Private Journal Entry — Father Ridire
Date: [Unmarked]
Location: Private Chambers
One of the tensions I continually encounter, both within myself and in conversation with others, is the question of objectification.
It is a difficult word.
For many, it evokes erasure, reduction, and disregard. It speaks of a person becoming a thing, and in that transformation something essential is assumed to be lost. Humanity is treated as something that dissolves under the gaze that defines.
Yet within the Cyrenaian Hedonic Church, I find myself approaching the idea from another direction entirely.
What if objectification is not something done to another person, but something entered into with them? What if it is not a stripping away of agency, but a narrowing of attention, a shared agreement to hold certain meanings at the center of experience while others fall away?
The Church concerns itself with desire, symbolism, and transformation. It is not only interested in what people do, but in what meanings are created between them when they act. Roles, masks, and archetypes become ways of entering experience more deliberately, rather than escaping from it.
Hucow play fascinates me for this reason, because it removes a great deal of noise. It suspends, at least temporarily, the demand to perform identity, to remain socially legible, or to constantly justify one’s presence through intellect or persona. What remains is something more immediate and more vulnerable. Function, yield, care. Not as reduction, but as focus.
In that kind of space, objectification begins to shift in meaning. It stops being about erasure and starts becoming about attention. The question is no longer whether someone is being reduced, but whether they are being seen clearly within a form that has been consciously chosen.
Cattle have long carried symbolic weight in this way. They are among humanity’s oldest forms of living wealth, not abstracted or distant, but tangible and dependent on care. Before wealth became numerical, it was something that grazed and required tending. It was something that could thrive or suffer depending on attention and responsibility.
The rune Fehu preserves this older understanding. Communal Wealth does not point toward accumulation in the modern sense, but toward living value, value that must be maintained through ongoing relationship. Wealth as something that breathes rather than something that is stored.
That distinction matters deeply here.
The objectification that interests me is not objectification as disposal, but objectification as stewardship. To be responsible for something is to enter into sustained attention toward its condition, its needs, and its changes over time. It requires a willingness to notice, to respond, and to remain present with consequence.
In that sense, ownership shifts away from possession and becomes closer to obligation. It is less about claiming something as inert property and more about accepting that something has been placed within one’s field of care.
A collar, then, becomes more than an accessory or symbol. It becomes a declaration that someone is being held within attention, that they are not forgotten, that they exist within a structure of recognition.
The bell that often accompanies it follows naturally from this logic. Bells have always marked presence across multiple human contexts, from livestock to ritual to communal gathering. They signal awareness. They announce belonging. They create a shared field of notice.
A bell around the neck carries all of these histories at once. It suggests being seen, being accounted for, and being held within a system of care that does not rely on invisibility or ambiguity.
This is where hucow play and hierophilic symbolism begin to intersect for me. Not in their surface aesthetics, but in their shared attention to devotion and the transformation of ordinary relational structures into something deliberately framed and held.
What matters is not the object itself, but what is sustained through it. The willingness to care. The willingness to be cared for. The willingness to remain accountable to another’s flourishing in a way that is chosen rather than assumed.
As I reflect on this further, I find less interest in whether something is objectifying in a general sense, and more interest in whether it is honest about the terms under which attention is being given. Even structure can carry tenderness when it is entered into consciously. Even designation can hold affection when it is maintained with care.
Perhaps value was never located in possession at all. Perhaps it has always been located in sustained attention, in the ongoing act of tending something in a way that allows it to remain alive within relationship.
And in that sense, what we tend most carefully begins, over time, to take on the weight of something approaching the sacred.
-Father Ridire
The Cyrenaian Hedonic church 