Episode 236: Creating Hindu Fantasy Worlds
Shveta Thakrar (Star Daughter, The Dream Runners), Kritika H. Rao (The Surviving Sky), Roshani Chokshi (Aru Shah, The Star Touched Queen), and Ram V (The Many Deaths of Laila Starr)…
Episode 237: Seeing Ourselves in Norse Myths
Thor and Loki have become pop culture icons thanks to Marvel. But the influence of Norse mythology on contemporary fantasy runs through Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings and…
Gnosticism
Gnosticism (from Ancient Greek: γνωστικός, romanized:gnōstikós, Koine Greek:, 'having knowledge') is a collection of religious ideas and systems that coalesced in the late 1st century AD among Jewish and early…
Turtles all the way down
"Turtles all the way down" is an expression of the problem of infinite regress. The saying alludes to the mythological idea of a World Turtle that supports a flat Earth…
The Golden Arm
The Golden Arm is a folktale, a story appearing in multiple cultures through oral tradition and folklore, most famously told by Mark Twain and also used by him to instruct…
How to Stay Married to Baba Yaga
"A yolk is not just a yolk: at the bottom of all that gold is a secret only the witches see. You aren’t a witch. Choke down the battered yolks…
Sirens, succubi & sex symbols: a history of female monsters
From the dangers of childbirth to female sexuality, myths and legends about female monsters like mermaids and sirens can tell us a lot about different societies’ attitudes towards women over…
A Girl Defines Herself
No one knows for sure where we came from; no one can say where we’re going. We are, in the linguistic sense, mysteries. Secrets. In some ways, threats.
A Brief Catalog of Humans, as Observed by the Cryptids of Encante
The Myopic Cryptozoologist - Everyone’s least favorite human, this persistent creature is a narrow-minded cousin of perhaps our favorite type of human—the cryptozoologist—and differs from that specimen in several key…
Satanic Panics and the Death of Mythos
All the stories in humanity’s history that have had a lasting impact on us, from the Bible to Greek myths to the X-Men franchise, have been rich in meaning beyond…