Deep dives into world mythology and folklore, without the dumbing down
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
Elias Blackwood · June 9, 2026
Dante’s Inferno is one of the most influential works in Western literature. It’s the first part of a three-part epic called the Divine Comedy. Written in the early 1300s by Italian poet Dante Alighieri, it remains surprisingly relevant and gripping today. The poem blends theology, politics, and personal emotion into a single narrative. Think of … Read more
Elias Blackwood · June 12, 2026
The full inscription above the Gate of Hell in Dante’s Inferno (Canto III) reads, in the most famous English translation: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” It’s the last line of a nine-line warning, spoken by the gate itself, declaring that Hell is eternal and that anyone who enters has lost any possibility of … Read more
Elias Blackwood · June 15, 2026
Twenty-five years ago, I sat in a dimly lit archive in Kyoto, squinting at a hand-painted scroll depicting a nine-tailed fox — and I realized something that changed how I approach mythology forever. Every culture on earth, no matter how isolated, had independently invented creatures that served the same deep human needs: to explain the … Read more
Elias Blackwood · June 18, 2026
If you have come across the word Dionysian in philosophy, literary criticism, or cultural commentary and found yourself uncertain exactly what it means — you are in good company. It is one of those terms that floats freely across disciplines, carrying different shades of meaning depending on whether you encounter it in Nietzsche, in a … Read more
Elias Blackwood · June 22, 2026
Of all the figures in Greek mythology, few are as simultaneously fascinating and disturbing as the maenads — the ecstatic female followers of Dionysus who appear throughout ancient art, literature, and religious record as women in the grip of divine madness, dancing on mountaintops, tearing animals apart with their bare hands, and immune to pain … Read more
Elias Blackwood · June 25, 2026
When people learn that Dionysus — the Greek god of wine, ecstasy, and ritual madness — was also the patron deity of theatre, the connection can seem surprising. What does drama have to do with wine? The answer is everything, and understanding it requires looking at the festivals of Dionysus: among the most important and … Read more
Elias Blackwood · June 28, 2026
Among the gods of the Greek pantheon, Dionysus had one of the richest relationships with the plant world. While Zeus commanded thunder and Poseidon ruled the sea, Dionysus’s power was expressed through growing things — through the vine, the ivy, the pine, the fig — the fertile, intoxicating, and sometimes dangerous bounty of the earth. … Read more