I was once the snake woman

the only person, it seems, in the whole place

who wasn’t terrified of them

I used to hunt with two sticks

among milkweed and under porches and logs

for this vein of cool green metal

which would run through my fingers like mercury

or turn to a raw bracelet

gripping my wrist:

I could follow them by their odor

a sick smell, acid, and glandular

part skunk, part inside

of a torn stomach,

the smell of their fear

from Snake Woman by Margaret Atwood

“Photographs by Marcus Bullik, from his series 

“Volksfiguren der Dorfgesellschaft” (Folk Figures of Village Society)

 "On the subject of Greenmen, Kathleen Blandsford writes:“these are often allusions to man’s own frail, fallen, and concupiscent nature and to his brief life on earth. The imagery is often ambiguous; a greenman who at first glance seems the very personification of ‘summar is i-comen in’ may on closer inspection reveal himself as a deadly horror hidden in the leaves. Their expressions suggest various levels of inebriation: belllicose, morose, even comatose, but seldom jocose.” 

This nine year ritual has been performed at sites around the United States and Canada from the desert of Death Valley to Green Point, Newfoundland. These rituals have addressed everything from global warming to the disappearance of old growth forests. 

The first ritual took place on January 9, 1995 in a wooded site in Lockport, Illinois, to transmit through the trees our concern for the living conditions of planet life.

Artist: Fern Shaffer & Othello Anderson

.:.

Braided hair found in Danish bogs, National Museum Copenhagen

Wanderer in the black wind...

Wanderer in the black wind; quietly the dry reeds whisper
In the stillness of the moor. In the gray sky
A flock of wild birds follows;
Slanting over sinister waters.
Turmoil. In decayed hut
Putrefaction flutters up with black wings.
Crippled birches sigh in the wind.
Evening in deserted tavern. The way home is scented all around
By the soft gloom of grazing herds,
Apparition of the night: toads plunge out of silver waters.

At the Moor, Georg Trakl, 1915 (taken from Sebastian In Dream)

La Source Enchantée, dir. Georges Méliès, (1901)

Genuine, dir. Robert Weine (1920)

One of my favourite vampire films, and lesser known than his other cult masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; Genuine is a brilliant silent film - decadent, daft and delirious, it perfectly encapsulates the voluptuous horror and sensuality of vampirism (and incredibly stylishly, too). It is a brilliant evocation of German expressionist cinema, with brilliant sets by artist Cesar Klein and starring Fern Andra. Recommended viewing.

"decked with black lambskin and white catskin, with polished metal and shining stones"

— garb of a female witch, Folklore Vol. 63, No. 4 (Dec., 1952), M.A. Murray

Witchcraft

Paint, Collage On Panel

Carlton Harris, MMIX

"Emily gazed with melancholy awe upon the castle, for, though it was now lighted up by the setting sun, the gothic greatness of its features, and its mouldering walls of dark grey stone, rendered it a gloomy and sublime object. As she gazed, the light died away on its walls, leaving a melancholy purple tint, which spread deeper and deeper, as the thin vapour crept up the mountain, while the battlements above were still tipped with splendour. From those too, the rays soon faded, and the whole edifice was invested with the solemn duskiness of evening. Silent, lonely and sublime, it seemed to stand the sovereign of the scene, and to frown defiance on all who dared to invade its solitary reign. As the twilight deepened, its features became more awful in obscurity, and Emily continued to gaze, till its clustering towers were alone seen, rising over the tops of the woods, beneath whose thick shade the carriages soon after began to ascend."

Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho

Laurence Housman illustrations for 'The Sensitive Plant'

neolithic tools 

Nepalese mushroom mask

Terrible Chair” (1990) - Michele Oka Doner
Ph. Bruce Weber for Vogue Italia June 2013

Pliny, a Roman author writing in the first century CE, recommended that a wolf or horse’s tooth be placed on the child’s body to help with teething but not to let the tooth touch the floor. This charm has a tooth set into a bronze handle.

Viking Iron Lock and Keys, 9th-11th Century AD

Viking Bear’s Tooth Pendant, 9th-11th Century AD

Egyptian mummy finger stalls

.:.

images found on B L U D B L U M

"The gothic castle itself, that formidable place, ruinous yet an effective prison, phantasmagorically shifting its outline as ever new vaults extended their labyrinths, scene of solitary wanderings, cut off from light and human contact, of unformulated menace and the terror of the living dead - this hold, with all its hundred names, now looms to investigators as the symbol of a neurosis; they see it as a gigantic symbol of anxiety, the dread of oppression and of the abyss, the response to the insecurity of disturbed times..."

Sir Herbert Read, from the introduction to 'The Gothic Flame' by Dr. P. Varma (Arthur Barker, 1957)

 

Recent photos from a visit to Betchworth Castle, Dorking, Surrey
(some have been previously posted in an edited format on my instagram)

Grizelda & Grizmuth

"There was once a gigantic pestilential toad, who was peppered all over with greenish warts like an ancient leathery pincushion. Deep, deep underground she sat squalidly and ruminated vastly on the flawed nature of existence, her yellowish eyes glowing like ominous lanterns in the gloom. 300 years ago she had clawed her way down, down into the depths beneath the great castle, slithering slowly past great clotted hanks of roots and foetid earth - like hairy curtains, down down, past ruins and ancient forgotten relics, crumbled and sunken into the rich primordial loam like petrified fallen stars. In the deep, dark, dank silence she was all alone. Sullen, forgotten and sunken dejectedly into eternal solitude.

For she had not always been a toad, not always confined to this subterranean squalor. Once, 300 years ago she had been Grizelda - a beautiful princess admired far and wide for her long, long silvered hair, her wonderful singing voice, skill with needlework and sword, and collection of rare jewels. That was before she had been banished in disgrace, for the princess had a secret - she had fallen in love with her chambermaid and the two girls had been plotting their escape when they had both been discovered by the wizard Grizmuth, who had bewitched her into her present form, and imprisoned the distraught and now long dead chambermaid in the chill ridden dungeons to waste away to nothingness.

In her cavern, she sat festering, a frightful amphibious vision consumed with hatred and malice, poison twisting and writhing through her mind like stormclouds gathering at dusk. She had been plotting for centuries, and now it was time to clamber forth from the abyss. In the velvet blackness her tongue flickered, tasting the mildewey stale air, breathing deeply of silver fingered rot and decay in the putrid bowels of the earth; a great stenching hulking mass of filigreed flesh intent upon her revenge."

from Grizmuth and Grizelda and other Queer Tales
...unwritten fairytales by xphaiea

A ROMAN OBSIDIAN MAGIC GEM | CIRCA 2ND CENTURY A.D. 

The flat oval stone engraved on one side with a radiate Anubis striding to the right, wearing a kilt, holding an ankh and a was-scepter, a crowned horus-falcon at his feet, on a short groundline; the other side with an eight-line Greek inscription; mounted as a swivel ring in a modern gold setting, the bezel ornamented with granulation.

.:.

Gustaf Tenggren, Snow White

"In the medieval German legend called the Wulfdietrich Saga, an Alder woman appears seductively to foolish travellers and teaches them a lesson by turning herself into a hairy bark-like creature if they embrace her.  Called Rough Else, she is a wild looking woman of the woods, covered in hair, who in part of the story, puts a spell on a hero which eventually causes him to go mad.  He runs through the wood living off herbs for six months, after which Rough Else takes by sea to another land where she is queen.  Here she bathes in a magical well that washes away her rough skin and she becomes transformed into the beautiful Sigeminne"

the alder in german folklore

illustration by Marjorie Cameron

.:.

Syzygites megalocarpus on an agaric host

"Omens are innumerable, but those that portend bad luck are far more common than those of good luck. It is difficult to think how our ancestors lived under such perpetual worry; everything they did, or saw, or heard meant something … I have strung together a few omens collected at a little country school in Norfolk: You start the day badly by breaking a mirror … You go into the garden, a cuckoo flies overhead,—a death—a crow flies round the house,—another death—the crow and cuckoo settle on the house where already a hawk has perched,—three deaths. You find your bees all dead,—you forgot to tell them of a death in the family last week.…Finally you go to bed, remember you have left a candle alight in a shut-up room, go down to put it out, find a coffin in the wick, and only glowing embers in the hearth,—two more deaths …"

Reverend Mark Taylor, Folklore Journal, 1929

Image from page 470 of 

“Coral and atolls: a history and description of the Keeling-Cocos Islands, with an 

account of their fauna and flora, and a discussion of the method of development and 

transformation of coral structures in general” (1912)

"Spare claimed two sources for his oracular inspiration, both of them occult: the entity which he knew as Black Eagle, and another known as the Delphic Pythoness. Black Eagle was a Familiar spirit which he inherited from his mentor in sorcery, Mrs. Paterson. The Delphic Pythoness, an unembodied sybil, he consulted on matters of aesthetics and philosophy. Spare’s mode of working with Black Eagle was curious. He let his mind wander in the network of lines which formed his portrait of Black Eagle, and this created in him a state of consciousness acutely receptive to the Spirit’s influence. In the case of the Delphic Oracle, he had merely to gaze steadily into its eyes for inspiration to flow. When referring to himself in relation to his sorcery Spare identifies himself with a concept which he calls Zos, or the Zos. He first defined the term in The Book of Pleasure (1913) as “the body considered as a whole”; it is the alembic of his sorcery. Complementary to the Zos is the Kia, the “Atmospheric ‘I”’ or cosmic Self, the field, or playground, of the Zos. The Cult of the Zos and the Kia (Zos Kia Cultus) is the cult of the interplay of forces which Spare further symbolizes by their physical instruments - the hand and the eye . Their magical coordination evokes images latent in the subconsciousness. Hand and Eye, Zos and Kia, “ all-feeling touch and all-seeing vision” facilitate the function of the Primal Id, or Desire, which the Zos is ever seeking to reify, or - as Spare had it - to flesh."

from Kenneth Grant, ZOS Speaks!

Cover art for Shirley Jackson’s novel, 

“We Have Always Lived in the Castle" 

(William Teason, 1962)

"Before our forests heard the talk of men;
Before the first of Druids was a child;–
Long didst thou sit amid our regions wild
Rapt in a deep prophetic solitude"

John Keats: Endymion Book IV