A Google Books preview of my mummy encyclopedia is now available. At least from my end — and I know these previews tend to shift and alter sometimes — it shows the full table of contents (two of them, actually, one alphabetical and the other topically organized), the full preface and introduction, portions of the…
Category: Religion & Philosophy
Interview with James Fadiman: The Daemon and the Doors of Perception
Dr. James Fadiman Just published and now available here at The Teeming Brain: my interview/conversation with Dr. James Fadiman, one of the pioneers of transpersonal psychology and modern research into the spiritual and therapeutic applications of psychedelics. This has been a long time in coming, for reasons that I explain in the interview’s introduction. The…
To reject philosophy is to embrace the Matrix
To reject philosophical thinking, as Neil deGrasse Tyson recently and blatantly did, is to consent to living in a false world of your own unexamined biases and assumptions.
A new interview with me: “Life and Mind of a Teeming Brain”
My online friend Rafael Melo has just published a new interview with me at his blog Cloudy Sky. Topics include my reasons for writing about horror and religion and such, my creative process, the centrality of depression and dread in my life as a writer, my favorite music and movies, the deep meaning of…
Beyond the Beautiful Darkness: Mark Samuels on Atheism, Christianity, Weird Horror, and the Road out of Hell
EDITOR’S NOTE: The Teeming Brain interview with Mark Samuels has long been one of our most popular features, and with this post we finally welcome Mark to our Teem of contributors. Mark’s interview was published back in 2006, and it still continues to draw a steady stream of readers these eight years later. This is…
Chris Hedges: Only the power of sacred imagination can save us
I’m always struck by the passion and power of Chris Hedges’ words whenever he mingles his signature brand of journalistic-prophetic doomsaying with reflections on spiritual and artistic issues. (No surprise that he’s quite lucid in the latter area, by the way; he does have a Master of Divinity from Harvard, after all.) Current case in…
‘The Forbidden Forest’ – Short film inspired by Arthur Machen’s ‘The White People’
Directed, animated, scored, and edited by filmmaker Keith Ronindelli, this amazing short film evokes the dark mystery and sacred terror of Arthur Machen’s classic tale “The White People” in just six minutes. I’m personally struck by the depth and richness of both the vision and the execution, and by the sheer awesomeness of the hallucinatory…
‘Mummies around the World’ now available for preorder
I’m pleased to announce that my mummy encyclopedia is now available for preorder from the publisher, and also from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and elsewhere. The scheduled publication date is November 30. From the official publisher’s description: Perfect for school and public libraries, this is the only reference book to combine pop culture with science…
Anthony Hopkins on philosophy, shamanism, and ‘a landscape of darkness and horror’ in ‘Noah’
“The Flood” by Johann Heinrich Schönfeld (1634/35) Via Art and the Bible, Fair Use I recently saw the Noah movie, and I’m pleased to report that I really liked it. The angle taken by writer-director Darren Aronofsky and his co-writer Ari Handel struck me as deeply engrossing and just right for our collective cultural moment….
Scientism, the fantastic, and the nature of consciousness
Religion scholar Jeffrey Kripal is one of the most lucid and brilliant voices in the current cultural conversation about the relationship between science and the paranormal, and about the rehabilitation of the latter as an important concept and category after a century of scorn, derision, and dismissal by the gatekeepers of mainstream cultural and intellectual…