(The following guest essay by Tony Wolf has been excerpted and modified from the Introduction to the 2025 interview anthology Poetic Faiths: New Religions and Rituals as Living Works of Art, edited by Tony Wolf and published by Sky Meadow Press. For a brief bio of Wolf, see bottom of page.)
It is sad – one half of the world does not believe in God and the other half does not believe in me. — Oscar Wilde
On the 7th of July, 1896, the famed Anglo-Irish poet, playwright and bon vivant Oscar Wilde was incarcerated in Reading Prison on a charge of “gross indecency” – what the more enlightened would now refer to simply as “gay sex”. He would remain there for a full two years, sentenced to hard labor in the form of trudging upon a wooden treadmill in between long periods of confinement in his dark cell; a devastating fall from grace for a man whose elegant wit and refined sensibilities had once made him the toast of London.
Initially denied either books or writing implements, Wilde was eventually allowed to write – one page at a time – and so, between January and March of the year 1897, he produced the remarkable document known as De Profundis (“From the Depths”). Addressed as a letter to Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, De Profundis offered firstly a recap of Wilde’s relationship with Douglas, and secondly Wilde’s identification of (and with) Jesus Christ as a romantic, rebellious artist-figure whose profound compassion was inspired by profound suffering.
The Roman Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone – for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do. — Wilde
Oscar Wilde’s intellectual stance on religion was complex. Although he would famously fulfill his long-term pledge to die as a Roman Catholic – being received into the Church literally upon his death-bed – he had decidedly not lived as one, and there are passages within De Profundis that seem to advocate for a deeply unorthodox praxis of agnostic ritual. He wrote:
Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at.
My gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also.
Wilde, thus, eschewed faith in the supernatural for the sensual experiences of the material world, in all its glory and with all its dangers. His spiritual naturalism might be compared with that of the Epicureans of ancient Greece and was compared, by Wilde’s contemporary and philosophical nemesis, the writer and cultural critic G.K. Chesterton, to the bittersweet, proto-Existentialist poetry of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The Rubaiyat similarly evinced a deep skepticism regarding the “supernatural” – especially the notion of a literal afterlife – and saw Earthly pleasure as the highest good. Chesterton was, not incidentally, perturbed by the popular cult surrounding the Rubaiyat, referring to it darkly as “the carpe diem religion”.
Wilde then mused that:
When I think about religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine.
Writing within the bowels of Reading Prison, Wilde understandably imagined his “Confraternity of the Faithless” as an austere order, whose rituals would be marked by absences. He continued, however:
Every thing to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. It has sown its martyrs, it should reap its saints, and praise God daily for having hidden Himself from man.
But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own creating. Only that is spiritual which makes its own form.
If I may not find its secret within myself, I shall never find it: if I have not got it already, it will never come to me.
In these few lines Wilde envisions a “Poetic Faith”, whose communion is via artistic creation and whose godhead lies within, standing upon the bedrock of rationality while still partaking – almost wholeheartedly – in a kind of soulful, Romantic impulse via the ritual suspension of disbelief.
Here’s a thought experiment: It’s the 27th of December, 1904 – some four years after the death of Oscar Wilde, whose health as well as reputation had been broken at Reading Gaol.
You’re at the Duke of York’s Theatre in London, seated in the audience of the inaugural performance of Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, by Wilde’s near-contemporary J.M. Barrie. About half-way through the play, Peter Pan’s fairy companion Tinker Bell prevents him from accidentally drinking poison by swallowing the fatal elixir herself. Urgently, Peter breaks the fourth wall, turning to the audience and begging all children who believe in fairies to clap their hands, as it is only through this demonstration of faith that Tinker Bell’s life might be saved.
Do you applaud?
If so, why?
If you’d suspend disbelief in this scenario and join in the ritual of applause, then perhaps you have some sympathy with Wilde’s Romantic notion of the Confraternity of the Faithless.
Poetic Faith and the Counterculture
The English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the term “poetic faith” in 1817, during a collaboration with William Wordsworth. Coleridge recalled:
(…) it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.
This suspension of disbelief isn’t an esoteric skill; in fact, we all gain it as children, when we learn to imaginatively and emotionally enter into the spirit of a story, a poem, a song. This trick of perspective lies in calibrating the literal with the metaphorical. Applying Wilde’s insight to Coleridge’s phrase transforms the literary device of poetic faith into the life-stance of Poetic Faith; embodying soulful practice through ritual participation in mythopoetic art, it is a way of taking as profound that which may not be taken literally.
To understand how these mythopoetic rituals can be deeply meaningful to participants who categorically do not believe in gods, magic, the power of prayer, etc., it’s useful to look at ritual itself as a narrative art-form – closely comparable to storytelling or music. One suspends disbelief and enters a state of poetic faith for the duration of the narrative. Because these rites represent values that the participant genuinely does take very seriously, the rituals can be taken seriously as affirmations of those values.
Many people are moved by the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty, for example, while fully understanding that “Lady Liberty” is an imaginary personification of freedom – a value that they genuinely do hold deeply, as core to their sense of being and value in the world.
There have been many instances of this Poetic Faith throughout history, some before and more after Oscar Wilde; in the interests of brevity, I shall only mention here the Cult of Reason, founded as an explicitly Humanist religion in the chaotic aftermath of the French Revolution, and the ritual pageantry of the Kibbo Kift Kindred, founded by John Hargreaves as a progressive, quasi-mystical alternative to the Scouting movement in the years following the First World War.
During the 1960s generational rebellion against the repressive, conformist mainstream mores of the previous decade fueled a renaissance of earnest Poetic Faith via the burgeoning counterculture movement, as a significant number of young people realized that, for example, J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasies held greater spiritual resonance than did the organized, institutional religions of their collective upbringing. The first instances of sincere Poetic Faith at a generational scale occurred when Utopian counterculturalists – mostly on America’s west coast – felt empowered to play with the very notion of spirituality, up to and including the invention of new religions.
Throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s – and allied, to varying degrees and in varying ways, with kindred movements such as the Renaissance Faire circuit and science fiction and fantasy fandom – neo-Paganism flourished into a kaleidoscopic subcultural landscape of invented religions, influenced by a heady brew of history, imagination and psychedelics and by social movements including feminism and environmentalism.
The matter of neo-Pagan belief in the supernatural – in literal gods and goddesses, magic, etc. – has always been more nuanced than many critics have realized. Entire bodies of Pagan practice began as immersive theatrical experiments, or even as meta-jokes, gradually evolving into something more as their practitioners realized the power of suspending their disbelief and behaving as if.
Here’s Margot Adler’s commentary on that subject from the first (1979) edition of her excellent survey, Drawing Down the Moon:
In the next chapters you will encounter priests and priestesses who say that they are philosophical agnostics and that this has never inhibited their participation in or leadership of NeoPagan and Craft groups. Others will tell you that the gods and goddesses are “ethereal beings.” Still others have called them symbols, powers, archetypes, or “something deep and strong within the self to be contacted,” or even “something akin to the force of poetry and art.”
Robert Ellwood, whose book Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America (1973) offered one of the earliest and most insightful “outsider” perspectives on the neo-Pagan phenomenon. In his chapter “The Edenic Bower”, Elwood wrote that:
What neo-pagans seek is a new cosmic religion oriented to the tides not of history but of nature – the four directions, the seasons, the path of the sun – and of the timeless configurations of the psyche. (…) they suggest a romantic, living, and changing world continuous with human fancy and feeling instead of one dead and subdued; a religion of atmosphere instead of faith; a cosmos, in a word, constructed by the imagination (considered the surest guide to what is in the heart of things) instead of by the analytic intellect or bare faith, which seeks only the outer husks.
When respected and indeed deliberately heightened, imagination is a faculty not only of fantasy but also of tremendous power. It can make the emotions feel the gods within things, and the eyes see them, and divine forces go out into the world to sow love, or prophecy, or fear. Evocation, calling up the gods from within the self, is true magic.
These neopagan groups have in common a particular emphasis on the second of the three forms of religious expression, the “practical” – rite, gesture, ceremonial act. It is through corporate “work” that the magical cosmos is evoked; it is “made” by ritual actions that demarcate and celebrate it, and by acts done as if it were present.
Thus, Elwood and Adler demonstrate that the “deep play” of Poetic Faith – easily taken to be a metamodern, 21st century concept and approach – was not only present but quite widespread in the avant-garde neo-Pagan scene during the 1970s.
The Oscar Wilde Temple
In September of 2017 – some 117 years after Oscar Wilde’s death, 87 years after Tolkien wrote Mythopoeia and 56 years after the founding of the neoPagan Church of All Worlds – the artists David McDermott and Peter McGough opened their joint immersive art project/secular ritual space, The Oscar Wilde Temple, in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Inspired by the Aesthetic Movement of the late 19th century and subverting traditional Catholic iconography, the Temple evokes a kind of alternative reality in which Wilde’s suffering has consecrated him as a martyr/deity within a hypothetical queer religion. It invites visitors to imaginatively participate in a “faith” that might have been founded by Wilde himself, or perhaps by his friends and admirers, after his release from prison in 1897.
In 2016, Peter McGough described the project as:
(…) a temple to our god and martyr, Oscar Wilde, a place where unions of love can be celebrated without Christianity—or really, any fucking religion—frowning down upon anyone.
(…) I was mocked and beaten for who I was and who I wanted to be—tripped, spit on, called a faggot—since I was seven years old. So fuck everyone—if fucking Scientologists can have their tax-exempt religion, I can certainly have Oscar Wilde be the savior for all queers.
The images of the sunflower (championed by Wilde as an emblem of the Aesthetic Movement) and the green carnation (representing Wilde’s notion of “nature imitating art”) are featured throughout the Temple, likewise the cipher C.3.3., which had been Wilde’s cell number at Reading Prison and was the pseudonym under which he later published The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Much as he had anticipated in De Profundis, the symbols of the “Wilde religion” are of his own creation.
Although “immersive environments” are currently trending in the art world, the Oscar Wilde Temple is highly unusual in that it is intended as a venue for formal, secular ceremonies as well as an aesthetic experience. The space may be privately used for Queer marriages, blessings, transgender re-naming ceremonies and commemorative rituals, as well as for public lectures and book readings. Co-creator David McDermott had long expressed the wish to create a “new religion” for queer folk who had traditionally been shunned and worse by orthodox, mainstream faiths, and the Oscar Wilde Temple represents a case study of the premise “if you build it, they will come”.
This melding of art, play and ritual within a nontheistic or quasitheistic environment raises intriguing questions about the nature and potentials of contemporary secular spirituality. The aesthetics and facilities of the Oscar Wilde Temple evoke an as-if sense of religion without imposing any supernatural doctrine; as with John Hargrave’s ritualism within the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, any deeper symbolic meanings are for the viewer/participant to decide for themselves. Through imaginal time travel, the artists have created a liminal, secular place – somehow simultaneously timeless and transient – serving most of the traditional functions of a “sacred space”.
Thus, the Oscar Wilde Temple is a potent and provocative exercise in artistic recontextualization. Among the questions it provokes; how else might the time-honored artistic and ritual “technologies” of religion be utilized or transformed by new generations of creators?
This is the kind of ritualized, anti-authoritarian, naturalistic and creative Poetic Faith that I practice and that I’m interested in encouraging.
Poetic Faith in the Spiritual Naturalist Milieu
There is a school of modern skepticism that delights in (or at least satisfies itself with) simply pointing out the folly of superstition. There are also entire movements composed of secular Houdinis who, having escaped the confines of authoritarian, supernaturalist religions, devote themselves to exposing and defying that dogma. Having attained the summit of disbelief, that becomes their hill to die upon.
In their zeal, though, they are often inclined to throw the metaphorical baby out with the metaphysical bathwater. By viewing with suspicion, if not outright scorn, everything that even looks like religion, they risk cutting themselves off from Wilde’s “colour element of thought and imagination”. At one level that kind of skeptical, secular Humanism is very easy, rational and natural, but at another it’s bland to the point of irrelevance and invisibility – perhaps most especially in cultures that have, in fact, become ever more increasingly secularized over the past sixty years. It could be argued that this means “mission accomplished, well done everyone, take a bow”, but I think that, in practice, it leaves some serious gaps which are far too easily filled by political cultism, shallow corporate consumerism, descents into identarian narcissism and nihilism.
The original proponents of Enlightenment thinking believed that the place of supernatural religions should (and would) be taken by exposure to the wonders of democratized art, literature, philosophy and nature. And that holds true, for a small minority. Most people, though – and I refer to the gigantic majority of human beings – aren’t so taken with that approach. It doesn’t scratch their spiritual itch, or the deeper meanings and connections aren’t made explicit enough, or whatever the case may be.
It’s safe to say that the majority of that group simply want to be told what to believe and are satisfied with the kind of authoritarian faith promoted by most traditional religious institutions. A sizable minority, though, opt instead for a catch-all, “spiritual-but-not-religious” DIY eclecticism that de facto embraces all kinds of supernatural beliefs. Perhaps they look at Humanism and think “yes, that’s all very sensible”, but they want something more than that – something that stirs their blood, something that feels mysterious and (literally) awesome, that offers a sense of soulful communion and heartfelt meaning; something akin, in fact, to a religion. Jamie Wheal, the author of Recapture the Rapture; Rethinking God, Sex and Death in a World That’s Lost its Mind (2021), refers to the contemporary Confraternities of the Faithless that form around these new sensibilities as “ethical cults”.
Humanists and rock-ribbed skeptics can participate in these Wildean Poetic Faiths with clear heads and consciences because the positive benefits of imaginative and emotional immersion in artistic narrative are learned and understood from early childhood. Just as we can accrue real benefits from immersion in a great novel, piece of music or a movie, we can also gain real wisdom, insight, catharsis and such from the ritual exercise of Poetic Faith.
I have been developing my own experimental, sub rosa Poetic Faith since the late 1980s, and I’ve paid attention to manifestations in this rarefied sphere, as and when I’ve been lucky enough to come across them. On a long-ago visit to London I found a set of old iron gates in a South Bank back-street, their bars bedecked with a colourful array of ribbons and tokens and poetic messages, and thereby gleaned a fraction of the Southwark Mysteries as – I much later learned – revealed to and by John Constable, a.k.a. the urban shaman John Crow. I was more than intrigued when Alan Moore – whose writing I’d admired since I was a boy – publicly declared himself to be a ceremonial magician and a devotee of Glycon, an ancient Roman snake-deity/glove puppet. A more recent example, and certainly the largest and most politically active, is to be found in the Satanic Temple, co-founded by Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry in 2013 as a nontheistic religion of defiance against encroaching theocracy. Within TST, the Romantic figure of “Satan” offers a culturally potent metaphor for members’ genuinely deeply-held outsider values of liberty, justice and compassion.
And there were, and are, a wild diversity of others, many of whom I’ve had the privilege of meeting in recent years; an emerging, disparate and somewhat underground counterculture of artists, scholars and activists who have, in effect, taken Wilde’s insight as practical advice. They are engaged in a metamodern, post-Humanist form of spirituality; taking the skeptical and scientific world-view for granted, taking soulfulness and imagination seriously, then asking “now what?” and finding their answers in and via artistic creation.
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Bio: Tony Wolf (SNS Council Member) is a New Zealand citizen and US resident. He is an author, producer, teacher, antiquarian and creator. A born and raised atheist, he developed a strong intellectual interest in the phenomenon of belief as a young teenager and began creating experimental, artistic “poetic faiths” during the late 1980s. Tony served as the Cultural Fighting Styles Designer for the Lord of the Rings feature film trilogy (2001-2003) and has taught performance masterclasses throughout Europe, North America and Australasia. His novels include the popular Suffrajitsu trilogy (2015) and The Life and Fantastical “Crimes” of Spring Heeled Jack (2020) and he co-produced and directed the independent documentaries Bartitsu: the Lost Martial Art of Sherlock Holmes (2011) and No Man Shall Protect Us: The Hidden History of the Suffragette Bodyguards (2018). In recent years, Tony’s essays, lectures and online courses on the themes of poetic faith, secular ritual and “hidden history” have been featured via Morbid Anatomy, Atlas Obscura, OnlySky Media and Reimagine.
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