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 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.
Episodes
88 episodes
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 that the human relationship with fire goes back over 1.5 million years. And so — fire has play...
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Season 1
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Episode 89
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1:50:45
(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 wellness and optimization culture, finding its way into corporate boardrooms, therapist's too...
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Season 1
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Episode 88
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1:35:54
Guardians and Protectors!
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....
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Season 1
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Episode 87
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2:31:46
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 steady across generations. But it's also a story of constant mutation, assimilation, and re-expre...
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Season 1
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Episode 86
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2:11:37
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, burden, and arbitrarily imposed rules. Yet historically, tradition after tradition sees an innate...
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Season 1
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Episode 85
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1:58:12
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 viewed as a contract, an agreement forged between human beings rather than something inherent to th...
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Season 1
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Episode 84
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3:18:51
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 because civilization, with its narratives of individual agency and control, its relentless emph...
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Season 1
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Episode 83
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1:58:57
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 visions of what is to come. Such sensitivity, traditionally, is common. It's common to have premoni...
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Season 1
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Episode 82
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1:37:05
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 vibrates in the names of the gods and goddesses themselves. Across the world, tradition after tradi...
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Season 1
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Episode 81
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1:43:18
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 trauma is nothing new — traditional cultures across the globe have historically had their own f...
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Season 1
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Episode 80
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1:13:17
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 need for ethics and regulatory measures. Yet it may be that the only way to truly understand the ...
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Season 1
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Episode 79
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1:57:37
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 that move of their own will. Mirrors speak. Swords dance. There are flying carpets and far-see...
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Season 1
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Episode 78
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2:05:55
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 — imbued with life force, inhabited by and permeated with beings with which we exist in ongoing...
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Season 1
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Episode 77
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1:02:33
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 truth to power to opening up other spaces of power-with. In this episode of The Emerald, B...
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Season 1
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Episode 76
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1:16:48
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 psychologists from theologians. Now, with pop-psychology vernacular inundating all aspects of life, i...
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Season 1
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Episode 75
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1:37:52
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 adornment as simply an indication of status, wealth, and identity. But adornment is also more tha...
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Season 1
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Episode 74
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1:52:00
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 linked to birds, who, through the arcing patterns of their flight, their hypnotic songs, and thei...
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Season 1
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Episode 73
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1:43:32
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 world, the current emphasis on embodiment serves to help reclaim a relationship with ecology a...
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Season 1
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Episode 72
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1:27:57
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 world are full of stories of death. Many initiatory rituals directly enact death, taking the init...
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Season 1
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Episode 71
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1:44:07
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 some anthropologists to label the attainment of these states the 'main need' of the 'ceremonia...
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Season 1
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Episode 70
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1:43:30
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 social and environmental ills that are plaguing the planet. The consequences of ecosystem destru...
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Season 1
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Episode 69
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1:27:03
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 plays an active role in governing the daily rhythms of life. The moon — in its repetitive pulse —...
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Season 1
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Episode 68
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1:27:50
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 character of its own, alive, awake, animate, both treacherous and beautiful. The forest doesn't '...
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Season 1
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Episode 67
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1:22:04
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, war is so widespread that it is impossible to see it as anything other than a primal human drive...
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Season 1
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Episode 66
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1:10:19
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 spirits, and, of course, shapeshifting people who assume the forms of tigers, bears, wolves, e...
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Season 1
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Episode 65
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1:45:55