The Emerald
Kanal-Details
The Emerald
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...
Neueste Episoden
94 Episoden
I Think I Hear the Coming of a Planetary Roar (with Louder Music)
In times of rising frustration over the state of nations, times of personal, ecological, societal, and planetary impasse, when cycles of senseless suf...
I Think I Hear the Coming of a Planetary Roar
In times of rising frustration over the state of nations, times of personal, ecological, societal, and planetary impasse, when cycles of senseless suf...
On Powers, Great and Small
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 p...
Trickster Jumps Sides (Re-Issued for Tricky Times)
Tricksters and culture disruptors populate global mythology. From Loki to Coyote to Èṣù and Hermes, they bend rules, cross boundaries, commit delibera...
On Singing to the Beloved in Times of Crisis
We live in times of individual, sociocultural and planetary crisis, exacerbated by rising divisions between people. How have humans historically navig...
For the Divine Mother of the Universe (Remixed and Reissued)
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 tho...
This Episode is FIRE
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...
(Why Mindfulness Isn't Enough)
In recent years, the practice of 'mindfulness' has become ubiquitous. Mindfulness has outgrown its traditional Buddhist roots and now permeates modern...
Guardians and Protectors!
Practices of guardianship — invoking guardian deities, enlisting spirit help, clearing spaces of questionable energies, and establishing boundaries ar...
Let Us Sing of the Syncretic Gods of Outcasts and Wanderers
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 ste...
On Clouds and Cosmic Law
In the modern world, words like 'law' and 'order' carry with them a good deal of sociocultural baggage, and are often associated with restriction, bur...
Oh Justice
In times of global upheaval, ecological destruction, and societal inequity, justice can seem very far away. Justice in the modern world is often viewe...
For the Intuitives (Part 2)
Across the globe, the arrival of 'civilization' brought with it the persecution of the seer, the shaman, and the visionary. Why? Perhaps it is becaus...
For the Intuitives (Part 1)
Across cultures and traditions, there have always been those that speak with the dead, hear voices, enter states of oracular trance, and receive visio...
All of My Lessons Come in the Form of a Sound ( w/ Trevor Hall)
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 vibra...
Reissue: On Trauma and Vegetation Gods
Modern discussions on healing individual minds, cultural wounds, and painful societal histories now revolve around the word ‘trauma.’ Yet addressing t...
So You Want to Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers... (The AI Episode)
The rise of Artificial Intelligence has generated a rush of conversation about benefits and risks, about sentience and intelligence, and about the nee...
Inanimate Objects Aren't Inanimate (Or Objects)
In the myths and fairytales, everything teems with sentience and agency... Everything is alive. There are talking trees and singing stones and hedges...
Animism is Normative Consciousness (Re-mixed, Re-musicked, and Re-released)
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 —...
The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized, Part 2 (Interview w/ Báyò Akómoláfé)
Báyò Akómoláfé is an author, celebrated speaker, teacher, and self-styled trans-public intellectual whose vocation goes beyond justice and speaking t...
The Revolution Will Not Be Psychologized
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 psychol...
Universe, Adorned: Ornament in Culture, Cosmos, and Consciousness
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 ado...
On Birds, and the Imperative of Mystic Flight
Birds in myth are messengers, deliverers of prophecy, and instigators of journeys. But birds are much more than this. Human neurobiology is deeply lin...
Embodiment Means Being Torn Apart and Flying Away
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...
No One Here Gets Out Alive (The Death Episode)
Death is universal, an undeniable fact of existence that every single one of our ancestors faced, just as we will. So mythic traditions around the wor...
Reissue: How Trance States Shape the World
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...
I Wish It Could Have Been Another Way (A Lament w/ Peia Luzzi)
Not easy listening, but possibly necessary listening — this episode of The Emerald dives deep into the heart of the grief many are feeling over the so...
Your Consciousness Comes From the Moon
Traditional mythic, animist, and astrological systems have long told us that the moon is more than a distant, detached object in space, but rather pla...
Awake in the Forest of Dangers and Wonders
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 cha...
War and Ritual Ecstasy
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, wa...
Neck Hairs of the Shapeshifter (w/ Simon Thakur)
Shapeshifting is nearly universal to global mythic tradition. The myths of the world feature shapeshifting gods, shapeshifting animals, shapeshifting...
For the Divine Mother of the Universe (w/ Nivedita Gunturi)
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 tho...
Snail Juice & Bear Fat & Werewolf Moons (w/ Leah Song of Rising Appalachia)
Modern culture increasingly encroaches on unknown, uncharted space, both geographical and mental. This primordial space is accessed during times when...
The Body is the Metaverse
Science fiction writers and tech enthusiasts have long spoken of a digital Metaverse — a virtual otherworld that, as the narrative goes, is the logica...
Festivals! Initiation and the Brilliance of Eternity
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 an...
On Resonance: Caves, Hooves, Hearts, Harps... and the Birth of Culture
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. ‘Reson...
Becoming a Ruin: Decomposing and Regrowing the Mythic with Sophie Strand
Sophie Strand describes herself as a writer, an animist troubadour, and a giant pile of composting leaves. Her lyrical, eco-centric vision of the myth...
Mapping The Mystic: Geographies of Ecstasy in Consciousness and Culture
Modern studies of mystic states focus on the 'ineffability' of the ecstatic experience — the impossibility of explaining what the experience was like....
The Shape of Stories: How Myths Move Through Bodies and Worlds
Author Kurt Vonnegut once proposed that stories have shapes — that there are a few common wave-trajectories that underlie all of our stories. This epi...
TRA is for Trance: On the Linguistics of Crossing Over
Trance, traverse, transformation, tradition, transcendence, transgression — all come from a single Indo-European linguistic root TRA, which signifies...