witchcraft
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On resurrection.
We are unlikely to live again … but religions themselves get resurrected all the time. As you might expect, the religions that rise from the grave sometimes come back as shambling monstrosities.
Achilles, ancient European myths, Anthony Appiah, Asatru, astrophysics, Birka warrior, Boltzmann brain, Celtic mythology, Celtic religion, Christianity, Daoism, druid, druids, female viking, female viking warrior, female warrior, forgotten faiths, Greek mythology, Ian Johnson, Icelandic poetry, In Search of the True Dao, life after death, lost faiths, Louis Komjathy, milk, mythology, neopaganism, New York Review, Norse mythology, Odin, Odin’s gift, odinism, Odinist revival, Odysseus in the underworld, pagan, pagan revival, paganism, physics, poetry, prejudice, pseudoscience, rebirth, rediscovering lost faiths, rediscovering lost religions, rediscovering Norse faiths, reincarnation, resurrection, Roman propaganda, Sexism, space dust, The Lies that Bind, The Odyssey, the old beliefs, Viking myths, Viking religion, viking revival, viking warrior women, viking women, white supremacists, white supremacy, Wicca, witchcraft, world mythology, world religions
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On Colson Whitehead’s ‘The Underground Railroad.’
In Colson Whitehead’s new speculative fiction, he condenses a century of racial injustice into a single fugitive’s journey. I hope readers realize the reality was even worse, that some of these crimes spanned the century and reverberate still.
alternate history, animal welfare, Blood at the Root, Carol Anderson, Colson Whitehead, curses, Douglas Blackmon, emancipation, evil, Forsyth County, fugitive slave act, graduate school, Harriet Washington, incarceration crisis, Lewis Hyde, Medical Apartheid, Michelle Alexander, oppression, Patrick Phillips, police brutality, review of The Underground Railroad, science fiction, slavery, Slavery By Another Name, speculative fiction, Stanford, The Gift, The New Jim Crow, The Underground Railroad, Thirteenth Amendment, trust, Tuskegee Syphilis Study, vegan, vegetarian, whose pain matters, witchcraft
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On witchcraft and mass psychogenic illness.
Because she is N’s best friend’s grandmother, I recently had the pleasure of meeting the researcher who first proposed that the Salem witchcraft trials were inspired by ergot poisoning of rye crops. And that, of course, is one of the papers I read while researching mass psychogenic illness / conversion disorders / violence against women. Does…
bistable switch, Caporael, conversion disorder, dancing sickness, did drugs cause the Salem witch trials, did PTSD cause the Salem witch trials, ergot, ergot poisoning, history of women not being taken seriously by medical doctors, how to explain complicated mathematics to people without a math background, hysteria, Intoxication, Le Roy, lysergic acid, mass psychogenic illness, oppression, ordinary differential equations, pop psychology, post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, Ronald Siegel, Salem witch trials, self-reinforcing behavior, stress, tarantism, the tipping point, tics, witchcraft
Frank Brown Cloud 