That’s cool.

I better come clean. As much of a genius as I am, I didn’t really come up with the idea for the Bacchic Orphic blood rite on my own.

Basically all I want to do is get drunk with a bunch of people in the woods and have some communal ecstatic revelry with them and the gods and spirits of the Starry Bull tradition.

But then all of these immersive polytheists started spinning these wild conspiracy theories about how we were calling ourselves devotional polytheists to brainwash people into performing some obscure Roman rite 95% of them hadn’t heard of and the rest didn’t even think of because the word has developed a completely separate meaning over the last two thousand years …

… and it all sounded like such paranoid fun that I just had to try it out myself.

And it totally was.

Being an evil cult leader is way funner than being some dude who’s trying to get people to honor a weird group of gods and spirits and write pretty things for them. (Like the communal hymns for Apollo Soranos or Melinoë – hint, hint.)

No wonder people spend so much time immersed in intarwebz drama.

Real life is boring.

Except it isn’t. Real life is kind of cool. At the Polytheist Leadership Conference I saw a bunch of strangers get together and do a spontaneous ritual to the Moon, because it was there and they were there and they didn’t have the internet to remind them of why they should hate each other. Oh, they had plenty of differences between them. Gender, sexual orientation, politics, religious methodology – you name it, they came down on different sides of it. But one of them glanced up at the sky and said, “Wow, the moon looks cool tonight.” And another said, “Hey, I’ve got some alcohol – let’s make an offering.” And before you knew it, there was a whole group of them standing there doing shit.

And that’s cool.

Even if it’s not very evil.