Tartaria: The Counter Arguments

Dear Shadow Tribe,

 

Last post I looked at the three main arguments for the Tartaria conspiracy. This post looks at the counter-arguments against it.  

The mainstream response is straightforward. Each of the three main evidences for the Lost Kingdom of Tartaria has a documented, ordinary explanation that does not require a lost empire or a hidden reset.

A label for the unknown, not an empire

European cartographers used Tartaria as a broad regional label for large parts of Asia they knew poorly. It was never intended as the name of one government or civilization. Most maps subdivided it into Great Tartary, Chinese Tartary, Independent Tartary, and others, reflecting different areas under different rulers. 

 

As exploration improved in the 18th and 19th centuries, the old blanket term for "unknown" was replaced by more accurate names such as Siberia and Central Asia. Contemporary sources, including encyclopedias and travel accounts from the same period, describe the region as inhabited by various nomadic and settled peoples, not a single advanced empire. The actual history of those lands, such as the the Mongol Empire and its successor states, is recorded in multiple languages and archaeological records. The old maps record European ignorance of the areas, not the existence of a unified Tartarian civilization.

Buried lower levels show ordinary city growth

Windows and doors below modern street level appear in many older cities for practical reasons. Streets were raised to install sewers, improve drainage, or reduce flooding. Buildings were sometimes lifted or new ground levels added as cities expanded. Chicago and Seattle both have well-documented projects that raised street grades in the late 19th century. 

 

Similar work occurred in European cities around the same time. Contemporary city records, engineering reports, newspaper articles, and photographs show these changes happening over years through ordinary construction, not a sudden global mud flood. The pattern matches known city development, not a worldwide catastrophe that somehow left no other traces.

The ornate buildings actually fit 

World’s Fair structures such as those at the 1893 Chicago exposition were temporary. They were designed by known architects, built quickly with plaster over wood frames, and demolished afterward. Construction photos, contracts, and contemporary descriptions exist. Similar ornate styles appear worldwide because classical and Beaux-Arts forms were taught and copied throughout the 19th century. 

 

No physical or written evidence supports free-energy systems or other technology beyond what was available at the time. The speed of construction is explained by large workforces, prefabrication, and the temporary nature of the buildings. Reassigning them to a lost empire requires ignoring the paper trail that already accounts for them.

Conclusions

Taken together, the three main claims rest on reading ordinary historical and engineering records as anomalies, or ignoring them altogether. Those records show regional map labels, city-by-city street raising, and well-documented construction projects. No contemporary accounts, archaeological layers, or physical evidences support a recent global mud flood capable of erasing an advanced civilization across multiple continents at the same time.

Despite my usual skepticism toward official narratives, this is one alternative I have to reject. A mud flood recent enough to bury 19th-century buildings and global enough to affect cities on several continents should have left unmistakable traces in newspapers, government records, and diaries, as well as considerable physical evidence that would be impossible to hide so quickly. The complete absence of those traces, while ordinary explanations match the maps and buildings, makes the claim impossible for me to accept. 

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Tartaria: The Evidences

Dear Shadow Tribe,

 

Supporters of the hidden-history version of Tartaria (post link) point to three main lines of evidence that they say do not fit the standard narrative.

1) Old maps label Tartaria 

Maps drawn by European cartographers from the 1500s into the early 1800s repeatedly show sizable areas marked Tartaria, Great Tartary, Independent Tartary, Chinese Tartary, and similar names. These are not mistakes. Well-known mapmakers such as Guillaume de L’Isle around 1700 divided Asia into substantial Tartarian zones covering what is now Siberia, Central Asia, and lands farther east. The labels largely vanish from ordinary maps as the 19th century continues, replaced by Russian, Chinese, or other modern names. From this perspective, a consistently named region on primary source maps, followed by its near-total disappearance, looks like a real political or cultural entity that was later written out rather than simple geographic ignorance.

2) Buildings with buried lower levels

In cities across Europe, North America, and elsewhere, many older buildings show ground-floor windows, doors, and archways that sit partially or fully below the current street level. Examples appear in Chicago, Seattle, Paris, and smaller towns. These are not isolated basements. The pattern is systematic in places, as if the original street level was several feet lower. Old photographs of some cities also show streets that look recently cleared or unusually empty next to large, ornate buildings. The explanation offered is a large-scale mud or sediment event (or series of events) that buried lower stories. Streets were later rebuilt higher, while the buildings themselves remained. The history of how the ground rose is said to be missing from standard accounts.

3) Ornate buildings too advanced for their time period

Many grand structures, such as domed capitols, star forts, elaborate civic buildings, and the temporary palaces of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair or the 1915 San Francisco Panama-Pacific Exposition, are claimed as Tartarian. Construction records for some of these, especially the fair buildings, show them going up extremely quickly with limited documented heavy machinery relative to their scale and detail. After the fairs, most were demolished, yet contemporary photos and accounts describe them as finished, substantial structures rather than flimsy temporary sets. Similar classical or ornate styles appear on multiple continents without a clear chain of continuous transmission that matches the official timelines. Combined with claims of free or wireless energy systems suggested by the prevalence of domes, spires, and certain metal elements, the pattern is read as the remnants of a more advanced civilization whose structures were later re-dated and reassigned.

These three evidences (maps, buried architecture, and surviving ornate structures) form the core case for the hidden history version of Tartaria. My next post will give the counter-arguments against this version.  

 

Suggested Readings

• Michael Luciano, The Lost Civilization of TARTARIA. Presents the case for a lost advanced empire, mud floods, free energy, and a historical reset.
• James W. Lee, The One World Tartarians: The Greatest Civilization Ever Erased From History. One of the earlier book-length treatments of the global Tartaria claim. 
• Simon Horowitz, The Great Tartaria: Myth, History, and the Lost Empire. Covers the historical name alongside the modern alternative narrative. 

 

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Tartaria: The Hidden History Narrative

Dear Shadow Tribe,

 

In the alternative history version, Tartaria (or the Tartarian Empire) was far more than a name on old maps as mainstream historians claim (see my previous post Tartaria: The Mainstream Historical Narrative.). It was a real, advanced civilization that once covered large parts of the world. Supporters say it built grand architecture on multiple continents, possessed technology beyond what official history credits to the 18th and 19th centuries, and was then deliberately wiped from the record.

Available on Amazon

According to this account, Tartaria was a unified or loosely unified empire with its own rulers, culture, and style of building. Its people are described as technologically capable, often peaceful, and skilled at large-scale construction. Many of the ornate public buildings, star forts, domed structures, and even the temporary World’s Fair palaces that appear in old photographs are said to be Tartarian, not the work of the nations that later claimed them. Some versions of the story add that the Tartarians used free or wireless energy systems, visible in the domes, spires, and metalwork on surviving structures. Giants are sometimes included among the population as well.

The end of this civilization, in the claim, came suddenly in the 19th century (sometimes earlier). A global or near-global “mud flood” buried lower levels of cities, raised street levels, and destroyed much of the population and infrastructure. Surviving buildings were left with windows and doors partially underground. After the catastrophe, the story continues, those in power rewrote the history books to their benefit, reassigned the architecture to later cultures, demolished many of the remaining structures, and erased Tartaria from standard accounts. The name disappeared from maps at roughly this same time. Wars, revolutions, and institutional control of education and publishing are offered as the tools that finished the cover-up.

In short, the hidden-history narrative holds that a sophisticated Tartarian world existed into relatively recent times, was destroyed by a mud flood or similar event, and was then systematically removed from public memory so that modern nations could claim its buildings and its timeline.

 

What evidences do the proponents of this theory offer? Several, it turns out. Some of which are hard to dismiss. In part 3 (Tartaria: The Evidences), I will present their top three evidences that Tartaria was very real. Until then, check out the suggested readings list. 

Suggested Readings

• Michael Luciano, The Lost Civilization of TARTARIA. Presents the case for a lost advanced empire, mud floods, free energy, and a historical reset.
• James W. Lee, The One World Tartarians: The Greatest Civilization Ever Erased From History. One of the earlier book-length treatments of the global Tartaria claim. 
• Simon Horowitz, The Great Tartaria: Myth, History, and the Lost Empire. Covers the historical name alongside the modern alternative narrative. 

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Tartaria: The Mainstream Historical Narrative

Dear Shadow Tribe,

 

1700 Map / Grand Tartaria

If you look at old European maps from the 1500s to the early 1800s, you will often see large stretches of Asia labeled Tartaria or Tartary. The name covers huge areas that today include Siberia, parts of Central Asia, Mongolia, and regions farther east. To most historians, this is not mysterious. It is simply what European mapmakers called a part of the world they knew very little about.

The word comes from “Tatar” or “Tartar.” That was a broad European term for various Turkic and Mongol peoples who lived on the Eurasian steppes. After the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, Europeans associated the name with the lands those groups came from. On maps, Tartaria functioned as a general regional label, not the name of one single empire or country. Mapmakers sometimes split it into pieces: Great Tartary or Russian Tartary for Siberia, Chinese Tartary for Manchuria, Independent Tartary for parts of Central Asia, and Little Tartary for the area around the Crimean Khanate.

European knowledge of the region stayed limited for centuries. The people who lived there were mostly nomadic or organized into different khanates and empires of their own. The most famous of those was the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan and his successors. Later, Russian expansion, Chinese rule in the east, and better exploration gradually filled in the blanks. As that happened, the old blanket name Tartaria stopped being useful and dropped out of ordinary use by the mid-to-late 1800s. Newer terms such as Siberia and Central Asia took its place.

In the mainstream view, nothing dramatic was erased. There was no single advanced Tartarian civilization that suddenly vanished. The name was a cartographer’s shorthand for poorly mapped territory. Once Europeans mapped the area more accurately and identified the actual peoples and states there, the old label faded. Historians treat the maps as products of their time, not as proof of a hidden empire. The real history of those lands is documented in Mongol, Turkic, Chinese, Russian, and other local records.

That is the standard account: Tartaria was a European name for a large, little-known region, not a lost super-civilization. The next part of this series looks at the very different story told by people who reject this official narrative.

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Macabre History: The Black Death, the Great Plague, and the Doctors in Beaks

Dear Shadow Tribe, 

The Black Death and the Great Plague were not the same event, but were the same disease, commonly called the bubonic plague. The Black Death cut through Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East in the middle of the fourteenth century. The Great Plague usually means a later city epidemic of London in 1665. The beaked doctor people picture shows up in the seventeenth century, dressed for a theory of disease that will eventually prove wrong (miasma/dirty air).

The bacterium is Yersinia pestis, and it still exists. Rodents are the reservoir for the disease. Their fleas are the vector that carries the bacterium from host to host. Humans usually catch it from a flea bite. Left alone, the bubonic form settles in the lymph nodes and produces the swellings called buboes. It can move into the blood and into the lungs. Once in the lungs, pneumonic plague passes on the breath. 

The Black Death

The pandemic that would be called the Black Death began in Central Asia, reached the Black Sea and the Mediterranean around 1346–1347, and ran through Europe and the Mediterranean world, including Northern Africa, until about 1353. people at that time did not use the name. They said the pestilence, or the great mortality. “Black Death” is a later label for that specific wave.

The death toll is argued in the details and not in the scale. A third to three-fifths of Europe is the usual range. Tens of millions of people. Cities hired doctors at emergency rates because the ordinary ones fled or died. The city of Orvieto, in central Italy, contracted Matteo fu Angelo in 1348 at four times a normal fee. Pope Clement VI added doctors in Avignon. In Venice, of eighteen doctors in the city, one was still at work by the end: five dead, twelve fled. Those men were plague doctors in the job sense. They did not wear the costume and the beak at that time.

A 1373 note by Johannes Jacobi recommends masks for physicians. It does not describe them. No surviving evidence puts the bird mask in the fourteenth century. The plague doctor costume people think of is three hundred years later.

The Plague Never Fully Went Away 

The bacterium did not leave with the end of Black Death. Europe had plague outbreaks for centuries after 1353. Most were local. Some were bad enough to empty quarters of a city. The name “Great Plague” is not a second Black Death. In English it usually refers to the London epidemic of 1665–1666, with about 100,000 dead in the city, roughly a quarter of its population. Other places had their own great plagues: Naples and Rome in 1656, Vienna in 1679, and Marseille in 1720. Same organism, but less wide-spread. By then towns had boards of health, quarantine, and pesthouses. They also had the outfit.

The Beak of the Plague Doctor

Charles de Lorme, physician to Louis XIII, described the kit during a Paris outbreak in 1619. Waxed Moroccan goat leather: long coat, breeches joined to boots, gloves, hat. A mask with glass over the eyes and a beak about half a foot long, packed with herbs, vinegar, perfume, or theriac, a compound of dozens of ingredients that included viper flesh, myrrh, cinnamon, and honey. The idea was miasma, the bad air carried the pestilence. A long beak was supposed to give the herbs time to clean the breath before it reached the lungs. He also carried a rod, to point, to lift a sheet, or to keep a patient off him.

Paul Fürst, Der Doctor Schnabel von Rom

The picture that fixed the figure is later. In 1656, during the plague of Rome and Naples, Paul Fürst published an engraving of Doctor Schnabel von Rom, Plague Doctor of Rome. The doctor in the print frightens the living and picks over the dead. Naples lost about 300,000 people that year, roughly half the city. The beak was already a sign that the house you were entering was finished.

The costume was never standard issue. Most physicians who treated plague did not wear it. Some did. Two masks survive, both from seventeenth century Germany. The look lasted as a warning longer than it lasted as equipment. It appears again in images of the 1720 Marseille outbreak. After that it belongs to prints, theater, and masks.

The theory under it was wrong. The beak did not stop the fleas. A waxed coat may have kept some fleas off a man’s skin. That would have been an accident of the leather, not a success of the herbs. Pneumonic cases would have made it through the herbs and perfume unchanged.

The role is older than the costume. Cities were already paying men to walk into plague houses in 1348. The beak is a seventeenth-century object, tied to de Lorme’s 1619 description, the 1656 image from Italy, and the surviving masks from Germany. 

Current Events

The plague did not retire with the last European city outbreak. It still moves in rodent populations in parts of Asia, Africa, and the Americas, including the United States. Cases still occur. Antibiotics stop it if they are given before the blood or the lungs are gone. 

 

In early October 2026 a Russian researcher at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Institute in Siberia died of a pneumonia that authorities are denying is tied to the pathogens she handled. The institute does work with Yersinia pestis. Contacts were watched. Official tests report no spread. The cause of her death is still unconfirmed as this is being written, and WHO is investigating. 

 

Suggested Reading:

• John Kelly, The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death. Narrative history of the fourteenth-century pandemic for a general reader.
• Ole J. Benedictow, The Black Death, 1346–1353: The Complete History. The demographic case for the high death toll.
• Paul Slack, Plague: A Very Short Introduction. Short, sober map of the disease from Justinian’s plague through the later European outbreaks.
• William Rosen, Justinian’s Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe. The earlier pandemic, sixth century, same bacterium, different world.

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The Men Who Sold the Dead

Dear Shadow Tribe,

My Waterloo teeth post asked what the living took from the dead and placed into the mouths of the living. This is the direct sequel: the body itself, not just the teeth.

From the mid-1700s into the 1830s, medical schools in Britain needed fresh bodies to teach anatomy. They could not get enough legally, so a trade grew up to fill the gap:  body snatching. The men in it were called Resurrection Men. They did not bring anyone back dead. Instead, they dug them up and sold them.

The shortage was written into the law. After 1752, the only bodies a school could take legally were those of executed murderers, handed over by the court for dissection. Hangings did not keep pace with the needs of the schools. London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow were turning out more surgeons every year, and each student was expected to dissect a corpse. There simply weren't enough even if they shared. 

A Legal Loophole

The workaround sat in a loophole in the common law. A dead body was not property, therefore you couldn't be charged with with theft. Take the body and leave the linen and coffin in the grave, and you hadn't stolen anything the courts recognized. That was the whole business model. Go in at night, work fast, pull the corpse out, refill the grave so it looked untouched, and be gone before dawn. Relatives hired watchers. Churches built iron cages, called mortsafes, over new graves. Gangs of  body snatchers still worked because the price was worth the risk.

 

Mortsafes, photo by Judy Wilson

A body in London in the 1810s and 1820s typically brought four to twelve guineas, sometimes more in the teaching season, when cold weather also kept the goods usable. A guinea was twenty-one shillings. A weaver in the East End might clear five shillings a week. Split among a gang of three or four, one night’s work could still beat a month of more honest labor. The big London outfit, the Borough Gang of Ben Crouch, supplied St Thomas’s and St Bartholomew’s teaching hospitals, and the private anatomy schools. 

 

One of the Resurrection Men, Joseph Naples, kept a diary for 1811–12. It reads like a delivery ledger: which churchyard, which hospital, what was paid, who had to be bribed to look the other way. The schools were the customers. They asked few questions and paid cash.

Burke and Hare, and Murder 

Edinburgh, Scotland, ran the same market, just smaller tighter, and even more macabre. In November 1827 a tenant died in a lodging house in Tanner’s Close owing back rent. No family came for the body. William Hare and his wife ran the house, and they sold the body to Dr Robert Knox, the most popular anatomy lecturer in the city, for £7 10s. Knox wanted a steady supply and taught in the Paris style, which meant a corpse for the students, not a diagram.

William Burke was a lodger and laborer who lived at that same lodging house. Burke and Hare did the arithmetic and skipped the churchyard entirely. Over the next ten months they killed sixteen people, mostly poor, old, drunk, or alone, the sort of folks nobody would miss quickly. The method was suffocation: one held the victim down, the other closed the mouth and nose. No wounds, so the body still looked like a natural death when it reached the table. The word “burking” came out of that. Knox’s assistants paid £8 to £10 a body and did not inspect too closely. Hare turned king’s evidence. Burke was hanged on 28 January 1829, then dissected in public. His skeleton is still in Edinburgh. Knox was never charged. The crowd burned him in effigy anyway.

Bishop, Williams, and May: the London Burkers

London eventually produced its own murderous gang. John Bishop, Thomas Williams, and James May already worked the churchyards. Bishop later claimed five hundred to a thousand bodies over twelve years, sold to St Bartholomew’s, St Thomas’s, and King’s College. In November 1831 they brought a suspiciously fresh boy to King’s College and asked twelve guineas. The school offered nine and then noticed the body had not been buried. Bishop and Williams were hanged that December. May was transported. The papers called them the London Burkers.

Parliament had tolerated grave robbery for decades because the schools needed the bodies and the victims were mostly poor. Murder made the arrangement indefensible. The Anatomy Act of 1832 did not stop the body snatching. It changed who did it and who got paid. Unclaimed bodies from workhouses and hospitals could now be sent to the schools by law. The Resurrection Men lost their market almost overnight. The supply became the poor who died with no one to claim them, and the payment was made to an institution instead of a gang.

The living needed something the dead still had. The schools needed subjects. The gangs needed cash. After 1832 the state needed the schools supplied without a scandal. The corpse was the goods in every version of the deal. Only the middleman changed.

Similar questions as the teeth: If the only way to train the surgeon who might cut on you later was a body taken from someone who could not refuse, whose body should it be, and who should be allowed to sell it?

Suggested Reading

• Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1987, revised 2001)
• Sarah Wise, The Italian Boy: Murder and Grave-Robbery in 1830s London (2004)
• Lisa Rosner, The Anatomy Murders (2009)

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Shadows of the Temple: Rise and Brutal Fall of the Knights Templar

Dear Shadow Tribe,

Picture this: A handful of hard-eyed knights in the dust of Jerusalem, barely a decade after the First Crusade liberated the Holy City from its Muslim conquers in 1099. Pilgrims were still murdered on the roads. Bandits and raiders waited in the hills. 

 

Then, in 1119, a French knight named Hugues de Payens and eight companions stepped forward and offered a solution that would echo for centuries. They would become warrior-monks. Poor. Celibate. Armed. Their headquarters sat on the Temple Mount itself, in the shadow of what they believed was Solomon’s Temple. From that choice of ground, they took their name: the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. The Knights Templar.

They were never meant to become what they became.

At first they were just bodyguards for the faithful on pilgrimage. Then the Church blessed them. Donations poured in. Land. Gold. Castles. Within a generation the white mantle and red cross of the Knights Templar were known from Scotland to the Levant. 

 

They fought like fanatics, held the line when others broke, and developed something that would prove far more dangerous than swords: a network of commanderies and safe houses that let them move money across continents without the usual risks of travel. Kings borrowed from them. Pilgrims deposited coin in one place and withdrew it in another. In an age of iron and superstition, the Templars became bankers, quartermasters, and private army all at once.

 

Think of a modern BlackRock and Blackwater merging, with religious zeal and official recognition. Power like that does not go unnoticed, unenvied, or unfeared.

And then the shadows closed in.

By the early 1300s the Holy Land was lost to its Muslim conquers once more. The order’s purpose had blurred. King Philip IV of France was drowning in debt, much of it owed to the Knights Templar. On Friday the 13th of October, 1307, the King's agents struck across the his kingdom at dawn. This is the origin of Friday the 13th being viewed as unlucky and dangerous.

 

Grand Master Jacques de Molay and hundreds of his brothers were seized. The charges were conveniently invented, but pure nightmare fuel for the medieval mind: denial of Christ, spitting on the cross, secret rites, and the worship of a mysterious head or idol they supposedly called Baphomet. 

 

Under torture, many confessed. Some later recanted. It did not matter. In 1312 the Pope dissolved the order. Two years later, de Molay and a handful of the last leaders burned alive on a slow fire on an island in the Seine. Legend claims the Grand Master cursed both king and pope as the flames rose. Both cursed men were dead within the year. Coincidence? History rarely answers cleanly.

What remains is the silence that followed, and the stories that refused to die.

No great treasure was ever found in the Temple’s vaults. No idol of Baphomet surfaced in the inventories. The confessions were extracted under conditions that would make any modern court throw the case out. Most serious historians see a political hit job. A powerful, secretive, wealthy order outlived its usefulness and threatened a desperate king. Yet the secrecy that once protected the Templars also damned them. Closed chapter meetings. Private initiation rites. A network that answered only to its own hierarchy and the Pope. In the dark, people imagine monsters.

And so the Templars slipped into the deeper current of Western memory as keepers of forbidden knowledge, guardians of lost relics, and the original shadow brotherhood. Some claim the order never truly died, that it simply went underground, carrying its secrets into Scotland, into Switzerland, into Freemasonry, into places where the official narrative refused to look. Whether any of that is true is almost beside the point. The real power of the Knights Templar was never just in their swords or their ledgers. It was in the way they occupied the borderland between the sacred and the forbidden, the visible and the hidden.

Seven centuries later, the red cross still carries a charge. Friday the 13th still feels like doom. And somewhere in the back of the mind, a question lingers: what does a society do when the men it once trusted to guard the light become too comfortable in the dark?

 

For Further Reading

• Dan Jones – The Templars: The Rise and Spectacular Fall of God’s Holy Warriors.
• Dan Jones – Crusaders: The Epic History of the Wars for the Holy Lands.
• Michael Haag – The Templars: The History and the Myth.
• Barbara Frale – The Templars: The Secret History Revealed.
• Thomas Asbridge – The First Crusade: A New History. 

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The Corpse in Your Mouth

Would You Wear Dentures Made from a Corpse?

 

Dear Shadow Tribe, 

 

Do you know this bit of macabre history? In the 18th and 19th centuries, dentures were commonly made out of human teeth sourced from dead people. The teeth were often taken from battlefields, graveyards, morgues, and even executed criminals.

If no other options existed, would you wear dentures made from a corpse?

Most modern folk would recoil. We live in a sanitized age that pretends death is distant, clinical, and best left to professionals behind closed doors. But history rarely grants us that luxury. For a couple of centuries, the best false teeth money could buy came straight from the jaws of the recently dead.

Human teeth were preferred because they looked natural. Ivory bases (usually hippopotamus, walrus, or elephant) were carved to fit the gums, then real human front teeth were pinned into place. Animal teeth or fully carved ivory substitutes existed, but they lacked the right color and shape. Wealthy patients wanted something that fooled the eye across a dinner table.

Supply was the problem. Living donors sometimes sold their teeth out of desperation, but the quality was uneven and the pool limited. Grave robbers, provided another stream, lifting teeth from fresh corpses destined for the anatomists’ tables. Executed criminals and unclaimed bodies from morgues added to the stock. Still, demand outstripped what the dead of ordinary life could provide.

Then came the battlefields.

The Napoleonic Wars, and especially the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, turned the trade into something on an industrial scale. Tens of thousands of young, relatively healthy soldiers lay scattered across the field. Scavengers, be they locals, surviving troops, or just opportunistic looters who traveled specifically for the harvest, moved among the corpses with pliers. Front teeth were the prize. Molars were harder to extract and reshape, so they were often left behind. The teeth were sorted into matched sets, strung together, and shipped by the barrel-full back to Britain and beyond. Dentists boiled them (the extent of their “sterilization”), cut off the roots, and fixed them into the ivory bases.

Waterloo Teeth

These became known as “Waterloo teeth.” The name stuck long after the battle itself, applied to any set of healthy young teeth pulled from the fallen. Some wearers even took pride in them. It was better to wear the teeth of a soldier cut down in his prime than those of a disease-ridden pauper or a hanged thief. The practice didn’t die with Waterloo. Teeth from later conflicts, including the American Civil War, continued well into the 1860s.

By the mid-19th century, better materials (porcelain teeth, vulcanite bases) finally made human teeth less necessary. The trade faded. But for decades, countless mouths carried the teeth of strangers who had died violently, anonymously, or under the hangman’s noose.

There is something profoundly intimate about that. A dead man’s grin becomes your smile. His bite becomes yours. The boundary between the living and the dead grows thin in the space between your lips.

We tell ourselves we are more civilized now. Our dentures are resin and plastic, mass-produced, hygienic, and free of any personal history. Yet the older practice forces a harder look at mortality and necessity. When the body fails and the alternatives are worse, people have always taken what the dead no longer need.

So the question remains.

If no other options existed... if your only path to eating, speaking, and facing the world with a complete set of teeth required wearing the teeth of a corpse, would you do it? Would you wear them?

 

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Elizabeth Báthory: Blood, Power, and the Making of a Vampire Legend

Dear Shadow Tribe,

In the shadowed halls of history, few figures blur the line between documented atrocity and pure myth as thoroughly as Elizabeth Báthory. Born August 7, 1560, into one of the most powerful Protestant noble families in the Kingdom of Hungary, she died on August 21, 1614, sealed inside her own castle. Between those dates lies a story of torture, hundreds of dead young women, political maneuvering, and the birth of one of the most enduring images in Western horror: the aristocratic woman who bathed in the blood of virgins to keep her beauty.

The Historical Woman 

Elizabeth Báthory (unknown artist)

Elizabeth (Erzsébet) Báthory belonged to a dynasty that produced kings, princes, and warlords. Her uncle was Stephen Báthory, King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. The family controlled vast holdings in what is now Hungary, Slovakia, and Transylvania. At fifteen she married Count Ferenc Nádasdy, a celebrated military commander known as the Black Knight of Hungary. The marriage brought her Castle Čachtice (Csejte), a fortress that would later become both prison and tomb.

Count Nádasdy spent long periods away at war against the Ottomans. Elizabeth managed the estates. After his death in 1604, rumors of cruelty intensified, leading King Matthias of Hungary to order an investigation led by György Thurzó. In late December 1610, Thurzó’s men raided Čachtice. Servants were arrested. Testimony was taken. The number of murders claimed ranged wildly, from dozens to more than six hundred victims, mostly peasant girls and some of lower nobility.

Four of her closest servants were tried in 1611. Three were executed. Elizabeth herself never stood trial. Noble blood and political calculation spared her the scaffold. Instead she was confined to a suite of rooms in her own castle, some accounts saying bricked in with only narrow slits for air and food. She died there in 1614 at the age of fifty-four.

Modern historians remain divided. Some accept that serious crimes occurred, though the body count was likely far lower than the sensational figures (estimates of 50 to 80 are now more common among researchers). Others argue the case was inflated or even fabricated to seize her wealth and neutralize a powerful, independent widow in a time of shifting Habsburg power. Confessions were extracted under torture. Key documents vanished. The most lurid details of the systematic blood baths do not appear in the contemporary records that survive.

The Birth of a Legend

The vampire image arrived later. The first detailed printed account that transformed Elizabeth into a blood-obsessed beauty-seeker was published in 1729 by the Jesuit László Turóczi. More than a century after her death, he described the countess discovering that a servant’s blood, splashed on her skin during a beating, left that patch of flesh looking younger. From that moment, according to his tale, she began collecting the blood of virgins for ritual baths.

This story emerged precisely when Europe was in the grip of its great vampire panics of the early eighteenth century. Reports of the undead rising from graves in the Balkans and Central Europe filled pamphlets and official reports. The Blood Countess and the vampire became twins in the popular imagination.

By the nineteenth century the fusion was complete in folklore and literature. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) drew on the aristocratic female predator (Amazon link). 

 

Some researchers have suggested Bram Stoker was aware of the Báthory material while writing Dracula (1897)(Amazon link), though the primary historical model for the Count remains Vlad Țepeș (see my prior article). Still, the parallel is obvious: a noble of the Carpathian region, associated with Transylvania, accused of monstrous cruelty, and forever linked to the idea that blood grants power over time itself.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the image only grew. Films, novels, metal albums, video games, and gothic fashion all returned to the woman who supposedly sought immortality in other people’s blood. The historical Elizabeth, whatever her real crimes, had been absorbed into the larger mythology of the vampire.

Why the Myth Endures

The story satisfies several deep cultural hungers at once. It offers a female counterpart to the male vampire lord, a figure of beauty, cruelty, and aristocratic privilege. It plays on the ancient association of blood with life-force and youth. It allows later generations to project their own fears (of aging, of powerful women, of the hidden sadism of the elite) onto a single, spectacular villainess. 

Yet the historical record is more ambiguous and more interesting than the legend. A real woman of immense wealth and status was accused of extraordinary violence in a brutal age. Whether she was a sadistic killer, a political victim, or something in between, the machinery of rumor, politics, religion, and later gothic taste turned her into something larger: a living bridge between documented history and the modern vampire myth.

 

For Further Reading

• Infamous Lady: The True Story of Countess Erzsébet Báthory: Second Edition, by Kimberly L. Craft.
• The Private Letters of Countess Erzsébet Báthory, by Kimberly L. Craft. 
• Countess Dracula : Life and Times of Elisabeth Bathory, the Blood Countess, by Tony Throne.
• The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster, by Shelly Puhak. 

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Grigori Rasputin’s Wife, Family and Living Legacy

Check out my original Rasputin post: Grigori Rasputin: Siberian Mystic Who Shadowed the Romanov Throne. 

 

Dear Shadow Tribe,

While the world remembers Grigori Rasputin as the wild-eyed Siberian mystic who cast a hypnotic shadow over the Russian imperial family, fewer know the quieter, more grounded side of the man: the peasant husband, father, and progenitor of a bloodline that survived revolution, persecution, and exile. His family life reveals the strange duality of a man who wandered the empire as a holy mystic while maintaining ties to a simple Siberian household.

The Loyal Peasant Wife

In February 1887, at about age 18, Rasputin married Praskovya (Praskoviya) Fedorovna Dubrovina, a local peasant girl from the area around Pokrovskoye, Siberia. Their marriage was typical of rural Russian life at the time, yet it endured decades of separation and scandal. Praskovya stayed behind in their village, raising the children and managing the household while her husband embarked on religious pilgrimages and later rose to infamy in St. Petersburg's political world. She remained devoted to him until his death in 1916, reportedly untroubled by rumors of his many affairs, even once allegedly remarking that “he has enough for all.”

Seven Children, Three Survivors

The couple had seven children, but only three survived to adulthood amid the harsh realities of Siberian peasant life in late Tsarist Russia:

• Dmitry Grigoryevich Rasputin (born 1895). The son. After his father’s assassination and the Bolshevik Revolution, he faced property confiscation and Soviet repression. His later fate involved arrest, disappearance and probable death into the system of labor camps.
• Maria (Matryona) Grigorievna Rasputina (1898–1977). The most famous and resilient of the children. She moved to St. Petersburg to join her father at the height of his influence. After the Revolution, she fled Russia, lived in Europe, and eventually settled in the United States. Maria worked as a cabaret dancer, circus performer (including lion taming), shipyard riveter during WWII (she was an actual Rosie the Riveter), and wrote memoirs defending her father’s memory. She became a U.S. citizen and died in Los Angeles.
• Varvara (Varya) Grigorievna Rasputina (born 1900).Younger daughter. Like her siblings, she endured Soviet persecution. Details of her later life are scarcer, but she too suffered under the new regime.

 
Rasputin maintained contact with his family even as he became a fixture at the Romanov court. His daughters, particularly Maria, spent time with him in the capital, adding a human (and sometimes controversial) domestic layer to the mystic’s public persona.

The Living Shadow Lineage

Public Domain Image

 
Rasputin’s direct male line appears to have ended, but his bloodline continues through Maria. She had two daughters with her first husband, Boris Soloviev:

• Tatyana Soloviev (1920–2009)
• Maria Solovieff (1922–1976)

 
Through this line, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren exist today. Notable among them is Laurence (or Laurance) Huot-Solovieff, a great-granddaughter who has publicly discussed the family legacy and visited Russia. Other descendants, such as Valerie Eo-Theron, have also appeared in media exploring the Rasputin heritage.

The family endured immense hardship after 1917, including arrests by the NKVD, loss of rights, and exile. Yet fragments of the Rasputin lineage persist into the 21st century, a quiet reminder that even the most notorious figures leave behind ordinary human threads.

Father, Mystic, Legend

Rasputin’s family story humanizes the legend without diminishing his creepy mystical edge. The wandering holy man who allegedly healed a tsarevich through prayer and presence was also a husband who left his wife in Siberia, and a father whose children carried his controversial identity through revolution and beyond. In the hidden corridors of history, bloodlines like this remind us how personal legacies intertwine with the fall of empires.

What fascinates you most about Rasputin’s family? The loyal wife left behind, the survivor daughter Maria, or the living descendants still walking in his shadow? Drop your thoughts below or join the Shadow Tribe (just click here)  for more exclusive deep dives, sources, and discussions.

Maria Rasputin’s Memoirs

Maria (Matryona) Rasputina wrote three main memoirs defending and humanizing her father. She portrayed him as a simple, deeply spiritual man with a “big heart” whose reputation was ruined by enemies, slander, and misinterpretation. Historians often note that these accounts are biased and not always reliable, but they remain valuable primary sources offering a daughter’s intimate perspective. All three are currently out-of-print and hard to find.

• The Real Rasputin (1929). Her first memoir.
• Rasputin, My Father (1932 / English editions in the 1930s). The most well-known and widely referenced. It focuses on family life, his relationship with the Romanovs, and refutes many scandals.
• The Man Behind the Myth (1977, co-authored with Patte Barham). Published shortly after her death; a later, more reflective account.

  

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John Dee: Elizabethan Magus and Shadow Architect of Empire

Dear Shadow Tribe,

In the shadowed corridors of Elizabethan England, where the Renaissance met the occult, few figures loom larger, or more mysteriously, than John Dee (July 13, 1527 – 1608/09). Mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, alchemist, Hermetic philosopher, and advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, Dee embodied the fusion of emerging science and ancient hidden knowledge. For those drawn to hidden histories and unseen realms, Dee stands as a guardian of forbidden wisdom, a man who sought to pierce the veil between worlds.

Early Life and Rise to Prominence

Born in London to a Welsh-descended family, Dee showed talent early. He studied at Cambridge, becoming a fellow at the newly founded Trinity College. As a stage magician, Dee used mechanical effects, using pulleys and mirrors to create illusions like a flying scarab, earning him an early reputation as a magician, a label that would later haunt him.

Dee traveled Europe, studying under luminaries like Gemma Frisius and befriending Gerardus Mercator. He amassed one of England’s greatest private libraries (thousands of volumes) at his Mortlake home, turning it into a hub for scholars. Under Queen Mary I, he faced arrest on charges of “conjuring” for casting horoscopes, but he later became a trusted advisor to her successor, Elizabeth I. Dee selected the date for her coronation and served as her court astrologer and scientific consultant.

The Visionary of Empire and Hidden Knowledge

Dee was no mere courtier. He coined the term “British Empire” and advocated for English colonization of the New World, blending navigation, mathematics, and imperial ambition. His works, like the Mathematical Preface to Euclid and General and Rare Memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (Amazon link), influenced exploration and laid intellectual groundwork for expansion.

Yet Dee’s true passion lay in the shadows. Disillusioned with earthly limits, he turned to scrying, gazing into crystals or obsidian mirrors, to contact angels. In 1582, he partnered with Edward Kelley (Talbot), a colorful and controversial scryer. Together, they conducted “spiritual conferences,” recording supposed conversations with entities like the archangel Uriel.

Enochian Magic: The Language of Angels

From these sessions emerged Enochian magic, a system including a unique angelic language supposedly spoken by Adam before the Fall and dictated by angels (and linked to the biblical Enoch). They used a Holy Table inscribed with Enochian letters, seals, and a shew-stone. Dee documented extensive diaries of these communications, which touched on cosmology, prophecy, and divine secrets.

The work produced texts like Liber Logaeth (the Book of the Speech of God) (Amazon link) and drew on influences including the Book of Soyga (Amazon link). While some view Kelley as a charlatan or the sessions as elaborate delusion, others claim genuine occult revelation. Elements influenced later figures like Aleister Crowley. Dee’s pursuits also carried risks. Demonic encounters appeared in the records, and accusations of necromancy followed him.

Later Years, Travels, and Legacy

In 1583, Dee, Kelley, and their families traveled Europe, seeking patronage from Rudolf II and others while continuing angelic work. Controversies arose, including a notorious angelic directive for wife-sharing. Dee returned to England in 1589 to find his library vandalized. He served as Warden of Christ’s College, Manchester, but died in relative poverty at Mortlake. His grave is lost.

Dee’s legacy endures in hidden history: a possible spy (linked to 007 via Francis Walsingham?), cryptographic interpretations of his angelic writings, and the enduring allure of blending science, mysticism, and empire-building. His obsidian mirror and other artifacts reside in the British Museum, tangible links to his shadow realm explorations.

Some researchers believe Dee also served as an agent in Walsingham’s intelligence network. Dee reportedly signed sensitive correspondence with the code '007', the same digits that would later inspire Ian Fleming’s famous spy. The zeros symbolized watchful eyes, while the seven represented Dee’s devoted service to the Queen. In the dangerous game of Tudor politics, Dee’s travels and occult reputation may have provided perfect cover for espionage.

For Further Reading

• John Dee and the Empire of Angels: Enochian Magick and the Occult Roots of the Modern World  (Amazon link)
• Sacred Symbol of Oneness by John Dee of London: An English translation of John Dee's 1564 Monas Hieroglyphica (Amazon link)
• Mysteriorum Libri Quinque: Dr. John Dee's Five Books of Mysteries (Weiser Enochian Library) (Amazon link)
• The Life of Dr. John Dee (1527 - 1608) (Amazon link)

John Dee exemplifies the quest for truth beyond official narratives, pursuing angelic wisdom amid political intrigue, scientific revolution, and personal sacrifice. In an age of technocratic control, his story reminds us that the greatest power often lies in the unseen.

 

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