Ecology of Souls: A New Mythology of Death & the Paranormal - Volume One Paperback – July 7, 2022

Joshua Cutchin’s Ecology of Souls is a masterwork of scholarship and research. In this very comprehensive book, Cutchin explores the connections between sleep, dreams, death, UFOs and psychedelics. Ecology of Souls is loaded with historical references, inviting you to further explore other modern writers and also dig into the ancient texts that Cutchin refers to. The book is highly informative and very readable. Both the seasoned paranormal researcher and folks new to the topic will benefit from Ecology of Souls. Cutchin must have lived a thousand years to write this instant classic. Highly recommended.

I've been a fan of Joshua's work since A Trojan Feast, and his latest books Ecology of Souls is his most personal, and thought provoking yet! He covers UFOs, NDEs, Fairies, traditional folklore and more with a new and original lens that completely changed how I see the phenomenon. As he does in his others works, he expertly uses comparative analysis to draw comparisons between death and "the other". If you are new to his work, this book could sound intimidating, but I assure it is not. Somehow he's able to synthesise complex ideas into an easily digestible new way of looking at these topics. The first book gives you a great primer into his new philosophical approach, and the second volume goes in depth into what his idea of what an Ecology of Souls means. These books, including the companion are front and center in my paranormal bookcase...along with all his other works! Highly highly recommend!

This book was honestly amazing. I became aware of Joshua through various podcast interviews. I knew he had a very unique view on various paranormal topics. When I found out he had a new book out surrounding death I knew I had to buy it. I was in no way shape or form disappointed with this book. If you are considering buying this book or are on the fence BUY IT. The book is enormous and has obviously had a ton of work and research put into it. It is well written and very informative. I genuinely feel like I had questions answered that had never really never been answered before. 10/10 would recommend to anyone interested in the topic.

I was really disappointed to find this an example of woke "scholarship." Anecdotes are considered proof, the subjective is objective truth, lots of things are called racist, sometimes very questionably (lemurs have racist connotations??) I cannot fault his depth or attention to detail in terms of folktale research and I think this is worth a read for that alone. But his assumptions and conclusions are both logically flawed and over-simplified to the point of irrelevance. Just as an example:"The nûñnë'hï share so many attribute with Old World faeries we are faced with but two possibilities: Cherokee legends were irrevocably contaminated by European belief, or both cultures described a genuine phenomenen independently."My man, there's a whole world of other possibilities than that. The collective unconscious, remote viewing, certain tropes filling humanity's common need for explanation of the unexplainable, etc.On top of that, he presents zero argument that NDEs and people's hallucinogen trips etc are objectively real in any way, other than one woman who saw a shoe on a windowsill in an NDE and turned out to be right, and that people tend to see the same types of things during intense trips/sometimes seem to have gained some psychic knowledge. All this is not proof of anything except that people can sometimes access varying degrees of psychic ability, which was already proven by the literal government (see "Remote Viewing Secrets" by Joseph McMoneagle on the successful CIA remote viewing program, for example.) And in regards to drugs, I have sad news for the author: drugs tend to have the same narrow range of effects across different people.I wanted to read this because I'm intensely curious about any sort of grand unifying theory, so to speak, about the true nature of reality. I have experienced many things I can't explain, have gotten close to death, and have also experienced the depths of hallucinogens. In these respects, I am a perfect sample case study for his arguments, except that I vehemently disagree with everything I have read so far. I am almost done with volume 1 and I am going to read volume 2 to see how he ties this all together, but I extremely doubt I'm going to value his opinion much.

Could the creatures we call Bigfoot really be ghosts? Perhaps some of them?Could "alien" visitors in the sky (and sometimes on the ground) also come from the same place? At least some of them?Joshua Cutchin's Ecology of Souls: A New Mythology of Death & The Paranormal explores this idea. In two volumes (and a compendium with appendices and 4,200 endnotes) Cutchin documents the similarities in a wide variety of the "paranormal" manifestations that suggest "we are simply dealing with one giant ghost story."Along the way, Cutchin draws on near-death experiences, altered states of consciousness, faerie lore, ancient monuments, lake monsters, and other strange but not-uncommon phenomena that defy scientific measurement or replication.Depending on one's reading habits and schedule, Ecology of Souls may take a while to finish, perhaps weeks or months. But you will learn much, and scores of anecdotes help you understand these topics better.As I finished the book, I was pleased and satisfied with Cutchin's conclusions. The Other can be our teacher if we are open to being taught. These "disembodied" beings tell us that we are not our bodies. We are one in the same ecology of souls.I'm not abandoning my own wild theories of the strange. I think they're fun. But I agree with Cutchin that death is a big part of the paranormal.Just as death is a big part of life.