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Lore

Lore 294: Upon Reflection

Duration
34m
Broadcast on
01 Dec 2025
Audio Format
other

She's the most famous name in horror, and the theories behind the legend are more frightening than you'd ever expect.

Narrated and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with writing by GennaRose Nethercott, research by Cassandra de Alba, and music by Chad Lawson.

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©2025 Aaron Mahnke. All rights reserved.

Hey Denver! The Wayfair Store's grand opening weekend starts November 20th. Come shop, celebrate, and save with up to 80% off in store all weekend long. Plus, the first hundred customers in line each day get a free $50 gift card. Bring the whole family for giveaways, music, entertainment, and surprises. So mark your calendar and head to the Wayfair store at avenues at Northfield November 20th through 22nd for our grand opening celebration. Wayfair, every style, every home. When you're running a growing business, the right systems can unlock your full sales potential and make fulfilling every order effortless. Switch to ShipStation before peak season so you're prepped and ready before the rush hits. ShipStation connects Shopify, Amazon, TikTok Shop, and over 200 more marketplaces with one platform that does it all. You can manage orders, sink inventory, track returns, all automatically. Everything your operation needs, all in one place. Upgrade your shipping operations to stress-proof your biggest sales days and capture every bit of potential revenue. Go to shipstation.com and use code "audio" and get 30 days free. The exquisite green goblet must have taken untold hours of labor to create. From its intricately carved sides to the guilt bronze vines entangling the rib and foot of the vessel, the Lycurgus cup is regarded as one of the most impressive examples of ancient glasswork in all the world. Fashioned in 4th century Rome, the Lycurgus cup is named for the mythological king Lycurgus and his rather memorable death. After angering Dionysius, the god of revelry, the god decided that revenge is best served absolutely insane and so he drove Lycurgus mad. In his altered state, the king mistook his own son for a length of ivy and pruned away the boy's nose, ears, fingers, and toes before perishing himself. In another version of the myth, Lycurgus mistakes his own foot for ivy and snips it clean off. The tellings vary, but all involve poor king Lycurgus tormented by vines and ivy to the point of death, which is exactly the scene the stunning cup portrays. Chiseled into the thick glass are horrifying images of king Lycurgus being tortured to death by grape vines, disturbing imagery that scholars believe was meant to dissuade people from drinking wine. It's a stunning piece of workmanship, but it's not even the carving that makes this 1700 year old item truly mind boggling, but a secret held within the material itself. Because when light is shown through the opaque green glass, the entire goblet turns a translucent, bloody red. It's called dichroic glass, an ancient practical effect achieved by embedding powdered gold and silver into molten glass. The result? A mystical color changing spectacle that must have seemed to the people of ancient Rome? A little like magic. From Cinderella's glass slippers and snow whites glass coffin to fortune tellers crystal balls, glass has long been associated with magic and mystery, and sometimes the most frightening secret it holds is none other than your own reflection. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore. Today we see our faces everywhere. From selfies and makeup compacts to bathroom mirrors, we glimpse ourselves hundreds of times every day. It's easy to forget the fact that for much of human history, the only time you'd ever see your own face was in the abstracted ripples of a pool of water. The earliest mirrors ever discovered date to around 6000 BC, and to put that in perspective, modern Homo sapiens had already been on the scene for more than 290,000 years by then. That's a long time without a reflection. Now, these first mirrors didn't look like ours, of course. No, they were made from polished obsidian, and rather than hanging on a wall, they were found buried within women's tombs in what's now central Turkey. As metallurgy developed and people started making mirrors out of brass, silver, and gold, they became more common, but still, it would be thousands of years before mirrors became regular household objects. Amazingly, it wasn't until the late 1600s that what we now think of as a modern mirror, that is, plate glass with a reflective coating, began making its way into European homes. And by European homes, I mean, rich people's houses. Because though these mirrors would have been no larger than a book, a single one cost the equivalent of several hundred dollars in today's money. But before you start imagining mirrors as the Dyson air wrap of the 17th century,

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