Much like the Language of Flowers and other courtship rituals of the past, there was an entire conversation hidden in your love spoon. For example, an anchor might symbolize settled love, while interlocking chains were pretty self-explanatory. A wheel could signify a willingness to work for your partner; a shield would offer protection. Balls in a cage could refer to love held safe or show a number of children. Arwyn, you dog!
Summer, 1495. You’re Hans, King of Denmark and Norway, freshly anchored off the southern coast of Sweden for a little tête-à-tête with Sten Sture the Elder.
This isn’t a shake-hands-and-kiss-babies kind of diplomatic trip. You’re there because Sture, the “protector of the realm,” is trying to keep Sweden out of the Nordic union you’re supposed to be ruling over.
Rule number one for surviving the viking ‘Great Army’ invasion of 865 — don’t give the enemy a reason to shoot arrows at you. Somehow, King Edmund of East Anglia missed the memo, both in real life and in the Netflix series The Last Kingdom.
Tipu’s possessions, as well as anything associated with him, frequently had tiger stripes and tigers worked into the decoration. His throne? Jeweled gold tiger head finials. His coinage? Stamped with stripes. Swords and guns? Covered with tiger heads and stripes. Army mortars? Small bronze crouching tigers. Even the men who fired Tipu’s lethal rockets wore tunics woven with stripes.
Gévaudan was exactly the type of place where you’d expect the supernatural to occur. Nestled in the south of France, it had a reputation for being isolated and remote. It was a region where people mainly kept to themselves, shrouded in a self-contained bubble and surrounded by forests and hillsides that may still have been enchanted.
In ancient Greece, some mystics used mirrors as a form of fortune telling and divination, a practice called catoptromancy. These “mirror seers” would dip a looking glass into water before having a sickly person look into it. If the image was distorted, they were done for. If clear, all would be well.
Children who scramble to grab the sweets rolling on the floor — forgetting their manners in the process — would soon feel the smarting of a switch coming hard across their backs.
To begin, it’s helpful to have some background on Samhain. In Celtic Ireland, around 2,000 years ago, Samhain represented the division between the lighter half of the year that was summer and the darker half that was winter. During the interim, ancient people believed that the line between the spirit world and the mortal one became so thin that the dead could pass through it and walk the earth once more.
“Nor did she deign to touch her food with her fingers, but would command her eunuchs to cut it up into small pieces, which she would impale on a certain golden instrument with two prongs and thus carry to her mouth. . . . this woman’s vanity was hateful to Almighty God; and so, unmistakably, did He take his revenge. For He raised over her the sword of His divine justice, so that her whole body did putrefy and all her limbs began to wither.”
Part of it is that he has a giving heart and empathy that runs deep, but another facet is his hatred for the gentry. He’s consistently appalled by their utter disdain for the poor and their tendency to prize animals, machinery, and other luxuries above them.
