The Dionysian Naturalist

  The Window and the Hall:  Brendan Cathbad Myers, 1974–2026 Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Brendan Cathbad Myers begins The Mysteries of Druidry with a boy walking alone down a dangerous road. His name is Setanta. He has left his mother's farm and is traveling toward Emain Macha, intending to join the Boy's Troop of the Red Branch Knights. For three days a crow follows him. Then, one morning, he awakens to find a strange woman standing over him: tall, red-haired, wrapped in a dark green cloak adorned with black feathers, carrying a shield and spear. She is the Morrigan, the great queen, and she has come to offer him a choice. Setanta can have a long life. He can have a home, a wife, children who love him, and an old age surrounded by those he loves. Or he can choose another kind of life: adventure, passion, danger, and greatness. If he chooses that life, poets and storytellers will remember his name long after he is gone. But he will die young. Setanta chooses. Myers calls t...

  Form and Fire:  Starhawk's Dionysian Naturalism Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Starhawk does not call herself a Dionysian Naturalist. I do. The designation is genealogical and analytical, not an attributed self-identification—the same move Corrington makes when he builds an ecstatic-naturalist lineage out of thinkers who never used his vocabulary for themselves. I call Starhawk a Dionysian Naturalist not because she offers a systematic naturalistic metaphysics—she does not—but because five decades of her work locate sacredness within the immanent, embodied world and develop practices through which that sacredness can be encountered: ritual, magic, eroticism, ecological attention, collective action, permaculture, song, dance, and the cultivation of altered consciousness. Yet Starhawk is not simply an opponent of Apollonian form. Her achievement lies in repeatedly making form serve vitality: ritual contains ecstasy, permaculture designs with wildness, organization enables coll...