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In the course of studying Persian I very quickly realized that everything I “knew” about the Middle East was wrong; furthermore, everything I “knew” about Islam was also wrong. I found this disconcerting since I knew more about both subjects than most of my contemporaries. I did have a passing interest in Sufism and its considerable body of practical and theoretical observations, since the Twentieth-Century Traditionalists, whom I admired greatly, had mostly taken that road; but I am also a stickler for doing things properly, and to comprehend Sufism properly one must view the universe from the perspective of hard monotheism. As a hard polytheist myself, this just wasn't going to happen. Even if Heathenry turned out to be a dead end--a thought which I couldn't remotely entertain at the time--I had no interest in Islam as I perceived it. It was certainly not worth giving up gin, port, beer, wine, mead, whiskey, tenderloin, black pudding, bacon and brawn for anyway!
I recall a section in Meetings With Remarkable Men where Gurdjieff complained that Westerners know nothing of Asia, not even what they suppose they know. That was the nineteen twenties, and people today are more sophisticated, I thought. I know some things about Asia, I thought. We’ve got mass communication...
I was dead wrong, and the study of Persian had opened up new vistas so large it was bewildering. I had to rethink everything I thought I knew. I also began to see why so many of the Traditionalists had converted to Islam instead of trying to revive European paganism. The contrast between the living traditions--all of the living traditions--and the revivals is a stark one in terms of adaptability, complexity and completeness.
And as much and as assiduously as I had worked for the gods of my forebears, when it came down to it I had been abandoned and wasn’t going to take it lying down. Going considerably beyond rune-Work and outside my comfort zone, I was pulling out all the stops in search of a cure. I did all manner of Workings. I wasn’t cured. I did a course of uncrossing baths for a week; every morning before dawn I would take the bath, let it dry on my skin, dress and dispose of the remains of the bath at a crossroads. I wasn’t cured. I even listened to Surah al-Baqarah three times a day for a week. I wasn’t cured.
I had by this time given up the study of Persian; my brain was fried and the emotional associations I had with it as the Thing I Was Studying When I Got Worse made it no longer viable. But I continued to have an interest in Islam, especially the esoteric side. I began having apocalyptic dreams in which I converted or in which I would say things like, “alhamdulillah!" I began to learn a few wazifas--operative workings--and began to read the Qur’an. Frithjof Schuon’s book Understanding Islam was instrumental to, well, my understanding of Islam from a Traditionalist perspective. It was also the means by which I, a hard polytheist, could grasp monotheism in a way I could relate to. Let me say here that if it weren't for the profound similarities I discovered between some of the core ideas of Teutonic Paganism and Islam, I would never have converted. I don't want to give the impression that Schuon's book alone led to these discoveries; it was also the works of scholars like Eliade, Guenon, and Evola. I was, of course, already familiar with their work generally; but reexamining them with an eye toward what I now knew about Islam was profoundly illuminating.
By the spring of 2013, things had reached a crisis. Like a pale imitation of Gully Foyle I didn’t know who I was, what I believed or what to do about it. It was during this time that my mother called me out of the blue and asked me to go camping with her in our hometown up north. I had lately been reflecting on the Prophet’s (sawa) words that “[p]aradise is at the feet of the mothers,” and had been wondering how I could spend more time with her; so I assented.
We reached our spot and pitched camp at night, realizing when morning came that it was a low-lying spot surrounded by standing water; so we changed campsites. It was some hours later that I realized my wedding ring was gone. Gone! Missing. Disappeared. And when my wife found out, I would also be Gone, Missing and Disappeared.
If you have never had to search for a gold wedding band in a large wooded area covered with dead leaves and twigs, let me assure you that it's one of the more heartbreaking tasks Life has to offer. After several fruitless hours of this, I had had enough; something in me broke, and I threw up my hands to the sky saying, “fine, I’ll do what You want! Just please, give me my ring back.” I burned a handful of sacred objects I had with me as a sign of good faith and waited. There was not much else I could do.
At about five-thirty that afternoon an older couple in an RV pulled into our old campsite. I had searched that site thoroughly, but thought, it can’t hurt to ask; so I asked them to keep a weather-eye out for my ring. An hour later I received a call; they had gone for a walk, they said, and upon their return there it was, in front of, well, God and everybody. I have rarely been so relieved.
The couple was gone before sunrise the next day, and I had a new mission: convert.
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