Canticum Profanum

There is a long tradition of taking back the sacred.

Hymns have always moved across borders: borrowed melodies carrying new theology, old forms pressed into service for new devotions. Borrowed forms rarely remain obedient. The profane is often only the sacred outside the approved enclosure. Beneath the liturgical tradition lie older strata: seasonal rites, household charms, temple hymns, epic fragments, local gods, borrowed gods, half-remembered gods. The sacred has always been layered, borrowed, contested, and remade.

Canticum Profanum collects mythopoetic work emerging from a living practice: ritual texts and devotional songs, myths retold from the inside, poetry willing to meet the old gods face to face and argue when necessary. This is the art of thinking and writing through myth rather than merely about it. My work here draws on Western liturgy, literary tradition, esoteric practice, Eastern philosophy, and the mythic sources beneath them -- not as parody or costume, but as living inheritances that reward serious attention.

Scholarship and devotion are not opposites here. The critical mind is not asked to wait outside. These traditions reward serious attention, the kind too often reserved for canonized books, sanctioned rites, and respectable dead men. They have history, internal logic, genuine complexity, and the capacity to shape the people who engage them.

The pieces here are meant to be used. Read them aloud if the mood takes you. Adapt them if they fit your hand differently than they fit mine. A text offered to no one is just words on a page, and words on a page are only the beginning.

The world was made of words. It can be remade.

The works collected here as Cantcium Profanum are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. Use them, adapt them, carry them forward: just bring my name along, and leave the door open for whoever comes after you.