August Malmstr News Today

Ask anyone who has ever seen Ramsay Bolton in Game of Thrones—witnessing a Bolton "hunt" is rarely a good sign. So too is the case for the supernatural Wild Hunt of European myth. A phenomenon believed to resemble ghostly knights or hunters chasing the clouds across the sky, the Wild Hunt has long been considered a symbol of impending doom.

There has been much made in recent decades about the pagan origins of Christmas customs. It is important to note that this idea is not, strictly speaking,

The graves of important Viking chiefs with impressive burial goods, may point to Ivar the Boneless being buried at Repton, England.

The elves and dwarves of Norse mythology inspired Tolkien and others. How similar are they, and what was their relationship with the gods and humans?

Santa Claus, Keebler cookies, and overloaded shelves. When one speaks of elves, the mind most often goes to those who work for Santa or Keebler, or those which hide from little children in the middle of the night. These are their roles in popular culture today, but it is likely unsurprising to read that their origins stem from sources much less merry and jolly.

The basic premise is that the shamans of these stone age cultures transported themselves into altered states of consciousness and then painted the results of their experiences — experiences that frequently included the therianthropic beings they encountered. These works of art are manifest throughout the world over a vast prehistoric time period and demonstrate a universality of experience, from the entoptic images (dots, spirals and geometric patterns) frequently caused by psychotropic drugs...