism replaced feudalism and other forms of society, and how our modern image of the past is shaped by capitalism, not by history.
Chapter Four: How Colonialism and Slavery relate to Capitalism, and how racism and sexism developed as management strategies to keep the poor divided
Chapter Five: Why Capitalism cannot continue forever, how its internal contradictions are destroying nature and humanity, and how we might use Marx’s ideas to survive our current crises.
In addition, All That Is Sacred Is Profaned includes study questions, a glossary, and additional material for those who wish to learn more.
In The Midnight Hour
This is the digital edition. For the print edition, see here.
“A story like “I don’t matter” seems persuasive when it’s ricocheting off the interior of our skulls but makes no sense from the outside.
The truth is, we matter. Our bodies are literally matter. Once we exist, our very existence is an influence upon the world. Having a body means I take up space, I consume resources that could go to others, I am participating in life and culture and relationships. If I am in a room, someone sees me, and my presence impacts them in a certain way. There is no opting out."
From writer, witch, and licensed therapist Anthony Rella comes a collection of short essays on emotions, boundaries, disappointment, guilt, hope, shame, intimacy, and connection. Written with the warm voice of a caring and patient friend, these essays help guide the reader to their own center where they can find power, balance, and joy not despite difficult moments and emotions, but because of them.
Specifications
4 x 6 (“pocket”), 95 b&w pages
Other Titles on Paganism & Witchcraft
GODS-SPEAKING
(This is for the digital edition. For the print edition, see this link)
“Their world lies behind ours like a bright shadow of reality: the shadow does not reflect what 'we have built (or destroyed), but what could be.”
What’s it like to speak to a god? Or more importantly, how do you know you’re actually speaking to one and not a voice you made up in your head? Why try to speak to gods at all? And what do we actually do about what they’re saying?
With earthly prose and her often hilarious wit, Druid and writer Judith O’Grady offers answers to these questions, along with deeply profound insight into the implications of modern animism in an overly-industrialized (and dying) world. Greatly expanding upon her earlier work (God-Speaking), Judith recounts her own experiences and rituals—from cleaning trash along river-banks to awakening sleeping spirits in abandoned urban places. Gods-Speaking narrates a world full of meaning in a time where we’ve forgotten humans are not the only beings with something to say.
“If you’ve ever just wanted to know how to talk to gods and change the world, and you’d rather learn how to do it from a kind elderly Druid woman (rather than some dense and overwrought esotericist who’s like 25 years old and can’t tell the difference between a Birch and an Alder), I think this book will mean as much to you as it meant to me.”
-Rhyd Wildermuth, from the Foreword.
The Dead Hermes Epistolary
(This is for the digital edition. For the print edition, see this link)
“This is the necromantic power of love, revealed to us at last by Dead Hermes. And by raising the ghosts of the past we are given visions of the future…”
In the nine missives which comprise The Dead Hermes Epistolary, trickster poet Slippery Elm leads the reader away from the pale world of dying meaning into the ever-living dream world of our forgotten past.
Whispers of wet forests, conspiracies of witches and indigenous elders, the erotic lyric of the troubadours, the arguments of Sephardic poets, Arabic mystic texts on agriculture, perfumed Andalusian gardens where kings bow before the power of beauty, the dead dancing with the living at a wedding: all these are the ghosts Slippery Elm summons to lead us towards the transgressive and liberating magic of Hermes Chthonios.
The Dead Hermes Epistolary is a work of deep poetic beauty and an act of soul retrieval for the revolutionary spirit, lost as it’s become in the pale half-light of the internet and Empire’s relentless war against meaning. Slippery Elm deftly awakens the knowledge hidden in places we’ve forgotten to look, all the while awakening in the reader the deep power of words and the deeper magic of radical friendship.
Circling the Star
(This is the digital edition. For the print edition, see this link)
With your freedom, what would you make of this world?
Circling the Star is a practical journey into the esoteric wisdom of the Iron Pentacle for activists, witches, rebels, and mystics seeking a deeper understanding of themselves and of the world they wish to transform.
Circling the Star offers the seeker a spiritual philosophy which will empower their resistance to capital and Empire. Weaving together psychology, Egyptian polytheism, queer and occult theory, Kabbalah, intersectional feminism, and Feri witchcraft, witch and therapist Anthony Rella offers us a powerful manual for personal and political liberation.
Those already familiar with the workings of the Iron Pentacle but seeking a more engaged witchcraft will find Circling the Star invaluable. Those new to these workings will find Circling the Star an ideal introduction. And the many of us wary of mass-market glossy ‘magic’ texts and white-light spiritual bypassing will find Circling the Star an exhilarating glimpse of what engaged, radical witchcraft can be again.
All digital books are available for immediate download after purchase. This edition is a pdf, which preserves all the original formatting of the print edition.
Enchanting the Shadowlands
This is the digital (pdf) edition. For all other editions, see this link.
Few of her poems do what you think they’ll do; none of the paths she leads you down go where you expect, and each time you’re left a little breathless, a little surprised at yourself, and looking around for the guide you thought you were following." (From Rhyd Wildermuth's review)
Gods&Radicals Press, through our new poetry and mystic imprint Ritona, is pleased to release a new edition of Lorna Smithers' first collection of poetic works, Enchanting The Shadowlands. Poems and short stories gathered from the local landscape in response to an imperative from Gwyn ap Nudd, Enchanting The Shadowlands does precisely what its title suggests.
Originally released in 2015, this edition features updated layout and cover design, as well as an introduction from Rhyd Wildermuth.
The Broken Cauldron
This is the digital (pdf) version. For all other versions, see this link.
“What lies in the cauldron now you have done away with the knowledge of wise women? Split the witches in half? Killed the giants? Driven to the seas the most ancient of boars? You are on the wrong quest, looking for the wrong grail, the cure-all that does not exist.”
Gods&Radicals is pleased to re-release the print edition of Lorna Smithers’ second collection of mystical and mythic poetry and prose, The Broken Cauldron.
At the centre of ancient British mythology stands the cauldron; a symbol of inspiration, wisdom, rebirth, the womb of Ceridwen, Old Mother Universe. What happens when it lies shattered, the universe fragmented, the world out of kilter?
The Gatherer of Souls
This is the digital (pdf) edition. For the print edition, see this link.
Gods&Radicals Press is thrilled to announce that we are re-releasing Gatherer of Souls, by Lorna Smithers. Originally printed in 2018 and out of print, this collection of prose and poems by awenydd Lorna Smithers lures the reader into the mist-veiled forests of time to meet Gwyn Ap Nudd.
'“Chasing the chaser into his myths, hunting with the hunter into the place from which dreams and reality are both born, Lorna leads the reader into the wet caverns below the coal mines, across the ice fields long-since melted into sea, into a time long before witch-blood and wolf-blood could ever be stolen to build Empire.
As with her other books (Enchanting the Shadowlands and The Broken Cauldron), Gatherer of Souls seems at first to be an innocuous collection of prose and poems. Part of Lorna’s particular magic (and her path as an awenydd), however, is to lull the reader into a serene sense of wonder and familiarity before moving the earth beneath their feet. Like walking through a forest shrouded in mist, her narrative voice feels safe, close, quiet, but veils from your sight until it is time the unearthly truths she wants to show you.”
—Rhyd Wildermuth
Your Face is a Forest
This is the digital edition. For the print edition, go here.
The tea-soaked and rain-drenched musings of a nomadic punk bard. Encounters with the gods, the dead, and the spirits of forest and stream. Musings for the dreaming rebel in the leaf-strewn tavern, the urban poet following the course of buried rivers beneath her feet, and all those who await the return of the gods and the uprising of the trees.
This is the second edition of Your Face Is a Forest, now published by Gods&Radicals Press
A Kindness of Ravens
This is the digital edition. For the print edition, go here.
A dead bard on a desolate hill, giants on a cliff-edge, a heroin-addict in a dumpster, blood-soaked shattered glass on a window-ledge, and midwinter sunlight streaming through the tomb of Newgrange...
A Kindness of Ravens is a collection of forest-edged words arrayed against the theft of meaning and the death of dreams. Find within essay on civilisation and its end, poems on gods & love, and journals from an unlikely pilgrimage each haunted by the songs of the Singers in the Darkness and the rage of the Raven King.
This is the second edition, now published by Gods&Radicals Press
THE PROVISIONER
This is the digital version. For the print version, go here.
Garen is a Provisioner, gifted and cursed with unbidden visions of the future and unconscious moments of sordid lust. He is trained and devoted to use his ability to help those in need, but when an empire on the verge of war enlists him to provision a group of brutal killers hunting the last surviving wolf, he must decide whether to follow the inscrutable plots of the goddess of foresight or embrace his own buried desire.
The Provisioner is a work of erotic fantasy, of bodily liberation, and of deep magic.
Specifications:
158 pages, 8 x 5.25, pdf format (kindle version available here)
Release date: 1 May, 2021
Books and Journals on Anti-Capitalism
We Live In the Orbit of Beings Greater Than Us
A Beautiful Resistance: Everything We Already Are
A Beautiful Resistance: The Fire is Here
A Beautiful Resistance: Left Sacred
A Beautiful Resistance: The Crossing
A Beautiful Resistance: After Empire
This is the digital edition
`GODS&RADICALS PRESS IS THRILLED TO ANNOUNCE AFTER EMPIRE, THE FIFTH ISSUE OF OUR PRINT JOURNAL, A BEAUTIFUL RESISTANCE.
A Beautiful Resistance: After Empire explores the truths we are all beginning to understand, the whispers on the plague winds, the portents in the polluted sky, the omens in the failing harvests and the chthonic call in the rising seas. Everywhere we look we see it: Empire is ending.
But no Empire ends politely nor quietly, nor do the torturous forms of their control merely disappear with them. Centuries of oppression, of discipline, of the shaping of our thoughts and dreams will not merely go away when the Capitols and Capital no longer exert their mythic power over our lives.
A Beautiful Resistance: After Empire is a ritual work of re-imagining, a revel and a parade back into the wilds of our own dreaming, our own symbols, our own forms of connection and community decoupled and divorced from what Empire has made of us.
A Beautiful Resistance: After Empire is edited by Rhyd Wildermuth with the brilliant design work of Casandra Johns and features the literary, poetic, fictive, and graphic work of 27 artists and writers, including:
CHRISTOPHER SCOTT THOMPSON · MIRNA WABI-SABI · EMMA KATHRYN ·PETER GREY · RUNE KJÆR RASMUSSEN · TWM GWYNNE · ULRICH GEHMANN · V. CROWE · SHANE BURLEY · KATHLEEN YEARWOOD · FRANK SEEBURGER · TAHLIA PALMER · SONALI ROY · PETER MARK ADAMS · FINNCHUILL · JANE SKJOLDLI · MADDY HAG · ALLYSON SHAW · LIA VÉ · MASON PARKER · AYLING ZULEMA DOMINGUEZ · LAURA WELSMAN · SLIPPERY ELM · LAURIE RAE DIETRICH · MEL HILL · BEA XU ·Z. SAGER · RHYD WILDERMUTH · DOMINIK RINNHOFER
Of Monsters and Miso, by Alley Valkyrie
This is the Digital version. For the Print editions, see this link.
“The old world is dying, a new world struggles to be born. This is the time of monsters…”
Antonio Gramsci
Is it a bilingual book of delicious miso sauce recipes?
Or a gallery of monsters wielding political slogans?
Is it in English?
Ou en français?
Why not both????
From print and textile artist Alley Valkyrie comes our latest book, Of Monsters and Miso. 12 recipes for amazing sauces and dressings with miso, accompanied by 12 adorable monsters with great politics.
This is the digital version, which contains two pdfs: one in English, one in French
A Pagan Anti-Capitalist Primer (Free!)
This is the Digital edition. For the print edition, see this link.
The zine that started a movement…
Gods&Radicals was started after Alley Valkyrie & Rhyd Wildermuth gave a presentation about Capitalism and Paganism at a conference. The room was packed, people spilled outside, and both Alley and Rhyd found themselves sitting on a counter ledge so more people could fit.
A Pagan Anti-Capitalist Primer is the zine they handed out, and Gods&Radicals now offers an expanded version. The digital version is free. For the print version, see this link.
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