You're listening to the ancient tradition.

A Wonk Media production.

Music provided by Joseph McDade.

Here's your host, Dr. Jack Logan.

Welcome to the ancient tradition podcast.

I'm your host Jack Logan.

Jack is short for Jacqueline.

Since this is the inaugural edition, it's only fitting that I start by way of introduction with a little bit of background,

give you some information about what brought this podcast to fruition, and that starts way back in the mid-90s when I was thinking

a lot about religion and spirituality. So I started reading, and I read loads and loads of books,

and that included things from academic articles to scholarly books, and I even dove into the

sacred religious writings themselves. And I tried to read on a whole array of religious

traditions. And this included the ancient Egyptian religion, the Hellenistic mystery religions,

early Christianity, I read about a whole bunch of Native American folk religions. I was just trying

to get the lay of the religious landscape. And the more and more I read, the more I started to notice

that there were these remarkable similarities between these apparently different religious traditions.

And this is, in the modern world, this is a lot

how these religious traditions are perceived as being vastly different from each other. But as I was

reading, I was getting really a much different perception of the world's religions. Because instead of

being vastly different from each other, I was seeing an abundance of really remarkable

similarities and correspondences between them. And this was apparent in the symbols that they used,

the cosmogonies, which are ancient creation stories about how the world came to be. I could see

...