Alfredo Cattabiani: "The feast of All Saints and the Celtic New Year"

November 1st is the watershed between one agricultural year and another. At the end of the fruit season, the land, which has welcomed the wheat seeds destined to be reborn in spring, enters the period of hibernation. For Christians, two important feasts are celebrated in these days, All Saints' Day and the Commemoration of the dead. But once upon a time, in the lands inhabited by the Celts, which stretched from Ireland to Spain, from France to northern Italy, from Pannonia to Asia Minor, this period of transition was the New Year: it was called in Ireland Samuin and it was preceded by the night still known today in Scotland as Nos Galan-gaeaf, the night of the winter Kalends, during which the dead entered into communication with the living in a general cosmic mixing, as has already been observed in other critical periods of 'year.

Tomte and VΓ€ttar, Swedish farm folklore entities

For centuries and perhaps millennia, Swedish farmers have shared tales of supernatural creatures inhabiting their farms. Since the nineteenth century, folklorists have begun to study these stories, gathering information on the mysterious entities, traditions and rituals connected to them.

Live video: β€œThe myth of Agartha & Shambhala”, with Paolo Dolzan

Tomorrow evening at 21:00 on our YouTube channel the third live video of this month will be broadcast. After Paula Giovetti e Massimo Centini, at this tour we will have the pleasure of hosting Paolo Dolzan, creator of the site and channel "The Tetanus of the Fifth Race", to discuss the myth of agartha e shambhala in the occult and alternate reality of the last century and a half.

The "memetic contagion" in the metropolitan folklore of Danilo Arona

A multifaceted author whose interests range from film criticism to fiction to non-fiction dedicated to alternative realities, Danilo Arona has become the singer of a particular and very personal declination of horror and weird that has its roots in the Italian context. In his essay "Media Possession", Arona wonders if it is possible that certain media, especially audiovisual ones, are capable of provoking in predisposed subjects a temporary cancellation of conscience whose place is taken by "something else", in a nutshell what in other places, times and cultures would have been called possession.

Live video: L'Uomo Selvatico, with Massimo Centini

Tomorrow evening at 21:00 on our YouTube channel we will have the pleasure of hosting prof. Massimo Centini to discuss the legendary corpus concerning one of the most famous mythical characters of Alpine folklore: the Wild Man.

The Wild Man's Tomb

Legends and popular traditions about the figure of the Wild Man are widespread throughout the Alps [which we will have the opportunity to analyze on Wednesday evening together with Massimo Centini on our YouTube channel]. Thanks to this report by GM Mollar we discover that on the bottom of the Lanzo valley, in Piedmont, there is even what, according to local folklore, would be his tomb: let's go and see precisely what the legend that has been transmitted to us tells us through the ages.

For an anthropological reading of the "Journey into the Matamonia of Esagro Noroi", by Lucio Besana

"A journey into the Matamonia of Esagro Noroi ”by Lucio Besana, contained in the collection "Stories of the crimson series" (Edizioni Hypnos 2021), accompanies the reader through a pilgrimage with uchronic connotations, showing the limits and tensions of the symbol, both given by its dependence on the processes of natural and sacral reification. The story takes the destructive symptomatology of the present to an extreme, an Enlightenment residue that tends to demystify the cultural power of a given object, thus resizing the value and potential of the human being.

The diabolical conferences of Arthur Christopher Benson

Dagon Press recently published in Italian - with the title "The closed window" (translation by Bernardo Cicchetti) - the supernatural tales of Arthur Christopher Benson, along with Montague Rhodes James one of the most significant "ghost-writers" English of the early twentieth century, as well as comparable in suggestions and themes to writers roughly contemporary to him and equally "esoteric" such as Arthur Machen, HP Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood.

Live video: "Encounters in the world of mysteries", with Paola Giovetti

Thursday 14 October at 21:00 we will have the pleasure of hosting on our YouTube channel the journalist and researcher Paola Giovetti, for over 40 years a scholar of mediumship, parapsychology and more generally spirituality and esotericism. For the occasion, she will present her new work β€œEncounters in the world of mysteries”, just released by Edizioni Mediterranee.

Thor Heyerdahl, theory and practice

On 6 October 1914, exactly 107 years ago, Thor Heyerdahl - anthropologist, explorer, writer and director - was born in Norway. Let's retrace the main stages of his life, starting with the Kon-Tiki expedition with which he crossed the Pacific on a balsa raft built in the manner of the ancients, in order to demonstrate to academics the possibility of transoceanic travel in antiquity.