Light a candle. Watch the flame for a while. Feel its heat, then blow it out. Watch the smoke drift away. Look at the blackened wick. That is birth, life, death, and non-existence. If you re-light the candle, that’s a new life; the original flame exists only in memory. Now remember the smoke and consider … Read moreAccept death, embrace life.
Participants at the recent Nightfall event – an annual, nocturnal celebration of art, music and performance at Brooklyn, NYC’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery – were afforded the opportunity to “rehearse” passing through the Veil between life and death. This imaginative and surprisingly meaningful mobile performance piece/installation/ritual was the brainchild of Greedy Peasant, a NYC-based pageant troupe.
An unusually hot and dry Fall has delayed some of the usual seasonal cues, but now it is undeniable; Memoria has arrived once again. We actually began our observances very early by taking part in the annual Sacred Harvest event at Sky Meadow in Vermont. … and we’ve just returned from an anniversary vacation that … Read moreMemoria 2025 (Part 1)
(Cross-posted from our sister site, Cultpunk.art) In the futuristic world of Logan’s Run (1976), humanity – or at least that portion of humanity that the movie is concerned with – is sequestered away from the unknown “world outside”, living and dying inside vast Xanadu-like pleasure domes. Their lives and deaths are supervised by an AI … Read more“Renew! Renew!” The Cult of Carrousel in Logan’s Run (1976)
In this scene from the drama Apple Cider Vinegar, Lucy Guthrie, played by actress Tilda Cobham-Hervey, experiences a shamanic vision of her own death, dissolution and reintegration into Nature during an ayahuasca retreat.
Chelsea Edgar writes for Seven Days on the traditions and legacies of the Bread and Puppet Theater, a mainstay of the East Coast (and particularly Vermont) counterculture: A short distance into the pine forest above the circus field, just beyond the remnants of a Baldwin piano that has been left to molder in the elements, … Read moreBread and Puppet Theater Memorial Shrines
In connection with the launch of Poetic Faiths: New Religions and Rituals as Works of Living Art, here’s my recent conversation with Metamodern Meaning luminary Brendan Graham Dempsey. We discuss the Poetic Faith ethos from a variety of perspectives, the structure and aims of the anthology, my own practice of the Mysterium as an example … Read more“Metamodernism and Poetic Faiths”
The first volume of the Poetic Faiths interview anthology is now available! Poetic Faiths: New Religions and Rituals as Works of Living Art is an anthology of illustrated interviews with an emergent counterculture of artists and activists who take secular humanism as a given, then ask, “Now what?” and find their answers in artistic creation. Poetic … Read more“Poetic Faiths: New Religions and Ritual as Works of Living Art” Vol. 1 now available
A short, informative presentation on the Festa dei Morti traditions of Sicily.