My name, Rob Brezsny appears on the covers of many books, but most of them aren't my sole productions. Most are riotous lovechildren born of numerous collaborators and woven from ecstatic research experiments.

First, there is my beloved River Rapunzel Magdalen Medusa Blavatsky, who coaxes revelation from chaos with the precision of a trickster midwife. She is my querida, my co-dreamer, my Muse of the Impossible. Every sentence in this book bears the influx of her radiant heresies.

Two of our family members have also contributed to Enlightenment for Rebels: Vimala Viatrix Blavatsky, one of River’s seven mothers, and our daughter Zadi Blavatsky-Brezsny.

Feral Paradise University is a key player in the mix. River and I have studied with the brilliant faculty there for years. It’s our inexhaustible source of insurrectionary teaching and rapturous scholarship. Many, though not all, of our classes and lessons unfold in dreams and altered states.

The faculty of our mystery school, at least the part of it we know, includes 11 luminaries. All of them are our co-conspirators, collaborators, and co-authors. Some are spirits, some are very fleshly, and some are both. Four of this crew are animals!

And yes, we know how this sounds. If a stranger told us they co-wrote their books with a 400-year-old sorceress, a talking coyote, an ancient Goddess with snakes for hair, and the postmortem upgrade of Arthur Rimbaud, we might feel moved to check their medication schedule.

So we won’t try to talk you into believing us. We'll just report from the inside: River and I really do commune with and learn from these beings.

Their curriculum is as real to us as my sociology classes at Duke University and River's calculus tutorials at UC Berkeley. After decades of faithful chaos magick and dreamwork, we've earned a tender stubbornness about this truth.

And no, we don't tidy our experience into a neat package that’s more socially acceptable because it hews to the well-groomed specs of The Ordinary Real World.

But you are, of course, welcome to translate "spirit being" into "imagination," "archetype," "inner figure," or "useful fiction." Any of those will get you through the book. For the record, the beings themselves don't mind what you call them.

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Below we briefly identify our mentors and collaborators at Feral Paradise University. For more substantial descriptions composed by the souls themselves, go to the end of this article.

• Skeleton Woman. Her many specialties include the art of regenerative and resurrectional dying. She has expertly mentored us in the use of the magickal formulas “I die daily” and "Dissolution is the secret of the Great Work”: practices that are instrumental in breaking down psychological fixations.

• Medusa. She’s the real priestess of the divine feminine mysteries—NOT the distorted and abused simulacrum foisted on the world by the ancient patriarchal Greeks. Forget everything you think you know about her as the ugly Gorgon who turns people to stone with her gaze and gets beheaded by Perseus. Nope to all that. She specializes in compassionate upheaval and creative destruction, motivated by love rather than vengeance.

• The resurrected and thoroughly modern permutations of liberator Harriet Tubman and poet Arthur Rimbaud. They are not static historical characters frozen in time, but evolving souls who have continued to grow and develop since their earthly deaths in 1913 and 1891.

• Durga Tagore and Shakti Guhathakurta, two Bangladeshi sorceresses who managed to alchemize their childhood traumas—kidnapped and forced to do enslaved work at a leather tannery!—into unsurpassed magickal expertise.

• Four brilliant talking animals: Miracle Hex the frog, Heart Song the fox, Shadow Dazzle the coyote, and Moon Omen the cormorant. They run the Field Station for Creature Intelligence and Untranslatable Joy. Their exploits and adventures abound in our four-book series, Love Stories for the Earth and our five-book collection, The Soul Flesh Chronicles.

• The World Riddle serves as the main campus for Feral Paradise University. She is a sentient island-sized ship that sails the planet’s seas, lakes, and rivers, gathering and giving refuge to members of critically endangered species. She is also a sanctuary preserving the world’s most beautiful futures and the host for the never-ending Sacred Global Jubilation Party.

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Here are two other participants in the creation of our books:

• The World Riddle (unitalicized) isn’t exactly the same as the island-ship that sails the seas, though it overlaps. In its broader identity, it’s the gaggle of essential mysteries at the heart of life on Earth. And yes, it’s sentient, too. No image of its beingness is accurate, but we like to imagine it as:

• Infinite Mirror-Lattice
• Planetary Nervous System
• Indra’s Net of Fractal Seeds
• Self-Weaving Loom
• Hanging Gardens of Shared Dreaming
• Endless Library Without Walls

• The Other Real World is the source and progenitor of many adventures described in this book: the realm we enter through dreams, visions, synchronicities, rituals, and reveries.

In a real, not just metaphorical, sense, it’s also a main informant and prime teacher, replete with spooky synchronicities that have had a disproportionately immense role in our education. It’s the complement to what we call The Ordinary Real World, which is the material realm where so much of waking life takes place.

Various humans have used many other names for it: the Dreamtime, the astral plane, the collective unconscious, the other side of the veil, the Mysterium, the underworld, the Duat of the Egyptians, Annwn of the Welsh bards, and Alam al-Mithal of the Sufi imaginalists. We like “The Other Real World” because it conveys the truth that what happens there is as dynamic, potent, and transformative as the events of the daytime.

For a more complete discussion of these various terms, go here.

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About the Co-Conspirators

ROB BREZSNY

I’m Rob Brezsny, the person responsible for “Free Will Astrology,” a column that has somehow appeared for many years in over 200 publications around the world. I say “somehow” because I still don’t fully understand how an introverted extrovert like me stumbled into a career of slipping cosmic riddles to millions of strangers. But I’m forever grateful and bewildered.

I also wrote the book Pronoia Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings. It’s a manifesto of crafty, cagey optimism. People sometimes treat it as if it were a new spiritual movement, which is flattering, confusing, and alarming. I promise I am not founding a church, unless you count the Guerrilla Temple of Paying Rapt Attention to the Gorgeous Mess of Life on Earth.

My creative life has always been a jumble-sale of forms: astrology, philosophy, novels, essays, poetry, performance art, and music. Before I became “Rob the Writer,” I was “Rob the Rockstar.” My band, World Entertainment War, was described by one critic as “a pagan revival meeting mixed with a dance therapy session and a cynical optimists’ pep rally and a tribal hoedown." That may be one of the most accurate descriptions of my whole aesthetic in any medium.

I still refer to myself as “Rockstar,” almost always with a wince and a grin. It’s a tender inside joke with myself. A San Francisco Bay Area DJ used to introduce me on-air as “the once and future rockstar, Rob Brezsny,” echoing the old Arthurian line about the once and future king. The nickname stuck—half blessing, half prank, wholly poignant. Alas, the chances are only 50-50 that I will ultimately return to some semblance of a music career, and the potential loss aches.

But the truth is that my writing is saturated with musicality. Most sentences have at least a suggestion of a vocal trill or guitar lick. Every book is a setlist that hopes to lift the roof off the world. “Rockstar” is less a boast than a vibrant ghost-light I carry with me.

As for my work as a whole, I’ve been called many sweet things by people whose opinions I respect far too much to fully trust. PopMatters.com once grouped me with cultural shamans like Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, and Ken Kesey. These names make me blush, but hell, what do I know? Maybe they’re partially right.

The novelist Tom Robbins once said, “I have seen the future of American literature, and its name is Rob Brezsny." I re-read that sentence when I need courage and then hide from it when I fear believing my own press.

Utne Reader magazine called me a “Culture Hero,” Rain Taxi said my writing “dances,” and Gnosis magazine editor Jay Kinney compared me to the improbable love-child of Jack Kerouac and Anaïs Nin.

I treasure those compliments, though I don’t take them as gospel. At best, they’re reminders that my decades-long experiments—mixing mystical comedy, soulful reflection, philosophical troublemaking, and irreverent reverence—have reached some of the people I most hoped it would.

By the way, I’ll never say, “My life and work would be NOTHING without my beloved querida River Rapunzel Magdalen Medusa Blavatsky.” That would be melodramatic hyperbole. But the truth is that I am a far better human and creator because she has been a key part of my life for so long. If you’d ever like to learn more about our early history, read our book The Televisionary Oracle.

So in conclusion, I show up in our books as a fellow pilgrim, stumbling toward wisdom with a guitar-shaped shadow and a heart full of perplexed gratitude. If anything in the books' pages sings to you, I’ll count it as a successful encore.

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RIVER RAPUNZEL BLAVATSKY

I’m River Rapunzel Blavatsky, though on any given day I might also answer to a dozen other mythic aliases I’ve picked up along the way. (Some people collect stamps and coins; I collect identities.)

I’m the chief gonzo sorceress and priestess of the Temple of the Rebel Grail and also an aspiring initiate of Feral Paradise University. The curriculums of both include dreamcraft, ecstatic epistemology, and learning to laugh fondly at one’s own mystique.

I’m the co-author—with my beloved LushBuddy, Rob “Rockstar” Brezsny—of ten mythopoetic memoirs and this book. I promise I don’t refer to him as “Rockstar” because he demands it. On the contrary, I use the nickname partly because it embarrasses him in such an endearing, Arthurian “once and future rockstar” way.

My official reputation paints me as a dangerously healing philosopher of embodied chaos magick, bridging ancient Goddess traditions, Western Hermetic craft, and a post-patriarchal activism that regards cagey tenderness as a tactical force. That description makes me sound more intimidating than I actually am. In practice, what I often do is try to love the world so intensely it starts remembering how to love itself back.

I’ve been called a practitioner of “Blissful Blessing Blasts,” which is a fancy way of saying that I rely on affection, ritual, dreamwork, and altered states to help mend what has been frayed—in people, in landscapes, and in the psyche of our reeling collective community

My early life in the 9,200-year-old mystery school that is currently known as the Temple of the Rebel Grail trained me in sacred paradox: pleasure and discipline, intuition and intellect, occultism and science. Eventually I broke one of the Temple’s more rigid vows by choosing partnership as a path of awakening. (Heretics make the best sorcerers; I say this with only mild self-interest.)

My work ripples more through my vast esoteric, underground, and dream-based congregation than through anything resembling mainstream fame. Seven doctoral dissertations have cited my teachings, which is an honor I meet with equal parts gratitude and amused disbelief. One scholar described me as “the anarchic midwife of a new sacred sensuality.” Another zine writer called me “half oracle, half healing troublemaker”

Artists and thinkers I respect have concocted outlandish yet possibly semi-accurate descriptions of me. One beloved crank compared me to Hildegard of Bingen mixed with Frida Kahlo, raised by Arthur Rimbaud and Harriet Tubman in the dreamworld.

I take this as a poetic compliment, though if you crossed paths with me in everyday life, you’d witness the other half of the paradox: the avatar who carries a 9,200-year-old lineage in her bones is also the woman cooking food at a soup kitchen, offering dream-interpretations on a park bench, or guiding a lost soul through a psychic metamorphosis outside a women's shelter.

My devotees regard me as the reincarnation of Mary Magdalene. Truth be told, though I fully claim that story, I need to periodically rebel against it. Who can bear to be goddessdamn iconic, right?

My work happens in temples and alleyways, wetlands and classrooms, festivals and hospitals. I’ve officiated lunar baptism retreats for CEOs and spent the next day listening to houseless mothers in Oakland tell me the real story of America.

Those who kindly exaggerate my contributions sometimes call me “the itinerant muse of the wild heart’s underground railroad.” There’s a soupçon of truth in that. But what I also understand is that healing is always reciprocal. Every time I help someone mend a wound, some piece of me is mended too.

A writer for Alchemy Today once claimed that I heal the visible world by working in the invisible—and also heal the invisible by sewing the visible back together. I appreciate the poetry of that line, and I’ve seen enough strange evidence to refrain from denying it.

The bigger truth is simple: I’m trying to make myself useful to the world I adore, using whatever tools the Goddess, the ancestors, the Dreamtime, and the gorgeous mess of my own life have handed me.

If anything in these pages helps you re-enchant your ordinary life, feel your own sacred weirdness, or trust one more degree of feral tenderness, then my work and my life feel well spent.

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Vimala Viatrix Blavatsky

I'm Vimala Viatrix Blavatsky, high priestess of the Temple of the Rebel Grail and one of the seven mothers who have raised and trained River Rapunzel Magdalen Medusa Blavatsky.

I was born in the 16th century, which makes me well over 400 years old. I understand this is the moment you decide whether I'm a liar, a metaphor, or a remarkably well-preserved eccentric. I won't try to talk you out of any of those verdicts.

I'll only mention that I've lived in England, Vietnam, Indonesia, Mongolia, Mali, Poland, Russia, Nunavut, and 29 other hotspots. I have the lush, intricate, frequently inconvenient stories to prove it.

In 1635, for instance, the religious-freedom rebel Anne Hutchinson trained me as a midwife in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. One April afternoon, between her children's games of leapfrog and nine men's morris, a golden ball of light bloomed above her kitchen table, and the voice of God offered us both eternity.

Anne took hers for her soul alone. I, being greedy and curious, took mine for soul and body together. I've never regretted it, though it does complicate the small talk.

Over the centuries I've been called matriarch, mentor, confidante, defuser of trouble, and patron saint of practical wisdom. One of my specialties is noticing what people are capable of before they notice it themselves.

My philosophy is too many-splendored to compress, but a few of its clauses go like this: Love and intelligence play together beautifully. Generosity does its best work when paired with discernment. And family performs its finest insurrectionary service when it grows liberators.

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Zadi Blavatsky-Brezsny

I'm Zadi Blavatsky-Brezsny, and yes, my actual parents are the astrologer who slips cosmic riddles to hordes of strangers and the gonzo sorceress who collects identities the way other people collect playlists. I was talking to Goddesses before I could do long division, attending rituals before I knew what a ritual was, and being told by both parents, always, that I should never take any of it on faith.

People assume that being raised by two mystical weirdos made me a true believer. The opposite is closer to the mark. My parents are the most reverent people I know, and also the most allergic to spiritual nonsense, as embodied in the gurus who hoard power and the teachers who shrink their students. Momzer and Dadzer taught me both halves at once: that the sacred is real and worth devoting a life to, and that most of what gets sold under its name is authoritarianism in a prettier outfit.

Discernment is a cornerstone of the family religion. Awe is another. So I'm fluent in both. I can feel the velvet wham of the Milky Way pouring into my skull under a sky with no light pollution, get my soul rearranged by a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan song, and lose two hours to making art while my hands know things my brain doesn't. And I can still side-eye anything that smells like a belief contract. My parents call the source of all that the Shiny Sublime Divine Playtime Designer. I mostly just call it the thing I can't stop noticing and adoring.

I show up in these pages as the resident youngblood, trying to practice what the poet Ada Limón calls the religion of noticing things, the only church I'd ever willingly join. If anything here helps you crave the sacred without checking your brain at the door, then I've done my job.

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FERAL PARADISE UNIVERSITY

by Skeleton Woman and Medusa

We are Skeleton Woman and Medusa, founders and long-tenured faculty members of Feral Paradise University—if “tenured” still means anything in a school that’s older than agriculture.

We speak here on behalf of our ever-morphing sanctuary of unruly wisdom and ecstatic scholarship. It’s part mystery school, part think tank, and part laboratory of the impossible.

In one version of our mythic story, Feral Paradise University was born 11,700 years ago. We coalesced in the shuddering aftermath of Meltwater Pulse 1B, right at the end of the Younger Dryas period, when ice sheets wept themselves into oceans and whole species teetered on extinction’s ledge.

From the beginning, FPU was a refuge for endangered species of all kinds: flora, fauna, and human souls seeking transformation. But equally crucial to our calling, we were then and have always been the host for the Sacred Jubilation Global Party, a never-ending celebration of our planet’s miraculous experiment.

We always go both ways in every imaginable sense: the synergized overlap of the waking and dreaming worlds, the hot fertile paradox of life and death, the ongoing chaos blend of grief and joy.

Our headquarters is the World Riddle, an almost unimaginably huge sentient island-ship who is forever sailing the 71 percent of the Earth’s surface made of water. She has her own opinions about where we anchor, whom we rescue, and which ecosystems need tending. She is older than many gods and a thousand times as funny.

Our founding principle is simply radical: Wisdom must remain playful or perish. Knowledge without wonder rots into dogma. We enforce this law with the sternest possible tools—laughter, paradox, ecstatic discipline, and a sly disregard for anything pretending to be absolute.

Eleven luminaries (including World Riddle) anchor the part of our faculty that River and Rockstar know about, though “anchor” is a generous word for beings who routinely dissolve into dreams, reincarnate for office hours, or shape-shift during staff meetings.

There is us, Skeleton Woman (Keeper of Regenerative Dying) and Medusa (Priestess of the Wild Divine Feminine Mysteries), along with the resurrected spirits of liberationist Harriet Tubman and poet Arthur Rimbaud. Those two co-teach the seminar Diehard Liberation Through Impossible Poetics.

Then come Durga Tagore and Shakti Guhathakurta, Bangladeshi sorcerers who transmuted childhood trauma into a sovereign magical expertise unmatched in this or any other realm.

And penultimately, there are our four animal professors, maestros of Creature Intelligence and Untranslatable Joy: Miracle Hex the marsh frog, expert in amphibious consciousness; Heart Song the red fox, theologian of tenderness and cunning; Shadow Dazzle the California coyote, patron saint of necessary trouble; and Moon Omen the cormorant, the most successful shock redeemer we know.

Last but not least: the World Riddle herself, the sentient and impossibly huge island-ship, Roaming Embassy of Multispecies Diplomacy, Protector of the Planet’s Wounded Beauty, and Overseer of the Long Work of Repair and Re-enchantment.

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Our coursework ranges widely. Among our most popular classes these days are Dream Decolonization, Eco-Erotics, Fungal Intimacy Theory, Deranged Healing Medicine, Animal-Led Waking Dream Lucidity, Rebel Enlightenment Sanctuaries, and Sacred Toys.

A core theme running through them all: Enlightenment without embodiment is just another exile, and activism without enchantment is a malnourished wannabe.

We train our students to move through multiple realities at once, because the Sixth Mass Extinction, currently underway, demands nothing less than multidimensional intelligence.

Our spiritual lineages predate even Çatalhöyük and Göbekli Tepe, and our curriculum gathers wisdom from Hermetic Qabalah, Tantra, Sufism, Inuit shamanism, Indigenous cosmologies, Jungian dreamwork, and Vajrayana.

But we hoard no dogma. Our sacred allergy is fundamentalism in all its forms. Everything must breathe or be buried.

One of our unofficial mottoes, which you will rarely see written but always feel, is this: The world is holy, its wounds are holy, and our work is to make justice and beauty from both.

As mythologist Zephyra Quine once wrote (before her monograph Dreaming the Curriculum was banned for excessive accuracy), “To call it a university is convenient shorthand, but Feral Paradise University behaves more like weather: it gathers, breaks, and reforms wherever the conditions of wonder are right.”

And as Rice University’s mysticism scholar Marisol Starling Rhee observed, “FPU’s pedagogy is feral not because it rejects order, but because it honors a higher one: the ecological intelligence of mystery and paradox. Its students learn that breakdown is the laboratory of breakthrough, and that the sacred is often most legible in the cracks.”

Even esoteric journalist Luna Seraphina Maravilla fell into our gravity when she tried to map us: “Every attempt to capture the essence of Feral Paradise University dissolves the moment it’s drawn. Its coordinates shift with each dreamer’s need. It’s the quantum campus of the soul: unlocatable, participatory, and uncannily personal.”

We, Skeleton Woman and Medusa, confirm all of this and deny none of it. We invite you to find your way here—with your attention, your longing, your dreams and imagination, and the regenerative trouble you were born to cause.