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...

  A Rite of Remembering A Dionysian Religious Naturalist Ritual to Accompany "Sacred Nature, Wild Grief" \ Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Designed for the CLUE Forum Approximately 30 participants Running time: 25–30 minutes Purpose and design This ritual gives embodied expression to the central argument of "Sacred Nature, Wild Grief": the environmental crisis is not only a scientific, technological, or political problem. It is also a crisis of relationship, belonging, memory, and moral imagination. Religious Naturalism has often been predominantly Apollonian—strong in cosmology, intellectual coherence, scientific understanding, and ethical reflection, but comparatively thin in ritual, ecstasy, grief, and embodiment. This rite seeks to hold those dimensions together. Its clear structure, scientific cosmology, and carefully stated boundaries form an Apollonian container for Dionysian experiences of grief, breath, sound, gratitude, solidarity, and renewed commitmen...

                                           Sacred Nature, Wild Grief Remembering Our Place in the Environmental Crisis Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. DRAFT: Prepared for potential presentation at the CLUE Forum on “ The Spiritual Roots of our Environmental Crisis Opening Prayer: We Gather Within the Living Earth Spirit of Life— the sacred creativity moving within the unfolding universe, the life of which we are made and the living community to which we belong— we gather upon the ancestral and unceded lands of the Chumash people, whose care for these mountains, creeks, islands, and coastal waters reaches back beyond memory and continues today. We honor Chumash Elders, past, present, and future, and the Wishtoyo Chumash Foundation and other Chumash-led communities protecting sacred lands and waters today. We gather where the Santa Ynez Mountains ri...