History

Once again, the style of this post is a bit different from my previous ones. Instead of doing short, blurb-ish myth retelling like the ones I did over the summer, I'm going to try to shift the content of my blog into research. The following is a slightly modified version of a research paper I completed over the past two months, complete with Thesis and Bibliography. The following is my original research. Enjoy! Introduction  Since its conception, race has always been in conve

Back in middle school, I carried a piece of amethyst with me everywhere. I have no recollection of where I managed to find it, but I always thought of it as a lucky charm. After all, isn’t it the case with gems and pretty things that we tend to think of them as fortune-bringers? However, the (alleged) origins of amethyst aren’t quite as nice as its looks. The inside of an amethyst gemstone Supposedly, there once lived a nymph named Amethyste. Her looks caught the affections o

The Roses of Heliogabalus, a painting by the Dutch artist Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. "He [Elagabalus] loaded his parasites with violets and other flowers in a banqueting room with a reversible ceiling, in such a way that some of them expired when they could not crawl out to the surface." Marcus Aurelius Antoninus had only turned 14 when his mother staged a coup against Emperor Macrinus in 218 AD and replaced him with her son, who had just barely started developing his prefront

Image of a Roman wedding carved onto the side of a tomb. The question of love is one that remains constant throughout the ages. Love’s definition is so difficult to pin down because of its fluidity and variability from person to person, circumstance to circumstance. Nowadays, we look at love as a mental phenomenon that simply happens because our brain wills it to. We naturally respond to our cravings of love by seeking out companionship. The psychological miracle that is love

On the Walpurgis night of 1977, mobs of women stormed Rome in witch disguises, passing the night in rowdy drinking and dancing.  Trailing off American revivals of witchcraft in feminist organizations such as W.I.T.C.H (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), these popular performative transgressions coalesced historical traditions of witchcraft circulating in the late 1950s and the political programs designed to mobilize non-hegemonic knowledge of the 1970s, pr

A painting depicting a stereotypical Roman witch: an old hag with supernatural abilities ***The following is a revised excerpt from a larger research project on the evolution of the identity of the witch that I did in the past spring. The first part of this project focuses on Roman witches. In the past, a learned Roman woman would find herself a social pariah for her intelligence. Most likely, she would also be a skilled herbalist and healer. Men fear that her superior knowle

The Saja Boys really took “let me be your idol” to a new level. Topping every single chart in the world, the fictional Kpop demon boy group from Kpop Demon Hunters did something that I never thought would be possible in a million years…dethrone BTS. Since Kpop had really only turned mainstream in the past decade, you’d expect these kinds of fanatic circles to be relatively modern, but the Ancient World totally pioneered the craze.