For as long as I can remember I have been drawn to nature and mythic stories. I’ve had a sense of beings, who I now know to be Gods and spirits, at the edges of known reality calling from beyond an unknown horizon.

I caught my first glimpses of the spirits of the Otherworld during ecstatic states induced by alcohol and drugs and dancing in my late teens and early twenties. I had initiatory experiences but without a context thought I was going mad.

I tried interpreting them through my philosophy studies without success. Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings on Dionysian ecstasy giving birth to Apollonian visions in The Birth of Tragedy felt familiar only I wasn’t seeing Dionysus or satyrs. This made me start questioning whether, like the Greeks and Romans, we have our own Gods and Goddesses here in Britain.

This led me through Paganism and Druidry to Brythonic Polytheism. I found out the name of my local river Goddess, Belisama, of other Deities associated with northern Britain such as Brigantia, Maponos, Matrona and Nodens.

Yet it wasn’t until I met my patron God, Vindos / Gwyn ap Nudd, a King of Annwn / Faery, that I realised Who had been behind my initiatory visions. In true Lord of the Hunt style He swept me off my feet and I dedicated myself to Him.

My life now centres on my devotional relationship with Gwyn. His name is the first thing I speak in my morning prayers and the last thing I speak in my evening prayers. He’s my patron, my inspiration, my teacher, and my truth. He provides me with meaning and wonder in a world that has lost its purpose.

I also honour Gwyn’s consort, Creiddylad, and His mother and father, Anrhuna and Nodens, along with the spirits of my local landscape. But my heart and soul belong to Gwyn. I couldn’t live without Him. Hail Gwyn!

I've been interested in Mythology since I was a kid. I remember learning about the Greek Myths, such as the Trojan War, and the twelve labours of Herakles in primary school and being absolutely enthralled by those myths. Then we learnt about Egyptian gods and mythology, which is around the time my fascination with death deities and the like began (Anubis was always my favourite of the Egyptian deities).

Fast forward several years later to when I was about 18 or 19. A friend introduced me to Wicca, which is around the time my journey into paganism began. I had previously had a minor interest in druidry a few years before that, but never took it any further than reading smalls bits here and there. A couple of years later, I found myself involved with the Latter-Day Saints, having become distant from Wicca and paganism in general. My time with the LDS church lasted less than a year. I couldn't quite accept the theology and some other things led me to eventually leaving.

After this, I became a Heathen, and very strictly reconstructionist. The idea of even doing any form of syncretism was unimaginable to me. It was a stance I maintained for over a decade as I tried to maintain an “authentic” Heathen practice. In 2019, life threw me a proverbial curveball, with a series of undesirable and unpleasant events, including but not limited to being suspended from work and finding out I had testicular cancer. By 2021, I was still suspended from work. A combination of the Covid pandemic, chemotherapy, and the doctors refusing to even deem me as being fit for work until October of that year meant my suspension was prolonged. Shortly after this, I began hearing a call of sorts towards Brittonic Polytheism. I'd never been one to believe that deities would reach out to people, especially not someone like me, so for a few weeks, I had tried ignoring that call, just assuming that I had somehow hyperfixated on Brigantia's name, despite not reading anything about her since 2016 when I was writing my second book, She Set The Sky Ablaze.

I ended up talking to some pagan and witchy friends because this was something out of my area of understanding. Once I allowed myself to accept that it was Brigantia calling out to me, in her own way, I began looking into Brittonic Polytheism. Eventually, that led me to AlbionAndBeyond.com and the BritPol server Banssus Brittonon, and in turn, to developing a practice consisting of Brittonic Polytheism and Heathenry.

Ever since I was a child I was fascinated by the other-than-human world, by magic and fantasy, and of course by religion. Like many others in the English speaking world I grew up Christian, but I could never shake the desire to explore other religions and ways of being as the idea of there being only one God in a world so big and old never stuck with me.

Over the years I explored various religions, mostly informally but some academically through university, including Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Islam and the various pagan/polytheist faiths, which were my first official forays into non-Christian religious practice. For a time I identified variously as a Druid, following OBOD druidry, a Heathen, at first as a Norse Heathen and then an Anglo-Saxon Heathen, and then as a Gaulish polytheist. It was through my education and the development of my practice through the organisation Touta Galation that I found the core of my practice, and which would be a very significant stepping stone to growing a Brittonic practice and finally starting this website.

Other than Gaulish polytheism and other religions, the work of Tolkien and the Arthurian mythos captured my attention in a way that other stories couldn’t, and I developed a desire to understand the strands of inspiration which came together to weave these stories. And whilst Tolkien and Arthurian mythos has an undeniable Christian influence, they also draw upon the Brittonic and Germanic histories of Britain and surrounding regions. British Celtic archaeology, religion, language and culture shares many similarities and overlaps with continental Celtic groups, especially the Gauls, and my Gaulish practice helped to inform my Brittonic one.

Today I draw little to no distinctions between my various unified religious practices, and treat my worship of Brittonic Gods, such as Nodens, no differently to my worship and veneration of Gaulish, Roman, Arthurian or other figures. This largely came about through research into religion in Roman Britain, where people from all over the empire would worship British Gods in Britain, but also Syrian, German, Egyptian, Roman or any other Gods, regardless of where they as worshippers hailed from. The plurality of religion in Roman Britain is so rich that it still today inspires me and many others, and that is how I came to be a Brittonic polytheist.