Nemo tagged me for the Sunshine thing that’s going around. I don’t normally participate in such endeavors, but I liked the questions he posted so here are my answers. Anyone who wants to participate, consider yourselves tagged. And if you have any questions of your own that you’d like to ask me, comment below. 

• • How does your Spiritual Tradition square with your daily life; do you find peace, conflict or both in integrating them?

What is this “peace” that you speak of? I have definitely never gotten that from my religion (just increasingly difficult challenges, most of which I’ve fucked up a bunch before finally getting right) nor would I wish it otherwise. What Syd Barrett says about love in Legion is pretty much how I think of peace: 

Do you know what love is? It’s a hot bath. What happens to things when you leave them in a bath for too long? Huh? They get soft; fall apart. 

But I also like her follow-up to that: 

Love isn’t gonna save us. It’s what we have to save. Pain makes us strong enough to do it. All our scars, our anger, our despair; it’s armor. Baby, God loves the sinners best because our fire burns bright, bright, bright. Burn with me.

Gods, that was a great show. 

• • Do you supplement your Tradition with auxiliary philosophies, or are you a purist?

I am both a purist, and an eclectic. I am only interested in the Dionysian. As it happens, lots and lots of people from all over the world for the last 4,000 years or so have been too, which gives me a rather large pool of philosophy to swim in. 

I am much more interested in the Friedrich Nietzsche / Georges Bataille / Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov / Jim Morrison strain of Dionysian philosophy than the ridiculous spectacle that is the Hellenic and Dionysian communities on Reddit, to be clear. One side is talking about a God, the other their paraphilias. 

• • What are your favourite foods, and do you have a weakness for any in particular?

I don’t really like food. Living with constant high levels of pain has a funny way of killing most of one’s bodily appetites. 

• • What are your clean guilty pleasures?

I don’t feel guilt. It’s the most useless and wasteful of emotions. To paraphrase Yoda, “Do, or do not. But don’t be a whiny bitch about it.”

• • If the obligations of the current economic order were no longer an order, what would you do with your life?

I would be an itinerant religious specialist. So basically what I am now, just more itinerant. 

• • What does your utopia look like?

Nothing, since it comes from the Greek οὐ (“no/not”) and τόπος (“place”) meaning “somewhere that does not exist” — however, if you change the prefix to εὖ (“good” or “well”) so you end up with eutopia meaning “the good place” it would probably be a misoxenic tribal confederacy with strong warrior and priestly classes, spread throughout present-day Montana, Wyoming and  Alberta. Basically the Blackfeet in their prime, but with Pythagoreanism mixed in.   

• • If you could spend time as an anthropological observer in a specific timeline and place, where, why and for how long?

The ancient Mediterranean in a timeline where M. Antonius does not go to war with Iran, which puts him in a better position with regard to Kleopatra, and ensures that they do not suffer defeat at the hands of that catamite Octavian. How long depends on how successful their descendants are. (Which could really go either way.) At the very least I’d be curious to see how differently they handled tensions in Judaea, and if there was, as in our timeline, a plethora of rabble-rousing messianic pretenders, which was a major factor in the lead up to the Jewish wars. Based on the greater experience Ptolemaic Egypt had in dealing with the population compared to Rome I suspect things would have turned out very differently. Herod would never have been made tetrarch/ethnarch for one, and if Jesus did start causing trouble he and his followers would probably have been exiled rather than executed, ensuring that they never grew beyond a minor Jewish sect into the creepy death cult we all know and love today. In fact, without the destruction of the Jerusalem temple we would have a very different Judaism today, a sacrificial religion rather than one of pietism and study, at least in its mainstream expression. But I don’t believe that the centrality of the Jerusalem temple or their monotheism would have lasted, meaning Judaism would probably resemble Hinduism or Zoroastrianism a lot more. This is predicated on the Egypto-Roman empire surviving for more than a couple generations however. While Kleopatra and her father and later her daughter were notable exceptions to the generally deplorable state of the dynasty by that point, in our timeline the Antonines were capable and wise rulers (for the most part) so I like to think that the grafting would have produced favorable fruit. Also note that the policies behind the political theater of Antony’s “Donations” prefigure the organizational and other reforms that our Rome would adopt a couple centuries later. Given enough time they could create a very different world than the one we currently inhabit — especially if the Mouseion and its famous Library in Alexandria was replicated throughout the empire, ensuring that there was no slide into the European Dark Ages and its barbarisms when the dynasty collapsed or was superseded, as all things must eventually be.  

• • What is your favourite clean dirty joke?

What was the name of the paraplegic in the pool of Bethesda that Jesus healed? Bob. 

• • If you had a kill-switch for “the grid” like Kurt Russel did in Escape from Wherever, would you press #666?

Oh, hell yeah. 

• • Do you believe that life would be much improved by the restoration of the Holmgang in English speaking countries?

I don’t like islands, but otherwise abso-fucking-lutely. 

• • What are your least favourite superstitions?

Modernity. Scientism. Liberalism.