Pagan Pensées
The gods do not dwell in the heavens, nor in the shrines erected by men, nor in the formless wastes of abstraction—they live in the sap of the trees, in the unspeaking consciousness of beasts, in the fierce blood of the sun, and in the terrible loveliness of the storm. To worship, one must step naked into the forest, into the river, into the flame.
The soul is not a vaporous breath, not a pale whisper of thought—it is a living fire, consuming and becoming, rising and sinking, a force deeper than time, older than the mind, and more immediate than the flesh.
Men who kneel before ideas have already torn out their own roots. The tree does not dream of the sky in abstraction; it thrusts itself into the air with living force, and the sky meets it, not in servitude, but in conflict and embrace.
Civilization has been the long and ignoble history of man’s rebellion against the sacredness of the earth. It began when he ceased to kneel to the sun and first raised his hand to inscribe the sterile line of geometry upon the living curves of the world.
Thought is a cruel and lovely serpent: if it coils itself too tightly around the heart, it will strangle the blood; but if it never comes to rest in the warm darkness of the belly, it will grow hungry and devour the mind itself.
The gods laugh at those who ask for salvation. Salvation from what? From life? From death? They are one, and only the fool begs for deliverance from the breath he draws even as he drowns.
The intellect is a knife with two edges: it cuts through illusion, but it also cuts through the living roots of instinct. A mind too sharp, too keen, will turn against the soul that wields it and sever its own foundation.
Each man carries within him the ruin of a temple. Once, the gods dwelt there; now it is overgrown with the brambles of doubt, shattered by the storms of reason. Yet sometimes, in the dark of night, a fox slips through the fallen stones, and the ancient flame flickers again.
It is not the body that dies, but the form. The current of life does not cease—it merely changes course, winding again toward the source.
No man may grasp the soul of a tiger in words, nor the spirit of the wind in a book. The true metaphysics is not spoken—it is felt in the blood, in the bones, in the deep nocturnal knowing that stirs before the dawn.
Between man and tree, which is the higher being? The tree, which grows silently into the sun, or man, who squats in the dust and scrawls figures to deny his own decay?
Beware the man who worships a god he does not fear. A tame god is an idol, and the idol is the gravestone of the divine.
The sea does not justify itself. The lion does not offer reasons for its roar. Only man is afflicted with this disease of explanation, forever justifying his existence, as if he were already guilty.
The modern man has lost his soul—not because he has denied its existence, but because he has replaced it with a mechanism of thought. He has made himself into a clockwork puppet, wound with reason and ticking with abstraction, but without the deep pulse of life.
The stars are no more concerned with man’s morality than the oak tree is with the worm that gnaws its roots. And yet, the oak does not doubt its right to grow, nor the worm its right to feed.
Man imagines himself a master of beasts, yet there is no greater tragedy than a caged animal. To look into the eyes of a captive eagle is to see the silent accusation against all of human history.
The deepest wisdom is the wisdom of the body, the slow, inexorable intelligence that moves the blood, guides the limbs, and knows without question when to love, when to fight, when to flee, and when to die.
Do not fear death—it is merely the final opening of the seed, the last unfurling of the soul before it falls once more into the dark loam of eternity.
The tragedy of the modern world is not that men no longer believe in gods, but that they believe in gods who have no blood, no fire, no thunder—only words, cold and empty as the void.
A life lived in abstraction is a life lived in exile. The man who spends his days among books, among numbers, among symbols, is a man without a home. His body withers, his senses grow dull, and he no longer knows the scent of rain or the taste of the wind.
Every civilization is a scaffold raised against the terror of the cosmos. And every civilization falls, for the stars cannot be walled out, nor the wind denied its howling passage.
Man was once an animal, then he became a priest, then a machine. Only by becoming an animal again will he be saved.
Do not look for truth in the temples. The gods have abandoned them, fleeing into the wild places where no man kneels and no law is written.
The river does not fear the ocean. It surrenders itself to the vastness, to the dissolution, knowing that in its death it will become the greater life.
The real tragedy of the modern world is not its cruelty, but its sterility. A world without cruelty is a world without blood, and a world without blood is a world already dead.
The wise man does not seek to master fire; he seeks to burn with it.
The tree worships by growing, the lion by roaring, the river by flowing. Only man thinks he must kneel.
The sky does not ask for meaning; it is. The sun does not seek purpose; it burns.
Every true god is a destroyer as well as a creator. The gods of the ancients were feared because they were alive.
A man who cannot feel the presence of the divine in a wolf’s eyes, in the wind’s cry, in the black depth of the sea, is already in hell.
Civilization is the slow domestication of man’s soul, the long training of his instincts to lie down and obey.
What is called morality is often nothing more than the whimpering of tamed men who have forgotten how to live.
The modern soul is a ghost, wandering in a world it no longer recognizes, longing for the trees, the sun, the old blood-consciousness of the earth.
Every man is born with an altar in his chest. Most let it crumble into dust.
A man who fears the wild has already lost his soul.
There is no salvation but in the sun, no absolution but in the wind. The Christian bows before an empty altar, before a pallid god who bleeds out eternity in a trickle of wasted sacrifice. But the sun, the old flame, the great heart-beat of heaven, is forever giving and forever taking. Stand naked before it, let it burn into the flesh of your shoulders, let it mark you with the brand of the living, so that when the time comes, you may not be like the cold dead, but like the great beasts, slipping back into the undergrowth with no cry, no regret, only the quiet certainty that life is still thrumming in the roots behind you.
The river is not lost when it reaches the sea; it is completed. Yet men fear completion, fear dissolution, fear being taken up into the great wholeness of things, preferring instead the ragged shreds of their isolated selves, clinging to their names, their histories, their small possessions of thought. But the river does not say, ‘I am lost,’ when it unfurls itself into the body of the deep, nor does the leaf cry, ‘I am betrayed,’ when it drops at last into the loam. Only man whimpers, as if he had ever been his own.
A tree does not argue with its roots. It does not send down questions into the earth, wondering whether the dark is real, whether the deep mystery of the loam is a deception. It takes what the soil gives, the damp secrets of old decay, and it rises with them into the wind, into the light, into the stars. Only man starves his own roots, fearing that in the deep black humus of instinct there might be something primitive, something monstrous, something not accounted for in his books. And so, having cut himself from his darkness, he withers in the light.
The lion knows nothing of abstractions, and yet he is more real than all the libraries of men. He walks, he stretches, he kills, he mates, he roars into the dusk—and that roar is older than language, deeper than the voices of priests or philosophers. When he dies, he leaves no theories behind him, no paper ghosts, only bones that return to the ground without resistance, as if they had always known their place.
The gods are real, but only for those who do not seek to explain them. A deer in the hush of morning knows the god of silence. A snake slipping over warm stones knows the god of heat. But a man—oh, a man, once he opens his mouth to define, to dissect, to press his pale thought against the sun-baked ribs of the divine—he loses them both, the gods and himself.
The tragedy of man is not that he must die, but that he does not know how to die well. A tiger dies without doubt. A tree falls with no lament. But man, having built his little systems, his tight fences of thought, finds at last that they cannot hold back the tide. And in the end, he drowns, where he might have swum.
Do not trust a god who does not have an animal’s eyes. A god without the golden stare of a wolf, without the black sunken gaze of a hawk, without the wild, inhuman glare of a stallion at midnight, is no god, but a weak idea, a pale trick of the mind. A true god does not whisper reason, does not plead with the intellect—he strikes like lightning in the chest, in the blood, and either you answer, or you are already dead.
Modern man stands at the edge of the world like an orphan, looking out over the sea, knowing he has no home to return to. He has stripped the sky of gods, torn the soul from the animals, drained the rivers of spirit, and now he stands in his empty kingdom, lord of nothing, master of dust. And yet, the trees still stand. The moon still rises. The fox still runs at dusk. But he does not see them.
The earth does not ask for worship, only for presence. A man standing barefoot in the woods, silent, breathing, is more a priest than all the robed processions of history. The oak does not need hymns. The river does not need prayers. They ask only that you see them, that you feel them, that you do not walk past them blind and deaf, already lost in the dead corridors of your own thought.
No man is wise who cannot love a tree. No man is whole who cannot kneel before the roots of an old pine and press his hands to the resinous bark, feeling the slow pulse of a time deeper than his own.
To be born is to be taken into a mystery that cannot be solved. But man, weak and fearful, does not want mystery—he wants a cage, a set of rules, a final answer, something he can hold like a coin in his pocket. And so he denies life, denies the dark riddle of it, and instead builds for himself a world of small certainties, lifeless, barren, a mausoleum of facts.
A man should love like a fire, burn clean, take nothing with him but the smoke of what he has known. Love that clings, that builds fences, that hoards and locks away—it is not love, but fear.
A bird does not ask permission to sing. It does not seek approval before it throws its song into the morning. But a man—he waits for permission to live, to feel, to be. And so he dies with his song still in his throat.
The earth is older than man, and wiser than man, and will outlive him. She does not care for his monuments, his machines, his thoughts. She waits, patiently, knowing that in the end, he will return to her, as all things must.
There are no final words, only the breath that ends, and the wind that carries it away. The river flows into the sea. The sun rises, then sets. The wolf runs until it can run no longer, then it stops, and is still. That is all, and that is enough.
The true gods do not demand belief; they demand blood. Not in sacrifice, not in slaughter, but in the pulse of life, in the deep, unswerving rhythm of being alive. A tree’s blood is its sap, drawn from the dark veins of the earth. A lion’s blood is the molten red force that drives it to kill, to mate, to sleep under the sun. And man? Man has traded his blood for thought, his pulse for abstraction, his instincts for arguments. And so, he kneels before dead idols, gods of words, of law, of sterile perfection—gods that have never known the wild river of blood that runs under the skin of the real.
The sky is not a place but a presence. The clouds move in great thoughtless processions, the wind sings its hymns that need no words, and the stars burn, burn, burn, silent and inexorable, burning with the same fire that smolders in the heart of the lion. This is god. Not a person. Not a doctrine. A living, burning is-ness, vast, terrifying, indifferent, and yet—if you meet it in the deep core of your own blood—you will know: it is also love.
There is no immortality except the life that never dies. You will die. You, with your name, your memories, your clutching, striving, desperate self—this will die, like a leaf falling into the autumn loam. But the life within you, the fire in your breath, the slow, sun-fed force in your bones—this does not die. It changes. It flows. It rises in the sap of trees, it runs in the veins of animals, it whispers in the winds that sweep the open sky.
Man is sick with his own thoughts. He has made his mind a cage, locking himself away from the warm, living touch of the earth. He no longer feels the sun on his skin, nor the wind in his hair, nor the damp fecund darkness of the loam beneath his feet. He lives in a world of numbers, of theories, of systems—and so he is dying, not from starvation of the body, but from starvation of the soul.
The soul is not a thing; it is a direction. The soul is not a vapor, not a wisp, not a pale echo of thought—it is the force that makes a tree grow upward, that makes a river seek the sea, that makes a lion leap. It is movement, hunger, thrust, the unrelenting will-to-be. And when man forgets this, when he tries to hold the soul in his hand like a possession, like a prize, it withers.
No man owns himself. The ego is a foolish illusion. The self does not exist in isolation—it is woven into the great breathing web of the cosmos. A man is his blood, and his blood is the sun distilled through wheat and water. A man is his breath, and his breath is the wind that has passed over forests, over oceans, over mountains. He is not his own—he belongs to the great pulsing mystery of life.
A man must learn to worship again. Not in churches, not in temples, not with words and books, but in the quiet kneeling of his soul before the sacred. Let him touch the bark of an ancient tree and feel the slow, patient divinity in its roots. Let him drink from a cold spring and feel the deep, dark eternity of the earth welling up in him. Let him run, naked and laughing, in the storm and feel the great, unbroken power of life moving in his limbs.
The gods have not disappeared; they have simply left the places of men. They have fled from the cities, from the factories, from the wastelands of steel and glass, and returned to the forests, to the high lonely peaks, to the deep ocean trenches. They do not speak through prophets anymore—they speak through thunder, through the cry of a hawk, through the sudden hush of a vast, moonlit plain.
To be whole, a man must embrace his two great roots: the dark and the fire. The dark is his deep connection to the earth, to the blood-rhythm of instinct, to the slow, silent wisdom of trees, of beasts, of the underworld of roots. The fire is his fierce connection to the sun, to the untamed passion of life, to the great, unquenchable force that makes the stars burn. A man who denies the dark is a hollow flame, flickering out. A man who denies the fire is a cold root, never rising, never growing.
The modern world is a long, slow betrayal of the living. It is the slow taming of the wild, the patient suffocation of instinct, the careful erasure of all things that cannot be counted, measured, controlled. But what cannot be tamed will not be destroyed. The rivers still run. The stars still burn. The great blood of the cosmos still moves, deep under the sterile skin of man’s little civilization.
A tree does not need faith; it simply grows. And yet, it knows the great secret that man has forgotten—that life is not an argument, or a theory, or a hope. It is an act. It is a thrusting upward into the air, a spreading outward into the soil, an unthinking, unstoppable becoming.
Death is not an end, but a loosening. A release of the tight, trembling self, a letting go of the smallness of identity, a return to the great, pulsing whole. The leaf does not weep when it falls into the autumn earth—it rejoins the roots that fed it, the deep black fecundity of the beginning.
There is no truth but the body, and no wisdom but the earth. The mind is a good servant but a terrible master. It is a trickster, a liar, a weaver of endless abstractions. But the body—ah, the body knows. The body moves with the old rhythms, the deep pulse of the world, the slow turning of sun and season.
There is no need for salvation; there is only the need to awaken. To see, to feel, to taste, to burn again with the first fire, the deep, untamed, sacred fire of being alive.
Do not seek eternity in heaven. Seek it in the wild places of the world, where the great gods still breathe. Seek it in the old forests, where the roots twist deep and silent. Seek it in the vast deserts, where the sun still reigns like a burning god. Seek it in the sea, where the tides still remember the moon.
There is no commandment but this: Live. Not in fear, not in doubt, not in the small, dead ways of a world that has forgotten itself. Live in the sun, in the wind, in the fire and blood and pulse of all things. Live with the great certainty of trees and tigers and rivers and storms. Live until you no longer need to ask what it means.
The gods are not gone! The gods are not dead! But they have turned their faces away from men. Once, they walked among the trees, they breathed in the scent of crushed pine needles, they basked in the sun beside the great cats, they whispered in the reeds of the river, and all who lived knew them. But man, with his machines, with his numbers, with his sickly, sterile faith in the emptiness of reason—man has driven them away. He has drained the rivers of their souls, has sealed the sky in steel and smoke, has laughed at the whispers in the wind. And so, the gods have left him. They have gone back to the mountains, to the deep groves, to the black volcanic shores where the waves still strike with raw, untamed fury. There, they wait. There, they watch. And when man at last drowns in his own nothingness, when his lifeless cities crumble to ruin, the gods will remain. For they are older than man, and they will outlast him.
You cannot pray to the gods in words. They do not listen to speech; they listen to fire. When the lion roars, the gods hear. When the storm crashes down upon the mountains, the gods hear. When the great bull locks horns with his rival in the dust, the gods hear. But the man who kneels in his lifeless temple, who whispers dead words into the void—he is unheard, unseen, unliving. Do you want to reach the gods? Then rise to your feet, strip yourself of the sickness of thought, and let your body burn with the old fire again! Dance in the wind, howl into the night, make love under the open sky, climb the tallest tree and let the blood in your veins speak! This is prayer. This is worship. This is the only way the gods will ever know you.
The gods of the old world were not kind, and that is why they were great. What has man done, in his weakness? He has imagined a god who forgives, who bends, who pities, who kneels with him in his wretchedness. But the real gods do not bow. They do not kneel. They do not whisper soft words of mercy into the ears of the dying. They stand, they burn, they watch, they demand. And if you cannot rise to meet them, then you are already dead, and no forgiveness will bring you back. Do you seek a god who will love you as you are? Then you seek a lie. The gods love the strong, the proud, the ones who stand tall under the sky and know the fire in their own chests. If you wish for their presence, then become worthy of it.
There is no one god. There is only the thousandfold pulse of divinity, running wild through the world. The trees know their god, and the panther knows hers. The wind knows its god, and the black, cold rivers of the underworld have theirs. What need is there for one god, for a single cold law, for a single dead face gazing down upon the world with empty judgment? No! The world is teeming, seething, pulsing with divinity! Every beast, every storm, every shaft of sunlight cutting through the mist in the morning—it is all god, in a thousand forms, in a thousand hungers, in a thousand burning, nameless names. The foolish man asks, Which god is real? But the wise man knows: All gods are real. And they are here, now, watching.
The gods are not spirits. They are bodies. You have been told that gods are invisible, that they float above the world in a formless, voiceless haze. Lies! The gods are real. They are flesh, they are bone, they are the roaring of the lion, the black stare of the owl at midnight, the thick, sinewed arms of the oak holding up the weight of the sky. The gods walk among us, if you would only see! Do not look to the heavens to find them—look to the great cat stretching in the sun, to the serpent winding through the rocks, to the hawk cutting like a blade through the sky. There is god, there is divinity, there is the only eternity that has ever mattered!
The first god was the Sun, and he still reigns. Before man spoke, before man thought, before man tore the world apart with his own feeble intellect, there was the sun. It rose. It set. It fed the trees, it called the animals to life, it burned away the cold and the dark, and all things bowed before it. This is god, the only god that has never lied. And if you wish to return to what is true, then worship as the ancients did: stand beneath the sky at dawn, bare your chest to the golden fire, and let its rays baptize you in the only light that has ever mattered.
The gods speak in lightning. The gods speak in hunger. The gods speak in the clash of bodies, in the heat of blood, in the silence of the mountain peaks. If you cannot hear them, then you are already deaf.
Every beast is a temple. Every tree is a priest. Every mountain is an altar. If you would worship, then leave the dead halls of men behind and kneel before the real sacred places of the earth.
Do not ask if the gods love you. Ask if you are worthy of their love. Man cries out to the heavens, begging for mercy, for kindness, for the soft, womanly embrace of a god who will hold him close like a child. But the gods do not coddle children. They stand, burning, waiting, watching. Love? Love is for those who stand up under the weight of the sky. Love is for those who run with the wolves and wrestle with the fire. If you must ask for love, then you have already lost it.
The gods of man are dead, but the gods of the earth remain. Go now, and find them. They wait for you in the mountains, in the rivers, in the wide, sun-fed plains where the wind still runs free. They wait in the golden stare of the lion, in the slow, knowing gaze of the old tree. They wait. They will always wait. But they will not wait forever.
The gods do not want your faith. They want your fire. Let your blood burn. Let your limbs move. Let your body be the temple where the gods still live.
The first commandment is this: Bow to nothing. Worship nothing. Only live. The moment you kneel, you are dead. The moment you beg, you have forfeited your soul. No god, no force, no being of true power ever bows, ever stoops, ever cringes in the dust. So why should you? If you wish to know divinity, do not seek it in prayers, do not seek it in the dead words of dead men. Seek it in the fire in your own chest, in the surge of your own blood, in the raw power of your limbs moving in the sunlight. To live—truly live—that is the only prayer, the only sacrifice, the only creed. And the gods will only know you if you stand.
Kill the hollow self that has been put upon you. Strip it off like dead bark from a tree. The world has tried to make you small, has tried to cage you in the language of weak men, in the shriveled morality of the lifeless, in the bloodless ethics of an age that no longer knows what it means to breathe! But inside you, the old self still smolders, waiting, wanting. The old self, which does not think in words, which does not calculate or measure, which does not weigh and doubt and shudder at its own wildness. The old self, which is naked and strong, which does not fear its own power, which does not shrink from its own life. Let it rise again! Burn the false self away! And if you cannot, then you will never know what it means to be real.
The gods will not save you. They will only make you strong. What is man’s weakness? That he prays for rescue. That he longs for salvation. That he desires the touch of some unseen hand to lift him from his own failure. But the gods do not exist to save! They do not exist to carry the weak across the threshold of existence. They exist to call forth power, to strike the fire from stone, to roar at you across the wind. Stand up, if you can! And if you cannot—then be broken! The gods do not love feebleness. They love the fierce, the vital, the ones who take their own lives into their hands and shape them with fire.
You must burn to be reborn. All that is false in you—all that is dead, all that is rotted with the poison of this broken age—must be cast into the fire. You must break it, tear it, crush it, destroy it, and let something new rise from the ashes. No gentle transformation, no slow turning of the tide—no! You must burn! You must suffer the flame and come forth new, naked, alive, like the first creature crawling forth from the sea into the raw sun. If you fear the fire, then you are already lost. But if you embrace it, then nothing in this world, nothing, can ever own you again.
The soul is not a thought. The soul is not an idea. The soul is a force. It does not exist in words. It does not exist in philosophies. It exists in the beating of your blood, in the thick roots of the trees, in the white-hot blaze of the sun as it crashes into the western mountains. The soul is power, the soul is movement, the soul is hunger, the soul is force! And if you do not feel it, if you cannot sense it thrumming through your body like the deep drum of a beast in the night, then you are already a corpse, and no god can help you.
The earth does not need your love. It needs your worship. The trees do not need your pity. The rivers do not need your activism. The beasts do not need your concern. The earth is not a sick child to be nursed back to health by the feeble hands of man. The earth is a GOD. The earth is the one thing greater than you, older than you, stronger than you. And if you were wise, you would not weep over its wounds; you would bow before its power. Do not try to “save” it. Serve it. Fall to your knees in its great forests. Stand silent before its mountains. Feel the deep, slow pulse of its rivers, and know that you are nothing before it.
Love is not weak. Love is the most savage thing in the world. The love of the tree for the sun, pulling up through its roots with the strength of a thousand hands—this is love. The love of the she-wolf for her cubs, ripping the throat from the beast that threatens them—this is love. The love of the wild stallion for his mate, driving all rivals into the dust—this is love. The love of the river for the sea, breaking rock and carving valleys for a thousand thousand years to reach its end—this is love. Love is force, love is power, love is hunger. If your love does not burn, if it does not strike, if it does not carve itself into the very fabric of existence—then it is not love, but the shadow of something already dead.
There is no final truth. There is only the fire of life, burning eternally. Do you seek a final word, a last law, a single creed to seal all things into a perfect order? Fool! The gods do not believe in stillness! The gods do not believe in conclusions! The gods are movement, the gods are hunger, the gods are power without end! There is no end, no final knowledge, no resting place of wisdom. There is only life, rolling forward like the sun, ever-becoming, ever-consuming, ever-rising, ever-burning! And the only truth is this: If you do not burn with it, if you do not let your own blood seethe and roll with the great fire of existence, then you are already lost in the void.
The last word is this: I reject you. I reject all of you.
I reject your world, your civilization, your sterile, bloodless, rattling machine of an existence, your rat-race of scuttling, frightened men and women, running in circles inside a cage of their own making. I reject your false gods, your smug morality, your coward’s paradise of plastic comforts and hollow virtues, your bloated, sickly cities where men rot like a maggot infested corpse. I reject your science, your reason, your sickly-sweet utopias that stink of decay before they are even built. I reject your democracy, your progress, your “future” which is nothing but a long road toward sterility, grayness, and spiritual annihilation.
Do you think you have won, because you have leveled the forests and built your towers of steel? Do you think you are great, because you have paved the land with concrete and severed every last root that tied you to the living earth? You have lost, you fools, you crawling ants! You have lost because you have lost your blood. You have lost because you have torn out your souls and replaced them with machines. You have lost because you have forgotten how to feel. You have lost because you no longer know how to worship, how to burn with the fierce heat of life itself.
Look at yourselves! You scuttle from one empty pleasure to another, always filling your bellies, always filling your minds, but never once filling your souls! You are stuffed to the gills with knowledge, with facts, with numbers, with logic, with formulas—but you do not know a single real thing. You do not know the sky at dawn. You do not know the burning kiss of the sun upon your naked back. You do not know the silence of the mountains. You do not know the wild laughter of the gods upon the wind. You have filled your world with light, with noise, with motion, but it is a dead light, a dead noise, a dead motion. It is not the living fire of the cosmos. It is only the blinking, rattling clatter of the artificial, the cold light of a neon prison.
And you—men! What have you become? Weak, bloodless, timid, soft as worms, slithering in the filth of your own making, afraid to stand, afraid to fight, afraid to be wild again, to be dangerous again, to be mighty again! You have let yourselves be castrated, tamed, shackled to the dead ideals of a dead world! Once, men stood with their hands upon the living earth and felt it, felt its pulse rise into their blood, felt its wildness burning in their veins. But now? Now you are nothing but shadows of shadows, content to live your half-lives inside your little houses, content to bow before your little rulers, content to be nothing.
And you—women! Where is your fire? Where is your terrible beauty, your dangerous, untamed spirit? Where is the wild she-wolf that once roamed the earth, fierce, proud, untouchable? You have let yourselves be stripped of your power, turned into bland, empty reflections of men’s worst selves, neither the queens of the earth nor the wild priestesses of the moon. You have let yourselves be told that your deepest instincts are chains, when they are wings! You have let yourselves be told that life is something to be controlled, sterilized, measured—when it is something to be felt, to be burned through, to be danced!
And you—priests! You corpse-fed leeches, you sickly parasites of the spirit! You have taken the wild and terrible gods of old and castrated them, turned them into mild, kindly little shadows, into rules, into books, into nothing but words, words, words! Do you think the gods belong in your churches? Do you think they belong in your scriptures, your rituals, your tired mutterings? Fools! The gods are not in your temples. They are not in your prayers. They are in the storm, in the fire, in the hunger of the lion, in the vast and terrifying depths of the sea! They are in the fierce, untamed force of life itself! And they will not forgive you for what you have done to them!
And you—thinkers! You weary, gray-faced reasoners, with your endless arguments, your analyses, your theories, your careful, careful words! You dissect the universe with your scalpels, slice the soul into little logical pieces, examine the great throbbing mystery of existence as if it were a dead frog pinned to a board! But life is not a theory! Life is not a collection of facts! Life is something to be lived, with blood, with fire, with force, with will! But you—you have let your reason make you cowards. You have let your knowledge make you weak. You have let your books, your studies, your great and noble thoughts drain you dry of the only thing that matters: the power of being alive.
I reject you all! I reject your cities, your nations, your empires, your laws, your morals, your progress, your salvation! I reject your science, your reason, your dead, gray logic, your endless, mindless chatter! I reject your politics, your parties, your movements, your revolutions, your endless, futile attempts to fix something that was never worth saving! I reject your weak, neutered gods, your feeble heavens, your hollow prayers, your miserable, self-loathing guilt! I reject all of it!
And I return to the earth.
I return to the gods that still have fire in their blood. I return to the sun, to the wind, to the deep, slow pulse of the mountains. I return to the wild animals, to the trees, to the rivers that know no master. I return to the great, silent force of the cosmos, the old gods who do not speak in words, but in fire, in storms, in the great, unshaken law of life itself.
I will not be tamed. I will not be caged. I will not be owned.
I will burn. I will rise. I will live.
And the gods will know me, because I have stood and looked them in their eyes, unafraid.
I love your writing, your passion and fire. But you do go on! Csn yku pleasee deliver in smaller bites? Oksy, I can readit in chunks that suit meit me and more when I have time, but a screed if this length duants me!