Since younger days I’ve been a hierophile – someone who finds spiritual and even semi-e***** joy in religious ideas, objects, and liturgical rubrics and clothing.

I was raised in an irreligious if ethical home with two semi-pagans – and I am rather pagan myself – yet from a young age I have delighted in the idea of serving in a religious role. I love pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic vestments and at least the outward aesthetics of the traditional sacraments and (some) of the internal mysteries even as I do not believe in the (canonical at least) narrative as preached by that Church and most other forms of Christianity and Abrahamic religion in general. To serve as a pre-Vatican II Catholic priest is a fantasy I keep returning to though as is, if perhaps much more fanciful, the idea of being a Biblical Aaronic priest ensuring the Law and giving oblative prayers and carrying the ark of the covenant. I hate both human and animal sacrifice and both old/Temple and New/Rabbinical Judaism does nothing for me as, again, does all organized religion and particularly Abrahamic religion but the fantasies are heart-felt, when I “go there” in my own mind, and lovely.