Sad to learn of the recent passing of Steve Aydt, a longtime fixture, mover and shaker in the Texan counterculture scene and founder of the Eulessyinian Hot Tub Mystery Religion. I interviewed Steve on that subject in late 2024, and that interview is part of the second volume of the anthology Poetic Faiths: New Religions … Read moreIn Memoriam: Steve Aydt (1963-2026)
Excerpts from John Cowper Powys’ essay: To regard religion as mythology does not make it less important. It gives it a new and lovely glamour. It restores to it the enchantment which it possessed at the beginning when its dogmas had not yet lost their natural poetry in the laboratory of theological speculation. No cultivation … Read more“The Religion of a Sceptic” (John Cowper Powys, 1925)
In Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Egypt Game (1967), a group of children transforms a hidden yard into an improvised sacred world inspired by ancient Egypt. They invent names, costumes, gods, ceremonies, initiations, sacrifices, funerary rites and an oracle, gradually developing a shared mythology that feels consequential without requiring literal belief. As an example of cultpunk … Read moreThe Egypt Game
Coincident with the recent Metamodern Meaning Lab at Sky Meadow, Brendan Graham Dempsey interviewed [M] Dudeck and Javi Acevedo on their upcoming book Xenotheology: The Transmedial Scriptures and on the practice of creating one’s own religion as a work of art.
The inimitable M. Dudeck on This Podcast is a Ritual, discussing Xenotheology and the intimate relationships between imagination and spirituality.
I first came across this poetic essay by the controversial anarchist philosopher Peter Lamborn Wilson – more widely known as Hakim Bey, author of the TAZ theory among many other provocative ideas – sometime in the early ’90s. I lost track of it over the years and only recently rediscovered the text, which (faint bell) … Read more“The Runaway Child”
The Cordite Poetry Review offers 13 collage artworks by Australian artist Deborah Kelly, in connection with her queer insurrectionary science fiction climate change religion known as CREATION: “The religion proceeds from a text I commissioned from artist SJ Norman called the Liturgy of the Saprophyte, and some of these artworks were made as part of calling-into-being … Read more“13 Artworks by Deborah Kelly”
Colin Campbell, the founder of Aretéanism, is interviewed on the whys and wherefores of starting one’s own, nontheistic religion.