rite & omen
Sep 15, 2026
When the Hunt Rides Overhead
A survey of the Wild Hunt, the storm-borne procession of masked riders and howling hounds that recurs across European folklore as a warning to those still walking the roads below.
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Sep 14, 2026
The Threshold Must Be Guarded
A look at the old European practice of laying salt and iron at doorways to bar witches, spirits and the fae from crossing into the house.
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Aug 30, 2026
Where the Whistlers Fly
On the old English belief in the Seven Whistlers, the unseen birds whose calls marked the boundary between the known road and the country beyond it, and on what the blank edges of old maps once meant to those who had to cross them.
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Aug 24, 2026
The Grammar of Birds
On the old Roman and Etruscan art of augury, in which the flight of birds, the fall of lightning, and the appetite of sacred chickens were read as the language of fate.
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Aug 16, 2026
The Bells Under Dunwich
A record of Dunwich, the medieval Suffolk port swallowed by the sea, and the enduring claim that its church bells can still be heard tolling beneath the waves during storms.
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Aug 15, 2026
The Bird That Watches the Fall
A journal entry on the raven as a death-omen in British and Celtic tradition, from the ravens kept at the Tower of London to the corpse-bird of the Welsh Marches and the war-goddesses who wore black feathers over the battlefield.
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Aug 14, 2026
The Line Nothing Crosses
A short account of the salt circle, a protective boundary drawn against unwelcome spirits, and why so many unrelated traditions arrived at the same substance and the same shape.
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Aug 1, 2026
The Fire That Must Not Go Out
A journal entry on the old, near-universal duty of keeping a fire alive through the night, from the Vestal flame in Rome to the smoored peats of the Scottish Highlands.
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