2016, Planetary Mythologies and the Crisis of the Serpent
2016 isn’t the culprit. The mythologies we’ve used as a global culture are collapsing around us. Where do we look to find new ones?
Psychedelic, Shamanic, and Magickal Themes in Anime Culture
Ancient mythic themes emerge anew in video game virtuality and anime culture as expressions of the unconscious desire to shamanize, or walk between the material and spiritual planes of existence.
Psychedelic, Shamanic, and Magickal Themes in Video Game Culture
A cursory view of video game history demonstrates the pervasive historical and real world applications of shamanism and sorcery that lie latent in many popular titles masquerading as mere fiction.
Why Following Your Bliss is Bullshit
Once we pull back the veil and dissolve the illusory hype about following our bliss, we see that this whole arena of living our soul purpose, following our daemon, giving our talent and artistry, is a real gift of lasting value.
Radiation: Metaphysical Energies and Super Sexualities
Einsteinian physics and the atomic bombing of Japan birthed an era of global anxiety and metaphysical awe. Thus the major mythemes of science fiction and the comic book superhero came to play a special role in the early 1960s and the American counterculture.
Truth or Fiction
For
centuries, even millennia, humans have believed that a conflict exists in the
human mind — a conflict between
good and evil. But this isn't true. Good and evil are just the result of the
conflict, because the real conflict is between the truth and lies.
Biting the Apple: The Impossibility of Postmodern Innocence
Mary's ability to reproduce asexually occurred through divine intervention, but today we are able to create new life through human intervention. Sex and reproduction have been uncoupled, troubling commonly held and often heterosexist notions of gender, sexuality, family, and kinship.
An Army of Jacks to Fight the Power
Money could be seen as an exteriorized soul to be locked away so that our bodies acquire magical invulnerability. But it need not be hidden away — it can be circulated and "beget" itself endlessly in usury. It constitutes humanity's one really totally successful experiment in magic:
Pregnant With Meaning
Whether a naked Sheela-na-gig flaunting her enlarged vagina or a Madonna protecting her swollen belly with layers of reticent robes, feminine icons defy our inclination to identify the one "correct" reading of an image. They require us to employ multiple readings, a skill that is vital to feminist inquiry and, perhaps, to our very survival.
Myth, Gods, and Video Games
We have a real, innate desire to see our dreams come to life. Video games can help us understand our potential to become the gods and myths of our imagination.
