I'm honored to share with you my participation in the revival of Black Stone Sanctuary. The Sanctuary is the brainchild of essayist Danica Swanson whose work appeared in the first of its kind anthology, Polytheistic Monasticism: Voices from Pagan Cloisters. From Danica's intro to the space:

"The Sanctuary is a dark monastic incubation space inspired by animist pre-Christian Nordic and Germanic religious and folk traditions."

When Danica moved to the web3 social media platform Farcaster, I followed her to keep up with her work as she had retired much of her Sanctuary material. After several discussions, we found that we shared an interest in web3 and a love of the Sanctuary; for her as a full-time living goal, and for me with a retreat or sabbatical space in mind. This developed into a renewed interest to bring her work onchain.

For now, this is a virtual santuary where we are publishing Danica's previous and new work as well as accompanying art and videos. Danica's recap of our launch week includes links to our first published pieces. She's recently published a comprehensive introduction to the experimental liturgical framework for the Sanctuary.

Our videos will be published on the Zora platform. Our Black Stone Sanctuary Zorbish Meditation #1 (preview and link below) is an example of the type of non-spoken meditations we'll be offering. There will also be spoken meditation and prayer videos. Accessibility is important to us, so they will include one noncaptioned and one captioned version with each video and the option of a downloadable and/or mintable transcript. You can watch these videos for free on Zora without ad interruption with the option of minting the NFT for a small fee to support the project.

I also plan on releasing videos of my creative processes. I have a renewed interest in art and writing, so I am learning a lot as I go. I'll share everything from short tips and trick video clips featuring the software and traditional art mediums I use to longer form videos showing the entire process of a piece.

Anyone who understands the bootstrapping nature of what we're doing may enjoy seeing how we build this virtual space in hopes of one day supporting Black Stone Sanctuary as a physical polytheist monastery. We look forward to sharing this journey with you.

Other places to find us:

• Danica is at Digital Incubation Space, Farcaster, and Zora.

• I'm here at Paragraph, Zora, Farcaster, and Drakula.

• We host the Slowcore-HQ channel on Farcaster.

To learn a little bit about my background, see my intro at the Sanctuary, Came for a Goddess, Stayed for the Darkness.

©️ Trish Deneen