witchcraft Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Where Does the Canonical Image of Satan Come From?

If I told you to imagine what the Devil looks like, you would probably have a very clear image in your head: a man with horns, red skin, a goatee, cloven hooves, and a tail with a point on the end, holding a pitchfork. This image of Satan is ubiquitous in popular culture. But where does it come from? The Bible never describes Satan’s appearance, so our image of Satan clearly doesn’t come from the Bible—or at least not directly. It must come from other sources.

As it turns out, the conventional image of Satan developed gradually over the course of many centuries. Some aspects of Satan’s iconography (in particular the cloven hooves, horns, and pitchfork) are very ancient, while others (such as him being red and having a goatee and a tail with a point on the end) are fairly recent developments.

No, Ancient Skythian Enarees Didn’t Drink Urine from Pregnant Mares as a Primitive Form of HRT

The Skythians were an ancient mostly nomadic people who inhabited the northern Eurasian steppes in what is now Ukraine, southern Russia, and Kazakhstan. They were known in antiquity as a very warlike people and were especially known for their skills at horseback riding and archery. The ancient Greeks generally regarded them as archetypal barbarians and Greek ethnographers were deeply fascinated by their culture. They wore trousers, which the Greeks regarded as the most barbaric kind of garment, and they practiced tattooing.

As I discuss in this post I wrote in August 2020, various groups of people existed in ancient world who might fit the definition of the modern word transgender. The Enarees were one such kind of gender-variant people who existed among the ancient Skythians. Although they were assigned male at birth, they wore women’s clothing, took on roles traditionally assigned to women, and spoke in a feminine manner.

A story has become widely circulated online in recent years claiming that the Enarees drank estrogen-rich urine harvested from pregnant mares in order to feminize their bodies as a form of primitive gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy (HRT). Sadly, as awesome as it would be if this story were true, it has absolutely no basis in any kind of historical evidence and is entirely a piece of unfounded modern speculation.

Misconceptions about the Witch-Trials

Everyone is familiar with the concept of a witch-hunt. Witch-hunts appear in books, movies, television, and plays. The idea is so familiar that it has become metonymic for any situation in which a person is persecuted without evidence. But there is also a prodigious number of misconceptions about what witch-trials were, who led them, when they took place, and what they were really about.

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