Metaphysics, Folklore, Spirituality
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Read more: Why Did Sasquatch Endure as America’s Most Recognizable Folklore Monster?
On the morning of August 27, 1958, a bulldozer operator named Jerry Crew climbed onto his machine at a road-building site near Bluff Creek, in the old-growth country of Northern California, and noticed enormous humanlike footprints pressed into the graded dirt. He did what a practical man does: he m
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Read more: Loch Ness Monster & The Surgeon’s Photo: Evidence or Hoax?
Some legends are born in the mouth, carried from hearth to hearth and polished by generations. Others are born in a press room, stamped onto paper in a single day and multiplied into thousands of identical memories. The modern legend of the Loch Ness Monster grew from both kinds of birth: older Scottish stories about…
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Read more: The Siberian Unicorn and the Folklore of Fossils
In the frozen steppes of Siberia, beneath layers of permafrost and ice, there once lay a colossal skull unlike any other. The wind-whipped grasslands of the Ice Age had buried this secret for millennia. When at last the skull was unearthed by modern hands, its heavy bones spoke of a creature that bridged myth and…
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Read more: Egypt’s Sacred Cats – From Myth to Meme
Have you seen the videos? A young woman presses play on her smartphone, and a haunting melody of ancient flutes fills her living room. Her cat, previously lounging lazily on the windowsill, bolts upright. Ears perked, eyes wide, the feline seems transfixed by the mysterious music echoing from millennia past. This is a scene playing…
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Read more: The Rise of Dark Christmas: Folklore, Mischief, and Pop Culture
On a crisp December night, under twinkling lights and candy cane stripes, a different kind of Christmas spirit stirs. Instead of sugarplum fairies, we glimpse horned silhouettes and skeletal grins peeking from the edges of our holiday cheer. A new generation has welcomed old ghosts and dark visitors into the season’s festivities. Figures like Krampus,…
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Read more: Holidays without Christmas: A Collection of Winter Festivals from Around the World
As a non-christian omnist, I have complicated feelings about the celebration of Christmas. Although we in the United States are often told that a “traditional” Christ-focused Christmas is central to the American identity, the truth is that Christmas was outlawed for several decades by a congress that was, arguably, made up of more practicing Christians.…
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Read more: Conscious Agents and the Simulation of Reality
Imagine sitting at your kitchen table, pressing a solid mug of coffee to your lips. It feels undeniably real… the cool ceramic against your skin, the bitter aroma of coffee in the air. But can you be certain the mug exists as you perceive it? Throughout history we’ve been prompted to doubt our senses. In…
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Read more: Could Our Consciousness Exist in Another Spatial Dimension?
Consciousness is the simple word for the complex processes of how we experience our world. Each of us has a vivid inner life that accompanies the firing of neurons in our brain. Yet the nature of consciousness remains one of the greatest mysteries in science. How does the soggy, electric tissue of the brain produce…
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Read more: A New Dawn for Psychedelics – Microdosing and the Road to Legalization
In the mid-20th century, psychedelic substances like LSD and psilocybin mushrooms went from scientific curiosities to symbols of the counterculture. In the 1950s and 60s, researchers explored LSD’s potential to treat mental illness, and some psychiatrists reported promising results. But by the late 1960s, these hallucinogens escaped the lab and exploded into popular use, sparking…
