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The Emerald
30 episodes
Bronze Age Reset: De- and Re-Mythologizing the Manosphere
Ep 101 · Aug 10, 2026 · 2 hr 5 min
In a time of fracture, in which people are searching for meaning and belonging, it is no wonder that men are re-exploring what manhood means. Yet the sense-making project around manhood has veered from the mythic journey it rightly could and should be into decidedly different territory. The last several years have seen the rise of the alt-right manosphere, whose narratives journey into outright misogyny, eugenics racism, and advocated violence. To weave these stories, the manosphere reaches for…
Space Hex! (The Curse of Restlessness, Revisited)
Ep 100 · Jun 13, 2026 · 1 hr 1 min
“We don’t go to other planets because our planet is dying. Our planet dies, specifically because we perpetually want to go somewhere else.” Fresh off of the Initial Public Offering of Space X, the largest IPO in human history, it's worth revisiting the deeper implications of humanity's incessant drive... beyond. Today on the podcast, we look at humanity’s increasing obsession with transcending planet Earth, in the context of the mythologies of human restlessness. How human beings, whether throug…
Seven
Ep 99 · Jun 8, 2026 · 44 min
Seven years ago last Tuesday, The Emerald podcast was born. This episode reflects on the journey of the podcast so far and gives hints of what's to come, all through the prism of the number 7, which is — to say the least — a mythically important number. The myths often iterate in cycles and families of seven—seven swans, seven dwarves, seven ravens, and seven gates of the underworld. In many traditions, seven represents the completion of a cycle and the beginning of a new one. In Ayurveda, in or…
Enter the Dragon, Part 2: On Order and Chaos
Ep 98 · May 1, 2026 · 2 hr 12 min
The dragon, or serpent, in myth and story, is the coiling, spiraling power of nature itself. And so, how cultures have treated the dragon depends a lot on how they view nature and how they view the world. Some have celebrated and honored the serpent power, some have sought to harness or direct it, others to contain or tame it, while some have labeled it as chaos and sought to subdue and slay it. The history of the Western world's relationship with dragons and serpents is fraught, and Western myt…
Enter The Dragon, Terrifying and Beautiful (Part 1)
Ep 97 · Feb 17, 2026 · 1 hr 59 min
Dragon lore is everywhere in global mythology — no matter what continent you live on, the land you inhabit holds dragon story, and quite possibly was shaped by dragons, or has sleeping dragons in it. Such dragons have captured human imagination across hundreds of cultures and thousands of years. But the dragon is much more than a category of fantastical beast. In many traditions the world-dragon, or world-serpent, is creator, land-shaper, present in the water cycle and in weather systems and in…
Carry That Weight: On Mythic Burdens and Cosmic Supports
Ep 96 · Nov 12, 2025 · 2 hr 16 min
There is a weight to modern existence — perhaps you've felt it. In a world in which social and environmental crises only seem to be deepening and our familial, communal and spiritual support systems are steadily crumbling, individuals are buckling under the weight. This weight is not simply metaphorical. When the web of relationships that traditionally hold human culture together is fractured, then sociocultural, ecological, and even cosmic burdens are funneled to individuals to carry. We often…
I Think I Hear the Coming of a Planetary Roar (with Louder Music)
Ep 95 · Sep 7, 2025 · 2 hr 6 min
In times of rising frustration over the state of nations, times of personal, ecological, societal, and planetary impasse, when cycles of senseless suffering seemingly repeat themselves over and over, and all the global upheaval still isn't bringing about change... in times when stuck energies need to move and forces that have been restrained for generations long to break free, the myths offer visions of roarers, bellowers, trumpeters, and conch-blasters. These movers and shakers do more than rel…
I Think I Hear the Coming of a Planetary Roar
Ep 94 · Aug 30, 2025 · 2 hr 6 min
In times of rising frustration over the state of nations, times of personal, ecological, societal, and planetary impasse, when cycles of senseless suffering seemingly repeat themselves over and over, and all the global upheaval still isn't bringing about change... in times when stuck energies need to move and forces that have been restrained for generations long to break free, the myths offer visions of roarers, bellowers, trumpeters, and conch-blasters. These movers and shakers do more than rel…
On Powers, Great and Small
Ep 93 · Jun 16, 2025 · 2 hr 6 min
POWER is on the mind these days, as the world grapples with shifting global power dynamics, old powers crumbling, new ones rising, and archaic power paradigms resurfacing… Yes, issues of power run rampant and discussions on power are front and center. But like everything else in modern discourse, the discussion on power has been decontextualized. Power is seen as an abstract bodiless force that governs from above, or an arbitrary human construct that is either relentlessly pursued or seen as 'ba…
Trickster Jumps Sides (Re-Issued for Tricky Times)
Ep 92 · Apr 2, 2025 · 1 hr 15 min
Tricksters and culture disruptors populate global mythology. From Loki to Coyote to Èṣù and Hermes, they bend rules, cross boundaries, commit deliberate and unintentional offenses and generally mess with established orders. Yet they are often seen as indispensable to these orders — they are renewers and cultural innovators and often pave the way for great change. So in many cultures, Tricksters, despite their shenanigans, are seen as sacred. In modern society, we have no such ritualization of cu…
On Singing to the Beloved in Times of Crisis
Ep 91 · Feb 27, 2025 · 2 hr 8 min
We live in times of individual, sociocultural and planetary crisis, exacerbated by rising divisions between people. How have humans historically navigated such times of crisis? Yes, we've organized, taken action, and responded as we've been called to respond. But we have also deepened our connection to the greater cosmos, through songs and poems and rituals of devotion, through crying out to a beloved universe whose workings remain a mystery but to whom we feel intimately and inextricably connec…
For the Divine Mother of the Universe (Remixed and Reissued)
Ep 90 · Jan 1, 2025 · 1 hr 39 min
There’s a lot of cultural clutter these days around 'The Goddess.' She appears everywhere, her many names are invoked free of context in a hundred thousand ways. She’s what? An empowerment tool. An archetype. A self-help course. A political symbol. Something that is invoked to bring more creative energy or material abundance into our lives. Something that, in an individualistic modern world, always seems to have a whole lot to do with us. Yet the goddess, traditionally, is much more than this. S…
This Episode is FIRE
Ep 89 · Nov 3, 2024 · 1 hr 51 min
In the deepest, oldest caverns of human memory, a fire burns... and that fire has been with human beings since the very beginning. Scientists now say that the human relationship with fire goes back over 1.5 million years. And so — fire has played a profound role in shaping human bodies and human consciousness in ways we're often unaware of. For fire... changed everything. It took us out of the immediacy of the animal experience and gave us a focal point, a place to gather and tell stories, to id…
(Why Mindfulness Isn't Enough)
Ep 88 · Oct 1, 2024 · 1 hr 36 min
In recent years, the practice of 'mindfulness' has become ubiquitous. Mindfulness has outgrown its traditional Buddhist roots and now permeates modern wellness and optimization culture, finding its way into corporate boardrooms, therapist's toolkits, and an ever-increasing number of calmness apps. Yet modern iterations of mindfulness practice often live removed from their original context. The forest ecology from which mindfulness grew was animate and alive, and what we call mindfulness practice…
Guardians and Protectors!
Ep 87 · Sep 2, 2024 · 2 hr 32 min
Practices of guardianship — invoking guardian deities, enlisting spirit help, clearing spaces of questionable energies, and establishing boundaries around ritual, communal, and personal space — are common to animate traditions across the world. In many traditions, guardianship is absolutely central as we navigate a world of forces, not all of which are traditionally seen as beneficial. So traditional practitioners — even as they commune with the natural world — also draw clear boundaries, send w…
Let Us Sing of the Syncretic Gods of Outcasts and Wanderers
Ep 86 · May 24, 2024 · 2 hr 12 min
The story of human ritual and cultural tradition is one of depth and deep connection to land, to place, and to processes and protocols that remain steady across generations. But it's also a story of constant mutation, assimilation, and re-expression. There is a fluidity to culture and tradition that is not always acknowledged in modern discourse. Religious scholars will tell us that all traditions are — to one degree or another — syncretic, and when we lift the lid off of traditions and look dee…
On Clouds and Cosmic Law
Ep 85 · Apr 9, 2024 · 1 hr 58 min
In the modern world, words like 'law' and 'order' carry with them a good deal of sociocultural baggage, and are often associated with restriction, burden, and arbitrarily imposed rules. Yet historically, tradition after tradition sees an innate, artful order to the natural world and views the Law of the Land as something vibrant and alive, present in the breath and in the waters and in the endless cycling of the clouds. In this living vision of Law, nature unfolds along particular patterns and p…
Oh Justice
Ep 84 · Mar 3, 2024 · 3 hr 19 min
In times of global upheaval, ecological destruction, and societal inequity, justice can seem very far away. Justice in the modern world is often viewed as a contract, an agreement forged between human beings rather than something inherent to the natural world. And yet, for many cultures and traditions, justice is seen as a living presence, as the actual dynamic flow of cause and effect that serves to keep a larger natural balance. Tradition after tradition speaks of the larger law of the cosmos…
For the Intuitives (Part 2)
Ep 83 · Dec 31, 2023 · 1 hr 59 min
Across the globe, the arrival of 'civilization' brought with it the persecution of the seer, the shaman, and the visionary. Why? Perhaps it is because civilization, with its narratives of individual agency and control, its relentless emphasis on forward progress, its commitment to the removal of mystery from daily life, and its encouragement of numbness over feeling, is fundamentally at odds with the seer's sensitivities and alignment to larger forces beyond human control. So modernity pushes th…
For the Intuitives (Part 1)
Ep 82 · Nov 21, 2023 · 1 hr 37 min
Across cultures and traditions, there have always been those that speak with the dead, hear voices, enter states of oracular trance, and receive visions of what is to come. Such sensitivity, traditionally, is common. It's common to have premonitions that come to pass, to have dream experiences that translate into day-to-day life, and to be in continual felt dialogue with ancestors, with the dead, and with a larger world of animate forces. For most of human history, the people that received such…
All of My Lessons Come in the Form of a Sound ( w/ Trevor Hall)
Ep 81 · Oct 21, 2023 · 1 hr 43 min
There is... a sound. Many, through the ages, have heard it. It echoes in the world all around us, it reverberates in songs of joy and lament, it vibrates in the names of the gods and goddesses themselves. Across the world, tradition after tradition describes a sound that is the source of all sound, a sound that can be heard if we practice attuning ourselves to it. So the Indian yogi follows the sound OM to its source, the Brazilian Umbanda practitioner rides a thread of vibration to the great vi…
Reissue: On Trauma and Vegetation Gods
Ep 80 · Aug 28, 2023 · 1 hr 13 min
Modern discussions on healing individual minds, cultural wounds, and painful societal histories now revolve around the word ‘trauma.’ Yet addressing trauma is nothing new — traditional cultures across the globe have historically had their own forms of trauma work, without ever labeling it trauma work. For many cultures for many years, cathartic ritual practice that bypasses the conditioned mind has served multiple purposes as it regrows and re-patterns brains and bodies and communities. These ri…
So You Want to Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers... (The AI Episode)
Ep 79 · Jul 12, 2023 · 1 hr 58 min
The rise of Artificial Intelligence has generated a rush of conversation about benefits and risks, about sentience and intelligence, and about the need for ethics and regulatory measures. Yet it may be that the only way to truly understand the implications of AI — the powers, the potential consequences, and the protocols for dealing with world-altering technologies — is to speak mythically. With the rise of AI, we are entering an era whose only corollary is the stuff of fairy tales and myths. Po…
Inanimate Objects Aren't Inanimate (Or Objects)
Ep 78 · Jun 6, 2023 · 2 hr 6 min
In the myths and fairytales, everything teems with sentience and agency... Everything is alive. There are talking trees and singing stones and hedges that move of their own will. Mirrors speak. Swords dance. There are flying carpets and far-seeing spyglasses and cloaks and boots that leap by themselves. This pervasive insistence in the old stories that absolutely everything is alive — that everything has eyes — butts up against modern rationality and therefore gets marginalized as childish 'fant…
Animism is Normative Consciousness (Re-mixed, Re-musicked, and Re-released)
Ep 77 · May 9, 2023 · 1 hr 3 min
For 98% of human history — over 10,000 generations — our ancestors lived, breathed, and interacted with a world that they saw and felt to be animate — imbued with life force, inhabited by and permeated with beings with which we exist in ongoing relation. This animate vision was the water in which we swam, it was consciousness in its natural dwelling place, the normative way of seeing the world and our place in it. It wasn’t a theory, a philosophy, or an idea. It wasn’t, actually, an "-ism." It w…
The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized, Part 2 (Interview w/ Báyò Akómoláfé)
Ep 76 · Apr 7, 2023 · 1 hr 17 min
Báyò Akómoláfé is an author, celebrated speaker, teacher, and self-styled trans-public intellectual whose vocation goes beyond justice and speaking truth to power to opening up other spaces of power-with. In this episode of The Emerald, Báyò joins Josh for a deep-dive discussion into how the Western psychological vision shapes modernity, and the need to expand into alternative stories of what 'being' means. Says Báyò: "Psychology is complicit in the creation of Western modernity. It is not a thi…
The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized
Ep 75 · Feb 21, 2023 · 1 hr 38 min
Once upon a time, psychologist James Hillman spoke of anima, the breath of life, the soul of the world, as something that had to be rescued by psychologists from theologians. Now, with pop-psychology vernacular inundating all aspects of life, it may be time for the breath of life to be rescued all over again. The New York Times recently released an article entitled 'The Problem with Letting Therapy Speak Invade Everything.' Philosopher Bayo Akomolafe writes of the need to 'decenter Western psych…
Universe, Adorned: Ornament in Culture, Cosmos, and Consciousness
Ep 74 · Jan 9, 2023 · 1 hr 52 min
Human beings adorn. Scientists now say that the earliest adornments date back over 160,000 years. Why is adornment so universal? It is easy to see adornment as simply an indication of status, wealth, and identity. But adornment is also more than this. The word 'adorn' and 'ornament' relate directly to the word 'order,' to the pattern of the cosmos. And so to adorn has also been associated with aligning to a greater pattern, a pattern evident in the harmonic structures of nature and expressed in…
On Birds, and the Imperative of Mystic Flight
Ep 73 · Nov 24, 2022 · 1 hr 44 min
Birds in myth are messengers, deliverers of prophecy, and instigators of journeys. But birds are much more than this. Human neurobiology is deeply linked to birds, who, through the arcing patterns of their flight, their hypnotic songs, and their high, piercing calls, awakened human sense faculties, taught us to look up in wonder, and therefore gave us the ability to soar into imaginal spaces. Somatically, we ideate, journey, and soar because of our coevolution with birds. So we find the influenc…
Embodiment Means Being Torn Apart and Flying Away
Ep 72 · Oct 24, 2022 · 1 hr 28 min
Modern embodiment discourse has arisen as a reaction to the Western world's fraught history with bodies. In a world of deep fracture from the natural world, the current emphasis on embodiment serves to help reclaim a relationship with ecology and with the sacredness of the immediate. But what does 'embodiment' really mean? For some, embodiment is synonymous with wellness. For others, embodiment is related to ongoing personal processing. Often, traditional cultures are held up as examples of embo…
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