Bram Stoker Did Not Model Dracula On Vlad The Impaler.

It's one of those so-called facts that everyone knows: Bram Stoker's character Count Dracula was loosely based on Vlad the Impaler. But while there's no doubt that Stoker took the name from Vlad III's patronymic, it's doubtful that the Impaler was actually the basis for the famous vampire.

Read HERE for more.

Mythological Creatures of the Philippine Folklore

                                                                                                                        Picture taken from www.travelbook.ph

Zombie Trivia

From: Taringa! La realidad acerca de los "Zombies"

The traditional idea of a zombie doesn't kill people nor eat their brains.

In Haiti, zombies are not figures of terror. In fact, these zombies are not capable of harming anyone. Instead, the zombie— a creature between life and death, an outcast, something with no will of its own—is a fearful symbol of human bondage. The word zombie was first recorded in 1819, by the poet Robert Southey from two African words, "nzambi" (god) and "zumbi"" (fetish) and it has something to do with the Voodoo religion of South America.

According to the belief, a bokor sorcerer, through a combination of drugs and black magic, puts the living into a deathlike state, then resurrects their ‘‘corpses’’ as slaves who perform grueling labor on some South America’s sugar plantations.

A Few Trivias About Werewolves

                                                                                                                                                       Artwork from Magic The Gathering

The earliest examples of the werewolf legend can be found in Greek mythology. King Lycaon was

transformed into a wolf as a result of sacrificing a baby to Zeus. Lycaon was a king of Arcadia, son of Pelasgus and Meliboea, who tested Zeus by serving him the roasted flesh of a guest from Epirus in order to see whether Zeus was truly omniscient.

Zeus found out King Lycaon's vile sacrifice so he transformed the king into the form of a werewolf and killed Lycaon's fifty other sons with lightning bolts. The slaughtered child, Nyctimus, was restored to life.

Hammer Time!

Thanks to the Christian English translation of the Bible, the word chaspah in Exodus 22:18 was translated into the word “witch.” Pope Innocent VIII, believing literally in Exodus 20:18, issued a bull in 1484 designed to root out witchcraft in Christian Europe. Thanks to these two Dominican inquisitors, Henrich Institoris (Kramer) (c. 1430–1505) and Jacob Sprenger (c. 1436–1495) and their book "Malleus Maleficarum," A Hammer for Witches – we have now stereotyped witches as evil and Satan spawn. In this book, definite instructions were given to the prosecution of witches. The infamous Witch Hunt that has killed over nearly tens and thousand of innocent women as three hundred years of persecutions raged was the result of this book.

FYI: Warlocks are not Male Witches

                     Picture from WiseGeek.com

Thanks to Hollywood and other misinformation from local TV and reading materials (who were not written by a witch of course), we now think that a warlock is a male witch. That is not true. A male witch is called a “witch.” 

Now, how about a warlock?

The name “warlock” came from a Saxon word, wǣrloga that means an "oath-breaker." Simply put it, a warlock is a witch that broke his oath of not hurting or harming anyone.

But not every pagans agree. In other witches community, warlocks are known to be a “spell singer.” This was derived in Norse myth from the poetic eddas, a song called the Vardlokkur  which is sung to ward off evil spirits during a religious ceremony.