The Bright and Bristling Mind: Hair in Imagination and Myth

Have you ever looked at your dog and wondered what it feels like to have whiskers? Those bristling antennae, so bright and alive… Or have you put your hand on one of those globes at a science museum and felt the energy surge through the very ends of your hair? Today on the podcast, we’re going to talk about hair. Tumbling, cascading, curling, radiating — hair holds a very special and very energized place in the imaginative mind. Across the world, visions of the divine involve wild-haired goddesses, bristling white beards, and even silver-haired baboons. Turns out that hair and energy and even consciousness are very closely linked in the human mind and in some traditions, even the cosmos itself is a little bit hairy. These aren’t just Rapunzel stories, this is something wilder and more unkempt — hair that sprouts out of the back of trance practitioners, hair in the shamanic experience of animal transformation, and hair as a qabbalistic mystery