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The Saucer People Want Twinkies: Folk Practice as Cultural Behavioral Therapy
In his 2016 book written with UFO abductee Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained, Jeffrey Kripal notes Grays were, in appearance, strikingly similar to the fairy folk of Northern Europe. Also like them, they were frightening, came out of the night, and abducted people. I might note in passing that the […]
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Nixon and the Dinosaurs: A Folkloric View of Time
A substantial number of years ago, a friend of mine explained to me his view of history. “Everything that happened before me happened at the same time. Nixon. The Dinosaurs. All of it.” He was joking. Mostly. But it’s something that has stuck with me for thirty years now, because as a view of how […]
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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 […]