@onpyre Asked If I Knew Any Books About Monster Theory, And I Decided To Share My List With Everyone.

gdrive link where you can find free books regarding Palestine, liberation and orientalism to download and read

Alexa Demie in Fairy Tales (2020) Photography: Petra Collins

Do you have a list or something of your favourite academic/theory books? 🥺

sure! all of them should be available on libgen, so enjoy 🧚🏻‍♀️ i did focus on cultural histories rather than theory, though, otherwise it would get too long. virtually all of them are published by the academic presses, and well-sourced and peer-reviewed. no pseudoscience in this household, no sirree! (also, none of them have anything to do with my actual field of study. i’m just like that)

— Medieval Ghost Stories: An Anthology of Miracles, Marvels and Prodigies, — Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages, — After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, — Darkness: A Cultural History, — Eccentricity and the Cultural Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Paris, — Angels & Angelology in the Middle Ages, — Enchanted Europe: Superstition, Reason, and Religion 1250-1750, — Bedeviled: A Shadow History of Demons in Science, — The Extraordinary and the Everyday in Early Modern England, — Landscapes of Fear, — Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness, — The Severed Head: Capital Visions, — Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural, — Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, — When the Dead Rise: Narratives of the Revenant, from the Middle Ages to the Present Day, — Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and New Religions in American History, — Religion and Its Monsters, — On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, — The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History, — Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages, — Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art, — Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, — From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, Or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends, — A Cabinet of Byzantine Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from History's Most Orthodox Empire, — Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics, and Other Airborne Females, — The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration, — Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds, — Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages, — Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, — Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers,

etc, etc, etc. 

But our notebooks give us away, for however dutifully we record what we see around us, the common denominator of all we see is always, transparently, shamelessly, the implacable “I.” We are not talking here about the kind of notebook that is patently for public consumption, a structural conceit for binding together a series of graceful pensées; we are talking about something private, about bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker. And sometimes even the maker has difficulty with the meaning.

Joan Didion, from On Keeping A Notebook in: Slouching Towards Bethlehem

I’ve been listening to “Blood Moon” by Saint Sister a lot this season and it inspired this piece of a spooky Minoan Artemis dancing in the woods. 

“The manifold self-contradictions in Greek ideas and phrasing about death are not errors. They are styles of imagining the unimaginable, and are responsive both to personal needs and to old conventions. The same conflicts surge up in many cultures. They are necessary ambiguities in a realm of thinking where thinking cannot really be done, and where there is no experience.”

— Emily Vermeule, “Immortals are Mortal, Mortals Immortal,” Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry

As with most female horror fans, people love to ask me what it is I get out of horror. I give them the stock answers: catharsis, empowerment, escapism and so on. Less easy to explain is the fact that I gravitate toward films that devastate and unravel me completely – a good horror film will more often make me cry than make me shudder.

Kier-La Janisse, House of Psychotic Women

From Head of Medusa (1617-1618) by Peter Paul Rubens

Judith with the Head of Holofernes (ca.1633-37, detail) Francesco Cairo

Source: Redefining Ancient Orphism: A Study in Greek Religion by Radcliffe G. Edmonds

FASCINATING stuff where this scholar on orphism argues that several texts on persephone explicitly (and the homeric hymn implicitly) claim that mortals pay the recompense (ποινη) for the grief (πενθος) that persephone underwent at her abduction. not hades, but mortals try to appease the goddess for her mistreatment, and in return they earn her favour and a blessed afterlife (or even next life). there's this irreconcilable problem here in that hades was culturally justified, but persephone as a goddess still warrants respect/pity/appeasement, and so mortals through rites and sacrifices console her.