A good start

Written by thehouseofvines

I woke up this morning to very good news. One of the folks I had in mind with my confessions of a gadfly post can now be scratched off the list. If you knew even a fraction of the damage that Theanos Thrax had done to both individuals and groups within the polytheist movement you would understand why his death is something that our household is celebrating. (Especially since most of his victims were vulnerable women who fell for his “male feminist” and “female empowerment” shtick, which he used to sexually, financially and otherwise abuse them.) The rest of y’all on that list better make amends while you can. Just saying.  

18 thoughts on “A good start”

    1. I like that take.

      The pragmatist in me, however, says that if you improperly house 60+ snakes in a ramshackle property tragedy of one sort or another is pretty much inevitable.

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  2. I had very little interaction with the man. What little that I did, and what I read, I didn’t have a positive impression. His death is neither here nor there for me. I’ve long been withdrawn from most of the pagan community and do my thing mostly alone, and as far as I can tell he had no direct impact on me. *shrug*

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  3. I had two intense interactions on Facebook. One on when I mentioned that according to the dictionary, the word inclusivity does mean everyone including Nazis. He redefined the word to exclude Nazis and said the dictionary was wrong. Second, when I posted to my wall a study on ADD/ADHD brains. He blasted me for insulting him, saying how smart he was, and how his brain wasn’t damaged. Then he insisted that I did not know diddlysquat about anything. In other words, he was the smartest person in the room.

    One thing though, I have spent my adult life working with PhDs. and other very smart people high in the Federal Government like Chairman Greenspan and Chairman Volcker of the Fed. I realized that I was dealing with someone who is used to being one up on people by virtue of his intelligence. Thing was that I was as one of my co-workers put it, “Wicked Smart, scary smart.” So, I cut ties with him.

    That was when I realized that the Neo-Pagan universe was full of grifters using their knowledge to gain control over ordinary people. I also realized that my experience as an adult was unusual since the people I knew were knowledgeable beyond most people. I am not bragging. I just assumed that everyone was smart, and we were all equal.

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    1. I congratulate you on your discernment, neptunesdolphins. My years in the science fiction community taught me automatically to be suspicious of people who brag about their intelligence. It always meant a brittle ego, a monologuer in love with his or her own voice, and a bitter nurser of grievances from high school.

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      1. Agreed, Sister Crow and well said Neptunesdolphins. I’ve known a lot of really smart people over the years (in fact I’m married to one!) and one of the things I’ve noticed is they don’t go around telling people how smart they are. They just buckle down and get shit done.

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    2. Neptunes dolphins, he tried that shit with me as well. He once told me he saw no indication that I was smart and questioned the spiritual work I was doing – wondering if it was really spirit work; and when I turned and confronted him backed the fuck up really fast taking his comments back and telling me I misunderstood. It was one of the few times he shut his fucking mouth and stepped back. He was constantly bloviating about his IQ. Ok. But dude, what have you done with it? (and no, he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was. I too work with PhDs and I’m reasonably intelligent and know what I know and what I don’t). Smart people aren’t always saying how smart they are. It doesn’t matter. What matters is results.

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      1. H e was consistently trying to undercut female spirit workers this way, sometimes right in the middle of work we were doing (I have no problem telling someone to fuck off so it was a continual frustration to him, I suspect that his gaslighting never worked on me — but I had 30 years of bs from heathenry to train me to ignore assholes). He also once told me, in the middle of a working that I was doing along with a friend — and this was early on when we didn’t yet realize how rancid he was and had asked him tow and the space (one less thing for me to deal with if I’m doing intense work with someone), told me afterwards that he had been resisting putting a knife in my back the entire time. Verbatim. and maybe it was spiritual attack, but maybe ordered space of spirit work brings forth truth.

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        2. I noticed that too. For all his talk about being a male feminist and advocate for female empowerment his treatment of women (and what he would say about them in private) vastly differed from that of his male colleagues. I think a lot of the time he undercut them so that he could rush in and play the white knight. I hate everybody equally. I’m more interested in what’s between your ears than what’s between your legs.

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          1. well, “male feminist” tends to be synonymous with “complete misogynistic douche often hoping to get laid from the prettier girls” in my book…which definitely as his MO with younger women. I trust ‘male feminists” about as far as I can throw them and would never use the term “feminist” for myself. I’m tribal by nature; it’s moot.

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            1. Bingo. For me the questions that matter are what have you done for your divinities? What have you done for your people? Or even just what have you done period? Everything else is incidental.

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  4. One last comment. This brings up a pet peeve of mine. (I have many.) Neo-Pagans who lord their knowledge over others and act smarter than the rest of us. I have tangled with quite a few of them and ending up blowing them away. I guess one of my attributes is to sniff out these folks and blast them in a knowledge duel. I have done this with witnesses. Anyway, I did not with Thax since it was useless as he would twist and slip away.

    I guess he brought out the grumpy parts of me. It is that he seemed to be the typical Neo-Pagan who knows enough to be dangerous. (A Little Knowledge is a dangerous thing.) I can think of others who are public, but I don’t really engage with them. I figure if I blog away, and just keep at it, I provide another speck of knowledge.

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    2. That could be his epitaph right there.

      I accepted a long, long time ago that I am not a smart man, so I am constantly impressed by the intelligence and creativity in the neopagan and polytheist communities. (I wish there were better organizational skills, but hey, everything’s a trade off.) I also don’t get why it’s a competition. I consider these things to be gifts from the Gods and they are so incredibly generous. It’s not like it’s a finite resource we have to squabble over. I suspect the attitude you’re discussing comes from a deeply seeded insecurity, and that’s just sad because I haven’t met a single person who didn’t have something of value to contribute.

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