ON RAVEN WINGS: THE MIDDLE AGES AND THE MARVELOUS

“When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.” — Rudyard Kipling[1] Late last year, I was asked if I would consider doing a preface for a book on Tolkien. I duly received a copy of the text, and replied that I would be...

“Everything you are not stares back at what you are.” Adam Nicolson, from The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters   “In the very earliest time When both people and animals lived on earth A person could become an animal if he wanted to and an animal could become a human...

FORGOTTEN BOOKS... A few years ago, I acquired a couple of books. I know what you are thinking, and you are right, I have indubitably bought more than that – a healthy amount of books pass though my hands – but these two were special. You see, they had gotten away....

THE UPAS AND OTHER UNUSUAL TREES OF DEATH AND EVIL At the annual British Institution exhibition of 1820, a singular tableau by an unheralded artist was on display. Entitled “The Upas, or Poison Tree of the Island of Java”, it was a sensation. For a debut, Irish...

‘Within the sanctuary at Nemi grew a certain tree of which no branch might be broken. Only a runaway slave was allowed to break off, if he could, one of its boughs. Success in the attempt entitled him to fight the priest in single combat, and if he slew him he reigned...

BUT, knowing now that they would have her speak, She threw her wet hair backward from her brow, Her hand close to her mouth touching her cheek, Opening lines of The Defence of Guenevere, from The Defence of Guenever and Other Poems by William Morris, Bell & Daldy,...

Hermes is a tricky fellow, the ancient Greek equivalent of Raven, Coyote or Loki. He is a mediator, a guide between worlds, principally the worlds of life and death, a messenger between gods and mankind, but also a traveler in the circadian liminality of dawn and...

The tour guide is expostulating with equal measures of enthusiasm and malleable exactitude on the Golden Mean. We listeners are scattered in a loose, meditative but fidgety herd of participants of all horizons, around the orchestra of the Theatre of Epidaurus. The sun...

This last summer, I was delighted to receive a request to do a foreword for a new illustrated Lovecraft book. (This is always mixed with mild dismay at my own enthusiasm, as the more sensible part of myself pulls my ear and reminds me that I actually must write...

This summer, I wrote a short foreword for a book about a long-neglected artist from the Alsace: Léo Schnug. I discovered Schnug's work on my first visit to Haut-Koenigsbourg in the Vosges. I am certain I believed they were real (I thought the castle was real as well.)...

Travels in the Ur-real Landscape    "Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation..." - Joseph Campbell   Players and painted stage took all my love And not those things that they were the emblem...

ORPHIC HYMN TO HEKATE You, of roads and crossways, Of heaven, of earth, and sea as well. You, the saffron-clad, among the tombs, Dancing with dead souls the Bacchic rite. You, daughter of Perses, lover of desolation, Taking joy in deer and dogs, in the night. You,...