Warlike, Howling, Pure | Areïon

186 pages | Contagion Press | 6.1.24

Given the failure and inadequacy of secular attempts to bring about revolution, Warlike, Howling, Pure offers an insurrectionary and devotional approach to anarchy that expands the uprising into spiritual and religious dimensions. This book of four essays delves into the animism of revolution, suggesting its manifestation through relationship with the numinous – a divine intervention, rather than a product of crass historical determinism.

Drawing on a diverse range of historical, mythic, and arcane sources – from Chinese millenarian movements to the Dionysian cults of ancient Greece, from Ursula K. Le Guin to James Baldwin – Areïon widens the scope far beyond the Abrahamic religions that dominate the discourse around religious insurgency. Through examination of rebellions and ecstatic rites, Areïon offers a cosmology of revolt, at once both animistic and alchemical. More, we find new constellations in our anarchist galaxy: vibrant, howling, and at moments, intimately present in our lives.

In his foreword to the book, Idris Robinson calls it: “a struggle against poverty. A poverty, however, that is just as much spiritual as it is material: an affliction of the body as well as the soul. Against the reduction of survival to a few crumbs of bread without roses, these pages are engaged in a fight to instead achieve a fulfilled and redeemed existence… nothing short of a life or death struggle, over what it is to live and what it is to die.”