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The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine
A deep exploration of the regenerative and magical secrets of sacred masculinity hidden in familiar myths both ancient and modern
• Reveals the restorative fungi archetype of Osiris, the Orphic mysteries as an underground mycelium linking forests and people, how Dionysus teaches us about invasive species and playful sexuality, and the ecology of Jesus as depicted in his nature-focused parables
• Liberates Tristan, Merlin, and the Grail legends from the bounds of Campbell’s hero’s journey and invites the masculine into more nuanced, complex ways of dealing with trauma, growth, and self-knowledge
Long before the sword-wielding heroes of legend readily cut down forests, slaughtered the old deities, and vanquished their enemies, there were playful gods, animal-headed kings, mischievous lovers, trickster harpists, and vegetal magicians with flowering wands. As eco-feminist scholar Sophie Strand discovered, these wilder, more magical modes of the masculine have always been hidden in plain sight.
Sharing the culmination of eight years of research into myth, folklore, and the history of religion, Strand leads us back into the forgotten landscapes and hidden secrets of familiar myths, revealing the beautiful range of the divine masculine, including expressions of male friendship, male intimacy, and male creative collaboration. In discussing Dionysus and Osiris, Strand encourages us to think like an ecosystem instead of like an individual. She connects dying, vegetal gods to the virtuous cycle of composting and decay, highlighting the ways in which mushrooms can restore soil and heal polluted landscapes. Exploring esoteric Christianity, the author celebrates the Gnostic Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas, imagining the ecology that the Rabbi Yeshua would have actually been referencing in his nature-focused parables. Strand frees Tristan, Merlin, and the Grail legends from the bounds of Campbell’s hero’s journey and invites the masculine into more nuanced, complex ways of dealing with trauma, growth, and self-knowledge.
Strand reseeds our minds with new visions of male identity and shows how each of us, regardless of gender, can develop a matured ecological empathy and witness a blossoming of sacred masculine powers that are soft, curious, connective, and celebratory.
• Reveals the restorative fungi archetype of Osiris, the Orphic mysteries as an underground mycelium linking forests and people, how Dionysus teaches us about invasive species and playful sexuality, and the ecology of Jesus as depicted in his nature-focused parables
• Liberates Tristan, Merlin, and the Grail legends from the bounds of Campbell’s hero’s journey and invites the masculine into more nuanced, complex ways of dealing with trauma, growth, and self-knowledge
Long before the sword-wielding heroes of legend readily cut down forests, slaughtered the old deities, and vanquished their enemies, there were playful gods, animal-headed kings, mischievous lovers, trickster harpists, and vegetal magicians with flowering wands. As eco-feminist scholar Sophie Strand discovered, these wilder, more magical modes of the masculine have always been hidden in plain sight.
Sharing the culmination of eight years of research into myth, folklore, and the history of religion, Strand leads us back into the forgotten landscapes and hidden secrets of familiar myths, revealing the beautiful range of the divine masculine, including expressions of male friendship, male intimacy, and male creative collaboration. In discussing Dionysus and Osiris, Strand encourages us to think like an ecosystem instead of like an individual. She connects dying, vegetal gods to the virtuous cycle of composting and decay, highlighting the ways in which mushrooms can restore soil and heal polluted landscapes. Exploring esoteric Christianity, the author celebrates the Gnostic Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas, imagining the ecology that the Rabbi Yeshua would have actually been referencing in his nature-focused parables. Strand frees Tristan, Merlin, and the Grail legends from the bounds of Campbell’s hero’s journey and invites the masculine into more nuanced, complex ways of dealing with trauma, growth, and self-knowledge.
Strand reseeds our minds with new visions of male identity and shows how each of us, regardless of gender, can develop a matured ecological empathy and witness a blossoming of sacred masculine powers that are soft, curious, connective, and celebratory.
208 pages, Paperback
Published November 29, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 117 reviews
January 27, 2023
Rating: one star.
The Flowering Wand is a book that is desperately in need of an editor, not for spelling or grammatical mistakes, I didn’t find any, rather the author tried to deal with too many subjects and draw too many ties, and she failed in both her aims. The book is a slender tome, nominally reaching 200 pages, but the text of the book itself, devotes slightly less than 150 pages to the chapters themselves. This is an issue because there is a total of 33(!) chapters in the book, each attempting to deal with a different myth or a different aspect of a myth. Five pages is simply not enough room to explain the intricacies of a myth, let alone expound and extrapolate upon the myth effectively. With a bit of work, the length of this book could have been increased, or the number of myths decreased. Sadly, the topical handling of the myths by the author failed to be impactful or adequately explanatory.
Sophie has an excellent narrative voice, a wide vocabulary and engaging prose. Although I did not enjoy this book and found the prose to be a more than a tad too effluviant, with a little editing the author’s future works could be greatly improved. She has obviously done a lot of thinking and cursory research for this book, and her passion for fungi flows onto every page.
The title and introduction of the book is disconnected from the actual contents, and each chapter is more of a stand-alone essay rather than a part in a flowing narrative. The title and subtitle of the book The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine and the introduction, seem to imply that the iconography and conception of masculinity needs to be divorced from violence, social hierarchy and whatnot, and I agree with the author in her stance. She opens the book immediately with the contention that the wand is a better symbol for masculinity than the sword. This is hardly a new argument, but it is a good one. The sword, in spite of its modern romantic associations, is the ancient equivalent of a rifle. Mythically speaking, a wand is a more versatile representation of masculinity, because it has the power to heal and harm. The author briefly touches on these aspects and then moves on. Once we get into the book itself, the focus shifts and turns into more of a critique on the patriarchy, monotheism, and gender roles, which can all be well and good, but the change in focus left me jarred and disappointed.
The author is clearly very passionate about fungi and fungal networks, however, not every argument requires a fungal analogy, many of the analogies detracted and distracted from the actual myth. Throughout the course of reading the book, the incessant, and largely, unnecessarily infusion of fungal references became quite grating. Once again, if the analogies had been fleshed out, expounded upon and fully integrated into the narrative it would have been redundant but acceptable, rather they just detracted from the message of the chapters.
In addition to stylistic issues, there are some issues with content and logic that mar the book.
Jumping into the first chapter, the author states ‘The God of the Old Testament is, above all else, a storm god.’ And then proceeds to make comparisons between the ‘storm gods’ from other mythologies and cultures. The issue is that any nuanced investigation of myths, cannot make effective use of a category such as ‘storm or sky’ god. These categories did not exist in the minds of ancient worshipers, these are categories created by researchers and moderns to place myths into nice and tidy little boxes. Logic and argumentation built on generalizations of ‘sky gods’ or for that matter, any other category of divinity types, falls apart under close scrutiny. The author’s approach to the myths and her argumentation requires a nuance and detailed understanding of the subject that was not displayed.
I won’t address each chapter, but I would like to point out a couple of other issues. In Chapter 3 the author states “The creation of Genesis itself was a covert attempt by a new priestly class to prove the Jewish people’s right of origin, establish a new temple, concretize a code of law, and defend the right of the Jews to the land of Judea”. While this may be true of parts of Genesis, namely the Abrahamic Covenant and the adventures of Isaac and Jacob, the author misapplies the scholarly observation above, and insists that the act of Adam naming the animals is an example of establishing a right of origin. The author patently takes her source out of context, and what is worse, the above quote didn’t even need to be in the text. Within the paragraph, the sentences before and after this excerpt do not hinge in any way on the quote. In fact the passage reads much more smoothly if this is omitted. A firm editor should have pruned it and investigated the source of the material.
Another example is a line in Chapter 4 which says ‘the millions of women, femmes, and queer people who were murdered during the Inquisition for their pagan spiritual practices’. This statement, besides be categorically false and untrue, also didn’t need to be included. The paragraph was better off without it, it wasn’t tangential to any argument. I won’t get into the details of the historiography of the Inquisitions, but there is no reliable modern historian who would make such a ludicrous statement. Unfortunately, these kind of throw away, erroneous, non-tangential sentences and half arguments littered the book, and spoiled the appeal.
I hope that in the future, the author is able to narrow her focus and find a good editor capable of pruning her prose and argumentation. I could not, in good conscience, recommend this book to anyone.
Cross posted on my blog at https://adruidinthedesert.wordpress.c...
The Flowering Wand is a book that is desperately in need of an editor, not for spelling or grammatical mistakes, I didn’t find any, rather the author tried to deal with too many subjects and draw too many ties, and she failed in both her aims. The book is a slender tome, nominally reaching 200 pages, but the text of the book itself, devotes slightly less than 150 pages to the chapters themselves. This is an issue because there is a total of 33(!) chapters in the book, each attempting to deal with a different myth or a different aspect of a myth. Five pages is simply not enough room to explain the intricacies of a myth, let alone expound and extrapolate upon the myth effectively. With a bit of work, the length of this book could have been increased, or the number of myths decreased. Sadly, the topical handling of the myths by the author failed to be impactful or adequately explanatory.
Sophie has an excellent narrative voice, a wide vocabulary and engaging prose. Although I did not enjoy this book and found the prose to be a more than a tad too effluviant, with a little editing the author’s future works could be greatly improved. She has obviously done a lot of thinking and cursory research for this book, and her passion for fungi flows onto every page.
The title and introduction of the book is disconnected from the actual contents, and each chapter is more of a stand-alone essay rather than a part in a flowing narrative. The title and subtitle of the book The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine and the introduction, seem to imply that the iconography and conception of masculinity needs to be divorced from violence, social hierarchy and whatnot, and I agree with the author in her stance. She opens the book immediately with the contention that the wand is a better symbol for masculinity than the sword. This is hardly a new argument, but it is a good one. The sword, in spite of its modern romantic associations, is the ancient equivalent of a rifle. Mythically speaking, a wand is a more versatile representation of masculinity, because it has the power to heal and harm. The author briefly touches on these aspects and then moves on. Once we get into the book itself, the focus shifts and turns into more of a critique on the patriarchy, monotheism, and gender roles, which can all be well and good, but the change in focus left me jarred and disappointed.
The author is clearly very passionate about fungi and fungal networks, however, not every argument requires a fungal analogy, many of the analogies detracted and distracted from the actual myth. Throughout the course of reading the book, the incessant, and largely, unnecessarily infusion of fungal references became quite grating. Once again, if the analogies had been fleshed out, expounded upon and fully integrated into the narrative it would have been redundant but acceptable, rather they just detracted from the message of the chapters.
In addition to stylistic issues, there are some issues with content and logic that mar the book.
Jumping into the first chapter, the author states ‘The God of the Old Testament is, above all else, a storm god.’ And then proceeds to make comparisons between the ‘storm gods’ from other mythologies and cultures. The issue is that any nuanced investigation of myths, cannot make effective use of a category such as ‘storm or sky’ god. These categories did not exist in the minds of ancient worshipers, these are categories created by researchers and moderns to place myths into nice and tidy little boxes. Logic and argumentation built on generalizations of ‘sky gods’ or for that matter, any other category of divinity types, falls apart under close scrutiny. The author’s approach to the myths and her argumentation requires a nuance and detailed understanding of the subject that was not displayed.
I won’t address each chapter, but I would like to point out a couple of other issues. In Chapter 3 the author states “The creation of Genesis itself was a covert attempt by a new priestly class to prove the Jewish people’s right of origin, establish a new temple, concretize a code of law, and defend the right of the Jews to the land of Judea”. While this may be true of parts of Genesis, namely the Abrahamic Covenant and the adventures of Isaac and Jacob, the author misapplies the scholarly observation above, and insists that the act of Adam naming the animals is an example of establishing a right of origin. The author patently takes her source out of context, and what is worse, the above quote didn’t even need to be in the text. Within the paragraph, the sentences before and after this excerpt do not hinge in any way on the quote. In fact the passage reads much more smoothly if this is omitted. A firm editor should have pruned it and investigated the source of the material.
Another example is a line in Chapter 4 which says ‘the millions of women, femmes, and queer people who were murdered during the Inquisition for their pagan spiritual practices’. This statement, besides be categorically false and untrue, also didn’t need to be included. The paragraph was better off without it, it wasn’t tangential to any argument. I won’t get into the details of the historiography of the Inquisitions, but there is no reliable modern historian who would make such a ludicrous statement. Unfortunately, these kind of throw away, erroneous, non-tangential sentences and half arguments littered the book, and spoiled the appeal.
I hope that in the future, the author is able to narrow her focus and find a good editor capable of pruning her prose and argumentation. I could not, in good conscience, recommend this book to anyone.
Cross posted on my blog at https://adruidinthedesert.wordpress.c...
July 11, 2023
Full disclosure: I read this book because I was at the library, saw it, and knew it would make me mad.
I was not, however, prepared for how aggressively stupid it is. This may be one of the worst things I’ve read in a while, and I regularly read and mock evangelical parenting manuals.
Some background here: I am a medievalist, a historian of Christianity, a recovering classicist who focused much of her degree on early Christian studies, lifelong mythology nut, theology nerd, a tarot reader with a particular interest in the Visconti-Sforza decks (and yes, Sophie, they were in fact playing cards), and someone with a long-standing interest in Christianity as mystery religion. This book seemed specifically designed to make me furious and to, at one point, scream “that’s not what sola scriptura means!” to an empty room.
While I don’t disagree with her main idea of rethinking our connection to the natural world and rebuilding ideas of masculinity, Sophie Strand manages to be astonishingly wrong about a whole lot of things, including history (there’s some implications she’s a “never again the burning times” dumbass throughout), Dionysian cults, ancient religion, Christian theology of the resurrection, Tolkien, Shakespeare, ancient languages, ancient Judaism, medieval romance, the Tristan mythos, tarot, and Gnosticism. There’s also some really glaring implicit antisemitism in here. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this. I have a low tolerance for Jesus Was a Mushroom people, and an even lower tolerance for people who write extremely stupid blog posts about Joan of Arc (which is one of the ways, along with her very dumb Mary Magdalene and mushroom theology posts, I became aware of Sophie Strand). There are a lot of books on the subjects she writes about here. Many of them are very good and not published by houses that peddle Annunaki nonsense along with bad Hildegard of Bingen translations like the publisher of this one does. You should read one of those instead of this confused claptrap.
Oh, and Sophie? If you’re reading this, consider not bitching about academic jargon when your own work is largely incomprehensible purple prose word salad shoehorning mushrooms into places that have nothing to do with mycelium.
I was not, however, prepared for how aggressively stupid it is. This may be one of the worst things I’ve read in a while, and I regularly read and mock evangelical parenting manuals.
Some background here: I am a medievalist, a historian of Christianity, a recovering classicist who focused much of her degree on early Christian studies, lifelong mythology nut, theology nerd, a tarot reader with a particular interest in the Visconti-Sforza decks (and yes, Sophie, they were in fact playing cards), and someone with a long-standing interest in Christianity as mystery religion. This book seemed specifically designed to make me furious and to, at one point, scream “that’s not what sola scriptura means!” to an empty room.
While I don’t disagree with her main idea of rethinking our connection to the natural world and rebuilding ideas of masculinity, Sophie Strand manages to be astonishingly wrong about a whole lot of things, including history (there’s some implications she’s a “never again the burning times” dumbass throughout), Dionysian cults, ancient religion, Christian theology of the resurrection, Tolkien, Shakespeare, ancient languages, ancient Judaism, medieval romance, the Tristan mythos, tarot, and Gnosticism. There’s also some really glaring implicit antisemitism in here. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this. I have a low tolerance for Jesus Was a Mushroom people, and an even lower tolerance for people who write extremely stupid blog posts about Joan of Arc (which is one of the ways, along with her very dumb Mary Magdalene and mushroom theology posts, I became aware of Sophie Strand). There are a lot of books on the subjects she writes about here. Many of them are very good and not published by houses that peddle Annunaki nonsense along with bad Hildegard of Bingen translations like the publisher of this one does. You should read one of those instead of this confused claptrap.
Oh, and Sophie? If you’re reading this, consider not bitching about academic jargon when your own work is largely incomprehensible purple prose word salad shoehorning mushrooms into places that have nothing to do with mycelium.
Read
March 9, 2025This was a DNF for me (after about 30-40 pages); it had so many inaccuracies related to topics I know about that it left me doubting everything else too. Also I'm a bit tired of neo-pagan books complaining about straw-man versions of monotheism.
Some of the critical reviews seem to be from TERFs, so I should probably make it clear that I'm not DNFing because of trans inclusion in masculinity or anything like that. This hasn't even come up much as far as I got in the book, but some of the quotes I saw in various reviews made me frustrated; replacing "women" with "people with wombs" while *still* making a gender-essentialist argument is not going to please ANYone. (And I get to play a round of "as an intersex person, am I even included in this, and how??")
Find me elsewhere: My Patreon | My Bluesky account
____
Source of the book: Lawrence Public Library
Some of the critical reviews seem to be from TERFs, so I should probably make it clear that I'm not DNFing because of trans inclusion in masculinity or anything like that. This hasn't even come up much as far as I got in the book, but some of the quotes I saw in various reviews made me frustrated; replacing "women" with "people with wombs" while *still* making a gender-essentialist argument is not going to please ANYone. (And I get to play a round of "as an intersex person, am I even included in this, and how??")
Find me elsewhere: My Patreon | My Bluesky account
____
Source of the book: Lawrence Public Library
January 1, 2023
I am allll over this, exploring the connective tissue—the mycelium, if you will—of ancient myths and legends, especially regarding gender and the lack/fluidity thereof, and how ‘divine masculine’ and ‘divine feminine’ really might not be the most super helpful construct, even when we try to deconstruct or redeem the terms.
Just gonna dump a bunch of my highlighted quotes here, snacks for thought:
Just gonna dump a bunch of my highlighted quotes here, snacks for thought:
“Because mythologies and sciences alike aspire to be true, they are perpetually under revision,” Bringhurst explains. “Both lapse into dogma when this revision stops.”
- - -
Monotheism is trapped by its attachment to a mythic monologue. Sky gods think sunshine, abstraction, and ascension are the answer to everything. But the problem with the sun is that if it isn’t tempered by darkness and rain and decay, it tends to create deserts instead of biodiverse ecosystems.
- - -
How can honoring our “both-ness” change courtship into a terrain that is more egalitarian, playful, and reciprocal than the patriarchal modes of romance that seem to invite sexual violence and domination?
- - -
Bodies, liquid in a flesh silhouette, are tides of lunacy, constantly shifting their internal shorelines. To be lunar means to change—to be full and ripe one night, and tired and reclusive another.
- - -
Hundreds of years of simplistic binaries have led us to believe that the hearth fire is tended by the feminine, while the hunt or external world is governed by the masculine. The man is welcomed back into the home, fed, and cared for, but he is never the lap of plenty. He rules the home. But he is not allowed to “be” the home.
- - -
Myths that stay the same don’t survive.
- - -
As philosopher Isabelle Stenger urges, we must somehow make decisions in the presence of those who will bear their consequences.
- - -
Dionysus was also popularly called Liber. In fact, this version of the vegetal god’s name is the root of our words for freedom and liberation and deliverance. Why, then, do we only think of Dionysus as a god of drunken foolishness? His worshippers very clearly saw him as a god of revolution and independence. Mythically, his arrivals signaled the inversion of social norms and the blooming of unfettered, uncivilized celebration, often conducted by a society’s underdogs. This behavior isn’t just fermented ecstasy. This is spontaneous, unruly revolt.
- - -
Climate collapse will not be solved by techno-narcissism. Patriarchy will not be cured with shame and guilt. Racism cannot be cut out of our brains with a sword.
- - -
My favorite aspect of their relationship is that in many stories and images—a wonderful example being the frieze from the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii—Ariadne is depicted as occupying the sovereign throne while Dionysus sits in her lap. Their relationship is flipped, dynamic, unfettered by gendered stereotypes. There is no dominating “king.”
- - -
What does it mean to approach the beloved knowing that they have been wronged? What does it look like to tenderly heal that wounding and that power imbalance? My guess is the answer is more luscious and beautiful and sexy than we can even imagine. Healing doesn’t have to be hard work. It can be romantic. It can be a bacchanal.
- - -
The body and the psyche’s place is distinctly opposed to the culture’s suicidal sprinting.
- - -
Real healing cannot be rushed. If we don’t emerge slowly from the shallows, we won’t give our lungs time to adjust to the intoxicating chill of fresh air. If we don’t give our wings time to dry, we will never be able to fly. Stepping out of dominant cultural narratives involves a process of grieving, tending to our losses, and transforming our dreams. This doesn’t happen in an hour. And it can’t be “gamed.”
- - -
But let us halt the story, because stories are often defense mechanisms used to distract from pain. Trauma can look like heroism. It can look like strength. Sound like beautiful music. It can be handsome and well behaved. What beautiful Tristan really represents is pain.
- - -
So much of the current rhetoric about healing is wedded to progress and to narrative. But the body is not a story. It is porous and complicated and changeable. It needs to dance and swim. It needs to lie on the ground for days, re-regulating its nervous system to the seasonal heartbeat of the soil. The concept of “healing” has become the time-sensitive demand of a culture bent on progressing, and unwittingly taken up by wellness and new age spiritual communities. They say we must be “integrated” and whole again; we must achieve functionality so that we can keep the narrative moving. But a body doesn’t need to move through healing. It just needs to move. And then it needs to be still. It needs to feel safe.
- - -
It is ironic that Joseph Campbell’s favorite hero, Tristan, is so desperate to escape the very thing Campbell wanted to enshrine him inside: the hero’s journey.
- - -
We have to admit that our world is not a linear romp into civilized eloquence, with cardboard cut-out temptresses, riddling dragons, and singular heroes. It is a polytemporal explosion of contingencies and sorrows and contamination.
March 13, 2023
I usually love anything written at the intersection of ecology, mythology, and spirituality, but as Sophie Strand describes herself as a ‘queer ecologist’ I knew I was likely to struggle with this book.
While she does write beautifully of some fascinating connections between fungi and mythic characters, develops some interesting reinterpretations of certain myths, and comes to some useful conclusions about what men could be doing to create a new kind of masculinity, there was also a lot of confusion.
It is interesting that in a book about the ‘sacred masculine’ that she never really defines what she thinks the masculine is. Instead, it seems pretty clear that she writes from a queer theory/gender identity ideology perspective that (deliberately or not) misdefines sex and gender, or conflates them. Thus, there were numerous moments when I found myself unable to understand what she was saying. Though I could guess her meaning, the distortion of the terms meant that any mention of 'gender' was confused and nonsensical. It’s also pretty clear that she doesn’t really know what a binary/dualism is, and therefore she misunderstands how you undo them (hint: it’s not by eliminating distinctions).
Though she does seem to have a feminist point of view, she’s clearly not averse to using the dehumanising term ‘people with wombs,’ which I found alarming. She also imposes contemporary terms like ‘femme’ and ‘queer’ on people from the past, which is ridiculous.
I also found her descriptions a bit cloying at times, like filler rather than anything strictly necessary, even though I usually do love lush language. And there were too many chapters, so it lacked overall coherence.
Ultimately, the queer theory perspective was so irritating, and so lacking in intellectual rigour, that I found it tainted the whole book, and I did not enjoy it.
That said, the conclusion was good, and the fictional and poetic offerings at the end were wonderful, so perhaps I just have a problem with Strand’s non-fiction, and her upcoming novel will still be good.
While she does write beautifully of some fascinating connections between fungi and mythic characters, develops some interesting reinterpretations of certain myths, and comes to some useful conclusions about what men could be doing to create a new kind of masculinity, there was also a lot of confusion.
It is interesting that in a book about the ‘sacred masculine’ that she never really defines what she thinks the masculine is. Instead, it seems pretty clear that she writes from a queer theory/gender identity ideology perspective that (deliberately or not) misdefines sex and gender, or conflates them. Thus, there were numerous moments when I found myself unable to understand what she was saying. Though I could guess her meaning, the distortion of the terms meant that any mention of 'gender' was confused and nonsensical. It’s also pretty clear that she doesn’t really know what a binary/dualism is, and therefore she misunderstands how you undo them (hint: it’s not by eliminating distinctions).
Though she does seem to have a feminist point of view, she’s clearly not averse to using the dehumanising term ‘people with wombs,’ which I found alarming. She also imposes contemporary terms like ‘femme’ and ‘queer’ on people from the past, which is ridiculous.
I also found her descriptions a bit cloying at times, like filler rather than anything strictly necessary, even though I usually do love lush language. And there were too many chapters, so it lacked overall coherence.
Ultimately, the queer theory perspective was so irritating, and so lacking in intellectual rigour, that I found it tainted the whole book, and I did not enjoy it.
That said, the conclusion was good, and the fictional and poetic offerings at the end were wonderful, so perhaps I just have a problem with Strand’s non-fiction, and her upcoming novel will still be good.
January 28, 2023
I just finished reading this book. I had seen some excerpts on social media and was really excited to preorder it.
At first, I wasn't entirely sure what I was getting myself into, particularly with "Rewinding the Sacred Masculine." Where was the author going with masculinity--a topic that's received a lot of attention and focus over the last few decades and seems a bit tired and stagnant?
But I was enchanted. This book is about old mythic figures prevalent in western culture - particularly greek and christian figures - and what these stories actually mean when we examine them with a more than human and ecological lens. Using a mycological metaphor, she likens myths as fruiting bodies or above ground manifestation of underground, mycelial ecologies.
In terms of the reading experience - her writing style is engaging and really excellent. I love some of these concepts and phrases like narrative dysbiosis, revision as decay, ecology as courtship--very creative and vibrant and celebratory. Language is very accessible while being sharp and vivid, and chapters are shorter - she gets to her point quickly and the pace is great.
Some of the passages read like evocations - something is being invoked "I summon the wildflower pollen/Let us give back to the masculine the flowering wand/I call on" and so forth.
I think some of these pieces could benefit from visuals and it would really drive impact. I hope the author considers some artwork or visual accompaniment in her book, which is she working on for release later this year. On social media, these excerpt were accompanied by digital collages and it really bolstered the tone of the writing so I'd encourage more of that.
I recommend this to anyone interested in narrative, myth, gender, ecology and how these overlays impact our collective psyche and behavior.
At first, I wasn't entirely sure what I was getting myself into, particularly with "Rewinding the Sacred Masculine." Where was the author going with masculinity--a topic that's received a lot of attention and focus over the last few decades and seems a bit tired and stagnant?
But I was enchanted. This book is about old mythic figures prevalent in western culture - particularly greek and christian figures - and what these stories actually mean when we examine them with a more than human and ecological lens. Using a mycological metaphor, she likens myths as fruiting bodies or above ground manifestation of underground, mycelial ecologies.
In terms of the reading experience - her writing style is engaging and really excellent. I love some of these concepts and phrases like narrative dysbiosis, revision as decay, ecology as courtship--very creative and vibrant and celebratory. Language is very accessible while being sharp and vivid, and chapters are shorter - she gets to her point quickly and the pace is great.
Some of the passages read like evocations - something is being invoked "I summon the wildflower pollen/Let us give back to the masculine the flowering wand/I call on" and so forth.
I think some of these pieces could benefit from visuals and it would really drive impact. I hope the author considers some artwork or visual accompaniment in her book, which is she working on for release later this year. On social media, these excerpt were accompanied by digital collages and it really bolstered the tone of the writing so I'd encourage more of that.
I recommend this to anyone interested in narrative, myth, gender, ecology and how these overlays impact our collective psyche and behavior.
August 2, 2023
Did not finish. I want you to know that I tried really hard to work through this book and had been super excited to read it, but it was just painful. I cannot remember the last time I read a book this bad. It's full of inaccuracies and the prose reads like a mad libs of trendy buzzwords. I'm not going to be mean by going into detail but I read a lot of excerpts of this aloud to a room full of experienced and knowledgeable witchy trans folks and every paragraph was interrupted by uproars. You will not get an accurate picture of any of the subjects covered by reading this book. I particularly encourage other trans folks and people of color, as well as Jews, to avoid it and its weird assumptions.
Read "The God of Ecstasy" by Arthur Evans for the spirituality and gender/sexuality/masculinity content, and any book by Paul Stamets (cited extensively by Strand here) for competent ecological writing.
Read "The God of Ecstasy" by Arthur Evans for the spirituality and gender/sexuality/masculinity content, and any book by Paul Stamets (cited extensively by Strand here) for competent ecological writing.
March 8, 2023
Conceptually, I think this was really fun. I just think it needed to be organized differently. There were too many chapters that were all so short. I just think for this sort of analysis of concepts, the chapters needed to be more fleshed out. A lot of the chapters could have been combined/reorganized to make them more effective, especially because the theses of many of the chapters were really similar.
Overall I really liked it, I’m a sucker for this kind of writing, and Strand quoted some of my favs like Rebecca Solnit, Donna Harroway, and Merlin Sheldrake throughout the book. The chapter on Tom Bombadil as well as the last chapter were highlights. Some of the conclusions were maybe a bit far fetched, but it was all a good time. Lots of really beautiful language and imagery throughout.
Overall I really liked it, I’m a sucker for this kind of writing, and Strand quoted some of my favs like Rebecca Solnit, Donna Harroway, and Merlin Sheldrake throughout the book. The chapter on Tom Bombadil as well as the last chapter were highlights. Some of the conclusions were maybe a bit far fetched, but it was all a good time. Lots of really beautiful language and imagery throughout.
Read
September 12, 2023Whenever I picked up The Flowering Wand I felt myself breathing a little slower and deeper. Sophie Strand writes such lush metaphor. Mythologies become mycelia, and gods become the fruiting bodies of mycelial networks: temporally and spatially situated incarnations of a sacred aliveness, spanning disparate ancient traditions. I don't know of many people in my life who could make it through this book with a straight face (I don't even know if I am one of those people), but. I think it beautifully rewards your attention, your credulity, your trust.
January 31, 2023
I love Sophie Strand's wild thinking and her deep minded writing, and so was very much looking forward to reading 'The Flowering Wand'. I enjoyed the format of exploring different masculine figures from myth as a way to weave a new masculinity for our times, one that is deeply woven into, and wedded to, the earth. The imperative to do this is a matter of survival and there was much in this book that aids that new weaving.
I have heard Sophie talk about this subject and felt that she drew out themes that are less well explored in the book. It sometimes feels they there is a beautiful truth here that is never quite drawn out and that left me feeling rather frustrated in a way that I can't quite pinpoint. I loved the theme of mycelial rootedness that moves through the book and felt that that could have been drawn out even more. Somehow, the book lacks an anchor, or a tap root, that might aid understanding. But perhaps that was the intention.
There is some beautiful writing here, and some difficult and important themes. Ultimately, I gained more from her short essay 'Jesus is a Fungal God', which can be found on her blog, but there is much in 'A Flowering Wand' that is valuable and worth further exploration. I am so grateful that Sophie Strand added to the conversation.
I have heard Sophie talk about this subject and felt that she drew out themes that are less well explored in the book. It sometimes feels they there is a beautiful truth here that is never quite drawn out and that left me feeling rather frustrated in a way that I can't quite pinpoint. I loved the theme of mycelial rootedness that moves through the book and felt that that could have been drawn out even more. Somehow, the book lacks an anchor, or a tap root, that might aid understanding. But perhaps that was the intention.
There is some beautiful writing here, and some difficult and important themes. Ultimately, I gained more from her short essay 'Jesus is a Fungal God', which can be found on her blog, but there is much in 'A Flowering Wand' that is valuable and worth further exploration. I am so grateful that Sophie Strand added to the conversation.
October 1, 2023
This book re-roots many myths of masculine figures, including Merlin, Orpheus, Narcissus, Tristan, Dionysus, King David, and Jesus into a larger ecological perspective, where they can hopefully be generative in ways that reconnect humans to each other and the world.
There are also sections on the tarot interspersed throughout, and while I like the tarot, I'm not convinced that the sections did a lot for the book.
The book is full of insight, but the style was not for me. Individual sentences are so maximalist, but chapters are short, and the topic jumps quickly from paragraph to paragraph, a bit like the book is still social media posts gathered together. I wanted the same explosion of words to extend into a woven, interconnected composition.
Nevertheless, this feels like a very exciting step into new territory for the "hero's journey," and I'm really glad the book exists. My favorite chapter was the last, in which the author imagines an alternative mythological meeting post death between Jesus and other male gods, including Dionysus and Orpheus. What other voices will spring up from this composting?
There are also sections on the tarot interspersed throughout, and while I like the tarot, I'm not convinced that the sections did a lot for the book.
The book is full of insight, but the style was not for me. Individual sentences are so maximalist, but chapters are short, and the topic jumps quickly from paragraph to paragraph, a bit like the book is still social media posts gathered together. I wanted the same explosion of words to extend into a woven, interconnected composition.
Nevertheless, this feels like a very exciting step into new territory for the "hero's journey," and I'm really glad the book exists. My favorite chapter was the last, in which the author imagines an alternative mythological meeting post death between Jesus and other male gods, including Dionysus and Orpheus. What other voices will spring up from this composting?
January 5, 2024
Considering how passionate I am about the topic that the modern new age spiritual movement has exiled the divine masculine to the sky and separated him from the earth you'd think I'd like this more but honestly I found the author's tone to be quite condescending and pretentious, and she uses words without knowing what they mean ('racinated' being the most egregious example). I also don't like this idea in feminist spirituality that we should completely get rid of anything to do with valor, heroism, being a warrior from the sacred masculine- these things are only bad when they exist to dominate and conquer, and not to protect others. She makes some other weird conclusions I wasn't personally a fan of. Not a bad book, just not for me.
May 2, 2023
I’ve just finished The Flowering Wand, and although I don’t disagree with her thoughts about our need to reimagine our relationships with the natural world, with each other, and with ourselves, I found her extended metaphors of mycorrhizal interconnectivity, reimagining of mythology and folklore, neopagan nonsense, and unnecessarily obtuse vocabulary off-putting. But I’ve had worse. It’s a strange blend of a philosophic/poetic voice and very personal. So I can see how it might resonate with some people, it simply didn't resonate with me.
June 13, 2023
This book should be read and understood as new age devotional literature. It is not philosophical, nor is it academic, as the author is not trying to be clear and precise in her language and argumentation. In fact, it would probably be accurate to say that the author deliberately eschews these expectations as being harmful masculine intrusions on epistemology.
I did learn a new word from this book: deracinated. It was used every couple of pages.
I did learn a new word from this book: deracinated. It was used every couple of pages.
July 10, 2024
It isn’t a factual book, and many of the assertions are even problematic in the context of transgender assessments. That said, I’d give this 3.5 stars if I could just because it’s a wild thing. Feral and explorative and poetic. Don’t take it too seriously, but rather enjoy its florid carousing through mythology and gender.
May 28, 2024
Sophie Strand puts forth an interesting argument for a complete re-mix of masculinity as it exists in our culture and spiritual lives. These ideas are not new to neo-pagan or non-Abrahamic religious practitioners, but her particular, over-arching theme that the answers to replacing the staid, patriarchal, misogynistic and violent ways of the (ancient) past are to be found in the study of mycology *was* new to me. While she cites intriguing and varied sources in her notes (I plan to comb through all of them) I really think she needed to write three books: 1.) An argument for ecological awareness through studying the environment (literally) from the ground up, 2.) A further examination of how our society may better interact with our natural surroundings while gaining some of this knowledge from Native Peoples Internationally, and 3.) More research into non-phallocentric interpretations of legends, folk beliefs and religion. This book has very fertile ideas, but the metaphors don't completely hold up. I respect the author's ambitions, but the chapters read as if she were writing a collection of essays, not compiling a set of unified chapters for just *one* book. Still, plenty of readers might enjoy her individual chapters and her final vision of what needs to happen to jail-break the Sacred Masculine from its sterile self-imprisonment.
January 19, 2025
This is a book very much written by a poet, and there were a lot of extended metaphors and words I did not know (“deracinated” and “tautological” are new ones for me that I like). I’m also not the most familiar with myths or tarot, so there were parts I didn’t totally understand. But I learned new things and thought new thoughts, which is ultimately what I love about reading.
A couple parts I particularly liked:
I think the part that resonated the most with me was talking about how intelligent our bodies are and how we are trained to outsource our intuition and fight against them. And it made me sad as always.
I also liked the central thesis around mythologies and stories adapting to different contexts (and the extended mushroom metaphor), and how when we uproot them they can be easily corrupted.
I liked how a book ostensibly about masculinity hardly dealt with it (or patriarchy) directly. (Also almost no discussion on class or race which must be purposeful.) But the idea that making space for different physical presentations and behaviors for all of us, the feminine and masculine alike, can lead to a sort of collective liberation.
A couple parts I particularly liked:
I think the part that resonated the most with me was talking about how intelligent our bodies are and how we are trained to outsource our intuition and fight against them. And it made me sad as always.
I also liked the central thesis around mythologies and stories adapting to different contexts (and the extended mushroom metaphor), and how when we uproot them they can be easily corrupted.
I liked how a book ostensibly about masculinity hardly dealt with it (or patriarchy) directly. (Also almost no discussion on class or race which must be purposeful.) But the idea that making space for different physical presentations and behaviors for all of us, the feminine and masculine alike, can lead to a sort of collective liberation.
December 7, 2022
Just glorious. Sophie Strand has written a book that will make you think, shower you with beauty, and give you hope. Examining how so many of our beloved stories (Dionysus, Merlin, King David, the minotaur, Jesus) interpret men and the masculine in narrow, death-worshiping ways, Strand offers exuberant, expansive alternatives for what the masculine can mean and do. Crammed with fresh ideas and rendered in gorgeous prose, this book will sit on my shelf of favorite ecofeminist spirituality books, like Women Who Run with The Wolves and Braiding Sweetgrass. Highly highly recommended.
October 31, 2024
I was expecting to be mostly annoyed and upset at what I expected to be silly gender-essentialist arguments about how masculinity and sacredness were absolutely. Apologies offered. Deep bows. A fertile exploration of how we might playfully and reverently pay attention to gender and how it has been and could be used. The author as a bonus explores the dance between immanence and transcendence, monotheist world-view and polytheist (I would posit poly-nomenclature) world-views. Most of what I've been exposed to before on this tip set up straw men in their disrespectful engagement with Abrahmic faith scriptures and I didn't experience that here. See page 154 (and the whole book) for an exploration of symbiosis between Dionysus and Jesus.
-------- (see WritingWorshipLament folder for quotes from last 1/4 of book)
P3 My deepening study into myth and science blurred my ideas of gender distinction and, even more excitingly, my ideas of bounded individuality.
P4 Just as fungi originally taught plants how to root into the soil, so myths teach us how to root into relation with our ecological and social ecosystems.
P5 Patriarchy’s monolithic vision of the masculine is bad for everyone and terrible for our ecosystems. But patriarchy is not the only narrative.
P6 How can we think of our bodies as ecosystems of kinship? How can we see ourselves as relationally woven into the larger whole of our environment?
P8 My greatest desire is to be in conversation with you.
P13 How can a monotheistic sky god rule the dirt, the fungi, the funky and sexy reality of embodied life if he is always hovering above it? How can he understand the millions of different stories that constitute an ecosystem if he insists there is only one story and one god?
Monotheism is trapped by its attachment to a mythic monologue. Sky gods think sunshine, abstraction, and ascension are the answer to everything. But the problem with the sun is that if it isn’t tempered by darkness and rain and decay, it tends to create deserts instead of biodiverse ecosystems. We are ground people who have been worshipping sky stories not properly suited to our relational existence rooted in the land. Sporulated storm gods come from the ground, like us, so they understand our soil-fed, rain-sweetened existence. They bring the wisdom of the underworld and lift it into the sky, only to pour it back into the leaves, the grasses, the valleys, soaking back into the dirt from which they originally emerged. Sky gods encourage linear thinking. Spore gods teach us that everything is cyclical.
P17 When I think of what I believe in, it is closest to a form of animism – the belief that all plants, creatures, and parts of the earth are animate and alive. But it is an animism of chaotic difference. Of woven contamination. It is an understanding that my being alive does not mean I should assume that the aliveness of the hill or the river or the wild roses is the same flavor as my aliveness.
P30 What is the masculine? The masculine doesn’t belong to a specific type of body. The masculine, like the moon, is mutable. There is no final destination for masculinity. It flickers. Thickens. Breaks. Flows.
[…] Patriarchal masculinity is painfully static.
P31 This isn’t a gender expression. Expression implies movement and creativity. Patriarchal masculinity stays the same, and it stays still.
P41 Like Dyonysus, we can remember our deeper, pre-patriarchal root systems that help us stay grounded, while still able to sway in a storm. Let us give masculinity back its flowering wand of reciprocal relationship with the natural world. Let us call Dyonysus to the gates of our cities and homes. A man who can dance with plants and honor beasts, a man who can be a woman and an androgen and an animal, is more than a gender. He is a celebration. A hive of humming bees. A secret network of fungus ready to erupt as the air moistens. A murmuration of birds. A cluster of grapes. A throng of singing women. A magician.
P52 A feral mind.
P58 Take a moment, and if you have access to the internet, look up the last recorded song of the Kau’io’o bird species. It is singing to a mate that will never arrive. Listen to the plaintive lilt and questioning descent of the song. Attune your ear to the void space that shows you the shape of the lover that no longer sings a reply. Feel the vibrations in the bones of your face, in the wave of your mind, and then, let a hunger bloom in your body for the missing song.
P59 His song serves three purposes: to celebrate what is lost, to move through mourning, and to agitate the listening audience into relational action.
[…] Solastalgia is a new word for a new type of heartbreak. The term was coined by scholar Glenn Albrecht to describe a form of emotional distress caused by environmental change. It encapsulates the homesickness for a home or a lover that no longer exists.
P61 Orpheus asks the masculine to acknowledge all the lost songs.
P62-3 To accept a life without poetry, without love, and without access to wilderness – these seem much more maddening than running off to the woods to celebrate spiritual connectivity and the power of a handsome, generous, and empathic god.
P64 Women […] Their rage and anger is mocked, repressed, and punished. The passivity of depression and sorrow is encouraged over the dynamism of angry problem-solving.
What if the masculine could call forth and celebrate more than just the starved, porcelain maid? What if the masculine was so plural, so mutable, so relaxed and confident in its ability to flow and shift, that it opened up room for the maenad? What would it look like to allow the women in our lives to express their full complexity? I suspect the transformative alchemy of that experience wouldn’t benefit only women. I think it might just have the power to turn men into gods and revolutionaries.
P67 What if, before we began to fight, we rooted back into our earth-based pleasure?
P70 What if the fact that Dionysus does not need to commit rape or violent assault in order to attract lovers makes him even more masculine? What if the ease of his masculinity, the biodiversity of forms and possibilities he represents, causes the rigid and monolithic masculinity of patriarchy to contract around its lack of options? What if Dionysus is a window into a healthier, more fertile world of masculinities that existed before the Greek invasions of the Mediterranean Basin and the end of the Bronze Age? What if he was so sexually potent and self-assured that he didn’t have to resort to patriarchal modes of repression and abuse? Dionysus is referred to as the god of women. Women were easily attracted to him and his flavor of ecstatic, nature-based spirituality. He didn’t need to punish or force lovers into sexual submission. The lovers, women and men and satyrs and goddesses, were already fully ready to offer their affections.
P72 At a time when one in three women have experienced sexual violence, Dionysus might be an important role model for the masculine. What does it mean to approach the beloved knowing that they have been wronged? What does it look like to tenderly heal that wounding and that power imbalance? My guess is the answer is more luscious and beautiful and sexy than we can even imagine. Healing doesn’t have to be hard work. It can be romantic. It can be a bacchanal.
P80 As men try to attend to the wounds of patriarchy, the wounds they have inflicted on others and on themselves, the roles they are trying to shed, the roles they are trying to expand into, it is important to remember that real healing cannot be rushed. […] If we don’t give our wings time to dry, we will never be able to fly. Stepping out of dominant cultural narratives involves a process of grieving, tending to our losses, and transforming our dreams.
P81 […] it involves a compassionate, daily check-in. How am I feeling? Do I need to move more slowly?
[…] the natural world has always been our chrysalis. It has always been our transformative medicine. As men move into new modes of the masculine and sense that it is time to shed an old skin, to heal a wound from the bottom up, they need only step outside and request tenderly: “Please hold me during this time. Please move me slowly and lovingly into newness.”
P83 Ireland, where paganism had been semiprotected from the Romans and Christianity. Where the Goddess still knew how to transform narcissistic heroes into fertile magicians.
P86 Just as Tristan's body is wounded, so is his narrative. He is a Celtic pagan hero,
deeply tied to the environment, wrenched from his homeland and reinserted into a civilized Christian romance more interested in “duty” than in sacred ecology. […]
As he is thrown into one event after the other, Tristan is never allowed the slow, nonlinear, nonnarrative time it takes to heal. Words aren't always the best way to access pain. Sometimes the story doesn't staunch the bleeding heart. […]
So much of the current rhetoric about healing is wedded to progress and to narrative. But the body is not a story. It is porous and complicated and changeable. It needs to dance and swim. It needs to lie on the ground for days, re-regulating its nervous system to the seasonal
heartbeat of the soil. The concept of "healing" has become the time sensitive demand of a culture bent on progressing, and unwittingly taken up by wellness and new age spiritual communities. They say we must be "integrated" and whole again; we must achieve functionality so that we can keep the narrative moving. But a body doesn’t need to move through healing, It just needs to move. And then it needs to be still. It needs to feel safe.
As we look back on centuries of violence and oppression and begin to confront the very real wounds we have inflicted on the land and on on each other, it is important that we don't try to accelerate through the difficulty. We must, as Donna Haraway so elegantly puts it,
P87 “stay with the trouble." Ultimately, sorrow is not healed. It is held. It is honored. It is melted and blended. It moves with the body, not through linear episodes, but through slow, conscious, spiraled dance. As men acknowledge the harm they have done to others and to each other, it is important that they check in with their bodies and the greater body of the earth. Let us take Tristan and put him on a hill with a cup of tea. Let us tell him he can be still for as long as he likes. For right now, he doesn't need to save anybody. He doesn't even need to save himself.
P95 A man sets out on a quest. He encounters dragons. Distressed maidens. Riddling wizards. Through a combination of cunning and brute strength, he reaches individual glory. The framework is familiar because it has been the most popular narrative frame for masculinity since the Middle Ages. But is the hero’s journey still a useful story?
P96 Campbell’s theory of the monomyth was convincing enough that, although it faced much criticism, the hero’s journey has infiltrated the very pith of our literature, our entertainment, and our psychosocial narratives. […]
What does it feel like, as someone who identifies as a man, to be given only one story?
P97 A species of wild lupine dies and suddenly the Karner blue butterfly cannot lay her eggs. Overharvesting of horseshoe crabs disrupts the crucial rest and feeding opportunity of the red knot bird’s continent-long migration. What is the journey of synchronous relationships, delicately attuned to the seasons and other beings’ appetites? How can multiple stories with competing needs live together simultaneously?
[…] How can we write ecosystems rather than individuals? A hero’s journey implies a singular hero and a linear path. How can we write stories with crisscrossing paths? How can we write stories that reflect the messy, intertangled reality of living inside an ecosystem alongside many other species?
P98 We need to offer the masculine many different modes of narrative expression.
[…] most importantly, the masculine is not one star in the sky; it is a constellation of relationships, rather than a concrete singular. We are teeming cauldrons of aliveness.
P100 I’m not saying we need to throw out the hero’s journey. But we do need a biodiversity of stories. […] And then to begin talking and singing and sprouting into as many stories as there are spores on the wind, bacteria in our gut, unsung loves in the forgotten corner of our feral hearts.
P106 In her memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit writes:
You should be yourself some of the time. You should be with people who are like you, who are facing what you're facing, who dream your dreams and fight your battles, who recognize you. And then, other times, you should be like people unlike yourself. Because there is a problem as well with those who spend too little time being anyone else; it stunts the imagination in which empathy takes root, that empathy that is a capacity to shape-shift and roam out of your sole self. One of the convenient afflictions of power is a lack of this imaginative extension. For many men it begins in early childhood, with almost exclusively being given stories with male protagonists.
P107 As our capacity for empathy blooms, nourished by otherness, we will be able to see different narrative possibilities in our own lives.
[…] It’s not that the dragonflies and the ivy and the fungus and the frogs and the mountain lions remain mute. It’s that, high on our own narrative of human supremacy, we forget to ask, “What troubles you?”
Parzifal, when he finally asks the Fisher King for his story, has learned not what it means to be a hero, but what it means to be a storyteller. A storyteller needs a basket of stories. A multiplicity of tales suited for different seasons and audiences. A storyteller asks for stories, knowing each one will come in handy at some point.
P108 […] early sixteenth century […] Thinkers like Locke, Newton, Spinoza, and Descartes stressed “observable phenomena” as a new type of revelation. What we can see and prove, we can believe. While this paradigm shift could have bloomed into an increasingly sensual, interrogative mode of relating to the natural world, it withered into the bare tree of disembodied jargon and teleological excuses for using nature as a standing reserve of resources. Western philosophy has continually reified this dualism in its attempt to distinguish the human as different from every other flavor of being. Descartes gave us two things: a mind constituted by abstract thinking, and a dead world.
But what if the world wasn’t dead matter after all? What if, under the sloppy paint job of materialism and rationalism, the animate world was just asleep?
P113 Although I began my studies through the lens of the Divine Feminine, I find it is no longer big enough for me. The opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy. The opposite of civilization is not an idealized return to Paleolithic hunting and gathering. The opposite of a human is not an animal or a rock or a blade of grass. The opposite of our current predicament – climate collapse, social unrest, extinction, mass migrations, solastalgia, genocide—is, in fact, the disintegration of opposites altogether.
Everything is both. And more. And everything is penetratingly, painfully, wildly alive.
[…] The reason I have begun to shy away from the Divine Feminine and the Sacred Masculine is their unfortunate identification with gender and, more importantly, their overidentification with humans ad their myopic classifications generally. Animacy is plushier. Springier. More mosslike. It seems a soft spot to rest on while I try to understand and explain how very sentient the world is to me these days.
P114 The opposite of anthropocentrism is not any Divine Gender. The opposite of anthropocentrism is Everything. […] Everything is us, but it needs something in return. It needs us to melt our ideas of sentience as a purely human property. Or as a purely animal property. Or as a purely individual property. Relationships are sentient. […] With every exhalation we decant ourselves back into the world.
P115 We ensoul the world and are ensouled in return. Our myths about individuation and linearity no longer hold all the trouble. And all the love. […]
Divine Feminine just isn’t big enough for all the relationships holding and constituting me these days. She thins my language into a one-to-one relationship. […]
I’m not throwing her out, the Divine Feminine. I’m throwing her in. Melting her down. Mixing her into the messier, polytemporal animacy of everything I touch, change, and become.
The animate earth is a verb. An assemblage of verbs. A mycorrhizal system sewing together a whole forest. A shared breath. A midsummer celebration where everyone is invited.
P117 Mel Y. Chen […] Animacies […] “Animacy has the capacity to rewrite conditions of intimacy.”
P118 […] demonstrating that what matters is less character and more aliveness – animacy itself pulsing through every cascading call and perfumed noun. […] What if we didn’t need to enter into a sacred marriage? What if we already were one? […] Contaminated intimacy at our very core. Lovemaking in every vibrating part.
I’m proposing a new sacred marriage: lichen. […] How can we walk into more ecstatic, blended union with the world? […] We need daily reminders that we are all mutually related and becoming. We need to slip loose our ideas of sex, our tired rituals of heteronormativity, and begin to dance with other species. Our cells are made of a love that is neither strictly penetrative nor gendered. It is lichenized.
P119 The Song of Songs offers us an alternative mode of masculinity. This is not the sexless, starved bridegroom of Christ’s church. This is the man so consumed with love that he slips loose his edges and becomes every blade of grass. […]
Let’s liberate men from the lonely quest into the dark wood. Let’s offer them courtship as a new mode of questing. Courtship as exploded from obsolete heteronormative rituals. What would it mean to go outside and begin to woo the trees? The foxes? The field? Let us acknowledge that the world is a green bride: playful, alive, resplendent, anticipatory. Waiting to be convinced into blooming by a song, an open hand, a bridegroom.
-------- (see WritingWorshipLament folder for quotes from last 1/4 of book)
P3 My deepening study into myth and science blurred my ideas of gender distinction and, even more excitingly, my ideas of bounded individuality.
P4 Just as fungi originally taught plants how to root into the soil, so myths teach us how to root into relation with our ecological and social ecosystems.
P5 Patriarchy’s monolithic vision of the masculine is bad for everyone and terrible for our ecosystems. But patriarchy is not the only narrative.
P6 How can we think of our bodies as ecosystems of kinship? How can we see ourselves as relationally woven into the larger whole of our environment?
P8 My greatest desire is to be in conversation with you.
P13 How can a monotheistic sky god rule the dirt, the fungi, the funky and sexy reality of embodied life if he is always hovering above it? How can he understand the millions of different stories that constitute an ecosystem if he insists there is only one story and one god?
Monotheism is trapped by its attachment to a mythic monologue. Sky gods think sunshine, abstraction, and ascension are the answer to everything. But the problem with the sun is that if it isn’t tempered by darkness and rain and decay, it tends to create deserts instead of biodiverse ecosystems. We are ground people who have been worshipping sky stories not properly suited to our relational existence rooted in the land. Sporulated storm gods come from the ground, like us, so they understand our soil-fed, rain-sweetened existence. They bring the wisdom of the underworld and lift it into the sky, only to pour it back into the leaves, the grasses, the valleys, soaking back into the dirt from which they originally emerged. Sky gods encourage linear thinking. Spore gods teach us that everything is cyclical.
P17 When I think of what I believe in, it is closest to a form of animism – the belief that all plants, creatures, and parts of the earth are animate and alive. But it is an animism of chaotic difference. Of woven contamination. It is an understanding that my being alive does not mean I should assume that the aliveness of the hill or the river or the wild roses is the same flavor as my aliveness.
P30 What is the masculine? The masculine doesn’t belong to a specific type of body. The masculine, like the moon, is mutable. There is no final destination for masculinity. It flickers. Thickens. Breaks. Flows.
[…] Patriarchal masculinity is painfully static.
P31 This isn’t a gender expression. Expression implies movement and creativity. Patriarchal masculinity stays the same, and it stays still.
P41 Like Dyonysus, we can remember our deeper, pre-patriarchal root systems that help us stay grounded, while still able to sway in a storm. Let us give masculinity back its flowering wand of reciprocal relationship with the natural world. Let us call Dyonysus to the gates of our cities and homes. A man who can dance with plants and honor beasts, a man who can be a woman and an androgen and an animal, is more than a gender. He is a celebration. A hive of humming bees. A secret network of fungus ready to erupt as the air moistens. A murmuration of birds. A cluster of grapes. A throng of singing women. A magician.
P52 A feral mind.
P58 Take a moment, and if you have access to the internet, look up the last recorded song of the Kau’io’o bird species. It is singing to a mate that will never arrive. Listen to the plaintive lilt and questioning descent of the song. Attune your ear to the void space that shows you the shape of the lover that no longer sings a reply. Feel the vibrations in the bones of your face, in the wave of your mind, and then, let a hunger bloom in your body for the missing song.
P59 His song serves three purposes: to celebrate what is lost, to move through mourning, and to agitate the listening audience into relational action.
[…] Solastalgia is a new word for a new type of heartbreak. The term was coined by scholar Glenn Albrecht to describe a form of emotional distress caused by environmental change. It encapsulates the homesickness for a home or a lover that no longer exists.
P61 Orpheus asks the masculine to acknowledge all the lost songs.
P62-3 To accept a life without poetry, without love, and without access to wilderness – these seem much more maddening than running off to the woods to celebrate spiritual connectivity and the power of a handsome, generous, and empathic god.
P64 Women […] Their rage and anger is mocked, repressed, and punished. The passivity of depression and sorrow is encouraged over the dynamism of angry problem-solving.
What if the masculine could call forth and celebrate more than just the starved, porcelain maid? What if the masculine was so plural, so mutable, so relaxed and confident in its ability to flow and shift, that it opened up room for the maenad? What would it look like to allow the women in our lives to express their full complexity? I suspect the transformative alchemy of that experience wouldn’t benefit only women. I think it might just have the power to turn men into gods and revolutionaries.
P67 What if, before we began to fight, we rooted back into our earth-based pleasure?
P70 What if the fact that Dionysus does not need to commit rape or violent assault in order to attract lovers makes him even more masculine? What if the ease of his masculinity, the biodiversity of forms and possibilities he represents, causes the rigid and monolithic masculinity of patriarchy to contract around its lack of options? What if Dionysus is a window into a healthier, more fertile world of masculinities that existed before the Greek invasions of the Mediterranean Basin and the end of the Bronze Age? What if he was so sexually potent and self-assured that he didn’t have to resort to patriarchal modes of repression and abuse? Dionysus is referred to as the god of women. Women were easily attracted to him and his flavor of ecstatic, nature-based spirituality. He didn’t need to punish or force lovers into sexual submission. The lovers, women and men and satyrs and goddesses, were already fully ready to offer their affections.
P72 At a time when one in three women have experienced sexual violence, Dionysus might be an important role model for the masculine. What does it mean to approach the beloved knowing that they have been wronged? What does it look like to tenderly heal that wounding and that power imbalance? My guess is the answer is more luscious and beautiful and sexy than we can even imagine. Healing doesn’t have to be hard work. It can be romantic. It can be a bacchanal.
P80 As men try to attend to the wounds of patriarchy, the wounds they have inflicted on others and on themselves, the roles they are trying to shed, the roles they are trying to expand into, it is important to remember that real healing cannot be rushed. […] If we don’t give our wings time to dry, we will never be able to fly. Stepping out of dominant cultural narratives involves a process of grieving, tending to our losses, and transforming our dreams.
P81 […] it involves a compassionate, daily check-in. How am I feeling? Do I need to move more slowly?
[…] the natural world has always been our chrysalis. It has always been our transformative medicine. As men move into new modes of the masculine and sense that it is time to shed an old skin, to heal a wound from the bottom up, they need only step outside and request tenderly: “Please hold me during this time. Please move me slowly and lovingly into newness.”
P83 Ireland, where paganism had been semiprotected from the Romans and Christianity. Where the Goddess still knew how to transform narcissistic heroes into fertile magicians.
P86 Just as Tristan's body is wounded, so is his narrative. He is a Celtic pagan hero,
deeply tied to the environment, wrenched from his homeland and reinserted into a civilized Christian romance more interested in “duty” than in sacred ecology. […]
As he is thrown into one event after the other, Tristan is never allowed the slow, nonlinear, nonnarrative time it takes to heal. Words aren't always the best way to access pain. Sometimes the story doesn't staunch the bleeding heart. […]
So much of the current rhetoric about healing is wedded to progress and to narrative. But the body is not a story. It is porous and complicated and changeable. It needs to dance and swim. It needs to lie on the ground for days, re-regulating its nervous system to the seasonal
heartbeat of the soil. The concept of "healing" has become the time sensitive demand of a culture bent on progressing, and unwittingly taken up by wellness and new age spiritual communities. They say we must be "integrated" and whole again; we must achieve functionality so that we can keep the narrative moving. But a body doesn’t need to move through healing, It just needs to move. And then it needs to be still. It needs to feel safe.
As we look back on centuries of violence and oppression and begin to confront the very real wounds we have inflicted on the land and on on each other, it is important that we don't try to accelerate through the difficulty. We must, as Donna Haraway so elegantly puts it,
P87 “stay with the trouble." Ultimately, sorrow is not healed. It is held. It is honored. It is melted and blended. It moves with the body, not through linear episodes, but through slow, conscious, spiraled dance. As men acknowledge the harm they have done to others and to each other, it is important that they check in with their bodies and the greater body of the earth. Let us take Tristan and put him on a hill with a cup of tea. Let us tell him he can be still for as long as he likes. For right now, he doesn't need to save anybody. He doesn't even need to save himself.
P95 A man sets out on a quest. He encounters dragons. Distressed maidens. Riddling wizards. Through a combination of cunning and brute strength, he reaches individual glory. The framework is familiar because it has been the most popular narrative frame for masculinity since the Middle Ages. But is the hero’s journey still a useful story?
P96 Campbell’s theory of the monomyth was convincing enough that, although it faced much criticism, the hero’s journey has infiltrated the very pith of our literature, our entertainment, and our psychosocial narratives. […]
What does it feel like, as someone who identifies as a man, to be given only one story?
P97 A species of wild lupine dies and suddenly the Karner blue butterfly cannot lay her eggs. Overharvesting of horseshoe crabs disrupts the crucial rest and feeding opportunity of the red knot bird’s continent-long migration. What is the journey of synchronous relationships, delicately attuned to the seasons and other beings’ appetites? How can multiple stories with competing needs live together simultaneously?
[…] How can we write ecosystems rather than individuals? A hero’s journey implies a singular hero and a linear path. How can we write stories with crisscrossing paths? How can we write stories that reflect the messy, intertangled reality of living inside an ecosystem alongside many other species?
P98 We need to offer the masculine many different modes of narrative expression.
[…] most importantly, the masculine is not one star in the sky; it is a constellation of relationships, rather than a concrete singular. We are teeming cauldrons of aliveness.
P100 I’m not saying we need to throw out the hero’s journey. But we do need a biodiversity of stories. […] And then to begin talking and singing and sprouting into as many stories as there are spores on the wind, bacteria in our gut, unsung loves in the forgotten corner of our feral hearts.
P106 In her memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, Rebecca Solnit writes:
You should be yourself some of the time. You should be with people who are like you, who are facing what you're facing, who dream your dreams and fight your battles, who recognize you. And then, other times, you should be like people unlike yourself. Because there is a problem as well with those who spend too little time being anyone else; it stunts the imagination in which empathy takes root, that empathy that is a capacity to shape-shift and roam out of your sole self. One of the convenient afflictions of power is a lack of this imaginative extension. For many men it begins in early childhood, with almost exclusively being given stories with male protagonists.
P107 As our capacity for empathy blooms, nourished by otherness, we will be able to see different narrative possibilities in our own lives.
[…] It’s not that the dragonflies and the ivy and the fungus and the frogs and the mountain lions remain mute. It’s that, high on our own narrative of human supremacy, we forget to ask, “What troubles you?”
Parzifal, when he finally asks the Fisher King for his story, has learned not what it means to be a hero, but what it means to be a storyteller. A storyteller needs a basket of stories. A multiplicity of tales suited for different seasons and audiences. A storyteller asks for stories, knowing each one will come in handy at some point.
P108 […] early sixteenth century […] Thinkers like Locke, Newton, Spinoza, and Descartes stressed “observable phenomena” as a new type of revelation. What we can see and prove, we can believe. While this paradigm shift could have bloomed into an increasingly sensual, interrogative mode of relating to the natural world, it withered into the bare tree of disembodied jargon and teleological excuses for using nature as a standing reserve of resources. Western philosophy has continually reified this dualism in its attempt to distinguish the human as different from every other flavor of being. Descartes gave us two things: a mind constituted by abstract thinking, and a dead world.
But what if the world wasn’t dead matter after all? What if, under the sloppy paint job of materialism and rationalism, the animate world was just asleep?
P113 Although I began my studies through the lens of the Divine Feminine, I find it is no longer big enough for me. The opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy. The opposite of civilization is not an idealized return to Paleolithic hunting and gathering. The opposite of a human is not an animal or a rock or a blade of grass. The opposite of our current predicament – climate collapse, social unrest, extinction, mass migrations, solastalgia, genocide—is, in fact, the disintegration of opposites altogether.
Everything is both. And more. And everything is penetratingly, painfully, wildly alive.
[…] The reason I have begun to shy away from the Divine Feminine and the Sacred Masculine is their unfortunate identification with gender and, more importantly, their overidentification with humans ad their myopic classifications generally. Animacy is plushier. Springier. More mosslike. It seems a soft spot to rest on while I try to understand and explain how very sentient the world is to me these days.
P114 The opposite of anthropocentrism is not any Divine Gender. The opposite of anthropocentrism is Everything. […] Everything is us, but it needs something in return. It needs us to melt our ideas of sentience as a purely human property. Or as a purely animal property. Or as a purely individual property. Relationships are sentient. […] With every exhalation we decant ourselves back into the world.
P115 We ensoul the world and are ensouled in return. Our myths about individuation and linearity no longer hold all the trouble. And all the love. […]
Divine Feminine just isn’t big enough for all the relationships holding and constituting me these days. She thins my language into a one-to-one relationship. […]
I’m not throwing her out, the Divine Feminine. I’m throwing her in. Melting her down. Mixing her into the messier, polytemporal animacy of everything I touch, change, and become.
The animate earth is a verb. An assemblage of verbs. A mycorrhizal system sewing together a whole forest. A shared breath. A midsummer celebration where everyone is invited.
P117 Mel Y. Chen […] Animacies […] “Animacy has the capacity to rewrite conditions of intimacy.”
P118 […] demonstrating that what matters is less character and more aliveness – animacy itself pulsing through every cascading call and perfumed noun. […] What if we didn’t need to enter into a sacred marriage? What if we already were one? […] Contaminated intimacy at our very core. Lovemaking in every vibrating part.
I’m proposing a new sacred marriage: lichen. […] How can we walk into more ecstatic, blended union with the world? […] We need daily reminders that we are all mutually related and becoming. We need to slip loose our ideas of sex, our tired rituals of heteronormativity, and begin to dance with other species. Our cells are made of a love that is neither strictly penetrative nor gendered. It is lichenized.
P119 The Song of Songs offers us an alternative mode of masculinity. This is not the sexless, starved bridegroom of Christ’s church. This is the man so consumed with love that he slips loose his edges and becomes every blade of grass. […]
Let’s liberate men from the lonely quest into the dark wood. Let’s offer them courtship as a new mode of questing. Courtship as exploded from obsolete heteronormative rituals. What would it mean to go outside and begin to woo the trees? The foxes? The field? Let us acknowledge that the world is a green bride: playful, alive, resplendent, anticipatory. Waiting to be convinced into blooming by a song, an open hand, a bridegroom.
December 3, 2022
This book, and all of Sophie Strand's writing, is a true joy. It has the penetrating insight of a naturalist into ecological realities I barely understand and the enveloping reverence of deep poetry. It is not just another mythology book-- it is a faerie tale from an alternate universe that I read to my children. Her story reads like a multi-species love story, way beyond the hero narrative we think we know .... deeply humane and more than human
As a life long lover of Dionysus without really knowing his name--it having been corrupted into a cartoon of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll--I feel like I've entered into intense conversation with his metamor, the kind of intimate discovery that makes you fall deeper in love with the familiar seen through new eyes. Her eyes are fresh, her voice sweet and playful, her story beckons us to look again at our old tales.
In Divine madness is the resurrection of the World
Dancing with the Animacy all around us
Ecstasy of escaping the bounds of the human and melting into landscape
And isn't that at the heart of our Pagan dreams
As a life long lover of Dionysus without really knowing his name--it having been corrupted into a cartoon of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll--I feel like I've entered into intense conversation with his metamor, the kind of intimate discovery that makes you fall deeper in love with the familiar seen through new eyes. Her eyes are fresh, her voice sweet and playful, her story beckons us to look again at our old tales.
In Divine madness is the resurrection of the World
Dancing with the Animacy all around us
Ecstasy of escaping the bounds of the human and melting into landscape
And isn't that at the heart of our Pagan dreams
December 18, 2022
Wonderful, wonderful read. Read this a number of years ago when I was casting out, looking at a range of programs - among them Wicca. This book contains wisdom and insight I did not see in any other resource and I am a two fisted reader.
I am not Wiccan but I still hold this book in the highest of regard in its capacity to unravel how the contemporary Pagan/Wiccan awareness and substantially expands the standard narrative.
I am not Wiccan but I still hold this book in the highest of regard in its capacity to unravel how the contemporary Pagan/Wiccan awareness and substantially expands the standard narrative.
November 30, 2023
I enjoyed this book on so many levels. The beautiful prose alone is enough to make this book memorable but the way the author illuminates old stories and myths is second to none. I loved this book because I know I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate it a few years ago. Read this or don’t, I don’t care, but wow it was refreshing to experience.
April 5, 2024
Sophie Strand always makes me question what I think I know, and I appreciate that.
January 14, 2025
A bit woo for me, but I appreciate the concepts at play and am moved by the sense of poetry and imagination. However, not everything is a mushroom and I think we will soon move on from the mycelial era in contemporary thought.
January 7, 2023
Incredible read. Thank you Sophie.
Read
March 16, 2024wow ok this was a big one. so mulchy & churny & transformative that when i finished it i was like damn i need to make a google doc with my thoughts on this and favorite quotes....but that is just a goodreads review so that is what im gonna do. reminds me of the feeling of finishing emergent strategy and immediately having 10,000 ideas of how to apply it and braid it into my life. i have a google doc with emergent strategy quotes in it and every so often i come back to it....excited to see how sophie strand shows up in my life going forward....already having ideas...
first of all, thank you to my mother for recommending me a podcast episode with sophie strand in the first place and then i listened to every episode ever with her in it. i will say that i had the elvia wilk problem with her (also she and elvia wilk must be on the same cosmological compost wavelength or something, like let me IN to that vibe plzzzz) where i listened to too many of her podcasts before i read her book and then it wasn't as revolutionary as it could've been but like that's ok plus it was cool to have her voice and some background knowledge about her in my mind as i was reading. but ya if u r one of my friends reading this u shld listen to any podcast episode with sophie strand bc she will blow ur mind. she's one of those awesome people who doesn't blow your mind by hitting you with all these new crazy innovative ideas but she just weaves everything that i love and everything that is important to me together in such a beautiful and revelatory way. the braiding and poetic phrasing, the lying of the strands (lol) against each other is what is revelatory - very much an earthseed vibe, not creating something new but just observing the world and braiding bits together. but also she talks in a podcast abt how much she loves research and i loved all those deep cuts she pulls out abt mary magdalene and jesus.
but yeah this book is about compost culture and ecology-based storytelling and interconnectedness and the erotics of rot (shotout elvia wilk pt 2) and microbiomes and holobiont-ry and ecologies of place and gods and pleasure activism
and STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE. yes i need to read that book now. i love this idea which sophie strand sort of rephrases as composting the problematic thing, inundating it with other possibilities, instead of a disposability/cancel culture....and the way she does that with christianity is so beautiful...and in line with how i'm thinking about my journey with judaism...and in line with mr fabian's thing about acknowledge complexity/souffle instead of syrup lol...but yeah this book gave me sooo many other books to read like shoutout to sophie for caring citation. citation as a form of love.....yum. here are some of the ppl i need to read now: robert alter, tolkien on fairy stories, mel y chen animacies, karen armstrong the lost art of scripture
ok but more preamble before quote time. this book came almost at a too perfect time in my life. i just had the most microbiome-focused week of my life which included multiple revelations about the interconnectedness of soil and gut microbiomes. including willy's lecture on microbe cooperation and coevolution and HOLOBIONTS. I LOVE BEING A HOLOBIONT!!!! and then literally sophie strand loves being a holobiont too! it was just cracking me up how willy and sophie strand were saying the exact same things in the exact same week and it just feels like the universe is telling me to be microbial right now...hmmm must consider the implications. also must recommend this book to willy or something. except she's so obsessed with mycorrhizal networks and willy was like everyone is talking about fungus but let's talk about something else. but he just likes to be special.
- "myths were originally situated in particular ecosystems. just as mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of underground mycelia, so are myths the aboveground manifestations of specific ecologies. myths are momentary eruptions of beings that have been growing for millennia belowground." THIS. is so cool. going in my politics of writing note. her whole thing is that we have deracinated myths from their ecological contexts which deracinates them from their meaning. how can we recover the land based place based roots of the stories that form us culturally? how can we create new stories that are in tune with the land around us? what is especially interesting abt this is her concept that "these myths are translations of older stories" that have been shifted (coopted even, one cld argue....) to become patriarchal and solarized. this resonates so much with what i am learning about jewish texts and how they house within them the stories of so many other cultures.
- sophie strand loves to explode a binary. like sky vs ground. "one of the drivers behind rainfall is something very curious indeed: fungal spores. the group of fungi that produce mushrooms, called basidiomycetes, grow through an osmotic inflation process, their hyphae bonding together and filling with water in order to 'bloom' above the soil. once the mushrooms have developed, tiny stalks (basidian) grow underneath the mushroom cap, culminating in tiny spores. a drop of water forms between the gills under a mushroom's cap. finally, the water droplet condenses against the spore, jettisonning the spore out of the mushroom. in his book mycelium running....paul stamets estimates that the force with which mushrooms eject spores is ten thousand times the force undergone by astronauts as they exit the gravitational pull of earth's orbit. some land many inches away from the original mushroom. but most are buoyed upwards by the wind, into the sky...sugar on the spores' surface cause water to condense around them once they have been ejected. spores become a nucleus of sorts in a floating water molecule. these water-coated spores bump into each other, again and again, millions of times, until they accumulate into rain clouds." MUSHROOM CLOUDS CAUSING RAIN OKKKKKK.....and then this helps them grow bc they need damp environments. this is on pg 27 if i need to come back to it!!!!!! which i might!!!
- "knowing that a stone is alive keeps me alive. and knowing that a stone is alive differently than me keeps me asking questions, keeps me humble and curious and open to surprise." this is a lovely answer to the anthropomorphism debate that rattles around in my brain every so often. and i love how sophie strand emphasizes the asking of questions, of curiosity, as a possibility for a new masculinity...also bc "answers tend to end stories"
-THE ANIMATE EVERYTHING. yep
- "the divine, although it includes us, is mostly inhuman. mutable. mostly green. often microscopic"
- dionysus' vine as theory of change....strangling the master's house....digesting the master's house....welcoming in the invasive species....learning how it interacts with the land...instead of trying to find a "cure"...... using pleasure/fermentation/dance....“how can our pleasure, our vine-like questioning and probing of the system, begin to confuse the systems that constrict us?...i’m not sure what the answer is, but i think by studying the invsaive species in our local ecologies we can learn about subversive revolutionary tactics…”
- “how can we write ecosystems rather than individuals?”
- "The Animate Everything is waiting to be asked for its stories. it's not that the dragonflies and the ivy and the fungus and the frogs and the mountain lions remain mute. it's that, high on our own narrative of human supremacy, we forget to ask, 'what troubles you?'"
- "not even the neo darwinian idea of linear evolution has proved infallible, increasingly melting into questions of horizontal gene transfer and symbiogenesis" WILLY WAS LITERALLY TALKING ABOUT THIS LOLOLOLOL LIKE THIS IS HIS BIG THING
- "what would it mean to go outside and begin to woo the trees? the foxes? the field?"
- “the more we love, the more we see. maybe then, trouble with love, melted into otherness, we will marvel”
i do think this book was a little too perfect and poetry>sense and even buzzwordy at times but there is still so much in it that is RIGHT and resonant and so important for rn. feeling very thankful
first of all, thank you to my mother for recommending me a podcast episode with sophie strand in the first place and then i listened to every episode ever with her in it. i will say that i had the elvia wilk problem with her (also she and elvia wilk must be on the same cosmological compost wavelength or something, like let me IN to that vibe plzzzz) where i listened to too many of her podcasts before i read her book and then it wasn't as revolutionary as it could've been but like that's ok plus it was cool to have her voice and some background knowledge about her in my mind as i was reading. but ya if u r one of my friends reading this u shld listen to any podcast episode with sophie strand bc she will blow ur mind. she's one of those awesome people who doesn't blow your mind by hitting you with all these new crazy innovative ideas but she just weaves everything that i love and everything that is important to me together in such a beautiful and revelatory way. the braiding and poetic phrasing, the lying of the strands (lol) against each other is what is revelatory - very much an earthseed vibe, not creating something new but just observing the world and braiding bits together. but also she talks in a podcast abt how much she loves research and i loved all those deep cuts she pulls out abt mary magdalene and jesus.
but yeah this book is about compost culture and ecology-based storytelling and interconnectedness and the erotics of rot (shotout elvia wilk pt 2) and microbiomes and holobiont-ry and ecologies of place and gods and pleasure activism
and STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE. yes i need to read that book now. i love this idea which sophie strand sort of rephrases as composting the problematic thing, inundating it with other possibilities, instead of a disposability/cancel culture....and the way she does that with christianity is so beautiful...and in line with how i'm thinking about my journey with judaism...and in line with mr fabian's thing about acknowledge complexity/souffle instead of syrup lol...but yeah this book gave me sooo many other books to read like shoutout to sophie for caring citation. citation as a form of love.....yum. here are some of the ppl i need to read now: robert alter, tolkien on fairy stories, mel y chen animacies, karen armstrong the lost art of scripture
ok but more preamble before quote time. this book came almost at a too perfect time in my life. i just had the most microbiome-focused week of my life which included multiple revelations about the interconnectedness of soil and gut microbiomes. including willy's lecture on microbe cooperation and coevolution and HOLOBIONTS. I LOVE BEING A HOLOBIONT!!!! and then literally sophie strand loves being a holobiont too! it was just cracking me up how willy and sophie strand were saying the exact same things in the exact same week and it just feels like the universe is telling me to be microbial right now...hmmm must consider the implications. also must recommend this book to willy or something. except she's so obsessed with mycorrhizal networks and willy was like everyone is talking about fungus but let's talk about something else. but he just likes to be special.
- "myths were originally situated in particular ecosystems. just as mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of underground mycelia, so are myths the aboveground manifestations of specific ecologies. myths are momentary eruptions of beings that have been growing for millennia belowground." THIS. is so cool. going in my politics of writing note. her whole thing is that we have deracinated myths from their ecological contexts which deracinates them from their meaning. how can we recover the land based place based roots of the stories that form us culturally? how can we create new stories that are in tune with the land around us? what is especially interesting abt this is her concept that "these myths are translations of older stories" that have been shifted (coopted even, one cld argue....) to become patriarchal and solarized. this resonates so much with what i am learning about jewish texts and how they house within them the stories of so many other cultures.
- sophie strand loves to explode a binary. like sky vs ground. "one of the drivers behind rainfall is something very curious indeed: fungal spores. the group of fungi that produce mushrooms, called basidiomycetes, grow through an osmotic inflation process, their hyphae bonding together and filling with water in order to 'bloom' above the soil. once the mushrooms have developed, tiny stalks (basidian) grow underneath the mushroom cap, culminating in tiny spores. a drop of water forms between the gills under a mushroom's cap. finally, the water droplet condenses against the spore, jettisonning the spore out of the mushroom. in his book mycelium running....paul stamets estimates that the force with which mushrooms eject spores is ten thousand times the force undergone by astronauts as they exit the gravitational pull of earth's orbit. some land many inches away from the original mushroom. but most are buoyed upwards by the wind, into the sky...sugar on the spores' surface cause water to condense around them once they have been ejected. spores become a nucleus of sorts in a floating water molecule. these water-coated spores bump into each other, again and again, millions of times, until they accumulate into rain clouds." MUSHROOM CLOUDS CAUSING RAIN OKKKKKK.....and then this helps them grow bc they need damp environments. this is on pg 27 if i need to come back to it!!!!!! which i might!!!
- "knowing that a stone is alive keeps me alive. and knowing that a stone is alive differently than me keeps me asking questions, keeps me humble and curious and open to surprise." this is a lovely answer to the anthropomorphism debate that rattles around in my brain every so often. and i love how sophie strand emphasizes the asking of questions, of curiosity, as a possibility for a new masculinity...also bc "answers tend to end stories"
-THE ANIMATE EVERYTHING. yep
- "the divine, although it includes us, is mostly inhuman. mutable. mostly green. often microscopic"
- dionysus' vine as theory of change....strangling the master's house....digesting the master's house....welcoming in the invasive species....learning how it interacts with the land...instead of trying to find a "cure"...... using pleasure/fermentation/dance....“how can our pleasure, our vine-like questioning and probing of the system, begin to confuse the systems that constrict us?...i’m not sure what the answer is, but i think by studying the invsaive species in our local ecologies we can learn about subversive revolutionary tactics…”
- “how can we write ecosystems rather than individuals?”
- "The Animate Everything is waiting to be asked for its stories. it's not that the dragonflies and the ivy and the fungus and the frogs and the mountain lions remain mute. it's that, high on our own narrative of human supremacy, we forget to ask, 'what troubles you?'"
- "not even the neo darwinian idea of linear evolution has proved infallible, increasingly melting into questions of horizontal gene transfer and symbiogenesis" WILLY WAS LITERALLY TALKING ABOUT THIS LOLOLOLOL LIKE THIS IS HIS BIG THING
- "what would it mean to go outside and begin to woo the trees? the foxes? the field?"
- “the more we love, the more we see. maybe then, trouble with love, melted into otherness, we will marvel”
i do think this book was a little too perfect and poetry>sense and even buzzwordy at times but there is still so much in it that is RIGHT and resonant and so important for rn. feeling very thankful
December 16, 2024
While I am quite sympathetic to Strand's premise, and was interested in her research into the precursors of more familiar myths (which is what saved this from a "1" rating), I thought way too many strands (no pun intended) were in play in this slender book of short essays. Simpler language would have helped - the combination of florid lyricism and academia simply didn't work for me. Attempts at connecting the chapters felt disjointed. The mycelium metaphor was so very, very overworked and strained. I think this book needed more focus and a good editor.
July 9, 2023
This book felt so disjointed. If you come into this with zero context, you will not understand anything she is talking about. After discussing the book with others, it does seem as though it has some really great point, but absolutely the wrong delivery. The subjects were all over the place and I’m not sure how or if they tied in together.
June 25, 2024
I really liked the general topic of the book. What is “non-toxic” masculinity and how have we imagined it in past. The book gave me things to think about, both about men and about ecology. I listed on audible, and the author reads it well. Having said all this, this book was not enjoyable to read. The mycology analogy was very overdone and the language was unnecessarily complicated.
February 4, 2023
I enjoyed the individual chapters, but not the book as a whole. Each chapter and story was a good read, but they didn't seem to flow together cohesively. Overall, though, I would still recommend it and will keep it on my shelves for future re-reads.
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