The Soil
Sir James Frazer was the hammer that cracked open my soul.
I was raised in various forms of Protestantism. My parents are devout lovers of Christ and the Scriptures, but they never seemed to find the right church community to express that devotion. Because of this early wandering, I have participated in many Protestant denominations.
I was baptized Episcopalian, Sunday-schooled Methodist, confirmed Lutheran, whirl-winded through everything from Black Baptist to Pentecostal. We did prison ministry with Non-Denominationals, homeschool-grouped with Millenarians, and summer camped with Presbyterians. It was the Presbyterian church where I was eventually confirmed again.
But by the time of that confirmation, I had already lost my faith. This fact was quietly admitted in a penciled note in my Extreme Teen Bible, a final gesture of honesty toward a collapsed worldview.
I maintained a love for the Bible, thanks to my mother, who read Scripture to her children almost every day. I might have retained some vague belief in a spiritual reality. But mostly, I was just angry. I was angry at Christianity for being so boring in practice. I couldn’t understand why, if the god of the universe became a man, died, rose again… why didn’t that change everything? Why are we getting desk jobs, going to school, watching football? If anyone took this seriously, wouldn’t it mean that we should drop everything and dedicate our lives to this truth? I wanted answers. Instead, I got children’s bulletins with Jesus as a cartoon shepherd.
Connect the dots, kids.
The more questions I asked, the more confused I was. We professed all these extreme doctrines, but they were weakly held. Presbyterians, for instance shake the soul with their pronouncements—but as confirmands, we were encouraged, to “write our own creeds.” Utter nonsense.
Whence this limp-wristedness?
I had felt something, as a Lutheran, and something there staked a claim to me.
There was this old, dour, very Teutonic minister who no one liked but me. Pastor Eckert. He took Christianity seriously, at least. The services on Sunday were boring and slow, but he seemed to actually believe that it did something.
I loved him. He was my mentor; he would take me to the library and we would read Scripture, and I would ask a hundred questions which he patiently answered without condescension. And when I was confirmed by him—his last act as a pastor before retiring—I felt the Holy Spirit come into my body. I wept uncontrollably, embarrassed beyond words. Let no one say that Grace is absent from Protestants.
That was the only memory I had of feeling God’s presence. I had tried. I participated. I sometimes believed intellectually, sometimes culturally, sometimes emotionally, but never deeply. I had argued with myself and others, I had memorized the verses, walked the altar calls, prayed the prayers—but my Lutheran confirmation, as close to a sacrament that I had ever experienced, was my one genuine encounter with God in the Christianity of my youth.
But I had another religion. My real religion—though I wouldn’t have known to call it such—was the worship of Magic. Beauty, mystery, and meaning—in all their aching, startling, often terrifying presence. And my devotion to Magic was private, intense, and total.
I’ve always been bookish, especially for a farm boy. I finished Lord of the Rings when I was six or seven; I immediately went to the beginning and read it again, and read it perhaps every year of my life after that. I devoured, over and over again, Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Chronicles of Prydain, The Dark is Rising Sequence, Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh, Alice in Wonderland. Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver were companions, along with piles of ghost stories and fairy tales. And more: Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Andrew Lang. The full list would be inexhaustible—but the point is made. I loved adventure and faerie, fantasy and magic. I occupied those worlds with fierce loyalty. Even during my chores, I’d daydream about magic.
To the probable distress of my parents, this literary diet spilled out into more academic interests. I had encyclopedias of the world’s religions, and I claimed my father’s old college textbooks on art. I had a magnificent encyclopedia set on witchcraft and magic, which I believe my parents quietly removed one day, to their credit. My grandmother also fed me books: ancient priestesses and archaeology (Marija Gimbutas was her heroine), William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, Native American shamanism and Transcendental poetry.
I knew that I loved these things with an unstoppable, mind-altering passion. I didn’t realize, however, that it would erode the tentative grip I had on Protestantism. These ancient mysteries grew larger in my mind, and the cartoon Christ I had been handed began to look paper thin. While the magic of the ancient world made my heart race—the sacrifices on the bloodstained temples, the distant drums in the forest, the sensual language of mythic poetry—the vacation bible school songs about Jesus’s love for His sheep rang increasingly hollow, childish, empty of tradition or meaning or mystery. While I kept up the pretense of belief—for my own hope, and for the love of my parents—it was over. I was a secret pagan child.
I can’t remember when I first came across The Golden Bough—perhaps in an encyclopedia entry—but the moment I encountered its thesis, something deep in me snapped to attention. Sir James Frazer had proposed that all religions shared a common root: the myth of the dying and rising god, the corn king who falls and returns with the seasons. Across ancient texts and folk traditions, Frazer traced this rhythmic pattern of death and rebirth: the seed buried, the stalk risen, the harvest gathered. His claim was simple, and for me, utterly compelling: Christianity, far from being unique, was simply another expression of this primeval cycle, a polished, sanitized version of the old Cult of the Corn God.
This idea set me on fire. In my heart of hearts I desired ancient traditions, mystery, real magic. And whatever Frazer’s secret religion was—this raw, earthy, occult one, not cleaned up by bureaucracy or banality—I wanted to practice that one.
The Seeds
Growing up on a farm with a poetic little soul, I had witnessed firsthand the mystery that Frazer described: the teeming and twining, rooting and rotting, fruiting and frothing. I had watched crops grow from the dead soil—I had seen animals birth new life dripping with red viscera, and I had watched them die in spongy loam, consumed by ants. I had branded the cattle and smelled the burning hair, watched the seedling break through the topsoil, felt the blissful gusts of a blue norther, licked the ice that stoppered the trough. I had witnessed the fiery autumn sunrise over golden fields of bluestem and the warm barnyard fattiness of milk right from the cow. The mushrooms shooting out of the piles of manure, the unctuous drips of juice from smoked ribs. I drank it all in like water.
The magic behind it all—the unseen power that made creeks burble, dewberries bloom, colored the shadow that followed the coyotes as they slunk under the huisache… whatever that was, it demanded reverence. Whatever that was, I worshiped. Surely, I thought, surely the pulse of creation belonged to some goddess.
With Frazer as my guide, and this wild, brutal beauty as my pantheon, I gave myself over to study.
In college, I read deep into comparative mythology, deep into art history and archaeology, deep into the rites of ancient magic and sacred kingship.
I met a Wiccan for the first time and initiated myself in a snowy grove alone. I wrote my first real research paper—choosing as my topic the “Mithraism of Constantine.” I spent sleepless hours in the library, savoring graphic descriptions of ancient rites, violent, sexual, poetic, terrifying. Beautiful. I had wanted to be an archaeologist (since I was six, I believe), but now archaeology had lost something for me. In archaeology’s attempt to become respectable, it had turned itself into a science. Now, instead of the romanticism and exploration that I expected and needed, it was all lab work and charts. It’s certainly more respectable, and thank God people do it, but, blast it, I wanted temples and adventures.
It was also at this time that I discovered the Western Esoteric Tradition. Not only ancient worlds but now the Medieval and Renaissance opened up, with their arcane symbols, their grimoires and sacred diagrams and folk remedies that sounded straight out of Shakespeare. This was what I was looking for; the secret old religion underneath the crust of sentimentality. I went full blown Medievalist, and then fell headlong into Religious Studies when I transferred to Rice. I became increasingly self-aware as a natural-born pagan and occultist. Anything beautiful in Christianity, I decided, was simply a pagan holdover—the last bright threads of the old religion, woven into the dull cloth of a bourgeois, modernist, moralizing faith. So when I had to contend with Medieval beauty, which moved me in ways I cannot describe, I believed that this, too, was due to pagan holdovers.
The most striking of these supposed holdovers, to me, was the Green Man. A leafy face hidden in the margins of cathedrals, peeking from corbels, grinning in paneling, obscured by vines—he seemed to confirm everything Frazer claimed. Surely this was the forest god in disguise, lurking within the very churches that sought to replace him. Many modern pagans, too, saw in the Green Man the old sylvan god of fertility, masked but alive. He was the wild counterpart to my wild goddesses. The nymphs and naiads, the fates and Norns to whom I had poured out my heart—they were his natural brides. I had found my pantheon. The Green Man and the Graces.
But then I began to read the medieval saints.
Fertilization
I had, of course, always known about them. By far, most of our sources concerning magic, paganism, and myth were written by monks in the Conversion Period and early Carolingian Renaissance. So I mined them, looking for echoes of Freya and Juno, ignoring their theology.
But while taking a class on medieval and Renaissance magic, we were assigned St. Hildegard of Bingen, Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite, Albertus Magnus, and others. They were shocking to me. Here were Christian people; very Christian people. And they not only saw the world I saw, but were steeped in its mystery. Magic poured from every word, and it was all about Christ.
This was a Christianity I had never encountered—nothing like the flat, transactional 'Jesus died so you wouldn't go to hell' religion of my youth. This was fleshy. This was a whole thought-world. Christ was no cardboard cutout pasted onto the material world, but the living, breathing, mystical source of Reality. I read Gregory the Great and stories about Boniface and Patrick and Augustine of Canterbury. I had thought that these were the culprits of suppressing the old, real, pagan religion. They burned the books of magic! But instead, when I read them, I found gentleness, strength, love, rigor, and depth. They didn’t talk about ruthlessly rooting out the old cultures—they spoke about baptizing them. They weren’t going to the North as colonizers, but to share the Good News. And these monks, like Bede, scribbling away in scriptoriums… they weren’t Roman bureaucrats. They were natives. Not only that, they spoke excitedly about Creation, about the mysterious powers inside the visible world.
These saints didn’t come to banish the old gods. They came to fight dragons.
Something about Frazer’s story was off. I needed to understand.
A Seedling
One of the most respected and excellent scholars in studies of pre-Christian religion, especially English paganism, is Ronald Hutton. I met with him at the University of Bristol while I was doing research on magic and paganism in England, and we had a striking conversation about the historical shallowness of modern occultism.
It was a beautiful conversation (for me at least), and gracious of him to take time out of his day. I was beginning to be quite bothered at the historical claims that some Neo-pagans and Goddess-worshippers were making; claims that Christianity killed all the pagans, that the witch trials were about suppressing women’s occult power. Claims that their “spiritual paths” were descended from Druids or Merlin. He sympathized deeply with my frustration, and talked about his own history in the community.
At first his work was embraced by pagans, but the rise of the internet and identity politics had changed the modern practice of paganism from romanticism to just another New Age spiritual menu item.
He sat there in his frumped velvet frock coat and jolly Victorian vocabulary, next to his computer and paperwork. To me, he was almost a symbol of how I felt—out of place in our time. Time. Something needed to sanctify it.
As the conversation ran on, I found out that he shared my deep love of the ritual year, and had written a book on it called The Stations of the Sun. I purchased it when I came home from that summer, and devoured it in two days. It became my bible. I not only read the book so much that I had to buy a second copy, but I purchased nearly every book in its bibliography and read those too. That’s how I encountered Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars.
Both The Stations of the Sun and The Stripping of the Altars demonstrate conclusively that the strange rituals, beliefs, and material cultures of the Middle Ages were anything but remnants of forgotten paganism. The Green Man, the Christmas tree, Hallowe’en… these had emerged in medieval Europe, not in defiance of Christianity, but as a result of Christendom’s full flowering. I was floored. I dug into a hundred other examples. Yule logs and bonfires, maypoles and flower crowns, folk dances and herbal lore. Christian, Christian, Christian. Of course the pagan people had lit fires and danced, sung and decorated. Some things had lasted for centuries, but it didn’t mean that these rituals were hidden bits of Ye Olde Religion snuck in under the noses of the imperious Inquisition and meddling bishops. These ancient things were either baptized and gracefully incorporated into the Faith, or they had come from the Faith itself. And the people participating in these strange rites were unapologetically, unmistakably Christian.
What could this mean?
Even while I was teaching a class on paganism and magic, my personal conviction about its superiority to Christianity was wearing thin. The more widely I read, the more the history of this incarnated version of Christianity became clear. And my research was rewarded. I began, finally, to understand the inescapable conclusion. This earthy, living Christianity was indeed suppressed. But not by the medieval Church. It was suppressed by State Protestantism.
The Church in full flower had problems, of course, but I quickly recognized those problems as stemming not from the Faith itself, but rather from human failure to live up to Christ. The various cruel sins of medieval Catholics were not a “problem” for me; sinful humans exist at all times. The structure, the aim of their society was remarkably beautiful. It was a mystical, mysterious, living structure.
And it was this structure that was eroded by the Reformation, especially the English Reformation. Henry VIII’s greed for monastic land. Puritans who believed the apocalypse was just around the corner. Merchants and bureaucrats who saw their chance for wealth. Princes who wished to break from Rome—for purely political purposes.
It is impossible not to note that most of the Reformers had good intentions—but more often than not, their followers were motivated not by conscience, but by greed and frustration. And the things that they were frustrated by were not the sacraments or the hierarchy or Marian dogmas, but corruption and apocalyptic dread. Corruption and fear can be fixed more easily than a broken worldview. They had made a mistake.
I came to a two-fold conclusion: One, that the Reformation was not progress, but a rupture in society that crippled the Christian worldview. And Two, that the Reformation led directly to modernity. This was confirmed again and again, in study after study. Even the Protestant historians agreed, though they put a positive spin on it. This wasn’t my instinct. This was factual history. While the leaders of the Reformation were genuine, the change from old Europe to new Europe had to be enforced on the common people. I was surprised at the brutality of it, the obviousness of it.
I wasn’t just reading the history of Early Modernity. I was reading about the systematic dismantling of a world that I loved and understood, a world that fit every instinct that I had. And worse, this dismantling was often not motivated by genuine religious fervor, but rather money and power. This was explicitly confirmed by Protestant historians: Franklin Baumer, Jacques Barzun, Ernst Troeltsch, Max Weber, Steven Ozment, Jaroslav Pelikan, Peter Gay… the list could be extended ad infinitum.
My professor, John Stroup, helped me delve into this world, gave me clarity. He was himself an inheritor of Protestant civilization, and he was the first to assert: The Reformation is the origin of the modern world. The rejection of the Medieval… or what I began to call, as Medieval people called themselves, Christendom.
Had I misjudged the faith of my youth? Perhaps what I rejected was not Christianity, but its modernist reduction: flat, plastic, propositional, moralistic, social. Perhaps there was something deeper, richer, still to be recovered. Something still green.
I began to defend Christianity as a cultural good, even if I didn’t believe in Christ or the church in the slightest. I saw in Christianity another ally against the disenchanted world that exhausted and depressed me. I wanted the West to be Christian, even just aesthetically. I didn’t think it mattered whether or not one actually believed it, as long as you supported it. I was still a pagan in my heart, but I was softening to the beauty of the Church.
I became fluent in the literature of the anti-modern. From the Counter-Revolutionaries, to the Romantics, to the medieval revival. I read Chesterton, Belloc and Dawson, Nietzsche and Knox. Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, Ernst Junger and Mencius Moldbug. I read papal encyclicals and Anglican Divines. Waugh and Hopkins and Huysmans. Schiller and Schegel, Marx and Freud, Radical Orthodoxy, Decadence, Oxford Movement, Symbolists… everyone everywhere seemed to be dealing with the same problem.
We had broken the world somehow, had lost our faith, and had destroyed our culture. I wanted it back.
Our Protestant, Enlightenment States had trained me to see Christianity as an ethereal, spiritual thing—otherworldly, abstract, scrubbed clean of the soil. But Christendom? Christendom was holy wells and harvest feasts, color and music, miracle plays and relics—bound not to pre-Christian cults but to the liturgical rhythm of the Church. The villagers were not secretly pagan. They were fully Christian. And the world they inhabited was steeped in a sacramental understanding that saw no contradiction between baptized flesh and baptized soul. I softened further, and read further, and even began to play with the idea of praying.
Seasons passed. I read monks and chroniclers, mystics and saints. Over and over again, I encountered a Christianity I had never been shown: one of incandescent wonder and ferocious joy. A faith that dipped the gold-covered gospel in cattle troughs to bless the oxen, that danced in the nave holding hands and sipping ale, that baked great bread-men and ate them with grinning relish. A people not detached and efficient, but earthy, mysterious, solemn and laughing, passionately alive.
And the more I occupied their world, I couldn’t help but notice that our world by comparison was abstract, flat, upheld by the thinnest of fictions and the airiest of assertions.
I had, unknowingly, raised myself to understand the medieval world, and forever be lost in the modern. I began to realize that I would never be whole again if I did not at least try to be a Christian.
With a sense of trepidation and cultural relief, I stepped tentatively back into the faith of my youth. Because of my Anglophilia, and my love for language and ritual, Anglicanism seemed to be a good fit. I started attending Church. I even decided to go further. I applied and was accepted to Yale Divinity School, planning to become an Anglican priest.
But something… was still missing.
So I went even deeper into the tradition.
I began attending Our Lady of Walsingham Catholic Church in Houston. Here was the high church tradition for sure, but also something more lively. The pews were packed. There were times of reverent silence. There was no pandering to modern sensibilities. The incense rose to God. The chants were solemn and beautiful. I was enchanted with the messy families and the booze on feast days. Bemused by the laughter and cigars, the silence and the tears in the eyes of the faithful, kneeling before statues.
My fiancee (now my wife) was very happy for me. She had watched my spiritual homelessness for so long, and now it seemed I was coming home. It was moving, but I was still merely a cultural Christian, and so I felt locked out. I tried to understand Jesus in the light of her love.
And then I watched her kneel and receive the Host, dipped in wine.
“The Body and Blood of Christ”.
Flowering
It finally dawned on me that Catholicism alone had kept the old magic alive.
The Eucharist, not as symbol—but as actual Body and Blood. The meeting place of heaven and earth, the world of spirit and the world of flesh. The sacrifice in the temple. The blood spilled for the salvation of the world. And from this touching point of heaven and Earth, the greyness of reality washed away; there was a new root from the stem of Jesse. Christ was the only living thing in the Universe and we are all only alive if we graft ourselves to His Body. His Blood. I remember that day, when it came together. I remember the ache in my chest and the slaver in my mouth. I was hungry for the Eucharist.
Seeing my future wife bow before Him, vulnerable, grateful, humble—that was the final piece.
Wherever His Body and Blood are, that is the only place that I can be. Any diminution of the Eucharist is the death of the world. The Eucharist is everything. If it is true, nothing else matters, and the only way we can approach this tremendous mystery is to surround it with guards and reverence, trembling and mystery. The Eucharist is the key that unlocks every door, the one paradox that untangles every paradox. The one miracle which makes all things miraculous. It is the Old Magic.
Everything made sense, then. The prayers that invoked saints and angels. The paintings, the bells, the processions, the incense and icons. Mary. The sacraments. The whole blooming, teeming, sprawling garden of Christendom came into sharp focus. The Middle Ages wasn’t a “religious age”. No.
Christendom was a Sacramental Reality.
I couldn’t ignore my heart any longer—I had to become Catholic.
Something strange happened when I surrendered my judgment, when I made a sacrifice of my need to understand and approve. I had expected beauty. I had even expected enchantment. But I did not expect Truth.
I found myself believing—not just in ritual or poetry or myth, or even the West—but in the reality and the love of Christ.
Not the flattened, weak picture of Jesus I had been given, but a Man. The Son of Man. A Person. One I could love with my whole soul. One who had been there from the beginning.
He had been patient with this poetic little soul. He had seeded bread crumbs everywhere, and finally I had come home. I went into the Church hoping for tradition, beauty, and culture. I went into the Church for the Green Man in the corners and three Graces dancing in the stained windows.
Instead I found a Man standing there with open arms, waiting for His beloved son, His Mother at His side, overflowing with infinite Graces.
And this Man, this Jesus…
He was wreathed with leaves.
"He had seeded bread crumbs everywhere, and finally I had come home." Though I was always a Christian at heart, this is how I describe my own journey into the Church. A little seashell Marian grotto in a patient's home on a house call with my father, colored plates of great Christian art in a book, a grape hyacinth at eye-level in a nearby vacant lot, Texas weather, a classmate making the sign of the Cross over her public school lunch, novels about Catholic life when I was a teen- all these started me on a path with many detours, but a final arrival.
I look forward to the rest of this series.
So beautiful. I loved H.Rider Haggard too.
For a wonderful novel about a 13th century priest, a student of Albertus Magnus, who encounters aliens from a stranded spaceship, recommend Eifelheim by Michael Flynn.