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A short extra episode on Befana, the gift-bringing Italian witch associated with Twelfth Night, the end of the Christmas season. Included in the show is material from the book, “The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas,” traditional music of the season, audio from actual celebrations, and a few pop songs associated with la Befana.
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A figure of mythic proportions during his lifetime, Vlad the Impaler’s notoriety receded over the centuries only to be resurrected in the 1970s, when a pair of Boston University scholars went public with theories connecting him to Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula.
We begin with snippet of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 film, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the first film to connect the literary vampire with the Eastern European prince — a rather ironic departure from Stoker’s novel, which references the historic figure only in passing.
Vlad’s 15th-century notoriety was sparked by two German texts both published around 1463, or shortly thereafter. Probably the earliest of these,written anonymously and published in Vienna, was titled, The History of Voivode Dracula, is sometimes called “the St. Gallen manuscript” named for the Swiss city where it is preserved. (“Voivode,” is a Slavic term, used in this context to mean, essentially, “Prince.”) The second is a rhymed narrative written by Michel Beheim, a poet associated with the Meistersinger tradition and a performer at the court of the King Friedrich III. About three decades later, in 1490, Vlad’s story appeared in northwestern Russia. We don’t know its author but the monk who copied it from a lost original, mentions that his source was written in 1486.
All three of these narratives provide plenty of gruesome anecdotes detailing the voivode’s cruelties. Before going further into Vlad’s history, and as a quick appetizer, Mrs. Karswell reads a description by Beheim of a ghastly picnic said to have been enjoyed by the voivode.
Next, we clear away some misconceptions regarding Vlad the Impaler, the first having to do with his name. Called “Vlad Țepeș” (Vlad the Impaler) in Romanian, he is less dramatically referred to as Vlad III. His father, Vlad II, was also known as “Vlad Dracul.” His son, using the Slavonic possessive form of that was referred to as Vlad Drăculea (that is, “of – the son of – Vlad Dracul). The father’s epitaph means “Vlad the Dragon,” referencing Vlad II’s (and later Vlad III’s) membership in The Order of the Dragon, a society of Christian knights dedicated to staving off incursions of the Muslim Turks into Christendom.
We then have a look at Vlad III’s over-emphasized association with Transylvania, one of the three historical regions (along with Moldavia and Wallachia) that would later become Romania. In fact, it was not Transylvania but Wallachia over which both Vlad II and Vlad III served as voivodes. While Transylvania was his birthplace, at the age of 4, he and his family departed for Wallachia, and Vlad’s historical relationship with Transylvania was later anything but friendly.
We then look at Wallachia’s role as a buffer between Ottoman regions to the south and Hungarian/German controlled regions to the north, as well as the regrettable deal Vlad II made with the Turks to keep the peace.
The last involved the “child levy,” or “blood tax” demanded by Sultan Murad II. Known in Turkish as “devshirme,” this was a sort of ransom imposed on Vlad II, requiring that he leave his sons Vlad and Radu with the Turkish court to ensure the ruler’s compliance with the sultan’s demands. We hear some interesting details on this four-year exile, some of which likely shaped Vlad III’s actions later in life.
Before Vlad III is released, his father and eldst brother Mirea are murdered by Hungarian forces, who install their desired ruler on the Wallachian throne. While Vlad III manages to briefly seize his father’s throne while the Hungarians are distracted in conflicts with the Turks, he’s again forced into exile after only serving one month.
After several year in exile among the Ottomans and Moldavians, Dracula takes advantage of the death of the Hungarian ruler, János Hunyadi, to again sieze the Wallachian throne, and it’s during this second reign that he gains his notoriety. The first order of importance is to punish Transylvanians who aided the Hungarians responsible for his father and brother’s deaths. Beheim provides some gratuitously gruesome descriptions of exotic acts of revenge.
We then hear of Vlad III’s murder of Turkish emissaries, and of the campaign Sultan Mehmet II mounts to punish the Wallachians. Vasly outnumbered by the Turkish forces, Vlad and his men resort to guerrilla warfare to slow down the Ottoman army advancing on his capital city of Târgovişte.
On the night of June 17, 1462, Wallachian troops under Vlad conduct an attack on the sleeping Ottoman camp, in an assult known by Romanians as the “The Night Battle” or “Battle with Torches.” The actual tactical gains made during this foray are debated, but the following day, the Ottomans are subjected to a powerful psychological assault as they encounter a forest of their comrades collected from the battlefield and impaled on stakes. According to the Greek historian Laonikos Chalkokondyles, roughly 20,000 corpses were seen spitted in a field measuring two miles long and three-quarters of a mile wide.
After this, we hear of Dracula’s 14-year imprisonment by the Hungarians, during which he supposedly amused himself by impaling rats in his cell. We then hear of the voivode’s death at the hands of his own men in 1476, and decapitation by the Turks.
The literary embellishments of some of our German texts, and the rationale for such, are next discussed and these are contrasted with stories from the Russian collection that offer a slightly more balanced picture of the ruler, portraying him through several anecdotes as one who maintains social order through highly effective (if brutally excessive) means.
We then take up the question of whether, or to what extent, Bram Stoker based his vampire on Vlad III, finding but a few points of agreement as well as details (largely geographic) arguing against the idea.
Last, we have a look at Vlad the Impaler’s rediscovery via the 1972 book, In Search of Dracula, by Romanian émigré Radu Florescu and Raymond T. McNally, a scholar of Russian and Eastern European history. Mr. Ridenour offers some sour grapes on the success of this bestseller and ends the show with a clip featuring Christopher Lee from a 1975 same-name documentary inspired by the Florescu-McNally book
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Agartha, Shambhala, and Hyperborea are all names for a a mythic spiritually and scientifically advanced kingdom, always in some hidden location, sometimes within the earth, a legend which became an obsession of early Soviet spies, a mad soldier of fortune, and a mystical Russian artist during the 1920s.
We begin with a clip from the 1939 German documentary, Secret Tibet, which records the activities of visiting Nazi researchers in that country. While we can’t establish to what extent the expedition focused on Third Reich mythology connecting their Nordic Aryan with South and East Asia cultures, we examine other efforts by the Reich’s department of Ahnenerbe (ancestral heritage) to make such connections. Alongside this, we look at some 19th-century precedents associating an ancient, primal race with both the far north and Vedic culture of the subcontinent. We also examine the classical concept of Thule (a far-north Neverland) appropriated by the pre-Reich Thule Society.
We next look have a brief look at 1871 book by French writer Louis Jacolliot, The Son of God, which introduces the name “Agartha,” (and its many forms) to designate an underground city or land serving as a repository of ancient wisdom. Jacolliot places this land in the East and associates it with a sort of universalized Vedic culture.
It’s Alexandre Saint-Yves’ 1886 book The Mission of India in Europe, that really defines Agartha as its come to be understood, placing it underground, in the East, and probably within the Himalayas. His fascination with the topic probably was inspired by his Sanskrit tutor, a mysterious Afghan, who called himself Hardjji Scharipf, and claimed to be “of the Great Agartthian School.” Scharipf, however, had little to do with the specific content of Saint-Yves’s book, which in part reads like Hollow Earth fiction of our previous episode. Mrs. Karswell reads for us some fantastical passages from his text.
The majority of Saint-Yves’s work, however, is devoted to the ruling principle of this hidden kingdom, something he calls “Synarchy,” (from Greek words for “together” and “rule.” Fearing the West’s descent into anarchy (Synarchy’s opposite) and its inability to receive the “Synarchic radiations” of Agartha, he calls upon the East to unify with Europe and guide the world toward a Synarchic utopia (the titular “Mission of India to Europe”). Saint-Yves is particularly concerned with Britain and Russia’s competition for the lands of Central Asia, an area poised to become the hypothetical capital of a united East and West.
This brings us Russia or the competing Red and White armies of the Russian Civil war fighting in this region.The Polish writer, Ferdynand Ossendowski, who served with the White Guard in this setting documents these conflicts in his 1922 best-seller, Beasts, Men, and Gods. Ossendowski not only mentions encountering the local myth of Shambhala (Tibetan Buddhism’s equivalent of Agartha). but also relates tales of Baron Roman Ungern von Sternberg, a German cavalry officer loosely allied with the Whites, but fighting not so much for the Tsars as for Mongolia’s Bogd Khan, third highest lama of Tibetan Buddhist, whom Ungern imagines rebuilding the empire of Genghis Khan. Ossendowski describes the Baron’s use of Tibetan legends, including that of the King of Shambhala, to promote this cause. He also describes some of the German’s more perversely brutal ways, which earned him the moniker, “the Bloody Baron” which we naturally share.
Next we come to a figure who represents a sort of nexus of all we’ve discussed — a Russian occultist and mythographer, Aleksandr Barchenko. We hear a bit about his early life, involving extracurricular ESP experiments, lecturing sailors of the St. Petersburg fleet on Shambhala, and his meeting with the occult-minded chief of the Secret Police, Gleb Bokii, who is attracted by Barchenko’s talk of an ancient body of knowledge that might be mined for new techniques of psychic control, surveillance, or manipulation.
While Barchenko was denied funding he sought for an expedition to locate Shambhala, Bokii sent him to investigate a phenomenon with of possible supernatural import on the far northern Kola Peninsula. There he was study a collective outbreak among the Sámi people of a trance-like state peculiar to Artic regions, known locally as “menerik” and elsewhere as, “the Call of the as North Star.” We hear some details of this bizarre condition and of Barchenko’s alleged discovery of vestiges of ancient Hyperborean culture on the Peninsula. We also hear of his search among the people of the Altai Mountains for legends related to Shambhala.
The last Russian Shambhala-enthusiast discussed is Nicholas Roerich, an artist and writer best known for his paintings of glowing Himalayan landscapes and spiritually charged scenes from Asian and Russian mythology. Along with his wife, Helena, a psychic in communication with Theosophy’s “Hidden Masters,” Roerich hatched a scheme he promoted (unsuccessfully) to Soviet officials, a “Great Plan” for uniting East and West, in which the mythical King of Shambhala (or the Last Buddha, the Maitreya) were to play a key roles. We hear tales of Shambhala collected during Roerich’s travels through the Himalayas and of a physical token allegedly from that kingdom, the Chintamani stone. Details are provided of stone’s mysterious delivery to a Paris hotel where the couple was staying in 1923, its role in developing Roerich’s status among his following, and the not entirely convincing evidence presented in support of the tale.
We end with some audio from the Hollow Earth itself, from a Tibetan cave — so says the Russian YouTube account, along with a collage of sonic anomalies collected under the the title, “The Earth Groans,” and (strangest of all) sounds that seemed to issue from within a Chinese mountain in Guizhou Province in July of 2020.
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For centuries, Spain was said to be the home of secret, underground sorcery schools, Toledo being the first city with this reputation and later Salamanca. The notoriety of the latter was more enduring, and when the legend passed to Spanish colonies of the New World, the word, “Salamanca” was embraced as a generic term for any subterranean location said to be the meeting place of witches. We begin the show with a clip from the 1975 Argentine film Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf, which depicts just such a place.
A particularly early reference to this concept can be found in a romanticized 12th-century biography of a particularly interesting character, a French pirate and mercenary Eustace the Monk. Mrs. Karswell reads for us a passage written by an anonymous poet of Picardy, who describes Eustace’s occult schooling in the city of Toledo. Along with this we hear as a passage from a 1335 Tales of Count Lucanor by Juan Manuel, Prince of Villena, which adds another element to the legend, that of its underground location.
Curiously, a number of Spanish cities claim as their founder the Greek demigod Hercules, but in Toledo, he’s also credited with founding this school of magic, excavating a subterranean space in which he imparts his supernatural knowledge, at first in person, and later in the form of a magically animated sculpted likeness. Another Toledan legend, was later blended into this mythology. It’s the story in the Visigoth King Roderick, Spain’s last Christian ruler makes a discovery prophesying his defeat by the Moors in 711 CE. Along with a parchment foretelling this, Roderick exploration of this enchanted palace or tower results in the discovery of the Table of Solomon, a construction of gold, silver, and jewels also attributed with occult powers. Legends detailing this are believed to be of Arabic origin, first recorded in the 9th century and later appearing in One Thousand and One Nights. In later Spanish retellings, the treasure house is conflated with the Cave of Hercules, and the fall of Spain to the Moors is attributed to Roderick breaking of a spell woven by Hercules, to keep North African invaders at bay.
By the 16th century, this site (now identified as an ancient Roman structure underlying Toledo’s church of San Ginés) had inspired such wild tales that Cardinal Juan Martinez Siliceo organizes a 1547 expedition into a subterranean space in hopes of putting the rumors to rest, but it hardly succeeded at that. Mrs. Karswell reads a dramatic 1625 account of that misadventure.
While talking bronze heads and magic mirrors were being added to descriptions of the Toledo site, in the late medieval period, similar legends began to be told in Salamanca. Being the site of one of Europe’s most ancient universities in a time when scholars were not infrequently misunderstood as magicians, legends of this sort would naturally be associated with Salamanca. But unlike the universities of Paris, Padua, and Bologna, Salamanca’s location in Spain made it a center of Moorish learning and the study of Arabic texts filled with strange calligraphy, figures and charts readily passing for books of magic.
As Salamanca’s reputation emerged later, in an era after the witch trials had begun, instruction no longer was provided by a figure from classical mythology but from the Devil, one of his demons, or a professor or student in league with the Dark One. A favorite character filling this role was the Marqués de Villena, a scholar who’d written books on alchemy and the evil eye. Villena appears in a number of literary works of the era, both in Europe and the New World. In the 1625 play, The Cave of Salamanca, by Mexican dramatist Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, Villena figures into a scenario that became fairly standard in Salamanca stories, one involving the Devil’s payment for the lessons provided. This would be demanded in the form of a human soul, the victim chosen by lot among the seven students instructed at the end of a seven-years period.
In Salamanca, the underground location of this magic school is strangely associated with a Christian site, the Church of San Cyprian, a significant choice, as St. Cyprian of Antioch has strong occult associations throughout the Catholic world but especially in Spanish and Portuguese-speaking regions. Before Cyprian came to Christianity, this 3rd-century saint is supposed to have been a sorcerer and is sometimes referred to as “Cyprian the Magician”. His story is mirrored in Portugal by that of Giles of Santarém, and both figures appear in Spanish and Portuguese literary works in which the saints play roles parallel to that of the Marqués de Villena, and the magic school becomes “The Cave of Cyprian.”
There are also legends that the magical secrets of the pre-conversion Cyprian were preserved, and on the Iberian Peninsula particularly (but also prominently in Scandinavia) grimoires and spell books attributed to Cyprian began circulating as early as the 16th century. After a brief look at the history of these magic books, we turn our attention to the New World and their legacy there. In particular, the use of such books in Portuguese folk magic brought Cyprian the Magician to Brazil where, where he was absorbed into the syncretic religions of that country. The practice of Macumba, one of these religions synthesizing West and Central African beliefs with those of Catholicism, and 19th-century Spiritism, Cyprian the Magician is transmogrified into São Cipriano dos Pretos Velhos, or Saint Cyprian of the “Old Blacks” an embodiment of the departed African Ancestors. Our show ends with a Macumba chant dedicated to this figure and a Spanish prayer to St. Cyprian for protection against witches, curses, and the evil eye.
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The Monster of Glamis was a Victorian legend involving a Scottish castle, a secret chamber, and a monstrous aristocrat hidden from the world–a perfect story for Bone and Sickle’s return to its old format, a 45-minute deep-dive into the castle’s lore, including its association with Macbeth, a legend of a cursed Earl’s card game with the Devil, as well as theories regarding the extravagant measures employed to keep the castle’s terrible secret. Along the way, we learn a bit about other secret chambers in castles and estates of Britain, a scandal involving the Royal Family, and a connection between the Glamis legend and a popular literary trope of the day, one embraced in Gothic fiction and later in the pulps and horror films. We even hear Lon Chaney, Jr. sing!
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Six historical witchcraft cases as related in the 1880 volume by James Grant, The Mysteries of All Nations, Rise and Progress of Superstition, Laws Against and Trials of Witches, Ancient and Modern Delusions Together with Strange Customs, Fables, and Tales.
Mr. Ridenour and Mrs. Karswell also share listener comments on the Halloween season as well as a remix of a seasonal viral video.
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Tales of animal ghosts are usually relegated to the periphery of ghost story collections, but in this episode, we showcase this class of apparition. Our stories were collected in a volume from 1915 called Human Animals by Frank Hamel. It covers werewolves, animal transformations through witchcraft, possession by totemic animal spirits, and the phantom animals that haunt lonely roads, ancestral homes, and the storytellers’ imaginations.
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An Irish ghost story seems a good way to add a bit of Halloween spice to your St. Patrick’s Day. Our selection, which will be read by Mrs. Karswell, comes from the 1825 publication Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland. It’s the first of three volumes of stories told by the Irish antiquarian Thomas Crofton Croker, one of the earliest collector of the island’s folk tales.
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Dark fairy tale elements including floating heads and bags of bones are featured in a family of tales classified under the Aarne-Thompson system as Type 480, “Kind and Unkind Girls.” Imaginative punishments and rewards for the kind and unkind characters in question are a further interesting element. The girls in these tales are always sisters or stepsisters, and a wicked stepmother (sometimes mother) is part of the formula.
Our first example is the English tale, “The Three Heads of the Well.” The fairy tale bears a strange connection to an earlier 11th-century British legend featuring as its heroine the Byzantine Empress Helena, here portrayed as the daughter of the mythical “Old King Cole” of nursery rhyme fame. Both legend and fairy tale are set to the town of Colchester in Essex, understood to be named for King Cole.
From “The Three Heads of the Well,” we learn that being polite to heads floating out of magic wells serves one well, while rude behavior is strictly punished. A curious element of the narrative is the request made by the floating heads that their hair be combed.
Our next tale, “Three Fairies,” comes from Giambattista Basile’s Il Pentamerone, or Lo cunto de li cunti (“The Tale of Tales), a source used in our previous episode for the story “Penta the Handless.” The tale involves an encounter with fairies living in a fantastic palace hidden deep within a chasm.
Basile’s tales are particularly noteworthy for their extravagant and playful verbiage, illustrated in several lengthy passages read for us by Mrs. Karswell.
In this tale, we learn the value of diplomacy in discussing the hair and scalp conditions of fairies. A second lesson: one must be particularly wary when allowing oneself to be sealed in a barrel.
Our next story, “The Fairies,” comes from perhaps the most famous collection of fairy tales pre-Grimm, Charles Perrault’s 1697 volume Tales of Passed Times, sometimes subtitled Tales of Mother Goose. This French story can be found in certain English-language collections under the title “Diamonds and Toads,” referring to what falls from the mouths of its kind and unkind girls respectively — a blessing or curse depending on the girls’ charity toward fairies disguised as mortals.
The Grimms’ story, “Frau Holle” is introduced with a snippet of the “Frau Holle Lied,” a children’s song describing the grandmotherly (and witch-like) Frau Holle shaking feathers from her featherbed to make the snow in winter, an element from the Grimm story.
As in the Perrault’s “The Fairies” the Kind Sister in “Frau Holle” is sent to fetch water, and ends up not in an enchanted chasm, but falling into an enchanted well, passage to a sort of parallel dimension in which ovens demand their bread be baked, apple trees their fruit be picked, and Frau Holle has all sorts of housework for the heroine to perform. The girl’s unkind sister, however fails miserably when confronted with identical tasks, and we see both the rewarding and punishing side of Holle, an aspect of the story that relates it loosely to the winter mythology of the Frau Holle/Frau Perchta figure I discuss in other shows and my book as inspiration for the Krampus.
The rewards and punishments doled out in “Frau Holle” are likely borrowed from Basile’s “The Three Fairies,” as you might be able to guess from these depictions:
We introduce our next iteration of this tale with a clip is from an English-dubbed version of the 1964 Soviet folklore film Morozko (or Father Frost) by pre-eminent Russian fairy-tale director Alexander Rou. The film weaves its own elaborate story around the bare bones of the classic tale “Father Frost” collected by Alexander Afanasyev in the 1850s. Here, goodness is demonstrated by the Kind Girl’s willingness to endure cold, a particularly Russian virtue.
Our last story is the most obscure (and gruesome): “Rattle-Rattle-Rattle and Chink-Chink-Chink” from a 1919 collection by Parker Fillmore called Czechoslovak Fairy Tales. As with several of our stories, a key role is played by an all-knowing housepet who can speak.
We wrap up with a footnote to our first story, “The Three Heads of the Well” and its connection via an Elizabethan play, George Peele’s “The Old Wives’ Tale” to “Willow’s Song” from The Wicker Man (1973), all of which leads us into the bizarre folklore of an aphrodisiac charm known as “cockle bread.”
(NOTE: For details on the 2022 Bone and Sickle shirts and merch mentioned in the show, please visit boneandsickle.com, or go directly to our Etsy shop.)
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In pagan Germanic cultures, the seeress played an extremely important role, not only as a clairvoyant, but also often fulfilling the role of a priestess, wisewoman or witch.
We begin with a short clip from Robert Eggers’ The Northman, in which Björk plays a seeress. Old Norse words used to describe this role include spákona, or völva (pl. völvur, völur) — the last meaning “staff bearer,” as a staff was a signifying attribute of the völva, one possibly also used as a magic wand. Staffs discovered in graves of certain high-status women, as suggested by luxurious grave goods, suggest these individuals may have been völvur. We hear some details regarding such discoveries in Denmark and Sweden.
Next we provide a quick overview of the Nordic magic that may have been part of the völva‘s repertoire. Two Old Norse designations for witchcraft are galdr and seiðr (Anglicized as seidr). The latter has more to do with spoken or sung charms, and the latter most prominently with control of mental states but can also involve manipulation of physical realities.
We also address briefly the notion that, like the sibyls of the Classical world, the völva likely entered a trance in order to produce her utterances. Drumming is popularly associated with this, as it is central to the shamanic practice of the Sammi people on the northern and eastern fringes of Scandinavia and Lapland.
The first accounts we have of völvur come from Roman encounters with Germanic peoples on Europe’s mainland. A particularly important account we hear comes from Tacitus’ Histories, in which he describes a seeress by the name of Veleda, who guided the Bructeri tribe through their conflicts with the Romans. We also hear about a sacred grove of the Germans, one likely described to Tacitus by a Germanic priestess by the name of Ganna during her visit to Rome.
We also hear from the Greek historian Strabo, who in his Geographic portrays female seers of the Cimbri people, sacrificing prisoners of war, bleeding them, and telling fortunes from their entrails. Mrs. Karswell provides a lovely reading of this passage.
The earliest of our Scandinavian texts. one written anonymously probably around 960, is the Völuspá, (literally: “the prophecy of the völva). In the narrative the seeress in question is sought out by Odin himself, a dynamic testifying to the importance of the völva in Germanic culture.
A particular episode in this epic poem features a seeress by the name of Gullveig (later changed to Heidr) who is attacked by the gods in Odin’s hall, an event leading to the war between the two divine races, the Aesir and Vanir. It’s speculated that this seeress may be the narrator of the prophecies recounted in the poem.
Probably the most finely detailed account of the völva’s activities in the real comes from the 13th-century Saga of Erik the Red. Its description emphasizes the honor with which the seeress was treated while visiting farmsteads to relate her prophecies. It also notes the use of galdr (singing magic) and lavishly details the special attire worn by a seeress.
Our next selected episode featuring a völva comes from the 13th-century Icelandic saga, the Saga of Örvar-Odd, a name translated usually as “Arrow-Odd”. This one involves the seer’s prophecy of an inescapable fate involving a horse.
Our final story of a Nordic witch is from Gesta Danorum or”Deeds of the Danes,” a 12th-century chronicle of the country by Saxo Grammaticus. It features a witch who transforms herself into a walrus at a critical moment and a body that really needs to be buried.
We close with some audio snippets from Freyia Norling, a modern practitioner of seidr, who from her home in the Arctic Circle, hosts the intriguing YouTube Channel “A Discovery of Nordic Witches.”