Myths & mysteries
Discover facts about myths & mysteries. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Myths & mysteries
Paschal Randolph invented hashish-fueled sex magic
Aleister Crowley usually gets the credit for making occultism horny, but Randolph beat him to it by decades. This 19th-century Black mystic and physician…
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Tenure track academics sanitized Kabbalah
Before Gershom Scholem came along, Jewish mysticism was treated by respectable scholars as the embarrassing, irrational uncle of Judaism. Scholem…
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Minor museum artifact birthed a religion
Exhibit 666 in the old Bulaq Museum wasn't an earth-shattering archeological find; it was just a regular wooden funerary tablet for an obscure Egyptian…
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Taking cosmic dictation from a voice next to your heart
In 1840, Jakob Lorber was just an average Austrian musician preparing for a gig when a voice originating slightly to the left of his sternum told him to pick…
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Famed ghost hunter caught secretly throwing spooky rocks
Billed as "the most haunted house in England," Borley Rectory was allegedly crawling with phantom nuns, ghostly carriages, and aggressive poltergeists. Famed…
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Ancient Hebrew artifact copied from a Masonic dictionary
Nothing fuels pseudo-archaeology quite like a vaguely inscribed rock. The Bat Creek Stone, excavated in Tennessee in 1889, was hailed as definitive proof that…
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Rhine realized most poltergeists were just angry teenagers
When a Bridgeport home exploded with flying pans and smashing plates in the 1930s, the world thought it was a demonic infestation. But when parapsychologist…
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Victorians literally ate this crusty Welsh wooden bowl
Why search for the Holy Grail in treacherous caves when you can just find it in a Welsh mansion? The Nanteos Cup is a medieval mazer bowl that local folklore…
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Loudun nuns submitted a signed demonic contract in court
When a handsome local priest named Urbain Grandier made too many political enemies, the nuns at the Loudun convent coincidentally became victims of a…
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Amsterdam nuns claimed demonic possession via cursed bread
In 1566, the nuns of Amsterdam's St. Ursula convent didn't just have a bad carb day; they sparked a bizarre microhistory of institutional possession. After…
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Ancient papyrus holds headless demon hacks
If you thought your IKEA assembly instructions were baffling, wait until you see the Stele of Jeu. Buried within the Greek Magical Papyri, this Greco-Egyptian…
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Alien artifact turned out to be a valve part
In 1974, the Betz family found a completely smooth, heavy metal sphere in the woods after a fire, which immediately started rolling around their house on its…
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Shoemaker Jakob Bohme saw the cosmos in a shiny pewter dish
In 1600, a humble German shoemaker named Jakob Bohme stared at a pewter beam of sunlight reflecting off a dish and instantly hallucinated the underlying…
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Ripley Scroll uses giant toad poetry to explain alchemy
The Ripley Scroll is a 20-foot-long masterpiece of 15th-century Renaissance trolling. Ostensibly an instructional manual for creating the Philosopher's Stone…
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Ramon Llull built paper logic machines to prove God exists
Ramon Llull was a 13th-century Majorcan mystic who got so tired of arguing with Muslims and Jews about theology that he literally invented a rudimentary…
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Royal scryer hid his mutilated ears under a cap
Before he became Europe's premier angelic translator, Edward Kelley was just a petty criminal who had his ears chopped off for forgery. He spent his entire…
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Ancient wizards mixed Jesus and Anubis in spells
Late-antique magicians were the ultimate unhinged DJs of religion. The Greek Magical Papyri features chaotic invocation spells that casually mash up Jesus,…
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Spanish kids faked divine visions for media clout
In 1931, the rural Spanish town of Ezkioga became a circus of mass hysteria when local kids claimed the Virgin Mary was appearing to them. Soon, hundreds of…
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An Islamic scholar abandoned wealth after doubt left him unable to speak, then sought God as a beggar
You haven't had a real existential crisis until you literally lose the ability to speak. Abu Hamid al-Ghazali was the most prestigious Islamic scholar of the…
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Regardie saved astral magic by betraying everyone he knew
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was the most exclusive, pretentious occult country club of the early 20th century, strictly guarding its astral…
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Russian exiled thinker made art a holy weapon
Nikolai Berdyaev got kicked out of Soviet Russia for refusing to conform to Marxist materialism, mostly because he believed human creativity was a literal…
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Paracelsus accidentally mapped out fantasy lore
Paracelsus was a brilliant 16th-century toxicologist, but he was also a legendary drunk who formally classified fairies like a Victorian biologist. He wrote…
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Aleksandr Chizhevsky blamed human revolutions on the sun
Blaming your terrible text messages on Mercury retrograde is amateur hour. Soviet biophysicist Aleksandr Chizhevsky went all in, mapping 500 years of solar…
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Hilma af Klint invented abstract art on ghost orders
The art history books will smugly tell you Wassily Kandinsky invented abstract painting, completely ignoring a Swedish mystic who beat him to the punch. Hilma…
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