Tag: mythology
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Here Be Rakshasas: Creative Fantasy Writing for the Non-Fantasy Writer
A little over a month ago, one of the classicists I semi-follow on the internet’s premier hellscape made the following observation in response to someone else’s tweet about creating magical systems in fantasy literature: Certainly, as a general fantasy non-enthusiast, I was inclined to agree. I don’t really care if a fantasy story’s magical system…
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Mister Sandman: Artemidorus’ Oneirokritikon and the Surprising Science of Ancient Dream Interpretation
Caroline: I had this dream…Lloyd: Do we have to do dreams?Caroline: I’m in this restaurant, and the waiter brings me my entree. It was a salad. It was Lloyd’s head on a plate of spinach with his penis sticking out of his ear. And I said, “I didn’t order this.” And the waiter said, “Oh…
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House of Cads: The Unlikely Destiny of the Lusignans
“I spent nearly five years at the knees of the Poitevine princesses, my lord. They taught me to trust a Turk before a Lusignan.” – The Gourd and the Stars, chapter fourteen Much like with the world of The God’s Wife, there’s a lot of ancillary tangents to explore in the medieval Mediterranean of The…
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Day Tripping at the Met, Part 3: A Little Bit of Everything Else
Okay, folks we’ve made it to the third and final entry in my Met roundup, where I try to wrap up everything else that I saw after I escaped the first floor of the museum (and try not to think about all of the stuff I didn’t have time to see). A truly impossible task,…
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Day Tripping at the Met, Part 2: Little Latin and Less Greek
As promised, we’re back with round two on my latest experience in the Metropolitan Museum of Art—this week focused on the Greek and Roman Art wing. As my paraphrase of Ben Jonson above suggests, I spent more time with the Romans (and specifically the first century Romans of my books) than the Greek stuff, but…
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Day Tripping at the Met, Part 1: Egypt
Last week, my wife and I took the train (this is America, it really is the train—Amtrak’s singular, once a day Pennsylvanian route) up to New York City for a couple of days to do some general sightseeing. As I touched on in my Susanna Moodie entry, despite living in the same state for most…
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The Seven Against the Seven Hills: The Ancient-Medieval Mashup of the Roman de Thèbes & the Roman d’Eneas
“If lord Homer and lord Plato, and Virgil and Cicero, had concealed their knowledge, there would never have been any talk of them. For this reason I do not wish to keep my intelligence hidden, or to suppress my knowledge, rather does it please me to recount something worthy to be remembered.” — Roman de…
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Travels with Hadrian: Julia Balbilla, Her Poetry, and Ancient Tourism
In my entry about the two(?) Sulpicias, I said that she/them were the only Roman women poets that we have a record of—but that’s not strictly true. We have one more, the equally sketchily-known Julia Balbilla (72 – after 130 CE), but perhaps what we can mean is that the Sulpicias are the only Italian…
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Heavenly Advice: Christine de Pizan’s Othéa and Mythology as Morality
“Do not resemble Jason.” – Othéa to Hector (Allegory 54), giving out the single best piece of advice in the entire epistle We have discussed how the ancients often had an adversarial relationship to their own cosmogony, especially when it came to the truthfulness or utility of mythological stories that painted the gods in a…
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A Bug’s Life: Khepri & the Many Faces of Ra
“Khepri in the morning, Ra at midday, and Atum in the evening.” – ancient Egyptian saying “Khepri clicks his mandibles sympathetically. ‘I would, child, but I am not a god of death. I am here to create you from the ashes of your resurrection. Be who you were destined to be and be reborn before…
Sarah Holz 