Masery:<\/strong> You go by the name P. Sufenas Virius Lupus. If I\u2019m correct the translation of Lupus is wolf. What do the other names mean?<\/p>\n P. Sufenas Virius Lupus:<\/strong> Indeed, \u201cLupus\u201d does mean \u201cwolf,\u201d and though I\u2019m very close to wolves for a variety of reasons, that isn\u2019t necessarily why I have that as part of my name. My full name is actually the names of (at least) two historical Romans who are important to my own practices in a variety of ways, or (in one case) might be, for lack of a better set of terms, an echo of a past life or something of that nature. P. Sufenas was a phratriarch in the city of Neapolis, better known now as Naples, Italy, of the phratria of Antinous in that city; he was also a Lupercus, the youthful wolf-warrior priests of the Roman ritual of Lupercalia in mid-February. The existence of that individual is one of the reasons that in the Ekkles\u00eda Ant\u00ednoou, Lupercalia is one of our most important and enjoyable rituals, which we have often performed at PantheaCon each February if the con\u2019 runs on the 15th in a given year. Virius Lupus is the name of at least two different historical individuals: one of them was the governor of the province of Britannia that was appointed in about 197 CE during the early part of the principate of Septimius Severus, who for various reasons I seem to have some memories about that can\u2019t be directly confirmed by research on him, and yet other parts of those memories can be confirmed by research. A second Virius Lupus came to my attention a few years ago, who was the first priest of the Roman cultus of Sol Invictus, which only existed as of the mid-third century CE under the Emperor Aurelian. Long before that, the Romans worshipped Sol Indigenes, whose cult was not particularly remarkable or important; then under the Emperor Elagabulus, the cult of the Syrian solar god El Gabal Invictus came about, and because he was such a hated Emperor, it took the Romans several decades to get over their allergy of \u201cinvincible\u201d solar gods. I\u2019ve always enjoyed celebrating the birth of Sol Invictus on December 25th, so perhaps it\u2019s a further connection to the numen of that particular name and family on a spiritual level for me. So, interestingly enough, the actual direct wolf connection is not in the name Virius Lupus, but instead in the P. Sufenas part of my name!<\/p>\n Masery:<\/strong> You reside in the North Puget Sound area and are dedicated to some of the land spirits there. What is the area like? What is your relationship with these spirits like?<\/p>\n P. Sufenas Virius Lupus:<\/strong> From my perspective, this area of the country, and all of what we\u2019d call \u201cwestern Cascadia,\u201d from about northern California all the way up into British Columbia, Canada, is one of the most beautiful bioregions in the world. The climate suits me quite well, in that it doesn\u2019t usually get too cold during the winter and we tend not to have snow (which I don\u2019t enjoy that much), but likewise in the summer we only have a few days at most where we\u2019re in the 90 degrees or higher range. It\u2019s grey and misty and often rainy a lot of the time\u2013remember, this is the region that gave birth to grunge music in the 90s, and so we\u2019ve all got a bit of that aspect to ourselves in certain ways if we are from this area and enjoy living here, as I do. Many people comment that it is similar to parts of Britain, Ireland, and Scotland, and indeed when I first went to some areas of Ireland, like Glendalough in County Wicklow, it looks almost exactly like Pass Lake which is only a few miles from where I live now. I was born on Whidbey Island and grew up there, and now live on the next island up (Fidalgo Island), but my main work-for-pay is on Whidbey, and I actually teach in the town where I grew up and graduated from high school, and in fact took my first college classes when I was a sophomore in high school! We have a lot of evergreen trees, and one is almost always within sight of both mountains and water, which I love.<\/p>\n The spirits I\u2019m most in contact with are what I think are two different\u2013but perhaps related (I have not confirmed this in direct communication or local Samish and Swinomish nation lore at this point, though)\u2013female land spirits: one of which is called Kukw\u00e1lulwut, the \u201cMaiden of Deception Pass,\u201d and the other of which is the spirit of Mt. Erie, and I think largely of the land of Fidalgo Island itself. Mt. Erie and the other nearby hills, when viewed from a distance, somewhat looks like the body of a woman lying down. From the mountain top, on the lookout to the south, one can literally see the place where I was born. I go up to the top of the mountain regularly to have rituals of various sorts, all of which also honor first and foremost the lady of that mountain and this island; there is a rock formation with some fallen trees in it that make a natural torii\u2013a Shinto arched gateway signifying a Shrine space\u2013where myself and my friends and co-religionists do these rituals. I could describe my approach and my relationship with the lady of Mt. Erie as \u201cmountain mother\u201d: she is where my own life comes from, I think, and I honor her for that whenever possible, and every day in a small way when I pass her on the way to work. The Maiden of Deception Pass appeared to me in an older form when I was at college on the east coast one time in a dream, and I called her \u201cGrandmother Seaweed\u201d; however, in appearance and manner, she was almost exactly like the usually younger woman who is the main spirit of the Rosario Beach and Deception Pass area for the Samish nation that is indigenous to this island and this area (along with several other Native American nations, including the Swinomish and the Skagit peoples). While I likewise get nurturing feelings from her, at the same time she\u2019s a bit more dangerous; there is a lot of death and drowning involved in the history of Deception Pass, and as someone who is dedicated to a god who drowned, it is often difficult for me to be at Deception Pass where so many deaths occurred; but down at Rosario Beach, where the Maiden is said to come ashore to see her people, I always feel much more peaceful and like that is her \u201cgood\u201d side. I think it\u2019s important to remember that the powers in the land are not always benevolent, nor should they be, and that no matter what they are like, we owe them respect and reverence for our continued existence here.<\/p>\n The two islands, Whidbey and Fidalgo, have similar but very distinct feelings about them, and as someone who was born and raised here, and who has lived most of my life here, I feel the land is and very likely always will be an important part of me in every way, physically and spiritually. I hope that I will be able to find steady work in the Cascadia region so that I can stay near to this land for the rest of my life.<\/p>\n Masery:<\/strong> You are a very prolific author having written several pieces for anthologies, including Rooted in the Body, Seeking the Soul: Magic Practitioners Living with Addiction and Illness.<\/em> You\u2019ve also written five full length books. What motivates you to keep writing?<\/p>\n P. Sufenas Virius Lupus:<\/strong> Actually, I\u2019ve written a total of seven full-length books, but only six of them have been under the PSVL name. I think that writing is a kind of disease in itself, as much a physical infirmity as a mental difficulty: and in my own case, nothing settles a flare-up more than just producing as much as possible! It\u2019s something that I feel\u2013and that many writers in various media and genres feel\u2013is something that is rather necessary to my survival. Not unlike respiration and excretion, it\u2019s something that needs to be done to continue my air supply, and to make sure that I purge myself of materials on a regular basis (though I wouldn\u2019t say that what gets purged is necessarily bad or negative or poisonous, and it\u2019s certainly not waste!).<\/p>\n A lot of what I know about myself, as a person who is seriously ill with multiple conditions, and who has been such for more than thirty-two of my thirty-seven years of life, is that my time is limited on this earth, and very likely I won\u2019t get to do as much as I\u2019d like to get accomplished eventually before I die, and that death could come quite unexpectedly. The more I write, the more of a record of myself and my work that I can leave behind for others to potentially benefit from, and thus I think it\u2019s all the more important to write and publish as much as I have, to leave what wisdom I have found in a form that others can access in the future.<\/p>\n Masery:<\/strong> What is your advice for people who want to write a book?<\/p>\n P. Sufenas Virius Lupus:<\/strong> My advice on this is similar to the advice I give people who are starting out in a Ph.D. program and don\u2019t know what they want to write their dissertations on: choose a topic that you\u2019re willing to have an OCD-level amount of interest in for as long as it takes to finish the project. My most successful books\u2013whether it is a collection of poetry or of essays or of various chapters that end up developing a consistent theme\u2013have been produced in a relatively short period of intense, obsessive activity. I\u2019ve been working on several works that have been more piecemeal and haphazard, and not as focused, and those are still not finished\u2026five or six years on, in some cases, unfortunately! But, when the inspiration strikes, it\u2019s useful to just focus and push through, find the time wherever one can, and just get it done as fast and as well as possible in as thorough a manner as one can manage at a given time. In today\u2019s world, it\u2019s too easy to get distracted, to put off finishing that chapter, or even reading it over and editing it, another day or week or month. In 2012, I ended up writing and publishing three books during the year, and each one took about three weeks to a little over a month to produce; sometimes, the germ of the idea or some of the content existed before that, but it took that amount of effort and total focus to finish them. As I was very short on paid work at that stage, it felt like a waste to be using my time for anything else, and the idea for one of them pretty much came out of the blue in a moment of inspiration when I was trying to figure out a way to raise money to help some friends.<\/p>\n I suppose, thus, the advice I\u2019m giving here is advice that I have not taken as often as I should have: don\u2019t procrastinate. If you can hold on to the moment and the feeling of intense and complete absorption in your work in order to see it through, you\u2019ll get it done and produce a work that is something you can be proud of. While I still hope to eventually finish some of these projects that have taken much longer, it has ended up being too easy to let inertia set in with them, and to stay at rest rather than get moving on them again. So, to use the old clich\u00e9: strike while the iron is hot, and very likely the sword you\u2019ll produce will be much finer and more effective at cutting NOW than it would be to have such a tool available to you five years down the road.<\/p>\n Masery:<\/strong> On your \u201cQueer I Stand\u201d column at Patheos you write that \u201cI am metagendered, meaning that I do not identify as a man or a woman, nor as male or female, nor as transgendered of any sort, nor as androgynous or \u2018neutral\u2019; I consider metagender to be one of the many \u2018other,\u2019 non-binary possibilities for gender that are available to humans. My gender identifications are not dependent upon any single or grouped characteristics (physical, genetic, or mental), performances, mannerisms, or anything else.\u201d At what age did you begin to identify as metagendered? How did you discover this about yourself?<\/p>\n P. Sufenas Virius Lupus:<\/strong> One thing about me is that I have a very excellent memory back to the age of three, and even a bit before that. From that earliest age, I knew I was different, that I wasn\u2019t like the girls who I tended to associate with, but I was also not at all like the boys that I also sometimes played with at day care. For my first few years of school, I tended to have equal numbers of male and female friends, and wondered why it was that all of us couldn\u2019t play together, but I could go between the different groups and get along relatively well. Of course, things changed later. I knew there was a gender component to this, though I didn\u2019t have the language or the fuller understanding of it that I do now.<\/p>\n I heard the term \u201cmetagender\u201d for the first time in about 1997 when a friend of mine introduced it to me, but that friend didn\u2019t exactly define it. I later came to define it in various ways, and my definition of it has shifted a bit over the years, but the one given above fits it pretty closely.<\/p>\n In short, I think there\u2019s many more options for gender than male or female; and, even though there are nearly infinite ways to perform each of those genders as \u201cvalid\u201d men or women, at the same time, I don\u2019t think that all of the people in the world or all of the needs in people\u2019s lives are fulfilled by only those two options, even with all of the variation that each allows. I think an important cultural role, which has existed in many non-Western and premodern Western cultures, and which does still exist in some cultures, can be fulfilled by people of alternative genders, and I know that I\u2019m one of those individuals. We\u2019ll never be as common as the dominant genders, but I think having a space for us, whether in the larger overculture (which would be great, but it\u2019s pretty far off at this point), or even in the spiritual subcultures of modern Paganism only, would be beneficial not only to our own senses of self and well-being, but also to the cultures which do decide to include us and have a distinct and specific role for us, apart from \u201cuniversal stand-in\u201d or \u201chappy medium\u201d in terms of gender performance and identity. I\u2019m not here to be every gender to every person (that\u2019s something that pangendered people can do, though!); but I am here to be my own particular and peculiar gender to whomever chooses to accept that. Anyone who doesn\u2019t?\u2013Well, that\u2019s their choice, but their understanding of my gender along binary lines will never be accurate, and I am not responsible for fulfilling their expectations about what they perceive is my gender in my own actions or ideas. If they refuse to take responsibility for their own perceptions and expectations, I can\u2019t do anything about that, other than disengage with them at worst, and correct them and move them toward something not only more accurate, but also more respectful, at best.<\/p>\n Masery:<\/strong> On your blog you also write about the hard decision you had to make between buying insulin for your diabetes or inhalers to treat severe asthma. Ultimately you went with insulin since diabetes is the more serious of the two, though both are serious. What is your take on the current healthcare system?<\/p>\n P. Sufenas Virius Lupus:<\/strong> I think it is a \u201chealthcare system\u201d in name only, and that it is truly neither health, nor care, nor a system. As I\u2019ve lived in various countries in Europe, I was told repeatedly by people in the medical professions in the U.K. in particular that every civilized (or, since we\u2019re talking about the U.K., they might prefer \u201ccivilised\u201d!) country has socialized medicine as a right of all its citizens, and I think that\u2019s a very good thing. Governments should have an interest in the continued life and health of their citizens, and socialized medicine is a good way to do that. But, because health and access to medical treatment has been considered a privilege in this country rather than a right, and a privilege that people should have to pay top dollar for, and that the government has helped to insure costs more than any other country on earth to provide to its citizens due to medical, pharmaceutical, and insurance lobbies being extremely powerful, our country pretty continuously spits in the face of the first of the inalienable rights outlined by the Declaration of Independence, i.e. life. Politicians are happy to squabble over when life actually begins and preventing women from having control over their own reproductive processes, and likewise over whether or not citizens have a right to end their life with dignity in the face of debilitating illnesses, and these people are (wrongly!) called \u201cpro-life,\u201d but the huge middle part of life with all of its potential difficulties is of no interest to anyone unless they can make huge financial gains off the suffering and unfortunate situations of others. What\u2019s worse is that very few medical providers realize how serious this situation is for people, and there has been more than one occasion over the last few years when I\u2019ve been in a medical difficulty and end up having a doctor lecture me along the lines of \u201cCan you get a job that actually has insurance?\u201d (If I could, you patronizing overprivileged medical professional, we wouldn\u2019t be having this conversation!) It\u2019s disgusting, it\u2019s unjust, it is an offense to the gods and the ancestors, and it\u2019s a travesty to every value that I personally hold dear.<\/p>\n Masery:<\/strong> Do you have an opinion on the Affordable Healthcare Act?<\/p>\n P. Sufenas Virius Lupus:<\/strong> My opinion on this is nowhere near as nuanced or informed as it should be, mostly because it will largely not help me, and there\u2019s little that I can do about it. I think it is likewise a kind of contradiction in terms and is very poorly named. One of the only reasons that many people in the U.S. today do not have insurance is because they can\u2019t afford it, and what coverage it will give them still doesn\u2019t make it possible to get the services they need\u2013I found this recently myself when I had insurance temporarily for about three months. Even though it helped with the costs of my insulin a great deal, it did not help with other medical supplies, nor with getting doctor\u2019s appointments that didn\u2019t break the bank for the given month they occurred in\u2013and, on these latter points, it was totally misleading and deceptive. So, now, under this new act, people will be FORCED to have insurance, and thus the insurance companies\u2013even the ones that end up having affordable (but likely not very useful) plans\u2013are the only ones laughing all the way to the bank, and those who are struggling financially due to medical difficulties to begin with will likely be even worse off. It\u2019s a travesty, yet again.<\/p>\n The only good thing about it is that insurance providers cannot refuse someone coverage due to pre-existing conditions. This is something that plagued my family when I was younger every time there was a change in insurance providers or jobs or anything else; and at every possible stage, the insurance providers would attempt to get out of approving a particular medical treatment for me, or to pay for certain prescriptions, etc. It caused more mental and emotional havoc and trauma for me as a young person, and for my family as well, than the actual diseases themselves. That should just not happen to anyone anywhere. When Mitt Romney and other politicians were talking about these things during the 2012 election, I couldn\u2019t believe all of the able-bodied privilege, as well as the economic privilege, that was involved in the discussions without any acknowledgement or self-realization whatsoever.<\/p>\n Masery:<\/strong> You are involved in Greco-Roman and Celtic Reconstructionism. First, I want to ask you about your Greco-Roman traditions. You are one of the founding members of the Ekkles\u00eda Ant\u00ednoou\u2013a queer, Graeco-Roman-Egyptian syncretist reconstructionist polytheist group dedicated to Antinous, the deified lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. How was this group started? Who are the other founding members or member?<\/p>\n P. Sufenas Virius Lupus:<\/strong> Back in 2002, I was one of three individuals who started a group that was the first in the modern world to be dedicated to the worship of Antinous in an organized fashion: there were other individuals worshipping him since the 1970s in some cases, but they did not do so in an organized manner, nor did they draw upon the actual texts that have survived relating to him from the late antique world. However, after five years of that group running, I ended up having some irreconcilable theological differences with the other founders, and thus left it in June of 2007 and started the Ekkles\u00eda Ant\u00ednoou. An ekkles\u00eda is not a \u201cchurch,\u201d despite certain creedal monotheistic religions having re-interpreted it in that fashion and appropriated it since antiquity to designate their religious bodies\u2019 memberships; and, it is not a \u201cchurch\u201d despite many modern Pagans insisting on calling it that. An ekkles\u00eda is, essentially, the basic unit of an ancient Greek democracy, i.e. the voting population of a given district. Thus, it is a communal group, and a group of citizens, but also by necessity a democratic institution in the best senses of that word\u2013and, indeed, very different from the hierarchical churches as they emerged in late antiquity with Christianity! While we do have roles of leadership, which I hold, and thus there is a hierarchy of both experience and effort involved in what we do (as George Cecil Ives said, \u201cAll are equal as regards authority; not all are equal as regards effort\u201d), at the same time, I try to keep things on a day-to-day basis in running the group as democratic as possible. Membership in the Ekkles\u00eda Ant\u00ednoou is self-selected, but the best way to exercise one\u2019s rights as a member is to vote (early and often!) on whatever issues arise with us, no matter if you\u2019ve been a member from the start or just joined moments ago. This has been a difficult and uphill battle to get people to understand even within the group\u2026we have so many flawed ideas about how groups work, how religious communities can and should function, what constitutes \u201ctrue\u201d membership, and what some of these terms even actually mean, that it\u2019s no wonder there are some difficulties that modern Pagans generally experience.<\/p>\n So, the other founding members were the other people who joined the group immediately after it was formed, who were mostly from the membership of the previous group. It could not be an actual ekkles\u00eda if I was the only member, so I try and make it clear that the foundation of our group was a group effort and can only work if it is a group-oriented, communal, more-than-one-person activity. Even if one is isolated and only has a local community with the gods we worship, I hope that members of our group understand that all of our major prayers have \u201cwe\u201d in them because of our solidarity with one another, no matter where we are, and with the larger communities from which we have each originated and to which we have connections\u2013the great mass of people who have worshipped Antinous in the past and present, the great many queer and spiritual ancestors that we have and acknowledge, the various communities that all of us come from and are still active parts of (religious or otherwise), and the many gods with whom we deal and who have worked with our main god, Antinous.<\/p>\n