My name appears on the cover of the book Enlightenment for Rebels: Celebrating Our Wild and Sacred Earthly Selves in Jubilant Defiance of Disembodied Spirituality.

But the book isn't mine alone. It’s a riotous lovechild born of numerous collaborators and woven from ecstatic curiosity 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.

River is the wild intelligence that keeps proving to me that love is a research method. She is equal parts lyrical oracle and outlaw scientist, testing every hypothesis against the data of delight. She speaks fluent paradox and exults in plying the arts of sacred insurrection.

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.

Vimala has long been the chief guardian of River’s mystery school, The Temple of the Rebel Grail. (Its nature and history are described at length in our book The Televisionary Oracle.) She claims to be over 400 years old, and I have never found a single detail to disprove it. Teenager Zadi is almost absurdly precocious and seems to harbor more beginner’s-mind wisdom than anyone I’ve ever known.

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Feral Paradise University is a key player in Enlightenment for Rebels. River and I have studied with the brilliant faculty there for years. It’s our inexhaustible source of subversive teaching and rapturous scholarship.

Many, though not all, of our classes and lessons unfold in dreams and altered states. We can barely contain our excited greed to wrangle with the friendly shocks it will offer us next. Wisdom must remain playful or perish, FPU insists. Knowledge divorced from wonder curdles into dogma.

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.

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 spirit upgrades of Arthur Rimbaud and Harriet Tubman, 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.

So we won’t try to 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,” “muse,” “inner guide,” 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, go to “About the Co-Conspirators” at the end of the book.

• 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 Goddess 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 of 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. Their exploits abound in our two-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 Enlightenment for Rebels:

• The World Riddle (unitalicized) isn’t 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 suchness is accurate, but we 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. It’s 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 ‘Ālam al-Mithāl 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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PS: Any of the texts in our book that have no specific attribution were composed by Rob and River. If the byline says, “All of Us,” it means all of us co-conspirators pitched in.