Ishtar
It was Rodin who stated that “Man never invented anything new, only discovered things.” Although it’s correct to say that certain symbols have been man-made for a particular purpose, it’s just as correct to argue that everything is somehow inspired by the natural world around us, by the forms of nature, plants, animals, the elements. Even a reaction against the fluid forms of nature is usually...
twelve night of Yule with Holle
Holle the goddesses and Yule. Frau Holle is connected to springs, wells and lakes, where she lives in a land on the bottom of the water. She is also connected with the fog. Holle can be seen as a bright shape drifting in the fog, and her fog maidens are “die Hollen”, who move over the land to come to the aid of women and children....
Witch
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...
The tendency to deprecate the religious other through systematic attribution of Satanism survived the fragmentation of Western christianity during the Reformation schisms in the early modern period. Catholic polemicists deployed old stereotypes about Satanist heretics against Protestant Christians, while Protestants accused the Roman Catholic Church of demonic idolatry and proclaimed the Roman pope to be a servant of Satan. A new sect Indeed, it was to...
runen
The rune row or runic alphabet is not an alphabet comparable to the Greek or Roman alphabets. The rune row begins with another set of letters—f, u, th, a, r, k—and thus the rune row is called the Futhark. The order of the runes in this rune row was found on Gotland. On the Kylver stone, and on other items like the Vadstenabracteate and the Grumpanbracteate....
Benandanti. Carlo Ginzburg,  is a noted Italian historian and proponent of the field of microhistory and medieval culture. In 1966, he published The Night Battles, an examination of the benandanti visionary folk tradition found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Friuli in northeastern Italy. He returned to looking at the visionary traditions of early modern Europe for his 1989 book Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath. Italian Inquisition One of...
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