Discover the World’s Oldest Surviving Cookbook, De Re Coquinaria, from Ancient Rome

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West­ern schol­ar­ship has had “a bias against study­ing sen­su­al expe­ri­ence,” writes Reina Gat­tuso at Atlas Obscu­ra, “the rel­ic of an Enlight­en­ment-era hier­ar­chy that con­sid­ered taste, touch, and fla­vor taboo top­ics for sober aca­d­e­m­ic inquiry.” This does not mean, how­ev­er, that cook­ing has been ignored by his­to­ri­ans. Many a schol­ar has tak­en Euro­pean…

Why Knights Fought Snails in Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts

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The snail may leave a trail of slime behind him, but a lit­tle slime will do a man no harm… whilst if you dance with drag­ons, you must expect to burn.

- George R. R. Mar­tin, The Mys­tery Knight

As any Game of Thrones fan knows, being a knight has its down­sides. It…

Watch Joan Baez Endearingly Imitate Bob Dylan (1972)

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Joan Baez was already her­ald­ed as the “Queen of Folk” by the time Robert Zim­mer­man aka Bob Dylan arrived in New York City. Many things brought him to the bur­geon­ing folk scene there, but Baez was the siren who called to a young Dylan through his tele­vi­sion set long before he met her. He was…

What Is Kabbalah? An Introduction to the Jewish Mystical Tradition

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Though the pop-cul­tur­al moment that gave rise to the asso­ci­a­tion has passed, when many of us hear about Kab­bal­ah, we still think of Madon­na. Her study of that Jew­ish-mys­tic school of thought in the nine­teen-nineties has been cred­it­ed, at least in part, with the son­ic trans­for­ma­tion that led to her hit album Ray of…

2,178 Occult Books Now Digitized & Put Online, Thanks to the Ritman Library and Da Vinci Code Author Dan Brown

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In 2018 we brought you some excit­ing news. Thanks to a gen­er­ous dona­tion from Da Vin­ci Code author Dan Brown, Amsterdam’s Rit­man Library—a siz­able col­lec­tion of pre-1900 books on alche­my, astrol­o­gy, mag­ic, and oth­er occult subjects—has been dig­i­tiz­ing thou­sands of its rare texts under a dig­i­tal edu­ca­tion project cheek­i­ly called “Her­met­i­cal­ly Open.”…