"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."

― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

#ChthonicThursday: Laverna

In Roman mythology, Laverna was the goddess of thieves, cheating gamblers and the underworld, and you would gain her favour by pouring wine towards the outside with your left hand, a gesture that’s still considered offensive in some parts of Italy.
According to Horatius, a pious man would pray to Apollo and Gianus out loud, but would only whisper to Laverna, and he gives us a synthesis of how a summoning might have sounded like:

“Beautiful Laverna, let my deception succeed, let me appear just and pure, spread darkness over my sins and a cloud over my frauds.”

She’s today’s profile on my Patreon.
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S.S. Van Dine was the pen name of Willard Huntington Wright (1888–1939), an art critic, editor, and novelist from the US who created Philo Vance, apparently one of the defining amateur detectives of the Golden Age of detective fiction. The Vance series ran to twelve

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