Charleston’s foodways, language, folklore, art, architecture, and history all reveal connections to the Caribbean that shaped not only the city itself, but the entire South as a region and the U.S. as a nation as well.
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Blind Hills and Tar Pits:
The Swamps of Folklore in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby
By employing strands of existing and original folklore in the novel, Morrison depicts multiple ways in which her characters become trapped and freed, as well as how and whether they succeed in so freeing themselves.
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Behind the Mask:
An Enneagram Analysis of the Star Wars Saga
Like Vader, we all hide behind masks that protect us from the harsh, sometimes toxic outer world; and as with Vader, healing means learning to remove the mask, to return to and reveal our truest selves.
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Inside the Walls:
An Enneagram Analysis of Stranger Things
The Enneagram reveals nine ways the ego hides our essence behind a mask — like Will Byers hidden in the Upside Down, looking out at the world through the walls of his own house, waiting to be found and freed.
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Turning the Wheel:
An Enneagram Analysis of Lost
An ancient wisdom tradition with roots in Sufi, Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist mysticism, the Enneagram is a fitting lens for viewing and understanding the characters of Lost, and maybe — by seeing ourselves in their stories — uncovering our own secret strengths and wounds.
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Mark Twain and the Folklore of Day and Night
A look at two parallel ways Twain uses folklore and superstition in his works, and what this split says about the author himself.
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Yokai: The Folklore Roots of Pokémon
When Pokemon GO! released in the summer of 2016, it wasn’t my first encounter with a breed of monsters and ghosts unlike any elsewhere in the world: yōkai, the supernatural creatures of Japanese folklore…
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‘Fighting the Long Defeat’ : Nature and Grief in Tolkien and Medieval Poetry
Especially in The Lord of the Rings, medieval ideas of nature — from its decline and hostility to culture, to its own suffering alongside us — color Tolkien’s writing, where they ultimately develop into a reconciliation between wilderness and hearth…
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Sorrow and Light:
Reflections on Rewatching Lost
Characters, not mythology. Mystery, not answers. Five years after Lost’s polarizing finale, I look into the eye of the Island again. How I felt then, why I drifted away from the show, and what I saw when I came back to rewatch it — all six seasons — for the first time since “The End.”
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