The Dionysian Naturalist

The Dionysian Naturalist:  Studies in Religious Naturalism and Other Emerging Nature Religions An Annotated Bibliography  of Eco-Theological Writings Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Santa Barbara February 2026 Introduction to the Theological Writings Dionysian Naturalism did not begin as an abstract theological project. It began as a lived search. In 1981, I arrived in San Francisco. Northern California at that time was not merely a geographic region; it was a spiritual laboratory. The countercultural energies of the 1960s and 1970s had not vanished — they had metabolized. The Bay Area was a crossroads of feminist witchcraft, radical faerie gatherings, neo-pagan ritual, Zen centers, queer liberation, eco-activism, depth psychology, and an ongoing, often underground, exploration of psychedelic and entheogenic consciousness. I encountered the work of Starhawk and the Reclaiming tradition, where ritual was political and spirituality was inseparable from ecological resistance. I wit...