Ryan Kippes
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Ryan Kippes
A Memoir of Faith, Identity, and Finding My Way Home
by Ryan Kippes
What happens when the path you were given no longer fits? First Call to the Old Gods is a memoir of faith, identity, spiritual awakening, and finding the courage to trust yourself again.
What happens when the path back to Spirit is also the path back to yourself?
In First Call to the Old Gods, Ryan Kippes shares a deeply personal memoir of faith, identity, religious harm, queer resilience, spiritual awakening, and the long journey of coming home. From a first mystical experience as a teenager exploring Wicca, to years spent in Pentecostal ministry, to the painful unraveling of belonging after coming out as gay, this book traces the complicated terrain between devotion, rejection, healing, and reclamation.
This is not a book about escaping the world through spirituality. It is about building a life where your spirit can breathe.
Blending memoir, reflection, and practical spiritual teaching, Ryan explores what it means to trust your inner authority, create sacred space, strengthen boundaries, repair after rupture, and build community without control. With honesty and care, he names the ways spirituality can be weaponized—and offers a different path rooted in consent, discernment, embodiment, and love.
Written especially for readers who have felt spiritually sensitive, queer, wounded by religion, or called by something they could not fully explain, First Call to the Old Gods invites you to reclaim the sacred without surrendering your dignity.
Inside, you’ll find personal stories, spiritual reflections, and grounded practices for creating sacred space, listening inward, working with energy, honoring boundaries, and reconnecting with Spirit in a way that supports wholeness rather than fear.
This is a memoir of losing the thread and finding it again.
Not as a follower.
As an equal.
As someone finally ready to answer the call.
Featuring a foreword by Xwayama Qalamut, Elder, Mentor, and Teacher, this book invites readers to approach spiritual growth with an open heart, discernment, and respect for their own path.
Ryan Kippes is a writer, healer, and counselor-in-training whose work explores spirituality, identity, resilience, and the courage to live authentically.
Ryan Kippes is a cisgender, gay, white man living in Washington State, where he works at the intersection of public service, behavioral health, and community care. He is a Reiki Master and a lifelong spiritual practitioner whose path has moved through multiple worlds—early experiences in Pagan community and devotion, a decade in church leadership, and a return to the old gods through lived practice, discernment, and reclamation. Ryan has spent much of his professional life serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families. In Texas, he built and led Home and Community-Based Services programs, including group homes and foster care homes, and he is known for creating structures that protect dignity while strengthening independence and earning trust. His work has always centered on the same principle: people deserve care that is consistent, ethical, and human—care that does not require anyone to disappear to receive it. In 2020, Ryan sold his HCS provider agency and later moved to the Pacific Northwest, where his personal and spiritual life deepened alongside his professional calling. He now serves in leadership roles in health and social services within tribal community systems and is completing graduate training in clinical mental health counseling. His long-term aim is to blend the sacred and the clinical—bringing spiritual practice, nervous-system wisdom, and ethical care into the same room without bypassing, coercion, or dogma. When he’s not working or studying, Ryan can usually be found with his dogs, in a quiet ritual at his altar, or under the Washington sky—learning, listening, and building the kind of life that practice makes possible.