Essay Series

As a paid subscriber, you will receive access to ongoing essay series that weave together mythology, ancient history, poetry, and lived experience. Each series follows a theme—whether exploring the world’s great mystics, tracing the lineage of sacred poetics, or re-imagining ancient tellings of more popular myths—and is written to both illuminate forgotten traditions and spark the imagination. These essays are at the heart of my work on Substack: sustained journeys into ideas and stories that unfold over time, offering depth, beauty, and weekly companionship for your own path.

Encounters with the Deep Past

·
April 14, 2024
Encounters with the Deep Past

An archive and resource for exploring the origins of religious experience, the animistic cosmologies of our earliest ancestors, academic evidence of prehistoric ritual, alternative ways of knowing beyond academia, and what some call the world’s oldest religion: animism.


Poetic Disobedience: On the Great Mystics Who Set the World on Fire

Poetic Disobedience: On the Great Mystics Who Set the World on Fire

This one is on the world’s great mystics who defied the dogmatisms of their time and preached for a direct, personal experience of divinity: a poetic disobedience.


On Ritual

·
August 25, 2024
On Ritual

Genuine ritual has the power to maintain the world’s holiness.


The Lost Language of Imagination

·
February 12, 2023
The Lost Language of Imagination

This essay series tracks imagination through human history, from the cave paintings of the Palaeolithic, into the poetics of Islamic mysticism, the shamanistic nature of the British Romantic era, and the poetry of Spanish Surrealism.