For those who remember the wild barbarian, even in whispers
The Fence Around the Barbarian Fire
There is a certain calm that passes for modern Polytheism: quiet, polite, restrained. The altar is tastefully arranged. The incense is subtle. The tone is hushed. The movements are careful, practiced, and proper.
It is safe, predictable, and designed to invoke comfort.
What we call spiritual is often just safe. What we call humility is often just fear. And what we call “respect” is often the refusal to risk power.
It is the smoothing over of the wild, the taming of mystery, and the molding of the sacred into something academic, palatable, and urbane. Nowhere is this more visible than in the rituals of modern white Polytheists. The rites that once howled and danced are now curated into amorphous “wellness” practices, severed from their power.
This is not reverence; it is domestication.
Etiquette at the Altar
In the name of caution, of “doing it right” and avoiding harm, this modern polytheism avoids power altogether, but avoidance is not reverence. Disembodiment is not a virtue. And self-centered risk aversion is not solidarity.
What looks like care is often just performance; a curated identity of being responsible, informed, and sensitive. But beneath the veneer of etiquette is the same old fear of looking foolish, of losing control, of being seen.
This, too, is domestication, but a kind of domestication that does its violence in silence. It doesn’t brandish a sword or wear a hood, but comes to us in the form of “the good one”. They wave their finger in our faces and speak of historical accuracy, or of how the ancestors and the old ways are dead. Like all colonization, it insists that the fire must be managed, and then, when nobody is looking quietly smothered.
The domesticated won’t dance without knowing the steps, won’t hit the drum without permission, won’t face the gods without a script.
Power is not safe. And ritual will not always leave you looking polished.
Modern Polytheist Rituals of Restraint
This domestication can be seen across practices: seasonal rites devoid of heat, rituals hedged by disclaimers, prayer circles that invoke only the spirit of HR trainings. There is no danger. No willingness to look foolish; to be changed. The drum stays in the corner. The song is never sung.
Everything smells like incense but tastes like ash. Ancestors are named but never invited.
The fear of becoming a caricature, becoming the “white shaman”, becomes its own form of exile. It severs contact with the sacred before contact can even be attempted. The practitioner, terrified of looking ridiculous, creates distance instead of forming a relationship. And so the ritual dies before it begins.
It’s not just fear of appropriation, it’s fear of animation. Fear of being moved, of not being in control. Fear of praying to a god whose name was stolen by Marvel. Of invoking a force some may scoff at.
This is cartoonification from the inside out, not just the flattening by outsiders, but the self-imposed annihilation of meaning by those who fear becoming a spectacle more than they fear remaining numb.
This is how domestication survives its own critique, not by defending itself outright, but by laundering itself into goodness, appearing self-aware and sensitive. In doing so, it replaces the sacred and wild with the well-behaved; replaces power with trepidation and self-justification.
This posture is not without consequences. Because when fear of doing it wrong outweighs the desire to surrender to ritual, it becomes a performance. And performance, however well-meaning, is still a wall.
Reclamation Not Performance
Appropriation is real. Theft is real. But so is cowardice. So is the refusal to be moved. To get dirty. To be seen by something greater and to not know what it sees.
Reclamation is not performance. It is not theory. It is not neat. It is a relationship, forged in risk and humility. It is praying in a voice not yet trained, dancing without knowing the steps, offering without knowing if you’ll be answered.
Reclaiming power is not the same as seizing control. It is about being transformed. It is about remembering that the sacred is not a tool to wield, but a fire into which we choose to walk.
“Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” – commonly attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche, unverified
Tearing Holes in the Present
Reclaiming the wild does not mean returning to some imagined past. It means tearing holes in the fabric of the present and letting in the unknown. It means stepping outside the curated boundaries of comfort and correctness, and entering a relationship with that which is untamed, unpredictable, and real. It means not just confronting the wilderness outside but waking it up within.
This is how we walk beyond the fence. This is how we stop waiting.
This is how we become dangerous again.
What waits for us there is the wild Barbarian, the one who never needed permission. The one who prayed with their whole body, who offered their breath to the land, who made love and war with kin. The one who remembers that the gods do not speak in PowerPoint slides; they speak in thunder, silence, and mud.
This is who we become when the performance ends. When the fear burns off. When the cartoon is passed through, not avoided.
Through the fence and into the fire.
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