Digital Resources

Cornell Digital witchcraft archive- Cornell University Libraries put together a digital repository of a range of texts. Coverage spans the last several hundred years, though documents cannot be downloaded and the search interface is somewhat basic. Documents are scans of texts and, because most of them are no longer under copyright law, they can be found in various other places online as well

Wikisource - This can be hit or miss. It's a free online digital repository of all types of public domain texts.

Perseus -Tufts University created the Perseus Digital Library project as a collection of sources related to the humanities, primarily ancient Greek and Roman. The search interface is not intuitive but every single word in a given text is parsed, multiple lexicons are housed on the project, and texts are available in both the original language and translations.

archive.org

Project Gutenberg - Similar to, though predating Wikisource by decades, Project Gutenberg is the original digital library of public domain eBooks. It is a community effort to digitize resources that are no longer in public domain and most texts are available for download in multiple formats. The focus in mainly on literature.

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Not an Apple

Genesis 3 is probably one of the most famous parts of the Old Testament. It's where the devil convinced Eve to eat an apple from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Except not. The Hebrew is pretty clear. The נָחָשׁ mentioned in the first verse is just the Hebrew word for "serpent". It has nothing to do with the figure who would later become identified as the Christian Satan. And it wasn't an apple. Again, the Hebrew text is reasonably clear. The word used is פְּרִי which literally just means "fruit". Like in English, this can be an actual fruit or metaphorical for the "fruit of ___". Hebrew has a separate word for "apple" תַּפּוּחַ which does not show up (as far as I'm aware) in Genesis. So how did we get the whole "Apple" thing? Because languages are fun! The "apple" translation comes from people working with and getting confused by the Latin translation of the Old Testament. In Latin, the word...

Mithras: Introduction

Mithras, the focus of the cult The Mysteries of Mithras was a prominent mystery religion in the Roman Empire from early A.D. to the 4th century. In theory, it came from Persia, being the roman version of the Persian fire/sun god Mithra. This theory was espoused by Franz Cumont, though there is much debate about this. Plutarch claims that it was started by the pirates of Cicilia in Asia minor and, because of archeological evidence showing that the most important cult in this area was dedicated to Perseus, David Ulansey, in his The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries, takes this to mean that Mithras is a version of Perseus and uses this to develop his theory on the astrological focus of Mithraism. Because of the nature of a mystery religion, the adherents wrote nothing down, at least, nothing that survived. There exists a text referred to as the “Mithras Liturgy” from the Greek Magical Papyri and it should be taken into account, but its legitimacy is questioned. The only information ...

Golden Apple

Apples feature in a lot of stories and folklore. The most famous one is probably the golden apple that started the Trojan war. Eris, goddess of discord, took a golden apple, wrote " τῇ καλλίστῃ" (to the most beautiful) on it, and threw it into a group of goddesses: Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. They all wanted it, claiming the title of "most beautiful" for themselves, so they had this sort of ancient beauty contest, for lack of a better term. The judge was a man named Paris, a prince of Troy. Each goddess promised him various things in order to be declared the most beautiful. Aphrodite won. She promised him a woman, Helen, the most beautiful woman of the ancient world. Aphrodite took Helen and gave her to Paris. Whether this was a choice on Helen's part or whether she was taken against her will varies by source. There was a problem, aside from the obvious issues with kidnapping. Before she was "Helen of Troy", she was "Helen of Sparta", marrie...

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