Gus diZerega is a political scientist/theorist with a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. While living and working as an artist and craftsperson to finance his degree, he met and later studied with teachers in NeoPaganism, the earth religions more generally, and shamanic healing. His spiritual studies took him far from academia’s libraries into seasonal Wiccan celebrations, encounters with Pagan deities, and out into solitary fasts in the California desert, alone on remote beaches or isolated high on mountains doing vision quests. He was blessed with three very good teachers, Don Frew, Timothy White, and Antonio Costa e Silva (now Segyu Choepal Rinpoche).
The past 25 years Gus has aimed to bring together the disparate strands of modern social science, Pagan spirituality, and shamanic spiritual practices. He has done so through his own practice and through his teaching and writing. Gus continues being active in scholarly publishing in political and environmental theory and is the author of Power, Politics and Persuasion: A Theory of Democratic Self-Organization (2000), Pagans and Christians: The Personal Spiritual Experience (2001), and Beyond the Burning Times: Christian and Pagan in Dialogue (2009). He is also founding editor of the new online open source academic journal Studies in Emergent Order.