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In the Friuli region of Italy in 1580, during the peak of the Roman Inquisition’s foray into witchcraft, an inquisitorial examination of a local town crier produced the following eerie testimony: “…during the Ember Days, at night; I go invisibly in spirit and the body remains behind; we go forth in the service of Christ, and the witches of the devil; we fight each other, we with bundles of fennel and they with sorghum stalks.” A nocturnal spiritual battle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ witches among vast fields of crops at seasonal markers throughout the year is an especially enticing image as the autumn season approaches us, but its deep origins in pre-Christian folk practice are perhaps even more intriguing. The

Almost without exception, mythological and folkloric traditions around the ancient world were concerned with the matter of deep time and the earth’s creation. While creation myths exhibit great variation and often echo the prevailing psychology of their respective peoples, there is one critical motif that remains relatively common to a range of broadly dispersed ancient cultures from Mexico and Peru to Egypt and Sumeria: the primeval waters. These churning, chaotic primordial deeps feature consistently among ancient traditions and are often referred to by modern folklorists as the ‘cosmic ocean’. Rather than purely tabulating the widespread instances of this motif with the goal of highlighting their fundamental similarities, searching for shared meanings behind them may yield a more authentic understanding of

In 1892, architect W.R. Lethaby wrote: “The main purpose and burden of sacred architecture - and all architecture, temple, tomb, or palace, was sacred in the early days - is…inextricably bound up with a people's thoughts about God and the universe”. As an architectural historian, Lethaby was acutely aware of the association across ancient cultures between architecture and the divine, between the builder and God. A conspicuous number of ancient traditions, from the Greek Homeric tradition to the Vedic texts of India, conceived of the creator as an architect. Eventually, the creative force invoked in the practice of architecture was likened to the creative force of God himself. The association between the craftsman and God has persisted through the centuries

There is a certain perception of the Great Pyramid as an utterly void arrangement of empty halls and chambers, strangely bereft of artifacts and inscriptions that might offer clues to its construction. In 1992, however, German engineer Rudolf Gantenbrink and his team offered modern-day viewers their first glimpse of metal artifacts original to the Great Pyramid by sending a compact rover into the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber. The rover’s endoscopic camera revealed a limestone block, a ‘door’ equipped with a pair of copper fixtures or pins whose purpose is still being debated. The pins, however, are not the only pieces of metal to have been found inside the Great Pyramid that are thought to be original to the

Most casual students of ancient history know that the outer casing stones of the Giza pyramids were constructed of highly polished Tura limestone blocks that caused them to gleam like a trio of colossal jewels in the Egyptian sun. It is a lesser-known fact, however, that a portion of the casing stones were not light in color but dark, and that the Giza complex in its entirety once exhibited far more color than modern film and art depictions would indicate. In 1898, George St. Clair wrote: “We need not be surprised…that the Egyptians made some use of the symbolism of colors; and we need not despair of discovering what they meant.” The British anthropologist applied his study of color symbolism