Announcing Mythopoiesis: A Journal of Poetry and Radical Thought

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain . . .

At my back I always hear

Time’s winged chariot, hurrying near.

I edited and published four issues of a journal by that name (to be accurate, the first two issues were called The Catholic Socialist Review) back in the mid-1980s, using the primitive technology of paper and the US mail. There was no way it could have been self-sustaining. Now, the world is changed, changed utterly / A terrible beauty is born. True in so many ways.

I have always hoped, as all writers always have, of being able to support my family solely by my writing. Perhaps now, thanks to the new technologies that have transmogrified the world, such a hope might become a reality. I hope that Mythopoiesis might accomplish that.

I invite you to subscribe, using the services of Patreon (you sign up as a member, then go to my profile). The journal will be a vehicle for my own poetry, because the Muse has begun visiting me far more often than She had for years, but also for that of subscribers. It will also include progress reports about my writing, essays about social issues, and whatever else I feel like putting in it.

I think there may be many mute, inglorious Miltons in the world. How many people in America write poems? At least a million, maybe ten million, maybe more. That would certainly be a vast pool of both writers and readers of poetry. Obviously I cannot promise to include every submitted poem. I will need to be selective, since inclusion will mean, of course, is that I liked the poem and think others will like it too. I do have rather high standards, having studied with some amazing poets while getting my MA in Poetry at San Francisco State, but I am also eclectic. I have no arbitrary rules about what makes a poem good.

I propose that for a subscription of $10.00 a month:

• you will receive the journal monthly (maybe sometimes more often)
• you can submit poems and prose pieces (that’s the Radical Thought aspect) to be considered for inclusion.
• after each year of publication, I will gather up its best poems, using my Hierophant Wordsmith Press imprint, as (for example) The Mythopoiesis Anthology for 2016.
• you will receive the anthology as part of your subscription
• you will receive a royalty for each poem of yours in the anthology.

As a hypothetical scenario, suppose there were about a hundred poets in the anthology, each with family and friends who would, of course, buy copies, perhaps ten per poet. That’s 1000 copies, priced at, say, $20.00, producing a cash flow of $20,000. If I distribute half of that as royalties, you would receive about $100 for each poem in the anthology, thus offsetting the cost of your subscription. (What a concept: getting paid for writing a poem!) In addition, if we earn a reputation for providing good poetry, there could be significant public sales of the anthology to people who like to read poetry, even if they don’t try writing poems themselves.

Next, I propose that for a subscription of $20 a month:

• you will also become a member of the Mythopoiesis Book Club.
• You will receive one of my books about every three months for most of the next five years, or as soon as each is published (I’ll describe my books further down).

Next, for a subscription of $30 a month,

• I will autograph each copy of my own books that I send to you.
• I will gather up each year’s prose pieces from the journal (including some of mine) and publish them as The Mythopoiesis Reader for 2016 (or whichever year it is).
• You will, of course, receive your copy of it to show to family and friends.
• You will receive a royalty for each piece of yours that is included. (The cash flow calculations would be like those for the poetry anthology, but, various factors being vaguer, I cannot guess at numbers.)

Finally, for a subscription of $50 a month,

• You will receive a hardbound, limited-edition copy of each of my books as your subscription; each will be numbered and autographed.
• You will also receive a copy of each book by any other author that I publish.

My motivation for undertaking this project is, in addition to providing for my family, to be able to write and publish the ten books I have in various stages of completion or planning.

I am 74. I’m in pretty good health, and members of my family tend to pass on in their late eighties. But obviously, I can’t count on that. On my current schedule of teaching, tutoring, and contract writing and editing, I have only about one day a week to devote to writing. (As most writers know, an hour or two here and there is not enough to allow the Muse to manifest.) At that rate, it would take me about ten years to complete all ten books—and I may not have that much time left. Having another day or two strictly for writing will cut that time in half. Your subscription will be of far more than monetary significance—if you value my writing.

The extant books

The most recent is A Tapestry of Witches: A History of the Craft in America, Vol. I, To the Mid-1970s. In it, along with my Inventing Witchcraft: A Case Study in the Creation of a New Religion (published by my friend Tom Clarke in England), I trace the foundation, evolution, and flourishing of the Wiccan/Pagan movement, the fastest-growing religious movement of modern times. I seem to be the only person who both can write and saved the primary materials. Its primary importance is that it casts much light on how new religions in general are created.

A related book is my Hippie Commie Beatnik Witches: A Social History of the New Reformed Orthodox Order of the Golden Dawn. It tells the story of how many friends and I started growing the NROOGD in 1967 and created the Covenant of the Goddess in 1975 as the first national church for Witches. There are stories by about a dozen other NROOGDies in it, and it contains both our basic Sabbat script and the script for the Eleusinian commemoration still being used (occasionally) for the Mabon Sabbat; it is somewhat an oratorio with dancing. In a new edition, given the wonderful software available from MuseScore, I plan to include the music for it.

Goddess Murder: A Tale of Love, Witches, and Gnostics, being anovel, enables speculative explorations that go way beyond the acceptable boundaries of scholarship, yet may provide useful, testable hypotheses. In it I propose that perhaps some hereditary Witches might be the spiritual descendants of the original Nazarenes who preserved the enlightened Gnostic teachings of a certain Rabbi and his wife, the thoroughly underappreciated Magnificent Mary. Hence I use it as a vehicle for weaving together a diversity of historical, theological, and psychological materials.

Theoddysies and Paradoxologies: Collected Poems. I hadn’t thought I’d written much, compared to colleagues who pour out reams and volumes of verse, until the Muse told me to count, whereupon I discovered that I have more poems than are in the collected poetry of W.B. Yeats. I’ve had the pleasure of being told by people whose opinions I respect, such as Robert Anton Wilson and Sir Fred Hoyle, that they considered me a major poet. I hope they were right; at least, that’s what I’ve always aimed for. But you can, please, judge for yourself.

The planned (and partly written) books

Current work under way includes the next two volumes of Tapestry, which will bring the history down to the mid-1990s, at which time the Internet burst upon us, transforming the movement into a very different sort of beast, which I will leave for others to study; my colleague Doug Cowan has made an excellent start on that.

Another of equal importance is Princess Bella, Princess Chloe, and the Magic Kingdom. This evolved during several years of making up bedtime stories. The magical kingdom, ruled by King Daddy and Queen Mommy, is being threatened by a mysterious Dark Kingdom that is trying to invade and capture it. The coven headed by Mother Witch (a title that Esmerelda Hassenpfeffer much prefers), to which King Daddy and Queen Mommy belong, faces the task of detecting and neutralizing the dark forces, with the aid of the fairy-tale beings who dwell in the Magical Forest, one of whom is Red Riding Hood’s Granny and her pet wolf. This will be fun to get down on paper.

I’m also working on a triad of books, intended to provide a three-dimensional structure for explaining everything I’ve been thinking about for the last 60 years.

The first volume of it is The Road of Excess,a reference to Blake, of course. I’m thinking of it as an “autobiographic theology,” because, for me, the important philosophical and theological questions are not abstract, but arise out of my real-life problems and, occasionally, disasters. I will give a lot of personal details that others might fear to discuss, but that are central to one of my major concerns: how to understand and overcome the world-wide, endemic plague that I have labeled Aphrodiphobia.

The second volume will be the Principia Metanoia. It’s the nonfiction prose discussion of the theories and investigations I have pursued, circling around and focusing on the psychological transformation that the Gnostics called Awakening. This volume will have lots of documentation and footnotes. My contention in it is that only when a majority of mankind has undergone that Awakening experience will we be transformed into the kind of beings and society that any person dreams we might achieve. That won’t happen soon, but I can point toward the need for it.

Third is The Books of the Sacred Marriage, poems, myths, and stories, some in the form of gospels, that lay out what I have learned in forms that can have the emotional impact needed to be persuasive. In it I rewrite history, or perhaps discover a history that might have happened or that did happen but was hidden. It is somewhat a novel in the form of nonfiction, set in the same alternative universe as in Goddess Murder.

The next four books are somewhat less urgent.

• The Wedding Guests: Backstage at the Cosmic Theater, the wedding being that of Hades and Persephone, expands the three-act musical comedy I wrote as my doctoral dissertation into a surrealistic theater piece about all the various gods and theologies—and proposes a new one. I will also include the musical scores in it.
• On the Tarot and the Psychology of Divination;
• a collection of essays on social justice and radical politics;
• a collection of essays on the importance and significance of Wicca as a world religion.

If your subscriptions enable me to get all of these written and out in an average of three months each rather than a year, then five years from now I will have generated plans for even more books.