Deep dives into world mythology and folklore, without the dumbing down
Elias Blackwood · October 10, 2026
Most of what we know about vampire belief comes from written sources: trial records, church complaints, travellers’ reports, the folklorists who arrived in the nineteenth century with notebooks. All of it is filtered through someone. Archaeology is the one line of evidence that is not — a grave is a thing people did, not a … Read more
Elias Blackwood · October 10, 2026
Every popular history of vampires eventually reaches back to Mesopotamia and announces that the vampire begins with Lilith. I have read a fair number of those books, and I want to do something slightly different here: set out what the cuneiform material actually contains, and be honest about where the chain of descent is solid … Read more
Elias Blackwood · October 10, 2026
People often tell me the vampire is a Slavic invention that Bram Stoker dressed up in evening wear. The Slavic part is where the word comes from, and Stoker certainly did the dressing. But the creature — a night-flying, blood-drinking, child-threatening female figure — was already fully formed in Greek and Roman sources more than … Read more
Elias Blackwood · October 10, 2026
The last well-known vampire exhumation in the United States happened in 1892, in Exeter, Rhode Island, and it was reported in the newspapers. That fact still stops me. We tend to file vampire panics away in a distant Balkan past, comfortably remote. Mercy Brown was disinterred nine years after the Brooklyn Bridge opened. What Actually … Read more
Elias Blackwood · October 10, 2026
Of every vampire tradition I have followed over twenty-five years, the tlahuelpuchi of rural Tlaxcala is the one that unsettles me most — not because it is the strangest, but because it is the best documented. Most vampire folklore reaches us through a haze of second-hand retellings and eighteenth-century pamphlets. The tlahuelpuchi was recorded in … Read more
Elias Blackwood · May 27, 2026
Dante Alighieri wrote the Inferno in the early 1300s. His medieval vision of Hell shaped how the West imagines damnation. Before Dante, Hell was abstract theology. After him, it became vivid, specific, and unforgettable. Every circle has its own logic, its own torment, and its own moral lesson. Understanding these nine circles means understanding one … Read more
Elias Blackwood · May 23, 2026
The Cult of Dionysus: How a Synth-Pop Banger Channeled an Ancient Greek God “The Cult of Dionysus” by The Orion Experience is about rejecting the rigid, joyless norms of ordinary life in favor of a hedonistic, pleasure-and-freedom-centered existence — framed as joining a “cult” devoted to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, theater, and ecstatic … Read more
Elias Blackwood · May 30, 2026
Most readers approach Dante Alighieri’s Inferno as a medieval compendium of torment—a lurid ledger of suffering inflicted on the damned. This reading fundamentally distorts the poem’s inner logic. The Inferno functions not as Dante’s endpoint but as his clinical assessment. Like any rigorous diagnosis, it brings pain before healing begins. The spiritual architecture of Dante’s … Read more
Elias Blackwood · June 2, 2026
A yellowed facsimile of Dante’s original manuscript sits behind museum glass in Florence, its medieval ink faded but still legible where his hand moved across vellum centuries ago. What strikes you, standing before it, is not the poetry’s beauty but its specificity—the obsessive precision with which Dante mapped each circle, each torment, each sinner’s eternal … Read more
Elias Blackwood · June 5, 2026
When most people imagine Hell, they picture flames. Sulfurous pits. Demons with pitchforks. Fire, fire, everywhere. Dante Alighieri had a radically different vision. In his epic poem The Divine Comedy, the deepest, most terrible circle of Hell is not blazing—it is frozen solid. Cocytus, the ninth circle, is a lake of ice. And the further … Read more