This thread is so good.
THIS. ^^
As a folklorist, this kind of thing bothers the hell out of me. So much of what people think of as ancient is Victorian era or newer. Or just wildly inaccurate, really.
Another part of it is that much of what Victorians would view as planar communication or “channeling” was conceptually an altered state in ancient times.
Like the Greeks knew that the oracles at Delphi were huffing fumes. And that was cool. Faerie wasn’t a land or a race, but the altered, glamorous reality of the fae, the gentry who lived in the hills. It was overtly compared to intoxication. Djinn lived all around us, invisibility, raising their own cattle herds and going on hajj to Mecca.
The “other world” wasn’t another place, but another way, a demimonde, an invisible society within our own, or divine madness.
“The less magical the world was believed to be, the more it became necessary to posit a division between us and the realms of wonder.”
“The idea of the mundane hadn’t been invented yet.”
@spiritspodcast
The idea of the mundane hadn’t been invented yet.
