Eleusinian Mysteries: What We Know and the Kykeon
For a thousand years, thousands walked to Eleusis each autumn, fasted, drank a barley drink and saw something they were sworn never to reveal. What we know, and...
Jörmungandr: What the Norse Sources Say About the Midgard Serpent
Jörmungandr, the Midgard Serpent, is the monster that holds the Norse world together by lying around it — and the one Thor is fated to kill and die...
Archangel Ariel: Meaning, Signs and Nature Prayer
Archangel Ariel is the angel figure called on today as the guardian of nature, animals and the earth. The name means "lion of God." Here you can read...
The Three Fates: Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos Explained
Clotho spins, Lachesis measures, Atropos cuts. Who the Moirai were in Homer, Hesiod and Plato, how Rome turned birth goddesses into the Parcae, and where the thread of...
Archangel Sandalphon: What the Sources Actually Say
Sandalphon is the angel the old texts place with his feet on the ground and his head among the creatures that carry the throne — and who takes...
Yggdrasil: The World Tree and the Nine Worlds
What the Poetic Edda and Snorri actually say about Yggdrasil: three roots and three wells, the animals in the tree, why no source ever lists the nine worlds,...
The Phoenix: What the Ancient Sources Say, and Where the Fire Came From
The phoenix did not burn for most of antiquity. A source-by-source look at Hesiod, Herodotus, Pliny, Ovid, Tacitus, Martial, Lactantius and the Physiologus.
Is the Christmas Tree Pagan? What the Sources Say
In 723 an Anglo-Saxon missionary fells an oak near Geismar in Hesse, and the people watching expect their god to strike him dead. He does not. Boniface builds...
Nagas: Serpent Guardians of Hindu and Buddhist Myth
Nagas are the serpent-shaped guardians of water, earth and hidden knowledge in Hindu and Buddhist tradition - neither good nor evil, but keepers of balance.
The Ten Mahavidyas: Tantric Goddesses Explained
Ten goddesses, one Divine Mother — and half of them are frightening on purpose. The Mahavidyas are among the most demanding figures in Hinduism, precisely because they refuse...
House Spirits: Brownie, Nisse, Kobold Explained
There is one figure that plays the same role across the whole of Europe and gets a different name in every language: the spirit that lives in the...
The Merseburg Charms: Text and Meaning
Two spells written on a blank leaf in a tenth-century church manuscript are the only Old High German texts that name pre-Christian Germanic gods in an active religious...