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

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...

The Whispering Nights

As the sun reaches its lowest ebb and the longest night descends, a different kind of time begins. From December 21st through January 6th, the fabric of our world grows thin. This is the time of the Raunächte—the Rough Nights, the Smoky Nights, the time when the wheel of the year grinds to a halt, and the unseen world bleeds...

Bélisama, or the Memory That Refused to Die

There are moments in history when a civilisation does not lose its gods through conquest or argument, but through something far quieter: redefinition. Names are translated, functions reassigned, sanctuaries repurposed, until what once stood at the centre of a people’s inner life survives only as an annotation in someone else’s system. Bélisama belongs to this order of disappearance. Modern reference works describe her briefly as a “Celtic goddess, assimilated to Minerva.” The phrase appears neat, efficient, and final. Yet the […]...
Holle - Teich - Meissner

Holle’s kitten

Tidbits on the tale of  Frau Holle’s kitzen. There is a mountain in Hessen, Germany called the Meissner where one still can find traces of the central German goddess Holle, Holda or Helja. It’s a place where her cult seems to have survived for a long time. There are roads going to the mountaintop and there are many hiking paths....
Raven T-shirt design

The secrets of the Crow

Hrafn The Bird Goddess is believed to be the earliest and best-documented deity. During the Paleolithic period (Old Stone Age), carved figurines and cave paintings began to appear in a vast area that stretched from the Pyrenees of France to Lake Baikal in Siberia, just north of Mongolia. Crows are mentioned in the mythology of many cultures throughout the world...

Meet the Disir

Apart from gods or goddesses, medieval authors often refer to female guardian spirits identified as dísir and sometimes fylgjur. The conceptions under-lying these two kinds of spirits undoubtedly differed initially, however some of the later authors employed the terms interchangeably. Reference is made several times to sacrifice to the dísir, conducted at the start of the winter season. The ritual concerned a festive meal and seems to have been a private ceremony, hinting that the dísir belonged to one household, […]...

The Face That Tells No Lies

There is a scar on Otto Skorzeny’s face that irritated him deeply — not the scar itself, but the name given to it. Scar face. He knew exactly where the label came from, and he rejects it in his 1962 memoir with the precision of a man who has thought about this more than once: “Ich darf also feststellen: Ich...
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 […]...

Thursday’s Secret: Why Thor Is the God You Call When the World Burns

If Wednesday belongs to the master of masks, Thursday belongs to the one god in the entire Norse pantheon who could never wear one. Thor’s day. We say it every week — the same way we say Wednesday without hearing Wodan — and we don’t think twice. But Thursday carries something different from Wednesday. Something rawer. Something that still rumbles....
Odin

Will the Real Odin Stand Up, Please?

Who’s Odin? To find Odin’s origins, how far back must we go? Although the most likely explanation for Snorri’s attempts to connect the Æsir with Troy is medieval literary fashion, it is tempting to see a possible source in folk memories of the migration of the Yamnaya culture from the steppes of the Caucasus and Urals into northern Europe four...

Wagner and Schopenhauer

When reading Otto Maier’s journals and stumbling on his musical (harmony) ideas, the illusionary world and the references to the division “Parzival” one will meet without doubt Wagner and Schopenhauer. Philosophical ideas profoundly inspired Wagner. Not in a dilettante fashion, but out of genuine interest, passionate need, and deep study. In early adulthood he was a real revolutionary socialist and a comrade of  Mikhail Bakunin, in whose company he manned the barricades in the Dresden uprising of 1849, as a result spending […]...

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