This marble bust of the French philosopher Voltaire (né François-Marie Arouet 1694-1778) was crafted by the admiring artist Jean-Antoine Houdin, who rendered the famed thinker multiple times during his artistic career. This bust shows Voltaire vulnerable in his old age, yet with a wry expression of humor that speaks to his legendary intelligence and abrasive […]
This is a 14th-century painting of Saint Euphrosyne of Alexandria, who was one of the “monachoparthenoi”, a Medieval Greek term for “monk-virgins.” These were young women who disguised themselves as monks so that they could avoid marriage and live a life devoted to spiritual contemplation in male monasteries. It was a bit of a trend,
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As a Medieval historian, one of the things I do is study saints of the Middle Ages — they were akin to our modern-day superheroes, and their special qualities give us a good lens for understanding the values of the distant past. The holy woman featured here today — Rita of Cascia, nee Margherita Ferri
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Today my daughter and I got to visit VAMPA, a paranormal museum in Doylestown PA! The very recently constructed museum was a sensory adventure. Starting with the garage-sale garden exterior, which sprawled with iron gazebos, plastic near-life sized dinosaurs (only some of which were broken), and lots of pseudo-Greek statuary, visitors wind their way to
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Medieval Europeans were well aware of the balanced network of living creatures that populated their existence, but the great thinkers of the Late Middle Ages (about 1050-1500) were less interested in writing about the web of life than they were about trying to demonstrate the way the natural world pointed to spiritual truths. The Medieval
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Slander against the Islamic prophet Muhammad was rife in the Medieval Christian world. The religion of Islam spread rapidly and successfully, and in the agrarian hinterlands of Western Europe, many people’s fear of Islam was matched by their ignorance of it. Many depictions of Muhammad from the 12th to the 18th centuries reflect this. Here,
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This elephant ivory plaque from the Cathedral of Salerno dating to 1084 shows an image of God creating the animals. Early Medieval ideas about the place of animals in nature were shaped by Christianity. On the one hand, following Augustine (d 430) et al., who drew from the Genesis story, intellectuals thought that the animal
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This painting is breathtaking — especially when you consider that an artist painted the original in about 1535 — this is a copy from the first part of the 1600s. Entitled “Vädersolstavlan,” the Swedish name translates into “The Sun-Dog Painting” and may be the first artistic rendering of this celestial phenomenon. Sun-dogs happen in the
Sun-dogs, Astrology, and Apocalyptic Thought in the Italian Renaissance Read More »
There is a very long history of apocalyptic thinking in the history of Christianity, and one particularly strident episode came in the wake of the Protestant Reformation — specifically with regards to Martin Luther, who truly believed the End Times were imminent. Interpreted through Luther’s lens of European religious trends in the early 16th century,
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Giants appear in many ancient mythologies, and the Bible is no different in this way. One specific origin story for Biblical giants comes from the book of Genesis, which explains how the nephilim came about (6:1-4): “When humankind began to multiply on the face of the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons
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Here’s the Devil from the movie _Spawn_ (1997), and he looks a lot like the demon Mavet (Canaanite Mot), who personified death in ancient Judaism. The role of demons in Jewish and Christian history changed during Biblical times. In the Ancient Mesopotamian world, the _daimons_ were originally not as evil as their eventual manifestations —
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Here is poet and painter William Blake’s “Angel of the Revelation”, illustrated between 1803-1805, and you might notice the giant, mostly naked (it was the Victoriano age) figure does not have wings. And this is because Biblical angels didn’t. (In the Abrahamic tradition, the winged Seraphim and Cherubim eventually were considered angels, but in the
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The Seraphim were terrifying Biblical monsters, even if contemporary Christianity imagines them as more benign angelic creatures. They appear in the Hebrew Bible (Christian Old Testament) in several places, and although English translations of the Hebrew “Seraphim” (singular “Seraph”) often appear only in the vision of the prophet Isaiah, in fact they are mentioned elsewhere
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These statues are some of the remaining examples of “mushroom stones” from the Ancient Maya people. They testify to the usage of psilocybin by indigenous Central Americans that goes back hundreds of years. The second photo shows a real-life example, called Psilocybe Mexicana. The Central American consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms for ritual purposes was brought
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This scene of a man-in-the-moon with thirteen stars might strike a vague familiarity with you. And perhaps if you were alive in the United States during the 1980s, it might evoke a sinister connotation. And if that’s the case, you were tangentially affected by the “Satanic Panic” of that decade. Dungeons and Dragons, various rock
If you look carefully, you will see a corpse dressed in white lying in a coffin in this illustration of the Laws of Hamburg from 1497. This painting shows the Medieval practice of _cruentation_, a type of jurisprudence where someone convicted of murder would put their hands on their alleged victim – the idea was
Cthulhu was orange in the Middle Ages, evidently. (Jk this is Hildegard of Bingen – a famous mystic – being inspired by the Holy Spirit. Totally different primordial mind-influencing force.)
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The Goddess Diana above a group of women all reading. From “The Book of the Queen,” by Christine de Pizan, one of the most famous women authors of the Middle Ages, about 1410. Source: Digitised Manuscripts http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Harley_MS_4431
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“Have you thought of al-Lat and al-‘Uzza and Manat the third, the other?” . . . . “These are the exalted gharaniq, whose intercession is hoped for . . .” And these are the infamous Satanic Verses, passages in an Islamic tradition that most Muslims have rejected, but that an early source claims were lines
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Try as I might, I can’t find any sources that definitively link the “Upside-down” world of the show _Stranger Things_ to early Scandinavian myths about the land of the dead, but there are so many similarities it seems hard to believe that the content creators weren’t deliberately borrowing. To take the words of ethnographer Tim
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