The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/author/Luke/page/5)
Luke Babb is a magical Jack of All Trades and a companion of Robin Goodfellow Their eclectic polytheist practice centers travel, storytelling, and relationship as potent forms of magic. Luke lives in Chicago, where they spend time exploring new neighborhoods and looking for Hermes in unexpected architectural details.
My room became a Wunderkammer of sorts, filled with strange and magical items right alongside cheap pieces of mass-produced plastic that made me laugh and reminded me of my friends. The ways in which I saw the gods grew into a visual language, a series of physical metaphors grounded in my everyday experience and sprawling across my living space. Like all languages, it began to create its own meaning.
I have never considered myself either a woman or a man. From the first days of my exploration, I was very clear that my identity was something else, a trickster-slick and shifting thing that slipped past both words and into uncharted lands. It was, by definition, dangerous.
If I’m lucky, they’ll tell stories of the journeys they take across landscapes as alien as anything in Oz. “I ended up in someone’s garden,” they explain. “Only they were a sort of – scarecrow accordion? I apologized, and they let me cut through their house.” “Why did you need to go through their house?” I ask, and they pause, thoughtful. “Because that was the easiest way to get to you.”
If Dionysos could show up uninvited and distinctive in my life, and Darcy Lewis could become a defining characteristic of a fandom where she hardly existed in the main text, why did I only consider one of those a person? I could not find a satisfactory answer, so I turned to the greatest mind I knew. I called Sherlock Holmes.