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Novel Gnosis is both a concept and a title of what was going to be a book of essays by multiple authors. The concept may be familiar to long time readers of my blog: religious inspiration received while writing fiction. The book of essays eventually became this upcoming series of blog posts. In this intro, I'll briefly tell the story of why it's not a book. Most of the authors who contributed essays to the anthology are still onboard with the project and have agreed to have their essays run as a series of guest posts on this blog. 

The idea:

Easter 2025: Three Voices

A Satire in Bad Taste

Here, Your Holiness, I baked you some Easter cookies. They're from my mother's favorite recipe. I hope you enjoy them.

Why, thank you my son, I'm sure I will. Mmm, delicious. Bless you, and a happy Easter.

Twelve Hours Later

Although, thank Goddess, I didn't grow up Catholic, I've known many who did, and I've heard the stories.

So, for all those feel-good “Come Home to the Catholic Church” commercials, here's the truth-in-advertising version.

Hi, we're the Catholic Church.

We're the ones who, all over the world, have sexually abused hundreds of thousands of children.

We're the ones who did everything that we could to hush up that fact.

We're the ones who have routinely done everything that we could to protect the perpetrators.

We're the ones who repeatedly, when caught with our cassocks up and our pants down, have protested with words of repentance, but still done nothing to stop the abuse.

A long time ago, you walked away from the Catholic Church.

Bet you didn't know it, but Cecil B. de Mille's 1956 epic schlockfest The Ten Commandments has a pagan connection.

Dianic high priestess and musician Ruth Barrett grew up Jewish in Southern California. Apparently, religious leadership runs in the family. Her father was a rabbi in the Reconstructionist movement, a modern Jewish “denomination” that views Judaism as an ongoing religious civilization. Reconstructionist Judaism tends to be ritually conservative and socially liberal.

(The standard joke is: “At an Orthodox wedding, the bride's mother is pregnant. At a Conservative wedding, the rabbi is pregnant. At a Reform wedding, the bride is pregnant. At a Reconstructionist wedding, both brides are pregnant.”)

Anyway, when C. B. was putting the film together, he looked around for someone skilled at blowing the various calls on the shofar, the ram's horn trumpet used since antiquity in Jewish ritual—at the first sighting of the First Crescent, for instance.

Rheims Cernunnos

Gallo-Roman relief, 1^st century CE

What is it about witches and royals, anyway?

Maybe we're just waiting to have one of our own on the throne—again.

King Chuck

(To the Tune of: King Tut)

King Chuck (King Chuck)

When he was just a young man

he never thought he'd be

as ancient as the hills themselves

before becoming king!

King Chuck: with his royal willie

King Chuck: papa to Prince Billy

Married to Diana

Left her for Camilla (King Chuck)

In the dream, my old student apartment is decorated for a party. M. is finally graduating!

Oh, M. Through all the years that we shared this very apartment—ever since we worked together in that fancy restaurant downtown—I've been hopelessly in love with him. How many scurrilous poems have I dedicated to him over the years, how many epigrams? He's never seen any of them.

How I used to love watching him flirt his way through life. M. flirted with everyone: men, women, young, old, me included. We all knew that he didn't really mean it, and yet—such was his beauty, such was his art—our lives were made somehow the happier for having had him pass through them.

I, meanwhile, am on fire. My long-awaited book on the Tribe of Witches is finally writing itself. The words are pouring out of me. I can't find enough paper to write on. What I've got so far is written on anything I can find: envelopes, pages from the calendar, ads, anything with a blank back.

A writer friend hands me a stack of old handbills. I scroll the first into the typewriter and begin to type.

Suddenly M. is here, even more handsome than he used to be. How had I never realized before that he was actually Crown Prince of the Tribe of Witches? Or had I secretly known all along?