The Emerald explores the human experience through a vibrant lens of myth, story, and imagination. Brought to life through the wise, wild, and humorous vision of Joshua Michael Schrei — a teacher and lifelong student of the cosmologies and mythologies of the world — the podcast draws from a deep well of poetry, lore, and mythos to challenge conventional narratives on politics and public discourse, meditation and mindfulness, art, science, literature, and more. At the heart of the podcast is the premise that the imaginative, poetic, animate heart of human experience — elucidated by so many cultures over so many thousands of years — is missing in modern discourse and is urgently needed at a time when humanity is facing unprecedented problems. The Emerald advocates for an imaginative vision of human life and human discourse as it questions deep underlying assumptions about societal progress.
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Traditional mythic, animist, and astrological systems have long told us that the moon is more than a distant, detached object in space, but rather plays an active role in governing the daily rhythms of life. The moon — in its repetitive pulse — gave early humans the first systems of measurement and the first calendars. So the word 'moon' is directly related to the words meter, measure, and memory, and is tied to all human endeavors that repeat. Repetitive ritual enactment — humanity's primal mea...
How many myths and stories and fairy tales take place in... the forest? The forest in these stories is more than just setting or backdrop. It is a character of its own, alive, awake, animate, both treacherous and beautiful. The forest doesn't 'represent' something abstract in the myths, it is exactly what it was for our ancestors — a place of beauty and peril, of life and death, of food and devouring, of danger and wonder. To step into the forest is to step outside of linear, organized time and ...
The horrors of war have been part of the human story since the beginning. While there have been differences in how different cultures have done it, war is so widespread that it is impossible to see it as anything other than a primal human drive that fulfills some type of deep somatic need. What is that somatic need? It is easy to chalk war up to a base and 'primitive' aggression or to cold, calculated policy objectives. But an increasing number of scholars and thinkers are finding something else...
Shapeshifting is nearly universal to global mythic tradition. The myths of the world feature shapeshifting gods, shapeshifting animals, shapeshifting spirits, and, of course, shapeshifting people who assume the forms of tigers, bears, wolves, eagles, and more. The prevalence of shapeshifting in myth challenges our assumptions about the static nature of selfhood. Yet even from the scientific view, we are shapeshifters. We contain multitudes of beings within us — we are at once fish, bird, mammal,...
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...
Modern culture increasingly encroaches on unknown, uncharted space, both geographical and mental. This primordial space is accessed during times when we unplug, slow down, and allow ourselves to incubate and connect to a deeper rhythm. Traditionally, this space was accessed in trance rituals, in journeys to underworlds and otherworlds and in festivals which exist outside of mundane time. Access to this space is the true intention of the holidays — the holy days — that are meant to be time outsid...
Science fiction writers and tech enthusiasts have long spoken of a digital Metaverse — a virtual otherworld that, as the narrative goes, is the logical next phase in human technological development. This Metaverse serves a deep mythosomatic function — it satisfies our collective need for otherworlds, for trance, for mythic narrative, for journeying, and even for shapeshifting. Yet it does so removed from all somatic context — without the accompanying ritual, without any somatic sacrifice, withou...
Just in time for Holiday season, an episode that dives into the deep role of festivals in providing regular, ritualized access to states of rapture and initiation. For thousands upon thousands of years, the festival formed the drumbeat of culture. Festivals forged bonds and provided communal and individual focus. The festival gave space for grief, for rapture, for joy, for renewal. Hurts were healed at the festival… thresholds crossed, revolutions hatched, at the festival. The festival renewed o...
The word ‘resonance’ is commonly used these days to convey agreement with a point of view or perspective. But resonance is much more than this. ‘Resonance’ implies a universe that is sonorous and reverberatory and that operates according to the principles of harmony. Within this, many cultures have seen the role of the human being to become an instrument — to cultivate, through ritual repetition, a resonance with our fellow beings, with land, and with cosmos. This vision is not metaphorical. Sci...
Sophie Strand describes herself as a writer, an animist troubadour, and a giant pile of composting leaves. Her lyrical, eco-centric vision of the mythic has gained her a wide following, as she blasts monomyths wide open into swarms of glittering spores. With essays entitled 'My Saint is a Weed,' 'Confessions of a Compost Heap,' and 'Becoming a Ruin,' Sophie's work brings the mythic into the tangible, helps myths regain their body, and places stories deep in the middle of a living ecosystem of ti...
Modern studies of mystic states focus on the 'ineffability' of the ecstatic experience — the impossibility of explaining what the experience was like. Yet mystic experience might be indescribable in modern culture simply because we’ve failed to culturally describe it. For those cultures historically who tread the mystic space with great regularity, there’s nothing indescribable about it. Mystic unity has been mapped. The people who have tread its spaces for thousands of years describe in scintil...
Building on Vonnegut's idea that stories have mappable energetic shapes, this episode delves into how myths function as somatic journeys, mirroring natural cycles like breath and seasons. It discusses how these wave dynamics, from the hero's journey to divine dismemberment and rejoining, are felt kinesthetically, influencing brain activity and memory. The episode argues that ancient stories transmit vital life forces, addressing issues not through analysis, but through directional energetic shifts, essential for navigating life beyond mere abstraction.
Trance, traverse, transformation, tradition, transcendence, transgression — all come from a single Indo-European linguistic root TRA, which signifies some type of crossing over. Crossing over is something human beings have always been inclined to do — populations migrate across great expanses as explorers seek new horizons. Too much emphasis on crossing over, however, can lead to worldviews of transcendence, in which the purpose of existence is to 'get past' rather than exist in harmony with wha...
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...
In his book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, author, teacher, artist and Apalech clan member Tyson Yunkaporta presents a model of five minds — kinship mind, story mind, ancestor mind, pattern mind, and dreaming mind — that together form a way of seeing, knowing, and interacting with the world in a relational context. This episode looks at the rampant fragmentation in the modern world — which impacts everything from spiritual movements to transhumanist science to conspirator...
Stories of lightning and lightning-bearers pervade global mythology. With so many tales of mighty gods who punish mortals with lightning it can be easy to view the presence of lightning in the myths as simply a metaphor for power or brute force. Yet the lightning myths go a lot deeper than this. Across the world, the traditions most familiar with states of ecstatic rapture use a common language of lightning. This lyrical episode re-awakens the story of Semele, mother of Dionysus — herself incine...
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...
With the announcement that water futures have begun trading on the stock market, it's time to take a deeper look at our relationship with water. Water challenges us to ask how we are in relationship to something that is both continuous and discrete, something that flows, moves, evaporates, seeps, and pours forth. Yet rather than honor this multivalent nature of water, humans have tended to treat water as an object and a servant. Water is compartmentalized, sequestered, and marginalized, bottled ...
Human beings need ecstatic trance. Trance states have played a vital and necessary role in human culture and in the shaping of human history, causing some anthropologists to label the attainment of these states the 'main need' of the 'ceremonial animal' that is the human being. Trance states traditionally help communities reinforce shared bonds, establish values, gain insight into the nature of reality, establish reciprocal relation with the natural world, and even heal. Yet in the modern world,...
Water is life — all life on planet earth depends on it. So it is no surprise that in the mythic visions of all peoples, water teems with personhood and agency and speaks with many voices. The Ancient Greek world was populated with water beings, who existed not just as abstract concepts but as living entities that were deeply tied with ecstatic trance rituals. The Greeks heard the voices of hundreds of distinct animate forces in the sea, voices of melancholy and bliss and rapture. This joyous lon...
The link between music and trance is so deep that many ethnomusicologists will say that every single culture on the planet has some form of musically-driven trance tradition. Right at the heart of these traditions sits the drum. Far from being a 'primitive' instrument, the drum is advanced technology — more often than not, it is the essential instrument that opens up the doorway to states of rapture. This long-known power has led to the development of intricate cultures of trance drumming from W...
Telling people to 'just listen to reason' or 'just look at the facts' in a post-fact world mired in addictive consumption is akin to telling an addict 'just stop using.' Well intentioned, but not ultimately addressing the root of the issue. So while rational analysis of factual sources is certainly necessary to combat conspiracy and widespread untruths, there are deeper forces at play within human minds, hearts, and societies that ultimately must be addressed in order to find a harmonious way of...
For 98% of human history, 99.9% of our ancestors lived, breathed, and interacted with a world that they saw and felt to be animate. Imbued with lifeforce. Inhabited by and permeated with forces, 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 was felt experience. I...
Spontaneous expressions of gratitude on this Thanksgiving Day, and a look at the role that gratitude plays in consciousness, community, and cosmos. Support the show
Light, within nature, has always drawn us in, held our attention, and revealed marvels through its variegated displays. Coleridge said that the “eye is to light like lover to the beloved.” Light and human attention share a very deep relationship. And with our attention increasingly drawn towards a luminous focal point that is manufactured, it becomes more and more difficult to experience something essential that exists in the meeting point between us and the light of nature around us. This meeti...
Who remembers Medusa? Hair of snakes, gaze that can turn to stone, beheaded by Perseus… that Medusa. She's in the news again, because a sculptor has re-imagined the story of Perseus and Medusa as a tribute to the #MeToo movement — and this time, Medusa's the one doing the beheading. Some have embraced this re-telling, but the founder of #MeToo has spoken out strongly against it, saying that #MeToo isn't about vengeance or simply 'turning the tables.' Lost in the current dialogue is the sacred pl...
The defining characteristic of the postmodern capitalist world is a cycle of decontextualization for the sake of monetization. It happens everywhere — with the products we buy, the food in our grocery stores, and the spiritual traditions we import from other lands. Modern Yogic and Buddhist practices have been removed from the deep context of their original practice — and often what is lost in the process is the living, breathing, animist heart of tradition. This episode explores how consciousne...
Conspiracy theories abound these days. The Yoga and wellness communities have come under fire for being particularly prone to indulging these theories. Yet the teachings of Yoga ask us ultimately to look deeply at the difference between focused presence and spiraling mental agitation. This is how, in indulging conspiratorial world views, the yoga world is overlooking a profound treasure that lives at its very core. For right at the heart of yogic teaching is perhaps the greatest conspiracy of al...
Honey was revered across the ancient world — found in Egyptian tombs and Chinese apothecaries and referred to glowingly in ancient Sumerian medical texts. The myths and stories that come to us from the ancient world are soaked in honey. Honey is certainly a remarkable substance. But is that enough to explain the presence of liquid nectar in myth upon myth upon myth? There are strange commonalities in the myths and stories about nectar and honey. The association of honey and immortality. The desc...
Human beings have a complicated relationship with want. For some traditions, desire, want, or longing sits right at the heart of creation itself, providing the spark that sets the universe in motion, and is inherent to what it means to be human. Yet unchecked want has also resulted in untold suffering for people and planet. Renunciate traditions have put forth practices and philosophies designed to get rid of the want altogether. But is getting rid of want even possible? Is longing inextricably ...
