white fluffy cloud, blue skies.
In Polish folklore, the Platenik was the soul of the drowned and was associated with heavy low-hanging clouds. They could shape the clouds from fog above the rivers and move them using ropes. If one visited your house, it had to be greeted as an old friend and asked no questions... #MorbidMarch
silver replica of a horse's head with wide open jaws and flattened ears on a blue surface.
Hidden in the British Museum there is a 3d replica of a marble statue of a horse. It is smaller than a wavelength of light, the size of a speck of dust; created and released by Oxford’s Institute of Digital Archaeology to provoke dialogue around museum acquisitions... #MorbidMarch
📷IDA/AD Karenowska
'Hamilton Terrace, Autumn Morning', St John's Wood (1933) by George Clausen
(Private collection)
A golden crystal
Orpiment pigment creates a bright golden gilt effect. Once it excited alchemists as a way of making gold, and then it was famously used by artists from Rembrandt to Tintoretto, it has since fallen out of use because of its arsenic content... #MorbidMarch
A page from The Daily Mirror newspaper with photographs and text concerning Agatha Christie's disappearance.
December 1926 Agatha Christie's abandoned empty car was found in bushes, headlights on. A huge police search ensued. Clairvoyants sought. Then a waiter contacted police to say the writer was in a Harrogate hotel under an assumed name. It is still a mystery as to how & why she vanished. #MorbidMarch
A runner n muddy shorts collapses into the arms of a man who is holding a glowing bottle. Words behind them read Poisoned To Win.
The 19041 Olympic marathon was chaos, run in 32C heat with no water stops. The winner Thomas Hicks was given egg whites, brandy and strychnine sulphate (legal at the time) to keep him on his feet but became too weak to collect his medal. He never ran a marathon again... #MorbidMarch
Pale blue sky and a flowering hawthorn tree with pink and white blossom.
The overpoweringly sweet smell of the hawthorn is produced by the chemical trimethylamine. This is also one of the first chemicals exuded from a decomposing corpse. Perhaps explaining why hawthorn and its blossom has long been linked with death in British & Irish folklore... #MorbidMarch
🎨VanGogh
For #5 (SWEET)...did you know that La Morgue in Paris was not only a tourist attraction to view corpses but vendors and hawkers routinely set up shop outside the morgue to sell snacks? It was possible to buy sweet treats in case you got peckish while viewing unclaimed bodies.
I'm not posting an image from the movie because I feel too upset at the treatment of Shelley Duvall in making it!🖤
a jar of vicious lumpy pretend blood.
"Kensington Gore" theatrical blood began to be manufactured in the 1960s by pharmacist John Tinegate. Since his death, the name "Kensington Gore", a pun on the London street, has become a term for any fake blood used on the stage or in films. It was famously used in The Shining... #MorbidMarch
aww, you never know...!
🤣
A spectral black dog with a luminosity surrounding it, leaps forward. meanwhile hiding behind the small hill are two bowler-hatted gentlemen.
Scottish legend tells of the Blood Dogs which haunted battlegrounds to drink the blood of the fallen. They would manifest from morning mist, digging deep into the earth to find the blood and feast. Their breath could scorch but their paws left no prints... #MorbidMarch 🖌️Paget
The #wormmoon shines tonight and all kinds of ghoulies, ghosties, and long-leggedy beasties walk - and us, of course, up in the borderlands between Scotland and England, where we meet some of them in our 3rd #darkspringtide tale - read it below!
🎨 Franklin Booth
🍀🌕🍀Pointing at the moon was thought to be disrespectful and would bring misfortune. In the north-midland counties of England it was said that doing so nine times would prevent you from entering Heaven.
#OwlishMonday #MythologyMonday #FairyTaleTuesday #FullMoon #WyrdWednesday #LegendaryWednesday
Beautiful artwork💜
an indistinct blurry image showing a large dog in the foreground and behind the figure of a woman, her body lurching backwards a sthough in ecstacy.
In Irish folklore, a strange dog digging up your garden means illness or death is on its way... #MorbidMarch
🎨Donald Mcpartland
I love that!🖤
Painting of an owl with ear tufts sitting on branches that are bare of leaves but on which the first petals are starting to open.
#OwlishMonday 'Early Plum Blossoms' by Nishimura Goun (1936), painted on silk
Inside a church a young veiled bride dressed in white kneels upon a red velvet upholstered chair. A man in a black suit with a thin moustache stands alongside her.
Not only did the bridal veil originate to protect the bride from evil spirits, it has also been suggested the veil protected the congregation from the liminal power of the bride herself... #MorbidMarch 🎨 Albert Guillaume
In an underground crypt against the backdrop of a stone arch, a wooden coffin is creaking open and a hand reaching out. The lid is being prised open by a white-skinned human figure wearing a white shroud.
The coffin of a suspected vampire would have been filled with garlic or poppy seeds. Garlic would keep it bound in the grave. The seeds provided food but the vampire could only eat one seed at a time and eat them all before it could leave the grave again... #MorbidMarch 🎨Wiertz
In memory of dear Frodo, one of literature's most heroic and noble cats - Asmodeus #BookWormSat
A woman sleeps, head upon a table covered with playing cards lit by the table lamp.
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
AnneSexton #BookWormSat
Interior, an office. A 1950s business man sits at his wooden desk. A secretary glamorous in her black patent shoes and pencil skirt is pausing thoughtfully by the filing cabinet. The window is open and the evening light shines above her.
In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand
there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see
or the child’s older self, a poet,
a woman dreaming when she should be typing
the last report of the day.
from Dreamwood - Adrienne Rich #BookWormSat
🎨Edward Hopper
“I have drowned my candle’s light;
The night drifts in through the open pane,
Softly enfolds me, lets me be
Her friend, her kin.”
(Hermann Hesse)
🎨 Ludwig von Zumbusch
#bookwormsat #goldenageofillustration
A young child with blond hair poses thoughtfully. they wear a long loose white nightgown. everything else is bare and white in the background.
Worms turn.
Stars go in.
Even the moon is losing face.
Poplars stilt for dawn
And we begin
The long fall from grace.
I tuck you in.
from Night Feed by Eavan Boland #BookWormSat
Birds of prey have got into the henhouse attacking the hens. A young boy waves his arms. Commotion, chaos, flying birds.
Little henhouse boy,
Sharp-faced as new moons
Remembered, your photo still
Glimpsed like a rodent
On the floor of my mind
from Bye-Child by Seamus Heaney inspired by the true and tragic story of a child confined to a hen-house since birth.
#BookWormSat
Pale sky above the rooftops of London. a church spire in the background.
Unreal city,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
The Wasteland - T.S. Eliot #BookWormSat
Illustration of a train at night in a book by George Cupples, 1882. Crescent moon, starry night, clouds, rolling fields, trees, steam train.
‘This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner, the girl next door,’~ Auden, Night Mail.
This #BookWormSat coincides with Auden’s birthday so we will mark the day with C20th poetry. Join us!
A scary dragon-like monster (called the Leviathan) swims on the surface of the water with water bubbling around it. Its eyes look evil and angry and its mouth is open showing a lot of sharp teeth. There is a very small amount of sky at the top of the image, showing a horizon that is far away.
That's the end of an epic #FolkloreThursday 🦈
Today's theme was "Water Spirits & Shape-Shifters: Creatures of Lakes, Rivers and Seas”
This is @shanonsinn.bsky.social signing off - your very last host today! Wishing you a happy Lunar New Year 🌙
1908 Arthur Rackham
