Description
Friends go to the woods to celebrate the Pagan roots of modern culture. But their Nature-worshiping youthful exuberance soon comes under attack from an intolerant society. Now they must rise up and declare the return of the world’s oldest religion. It’s back!
Hayden is just another working stiff, trying to get through the day, when he falls into conversation with his colleague Nicholas one day. There in the break room of the busy business, Nicholas begins to relate the history of our culture’s calendar: beginning with the weekdays named after Nordic deities, and the months named after Mediterranean deities.
Intrigued by this lingering link from the paved present to the Pagan past, Hayden agrees to accompany Nicholas to a neo-Pagan gathering out in the woods to celebrate the Beltane holiday. There he meets a colorful cast of characters: including Phoenix, the group’s unofficial spokesperson and de facto leader; and Sage, with her flowy garments and her constant coterie of companions and admirers. Most importantly, he meets the elfin Melissa.
As the group sits around the bonfire until late at night, playing drums and dancing and reciting ancient esoteric lore, Hayden and Melissa quickly become enamored with one another. Later, back in town, what first began as a singular night at a festive party soon develops into a much longer-term relationship.
But their handfasting celebration is crashed and wrecked by violent self-righteous intolerant locals: locals who are convinced that their mainstream religious beliefs give them an excuse to harass and torment other people who have different beliefs.
Now it’s up to the outcasts to stand up for themselves, and to demonstrate to the world that freedom for all means tolerance for others: and tolerance means allowing other people to believe what they want to believe and worship how they want to worship, even if their gods are different from your gods.
About the Book
This story is fictionalized, but it was inspired by multiple real-life incidents that occurred at the Anarchists’ Beltaine festival in Eastern Washington in 2005 and again in 2006, when intolerant locals showed up and harassed the peaceful Pagans, shooting guns into the air and in one case felling a tree across a road to prevent egress.
Smith had previously attended that festival in 2004: so he was deeply moved when his friends told him about their experiences of these disturbing events. Eventually these themes and undercurrents all merged in Smith’s creative work, and this book is the result.
Rise of the Pagans was first released in 2014 with a black book cover. In 2016, Smith published a revised Second Edition with a green cover and a number of minor textual improvements. Presently, the version of Rise of the Pagans available here is the Third Edition, which also includes a number of perhaps rather abstract revisions to the discussion of calendars in the Appendix.
About the Author
Jesse S. Smith is a Nature-loving Pacific Northwesterner; a writer, musician, and multimedia creator.
