Anne Rice’s Modern Vampire Is as Influential as Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Interview with the Vampire author Anne Rice’s passing leaves a hole in literature which may not be filled for generations.

By Tony Sokol|December 13, 2021|

DEN OF GEEK

Photo: Getty Images

Anne Rice and Bram Stoker, what other writers have done more to define vampire mythology and culture? Yes, there were stories before and more to come, but Interview with the Vampire, like Dracula before it, set the template for the classic and modern immortal nocturnal narrative.

Stoker’s Dracula was as much a feral creature as the historical figure from whom Stoker borrowed the name. Rice’s characters came from her imagination and had as much of the human essence in their psyches as the flesh between their fangs. They contemplated existential horrors, averted their eyes when loved ones died, and debated the ethics of nutritional hemoglobin, straight from the tap. They did it unblinkingly, and not only because of post-mortem ocular putrefaction.

Interview with the Vampire was originally a 38-page short story Rice wrote in late 1968 through early 1969. She extended it out of grief in 1972. Her five-year-old daughter, Michelle, died of acute granulocytic leukemia, a cancer which affects blood and bone marrow. Rice’s incredibly tortured personal reality is where modern vampire art was birthed. It is blood-borne. It is lethal. It begs so many questions, and mocks so many of the easy answers people offer to alleviate despair. It birthed an undead mythology and philosophy which reverberates to each generation.
Louisiana, Transylvania – Native Soil or Bayou Mojo

Anne Rice was born Howard Allen Frances O’Brien in 1941. Yes, Howard. She was named after her father by a Bohemian mother. When asked her name on the first day of kindergarten, she answered “Anne” and had it legally changed in 1947, according to the authorized biography Prism of the Night by Katherine Ramsland. Anne was 15 years old when she lost her mother to alcoholism, and her father placed her and her three sisters in a boarding school at the Gothic and foreboding St. Joseph’s Academy in Baton Rouge. Not as well known as Dracula’s castle, its shadows touch every nuanced rebellion Rice would quietly incite.

Louisiana is Anne Rice’s Transylvania, but she knew it far more intimately. Stoker researched his titular character’s origin in broad strokes. Rice was born in New Orleans and while she lived in quite a few different locations, including Texas and Hollywood, she always called New Orleans her home. Readers associate her with its Garden District, and her characters originate in wards. Louis de Pointe du Lac, the vampire who is interviewed in Interview with the Vampire, was a slave-holding plantation owner in antebellum New Orleans. He travels the world after escaping his vampire maker, Lestat de Lioncourt, journeying from the theaters of Paris to the saloons of San Francisco. But New Orleans is his spiritual home.

Because of Rice, Louisiana is now associated with the vampire. Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries, which was adapted into HBO’s influential series True Blood, took place in Bon Temps, Louisiana. The state has a long and chronicled history of vampire-like activity, both legendary and surprisingly real, and sad tales of wayward innocents.
Remorseful Vampires

Rice’s vampires weren’t the first regretful bloodsuckers. In interviews, Anne herself cited Gloria Holden’s ambiguously carnal Countess Maria Zeleska in the 1936 Universal horror, Dracula’s Daughter, as an inspiration. Dark Shadows’ Barnabas Collins, played by Jonathan Frid, went as far as to bribe a friendly scientist to try and reverse the process which turned him into the undead. Even Count Dracula (John Carradine) went to Dr. Franz Edelmann (Onslow Stevens) for a cure to vampirism in House of Dracula (1945), as did biochemist Dr. Michael Morbius, who attempted it on himself in Marvel Comics’ Morbius. While none of them suffered biter’s regret like Lon Chaney Jr.’s werewolf in The Wolf Man, they fretted when they fed. Some were even prone to play sympathy games with their food.

“To die, to truly be dead, that must be glorious,” the Transylvanian count pondered in Dracula. The depths of his Eastern European philosophies laid cynically shallow. “Do you know what it means to be loved by Death,” Interview with the Vampire asked. “Do you know what it means to have Death know your name?”

Rice’s characters thrived on their immortality because it fed their hunger for meaning and tweaked their eternal curiosity. They could ponder the fates of mankind and beyond, measure death by the gallon, sin by the moment, and still procure dinner for two before the sun rose. Rice’s vampires were animals, beasts even, but they were thinking beasts. She taught even the most over-thinking vampires to explore the possibilities, with an eye towards ever-elusive karmic retribution, and go for the jugular.

“What we have before us are the rich feasts that conscience cannot appreciate and mortal men cannot know without regret,” we read, and Rice concisely sets out, for the first time with such eloquent clarity, the choice that lies beyond the veil. It is more than hunter and prey, and yet as simple an equation. “God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately He takes the richest and the poorest, and so shall we.”

We’re a Happy Family

Morality and immortality make for strange bedfellows. What is acceptable today got you burned at the stake centuries ago. The attitudes of a few years’ past can cancel your present, and Rice forever straddled attitudes yet to come. It has been said the character Claudia is based on Rice’s daughter Michelle, which explains the lingering pain of losing that character. But Rice twists this agonizing scenario until it redefines the nuclear dysfunctional family itself on a vampire’s terms. Lestat, Louis, and Claudia stay together for 65 years in Interview with the Vampire. Normal parents would have been throwing hints sometime around graduation.

Did Lestat make Claudia to save his relationship with Louis? Is this like having a child to save a marriage? What is fair about a mentally cognizant teenager, and then adult, stuck in a six-year-old’s body? Claudia is not acceptable in the world of the vampires, and inexplicably twisted in the world of the breathing. Is the relationship paternal? Incestuous? Rice took the time to pose new questions, expanding the emotional vocabulary of vampire fiction, but also of the horror genre and the audience at home. This continues as characters within all genre works, page or screen, now routinely dig at the deeper questions. They’re not afraid anymore. Rice did it without really scaring us.
Fluid Sexuality

Rice’s vampires live in a world of decadence and carnality. Age has taught them pleasure lies in diversity and expansion. Publisher Alfred A. Knopf bought the novel in 1974, paying Rice an advance of $12,000. Interview with the Vampire hit bookstore shelves on May 5, 1976.

Critics attacked its dark themes and overt eroticism. Some say Rice romanticized the vampire beyond its sinister limits. Her vampires are sexy, beautiful, self-determining creatures with the power to traverse heaven, hell, and time, as they would go on to do in Memnoch the Devil. Rice freed them from the petty morality of traditional social repression, and the limiting sensual expression of popular genre release.

Vampire lesbianism had always been projected through the male gaze. Ingrid Pitt in The Vampire Lovers (1971)–based on Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s 1872 seminal vampire work Carmella, or Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger, broke ground for sexual expression. But both films were made because it was a turn on for the director, producer, and/or mass audience.

Rice’s erogenous fluidity is a vampiric reality. What does anything matter if it truly all turns out to be exactly the same? There are no gender assignments in androgynous prose, no term limits on sexually active verbs. Male and female characters are defined through ability, survival, and adaptability. Vampiric mentorship also has no assignments. “Let the flesh instruct the mind,” Rice wrote

Mentors and Reluctant Students

Lestat turns and instructs Louis on his new existence, which is more than the older European vampire got when he was initially turned. This is the core of the most influential dynamic Rice brings to modern vampire fiction. Louis sees his supernatural impulses as unnatural while Lestat has lived long enough to know it’s the most natural thing in the universe. It is the natural order.

For motion pictures and television, the first and most prevalent takeaway from this was the importance of contrasting hair color. In The Lost Boys (1987), sun-bleached hemoglobin-sucker David (Kiefer Sutherland) shares takeout with the new Jim Morrison-wannabe-lookalike in town, Michael (Jason Patric), a very reluctant nibbler. While this could have easily moved into the openly sexual spectrum Rice found so easy to lay out, the two male vampire characters have Star (Jami Gertz), a female character, to assure the audience of their heteronormativity.

It is the same function Buffy Summers plays between Angel (David Boreanaz) and Spike (James Marsters) on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) convinced Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) and Eric Northman (Alexander Skarsgård) to indulge in their mutual lust for her in True Blood. By the time The Vampire Diaries hit the CW, Stefan (Paul Wesley) and Damon Salvatore (Ian Somerhalder) were vampire brothers, and all homoerotic tension was annulled.

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Vampire literature has not stayed so static. There have been blockbuster films made out of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, and underground masterpieces like the many works of Poppy Z. Brite, the professional name of Billy Martin. All of which owe something to the author who invented Lestat.

Rice caught a genre in flux and a culture in need. Her influence extends to the clubs and underground gatherings of the vampire community, where the decadence of the novels can be experienced in a natural setting: with music and dancing, something Rice liberally sprinkled onto her pages.

Rice’s output, of course, expands beyond the vampires who appeared in Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned, and other books of the Vampire Chronicles series. She also wrote about witches, in The Witching Hour, which began the Lives of the Mayfair Witches trilogy. Her ghost story, Violin, came out in 1997. She wrote historical novels, like The Feast of All Saints, and Cry to Heaven. Under pen names, the former Howard O’Brien published erotic novels, such as The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty, Beauty’s Punishment, Beauty’s Release, Belinda, and Exit to Eden, which was adapted into a film.

“Evil is always possible,” Rice wrote in Interview with The Vampire. “And goodness is eternally difficult.” Her later books struggled with this idea as they eventually took a more difficult path. She chronicled the life of Jesus in the trilogy of books Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, and Christ the Lord: Kingdom of Heaven, and wrote the first two books in her Songs of the Seraphim series: Angel Time and Of Love and Evil. It is all too clear Rice moved on from the vampire literature she altered, but her influence will continue to bring reminders. For the Blood is the Life. Rice brought art to bot



Written by
Tony Sokol | @tsokol
Culture Editor Tony Sokol is a writer, playwright and musician. He contributed to Altvariety, Chiseler, Smashpipe, and other magazines. He is the TV Editor at Entertainment…

The Curious Case Of Mercy Brown And The New England Vampire Panic

Featured in Ripley's Believe It or Not!
Jul 16, 2021 | 

New England hasn’t fared very well when it comes to blaming people for supernatural stuff. In the 1600s, the infamous Salem witch trials ended up with two hundred people accused and nineteen executed by hanging in colonial Massachusetts. Two hundred years later, farmers in the backwoods of New England became convinced that their neighbors were returning from the dead — and public hysteria took over the area again.

As the Story Goes

It all started innocently enough. It’s the year 1810 and outbreaks of a deadly disease are sweeping through New Hampshire. Locals are scared, as entire families are wiped out within weeks and doctors are at a loss for what to do. The wasting illness is unforgiving, preying on the young and the old equally, turning healthy people into walking corpses with sunken eyes and ashy skin.

While doctors at the time were quick to point out this was merely a physical affliction, the local townsfolk seemed unconvinced and took to the streets to “solve” the mysterious illness in their own way. For years to come, New England would become known as “the Vampire Capital of America.”

New England wasn’t alone in these beliefs, though. Europe was going through a similar vampire panic around the same time, with sightings of the undead across the continent.

Newspapers picked up the stories quickly and played a big role in the growing panic. In September 1884, The St. Charles Herald published a front-page story on vampire attack reports, sharing details on rituals being conducted in different corners of the world to stop them. While the publication wasn’t suggesting people in New England should do the same, it’s very possible the idea of pushing a stake through the heart of the undead came from the news.


The St. Charles herald. (Hahnville, La.), 06 Sept. 1884. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.

What Really Happened

During the 19th century, violent outbreaks of tuberculosis and other lung diseases were known as “consumption.” Medical professionals knew little about the disease or how to stop it, but they did know it spread quickly among those living under the same roof, usually with devastating results.

The New England vampire panic was very likely the result of one of those tuberculosis outbreaks. Throughout the 19th century, tuberculosis was the most deadly disease in the world, causing about 25 percent of all deaths among the population. Throughout much of the century, doctors were unaware that the infection was airborne and spread mostly through coughing, so there was little to be done once somebody fell ill. The most common treatment? A combination of prescribed bloodlettings and rest, neither of which did much to help with recovery.

Those who survived often suffered recurrences and either died of tuberculosis or other breathing problems later on.

Dealing with the Vampires

For panicked New England citizens who believed there was something more sinister at play, finding a way to protect the survivors became almost an obsession. The bodies of suspected vampires were exhumed and examined, looking for clues that the corpse was actually undead.

The most common sign of this was a body that still looked “fresh” and not decomposed enough when exhumed. An even more clear proof was the heart still containing a lot of blood after death. While the exhumations started as something clandestine done by neighbors and family members, many town fathers and clergymen eventually started voting on whether a certain person should be exhumed.



Once a vampire was identified, there were many different ways to deal with the undead and prevent its return. In many towns, certain organs (especially the heart) were removed and burned before the body was reburied.

In other places, family members would eat the ashes as a remedy for their illness, while others would inhale the smoke as the organs burned. Some towns beheaded the corpses or simply turned them facedown to “confuse” the undead and make sure he or she wouldn’t find their way out of the grave.

The Strange Case of Mercy Brown

Perhaps one of the most famous cases of vampire incidents in New England is the one of Mercy Lena Brown. Born in Exeter, Rhode Island, Mercy was one of many Brown family members who contracted consumption. Mercy was just 19 when she died in 1892, a few years after her mother and sister had also succumbed to the disease.

Mercy’s father, George Brown, survived. His survival, along with the panic sweeping through the region, got neighbors thinking: Perhaps a vampire in the family was to blame. Against his better judgment, George allowed the locals to exhume the bodies of his family. Mary had died very recently, it was winter and she had been kept in an aboveground crypt, which meant the body exhibited almost no decomposition, her heart so full of blood that it almost seemed like it was ready to start beating again.

That was all the proof the villagers needed to decide Mercy Brown was one of the undead. By this time, Mercy’s brother, Edwin, had also contracted consumption. So after burning her heart, the ashes were mixed with water and given to Edwin as a “cure.” He died two months later anyway, but the illness died with him and no other family members or close neighbors contracted tuberculosis. To the locals, that meant the treatment had worked.

Mercy’s remains were reburied in Chestnut Hill Cemetery, surrounded by her family members.

Rumor goes Bram Stoker himself was inspired by the case to write the 1897 novel that would give him immortality. One of Dracula’s most fascinating characters is Lucy Westenra, a teenage girl who succumbs to count Dracula and is eventually exhumed from her crypt and killed with a stake through the heart. A nod to Mercy herself perhaps? We’ll never know.

Image credit: svenstorm via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)

An undying interest in vampires

Humanities

October 25, 2021 - Philip Cox

Golz. Credit: UVic Photo Services

Although Halloween comes but once per year, the thirst for stories about vampires never seems to die. This has helped one UVic humanities professor, Peter Golz, to pursue his own passion for the study of these stories in film and literature for more than 20 years. In doing so, he’s made Victoria home to one of North America’s most popular university courses on vampires.

“The figure of the vampire allows students to delve into the desires and fears of particular cultures in particular historical moments,” says Humanities Associate Dean Academic Lisa Surridge. “Peter Golz has created a master class in cultural studies that has stood the test of time.”

More than a librarian of lore

For anyone who has spoken with Golz, it’s not surprising that his office is filled with an impressive range of vampire-related paraphernalia — action figures from popular TV shows like Twilight and Buffy: the Vampire Slayer; a vampire-themed magnetic poetry kit; a Dracula lunch box; a bottle of Dracula-branded wine (red, of course); a ‘little vampire pacifier,’ replete with blood-tipped fangs, still in its original packaging; along with film posters, DVDs and endless rows of books, books, books.

Even backed by this impressive cavern of keepsakes, the breadth and depth of Golz’ knowledge of vampire films, literature, culture and history is endlessly enthralling.

The briefest of conversations with this humble professor about his passion for the subject feels like an immersive symposium in vampirology. And no wonder: Golz has been teaching one of North America’s most popular courses on vampires for 20 years this fall.

When people ask me ‘what do you teach?’ and I say ‘vampire studies,’ they always reply with either ‘oh, that’s so cool!’ or ‘no, seriously, what do you teach?’

— Associate professor and vampirologist Peter Golz

A curriculum of vampires

The course Golz created for UVic’s Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies in 2001, which he’s taught every year since—A Cultural History of Vampires in Literature and Film—has captured the imagination of students, fans and the media alike over the last two decades.

It has been featured by a wide range of national and regional news outlets such as the Globe & Mail, CBC, Times Colonist and CHEK, and appears on countless ‘best course’ lists and vampire fan sites.

In 2014, Warner Brothers approached Golz about including a short clip on the course in the bonus materials of a special 20th anniversary edition BluRay release of the now-classic film Interview with the Vampire, but the deadline for filming was two weeks before the course started that year.

Attention like this, alongside glowing reviews from students, has helped course enrolment swell from 75 students in its first year to over 300 at its peak. When offered online for the first time last year as a result of the pandemic, the course attracted students from across Asia and Europe, as well as North and South America, despite the extreme time differences. Some passions never seem to sleep.

A vampire for every generation

In addition to the media attention and buzz generated on campus by word of mouth, Golz attributes the success of his course in part to the subject matter itself.

“Vampires have become a lot more interesting in the last 20 years, because they are not depicted as the stereotypical Other as they once were,” he says. In line with their famed shapeshifting powers, Vampires have learned to adapt—and fit in. “Now vampires are more likely to live among us, like in the TV series True Blood, the Twilight films or Buffy: the Vampire Slayer. And we are more likely to hear them tell their own story, like in Interview with the Vampire, which makes them more sympathetic characters.”

There is also an ever-growing diversity in the types of vampires, such as the child vampire of 1975’s Salem’s Lot, the ‘psychic vampire’ of Lifeforce and the ‘olfactory vampire’ of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer.

The characteristics of our imagined vampires shift alongside our times and circumstances. For instance, there’s a growing demand for ‘pandemic vampires,’ Golz says, as seen in films like 2007’s I Am Legend and in TV series like The Strain.

Although this trend clearly speaks to our own time, the concept behind it has a long history. In the classic 1922 German Expressionist silent horror film, Nosferatu, death follows the vampire protagonist Count Orlok indiscriminately when he moves from Transylvania to Germany. The doctors in his town blame these deaths on an unspecified plague brought in by a swarm of rats that arrive with Orlok’s ship.

“Nosferatu was filmed in 1921, just after the Spanish flu epidemic,” Golz explains, “but it was set in the 1830s when there was a big cholera outbreak in Germany, rather than in its present day or in the late 1800s when the novel upon which it was based [Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula] was set. I think the film’s director wanted to make something that was really appropriate for its time, which is a concern we often see reflected in vampire storylines.”

This continual evolution of vampire mythology has helped to keep both vampire stories and Golz’ course content fresh over the decades.

A famous vampire scholar, Nina Auerbach, once said that there is a vampire for every generation, which I think is quite right. I also think there is a vampire for everyone, really. We have vampire westerns, vampire science-fiction, vampire romances, vampire parodies…. There is no shortage of vampire sub-genres for every audience.

— Golz

The future of the darkness seems bright

Given the course’s longevity and sustained popularity, it’s hard to believe that it took Golz eight long years to develop and get it approved by university administrators.

“Some of my colleagues were very much against this course, which is part of the reason I had to have “literature” in the course title — it had to have a literary component to give it credibility,” Golz recalls. “Now there are a lot of courses throughout Canada and the US that focus on vampires, zombies and other fantasy- and horror-based works. It has become a very popular topic with a very bright future.”

When asked about the brightest moments in his own career, Golz can list many: that time when Ballet Victoria invited him to introduce their new Dracula ballet and to bring his entire class to one of their performances, or the half-dozen presentations by leading vampire scholars that Golz has brought to UVic as part of the Lansdowne Lecture series, or the novel ideas of students who have sat in his classroom and shared with him their own passion for the shadowy underworld of the undead.

“This course is a lot of fun for me and I get to work with students who are really interested in the topic and do great work, so as long as I’m here I will continue to teach this course,” Golz states.

“But, I am obviously not a vampire, so it has to end at some point. But, maybe then it will be reborn. Who knows?”

Prince George teacher taking his witch trials studies to Oxford

His interest in witch trials has led Aaron Larsen, local teacher and UNBC graduate, to do his doctoral research at the University of Oxford , one of the most prestigious schools on the planet.

Christine Dalgleish

Jun 20, 2021 5:54 AM

Aaron Larsen, a local teacher at the Indigenous Choice school, will take his witch trials studies to Oxford as he works towards his doctorate.UNBC photo

His interest in witch trials has led Aaron Larsen, a local teacher and UNBC graduate, to do his doctoral research at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, one of the most prestigious schools on the planet.

It all began as an undergraduate assignment for a UNBC history class where he studied a witch trial that took place in Zug, Switzerland in 1737.

Larsen will continue his work as a PhD student at Oxford under the supervision of Regius Professor of History Lyndal Roper, one of the foremost experts in witchcraft, religion, and gender in early modern Europe.

“My nine years at UNBC have prepared me immeasurably to continue my studies at Oxford,” Larsen said. “The combination of phenomenal courses in the department of history, dedicated faculty, and exceptional peers has allowed me to flourish in academia, building the confidence and breadth of understanding that I will need to thrive at Oxford.”

Larsen started studying history at UNBC in 2012. He graduated in 2017 with his bachelor of arts, finished his education degree in 2019 and has been a School District 57 teacher ever since while still working on his master of arts at UNBC.

Through the research of the witch trial, Larsen is looking to map the lives of the nine women and one man that were accused of witchcraft. As he combines their testimony with geographic information, he’s seeking to get a better understanding of their everyday lives.

“My research provides insights into the geographic world of lower status women living in eighteenth-century Switzerland, recreating the cosmos of people whose lives and experiences are so often lost to the past,” he says. “I am looking into both the borders of their world and their conceptions of the spaces in which they lived, all tied to the fantasy of witchcraft.”

Larsen’s interest in history was instilled by his grandfather Lloyd Comish, who began sharing picture books about the Titanic with Larsen when he was young and they explored other areas of interest as he grew up in Prince George.

“Though he passed away in November of 2020, my grandfather was always eager to hear about my research,” Larsen said. “I am so thankful that he lived long enough to know I had been encouraged by one of the top scholars in my field to apply for doctoral studies at the best school in the world, since this journey truly began with him.”

Larsen said he is grateful for the opportunities he had at the local university.

“My years at UNBC have given me a direction in life and the skills to pursue anything I could dream of,” Larsen said. “Over nine years and three degrees, I have gained so much through interdisciplinary research, community service on campus, and the tutelage of phenomenal professors.”

Out of the classroom Larsen joined many student-led organizations, served on the UNBC Senate, created a history conference that ran for a number of years before the pandemic and won an award for campus leadership as a result of the volunteer work he’d done in the university community.

Larsen believes his volunteerism in the community contributed to being accepted into Oxford.

He works at Nusdeh Yoh (House of the Future), the local Aboriginal Choice Program School.

“I trained as a high school social studies teacher,” Larsen said. “Since graduating from the education program I’ve been teaching in a variety of positions at Nusdeh Yoh - resource teaching, Grade 4/5 teaching and right now I am an English Language Learning teacher.”

Larsen said he’s really proud to work at an Indigenous choice school and enjoys working with the children there.

“It’s been really cool to work with children to help immerse them in their culture and help bring the history of their culture to life,” Larsen said. “It’s a really powerful feeling to help keep the history alive.”

A Study in Occultism: The Art of Jean Delville

The Belgian Idealist sought to depict the elevation of the human spirit in his art, believing that the defiance of base desires could lead to spiritual enlightenment


Benjamin Blake Evemy / MutualArt
Jul 23, 2021

Jean Delville, Self Portrait, 1887, Unknown Collection

Viewers of art often derive their own interpretations and meanings from the pieces that hang before them. At times, speculations on what the artist was trying to say, are exactly that — speculation — and bear no reflection on what the creator’s actual artistic intentions or motivations were for picking up the paintbrush. It is a common practice, which at times is not unlike staring at a page of text written in a foreign language and exacting an arbitrary translation, then telling those around oneself that the translation is indeed accurate. The truth is that there are some painters who simply paint what they feel, and any profoundly detailed interpretation is, by nature, inaccurate. Then, in contrast, there are other painters that have something very specific to express through their brushstrokes, whether the viewer realizes it or not. This is exemplified in pieces created from the core beliefs of the artist. And if one knows what those core beliefs are, interpretation becomes both easier and more accurate. One of those artists whose paintings are easier to interpret when delving into the spirituality of their creator, is Belgium-born symbolist painter, poet, Theosophist, and occultist, Jean Delville.

Jean Delville led the Belgian idealist movement in the 1890s and believed that art should be representative of a higher spiritual truth, expressed through the ideal, through a beauty indicative of belief. And while Delville discussed his spiritual beliefs frequently and openly, he was rather reticent when it came to discussing his paintings, preferring for the viewer themselves to form their own interpretation. Somewhat ironically, the clues needed to interpret their painter’s motivations, and subsequently the painting’s ‘true’ meaning, are hidden in plain sight.


Mysteriosa or The Portrait of Mrs. Stuart Merrill, 1892, pencil, pastel and coloured pencil on paper, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

Perhaps Jean Delville’s most well-known painting, Mysteriosa or The Portrait of Mrs. Stuart Merrill is a simplistically composed, albeit fascinating piece. A young, fiery-headed medium clutches a leatherbound black book, its cover inscribed with only a simple triangle, her eyes tilted up as if they are about to disappear completely into the back of her head in a trance-like state. The triangle is representative of Delville’s belief in the idea of ‘perfect human knowledge’ attained through occult practices, and the technique used in making the subject’s hair seem to radiate and bleed into the space around her shows that Mrs. Merrill is indeed transcending into a plane that is not that of the still-breathing mortal. The slender hands that clutch the book are pale and almost spectral, hinting at the divine power hidden within its pages. While little is known of Mrs. Stuart Merrill herself, her husband was a Symbolist poet who had works published in Paris and Brussels. The painting’s air of mystery had led it to be sometimes referred to as the ‘Mona Lisa of the 1890s.’

In the early stages of his artistic career, Delville was influenced by the writings and teachings of such renowned esotericists and occultists as Éliphas Lévi and Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, and later by Theosophists such as Helena Blavatsky and Annie Besant. Great emphasis on the theme of the transfiguration of the soul toward a higher purpose is evident throughout his work. Delville believed that the true purpose of man was to seek spiritual enlightenment, and that the base desires, such as sexual pleasure, the attainment of power, and the accumulation of wealth, all kept mankind from achieving that enlightenment. This ideology is evident in his 1895 painting, Sathan’s Treasures (Les Trésors de Sathan).

Jean Delville
Belgian, 1867 - 1953
Sathan’s Treasures (Les Trésors de Sathan), 1895, oil on canvas, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels

At first glance, Sathan’s Treasures appears to be simply a fantasy piece. A devil or demon cavorts above a stream of nude figures, against the backdrop of a mystical undersea land. And even though that may in fact be what the piece depicts, there is more to the painting than meets the eye. The unclothed figures represent the base nature of mankind, those carnal desires we all possess, and which subsequently come under the jurisdiction of Satan. The Great Deceiver has lured these souls away from the path of enlightenment, and into his underwater lair. Here, they are his ‘treasure,’ hence the painting’s title. Delville expressed his belief in these sentiments in an 1893 article, published in the journal Le Mouvement Littéraire:

“Erotic fever has sterilized most minds. One ordinarily thinks of himself as virile because he satisfies a woman’s unquenched bestial desires. Well, that’s where the great shame of the cerebral degeneration of our time starts…”


L’Homme-Dieu (Man-God), 1903, oil on canvas, Groeninge Museum, Bruges

Composed strikingly in a palette of pastel colors, Delville’s L’Homme-Dieu simply depicts the process of apotheosis. In the painting’s lowest third, its subjects are preoccupied with the animalistic aspects of existence, in the throes of copulation, pain, childbirth, and the like. This morphs into the second third of the painting, the subjects here raising their hands to the heavens, seeking wisdom and enlightenment to be imparted upon them. And once it has, and they have truly understood the spiritual truth of the universe, they can then transcend into a god-like being themselves, all-knowing from where they stand on the highest point of the spiritual ladder. This makes up the uppermost part of the painting. L’Homme-Dieu was painted when Delville’s interest in Theosophy increased, the religion’s followers believing that men, through a process of spiritual enlightenment, can become spiritual masters, similar to the beliefs of the Buddhists.

Jean Delville died in Brussels, Belgium, on January 19, 1953, at the age of 86. And even though he was a driving force in the Belgian idealist movement, he never quite achieved the same fame as his contemporaries. A large part of this was simply due to the fact that he wasn’t interested in doing so. While many Belgian Idealist artists exhibited their work within the highly commercialized exhibition societies, Delville never did so — simply because of his beliefs. Materialistic and monetary gain were not conducive while slowly and steadily travelling up the path of enlightenment. In fact, they were quite the opposite. He believed that art should be used as tool in which to educate society, a beauty created for posterity. He once summed up the sentiment perfectly in his writings:

“There will be nothing to prevent art increasingly to become an educative force in society, conscious of its mission. It is time to penetrate society with art, with the ideal and with beauty. Today's society tends to fall increasingly into instinct. It is saturated with materialism, sensualism and ... commercialism.”

Which unfortunately sounds like it could be referring to a time similar to that in which we currently live in, and most-likely always will.

Book Review: Spirits Of The Underworld: A Grimoire Of Occult Cocktails & Drinking Rituals


Jason Marshall

Lifestyle | October 25, 2021
Editor’s Note: This book was provided to us as a review sample by Prestel. This in no way, per our editorial policies, influenced the final outcome of this review. t should also be noted that by clicking the buy link towards the bottom of this review our site receives a small referral payment which helps to support, but not influence, our editorial and other costs.

I can still remember going to my first guitar lesson. I was a teenager and had just spent the summer mowing lawns, painting garages, and tending to any sort of chore that my neighbors didn’t want to deal with around their houses. No job was too small, and before I knew it, I had conquered the market in being a surrogate grandson to lonely grandparents with ungrateful grandchildren who never visited let alone helped around the house. I was determined with my eye on the prize of a used guitar that I saw hanging on the wall at the local music shop.

I had never even touched a guitar before, but I was certain that this instrument would get me on MTV. I saved and visited my future ticket out of this town until finally it was mine. As I was rung up on that day, the sales person asked me what my intentions were now that I was well on my way. I hadn’t thought that far ahead, but they let me know that they also offered lessons and had an opening if I was interested. I then understood that just holding my precious in my hand did not suddenly make me able to play, so what was cleaning out a few more gutters. Sign me up!



It has been a long time since then, and I was reminded of that while perusing a new cocktail book that had come my way. Not because I had signed a deal with the Devil, or my musical lessons had anything to do with the Occult, it was because of the first question my new instructor asked me when I sat down to learn in the back of that music shop: “ What do you want out of the guitar?” He went on to tell me that every note that can possibly be played has been heard, and every combination of those notes have already been played next to each other, so why am I here? This may have been a little too existential for a teenager, and he answered his own question as I sat there slack-jawed. “ The only thing that you can do differently is to have your own tone”.

This has stuck with me more than any diminished chord that I learned from him, and has been the motivation behind many creative endeavors. The ‘tone’. The personality. The color. Sharing things with the world through your particular tint of glass, that is creativity. And, that is what I saw in Spirits of the Underworld: A Grimoire of Occult Cocktails & Drinking Rituals.

The authors of this book certainly come by this honestly. They run a bar ( The Last Tuesday Society, London) that is located inside The Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art & Natural History. They have also opened Devil’s Botany, London’s first dedicated absinthe distillery. All of these endeavors with a penchant toward the macabre, and their cocktail book certainly follows that tone.

There is no mention of ‘Spooky season’ and not a single recipe features pumpkin spice, but what they do is weave a timeline of drinking rituals and history through a correlated history of people trying to make sense of the world around them. 50 cocktail recipes are divided into 5 chapters that tell the stories of cocktails and the occult in the ancient world, the Dark Ages, Renaissance, New World discovery, and the Modern era. All with well articulated tales to accompany each concoction.

While each recipe isn’t difficult ( the mention in the preface that they shouldn’t be any more difficult than a cup of tea), they are intricate, involved, and interesting. I was going to evaluate a couple of the recipes by making them, but I did not have any raisin infused Old Forester or Primum Ens Melissa Tincture on hand. But, I do have the recipe now and am looking forward to trying them out. They do feature products from their distillery quite often, (who can blame them), but do also offer alternative suggestions as well. The stories are great with a plethora of acknowledged classics, as well as plenty of new interpretations.

What I am most looking forward to is sharing this with a bar team and relating ways to find inspiration, to find your tone, and to have a lot of fun while doing so.

Smells like witch spirit: How the ancient world’s scented sorceresses influence ideas about magic today

Perfumes, potions and witches have been entwined for centuries.

  Frederick Stuart Church/Smithsonian American Art Museum/Wikimedia Commons

Most perfume ads suggest that the right scent can make you sexy, alluring and successful. A blend by Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs, meanwhile, offers to make you smell like Hecate, the three-faced Greek goddess of witchcraft.

As a classics scholar who studies both magic and the senses in the ancient world, this idea of a witch-inspired perfume fascinates me – and “Hecate” is just one of many magic-inspired fragrances available today.

What does a witch smell like, and why would you deliberately perfume yourself like one?

Smells are impossible to see or touch, yet they affect us emotionally and even physically. That’s similar to how many people think of magic, and cultures around the world have connected the two. My current research is focused on how magic and scent were linked in ancient Rome and Greece, ideas that continue to shape views of witches in the West today.

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Greeks and Romans of all walks of life believed in magic and used spells ranging from curses to healing magic and garden charms. Magical handbooks from the time show that Greco-Egyptian magicians used fragrance extensively in their rituals, even scented inks, and doctors believed strong-smelling plant species to be more medically effective than others. The gods themselves were thought to smell sweet, and places they touched retained a pleasant odor, making scent a sign of contact with the divine.
Witches wielding perfumes

Professional magicians in the ancient world claimed they could curse enemies, summon gods, heal the sick, raise ghosts, tell the future and accomplish various other miraculous feats. Surviving descriptions suggest that a majority of them were men, although certainly not all.

When it comes to Greek and Roman fiction, however, most magicians are women.

Witches in ancient literature use smells even more aggressively than their real-life counterparts did. Medea, for example – the most famous witch of antiquity – casts magic through scent repeatedly in Apollonius’ epic poem “Argonautica,” about the hero Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece. To help him, Medea puts the dragon guarding the fleece to sleep by chanting spells and drizzling herbal potions in its eyes. The odor of her herbal concoctions finally overcomes the monster.

Medea’s perfumed magic helped her lover overcome a dragon – and kill her brother.

  Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys/Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery/Wikimedia Commons

Later in the poem, more ominously, Medea scatters herbs into the wind, and their scent lures her own brother into an ambush. Medea has run off with Jason by this point, and he kills her brother to prevent her from being forced to return home.

The Roman poet Horace wrote several poems about a character named Canidia, who is a more horrific witch than Medea: Her teeth are black, and she uses her long fingernails to dig up graves.

In one poem, Canidia and her friends murder a child so they can use his liver and bone marrow in a magical perfume to re-enchant her lover, who has left her. In another poem, Horace even describes Canidia attacking him with scent. She made him ill with her odors, he writes, in return for his unflattering descriptions of her.
Women’s wiles

In the patriarchal societies of Rome and Greece, women were regarded with general suspicion, especially in matters of self-control like sex, money and drinking. Not only were women considered liable to weakness, but they were likely to lead men into self-indulgence as well.

Stories about magical scents encode these ideas, especially fears about the dangers of sexually alluring women. It was said that women who used perfumes and cosmetics could seduce men into behaving in ways they would not choose to if they were in their right minds. Roman writer Pliny the Elder commented that the best perfume was one that made all the men in the area forget what they were doing when a women wearing it walked by. The poet Ovid suggested that if you want to get rid of love, you should pay your girlfriend a surprise visit to catch her without her makeup – her “blended potions.”

Medea’s odoriferous potions and Canidia’s fragrant spells resemble ordinary women’s perfumes, but exaggerated to supernatural levels. The same misogynistic fear that women have the power to enchant men’s minds underlies both stories of witches and stories of ordinary seduction. In the “Iliad,” the goddess Hera distracts her husband, Zeus, from the Trojan War by seducing him. Her preparations include cleansing and perfuming herself with divinely fragrant ambrosia as well as borrowing a magical, lust-inducing belt from Aphrodite. Zeus falls asleep in Hera’s arms, unaware that a battle rages.

Becoming the witch

The association of fragrance and magic persisted long after the end of the Greek and Roman world. In C. S. Lewis’ 1953 novel “The Silver Chair,” for example, a witch appears who could be Medea’s cousin. She throws a green powder onto a fire to produce a “sweet and drowsy” scent, which makes the characters more and more confused.

These days, however, smelling like a witch has its attractions. Misogynistic stereotypes of seductive enchantresses and evil crones have been reclaimed as feminist symbols, and the modern proliferation of perfume blends named for witches, spells and potions suggests that many people find their associations empowering.

Modern perfumes evoking magical imagery are often presented with a feminist twist, reclaiming ancient stereotypes. Another scent from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, “Medea,” describes her as “the embodiment of ruthless power, indomitable will and furious vengeance.” Aether Arts Perfume’s “Circe” is based on Madeline Miller’s novel about the great witch of “The Odyssey” and describes her as “a woman of power and strength.” “Harry Potter” fans can find all sorts of Hermione-themed scented candles online.

Like costumes, perfumes offer a way to try on a persona for a little while. Maybe you want to feel like a powerful goddess, someone with a library full of magical tomes, or a seductive monster. But while costumes are obvious to other people, only the wearer knows what a perfume “means” – and perhaps that’s half the fun of smelling like Hecate.

Author

Britta Ager
Assistant Professor of Classics, Arizona State University

October 20, 2021 

The Year of Witch Lit: Weird Women Dominated New Stories of Suspicion and Rupture


ARTS & CULTURE / BOOKS


Three novels about confusion, distrust, and fear mirror our pandemic moment
BY ALIX HAWLEY
ILLUSTRATION BY CELESTE COLBORNE

Published  Dec. 17, 2021

THE WALRUS

FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS around 2000, I lived in Mistley, a pretty village just outside Manningtree, one of England’s smallest towns. Famous for its swans and its pair of elegant eighteenth-century towers, Mistley sits on the Stour Estuary, about an hour’s train ride east of London. My British partner and I lived in a semidetached place in a row of houses at the top of a hill, which petered out into fields. Our next-door neighbour operated a home hair salon, and one weekend she painted her half of the house ivory, so our side looked like a dirty face.

I often thought my own face might be dirty given how I seemed to perplex people in the streets or the shop. I knew I was a complete outsider with my Canadian accent and my jogging. Someone once opened his door to ask what I was running for, and it took me months to learn that “Yallright” was a greeting, not a question. The swans were ruthless and terrifying, chasing me whenever I passed with a bag of groceries. When I ran near Mistley Heath, a wolfhound sometimes appeared out of the woods to chase me too, nipping at my legs. I walked down the hill to Manningtree most mornings and often saw a man in a grey overcoat following me. A low-level paranoia grew in me: Was I literally being chased out?

I found out later that Matthew Hopkins, the self-styled “Witchfinder General” of the 1640s, was buried somewhere behind our house; his grave and most of the adjacent church were lost to trees and grass. He’d conducted interrogations at a nearby inn, sending some 100 people to be hanged for allegedly consorting with the devil. Once I knew that, I wondered whether the presence of his bones might have had some effect on me. I could never get warm in the house although it was well heated and not old for England. I wondered sometimes if it was mildly haunted. I had a hard time sleeping. Was I the problem? Or was my suspicion the problem?

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I’ve been reminded of my life in Mistley during the pandemic—the slow-rising fear, the mistrust of others, the general bafflement. Even after lockdowns began to end last year, I spent most of my time holed up inside my home in British Columbia. I insulated myself with old BBC detective shows, and my reading gravitated toward the criminal too. True crime felt too hard to take, so I stuck to fiction, mainly mysteries that felt more solvable than the present. Checking out new-books lists in hopes of anything to take me away, I noticed a thread of literary novels about witches. Witch hunts are detective stories of a kind—as readers parse notions of reality and supposition—which was probably what grabbed me first, but these books are very different. Not the witches of fantasy or of children’s lit, the characters of three 2021 novels are victims of historical persecutions in England, America, and Germany. The stories evoke a deep confusion about what’s happening and whether there’s any way to fix it, echoing so many questions of our current moment.

A. K. Blakemore’s The Manningtree Witches depicts Matthew Hopkins himself, but it’s much more intensely focused on some of the women he pursued. A passionately expressive novel with a bold energy, the book is mainly in the voice of one of the teenage girls accused of witchcraft. Rebecca West lives with her odd, “formidable” mother in Manningtree while they try to make ends meet with sewing and laundry. The girl is smart mouthed, adolescent, and alive, her observations of neighbours and nature full of cockeyed detail. (She wouldn’t mind seeing “an imp streaking red across the damp lawn.”) She has a crush on the clerk who tutors her, and she is too smart for her own good in a small town where the atmosphere is increasingly claustrophobic, with the English Civil War boiling in the background. Matthew, a thin man perpetually dressed all in black, arrives to collect information on suspect happenings—a sickened child, a possible case of possession. Rebecca, who he thinks has “a weird look to her,” is among those rounded up for imprisonment and trial.

These novels are all about rupture and its effects. In The Manningtree Witches, the war is a major split, but gender is another obvious divide. The majority of Matthew’s victims are women, and Rebecca notes wryly, “The men will not save you.” At heart, though, the books are about storytelling itself. Blakemore slyly shows Matthew inventing reasons behind random events and connecting dots to cohere his grand story of evil versus good. He was, after all, a writer too, author of The Discovery of Witches, a kind of how-to guide to hunting them down. But Matthew is a deliberately flattened character: although he often conjures dreamscapes about witch sex, the sections from his perspective are dialled far down compared with those from Rebecca’s. Observing him, Rebecca says, “I can find nothing there.” The book also makes witches into a kind of nothing, just a narrative device: as Rebecca’s mother half-laughs, “Witch is just their nasty word for anyone who makes things happen, who moves the story along.” This story moves along with some shifts and gaps between scenes and includes brief excerpts from real-world trial documents. The structure emphasizes the way we all try to fill in holes however we can. Black rabbits wouldn’t appear around town if there weren’t witches about; cases of the novel coronavirus, some claimed, would spike because of God’s punishment. The subtitle to Matthew Hopkins’s own book is In Answer to Several Queries—he’s just providing the facts behind the question of why the world suffers.

Hopkins’s guide had a large New England fandom, and Chris Bohjalian’s Hour of the Witch takes place in this infamous hunting ground in the mid-1600s. Mary Deerfield has emigrated with her well-off British merchant parents to a purer life in Boston. In this society, talk of the devil is as expected as chat about the weather. Mary marries an older man, Thomas, who proves domineering and abusive, frequently complaining that her brain is made of cheese and that she fails to produce children. Thomas badly injures Mary when he impales her hand with a fork (“the devil’s tines”), and she decides to sue for divorce. Her attempts at freedom, and at healing herself and others, lead only to her being tried for witchcraft. Bohjalian builds another claustrophobic world, and as in The Manningtree Witches, the ridiculousness of the charges creates a disquieting tone. Again, there’s a major split in the community, the “elect” versus the damned, and another between men and women—one of Mary’s crimes is that she speaks “with the surety of a man.”

Bohjalian is excellent at suspense (he also wrote The Flight Attendant) and at lovingly detailed scene setting. Hour of the Witch is more straightforwardly told than The Manningtree Witches, and although its characters are fictional, their quoted testimony is very convincing. But this novel’s true strength is in its portrayal of an abused person’s mind. Mary is not only cut off from others but self-divided too, always wondering if she is good or bad, trying to understand why her husband harms her. The exhaustion of her self-monitoring is painfully realistic. She’s confused over her ability to give herself private sexual pleasure and ashamed that she likes looking at handsome young men.

Hour of the Witch also raises perceptive questions about how fixed identity really is. Fretting over whether she reads too much, as Thomas believes, Mary wonders what it says “about her soul that a few bits of fashionable silk or cotton cloth and some interesting books could make her content.” Even more, the book asks whether we own our identities and whether we can know ourselves, the way many people have questioned who they are in the upheavals of the last two years. David L. V. Bauer, a London virologist who gave a TV news interview on research behind the Pfizer vaccine only to watch anti-vaxers edit, misquote, and circulate it widely online, says he “never imagined that my own work could actually be part of [an anti-vaccine] misinformation arsenal” or that he would be the involuntary star of conspiracy videos that make him out to be either “some sort of supervillain, or the unlikely hero of the anti-vax world.” Mary also speculates whether she might unwittingly be a supervillain herself: “Did a woman who was possessed not know it until it was too late?”

Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch by Rivka Galchen takes the question further. A spiky heroine, Katharina Kepler, mother of scientist Johannes Kepler, is another purported historical witch. As in the other books, there’s turmoil and division, here featuring war and crop failure and Lutherans versus Catholics. In early seventeenth-century Germany, Katharina, a widowed grandmother, irritates many neighbours with her straight talk, her “manly” behaviour, her herbal cures, and her love of her cow. One townsperson, Ursula Reinhold, sets off an avalanche of charges by accusing Katharina of poisoning her with a drink. Others pile on: she caused them bodily harm by looking at them or killed their livestock with a slap or “asked the gravedigger to dig up her father’s skull to make a drinking goblet of it cast in silver—a known witchy tool.”

Galchen’s insightful and dramatic novel is the most absurdist of the three, with the charges against Katharina clearly nonsensical (although based in fact). Its form is also purposely askew, with untitled chapters shifting between Katharina’s voice and her neighbour Simon’s interspersed with courtroom examinations of her neighbours’ accusations. As one witness argues, “We all know she’s a witch. We’ve always known. The matter of how we came to know is simple—we already knew.” How can anyone argue with what everyone knows?

Somewhat beaten down, Katharina sees a doctor to inquire what she really is. He tells her she’s likely not a witch. And witches are real, the doctor says: “Sure they are. But what can they do, really? Not much, is what I have observed.” Yet Katharina’s not off the hook. Like the other novels’ characters, she suffers physical examinations to check for what are often called “witch marks.” Her family’s fortunes are ruined in attempts to defend her, and she’s later informed that her real punishment will be “that the story of the evil she had done would live long, and survive as a tale to frighten children until the end of days.” However, one of the book’s most tragicomic twists comes when Simon tries to tell an English bookseller about Katharina and the man replies, “People don’t like an old lady story, you know? I wouldn’t lead with that.”

What do people want from a story? To make sense, to know what happens, to bridge gaps. Historians have shown that witch hunts weren’t panicked insanity. They were usually attempts to understand real problems—Why was life hard? Why didn’t the rain stop? Why did children die? How could a church pull in more followers? The witch as answer fit, the way witches do in the stories told about them for centuries. They make handy antagonists, powerful but satisfyingly defeated. “Hansel and Gretel” has its infamous witch tempting children into her candy house so she can cook them. She vanishes from the tale with surprising quickness, though, once Gretel shoves her into the oven and the children make their way home to the parents who forced them out in the first place. As Blakemore’s character shrugs, a witch’s job is to fill a slot, to “move the story along.”

In Mistley, I don’t think anyone saw me as some sort of jogging Canadian witch. Most of the people there seemed kind, if always reserved, not “the usual monsters” of the town in Galchen’s novel or the Boston gossips in Bohjalian’s or the flat “Them” of Blakemore’s Manningtree. I wonder still if I made a stranger of myself. I remember realizing some days that my voice was whispery from not having talked to anyone until my partner got home at night. All the major characters of the three novels keep themselves apart to some degree, whether from a fear of others seeing them as too different or because they can’t tolerate others’ difference from them.

Political and social splits now feel as jagged as they often were during the historical period of these books. And witchcraft hovers on the edges of anti-vaccine thought. Misinformation whispers that the COVID-19 shots do all the things witches were accused of doing: they’re poisons, they can track your every move, they can make you infertile, they’ll pull you into Satan’s orbit. A recent online blow-up insisted the Moderna vaccine contains the chemical luciferin. It doesn’t, and at any rate, luciferin is just an organic light-creating molecule. It’s the mechanism behind a firefly’s glow. We all want some light shed on why the virus has hit, what is to blame, and when we’ll get to the end. Without clear answers, stories get stitched together out of old pieces.

ALIX HAWLEY
Alix Hawley is the author of The Old Familiar, All True Not a Lie In It, and My Name is a Knife. Her new novel is forthcoming. She lives in British Columbia.

CELESTE COLBORNE
Celeste Colborne is a multidisciplinary artist and illustrator from Alberta. Her art has been featured in Canadian Wildlife and Politico Europe.