"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."
In Austrian and German folklore, the Drudenmesser is a decorated knife meant to guard off an evil spirit called Drude or Trude. It's today's Object of the Day on my Patreon. ...
When it comes to spooky mermaids, there's very little stuff that can match Elizabeth Jerichau-Baumann's paintings. We take a look at them today on my Patreon. ...
The Jikininki is a human-eating Japanese ghost who features in Lafcadio Hearn's collection of spooky stuff called Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. For those of you who follow the blog, I have written about him here and particularly I talked about three of his...
The Vetala Panchavimshati, also known as The Twenty-five Tales of Baital (Baital Pachisi) is a collection of Sanskrit tales and legends placed within the frame story of king Vikrama who promises a sorcerer (vamachari) that he will capture a creature. The collection of tales has...
For many of us, fall is the best season and October is the best month, leading up to all things spooky. Many people out there are creating prompts for artists and all people creative (check this out from WorldAnvil last year, for instance) and prompts are...
There’s the widespread narrative that transsexuality is something new and we’re all wound up around something we invented yesterday. And to that narrative we say: fuck you. Representation has never been so important and this is why I’m publishing this string of notes on LGBT+ characters throughout...
Following Aphra Behn’s death in 1689, Delarivier Manley collected her inheritance and brought forward the discourse around the sexual identity of women and the legitimation of female same-sex attraction. She’s one of the “fair triumvirate of wit” with Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood, a term coined by...
As we have seen with Aphra Behn, the Restauration period started challenging some of the concepts around women’s desire in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships, with delicate examples of transgender and what we now know to call non-binary relationships taken into account. Anne Finch's late production...
Undervalued as an author till the 1970s, Aphra Behn is not only a feminist icon but her works around women’s sexuality are an exquisite example of sapphic poetry. 240 years after her death, Virginia Woolf will remember Aphra in her independence manifesto A Room of One’s Own: All...
In 1964, Egyptologist Ahmed Moussa made an astonishing discovery: a tomb, in the necropolis at Saqqara, nearby the paved, raised road leading to the pyramid of King Unas. The tomb was a mastaba, a flat-roofed structure rising with sloped external walls from a rectangular footprint that...
