Through the Fires
Lou Percus (Copper Cauldron, 2018)
Through the Fires is an interesting artifact of its time and what should be an important early work in the tiny canon of gay paganism. Kudos for Copper Cauldron for making it available at last. As Raven Grimassi notes in his introduction, Percus was deeply ‘passionate’ for what he preferred to term the Old Religion. He is also dedicated to expressing the unique place gay people have within that practice. He weaves LGBTQ+ folks into the creation story of his mythos.
Percus presents a variation of the Old Religion he terms the Wizard’s Way. It is the bones of a complete system that one could take work. It is roughly based on Pictish, early Celtic deities and mythology. It is however also uniquely Percus’s. One can tell that he draws from his own personal gnosis more so than he does extent books of his day. This makes the work all that much more powerful and the system alive in his words.
The work is also an artifact of its time. One does get the sense that Percus was coming from a time when most people were still forced to hide their true selves from the rest of the world. There are also vestiges of heteronormative binarism, though he goes a longer way than many of his contemporaries in dealing with the hetersexism of ‘witchcraft’. Copper Cauldron chose to publish the work as it was found including these period artifacts and for this they should be commended.