Korean peoples — the pansori tradition flowered under the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1897), with roots in shamanic (mudang) ritual song, developing especially in the southwestern Jeolla region.
Pansori's world is the human and moral world of Joseon Korea — Confucian values of filial piety, loyalty, and virtue, interwoven with shamanic and Buddhist elements. The cosmos is moral: virtue is tested and ultimately vindicated, suffering is endured and transformed, and…
Read the entry →The figures, the cosmologies, and the traditions — read closely. Fifty-four traditions catalogued, and the scholarship behind each.
The Dogon and Sirius. Aboriginal Australian astronomical records spanning tens of thousands of years. Andean celestial cycles. Yoruba cosmology. What the world's peoples observed, recorded and built on.
Liu Cixin. Nnedi Okorafor. Yoon Ha Lee. Tade Thompson. Rebecca Roanhorse. Sixty works catalogued across thirty-six regions — reviews, author features, and what is being translated now.
Fifty-four traditions, each with its cosmology, its figures, its sacred elements and its sources. A working reference for readers and writers of speculative fiction.
Browse the Library →Translations, scholarship, field records, and the fiction itself. Every essay here names what it rests on.
Translations and collections — Tedlock, Christenson, the Kalevala, the Popol Vuh, the Mahabharata.
Archaeoastronomy and ethnoastronomy — the observational record, and the arguments about it.
The novels, collections and anthologies — in translation and in English.
Short-form pieces on the writers, the books, and the cosmological record. The video is the way in. This site is the depth.
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