👻 Malaysia, home to tropical rainforests, great food, and of course, one of the most horrifying mythical creatures ever imagined.

🐂 Jim Henson is mainly known for his work on Sesame Street and the Muppets, but he also had a hand in an adaptation of Greek mythology that was so unnerving that NBC refused to air it in the United States.

👹 An exorcism is the practice of removing or dispelling an evil, malevolent, or demonic entity possessing a human or place. Exorcism was popularized as a practice in the Christian world during the sixteenth century. But what of the word’s origins?

🐷 An army marches on its stomach, but it might make yours curdle to hear how the Spartans did it! ‘Melas Zomos’ was a soup culturally associated with the Spartans. It literally translates as ‘black soup,’ but it is sometimes known as ‘blood soup,’ owing to its grizzly ingredients.

🍽️ It’s the Cannibal Hymn from Unas’s tomb in Ancient Egypt! The inscription describes his superior power in the afterlife, sustained by the essence of the gods. He gains the ability to order the gods to slaughter others and serve him their entrails to nourish his power.

🌲 Nature can be both beautiful and cruel. This duality likely inspired the Slavic creature, the Leshy. A Leshy is a shapeshifting woodland creature, and it can take the shape of anything in the forest, big or small. It might guide a lost traveler home, or make sure they’re lost forever.

🧛🏼‍♀️ Vampires take on many forms from gothic monstrosities to confused citizens of Staten Island, but Ancient Greece and The Witcher share the view that the blood-leeching lamia is no idle threat. The lamia was a complex creature that endured debate regarding its origin, even in antiquity.

🧌 Monsters aren’t just monsters, they’re a warning. At least etymologically speaking. The word monster comes from the Latin “monere,” meaning “to warn.” Monsters throughout history have served as a warning for what is considered strange, scary, or unacceptable.

💀 Ancient Egyptians believed that the afterlife began with a hazardous journey that could cause the death of the soul before the dead could join the gods. The “Book of the Dead” inscriptions served as a survival manual full of spells of protection and guidance - for those who could afford it.

💀 These are the ruins of the ancient city of Milta, located in the current-day Oaxaca, Mexico! But it’s not the ruins of the city that are currently of interest, but rather the extensive tunnel system below the ruins that one ancient indigenous group believed to be the entrance to the underworld!

🔥She is the torch bearer, the one by the crossroads, the triple goddess. She is Hecate, the Greek goddess of magic. Hecate sometimes has three faces, letting her see the past, present, and future. She holds two torches, which she uses to help travelers find their way home at night.

🌙 He is the fist of Khonshu, the knight of vengeance, the protector of the night’s travelers. He is Moon Knight.

👻 Spirit comes from the Latin word “spiritus”, meaning breath. Which makes sense, considering every breath taken is as incorporeal as a ghost. Alternatively, the definition of “spiritus” has also been compared to the “breath of life”, a Biblical concept used to describe humanity's personhood.

👻 Monsters hide among us. But where do they really come from? Tokyo Ghoul follows Ken Kaneki, a college student who becomes part ghoul after being attacked by one and receiving some of her organs in a surgery. Kaneki has to balance his human life with his new desire to eat flesh.

💀 This is an epitaph, or grave inscription, from Ancient Rome! Many epitaphs were short and objective, giving details about a person’s life, such as their role in their family or what job they worked. However, many were also written in poetic prose or from the first-person perspective!

🏇 The Dullahan, or Dubhlachan, which translates to “dark one” in Gaelic, is a mysterious creature in Irish folklore. Is he a demon? A ghost? Death itself? Every version is different, but one thing’s for sure. The Dullahan does not have a head, at least not on his shoulders.

🌪️ Pazuzu. Evil hell-sent entity or a misrepresented wind demon? It’s complicated, but Pazuzu’s contradictory nature is often overlooked. Made notorious through ‘The Exorcist’ film and book, the story presents Pazuzu as truly insidious. But to the Babylonians, he possesses a deeper meaning.

🌙 What do Romulus and Remus have to do with October? The legendary founder of Rome, Romulus, is said to have overhauled the Roman calendar system around 738 BCE. This follows a cultural pattern of crediting legendary figures with practices whose origins had been lost.

🪦 The spooky season is upon us, and SASA Inspires is celebrating with a month of spooky posts! Starting on October 1st, we’ll be exploring some of the scary, creepy, and weird parts of ancient history across all of our social media platforms! We hope you follow along!

🌍 Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276-194 BCE) was an Ancient Greek scholar best known for being the first man to calculate the circumference of the Earth! Eratosthenes was also a mathematician, geographer, astronomer, music theorist, poet, and the chief librarian at the famous Library of Alexandria!

🪨 The Guayabo National Monument contains the most significant remnants of an ancient society in Costa Rica. This site was home to people over 2,500 years ago, peaking in 800 CE, when thousands of people lived in the area. But around 1400 AD, Guayabo was abandoned. And nobody knows why.

⚔️ What links Geralt and Odysseus? They both encountered sirens and survived. The Witcher universe features monsters from Eastern European folklore, but some originate in the classics. The Witcher’s use of sirens is a testament to the power of classical mythology to influence modern media.

🧠 The Hippocampus is the part of the brain responsible for learning & memory. But what does it have to do with seahorses? The root words “hippo-” & “campus” come from the ancient Greek words “hippo,” meaning horse, and “kampos,” meaning from the sea. Together, it means “seahorse”!

🍎 Rosh Hashanah is one of the holiest days on the Jewish calendar, the day the world was created. Though Rosh Hashanah is not mentioned in the Torah, it has been celebrated for over a thousand years. The holiday is a day of reflection, prayer, and, of course, some great food.

👎 A 3,000 year old one star review? This tablet, on display in the British Museum, was found in an excavation of an ancient Sumerian city. It was written by someone named Nanni, a dissatisfied customer who wrote this tablet to a merchant named Ea-Nasir.

🗡️ CHOOSE YOUR FIGHTER! Enter Xipe Totec, aka ‘The Flayed One’. Although he is depicted as a warrior figure, he is the patron god of spring in the Aztec pantheon! He is often depicted wearing the flayed skin of a war captive, symbolizing regeneration and change.

🦁 Disney’s “Hercules” (1997) is an animated classic that puts Greek mythology center stage. It follows the titular character as he tries to regain his godhood, which the evil Hades stole from him as a baby. He fights titans, falls in love, and ends up rejecting godhood.

👈 To us, the word “sinister” means something ominous, malevolent, and evil. But if you trace the word back to its original Latin origins, it initially meant “left”, or “the left side”! So what happened? Well, some scholars think it has to do with which hand is your dominant one!

☯️ In traditional Chinese philosophy and medicine, Qi (which is most frequently translated as “vital energy”) flows through the universe and is one of the vital components for life. The manifestations of Qi are best represented by Yin and Yang, each representing different aspects!

⛰️ Right in the middle of Nepal’s Mustang district lie 10,000 man-made caves that date back over 2,000 years. Though the true purpose of these caves is unknown, one thing is for sure. There are dead bodies in there!

🪝 Māui needs no introduction if you’ve seen “Moana”. This demigod once caught a giant fish with his magic jaw-bone, using his nose blood for bait. After his brothers tore the fish apart, they became islands! He also lifted up the sky, lassoed the sun, and gave humans fire!

👑 J.R.R Tolkien’s works have more similarities to Norse mythology than you might expect. For starters, the name. Middle Earth is an indirect English translation of Midgard, the human world in Norse mythology.

🎮 What is an avatar? The character you play as in a video game? A blue alien? A cartoon character that can control the elements? Well, the word avatar comes from the Sanskrit word avatāra, which means to descend. The word is also very significant to the Hindu belief system!

🏹 Released in 1993, “Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama” is an anime based on the Hindu legend Ramayana. Produced by Japanese filmmaker Yugo Sako, the anime follows the story of Prince Rama, an incarnation of the Hindu deity Vishnu, his wife, Sita, and his brother Lakshmana.

✍️ Congratulations to the winners of this year’s Ancient FanFiction Writing Contest: 🏅 Most Creative: Servilia’s Pearl by Zoe Bennett 🏅 Best Researched: As The River Flows by Yasi Zhu 🏅 Best Overall: Conversations With An Immortal by Dawn French

🦴 Would you use bones to divine the future? Well, what about as a toy? The astragalus is found around the ankle in most animals. The small, six-sided shape of the astragali bones in sheep, goats, cows, deer, and other similar animals makes them the perfect choice for game pieces!

🔥 LUCIFER!! From the Book of Job, through Milton’s Paradise Lost, to the figurehead of the moral panic movement of the 80s and 90s, the “Light Bringer” has penetrated our culture despite every effort to purge him from the collective imagination.

⚡George O’Connor’s series of graphic novels, ‘Olympians’, serves as a perfect entry point for kids who want to learn more about Greek mythology. Through twelve books, each beautifully written and illustrated, O’Connor retells the classics.

*CORRECTION* 🍂 If ‘sept-’ means ‘seven’, why is September the 9th month of the year? This is because ‘September’ is inherited from the original calendar of the Roman Republic, which only had ten months, beginning with March.

🍂 If ‘sept-’ means ‘seven’, why is September the 9th month of the year? Along with being the first month of Fall, September is the first in a series of months with numerical root words. It's also the only month with a numerical root word that doesn’t match its position on the calendar!

🍂 If ‘sept-’ means ‘seven’, why is September the 9th month of the year? Along with being the first month of Fall, September is the first in a series of months with numerical root words. It's also the only month with a numerical root word that doesn’t match its position on the calendar!

🔮 A popular magic system in fiction, Alchemy is actually an ancient precursor to Chemistry! It’s what modern scientists would call a ‘protoscience’, or an underdeveloped science. Alchemy typically involved attempts to transform (or transmute) base elements into new or noble elements.

🇲🇽 San José Mogote is one of the oldest cities in Mesoamerica, dating back to around 1500 BCE. It was an incredibly successful farming city thanks to some early irrigation systems. This is also where the earliest Zapotec writing was discovered.

🧞‍♂️ Introducing the interdimensional beings, Djinn. The real genies of the lamp, Djinn persisted from pre-Zoroastrian traditions, and they were featured heavily in the Quran, where it was revealed that they were created with free will by Allah as the antithesis to angels.

🖤 Ars Amatoria, or “the Art of Love,” is a three-volume series written by the Roman poet Ovid. The work was a satire of Augustus’s newly enacted morality laws, which heavily encouraged marriage while making adultery a crime punishable by death or banishment for women.

🗺️ In Greek mythology, Atlas was a Titan, one of the giants who ruled the world before the Olympians. After the Olympians won the war against the Titans, Zeus punished Atlas by making him hold up the sky, though sometimes the story has him holding up the Earth.

🍷 Grape wine is more than 6,000 years old, with evidence of wine production being found in the Middle East dating back to 4,000 BCE. However, there is speculation that production of this type of alcohol can be traced back even farther!

🪢 How can you record something without writing? The khipu is how! Invented in ~2500 BCE, and still used in the 1400s by the Incas, khipus use arrangements of strings used to communicate information using color, length and different knots.

❤️‍🔥 One of the 7 princes of hell who represents the deadly sin of ‘Lust’, Asmodai started out in Ancient Persia, killing men just before they consummated their marriages. Finally, Solomon locked him in a box and threw him into the sea. Now he rules the 9 Hells in Pathfinder.

🛡️ For over 80 years, Wonder Woman has been gracing the pages of DC Comics. As the “Amazonian Princess”, it’s no surprise that her comics are full of references to Greek and Roman mythology! For example, she shares a name with the Roman goddess of the moon, hunt, & maidens: Diana.