“During my life, I have had occasion to make my own little theories, and, what is perhaps more interesting, I have been able to test them.” – Roma Lister Roma Lister, like many of those in her circle (doctors, bohemians, dressmakers, diplomats, countesses, magistrates) were many-sided. They all had their working-day-world fixations and obligations. But…
Aradia’s Hidden Hand: The Untold Life of Roma Lister will be the first-ever monograph on Roma Lister, a British-Italian folklore collector, occultist, and friend of the American folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland.
In January 2023, the University of Copenhagen launched the Dark Arts Research Group (DARG). Covering the period from 1750 to the present, the project will take an in-depth look at the global public’s “fascination with otherworldly entities and the macabre”. The DARG is specifically interested in exploring the varied ways horror, gothic, and other esoteric…
“Throughout my childhood and adolescence I was an avid reader of folklore and mythology…it’s very apparent that this interest had a huge and long lasting impact on my life and the path it’s taken.” -Darragh Mason International travel these days seems like a thing of the past, a dream known only by faint remembrances or…
“He lived with such intensity that people have stayed fascinated by him. They’ve told his story over and over again–for different reasons and in different ways.” -from Magic and the Dignity of Man: Pico della Mirandola and His Oration in Modern Memory (2019) by Professor Brian Copenhaver It would not be an exaggeration to call…
“If they find any to be timorous and fearful, they admit not such a man to the secrets of magick…But such as appear to be of bold and undaunted spirits, they take especial notice of them, and reserve them for serious employments.” -from the English translation of Johann Cambilhon’s De studiis Jesuitarum abstrusioribus (1608) Sometime…
“We have in the Inquisition trials and elsewhere numerous testimonies of Africans and Europeans alike that describe how knives, swords, or even bullets from firearms have literally bounced off the skin of bolsa de mandinga wearers.” -Professor Cécile Fromont In 1730 an African slave and Vodun devotee named José Francisco Pereira was arrested in Lisbon…
“The idea that drives the subgenre is the survival of ancient cults, usually in remote rural areas, a mere step away from our ‘civilised’ surroundings…in folk horror the past always returns to haunt us.” -from “Archaeology and Folk Horror in Hellebore” (2020) by Maria J. Pérez Cuervo In 2019, Maria J. Pérez Cuervo launched Hellebore,…
“You have witnessed something of which everyone talks without knowledge; you have been initiated into secrets no less terrible than the grotto of Trophonius; you have been present at the Sabbath.” -from Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual (1896) by Eliphas Levi The witches’ sabbath has long been a source of fascination and debate. Sphinx-like,…
“They can assume all manner of shapes at their pleasure, appear in what likeness they will themselves…they are most swift in motion, can pass many miles in an instant…” -from The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1621) Almost four hundred years ago, a young Oxford graduate named Joseph Glanvill published The Vanity of Dogmatizing, a…