Although popular culture promotes an idea that the belief in magic flourished mainly in the Medieval European past, maybe declining with the onset of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th-century, this is not necessarily the case. As Owen Davies, author of _Grimoires: A History of Magic Books_, relays, the so-called “Modern” era of Western history […]
The Modern Era’s Rise and Spread of Magic Read More »
Cosplay is not new: dressing up in character has a long legacy, and has been considered appropriate in different occasions. Whereas in current American culture, you go to special conferences or wait for Halloween, in seventeenth-century Europe you would try to hire a fancy portrait artist and make a subtle statement about your personality and
Dressing Up During 1600s Europe Read More »
This terracotta statue from Ancient Rome of a breastfeeding mother with four swaddled infants gets at the challenges of raising babies when resources were scarce and infant mortality high. Scholars have been debating the extent to which ordinary people practiced infanticide, but it was undertaken without criminal prosecution in the Ancient Roman world. After all,
Ancient Rome and Infanticide Read More »
Sometimes the distant past seems exotic and remote, and sometimes it feels like today’s news headlines. The Ancient Greek myth of the prophetess Cassandra brings out both tendencies. Born into the Trojan royalty, beautiful Cassandra was cursed by the God Apollo after she changed her mind about sleeping with him. Although every utterance she predicted
Ancient Greek Myth of Cassandra Read More »
This watercolor by Julian Peters, called “I Have Come to Consume the World,” illustrates beautifully a central moment in the Hindu epic, _The Bhagavad Gita_. The _Gita_ is the most famous sacred scripture in Hinduism, dating to perhaps the second century BCE. This particular point comes in the eleventh chapter, when the hero Arjuna begs
Julian Peters “I Have Come to Consume the World” Read More »
Here you see one of the finest sarcophagi of all time. Carved out of marble in the late second-century CE, the panel shown here despicts the God of wine, Dionysius, approaching the comatose maiden Ariadne, who lies in the lap of the God of death (Thanatos). The close arrangement and true-to-life proportions of the figures
Ancient Carved Sarcophagi Read More »
One of the frustrations of studying the distant past is knowing that the lenses of earlier times are ultimately inaccessible. We can take the religion of the Celts as a case in point. For centuries, these peoples left very little in the way of written sources, and so we must rely on the statues, inscriptions,
Celtic God Sucellus Read More »
Here you can see the grim and chaotic scenes of battle depicted in the Ludovici Battle Sarcophagus, made in the Roman Empire mid-third century CE. The horrifying conditions that Ancient Roman soldiers experienced have led to a debate as to whether PTSD extended farther back in time than the late 19th-century. Some of the symptoms
Ancient Roman Battles and PTSD Read More »
People have claimed to see ghosts throughout recorded history. Stories about the “revanants,” or “those who return,” commonly state that these spirits startle the living, but they have not always been associated with evil forces. The association of ghosts with malevolence really got going in Ealy Modern Europe with the emergence of Protestant Christianity. Hitherto,
Lavater’s “Of Ghostes and Spirites Walking by Nyght” Read More »
Scientific genome analysis has shaped history once again with a recent study published in the science journal _Nature Communications_. This painting of death strangling a victim of the plague gets at the horror caused by the infamous Black Death, a pandemic that wiped out a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century. By studying
Scientific Genome Analysis and the Black Death Read More »
This gladiator mural was unveiled just last week from the Ancient Roman city of Pompeii. The unusually graphic depiction of a bleeding fighter — holding his thumb up, a gesture to signal for mercy — was found by archaeologists in a building thought to have been a bar and brothel. Since we know that gladiators
Gladiator Mural from Ancient City of Pompeii Read More »
“The Kiss of the Enchantress,” painted by English artist Isobel Lilian Gloag (c.a. 1890) depicts a monster from Ancient Greek mythology called a Lamia. Like so many stories about horrifying females, the Lamia’s backstory involves a grizzly subversion of the ideal woman — she destroys children rather than nurtures them, and seduces men in order
“The Kiss of the Enchantress” Read More »
So this lady looks unusually serene, especially in light of the fact that she’s using the blood of her own severed foot (!!!!) to write a letter to her husband. This is the heroine Hypermnestra, and in the Roman poet Ovid’s rendition of her tale, she pleads with her husband to come save her from
Heroine Hypermnestra and Her Loyalty Read More »
These two lovebirds are Shiva and the Goddess Bhairavi, from an exquisite painting dating from the Mughal Dynasty in India, c. 1630-35. Today’s yoga practices are very anesthetized relative to the ways undertaken by yogis, particularly in the left-handed Tantric tradition. The two figures dwell in the charnel grounds – you can see the smoky
Shiva and the Goddess Bhairavi Read More »
“The Lord and Lady of the Charnel Grounds/Pal Durdak Yab Yum,” 15th-c painting. Tibetian Buddhist traditions took much from Ancient India . . . As with the two Hindu deities featured in yesterday’s post, the juxtaposition of enlightenment with death and male-female pairings stands out. Tibetian art is highly symbolic, and the male-female, or “Yab-Yum,”
The Lord and Lady of the Charnel Grounds Read More »
This nineteenth-century Tibetian painting is of a well-known deity in the Tantric Buddhist tradition, named Vajrayogini. Unlike some other Buddhist traditions which have neither Gods nor Goddesses, the Vajrayana Tantric tradition has both, as we can see here. Vajrayana Buddhism differs from many other religious traditions in its elevation of the female. The eleventh-century Tantric
Vajrayogini in Buddhist Tradition Read More »
Painted on a silk scroll by the 18th-century Japanese artist Maruyama Okyo, this image is one of Japan’s most well-known artistic creations. _The Ghost of Oyuki_, as it is known, was painted when the artist Okyo awoke from his sleep to see the ghost, or _yurei_, of his deceased lover. She had pale skin, disheveled
The Ghost of Oyuki Read More »
Ghost stories have been an important part of China’s culture for centuries. As shown from this 14th-century Yuan Dynasty tomb, beliefs about ghosts can be seen in the visual arts, as well as in written sources. One of the most prominent types of undead spirits were the “Jiang Shi,” which were zombie-like reanimated beings. The
Jiang Shi Spirits from Chinese Culture Read More »
“The Temptation of Eve” from the cathedral at Autun dates to about 1130. It was the first large-scale nude sculpture since Antiquity, and has become a hallmark of the “Renaissance of the Twelfth Century.” Although not as naturalistic as Ancient Roman sculptures could get, the Eve portrait gets kudos for representing the nude female body
“The Temptation of Eve” Read More »
Dude underwear in the Middle Ages is something we actually know about. Commonly made out of linen (from the flax plant – but that’s material (*groan*) for another day), men wore versions of undershirts and boxers that tended to be loose and long (knee-length), but tied or tucked as the situation warranted. The undergarments were
Men’s Underwear in Medieval Europe Read More »
