A little warning about Robin Artisson…

wolfinthethorns:

You know, I hate to speak ill of people, but you know that feeling when a name from the past pops up and your hackles go up? Yeah, like that.

It seems like Robin Artisson, aka Son of Art, aka owl_clan, aka bloody hell not him again to any pagan over the age of 35 who was active on LiveJournal, has found himself a veneer of respectability on here.

Be really fucking wary of him

Back in the day, circa the 2005-2007, Artisson made quite the name for himself among online pagan circles for getting himself banned from pretty much everywhere for coming in, setting himself up as The Expert On Everything, and then viciously bullying anyone who disagreed with him – verbally abusing and threatening them, orchestrating sock-puppet pile-ons, stalking people around all the communities and other sites they were active on, leaving abuse on their personal blogs, the works. He was exactly the kind of person who would flood people’s in-boxes with anon hate on here. If he got called out by the mods, he invariably threw his toys out the pram and would porn-spam the community until he got banned, then pop back up under a different name and do it all again. And you really had to be going some to get banned from nonfluffypagans for arseholery, believe you me.

His areas of “expertise” covered Traditional Witchcraft, Druidry, Asatru/Heathenry, and Celtic Reconstructionism, all of which he’d definitely mastered and been researching intensely for at least 15 years (despite only being in his mid-20s at the time). By all accounts, he was (and probably still is) pretty well read, but equally a lot of what he claimed as Unassailable True was self-aggrandising bollocks he’d made up. (I’m all for UPG, but ffs acknowledge it as that). If you questioned his knowledge, asked for sources, or had the temerity to be doing it different to him, you were doing it Wrong, you were a fluffy new-ager, or a “gods-cursed idiot aetheist” conspiring against the True Old Religions, or a child, or he just bombarded you with obscenities. Quite frankly, he had his head so far up his arse he resembled a one-man Human Centipede.

Aside from this winning personality, he was gallopingly racist – claiming that he had it first hand from the Gods that you had to be “sufficiently” racially pure to practice any kind of Northern European tradition, that interbreeding was “polluting” magic, a whole bunch of neo-nazi master race crap, that Islam was eeeevil, among other things. He had a massive hard-on for Wim Wenders, too, by all accounts. He was also hugely misogynistic (females are inherently inferior and only useful for breeding, so it was their duty to be sexually appealing to men, and so forth), transphobic, homophobic, and generally an all-round charming individual.

Sadly, the bulk of the proof of all this behaviour has been lost to deleted blogs and forums, and LJ communties that have long been eaten by pornbots. The only real catalogues of that history are things like Encyclopedia Dramatica, and I really wouldn’t recommend going there.

Now, I would love to believe that ten years on, he’s grown as a person and left his bigoted, trolly past behind him. Gods know I was an uninformed bell-end back then. Unfortunately, a swift googlewhack and skim of his FaceBook, it seems that no, he’s still a racist, Islamophobic twat who bullies people off groups and communities. Only now he’s a twat who’s published some books, which means people are listening to him.

So yes. Maybe he has some useful and/or interesting things to say these days, but be very, very careful of him. Take what he says with a sizeable pinch of salt, and cross reference his assertions. Keep him at arm’s length. He did a lot of damage back in the day, and for those of us who remember that and/or had run ins with him, it’s going to take as serious effort on his part to win any trust from us.