I remember sitting in a graduate seminar on classical literature — this was about 1999 — when a professor said something that has stayed with me for the better part of three decades: “The Greeks did not write tragedies to…
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…
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…
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…
My Name is Breck, and I’m the Village’s Biggest Building Disaster Hi there! My name is Breck McPickaxe, but everyone calls me “Breck the Block-Breaker.” I live in a cozy village where all the other kids are amazing builders who can stack blocks perfectly and create beautiful houses. But me? I break everything I touch! … Read more
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
