A recording of Mushroom Church, a touring community art project created by Vancouver musician and biologist Tarun Nayar, who performs as Modern Biology. Its name arose when an audience member described one of his church-based concerts, featuring mushrooms connected to synthesisers, as “mushroom church”. Touring North America by 2024 and subsequently Europe, the events combine … Read moreMushroom Church
Pasaquoyanism was the religion of Eddie Owens Martin, the visionary artist better known as St. EOM. Its chief monument is Pasaquan, the seven-acre sacred environment he constructed near Buena Vista, Georgia from the mid-1950s until his death in 1986. There, brightly painted walls, temples, pagodas and monumental figures announce the presence of an imaginary civilization … Read morePasaquoyanism: Building a Religion into Being
A short philosophical video on the developing folkways – meaningful rituals, customs and mythopoetic traditions – at Sky Meadow, a nature retreat in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom mountains. The Sky Meadow folkways can be considered as the vernacular praxis of a hyper-local, naturalistic spirituality, taking the real world seriously enough to create ceremonies of storytelling, memorial … Read moreThe Sky Meadow Folkways
The two-day gathering in early November will feature presentations by doers and thinkers representing Epicureanism, spiritual naturalism, various artistic ritual practices, etc.
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