The Power of Water
I first got the idea of writing The Magic Circle while living in Idaho, where I’d moved in 1978 from Colorado to work with people from many different countries and cultures, all involved in energy research and nuclear safety. I was living in a tiny, furnished flat on the second floor of an old-fashioned building […]
Storytelling and Mythology
Today, when we use the word “myth,” we often mean something that isn’t true, something that has been fabricated to deceive others. But the myths that have come down to us from ancient times have deep roots and hold a magical significance that still flourishes in our own lives today. The word “mythos” in Greek […]
The Norns of Nurnberg
The minute I first stepped off the train in 1989 at the jewellike town of Nurnberg, I realized that in all the books I’d already read about Nazi Germany in my research for The Magic Circle–everything from serious historical treatments to woo-woo occult fantasy–nobody had ever raised one question. Why did Adolf Hitler base his […]
D.C. Mysteriosa
(Washington: Mysterious District of Columbia) For the Spanish launch of El Fuego (The Fire) the noted Spanish magazine El Mundo wanted to do a feature interview with me at home in Washington, DC, where many of the modern scenes of the book take place. For this interview, they flew over photographer Chema Conesa, with the […]
Moscow, Monks, Murder, Mayhem, the Mafia
Katherine in Red Square, Moscow, Russia Just after editing The Magic Circle, I made a quick trip to Moscow where 850th birthday celebrations were still underway. The city was festooned with posters of St George, their patron saint. I felt this was an omen, because though St George does not appear as a character in […]
The Sufis of Turkey
December 2000 marked an important historic event in Sufi annals: the first Mevlana Symposium was held in Turkey, to commemorate the 727th anniversary of the death of the great poet and mystic, Jalal al-Din Rumi (known throughout Turkey as Mevlana, not as Rumi), the founder of the Mevlevi Order (The Whirling Dervishes). The congress took […]
The Horse Of Carthage
Some say that the name Carthage was the punic word for New City, which would seem an apt title, as it was the new city founded by queen Dido of Phoenician Tyre. However, Robert Graves tells us there was once an incarnation of the universal and ancient Great Goddess, whose name was also Car, and […]
Mount Ida Part One: Visiting Troy
A big chunk of the research for The Magic Circle is related to what today is modern Turkey, a land where, in ancient times, so many major literary and historical events took place. Katherine beneath the ‘new’ Trojan Horse: Troy, Turkey Turkey was the home of King Gordius, whose Gordian knot was later cut by […]
Mount Ida Part Two: Visiting the Gods
The very first morning when we stopped at Troy, archaeologists were boarding up parts to begin further digging just outside the famous ruins. We learned a few days later from a newspaper headline that they’d just discovered unknown outer walls, revealing that Troy was seven times larger than originally believed. So despite what historians had […]
Adventures in Spain
The personal love affair between Spain and my books began in 1990, through a series of strange circumstances. I had just returned from a six month research project in Germany, and settled in the small town of Radford, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, where Karl Pribram and I had recently moved our household […]
My Secret Spain
This essay was published in Troika Magazine, Fall 1998. My Secret Spain by Katherine Neville My first exposure to Spain took place in the early 1970’s, when I was living in North Africa as a consultant to the Algerian government. This period would later provide fodder for my first book, The Eight, an epic story […]
Tunisian Centaurs of Aphrodite
Karl Pribram and I were invited to attend the first Centaur inaugural ceremonies, and subsequent congresses in Knoxville, Tennessee—fittingly held each year on April 1st, a date that is traditionally associated in Greece with the birth of Chiron, perhaps the world’s most famous centaur, as teacher to Herakles and Asklepios. My own schedule, to-date, has […]
