NOTE: This article is the final part of a series. Captain America is the member of the Avengers who is most obviously wearing a costume. It’s not a battlesuit or a uniform. It’s not the cultural garb of a mystical race. It’s a costume. This is significant, because his costume indicates his deepest identity as…
Category: Columns
Halfway between Earth and Stars: A Meditation on Sacred Sites and Future Mysteries
At the very earliest appearance of human civilization we observe the presence and importance of geometry. It is clearly evident that geometry was comprehended and utilized by the ancient Master Builders, who, laboring at the dawn of civilization some four and one half millennia ago, bestowed upon the world such masterworks as the megalithic structures…
Remote Viewing, Reality, and the Human Condition: Reflections on a Weekend with Russell Targ
There is no other discipline that I know which engages at the same time a person’s critical faculties and his imagination and then stretches them both to a comparable extent. — John Beloff, “The Study of the Paranormal as an Educative Experience” On the campus of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, the United States’…
Cosmic Horror, Sacred Terror, and the Nightside Transformation of Consciousness
What’s this? A discussion of current horror cinema that contrasts H. P. Lovecraft’s worldview of cosmic horror, pessimism, and despair with Arthur Machen’s worldview of redemptive sacred terror? And it’s published by — wait for it — Christianity Today magazine? The stars, it seems, are aligning. One is rife with despair, the other clings to…
Soothsayers, Seers, and other Specters of the Skeptical Mind
I remember the last time I consulted a soothsayer. ‘Twas in the early of the year, and sorrow had wont to call upon my home. Where, I thought dimly, shall I find succor now my very rooms themselves speak to me of tragedy? Aye me, the pains of a soul lost in this ill-lit world…
Deep Shadows and Numinous Horror: Introducing “Echoes from Hades”
The question of whether I found Horror or Horror found me is a longstanding one, and despite much contemplation, Iâm no closer to a definitive answer. Perhaps there isnât one to be had. Either way, Horror unquestionably crept into my world early, and with indelible power. My name is Richard Gavin. I am a Canadian…
The Avengers: Clothes Make the Iron Man (Men in Tights, Part 3)
The other big superhero film this year was The Avengers, or Avengers Assemble, as it was known in the UK. The reason for the name change was to avoid confusion with the old TV series, but that still didn’t stop thousands of people all across the Internet thinking it was funny and saying, “The Avengers?…
Humility and Silence: Where True Science and True Spirituality Meet
It is said that we live in an age of light, but it would be truer to say that we are living in an age of twilight; here and there a luminous ray pierces through the mists of darkness, but does not light to full clearness either our reason or our hearts. Men are not…
Awake inside the American Nightmare
The responsibility for being a real person instead of an economic zombie-drone whose raison d’ĂȘtre is employment by and for the system and its goal of indefinite self-perpetuation lies entirely on you. Only you can wake up. The organs of the American Nightmare can’t and won’t do it for you, and this includes the colleges, including, increasingly, the liberal arts ones.
Spider-Man: Totem and Tragedy (Men in Tights, Part 2)
[NOTE: This is Part 2 of a column series titled Men in Tights. For the introduction, see Part 1, “Batman: Daemon with a Cape.”] Spider-Man is another superhero whose origin is steeped in tragedy. When scrawny egghead Peter Parker is granted superpowers by a radioactive spider-bite, he decides to make some money by working as…