"Lakota women's robes, late 19th century. You can see the impact of the recent conquest which disrupted the entire lifeway, not just land tenue of the Plains peoples. Instead of buckskin, navy trade wool; dentalium shell collar has old roots, and ribbonwork with trade satin partakes of a cross-nations style movement shared by peoples from the Potawatomi to those settled in Oklahoma territory, replacing quillwork and other older arts." 

[Suppressed Histories Archive]

"The energies that move the body are the energies that move the imagination. These energies, then, are the source of mythological imagery; in a mythological organization of symbols, the conflicts between the different organic impulses within the body are resolved and harmonized. You might say a mythology is a formula for the harmonization of the energies of life."

Joseph Campbell, interviewed by Joan Marler, in The Yoga Journal, Nov./Dec. 1987

i've been reflecting of late the obtuse bullshit shrouding the hallowed ground called science... we forget, at our peril, that every breakthru in theory and practice came at the price of the dude or dudette that broke the news to the establishment... researchers who stumbled upon inconvenient truths were castigated and punished real good for their courage... highly ironically, today, in the post-truth century, we laud science for coveting the 'truth' when in fact it has been and continues to be the greatest obstructor of truth, dragged kicking and screaming its old ways, on record... for the interested, here's the story of one such suffragette... Ignaz Semmelweis....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

“I have noticed that the way women look at children is different from the way men do. There are two ways of looking at a little kid in an airplane toddling up and down the aisle: one is the way the woman looks at the child; the other is the way the man does. That’s why I say that the prime female power and virtue is compassion: the lack of egoistic isolation , the opening to participation. Even in sex, the man is aggressive, but the woman opens. The opening to that ubiquitous presence which is the ground of us all is compassion. Recognizing that spontaneous feeling, embracing it, and manifesting it in action is the female power.”

Excerpt From: Campbell, Joseph. “A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living.” Joseph Campbell Foundation, 2011-08-01. iBooks.

artwork Ming You Xu

in mythology we access the human of human theme and its encapsulated truths, like in the example i'm about to quote. it's not just abstractly interesting as anthropological report. it describes the evident tango between rationality and creative imagination at the global cultural level...

"The male serpent deity became the phallic consort of the Great Mother, sometimes a "father" of the races, because he was the Mother's original mate. In some myths, he was no more than a living phallus she created for her own sexual pleasure. In other myths, she allowed him to take part in the work of creation or to fertilize her world-producing womb. When the serpent-creator turned arrogant and tried to pretend that he alone made the universe, the Goddess punished him, bruising his head with her heel and banishing him to the underworld." [Barbara Walker]

"Snake Witch," as these dragon-suckling goddesses are called in Sweden; this one from Gotland Island, carved about 1100, in other words at the cusp of christianization.

on "science promotes and thrives on open-mindedness"....

the average scientist is just as constrained by articles of faith as the orthodox zealot, they just enjoy to proclaim otherwise... 'science' routinely excludes inconvenient facts from its literature and research climate, and then uses its own conclusions to curtail exploration along any lines that would challenge its persistent, cartesian hangover. 

what science likes to derogate as 'supernatural' can't be understood through the rational functions alone... as the quantum physicists you've quoted before will attest, our consensus notions of the physical world resemble not in the slightest what underscores that world at the post-atomic level. so too, the examples brought up to ridicule the 'supernatural' can't debunk the niggling fact that while much of our encounters with things "that can't be explained" can be reduced to simple causations, a lot of experiences cannot... like spontaneous remissions, remote viewing, ESPs and so on.

the notion that an exclusive, uber-credible approach to the world is to be found in the scientific method alone, that merely applying the criteria of the sciences as currently constellated will give us some edge on the truth, is just as absurd as the circuitous logic of purely magical thinking...

science is always going to be curtailed by the assumptions it leads with, even einstein attested to this when he talked about how the experimenters expectations had a definite influence on the outcome of tests, something also discussed by heisenberg... the scientific method is a valuable method, but it's only a partial method. it doesn't strike me as odd to imagine that our approach to investigation will continue to evolve, but we for the moment are still polarized by a rational/irrational lens. in short, this video is great for arming oneself for vindication with unreflective thinkers at dinner parties but its slightly hilarious for not realizing its just as guilty of myopia as wishful, primitive thinking is.... just my two cents.

[artwork Robert Bissel]