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.

The post La Befana, the Witch of Twelfth Night appeared first on Bone and Sickle.

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

The post Vlad the Impaler appeared first on Bone and Sickle.

The devilish reputation Ouija boards enjoy in horror films is a relatively new phenomenon.  In the Victorian era, they were regarded by “psychical researchers” as something to be embraced in a spirit of calm scientific inquiry, while Spiritualists saw in them a means of reaching out to those who’d passed into the “Summerland,” an anodyne realm of sweetness and light.

While these were the dominant attitudes of the day, the idea of spirit communications has  always been fraught with a sense of the uncanny, tainted even by an association with witchcraft and the Devil. We’ll see this element already present in those first communications of the Spiritualist movement, the dialogues the Fox sisters with an unseen presence at first presumed to be a sort of devil.

As we saw in our previous episode, spirit-boards represent a particular danger to those with psychologically fragile constitutions. Beyond the instances of obsessive madness detailed previously, this episode examines a handful of cases from the 1920s and ’30s involving actual bloodshed — murder, suicide, and explicit invocations of the Devil.

Of  course these remained isolated incidents, and historical distrust of the Ouija was generally low, and all but non-existent during the spiritual and occult explorations of the 1960s. But all of this would soon change with William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel, The Exorcist, and its 1973 cinematic adaptation, both of which famously depict the Ouija board as a channel through which the Devil enters.

Some listeners may know that Blatty’s novel was inspired by actual reports of an exorcism that took place in America of the late 1940s, one involving a teenage boy rather than girl, a change Blatty said he’d made to help preserve the privacy of the boy.

Within the last decade, as individuals involved in these incidents have passed on, more information on this case has made its way to public scrutiny.  In the last half of our show, we examine the role spirit-boards and Spiritualist practices played in these events as revealed by a day-to-day log kept by the lead exorcist during the rites . Mrs. Karswell reads for us the passages from the journal.

An element Blatty wove in with this source material was a specific identity of the demon possessing his fictional victim — Pazuzu, an ancient Mesopotamian wind spirit bringing dro ught, famine, storms, and all manner of ill fortune.  As this figure was digested into pop culture over the next decades, a version of its name, “Zozo,” would eventually appear in the  early 2000s as a destructive entity often channeled by unwary Ouija user.  We take a look at this bit of evolving web-lore, showcased in paranormal shows, like Ghost Adventures and at the heart of the 2012 indie horror film I am Zozo.

The post Devil Boards appeared first on Bone and Sickle.

Apparently, I clipped off the beginning of the show during the initial upload.  It’s been fixed, so this would only effect those downloading yesterday, but for those who missed it, here it is..

The post Missing Intro for Episode 133 appeared first on Bone and Sickle.

Ouija boards, or more generally, “spirit boards” have antecedents going back to the very first days of the Spiritualist movement.  We begin our show with a seasonally spooky visit to the cottage of the Fox sisters in Hydesville, New York, where the ghost of a murdered pedlar supposedly began communicating with the family through a series of mysterious knocking sounds. While the method used by the Fox sisters to translate these knocks into messages anticipates the process of pointing out letters on a Ouija board,  the evolution of spirit boards was not so straightforward.

We learn how the  planchette, used on board as a pointer, appeared long before any boards were printed and was initially used as a writing device.  It was  equipped with a pencil inserted through it like a third leg.  As the planchette was guided by the user (supernaturally and/or unconsciously), “spirit writing” was produced.

We next hear from a number of contemporaneous accounts describing the pencil planchette as if it were inhabited by a ghostly presence and how these devices first appeared in Paris and London. Once imported to America, the homeland of the Spiritualist movement, merchants in Boston and New York did brisk business in producing versions of their own.

By the 1880s, the planchette was finally beginning to be used as a pointer, and W. S. Reed Toy Company of Massachusetts became one of the first merchants to produce boards printed with letters. Reed’s model was known as the “Witch-board.”  Along the way, we hear of an unexpected connection between President Grover Cleveland and Witch-boards.

We then go to Baltimore, where former fertilizer salesman Charles W. Kenner partners with attorney Elijah to create their own version of the ghostly spelling board, one they name Ouija.  Lore around the naming of the board (through a seance) and peculiar happenings at the US Patent office in Washington DC are discussed along with the passing of rights to manufacture the novelty to William Fuld, who manufactured the Ouija board from 1897 to his untimely death in 1927.

We discuss the phenomenon of “Ouija-mania,” which generated a number of songs and (questionable) literary works. Ouija-mania also generated a certain degree of misery among unstable users.  Several absurd and tragic stories from newspapers of the day are read by Mrs. Karswell, and we close with a particularly dramatic story told in a letter preserved in the William Fuld archives.  It conceives of the Ouija as a tool of the Devil, something we will explore more in our next episode.

The post Spirit Boards appeared first on Bone and Sickle.

A special short announcement regarding the October 20 deadline for Trick-or-Treat-by-Mail for listeners joining our Patreon.  Find out how you can  receive a hand-packed candy bag from the home of Bone and Sickle Podcast. Each bag this year contains a special MYSTERY ITEM from Egypt!

Visit: https://www.patreon.com/boneandsickle

The post Announcement Trick-or-Treat By Mail appeared first on Bone and Sickle.

We’re getting into the spirit of the season with a classic tale of witchcraft set in 17th-century Salem Village, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “Young Goodman Brown.” Written in 1835 for New England Magazine, it later appeared in the 1846 collection, Mosses from an Old Manse, which also includes the excellent supernatural story, “Rappaccini’s Daughter.”  Hawthorne regarded “Young Goodman Brown” as his most impactful short story, and it received high praise from his contemporary, Edgar Allan Poe.

Two more Halloween-themed episodes (historical  explorations) await  you next month.

The post “Young Goodman Brown” appeared first on Bone and Sickle.

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.

The post Subterranean Sages and Russian Mystics appeared first on Bone and Sickle.

Borrowed from fairy lore, the notion of a hollow earth peopled by superior beings became a theme of literary fantasies as early as the 17th century and went on to influence fringe theories of the earth’s structure into the 19th century.

We begin with a snippet of the medieval Norwegian ballad “Liti Kjersti,” telling the fairy story of a young woman abducted into the earth by the Mountain King, and follow this an anecdote from Gerald of Wales’ 12th-century Itinerarium Cambriae (Journey through Wales) describing a kidnapping of a young boy by “two tiny men,” and the interior world he visits.

We then hear from Margaret Cavendish, a 17th-century poet, playwright, and writer on a variety of philosophical, political, and scientific topics. Her poem “The Fairy Queen’s Kingdom”(1653) and prose fantasy The Blazing World (1666) introduce the idea of interior kingdoms accessible only through entrances at the polar ends of the earth.

Over the next couple centuries, at least a half dozen novels describing travels into an interior world appeared. We briefly touch on Danish-Norwegian writer Ludvig Holberg’s Niels Klim’s Underground Travels (1741), Giacomo Casanova’s Icosaméron (1788), American writer Mary Bradley Lane’s Mizora: A Prophecy (1880), and Irish-American writer William R. Bradshaw’s The Goddess of Atvatabar (1892), the last coming closer to what we would think of today as science fiction. Universal to these hollow earth tales is portrayal of the interior civilization as a utopia, highlighting the failings of our own.

We then spend some time examining the particularly weird hollow 1895 earth novel by John Uri Lloyd, Etidorhpa, or, the end of the earth: the strange history of a mysterious being and the account of a remarkable journey, an underground adventure tale larded with odd religious, philosophical and pseudoscientific theories. It describes the education of a character identified only as “I—Am—The—Man—Who—Did—It,” guided by an eyeless amphibious humanoid along a subterranean route, with stops for various knowledge-imbuing experiences, i.e., “How to See Your Own Brain,” as one chapter is titled.

Next we explore a late 19th-century cult founded in upstate New York by Cyrus Tweed, who went by the name “Koresh.” Koreshanity, as it was called, regarded Tweed as a second coming of Christ and taught that earth’s inhabitants actually live on the inside of our hollow planet. His teachings began with an 1869 vision experienced during his laboratory pursuit of what he called “electro-alchemy.” Mrs. Karswell reads for us his account in which he encounters God in his female aspect. We hear of the cult’s heyday in the first years of the 20th century on Estero Island, of the coast of Fort Myers, Florida, and of the uncomfortable situation that attended Tweed’s death in 1908.

We then hear a bit about the man most widely associated with hollow earth pseudoscience, the American John Cleves Symmes, Jr., who in 1812 declared these beliefs in published his “Circular No. 1,” and later lobbied Congress to mount an expedition that would verify his theory. Symmes’ bold proposition was so widely known at the times as to be spun into a novel, our next topic, the anonymously penned Symzonia: Voyage of Discovery (1819), a work of utopian fiction with steampunk-style details.

Edgar Allan Poe’s only novel, written in 1838, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, describes a voyage into the South Polar seas. Passages from the novel’s startling ending, which appears to describe entrance into the hollow earth, are read by Mrs. Karswell. Poe is believed to have been introduced to this concept by writer, and explorer J.N. Reynolds, who figures into the mystery of the writer’s mysterious death, as we hear.

A bizarre culinary experience is next described in passages from William F. Lyon’s 1821 book, The Hollow Globe. We hear how meat from the frozen remains of mammoths, is taken as evidence for their survival in the earth’s interior.

Finally, we discuss Journey to the Center of the Earth, not just the 1864 novel by Jules Verne but a same-name French novel written earlier in 1821 by Jacques Collin de Plancy. Mr. Ridenour offers some final thoughts on the dinosaurs from Verne’s novel as well as its 1959 film adaptation.

The post Inside the Hollow Earth appeared first on Bone and Sickle.

While the dummies may be inherently creepy, they were not the source of  ventriloquism’s dark reputation in earlier times. This originates with the understanding that the voice heard, when no mouth seems to speak, belongs to a demon.

We begin with a bit of audio mixing bits from various frightful ventriloquist films, including Devil Doll (1964), Magic (1978), and the earliest example of the sub-genre The Great Gabbo (1929).  Also adding to the mix, is a scene from the 1945 British anthology, Dead of Night, the head-and-shoulders stand-out among these, offering a truly satisfying wraparound story and use of ventriloquist and wooden colleague.

A vapor said to rise from a cleft within the rocks at Delphi was often said to be the source of her inspiration and was personified as the spirit of Apollo rising within her or even uniting with her sexually.  Much was made of this by medieval Christian writers in efforts to demonize the Oracle. In this way, the voice that spoke from within her, while sometimes said to issue from her belly, was also described by these writers as having its source within her “filthy parts,” (bowels or genitals). We hear some particularly lurid passages along these lines, which bring us to some commentary on the spirit of Python” by the 17th- century German polymath, Athanasius Kircher, who weaves together noises from the belly, ancient Egyptian religion, and flatulence.  From there, it gets really out of hand with a discussion of the supposed Roman or Greek “god of farts,” Crepitus Ventris.

We end with brief discussion and audio sampling from the 1970’s Christian ventriloquist, Marcy Tigner, better known under her puppets’ name, “Little Marcy.”

The post The Dark Art of Ventriloquism appeared first on Bone and Sickle.