A reconstruction of the medieval Tintagel Castle is on English Heritage’s web page.
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Cornwall: Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall, Volume 1
Bottrell was one of the researchers that Robert Hunt used to flesh out his book, so his material has been already fossicked over, at one remove. Bottrell uses a lot more of the local dialect, and his colour text is better than Hunt’s. For example, all the descendants of Jack the Giant are shaggy because…
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Walking under Wittgenstein’s ladder
This week I’ve been thinking about Hermetic applications of Wittgenstein’s ladder, but to get there, I need to take three steps back. I hit upon the idea in Terry Pratchett’s books, where it’s called lie-to-children, which is taken from Cohen and Stuart. An example I can think of is when Neil Gaiman wrote a Doctor…
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Dunsany: a moral little tale
A quick Lord Dunsany story. The Puritanical Devil is a sort of inverse of the Merry Devil which I wrote up for Realms of Power : Infernal (p.73). It is likely hated not only by the angels, but a lot of faeries as well. A Moral Little Tale There was once an earnest Puritan who…
Read MoreGames From Folktales July 2018
Sound the bells and lock the gates! It’s the July 2018 Games From Folktales pdf!
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Was Bonisagus an Epicurean?
A few weeks ago the blog discussed the weeping philosopher, Heralcitus. His parallel, the laughing philosopher Democritus, doesn’t have a lot of surviving work, but one of his followers was Epicurus, and he seems to have been a Hermetic magus before his time. Epicurius gets a bad rap in history. His name is used for…
Read MoreEverything that rises must converge
This week, I’m going to beat to death the idea that this blog is designed to make Ars Magica easier for outsiders to understand, by taking the deepest dive yet into Mythic Europe’s cosmology and escatology. In vanilla Mythic Europe we have the following features: The magi who best understand how the clockwork of reality…
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Washington Irving: Adventures of the German Student
I thought this story was folklore, but it turns out it’s fiction by Washington Irving. Statistics for the creature at the end. *** On a stormy night, in the tempestuous times of the French Revolution, a young German was returning to his lodgings, at a late hour, across the old part of Paris. The lightning…
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Cornwall: Looe Island
Looe Island is a potential covenant site that will be added to the material which is gradually being collected for a Cornish gazette for the Ars Magica roleplaying game. Much of this material comes from Alex Langstone’s book “From Granite to Sea” or from the Cornish folklore journal he edits “Lien Gwerin”. Looe Island has…
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Dunsany: Two Tales of Death
The Grim Reaper doesn’t get much of a look in in Mythic Europe: he’s a later artistic contrivance. The Romans had a God of Death, but the god of the process of dying, sadly for the order, was Hermes himself, in his role as psychopomp. I’ve split off a third story, “Death and the Orange”,…
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Games From Folktales 