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

December 27, 537 — Hagia Sophia and the Architecture of Knowing

Long before creeds hardened and empires mistook obedience for faith, wisdom was understood as a path rather than a command. In the ancient Greek world, the sacred did not begin with submission, but with recognition. Above the entrance to Apollo’s temple at Delphi stood the words that framed an entire civilisation’s understanding of consciousness: Gnōthi seauton — Know thyself. This...

Eleusian Mysteries

Harvest traditions have roots in Eleusis. The foundation of the Mysteries of Eleusis was the story of Demeter and Persephone. In this tale, Hades fell in love with Persephone and kidnapped her from the fields where she played, taking her back to his kingdom in the underworld. When Demeter discovered her child missing, she searched everywhere on Earth for her....
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 of the misery wrought by the obliteration of truth. James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) felt under […]...

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...
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 L. Weston, after more than thirty years of study, wrote a little book entitled From Ritual to Romance (London: Cambridge […]...
House of the Chalice

Gards AĂşirkeis, 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 AĂşirkeis, 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....
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, Trier, Salzburg, and Bremen, the papal bull declared that “some parts of Northern Germany” were infested with “many persons of […]...
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...

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 death, and it usually remains within one family. It is usually connected with the name, so that if a child […]...

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