Recreated Norse long house, L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. The site was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 1978.

In an age full of noise and hurry, many people are turning back to something very old: the drum, the symbol and the quiet ritual. These are among the first tools human beings used to reach beyond ordinary awareness. From the forests of Siberia to the plains of North America, from the Arctic to the Amazon, sound and sign have served as bridges between the visible world and the unseen realms of spirit. The scene at the top of this page gathers those elements in a single image: a painted drum, faces turned inward and outward, and the adornments of people who carry their beliefs on their bodies. Each of them opens a door into the long history of the shamanic journey. The Drum, Heartbeat of the Earth At the center of many shamanic traditions stands the frame drum. A round wooden hoop covered with hide, it is often painted with stars, animals, trees and spirits. Among Siberian peoples, the drum was sometimes called the shaman's horse, the mount that carried the healer between worlds...

On August 18, 1590, a ship landed on a narrow barrier island off the coast of what is now North Carolina. On board was John White, the governor of a colony that he had left three years before. His daughter, her husband and a granddaughter, the first English child born in North America, had stayed behind. He walked to the settlement and found the houses gone. The fort was empty, and on a post, in neat capital letters, someone had carved a single word: CROATOAN. The 115 men, women and children of Roanoke had vanished, and what became of them is one of the oldest unsolved mysteries in American history. The Colonies of Roanoke The story began with Sir Walter Raleigh, who received a charter from Queen Elizabeth I in 1584 to found a colony in the New World. A first group of soldiers and explorers settled on Roanoke Island in 1585 under Ralph Lane. They struggled with food and with the local people, and in 1586 they left with Sir Francis Drake's fleet. In 1587, Raleigh sent a second...

A taunt is a small thing, yet it set the sky on fire. In the Roman poet Ovid's retelling of the Greek myth, a boy named Phaethon was bragging to his friends that his father was the Sun. A rival named Epaphus laughed at him. Your mother is lying, he said; no god is your father. Stung and ashamed, Phaethon went to his mother, Clymene, and asked for proof. She told him to go and ask the Sun himself. The journey ended with a golden chariot in flames, a river of tears turned to amber and one of the most famous warnings of ancient literature. A Boy and a Promise The name Phaethon means "shining" in Greek. In the usual version, he is the son of the Sun god Helios and of Clymene, a sea nymph. He traveled east to the palace of the Sun, a place of shining columns, gold and ivory. Helios welcomed him and, to show his love, swore by the river Styx to grant any wish. Oaths sworn by the Styx could not be broken, even by the gods. Phaethon asked for the one thing his father shoul...