As a way of capping off this year’s Halloween season, I have just just begun to read this long, fascinating summary essay by Laura Knight-Jaczyk, the founder of sott.net, and yet, already, I am reminded of my time in Siberia last summer, and especially of the day, on the shores of Lake Baikal, when we were introduced to shamanism via the ceremony of shy, colorless bank clerk who transformed, as soon as he donned his strange garments, into an elemental being so powerful, and so powerfully foreign to my experience that it took my breath away.

Laura Knight-Jaczyk: “My work is all about following the lines of Pagan/shamanistic ideas and teachings back to the Ice Ages – the cave painters, the Northern European origins – to find the most original, fundamental, common foundation of all of them.”

Witches, Comets, and Planetary Cataclysms (2010)

P.S. I’ve now finished reading it. Fascinating, worth the read, and ultimately, discouraging, if one wants to hold on to a humane view of the human race when under great pressure and stress. At least that seems to have been true then, in the past. But this is NOW.