The mummified body of a Pre-dynastic Egyptian man known as Gebelein Man (formerly called Ginger) in the British Museum Editing the mummy encyclopedia over the past year and a half has left me with a still-active internal radar that scans the media incessantly for mummy-related news, and a recent (May 20) piece in The Independent…
Category: Society & Culture
Guerilla ontology on nuclear steroids: The realism of ‘Godzilla’
Charles Fort wrote, “I cannot say that truth is stranger than fiction, because I have never had acquaintance with either. . . . There is the hyphenated state of truth-fiction.” Robert Anton Wilson wrote, “The main thing I learned in my experiments is that reality is always plural and mutable. . . . Alan Watts…
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…
Bobcat Goldthwaite: Why have a civilization if we’re no longer interested in being civilized?
A couple of years ago when I watched the movie God Bless America, written and directed by Bobcat Goldthwaite (whom I once had the pleasure of seeing live when he was doing standup comedy), it didn’t turn out to be as good in its entirety as I had hoped. The trailer (see below) had been…
Eckhart Tolle on enlightenment, ego, and apocalyptic collapse
Eckhart Tolle I have sometimes wondered about the reactions of my readers whenever I mention the writings of Eckhart Tolle with approval, as I have done several times. Tolle is a best-selling writer whose books occupy the same general “mind/body/spirit” publishing niche as those of Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, etc. He’s a speaker who has…
Uncanny impact: The paranormal implications of the missing Malaysian airliner
I presume that at this point we’ve all heard about the (apparently serious?) speculations by a CNN personality that a black hole or an unspecified supernatural force might be responsible for the disappearance of Malaysian Flight MH370. Weird as this is, it’s only slightly weirder than the recent and sudden decision to radically relocate the…
Rebranding Giordano Bruno: How the new ‘Cosmos’ spins the history of religion and science
The updated/remade version of the classic Carl Sagan series Cosmos has been drawing lots of attention in the past few weeks, both positive and negative, and one of the areas that has come under the most scrutiny is the show’s inaccurate portrayal of Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century philosopher, occultist, mystic, and proto-scientist whose life and…
The Cultural Sounds of Apocalypse
Sounds of Apocalypse, Part Two “The Walls of Jericho Fall Down” by Gustave DorĂ© This is Part Two of contributor Dominik Irtenkauf’s four-part essay “Sounds of Apocalypse.” Before reading it you may want to read Part One, “Roar of Creation and Destruction,” in which Dominik lays the explanatory groundwork for the theme he is pursuing….
Collapse and dystopia: Three recent updates on our possible future
It looks like we can forget about “collapse fatigue,” the term — which I just now made up (or maybe not) — for the eventual exhaustion of the doom-and-collapse meme that has been raging its way through our collective public discourse and private psyches for the past decade-plus. I say this based on three recent…
Jacques Ellul’s nightmare vision of a technological dystopia
It’s lovely to see one of my formative philosophical influences, and a man whose dystopian critique of technology is largely unknown to the populace at large these days — although it has deeply influenced such iconic cultural texts as Koyaanisqatsi — getting some mainstream attention (in The Boston Globe, two years ago): Imagine for a…