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Everything on Culture and related to the Maier files series. A cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings

Witch

European Witch-Craze

Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. —EXODUS 22:18 The European witch-craze. Evil thrives on lies, the most malignant of which have drained all through populations and nations—even the world—with devastating consequences. Nothing is more dangerous on this planet than a mob of idiots and ignorant human beings using their childish, literalist mind-set! What follows is a mere glimpse...

Folklore in Baltic history: Resistance and Resurgence

This book should be seen as a nuanced representation of the relationship between folklore studies and a socialist-totalitarian state, based on some of the significant issues in the history of folklore studies in the three countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, often referred to as “the Baltic countries.” This is not a complete and comprehensive history of folkloristics in the...
Bacon

Francis Bacon: Knowledge is Power

Francis Bacon was a great genius who helped to shape the modern world. But many people would be hard put to say exactly why. He made no new discoveries, developed no technical innovations, uncovered no previously hidden laws of nature. His achievement was to offer an eloquent account of a philosophy and a method for doing those things. And in that way he turned out to be as important as people famed for particular discoveries, like Galileo or Isaac Newton, […]...
Albruna Gudrun

From Ritual to Romance

Like in all ancient Norse myths codes and messages are hidden within. Mainstream scholars like us to believe that these myths are just simple stories to entertain or to describe natural phenomena our dumb forefathers were too ignorant to understand. But these tales are like riddles and intellectual challenges to be solved and contain real wisdom and knowledge. Ms. Jessie...
House of the Chalice

Gards Aúirkeis, a very ancient society

Warning: Major spoilers ahead for “Maier files” Somewhere in central Europe dwells a very ancient society known by its Gothic name: Gards Aúirkeis, or the house of the Chalice.  Some claim that its members protect an ancient knowledge and they have access to the wisdom of a lost civilization, others claim they form an ancient witch coven with roots going...

German & Celtic Women at War

Tacitus gives us some fascinating details in Books 7 and 8 of his Germania, written in about 98 CE, relating to the role of German women in war and battle. He points out that a major contribution to German military success lay in the fact that their fighting units were not made up of warriors randomly formed into motly crews. But rather are ‘composed of men from one family and that their households go with them to the battle, and […]...
Hexen kommando

German Witches

It’s almost Walpurgisnacht, no better moment to have a closer look at our witches or Hexen. Where did this cruel hatred against women and the ancient pre-christian sanctuaries start? When Pope Innocent VIII (1484–92) professed his belief in witchcraft, he condemned it, and dispatched inquisitors to Germany to try its supposed practitioners and punish them unimpeded. Singling out Mainz, Cologne,...
Faust

Goethe the Alchemist

The secret teachings of Goethe. That Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Germany’s greatest poet, had an interest in the occult and alchemy is clear from Faust. Based on an historical character, the original Faust legend goes back to medieval times and prior to Goethe‘s there were earlier dramatic renditions of the tale, notably Christopher Marlowe’s. Yet it is to Goethe’s...
gothic

Gothic form is living form

Wagner’s mythic medievalism and Teutonic underworldliness was shared by the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s embrace of William Blake’s prescient dictum—Gothic form is living form—the largely unacknowledged creed of Victorian architectural revival. Barbaric An adjective that had once meant “barbaric,” “Gothic” had been redeemed by perception of the medieval Catholic Church’s architectural embrace of the divine-maternal, the mysterious, tempting curve: the very essence of art, according to Edmond’s Bailly’s bookshop habitué, art critic, aesthete, monarchist, and Catholic Decadent Joséphin Péladan. Ogives Erik […]...

Hamingja and the supernatural guardians of the North

Hamingja, as used in the sagas, stands for an abstract conception, that of something belonging to an outstanding person which is partly a matter of character and partly of personality, and partly something more than either—that strange quality of ‘luck’ or luck-lessness’ which attaches itself to certain individuals more than others. It is something which can be handed on after...
Harvest festivals

Harvest festivities

Harvest festivals celebrated more than finished work for the season; they celebrated the capacity to survive the winter. The best known of these harvest festivals was the Eleusinian Mysteries, a weeklong celebration in ancient Greece that fell close to the Autumn Equinox. The equinox is not just a one-day event It can happen over a span of two to three...
Himmler's book stash Czech Library

Heinrich Himmler’s hidden book collection

The Daily Mail published an article related to one of the Maier files backstories. An unusual collection of books on witches as well as the occult that was collected by SS chief Heinrich Himmler in the war has actually been found in the Czech Republic. The books – part of a 13,000-strong collection – were discovered in a depot of the National Library of Czech Republic in close proximity to Prague which has not been accessed since the 1950s. Norwegian […]...
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