The Wise and the Wild: Legendary Wizards Across Cultures
Merlin, Solomon, Thoth and Abe no Seimei are all called wizards, but the sources describe four very different jobs. What the legendary sages actually did.
Tools of the Arcane: Wands, Staffs, Books, Familiars, and Symbols
The wizard’s staff can be dug out of the ground: iron staffs in Viking women’s graves. The athame is from the 1950s. Sorting the old tools from the new.
The Feet We Never Drew: Three Years of Redrawing This Site
We have drawn the Curupira four times in three years and never once drawn his backward feet. What an audit of this site’s own artwork actually turned up.
Words of Power: Naming the Wizard, Witch, Mage, and Sorcerer
Wizard is not an Old English word. Sorcerer means caster of lots. What we call a magic-worker decides whether they are consulted, paid, feared or killed.
The Birth of Magic: Ancient Sorcerers and Shamanic Roots
The first magic we can actually read is about 4,000 years old, and it belonged to salaried professionals with a syllabus. Mesopotamia, Egypt and Siberia.
The Magic Instinct: Why We Tell Stories of Wizards and Witches
Every culture produced a magic specialist, but the oldest written magic is not noble balance-keeping. It is curse tablets, lawsuits and buried grudges.
Trickster Gods (Part 2): Where the Rule-Breaking Is the Doctrine
Part 2 of Trickster Gods: Māui, Krishna, Tezcatlipoca, Eshu — the figures whose rule-breaking isn’t deviation from doctrine. It IS the doctrine.
Trickster Gods (Part 1): What Each Culture Lets the Rule-Breaker Break
Every culture has a trickster. The rules each one breaks reveal what that culture defended hardest — and the differences are sharper than the similarities.
Who Comes for You When You Die: The Hunters and Reapers (Part 2)
The psychopomps of folk nightmare — wailing women, headless horsemen, the man in the top hat, and the hooded skeleton who came after the Black Death.
Who Comes for You When You Die: The Guides Between Worlds (Part 1)
Every culture invented someone to meet you at death — jackal, ferryman, winged goddess, shield-maiden, hound. Here’s who does death’s administrative work.