A chatty and inspired podcast of all occult. Everything from the Illuminati, secret societies and black magic. It is superbly researched and manages to rely the dry historic research in a witty way together with the alchemic actors, breaking into songs, taking unexpected side roads in the conversations.
Butter smooth voice taking you on a journey with the witches and a peep behind the curtain as how to live the witch life in the modern era. The host is a great interviewer and a great and optimistic view on the occult, even the most skeptics can respect and appreciate.
A sort of roadhouse bar playing stomping rock and metal, talking with practitioners of several types of magic, occult traditions. And even though the host, Cooper Wilhelm is a practitioner himself he really lets his guest take the place and comes off as an interested and a guy willing to ask questions about anything! Too bad this is a finished podcast, but enjoy the episodes that were made.
For the more researched based distanced podcast, check out Night Tide. A bi-monthly production, these guys really take their time doing the research, and presenting it in a great way. The host Stacy is super pleasant listening to and is one of the podcast host that manage the balance between music/narrating and the stories are the perfect blend of creative and informative storytelling.
Love a niche podcast, and this is it! Satanic panic was raving through the 80’s America, where a numerous cases accusing others for satanical acts. The hosts takes you through what really happened, covering the court cases, rumors, dungeons and dragons and the Church of Satan. Yeah, its great, check them out.
Witches have been around as long as women have been around. At times, they have been cursed, at times, praised. Depending on the time, it is always about power though, and how to use it among the rest of the human population.
Even if they are after you we are still fascinated by witches, the power within seemingly normal people. And perhaps that is one of the things we are drawn to. Because if people posses this great power within, why not you as well?.
This is a reading list of some of the books containing witches that we love.
Witch Child
By Celia Rees (2009)
This book was one of the books that got this writer into books about witches. More than an adventure of the witch myth and legend it is an exploration about the consequences of it. It is also dealing with a lot of issues just from one story, with women, religion and Native Americans. I also loved the next book, Sorceress
Synopsis: Welcome to the world of young Mary Newbury, a world where simply being different can cost a person her life. Hidden until now in the pages of her diary, Mary’s startling story begins in 1659, the year her beloved grandmother is hanged in the public square as a witch. Mary narrowly escapes a similar fate, only to face intolerance and new danger among the Puritans in the New World. How long can she hide her true identity? Will she ever find a place where her healing powers will not be feared?
This first book of the Winternight Trilogy, was recommended to me by my creative writing lecturer. And, yes, thank you for that. This is sort of fantasy that is rare and witches that claimed their way to the throne so fast.
Synopsis: Beware the evil in the woods. . . In a village at the edge of the wilderness of northern Russia, where the winds blow cold and the snow falls many months of the year, an elderly servant tells stories of sorcery, folklore and the Winter King to the children of the family, tales of old magic frowned upon by the church. But for the young, wild Vasya these are far more than just stories. She alone can see the house spirits that guard her home, and sense the growing forces of dark magic in the woods. . .
She changed the world’s view on vampires, and she didn’t shy away from writing about the witches either. In the series Lives of the Mayfair witches. It centers on a family of witches whose fortunes have been guided for generations by a spirit named Lasher. The series began in 1990 with The Witching Hour, which was followed by the sequels Lasher (1993) and Taltos (1994). All three novels debuted at No. 2 on The New York Times Best Seller list. Cool fun fact: Even some of her character cross over to the Vampire universe of hers.
Synopsis: It begins in our time with a rescue at sea. Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery—aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches—finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life.
As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and—in passionate alliance—set out to solve the mystery of her past and his unwelcome gift, the novel moves backward and forward in time from today’s New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the France of Louis XIV. An intricate tale of evil unfolds—an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, where the first “witch,” Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjures up the spirit she names Lasher… a creation that spells her own destruction and torments each of her descendants in turn.
A classic one. it more suggest and hint at the supernatural to highlight the drama that enfolds, but nonetheless creates the same atmosphere many horror and supernatural writers strive all their life for.
Synopsis: This enduring novel of crime and retribution vividly reflects the social and moral values of New England in the 1840s. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s gripping psychological drama concerns the Pyncheon family, a dynasty founded on pious theft, who live for generations under a dead man’s curse until their house is finally exorcised by love. Hawthorne, by birth and education, was instilled with the Puritan belief in America’s limitless promise. Yet – in part because of blemishes on his own family history – he also saw the darker side of the young nation. Like his twentieth-century heirs William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hawthorne peered behind propriety’s facade and exposed the true human condition.
A Paulo Coelho book is always filled with heart, thoughts and love. But do be careful of reading his work. There is always a danger of becoming “deep”.
Synopsis: How do we find the courage to always be true to ourselves-even if we are unsure of who we are?That is the central question of international bestselling author Paulo Coelho’s profound new work, The Witch of Portobello. It is the story of a mysterious woman named Athena, told by the many who knew her well-or hardly at all. Like The Alchemist, The Witch of Portobello is the kind of story that will transform the way readers think about love, passion, joy, and sacrifice.
In honor of the new spin-off series, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels (2020), we took a nostalgic look back to the awesome Showtime series that started it all. RIP Original series, you were cancelled all too soon.
Penny Dreadful is a British-American horror drama television series created for Showtime and Sky by John Logan. It ran for three seasons from 2014-2016.
Iconic Vanessa Ives (Eva Green). An original character and also some of the most well crafted ones.
Penny Dreadful is an old term used during the nineteenth century to refer to cheap popular serial literature. Sort of like pulp fiction. It was also called penny blood, penny awful, or penny horrible. It means a story published in weekly parts, with the cost of one (old) penny. The main plot of these stories were typically sensational, focusing on the adventures of detectives, criminals, or supernatural entities.
This is exactly what Penny Dreadful was, and what it payed homage to. So we found some old stuff the series borrowed or was inspired by. And there is A LOT. So get your cigarette on a stick and let’s go on some vampiric monster hunt with out pals.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel written by English author Mary Shelley (1797–1851) that tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a hideous sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific experiment.
Harry Treadaway played Victor Frankenstein, an arrogant, reclusive young doctor whose ambition and research involve transcending the barrier between life and death. In this show, Dr. Victor Frankenstein likes to quote the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley’s second wife was Mary Shelley.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a Gothic and philosophical novel by Oscar Wilde, first published complete in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. Fearing the story was indecent, the magazine’s editor deleted roughly five hundred words before publication without Wilde’s knowledge. It is Wilde’s only novel.
In the series he was played by Reeve Carney. A charismatic man who is ageless and immortal. And this Dorian Gray had a great, but utterly confusing story line. Where his purpose in the show was to throw great balls and parties and have sex with absolutely every character.
In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus, Victor Frankenstein is tempted by his monster’s proposal to create a female creature so that the monster can have a wife: “Shall each man,” cried he, “find a wife for his bosom, and each beast have his mate, and I be alone?”
In Penny Dreadful, the bride of Frankenstein is Brona Croft (portrayed by Billie Piper), an Irish immigrant with a dark past who dies of tuberculosis at the end of Season 1. In season 2, she is brought back to life with no memory after Frankenstein’s monster demands a bride and given the new name “Lily Frankenstein” by Victor. That last scene of her speech will haunt television forever.
Often called John Clare. He was a labour poet in the mid 1800’s England. But if it is a reference to the creature is unclear. What is clear though is that the creature often is called Caliban as well, a character from Shakespear’s The tempes. Half human, half monster. In some traditions he is depicted as a wild man, or a deformed man, or a beast man, or sometimes a mix of fish and man, a dwarf or even a tortoise. Another connection from the creature to penny dreadful is Dorian Gray. In the preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde muses: “The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.”
In the series he was played with Rory Kinnear, and had long storylines without many of the characters, alone.
Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. Dracula was a big influence from the start. From Mina being taken by him, the chase after Dracula and several character that appears in the series. Van Helsing included. But the series managed to make a twist of it all, and the influence of Dracula is almost as if just a eerily familiar setting and feeling of the series. He did however show up in series three in the flesh. Christian Camargo as Dracula, the brother of Lucifer who fell to Earth to feed on the blood of the living as the first vampire. In London, he takes the guise of kindly zoologist Alexander Sweet to captivate Vanessa.
In season 3 of TV series Penny Dreadful, Patti LuPone portrays Dr. Florence Seward, a female version of the character. It is originally a character from Dracula, a doctor in the insane asylum, He calls in his mentor, Abraham Van Helsing, to help him with her illness, and he helps Seward to realize that Lucy has been bitten by a vampire and is doomed to become one herself. He was in love with her and proposed to her, but was rejected. After she is officially destroyed and her soul can go to heaven, Seward is determined to destroy Dracula.
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a gothicnovella by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, first published in 1886. It is about a London legal practitioner named Gabriel John Utterson who investigates strange occurrences between his old friend, Dr Henry Jekyll, and the evil Edward Hyde.
Dr. Jekyll (Shazad Latif) as a former classmate of Dr. Frankenstein’s.
Varney the vampire
Abraham Van Helsing gives a copy of Varney the Vampire to Victor Frankenstein, explaining that the story is more truth than fiction and that the mysterious creature the series’ characters are pursuing is a vampire.
Justine
Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue is a 1791 novel by Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, better known as the Marquis de Sade. Justine is set just before the French Revolution in France and tells the story of a young girl who goes under the name of Thérèse. Her story is recounted to Madame de Lorsagne while defending herself for her crimes, en route to punishment and death.
In Penny Dreadful she is the a homeless, brutalized young prostitute who becomes an acolyte to Lily played by Jessica Barden. In an interview with John Logan from the show, he also said the relationship between Justine and Lily was inspired by th Novella Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan LeFanu
Larry Talbot was the main character in the movie series the Wolfman from 1941 and onward. There are sequels, reboots and several other medias tied into this franchise. He has his own interaction with all the Penny Dreadful characters from Dracula, Frankenstein and so on in his own franchise as well.
In the TV series Penny Dreadful, Ethan Chandler’s real name is revealed to be Ethan Lawrence Talbot, and he suffers from the curse of lycanthropy. This version of the character is played by Josh Hartnett.
Hecate
Hecate Poole is the witch played by Sarah Greene and is Evelyn Pool’s eldest daughter. She is the witch who pursues Ethan Chandler in seasons two and three. She shares her name with the ancient Greek goddess of witchcraft and the moon. Like Ethan’s relationship with the moon and her witchcraft ability as a Nightcomer witch.
The unquiet grave
“The Unquiet Grave” is an English folk song in which a young man mourns his dead love too hard and prevents her from obtaining peace. It is thought to date from 1400. It is heard in the mansion of the Nightcomer witches.
An online magazine about the paranormal, haunted and macabre. We collect the ghost stories from all around the world as well as review horror and gothic media.
