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.Support the show

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.  Support the show

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.Support the show

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 Mandozay 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. Support the show

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. Support the show

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. Support the show

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!Support the show

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. Support the show

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. Support the show

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.Support the show

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. Support the show

In the myths and fairytales, everything teems with sentience and agency... Everything is alive. There are talking trees and singing stones and hedges that move of their own will. Mirrors speak. Swords dance. There are flying carpets and far-seeing spyglasses and cloaks and boots that leap by themselves. This pervasive insistence in the old stories that absolutely everything is alive — that everything has eyes — butts up against modern rationality and therefore gets marginalized as childish 'fantasy.' But as science discovers more and more that the lines between living and dead, conscious and not, human and non-human are not as clearcut as we'd once imagined, as science starts to unpack the sentience of trees and the latent life within clay, we start to (re)discover that 'things' are not just dead objects at all, and that this whole world hums with animacy. And so the vision of a world of persons, a world with eyes, is not simply a child's eye view — it's actually much closer to the way things are. In taking our attention to the least of things, and remembering that we inhabit a world with eyes, we open up the possibility of redefining our relationship with the cosmos itself. Sparked to life by a conversation with sculptor Rose B. Simpson and featuring original music by Peia, Marya Stark, Sidibe, Ben Murphy, and Andy Aquarius, this episode takes us on a journey through talking stones and living clay and animate bells and drums into a world in which everything has eyes, everything has agency, everything is a portal to the infinite — even the seemingly 'inanimate.' Even... your car. Listen on a good sound system, at a time when you can devote your full attention.Support the show

For 98% of human history — over 10,000 generations — our ancestors lived, breathed, and interacted with a world that they saw and felt to be animate — imbued with life force, inhabited by and permeated with beings with which we exist in ongoing relation. This animate vision was the water in which we swam, it was consciousness in its natural dwelling place, the normative way of seeing the world and our place in it. It wasn’t a theory, a philosophy, or an idea. It wasn’t, actually, an "-ism." It was direct, felt experience. It was, simply, how things were. Which is why it has been commonly understood across the entire world for all of time. In this musically reimagined reissue of a classic episode of The Emerald, we explore how foundational the animate worldview is to the human experience and to human consciousness, and what we lose when it starts to fade. Listen on a good sound system when you have time to devote your full attention. Support the show

Báyò Akómoláfé  is an author, celebrated speaker, teacher, and self-styled trans-public intellectual whose vocation goes beyond justice and speaking truth to power to opening up other spaces of power-with. In this episode of The Emerald, Báyò joins Josh for a deep-dive discussion into how the Western psychological vision shapes modernity, and the need to expand into alternative stories of what 'being' means. Says Báyò: "Psychology is complicit in the creation of Western modernity. It is not a thing apart. Its disciplinarity, its history, and its legacies are tied up with the industrialization, commodification, the manufacturing, the replication and the reproduction of the human subject. How we think about what it means to be human, what it means to have agency, what it means to think, who has cognition, who doesn't have cognition — all of this is tied in with the historicity of psychology." Using animate tradition as a foundation, Josh and Báyò explore Norse and Polynesian trickster myths, trauma discourse and Puritanism, and pay homage to the gods of in between spaces as they explode open a vision of being, bodies, and sentience that is vast, wild, and porous. Support the show

Once upon a time, psychologist James Hillman spoke of anima, the breath of life, the soul of the world, as something that had to be rescued by psychologists from theologians. Now, with pop-psychology vernacular inundating all aspects of life, it may be time for the breath of life to be rescued all over again. The New York Times recently released an article entitled 'The Problem with Letting Therapy Speak Invade Everything.' Philosopher Bayo Akomolafe writes of the need to 'decenter Western psychology.' It seems that psychology discourse has grown from a simple means of understanding and evaluating the forces at play in the psyche to be the medium through which much of modern discourse takes place, through which nearly everything is evaluated. If there is a value to ritual, it is increasingly articulated as a psychological value. The traditional yogic process has become deeply conflated with the psychological process. Traditional plant medicines are on the verge of a global psychologization. Psychology vernacular has been adopted en masse — and also weaponized en masse — so that simple disagreements in viewpoint or worldview are now called out as psychological pathologies. Activist movements have abandoned the spiritual vocabulary of Martin Luther King and Gandhi and the Dalai Lama in favor of outing narcissists and addressing collective traumas. Part spoken-word rant à la Gil Scott-Heron, part devotional ode to the breath of life, this episode is not an indictment of psychology or of therapeutic systems that benefit many people, but rather a glimpse into what goes missing as we increasingly evaluate everything through the psychological lens.  As always in the modern west, what gets sidelined first is... the animate itself. There are textures and depths to the way that traditional systems understand relationality with the larger animate world that get lost when seen through the modalities that have arisen out of individualism. And in traditional animate systems, we find visions of consciousness, animacy, and relationality that make us deeply rethink psychological visions of trauma, safety, agency, and alterity. Listen on a good sound system, at a time when you can devote your full attention.Support the show

Human beings adorn. Scientists now say that the earliest adornments date back over 160,000 years. Why is adornment so universal? It is easy to see adornment as simply an indication of status, wealth, and identity. But adornment is also more than this. The word 'adorn' and 'ornament' relate directly to the word 'order,' to the pattern of the cosmos. And so to adorn has also been associated with aligning to a greater pattern, a pattern evident in the harmonic structures of nature and expressed in the aesthetics of culture and ritual. So in many traditions, to adorn is to directly enhance and pattern consciousness. To assume the boar-tooth mask or the macaw-feather crown is to bring consciousness into greater unification with the pattern of nature — to both heighten perception and to defend against unwanted forces. So adornment plays a key role in the shamanic navigation of the cosmos. In Tantric traditions, deep, loving, attention is paid to adornments. Hymns are sung to the goddess's adornments. The entire universe itself is seen as the adornment of the primal mother power, and practices of invocation and imaginal architecting deliberately adorn the consciousness of the practitioner. Such meticulous adornment has been foundational in many animist traditions. Yet in a world of decontextualized spirituality, the architecting and adorning of consciousness through ritual patterning is often discarded in favor of spiritualities that put all the emphasis on ridding the mind of constructs rather than deliberately patterning it.  Perhaps in a post-modern, post-structuralist world, modern minds need deliberate patterning. Like the Sumerian goddess Innana, we need to adorn... for survival. Featuring music from Sidibe, harpist Andy Aquarius, and Nivedita Gunturi and drawing on the work of Tantric scholar Sthaneswar Timalsina, this episode is a patterned journey through that which shines, shimmers, jingles, defends, and aligns... listen on a good sound system, at a time when you can devote your full attention. Support the show

Birds in myth are messengers, deliverers of prophecy, and instigators of journeys. But birds are much more than this. Human neurobiology is deeply linked to birds, who, through the arcing patterns of their flight, their hypnotic songs, and their high, piercing calls, awakened human sense faculties, taught us to look up in wonder, and therefore gave us the ability to soar into imaginal spaces. Somatically, we ideate, journey, and soar because of our coevolution with birds. So we find the influence of birds everywhere in human culture —particularly in the core foundations of global spiritual traditions, whose visions of spirit are deeply tied to birds. The first recorded word for spirit itself is a picture of a bird, and birds have provided the primary means of shamanic and mystic travel for centuries. All across the world, birds influence language, poetic meter, musical composition, ritual vision and artistic expression. Most fundamentally, birds invite us to see farther, soar higher, imagine, initiate, ideate and dream. At a time when planetary futures seem bogged down in bleak inevitability, birds remind us that the ability to soar upwards, see far, imagine, ideate, dream, and navigate spaces of heightened awareness is more vital than ever. In fact, mystic flight is a somatic necessity that provides potential solutions for the future. For if we are going to ideate our way out of the mess we're in, we have to be able to see far and soar high. With original music from Peia, Sidibe, and Charlotte Malin, this episode recounts mythologies of eagles, falcons, macaws, roosters, ravens, hummingbirds, hoopoes and more as it invites a whole lot of upward soaring. Note — The Emerald podcast is meant to be listened to with full attention, preferably on a rocking sound system or a good set of headphones.Support the show

Modern embodiment discourse has arisen as a reaction to the Western world's fraught history with bodies. In a world of deep fracture from the natural world, the current emphasis on embodiment serves to help reclaim a relationship with ecology and with the sacredness of the immediate. But what does 'embodiment' really mean? For some, embodiment is synonymous with wellness.  For others, embodiment is related to ongoing personal processing. Often, traditional cultures are held up as examples of embodiment. Yet traditional mythic and ritual visions of embodiment are very different from modern wellness embodiment and from therapeutic/psychological visions of embodiment. Bodies, in ritual, go through agonizing repetition. Bodies are driven to the point of rupture. In myths, bodies do not exist in a kind of happily embodied stasis — bodies are ripped apart. Bodies shrink. Bodies expand. The individual self in initiation is specifically meant to be taken to the brink and then ritually dismantled. Ritual and mythic visions of embodiment ask us to expand our vision of what the body is, to embrace all the paradoxes of embodiment. As we explore in this episode, sometimes, to be embodied requires tearing the body into pieces. Sometimes it requires soaring out of the body. Ultimately, we find that in mythic and ritual traditions, embodiment is less about us and our individualized journey, and more about the great transformative journey of the body of the community and the cosmos itself. This episode seeks to challenge some of the common narratives of embodiment discourse in order to help return embodiment discourse to its living, breathing, paradoxical body. Best listened to when you have time to devote your full attention, on a bumping sound system or with really good headphones. Support the show

Death is universal, an undeniable fact of existence that every single one of our ancestors faced, just as we will. So mythic traditions around the world are full of stories of death. Many initiatory rituals directly enact death, taking the initiate through a process of dying while alive. For Ancient Egyptians and Tibetan Tantrikas, death was not something to run from, but something to actively embrace, as acolytes regularly plunged into the intermediary state. Yet modern culture tries to run from the reality of death. For in an individualistic world, what could be more terrifying than individual death? So billionaires feverishly seek to reverse the aging process and 'solve death.' And yet, in seeking to stave off death at all costs, and in the absence of a healthy intimate relationship with death, modern consumerism also enacts death on a massive scale. For modern culture to reconcile its terror of death requires a deep re-orientation around the place of the individual within the universe. For if “I” am not an isolated unit but rather a continuum of ancestry, then what actually dies? If "I" am water molecules momentarily repurposed as a human on my way to become streams and summer thunderstorms, then what actually dies? So death, as described by tradition after tradition, is a great continuance, a great cycling of matter... and perhaps more. This episode dives deep into the mytho-somatics of death, providing a felt journey into a place many fear to tread, but a place that for many traditions was absolutely essential to navigate while alive. Join us as we explore Tantric death texts, Japanese death poems, Siberian death realms, heroic death epics and culminate with a journey into 4500-year-old Egyptian funerary texts in which death and spoken poetry are intimately linked. Rising Appalachia reprise the old folk classic 'Oh Death' specifically for this episode. Note — The Emerald podcast is meant to be listened to with good headphones or on a high quality sound system, at a time when you can give it your full attention.Support the show

Human beings need ecstatic trance. Trance states have played a vital and necessary role in human culture and in the shaping of human history, causing some anthropologists to label the attainment of these states the 'main need' of the 'ceremonial animal' that is the human being. Trance states traditionally help communities reinforce shared bonds, establish values, gain insight into the nature of reality, establish reciprocal relation with the natural world, and even heal. Yet in the modern world, trance states have been pathologized by both institutionalized religion and science, and ecstatic ritual has lost its centrality. Finally, anthropologists are recognizing what many cultures have known all along — that trance states are essential for human thriving, and that when we lose access to these states we seek ecstasy in darker, more destructive ways. This episode goes deep into the trance states that have defined cultures and traditions for thousands of years. We look at trance in India, Ancient Greece, Africa, South America, and beyond and explore what it means when a culture loses its ecstasy.Support the show

Not easy listening, but possibly necessary listening — this episode of The Emerald dives deep into the heart of the grief many are feeling over the social and environmental ills that are plaguing the planet. The consequences of ecosystem destruction, species loss, industrialization, social inequality, and rising extremism can be felt everywhere — acutely, in the bodies of those affected by environmental toxicity, armed conflict, and class divide, and more subtly in the gnawing sense of anxiety that pervades the modern psyche. Our experience of the world feels diminished. A vastness and wonder, a fundamental hope has been seemingly lost. Faced with such devastation, what is there for us to do? The mythic traditions have much to say about grief and woe. Rather than simply being 'about' grief, this episode takes us on a direct journey into the tears, into heartwrenching mythologies of lamentation and woe, through rivers that weep and fields of flowers that cry to the skies. The journey follows Demeter's search for her missing daughter, weaving its way through the story of the sirens, who were fated to sing forever of the violation of the world. Featuring original music by Peia Luzzi and Serena Joy, this is one great keening for the loss of the world, a journey through the depths that emerges at last into the morning meadows where grief and joy are one. It is recommended to listen to this episode on a good sound system or with headphones, when you have dedicated time to feel. Support the show

Traditional mythic, animist, and astrological systems have long told us that the moon is more than a distant, detached object in space, but rather plays an active role in governing the daily rhythms of life. The moon — in its repetitive pulse — gave early humans the first systems of measurement and the first calendars. So the word 'moon' is directly related to the words meter, measure, and memory, and is tied to all human endeavors that repeat. Repetitive ritual enactment — humanity's primal means of remembering — is something we learned from the moon. Poetic meter, in its repetitive cycles, is similarly lunar. But the influence of the moon goes far deeper than this. Scientists now find this lunar influence in all bodies, aquatic and terrestrial. "It is plausible that… the first life forms adapted to the different rhythms controlled by the moon," says one new study published in the Journal of Molecular Biology, and it is becoming increasingly clear that living bodies — all of which are made of liquid — have fundamentally tidal, lunar structures. Our somatic ancestry is lunar. The pulse of the moon lives in the valve structures that formed the very first sea life, and the very fact that cells pulse and breathe at all can be attributed to the moon. Within human bodies, the tides of hormones, neurological signals, and the feelings and thoughts of consciousness are built around the lunar rhythm. This lunar structure to consciousness has implications for everything from how we align our lives around ritual, to how we navigate cycles of thought and feeling, to the 'hard problem' of consciousness itself. In diving into lunar mythologies and Tantric understandings of lunar goddesses, we start to see consciousness not just as an isolated function of individual biological units, but a billion year agreement between bodies across time and space. The moon begs the question — if an 'inanimate object' is the source of so much animacy, is it really inanimate at all? Come, let us build a ladder to the moon. Featuring music by Sidibe and Robby Rothschild.Support the show

How many myths and stories and fairy tales take place in... the forest? The forest in these stories is more than just setting or backdrop. It is a character of its own, alive, awake, animate, both treacherous and beautiful. The forest doesn't 'represent' something abstract in the myths, it is exactly what it was for our ancestors — a place of beauty and peril, of life and death, of food and devouring, of danger and wonder. To step into the forest is to step outside of linear, organized time and space into the liminality of trance. In the forest, sounds are different, everything is immediate and up close, and every choice matters. To navigate the forest well — like the protagonists of so many fairy tales show us — is to use discernment, to cultivate sensory wakefulness and a deep respect for protocols of animacy. Animism, therefore, is not simply about acknowledging nature's beauty. It is about cultivating a deep relationality with the varying forces of the forest — some of which are perilous. Traditional forest-dwelling cultures recognized the danger of the forest, while the modern world tends to flatten the forest into something either to be destroyed or to be adored from a distance.  But to deeply know the forest also means knowing how to navigate unfriendly forces.  It's easy in the modern world to view traditional understandings of malevolent forces as 'primitive,' or 'superstitious.' Yet for cultures who actually navigate the forest and its intricacies, knowing how to navigate these forces means survival. And so — if we value animism, it means not looking at the forces of the forest as an 'illusion', or as something to 'move beyond' but something to be treated with deep discernment and respect. Take a step into the forest, this time on The Emerald. Featuring music from Rising Appalachia, Charlotte Malin, and Nivedita Gunturi. Support the show

The horrors of war have been part of the human story since the beginning. While there have been differences in how different cultures have done it, war is so widespread that it is impossible to see it as anything other than a primal human drive that fulfills some type of deep somatic need. What is that somatic need? It is easy to chalk war up to a base and 'primitive' aggression or to cold, calculated policy objectives. But an increasing number of scholars and thinkers are finding something else when they examine the roots of war — war involves many of the same protocols and therefore serves much of the same purpose that traditional ecstatic ritual once served. Both traditionally involve group syncopation, drumming, invocation, consciousness alteration, all built around a ritual enactment within a dedicated time and space that leads participants towards a sacrificial catharsis that follows a mythic narrative. So war becomes a way of fulfilling the human need for ritual intensity. In a day when we live without initiation rites, when we have no ecstatic ritual outlet for the intensities we crave, war becomes — sadly, tragically — the acceptable way for people (men, particularly) to feel ecstasy. So to truly understand war involves understanding why human beings crave ritual intensity to begin with. This inquiry takes us deep into our ancestral past, when the intense ecstasies and traumas we felt were hardwired into us as the basic experience of being within the cycle of predator and prey. Drawing heavily on the book Blood Rites by Barbara Ehrenreich, this episode goes into the origins of war, and as we understand more its ritual, ecstatic foundations, leads to the conclusion that the way to peace is not a process of 'reason' triumphing over the 'primitive'  — for humanity' s worst wars have come during the age of 'reason' — but rather in looking to rediscover ecstatic ritual outlets for our need for intensity. Support the show

Shapeshifting is nearly universal to global mythic tradition. The myths of the world feature shapeshifting gods, shapeshifting animals, shapeshifting spirits, and, of course, shapeshifting people who assume the forms of tigers, bears, wolves, eagles, and more. The prevalence of shapeshifting in myth challenges our assumptions about the static nature of selfhood. Yet even from the scientific view, we are shapeshifters. We contain multitudes of beings within us — we are at once fish, bird, mammal, reptile, and more. Understanding and connecting to this permeable, malleable self was key for our ancestors for many thousands of years, as we learned about things primarily by becoming them in states of conjunctive trance. Shapeshifting, accomplished through the animal dance, through the assumption of the animal form in states of ecstasy, formed the foundation of  how we learned, communicated, and cultivated empathy for the world. In a world that has turned its back on the sensate animal body, shapeshifting is more important than ever, as it offers a way back to a deep relationship with the living world. Simon Thakur of Ancestral Movement and Biblical Scholar Dr. Natalie Mylonas join us for this episode on shapeshifting, conjunctive knowing, and the sensate body. Support the show

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. Support the show

Modern culture increasingly encroaches on unknown, uncharted space, both geographical and mental. This primordial space is accessed during times when we unplug, slow down, and allow ourselves to incubate and connect to a deeper rhythm. Traditionally, this space was accessed in trance rituals, in journeys to underworlds and otherworlds and in festivals which exist outside of mundane time. Access to this space is the true intention of the holidays — the holy days — that are meant to be time outside of time and so serve as portals to the eternal, to true unknown wild. Yet in the modern vision, this unknown space must be quantified, categorized, mapped, and regurgitated into a commodity at all costs. Why? Beyond the obvious monetary implications, the want to colonize these imaginal slow spaces stems from a deep-seated fear — the fear of nature, of an order that exists beyond our control... and the fear that if we succumb to this larger order we may experience the annihilation of our mundane concerns and encounter instead a world that operates in slow, spiraling, billion-year cycles that have very little to do with us. Yet we vitally need these unknown spaces. Defined, articulated access to unknown space is essential to maintaining our alignment to the greater rhythms of the world around us and is therefore vital to the process of planning for and creating lasting change. In a world that is facing the consequences of its own addiction to urgency and anxiousness, access to such spaces remains essential, even in the midst of all that needs to be addressed right now. Special guest Leah Song from Rising Appalachia chimes in for this episode on the ongoing necessity of access to the deep, slow, primordial and wild.Support the show

Science fiction writers and tech enthusiasts have long spoken of a digital Metaverse — a virtual otherworld that, as the narrative goes, is the logical next phase in human technological development. This Metaverse serves a deep mythosomatic function — it satisfies our collective need for otherworlds, for trance, for mythic narrative, for journeying, and even for shapeshifting. Yet it does so removed from all somatic context — without the accompanying ritual, without any somatic sacrifice, without the sweat of the dance or the fast or the vision quest and without providing any larger contextual purpose or individual/cultural renewal. The brokers of the new digital Metaverse seek to sell us a shamanic otherworld, while traditional access to such otherworlds takes place through the simplest of all vehicles — the body. Traditional trance practices harness breath, movement, vocal invocation, and artistic visioning as portals to otherworlds, whose ultimate purpose is not escape, entertainment, or distraction but to re-invigorate our relationship with this world. And so the magisters of tech veer into what, according to the myths and fairy tales, is profoundly dangerous territory — misusing the power of the otherworld, harnessing mass trance-induction techniques for profit rather than for communal transformation and renewal. Tech dystopias, shapeshifters, plant beings, Tantric meta-anatomies, fairy woods and more... on this episode of The Emerald.Support the show

Just in time for Holiday season, an episode that dives into the deep role of festivals in providing regular, ritualized access to states of rapture and initiation. For thousands upon thousands of years, the festival formed the drumbeat of culture. Festivals forged bonds and provided communal and individual focus. The festival gave space for grief, for rapture, for joy, for renewal. Hurts were healed at the festival… thresholds crossed, revolutions hatched, at the festival. The festival renewed our relationship with the vegetal world and established us in right relation with plants. The festival was able to accomplish all these things specifically because the festival was a shared agreement around time, an architecting of temporal reality to construct a portal to the eternal. Yet at a certain point in the history of the modern west, the festival was de-sanctified. And so, we are left with a schism between the sacred and the profane, in which the festival and its associated arts become simply ‘entertainment.’ The results of this schism are deep. Traditional festivals took participants on a fully enacted journey through pain, grief, loss, death, and then renewal and ecstatic communion, while the modern holiday celebrates only the consumptive side of this cycle. The ethos of modern capitalism removes all possibility of ‘sacred time,’ and gives space only for debauchery as an antidote to the numbing cycle of the workplace. What do we lose with the de-sanctification of the festival? Ultimately, we lose the potential for the festival to provide one very important thing — enacted access to the initiatory moment, to what Byung-Chul Han calls the brilliance of eternity. Support the show

The word ‘resonance’ is commonly used these days to convey agreement with a point of view or perspective. But resonance is much more than this. ‘Resonance’ implies a universe that is sonorous and reverberatory and that operates according to the principles of harmony. Within this, many cultures have seen the role of the human being to become an instrument — to cultivate, through ritual repetition, a resonance with our fellow beings, with land, and with cosmos. This vision is not metaphorical. Science is increasingly finding that nature operates through resonance, that music predates language, and that when human beings decide to do things — to embark on adventures, to vote for politicians, to join groups — the primary driving force to do so is not ‘fact’ but resonance. Culture itself almost certainly arose through resonance, as we entrained to one another, in sync, through musical somatic ritual in resonant spaces. From the deep sounding board of the Paleolithic cave to the resonant spaces that birthed Greek prophecy to mythic visions of humans-as-instruments, this episode explores how resonance is utterly central to human experience, how modernity has become what one sociologist referred to as a ‘catastrophe of resonance,’ and what we can do to reclaim our deep resonance with one another and the natural world.Support the show

Sophie Strand describes herself as a writer, an animist troubadour, and a giant pile of composting leaves. Her lyrical, eco-centric vision of the mythic has gained her a wide following, as she blasts monomyths wide open into swarms of glittering spores. With essays entitled 'My Saint is a Weed,' 'Confessions of a Compost Heap,' and 'Becoming a Ruin,' Sophie's work brings the mythic into the tangible, helps myths regain their body, and places stories deep in the middle of a living ecosystem of time, place, and specificity. In this episode, Josh and Sophie discuss her model of looking at stories through the triple lens of Myco Eco Mytho, and then go on a rhizomatic conversational journey into kingdoms of astonishment, Orphic root systems, flowering wands, and visions of how to give the Gods back their bodies. Support the show

Modern studies of mystic states focus on the 'ineffability' of the ecstatic experience — the impossibility of explaining what the experience was like. Yet mystic experience might be indescribable in modern culture simply because we’ve failed to culturally describe it. For those cultures historically who tread the mystic space with great regularity, there’s nothing indescribable about it. Mystic unity has been mapped. The people who have tread its spaces for thousands of years describe in scintillating detail landscapes, architectures, points, vortexes, luminosities, mandala-like configurations, all alive with animate entities. And these geographies are not simply described as personal visions, but as tangible externally existing landscapes that others can visit too. So where do such mystic scapes live? Are they a function of brain chemistry? An externally existing reality? An overlap of individual consciousness and the external world? All of the above? This episode unpacks the articulated geographies of mystic states and looks at the mystic experience beyond 'just brain chemistry' but rather as a state of alignment to greater patterns and forces that already exist within nature, forces that shaped our biology to begin with. Within this ongoing relationality, art, ritual, story, and song, work together to create a fully formed mythic structure through which human beings contextualize the world, and in an age of decontextualization and fragmentation, this mythic structure is as vitally important to the human bodymind as it has ever been. Support the show

Author Kurt Vonnegut once proposed that stories have shapes — that there are a few common wave-trajectories that underlie all of our stories. This episode builds on Vonnegut's thesis and explores the energetic shapes and trajectories of myths — trajectories that serve, within oral myth telling cultures, to take the listener on an experiential journey of scattering and rejoining, of rupture and cascade, of coiling and release, and of journey and return. These wave dynamics exist throughout nature and are inherent to our somatic structure, which is also why certain story structures, like the Hero's Journey, are difficult to get away from. Stories of journey and return mirror energetic cycles that exist in the breath, in the brain, in seasonal cycles, and in the phases of the moon. So while the socio-political externals of Hero's Journey stories can — and in some cases probably should — change, the underlying circular energetic of departure and return is as fundamental to human experience as the breath is. From the tale of Sisyphus, a breath-journey of rise and fall, to the vibrant spiral dynamics of the Indian goddess tales, this episode explores myths in terms of their directional energetic dynamics and cracks open a way of understanding and feeling story that is somatic rather than analytical.Support the show

Trance, traverse, transformation, tradition, transcendence, transgression — all come from a single Indo-European linguistic root TRA, which signifies some type of crossing over. Crossing over is something human beings have always been inclined to do — populations migrate across great expanses as explorers seek new horizons. Too much emphasis on crossing over, however, can lead to worldviews of transcendence, in which the purpose of existence is to 'get past' rather than exist in harmony with what is. Transcendence worldviews are alive and well in modern apocalyptic religion and in modern science, which seems determined to transcend nature, blast us to mars, and extend human lifespans. Yet traditionally, this human need for traverse was addressed through ritualized trance, which carried practitioners across a great inner divide. The great inner traverse offered by trance practice brought the practitioner into a state of focused presence, a flow state that is the heart of mystical tradition, and that requires the greatest of traverses to reach — the traverse across the torrent of agitated discursive thought to a state of seamless integration. These days, this traverse is harder and harder to make, as we are inundated with technologies that 'carry us across', and we spend most of our waking lives in an unwitting trance, perpetually crossing over without even realizing it. TRA is for trance — choose your trances wisely. Support the show

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.Support the show

In his book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, author, teacher, artist and Apalech clan member Tyson Yunkaporta presents a model of five minds — kinship mind, story mind, ancestor mind, pattern mind, and dreaming mind — that together form a way of seeing, knowing, and interacting with the world in a relational context. This episode looks at the rampant fragmentation in the modern world — which impacts everything from spiritual movements to transhumanist science to conspiratorial worldviews to progressive discourse — through the lens of these five minds. From Aboriginal rain rituals to QAnon pattern-seekers, from sorcery and curses to alternative communication models, this vibrant and polytropic discussion between Tyson and Josh explores what context means in a fragmented world, and how to truly find it requires seeing beyond obvious dichotomies into deeper layers of connectivity. Support the show

Stories of lightning and lightning-bearers pervade global mythology.  With so many tales of mighty gods who punish mortals with lightning it can be easy to view the presence of lightning in the myths as simply a metaphor for power or brute force. Yet the lightning myths go a lot deeper than this. Across the world, the traditions most familiar with states of ecstatic rapture  use a common language of lightning. This lyrical episode re-awakens the story of Semele, mother of Dionysus — herself incinerated by lightning — and uses it as an entry point into a network of global myths and traditions that sing of lightning as a central aspect of the rapturous experience. Across the globe, we find a common somatic language of interiorized lightning from the Dionysian mysteries to the Kuṇḍalinī traditions of India to the Sufi illuminationist traditions to the trance practices of the Kalahari. In an era when Kuṇḍalinī is a buzzword, Zeus is a scorned adulterer/patriarch, and the story of Semele is a scholar's footnote, this episode seeks to restore somatic sanctity to the force of living lightning that has guided ecstatic practice for millennia. Listen with headphones, preferably in a quiet meditative space, and maybe even in the dark. Support the show

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.Support the show

With the announcement that water futures have begun trading on the stock market, it's time to take a deeper look at our relationship with water. Water challenges us to ask how we are in relationship to something that is both continuous and discrete, something that flows, moves, evaporates, seeps, and pours forth. Yet rather than honor this multivalent nature of water, humans have tended to treat water as an object and a servant. Water is compartmentalized, sequestered, and marginalized, bottled and sold in plastic, all in the effort to make it 'just another commodity.' This episode examines what right relationship with water looks like and advocates a relationship not simply based in metrics of quantity but in metrics of quality — in feeling, in longing, in reciprocity, in reliance, in ritual, in art, in song, in bodies — a relationship in which we construct our lives around water instead of expecting it to serve us, in which the mutable aspects of water are honored. Water, beyond plastic, beyond lines. Special guests include Water Activist Isabel Friend, Designer and Professor Dilip Da Cunha, and Greenpeace USA's Oceans Director John Hocevar.Support the show

Human beings need ecstatic trance. Trance states have played a vital and necessary role in human culture and in the shaping of human history, causing some anthropologists to label the attainment of these states the 'main need' of the 'ceremonial animal' that is the human being. Trance states traditionally help communities reinforce shared bonds, establish values, gain insight into the nature of reality, establish reciprocal relation with the natural world, and even heal. Yet in the modern world, trance states have been pathologized by both institutionalized religion and science, and ecstatic ritual has lost its centrality. Finally, anthropologists are recognizing what many cultures have known all along — that trance states are essential for human thriving, and that when we lose access to these states we seek ecstasy in darker, more destructive ways. This episode goes deep into the trance states that have defined cultures and traditions for thousands of years. We look at trance in India, Ancient Greece, Africa, South America, and beyond and explore what it means when a culture loses its ecstasy.Support the show

Water is life — all life on planet earth depends on it. So it is no surprise that in the mythic visions of all peoples, water teems with personhood and agency and speaks with many voices. The Ancient Greek world was populated with water beings, who existed not just as abstract concepts but as living entities that were deeply tied with ecstatic trance rituals. The Greeks heard the voices of hundreds of distinct animate forces in the sea, voices of melancholy and bliss and rapture. This joyous longing is also present in the profound Afro-Brazilian traditions that honor Iemanja, the Queen of the Sea. The songs sung to Iemanja from Nigeria to Benin to Brazil to Cuba invoke qualities of the sea that are also qualities of consciousness itself — and many are the traditions that have viewed consciousness as an ocean. This understanding of consciousness is more than a mythopoetic metaphor, when we consider that all of the conscious processes of the human being happen in a matrix of water. With a range of diverse voices, including water activists, scholars of water traditions, free divers, and more, this first installment of a series of three episodes on water explores the ocean's many voices, and sets the stage for a deeper look at some of the profound issues facing our planet's waters today.Support the show

The link between music and trance is so deep that many ethnomusicologists will say that every single culture on the planet has some form of musically-driven trance tradition. Right at the heart of these traditions sits the drum. Far from being a 'primitive' instrument, the drum is advanced technology — more often than not, it is the essential instrument that opens up the doorway to states of rapture. This long-known power has led to the development of intricate cultures of trance drumming from West Africa to Cuba to Tibet to Scandinavia. This power has also led the drum to be vilified, even banned. 17th century European witch trials banned ritual drumming, even, in some cases, executing drummers. But as ritual drumming and trance traditions reached the New World via the slave trade, they rose to prominence again, in the new musical forms of blues, jazz, and rock 'n roll. European and American youth went crazy for the trance states offered by the rhythms of amplified music, and the same culture that once vilified drumming now came to adulate it. It is no exaggeration to say that all popular modern music is based on what were once African ritual trance rhythms. In this way, the recent history of drumming has a lot to teach us about how the postmodern mind — in a culture that outwardly marginalizes trance states — still longs for trance, and what it looks like when trance rituals are taken out of their traditional context and become more of a free-for-all. Anthropologist Wade Davis and producer/DJ Walker Barnard chime in on this episode that takes us from the Orixá traditions of Brazil to the Tibetan Bönpo shamans to John Bonham and Clyde Stubblefield. Take a journey on the wings of the drum. This time, on The Emerald. Support the show

Telling people to 'just listen to reason' or 'just look at the facts' in a post-fact world mired in addictive consumption is akin to telling an addict 'just stop using.' Well intentioned, but not ultimately addressing the root of the issue. So while rational analysis of factual sources is certainly necessary to combat conspiracy and widespread untruths, there are deeper forces at play within human minds, hearts, and societies that ultimately must be addressed in order to find a harmonious way of living in the world. Within this, pursuits that have long been deemed ‘irrational’ — structuring societies around a living, breathing, ritual core, enacting forms of regular cathartic expression, telling stories that reinforce deep access to the imaginal, forwarding a vision of life in which we are deeply linked to animate forces of nature  —  such ‘irrational pursuits’ that reprioritize harmonious relationship with a living world as the pinnacle of all human purpose may be the only rational way to get us out of the mess we’re in.Support the show

For 98% of human history, 99.9% of our ancestors lived, breathed, and interacted with a world that they saw and felt to be animate. Imbued with lifeforce. Inhabited by and permeated with forces, with which we exist in ongoing relation. This animate vision was the water in which we swam, it was consciousness in its natural dwelling place, the normative way of seeing the world and our place in it. It wasn’t a theory, a philosophy, or an idea. It wasn’t, actually, an -ism. It was felt experience. It was, simply, how things were. Which is why it has been commonly understood across the entire world for all of time.Support the show

Spontaneous expressions of gratitude on this Thanksgiving Day, and a look at the role that gratitude plays in consciousness, community, and cosmos. Support the show

Light, within nature, has always drawn us in, held our attention, and revealed marvels through its variegated displays.  Coleridge said that the “eye is to light like lover to the beloved.” Light and human attention share a very deep relationship. And with our attention increasingly drawn towards a luminous focal point that is manufactured, it becomes more and more difficult to experience something essential that exists in the meeting point between us and the light of nature around us. This meeting point has been envisioned as a place of revelation, of germination, of ideation,  and as the home of the imaginal itself.  At this meeting point,  the architectures and harmonies of nature reveal themselves to us and we see right into our own relationship with ourselves, each other, and the world — and so it informs our perceptions of truth, ecology, art, beauty, harmony, and justice. All in that little place where the light of our attention meets the light of the natural world. Support the show

Who remembers Medusa? Hair of snakes, gaze that can turn to stone, beheaded by Perseus… that Medusa. She's in the news again, because a sculptor has re-imagined the story of Perseus and Medusa as a tribute to the #MeToo movement — and this time, Medusa's the one doing the beheading. Some have embraced this re-telling, but the founder of #MeToo has spoken out strongly against it, saying that #MeToo isn't about vengeance or simply 'turning the tables.' Lost in the current dialogue is the sacred place that Medusa actually holds in the original myth. The original myth is not about Medusa 'losing' and Perseus 'winning.' Like so many myths, the story of Medusa is about deep cycles of nature, sacrifice and regeneration, and in these myths the place of the 'slain one' — whether Medusa, or Vrtra, or Ouranos, or Ulu — is the heart of the myth. In this episode we dive into the story of Medusa and find her original power as the slain-creatrix, the primordial goddess herself, who through her unending involutions leads us to eternity. And we explore how when myths are bent to fit modern narratives about punitive justice and socio-political issues, we lose out on the beating, animate heart of myth, which, like nature itself, doesn't always fit into neat boxes. Support the show

The defining characteristic of the postmodern capitalist world is a cycle of decontextualization for the sake of monetization. It happens everywhere — with the products we buy, the food in our grocery stores, and the spiritual traditions we import from other lands. Modern Yogic and Buddhist practices have been removed from the deep context of their original practice — and often what is lost in the process is the living, breathing, animist heart of tradition. This episode explores how consciousness naturally exists in context — mythic, animate, communal, and cosmic — and looks at the consequences of this deep loss of context on our minds and our world. Support the show

Conspiracy theories abound these days. The Yoga and wellness communities have come under fire for being particularly prone to indulging these theories. Yet the teachings of Yoga ask us ultimately to look deeply at the difference between focused presence and spiraling mental agitation. This is how, in indulging conspiratorial world views, the yoga world is overlooking a profound treasure that lives at its very core. For right at the heart of yogic teaching is perhaps the greatest conspiracy of all — a conspiracy that resurfaces throughout the ages in traditions everywhere. The ability of the the individual to find freedom from panicked reactive thought and find peace and presence here and now. Through this inner work comes the agency that the conspiracy theorists so deeply crave — the agency to find center, and act from a place of focus to navigate chaotic seas effectively.Support the show