My story begins when I was three and my father took me to see Fantasia, quickly followed by a visit to the American Museum of Natural History to meet T. rex. I fell in love with dinosaurs, a love which gradually expanded into a broader image of the past as a vast, unknown realm.

My love of the past took on an additional dimension when I was seven and fell headfirst into Greek mythology while recovering from measles. However, something odd happened when I tried to share my passion for the Greek gods with my friends Suzi and Ellen. They replied very seriously, “That’s not what God is. God is an old man with a long white beard who lives up in Heaven and wishes he could down and play with the little children.”

I knew better, even at that age, than to try to argue with them, but the utter bizarreness of that response — and the fact that both of them shared it so unquestioningly — has haunted me all these years. It is why much of this website is dedicated to exploring the sources of belief systems and why people are disposed to believe peculiar things about the unknowable.

The succeeding chapters of my story can be summarized more briefly. By the time I was nine, my obsession with myth had led me to both ancient history and contemporary fantasy — initially the books of E. Nesbit and C.S. Lewis, then J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. But when I was twelve and aged out of the children’s library, I resorted to historical novels and spy thrillers as the next best thing, followed by science fiction. All three genres fueled an admiration for fighters against tyranny and oppression, along with a dawning sense that even the recent past and near future could be as weird and romantic as more distant times.

However, none of this satisfied my craving for a world that was not only stranger but more magical than the flat terrain of the early 1960s. So I returned my attention to Tolkien’s Middle-earth and over the next decade slowly came to recognize that the vast expanse of human history was as miraculous in its own way as anything in The Lord of the Rings. This realization, which has guided me during all the years since, forms the second backbone of this site.