"It's just a sprinkling for the May Queen."

Well, I never did manage to find that Horned God Sex Cult that I've been looking for all these years. Presumably, it doesn't exist. If it ever did, I can read you this oracle: it didn't last long before it managed to blow itself up.

(There was supposed to have been a local sex coven back in the early days of Paganistan. No, it didn't last: they just gave each other various STDs, and then broke up.)

Probably that's just as well. As any historian of religion can tell you, your average sex cult doesn't have a very long shelf life: not terribly surprising, when you think about it. “Volatile” would be the operative word here.

Doesn't mean they're not fun to fantasize about, though.

Beltane's coming—now there's a phrase for you—and the sap is flowing.

Me, I'm a writer: it's Spring, and the green fires burn. Naturally, I've been writing pornography.

Pagan porn, of course: the convergence of obsessions. Talk about a niche market.

Well, why shouldn't there be holy pornography? Sacred pornography? Now there's a pagan literary genre, if ever there was one. Think of the Kama Sutra. Whoever decided that religion and sex don't mix? Whoever he was, he was no pagan, I can tell you that much.

I don't know about yours, but the Witch religion is an eros-driven religion. Gardner got that one absolutely bang-on right. Our gods have genitals, and they know how to use them.

That's where everything comes from, they say: “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

Interestingly, much of what I've been writing is not terribly, as they say, explicit.

In my experience (such as it is) the indirect and figurative is way hotter than getting slapped in the face with it. I learned this from, of all people, Mary Renault. Her novels have some incredibly hot male-male sex in them, but if you weren't reading carefully, you'd probably miss it.

Sex, after all, isn't something one person does to another: it's what we do together.

Gods: gay pagan pornography for smart people. Talk about the niche of a niche of a niche of a niche.

No, you won't be seeing any of my holy porn any time soon; not around here, anyway. Once I get my Substack up and running, just possibly (and selectively). For now, it circulates privately among friends: those who understand both what it means, and what it doesn't.

Not that you, of all people, need it, of course. After all, you've got a wild pagan imagination of your own.

Like every other organ, imaginations need exercise.

So, you know that Horned God Sex Cult I was talking about earlier?

Well, let me tell you a story....

Above:

Ceri Richards,

"The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower (Trial Print)" (1965)