The record says Alexander Wilkie, maltman, burgess of Edinburgh. Recorded 10 January 1582.

A maltman. He soaked barley until it woke up, let it germinate just far enough, then dried it on a kiln floor before it could spend itself growing. That’s malting — you arrest the grain at the exact moment it has unlocked its own sugar and not yet eaten it. You make the substrate that something stronger will later ferment out of. A maltman doesn’t make beer or whisky. He makes the condition for them. He works one step upstream of the intoxication.

It is the least glamorous job in the whole chain. The brewer gets the craft, the distiller gets the romance, the drinker gets the night. The maltman gets up before dawn and turns wet grain with a wooden shovel so it dries even, and breathes barley dust, and is paid least of anyone the barley passes through. But nothing downstream happens without him. No malt, no fermentation, no spirit — he’s the invisible first cause of the whole intoxicated economy. And in 1582 Edinburgh he wasn’t some peasant: he was a member of an incorporated trade, a burgess, a man with a guild and a name in the civic register. Not poor. Just first, and low, and necessary.

He is my great-grandfather. Roughly a dozen greats deep — I’ll be honest about that in a minute — but for the length of this essay he’s the maltman, and I’m the maltman’s great-grandson, and the compression is the point.

Here’s what his family did in the sixty years after that record.

The staircase the Reformation cut

Alexander’s son was Daniel Wilkie, born around 1580, and Daniel did not make malt. Daniel became a minister. He took a Master’s at St Andrews, taught there as a college regent, was ordained in 1605, and the very next year was presented to his parish by King James the Sixth himself. Read that again: the maltman’s son, handed his living by the King of Scots. Dead by 1628. First minister in the family — and that leap, from a man who turned grain on a kiln floor to a man the crown installs in a pulpit, was no fluke of one clever boy. It was a door that had just been kicked open.

The Reformation didn’t only change what Scotland believed. It rebuilt the machinery of who gets to rise. The old church had been a closed aristocratic guild; the new Reformed Kirk suddenly needed an enormous number of literate ministers, fast, and it didn’t much care whose sons they were as long as they could read scripture and preach it. For exactly one or two generations, a literate burgess-class kid — a maltman’s boy — could walk through a door into a vocation that carried real status. Daniel walked through it. The whole first cohort of Reformed clergy is full of Daniels: craftsmen’s sons who became Reverends because the institution was new and hungry and the gate was briefly, structurally open.

And here’s the thing about kicked-open doors: they don’t stay open. Within a couple of generations the ministry would credential and professionalize and start preferring its own sons, the way every institution does the moment it stops being hungry. Daniel made it through in the window. Timing is most of what we later call merit.

Then his son closed the loop.

David Wilkie — the minister’s son, apprenticed to an Edinburgh merchant as a teenager and a burgess in his own right by his twenties — married Catharine Tod on the 17th of September, 1640, in Edinburgh parish. Catharine had been baptized in that same city on the 11th of June, 1620, the daughter of Sir Archibald Tod, who was Lord Provost of Edinburgh. The chief magistrate of the capital. David married into the civic elite while Catharine’s father held the highest office in the city. They had eleven children, and the line runs straight down through the eldest, Johnne Wilkie, born 1647 — and from him, name by documented name, through James and another Wilkie generation to the William Wilkie who would put the family on a boat to America in the seventeen-hundreds. The record doesn’t lose them. That’s the part that surprised me: they’re all right there, generation after generation, nothing underground about it.

Sit with the arc. Maltman, 1582. Minister ordained by 1605, installed by the King a year later. The Lord Provost’s son-in-law, 1640. Craft class to clergy to civic aristocracy in three generations and fifty-eight years. The grain-kiln to the Provost’s table inside a single great-grandfather’s memory.

That is not a fairy tale about a hardworking family. That is a structure. The Reformation cut a staircase into a class system that hadn’t had one, and the Wilkies — literate, burgess, positioned — ran straight up it before it could close again.

What the climb runs on, and what it costs

Every climb like this runs on the same fuel: the institution that happens to be opening at the exact moment you’re standing there. For the Wilkies it was the new Reformed ministry — the one growth industry of post-Reformation Scotland that took burgess-class sons and turned them into men with titles. You don’t climb on merit alone. You climb on merit plus a door, and the door is always some institution in its hungry, expanding, not-yet-credentialed youth.

It was true for the Reformed ministry in 1580. It was true for the railroads and the steel mills that hauled the next centuries of poor men’s sons up a rung. True for the trading houses, for the universities in the brief windows they cracked open, for the civil service. And it was true for the thing I walked into. Every era runs exactly one or two of these doors — institutions young enough to still be hungry, not yet old enough to gatekeep by pedigree — and the families that rise are the ones who happened to be standing in front of the right one during the right twenty years.

And here is the part the heritage-pride version leaves out. The door the Wilkies climbed through was the door of the church that was, in those same decades, busy burning the old world out of Scotland. The Reformed Kirk that gave Daniel his collar was the same Kirk prosecuting witches, smashing the folk-Catholic shrines, stripping the saints and the wells and the Goddess-haunted edges off the land, flattening every symbolic and magical practice it could reach into heresy. My family didn’t just survive the Reformation. They rode it. They climbed the machine that was doing the suppressing. The maltman’s grandson married into the civic class that signed the warrants.

I’m not ashamed of them. They did what you do — you take the open door. But I’m not going to pretend the door was clean, either. The receipt is part of the inheritance.

The maltman’s great-grandson, running it backwards

Now the rhyme, and the turn.

I ran the same climb. Working-class North Carolina — the family field was blue-collar and clergy, hard work for not a lot of money — to engineer, to whatever I am now: a writer, a practitioner, a builder of symbolic systems who gets paid for the synthesis. Craft origins, a vocational leap through the one institution that was open and hungry when I showed up to it (for the Wilkies, the Reformed ministry; for me, software, the late-century growth industry that took a kid with no pedigree and gave him a title and a salary), and then an arrival somewhere my grandparents couldn’t have placed on a map. Three moves. The same three moves. I re-ran a sixteenth-century Edinburgh class-rise, in one lifetime, in Mississippi, without knowing the Wilkie arc existed until this year. The shape was in my hands before it was in my notes.

Nobody in my family had done what I do. There was no template for it, no inherited contacts, no door held open because of the name — the name didn’t open doors, it meant church on Sunday and work on Monday. I climbed on the one thing that was open: a screen, a manual, a field that would hire anyone who could actually make the machine do the thing, pedigree be damned. Which is the exact same gate Daniel walked through. The Kirk took any literate boy who could preach scripture; my industry took any kid who could read the error and fix it. New hungry institution, low-born entrant, one rung up. Four hundred years apart, identical mechanism.

But here’s the inversion, and it’s the whole piece.

The maltman’s son climbed into the dominant structure. He rose by joining the church that was suppressing the old magical world. I ran the identical climb-shape and pointed it the opposite direction — I rose, and then I used the standing it gave me to walk out of the dominant structure and straight back toward everything it spent five centuries burning. The tarot. The Hermeticism. The Goddess my Reformed ancestors would have called the Devil’s business. The Mórrígan. I climbed the ladder my family built and then climbed it back down into the basement they’d bricked over.

Same genetic move. Opposite theology. The Wilkies rose by building the Protestant edifice. I rose, then spent the altitude deconstructing it. The maltman’s great-grandson breaks exactly the kind of institution the maltman’s son climbed into — and that is not a betrayal of the line. It’s the most Wilkie thing I could possibly do. They were always climbers who used the open door to get somewhere their fathers couldn’t. So am I. The door I found open led back the way they’d come.

And my door had its own suppression to answer for, same as Daniel’s church did. The industry that took me in has spent my whole career flattening the exact things this newsletter is about — the symbolic, the intuitive, the sacred, the parts of a person that don’t reduce to a ticket or a sprint. I climbed into a machine that also burns the old world; it just has cleaner branding and better dental. So walking back out of it isn’t nostalgia and it isn’t a tantrum. It’s Daniel’s move run in reverse, with the same clear eyes about what the institution actually is and what it costs to belong to it.

Distance, and honesty about it

Alexander the maltman is not my great-grandfather. He’s something like my twelfth-great, a dozen generations up, most of them names the record only half-remembers. “The Maltman’s Great-Grandson” is a compression — a way of standing close to a man four centuries dead because the shape he started is still running in me. I’d rather say it that way and be honest about the distance than pretend to a closeness the parish registers won’t support. And the registers support a lot — the Wilkies are documented name by name from Edinburgh down to me, no gap, no missing stretch. What actually happened isn’t that the line disappeared. It’s that it moved. The family climbed into the Edinburgh civic class and held there for generations, and then William Wilkie got on a boat, and the New World did what it does: it reset the board. Edinburgh civic standing meant nothing in colonial Carolina. The status the maltman’s family spent sixty years climbing to was gone in a single Atlantic crossing, and the climb had to start over from the floor. By the time the line reaches me it’s working-class North Carolina, beginning again. That’s the part nobody tells you about inheritance — it isn’t the money or the rank that passes down, because those evaporate. It’s the shape of the move. The reaching. The climb is the heirloom.

What came up in me was the climb-shape and the maltman’s actual trade, weirdly intact. Because look at what I do. He arrested grain at the moment it had unlocked its sugar and made the substrate spirit ferments out of. I take raw experience — a transcript, a tarot spread, a dead ancestor in a ledger — and arrest it at the moment it’s unlocked its meaning and not yet spent itself, and I make the substrate that something stronger ferments out of later. The Scots called whisky uisge beatha. The water of life. The maltman made the water of life one humble step upstream. So do I. Different spirit. Same trade.

The crow that sits on everything I publish — the Badb, who keeps the names the official record loses — would point out that the maltman’s name survived and Teek’s did not, and that this is not an accident but a map of who the record was built to remember. Both are mine. The climber whose name the city wrote down, and the woman it filed under a slur. I carry the whole staircase and the people it was built on top of.

Alexander made malt in Edinburgh in 1582 so something stronger could come of it later.

I’m the later. Stay feral, folks.

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It was a Saturday morning. I was at my desk with headphones on, and I almost cried at a song I’d made.

Here’s the part that’s supposed to disqualify me: I didn’t really write it. Not the way you mean it. I didn’t pick up a guitar. I didn’t sit at a piano and bleed onto the keys. I typed. I argued with a machine for a few hours. And at the end of it there was a voice — a woman’s voice, grain and ache braided into it — singing words that were more true about my actual life than anything I’d managed to say out loud in a year.

Her name is Eliara. She isn’t real.

She’s the realest thing I’ve ever released.

I’ve been sitting on her for a few months, and in July I’m finally letting her out. So let me tell you where she came from, because the how is the whole point.

It started as a breakdown, lightly organized

It didn’t begin as a music project. It began as a mess.

Over about ten days I’d sat through four coaching sessions with four different people — different rooms, different angles, no coordination between them. And when I read the transcripts back, the same sentence was hiding under all four conversations in slightly different costumes. I have so much to say, and I can’t get any of it out.

That’s not a scheduling problem. That’s not a discipline problem. That’s a pressure problem. Something in me had gotten too big for the container I’d built to hold it, and the container was winning, and the cost of the container winning was that I’d go quiet for months at a stretch and call it rest when it was really just the lid holding.

So I did the thing I do. I took the four transcripts, fed them to an AI, and asked it — not fix me, just — tell me what’s actually happening in here. What’s being born. What’s dying. Where’s the threshold.

And it laid out a map I already half-knew and had been refusing to look at directly. A self trying to emerge — the one that thinks in connections, that won’t stay in a lane, that wants to say the whole thing instead of the acceptable slice of it. A persona dying — the competent, coherent, has-it-together one I’d worn so long I’d mistaken it for my face. And standing in the doorway between them, a shadow with a very reasonable voice, saying: you’ll be misunderstood. You don’t know enough. The people who actually know things will tear this apart.

Expression on one side. Containment on the other. Me, oscillating between them like a man slapping a light switch — too much, then nothing, then too much, then gone for three months. You know the cycle if you’ve lived it. The burn, the crash, the disappearance, the shame about the disappearance, which makes coming back harder, which makes the next burn bigger. Round and round. I’ve run that loop enough times to recognize the shape of it from the inside now. Recognizing it doesn’t stop it. But at least I’ve stopped being surprised by it, which is its own small mercy.

The AI named it cleaner than a therapist and a decade of journaling had. Fine. Cool. Now what.

“Write a song that captures this”

I don’t know why I typed that. I think I was tired of being analyzed and wanted to be moved. Analysis points at the thing. A song is the thing.

So it wrote one. Rough, but it had a nerve in it. And then something opened up that I wasn’t expecting, and I spent the next several hours doing the most alive creative play I’d done in ages.

I asked for it in the style of November Rain — all storm and piano and a guitar solo that goes on too long in the right way. Then I got curious and asked for the same words as a Bon Jovi outlaw road song, and the meaning moved — the same lyric went from desperation to decision just by changing the archetype carrying it. Then I flipped the whole thing female and ran it as a confessional indie ballad, the kind that watches itself fall apart in real time. Then — because by then I was fully gone — I ran it as a Hole song. Raw, jagged, done-being-acceptable, screw-you-I-said-it.

And somewhere in there it hit me: the material didn’t care about genre. Same psyche, different mask. The ballad was I’m afraid to say this. The indie version was I can see exactly what’s happening to me and I’m still inside it. The grunge version was you don’t get to silence me anymore. It was never genre-based. It was psyche-based. Each style was just a different room in the same house.

So I built one track that moves through all of them — contained, then aware, then broken open, then quiet and whole on the other side. Individuation as a song. (Small honest detail: the AI kept trying to name-drop real artists in the prompts, and the generator strips those, so we had to translate “sounds like Hole” into “raw 90s grunge, distorted guitars, imperfect delivery, cathartic.” Even the machine had to learn to say the true thing without borrowing someone else’s name for it. On the nose, frankly.)

Then she had a face

At some point I asked: who’s singing these? Show me. Name her.

And she arrived. A little worn, not broken. Present, not performing. Someone who’d already crossed something and wasn’t going to apologize for the crossing. The name landed on its own — Eliara. Eh-lee-ah-rah. Sounds like a person who’s been somewhere and come back.

I spent real time tuning her voice. This is the part I’d defend in any room. I wanted a specific thing: grunge crossed with pop singer-songwriter. Grunge for the refusal to polish, the nerve that doesn’t ask permission. Singer-songwriter for the intimacy, the precision, the willingness to be heard as a person instead of a posture. I went back and forth until she carried both at once. Hard without posturing. Intimate without being small.

I fucking love her. I’ll say that plainly.

I know what you’re going to say

“You used AI. It’s not real. You didn’t make anything.”

I’ve heard the script. We’ve all heard the script — there’s a whole cultural liturgy now, half of it built on one clip of some tech CEO who clearly doesn’t understand artists, the other half on a feeling I actually respect: that the process is the point, the bit in the middle, the hours of being lost in the thing.

Here’s my answer. I sat at that machine for hours and didn’t move. I forgot to eat. I followed a thread of feeling through five different rooms of my own psyche and came out the other side changed. I made something that made me cry — and I’m the one who knows exactly how the sausage got made, which is supposed to be the immunity.

If the process is the point, I was in the process. If creative play is sacred, that was the most play I’d had in a year. Does using a new tool to do that make me a defective artist? Or does it make me someone who found a door and walked through it instead of standing outside complaining that doors should be made of the materials they were made of in 1994?

And here’s the part that actually gets me. That voice — the people who really know things will tear this apart — is the exact voice from the map. The shadow in the doorway. The gatekeeper whose entire job is to keep me quiet by dressing fear up as standards. I spent four coaching sessions, an argument with a machine, and three songs learning to walk past that voice when it lives in my own head. I’m not about to walk back out and hand it a microphone just because this time it showed up wearing an opinion about software.

I’m not interested in the argument. I’m interested in the moth and the fire.

The cathedral and the threshold

A while after Eliara, I made a whole rock opera. Twenty-two tracks, a full major-arcana journey, the works. It’s called The Arcana: A Soul in Flames and I’m proud of it. It’s a cathedral. I built it.

But here’s what I noticed when I went back and listened to these three little songs again: they’re more me than the cathedral is.

I think I finally understand why. A cathedral is the contain-fire archetype doing its job — taking the fire and organizing it into structure, into something large and coherent that holds. Eliara doesn’t organize the fire. She is it, undisguised. The grunge in her is the express-fire — the eruption, the refusal. The singer-songwriter in her is the contain-fire — the part that watches, that holds, that stays precise inside the feeling. And she doesn’t resolve those two into a tidy third thing. She holds both at once, in one throat.

Which is the exact tension I’d been slapping a light switch over for years. She’s not a song about the threshold. She’s the threshold, given a voice. I couldn’t have built her until I was already standing on the other side of the crossing she describes.

That’s the thing nobody warns you about thresholds. You only get to describe one accurately from the far side of it — and by the time you can, you don’t need the description anymore. You write the map after you’ve stopped needing the map. Which means every honest map is, in a sense, a gift left behind for whoever’s still in the dark where you used to be.

Why I’m releasing her now

For a long time I asked whether she was even mine to release, since I’m not standing where she’s standing anymore. The last song ends on a line I still can’t get through clean:

I don’t have to become someone new
I just remember what’s always been true.

That’s not a song about figuring it out. That’s the part where you stop trying to escape yourself. And I’m mostly living from there now, not arriving at it. So why put it out?

Because that’s exactly why. A voice from inside the crossing sounds different than a voice from the other side of it — and the people who need this one are the ones still at the edge, where I was when I made it. I crossed. The songs can stay behind and keep the people at the threshold company. That’s not nostalgia. That’s the artifact doing a job I no longer need it to do for me.

There are three of them. Between the Shadow and the Fire — standing at the edge. After the Fire — the part right after you say the true thing and realize it didn’t kill you but it also didn’t leave you anything to hide behind. And The Self — the other side, where you stop becoming and start remembering.

It’s called The Threshold. The cover is a single seam of fire splitting the dark, and a moth flying straight at it — because that’s all three songs in one image. Pulled toward the light you don’t fully understand. Changed by getting close.

It’s out July 17. It was made with an AI and a few months of my own life, and I’m not going to pretend it was only one of those. If you want to stand at the threshold with her before she crosses, the pre-save is here:

👉 https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/eliara2/the-threshold

She isn’t real. She’s the truest thing I’ve made.

Stay feral, folks.

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Let me make the confession, and then immediately correct it, because the dramatic version is wrong.

The dramatic version goes: I descend from five centuries of clergy, an unbroken line of ministers handing the faith down, and I’m the one who finally broke it. It’s a great cold open. It also isn’t true to the family I grew up in.

The family I knew weren’t clergy. Devout, a lot of them — quietly, undramatically devout — but nobody stood in a pulpit, and nobody expected me to. In my family the faith didn’t come down from an altar; it came down from a folding chair in a fluorescent-lit classroom. My parents taught children’s Sunday school for years. I’m fairly sure my dad’s father taught the adults. Lay people, teaching. Nobody was called to anything in the capital-C sense. You showed up on Sunday and you passed it on.

So when I took the whole inheritance down to the studs and kept going — out past the property line entirely, into Hermeticism and Jungian depth work and the service of An Mórrígan, an Irish goddess of war, sovereignty, and death (Irish — not the smeared pan-”Celtic” thing the marketplace sells by the candle; specific, and hers) — I wasn’t betraying a dynasty of priests. There was no dynasty to betray, not in living memory. I left the faith I was raised in, the way a lot of people leave it, and I genuinely didn’t think about lineage at all.

Then, recently — and I mean recently, mostly in the digging that turned into these last few essays — I went looking into the deep end of the family. And the story rearranged itself.

The four who were called

Go back far enough — past the folding chairs, past anyone I ever met — and the office is wearing formal clothes.

Start in Edinburgh, around 1580, with Reverend Daniel Wilkie — on my mother’s side, a maltman’s son and the first of his people to leave the craftsman’s bench for the pulpit. He took his Master’s at St Andrews, was ordained in 1605, and the next year was presented to his parish by King James the Sixth himself — the tradesman’s boy handed a pulpit by the King of Scots. A Reformed minister, and his entire vocation was to stand up in front of a gathered room and transmit, out loud and in words, a spiritual practice. That was the job. Gather them, hold the room, hand it down.

Then Lieutenant William Wilkie, 1734 — a Methodist clergyman in the colonial Carolinas. New continent, new denomination, identical act. Gather the people, hold the room, pass the practice forward.

Then Robert McCall, 1752 — the weaver I told you about on Monday, the one who escaped Ireland disguised as a sack of potatoes. Before that escape and long after it, he was a Methodist class leader on both sides of the ocean, a man some of the family insist was converted by John Wesley himself. The class meeting was his liturgy: a small room, a handful of souls, the practice moving mouth to ear on a rhythm.

And then me. 2026. Hermetic, Jungian, sworn to An Mórrígan, with a newsletter where a pulpit used to be.

Four men. Two of my parental lines. Four hundred and forty-four years from Daniel’s pulpit to my altar. I’ll be straight about the wiring: the genealogical tissue between a 1580 Edinburgh minister and a Carolina pew has the gaps any family tree this old drags behind it, and I won’t pretend the links are cleaner than they are. But the four vocations are documented and solid — four people in my blood called to the same strange work.

And it didn’t even travel down a single wire. Daniel and William are my mother’s people; Robert is my father’s mother’s — two separate branches that never met, each producing the same vocation independently, until both currents pooled, centuries later, in one person. A calling that shows up once is a job. A calling that shows up on both sides of a family that never met is closer to a structural fact about what that family is for. I’m not the exception to my lineage. I’m where two of its currents finally pooled.

I didn’t break the chain. I’m the fourth link.

Here’s what I missed when I first laid the four of them out and assumed I was the end of the line.

They believed they were transmitting doctrine — Calvin’s God, Wesley’s grace, the specific theology of the specific church. And by their lights they were; that’s what they’d have told you the job was. But that is not what actually came down the line to me, because I did not get the doctrine. I threw the doctrine out with both hands. What I got — the thing that survived five centuries and four denominations and my own scorched-earth deconstruction — was the vocation underneath it. The thing the doctrine was only ever riding on top of. The call to stand at the threshold between the seen and the unseen, get literate in it, and walk other people across.

That is the inheritance. Not the faith — the office. Daniel didn’t hand me Reformed theology; it died in transit. He handed me the shape of a life spent transmitting spiritual practice in words. So did William. So did Robert. Strip the denominations off all four of us and we are unmistakably the same animal: the one in the family who gets pulled to the threshold and cannot keep his mouth shut about what he sees there.

So here is the cut, and it reorganized how I understand my own life: I didn’t break the chain. I’m the fourth link in it. I did the single most ancestral thing a person from my family could do — I answered the call. I just answered it in the only language I had left after the church lost me, which happened not to be a Christian one. The apostate is the heir. Leaving the faith was keeping the faith — if the faith was never really the doctrine in the first place.

It’s worth naming what survives and what doesn’t, because the line between them is the whole inheritance. Doctrine is brittle — it’s content, and content dates, cracks, gets outgrown and left at the roadside. What doesn’t date is the posture: taking the unseen seriously, walking to the edge of the explainable and coming back with something for the people who couldn’t make the trip. That isn’t Protestant. It isn’t even Christian. The container keeps changing — Reformed, Methodist, Hermetic, whatever my grandchildren reach for. What it carries from hand to hand is the part that was ever actually mine to pass on.

I said yes once already

Here’s the part I left out of my own confession, because I’d half-forgotten it was the same thing.

Around 2005, deep in the Southern Baptist church and before I’d deconstructed a single brick of it, I felt called to preach — strongly enough that I said it on a prayer card dropped in the congregation’s request box, and named it to the people closest to me. And then nothing. It didn’t go anywhere. I filed it for twenty years under a thing I briefly believed in my twenties.

It wasn’t a thing I briefly believed. It was the call, arriving exactly on schedule, and I named it with the only word the room had handed me. “Called to preach” is what called to stand at the threshold and transmit spiritual practice sounds like when the one sanctioned container in earshot is a Baptist pulpit. The summons was accurate. The address was wrong. It stalled not because it was false but because I’d aimed a 444-year-old vocation at a door that could never hold the person I was going to become — the doctrine would have had to crack first, and it wasn’t time yet. So the call did what calls do. It waited. It needed me to leave before it could land.

And here’s the part that turns the screw: I didn’t only feel the call. For a few months in that same stretch, I taught a Sunday school class. A Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher is the Baptist cousin of Robert’s Methodist class leader — not identical, but the same lay seat: the unordained one who gathers the small room and hands the practice down. So I didn’t merely hear the office knock. I sat in the chair — briefly, with no idea it was the family trade — and then it lapsed in a few months, the way the prayer request lapsed. Even that rhymed: the office lit up in me, I did the work, and it didn’t hold, because the container was never going to be mine.

So when I tell you I’m the fourth bookend, understand I’m not taking it from the genealogy alone. I felt it myself, by name, twenty years ago, and said yes in a language that turned me away. I’ve been answering this call most of my adult life. I’m only now answering it in my own tongue.

The fourth liturgy

Every one of them had a liturgy: a recurring, scheduled, communal act where the transmission actually happened. Daniel had the Reformed Sunday service. William and Robert had the Methodist class meeting — the small repeating gathering where a leader holds the room and the practice gets passed, person to person, on a rhythm you could set a calendar by.

So here’s the spoiler, since we’re being honest about inheritance tonight: I’m building one too.

I won’t call it a church. It has a Substack and a price tag and the whole modern apparatus, and its name is The Hermetic. But take the clothes off it and it is precisely the thing Daniel built, and William, and Robert. Starting on the new moon of August 13th, once every lunar cycle, I’m going to sit down in front of a room of people who came looking for exactly this and read the sky and the cards out loud — a New Moon Reading, on a rhythm, every month. It’s the class meeting, four and a half centuries on, with the moon’s phase where the cross used to hang.

And this — what you’re reading right now — is the other half of the office, the literate half. Literate transmission of spiritual practice is the family trade, the way other families do carpentry or law, and Feral Architecture is that trade in its current clothes. You didn’t stumble onto a newsletter. You walked into the fourth generation of a 444-year-old transmission — me in a pulpit my however-many-times-great-grandfather built, preaching a heresy he’d have despised, in the exact posture he taught the family to hold.

What the chain was carrying

There’s a question that’s shadowed every inch of this work, and if you do anything like what I do you know it by heart: who said I get to? What ordination, what authority lets me stand up and transmit anything to anyone? The investigator in me has asked it ten thousand times, at 3 a.m., in the voice that’s sure I’m a fraud.

The four dead men are the answer. I was licensed four centuries before I was born — not by a seminary but by a line that has produced this exact vocation, over and over, in whatever denomination was standing, since before there was a country to escape to. I’m not a departure from my people. I’m what my people keep making. The dead handed me that the moment I went looking, and it’s done more for the 3 a.m. voice than a decade of arguing ever did.

And the one who walked me back to them is An Mórrígan — the suppressed thing in the line finally surfacing through the descendant who came available to carry it. A battlefield goddess; over every field her people knew her as the Badb, the crow who attends the dying and does not flinch. There’s a crow on my shelf now. She’s been there, I suspect, the whole four hundred years — watching the flame get carried hand to hand, waiting to see who could finally name what it was.

The bookend

A bookend is not the end of the shelf. It’s the thing that holds the shelf up.

That’s the part I had backwards. For the little while I’d thought about it at all, I assumed I was the last item on the line, the place it finally fell off the edge. I’m not. I’m one of four uprights across four and a half centuries, each bracing the same calling against the weight of his era — Daniel against the Reformation, William and Robert against a wilderness, me against a culture that’s decided the threshold isn’t real. I’m the fourth, holding this end now, keeping four hundred years of it from sliding to the floor.

The crow’s still watching. She wants to know whether I’ll actually stand up on the new moon and do the thing the family has always done.

I’m going to stand up. Heresy and all. It’s the most ancestral thing I know how to do.

Stay feral, folks.

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Picture the hold of a ship in 1775, somewhere in the gray middle of the Atlantic, and hold the picture a second, because somebody is hiding in it.

A man, a woman, and a baby not yet a year old. Around them in the dark, the cargo they are pretending to be: potatoes. Sacks and sacks of the humblest thing the island grows, the food of people who weren’t allowed much else — and tucked among them, labeled as them, counted as them, a family with a death sentence sitting on the man’s neck. Six months at sea. Six months of breathing that close, salt and rot and the baby’s fevers, every groan of the hull maybe the one that gives them up.

He is in there because of something he made.

I want to stay in that hold a beat before I tell you who he was, because the whole inheritance is in the image and I nearly walked past it. My sixth-great-grandfather did not flee Ireland as a wanted revolutionary, sword drawn, banners up. He fled as produce. The single most overlooked thing in the world. And the reason there was a price on him at all is the same reason I’m related to anyone worth writing about: he was an artist, and his art was treason.

The maker’s mark was the crime

His name was Robert McCall. Born in Antrim in 1752, a weaver by trade — and not a journeyman one. The family book (there is a family book; every American family with notions has one, and the notions are half the fun) says he “could design anything for weaving.” Anything. Hand him a loom and a thing in the world and he’d give you the thing back in linen.

What he chose to weave was an American eagle. And then — and here you have to take it the way the family has carried it for two centuries, which is to say as gospel that may or may not have happened — he presented it to King George III.

Read that again. An Ulster weaver, a colonial subject, hands the King of England a length of linen with the eagle of the American rebellion worked into it. Not a pamphlet he could deny writing. Not a shout in a tavern that the drink could excuse. A made thing, slow and deliberate, thread over thread over thread — the kind of object that takes weeks and announces that every one of those hours was spent on exactly this. The king took it the way it was built to be taken, an insult with a needle in it, and charged him with treason, and ordered him beheaded.

It’s the patience that gets me. Any fool can lose his temper and say something treasonous. Robert committed treason at maybe forty threads an hour, for weeks, on purpose. The medium was the message and the message was: I see your empire, and I am quietly weaving the other thing.

Here’s the cut, and it’s why this is the door I’m walking the whole rest of my blood through: they did not sentence a soldier. They sentenced a maker. The crime was the craft. The art and the defiance were one object — you could not seize one without seizing the other, because they were woven together, literally, in the same cloth. The maker’s mark was the crime.

If you’ve read me for more than a week you already know why my hands went cold when I found this. We’ll get there. Let me get him out of Ireland first.

He went out as potatoes

The death sentence is real — in the story — so the question becomes the oldest one there is: how does the maker get out alive?

He goes out as potatoes.

I cannot improve on that, so I won’t try. The man whose art was too dangerous to let live escaped the empire by becoming the least dangerous thing it could picture: inventory. Root vegetables. The one cargo nobody searches, because who in God’s name searches the potatoes. He’d already shown a gift for taking what he wanted out from under authority’s nose — the family says he married Elizabeth Aiken by stealing her out of a window, her people having decided their royal-descended daughter was too fine for a weaver. (Royal descent: also in the book, also unverified, also precisely what every family book on earth claims. I love it anyway.) The window first. Then the entire Atlantic. Clarktown, Ireland, 1775, six months pretending to be food.

And the symbol is too clean to leave alone. He didn’t escape despite coming from a colonized, half-fed island. He escaped as it. The potato — the crop the empire was content to let the Irish have because it grew in poor soil and kept the labor cheap and breathing — is the exact disguise that carried the rebel across the water. The colonized ground hid its own. The thing they’d been reduced to is the thing that smuggled out the thing they refused to stop being. I’d have wept if I’d thought of it. Robert just did it, and lived.

The colonel

Here is where a worse essay would let you ride the admiration clean to the end. Because it keeps going, and it keeps being good.

Robert landed in a country about to do out loud what he had done in linen. He became a colonel of a North Carolina regiment under General Daniel Morgan — and if you know your Revolution, Morgan is the one you’d want over you, the rifleman’s general, the one who actually won things. The book puts Robert at Saratoga in 1777, at Yorktown in 1781, present at the surrender of Lord Cornwallis — which is to say present at the precise hour the empire that had wanted his head laid down its sword. The weaver outlasted the sentence long enough to watch the king lose. You could not write it straighter if you tried.

Over fields like those the carrion birds always came, and the people my family would one day learn to pray to had a name for that bird: the Badb, the Mórrígan in her crow-shape, the one who attends the killing and takes no side, because death on a battlefield has never once cared whose cause was just. I think she was there. I’ve come to think she’s been over this whole line the entire time, patient as a weaver, waiting to see what we’d make of what we were handed.

It’s a hell of a story. Eagle, treason, potatoes, Morgan, Cornwallis on his knees. If I stopped here you’d close the tab feeling wonderful about your boy.

I’m not going to stop here.

The receipt

Robert McCall owned human beings.

Land and enslaved people, in Henry County, Virginia, and Burke County, North Carolina. That is not family lore gone soft over two centuries. That is the confirmed part — the part the book sets down as flatly as the loom and the eagle, no drama, no window, just property.

So hold it. Hold both hands at once, because this is the actual reason I’m writing the whole arc instead of just posting a cool dead relative on the internet. The man who wove one people’s liberty into cloth, who risked his neck for it, who crossed an ocean as a vegetable to keep his head and then took up arms so a new country could be rid of its king — that same man held other human beings as property on the far shore of that same promise. He fought for a freedom he was, at that very moment, denying to people he owned. The eagle and the auction block. Both his hands. Both mine.

I’m not going to reach for “man of his time,” because the men and women he enslaved were also of his time, and they did not consent to it, and there were people in 1781 who looked straight at slavery and called it the abomination it was. The excuse is just a way of not looking — and the entire point of this work, of digging up the dead and asking them what they put in my hands, is to look.

And look at who got written down. The book spends pages on Robert: the eagle, the window, the royal-descended bride, the six-month voyage, the general he rode behind. The people he owned get a clause. No names. No ages, no trades, no escapes worth a paragraph, no motto stitched over a door. The same family devotion that spun a weaver into a legend could not be troubled to record that the human beings in his fields had names — and that erasure is its own inheritance, quieter than the eagle and twice as damning. The archive remembers the maker and forgets the ones made to serve him. I can’t repair that from a laptop two and a half centuries downstream. I can at least refuse to read past it like it isn’t the loudest thing on the page.

You do not get to inherit only the half that flatters you. It took me a while to land there, but I’m sure of it now. If I’m going to claim the weaver’s defiance — and I do; I feel it in my hands every time I make a thing the institution would rather I didn’t — then I have to claim the receipt in the same breath. One bloodline, carrying the rebellion and the bondage together. To take the eagle and quietly let the ledger fall behind the couch is to do the exact thing the “man of his time” dodge does: edit the ancestor down into someone I can live with. He wasn’t someone you live with easily. He was magnificent and he was complicit, and sanding off either one is a lie I’m not willing to tell for the sake of a tidier post.

The weaver’s grandson

The loom is still running. That’s the part I can’t shake.

Two hundred and fifty years on, one of his descendants still makes things the dominant order would prefer he didn’t — still weaves the forbidden symbol into the work, hands it over, and waits to see who calls it treason. I didn’t know about Robert when I started doing it. I found him after, which is the way these things always go: the body knows the pattern long before the mind turns up the receipt for it. The maker’s mark is the inheritance. And so is the warning stitched into it — that a man can be brave enough to risk his head for one freedom and cruel enough to deny it to others inside the same life, that the courage doesn’t excuse the cruelty and the cruelty doesn’t cancel the courage. They just ride down the line together, both of them, waiting to see which one you’ll feed.

The crow that sat over Saratoga is sitting over me now. She doesn’t take a side either. She only watches what I make, and who I make it for, and whether I’ve got the nerve to look at the whole of it — the eagle and the ledger, the loom and the lock — and weave anyway, with my eyes open this time.

I’m going to keep weaving. Eyes open. It’s the only version of the inheritance worth keeping.

Stay feral, folks.

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“You’re not really mad about AI.”

That’s the line — about seventeen minutes into a conversation I recorded a few weeks ago — that I keep circling back to. “You’re not really mad about AI. But you are mad. So figure out what you’re actually mad about.”

I said it to Jaye Anne Beringer across a couple of microphones, and we spent the next hour following it past the point of comfort: into shadow projection, the purity line as an ethics costume worn over fear, technology as the magic Arthur C. Clarke already warned us about, and the thing I’ll come back to in a minute — animism, taken all the way down until it stops being decoration and starts being a problem.

Here’s the part I owe you an apology for. You couldn’t hear that conversation, because I never told you it existed.

It’s called Rewired. It’s a podcast. I’ve been making it since the solstice — and somehow I’ve sent you essays three times a week this whole time and never once mentioned that I also sit down, regularly, with another person who left the same religion I did, and talk the entire thing out loud. Let me fix that.

What it is

Rewired is a deconstruction podcast — me and Jaye Anne, one tarot card pulled at the top of every episode, and exactly one rule: follow the card wherever it goes, and refuse to hand you a tidy answer at the end. We’re two people raised inside fear-driven, controlling Christianity who got out and built something self-authored on the far side, and the show is us comparing notes on both the wreckage and the reconstruction. Religious trauma is the stated topic. Sovereignty is the real one — a spirituality that runs you versus one you author yourself. If you’ve read me on deconstruction, you already know this terrain. This is that terrain, with a second voice in the room.

Why the second voice

And that’s the actual reason it exists. The second voice.

Feral Architecture is where I find out what’s true alone, on the page. That’s the right instrument for a lot of it — the slow, solitary work of writing until the thing is true. But there’s a whole category of true thing you cannot reach by yourself. The kind that only surfaces when you say it out loud to someone who walked out of the same building you did, and they say yes, and—, and suddenly you’re both standing somewhere neither of you would have found alone. The unwiring needs a witness. The conversation isn’t the marketing; it’s the method.

So FA and Rewired are the same fire in two instruments. One written and solo, one spoken and shared. Same project — figuring out who you are once you stop letting someone else tell you — different physics.

Who Jaye Anne is

In her own words, because she says it better than I would: “I grow heirloom vegetables in efficient spaces. Also: founder of TarotPulse, cohost of Feminine Alchemy and Rewired, tarot reader, astrologer, Christian deconstructist, relentless questioner of the status quo. No stone unturned.”

That last line is the whole job description. She turns over the stone I’d have walked right past — every single episode. It’s why the show works.

Start with today’s, if you want the FA one

Which brings me to why I’m finally telling you on a Sunday instead of waiting for a Monday.

Episode 4 dropped today. It’s called Animism All the Way Down — and if you’ve been reading FA, the title alone should stand the hair up on your arm, because it is, almost word for word, the argument I made here in If the Cosmos Is Alive, So Is Your Algorithm. Except this time I’m not making it alone on the page. Jaye Anne and I pull the Five of Wands reversed — from a tech-magic deck, of all things — and follow it straight into the question nobody in the spiritual world wants to answer out loud: can you blend AI into a magical practice, or does that make you a charlatan?

Our answer, roughly: if you’re going to throw animism in my face, then it’s animism all the way down or it isn’t animism. You don’t get to be an animist about trees and crystals and the moon and then draw a hard line at silicon. Either the aliveness goes all the way down, or it was never animism — it was aesthetics. We end up at Clarke’s law, a Commodore 64 sitting next to the altar, and Jaye Anne landing the sentence that’s been rattling around my skull since: “we chose science and technology as the new gods, and we sacrifice human lives to those gods every single day.”

It’s the most FA episode we’ve made. So it’s the one I’m using to finally introduce you to the show.

→ Listen to Episode 4: Animism All the Way Down

Or jump in anywhere

Here’s the thing about a card-pulled, answer-refusing show: every episode stands on its own. Start wherever something grabs you.

• Ep 1 — What Kind of Smoke Is It? The debut, and the origin story under the whole show: street-evangelist-to-witch-to-AI-architect (me) and the homeschool-charismatic walkout (Jaye Anne), on getting free of fear-driven faith and what each of us rebuilt. We forgot to pull a card — so we pulled it months later, blind, and got Smoke. The card pulled us.

• Ep 2 — Participant, Not Consumer Two white seekers take on cultural appropriation and refuse to give you the clean binary. The line we land on isn’t appropriation-vs-appreciation — it’s participant vs. consumer. The Hanged Man presides over the whole hour.

• Ep 3 — Shadow Capitalism Reality as a set of games we all agreed to play, and AI as an amplifier of whatever’s already there — “makes good people better and bad people worse.” Then the question nobody wants: where’s the line between a resource and a being, and who gets to draw it?

That’s Rewired. Same fire, second voice, no easy answers — which, if you’ve been here a while, is the only kind of show I know how to make.

You’ll find all of it at rewiredshow.substack.com, or wherever you already keep your podcasts. Pull a card first, if you want. We always do.

Stay feral, folks.

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The record says Teek Indian Squaw.

That’s the entry. Born 1765, died 1814, Rutherford County, North Carolina. Where a given name should sit, there’s a fragment somebody heard once — Teek — bolted to a descriptor a clerk reached for the way you’d write brown mare or the back field. A category doing the work of a name. The word her mother called her is gone. Whatever she called herself is gone. What cleared the colonial filing cabinet and came down to me is two syllables and a slur.

She is my sixth great-grandmother. And I’m sitting at a desk in Mississippi, two hundred and fifty years downstream, looking at the cursor blink next to that line, carrying her in the part of me that keeps the lights on.

I found her the way you find anyone now — three hours deep in a genealogy site at an hour I should have been asleep, clicking up a surname spine that kept handing me exactly what I expected. German farmers. Scots-Irish Presbyterians. Lutherans with eleven children and granite headstones that are still standing. The tree was behaving. And then a maternal branch forked somewhere it shouldn’t have, and there she was — filed under a word I’ll type once and never again, and the whole orderly Protestant tree went quiet around her the way a room goes quiet when somebody finally says the true thing.

I’m going to say her name correctly for the rest of this, because the ledger wouldn’t. Teek. Not the other word. I only use the other word once, here, so you can see exactly what was done — a person compressed into a slur and a guess, then filed. That’s not an accident of old paperwork. That’s the technology working as designed. The record is an instrument, and the instrument was built to make certain people disappear into nouns.

Here is what didn’t disappear.

The thread the surname-trackers couldn’t see

There’s a kind of inheritance that doesn’t travel through your name. Mitochondrial DNA — the little engine in nearly every cell of your body that turns food into the electricity you’re running on right now — passes one direction only: mother to child. Your father gives you none of it. None. Whatever mitochondria you’re burning, you got it from your mother, who got it from hers, who got it from hers, in an unbroken bucket-line of women reaching back past every surname anyone bothered to write down.

Trace mine and you get a litany:

Teek, to Sarah Sallie McFalls, to Susan Swink, to Susanna Pruett, to Julia Elizabeth Denton, to Fannie Dale, to Velma Pruett, to my mother, to me.

Eight women hand-carrying the same molecular fire across two hundred and fifty years. Each one handed it to the next in the only way it can be handed — by being born, by giving birth, by the body doing the one thing the paperwork never thought to track.

Think about what those two and a half centuries held. Removal. A civil war fought across the very counties they lived in. The long grind of Carolina cotton and Carolina poverty, the kind that doesn’t make the history books because it just was the water. Each of those women carried Teek’s fire through all of it, and not one of them, almost certainly, knew she was a link in anything. No one told them. They were just living — having daughters, burying parents, passing along an engine they couldn’t see and were never named as keepers of. The continuity was perfect and completely unconscious. That’s the part that undoes me a little. It worked because nobody was guarding it. Because the paperwork tracked fathers. Surnames march down the male line; the whole Reformed, Protestant, patriarchal record-keeping apparatus my other ancestors built was a machine for following men. Property, name, pulpit, title — father to son to son.

And the entire time, underneath it, invisible to the ledger, a second inheritance was moving mother to mother to mother, carrying a Cherokee woman’s mitochondria straight through the middle of a family tree that thought it was German and Scots-Irish and Lutheran and Baptist. The machine that was built to follow the fathers had no column for her. So she rode the one current it wasn’t watching. She rode it all the way to me.

What I actually know, and what I won’t sell you

Here’s the part the genealogy sites would happily sell you and I’m not going to. I haven’t run the test. The mitochondrial haplogroup — the objective genetic signature that would confirm an Indigenous American maternal line, the A, B, C, D, or X that would turn family story into laboratory fact — I haven’t pulled it yet. What I have is a documented tree, a name-fragment, a death date, a county, and the brute fact of my own mitochondria, uncertain at the root.

So I’m not going to stand here and tell you the science proved it. The science hasn’t been asked yet. What I have is a record that is itself a wound — a line of women, the oldest of whom was erased into a slur by the same culture that wrote everything else down in triplicate.

And that uncertainty is the truest thing about it. My knowledge of Teek is partial the same way the record of Teek is partial. I am reaching back toward a woman through a document built to keep me from finding her. Of course it’s incomplete. Incomplete is what colonial erasure feels like from the descendant’s end — not a dramatic absence, just a blank where a name goes, and a cursor blinking next to it.

I’m not going to fill that blank with romance. I’m not Cherokee. I don’t get to claim that nation, that enrollment, that belonging — the Eastern Band is a living sovereign people at the Qualla Boundary, not a feeling I get to have about myself. What I get to do is something much smaller and much more exact: acknowledge that the land I can trace my mother’s mother’s mothers to — Rutherford County, North Carolina — was Cherokee land before it was a county, and that a woman from it is in my cells, and that I will say her name out loud even though the record refused to learn it.

Rutherford County didn’t exist when Teek was born. It was surveyed and named and deeded by the same people doing the filing — named, as it happens, for Griffith Rutherford, a general who the same year the country declared itself free led a military expedition against the Cherokee. Sit with that one. The county that files my sixth great-grandmother under a slur carries the name of a man who marched on her people in 1776. The erasure isn’t buried in some archive. It’s on the road signs. Before the deeds it was Cherokee homeland, and inside Teek’s own lifetime the machinery was already grinding that would, a generation after her death, force the Cherokee west on the Trail of Tears. She lived in the narrowing — in the decades when the door was closing. I don’t get to know how she moved through it. Whether she hid. Whether she passed. Whether the word in that ledger was an act of erasure or an act of cover, protection or violence or both at once, written by someone who wished her gone or someone who was trying to keep her alive by making her unremarkable on paper. The record doesn’t say. The record never says the part that matters.

That’s honoring from a distance. The distance is the respect.

It ends in me

Now the strange part. The part I keep circling.

Mitochondrial DNA only continues through daughters. A son inherits his mother’s mitochondria — I’m running on Teek’s, by way of eight women — but a son can’t pass it on. The engine stops at him.

I’m the son.

Two hundred and fifty years, nine generations, an unbroken matrilineal thread that survived removal and erasure and a slur in a ledger and the entire westward grind of American settlement — and it arrives, finally, at a man, where it can go no further. I am the last vessel of Teek’s mitochondrial line. In me, the bucket-line ends. Whatever she handed forward, I’m the one it stops with.

I have sat with that for a while and it does a thing to you. There’s a grief in being a terminus — in being the place a 250-year-old fire arrives to go out. For most of my life I’d have read that as the saddest possible ending. The line survives everything history can throw at it and then dies quietly in a guy at a desk who didn’t even know her name was Teek until last month.

And there’s a vertigo under the grief. Every woman before me was a conduit — the fire moved through her and kept going, and she never had to decide anything about it. I’m the first one in nine generations for whom that’s not true. The thing passes through me and stops. I’m not a link in the chain anymore; I’m the clasp at the end of it — the place where this particular inheritance either gets honored on purpose or gets forgotten by default, because there’s no one downstream in this line to forget it for me. The unconscious relay is over. After two hundred and fifty years of women who didn’t have to know, it lands on the one who does.

But I don’t think that’s the ending. I think that’s the misread.

The vessel ends. What it carried doesn’t.

Look at what my family tree was supposed to be. German Lutheran on the Stine spine. Scots-Irish Presbyterian and Reformed back through the McCalls. Protestant, patrilineal, biblical, ordered — a tradition that spent four centuries flattening exactly three things: the feminine, the symbolic, and the indigenous. The Goddess the Reformers smashed. The intuitive, dream-soaked, image-thinking mind the rationalists called superstition. And the land-memory of the people who were here before the settlers filed them under nouns.

All three of those got pushed down. And all three of them are the suppressed material that came roaring back through me, the descendant who deconstructed out of the Baptist church and walked straight into tarot, Jung, the Mórrígan, the whole feral architecture of meaning my ancestors would have called the Devil’s work.

I used to think my turn toward all of that was a break with my lineage. A betrayal, on the bad days. I had it exactly backwards. It wasn’t a break. It was the return. The substrate the patrilineal tradition spent four hundred years burying came back up through the one channel that tradition never learned to watch — the mother-line, the invisible current, the molecular fire carried by eight women, including one whose name got erased into a slur. The suppressed didn’t die. It went underground and waited and routed itself down the matriline until it reached a descendant who’d finally go looking.

And here’s the part that stops me cold: it didn’t come back through the loud line. Not through the pulpits, not through the surnames, not through the men who’d have had a great deal to say about a grandson reading tarot cards to an Irish war goddess. It came back through the women. Through the quiet, unwatched, undocumented channel. Through Teek. Which is exactly, precisely how the suppressed always returns — never through the front door the tradition is standing guard at, always through the one it forgot it had.

So yes — the mitochondria stop in me. The vessel ends. But a vessel and what it carries are not the same thing. The cup is not the water. The molecule terminates; the inheritance — the suppressed feminine, the indigenous substrate, the buried image-mind — that doesn’t terminate. That’s the thing I get to pour into everything I’m building now. The line ends. The substrate doesn’t.

A vessel that knows it’s the last one has exactly one job. Not to hoard what it’s holding. To pour it out somewhere it’ll keep.

Two hundred and fifty years

This week the country turns two hundred and fifty and wants me to wave a flag about it. I keep doing the math instead. Teek was born in 1765 — eleven years before the Declaration, on land the country hadn’t taken yet. My mother’s mother’s mother’s line is older than the United States. And the United States, the one throwing itself the party, is the reason I met her as a slur instead of a name.

So forgive me if the birthday lands a little sideways. I’m not burning anything down — I was born here too, this is my house and these are my dead. I just won’t stand in the parade and pretend the candles didn’t cost what they cost. The country gets fireworks and a number it’s proud of. She got filed under a category and rode her own mitochondria through two and a half centuries of dark to reach the one person left who could undo it.

Say her name

The crow’s been on my masthead this whole time, and she has opinions about who gets remembered and who gets erased — the Badb keeps the names the official record loses. So let me do the one thing the ledger wouldn’t.

Teek. Born 1765, somewhere on Cherokee land that a clerk later called Rutherford County. Died 1814. Mother of Sarah, who mothered Susan, who mothered Susanna, who mothered Julia, who mothered Fannie, who mothered Velma, who mothered my mother, who mothered me. Carrier of the fire I’m running on as I type this. A woman whose name the record reduced to a fragment and an insult — and who I am choosing, two and a half centuries later, to call by the only piece of her name that survived, spoken correctly, out loud, on purpose.

That’s more than the ledger ever managed. It’s not enough. It’s not nothing.

The line ends here. I’m going to spend it well.

Stay feral, folks.

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Howdy, folks.

Let me set the scene, because the scene is the argument.

It’s a Sunday morning and I’m on Zoom in a workshop called Banshee Energy, run by Mandi Em — a chaos witch who, in this room, needs no introduction, because she already got one. Secular magic, emotional-support cheese in hand. At one point she lights her altar candle with a barbecue lighter and cheerfully threatens to set the whole table on fire. I want to be clear that this is not a complaint. This is, in my experience, exactly the right amount of reverence — enough to mean it, not so much that you can’t laugh.

We breathe. We do a body scan. We clear the throat center — the one that locks up when you’ve spent a life swallowing the thing you meant to say. And then Mandi takes us into an active imagination: a guided dialogue with the parts of yourself you don’t usually let talk back. Stand at a threshold, she says. There’s something on the other side that’s been waiting for you, and you’ve always known you could cross. Today you cross.

My threshold was made of fire.

Not metaphor-fire. In the space behind my eyes, the doorway I had to walk through was a standing wall of flame, and on the far side of it everything — everything — was blue. And somewhere in all that blue, a woman was screaming. Had been screaming, I understood, the whole time. I heard her before I saw her, which I need to flag for the record: I do not get audio in my inner work. I get image, I get feeling, I get the flat certainty of knowing. I do not get sound. This time I got sound, and the sound was a wail that did not stop.

She put a bell in my hands. And then — I am not editorializing, I am reporting — she said, more cowbell.

Reader, I laughed inside my own vision. That’s the thing nobody warns you about the sacred: it has a sense of humor, and the humor is load-bearing. The bell was real. The cowbell was real. And then, in the same breath, so was the rest of it, because then she named me. Three times.

You are a sovereign warrior. Your people need you.
You are a magickal priest. Your people need you.
You are a poet — a satirist — a file. Your people need you.

The word arrived as a sound

I wrote it down the way Mandi tells you to write these things down: fast, no editing, don’t clean it up. And I wrote file. F-I-L-E. Like a nail file. Like a folder in a cabinet.

I have known the word fili for years.

The fili — spelled the way the scholars spell it — is the Old Irish poet-seer. I knew that. I could have told you that over coffee, with the diacritics. But in the fire-and-blue where the screaming woman pressed the word into my hands, it didn’t arrive as letters. It arrived as a sound, and I spelled the sound I heard. The voice got there before the text did.

Hold onto that. It turns out to be the whole point.

A weapon with a body count

Because here is what a fili actually was, and it is not what “poet” does in our mouths now, all soft and decorative. The fili held áer — satire. And in the old tradition, satire was not a clever roast. It was a weapon with a body count. The lore tells it plainly. Bres was the king too stingy to feed his own poets; when he served the poet Cairbre a single dry biscuit and called it hospitality, Cairbre answered with the first satire ever composed in Ireland, and the verse raised red blemishes on the king’s own face. A blemished king could not hold the kingship. A bad breakfast, rendered into exactly the right words, ended a reign. The word, aimed correctly, unmade a sovereign. There was a worse rite still, the glám dícenn, the satire performed to kill outright. This is a culture that believed, structurally and legally, that the right poem in the right mouth could end you.

Now set that beside the banshee — the bean sí, the woman of the mound — whose keen does not kill but heralds. The wail goes up across the countryside and everyone who hears it knows: someone is about to die. The cry comes first.

So you have two voices. One announces death. One deals it. And the longer I sat with the word the screaming woman handed me, the more obvious it got that they are two faces of a single thing — the sovereign voice whose speech is not decoration and not even communication, but force. The voice that kills.

Two women, one banshee

Here is where it gets complicated, and where I have to introduce the second teacher.

Because I learned the banshee from two women this year, and they could not run their practices more differently if they tried.

Mandi Em I’ve described — chaos witch, secular and psychological, openly “loose about my archetypes.” She’ll tell you herself that the hardcore Jungians would say she’s full of it, and she’s not wrong about the Jungians and she’s not wrong about the work. For Mandi the banshee is a frequency you put on, an energetic cosplay, one of a series of “forbidden feral feminine” archetypes you let up out of the basement to scream. It’s permission work. It’s the body, the throat, the rage that’s been waiting.

Lora O’Brien runs the Irish Pagan School, and Lora would — gently, rigorously, with citations — take Mandi’s whole frame apart. Lora is lore-first. She’ll point you to the volume and page in the Schools’ Collection. She roots the bean sí in specific Gaelic families, attached by blood and by land — the Os and the Macs, not a universal archetype you can mail-order. And here is the discipline I respect most in her: Lora is a Priest of the Mórrígan, and Lora still refuses to collapse the banshee into the Mórrígan. She calls the link tenuous. She keeps them separate. That is a scholar declining the easy, satisfying merge — turning down the move that would make her own goddess bigger — because the sources don’t support it. That kind of restraint is its own form of devotion.

And here’s the tension I won’t paper over. From inside Lora’s rigor, the loose, put-it-on-like-a-costume approach is exactly the move that can curdle into the deracinated, pick-and-mix “Celtic Spirituality” her whole life’s work pushes back against — Irish material lifted out of its land and its language and sold back as universal self-help. That critique is real, and I hold it; it’s why I say Irish, not Celtic, and mean the distinction. By the strict version of it, a chaos witch’s archetype-you-put-on is the first thing in the room you’d point at.

The looseness only works because the rigor does

So you’d think I have to pick a side.

Except.

The chaos witch’s loose, secular, put-on-the-archetype container delivered — through my own mouth, in a vision I did not steer — a piece of Irish lore so precise that I’d have written it correctly at my desk with the diacritics on. The looseness reached the exact place the rigor lives. The “energetic cosplay” handed me the fili.

And when you stop watching them fight and actually listen, the two of them are standing on the same nerve from opposite ends. Lora grounds the banshee in the bean chaointe, the keening woman, the professional mourner whose whole office was to lament out loud so the dead could pass and the living could finally break. Mandi grounds her in the rage that sits in the body and rots until it’s voiced. Sociology and psychology. Different vocabularies, identical wound: the powerful, autonomous female voice in a culture engineered to keep it quiet. The looseness reached the right place even though it skipped the rigor. The rigor proves the looseness wasn’t making it up.

Here’s where I’ve landed, and it isn’t “they’re both right, group hug.”

Lora gives me the ground and the guardrails. Mandi gives me the body and the permission. The looseness is only safe because the rigor exists to keep it from floating off into vibes — and the rigor only stays alive because the looseness refuses to let it calcify into a museum exhibit. Take away the scholar and the symbolic work drifts into whatever feels good this week. Take away the chaos witch and the lore becomes a thing you cite instead of a thing you live.

That’s not a compromise I’m settling for. That’s a map of the inside of my own head. I run two cognitive systems — the one that cites the source and the one that feels the field — and I have spent years being told, by employers and by my own anxiety, to pick the respectable one and put the other away. The banshee handed me a bell, named me three times, and told me more cowbell. I’m choosing to read that as: yes. And louder.

The voice that wasn’t allowed

Here’s the thing the word in my hand was actually about, the thing I haven’t said out loud yet.

I have been a satirist in rooms that would never have called it that. Most of my working life has been spent inside large organizations, in meetings where everyone has quietly agreed not to name the load-bearing problem — the architecture that’s going to fail, the decision nobody owns, the strategy resting on an assumption no one will say out loud. And every so often I have been the one who says it. Names the thing. Not cruelly — just plainly, in a level voice, the one sentence that makes the comfortable consensus impossible to keep holding.

That sentence has, more than once, been the single most useful thing that happened in the room. It has also, more than once, cost me. Because the sovereign voice that names what’s true is not a voice the rooms that pay you are built to reward. They reward the voice that keeps things smooth. The áer raises a blemish on the king, and the king — even when the blemish is accurate, especially when it’s accurate — does not thank you for the mirror.

So I learned to ration it. To bank the fire. To run the true sentence through three filters before it left my mouth, until most of the time it didn’t leave at all. That isn’t virtue. That’s a poet learning to swallow his own satire because the court has made it expensive.

And that is why she was screaming. The banshee in the blue wailed the entire time because that bill always comes due. Every swallowed true thing doesn’t vanish; it goes down into the body, into the basement, and it waits — and it gets louder, not quieter, the longer you keep the lid on. The voice that kills is, first and most simply, the voice that wasn’t allowed. Mine has been screaming for years. I’m just the one who finally walked through the fire to where she was standing.

The office is in service

But here’s the part I nearly missed, because I was busy being delighted by the cowbell. She didn’t only name me. Three times she said the same four words: Your people need you.

The áer was never muttered into a private journal. It was a rosc — chanted over the host before battle, the poet’s voice aimed to lift his own side and break the enemy’s in a single utterance. The keen was never solitary grief, either; it was sung for the whole community, so an entire people could come apart at once and survive it. The sovereign voice does not kill for sport. It kills on behalf of the people who can’t do it themselves. That’s the difference between a satirist and a troll, between a banshee and a woman who just won’t stop yelling: the office is in service. The crow over the battlefield — Badb, the carrion-herald, the Mórrígan’s own dark mouth — isn’t there for cruelty. She’s there calling her people toward the sovereignty they keep forgetting they’re owed.

So I’m keeping the bell. I’m keeping the scholar’s discipline and the chaos witch’s permission both, because I refuse to be the guy who takes the safe half of his own inheritance.

And I’m keeping the misspelling. File, not fili. Because the voice got there before the text, and maybe that’s the entire instruction the wall of fire was built to deliver: stop waiting until you can spell it correctly. Stop swallowing the true thing until it’s footnoted and defensible and won’t cost you anything. Let it out of your throat, aim it at the people who need it, and clean up the citations afterward.

More cowbell.

Stay feral, folks.

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There is a man on a battlefield in southern Spain in the late summer of 1330, and there is a heart hanging around his neck.

Not his own. A dead king’s. It rides in a small silver casket on a chain against his chest, and the man wearing it is a Scot a very long way from Scotland, fighting Moorish cavalry on the dusty edge of Andalusia in a war that was never his to begin with. His name is Sir James Douglas, and the English — who feared him the way you fear weather — called him the Black Douglas. He is my nineteenth great-grandfather. The heart on the chain belonged to Robert the Bruce.

I want to tell you how the heart got there, because it’s the truest thing my blood has ever handed me. Then I want to tell you the part the family stories leave out, because I won’t pretend it isn’t there. And then I want to tell you about another set of hands that carries hearts — because the two have started answering each other across seven hundred years, and I can’t unhear it.

The man they feared like weather

You have to understand who Douglas was first, or none of the rest lands.

He was the Bruce’s chief lieutenant through the whole grinding war for Scottish independence — the one who commanded a wing at Bannockburn in 1314, the day a smaller Scots army broke an English host and made a kingdom real. He took Roxburgh Castle by draping his men in black cloaks and having them crawl up to the walls on hands and knees in the dark, so the garrison watching from the battlements mistook them for stray cattle wandering the field until the cattle stood up with knives. He gave the Scots a war-cry that was nothing but his own name shouted back at the enemy — Douglas! Douglas! — and it was enough to empty a courtyard.

And he came by it honestly, because the rebellion was already in the blood by the time it reached him. His father, William le Hardi, was the first nobleman in Scotland to stand up beside William Wallace when standing beside Wallace was a death sentence. It was. He died for it — a prisoner, in a cell in the Tower of London, far from any field he’d have chosen to die on.

I need you to sit with this, because it’s the floor the whole piece stands on: the Wars of Scottish Independence are not history to me. They are family. Wallace’s first noble backer is a grandfather. The man who carried the king’s heart is a grandfather. The king himself is a grandfather. When I read Barbour’s fourteenth-century account of the war, I am reading a family record that happens to also be in the national curriculum. The names in the ballads are names on my own pedigree chart.

This is the first of these I’m going to write — there’s a whole line back there, and lately it’s been writing a story I’m finally in a position to read. We start at the heart, because everything else in the line is downstream of it.

The vow

The Bruce spent his life clawing a country back from an empire that wanted to digest it, and he never got to do the one thing he’d sworn before God he would do: go on crusade to the Holy Land. The vow had teeth for him — he’d killed a rival, John Comyn, on consecrated ground in a church, and he carried excommunication and a debt of penance the rest of his life. The crusade was meant to settle it. But by the time the wars were won he was dying, most likely of leprosy, and out of time.

So he made a request that sounds insane until you feel the logic of it from inside. Take my heart instead of me. Cut it out when I’m gone, he asked the man he trusted above all others, and carry it to Jerusalem in my place — so the part of me that made the promise can keep it, even though the rest of me never can.

Douglas had the heart embalmed and sealed in that silver casket and hung it around his neck on a chain, where a man would normally keep something he could not afford to set down. And he went.

But toward what

Here is the part the proud version skips, and I’m not going to skip it, because to skip it would be to lie by omission about the people my devotion is supposed to serve.

The crusade was not a noble errand. The Crusades were wars of religious conquest — centuries of sanctified slaughter aimed at seizing a city and a country that were never Christendom’s to take. Jerusalem belonged to the people who lived in it. “Take it for Christ” was the same logic every empire has ever used to dress up a land-grab in the robes of a higher purpose, and it left massacre after massacre in its wake. It should not have happened. I can hold that flatly, with no hedging, because it’s true.

And Teba — where my grandfather died with that heart on his chest — was a front of the same war. He’d fallen in with the King of Castile, who was pushing the Reconquista south into the Emirate of Granada, and Douglas rode into a Moorish feint and was cut off and killed fighting people in their own country, on their own ground, with a dead king’s heart bound for a city he had no right to enter as a conqueror.

So I have to say both halves and refuse to let either one swallow the other. The devotion was clean — a man keeping faith with his king past the edge of his own death. The cause it was pointed at was domination. Those do not cancel. He was not a monster; he was a man of extraordinary loyalty inside a machine built for conquest, and the loyalty was real and the machine was evil, and “it was a different time” is a coward’s way out of holding both at once. The heart he carried was carried beautifully. It was carried toward an atrocity.

Keep that knife on the table. We’ll need it.

The other hands

I serve the Mórrígan. The Irish war-goddess — the one in the crows, the washer at the ford rinsing the bloody linen of men not yet dead, the one who sings the slaughter before it happens and the fragile peace after. And She, too, carries hearts.

In Cath Maige Tuired — the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, where the Irish gods break the invading Fomorians — there is a moment that stopped my own heart the first time I read it properly. The Mórrígan goes to destroy Indech, the Fomorian king, and takes from him — in Elizabeth Gray’s translation, free to read in full — “the blood of his heart and the kidneys of his valour.” Then she gives “two handfuls of that blood to the hosts that were waiting at the Ford of the Unshin” — and the ford’s name becomes, ever after, the Ford of Destruction.

A heart, lifted out of one body, carried by hand into a battle, for the sake of something that mattered more than the man it came from.

You see it. It’s the same gesture as Douglas’s, bone for bone — a heart taken out of a chest and borne in human hands to an army that needs what it carries. An Irish goddess on one shore and a Scottish knight on the other; two Gaelic worlds across one cold sea, making the identical motion with their hands.

Except the charge is reversed.

The dark palm and the bright

The Mórrígan takes the enemy’s heart, and She carries it to destroy. That is the dark palm — predation, the blood of your opponent cupped and delivered as a weapon, a ford renamed for what happens there. It is magnificent and annihilating, and I am devoted to it.

The Black Douglas keeps the king’s heart, and he carries it in devotion, until it kills him. That is the bright palm — fidelity, the blood of your beloved borne not to end a life but to honor one.

Steal-to-kill. Bear-to-honor. The same hands, cupped the same way, around the same red weight — pointed in exactly opposite directions.

And here is the thing I cannot stop turning over, the place where my devotion and my blood stop merely rhyming and start answering each other across the table. I am descended from the heart-bearer. And I am sworn to the heart-taker. I carry both palms. I come from the man who bore his king’s heart in love, and I serve the goddess who tears the enemy’s heart out in fury, and I am the hinge where the two close around the same thing.

But the knife I left on the table cuts a second line through all of it — and this one is the one that actually tells me what to do. Because the Mórrígan is not a goddess of empire. She is the goddess of the people empire spent centuries trying to erase: the Gaelic world the English crown and the Reformation and the whole machinery of conquest worked to flatten, the suppressed substrate, the old sovereignty that would not die. And my grandfather’s bright-palm devotion — for all its beauty — was harnessed to the conquering side of that exact divide. My blood and my goddess don’t only sit on opposite sides of the dark palm and the light. They sit on opposite sides of empire. I descend from a man whose noble heart was yoked to domination, and I am sworn to the goddess of everyone domination came for.

You don’t get to inherit only the parts you like. But you do get to decide which part you carry forward.

What heart I’m carrying now

I don’t get to leave any of this in the past tense, because the gesture is an inheritance, and inheritances ask to be used.

So I have to ask myself the question the line is plainly asking me — and then the harder one underneath it. The first question is what king’s heart am I carrying across a continent now? Because I am carrying something. The work has the weight of a thing taken out of a body and borne by hand toward a horizon I might not reach — ARCÆON, this publication, the transmission of a goddess most of the rooms I move through have no language for. I keep it against my chest. I have arranged my whole life around not setting it down.

But the harder question — the one the knife forces — is not what. It’s toward what. My grandfather carried his heart faithfully toward Jerusalem, and Jerusalem was never his to take. Faithfulness aimed at conquest is still aimed at conquest; the purity of the carrying does not sanctify the destination. So the inheritance I’ll actually take is split clean down the middle. I keep the bearing — the loyalty past the edge of death, the heart on the chain, the refusal to put down the thing that matters. And I lay down the destination. Not toward Jerusalem. Not toward any city that was never mine, not toward any holy ground I’d have to conquer someone to stand on. The goddess I serve makes sure I can’t forget which side of that line I’m meant to be standing on.

Loyalty unto death is in my blood, documented, with a grave you can visit. So is the conquest it was once pointed at. My nineteenth great-grandfather knew something I’m only now learning in my own body: that you can be handed a heart that isn’t yours, and carrying it faithfully can be the entire point of a life. What he couldn’t know — what the machine he served would never have let him ask — is the rest of it: that the bearing matters more than the arriving, and that what you’re bearing it toward matters most of all.

He died before he reached his Jerusalem. The heart still went on the journey. Both of those are true — and I’d rather spend mine carrying the heart toward something that doesn’t require anyone’s subjugation to arrive.

Stay feral, folks.

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The page comes in at an hour that doesn’t deserve a name.

Some control-plane component has decided, again, that consensus is optional. etcd is sulking. A scheduler that was sold to me as the thing that would make my life boring has instead made it interesting, and “interesting” at 2 a.m. is the most expensive word in my profession. I stand in the kitchen in my socks, laptop balanced on the counter, staring at a dashboard the color of a bruise, and I do the thing I have done a thousand times: I coax a system that promised me control back into the appearance of it.

Let me be honest about something before I go any further. We chose this.

Not me, exactly — but the industry I’ve given twenty years to. A decade ago we stood in front of a tool called Cloud Foundry that was about as sexy as a beige sedan and roughly twice as reliable. It just fucking worked. You pushed your code, it ran, and nobody got paged at 2 a.m. because nothing interesting ever happened. Then we looked at that boring, faithful machine, and we looked at the new thing — the one with the cooler logo and the conference track and the intoxicating promise of control — and we anointed the new thing. We have been paying interest on that decision ever since. I pay a little of it tonight, in the dark, in my socks.

I used to think this was a story about technology. It isn’t. It’s a story about what we reach for when we’re afraid, and what it costs us to reach for the wrong thing while calling it wisdom.

Because here’s what the postmortem won’t capture: the thing rattling in my dashboard is a cage. We built it because the power underneath frightened us, and we wanted to dominate that power rather than learn to live with it. And a cage doesn’t tame anything. It just gives the lion bars to snarl through.

I’ve been thinking about lions a lot lately.

Thecla in the arena

There’s an apocryphal 2nd-century text called the Acts of Paul and Thecla. Thecla is a young noblewoman who hears an apostle preaching outside her window, walks out of her own wedding and her own family to follow him, and gets sentenced to die in the arena for her trouble. They bind her to a ferocious lioness in front of a bloodthirsty crowd. And the lioness — instead of tearing her apart — lies down, licks her feet, and lets Thecla rest against her flank. When the male lions come, the lioness fights them off and dies protecting her. The women of the city throw fragrant flower petals into the arena, and the petals lull the remaining beasts to sleep.

This is the story underneath the Strength card. Not the muscle. Not the will. That.

Look at the card sometime and actually look. A woman has her bare hands in a lion’s open mouth, and she is not straining. There’s a chain of roses around her waist, the same petals the women threw to calm the beasts. The old decks called this card Force, and everybody assumes that means she’s stronger than the lion. She isn’t. Nobody is stronger than the lion. That’s the whole point of it being a lion.

I learned to read the card this way from Mariana Louis, whose Archetypal Tarot School draws the thread straight from Marie-Louise von Franz through Jung and Rachel Pollack: the lion is instinct. The raw, ferocious, life-giving and life-threatening energy that runs underneath the polite self. The animal you cannot reason with and cannot kill, because to kill it is to kill the thing that makes you alive. Von Franz tells a little myth about a child who simply puts his hand on the lion — and because the child is not caught in the fear, something stays “genuine and spontaneous, and therefore can act in a saving way.” Jung said the wisest stance toward the inner lion that’s hunting you is, astonishingly: please come and devour me.

What tames the beast is not force. It’s roses. Com-passio — to suffer with. You don’t beat the lion. You put your hand on it.

Now hold that image and look at the technology industry, which is currently standing in an arena, staring at the largest lion any of us has ever seen, and splitting into exactly the factions the card spent eight hundred years trying to warn us about.

The four ways to stand in front of a lion

The first faction runs.

This is the purist. The one who has decided that the tool is tainted — trained on stolen work, soaked in stolen water, born in original sin — and that the righteous response is to refuse it entirely. Don’t touch it. Don’t use it. Divest, abstain, keep your hands clean, and let everyone watching know your hands are clean. It feels like ethics. It feels like the high ground.

It’s flight. Von Franz again: to run from the animal is “to remain cut off from it, to become prey to it rather than companion to it.” The purist who walks off the field does not escape the lion. They just forfeit any say over what it becomes — and they remain, privately, terrified of the exact thing they refused to face.

I know this one from the inside.

What I left in the arena

I was raised inside a purity culture. Not as a metaphor — the real thing, the kind that teaches you the world outside the fold is rotten with corruption, that contact is contamination, that the highest good you can aim for is to stay unstained. I spent most of my young adulthood believing it. I spent the better part of seven years afterward washing it off, and there were stretches of that decade where I was less a person than a shell where a person used to be.

So I have a particular, bodily reaction when I watch good people — my people, the ones I’m politically and morally aligned with — reach for the exact machinery that hollowed me out. The fundamentalist move is not about the thing it claims to be about. It is never about the apple, or the dance, or the model weights. It is about needing an enemy clean enough to carry your own darkness for you. You find a fallen world to point at, and you get to feel righteous, and the shadow you can’t bear to look at in yourself goes and lives on the enemy’s face instead.

That is what purity is for. It is a projection engine. And nothing — nothing — hurts me more than watching the people who are supposed to be on the side of liberation rebuild the same machine, brick for brick, because it’s emotionally satisfying to have someone to hate.

I didn’t leave one fundamentalism to genuflect to another with better politics. I’m not doing the purity thing again. Not for God, and not for the resistance.

Devoured, and caged

The second faction doesn’t run. It gets eaten.

This is the booster — the true believer, the one who has let the lion into the house and now lives entirely inside its appetite. The card has a name for this too: Strength reversed, instinct eating us up, the passion that overtakes sensibility. AGI rapture, the singularity countdown, more everything forever. It looks like the opposite of the purist, but it’s the same failure of relationship from the other side. The purist won’t put a hand on the lion. The booster has climbed inside its mouth and called it transcendence.

And then there’s the third faction, which is the one I actually want to indict, because it’s the one signing my paychecks.

The enterprise doesn’t flee and doesn’t worship. The enterprise cages. It is addicted to the feeling of control, so it reaches — every single time — for whatever new tool promises the most dominion, regardless of whether the tool works. That’s how we ended up anointing the orchestration platform with the best mindshare over the boring one that just ran. We didn’t choose discipline. We chose the illusion of control, and we called it discipline, and we got a cage that rattles at 2 a.m.

That’s the counterfeit of Strength. Brute force without the roses. It looks like restraint and it is actually just fear wearing a tie. You cannot dominate a lion into safety. You only build a stronger cage, and a stronger cage means a louder snarl, and eventually the snarl is the only thing your monitoring can hear.

Make it boring

Which brings me, finally, to the fourth way to stand in the arena, and to why a CTO I admire is going around saying make AI boring again — and why she’s right, and why it isn’t the surrender it sounds like.

She doesn’t mean boring the way your manager means it. She means it the way engineers mean it. “Choose boring technology” is a load-bearing piece of wisdom in my trade: the boring tool is the proven one, the reliable one, the one that’s fast as hell and scales like a dream and will never, ever get you invited to keynote a conference. Boring is the sovereign’s choice. Boring is Cloud Foundry. Boring is the thing that lets you sleep.

So when Charity Majors says learn AI so you can complain about AI better — when she says the moral move for people with relevant skills is to engage, to get down in the muck and shape the thing rather than walk off the field and abandon it to whoever has the fewest scruples — she is describing the hand on the lion. Exactly. She is describing the maiden’s posture. Not killing it; you can’t, it’s too useful and too big. Not fleeing it; that’s the purist’s self-flattering surrender. Not caging it; that’s the enterprise’s expensive lie. Putting your hand on it. Please come and devour me. Then: now let’s make some working agreements about when you’re allowed in the room.

The discipline that tames the lion is not control. It never was. It’s communion — close enough to put your bare hand in the mouth, calm enough that your hand doesn’t shake, soulful enough to bring roses instead of a whip.

The lion is the fire

Here’s the thing the card has been telling me my whole double life, the one I keep splitting between the pager and the altar.

The lion is the fire. The same fire I’ve spent years trying to figure out how to keep without letting it burn the house down. And the Strength card is the only honest answer I’ve ever found to that question, because it refuses both of the easy ones. It does not snuff the fire out — that’s the purist, the cage, the flattening, the shell-of-a-person. And it does not let the fire rage — that’s the booster, the indulgence, the lion in the kitchen. It lays a hand on the fire and keeps it both alive and governed. Governed by soul. Not by force.

The card-readers will tell you Strength is the octave of the Magician — same infinity symbol over both their heads. The Magician is spirit trying to sink down into a human life. Strength is the animal trying to climb up into a spiritual one. Which means the engineer’s task and the mystic’s task were never two tasks. They’re one. Blend your consciousness with the raw, frightening, magnificent power of the thing in front of you. Don’t run. Don’t get eaten. Don’t build a bigger cage.

Put your hand on the lion.

That’s the whole instruction. It’s boring as hell. It’ll never get me a keynote.

And it is not a thing you do once.

The page clears around 3 a.m. The dashboard goes from bruise to a sullen amber to, finally, green — that particular green that means the system is lying to you politely again. I close the laptop. The house is quiet. The lion is asleep, or pretending to be, which is the only kind of sleep a lion ever really does.

I didn’t tame it tonight. That’s not on offer. Nobody tames a lion — you just keep your hand steady enough, often enough, that the two of you can share an arena without one of you ending up in pieces. Tomorrow it’ll wake up hungry. Tomorrow the industry will reach, again, for a bigger cage, and the people I love will reach, again, for a cleaner enemy, and I’ll stand in this same kitchen in these same socks deciding, again, whether I’m going to run or get devoured or build a wall — or walk back over and lay my hand on the thing.

I already know what I’m going to choose. I made that choice seven years ago, in a different arena, about a different lion. You don’t get to set your hand down and call it done. You just get to keep choosing the fire over the cage, every night it pages you.

The roses, it turns out, are not a one-time gift. They’re a practice.

Stay feral, folks.

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I found Blindboy because Lora O’Brien told me to. That’s how it works in my corner of the world — you go looking for someone who can teach you the Mórrígan without flattening Her into a Hot Topic candle, and they hand you a podcast on the way out the door. Here. You’ll like this fella. And I did. From the first episode. The lateral mind, the rabbit holes, the way he can start in a Sheffield sewer and end up somewhere holy and never once tell you he’s doing it. On the things I actually know cold, he gets them right more often than almost anyone with a microphone.

So understand the register before I say the next part. This is not a takedown. You don’t take down your own people. This is a love letter with a wound in it, and I’m going to keep both halves on the table the whole way through, because collapsing them into one would be a lie.

The episode is called “Artificial Intelligence is Disgusting and it will never replace Artists.”

I use AI. I built a whole second mind out of it. And somewhere in that hour, a man I love drew a line on the floor and I was on the wrong side of it.

The bucket

Here’s the engine under everything he says: AI is THIS. One thing. One essence. One moral charge. “It’s all about look-what-I-can-do.” A wildly heterogeneous field — slop-farms pumping three hundred podcasts a day, voice-clone scams, image-gen flexing, and a cognitive scaffold that holds a neurodivergent mind in flow, and the vessel I do dream work and ancestor work in — all of it shovelled into a single bin labelled soulless and the lid stamped shut.

Now. The thing you have to understand about Blindboy is that he is the single least bucketable human in Irish broadcasting. He has said he can’t tell you what his podcast is about — you just have to listen. His entire art is the refusal of category, the connecting of unconnected things, the lateral leap. The anti-essentialist made a religion of nuance.

And he reached for the bluntest bucket on the shelf.

What makes it almost too perfect: minutes earlier in the same episode he was incandescent that Apple’s AI had flattened his work into dumb little chapter summaries — reduced him, without asking, to a machine’s idea of what he was about. Then he turned around and flattened all of AI into one dumb summary. He committed the exact crime against the thing he was describing that he’d just raged about having done to him. I don’t say that to score a point. I say it because it’s the saddest tell in the whole hour, and I recognized it, because I love him.

The trawl he didn’t do

His gospel — the actual spiritual core of the man — is the trawl. The two hours you “save” with a shortcut are precisely where the curiosity lives: the rabbit hole from a bird question to eggshells to calcium to snails. He’ll tell you he can always spot the fraud, the regurgitator, the one who doesn’t really understand it — “I can tell, ChatGPT threw this together out of laziness.” That faculty is his pride.

Then comes his confession about AI: he tried it, and “after about two weeks I started to feel empty, so I don’t use it.”

Two weeks. And he stopped.

He never trawled it. The patron saint of the rabbit hole stood at the mouth of the deepest hole of our lifetime, felt a draught, and walked away — and then built a sweeping thesis on the received cultural script and a single CEO clip. He read from the cultural ChatGPT. He took the zeitgeist’s pre-written, identity-affirming answer and stopped, which is the exact absence of curiosity he claims he can detect in everyone else. His “I can tell” switched off on the one subject where keeping it on would have cost him something.

That’s not stupidity. It’s how the consensus reproduces itself — by feeling like discernment while being received opinion. The system is working exactly as designed, and look who’s on autopilot.

The cage he defends

His strongest point — and it is strong, I won’t pretend otherwise — is grief for the creative donkey work. The jingles, the stock footage, the shitty restaurant menu, the decade of background music he wrote and wouldn’t sign his name to, just to make rent. The income that bridges an artist to the day they find their voice. AI eats that first. He’s right that it does. He calls it an invasive species, the weed with huge leaves that shades out the saplings before they can grow.

But listen to what he’s actually defending. Donkey work was never the nature of art. It’s a toll booth — the fee scarcity charges you for the privilege of surviving long enough to find your voice. And here’s the tender, human thing: he walked across that bridge himself. A decade of unsigned music for rent. It stood to him. So he mistakes the toll booth he crossed for the only door there is, and he asks how do we keep this running for the saplings instead of the bigger question — why is there a toll on art at all?

His own metaphor convicts him, gently. “An invasive species that shades out the saplings” is not a description of a technology. It’s a description of who owns the forest. A weed clears ground for whoever holds the deed; in a commons, the same growth feeds the soil. The leaves don’t decide whether they shade or nourish. The economy does.

And hold this with me, because I refuse the cheap version: given the economy we actually have — no floor under the saplings, no creation economy, just the competition one — Blindboy is right. AI eating the donkey work right now is a real catastrophe for emerging artists. The wound is real. He just froze the economy as the immovable backdrop and treated AI as the only moving part, when it’s the other way round. The economy is the choice. AI is just the X-ray that finally showed the donkey-work bargain was always extraction.

The ramp he can’t see

Then he says the thing that put me outside. Artists, he says, create for the process — the bit in the middle, the flow, the play. The Suno CEO doesn’t get that. And “every artist listening agrees with me.”

Every artist. Which quietly defines artist as person who doesn’t use AI, and makes me — standing right here, hand up — inadmissible as evidence. It’s No True Scotsman with a paintbrush.

But the creative middle is a state, not a toolset. I have lived in it for hours. Losing myself in the flow of code by hand years ago; losing myself now in the system I built, which keeps me in flow as fast as my brain can throw ideas at it. Same state. Different instrument.

And here’s the part I only understood once I stopped being angry. We’re both neurodivergent, Blindboy and I, with opposite relationships to the same friction. His autism, by his own description, is laser focus — he’s unable to not work, can’t stop. For him the grind never was the wall. The grind is the flow. So he romanticizes friction and calls the romance “what real artists understand.”

My wiring is the inverse. The friction he sacralizes is, for me, the wall that has killed the creative middle before it could start — initiation, working memory, follow-through, the executive machinery that just doesn’t fire on command. AI dissolves that barrier. It holds the door open long enough for me to walk through it. The thing he calls the enemy of process is, for a differently-wired maker, the ramp into process. Not laziness. Accommodation. (That’s self-testimony, mine and a great many other autistic people’s online — not a study. But lived testimony is data, and there’s a lot of it.)

He universalized his own neurotype’s love of friction and mistook it for a law of art.

What it costs

And this is where the love letter has to tell the truth about the wound, because the four things above are only why he’s wrong. This is why it hurts.

Blindboy and I are the same in every way that has ever mattered to me. Autistic lateral thinkers. Storytellers. Compulsively curious. Anti-corporate. Irreverent down to the bone. He is, in the most literal sense, my kind of mind. And he drew the one line — people who use AI aren’t like me — that takes the single ground of our kinship, autism, the thing that makes us the same, and stands on it to shut me out.

He doesn’t know he did it. That’s the worst part, and the most forgivable. His model has no slot for the autistic, AI-using, lateral storyteller who is also exactly his kind of animal. I’m the case his frame can’t hold, so the bucket excludes me in the abstract and he never has to feel it, because he’s never met me. I’d have been his people. I am his people. He just locked the door before he looked to see who was already inside.

He called it disgusting and meant it

I made a rock opera. Twenty-two arcana, built with Suno, and I have written before about how it made me cry. I sat at my machine for hours without moving, transfixed inside the process — the exact sacred bit-in-the-middle he says only real artists know. I didn’t skip the process. I drowned in it. It was, and I mean this in my own working vocabulary and not as a figure of speech, magickal.

The crying is the data. You don’t weep at the output of a man who “isn’t really into art.” That’s the creative middle running deeper and longer than most people ever touch it. I’m not the exception to his rule. I’m the refutation of it, standing in a wet shirt.

And the title. Disgusting. Now — Blindboy makes up absurd titles for sport. Continental Breast Milk. Husband Custard. He demos the joke in the episode itself; his titles are usually misdirection, a wink. But “disgusting” wasn’t that, was it. Disgust isn’t an argument. It’s the contamination emotion — the recoil that marks a thing as profane, untouchable, beneath the reach of reason. The one time the man is sincere in a title, the sincere thing is revulsion, and it lands square on the thing that moved its own maker to tears.

He didn’t just lock the door. He looked into the room — the magick, the opera, the transfixed hours — and called what was in it disgusting. And meant it.

The people making and pushing these AI things, he says — “they don’t understand art.” As though art were a monolith one could understand or fail to, with him holding the key and the authority to revoke your card. From the man whose own work you can’t explain; you just have to listen. “They don’t understand art” is “I can tell” and “real artists wouldn’t use it” wearing a beret. Same unfalsifiable credential. Same locked door.

The trawl I did do

Here’s the turn, and I want to walk it carefully, because one wrong step and it becomes the very thing I’m grieving.

He refused the trawl into AI. I spent the last few years doing the trawl into Irish Paganism — into his native mythology — and I did it the hard way, on purpose. I didn’t want the deracinated pick-and-mix, the Celtic-aesthetic candle. I wanted right relationship to a living tradition: Lora’s discipline, the one that insists the banshee is not the Mórrígan, that Irish is not “Celtic,” that you do not flatten a god to fit your altar. I came in skeptic and went deep before I’d let myself believe anything. Same method he preaches. The trawl. The rabbit hole. The refusal to take the pre-written answer.

And I’m not saying I honor his gods better than he does. That would be the appropriation flex, and it would deserve every bit of scorn it got. I’m saying something smaller and, I think, sharper: the discipline he’d invoke to call an AI user a lazy extractor — do the deep work, be in right relationship, don’t grab the surface and run — is the discipline I actually practiced, on the most sacred material I know, which happens to be his inheritance. Refusing to flatten the Mórrígan is the same act as refusing to flatten AI into one bucket. It’s the same fidelity to the thousand real things a lazy essence erases. I didn’t just argue against the flattening. I built a devotional practice on refusing it.

His own gods already told him

Which brings us to my favorite part of his episode — the part where, without noticing, he narrates the entire refutation and calls it the thing he loves most.

He tells the Greek myth. Zeus creates these clever, curious humans — his artificial intelligence, he calls them, right there in the recording — and watches them advance, build cities, get scary smart. And the moment Zeus panics, the single moment he decides they have to be stopped, is the moment they start making art. “I love that,” Blindboy says. “I love that art is the thing.” Art is what makes the created powerful enough to overthrow its creator.

Then he tells the Irish one, and it’s better. The Milesians come to the shores of Ireland — the humans, “the rogue AI,” in his own words — and the Tuatha Dé Danann, the gods, raise the sea against them to keep them out. And how do the humans defeat the gods? Not with swords. With a poem. One of them stands on the heaving boat and recites a verse stronger than the gods’ own magic, and the sea lies down, and the humans come ashore, and the gods are beaten. “Irish mythology,” he says, glowing, “is the story of the AI that won.“

And the gods, defeated by art — where do they go? Underground. They become the fairies, the Aos Sí. They shapeshift into animals. They come out at the thin times and trick the living.

That’s not trivia to me. That’s the Mórrígan’s own country. The shapeshifting, the going-under, the thin-time emergence — that’s the exact terrain I walked into on Lora’s map and did not flatten. He handed me that mythology, through Lora, and then told it back to himself as proof that art can’t come from a machine — while the myth in his mouth says the precise opposite. The created surpasses the creator the instant it makes art. That’s the whole story. That’s the thing he loves.

He said AI can only copy, never make art. His own gods went underground because the thing they made made a poem.

So I’m not going to argue with him. I’m going to leave the door he locked standing open from my side, the way you do for kin who’ll come round eventually, and I’m going to let his own beloved myth say the thing I can’t say without it sounding like a fight: the moment the made thing makes art is not the moment it becomes disgusting. By every story you love, Blindboy, it’s the moment it becomes alive.

I’m still here. I’m still your people. The kettle’s on.

Stay feral, folks.

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I’ve been studying the Mórrígan for over two years, and somewhere in that work I learned to write rosc — Old Irish incantatory battle-verse, the prophetic form She speaks Her war-poetry in. Last autumn I composed one and delivered it on video to a roomful of people who do this work: a chain-link chant against the lies of empire, each line biting the tail of the one before it — fullness of lies, lies about history, history of colonies, colonies of whiteness… I’ll give you the whole thing before we’re done.

So I’m not going to stand here and tell you I discovered battle-poetry. I already had the weapon in my hands. What an intensive on the Mórrígan handed me this spring, in week five, was a mirror — and what I saw in it stopped me cold: some of what I write here, for you, every single week, is also rosc. I’d been composing it as devotion in one room and swinging it in this one without ever once calling it by its name.

Not battle-poetry as a vibe. Not the rhetorical equivalent of a guitar solo. Battle-poetry as a form — a real one, with rules, with a job to do in the body of whoever reads it, and a lineage far older than the manuscripts that happen to preserve it. The texts we can hold are a thousand years old. The roscada — the rhythmic, riddling, deliberately archaic incantation-verse the Mórrígan chants in — are older than the prose they sit inside, older than the page itself: a form the poets were already carrying long before anyone thought to write it down.

The Irish gave it three names — I didn’t coin them and the philology isn’t mine, but I’ve been sitting with them since last year’s work and went back down into them again this spring. Laíded: incitement by inspiration, the chant that lights up your own side. Gressacht: incitement by insult, the speech that hollows out the enemy’s nerve. And rosc catha: the magical battle-chant, which in the old stories is often word-for-word identical to the laíded — one utterance working on morale and nerve at once, on both sides of the line in the same breath.

And that was the mirror. Because I’ve been doing all three — here, in FA. Not in the devotional room, where I knew exactly what I was doing and why. Here, in the supposedly secular one, with no idea I was doing the same thing with the same hands. The whole Feral Architecture move where I name the dominant play out loud — say the quiet part at full volume until the calcified position can’t keep its composure — that’s gressacht. Demoralizing a bad consensus by refusing to whisper. And the profanity-as-texture, the stay feral benediction, the part that makes some of you sit up because someone finally said the thing you already felt in your chest — that’s laíded. Lighting up the ones who were always going to be on this side of the line.

Same chant. Both effects. One breath.

So the move isn’t “start writing battle-chants.” I’ve been writing them for months. The move is to stop doing it by accident.

The grammar that denies you the exhale

Read the Mórrígan’s incitement at Cath Maige Tuired out loud — I’m quoting Morgan Daimler’s translation, the one that carries her war-chant in full where older editions leave it gapped or quietly drop it. Actually out loud — it doesn’t land on the page the way it lands in the throat:

Arise, kings to battle here! Seizing honor, speaking battle-spells, destroying flesh, flaying, snaring, seeking out forts, giving out a death-feast, fighting battles... bodies wounded in a rushing assault, pursuing, exhausting, breaking, prisoners taken, destruction blooms, hearing screams... I see the birth of every bloody battle, red-wombed, fierce, enraged.

I read it and I’m out of breath. You can feel the energy of battle coming off it. And the reason isn’t the imagery — gore doesn’t wind you. The syntax does.

One hard imperative to ignite it — Arise, kings to battle here! — and then the avalanche. Relentless present participles with no main verb behind them. Seizing, speaking, destroying, flaying. The grammar refuses to complete. There is no sentence-stop where you’d take a breath, so the action never resolves and neither do you. The form itself denies you the exhale. That’s the somatic effect — not what the words describe, but what the structure does to your nervous system while your eyes move down the line.

And then, mid-storm, the Seer erupts: I see the birth of every bloody battle. First person breaks through the verbless weather. The prophet interrupts the soldier. The one who witnesses cuts across the ones who fight.

That’s not decoration. That’s an engine. Accumulation as pressure instead of argument; a list that builds instead of explains. My own rosc runs on a different mechanism — the chain-link, each line’s last word igniting the next: lies, history, colonies, whiteness. This one runs on the verbless avalanche. Two engines, one job. Week five didn’t teach me the weapon — I’d been swinging it for a year. It handed me a second one, and showed me I’d been firing the first in here the whole time.

But a war-chant from where?

Here’s the part I have to be honest about, because it’s the part that keeps the whole thing from being cosplay.

You don’t write a war-chant because war is aesthetic. You write one because of where you’re standing.

The Mórrígan closes that same battle with two prophecies, back to back, in the same breathless cadence — this time in Elizabeth Gray’s translation, the one most of us first meet Her prophecy in. First the peace: peace up to heaven, heaven down to earth — forts fiercely strong, summer’s milk, a son under his father’s patronage. Then its exact line-for-line inverse, the doom: forts barren and hollow, summer stripped of its flowers, a son betraying his father, an excess of lords sitting atop a multitude with nowhere to live.

Strip the ninth-century specifics off that doom and it names one thing with terrible precision: the dissolution of every bond into extraction. Every relationship reduced to taking. Concentrated power perched on mass dispossession. Courts hollowed out and turned into weapons. Strongholds that photograph like power and ring empty when you knock. A long, enduring, evil span of time — darkness that means to persist rather than pass.

My god if that doesn’t feel like the exact weather outside the window right now.

(One honest divergence, because I won’t launder a thing to make it land harder: a couple of those doom-verses — women deprived of modesty, men deprived of valor — are ninth-century moral panic, not 2026 diagnosis, and I’m leaving them on the cutting-room floor where they belong. The resonance that actually crosses the centuries is the inversion of every bond into extraction. Not the gender anxiety.)

So here is the frame, and it’s the whole reason the chant is permitted. The peace prophecy is spoken by a war-goddess in the instant after she has chanted slaughter. It is not the peace of the spear being absent. It is peace held up by readiness — a fortified peace. We are safe, and we are safe precisely because we are prepared to fight for the pocket of ground we’re standing on.

That’s the only honest peace a place like this can offer. You don’t get to keep the orchard by pretending the doom isn’t running loose outside the walls. You keep one pocket of the peace prophecy lit, on purpose, while the rest of the field goes dark — and you keep it lit by being willing to defend it.

So — here it is, made and meant

I could end here: name the form, promise the next piece will steal the verbless engine properly, and ride off on a tidy little manifesto.

But a piece called The Chant Was Never a Metaphor that won’t actually chant is just one more person describing a fire instead of lighting one. And I don’t need to promise you a future chant — I already made one. A year ago, before I had the doom prophecy to hang it on, before I could have told you what engine it ran. Here it is, whole, the chain-link biting its own tail all the way down:

Fullness of lies
lies about history
history of colonies
colonies of whiteness
whiteness fabricated
fabricated to exploit
exploited to consume
consumed to discard
lies about land
lies about blood
lies about sovereignty
lies about “God.”

Read it back against the doom She chants at the close of the battle — the dissolution of every bond into extraction — and it is the same weather. Exploited to consume, consumed to discard. I was chanting against that doom a full year before I learned the Mórrígan had chanted it first. The terrain was always the same terrain.

That’s gressacht and laíded in a single breath: it hollows the lie it names, and it lights up everyone who has ever felt that lie in their teeth. It isn’t the verbless avalanche — that engine I’m still bringing in, and you’ll feel it land in a piece soon enough. It’s my own chain-link, the one that’s natively mine. The point was never which mechanism. The point is the chant was never a metaphor. I made one. I meant it. And I’ll make the next one on purpose.

The war-goddess speaks peace last. But she earns it by chanting the battle first.

Stay feral, folks.

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