The Emerald
Episodes
Enter The Dragon, Terrifying and Beautiful (Part 1)
17 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Dragon lore is everywhere in global mythology โ no matter what continent you live on, the land you inhabit holds dragon story, and quite possibly wa...
Carry That Weight: On Mythic Burdens and Cosmic Supports
12 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
There is a weight to modern existence โ perhaps you've felt it. In a world in which social and environmental crises only seem to be deepening a...
I Think I Hear the Coming of a Planetary Roar (with Louder Music)
07 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In times of rising frustration over the state of nations, times of personal, ecological, societal, and planetary impasse, when cycles of senseless suf...
I Think I Hear the Coming of a Planetary Roar
30 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In times of rising frustration over the state of nations, times of personal, ecological, societal, and planetary impasse, when cycles of senseless suf...
On Powers, Great and Small
16 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
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 p...
Trickster Jumps Sides (Re-Issued for Tricky Times)
02 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Tricksters and culture disruptors populate global mythology. From Loki to Coyote to รแนฃรน and Hermes, they bend rules, cross boundaries, commit deli...
On Singing to the Beloved in Times of Crisis
27 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We live in times of individual, sociocultural and planetary crisis, exacerbated by rising divisions between people. How have humans historically navig...
For the Divine Mother of the Universe (Remixed and Reissued)
01 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Thereโs a lot of cultural clutter these days around 'The Goddess.' She appears everywhere, her many names are invoked free of context in a...
This Episode is FIRE
03 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
(Why Mindfulness Isn't Enough)
01 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In recent years, the practice of 'mindfulness' has become ubiquitous. Mindfulness has outgrown its traditional Buddhist roots and now permea...
Guardians and Protectors!
02 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Practices of guardianship โ invoking guardian deities, enlisting spirit help, clearing spaces of questionable energies, and establishing boundaries ...
Let Us Sing of the Syncretic Gods of Outcasts and Wanderers
24 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 ste...
On Clouds and Cosmic Law
09 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In the modern world, words like 'law' and 'order' carry with them a good deal of sociocultural baggage, and are often associated w...
Oh Justice
03 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In times of global upheaval, ecological destruction, and societal inequity, justice can seem very far away. Justice in the modern world is often viewe...
For the Intuitives (Part 2)
31 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Across the globe, the arrival of 'civilization' brought with it the persecution of the seer, the shaman, and the visionary. Why?ย Perhaps i...
For the Intuitives (Part 1)
21 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Across cultures and traditions, there have always been those that speak with the dead, hear voices, enter states of oracular trance, and receive visio...
All of My Lessons Come in the Form of a Sound ( w/ Trevor Hall)
21 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 vibra...
Reissue: On Trauma and Vegetation Gods
28 Aug 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Modern discussions on healing individual minds, cultural wounds, and painful societal histories now revolve around the word โtrauma.โ Yet addressi...
So You Want to Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers... (The AI Episode)
12 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The rise of Artificial Intelligence has generated a rush of conversation about benefits and risks, about sentience and intelligence, and about the nee...
Inanimate Objects Aren't Inanimate (Or Objects)
06 Jun 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In the myths and fairytales, everything teems with sentience and agency... Everything is alive. There are talking trees and singing stones and hedges ...
Animism is Normative Consciousness (Re-mixed, Re-musicked, and Re-released)
09 May 2023
Contributed by Lukas
For 98% of human history โ over 10,000 generations โ our ancestors lived, breathed, and interacted with a world that they saw and felt to be anima...
The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized, Part 2 (Interview w/ Bรกyรฒ Akรณmolรกfรฉ)
07 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Bรกyรฒ Akรณmolรกfรฉย is an author, celebrated speaker, teacher, and self-styled trans-public intellectual whose vocation goes beyond justice and spea...
The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized
21 Feb 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 psychol...
Universe, Adorned: Ornament in Culture, Cosmos, and Consciousness
09 Jan 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 ado...
On Birds, and the Imperative of Mystic Flight
24 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Birds in myth are messengers, deliverers of prophecy, and instigators of journeys. But birds are much more than this. Human neurobiology is deeply lin...
Embodiment Means Being Torn Apart and Flying Away
24 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 nat...
No One Here Gets Out Alive (The Death Episode)
17 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 wor...
Reissue: How Trance States Shape the World
09 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
I Wish It Could Have Been Another Way (A Lament w/ Peia Luzzi)
29 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Not easy listening, but possibly necessary listening โ this episode of The Emerald dives deep into the heart of the grief many are feeling over the ...
Your Consciousness Comes From the Moon
31 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Traditional mythic, animist, and astrological systems have long told us that the moon is more than a distant, detached object in space, but rather pla...
Awake in the Forest of Dangers and Wonders
26 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 cha...
War and Ritual Ecstasy
25 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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, wa...
Neck Hairs of the Shapeshifter (w/ Simon Thakur)
09 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Shapeshifting is nearly universal to global mythic tradition. The myths of the world feature shapeshifting gods, shapeshifting animals, shapeshifting ...
For the Divine Mother of the Universe (w/ Nivedita Gunturi)
07 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Thereโs a lot of cultural clutter these days around 'The Goddess.' She appears everywhere, her many names are invoked free of context in a...
Snail Juice & Bear Fat & Werewolf Moons (w/ Leah Song of Rising Appalachia)
10 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Modern culture increasingly encroaches on unknown, uncharted space, both geographical and mental. This primordial space is accessed during times when ...
The Body is the Metaverse
03 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Science fiction writers and tech enthusiasts have long spoken of a digital Metaverse โ a virtual otherworld that, as the narrative goes, is the logi...
Festivals! Initiation and the Brilliance of Eternity
18 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 an...
On Resonance: Caves, Hooves, Hearts, Harps... and the Birth of Culture
12 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The word โresonanceโ is commonly used these days to convey agreement with a point of view or perspective. But resonance is much more than this. โ...
Becoming a Ruin: Decomposing and Regrowing the Mythic with Sophie Strand
16 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Sophie Strand describes herself as a writer, an animist troubadour, and a giant pile of composting leaves. Her lyrical, eco-centric vision of the myth...
Mapping The Mystic: Geographies of Ecstasy in Consciousness and Culture
31 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Modern studies of mystic states focus on the 'ineffability' of the ecstatic experience โ the impossibility of explaining what the experien...
The Shape of Stories: How Myths Move Through Bodies and Worlds
05 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Author Kurt Vonnegut once proposed that stories have shapes โ that there are a few common wave-trajectories that underlie all of our stories. This e...
TRA is for Trance: On the Linguistics of Crossing Over
15 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Trance, traverse, transformation, tradition, transcendence, transgression โ all come from a single Indo-European linguistic root TRA, which signifie...
On Trauma and Vegetation Gods
22 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Modern discussions on healing individual minds, cultural wounds, and painful societal histories now revolve around the word โtrauma.โ Yet addressi...
Tyson Yunkaporta on Pattern, Kinship, and Story in a World of Decontextualized Minds
26 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In his book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, author, teacher, artist and Apalech clan member Tyson Yunkaporta presents a model o...
Semele, Kuแนแธalinฤซ, and the Path of Interiorized Lightning
08 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Stories of lightning and lightning-bearers pervade global mythology.ย With so many tales of mighty gods who punish mortals with lightning it can be e...
Trickster Jumps Sides: Disruption and the Anatomy of Culture
21 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Tricksters and culture disruptors populate global mythology. From Loki to Coyote to รแนฃรน and Hermes, they bend rules, cross boundaries, commit deli...
The Many Voices of Water, Part 2: Imagining Water Beyond Lines
02 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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. ...
How Trance States Shape the World
12 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Human beings need ecstatic trance. Trance states have played a vital and necessaryย role in human culture and in the shaping of human history,ย causin...
The Many Voices of Water, Part 1: Oceans of Melancholy and Bliss
04 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Water is life โ 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 ...
Give the Drummer Some: Trance, Danger, and Rapture in the Oldest Instrument of All
19 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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-...
When Exactly Was the Age of Reason?
30 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Telling people to 'just listen to reason' or 'just look at the facts' in a post-fact world mired in addictive consumption is akin ...
Animism is Normative Consciousness
01 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
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 lifefo...
Giving Thanks
26 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Spontaneous expressions of gratitude on this Thanksgiving Day, and a look at the role that gratitude plays in consciousness, community, and cosmos.ย S...
Seeking the Luminous in an Age of Manufactured Light
15 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Light, within nature, has always drawn us in, held our attention, and revealed marvels through its variegated displays.ย Coleridge said that the โe...
Medusa and #MeToo: How Modern Narratives Miss the Heart of Myth
01 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Who remembers Medusa? Hair of snakes, gaze that can turn to stone, beheaded by Perseusโฆ that Medusa. She's in the news again, because a sculpto...
When Bread is No Longer Bread: The Importance of Context in Consciousness, Community, and Cosmos
08 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The defining characteristic of the postmodern capitalist world is a cycle of decontextualization for the sake of monetization. It happens everywhere โ...
The Return to Focused Presence: Rediscovering the Greatest Conspiracy of All
16 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Conspiracy theories abound these days. The Yoga and wellness communities have come under fire for being particularly prone to indulging these theories...
The Honey that Hums and Blazes: Somatic Nectars of the Trance State
01 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Honey was revered across the ancient world โ found in Egyptian tombs and Chinese apothecaries and referred to glowingly in ancient Sumerian medical ...
A Brief History of Want: Longing and Its Place in Cosmos and Consciousness
18 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Human beings have a complicated relationship with want. For some traditions, desire, want, or longing sits right at the heart of creation itself, prov...
In These Mythic Times: Monsoon, Apocalypse, and What We Are Truly Longing For
04 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
These are mythic times. And what are we called to do in mythic times? What is the deep mythic transformation we are seeking? Often the mythic journey ...
Holy River of Flows: Words and Discourse in a Declarative Age
21 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Wonder of wonders, words have started arriving for my 13-month old son! Their arrival is a deep reminder that words are more than detached concepts โ...
Sand Talk with Tyson Yunkaporta
30 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Tyson Yunkaporta is an academic, an arts critic, and a researcher who is a member of the Apalech Clan in far north Queensland Australia. He's the...
Space Hex: The Curse of Restlessness in Worldviews of Perpetual Escape
24 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
"We donโt go to other planets because our planet is dying. Our planet dies, specifically because we perpetually want to go somewhere else."...
Rapturous Focus and Extraordinary Powers: Breathing Life into the Third Book of the Yoga Sutras
19 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The third book of the Pataรฑjali yoga sutras, the Vibhลซti Pฤda, is often skipped over in modern yoga teacher trainings. Why? Its descriptions of sup...
Broadcasting Live From the Time of Poets and Bards
06 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The poet/bard/singer holds a special place of reverence in many cultures and traditions. Far from being seen as 'escapism,' sung music, inca...
Broadcasting Live From the Center of the Universe
22 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this live storytelling episode, we look at mythological visions of the world axis or central column across a range of cultures. Starting with the s...
O Holy Rupture: Cracking Open the Great Myth with Joseph Sansonese
07 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Thereโs a great myth that is told and retold in cultures throughout the world. The story goes like this โ something is harnessed, raised upwards, ...
The Pandemic and the Goddess: Perspectives on Humanity, Disease, and Nature
25 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
More and more pandemic experts are saying that humanity's disruptions of natural environments are responsible for outbreaks of new viruses. This ...
The Eyes Have It: The Optics of Creation and Consciousness
03 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Eyes have always held sway over the human imagination โ mesmerized us, scared us, inspired us. The windows to the soul, theyโve been called. Theyโ...
Reimagining Our Ancestors: A Dive into the Paleolithic Heart and Mind
18 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We often assume that Paleolithic people lived in a world that was fundamentally less than ours because they didnโt yet have what we have. We assume ...
The Shape of Art: Place, Relevance, and the Living Force Between Adorer and Adored
21 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Bette Midler recently made headlines for tweeting a picture of three girls at a museum distracted by their phones instead of admiring the art. Yet the...
Airplanes, Epilepsy, and Shamanism: A Respectful Response to Neil deGrasse Tyson
07 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A few weeks back, wizard-yogi-talkshow host Russell Brand interviewed scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson on his podcast Under the Skin. Itโs the November...
Melting Frost: A Holiday Hymn to the Animate Heart
24 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In this poetic ode to the animate vision of the cosmos that has been so central to humanity for so long, we explore the idea that the ritual heart of ...
How to Churn an Ocean and Breathe Like a Horse: Rekindling the Somatic Heart of Myth
10 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The power of myth exists beyond representation and symbolism. Myths grow out of a time when to utter the word โskyโ around a fire at night would t...
Great Bear: The Being at the Heart of Global Tradition
26 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Bears have been right at the center of pan-global belief systems for a very long time, causing some anthropologists to speak of a circumpolar bear cul...
The Poetry of The Point: All of Cosmos and Consciousness in a Little Round Dot
12 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
What's the point? Well, far from being an image of smallness or insignificance, the single point, the dot communicates a lot. In fact, in India, ...
On Cauldrons, Inner and Outer
29 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Cauldrons โ cooking vessels โ have been part of the human experience and have captured the human imagination for a very long time, from the ancien...
Healing the Science-Spirit Divide in 34 Minutes
15 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode we take a deep dive into the abyss โ the seemingly unbridgeable gap that exists between science and spirit. Are there places where s...
Picture This with All Your Heart: Reclaiming the Urgent Incandescence of Imaginative Vision
01 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The active practice of imaginative visioning has been utterly central for many societies. Far from being fantasy, such practices reinforce a deep unde...
Enchanted Lands: Remembering the Holy Hum Between Person and Place
25 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The word 'enchanted' is used a lot, from old fairy tales to modern pop culture. But enchantment is not something reserved for fairy stories ...
Orpheus: The Song Of Life โ A Conversation With Ann Wroe
17 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Heโs stirred the imagination of poets and writers and artists for 30 centuries. Rilke wrung his pale heart out to him. He finds his way into Shakesp...
The Goddess Wept All Night: That Little Matter of Sacrifice
27 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Itโs easy to dismiss the practice of sacrifice as brutal, but the fact is that sacrifice, enacted in varying degrees in both external and internal r...
Sei and Her Soul Are Separated: The Colonization of Consciousness and Reclaiming the Visionary State
20 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the modern western understanding of consciousness, certain states are afforded the status of more important, or real, than others. The visionary st...
Dispatches from the Cremation Ground: Comfort, Discomfort, and Surrender in Practice
13 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Modern yoga has put forward a vision of the whole human being that revolves around comfort, ease, freedom from pain, and the healing of trauma. Yet in...
The Shamanic Vonnegut: Or, The Fine Art of Hearing the Purple Hum
06 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In his classic novel Slaughterhouse Five, about four-dimensional alien beings and a protagonist that has come unstuck in time, Kurt Vonnegut describes...
Homer, Tolkien, and the Heart of the Visionary Experience: A Conversation with Robert Tindall
30 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
This week on The Emerald, a conversation with author Robert Tindall on Homer, Tolkien, Paleolithic cave art, Zen koans, Shakespeare, sacred song, and ...
Stone Soup: In Which I Argue Strongly in Favor of The Worship of Rocks
24 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Sacred stones are ubiquitous across India. You find them in villages, in rural shrines, and in major urban temples that see tens of thousands of pilgr...
The Fauna Mandala: Animals, Imagination, and Consciousness
16 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Animals have not only โshared the planetโ with human beings as we often hear on nature shows, which of course is a noble description intended to c...
Who Gets To Claim Objective Reality? An Imaginative Dive Into Cultural Fictions Along the Science-Spirit Divide
09 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
"I mean seriously, what's more out of touch with objective reality? The Lakota sense of Wakan-tanka, mother and father nature, mirrored in c...
Dismembered Frost Giants and the Core-Power Paradox โ Self-Care Meets Self-Obliteration in an Identity-Driven World.
03 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Ancient visions of cosmic dismemberment and ego destruction meet modern yoga practice with its focus on self-care and self-worth in this episode of Th...
The Yoga of Gun Control, The Grail Myth, and the Healing of the American Wound
25 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In this mytho-poetic look at one of the defining modern political issues, Josh explores ideas of freedom, empathy, and responsibility and how they are...
Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World: A Conversation With Wade Davis
18 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
What can we learn from those who can read the ocean like we can read words on a page? How can we transform how we view culture when modern western cul...
The Bright and Bristling Mind: Hair in Imagination and Myth
11 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Have you ever looked at your dog and wondered what it feels like to have whiskers? Those bristling antennae, so bright and alive... Or have you put yo...
The Cow in the Elevator โ An Anthropology of Wonder. An Interview with Professor Tulasi Srinavas
26 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Today on the Emerald, we dive a little further into the topic of wonder. Not wonder as just a fleeting feeling, but rather wonder as a state of consci...
The Case of the Man Who Grew Horns: Imagination as a Driving Force of the Human Experience
26 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Today on The Emerald. How did paleolithic and neolithic peoples see the world? What if, as an increasing number of anthropologists now think, they had...
Notre Dame in Flames, The Goddess Isis, and the Architecture of Consciousness
26 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In this inaugural episode of The Emerald we take a look at some of the more mythic implications of the 2019 Notre Dame fire, the place that buildings ...