Joseph Campbell once said that any new myth, in the “high” sense of the word as an overarching, meaning-making narrative, would necessarily have to be planetary in scope and nature, given the global outlook of our modern technological civilization. He said the famous image of planet earth as photographed from space — an image unknown…
Author: Matt Cardin
Teeming Brain founder and editor Matt Cardin is the author of DARK AWAKENINGS, DIVINATIONS OF THE DEEP, A COURSE IN DEMONIC CREATIVITY: A WRITER'S GUIDE TO THE INNER GENIUS, and TO ROUSE LEVIATHAN. He is also the editor of BORN TO FEAR: INTERVIEWS WITH THOMAS LIGOTTI and the academic encyclopedias MUMMIES AROUND THE WORLD; GHOSTS, SPIRITS, AND PSYCHICS: THE PARANORMAL FROM ALCHEMY TO ZOMBIES; and HORROR LITERATURE THROUGH HISTORY.
‘This myth is realized today in us’: On the deep meaning of Christmas
Most of my readers know that I grew up in a strongly evangelical Protestant tradition and went on to make the study of world religions, spiritualities, and philosophies a major part of my life. This informs all of my horror fiction (and in fact forms a great deal of its explicit substance), as well as…
Published: Ebook edition of ‘Divinations of the Deep’
During the past couple of years, I’ve been receiving requests for an ebook edition of Divinations of the Deep with increasing frequency, and today I’m pleased to announce that the wait is over. Divinations, the ebook, is now available in both Kindle and ePub formats (the latter for Nook, Kobo, and other ereaders). You can…
Aliens and ontology: Are abductions “not real” if they’re “just dreams”?
Note the predictable materialist-reductionist assumption that characterizes a newly reported round of research into the alien abduction phenomenon. Because people could be trained to see/experience aliens and abductions while such phenomena were clearly not physically happening, Michael Raduga of Los Angeles’ Out-of-Body Experience Research Center deemed the phenomena themselves to be, therefore, illusory products of…
“The Vampire Is Always within Us”: My SF Signal interview with Ian Holt
My interview with Dracula-and-vampire expert Ian Holt is now available at SF Signal: “The Vampire Is Always within Us: A Conversation with Ian Holt.” Ian is the man who co-wrote Dracula: The-Undead with Dacre Stoker, Bram Stoker’s great-grandnephew. As you probably already know, the book is the official, Stoker-family-sanctioned sequel to Bram’s classic novel. Ian’s…
Technology, ecology, and the real sin of Dr. Frankenstein
I first read Lewis Thomas’s wonderful Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Sympthony as an undergraduate communication major (philosophy minor) at the University of Missouri. In more than one of the essays contained therein, Thomas expresses the belief that many or most of humanity’s basic problems, including environmental and ecological ones, can only…
“Accepting the Monster into Your Heart”: Horror as a spiritual path
Recently, I was telling some of my college students about a shift in mass entertainment culture. A few years ago, I told them, I began to feel as if “my time,” and also that of my generation — namely, Generation X — had finally arrived. Somewhere around the turn of millennium, the appearance of things…
Penn State announces new sleep paralysis study
During my Darkness Radio interview last week, I mentioned the culture-wide surge of awareness and interest in sleep paralysis that has occurred during the past few decades, and especially in the past four and five years. From being an experience and phenomenon that was essentially forgotten, or rather suppressed from memory, in Western culture at…
The Occupy movement as global insurrection and revolution
Leave it to Daniel Pinchbeck to provide a predictably excellent statement of what the consciousness movement could or should be doing relative to the worldwide Occupy phenomenon. I heard a few days ago that he was scheduled to address the assembled protesters in New York City. This new and short piece at Reality Sandwich is,…
Shadow people, sleep paralysis, and discarnate dark entities: My guest spot on Darkness Radio
Four days ago, on October 11, I was the featured guest on Darkness Radio, the popular paranormal radio show originating out of Minneapolis on KTLK and hosted by David Schrader (of the Travel Channel’s Paranormal Challenge and Ghost Adventures). The topic was sleep paralysis, shadow people, and discarnate dark entities — all things I’ve talked…