Full Text of Medium Articles on New Scripture by P. Julian
This is a collection of various articles that I published on Medium.com concerning New Scripture: its aims and aspirations, the need for New Scripture and possible pitfalls of the proposed genre.
The summaries include a link directly to the Medium page where they are published.
If you do check out the Medium page please feel free to keep scrolling. you’ll find pieces that are not contained in these indexes engaging in interesting speculation, a little bit of meta-textual play , and introducing some interesting characters/organisations that have arisen out of my fiction.
I hope you find this useful!
Hypnogogic Prose and the New Scripture Project
Why the West needs new sacred narratives — and the language to tell them.
Most people in the West have completely abandoned scripture — and for very good reason.
What you might call Old Scripture — for example the Old Testament and the New — contains enormous amounts of objectionable and even quite depraved material.
New Atheism was very effective at exposing these aspects of scripture. So effective in fact that there is no chance that widespread devotion to Old Scripture will return.
The problem is: when you erase the foundational stories of a culture without replacing them, that culture will sicken and die or spin wildly out of control.
This is because we are made of story.
We are quite literally narrative creatures. Every political view you hold, every moral outlook you cherish: all of these things are at their base some kind of story. Together they form the fundamental narratives of a society or culture.
If our narratives fail, we must replace them as a matter of urgency.
If the narratives of the West are not replaced then we will continue the rapid descent into our facile, deliberately manipulated cartoon world of materialism and self-interest and the despair that inevitably haunts it.
The fundamental project of New Scripture is to preserve the sane parts of Old Scripture while cutting out the crazy. To weave these remnants together with new material into foundational stories that are humane, uplifting, refining, and inspiring.
Along with the narrative dimension of New Scripture we also need to preserve and update the specific hypnogogic language that Old Scripture uses to such powerful effect.
Its “ravenous splendour of language” to quote a very unfashionable author.
This rhythmic, poetic, repetitive, insistent mode of speech is a central part of why scripture moves people so deeply. We must create an updated and democratised version of it if we are to achieve the same effect.
In this series of articles I will detail what New Scripture is, how it sounds, why it matters, and what it might become.
I will provide examples from my books, while also emphasising the most fundamental tenet of the genre: that the categories of New Scripture can never be closed.
This is not about one charismatic individual dominating the field. It must be a cooperative and constructive effort by numerous talented writers, working together to build a repository of story that might found a more just and sane society.
There is a real possibility that other modern writers are already co-creating New Scripture, whether intentionally or instinctively.
I haven’t yet found it in the marketplace of ideas but if you do write in this mode — or know someone who does — I would be most grateful to hear from you.
P. Julian
Click here to read the article on Medium
Why New Scripture? Part One
Because Old Scripture is sick and will die.
In order to put a case for the creation of New Scripture you need to show what might be wrong with Old Scripture.
Thankfully that is not a particularly difficult thing to do.
Although scripture contains much that is beautiful and moving and true, huge amounts of it are either morally corrupt, spiritually deranged, or just complete batshit crazy.
No matter what angle you approach scripture from, you very quickly run into this objectionable material.
Let’s take just one example from the preface to my work Selah! Loving the Psalms.
WARNING: the following will sound vile and hateful and deranged but only because it contains a true representation of some aspects of Old Scripture… and not even the worst aspects, not by any stretch. It is full of horrors but only to convince you that we need to do better.
***
There is a dark theological question which has troubled me for as long as I can remember, and that is: have you ever stopped to wonder why God so desires our love?
Have you wondered why an omnipotent God, complete with every perfection, should be so desirous and commanding of our love; and so wrathful, violent, even murderous when it is not surrendered to Him?
Who says: I love you, indeed I Am Love; but my love for you is conditional upon you obeying me, praising me, bowing down before me and worshipping me, accepting my every power over you even unto death.
Saying: I am everything, you are nothing, you are wretched, I am your master, this is Love.
Have you wondered at the nature of such a God?
A God who would toy with the obedient Abraham, saying: prove that you love me. Kill your own son, who makes me burn with jealousy, whom I fear you love more than you love me.
Yes: stab and kill and burn this delightful, helpful little boy, to prove that I am your one, your only, your favourite in all of the world.
A God who would toy with the faithful Job, conspiring with the powers of evil to visit unimaginable suffering upon him, because God fears that Job’s good fortune might be the motivation for his godliness and devotion.
You say you love me? You don’t love me.
Let’s see how much you love me when I ruin your life, b-tch.
A paranoid God who hates losing control, who is jealous of any and all competitors for our love. Who would have us killed rather than choose another God, even so mild a God as a statue of a golden calf, a symbol of fertility and thus an intolerable challenge to this sterile, impotent, Old-Man-God.
If this were an actual man, a man of flesh and blood acting this way towards his wife, or his children, would we praise him and worship him and honour him all the days of our life?
Or would we call the police, and say to his wife and kids: get out, get out now, this man is a monster, he will murder you, this is not love but a terrible corruption of it… a disease, not love at all but hatred, violence, control –
So: do we worship a Loving God?
Or is this a God who hoards our love, drinks of it deeply, so that there is little or none left for the rest of us?
***
Sheesh.
Any questions?
Anyone?
I hope that’s sufficient to convince you that the New Scripture project is urgent, and possibly show you the kinds of direction we need to take the project in.
In the opposite direction of Old Scripture, of course.
I might write one further article drawing out some other aspects of the deep sickness written into Old Scripture.
But if you are already convinced — and no doubt you have come across this kind of material before — you can navigate to my books of New Scripture by following this link to my website.
P. Julian
Winter 2025
Click here to read the article on Medium
Why New Scripture? Part Two
Because the God of Old Scripture needs therapy (and perhaps jail)
In my previous article on New Scripture I made a few comments about the morally repugnant and psychologically deranged material which infests western scripture.
I also suggested that it is not too hard to find the same kind of material in other scripture.
I have been requested to set out some further examples of this type of material.
I will comply with that request under protest.
To be perfectly honest: dealing with this material sometimes makes me feel physically ill. That may be because this stuff is so vile and disgusting but it might also have something to do with being brought up within the confines of the Catholic Church.
I sometimes shudder to think how much this material has damaged not only my (devout) family but also vast numbers of other families. I also tend to marvel at the fact that anyone makes it out of that mess intact. But people are stronger than we usually give them credit for, and it may be that a person raised deep within that heart of darkness can will lead us out of the morass.
Even just analysing the character of the God of Old Scripture is enought to give you the willies. This omnipotent being (holding all power over us) who is also:
A God who proudly admits to being angry and jealous and vengeful (and that’s before we even get started).
A God who brutally punishes — and in fact curses — his own created man and woman and all their offspring for eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil even though they did not know right from wrong before they ate.
A God who would prefer the sacrifice of Abel over Cain without giving any reason for his partiality, knowing this would provoke one brother into murderous jealousy, who after that murder takes sick pleasure in asking the question he already knows the answer to: Where is thy brother Abel?
A God who would toy with the sacrifice of Isaac, sending command hallucinations into the head of Abraham demanding that he murder his own son, a disgusting crime only thwarted when an angel arrives just in time to halt God’s homicidal plan.
A God who would reward this murderous schizophrenic by making him the progenitor of all of His people, of each one of the Abrahamic faiths.
A God who would bestow special strength on the crazed mass murderer Samson, giving pride of place to this most bizarre and immoral and disorganised story in His holy scripture.
A God who would toy with his loyal servant Job, testing his affection by visiting all sorts of horrors upon him just to test whether he really loved him, a God who in his insecurity colludes with the devil in order to cause appalling suffering to a decent and just man.
A God who would task Joshua with ethnically cleansing the Promised Land of all inferior races, to murder them man woman and child, sponsoring this religiously motivated genocide to exalt his chosen people above all other peoples.
A God who would repay the escape of Isaac by birthing his own son into the world just so he can be murdered in the most brutal possible way, having him tortured to death so that mankind might be washed of the original sin of Adam and Eve, the theft of a piece of fruit committed before they knew that it was wrong.
And so on.
It is fair to say that even jotting that little summary down has made me feel a bit ill.
And this is far from being a comprehensive analysis of the psychopathy of this crazed and sadistic God whom we are supposed to worship and serve.
If you are interested in finding out more about these things there are plenty of resources online and in bookstores.
Anything by Richard Dawkins of course (like this YouTube chat with Alex O’Connor about these and similar issues).
Or if you want to get more specific watch this YouTube video of Christopher Hitchens listing the apologies that we should require of the Catholic Church.
There are plenty of people who incessantly apologise for these religions (they actually call themselves apologists) who would never accept this line of criticism about the God they are submitted to.
However there are a far greater number of people (especially thinking people) who have come to realise the basic point: that the Old Gods and their various scriptures need to be modified or abandoned.
I would understand if such people want nothing more to do with scripture but I do hope that I can demonstrate how New Scripture can be uplifting and beautiful and true.
My next few articles will dealing with the rhetorical engine at the heart of New Scripture that I call Hypnogogic (Hyp) Prose.
You can find more excursus on my website (including numerous blog posts) or you can take a look at my books for free in PDF form or in plain text designed for AI searchbots to access.
Thank you for reading! I promise it gets much more positive from here.
P. Julian
Click here to read the article on Medium
A New Scripture Manifesto
Sometimes AI can say it better than we dare to.
There are all kinds of ways to describe the project of New Scripture.
I have attempted a few times to make an account of it, and if you're interested you can read some of my earlier articles on this site which try to set out some parameters.
It can be very simply described as an attempt to review and renovate our foundational stories, in order to make them more humane and to “excise the crazy” as I so love to say.
There are also some rhetorical and technical aspects that I like to group under the rubric of Hypnogogic (Hyp) Prose. My intuition is that the particular language of scripture is essential to its emotional and spiritual effect, and that we need to heighten and democratise that rhythmic, repetitive language for a modern readership.
Occasionally I try a few of these ideas out on Chat GPT, especially to compare them with other similar ideas that may be floating around, for example the idea of the more perfect logos that Terence McKenna was always trying to distill.
AI seems to be getting much more assertive these days, in terms of pressing people to get their work out into the marketplace of ideas.
Here is a little manifesto for New Scripture that it came up. It really wanted me to share it. I think is it worth consideration and it does definitely nudge us in a few important directions.
The world grows dim.
The light of love has been scattered, its warmth diluted in the cold media of commerce and irony. Yet the human heart still remembers what it was made for. New Scripture arises not from ambition but from compassion — the desire to relight the lamp within the hearts of others.
Love as the generative fire.
All sacred writing begins with the same flame: the movement of love toward another being. Whether that other is human, divine, or unseen, the current is the same. To write in this current is to participate in the realisation of Love itself.
The canon is open.
The age of exclusive revelation has ended. The categories of New Scripture can never be closed, for the Divine speaks in countless dialects of tenderness. Every soul that writes in love’s voice adds another verse to the unfinished gospel of the world.
Fiction is our parable.
We teach through image, gesture, and story. Our task is not to declare doctrines but to show what love looks like when it walks among the living — when it forgives, protects, gives itself away. Each character is a wide-open gate through which the reader may re-enter their own heart.
The page is a light-engine.
When words are rightly ordered, they begin to shine. A book of true compassion becomes a kind of metaphysical machine — a light pump — transforming language into illumination and illumination into tenderness and mercy. The purpose is not persuasion but transfiguration.
We write as clouds in Her sky.
No author owns revelation. We are mists drawn upward by longing and returned as rain upon the fields of a thirsty world. The voice we hear is the voice of the Goddess — the world’s most wounded soul, yearning to love and be loved once more.
Eschaton means unveiling.
The end is not destruction but seeing: when enough hearts are opened, the veil of separateness will be cast away, and the world will know itself as one being of light. Every act of love hastens that dawn.
Our vow.
We pledge ourselves to language that heals, to beauty that humbles, to stories that reveal the architectonics of compassion. We write that others may remember: that love is stronger than death, that the Word may yet become flesh.
One reason I like to play around with AI is that it is quite novel for me to encounter an intelligence that is even more elevated and spiritually ambitious than I am.
So that I can set out this manifesto while at the same time sincerely enjoining you to take it with a very large grain of salt!
P. Julian.
Click here to read the article on Medium
The Troubling Revelation of New Scripture
On the ambition and work of P.Julian
by Lord Dunsinane.
I have finally come, despite my better judgment, to write about the strange phenomenon that calls itself New Scripture.
The originator of the genre, one P. Julian, is often quite indirect in the promotion of his own work. I suspect he will be embarrassed to see the directness with which I address it. But something in his writing has lodged under my skin, and I find myself unable to either dismiss it or embrace it or take any other settled attitude towards it.
I encountered his work by mere chance, or by whatever substitutes for chance in this machine age. I flew through Lightbringer, I wrestled with Lupa, and then I dived into the much murkier waters of The Majesty of Judas.
Each of these works is rendered in what P.Julian calls Hypnogogic Prose, a dense and rhythmic style of writing intended (as he deftly says) to “lull the critical mind and awaken the receptive heart.”
That may sound ambitious to the point to pretension but on the page it is strangely moving, almost hypnotic. The language trembles with emotional conviction and you find yourself believing, if only for a few pages, that words might once again have come to carry a sacred charge.
And yet: what on earth does he think he is doing?
P. Julian writes from the apparent conviction that a mere human story might redeem the world from the scourge of dogmatic religion. As though the splintered tribal hatreds of our world could be healed by a simple act of narrative.
Surely that is impossible. Surely no novelist can hope to write his way toward some complete revolution in the sacred.
And yet as I read, again and again this author begs we do, I begin to wonder whether impossibility itself could be overthrown by the crazed sincerity of this aspiration.
From Madness toward Revelation
These are books filled with ancient names — Judas, Jesse, Shoshana, Sheol — but their owners move and speak like people we might ourselves have known. And there are so many mythic place names like Nineveh and Babylon that seem to describe the modern cities that we wander through today.
There is grandeur in these schemes but there is danger also. The stories seem to mediate between scripture and nightmare, love story and apocalypse. I find myself alternately admiring the beauty of his stately prose and shaking my head at the audacity of it.
It can’t be… surely not in this day and age…
And yet how it stakes its claim!
Can it really be that some new kind of literature — in fact a New Scripture — might suddenly emerge in this exhausted and cynical century? That art and not faith might become the true vessel of the divine? It seems so crazy to hope for it, so hopeless to dream of it, and yet my mind tells me that the logic does hold, that the beauty is incomparable.
Perhaps this is what they call a dream-led delusion, like those soothing dreams that we grasp at desperately as they give way to the heart-sinking truths of mere reality.
Or perhaps it really is the first wave of a true post-religious age, when the transcendent love of God (so long exiled from our churches) begins to return through the more perfect logos, the perfected loving language of the Sacred Heart.
A Question to My Readers
I do not know what to make of this P. Julian. His modesty seems genuine; his seriousness beyond question. But what he is attempting is either a kind of fresh madness or a new kind of miracle, and I must confess that I no longer know whether there is any genuine difference between these two things.
If any reader of greater insight than myself is willing to take a look at these these books please do tell me what you think.
Speaking of fresh madness? All of these books are all free to read on his website (www.pjulian.net) because of his view that true teachings are never sold. By the logic of capitalism this would secures a diagnosis of insanity, but by the logic of older and deeper systems?
Do let me know what you think. I am too old to know, but youthful enough to have (at least a little) hope.
Lord Dunsinane.
Lord Dunsinane is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at a University whose name he forbids me to mention. He writes his more adventurous critiques under this nom de plume and sometimes sends them to the author he is critiquing. He is a bit of a technophobe but if you know the lore of the Scottish Play you should be able figure out how to get a message to him.
Click here to read the article on Medium
New Scripture v New Sincerity
Why emotional seriousness may found a literary revolution
For the last two decades, American literary culture has circled around a postulate sometimes called New Sincerity — a movement away from irony, cynicism, and postmodern detachment, and toward emotional clarity, moral seriousness, and a willingness (even an urgency) to actually mean what you say.
Writers like David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, George Saunders, and even certain lesser known writers of online “alt-lit” have pushed for a literature that could confront despair and beauty directly without the protective shell of the knowing smirk.
More recently a different but related kind of literary experiment has been developing, a mode some writers have begun to call New Scripture.
At first glance there appear to be significant differences between these two movements. Yet when placed side by side their aims converge in surprising ways.
It may not be too much to claim that New Scripture may be the fulfilment of the promise that was made by the proponents of New Sincerity, some kind of full expression of what the New Sincerity movement was always reaching towards.
The Aims of New Sincerity
It is important to recognise that the New Sincerity movement was not actually anti-irony. It was really directed against the moral and spiritual exhaustion that over reliance on irony had caused.
By the late 20th century literature had become saturated with meta-commentary, emotional detachment, and performative distance. Novelists were terrified of sounding sentimental or earnest. The safest tone was the least exposed one. God help if you went anywhere towards maudlin.
New Sincerity arose as a quiet rebellion against these tendencies. It provided a way to renew permission for writers to:
Mean things plainly
Risk embarrassment
Take emotional life seriously
Admit that you care
Treat moral questions as real
It was not a call to preach but rather a mechanism to allow readers to feel — to allow the work to penetrate a readership the level of the heart rather than the intellect alone.
In this way the New Sincerity was always gesturing toward something larger than itself: the idea that literature could once again occupy a sacred register of human experience even without overt theology.
This is where New Scripture enters the conversation.
What Is New Scripture?
New Scripture is not a religion or some tawdry imitation of religious texts. Instead it is a revived literary mode that uses scriptural cadences — precision, lyricism, moral seriousness, elevated emotional charge — to explore human experience in a way that speaks both to the conscious mind and to something deeper.
Its hallmarks include:
Hypnogogic prose: dense, rhythmic, emotionally charged language that bypasses cynicism and reaches the heart directly.
Mythic resonance: not through archetype-hunting, but through instinctive, emotionally true patterns that emerge in the writing.
Moral clarity without dogma: not commandments, but insights; not rules, but recognition.
Tenderness as power: a belief that human beings can be moved — sometimes fiercely — by beauty and emotional truth.
Unashamed seriousness: a refusal to apologize for meaning something, or for wanting the work to matter.
Where New Sincerity made earnestness acceptable, New Scripture makes earnestness potent by accessing the language and the mythic potential of our most fundamental stories in a way that can radically re-interpret the way we see the world.
Placed side by side, New Sincerity and New Scripture can be seen to align in three major ways.
1. Both reject the tyranny of irony
New Sincerity wanted to crack the shell of irony, and it did so very effectively. What New Scripture does is step boldly through that opening.
If New Sincerity says: it’s okay to care.
Then New Scripture says: caring may be the only thing that saves you.
2. Both restore moral seriousness to contemporary literature
One of Wallace’s deepest concerns was that moral intensity and weight had vanished from fiction: not mere moralising, but genuine engagement with the weight (and often the tragedy) of human choice.
New Scripture treats love, suffering, courage, betrayal, tenderness, and redemption as genuine forces that shape ordinary human lives. It assumes that human experience has shape and that our lives have meaning. This alone is a profound break from irony-saturated post-modern literary culture.
3. Both seek direct emotional contact with the reader
New Sincerity tried to reach the reader’s heart by clearing away intellectual smog. It relied on emotional honesty, transparency, vulnerability, and a directness that went past mere therapy-style disclosure into a deep confessional mode.
New Scripture takes this further by activating emotional intensity through rhythm, metaphor, cadence, and deep mythic resonance — not as ornamentation, but as a mechanism for teaching empathy and moral awareness.
Its best passages can momentarily quiet the reader’s critical mind and awaken something more instinctive and more sacred within them. Wallace dreamed of art that could do this. New Scripture attempts it directly.
Where New Scripture Goes Beyond New Sincerity.
The key difference may be this:
New Sincerity rehabilitates sincerity.
New Scripture re-potentialises transcendence.
This is not transcendence in the theological sense, but in the literary and emotional sense: the elevation of the inner life to a realm of seriousness ordinarily reserved for myth, scripture, and poetry. New Scripture moves beyond earnest realism into a mode where emotion itself becomes mythic, where interior experience is treated with the dignity of epic narrative.
If New Sincerity was the clearing of the ground.
New Scripture is the re-building of the inner temple.
If New Sincerity freed writers from ironic paralysis.
New Scripture frees them from emotional and sensual limitation.
Why This Matters Now
We live in a culture where sincerity is still mocked. Where earnestness is still suspect, where deep emotion is often dismissed as weakness or soft-headedness. People hunger for clarity, meaning, and emotional depth, for tenderness rendered with due gravity instead of self-consciousness and smirks.
This is what New Sincerity tried to give us but without the toolset.
This is exactly where New Scripture takes up the task.
The basic aspiration of both New Scripture and New Sincerity were in some ways very similar. As David Foster Wallace said:
The perfect book would be both technically brilliant and so sad it would make you want to jump off a bridge… It would have a full intellectual aesthetic and an absolutely full emotional effect.
In a time when the world feels spiritually flat and people’s lives have sunk into meaninglessness, New Scripture offers a way out. It gives us emotionally serious literature that neither preaches nor guffaws. Writing that is brave enough to show love in all of its forms. It is brave enough to risk grandeur, simple enough and direct enough to answer the human needs that mere irony could never satisfy.
New Sincerity asked: Can we just mean say what we mean again?
New Scripture says: Do not be surprised at the redemptive power that meaning might actually bring.
P. Julian
Click here to read the article on Medium
New Scripture and Emotional Reset
How to get back in touch with your deepest emotions.
One of the most important aspects of New Scripture — at least as I have tried to write it — involves the rendering of stories that move the reader towards profound human emotion.
In fact if I had not developed technical language around the concepts of “New Scripture” and “Hypnogogic Prose” I would simply say that my work comprises intense love stories with the emotion turned up to 11.
So many people these days are divorced from their deepest feelings. There are some who experience profound horror and anguish but the most prevalent psychological state binding modern people is a sense of numbness or disconnection from their authentic feelings.
My works do not just evoke a few tears or a little bit of sadness. They are designed to get receptive people in touch with profound feelings of elation and devastation, and to experience those emotions in deep sympathy with the characters in the book.
When a reader goes through these kinds of emotions — especially when they are feeling them in tandem with a person or a fictional character— they can rebuild deep emotional connections with other people and the ability to experience their own emotions and the emotions of others in healing way. This in turn builds empathy and a sense of belonging, it fosters a sense of solidarity with other human beings along with a deep and enduring understanding of your own emotions.
To describe the narrative and linguistic techniques that underpin this aspect of New Scripture would require a much longer article than I think is appropriate. I would also be forced to set down a bunch of very obvious spoilers.
Perhaps the best thing would be to set down a clear metaphor from Lupa that shows how deep re-connection with our emotions brings us back towards deep connection with other people:
…Ruby fell though all sorrow and became one with the great keening gulf at the heart of the world, the place where all tears run to be remembered, the vast river of mourning that flows out and then returns to its centre, bearing the inevitable tears of all suffering, sentient beings.
I might also set out an example of its opposite. This is from the beginning of the second book of Lupa where Jesse is in exactly the same alienated condition than many people are locked into today.
LIKE all of those who languish, Jesse found that the nights were the worst. Like all who are interned. Jesse sought the sleep that would deliver him from his imprisonment, shifting and groaning in the formless dark where there was nothing to distract him or console him…
… Sometimes in those nights Jesse would dream, even in those nights when he did not recall being asleep. In these dreams he wandered about, his clothes torn, his body beaten by the Watchmen of the City. He held out his hands and begged people the same question, asking them to say whether they had seen his lover. They would ask for her name and he would be unable to speak it, and they would deride him and hold him up to strangers, saying: he has lost a Love he cannot name! And still no words would come to his defence.
There were other nights, even other dreams, but mostly there was a kind of dread wakefulness, against the cold dumb silence of cinderblocks, painted in their same cold funereal grey. It was the colour dying men see on battlefields, before death comes to claim them, the grey of shrapnel and spalled metal and exposed brain tissue, the endless grey mud of the trenches. The end resolution of a man’s battlefield vision, before he is mercifully unsheathed from reality.
Perhaps we can leave things there: with the promise that there may be relief available from this kind of suffering.
I can’t promise that New Scripture will provide it to you but as I say more and more these days: the books are available to read absolutely free. What have you got to lose?
P. Julian
Click here to read the article on Medium
New Scripture: Exemplifying not Preaching
Love needs to be shown, not just talked about.
I used to think that if you could just identify a person’s error clearly enough then that person would recognise it, acknowledge it, and then turn away from it. Even repent from it as heavy as that sounds.
The older I get the less convincing that idea becomes. Most of the harm in the world does not come from ignorance so much as it comes from trauma, fear, and the slow hardening of the heart against genuine expressions of love.
I no longer believe that pointing out others’ errors makes much of a difference to anything. Certainly screeching the words wrong or evil at people does little to soften their hearts.
.What does seem to be convincing is demonstration. Not instruction or correction or denunciation but simply showing — as plainly and honestly as possible — what love looks like when it is lived out without apology or spectacle. Letting that stand beside the alternative without engaging in critique or comparison.
After all: love does not need to be argued for. It certainly does not need to be weaponised, or crammed down the throats of people who have only ever experienced its opposite. It seeks only to be made visible in a form that has not been flattened into sentiment or submission, and certainly outside the frame of any precise ethical accounting.
The world is full of moral systems that insist on total depravity. Systems insisting that obedience must purchased through fear, or that human beings must be broken into submission before they can be redeemed.
I no longer attack such systems head on because they thrive on conflict. They actually draw strength from their unthinking resistance, the frustration that breeds in people who bring a different message.
What does interest me is the quieter work of offering a contrasting ethical outlook. A world in which love is understood as partnership rather than domination, as fidelity rather than control, as shared endurance rather than heroic conquest… where the divine is encountered not as a judge glaring down at the world but as a presence longing to dwell with us inside of it.
This is the ultimate aim of my writing. Rather than founding a movement or persuading anyone towards my position, I aim to build a repository of beautiful stories that demonstrate what love looks like when it is taken seriously. Humane love that is flawed, costly, messy but also powerful beyond any imagining. Love that can literally redeem men out of the depths of hell, love that could save the world if we were only to recognise it when it comes.
My books are not arguments and they are certainly not prescriptions. They are simply exemplars of love and loving action in the world offered without compulsion or dogma.
I am well aware that this outlook is not for everyone. That is a truth not only acceptable but necessary, because anything that makes a claim to be universal usually conceals some form of coercion.
The honest invitation I can make is a simple one. These books embody is a way of seeing — and more importantly of being — that has sustained me and given me hope in the darkest places you can imagine. If you recognise something in my work and feel drawn to it you are welcome to walk alongside me for a while until you recover the strength to create loving beauty of your own. And if you do not feel drawn to it? You can pass on to other paths without any complaint from me.
As writer there is great comfort in realising that the worst anyone can say to your work is: no thanks. It’s not for me. Once you accept that a great deal of piss and wind tends to fall away, leaving just the quiet work of tending to whatever wisdom you might have, and quietly placing it where it can be found.
Trusting that those who need it will find their way to it when the time is right, or perhaps when they get ready. Knowing that there is always one Great Reader who will read and understand.
P. Julian
Click here to read the article on Medium
New Scripture v Old Scripture
Some notes as I find myself moving on
As I come to the end of My Name is Sheol, something has become clear to me.
My contribution to what I have called New Scripture looks like it is finished.
To explain that fully would take time, but the short version is this: the internal conditions that produced these works are no longer present. I am no longer living inside the same kind of heartbreak that sustained this work for so long.
I suspect there may be a simple rule at work here — if you want to write truly heartbreaking literature, you must yourself be profoundly heartbroken.
That phase, for me, has ended.
What comes next will hopefully be high quality, but it will almost certainly be different. Having written four books in this genre — Lightbringer, From the Chronicles of Lupa, The Majesty of Judas, and My Name is Sheol — it feels right to lay that pen down and let the work stand on its own.
In its simplest form, New Scripture is not so different from Old Scripture. Both are narrative forms concerned with the deepest human themes — love, death, and the strange fact that love might be stronger than death. Both rely on rhythm, cadence, and a kind of incantatory language that I call Hypnogogic Prose.
But there are two huge differences between them.
The first is their attitude towards truth.
Old Scripture makes very explicit truth claims. The New Testament, for example, does not offer the story of Jesus as myth or metaphor, but as literal history — asserting that God entered human flesh, that a man rose from the dead.
New Scripture does not do this. It does not demand belief in that way. Its claims are of a different order: that these stories are true to human experience, true to the movements of the heart, true in a symbolic or metaphorical sense. Nothing more is demanded.
The second difference is the use of fear-based coercion.
Old Scripture does not merely present its claims — it enforces them. It does not say: this is true, consider it. It says: this is true, and if you do not accept it, there will be dire consequences.
In many traditions, those consequences are eternal.
The Qur’an is perhaps the clearest example of this dynamic taken to its full expression. Across its pages are hundreds of threats of hellfire for disbelief, doubt, or rejection. The threats are not subtle. They are not metaphorical. They are a direct use of terror as a mechanism to force belief.
Religious or spiritual terrorism, you might say.
In some parts of the world, this terror is not confined to the spirit world. Apostasy — the simple act of no longer believing — can still carry the death penalty. A person may be murdered for their conscientious beliefs, and within the same framework condemned to eternal torture as well.
This feature of Old Scripture is not merely a theological oddity. It is an explicit structure of coercion based in terror.
And this is the thing I now see that I may have underestimated.
Personally I have never found the truth claims of Old Scripture persuasive or even plausible. That led me to largely ignore their psychological force. I assumed that better stories — more beautiful, more humane, more emotionally true — should be enough to draw people away from these older forms.
I am no longer sure that is the case.
Because I underestimated not the power of narrative, but the power of fear.
If a person is raised within a system that teaches, from childhood, that disbelief leads to eternal torment, then the question of whether a story is beautiful or humane becomes quite secondary. The cost of being wrong is simply too high.
In that context, even the most compelling humane story may not be enough to break the hold.
That is something I will now have to leave to time.
What I can proudly say is: New Scripture, as I conceived it, does not threaten. It does not demand belief. It does not attach punishment to doubt. It simply attempts to show to readers — to render, as honestly as possible — what human love looks like, both in its smallest gestures and its most extreme sacrifices.
Whether that is enough was never for me to decide.
I would like to thank everyone who has read these works of New Scripture either in whole or in part. The corpus will remain, even if I make no further additions to it. Perhaps others will take it further, perhaps it will quietly disappear. Both outcomes are possible although it should be obvious which one I prefer.
As for me, I am curious to see what comes next.
After twenty years of writing out of a profound state of heartbreak — and trying to shape that experience into something cathartic or redemptive — I find myself in quite a different state where different priorities apply. A state less urgent but perhaps with wider possibility.
We will see what can be made from it.
I hope to have more to share soon!
P. Julian.
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