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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Mithras: The Leontocephaline

Nyx, the goddess of night

Not being one of the 12 Olympians, Nyx is a relatively unknown goddess with little lore or legends about her. Most of what we have are descriptions of her from other deities, though what we do know is fascinating. Even for a goddess, she was ancient, being among the first children of Chaos and the mother of many who unfortunately ended up more well known than her. That is perhaps why she was such a powerful goddess. Her age and her legacy made her fearsome. While we don't know much, what we do know is that she was strong. Strong enough to terrify Zeus, who was himself obviously exceedingly powerful and feared. In Homer's Illiad 8.15-20 it explicitly states about Zeus' strength: ἐξάπτεσθε θεοὶ πᾶσαί τε θέαιναι: ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ ἂν ἐρύσαιτ᾽ ἐξ οὐρανόθεν πεδίον δὲ Ζῆν᾽ ὕπατον μήστωρ᾽, οὐδ᾽ εἰ μάλα πολλὰ κάμοιτε. ἀλλ᾽ ὅτε δὴ καὶ ἐγὼ πρόφρων ἐθέλοιμι ἐρύσσαι, αὐτῇ κεν γαίῃ ἐρύσαιμ᾽ αὐτῇ τε θαλάσσῃ: σειρὴν μέν κεν ἔπειτα περὶ ῥίον Οὐλύμποιο δησαίμην, τὰ δέ κ᾽ αὖτε μετήορα πάντα γένοι...

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...

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