Shakespeare filled his witches’ scenes with broom lore. “Hover through the fog and filthy air” echoes the image of bristles sweeping storm clouds, the broom an axis between earth and sky. #MythologyMonday Art: Henry Fuseli

Even modern folklore lingers. To find a broom falling means company is coming. To sweep after sundown means sweeping away luck. Every bristle holds a superstition passed from hand to hand. #MythologyMonday Art: Carel Fabritius

The humble brush was sacred to Roman vestal virgins. They swept the temple of Vesta with special care, for fire and hearth were bound to purity. A broom became instrument of ritual, not just cleaning. #MythologyMonday

The witch’s broom is more than a tool of flight. In medieval lore it was tied to fertility rituals. Women leapt astride poles or brooms in the fields at planting time, mimicking growth, urging crops to rise with them. #MythologyMonday Art: Robert Ingpen

The Basque Gaueko is the spirit of night itself. He warns mortals not to defy darkness. “What is done by night belongs to me,” he says, claiming the season of shadow as his own dominion. #FolkloreSunday Art: Martin de Diego Sádaba

The Dullahan of Irish lore rides headless across winter roads, holding his own skull aloft. Wherever he stops, death follows. In the long nights, he is both omen and executioner. #FolkloreSunday

Russian folklore tells of Koschei the Deathless, gaunt and skeletal, whose soul is hidden far away in an egg. His presence is sharpest in winter tales, embodying decay that cannot fully die. #FolkloreSunday

In Alpine legend, Schiachperchten are monstrous winter spirits, horned, shaggy, and grim, who storm through villages in noisy processions. They drive out evil but terrify with their grotesque masks. #FolkloreSunday Art: Rob Medley

Even animals take on spectral form in the dark half of the year. Black dogs with burning eyes stalk crossroads. Owls hoot as messengers of doom. Winter folklore brims with beasts that are more than they seem. #FolkloreSunday Art: David Castleton

In Greek myth, Hecate roams crossroads and thresholds when nights are longest. Her torches pierce the dark, her hounds howl across barren fields. She is both guide and terror in the waning of the year. #FolkloreSunday

As autumn wanes and winter deepens, the world belongs to the Cailleach, the hag of Scottish lore. She strides across the land with her hammer, shattering the green, summoning storms, and ruling until spring returns. #FolkloreSunday Art: Jane Star Weils

Harvest feasts often ended with nut games. Children cracked shells, raced hazelnuts across floors, or listened for the popping of chestnuts in the fire as omens of future joy. #FolkyFriday Art: ShyToby

Old ballads warned of apple trees that grew in cursed soil. To eat their fruit was to fall into enchanted sleep or be bound to the land’s spirit. The orchard was both sanctuary and snare. #FolkyFriday

Across Europe, the final sheaf of harvest was treated with awe. Some burned it as offering, others dressed it as a figure and kept it until spring. In its ashes and stalks, life slumbered until rebirth. #FolkyFriday

Apples carried omens on Halloween night. Young people would slice them crosswise to reveal the star-shaped core. If the star was whole, it promised good fortune and love. If broken, sorrow lay ahead. #FolkyFriday

Apples are tied to love charms. In Victorian England, a girl would peel one in a single strip and toss it over her shoulder. The peel’s shape on the floor was said to reveal her future lover’s initial. #FolkyFriday

Walnuts were called Jupiter’s nuts in Rome, sacred to the god of sky and thunder. Brides tossed them aside as symbols of leaving childhood, cracking open fertility and fortune. #FolkyFriday Art: Juan Luna

Fairy tales often turn apples into symbols of temptation. In Snow White, a single poisoned fruit carries betrayal, sleep, and death. The orchard becomes a stage for sorcery. #FolkyFriday Art: Giordano Aita

Shakespeare’s witches summon “Graymalkin” and “Paddock,” a cat and a toad, as if pets themselves were co-conspirators in fate. The line between companion and familiar vanishes in a puff of smoke. #BookologyThursday Art: Ocean's Bridge

Literature is littered with ghost pets. From Kipling’s spectral dogs to folk tales of cats who return to hearths long after death, these companions refuse to leave their beloved masters behind. #bookologythursday Art: Briton Riviere

The bizarre mingles with the beloved in Japanese folklore, where the bakeneko, a cat that lives too long, grows huge, walks on hind legs, and sometimes avenges abused animals. Pet, spirit, and monster in one. #BookologyThursday

Writers have given pets immortal roles. Emily Brontë’s bulldog Keeper guarded her grave long after her death. Lord Byron composed epitaphs for his Newfoundland Boatswain, lamenting man’s cruelty beside a dog’s virtue. #BookologyThursday

Folklore brims with bizarre pets. Witches were said to keep familiars, cats, toads, ferrets, that fed from blood and whispered secrets. Beloved to the witch, terrifying to everyone else. #BookologyThursday

The pharaohs kept cats not as mere pets but as divine guardians. Bastet, the cat goddess, blurred house and temple, protector and companion. Ancient art shows lap cats honored like royalty. As they should be! #BookologyThursday

In art, Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss is adored as passion, but its companion The Bride lingers with separation. Figures turn away, faces veiled. Desire and rejection share the same canvas. #LegendaryWednesday

The praying mantis was once seen as a prophet. In parts of Africa and Europe, people believed it pointed the way for lost travelers, a six-legged compass of fate. #WyrdWednesday Art: Eran Barnea

Slavic folklore tells of Rusalki, spirits of women betrayed or abandoned. They haunt rivers, luring lovers with beauty, then drowning them. Heartbreak becomes vengeance in the water’s depths. #LegendaryWednesday Art: Andrey Shishkin

Honored to share my latest for HISTORY: How Robert Redford Championed Independent Filmmaking. A look at how his vision created Sundance, gave new voices a stage, and changed film forever. www.history.com/articles/rob... #RobertRedford #Sundance #film

Moths were thought to carry spirits. In Appalachian lore, a white moth at the window was a departed soul visiting. To shoo it away was to insult the dead. #WyrdWednesday Art: Aimee Schreiber

Even modern rituals echo old grief. Burning letters, deleting photos, cutting hair of all acts of breakup magic meant to sever ties. Folklore remade in private rooms, binding sorrow into gesture. #LegendaryWednesday Art: Zainab Shahid

In Slavic folklore, the deathwatch beetle’s ticking was said to foretell death. Its tapping in the walls was the countdown of fate, a bug-beat that summoned the grave. #WyrdWednesday

Sorrowful deities haunt myth. Inanna descends to the underworld grieving the death of her beloved Dumuzi. Each year she mourns his absence, and the earth withers in sympathy until his return. #LegendaryWednesday Art: Judith Shaw

Fireflies flicker through Japanese poetry as symbols of fleeting love. Lovers compared themselves to lights glowing briefly in the summer night before vanishing into darkness. #WyrdWednesday

Divorce traditions carry folklore too. In some cultures, broken pottery symbolized the severing of a bond, each shard a piece of what once was whole. Ritual destruction as catharsis. #LegendaryWednesday Art: Michelle Calkins

Butterflies are souls in countless traditions. Aztec warriors who died in battle returned as butterflies, while in Greece Psyche herself was depicted with butterfly wings, fragile and eternal. #WyrdWednesday Art: Roi James

Fairy tales often hint at heartbreaks untold. The Little Mermaid surrenders her voice for love, only to be abandoned. She dissolves into sea foam, her body itself the poetry of lost devotion. #LegendaryWednesday Art: Lisa Keene

In medieval Europe, crickets were thought to bring luck if they sang by the hearth. But to kill one was to invite misfortune. Their small chirps carried omens from the unseen. #WyrdWednesday Art: Marmont Hill

Japanese folklore tells of the weeping willow spirit bound to a heartbroken man. Their love defied custom, but when she faded back into the tree, he was left with only branches swaying like tears. #LegendaryWednesday Art: Sakai Hōitsu

The scarab beetle was sacred in Egypt. Rolling its ball of dung across the sand, it mirrored the sun god Ra pushing the fiery orb across the sky. Life and rebirth hidden in the humblest of insects. #WyrdWednesday Art: Erika Gravino

The moon is muse as much as myth. Poets from Shelley to Lorca wrote of her silver melancholy, her pull on tides and hearts alike. She is at once cold and intimate, distant and near. #FairyTaleTuesday

Trivia: Shakespeare referenced the stars as fate itself. In Romeo and Juliet, they are “star-crossed lovers,” doomed because their destiny was written in the constellations. #FairyTaleTuesday Art: Zoe James-Williams

Children’s tales often give the stars voices. Each twinkle a lullaby, each constellation a fairy watching. The night sky becomes a storybook written across eternity. #FairyTaleTuesday Art: Jan Matson

Trivia: The word “lunatic” comes from the belief that the moon caused madness. Doctors once warned patients against sleeping in moonlight, fearing it unbalanced the mind. #FairyTaleTuesday Art: Philip James de Loutherbourg

Fairy tales often paint the moon as a keeper of secrets. In German folklore, the Man in the Moon was punished for working on the Sabbath. He carries his bundle of sticks forever, glowing down on earth as warning. #FairyTaleTuesday Art: Lthrasher

The Japanese sun goddess Amaterasu once hid in a cave, plunging the world into night. The gods lured her out with a mirror and a bawdy dance, reminding us that even cosmic order sometimes depends on laughter. #FairyTaleTuesday

In Norse myth, the sun and moon are forever hunted. Sköll the wolf chases the sun, Hati the moon. At Ragnarök, they will be devoured, plunging the world into darkness. Even light itself must fight for survival. #FairyTaleTuesday

Literature of the Romantic era often turned illness into metaphor. Tuberculosis, the “consumption,” was described as a wasting beauty, a disease that seemed to heighten the sensitivity of poets and artists even as it destroyed them. #MythologyMonday Art: Edvard Munch

In ancient Mesopotamia, illness was thought to be the work of demons who slipped into the body. The Ašipu moved between worlds as a healer, exorcist, and interpreter of signs, reading symptoms as omens, body as text. #MythologyMonday

Shakespeare wrote in the long shadow of plague. The theaters closed often during outbreaks. In Romeo and Juliet, plague itself prevents the letter from reaching Romeo, making disease a silent but deadly character in the play. #MythologyMonday Art: Sergio Cupido

During cholera outbreaks, Eastern European villagers told stories of vampiric revenants rising to spread disease. Corpses were exhumed, hearts burned, ashes scattered, in desperate attempts to halt invisible contagion. #MythologyMonday