Days of the dead tend to cluster around this time of year, whether they be Aztec, Greek, Celtic or Christian. Maybe the harvest season, full of life as it is, prompts a shadowy reflection of its opposite. Maybe the death of summer inspired ancient people to reflect on their  mortality.

The timing of things. You are here at the perfect, right time. All in due time. Your time will come. It’s not your time. We’re living in the wrong time. In the nick of time. Your timing is off.  We weren’t here on time. We escaped death,

Eight of us sat in circle as the Crone laid out the story. We were there to contact the dead. We were in a new age shop run by the gray-haired witch-crone now leading us. Mellow instrumental music drifted among the smell of sage, incense, and stale cigarette smoke. Eau

She didn't know her inside world was connected to her underworld. Until a hot wet stinky breath wakened her nose, a grunt landed in her weary ears, the railing rattled, and the underworld of her pleated skin was parted, exposing a tunnel. She didn't know her

In the grocery store a mother pushes a stroller stuffed with her screaming infant. All at once I feel an aching yearning in my chest to be the baby in the stroller. To cry and shit and scream and snot, to have my mother close by, to be held. Now

There was a time my head moved—it shifted like the cracking of a concrete foundation. Neurotransmitters fried into dead chemical compounds, wireless detritus bouncing to and fro. Cranium bleeds common, not an aneurysm more like the bloody soul destroyed by too many ignored pleas for help. In the end

When I was 14 years old, I almost died in a house fire on Mischief Night, the rough and tumble night that precedes Halloween. I had moved into the squat house the day before. A wild imagination awakened in me as my brother introduced me to the house full of

I think I could be a Christian. For the first time, I see a way. There is a path that I could walk to shed my spiritual baggage, to approach God with the eyes of a child, to allow all the stories to become meaningful again. I think I could

When I was a child, Halloween was a happy time. The day itself was a bounty of excitements, ending with me and my brother watching cartoons and gorging on the best candies (the chewy ones, the crunchy ones coated in chocolate). As we got older, we realized that if we

There was a time you let me know
 What’s really going on below
 But now you never show it to me, do you?
 —Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah” When my children were little I read them a book called Young Zeus, an illustrated recapitulation of the early life of the mythical

Preface: The ancient Mexica or Aztec people had different stories for the way a soul travels into the underworld [Mictlán] to be laid to eternal rest. There are myths of 9 levels through which the soul must traverse to meet the King and Queen of Mictlán, Mictlantecuhtli and Mictecacihuatl, the

Investigation of psychic phenomena, including those areas related to the continuity of consciousness after death, continues to be shunned by the mainstream. It is not a subject taken seriously at most universities. The New York Times and The New Yorker don’t investigate it. Yet many kinds of psychic, paranormal

What would an effective virtual "hell" be like? Let's explore this question.

Salacia cooks in the nude. I see her from across the way. Pasta and meatballs at least three times a week, half lamb, half pork, ajika, paprika and oregano. She’s petite, a D-Cup, vigorous thighs, and requires a three-legged stool to reach above the freezer where she keeps that

The western idea of a mythological underworld comes mainly from the Greek Eleusinian mystery tradition. Although very little historical evidence remains of the rites of Eleusis because of the secrecy around the practices of the cult, we know that these rituals enacted the transformation of woman from maiden to mother