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The Sea Priestess and the Origins of Neopaganism
The Sea Priestess is a 1938 novel by Dion Fortune, one of those books which is simultaneously oddly significant and mostly forgotten. And “oddly” is probably precisely the right word to describe its significance, since its idea have filtered down into many branches of the whole modern neopagan movement. Dion Fortune was born in 1890 to […]
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Alice Walker, The Lizards, and the Jews
It’s something of a disappointment that Alice Walker endorsed David Icke’s And the Truth Shall Set You Free in her New York Times Book Review’s By The Book piece this past week, calling it “a curious person’s dream come true.” Walker is a beloved cultural figure and the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Color Purple. David Icke is a former […]
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What’s It Like to Think You’re a Bat?
I want you to take seriously for a moment the proposition that you might be a bat. Therian is a term which has been coined by a group of people who self-identify as being, in some ontological sense, non-human, specifically an animal or plant which exists on this planet. That last disclaimer is because there’s a […]
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Using Ghosts to Understand Telephone Wires: Folklore as Cultural Ontology
Careful readers will have noticed the tagline of this blog, a critical look at the stories we tell about ourselves. As with most good taglines, this immediately raises some questions. Who is we? What stories? What is thing called telling, Earth man? So the standard academic definition of folklore is going to be something along […]
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Where Did My Pen Go? A Brief Theory of How to Understand the Universe
A Brief Theory of How to Understand the Universe Let’s start with a truism. Those are always good. To live is to continually encounter the unknowable. And boy, that unknowable is everywhere. Every time we ask a question to which we practically cannot get a definitive answer, we are encountering the unknowable. The unknowable can include […]