A short video based on our episode “Who Put the Hell in Helloween?” The audio is a remix of elements you hear in the show soundscape (along with bits of the 1922 film, Häxan, which many of you may recognize.) ON HALLOWEEN I’ll post the extended 10-minute remix to be blasted on loop from on …
During the Satanic Panic, the notion of Halloween as a Satanic High Holy Day came to prominence, but the elements necessary to this mythology were set in place much earlier. This episode focuses particularly on the early years of Wicca, some missteps in disassociating the movement from Satanism, and early evangelical personalities spinning “ex-Satanist” yarns …
A short and somewhat extra episode for the Halloween season, a presentation of the 1910 horror story by Ambrose Bierce, “A Vine on a House.” Also, some show updates. We’ll have a full episode, “Who Put the Hell in Helloween?” closer to the end of the month.
Spirits of the corn (grain) fields from the United Kingdom to Russia have been imagined as embodiments of the harvest and guardians of the fields, sometimes evolving into fantastically cruel fear-figures in the process. We begin with a look at the Scottish and English ballad “John Barleycorn,” first appearing as a broadside in 1568. The …
The Master of the Wolves is a supernatural figure central to Transylvania’s (modern Romania’s) voluminous body of wolf lore, a mythology that extends more broadly into Balkan regions once occupied, like Romania, by the ancient Dacians. We begin with a snippet from a contemporary recording of the 1857 poem “St. Andrew’s Night,” by the Romanian poet …
As a “summer intermezzo” Bone and Sickle is offering three episodes this August in our “Marvelous and Rare: Antiquarian Circle” format. These are shorter episodes normally enjoyed once a month by our $4+ supporters on Patreon (www.patreon.com/boneandsickle). There’s a reference in this particular episode to “world events” and the contemplation of heavenly phenomena as a …
As a “summer intermezzo” Bone and Sickle is offering three episodes this August in our “Marvelous and Rare: Antiquarian Circle” format. These are shorter episodes normally enjoyed once a month by our $4+ supporters on Patreon (www.patreon.com/boneandsickle). We look forward to returning in September with our regular shows.
As a “summer intermezzo” Bone and Sickle is offering three episodes this August in our “Marvelous and Rare: Antiquarian Circle” format. These are shorter episodes normally enjoyed once a month by our $4+ supporters on Patreon (www.patreon.com/boneandsickle). We look forward to returning in September with our regular shows.
Al Ridenour, your host of Bone and Sickle, has created a countdown book for HALLOWEEN! “THIRTY-ONE ROTTEN PUMPKINS” THIRTY-ONE images of surreal and decaying pumpkins rendered in a painterly 17th-century style – one pumpkin for each night of October to guide your nightly meditations toward Halloween. INFO/PURCHASE
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 …