“There were visions in the air, and dreams sitting on the staircases…” -from Memoirs (1893) by Charles Godfrey Leland “Kerner’s house is, perhaps, the most remarkable and peculiar in all Swabia…if we wish to receive or impart a right idea of Kerner, we must see him and describe him in his own house.” -from Justinus…
FANTAST IN FOCUS: DANIEL HARMS “They are either not mortal, or their date of life is indeterminately long; they are of a nature superior to man, and speak with contempt of human follies. By night they revel beneath the light of the moon and stars…” -from The Fairy Mythology: Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various…
“You will remember that Albertus Magnus…adds emphatically, that the process will instruct and avail only to the few— that a man must be born a magician!” -from The Haunters and the Haunted by Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1859). In 1870, Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton hosted a quirky American man of letters named Charles Godfrey Leland at his manor house in Knebworth, Hertfordshire. The two thinkers were…
ODD TRUTHS: ISLAMIC MAGIC IN MALTA Maltese folk magic has been studied in detail by scholars such as Francis Ciappara and Carmel Cassar. However, in 2014, a research team at the University of Exeter led by Professor Dionisius Agius, Dr Catherine Rider, and Dr Alex Mallett, recovered seventeenth-century court documents about an Egyptian slave who was accused of giving…
FANTAST IN FOCUS: PHENDERSON DJÈLÍ CLARK Phenderson Djèlí Clark (aka “The Disgruntled Haradrim”) is a writer, historian, and lecturer. His short stories have appeared in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology, and Daily Science Fiction. In the spring of 2016, Phenderson’s first novella A Dead Djinn in Cairo was published by Tor Books. The story is a fantastical mystery…
“Painting was, from the very beginning, one of the most important instruments of conquest in the sphere of thinking, the mind.” – Guy Brett, “Being Drawn to an Image”, in Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1991). The airy cities of the Altiplano region in South America were once at the forefront of a major culture war. Strangely enough,…
“A single man sometimes frightened a whole population.” – Brigand Life in Italy, vol. 1 (1865) by Count Alberto Maffei di Boglio. The origins of Ciro Annicchiarico (“Don Ciro”) are obscure, but most authors agree that his criminal career started with a blood feud, possibly in the Mezzogiorno village of Francavilla. Don Ciro, then a priest…
Images of mermaids first appeared in European bestiaries in the early Middle Ages. At the time, firsthand encounters with the legendary creatures were rare. Nevertheless, mythographers and chroniclers, no doubt inspired by Greco-Roman art, described merfolk as capricious water spirits that were usually up to no good. Like aerial demons, they were capable of copulation,…
ODD TRUTHS: PARACELSUS THE REBEL The nineteenth-century occultist Eliphas Levi praised Paracelsus as a kind of crazy wisdom guru. He pictured the Swiss doctor and alchemist as a frequently drunk “maniac”, who had been more powerful than the most “celebrated magnetists”. Levi’s views were typical of the romanticism of his era, but similar sentiments were…
Earlier this year, National Geographic reported that a team of archaeologists had discovered a legendary city in the remote La Mosquitia Valley of Honduras. The expedition’s ethnobotanist is quoted as saying that the area is “the most undisturbed rain forest in Central America”. Amazingly the ruins—which are still being excavated—point to the existence of a…