I Think I Hear the Coming of a Planetary Roar (with Louder Music)

Hi everyone, I'm Josh and this is The Emerald, currents and trends through a mythic lens. The podcast we explore in ever changing world and our lives in it through the lens of myth, story and imagination. The Emerald, all that's happening on this green jewel in space. Good morning, this episode is full of bold mythic pronouncements and trumpet accompanied annunciations. I feel like it's also a good time to announce right here at the beginning that the mythic body, my year-long course, is open for registration at the mythicbody.com/courses. It's a deep dive into the animate traditions of the world. It's an exploration of the heart of global ritual tradition. It's a journey to deepen our relationship with a living, breathing cosmos and with living breathing story. It's a vibrant community of people who are longing for reconnection and supporting each other in this deep exploration of what reconnection means. 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So please support the artistic, mythic and communal vision of the podcast and become a patron at patreon.com/theemeraldpodcast. A big thank you here at the beginning to the Fetzer Institute who provides structural support for the Emerald podcast. Urgent need for reconnection to the sacred and the need for spiritual solutions to the crises that humanity is facing. Fetzer's support is foundational and I deeply appreciate their work and their ongoing involvement with such matters of heart and spirit. And if you're interested in finding out more about them, it's fetzer.org, fetzer.org, and now that we've reached our URL quota for the day on with the episode. So this wasn't an expected episode. I usually map the episodes out and have a schedule of episodes that I try to stick to and a vision for what I want to explore episode to episode. And I was exploring a continuation of the discussion on power and getting into some trickster-esque reflections on decolonized discourse and developing an episode on how burdens are treated in myths and stories and animate traditions. At a time when people in the modern world are, shall we say, "feeling the burden?" And those episodes are all coming. But I noticed that something else was stirring. Something was rising. I'd start to work on the episode about cosmic support and the alleviation of burdens. And I would just feel that there was something that hadn't been addressed yet. Some stuck energy that needed to be moved. You ever feel that stuck energy that needs to be moved? I imagine, like me, you're feeling it a lot these days. So much going on in the world, so much friction, so much building. And in time of rising pressure, the mythic tales might say, "Energies gotta move." Sleeping lions have to wake. Clouds must burst. In such times there are myths and stories we can turn to. There are forces that are historically called upon. There are those whose role it is to move and shake. Maybe like me in these times you felt the pressure rising. Maybe like me you felt that this body, this society, this earth just can't contain it all anymore. Maybe you've heard the coming of a planetary. Shhh, listen. There. What is it? Something stirring in the depths. Some permutation of the great world breath. That after centuries of sleeping finally takes rise, is it a spark, a shifting, a great unveiling? What movement on what hidden wind is sailing? Have you felt it? As if there are points that are reached from which there is no choice but a great global tipping. Some kind of piercing through. Some kind of ripping. You know those times. When something's got to move, something must shift. Must crumble, something must die so that something you might live. There is something as Adrock says that's got to give. Perhaps like me you look out on the world these days and think as I do, things can't go on this way. And we're not alone in thinking this. So many traditions over so many generations in so many ways speak of such days. Times of reckoning or a great revealing. And that which is hidden can no longer stay hidden and must come to light. That which has been contained can no longer be contained anymore. When pressure in the magma chamber hits a rupgeon point. And what has been building for long ages must at last break free. There are forces the myths tell us that have been kept down, held back, bound and restrained for many a long age. There are long sleeping giants disturbed now by all the global yammering, relentless jack hammering, the mining, the fencing, the warring, the bombing. Oh beloved there is something rising. A planetary discomfort. A yearning. There is a great dragon body burning. As when the smoldering earth dragon opens its eyes and stretches its limbs and lasts and inflicts its tongue. Perhaps it's time for this earth body to shed a layer of useless, outdated skin. Yes stir up the cauldron long enough. Create enough cacophony and there are forces that one day shake free. Label yourself the center of the story long enough. And there are planetary forces, draconic forces, cosmic forces that will eventually lift their heads and say. Oh yeah, remember. me. Please remember me! Welcome to the time of waking giants of storms like we've never seen before. How are you fairing in the storm? Are you able to find a calm eye and then to scoot? Are you able to sleep? Able to focus? Able to freely breathe? Able to tend to the task-tam? Where is there something tugging, something annoying, something ceiling, something calling, something rising, something bursting, something more? I think I hear the coming of a planetary roar. The great rebound shockwave in which bodies somehow expected to hold all this friction, hold a world that is seething and boiling and upheaving, and in the midst of it all, are expected to adhere to something resembling normalcy. Bodies start to reject what has been expected. You know the friction. Frictions like 50 years into my life and I'm still watching humanity make the same damn mistakes. And after all this, we can't do better than kids starving. Can't do better than fascism rising. Can't do better than internet, inanity and rabbit holes of ideological insanity. Friction like, despite all the facts, despite all the signs that rear their heads like announcing lions right before our eyes, we're going to keep on drilling. Keep on mining. The hungry monster must keep on marching. The ravenous beast must constantly feed. Friction. Let us bombard you with a continuous stream of all the horrible things happening in the world today and then make it extremely difficult to actually do anything about any of the friction at the heart of the American dream that says, "Let us continually dangle carrots of success and tantalize you with all you'll never get. All you'll never be able to humanly achieve and set unreachable goals against which you'll always fail and dollar figures you'll never make." Yes, someday as I feel we need a global shaking. Awake. But oh, beloved, could it be that something's coming? A sound to counteract the number. Four hours I feel it. I feel it. When systems start to tremble and quake and each cell begins to shout how much of this could one more day, yes, each living cell, the shouts were not going to take it anymore. Have you felt it swirling, the planetary dragon churning? Have you felt the earth changes coming? Have you felt the restlessness of global currents shifting? There is an animate force who is known as the shifter of world currents. In Nosegaio some named him Poseidon, who struck his triant on the ocean floor and caused the very foundations of the earth to shake. Now he cracks open in Chakka 8.8. Now he loses vast and interplanetary waves. Just the other day, the sixth largest earthquake ever measured, sent a shockwave that was felt 4,000 miles away. It wasn't much in the world of tsunamis, they say, but from where I stood, from my vantage point here in the middle of the ocean. I saw the waters of an entire sleeping bay lift up, shift, and move the other way. There is energy in the ocean, the official spokesperson for the state of Hawaii said, "Like the governor said, there is energy in the ocean." "We are seeing a lot of energy over the waters." There is energy in the ocean to your hear. Listen close. Listen close for the planetary waters that have begun to at once shift and move the other way. Pay attention, great leaders, unassailable power brokers to the waters that suddenly shift and move the other way. Listen for the roar that is building. Listen for the global shaking awake. It starts faintly, some say. A murmur, a haunting lullaby from beneath the sea ice. An eerie green voice and the thicket of trees, and it grows. It turns, it turns, now black tails slapping the sea. A huddle of water scrolling. Now joined in chorus by the white wolf howling. Do you hear it shaking free its wings? Can you feel it wanting to soar? I think I hear the coming, the thrumming, the humming, the sounding, the tyrants on crowning, the corpse of the old world hits the fucking floor. I think I hear the coming of a planetary. Many are the mythic trumpets that call us to waking. The roars and the beings that roar them in the myths mark times of transition, times of shaking free. They open us up into new worlds they usher us across thresholds. They crumble old constructs, even as they herald a new and dawning day. So there is a roar of old worlds dying. There is a roar of new worlds being born. And this roar, this rushing, this rising, this crest in this fall is sounding now in ways. Perhaps we've never heard it sound before. Do you hear it? The roar of the old world dying. As if after all these years of pent-up silence, the swan finally sings. Silent his whole life. The swan finally sings. Oh tell me, what is the nature of that song? What is the sound the old world hudders before it falls? What is the death howl of the gorgon? What is the shuddering convulsive cry of all we could have been but never were? The wail of all that loss of belonging. And all that swandered joy. And all that life we wasted because we were trying to gather the most toys. And all the unnecessary hours and hours spent swollen and all the needless and twaling. And all the buried longing. And all that was right about this place that we beseed ourselves wronging. And all we wrecked and rooned along the way. What is the cry of the world as it falls? Is it a trumpet blast of final judgment? A shout of love, a song of rage, a cry of war. A cry of ecstasy, a blast of blaze, something more. Tell me now, tell me, do you hear the piper who sounds the call of the new world being born? Can we hear it, perceive it, open up our arms to breed it? Yellowed, shouted, shake it, dance it, dream it. Where I think I hear the coming of a planetary roar. In the minutes, there are roars and there are trumpet sounders who wake bodies from slumber. Moments of personal or planetary rupture in the stories. Moments of transformational passage are accompanied by resonant thunderous sounds. There are sounders of mighty sounds the myths tell us, who cross us over into the new world. So sometimes, when we've been hanging out too long at personal or somatic or sociopolitical or planetary crossroads, sometimes when the discourse is too thick to stir. Sometimes when things are all locked up and humanity seems determined to hang out in the land of the lowest common denominator forever. Sometimes when something's been stuck, we need to call on the shakers, the stompers. Sometimes we need to call on those conscious blowers, those howlers, those yelpers and yoppers, and say, "Ushur in a new world, please." "Ushur in a new world, please." Do we remember these roaring powers? The myths are full of shriekers and bellowers. Their roars move stagnant energy, rid us of complacency, light fires within us when fires need to be lit. So the Vedic and Tantric liturgies invoke Rudra, that fierce form of Shiva, whose name relates to the word "howl." Rudra the howler. The roaring storm god. Sellutations to the roaring one invokes the Dhrugbeda, the resounding one, to the one who roars or cries out. Rudra, wild-eyed and tempestuous, surrounded by his hosts of mothas, pulsing wind gods. Quote, "Blazing with the wind, clothed in rain, loud warriors, devours, they make the winds, they make the lightning with their powers. And the power and potency in these roars is in their ability to move, to shake, to jar things loose, so that even the heights of heaven that Ugveda says, shake at their roaring." So some situations in our lives can be moved with fairly little effort, right? Can be transformed over a lunchtime conversation or with a gentle benevolent breeze, but other things are so stuck. Some towers are so mighty, some patterns so deep, some systems so entrenched, that you need howlers, severers, dispelers, bell ringers and symbol clasers to shake, things up. You need forces who are described specifically in terms of their ability to move the immovable. The earth trembles as Ugams has won him to the Maruits. In things immovable, shake and real, you loud roars, shakers of the world. Shakers of the world. They're available when the mountain seems immovable, when the task seems impossible. You know what I mean? Does the mountain ever seem immovable? Does the task ever seem impossible? Like how will we ever get to love? How will we ever get to lasting peace? When the world seems so far from love that it needs a true storm to help love wake, when we've reached states of relational impasse, interpersonal impasse, two party impasse, who would we call "except the exact forces who move immovable things"? There are forces beloved who move immovable things. Let us find that which seems immovable in our lives, and call on the ones who move immovable things. In this vision, if you want movement, you call the gods of movement. You call in Vedic traditions these letters, thundering on their golden chariots with their red and golden horses, these gods with grubby faces, they are flushed red with urgency. They shout, they cry, they inhale, like the wind that burbles across the entire world. The wind that comes from life, from friction, from the heat of existence, from the buildup, from the end of energy, the wind that gives energy to the water. There is energy in the ocean. Have you heard it? When things have gone scale and stagnant in the body, in the ritual space, in the community, in the society, we call on movers and shakers who "stir" the forest trees and shake the very mountains. And paradoxically, the gods of movement are also who you call when you want shelter from the movement. When you want shelter from the storm, you call the storm gods, so the marutes are simultaneously the storm and shelter from the storm at once. They carry us to far places. They open up their arms to us and are the shelter even as they are the wind. They are the storm and they bear us through the storm. If we understand what it means to turn it over to them, to offer to them, how are we called to approach this time of unprecedented storms? Sometimes, as Rilka, we need to give ourselves over to the storm. If only we would let ourselves be dominated, he says, as things do by some immeths the storm, we would become strong to and not need names. This is how we grow, he says, by being defeated decisively by constantly greater beings. What is the name of the storm to whom we turn it all over? In some traditions, she is called Shakti, the power, the goddess, and she roars. In the goddess traditions of the Indian subcontinent, the goddess roars. Her hair bristling, her eyes wild, her ornaments flashing. The roar is her vibrational potency unbound, when particularly cacophonists are discordant forces run rampant, when global disobedience is abound, when disharmonious forces gain too much power, and when such temporal powers need to be shaken from their illusion and reminded again of the true powers, the ultimate powers, the cosmic powers, the power of nature. She tips her head back, shakes her hair loose, and roar. She laughs loudly, says the Kali Tantras, a terrible sound that resounds through the three worlds shaking even the gods. In the Devi Mahatma, she comes face to face with Maheshashura's armies, and she laughs, a great roaring laugh. She let out a great roar, the text says, and as she roars, she made the universe tremble. She laughs loudly and fearlessly again and again. Her terrible roar filled the entire sky, and a mighty echo resounded through all the worlds. The earth trembled, the oceans turned, and mountains shook. The roar of the goddess. Have you heard that roar of the shebeir, cornered in the cave? The roar of the Tigris protecting her cubs? Yes, Tigris stalking, foot pads softly stepping, walking regal and ready upon the forest floor. I think I hear the coming of a deep, mother, roar. We all know that sound that don't mess with mama, roar, that squawk of the mother-hand who ruffles up her feathers and screams, "Get away from my chicks, you f*ck d*cks!" "Stay away from the children." Do you hear the mother roar? But the roar of the goddess isn't just a bello of individual righteous indignation. The roar of the Dakinis, the roar of the Rudrani's and Yoginis is much more than this. It's a roar of awakening, of announcing new possibilities of crossing the threshold into the birth of the new. Her joyful, resounding laughter became a cosmic sound that spread through the triad of worlds, heralding the dawn of a new age free from the tyranny of the Asura's. So the roar is the roar that transforms. Not only the external or, not just the Asura armies and the entrenched systems, but that transforms us. When we invite the roar of the goddess in, we're not just asking for her to topple external societal orders. We're inviting her to shake the places in us that need to be shook, to rattle away the crud, to in live in places where we've been stuck and to cut through the cacophony that lives in us as well as in the greater world. The roar of the goddess is the cosmic sound itself, the sound of life, the light of eons, the fire of time. The dachines are born the Tibetan hunter say of the thunder speech of the awakened one, the diamond thunder speech of awakening. Just feel into it as if the heart of the world itself had a true voice, a voice that we could attune ourselves to, a voice that we could listen, and that voice reverberated its truth, the truth of nature, the truth of time, forever and ever. It is the voice of the axis of the world, the voice that rebalances all of us. cosmic straying over time, the voice that serves to put things in their place and set them right. Have you heard that undeniable roar? The roar of the rushing river that sets things right. The roar that makes all pretensions and obfuscations in places where we might be deceiving ourselves and getting tricky with ourselves and others and says, "Nope, you've got to find a better way." Rushing river, set things right. River, river, set things right. Today. The roar is the force of cosmic correction in this vision that dissolves the sticky, convoluted, tamasic energies that keep us stuck and tangled labyrinths. The Dakinis arrive and howl those forces away. They're laughter shakes the bones free of ignorance. The Dakinis utter piercing cries, matchy closets and the chill energy. They sever the root of ego with their song of emptiness. Yes, beloved, there are sky-fearing forces that even now are singing joyously of severance. Singing as they sharpen their cosmic blades and lick their cosmic lips and rumble their world moving hips of how it's time, time, time to let go of that thing. You know, that thing. Time to cut clean that old way of being. So when things need stirring up but not just stirring up, when they need to be repaturned with vibrational forces of greater clarity and cohesion, we need a good and global mother roar. We need a blast from Vishnu's conscience to rise above the din. A blast that reminds us of the true ocean. In times of global cacophony, planet-wide, radiostatic, pervasive, wrong speech, wrong mouths saying the wrong things advised by the wrong advisors and funded by the wrong advertisers. In the midst of the global battle for supremacy of the sound waves, the global maelstrom of poisonous commentary, we need fast blue gods that lift spiraling conscious to their lips and sound the sound that returns us to the source of it all. Have you heard? There is a sound that makes all other sounds irrelevant. There is a speech that makes all other speeches irrelevant. There is the thunder bellow of the universal sound of nature. And we're you to hear it. We're you to truly hear it. Boys, there's no way you could continue with your little toy noise makers anymore. So hush for a moment commentators. Hush instigators. Hush Tucker and Hannity and Shapiro and Ingram. Hush Maddo and Cooper and Cuomo and Lemon. Hush Rogan and Ezra and Bannon and listen. Listen to the sound. The sound of whom your ruminations are just an imitation. Listen to the ocean. Expand the vision. For if you heard, there is a conscious that sounds the sound that is beyond all other sounds. Yes, the gods blast their conscious, bringing Shupda, bringing the divine and Oshihannik. War. When the forces of Dharma and Adharma are arrayed on the battlefield, they're on the battlefield of Kuruksitra and the Kauravas create a great clamor of drums and symbols and battle shouts. The Pandavas, Paws and lift their conscious to the sky. The blowing of their conscious became a poor reals and vibrating both the sky and the earth. It shattered the hearts of the sons of Dr. Arustra and each of these consciousels has a name. Because remember in the animate traditions, the animate energies are very specific. Their vibrational quality is very specific. So Nakula sounds the conscious name is Sugusha, beautiful sounding or well resounding. Sahadeva sounds, Manipushbhaka, adorned with jewels and flowers. Arjuna gives voice to Devadata, divinely given, divinely empowered. While Bhima, the strongest Pandava sounds, Poundra, Poundra, mighty and deep. Yudhishtira, the future king, raises Anantavajaya Infinite Victory, like the infinite victory of the overarching sonic pattern of creation and so. The song that resolves all other songs, from which all other songs come into which all other songs return. And finally Krishna sounds, Panchajanya, the pure white conscious that carries within the force of the entire ocean. The great churning ocean in that one conscious. He sounds a blast so deep that it reverberates through heaven and earth, unsettling evil, awakening Dharma. The sound of cosmic truth made manifest. Uncaddling evil. The conch blast, the oceanic sound that unsettles evil. Let's go into that. That's one of the juicy parts. And I'm going to speak in good evil binaries here for a moment. Can you imagine a great sound, a great cry, a great shout that unsettles evil? Like a great protestation perhaps that challenges the status quo, that shakes the rotten rafters of civilization to its core. But we have to be careful here. Because we're liable to start thinking that anytime we call someone or something out, anytime we voice a complaint, that we're blasting Vishnu's conscience and sounding the universal sound and uttering truth to power. And not every call out you could say reverberates with cosmic resonance. What unsettles evil in this vision is not the sharpness or urgency or anxiousness or violence or protestation of the cry. It's the resonant embodied truth of it, the undeniable truth of its resonance. Nothing scarier than the truth, the truth of nature, the truth of time, the truth of we're not actually in charge of the world. There's a much faster ocean and time will take us all. And in this wave progression of time, tyrants will rise and tyrants fall. The truth that says you've been running around all up in a frenzy for what? What is this life all about at its core? And maybe just maybe what you've convinced yourself you're longing for might not actually be what you're longing for. Oh, I think I hear the coming of a universal roar. Have you heard that deepest of sounds, that most oceanic of sounds, the undeniable sound of nature? The undeniable movement of time. The undeniable roar that tells me that none of this is ultimately mine. That puts things in perspective and shifts my gaze from my individual obsessions to something faster. The breath of life that breathes us alive, breathes us alive. And its sonic reservoirs are so deep and so plentiful, that it makes all the petty shit irrelevant and washes away all the places where ignorance and denial can hide. That's the real call out. And this is another way of saying that in this sonic vision, what we call evil, has to be called out with the living breathing example of good. The system must be called out with the living example of true alternatives. It can't just be called out with more cacophony. Sure, sometimes it needs a good bang and a good rattle and a good protest chant, but when it descends into cacophony, that's a different story. There is cacophony and there is a roar that rises above the cacophony. There is a roar of agitated mental states. The roaring impulse that drives some to kill, to invade, to seize, to take, some to tremble, some to shake, some to curl up in heavy beds, unable to lift their heads to weak. There are rauravas and Tibetan and Indian cosmologies, hellish realms of incessant roaring, the chaos of a noisier and noisier consciousness and a noisier world. And then there is the roar that cuts through the roar. So in Buddhist traditions, the Buddha's teachings are called the Simhanada, the sound of the lion or the lion's roar. A proclamation that silence is all else in its reverberant truth. When the lion steps forth from his den and sounds his roar says bhikkhu nana moly. All the other animals stop and listen. It's a roar which reduces to silence the cry, as howls, bellows, shrieks, barks, and growls of other creatures. On such an occasion, none dares even to sound its own cry, let alone to come into the open and challenge the unsurpassable roar of the golden-mained king. All the radio-static goes silent in the face of the roar that heralds the end of ignorance. Think that moment, after all you've been through, after all you've endured, after all the navigation of those sideways twists and turns, you made it through the muck and the mire and into the morning light, into the morning light. Let loose a cry beloved you made it into the morning light. And so the Mahaprajna Paramita Sutra says that those who were weak in it last, those who were weak into the ultimate truth of existence, they quote, "utter the lion's roar." Yes, moments of awakening they say caused the 10,000-fold world system to quake. Awake, awake, awake, awake to life, to death, to the realization of the cycles of being. The roar that says, "Do you not see the time as triumphant? Have you not heard the sound of infinity knocking at your door?" The bodhisattva utters the lion's roar. It's the roar of compassion and action, the roar of mercy for all beings, the roar of in spite of all of it, in spite of everything I'm choosing the path of love, the roar of all those awakened ones over all those eons, when presented with a choice between reality and illusion, between service of the flow of time over short term greed and power and gain, all those ones who chose love instead. And you too, beloved, you chose the path of love, didn't you? And that choice is worth roaring about. In many traditions there is a special place for those who roar, aloud. The Zulu King, Shaka Zulu spoke in lion's roars, it said, "And the shaman in traditional Siberian cultures draws on a variety of yelps, hoops, howls and shrieks. The language of the shaman derives from animal cries, says Machialli Adi. And so the avenki and yakuut shaman sound great wolf howls and bird calls, and make rushing and roaring sounds like the wind of the tree." These howls serve to summon, to call spirits, to call ancestors, to call animal helpers. I spoke with Snow Raven, who is a sound sculptorous animal linguist, chirpurg and roar, from the Sakha traditions of Siberia, about the role of sounds and yelps and howls in Siberian shamanic traditions. The shaman's, they do a lot of sounds that you can clearly see that they are mimicking birds or animals or some entities, but there is also a lot of expression, almost like energy that they are letting to pass through their body. All of a sudden has a sound, it's a voice of the energy. And then there's of course mimicking birds and animal sounds where shaman's usually use when they fall into trance. They need some support of their total animals. And they summon their superpower. And for me it's also awakening that superpower that will all carry because I believe that we carry genes of our ancient ancestors, which is the animal, and fish, and reptiles, plants, and all the living beings, maybe fungi. Their codes, I believe they are also being carried within us through their evolution. Shaman's, the gifted ones, they use that for their translate states in order to help the community. So there is a part of the roar which is about summoning, in times of great cacophony when we are bombarded with disparate competing voices. It's the way to cut through all of that and get right to the spirit help we need, is with a no-nonsense cry allowed. In Tunga's traditions the Yelp and Cry is a crucial part of the shaman's journey into the trance state. The entry into trance is marked with howles and bells. We ponder our way, sing our way, chirp our way, roar our way into the heightened state. Among holy traditions the shaman's growled their way to the spirit world, and placate unruly spirits with their growls. They emit high pitched yelps, or pollulations of spirits entered the ritual space. The deep groans and piercing streaks are part of the shaman's transformation into the shape of a seal, or a burnt, or a bear. The avankey shaman invokes the cause of the eagle or the rainy weather to become a man who has sent the great world to the tree. The streak of the eagles as W. Badloth is heard when the shaman flies. First you summon or you are awakened, the superpowers of certain sorts of animals, and then you become a shaman becomes a bird or animal, and in order to become they embody. Let's say if it is an owl, what kind of superpowers owl has. You can see during the night, it can turn, rotate, it has 360 degrees, so it sees everything around. It has an amazing hearing senses, and also it flies quietly. You don't hear how the wings flap. So when the shaman wants to awaken one of those skills, superpowers, or all of them, any of them, they become owl, and when you do an owl sound. So it's easier to connect with the owl intelligence, and then you become wired with the nerve system of the animal that you are summoning. Quite often the sound is the guidance, it's the portal for that. The howl or bird cry is thus the sign of spirit flight. It is the shaman leaves the body, it marks the passage from this world to the next. The scream of the shaman says Siberian elder Yakov Afinasiyev is the tearing of the sky. So the roar or the cry is the breaking word you are conscious of. It clears blockages in the ritual space. It sets the shaman on their journey, sends on new spirits from the end. Wakes the dead, waiting in sends them free, and they need to be cast out. The vibrational force of it dislodges illness and spiritual stagnation. All of this power influences he rides upon a great roar. So you're summoning some spirits with the sounds, but would you also be like dispelling or scattering negative energies, or if there was something that was causing sickness that needed to be driven out, would sound be used for that too? Oh, absolutely. Thank you for that question. Sound, the source of sound could be coming from your voice, also from tapping your body, but also from your regalia. So the clothing of the shaman quite often has these hanging pieces, pieces of metal or bones. So when you move, they fly around, but they also hit each other. And these pieces of the metal are usually created as a shape of their clothing animals, or most of the time those are bells and bells ring. And that means they scare the hostile spirits away with the sound of bell or with the sound of metal clinging. And of course there's a lot of, you know, the shutting, more like a vowel sound, like very raw emotions. You can feel when someone does like, right, you can feel it's pushing away from the object of the sound, with making sound. So it's like a shield, it's a protection, or it's a reflection of the sound. And it all comes with how the sound as frequencies absorbed by the body, by whatever you are shouting to and then the reaction to that. So you can basically analyze later, like how do I feel when someone does for me like a, "Who would who sound?" Or with, "Ah!" Or with, "Oh!" What is the difference between them? Right? What is the difference when it starts from. Huh! What is the difference if it starts from. or. [Gasps] Oh! What is. Oh! What is. TOO! You know, and you can kind of feel it. It's hard to process it through the mind, but your body knows. And this combination of sounds would have this very visceral meaning. Before you process it through your mind, you understand it with your entire body. And it's some very deep intelligence that we all carry as a human beings. Perhaps we even. not aware of that skill. Because I believe we're like a walking receivers and transmitters. And we just need to tune it to the good frequencies, the frequencies that heal. Let's sound the sounds, cry the cries. Perhaps in times of cacophony, we need to deepen our sonic repertoire. Perhaps, you know, when someone comes at us on the internet, instead of spiraling into the gutter with them, we can conjure our inner shamanic yelper and just say, "Yep!" You know, like when someone's like, "I really take issue with you. " YEP! Do you see how that comment forwards the structural imperialism of the. Have you tried my new frog-derived wellness supplement? Well, Jordan Peterson's. Andrew Tate. Yep. Time to get your yip on. In times of anxiety, we need to move energy. Move it, right? Really, the heart of this episode, I would say, is about how there's a lot of stuck energy in the world right now. And so it's going into traditions that have, you know, used sound as a way to move stuck energy. To shake things up. Yeah, I don't know if that resonates at all. Absolutely. That what I'm actually offering these days, the exercises that I do with people is just. allows to release the tension or stuck to energy in the body and it's. It could be individuals also very collective, as you're saying, you know, all of these changes that are happening in the world and uncertainty and. The world is becoming more dense. It's just all being stored as an information, as an energy in our bodies. And there are not so many, you know, space where you can be welcomed to do weird sounds. That's why I say, in the end of all of my performances, don't be afraid to sound weird. And people just really love. They like that to hear that. So, letting that in their voice, that sound healing of yours that comes inside out and reverberates, through your bones, your skin, your inner organs, and make your. water of your own cells to cleanse or to reverberate or shake it, and make the energy that it's stored to move. Sometimes it gets stuck and just let it shake it and move through. We need to find that call, summoned from places so deep, it rouses us from sleep. Shakes the cobweb, shakes the stickiness away, shakes out the frustration, the discomfort over the state of the nation, shouts it all away. "Hey, cry the Diannaician dancers as the trance took them. Oh, the Lord of trance, he shook them, he cares rose along the spine. The pressures of life, the frustrations and their aggravating persistence, the pent-up lions of existence let loose their howling cry. Have you found it yet? Your yelp, your yelp, your yelp won't whip and set it like this. I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable. I sound my barbaric yelp over the roofs of the world. It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk. I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runway sun. I effuse my flesh in eddies and drifted in lacy jazz. "Yelp, yelp, yelp." So have you found it? Your inner cackling, seahag, your brrrr brrrr brrrrr. Yeah, we gon do some days and days you can't relate. Or your rrrah rrrah rrrah. *Rapidly screaming* Have you found inner lubrication? *Rapidly screaming* That call of the wild. "You wild, man! Wild!" It was the call, Jack London writes. The many noted call. Sounding more luringly and compellingly than ever before. And as never before he was ready to obey. It is a deep call that lives in all of us. It is the lion in each amber atom that starts to wake. Like Eddie Vedder hears vibrations in his cells as he sings of better days. "These days, I feel it. Do you? I feel the charged air. I feel a cellular thunder, ready to leap forth from every pore. I think I hear the new world's tides from up upon the shore. World shakers and universe breakers gearing up to settle the score. Or it is sounding. In secret depths resounding. Perhaps it is the coming of a planetary world. Crying, take note, take heed. How much longer do we got? Until the earth itself shakes, free. Do you get the sense that nature herself is rising? As each year brings bigger fires and higher temperatures and stronger storms than the year before. And how many flea bites upon the great deers back until the deer brushes off those fleas? How many rudeness is voiced upon it before the great turtle rises and tips a little earth back into the sea? Perhaps we've reached the time of planetary pushback. You know that day when the earth fights back at last? We've cinematically longed for that day for a long time, right? The day when the very trees fight back. Can't shock or need to die. Jake, it was her due. It was her due! Yeah, no offense to my hunter friends, but I secretly kind of like those videos when elk kicked the shit out of hunters. Don't you? Don't you long to see the forest rise like they've never risen before? And could we, like King Orfeo, sing a song at last that marches dark marshes to the shore and rouse the fur and spruce and long can elm firstly and rouse those dark birds that have been stirring in the deep and rouse the starlings with our operations? Summon the horned herds with our invocations and usher in the coming of a planetary move. But of course, the rising of the forests is already happening as we speak. We expect it to be a march of CGI ants or something blatant and obvious, but we can't see that we're already in it. We're in the great rebalancing now. Nature is balancing right now. Every breath we take nature is balancing. We think that we're ahead of nature somehow, like when is nature going to respond to what we've done? We think that we're separate from nature and that nature somehow has to catch up with what we're doing. Nature doesn't play catch up. Nature is movement. She is rebalancing now. All this is nature responding to nature. One part of nature holds another part down, and nature responds to nature by springing back up with a thousand shoots. One part of nature paves over another part of nature, and nature shatters that pavement with the power of persistent roots. Populations explode at words unchecked, and nature reels us in. We architect a world of numbness, and nature finds her way to make us feel. Again, this is nature, the balancer, the power, the toplar of mighty towers. And how high goes the tower before the tower inevitably falls, how high crests the wave before it comes crashing back to shore? I think I hear the coming of a deep and mighty roar. I think I hear nature, the toplar of towers, who says "Build it all too high, and watch it fall." Tell me how high was the citadel of Jericho when Joshua the trumpeter stood before the walls? Have you heard the myths blare with the sound of trumpets? Mythic traditions resound with trumpets and trumpeters, announcers and anunciators whose roaring blast pass us from one age to the next. In mystic traditions, Gabriel's trumpet is the voice of anunciation. It is the reverberation and amplification of the primal word, the sound of the cosmos, so it is associated with the moon, which also reflects and resounds. The moon even holds the shape of the face of the trumpet if you look at it right, which is also the shape of the morning glory flower, blossoming at dawn. All those many in-nago trumpets greeting the day and heralding us into the blue conscious space. There are mythic and actual trumpets across the Abrahamic world. In Judaic traditions, the ram's horn trumpet is sounded on the new year and on the day of atonement. It's blast, pierces illusion and calls for repentance. That's what they say. Could a true trumpet sound over the holy land today? I wonder could a true trumpet sound over the holy land today and make all the layers of illusion transparent and bring those responsible for all this madness to their knees and wake the perpetrators from their stumbling, fumbling genocidal sleep and rattle so deeply at old ancestral wounds until generations of anger shift instead to mercy and shared grief. Do you feel a great trumpet blast ready to sound? Ready to shake the architecture of nations? Ready to give voice to global frustrations over the lack of change, the lack of movement, the lack of resolution, the incescent bombing, the fire keeps building, like you're really going to bomb land that has already been reduced to ruins again. You're really going to move people who've been moved a hundred times again. You're really going to take aim at the aid station again while people are waiting in line for food. But listen close for the whisper that rises from the olive trees. Listen to the wind stirs the ancient voices thrumming. Do you hear a trumpet of reconciliation coming? Is there a sound that could lay things bare? Reveal fully and clearly the truth of how things are? Where we're at? Where we're going? What it's all for? Could there be the sounding of a planetary roar? So there's this vision in the myths in which the great sound, the great roar, is not simply a roar of awakening and passage. It's also like an evaluation. The power of the roar calls us out. Shows us where we've been hiding. Where are patterns have gotten too convenient? Where we've leaned into them a little too long. And it's time to shape things up a little bit and check ourselves. So in some traditions, right? The sound of the trumpet is a harbinger of judgment. You know, trumpets on the day of judgment, that kind of thing. And this is where people might be thinking, "Yeah, I just wanted to listen to a good emerald episode about trees and rivers and that kind of thing." And all of a sudden we're on trumpets on the day of judgment. Yeah, and this one's tricky. Judgment. Not everybody's favorite topic. You start talking about trumpets on the day of judgment and people's skin might start to crawl and all the religious baggage starts coming out. You know the image, the angel blows as trumpet, and the dead rise and are judged for their sins. And the good ones go to paradise, and the bad ones are eternally damned or even maybe vaporized. It can all sound arbitrary and punitive and harsh and disconnected from reality, right? But let's give it a little more life, a little more breath. There's a seed of anemonecy in all those old stories. Sometimes we've just got a shake at free from 2,000 years of socio-cultural dust. The idea of some type of vibrational reconciliation that we go through, that sounds a little more relatable, right? The roar at the heart of the cosmos sounds and makes clear to us our own vibrational state. The state of our heart field. Our insecurity is our fears, our patterns all get shaken loose by the resounding sound. It's like this. Imagine right now that you are compelled to walk through a hole of bells, bells of all shapes and sizes, deep bronze bells and resonant gongs and high chimes like far off starlight. And as you walk through this hall of bells, they begin to sound. But the sound they are sounding comes from you. It's an amplification, a reflection and echoing of the vibrations of your heart field. The bells are amplifying all those places of vibrational congruity and incongruity. All those places of harmony and dissonance within you. And they're playing your own song back to you. Do you hear the bells of the cosmos playing your own song back to you? Here in the sea of infinite vibration, in which our own heart song is played back to us, over and over again. What would it be like to have my own song played back to me like that? Could I stand it? Or would I run, fleeing for cover? And if I couldn't stand it if I were tempted to run by the sounding of my own song, allowed, then isn't it time to check myself a little bit? And do some of the work that needs to be done? The trumpet is karmic reckoning. Fearless and searching moral inventory, as they say in AA speak, and it's sounding for all of us, always. In the Tibetan Buddhist traditions in the intermediary state after death, we encounter a roar, a primal reverberation that is the reverberation of our own consciousness sounding back to us. Quote, from the midst of that radiance, the natural sound of reality, reverberating like a thousand thunders simultaneously sounding, will come. That is the natural sound of thine own real self, be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor odd. The sound of thine own real self, how sweet the sound of that great debaury, Lord. So this is the living, breathing, somatic version of the final trumpet, the trumpet of judgment. If we can soften the terminology a bit and see the truth behind it, it's the sound that gets in and vibrates us in all the places that need to be shaken free. That makes all the karmic patterns known to us. It's that luminous roar, maybe you've felt it. That luminous roar within the plant medicine circle that shows us all the deep inner stresses, all the vibrations, tensions and aggravations, and calls our attention to the place where we need a little fine-tuning. And this sound is not reserved for the end times. This sound is sounding right now, right here. In visions of an infinite universe in which all times are here in the present time, we can understand that the trumpet at the end of days is sounding right now and right here. That with each breath we take should we choose to pay attention. There is a vibrational reconciliation possible in which we can let ourselves be shaken free by the roar of the cosmos and carried and held and seen through a transformative rebirth seen through to the other side. So yes, there are trumpeters that make great announcements and myths. There are town cryers and denunciators. I've got a soft spot for town cryers. It's right there in my last name. Check it out. And it's a thankless task often to be the announcer, the messenger, the one who has to say, "Actually, the job market is down this month." Or by the way, progress narratives are a lie. Or, "Psst, reality isn't exactly what it seems." But we need those clarion calls. We need to be blasted awake. And the trumpeters perhaps are busy these days. Or at the very least, they're gearing up. For what heralds the apocalypse, the time of great cathartic transformation, the great personal and planetary unveiling in the myths, but the sound of the trumpet. The rupture into the new world of time of deep transformative change, whether felt individually or felt communally, societally or globally, comes with thunder and drones and loud announcing the wars. So the angels of Revelation are known by their thunderous voices and their roars. The angel cried with a loud voice as the book of Revelation as when a lion roars. And beyond the biblical evangelical associations we may have with this that might be uncomfortable, see if you can feel into the ecstatic, somatic heart of it. I mean really, like drop the baggage for a minute and get into it because this is animism too. You can say what you want about those biblical visions, but they're metal. Quote, "And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven clothed with a cloud, and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were in the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire. And he had in his hand a little book open, and he set his right foot upon the sea, and his left foot on the earth, and cried with a loud voice as when a lion roars. And when he had cried seven thunders under the voices, seven angels, seven thunders, seven trumpets, trumpets that bring hail and fire, and trumpets that turn the ocean to a boiling blood, and trumpets that swallow the sun and moon and darkness, and trumpets that cause the warm wind scarred of fall from heaven, and the rivers to go there, and trumpets that bring smoke and locusts, and trumpets that release the four angels and even bound in the U-3Ds to look. And trumpets that announce a last that all realms have merged with their one, the cappinum is now. And here, this is describing not only a moment of planetary upheaval, it is describing the cathartic visionary state itself, the moment of revealing when we glimpse into the heart of the lie, into the heart of the stories that we've been telling ourselves, and how we've been deluding ourselves, and how we've been just getting by, and how a great seismic shift is necessary to take us into the next phase. So angels with voices of thunder, angels of fire and snow, angels of great sonic river aberration, marked times of interior and exterior transformation, and when things have been building up, and we've felt the restlessness and the friction, and we can feel things are at a tipping point. We long for a great trumpet blast, a great trumpet blast to rattle the earth to its bones, to shake the sleeping awake, to vibrate the lies out of the hearts of the liars and the weapons from the hands of the soldiers, to strike dumb the broadcasters and give voice to the silent creatures, to squeeze tears from those who've gone numb, a trumpet that would take up the song of every trampled flower, that would give voice to every hidden power, that would call in a new world here today. Yeah, in one way, trumpets of judgment sound scary, right? In another way, we could say, "Yeah, it's high time for the trumpeter." In the Islamic traditions, Israfil, the trumpeter, the trumpeter who announces the end of days, sits with the trumpet right at his lips, always ready. His eyes upon the throne only waiting for one word, one glance from the great power, to blow the trumpet and signal the end of days. Maybe you've felt him recently. The one ready to blow the sewer and end the world and begin it all over again. Sometimes we can placate the trumpeter with offerings, with songs and poems and say, "Another day, Israfil, please wait another day." And sometimes perhaps when things have tipped so far, come so far unglued from their foundations, we must simply say, "Sound thy trumpet, blast away." Bring on the great unveiling, for I cannot hold this, grasp this, grok this, understand this madness. I cannot stare idly into this man or connect it abyss anymore. No, I think I hear the coming of a planetary roar. Shake us loose, shake us free, and the roar starts at the feet. But the souls of these pale and earth starved feet, those toes wriggle and flurred and bury themselves in new layers of black dirt. It rises through the mirror like a boiling, flaming bird. It shakes the dead ends, wiggles the entrails, as hell the guts drop and ribs fly open like a courtyard kees. Heavy arms cry free at last, and with a gasp the shoulder blades loose their pent-up wings. You feel those stooped and weighty shoulders, loose their pent-up wings. And that place where we've been carrying the weight of everything. You know that place at the base of the skull and the neck and shoulders that trapezoid of tension, where we've played atlas and held up the whole universe and taken responsibility for everything. That place grows and creaks and convulses and stretches to the limit as it comes near to bursting at the seams. And finally, collapses and offers itself up as a green feast. It forces great devours, shriekers and hounders tear open this place where I've been holding everything. Overs, shakers, stompers, rattlers help me shake off the dust of the world. Arise, a weak soul of the body says the Ginsaraba, shake off the dust of the world. Let's shake off the dust together. Come, together, one another. Let's dance beneath the summer thunder. There is a point in the ritual where the energy has built to the point it cannot be restrained. The fire cesseth strikes the earth. Thunder, clacks and milk and honey and wine. Pour forth, from everything. And how long have we been staving off that moment? How long have we been buckling under this grain? How long have we buried all we felt about the state of the world? How long have we kept the wolf restrained? There is the Norse tales tell us. A wolf. Long restrained with a magic ribbon. But there will come a time when that wolf will loose itself at last and be set free. The fetters will burst as the voodesspa. The wolf run free. Yes, at that time when the world has fallen into fragmentation and disarray. When brother slays brother for the sake of greed, when relational kinship is broken when familial bonds are severed, a time when perhaps like me, you look around and say, "This whole place is upside down and backwards." And the very axis of the world seems to tremble and shake. Oh, infirded world. We know it. We know it in ourselves how backwards it all is. We have an innate cellular knowing that we're never supposed to see that much of a child's spine. Children aren't supposed to f*ck starve. The natural generational flow. The order of creation is that the next generation grows and fattens itself off of what came before and if anything we diminish as they grow. We go gray as their locks curl and shine with healthy sheen. Our cheeks sink with time as their cheeks fatten and redden and thrive. This is bad, bad, backwards magic. This is the time of fracture. When the very depths rupture, the ribbon is loose. The wolf runs free. A ragnarok, the North traditions call it. The time of broken connectivity. We can learn a lot from this roaring and howling, Norse apocalypse story about the times that we're living in. Times when there's a longing to topple old orders and there are social movements harnessing and capitalizing on that longing and there is a deep sense of something that has been kept down that longs to break free. But what form that breaking free takes and how disruptive it is remains to be seen. It's a story about restraint and release. and the precarious dance of polarities. And central to this story is the gods trying to restrain the unrestrainable. And in that attempted restraint, in that suppression, in that holding down of the snarling wolf, the gods bring about the very thing they were trying to avoid. You can't blame the gods. There are times for restraining. There are times to set boundaries and times to tame. There are, in traditional, shamanic visions, spirit forces that need containing. And part of the act of being is to bring some of those unruly forces to heal. Containment of chaos is something that traditional animisms have been very concerned with. But those forces, those disruptive forces, those tricksters that are ultimately regenerating forces, we don't just bind them and leave them to fester, were meant to alchemize. And if there's not alchemization, if there's not an enacted cycle of transformation, then those forces grow and mutate. And oh, they long to break free. So it is with the story of Fenrir, the wolf. From the union of Loki, the trickster, and a great giantest named Ungerbotha, whose name basically means bad news, a giantest of chaos of the primal wilderness of frost and wind and snow, come three children. Fenrir, the wolf, Yurmangander, the serpent, and a daughter, hell, half blue. And the gods know what to do with the other two offspring right away. They send the serpent to become the boundary of the great cosmic ocean, where he goes and encircles the world, biting his own tail. And they send hell to rule over the underworld and administer the movement of the dead. Everything in its place. But the wolf now is different. He's in that gray area, is he came for wild? Is he franderful? And so they take him and keep him and feed him. He raise him amongst themselves. And then he starts to grow and grow and grow. He grows so fast that they do not know what to do until the gods shudder in fear. Oh my God, they think he's going to devour us all. We've got to bind him. They forge a great chain named Ladinger. They coax him into it, telling him they just want to see how strong he is and if he can break it. But when they declared it tightest the tech say, he braced himself, slammed it into the ground, kicked against it with his heels, and broke the fettors so that the pieces flew apart. Can't restrain the wolf with iron. They try again forging, draw me, and even mightier chain. He braids that. Finally, at a loss, they go to the dwarves. And the dwarves understand the way that the powers work. They understand that if you want to balance out the obvious powers, you do it with unavvious powers, with little powers, with silences and little spaces of contradiction, rather than bold self-congratulatory statements. So what do the dwarves do? They don't make a chain. They make a ribbon, glipeneer, a magic ribbon. And what do they make it of? They make it of the sound of a cat's paw touching the floor. And they make it of a hair of the beard, of a bearded woman. And, quote, the roots of a high mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish, and the spit of a bird. They make it of all those little contradictions and impossibilities. It was smooth and soft as a silken ribbon, they say. But as strong as the strongest iron chain. And so the wolf is tricked and bound. The coming roar momentarily restrained. The gods breathe the sigh of relief. On the one hand, disruptive forces have been kept at bay. But, of course, the fundamental energetic hasn't been addressed at all. Like, oh, we tied up the snarling wolf and tossed him in the corner. Problem solved, right? And meanwhile, things are plunging deeper into disarray. People are forgetting the sacred rituals. Kinship bonds are dissolving. It seems that tightening the grip just led to more chaos. More star systems slipping away. Sound familiar? It's as if all things live in a state of shifting relational balance. And to find that balance requires a constant negotiation between forces of stability and forces of disruption and change. And that is not an easy balance to strike. I spoke with Rune Rasmussen from the Nordic Anemism channel about Ragnarok and its relevance to the current age. Let me call it the kindergarten version of Nordic mythology. Would typically teach you that there are two groups of beings-- the gods and the Yarnara trolls. And these two groups of beings are fighting. And that's what happens in the Ragnarok. But in the Nordic mythology as a whole, what they're really doing is that they're being in relation in all kinds of different ways. They make babies and exchange wisdom and enter into social contracts and all kinds of relation building between them. And that is problematic. And sometimes they also fight and kill each other and deceive each other. And so there's this precarious network of relating between the gods and the Yarnara, the beings that are beyond the social space. So the world in the traditional knowledge of Nordic cosmology is predicated on this sort of precarious relating. Part of what you see in the sort of the establishment of the harmonious audit cosmos is that these bonds are created. And these bonds are sometimes bonds of control. So you have the binding, for instance, of the finire. You have the Yormungand, of the great serpent of the seas has thrown into the sea and so on. Hell, the goddess of death, this actually placed in the underworld. So these bonds are controllers, but they are also, I think, negotiated controllers. There's also kind of a connection there. The understanding is that the world is in a constant relational negotiation between forces of stability and change and how we hold center and established boundary while still honoring movement is an ongoing energetic negotiation that will occasionally inevitably lead to polarities and buildups and releases and reconcilations in bodies, in communities, in societies. So fascinating, all this interplay between what you can call order and chaos or what you can call boundary and openness. If you don't get that balance exactly right, then eventually, like it or not, there probably is going to be some type of reconciling. There is going to be some type of-- Yeah. Or perhaps it says something about that the world is just a really troublesome difficult place to build, for instance, stuff like human community. So there will be paradoxes. There will be deceit. And that will be somehow foundational to create a stable space, something of that sort. Yes, you need just the right dash of a pebble and change. You need that, which is outside to come in and replenish the inside. You need transgressions and oversteps. But when those oversteps go too far, they must be held back somehow. This is the negotiation. Trickster must be honored and also contained. The trickster, very much like Loki in the Nordic myth, is the initiator of almost everything. It's like such an important force. So you always acknowledge the trickster presence. But there's always also a containment. You're never supposed to, for instance, propitiate the trickster without also propitiating your own patron deities, because it can be disruptive. And so he's a mediator, but he's also send away. He's necessary for anything to happen in the world, but he's also controlled. And that balance between containment and letting things flow freely works until it doesn't. And inevitably, sometimes, the societal mandala gets too heavy at the center. And the periphery comes unanchored. And all those relationships crumble. And the whole thing collapses. And so it begins. And when that connection, then the Ragnarok myth, that begins with connectivity, Iconized breaking down. Break on kinship. that the world dissolves like pulling a string of yarn out of a knitted sweater and then connectivity in the world just breaks down, and then evraching clashes. Then what you see in the myth of the Ragnarok is that division of connectivity collapses. And that is expressed in a number of different ways. You see, for instance, that great serpent turns the waves, the eagle's shrinks in anticipation, pale beach, he rips the corpses, nagle far breaks free. Sort the fire giant comes from the south with branches ruined that's fire. The slaughter gods sun glances from the sword that is fire that reaches on the world. Eudder a seal, the principle of connectivity in the world burns. The sun turns black again. Connectivity also between humans, dissolves, kinship and respect. Brothers will fight brother and be his slave. Axe aids, sword aids, shields and cleft a sunder. Wailing in turbid streams, thoughts, oaths, swearers and murderers. It is these very dark images, visionary images, and some of the staff is also difficult to understand. Suddenly there's a person who sits on the mound striking his harp, and his name is Ekther, and that is the only place in the entire Norse literature that we see that name Ekther. So he's sitting there playing his harp while the world is coming apart basically? Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Do you hear the sound of the harpist playing as the very world comes upon him? So begins the great devouring, the great changing, the end of days. Ragnaraka, the earth and mountains shake so violently that the trees come loose from the soil, the mountains topple and all restraints break. Heimdall sounds as horned loudly in the air, the dwarves roam before their halls of stone. The sea surges as the mipoids, shipwrites and fury and advances. Nugglefar, the ghost ship made of the fingernails of the dead, comes unmoved. The bifrost, the great bridge of connectivity between worlds, breaks. The very world tree itself, the axis of the universe, trembles. And men walk, dazed into the underworld and broad daylight. Sound familiar, internet nation. Legions upon legions of hapless souls walking into the underworld and broad daylight. Ragnaraka, when that which was once in place, comes unmoored from place. When pairs of unreconsiled opposites do battle with each other. There is a tendency in this dissolving battle, the Ragnaraka, that oppositions clash and dissolve each other. So Heimdall, who is a deity of keeping things in their place, he's the guardian of the bridge, he is initiating also of the class system in one myth. He's a distinction role, he fights against, Loki of course, who's the transgressor. The Yormon Ganda, who's the sea fights against Thor, who's the heavens and so on. So there's a bit of oppositions meet and dissolve each other somehow. Until finally, the wolf himself wakes. Fenrir wakes. Howling terribly at the gates of hell, mouth gaping, his jaws reach Earth to sleep. His fur bristles like black lightning, like spears ready to strike. Flaming shoot out his eyes at nostrils, he swallows boat in the creator himself, and he and his fellow wolves devour the moon and the sun. Tell me, where are you and the wolf swallow the sun? Where are you and all things came undone? Where are you and all things swall the sun? And now tell me something, are you terrified of the wolf or are you cheering him on? Or how about a little bit of both? I mean, what would it be like to have everything that we've held down suddenly wake? That's the paradox. We long for it when we're talking about our repressed frustrations. We long for it when we equate the wolf with all that the system is held back from us. But what if Fenrir is literally everything that's been restrained? Not just the things you resonate with from your side of the political aisle, and society when we talk about everything that has been restrained, suddenly breaking free. We're talking about something we may not necessarily want to be around to see. So yeah, this is the paradox. We have a feeling that something's got to give, but what happens when something gives? The freeing of some restrained force that when freed shakes the world into a new age is a common theme in global mythic visions. Things are kept in a precarious balance. They are held together with communal ritual, with remembrance, with songs that honor the cycle. They are held together by human beings connecting to source, and remembering who they are, and establishing practices of offering, and with societal systems that keep the right balance of order and movement. They are held together in many traditions by having enough true sages, enough true elders who, in their connection to the very center of the cosmic world, because they live at the center of the cosmic world, become axes of their own, and keep the universe steady. But when religions go sour, and sages become abusers, and knowledge is diluted, and wisdom is lost, and tyrants tighten their grip, and things get too rigid, or too loose, or both at once. And those hidden forces tremble, and the great catfish wakes. Yep, don't mess with the primordial catfish. Shinto traditions speak of Namazoo, the vast sub-oceanic catfish, restrained by the thunder god Kashima Nokami with keystones that live at sacred sites all across the island chain. But when things are off, Namazoo gets restless, and he brings earthquakes. But he's not just a god of chaos unleashed. Namazoo, the catfish, was sometimes called the great god of world rectification. The balancing force. Understanding that when the catfish moves, when there are great earth changes and planetary shifts, this is part of a rebalancing process too, that all of it is linked together, our actions and planetary response. I love the vision of justice here, that the rebalancing justice of nature does not come merely in the form of far off sky-borne angels with scales. It comes in the form of a fish. It comes in the form of a river. It comes in the form of an ocean, teeming, with energy. Of course, in certain religious traditions, this understanding that human imbalance can lead to ecological imbalance can be spiraled into some pretty severe and out there correlations. You know, the whole immoral behavior causes earthquakes trope, right? And we don't have to go down that ideological rabbit hole. But at the same time, one need only look at intensifying storms, and floods, and rising temperatures, and raging fires to understand that there is a direct link between our behavior and environmental response. And maybe it's time to see that correlation less in terms of abstract angels of vengeance, and more in terms of direct ecological waves, immediate vibrational waves, like dump poison into the river and the fish die, and then you eat the fish and you die too. That kind of deep thinking, right? The fundamental recognition that the way that we've run completely amok, and simultaneously sought to keep the great wolf restrained, is roaring back at us in increasingly audible ways. And this is across cultural understanding. The disconnect, the disrespect, the distance from nature signals a societal degradation that means in many traditions, that it's time for a renewal of some kind. The Aztec traditions, the arriving of world-ending fire, or floods, is accompanied by roaring, or wailing sounds from nature itself, and the roar sounds to mark the fall of one age of the sun, and the rise of the next. The sun, often the crossing over, is marked by a darkening of the sun. And ironically, one of the ways that scientists are talking about counteracting the effects of climate change, and planetary warming, involves geoengineering the atmosphere by spraying calcium, calcium, and calcium. to the atmosphere to veil the sun's race. And that's a Ragnarok example if there ever was one. Sure, let's just see what happens if we cast a veil across the face of the sun. I wonder what the animate traditions of the world would say about that. Try to hold back the thing and end up bringing about the very thing you're trying to hold back. So sometimes it's a darkening sun. In other traditions, such times are heralded by the appearance of a strange and unusual. Star. Modern, Hopi prophetic traditions speaks of the arrival of a blue star. The blue star spirit. The kachina that heralds the day of purification and the movement into the fifth world. And just be clear here. As far as I know, this is a modern understanding that is quite possibly influenced by western traditions. It's not unbroken ancient Hopi as though. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have anything to offer. There's something about the story of the blue star, Kachina, that struck me. Amidst the familiar descriptions of the roaring of fire, the thunder of the ground breaking open, and the strange noises in the skies comes another image of a strange Kachina, a strange spirit. Who will, quote, "remove his mask in the plaza before the uninitiated"? Remove his mask in the plaza before the uninitiated. What could that mean? To take one's mask off in the midst of the ceremony is a deeply transgressive act and Hopi ceremonial culture. So one can see it as like a sign of the times. Things have gotten so backwards that people are rejecting the rules of sacred ceremony and violating the sacred order and taking their masks off in the middle of the ritual. But it's more than that, too. The word "apocalypse" means unveiling, right? It means that time when all is laid bare. All is revealed. To take the mask off before the uninitiated is nothing short of the collapse of the world order into the place where all things merge into one. Of duality and non-duality, merging into one. In the book of Revelation, this is what is meant when it speaks of the time when the kingdom of God comes present on earth. All dualities crumble. Which is what we've always spiritually been seeking. But to get there means that all we've known must die. This is the root paradox of the spiritual journey itself. We long to experience unification. We long to experience boundarylessness. But that unification and boundarylessness is death. And once we get there, there's not an "us" to experience it. And what is it ultimately? Enlightenment, annihilation, void, death. Is it the love and braids between the moths and the flame? When the conference of the birds after their long and arduous journey stands before the herald of the Simorgh, the great bird that they've come so far to see. And they hear it said that what they are about to meet might annihilate them. The vision of it might totally annihilate them. And they may never be the same again. They reply, "How can a moth flee fire?" When fire contains its ultimate desire. And if we do not join him yet will burn. And it is for this which our spirits are. This is what we wanted, right? The world of no boundary. For all things to be revealed. For the order to take its mask off in the ceremonial circle. For it to collapse. We wanted the moment of great revealing and unveiling. But then that moment is also death. And this is a paradox present in today's social movements too. We've longed for the toppling of old orders. We've longed for stagnant systems to go through revolutionary radical change. But then when that change comes, it's never on our terms. It's never exactly how we would do it. And there's a lot of upheaval along the way. The blue star, Kachina, removes his mask. The veil is lifted. The sacred is exposed. And we are at the threshold of a new world. And how we've feared and how we've longed for that moment of unification. And how will we meet it when it's here? So don't be alarmed here. I'm not saying like, "This is it folks. We've reached the end of days." It's time to start hoarding food and looking for bill. You know, bill, the irresistible foodie prepper from the last of us. I'm not saying it's time to start looking for bill to hunker down with and live out our last years. I'm talking about a particular energetic movement that is present in times of rising frustration, planetary pressure, of building more that is present globally and it's present in us. And I've been feeling it acutely and I bet you have to. We enact this apocalyptic cycle, this cycle of awakening and unveiling in us constantly. It's in the arrow cycle. It's in the cycle of gestation and birth, of birth and death. It's in the monsoon cycle, the artistic cycle. The cycle of social movements in waves of build up and release. In an earlier episode I said this, here's the thing about apocalypse. If we don't find and honor this ultimately life giving energetic crisis within, we will create it without. So our rituals have to enact the full cycle. They have to give voice to the full cycle. It's not enough just to connect to the peace and silence at the center. That's an essential part of it, but the center of the mandala is not the only part of the mandala. We have to connect to the dynamism of the cycles, to the energy in the water. Rituals the world overtake the practitioner through a process of build up and release. We must dance these waves together. These monsoon waves together. Let us dance these shimmers, these spirals, these stories, these surges, these roars. We must enact the cycle of accumulation, rupture and release. Over and over again, because it's what we're made of. Rituals enact a great death and renewal. They take us to an apocalyptic world ending moment within us. They take us to the point of obliteration, unification. Ritual harnesses apocalyptic urges within us, so that we don't enact them on the planet and on each other. So that the roars we feel rising don't have to manifest as relentless drilling, relentless bombing, relentless anxious seeking. So that these frustrations overflowing don't have to manifest as mass shootings. As random NFL headquarters killings. As gunning down insurance CEOs in the street. It doesn't matter if we've decided in some abstract sense that the cause is right. Justice is in the actual flow of cause and effect. Justice is the energy in the water. And instead of getting swept away, take a pause and simply watch the movement of the waves. Those little acts, those little exclamation points, those little mini roars might seem significant in the moment. Watch how quickly they die out. Watch those short immediate bursts. Watch how they ultimately fail to deeply move or galvanize. After riding a momentary wave of energy that wave crashes, and Luigi Mangione ends up staring at a cell wall and eating prison food for the rest of her life. And wondering if it was all worth it. And the question comes, "Wasn't there a better way to channel the war?" Because there's a much deeper war to channel our affidels to the world. The roar of awakening. The roar of remembrance. The roar of love. Inaction. The roar of feeding the hungry. All this to say, there's a lot of energy that wants to be moved these days. This is about recognizing that something's got to give. And we know that it's got to give. How do we channel that roar in life-affirming, nourishing, ultimately creative ways? So how do we meet the time of great unveiling? How do we meet the apocalypse, the rising of the roar? Is it with her ribbon made of the sound of cats' footsteps and bird spit? With hidden roots and paradoxes and strings of impossible things? Is it with grand proclamations and bold statements and the noise of marching feet? Or is it instead with a simple pair of shoes? Made of the scraps of coblers. In the midst of Ragnarok, Vithar, the silent God, steps forth. He's never said much throughout the world. this whole process. All he's done is slowly and carefully collected the scraps of the leftover leather from the floors of the culbers of the world and made a pair of shoes with them. And when the time comes because of that slow methodical practice, he's got shoes that are soft enough to counteract the wolf's jaws. "Vitaar strides forth," says the prosetta, and sets one foot on the lower jaw of the wolf. On that foot he wears a shoe which has been constructed from the scraps of leather that people cut from their shoes at the toe and the heel. So even as we're ritually enacting the intensities of the age, even as we're singing it out and shouting it out and dancing it out and playing it out, we're also slowly and meticulously architecting softness, softness to counteract the harshness of the age. In a world of sharp barbs, razor takedowns, minefields of discourse, are we antidoting with softness? Trust me, this is something I work with all the time. Because for me anyway, I've learned that embedded deep within the roar is a whisper. Deep below the surface is a whisper. And we only get there if we soften into listening. How about you? How's your relationship with softness? How about you, guys? Men of the manosphere? The overly bold gods get swallowed one by one in the great unveiling. Do you have shoes that are soft enough to mean what's coming? Turns out all the little silent scraps we ignored are the true cosmic weapon, and in the end a new world will be made with leftovers. A new world. The roar, the trumpet, the cauch, the cosmic sound, aren't just harbingers of doom. The doom was only doom if we were so committed to the old world that we couldn't let it pass. The sound is also the sound of a new world rising. In the Islamic traditions, Israel's trumpet sounds two notes, one that destroys and one that resurrects. This is the pulse. This is present in every breath. Every breath is a death of the old world and a brainer of new life. Every breath holds worlds crumble and new, dawns come. Dawns come. The apocalyptic tales after the great roar, after the unitary event, after the long night of chaos, speak of the dawning of the new age. When Gulencombe the golden rooster crows. The chanting of the sages and the Vedic traditions stirs Usha's the dawn goddess to wake. And those who survive the long cacophonist night, blink and rub their eyes of sleep. In the north traditions, a couple, leaf and leaf thresier, survive the apocalypse by taking refuge in Houdmimi's Holt. It's a grove which some say is right at the base of the great world tree. They huddle close, tell stories perhaps. They live, it says, off of morning, do, leaf and leaf thresier whose names simply mean life and the longing for life. And then in the Volospar this myth ends with the green earth rising again from the sea. And humanity will survive and there is a day tomorrow. And like we might be in for you know a period of human suffering on parallel in the history of our species with climate change rupture of agrarian patterns corresponding with politicians playing some sort of 20th century little barping. Let's try to start wars about borders again and these all things. Humanity is really really trying hard, very hard to not address the gigantic problems that we're in right. But there is a tomorrow. There is a healing is there and perhaps the world is in a breath of there's a breath of rupture in healing and rupturing and in the Nordic myth world there were actually grand ceremonies that happened every eight years which I believe are ceremonies of healing a world that is cyclically rupturing and then people need to come together and great ceremonies and heal the cosmos back into connectivity again. The world will be ushered into the new world by the tiniest of beings. In hope you tradition the littlest ones the ant people give shelter in times of crisis to those who maintain the sacred ways. In the Abrahamic tradition the ones who survive the ones who are able to go through the fires of individual and planetary alchemy and transformation are the ones whose names are written in the book of life and that's some deep poetry and that's a deep invitation. Imagine with every action we take to be more deeply writing our names into the book of life. With each breath we write our names more deeply into the book of life. With each tear of remembrance we write our names more deeply into the book of life. With each glimpse of the heart of this beloved world we write our names more deeply. Into the book of life we find our shelter our grove our community our morning dew our overflowing source. With each breath with each ritual song we're enacting continuity of song of sacred remembrance continuity of connection of life and our roars take root as songs and stories that spiral unbilically through dark ages and fast beyond to become threads for future generations that focus us into that humming point at the center that can keep us steady in the midst of the waves. That point around which the whole world dances that absorbs the whole world into it and then cracks open with new life like a seed. After the apocalypse the world the body is remade some story say regenerated from that point right at the center remade from the tailbone the bodies of the children about them crumble leaving one indestructible bone one point right at the center lose the tailbone from which the new world will be born. I bet the dancers who are listening have felt this the tailbone from which the new world will be born dancers who feel the empty diamond point of the tailbone from which the new world springs are you ready for it to rise forth like dancers right from the tailbone to spiral into all the permutations of being right from the tailbone. I know I long for it this world of new green shoots spiral made friction forged this next breath that waits let us be born into it and the new world coming let her usher us wide eyed and bleeding let her usher us blue and breathing let her usher us slick and steaming wet and grieving content yet still reaching crying laughing little fingers grasping let her usher us into life once more for I think I hear the coming of a planetary roar hi friends I'm sure that many of you have been just as distraught as I have over the horrible ongoing situation in Gaza and I reached out to Nadia Irshade Gilbert who has been on this podcast and is very active in the Palestinian movement and I asked her for some names of small scale aid organizations that she feels are actually able to get aid across and help Palestinian families in dire need and she gave me a couple of organizations and I want to name them here the first one is the Zainab project Zainab is Zaynab and if you go to Zainab project dot or you can find out information on how to donate and and for a very long time. low donation, you can get food and water across to help people. Obviously the situation there is very variable and volatile and so sometimes they can't get stuff across, but for the most part they have been able to get aid supplies in. The other organization is called the Lemon Tree Collective. It's a small scale humanitarian aid organization that works with specific families within Gaza. You can find it at lemon tree dash collective dot org and the dash is important because there is another lemon tree collective that does other work that is also very important work, but it's not directly related to this situation. And so I'm donating and if you feel compelled to donate, please do. Special thanks to Roon Rasmussen from the Nordic Animism Channel for coming in and diving right into Ragnarok with us. And if you're interested in finding out more about Nordic Animism, the Norse myths, Roon's Nordic Animism Channel is a great place to start and it's easily findable under Nordic Animism Channel. Many thanks also to Snow Raven. You can find her incredible music everywhere that you find music and she's on Instagram as Snow Raven official. That's Snow Raven official and all of her albums are definitely worth checking out. And Snow Raven let me use some of her recordings for this episode and these include the song Web of Life, which is an absolute banger and you can find it anywhere where you stream music. And I also grab some vocalizations that she did during a TED talk which you can easily find on YouTube. It's really inspiring. She also did a little improvisation on our call and that's woven in as well. So many thanks to Snow Raven for providing such beautiful texture for this episode. This episode featured music from Maria Stark and Travis Punterelli working together. They're incredible artists and it's a joy to work with them and a joy to hear them give voice to these roars. And if you want more info on their music Travis can be easily found at Baladeer B-A-L-L-L-A-D-I-R on major music streaming platforms and on Instagram. And Maria Stark you can simply look up her name. Maria Stark, M-A-R-Y-A Stark. Special thanks to those two. Special thanks also to Sonny Ryan Hart for providing some apocalyptic chunky guitar sounds. Sonny is from the band Necrot, which might not be the kind of music that all listeners of the Emerald Podcast listen to. But I bet there are some Emerald Podcast listeners that want to listen to Necrot. So N-E-C-R-O-T if you want to bring the noise. And this episode also featured Andrew Vestola on drums, Char Roth Child on the Middle Eastern Reads. Janay Elita, whose Instagram is Janay J-E-U-N-A-E underscore Elita E-L-I-T-A and check out Janay's music. It's beautiful. All of the conch blasts that you hear on this episode were in tone by my friend Macana who played the conch at a cliff inlet on the Nepali coast of Kauai called Honopu and it is a really sacred spot. And I believe you can hear that in the reverberation of the conch itself. It's a burial place for generations of Hawaiian ancestors and its name means the place of the conch shell. As always this episode contains reference to many songs, books, movies, articles, etc. These include the songs "Something's Gotta Give" and "Mark on the Bus" by Beastie Boys. The 1995 film Braveheart directed by Mel Gibson. The poetic and prose eddas by Snory Sturlison which also contained the Valdospah, the song of the Seeris and Penguin Classics as good translations of both of those. The article "Seaseless Voyaging, Spiritual Journeying in Ahtar and Ibn Rabi by Jane Clark" Hawaii News now's live coverage of the 2025 Pacific Ocean tsunami warning. The Rikveda, the poem "The Man Watching" by Rainer Maria Rilke. Kali, the Black Goddess of Docksha Neshwar by Elizabeth Harding, the Devi Mahatma, the Bhagavad Gita translation by Swami Prabhupada. The lion's roar two discourses of the Buddha by Bikkunanamoli, the Pali Canon, the Mahaprasana Padarmita Sutra, the Nitsusodashi Carniva, the film "Shaka Zulu", the book "Shamanism by Marcelli Adi", "Shaman's and Elders by Carolyn Humphrey", "Probender Vokes Literature", "Dare Turkish in Stama" by W. Radlov, the poem "Song of Myself by Walt Whitman", the song "Gusbumps by Travis Scott", the song "We're Not Gonna Take It" by Twisted Sister, the call of the wild by Jack London, the song "Better Days by Eddie Vetter", the Lord of the Rings, the two towers directed by Peter Jackson, the film "Avatar" directed by James Cameron, the Bible, and more specifically the book of Joshua and the book of Revelation, the Tibetan book of the Dead or the after-death experiences on the Bartoplane, English translation by Lama Kasi Dawa Samdup, the Quran, the Ginza Raba, the album "Oh Inverted World" by the Shins, the Conference of the Birds by Aatar of Nishapur, the sword in the song, a fantasy novel by yours truly featuring a hall of sentient bells, maybe one day I'll release it and you can read it. The HBO series "The Last of Us", the song "Get Oh Story" by Chom, and of course the song "Black Sabbath" by Black Sabbath, the guitar riff that changed music forever, R.I.P. Ozzy Osborne. , that's a whole lot of roaring. I think I hear the coming of a planet here. Gary Gargle.