Why do we let children dress as tiny monsters, knock on strangers’ doors and demand chocolate under threat of mild vandalism?

This spooky season, we’re unwrapping the history of trick-or-treating,from soul cakes and prayers for the dead to masked mischief-makers and the great suburban scramble for Freddo Frogs. There are disguises, doorstep performances and a bargain that’s simple, slightly extortionate and very hard to resist.

Grab something sweet and join us. It may be spring here in Australia, but the ghosts haven’t checked the forecast.

References & further reading

• National Museum of Ireland - “Traditions and customs of Halloween / Samhain”. Irish Halloween beliefs and customs, including returning spirits, ghostly masks and disguised visitors entertaining their neighbours.
• English Heritage - “What are soul cakes and what’s their link with Halloween?”. Soul cakes, prayers for the dead and John Mirk’s account of bread distributed for Christian souls around the year 1400.
• Dúchas / National Folklore Collection - “Halloween”. An overview of Irish Halloween traditions, including guising and house visits requesting fruit, sweets or money.
• Dúchas, The Schools’ Collection - “Hallow Eve Tricks,” Lucan, County Dublin. An original collected folklore account describing children dressing up, playing music and dancing at houses in exchange for money, nuts or apples. Volume 0794, page 217.
• Library of Congress, Folklife Today - “Masking and Mumming for the Holidays, Thanksgiving Style!”. A valuable discussion of masked visiting traditions and the difficulties of establishing a direct historical link between older customs and modern trick-or-treating.
• Library of Congress, Headlines & Heroes - “The Origins of Halloween Traditions”. Historical newspaper material and competing explanations for familiar Halloween customs.

Books for deeper reading

• Hutton, Ronald. The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford University Press, 1996. Scholarly background on Britain’s seasonal celebrations, including Halloween.
• Morton, Lisa. Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween. Reaktion Books, 2012. A book-length history covering Halloween in Britain and Ireland, its development in North America, and its place in popular culture.

Hex & Muse is recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders past and present - and to all First Nations people, whose stories and spirits continue to shape this land.

Follow along for more folklore, magic, and mythic musings:
Instagram: @hexandmuse
Website: www.hexandmuse.com

Hex & Muse is a spellbound journal of folklore, magic, art, and the sacred feminine - told through cinematic storytelling and whispered histories.
From my altar to yours… thank you for listening.

For the first ever Hex + Muse Book Club, we’re stepping inside The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, a world of ancient prophecies, secret passages, and spectacularly bad decisions.

First published in 1764 and widely regarded as the first Gothic novel, this short but dramatic tale begins with a doomed wedding and a giant helmet falling from the sky. What follows is a tangle of dangerous ambition, family secrets, and supernatural happenings, as the castle’s ruler fights to preserve his dynasty at any cost.

Join us as we explore the book that helped launch Gothic fiction, where the past refuses to stay buried and family drama reaches haunting new heights.

Where to read the book for free

Want to read along with Hex + Muse Book Club? The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole is available free through Project Gutenberg. Read it online or download an ebook, no purchase or subscription needed.

📖 Read or download The Castle of Otranto for free

Hex & Muse is recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders past and present - and to all First Nations people, whose stories and spirits continue to shape this land.

Follow along for more folklore, magic, and mythic musings:
Instagram: @hexandmuse
Website: www.hexandmuse.com

Hex & Muse is a spellbound journal of folklore, magic, art, and the sacred feminine - told through cinematic storytelling and whispered histories.
From my altar to yours… thank you for listening.

In this episode, we explore the spring equinox below the equator - from longer evenings and flowering wattle to nesting birds and unpredictable weather. We look at the difference between the equinox and Ostara, how to build a seasonal practice around what’s actually happening where you live, and why balance doesn’t have to mean giving everything equal time.

The episode finishes with a simple equinox ritual. You’ll reflect on what winter gave you, choose something you’d like to nurture this spring, and set one manageable action to take before the next full moon.

For the ritual: Bring two small objects - one dark and one light and something to write with.

If you’d like to explore a little further:

• Embracing the Equinox - NASA
  An easy-to-follow look at what happens during an equinox and why day and night aren’t exactly equal.
  https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/skywatching/night-sky-network/embracing-the-equinox/
• Solstices, equinoxes and the seasons- Bureau of Meteorology
  A useful guide to how seasons work here in Australia.
  https://www.bom.gov.au/news-and-media/solstices-equinoxes-and-the-seasons
• Indigenous seasonal calendars - Bureau of Meteorology
  Explore some of the seasonal calendars that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities have chosen to share publicly.
  https://www.bom.gov.au/resources/indigenous-weather-knowledge/indigenous-seasonal-calendars
• Indigenous seasonal calendars - CSIRO
  More about seasonal knowledge connected to particular Countries, along with guidance on respecting the communities who hold it.
  https://www.csiro.au/en/research/indigenous-science/indigenous-knowledge/calendars
• Phenology by Theresa M. Crimmins
  A lovely introduction to noticing seasonal changes in the plants and animals around us.
  https://www.penguin.com.au/books/phenology-9780262551052
• The Stations of the Sun by Ronald Hutton
  For anyone interested in taking a deeper dive into the history of seasonal festivals and the ritual year.
  https://academic.oup.com/book/1390

Hex & Muse is recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders past and present - and to all First Nations people, whose stories and spirits continue to shape this land.

Follow along for more folklore, magic, and mythic musings:
Instagram: @hexandmuse
Website: www.hexandmuse.com

Hex & Muse is a spellbound journal of folklore, magic, art, and the sacred feminine - told through cinematic storytelling and whispered histories.
From my altar to yours… thank you for listening.

What happens when we look at the world and ask it to answer us?

In Part II of The Art of Seeing, we leave the Oracle of Delphi behind and follow the quieter, stranger history of divination through bowls of water, dark mirrors, birds in flight, marked lots and ancient oracle bones.

We step into the candlelit world of John Dee and Edward Kelley, explore Dee’s mysterious obsidian scrying mirror and its connection to the Mexica god Tezcatlipoca, before following mirror magic into folklore, superstition and the childhood terror of Bloody Mary.

From Roman augury and Germanic divination to scrying, omens and ghost stories, this is an episode about our very old desire to notice patterns, search for signs and glimpse something just beyond ordinary sight.

And at the end, we’ll try a little scrying ritual of our own.

Further Reading & References

Clucas, Stephen, ed. John Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies in English Renaissance Thought. Springer, 2006.

Dee, John. John Dee’s Five Books of Mystery: Original Sourcebook of Enochian Magic. Edited by Joseph H. Peterson. Weiser Books, 2003.

Dundes, Alan. “Bloody Mary in the Mirror: A Ritual Reflection of Pre-Pubescent Anxiety.” Western Folklore, vol. 57, no. 2/3, 1998, pp. 119–135.

Olivier, Guilhem. Mockeries and Metamorphoses of an Aztec God: Tezcatlipoca, “Lord of the Smoking Mirror.” University Press of Colorado, 2003.

Campbell, Stuart, Elizabeth Healey, Yvette Balbaligo and Caroline Cartwright. “The Mirror, the Magus and More: Reflections on John Dee’s Obsidian Mirror.” Antiquity, vol. 95, no. 384, 2021, pp. 1547–1564.

Tacitus. Germania, Chapter 10. Translated by Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb. In The Complete Works of Tacitus. Random House, 1942.

Keightley, David N. Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-Bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China. University of California Press, 1978.

British Museum. Dr Dee’s Magical Mirror / Magical Speculum. Museum no. 1966,1001.1. British Museum Collection.

British Library. Oracle Bone Collection 甲骨. Or 7694/1506–2125. British Library Asian and African Collections.

Hex & Muse is recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders past and present - and to all First Nations people, whose stories and spirits continue to shape this land.

Follow along for more folklore, magic, and mythic musings:
Instagram: @hexandmuse
Website: www.hexandmuse.com

Hex & Muse is a spellbound journal of folklore, magic, art, and the sacred feminine - told through cinematic storytelling and whispered histories.
From my altar to yours… thank you for listening.

High on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, beneath the gaze of Apollo, people once climbed toward Delphi carrying questions they could not answer alone. In this episode, we follow them up the Sacred Way to meet the Pythia, the woman believed to speak with the voice of a god, and explore the strange, beautiful world of prophecy, ritual, myth and interpretation.Because sometimes the hardest part is not receiving an answer. It is deciding what we want it to mean.

Further Reading

Scott, Michael. Delphi: A History of the Center of the Ancient World. Princeton University Press, 2014.

Herodotus. The Histories. Translated by A. D. Godley. Harvard University Press, 1920.

Pausanias. Description of Greece. Translated by W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod. Harvard University Press, 1918.

Plutarch. Moralia, Volume V: Isis and Osiris. The E at Delphi. The Oracles at Delphi No Longer Given in Verse. The Obsolescence of Oracles. Translated by Frank Cole Babbitt. Harvard University Press, 1936.

Bowden, Hugh. Classical Athens and the Delphic Oracle: Divination and Democracy. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Johnston, Sarah Iles. Ancient Greek Divination. Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.

Hex & Muse is recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders past and present - and to all First Nations people, whose stories and spirits continue to shape this land.

Follow along for more folklore, magic, and mythic musings:
Instagram: @hexandmuse
Website: www.hexandmuse.com

Hex & Muse is a spellbound journal of folklore, magic, art, and the sacred feminine - told through cinematic storytelling and whispered histories.
From my altar to yours… thank you for listening.

What if a grimoire was never simply a book of magic?

Long before they were hidden behind glass in museums or wrapped in stories of spells and secret societies, grimoires were companions to everyday life. They gathered remedies, dreams, prayers, recipes, observations and the quiet moments their owners refused to let slip away.

Part history, part reflection, Ink, Memory & Living Magic traces the forgotten tradition of these remarkable books, from medieval manuscripts and herbals to the handwritten notebooks of ordinary people whose names have been lost to time. Along the way, it asks a gentler question: if a grimoire is simply a record of what we choose to notice, perhaps we have been writing them all along.

If you’d like to explore the history of grimoires, folklore and magical manuscripts a little further, these are some wonderful places to begin:

• Davies, O. Grimoires: A History of Magic Books (2009).
• Lecouteux, C. The Book of Grimoires (2013).
• Hutton, R. The Witch (2017).
• Wilby, E. Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits (2005).
• Wellcome Collection – https://wellcomecollection.org
• Museum of Witchcraft and Magic – https://museumofwitchcraftandmagic.co.uk

Hex & Muse is recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders past and present - and to all First Nations people, whose stories and spirits continue to shape this land.

Follow along for more folklore, magic, and mythic musings:
Instagram: @hexandmuse
Website: www.hexandmuse.com

Hex & Muse is a spellbound journal of folklore, magic, art, and the sacred feminine - told through cinematic storytelling and whispered histories.
From my altar to yours… thank you for listening.

There are stories that refuse to stay still.

Medusa has been carried through centuries as a monster, a warning, a figure placed at the edge of fear - and yet her story has never settled there.

In this episode of Hex & Muse, we return to Medusa with care, tracing her origins in ancient Greek mythology, her transformation through the writings of Ovid, and the way her image has moved through art, power, and culture across time.

We explore the meaning of her gaze; how it shifts the act of seeing itself and how her story has been reclaimed in the present, where Medusa has become a powerful symbol for survival, autonomy, and living within a body that has been changed.

This is an episode about myth, but also about what myth holds.

About who gets to tell a story.

And what happens when that story is taken back.

• Ovid - Metamorphoses, Book IV
  https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Metamorphoses4.php
• Hesiod - Theogony (Gorgons + early myth references)
  https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Hes.+Theog.+270
• Apollodorus - The Library, Book II (Perseus myth)
  https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Apollod.+2.4
• Theoi Greek Mythology - Medusa & Gorgons
  https://www.theoi.com/Pontios/Gorgones.html
• Caravaggio - Medusa (c. 1597)
  https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/medusa
• Benvenuto Cellini - Perseus with the Head of Medusa
  https://www.museumsinflorence.com/musei/perseus.html
  
  

• Marina Warner - Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form
• Mary Beard - Women & Power: A Manifesto
• Natalie Haynes - Pandora’s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths
• Jess Zimmerman -Women and Other Monsters
• Emily Wilson (trans.) - The Odyssey (for broader myth context and gender reading)

Hex & Muse is recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders past and present - and to all First Nations people, whose stories and spirits continue to shape this land.

Follow along for more folklore, magic, and mythic musings:
Instagram: @hexandmuse
Website: www.hexandmuse.com

Hex & Muse is a spellbound journal of folklore, magic, art, and the sacred feminine - told through cinematic storytelling and whispered histories.
From my altar to yours… thank you for listening.

As the Northern Hemisphere turns toward the light, we arrive at the spring equinox - known in many pagan traditions as Ostara.

In this episode of Hex & Muse, we explore the stories, symbols, and seasonal rhythms that shape this moment. From ancient myths of return and renewal to the folklore of hares and eggs, we trace how these traditions have travelled through time - eventually forming what we now recognise as Easter.

Blending mythology, history, and modern ritual, this episode invites you to reconnect with the turning of the earth and the quiet beginnings that come with it.

Historical & Mythological Sources

• Bede - The Reckoning of Time
  (Primary reference to Eostre and early spring festivals)
• The Golden Bough - James George Frazer
  (Comparative mythology - Adonis, Attis, seasonal cycles)
• Metamorphoses - Ovid
  (Greek myths including Persephone-related traditions)

Pagan Traditions & Seasonal Practice

• The Wheel of the Year - Pauline Campanelli
• Ostara: Rituals, Recipes & Lore for the Spring Equinox - Kerri Connor

🐇 Folklore & Easter Traditions

• Stations of the Sun - Ronald Hutton
  (Origins of British seasonal customs and festivals)
• The Oxford Companion to Food - Alan Davidson
  (History of Easter foods, including hot cross buns)

Optional Modern / Accessible Sources

• The British Museum -seasonal festivals & ancient rituals
• The National Trust - Easter traditions & folklore

Witches wheel Episode

https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-witchs-wheel/id1820752122?i=1000713487773

Hex & Muse is recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. I pay my deepest respects to their Elders past and present - and to all First Nations people, whose stories and spirits continue to shape this land.

Follow along for more folklore, magic, and mythic musings:
Instagram: @hexandmuse
Website: www.hexandmuse.com

Hex & Muse is a spellbound journal of folklore, magic, art, and the sacred feminine - told through cinematic storytelling and whispered histories.
From my altar to yours… thank you for listening.