Browsing the archives for the worldwide tag

Flower Crowns: Ancient & Modern

The interwebs are an ever-changing culture, and the blooming trends of today will have withered by next week. Nevertheless, the recent fad of Photoshopping “flower crowns” on popular figures from TV, film and other media has caught my eye. It’s a consciously ironic way of claiming ownership of a cultural icon, expressing devotion while showing […]

Sand Stories of Kseniya Simonova

Mythos means “a thing told,” an utterance, a story. Mythology is the art of passing down culture, lessons, ideas through stories which pluck at our souls, our dreams, our emotions, not just our rational minds. Bards are the purveyors of mythology in many societies. A bard is more than a storyteller, although a bard works […]

What Ancient Art Tells Us About Pinboards

What do “pin boards,” social media websites designed around sharing pictures, have in common with Stone Age cave paintings and Egyptian funerary art?

The Ham Sandwich and Eternal Happiness

An old logic joke goes like this: I. Nothing is better than eternal happiness. II. A ham sandwich is better than nothing. III. Therefore, a ham sandwich is better than eternal happiness! It turns out that there are a lot of ham sandwich myths trying to reassure us that our life is tasty just as […]

The Word and Unstruck Sound

Words have power, and many creation myths begin with god speaking or singing the universe into being. The New Testament speaks of Logos, the word. Kosmos, the universe, which also means “that which is ordered, structured,” arises from logos, the word. This is older than Christianity, of course: Greek philosophers spent a lot of time […]