Divine Inspiration

Ok, so... I am one day off of All Saint's Day, so today is about someone who was almost a Saint, but got excommunicated instead, Hildegard von Bingen.

Hildegard was a medieval abbess, writer, scientist, healer, philosopher, naturalist, composer, visionary, and counselor. She wrote theology, nature guides, poetry, scientific research documents, liturgies and the oldest surviving morality play - all this while suffering from poor health her entire life.

The tenth and most sickly child of a noble family, her parents gave her as a tithe to the church by the time she was eight, at which point she was already experiencing ecclesiastical visions. Hildegard and and her mentoring nun Jutta were enclosed at Disibodenberg in the Palatinate Forest in what is now Germany.

Jutta was also a visonary and taught Hildegard many things. The two developed a fantastically close bond and when Jutta died in in 1136, Hildegard was unanimously elected as "magistra" of her sister community by her fellow nuns, which was kind of like what the movies call being "mother superior" or something like that.

Believing that her visions came from God, Hildegard felt that God communicated with her directly and that He wanted her to move her nuns to a location where they could have more independence in Rupertsberg. Although the abbot declined her requests, she stayed her course and fought through her paralysing illness until she finally got her way.



Rupertsberg was on the Rhine River and Hildegard studied and documented more about the natural life and environment of that space than almost anyone else has achieved in one lifetime. She did all of this because she believed that God (in one of her visions) had told her to write down everything that she saw and heard.

Historians have tried to attribute her visions to her medical ailments, variously diagnosing her with everything from migranes to epilepsy. Whatever the cause, Hildegard's visions were a guiding force in her life that led her to do remarkable things.

She was the first woman to go on a preaching tour (although she was excommunicated for it). She didn't stay excommunicated though and the contemporary Catholic Church has paid a lot of attention to her music. It's actually really beautiful - even if you're not Catholic. I especially love the dulcimer in this video.

The Many Faces of Dracula

The name of that most infamous vampire can be traced back to the fifteenth century in reference to Vlad the Impaler. And since this guy's history is so long and so old, I am going to just share the visual representations of him with you today.

Living in the Balkans, it is generally believed that Dracula really didn't need to change his look very much for about 400 or so years - that is until a writer named Braham Stoker got his hands on a pile of letters and diary pages (the yellow cover on the book that Stoker published in 1897 served as a warning to its readers that the content was considered pornographic).

Apparently, Dracula travelled to Britain sometime in the late nineteenth century. Since that point in time. The movie industry has given us quite a few visual interpretations of what Dracula looks like. In the first film he was called Nosferatu (1922) and in 1922 was he ever in rough shape!

In less than ten years (which is not long for a vampire), he did clean up pretty well though. By 1931 he was a suave gentleman, who actually impressed the ladies quite a bit with his Germanic accent and foreign ways.

The 1930s weren't the end of Dracula's period of domestication. By the time he was in the House of Frankenstein (1994), he looked like a totally refined gentleman.

Ant then, by the end of the Second World War, Dracula was teaming up with other monsters to scare people, as he did with the Wolf Man and Frankenstein in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948).


In 1953 a Turkish film, Drakula Istanbul'da portrayed Dracula with fangs for the first time ever. Although he also had a rceding hairline. I didn't think vampires were supposed to age, but maybe the immediate postwar years were a little hard on the old Count.

It only took him five years to get his sexy back though. In 1958 he appeared in two films with two faces and two full heads of hair.

Then again, everyone was about to get their sexy on, and by the onset of the sexual revolution, Dracula even decided to try going blond for a little while in 1960. Apparently that look didn't work out so well for him, considering the fact that Christopher Lee dominated the whole Dracula scene for most of the 60s and 70s with few notable exceptions.

He found his Spanish great love in 1972.

He got together with Andy Warhol in 1974 with some weird and wonderful results, as is detectable by the bloody facepaint in the photo on the right.

In 1979, Dracula showed up a lot, but as the sexy, the comical, and the not-so-sexy.



And then we had the 80s. Even if the 80s are back in style, no one wants to remember what they actually looked like during those years.

In 1992, Draco tried out having long hair again, but for some reason also decided to start wearing John Lennon sunglasses. He also, for some reason, got this demonic look in his eyes.

Perhaps the demon eyes were a bit over the top, in 1995 Dracula's hair turned white again and he was making fun of him self, but obviously loving it.

Dracula entered the twenty-first century in style, with suave clothes and slightly shaggy hair that he stopped pushing back to hide that horrible widow's peak. In 2000 he even visited New Orleans.

The shaggy hairdo was just a stage in the process of totally growing his hair back out again though. By 2004 Dracula had hair long enough to tie back in ponytail at least six inches long and the ladies were totally digging that.

It's hard to say which was the sexiest look Dracula ever had. I know I will always have a soft spot for Bela Lugosi.

The Prince of Horror

The spookiest voice in horror movie history, this man needs no introduction. His was the scary voice of movies in the twentieth century, so the best I could do here was to pay him a visual tribute through collecting together as many of his movie posters as possible and presenting them to you in chronological order, beginning with Service de Luxe (1938).

Vincent (1982) was directed by Tim Burton and actually
about the life of Vincent Price. He even played the narrator.