Legends & Folklore

Seamlessly woven into everyday life, superstitions outlast culture after culture. For centuries, passers-by have avoided walking under ladders for fear of attracting bad luck. This superstition...

Soma is a quasi-mythical beverage and ritual sacrament, which is the subject of 200 hymns in the ninth and oldest section of the ancient Indo-European text, the Rigveda. Its exact composition,...

Today we understand fossils to be traces of ancient life we can use to understand evolutionary relationships between extinct and modern organisms. But fossils were once thought to have...

You may have heard such phrases as animal spirit, spirit guide and spirit animal. For those raised within more conventional spiritual structures, the idea of animal spirits may be a relatively...

People understand that the huge skeletons on display in our natural history museums are the fossilized remains of real creatures that walked the Earth millions of years ago. Likewise, to ancient...

Jewelry, as we understand it, has been around for at least 75,000 years--almost as old as humankind itself. Early humans created ornaments and figurines from the things around them: shells,...

The use of essential oils dates back to ancient times. Essential oils were used for healing as well as mystical rituals and religious ceremonies. Oils such as sandalwood and myrrh were used for...

For more than 6,500 years lapis lazuli, a rich blue semiprecious gemstone, marbled with sparkling golden pyrite, has been mined and transformed into jewelry, sculptures and even medicine. The...

Though man has been on the moon and telescopes have become so sophisticated that they seem to shrink the infinity of space, passion and curiosity for the universe remains piqued. And yet, to...

The legend of Atlantis has been the subject of debate for centuries. First mentioned in the teaching of Plato, Atlantis was portrayed as a highly advanced super society that existed either on an...