About Veiled Antiquity

Hi. I’m Idris Calloway, and I run this site.

The short version is that I find this stuff really interesting, and I like that hardly anyone talks about it. Secret initiations. Books kept sealed. Curses buried with the dead. It feels like forbidden knowledge, and technically a lot of it was: people went to real trouble to keep these things quiet. Luckily, I get to share it.

The sort of thing I mean

Out of the hot spring at Bath came a little sheet of lead with a message scratched into it. A man called Docilianus had had his hooded cloak stolen. He was asking the goddess Sulis to make sure the thief got no sleep and no children until it was brought back to her temple.

He never meant anyone else to read that. More than fifteen hundred years later, we can.

What’s on here

Mystery cults where you swore never to say what you’d seen, and mostly nobody did. Prophecy books the Roman Senate kept locked away. Spellbooks, curse tablets, names chiselled off monuments. Things that were hidden on purpose, and things that just stopped being copied until there were none left.

The secrecy worked better than you’d think. People went through the Mysteries at Eleusis for centuries and not one of them left a clear account of what happened inside. We still don’t know.

How the pieces work

Each one starts from something real: an object, a place, a person, a line in an old book. It follows the evidence as far as it goes and stops where it runs out. When the experts disagree you get the disagreement, not a tidy answer, and the sources are listed at the bottom so you can check them.

A lot of the time the honest answer is “nobody knows.” I’ve come round to thinking that’s usually the better story anyway.

If you spot a mistake, tell me. It gets fixed, and the fix gets noted on the page.

When new ones come out

Monday, Wednesday and Friday. If you’d rather not keep checking, sign up on the home page and they’ll land in your inbox, or follow along by RSS.