Deep dives into world mythology and folklore, without the dumbing down
Elias Blackwood Elias Blackwood · February 11, 2026
One of the things that keeps me coming back to mythology and legendary history is how directly it connects to the present — not as quaint relics but as the actual root system of ideas we still live with. Pull on almost any modern concept and you’ll find it attached to something thousands of years … Read more
Elias Blackwood · March 28, 2026
The history of civilization is largely the history of conflict — who controls resources, who defines legitimacy, who writes the story afterward. When you study the great wars of legendary and mythological traditions, you’re really studying how human societies process trauma, justify power, and construct identity through narrative. What fascinates me about moments like this … Read more
Elias Blackwood · April 1, 2026
My Saturday morning ritual used to be showing up at the university library with no plan and just following citation trails — one footnote leading to a 19th-century translation, which led to a fragmentary text, which opened up an entire mythology I’d never encountered. That kind of discovery is exactly what drew me to this … Read more
Elias Blackwood · May 17, 2026
I still remember the first time a student in one of my comparative religion seminars confidently declared that Medusa was “just a monster.” It took everything I had not to groan audibly. After more than 25 years of studying ancient…
Elias Blackwood · May 13, 2026
I still remember the exact moment this question clicked for me. I was a second-year graduate student working through Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda in one hand and a battered copy of Hesiod’s Theogony in the other, and I kept stopping…
Elias Blackwood · May 10, 2026
About fifteen years into my research, I was working through Hesiod’s Works and Days in the original Greek when something stopped me cold. Hesiod wasn’t just telling farmers when to plant their crops — he was embedding an entire cosmological…
Elias Blackwood · May 7, 2026
I still remember the moment I realized how badly most people misunderstand Dionysus. I was sitting in a graduate seminar on Greek religion — this was back in the late 1990s — when a classmate confidently declared that Dionysus was…
Elias Blackwood · May 4, 2026
What Were Dionysus’ Worshippers Called? Maenads, Bacchants, and the Thiasus Few things get me more excited as a history buff than digging into the stranger, wilder corners of ancient religion — and nothing in the Greek world is stranger or wilder than the cult of Dionysus. If you’ve ever wondered exactly what Dionysus’ worshippers were … Read more
Elias Blackwood · April 30, 2026
Introduction: The God of a Thousand Faces — and Just as Many Creatures Most people envision Dionysus as a lounging figure cradling a goblet of wine—comfortable, domesticated, almost bourgeois in his leisure. The historical record suggests something far wilder, far more primal, and far more dangerous than that settled image allows. One of the sharpest … Read more
Elias Blackwood · April 24, 2026
I studied mythology and ancient history at university, and the one thing that struck me across every culture I examined was how consistently people encoded their deepest values, fears, and social structures into their legends — which is exactly why…