As of this weekend, I have published a new ebook Tales of the Whirling Rainbow: Authentic Myths & Mysteries for 2012.

The book is my account of some of the key myths and mysteries of the Americas, and an exploration of how those myths are echoed in real time as we edge toward the signal year of 2012. The true stories in the book arise out of my experiences over the last four decades as I have traveled with the traditional wisdom keepers of the Americas, and also out of the venerable tradition of storytelling. While the tales are not overtly agrarian, they all do ultimately bear upon our relationship with the land.

This new ebook is in part a pastiche of elements that I have written for other books and articles, now woven together in a new telling both by the context of time as 2012 approaches, and also by the living, mythic image of the whirling rainbow.

In his book Transformations of Myth Through Time, the late Joseph Campbell noted that a society that does not have a myth to support it and give it coherence goes into dissolution. “That,” he wrote, “is what’s happening to us.”

And that, I feel, is why it is worthwhile to tell the rainbow tales again in yet another way in this ebook: to contribute a word picture of what I regard as a supporting and coherent myth for our times, a mystery to engage the fullness of the contemporary soul.