Hello, I’m Gileriodekel.
My spiritual journey has taken me from a traditional upbringing in the LDS church to a path of personal discovery and spiritual exploration. My path took a turn when I encountered the CES Letter in 2015, leading me to leave the LDS church shortly before turning 21.
Although I moved away from the LDS church and began to explore Buddhism, Mormonism continued to play a significant role in my life. I was an active participant in Mormon dialogue on Reddit for a number of years and even served as a head moderator of /r/Mormon. After I was ordained a Buddhist minister I longed for a place in the Restoration, and after discovering the Smith-Entheogen Theory also came to believe that there was still spiritual value in the tradition, and so I converted to Community of Christ. Despite my enthusiasm in both of these communities, I faced challenges in finding acceptance due to my Queer identity, specifically and respectively being transgender and polyamorous, and these challenges led me away from these groups as well.
My early religious education was profoundly shaped by the accounts of visions, revelations, and visitations that occurred in the Kirtland era of Mormonism. As a teenager, I sought to replicate these experiences for myself, but found no success. However, my first encounter with psychedelics gave me this Kirtland Endowment that I was looking for. I soon came to hold psychedelics, or “entheogens” when used within a spiritual context, as crucial to my personal spiritual practice. When I discovered the Smith-Entheogen Theory, which puts forward that Joseph Smith Jr. used entheogens to facilitate the experiences in Kirtland, I realized that entheogens had always been deeply important to me, and began to explore how entheogens were used in this time and how they could be used in our own day. After my disaffiliation from Community of Christ, several of my friends and I were led to co-found The Church of the Entheogenic Saints, which is a small religious group that values a non-hierarchical approach to Mormonism, partakes of entheogens as our central sacrament, and aims to offer fresh insights to the world through our unique Restoration-focused lens.
In addition to my spiritual pursuits, I am deeply engaged in studying the history of the Restoration, and have transcribed many historical documents and analyzed key events and trends in order to make them more accessible.
Beyond my spiritual and historical interests, I am a professional graphic designer with a passion for creating fractal art. I showcase my pieces here on my website so I can easily share them with family and friends.
I embrace my unique intersection of being a Queer woman in Mormonism, and I do it on my own terms. I believe that this freedom and encouragement of self-discovery lies at the heart of the Restoration, and I am proud to be an active inheritor of our tradition.