What Is A Profane Song?

A profane thing is not only a blasphemous thing. It is not only a vulgar thing, a dirty thing, a joke told too loudly beside the altar, a prayer with mud on its boots.

But it is not less than those things either.

A profane thing is also a thing left outside the temple doors. A thing before the sacred enclosure. A thing unblessed by authority, unwashed by permission, still humming with its own forbidden holiness.

That is where I have spent most of my religious life: not faithless, not obedient, not entirely at home. Not willing to pretend the divine speaks only through approved architecture. Not especially interested in becoming respectable at the cost of becoming numb.

Canticum Profanum means “profane song.” I chose the name because I wanted a capacious room for the whole unruly word: devotion that does not kneel on command, scholarship that has not had all the blood drained out of it, myth without false certainty, laughter with wine on its breath, holiness with dirt under its nails.

Also because it sounds better than “Pagan Blog.”

The Claim

I do not want to rescue profane from its vulgar meanings. I want those too.

I want the joke. I want the body. I want the dirty song, the drinking song, the love poem, the heresy muttered under someone’s breath, the scholar with ink on their fingers and appetite in their throat. I want the thing that makes respectable people clear their throats and look toward the bishop.

But I also want the older sense, because it gives the word its architecture. Profanus in Latin means before the temple: pro, in front of, and fanum, the sacred enclosure. The profane is what stands outside consecrated space.¹

Not necessarily because it has no relation to the sacred. Sometimes it was refused entrance. Sometimes it would not kneel. Sometimes it came carrying another god’s name in its mouth. Maybe it was simply too alive, too funny, too sexual, too wounded, too inconvenient, or too honest to survive inside a polished sanctuary without being declawed.

That is the part that interests me.

Once you are outside the temple, the question changes. It is no longer only whether a thing is sacred. It is who gets to say so. Who laid the stones? Who keeps the key? Who decides that one body may be washed while another is called unclean? Who hears the same longing from two mouths and names one prayer, the other obscenity?

And if the person outside happens to be clutching a manuscript of drinking songs and love poetry because they are a wandering scholar who has been asked to leave several monasteries and has opinions, that is not hypothetical.

It describes the goliards: a loose and gloriously disreputable crowd of educated wanderers who drifted through medieval Europe from roughly the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. They were not peasants. They were clerks and scholars, men who had Latin, who knew their scripture, who were often lesser members of the clergy. They also had very strong feelings about wine, desire, spring, Fortune’s wheel, and the comedy of ecclesiastical pretension. They saw no reason to keep those feelings out of their poetry.²

They were, in other words, people who had been inside the temple, or close enough to smell the incense, and had chosen to do some of their best work in the courtyard.

The most famous collection of their songs is the Carmina Burana, compiled in the thirteenth century in Bavaria and rediscovered in the nineteenth. Carl Orff set selections of it to music in 1937 with such apocalyptic grandeur that most people now associate it with movie trailers and the end of the world.³⁴ O Fortuna (take a moment to go look it up, you’ll probably recognize it instantly) is a goliardic song about how Fortune is a wheel that will ruin you, rendered as though the cosmos itself is announcing your doom at full orchestral volume.⁴

The monks would likely have found this extremely funny. They had a sense of humour about fate, because fate had a sense of humour about them.

The question of who gets through the temple doors, and what must be washed off them first, is never merely theological. It is power pretending to be purity. The goliards answered from the courtyard, singing with wine on their breath, Latin in their mouths, and just enough obscenity to make the walls listen.

I find this instructive.

The Threshold as Sacred Problem

Again and again, religion produces the same inconvenient person: someone too marked by the sacred to leave, and too troublesome to be welcomed without conditions. The exile still tending the fire. The heretic still praying. The skeptic still dreaming about gods they do not entirely trust. (The goliard, meanwhile, is in the corner writing a technically brilliant Latin ode about being hungover.)

I have been that figure, in one form or another, most of my religious life.

I am a queer man, which puts me outside the doors of most inherited temples before I say a single word about theology. I am a practitioner whose tradition the academy does not take seriously and whose scholarship makes some fellow practitioners nervous. I find certainty suspicious. I find dismissal lazy. I hold rituals to be real and to be constructed simultaneously, and I refuse to surrender either half of that sentence.

The threshold, I have come to believe, is a strategic position. And from that position you can see things that the interior cannot see: the shape of the building from outside, the faces of the others who are standing in the cold, the stars above that the ceiling of the sanctuary has been blocking.

What Canticum Profanum Is

This project is not reconstructionism, though reconstruction is one of my tools. It is not aesthetic witch-fluff, though I take beauty seriously enough as a theological category that I refuse to spell it esthetic.

It is not a place for pagan apologetics. It is not the smug debunkery some people call religious skepticism, where believers are treated as children who have not yet met empiricism. It is not therapy in antique robes, though I will not pretend this work leaves me untouched.

This is a space where I bring myth, history, ritual, body, doubt, longing, and the occasional flash of genuine ecstasy to the same table and let them collide. I do not promise they will behave.

I will write about Hekate and mean it. I will also ask hard questions about what it means to mean it. I will read the comparative mythology, the anthropology, and the papyri. I will write liturgy anyway. Scholarship and devotion are not enemies, unless someone has made a very dreary little religion out of choosing only one.

I will be funny sometimes (or at least, I will think I’m being funny), because the sacred has always known how to laugh and I distrust traditions that have forgotten this. The goliards knew it. Loki, who is a personal acquaintance, definitely knows it, and will remind you at the worst possible moment.

I will be wounded sometimes, because you cannot write honestly about gods and thresholds and exile without touching the wounds that brought you to the threshold in the first place.

The Method

I work with scholarship when I can: primary sources where they are available to me, secondary sources when they are useful, and footnotes, because who doesn’t love a tangential sidequest? I take folklore and oral tradition seriously, not because every tale preserves a clean historical fact, but because stories remember pressures, hungers, fears, jokes, and old arrangements of meaning.

I also use personal experience, because pretending experience is not data has always struck me as a very professional way of lying. Ritual belongs here too. So does imagination, provided it knows what hat it is wearing. When I enter a mythic frame, I am not claiming to have found “what really happened.” I am asking what the frame reveals when it is allowed to speak for itself.

And then there is mythic speculation: careful, playful wandering into territory a tradition has not explicitly mapped. I try not to confuse that with history. Scholarship is not devotion. Personal gnosis is not universal truth. A beautiful idea is not automatically an ancient one. When I move between registers, I will try to say so. This is sometimes called intellectual honesty and sometimes called covering your ass. Both are accurate.

The Invitation

I am not asking you to believe what I believe.

I am not building a tradition you should join, a framework you should adopt, or a cosmology that requires your assent. I am not handing out membership cards. There are no tote bags.

I am standing at the margin, and I am singing, and I am asking whether any of this reaches you. Whether the gods feel real when you read the old words. Whether myth moves something in you that cleaner categories cannot reach. Whether you have spent time outside the temple yourself, and whether it has taught you something.

Canticum Profanum is for the people who could not or would not go inside, and who kept singing anyway. The goliards would recognize you. So would the crossroads goddess who has been standing outside since before the temple was built, holding her torches, absolutely unbothered by zoning regulations.

Come stand at the threshold. The acoustics out here are surprisingly good.