Episódios
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The dragon, or serpent, in myth and story, is the coiling, spiraling power of nature itself. And so, how cultures have treated the dragon depends a lot on how they view nature and how they view the world. Some have celebrated and honored the serpent power, some have sought to harness or direct it, others to contain or tame it, while some have labeled it as chaos and sought to subdue and slay it. The history of the Western world's relationship with dragons and serpents is fraught, and Western mythic tradition is rife with monstrous serpent beings that are vilified as 'evil'. How does this primal undulant power come to be seen as 'evil'? As author Veronica Strang explains, it has to do with how human beings interact with forces we cannot control. With the rise of large scale societies, forces outside the civilizational order — floods, unpredictable weather, and movements of the water cycle — became labeled as 'chaos.' Whereas once 'chaos' signified primal oceanic generativity, chaos became seen as wanton disorder, and in Western tradition, a polarity forms between that which is stable and eternal and good that which is shifting and changing and undulant and evil. This dichotomy — this fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of stability and movement, of boundary and flow — informs the entire history of the Western world and is still playing itself out across the sociocultural, political, and spiritual spectrum today. In traditional systems, this power is not dichotomized but is met with deep protocol, in which it is understood that the dragon-serpent power is not to be vilified, nor is it to be invoked without caution. For in relational polytheistic systems, there may be serpent powers that are helpful and those that aren't, and there may be powers that require deep preparation before they are met. So the dragon-serpent asks us — what does it mean to be in real relationship with that which is awesome, powerful, and potentially dangerous? How do we treat... the dragon? Featuring interviews with author Veronica Strang, Nyoongar Elder Noel Nannup, Shipibo professor Eli Sanchez Pakan Meni, and Mythosomatic practitioner Eve Bradford and featuring music from Victor Sakshin, Travis Puntarelli, Jeunae Elita, and Marya Stark, enjoy this spiraling journey that concludes our exploration of THE DRAGON.
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Dragon lore is everywhere in global mythology — no matter what continent you live on, the land you inhabit holds dragon story, and quite possibly was shaped by dragons, or has sleeping dragons in it. Such dragons have captured human imagination across hundreds of cultures and thousands of years. But the dragon is much more than a category of fantastical beast. In many traditions the world-dragon, or world-serpent, is creator, land-shaper, present in the water cycle and in weather systems and in the vast temporal cycles of the cosmos itself. More deeply, the dragon is related to kinetic power — to all that moves in spirals. So the coils of the dragon draw us in to a deep discussion of the fundamental energetic power of a cosmos whose basic movements are serpentine — coiling and releasing, gathering and dispersing, shedding and regenerating — one sinuous energy that is also multifaceted. This power is paradoxical — it creates and destroys, it births and it devours. Like the world itself, it is beautiful and it is terrifying. So this power is met in vastly different ways — with awe and reverence, and with fear and suspicion. How a culture views dragons says a lot about how they view... the world. For the dragon is the primal power of creation, and to explore dragon story is to explore how human beings have interacted with the world and its powers, its cycles and convolutions, across cultures and generations. Discussions on the world-dragon have deep relevance at a time when socio-historical power patterns are repeating, and forgotten monsters waking, and old power structures crumbling and new ones rising. At stake are questions of how we as human beings treat vast, monstrous, beautiful, paradoxical, primal powers. Featuring interviews with Nyoongar Elder Noel Nannup and Shipibo Professor Eli Sanchez Pakan Meni and original music from Victor Sakshin, Jeunae Elita, Travis Puntarelli, Charlotte Malin Collins and Marya Stark, this episode asks us to stare deep into the eyes of the flashing, feathered, scaled, fractal power at the heart of creation itself. Enter.... THE DRAGON.
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There is a weight to modern existence — perhaps you've felt it. In a world in which social and environmental crises only seem to be deepening and our familial, communal and spiritual support systems are steadily crumbling, individuals are buckling under the weight. This weight is not simply metaphorical. When the web of relationships that traditionally hold human culture together is fractured, then sociocultural, ecological, and even cosmic burdens are funneled to individuals to carry. We often try to tackle these burdens on our own — but they are far too big for one person to bear. Traditional cultures, by contrast, tend to be constructed around networks of support — not only in their sociocultural and spiritual systems, but in their understanding of a cosmological and ecological mandala of animate forces, gods and goddesses and spirit helpers that literally bear weight. So animate traditions invoke various weight bearers, from turtles to elephants to the great mother goddess herself — who is known as the 'support' of everything that is. Such figures invite us into a deeper vision of support that is not generated or borne by us alone and that requires that we rethink the human role in the web of life. In such relational visions, people are not gods. They have responsibilities to the web of life, but they are not responsible for bearing everything. The tendency of the modern individualist mind to put itself at the center of the cosmos and try to bear universal burdens on its own has roots that go back to the creation story that lives at the heart of western history, a story that imbues individual beings with the greatest burden of all — the burden of salvation. If we look closely this unconscious burden is still at play everywhere, across the social and political spectrum, in wellness narratives and psychotherapeutic narratives, and even in the stories we tell about how it's our imperative to 'save the world.' Perhaps it's time to unpack this deeply rooted burden and regrow it as something else. Featuring a beautiful telling of the story of Sky Woman by Mohawk Chief Beverly Cook, and original music from Beya, Balladir, Olivia the Bard, Hummbbugggg, Victor Sakshin and Marya Stark, This episode dives deep into the roots of the cosmic burdens that individuals in modern culture bear, and explores what it means to redistribute the burden as we find cosmic, ecological, and communal support.
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In times of rising frustration over the state of nations, times of personal, ecological, societal, and planetary impasse, when cycles of senseless suffering seemingly repeat themselves over and over, and all the global upheaval still isn't bringing about change... in times when stuck energies need to move and forces that have been restrained for generations long to break free, the myths offer visions of roarers, bellowers, trumpeters, and conch-blasters. These movers and shakers do more than release pent up energy. They awaken, they transform, and they announce the transition from one world to the next. So the howling storm gods of the Vedas "move the immovable" and the Goddess herself trembles the worlds with her cosmic roaring laughter and ushers in a new age. But the roar of the goddess is not just the roar of speaking truth to external powers — it is also an internal reckoning, a moment of reconciliation that takes place within us — a recognition of all those places in us that have gone dormant and need waking and all those old patterns that need to be shaken free. As bodies try to somatically process and metabolize the times we are living in, sometimes we need a good mother roar.... and we can learn much from traditions that harness the power of uttered sound to invoke help, to guard against intrusion, to dispel negative forces, and to carry us into states of deeper connectivity. Ready yourself for roars and bellows, trumpets of judgement, announcing angels, and a deep dive into the Norse Ragnarok myth with Rune Rasmussen of the Nordic animism channel. Because sometimes you gotta go full apocalyptic to meet the energy of the times. Featuring music from (and an interview with) Sakha songstress Snow Raven, songs, yelps, bellows, and shrieks from Marya Stark and Travis Puntarelli, appropriately doomy guitar from Sunny Reinhardt, and angelic calls from Jeunae Elita, this episode is designed to MOVE STUCK ENERGY, and then ultimately to channel it in creative and life-affirming ways. Listen loud and shake it free.
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In times of rising frustration over the state of nations, times of personal, ecological, societal, and planetary impasse, when cycles of senseless suffering seemingly repeat themselves over and over, and all the global upheaval still isn't bringing about change... in times when stuck energies need to move and forces that have been restrained for generations long to break free, the myths offer visions of roarers, bellowers, trumpeters, and conch-blasters. These movers and shakers do more than release pent up energy. They awaken, they transform, and they announce the transition from one world to the next. So the howling storm gods of the Vedas "move the immovable" and the Goddess herself trembles the worlds with her cosmic roaring laughter and ushers in a new age. But the roar of the goddess is not just the roar of speaking truth to external powers — it is also an internal reckoning, a moment of reconciliation that takes place within us — a recognition of all those places in us that have gone dormant and need waking and all those old patterns that need to be shaken free. As bodies try to somatically process and metabolize the times we are living in, sometimes we need a good mother roar.... and we can learn much from traditions that harness the power of uttered sound to invoke help, to guard against intrusion, to dispel negative forces, and to carry us into states of deeper connectivity. Ready yourself for roars and bellows, trumpets of judgement, announcing angels, and a deep dive into the Norse Ragnarok myth with Rune Rasmussen of the Nordic animism channel. Because sometimes you gotta go full apocalyptic to meet the energy of the times. Featuring music from (and an interview with) Sakha songstress Snow Raven, songs, yelps, bellows, and shrieks from Marya Stark and Travis Puntarelli, appropriately doomy guitar from Sunny Reinhardt, and angelic calls from Jeunae Elita, this episode is designed to MOVE STUCK ENERGY, and then ultimately to channel it in creative and life-affirming ways. Listen loud and shake it free.
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POWER is on the mind these days, as the world grapples with shifting global power dynamics, old powers crumbling, new ones rising, and archaic power paradigms resurfacing… Yes, issues of power run rampant and discussions on power are front and center. But like everything else in modern discourse, the discussion on power has been decontextualized. Power is seen as an abstract bodiless force that governs from above, or an arbitrary human construct that is either relentlessly pursued or seen as 'bad' and flattened entirely. Traditional animate systems hold a very different vision of power, in which power is a tangible presence, a living breathing force inherent to the structure of nature itself. Within this vision there is the recognition of a greater power that operates in cycles and spirals of creation and destruction, and to which all temporal powers are beholden. When the existence of this power is acknowledged, then human beings can architect their ritual and social systems to be in alignment and harmony with it. In the absence of recognition of this power, human beings settle for the crudest, most obvious vision of power — the power to seize and force and control. These 'obvious' powers have come to dominate our vision of power. Yet the world is shaped by a multitude of powers, some silent and invisible. Every small power in the mandala of powers has its role to play in the overall web of power, and perhaps a complete vision of power means recognizing the power of the less obvious things, and cultivating those powers that slowly shift and repattern the more obvious powers. This means recognizing first and foremost that power is real and tangible, and that the structures and harmonic architecture of nature itself reveals much about what it means to construct systems that can honor it, call it, receive it, hold it, and pass it on. Featuring contributions from Nyoongar writer, storyteller and researcher Jack Mitchell, Hawaiian cultural practitioner Kanani Aton, and Living Sanskrit's Shivani Hawkins, with music by Althaea, Victor Sakshin, Marya Stark, and Travis Puntarelli. Let's take a deep dive into... the ***POWER***
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Tricksters and culture disruptors populate global mythology. From Loki to Coyote to Èṣù and Hermes, they bend rules, cross boundaries, commit deliberate and unintentional offenses and generally mess with established orders. Yet they are often seen as indispensable to these orders — they are renewers and cultural innovators and often pave the way for great change. So in many cultures, Tricksters, despite their shenanigans, are seen as sacred. In modern society, we have no such ritualization of cultural disruption. Trickster is relegated to the margins. So when Trickster comes along these days, he tends to upend everything. Sometimes, we welcome that change — it’s a wonderful thing when Trickster shows up and topples the gods that we want toppled. It’s a lot more disconcerting when it’s our gods being toppled. And ultimately… Trickster isn’t on our side. He’s the mythic embodiment of the other side. From ritualized mockery in Ancient Greece to the Merry Pranksters to Ol’ Dirty Bastard to the Capitol riot, this episode explores how a society acts in relation to its own dirt…and how, when Trickster is not honored by keeping a society fed and renewed, he shows up in darker ways. Warning: This episode contains explicit subject matter — because that’s how Trickster rolls.
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We live in times of individual, sociocultural and planetary crisis, exacerbated by rising divisions between people. How have humans historically navigated such times of crisis? Yes, we've organized, taken action, and responded as we've been called to respond. But we have also deepened our connection to the greater cosmos, through songs and poems and rituals of devotion, through crying out to a beloved universe whose workings remain a mystery but to whom we feel intimately and inextricably connected. In times when we are raw and situations are precarious, many poets tell us, the breath of life is closer than ever. So we have sung aloud to source, and honored the emotional intricacies of our relationship with a beloved world whose turnings can be maddening, painful and often beyond our control. Singing to the beloved in this way isn't about blissing out and bypassing, it's about finding a practice that honors the depth and emotional texture of our experience of a paradoxical world and that matches the intensity of the times we're living in. For the wounds of these times cannot simply be addressed through rational analysis and diagnosis, nor can they be addressed only with the short-burning flame of outrage. We need a deeper resourcing. At a time of a profound pan-societal longing for meaning and sacredness, connecting to the cosmos as beloved and seeing the sacred in every phase of the beloved's waves has deep implications for how we resource and replenish ourselves, how we align our movements to the actual ebbs and flows of the natural world, and how we begin to heal the divided sociocultural space between us. Featuring a conversation with Dr. Omid Safi and music by Leah Song, Chloe Smith, Duncan Wickel, Jeunae Elita, Marya Stark, Sidibe, Serena Bixby, Forest Sun, Haley Young and others, this episode of The Emerald podcast encourages us to pause for a moment in the midst of all the great world-turning events and remember and connect to the living, breathing, source of it all. Just... for a moment.
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There’s a lot of cultural clutter these days around 'The Goddess.' She appears everywhere, her many names are invoked free of context in a hundred thousand ways. She’s what? An empowerment tool. An archetype. A self-help course. A political symbol. Something that is invoked to bring more creative energy or material abundance into our lives. Something that, in an individualistic modern world, always seems to have a whole lot to do with us. Yet the goddess, traditionally, is much more than this. She is the animating power of the universe itself, felt in bodies, realized in states of deep conjunctive rapture, accessed through ritual protocols, alive in trees and stones and living geography, alive in song, alive in the myths and stories of her, alive in sound, alive in longing, alive in trance, alive in the states of consciousness realized by those who feel her. This devotional episode honors the goddess as the animating power of creation, drawing on her texts, her myths, her songs, and on personal experiences of journey to her sacred seats to evoke her as a living presence rather than as a conceptual abstraction. With songs and slokas from special guest Nivedita Gunturi.
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In the deepest, oldest caverns of human memory, a fire burns... and that fire has been with human beings since the very beginning. Scientists now say that the human relationship with fire goes back over 1.5 million years. And so — fire has played a profound role in shaping human bodies and human consciousness in ways we're often unaware of. For fire... changed everything. It took us out of the immediacy of the animal experience and gave us a focal point, a place to gather and tell stories, to ideate, and to dream. And because fire created for us a perpetual hearth in the midst of shifting seasons, fire also gives us the ability to pause and plan ahead. Forethought, in many traditions, is a gift of fire, as is ritual. Our ancestors recognized the universe itself as lit by a great cosmic fire and recognized that same fire present within themselves. So ritual practice — often centered around fire — reflects and enacts the transformative friction of the cosmos. And practitioners heat themselves through repetitive dance, drumming, rattling, singing in order to participate in a primal alchemy, a transformative process that is not possible without the heat of fire. The spiritual promise of fire is in the transformation it brings, in how it burns away dross and reduces old patterns to ashes and regenerates us anew. Yet fire has another side too. The very thing that warms and nourishes us, that cooks our food and provides the spark for our ideas can also... burn us. In dozens upon dozens of cultures, fire is brought to human beings by a trickster, and the gift of fire has consequences too. For, poorly tended, fire can burn out of control. Today, in a world inflamed, a world of conflict driven by obsessive hungers and enacted through incendiary discourse and weapons of fire, we can see clearly that there is a fire imbalance on planet earth. What is called for in such times? Perhaps a return to the old gods and goddesses of the hearth, and a lot of time spent learning what it means to properly tend the fire. Featuring incandescent music by Travis Puntarelli and Victor Sakshin, listen to this episode on a good sound system and perhaps while staring into the hottest part of a roaring fire.
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In recent years, the practice of 'mindfulness' has become ubiquitous. Mindfulness has outgrown its traditional Buddhist roots and now permeates modern wellness and optimization culture, finding its way into corporate boardrooms, therapist's toolkits, and an ever-increasing number of calmness apps. Yet modern iterations of mindfulness practice often live removed from their original context. The forest ecology from which mindfulness grew was animate and alive, and what we call mindfulness practices formed only a part of a rich tapestry that included rituals of ancestor worship, enacted connection to ecology, spirit mediumship, healing, and esoteric somatic practices. Modern adoptions of mindfulness tend to view the solitary meditative aspects of practice to be the 'essential' part, whereas the ritual and animist elements are seen as expendable. The reasons for this are deeply tied in with colonial history, and with the western legacy of body-mind divide. For it turns out that the animate, ritual context is profoundly important for shaping and architecting relational minds, and post-modern minds — free of context, already fractured from relational connectivity, left to simply 'sit with what is' or left to focus on individual optimization at the expense of relationality — may not benefit or be able to assimilate the power of such practices. Extracted from context, freed from ethics and the heart connection to other beings, mindfulness can exacerbate isolated individualism. In an age of fracture, is being mindful of an already fractured mind enough? Or is a more robust vision necessary? As science increasingly comes to recognize the importance of the context that traditional cultures have understood for thousands of years, we come to understand that minds need a contextual body. Mind needs fire and water, breath and movement, it needs story and song... it needs to establish a living relationship with those that came before and those yet to come, to offer in devotion and to repeatedly enact its place in the larger cosmos. Such realizations return us to the sacredness of... form. We find that all of the supposedly 'non-essential', ritual, form-based aspects of tradition actually architect a mind that has true fullness to it, and perhaps we can't find true fullness of mind without ritually placing the mind in living context.
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Practices of guardianship — invoking guardian deities, enlisting spirit help, clearing spaces of questionable energies, and establishing boundaries around ritual, communal, and personal space — are common to animate traditions across the world. In many traditions, guardianship is absolutely central as we navigate a world of forces, not all of which are traditionally seen as beneficial. So traditional practitioners — even as they commune with the natural world — also draw clear boundaries, send wayward spirits fleeing, and even do battle with malefic energies. Such practices challenge modern western minds and are often dismissed as 'superstitious' or as the least important part of any traditional practice. They rub up against modern visions of a cosmos or a natural world that is 'all good', as they suggest the existence of things like malefic forces that are incompatible with a modern rationalist vision. So modern spiritualities forgo traditional understandings of guardianship and promote a vision of 'openness' within a universe that is 'all good.' Yet many traditions focus a lot of attention on closing, sealing, and directly establishing boundary. Even in non-dual traditions that see a cosmos ultimately beyond yes and no and good and evil, practitioners spend years establishing boundary, cultivating discernment, and invoking guardian entities. With the rise of modern freeform spiritual experimentation, people are invoking and inviting spiritual forces and navigating heightened states of consciousness often without any attention to guardianship. In such a time, when mental states are fragile and traditional safeguards are no longer in place, it can be important to understand what guarded space looks like personally and ritually. Guardianship practice needn't be complicated. It starts very simply, with offering and gratitude, and with how we navigate our own thoughts and feelings. Featuring conversations with Tantric scholars Dr. Ben Joffe, Dr. Hareesh Wallis, and Dr. Sthaneshwar Timalsina, author and Ayurvedic Doctor Robert Svoboda, sculptor Rose B. Simpson and activist Nadia Irshaid Gilbert, this episode dives deep into how traditional systems have viewed guardianship practice and its necessity in an age of spiritual free-for-all and excessive exposure to internet imagery. Listen on a good sound system at a time when you can devote your full attention.
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The story of human ritual and cultural tradition is one of depth and deep connection to land, to place, and to processes and protocols that remain steady across generations. But it's also a story of constant mutation, assimilation, and re-expression. There is a fluidity to culture and tradition that is not always acknowledged in modern discourse. Religious scholars will tell us that all traditions are — to one degree or another — syncretic, and when we lift the lid off of traditions and look deeper, we start to see that even those that seem the most anchored and fixed are deeply porous and adaptive, that traditions have always traveled and changed shape, just as the land itself changes constantly. At a time when more and more people are looking to reconnect to ritual practice, to tradition, and to the land — and yet wanting to be respectful of cultural boundaries — it can be helpful to also understand the fluid, spontaneous, artistic and adaptive aspects of cultural tradition, to hear stories of traveling gods and cross-cultural mashups and innovations that arrive with the movement of travelers. Right at the heart of this exploration of adaptation lives the Divine Mother, who continually re-invents herself to meet the needs of the ecosystems she encounters. So the Polish Black Madonna becomes assimilated into Haitian Voodoo, the Indian mother goddess finds a way to re-express as Catholic St. Sarah, and the African sea goddess Yemoja re-arises to become the most popular vision of the Divine Mother in Brazil and possesses bodies from all socio-cultural and ethnic backgrounds regularly. In many places, syncretism — the fusion and blending of traditions — is welcomed, even if the histories that led to that syncretism are painful. And in these syncretic cauldrons, new traditions are born all the time. Once we start to view the flow of culture and tradition beyond a human-centered sociocultural lens, we see a living animate process in which gods travel and the forces of 'place' are not static, in which outsider species are assimilated into new ecologies, and in which wanderers and outcasts play a key role in the adaptive movement of traditions. These stories teach us that the world is not so neatly divided into those who belong to a place and a tradition and those who don't. And that the story of 'not feeling at home' — of feeling rootless and separate from a homeland that is far away — is actually a key part of the human story and serves as a starting point to the process of reconnection. Featuring conversations with Peia Luzzi, Scout Rainer Wiley, Tyson Yunkaporta, Skye Cielita Flor and Bayo Akomolafe and music by Egemen Sanli, Victor Sakshin, Beya, and more, this episode is an oceanic cross-cultural ride that asks us to leave our preconceptions of what is fixed and what is fluid behind.
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In the modern world, words like 'law' and 'order' carry with them a good deal of sociocultural baggage, and are often associated with restriction, burden, and arbitrarily imposed rules. Yet historically, tradition after tradition sees an innate, artful order to the natural world and views the Law of the Land as something vibrant and alive, present in the breath and in the waters and in the endless cycling of the clouds. In this living vision of Law, nature unfolds along particular patterns and pulses, and the task of the human being is to understand what it means to align to this inherent pattern. The culture attunes itself to the Law of the Land — and its dances and its artworks, its ceremonies and its cycles of planting and harvest are a reflection of this living Law. At the heart of this Law is a responsibility to give back to the living web of which we are a part, and the understanding that in the very act of being alive, we owe debts to the larger cycle of creation. Talk of shared responsibility and debt can seem at odds with a modern culture that focuses on individualist freedoms. Yet traditional visions of Law remind us that our responsibility to nature is not burdensome. In fact, to align to the larger web of life alleviates a great modern burden — the burden of isolation. So Law, ceremonially enacted, places a person in direct somatic relationship with the community and the ecology and the larger cosmos. In this vision, Law is not something that can be theoretically imposed. It must be felt, and it is traditionally felt ritually. So any discussion on Law — Natural Law, environmental law — that does not include a sacred, ceremonial component, is incomplete. For the Law of the Land, as it is traditionally seen, is alive, and what matters most is our communal ritual connection to it. Nyoongar Elder Noel Nannup, Native American activist and author Jose Barreiro, and author Bill Mahony join for this vibrant journey into Law... and clouds. Featuring original music by Marya Stark, Nivedita Gunturi, and Andy Aquarius.
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In times of global upheaval, ecological destruction, and societal inequity, justice can seem very far away. Justice in the modern world is often viewed as a contract, an agreement forged between human beings rather than something inherent to the natural world. And yet, for many cultures and traditions, justice is seen as a living presence, as the actual dynamic flow of cause and effect that serves to keep a larger natural balance. Tradition after tradition speaks of the larger law of the cosmos and of the human role in aligning to it. At a time when people are experiencing deep grief and anxiety over the fate of the planet, understanding and reconnecting to a living vision of justice can help provide not only a sense of somatic anchor, but a way forward that asks us to align to something both immediate and ultimate. This vision of living justice asks us to move away from the language of abstract 'justification' towards a more palpable understanding of cause and effect, of excess and repercussion, of balance and flow. Even as it asks us to be awake to the suffering of the world and take action to help remedy its imbalances, it also provokes us to find this living flow within ourselves, to go deep into the roots of cycles of vengeance and retribution in our own hearts. At once a lament over the sorry state of human justice, a cry out to a greater justice, and a deep inquiry into justice as a living force, this episode draws on a range of voices from activists and elders from diverse traditions. Joining for this episode are author and Islamic scholar Dr. Omid Safi, CNN commentator and activist Van Jones, former Tibetan political prisoner Ngawang Sangdrol, author and death row inmate Jarvis Jay Masters, Palestinian-American activist Nadia Irshaid Gilbert, Aboriginal Nyoongar Elder Noel Nannup, and author and Native American activist Jose Barreiro. Featuring original music by Leah Song, Chloe Smith and Duncan Wickel of Rising Appalachia and Sidibe, this episode is meant to be listened to on a good sound system at a time when you can devote your full attention.
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Across the globe, the arrival of 'civilization' brought with it the persecution of the seer, the shaman, and the visionary. Why? Perhaps it is because civilization, with its narratives of individual agency and control, its relentless emphasis on forward progress, its commitment to the removal of mystery from daily life, and its encouragement of numbness over feeling, is fundamentally at odds with the seer's sensitivities and alignment to larger forces beyond human control. So modernity pushes the seer to the fringe — and once cast aside, seeing can veer into charlatanry and delusion. The rise of free market spirituality and New Age conspiracy is a result of the unmooring of the seer from traditional context. Yet what this points to isn't something 'wrong' with seeing or spirituality. It points to the need for context in a larger culture of disconnect and fragmentation, for slow learning and earned wisdom within a culture that always rushes things outwards. Dichotomized narratives that pit scientific rationalism against the spiritual, shamanic, or oracular ignore the central importance that spiritual movements play in culture. Visionary movements drive all aspects of culture, including scientific innovation. And ultimately — as science itself tells us — having a 'fringe' that sees things differently than the mainstream is absolutely essential to the growth of culture. So perhaps the modern-day seer must re-learn what it means to find anchor and context and earned wisdom, just as society must remember that the seer is vitally important. In a world of fragmentation and numbness, the seer comes to wake the culture up, to restore its sensitivities, and ultimately to drive culture forward. Featuring conversations with Sophie Strand and Healingfromhealing's Adam Aronovich and music by Peia, Marya Stark, Char Rothschild, and more. Listen on a good sound system!
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Across cultures and traditions, there have always been those that speak with the dead, hear voices, enter states of oracular trance, and receive visions of what is to come. Such sensitivity, traditionally, is common. It's common to have premonitions that come to pass, to have dream experiences that translate into day-to-day life, and to be in continual felt dialogue with ancestors, with the dead, and with a larger world of animate forces. For most of human history, the people that received such visions lived right at the center of culture. But what happens when the seer is ripped from the ecology in which they traditionally lived? The intuitive is cast out, othered, vilified, and pathologized. Cast aside, relegated to the margins of society, without the context that once held it, oracular seeing can veer into charlatanry and delusion. So these days visions — like everything else in the modern world — are immediately monetized, translated into marketable pop-spirituality and much of the mastery and depth of visionary tradition is lost. But what this points to isn’t something “wrong” with intuition or the practice of oracular vision — it points to something wrong with modernity’s relationship with it. The proclivity towards vilifying and pathologizing intuition on the one hand and claiming it as an exotic and monetizable gift useful for attracting internet followers on the other — all of this is a function of the othering of intuition in the modern world. Societally, we would do well to rediscover the central role of the seer. For if we lose our ability to learn from the visions of seers, we lose the feeling body of culture — the very thing that drives culture forward. Featuring music by Marya Stark, Char Rothschild, and Peia, and featuring discussions with author Frederick Smith, psychoanalyst Bernardo Malamut, and Sophie Strand, this multi-part episode series seeks to place the seer back in their rightful place at the center of culture. It is simultaneously a celebration of the gifts of the intuitive and a reminder that dreams and visions need an ecology of accountability in which to live and grow. Listen on a good sound system, at a time when you can devote your full attention.
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There is... a sound. Many, through the ages, have heard it. It echoes in the world all around us, it reverberates in songs of joy and lament, it vibrates in the names of the gods and goddesses themselves. Across the world, tradition after tradition describes a sound that is the source of all sound, a sound that can be heard if we practice attuning ourselves to it. So the Indian yogi follows the sound OM to its source, the Brazilian Umbanda practitioner rides a thread of vibration to the great vibration, and the Gay'Wu group of Australian Aboriginal women speak of how sound transports the singer to their homeland, to the place where the 'time is now.' To access this sound isn't frivolous, it serves to replenish and renew our connection to the world around us, to reinvigorate relationships with land, with community, and with the harmonic laws of creation. So the role of the bard — the musical seer — has always been to listen for this sound, to dissolve into it, and to return laden with songs that reinvigorate natural relationships. Song, in this sense, reconnects us to and replenishes the law of the land, and in a time of fracture, listening for this sound and singing back to it in reverence is more important than ever. Anchored by an interview with musician Trevor Hall, and featuring original music from Leah Song and Chloe Smith and traditional Baul devotional singing from Sri Parvathy Baul, this episode is a love song to sound itself. Listen on a good sound system at a time when you can devote your full attention.
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Modern discussions on healing individual minds, cultural wounds, and painful societal histories now revolve around the word ‘trauma.’ Yet addressing trauma is nothing new — traditional cultures across the globe have historically had their own forms of trauma work, without ever labeling it trauma work. For many cultures for many years, cathartic ritual practice that bypasses the conditioned mind has served multiple purposes as it regrows and re-patterns brains and bodies and communities. These ritual enactments, communal ecstasies, and group catharses — these weepings over the bodies of lost gods — are traditionally tied to something very specific… vegetation. There is a profound link between the myths and rituals of the old vegetation gods and what we might now term trauma work — because the cycle of vegetative birth, growth, decay, and death mirrors our own cycle. This episode explores the deep link between the repatterning of the nervous system — which itself is described in a language of trees — and vegetation, from the numerous studies that show the healing power of the presence of plants, to the plant medicines that are literally regrowing nerve tissues, to the old vegetation deities whose theatrical ritual enactments, repetitive singing and dancing, and relationship to altered states of consciousness are deeply tied to trauma repatterning. The stories and rituals of the vegetation gods reveal a language around trauma which does not vilify or sanctify trauma, or isolate it, or see it solely as something to be extracted or released, but rather addresses it as part of a larger network of patterning and repatterning, regrowth and assimilation, a greater cycle of nature. If we start looking through this ritual lens, we see ritualized trauma work everywhere in cultures around the world. And it doesn’t always look like we think it would. Sometimes it even looks fairly… traumatic.
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The rise of Artificial Intelligence has generated a rush of conversation about benefits and risks, about sentience and intelligence, and about the need for ethics and regulatory measures. Yet it may be that the only way to truly understand the implications of AI — the powers, the potential consequences, and the protocols for dealing with world-altering technologies — is to speak mythically. With the rise of AI, we are entering an era whose only corollary is the stuff of fairy tales and myths. Powers that used to be reserved for magicians and sorcerers — the power to access volumes of knowledge instantaneously, to create fully realized illusory otherworlds, to deceive, to conjure, to transport, to materialize on a massive scale — are no longer hypothetical. The age of metaphor is over. The mythic powers are real. Are human beings prepared to handle such powers? While the AI conversation centers around regulatory laws, it may be that we also need to look deeper, to understand the chthonic drives at play. And when we do so, we see that the drive to create AI goes beyond narratives of ingenuity, progress, profit, or the creation of a more controllable, convenient world. Buried deep in this urge to tinker with animacy and sentience are core mythic drives — the longing for mystery, the want to live again in a world of great powers beyond our control, the longing for death, and ultimately, the unconscious longing for guidance and initiation. Traditionally, there was an initiatory process through which potentially world-altering knowledge was embodied slowly over time. And so… what needs to be done about ‘The AI question’ might bear much more of a resemblance to the guiding principles of ancient magic and mystery schools than it does to questions of scientific ethics — because the drives at play are deeper and the consequences greater and the magic more real than it’s ever been before. Buckle up for a wild ride through myths of magic and human overreach, and all the kung fu movie and sci fi references you can handle. Featuring music by Charlotte Malin and Sidibe. Listen on a good sound system at a time when you can devote your full attention.
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