Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Among the mysteries that history keeps, few are as strange as the disappearance not of a single person but of an entire army. The Ninth Legion of Rome — the Legio IX Hispana, a body of some five thousand trained fighting men with their officers, their eagle standard, their engineers and clerks and long, proud record of service — marched across the pages of the ancient world for well over a century, and then simply vanished from them. There is no account of its final battle, no record of its disbanding, no monument to its dead. At one moment the Ninth is present in the histories and the inscriptions, a real and formidable force garrisoning the northern frontier of Britain; at the next it is gone, and the sources fall silent, as though five thousand men had walked off the edge of the known world. What became of the lost Ninth Legion has been argued for centuries, and no one can say with certainty to this day. An Eagle on the Northern Frontier The Ninth was an old and distinguished leg...

Beneath the streets of Rome, in a network of underground galleries that extends for hundreds of kilometers through the volcanic tufa rock on which the city stands, lies one of the most important and least visited art collections in the world. The Roman catacombs — underground burial complexes used by Christians, Jews, and pagans between roughly the second and fifth centuries CE — preserve the earliest sustained body of Christian visual art in existence: frescoes painted directly on the plaster of burial chambers, carved sarcophagi, incised inscriptions, and a rich vocabulary of symbols that represent the first attempts of a new religious community to give visual form to its beliefs about death, resurrection, and the nature of the divine. The word "catacomb" itself comes from the Latin catacumbas — "near the hollows" — a name originally applied to a specific area along the Appian Way south of Rome before becoming the general term for all underground Christian buri...