Episode 41: An Interview with EA Fortneaux | Show Notes
Where to find EA Fortneaux and pre-order FOLLOWING THE SNOW:
Following The Snow preorder link: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CC6Q6D6Z
EA Fortneaux on Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@fortneauxwrites
EA Fortneaux’s website: https://www.fortneaux.com/
Here’s a copy of our interview outline!
Thanks for being willing to be our first non-horror writer on the show! Corinne is eternally grateful. Could you give us a quick synopsis of your debut novel, FOLLOWING THE SNOW?
Following the snow is about a young women who is born under the goddesses constellation which in Aerta signifies that she is one of the chosen Obligates who will be tasked with providing leadership to one of the four kingdoms that stood strong after a massive war between magical and non-magical forces a hundred years in the past.
What drew you into the world of Fantasy Romance?
Sure, I've always been an avid reader and make-believer. I am also a history and archaeology lover. I combined my two loves and began thinking through and creating a world built around fantastical concepts and then I threw in some spice because well, spice holds my interests firmly.
When we were first asking you about the book, you mentioned you drew from real-world folklore when developing your fantasy world. What can you tell us about that without giving away spoilers?
You will feel the presence of folklore throughout the tale. For example our main female character is first introduced to legends and lore as a youngin who was board with her reading lessons until her tutor introduces her to a text called Magika and Menagerie. She will reference that text throughout the story and of course, some of the sayings and colloquialisms will reference their folklore as well.
Growing up in KY I was surrounded by folktales…seers and whispers…7th son of the Severn son
Bloody bones and Haints and banshees
What was it like to adapt folklore to suit your world building? Was anything difficult? Or did you have no problem “filing off the serial numbers”?
Lore and legends are such an integral part of many cultures, both today and in their histories, so I wanted my world to be steeped in and have a solid use of lore as a means of helping the reader to understand the characters on a deeper level.
The continent has its own pantheon, Gods that they venerate and of course a past where magic and fantastical creatures once existed. When looking to create a world and the differing cultures within it I drew upon the tales of not only nordic/Irish/welsh cultures but, Greco-Roman and Mesopotamian as well.
I knew I wanted strong goddesses like Inanna and athena. I knew I wanted to use stories and tales as a means of establishing thoughts around superstition and morality. And I love things like trolls and pixies and wraiths so I wanted a way to have them included as well.
I know you’ve got a pretty good background in research - are there any skills you’ve developed that came in handy for writing?
-researching material cultures.
-archaeological digs, the fact that I’m not a writer.
-The eyes for small differences for
You also work full time, and you’re involved with pretty time-intensive hobbies like Society for Creative Anachronism. How did you balance all these competing priorities?
Actually I allowed myself grace to take breaks, and grace to not write for a few days at a time. I tend to be hyper focused and I knew that if I gave up everything to write constantly, I would ultimately end up damaging relationships or missing out on things I valued. I set goal dates however, but made sure they were obtainable. I also have a partner who was willing to take up so much slack around the house and I will be forever indebted to him for that.
Also, many of my hobbies allow me to write in a more realistic way, so it was important to me to study and think about things that I knew would be included in the text such as
Weaving: to describe textures and cloth
Fighting: to write in a more realistic way about movements and battle
We’ve talked a lot about fairy tales in folklore recently on the show. Are there any stories that you dream of retelling yourself?
I do. In my day job as an educator I think it is very important for when I teach a culture's history to either find a source to retell or take on the task of retelling excerpts for a peoples mythology or morality tales. For example.
-I have been able to find video sources of the Griots in Africa sharing their oral histories. But when I couldnt find the same for the Twin Heros of ancient Maya, I tried to do my best to retell the tale of their time in Xibalba.
Now, that being said. I would love to retell some of the classic tales with their more morbid endings. The little mermaid for example.
Favorite fantasy creatures?
MadreMonte- Colombian folklore, she is said to protect nature and if you are doing wrong she puts thickets and vegetation in your way to make you lose your path.
I love Harpies. Ugly winged women who snatch things from the unsuspecting. Seen in greek writings and felt all the way through the middle ages.
I love trolls in many iterations and gnomes and mermaids and minotaurs.
What authors have inspired you, fantasy or otherwise?
-Okay so this one may sound weird, but the oral traditionalists I've heard tales from have been my favorites. I have fallen in love with Russian and Hungarian tales through storytellers in the Society for Creative anachronisms. But I also love:
Hans Christian Andersons The Snow Queen, the little mermaid.
-Diana Galbodon
-Tolkien
-Suzanne collins
-Julie garwood
You’re also a singer, so I’ve gotta ask: Did you create a playlist for writing? Or for specific characters? Any pieces we’ve gotta listen to for the right ~vibes~?
Actually I wrote songs for the book that will be recorded and put up on my website for readers to hear what they sounded like in my head. You have local ditties that you’d never sing in from of your parents and war ballards to boot.
“The gong sounds, and the men called to arm—to keep fair love from fadin’.
And the horn blasts—but his banner do fall… to the goddess we all are prayin’
“The clangs sound… and the men, they do fall—to keep their foes from invadin’,
And they fight strong, but not all make it home… their mem’ries safe with their maidens.’
I will say however that Sam Smith’s Unholy was often in my head as were some southern gothic tunes. Okay and lets not forget Lizzo and Luciano pavirarri. Truly though, I can't write and listen to music with words because ill just sing along and forget myself.
Last but certainly not least - where can our listeners find you? When does FOLLOWING THE SNOW come out? Is there a preorder link we can make sure to include in our show notes?
-My ebook is currently available for preorder on Amazon and will be made available in Print, there, and at other retailers on its August 22nd release date.
Episode 40: Folklore in Pop Culture pt 2 | Show Notes
Amanda’s Notes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giselle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vila_(fairy)
https://petipasociety.com/giselle/
Alright, I am so excited about my topic for today. So, as you know Corinne, I spent the entirety of elementary and high school taking ballet classes and performing. And now I’m going to make that everyone else’s problem! Today I would like to talk about the ballet Giselle and the liberties it takes with the story of the Wilis, or the Vili (singular Vila) from Slavic folklore.
So, the ballet. First of all, ballet is probably the one place where I feel like you should go into the performance spoiled for the plot so that you can notice some of the more subtle details in the dancers’ performances so I am in fact going to sum up the entire plot here. Deal with it.
The ballet is set in Germany in the Middle Ages in a small farm community. Act one opens on an idyllic sunny autumn morning with a man named Loys courting Giselle, a peasant woman with a weak heart. Loys is new to the town, and the local gamekeeper Hilarion (also in love with Giselle) is supes suspicious of this new guy. And it’s totally not just jealousy, nope no ma’am. Giselle’s mother discourages just, so much of what’s going on. She’s like hey, maybe stick with the good local boy Hilarion, I also don’t trust the new guy. Hey daughter of mine, maybe stop dancing through the streets. I don’t care how happy you are, you have a weak heart and shouldn’t be so physically active. Giselle is all like, don’t care, do what I want.
That day, a party of noblemen and women show up in town and decide to stop there to break for a meal and to mingle with the commonfolk. Loys immediately hides himself away. The noblewoman Bathilde is absolutely enchanted with Giselle and the two discuss love. Bathilde talks about her recent engagement, Giselle talks about her new love with the new guy in town. The nobles eventually pack up, and Loys comes back to dance with Giselle.
Of course, act one can’t end there. Hilarion finds a very nice sword and a hunting horn, which he blows. The group of nobles turn around to come back as they recognise the horn. Once the noble party is back in town Loys is exposed as not being a commoner, but as Duke Albrecht, Lady Bathilde’s betrothed.
Giselle…does not handle it well. She goes a smidge mad and starts dancing a really frenetic version of her moments with the Duke, getting faster and wilder until, as her mother feared, her heart stops from the overexertion and grief. Thus ends act one. Super cheerful, have a fun intermission.
Act two is where our episode topic appears as we are introduced to the Wilis, the vengeful spirits of women who died before their wedding days. Led by the Queen of the Wilis, Martha, the Wilis take turns dancing with any man they come across until the men die of exhaustion. And it’s Giselle’s first night as one of these spirits. First, Hilarion comes by her grave with flowers. And yeah, I’d be distraught if my decision to blow a random-ass horn killed the person I loved. Fair. He is of course found by the Wilis, who dance him to exhaustion, and then I guess upset about how long it’s taking to kill the guy they drown him in a nearby lake.
Now, our favorite asshole Duke Albrecht ALSO came to the cemetery and asked Giselle’s forgiveness for his part in her death. And because we’re supposed to believe their romance was the real deal she forgives him. Her fellow Wilis however? No, they have the correct reaction and want to dance him to death because sure Hilarion shouldn’t have blown the horn but maybe don’t come up with a fake identity in order to cheat on your fiancee? Controversial, I know. I have very strong opinions about classical ballet plots, tune in next time to hear me complain about the fever-dream that is Coppelia.
Anyway, Giselle does not want her new sisters to dance the Duke to exhaustion because reasons. So she steps in and dances with each spirit that tries to dance with him throughout the night, ending only at dawn when the spirits fade until night falls again.
The ballet was a massive success when it premiered in Paris in 1841 and really injected some renewed appreciation for what was a bit of a dying art at the time.
So how close to the actual mythology was the ballet? Well, we all take poetic license when we write, right?
The Vila is a Slavic fairy-type spirit described as I saw, as similar to a nymph. They are always female spirits and they have an interesting relationship with humanity. Sometimes they are super nice. In fact, in Serbian epic poetry there is usually a Vila helping the hero along the way throughout the entire hero’s journey. But! If you insult a vila they will put a blight on your crops, hurt your livestock, kill you, whatever they’re in the mood for and how bad they perceived the slight.
In Czech folklore they are pretty much always malicious unless you give them a wide berth. They are said to try to entrance men who wander into their territory, often dancing around in a circle to trap the men in the center. Men trapped in this way are never seen again. So you can see the similarities there.
So, how did the “woman who died before marriage” thing happen? And the name change? Well, the brains behind the ballet, Adolphe Adam, read Heinrich Heine’s De l’Allemagne which describes the Wila as a Slavic folklore spirit who died before their wedding day and danced men to death. As far as I can tell this is Heine’s own interpretation of stories he heard and the particular “before the wedding day” thing was a bit of a misinterpretation as some bits of folklore did have the Vila being spirits of woman who died “before their time” which some sources believe to be women who died without becoming mothers.
And that’s my segment!
Corinne’s Notes:
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkie
https://books.google.com/books?id=DLmoKKkxAX0C&pg=PA121#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://books.google.com/books?id=H_3ZAAAAMAAJ&q=Seal-Skin
http://echoes.devin.com/selkie/selkie.html
https://www.thebottleimp.org.uk/2016/12/selkies-sex-and-the-supernatural/
https://www.vikingrune.com/selkies-folktale/
https://www.tor.com/2018/07/13/11-selkie-stories/
https://bookriot.com/ya-books-about-selkies/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swan_maiden
Quick correction: Corinne inadvertently mixed up Heather Dale and Alexander James Adams. Both singers perform folk and/or filk and were active in the 90s and 00s and released music with the first name “Heather”. We regret the error! “The Maiden and the Selkie was performed by Heather Dale, not Alexander James Adams.
As I have threatened Amanda MANY MANY TIMES, I’m doing this edition of Pop Culture Folklore on SELKIES. Because hot damn I love selkies a lot and also we did an episode about them so I had a lot of research close to hand.
I am going to quickly rehash a few of the more common stories on the origins of Selkies - again, this material is largely taken from research I did in our Selkies episode, and I’ve linked to the show notes to that here.
There are a few different takes on where selkies come from, and I’m going to share a few of my favorites, some based in mythology, some based on people trying to explain things that they didn’t have the technology or medical knowledge to explain:
Okay so probably my FAVORITE explanation is that selkies are actually fallen angels. According to some traditions, when God cast out the rebellious angels who sided with our good good GirlBoss Satan, the ones who landed on the earth became what we know as fairies, and the ones who landed in the sea became selkies.
In Norway, there was a common belief that the Finns (by which they meant indigenous Sami people), especially their shamans, could just turn into seals?? Because reasons?? And Magic???? I saw a reference in a book called The Good People about a tale where a Norseman stabbed a seal and then later had his knife returned by a Finn who had a scar from the knife wound. So like. That’s a thing I didn’t know until I did this research
One explanation I’ve seen was that when vikings invaded Orkney, the fur-wearing invaders were somehow mistaken for seals transforming into people
OR intermarriage between the residents of Orkney and Sami and Finn women, who used sealskin kayaks and wore furs
Another variant of this is dark-haired, shipwrecked Spaniards. No I did not make that up.
One of the more science-y leaning explanations I’ve seen is that people were trying to explain syndactyly, which is a condition that causes “webbing” between people’s fingers. Before our understanding of medicine got stronger, a common explanation for any sort of abnormality or deformity was to blame the Fair Folk. So if you had webbed fingers, clearly your mom banged the fae.
Selkies are a popular motif in literature, ballads, and film. They can be categorized as part of a larger “grouping” of folk tale motifs named for the “Swan Maiden” variations of the stories. The basic story beats include a (usually) young man taking an enchanted article of clothing from a (usually) beautiful young woman, thereby acquiring a spouse. So long as the human half of the couple has the enchanted clothing, the supernatural spouse is essentially trapped in marriage. However! Because of the wide variances in animal brides and grooms and their enchanted clothing, they’re not all categorized under the same Aarne-Thompson Index, it’s a little more scattershot than all that. The wikipedia article on Swan Maidens has a better explanation than I can give succinctly.
In terms of *some* of the pop culture where you can find selkie stories, I’ve got a small list that I’ll talk about here. I’ve included some other links that have more, but I’m trying to limit myself to works I’m familiar with.
I’ll start with one of the classics, the 1994 film The Secret of Roan Innish. I’m including this one on a technicality. I think I watched this when I was very very small at my best friend’s house? But I genuinely can’t remember. However, it’s frequently cited in modern tellings of selkie stories and is by all accounts a very charming indie film.
Slightly more contemporary, and one I know for a fact I’ve seen is Cartoon Saloon’s Song of the Sea from 2014, about a young boy who lives with his father and his little sister. His father is a fisherman who wants his children to have nothing to do with the sea, but his sister is nevertheless drawn to it. Three guesses why and the first two don’t count. Cartoon Saloon is probably one of my favorite animation studios out there, so even if you aren’t into Selkies, I recommend watching it just for their unique style.
In terms of literature, the very first time I heard about Selkies was in a Middle Grade novel called THE FOLK KEEPER, by Franny Billingsley. It incorporates a lot of celtic folklore, including stories of selkies. I don’t want to give too much away because it’s such a great story and also has an extremely cute romance. I will fully admit that I only picked it up in the bookstore when I was a kid because the main character’s name was “Corinna”, and I never see anything like my name in books.
Obviously, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the role selkies play in Seanan McGuire’s OCTOBER DAYE series. I love her take on them and how she weaves in just So Much Tragedy. She definitely keeps the core of selkie lore the same while also putting her own spin on things. I can usually be found screaming, crying, and throwing up after reading her books – I highly recommend them.
If you’re looking for music about selkies, there’s the Child Ballad “The Great Silkie Of Sule Skerry”. I also highly recommend Heather Dale’s “The Maiden and the Selkie”, or Talis Kimberly’s “Still Catch the Tide” (Seanan McGuire has a gorgeous cover on her Stars Fall Home album).
Episode 38: Blaming the Fair Folk | Show Notes
Amanda’s Notes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lutin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nain_Rouge
Corinne, I am stealing your schtick here and going with some North American stories by way of France. You know what that means, poor pronunciations for a few minutes! Let’s see how much I can make Corinne cringe during this segment, shall we?
So this episode I am covering the Lutin from France. The Lutin is often compared to the hobgoblin or house-spirit of English folklore. They were known to be obsessed with horses. When they made it across the Atlantic to Quebec one of the more famous stories told about them mentioned farmers coming out to their stables in the morning and finding out that the horses all had their manes and tails braided overnight.
To really tie into today’s topic, I want to focus on a version of the Lutin that made its way to Detroit via French immigrants. Please settle in while I talk about The Nain Rouge.
The story goes that a fortune teller told Detroit’s founder, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, to appease the Nain Rouge. Did our buddy Antoine do this? No! Instead, when he encountered the Nain Rouge he smacked it with his cane and yelled “Get out of my way, you red imp!”.
Believe it or not, causing bodily harm to a fairy didn’t go well for our mortal buddy Antoine. He started to encounter some incredible bits of bad luck. He was accused of abusing his power in Detroit and reassigned to Louisiana. His bad luck didn’t stop there, the French government wasn’t pleased with his performance in Louisiana and had him brought back to France to be imprisoned and stripped of his fortune.
In 1883 Marie Caroline Watson Hamlin’s Legends of Le Detroit described the Nain Rouge as "very red in the face, with a bright, glistening eye; instead of burning, it froze, instead of possessing depth emitted a cold gleam like the reflection from a polished surface, bewildering and dazzling all who came within its focus," and with "a grinning mouth displaying sharp, pointed teeth, completed this strange face". Other sources describe the Nain Rouge as small, having an old man’s face, red and/or black fur, and rotten teeth.
Now, the Legends of Le Detroit is the first known telling of Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac’s encounter and bad luck, written a full 180+ years after the man’s alleged curse. Now, that hasn’t stopped people throughout history claiming that they saw (or they heard about sightings) happening before misfortunes.
For example: The creature is said to have appeared on July 30, 1763 before the Battle of Bloody Run, where 58 British soldiers were killed by Native Americans from Chief Pontiac's Ottawa tribe. Supposedly, the Nain Rouge "danced among the corpses" on the banks of the Detroit River after the battle, and the river "turned red with blood" for days after. According to the tale, all the misfortunes of Governor and General William Hull leading to the surrender of Detroit in the War of 1812 are blamed on the Nain Rouge. Two utility workers claim to have seen the creature just before the 1967 Detroit riots,[2] and supposedly, it was also seen before an ice storm in 1976.
Naturally the Nain Rouge is a big part of city culture. Every spring there’s a community parade, the Marche du Nain Rouge, in which the imp is ceremonially chased out of the city. The parade ends with the imp being burned in effigy to keep it out of the city for another year. Starting in 2012 some lighthearted pro-imp protestors have showed up to the parade echoing the fortune teller’s sentiments to “appease the Nain Rouge”. And that’s my segment.
Corinne’s Notes:
Sources:
https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/4701657/4690221/4725247
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elfshot
https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2021/1021/1237227-fairy-forts-ringforts-superstitions-rural-ireland/
https://www.rte.ie/archives/2017/0202/849502-doomed-delorean-dream/
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-31459851
Hall, A. (2005). CALLING THE SHOTS: THE OLD ENGLISH REMEDY “GIF HORS OFSCOTEN SIE” AND ANGLO-SAXON ‘ELF-SHOT.’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 106(2), 195–209. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43344130
Bonser, W. (1926). Magical Practices against Elves. Folklore, 37(4), 350–363. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1256144
Those Fair Folk! If they’re not helping you through the woods, they’re absolutely wrecking your shit. Western european folklore is chockablock full of ways to avoid the ire of the fae. For example, you’ll recall in the Trees episode we did that certain trees were meant to guard against the supernatural - such as using Hawthorn for protection, or making a churn from ash trees [look up tree name omfg] to keep your butter from being ruined via witchcraft. I’m going to list off a few of the things I found that are blamed on the fair folk before I get into what might actually be my favorite- which I’d never heard of until I started down this research path!
Unexplained paralysis in livestock (frequently referred to as fairy riding)
Tuberculosis was once believed to be caused by the fae!
Fairy Forts in Ireland (which are probably remnants of settlements from circa Stone Age to early Medieval times) are to be left alone. Disturbing one often means you’re going to die young. This is great for archaeologists- there’s a reason there are so many fantastic sites that are well preserved throughout Ireland!
Similarly, Fairy Thorns (i.e. thorn trees/hawthorns) growing in the middle of fields are not to be torn down.
There’s a golf course in Ulster with a fairy thorn that’s been there since it opened in the late 1800s. If your golf ball hits it, you have to apologize or you will have terrible games. You’re to nod to it/greet it as you pass as well.
Reportedly, when Belfast built its ill-fated DeLorean factory in the early 1980s, they tore down a fairy thorn at the location. The factory closed 18 months after it opened. Coincidence? Or Fae malice?
And now for what I’m actually super excited to talk about! Elfshot!
In practical terms, elfshot refers to arrowheads and flints that date back to the Neolithic and Bronze ages. Which is super freaking cool, in my honest opinion. These arrowheads were believed to have been hurled by the fae, most often at cattle, but sometimes at other livestock or people, making them suddenly ill and in pain. In his 1926 essay MAGICAL PRACTICES AGAINST ELVES, Wilfred Bonser (and oh my god how I want to call him Willy Boner but that’s mean) talks about early writings around elfshot and posits that this particular believe was brought by the Anglo-Saxons.
Elfshot was reportedly (and I’ll explain what I mean by that in just a moment), written about rather extensively in medieval medical texts, such as the Leechbook from 900, written for King Alfred (iirc, this is the same text that has a cure for styes that is remarkably effective, as proven by contemporary scientists). Some of these cures for elfshot read as cruel to me as a contemporary person living in the 21st century. One such remedy that Bonser describes includes silently piercing the left ear of the afflicted animal with a knife and striking it on the back with a staff.
In collections of folk remedies for elfshot curated by researchers at Duchas.ie’s (doochas - ch like ch in hebrew) Schools collection in Ireland, one common ingredient I saw was something referred to as “elf stones”, which are small, round white stones. Nine of them plopped into holy water along with a few other ingredients (these other ingredients differed in the collections that I saw) will help cure elfshot in your cattle. I did think it was interesting that it was always nine elf stones, and I haven’t seen any reasons for that specific number in the research I did, but I know I only scratched the surface.
OKAY so remember what I said about elf-shot and medieval medical texts? In 2005, scholar Alaric Hall had some bones to pick with the translations being used in the Leechbook and other similar texts. Much of the research that had been done in the early 20th century seemed to be based around an 1860s translation. Hall goes into a LOT of nitty-gritty detail on both the original Old English (note to self: is this Old English? It looks like it to me, v germanic, and predates the Norman invasion of 1066) and how various scholars have translated (and possibly mistranslated) that particular remedy. His argument is that while yes elves are mentioned at the very end, the remedy itself is not for something called elfshot, it’s for an animal in extreme pain, possibly from having eaten too much and disturbed its digestive system. Horses are rather fragile, ya know? That said, in Hall’s own translation he does note that mention of elves at teh very end and suggests that the original writer was indicating that elves still could have been involved so really you ought to take care and follow the steps outlined.
Episode 37: The Fair Folk | Show Notes
Amanda’s Notes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairy
https://mountainlore.net/2019/02/23/the-fair-folk/
https://thekayseean.com/life-and-culture/appalachian-folklore-part-2-sprites-and-spirits/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%BB%C3%B1n%C3%AB%27h%C3%AF
So excited for this episode! Today we are discussing the fae, the fair folk, fairies. And this is one of those times that it would almost make sense for Corinne to go first, and we’ll get to why here in a bit, but I also don’t want to set the precedent that we know what we’re doing so I’m going to keep right on.
Sources today are as follows: The wikipedia page for “Fairy” because Wikipedia is always my jumping off point, the wikipedia page for “Nunnehi”, an article from The Kay Seean titled “Appalachian Folklore Part 2: Spirits and Sprites” by Austin Leonard, and an article from mountainlore.net call “The Fair Folk” by Steve Gilly.
So to start, what is a fairy? Well, that’s a loaded question. Per the wikipedia page, it’s the umbrella term for a type of creature found in the folklore of various European countries like Celtic folklore, Slavic, Germanic, English and French.
I won’t get too in depth here because I have a feeling you’re about to go freaking feral with the European things, but I did want to point out that some of the theories on the origins of fairies just make me happy so I’m going to talk about them. Deal with it. Various folklorists throughout history have attributed fairy stories to: the dead who were unworthy of heaven, the various children of Eve not mentioned in the Bible, demons, aliens, a species independent of humanity, a proto-human species, and fallen angels. So no real consensus.
So how do we tie this in to the United States? Well. You have your Irish and Scottish immigrants making their way across the Atlantic because aren’t we all trying to escape the English? A decent number of these immigrants end up settling in the Appalachian region.
And what do people bring wherever they go? Their stories. So you have these communities getting set up, isolated from quite a bit of the rest of the country due to the geography of the region, telling stories fairies tricking people. You get stories of fairy rings and warnings to stay away from mushroom circles you find after rain. And you get a community of people primed to twist Native stories to fit their own folklore.
Enter the Cherokee nation and their stories of the Nunnehi. The Nunnehi were said to be a powerful and benevolent type of spirit, between 2 and 7 feet tall. The stories say they worked with healers, fought in battle alongside the Cherokee people, and acted as protectors. There’s even a story that says the Nunnehi came by to warn about Andrew Jackson coming to decimate the Cherokee nation. The Nunnehi offered the people a chance to find refuge in their world outside of ours. This caused a split, with some people choosing to follow and some choosing to stay home and fight.
Ok, so we have our Scots-Irish immigrant communities who talk to the Cherokee people and learn about spirit creatures of great power who like offerings of venison, beadwork, milk, and honey and they go oh! Those are the fairy folk of these hills, got it. And over time the Nunnehi stories were reworked under the lens of British Isles fairy lore in these communities.
To finish out my segment, a couple of fairy related beliefs throughout the Appalchian region. If you find a fairy toadstool ring stand in the center and your wish will come true. When you have a fire going look at the flames. If any of the flames are blue you are being watched by good fairies. That was something my Gramps always told us when we went camping in the summers so I was so happy to find it mentioned when I was doing my research. Don’t throw out your floor sweepings or spent water at night, you might end up tossing them on a fairy you can’t see. And you definitely don’t want to know what happens when you piss off a fairy. And a combined fairy/Christian superstition: if you in a crowded room and it suddenly gets deathly quiet at 20 til or 20 after, you know that either fairies or angels just made their way through. And here I thought it was because I made a joke about my trauma again.
And that’s my segment!
Corinne’s Notes:
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tylwyth_Teg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duende
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaneque
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirt_Sikes
https://archive.org/details/britishgoblinsw01sikegoog
So, the Fair folk! This is one of those things that sounded easy on the face of things- I read a ton of fantasy, I know types of fae! I fully expected to just coast through this, make it nice and easy for myself. But uh. I’m me. So instead of what I thought I’d be offering to you we’re gonna dive into Fair Folk taxonomy, because things I thought of as individual types of fae are more like. Families of fae. Like talking felidae instead of Felis catus.
Because Amanda. Amanda did you KNOW that apparently Tylwyth Teg are not just one kind of fair folk? In Welsh folklore, y Tylwyth Teg are the fair folk in general, and there are more specific types! Types like the Ellyllon (more like what we think of as Elves) and Coblynau (more like dwarves. They like to mine). In the 1880 edition of “British Goblins: Welsh Folklore, Fairy Mythology, Legend, and Traditions”, the AMAZINGLY named journalist and folklorist Wirt Sike has this to say about attempting to classify the Fair Folk: “Fairies being creatures of the imagination, it is not possible to classify them by fixed and immutable rules. In the exact sciences, there are laws which never vary, or if they vary, their very eccentricity is governed by precise rules.” Which. A) I love the approach he’s taking but B) science has well and truly marched on. Sir I’d love to introduce you to the argument about whether or not “fish” are a thing, scientifically speaking.
Despite his aforementioned difficulties in making “scientific” categories, Mr Sike actually breaks the Tylwyth Teg down into 5 different types of fae: the Ellyllon and Coblynau I previously mentioned are two of those categories, but there’s also household fairies (similar to Brownies, for example), fairies of “the lakes and streams” (we love a wet tart), and mountain fairies.
Also, entirely off-topic, but Sike also points out that William Shakespeare drew a lot of his faerie lore from Welsh stories, which is pretty cool!
Sike goes on to drill down even further into more atomized types of Tylwyth Teg, such as the Pwca (better known with the spelling Pooka), which according to his understanding is a type of Ellylldan - analogous to Will-o’-wisps. One of the things I like about the book is how he connects these Welsh fair folk to other fae figures across Europe, and even into the Americas. I will say that again, this was published in 1880 and some of how he talks about other ethnicities is perhaps not what we’d use anymore. I’ll give him this at least, he seems to have taken a respectful approach, not a dehumanizing one. Other than the note that he used language that was once common, it’s a delightfully engaging
Episode 36: An Interview with Zach Rosenberg
Where to find Zach:
Twitter: @zachrosewriter
Instagram: @zachrose32
Other resources: Zach’s Linktree
Authors, Filmmakers, and other sources Zach cited:
(note from Corinne: I’m so sorry, this will come just as soon as I’m able - Zach named so many authors and artists I couldn’t keep up! I think we got a full syllabus on Jewish and Western Horror though so this will get completed, I promise!)
Episode 35: Tricksters | Show Notes
Amanda’s Notes:
https://dc.swosu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2423&context=mythlore
https://bycommonconsent.com/2017/08/07/when-satan-was-a-trickster/
https://morethingsjapanese.com/who-are-the-tricksters-in-the-bible/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foolishness_for_Christ#Holy_fool
https://religionnews.com/2015/01/28/theologian-says-jesus-trickster-not-offensive-think/
https://bibleinterp.arizona.edu/articles/2015/04/day398028
So I’m very excited about my notes. I’m actually breaking our usual model and not staying in North America and I am going to examine the role of the Trickster figure in Christian mythology and folklore. So let’s get into it!
So first and foremost, “In the Beginning…” the first figure that comes to mind is the serpent in the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis. Classic story played out over and over in Western mythology. The serpent slides up to Eve and says “hey, what’s that God up there hiding from you in that Tree of Knowledge? I bet it won’t even hurt you. Probably tastes good. Go on, try it.” Eve tries it, gains the knowledge of right vs wrong, is ashamed of nakedness, lots of terrible things get bestowed upon humanity.
So why trickster? Well if you look back to how we defined trickster figures in an earlier episode, trickster figures are cunning forces of chaos who often bring gifts and vital knowledge to humanity. Are we seeing the similarities here with the traditional Adam and Eve story?
Now, note that I keep saying “the serpent”, not Satan or Lucifer or The Devil. The serpent, in certain translations, is referred to as “the most clever of all of the beasts of the field that YHWH God had made,”. Nowhere in Genesis was the serpent referenced as Satan. In fact, while there are individuals referenced as “the Satan” which we can translate as “the accuser” or “the adversary” throughout the Hebrew Bible this is really more of a job description. Like, this was used for evil and celestial beings alike. In fact, looking at the appearances of “the satan” throughout the Hebrew Bible, these individuals’ job is to point out the unworthiness of mankind. In fact, to quote Biblicalarcheology.org you can think of “the Accuser” as God’s lead prosecutor.
Now, in doing this research I also stumbled across some slightly more modern style of trickster archetype in the Eastern Orthodox Church, the “Holy Fool” also known as “Foolishness for Christ”. Holy Fool, one who acts intentionally foolish in the eyes of men. The term implies behaviour "which is caused neither by mistake nor by feeble-mindedness, but is deliberate, irritating, even provocative." The Eastern Orthodox Church holds that holy fools voluntarily take up the guise of insanity in order to conceal their perfection from the world, and thus avoid praise.
Corinne’s Notes:
Sources:
https://lithub.com/the-enduring-appeal-of-literary-tricksters/
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/trickster
https://library.rcc.edu/c.php?g=1058258&p=7698104
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anansi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_King
Vecsey, C. (1981). The Exception Who Proves the Rules: Ananse the Akan Trickster. Journal of Religion in Africa, 12(3), 161–177. https://doi.org/10.2307/1581431
Emily Zobel Marshall. (2018). “Nothing but Pleasant Memories of the Discipline of Slavery”: The Trickster and the Dynamics of Racial Representation. Marvels & Tales, 32(1), 59–75. https://doi.org/10.13110/marvelstales.32.1.0059
One of my enduring favorite character archetypes is the trickster. I have always been a sucker for the clever thieves with hearts of gold, the cunning foxes, sly spiders, and bold monkeys of fiction and mythology. I’m not, like, advocating for people to go out to become thieves–I’ve had my shit stolen, thanks very much and while it makes for a hilarious story after the fact, it was a little traumatic to live through. But all in all, they tend to be among my favorite character types so this was super fun to start researching.
As Seth Fried’s LitHub article elaborates, tricksters are an endlessly appealing archetype. To quote the introduction of his article, “In literature and myth, tricksters are powerful figures. They’re clever, their lack of reverence for the status quo makes them dangerous to those empowered by societal norms, and their shamelessness is often a clarifying antidote to internalized oppression.” So, with that, let’s talk tricksters, shall we?
A lot of the mythological creatures I’ve talked about before fall into trickster archetypes, such as the fox spirits of Japan, Korea, and China. You may recall me mentioning Hermes in his weird merged “Hermanubis” form. In addition to being a psychopomp, he’s the god of thieves and a trickster himself. Hermes apparently invented lying, which is delightful. However, I want to talk a little bit about one of my absolute favorites, which I first heard stories of as a child at Library story times and in grade school - Despite my school’s many faults, one thing they did well was instill a love of world cultures in me. In first grade, my classroom learned about Ghana, which is where I first heard the stories of Anansi the spider, from Ashanti folklore. I freaking LOVED clever Anansi and his audacity, which is somewhat surprising because also I am wildly afraid of spiders. Apparently I’m chill with them as long as they’re also trickster deities? I dunno, my brain is weird. There are loads and loads of stories about Anansi, which is fitting, because in addition to being a trickster, he is also the god of stories, wisdom, and knowledge. I’d originally planned to sum up at least one story, but while doing some research, I found a note that, according to Christopher Vecsey’s 1981 article on Anansi, “Anyone can tell them, although only at night or at a ceremonial occasion, for example, at the funeral of a respected story-teller.” So in an effort to honor the spirit of those beliefs, I’ll save it for another time.
While there’s a wide variety of Ashanti stories of Anansi that have been recorded, I think it’s relevant to note that his stories continued into the African diaspora caused by the trans-atlantic slave trade. Anansi is popular across the West Indies, especially in Jamaica, which had a large population of enslaved people from the Akan and Ashanti cultures. In fact, some of the earliest records of stories of Anansi from the West Indies come from that period right after the abolition of slavery, because–get this– white folklorists, especially white women folklorists, were worried that the stories would be lost. This does mean that those records are uh. Not devoid of some serious biases (oh moralistic Christian literature, will we never be free of you). Surprise, surprise, it took white folklorists an excruciatingly long time to realize that there was a lot of commentary encoded into the stories enslaved people told about Anansi. As you’ll recall, contemporary research indicates that tricksters are an invaluable tool to deal with oppression and to fuck with the ruling status quo. Oh! Another fun fact– much like other tricksters like Loki, Anansi’s gender can be somewhat fluid. While often Anansi is depicted as male, in some places (especially among the Gullah people in South Carolina), Anansi is better known as Aunt Nancy, and is an extremely powerful woman.
And, because I’m me and completely incapable of focusing on one (1) thing, I’m also going to pull in The Monkey King a little bit because I somehow did not realize that he counts as a trickster figure until he showed up on the list I saw on wikipedia’s trickster page??? I LOVE Journey to the West and its various iterations. I am a sucker for The Monkey King, always have been. In Mandarin he’s most commonly known as Sun Wukong, and because of the media I consume, I’m also familiar with the Korean and Japanese transliterations of his name- Son Oh Gong and Son Goku, respectively. He is a hugely popular figure in media, especially in East and South-East Asia. There’s a lot of speculation about where Wu Cheng’en, the author of Journey to the West drew his inspiration for Sun Wukong- there are theories that he may have been drawing upon worship of gibbons and other monkeys in some regions and time periods in China, and some have argued that he was inspired by India’s Hanuman (though this is shaky at best, there’s not clear cut evidence that stories of Hanuman would have been available in Chinese). Regardless, Sun Wukong was born from a stone, made himself king of the monkeys and then embarked on some TRULY outrageous adventures, growing ever more powerful, until he got slapped down to size by the Buddha. Once he’s learned to chill, kinda. Sorta. He becomes a disciple of the monk Sanzhang, who’s duty it is to travel to India to bring back sacred scriptures to China. Sanzhang is kind of useless, and also demons want to eat him for immortality purposes, so Son Wukong has his work cut out for him. Apparently over the course of this journey he embraces buddhism and becomes an enlightened being, which seems like it gives him everything he was looking for in his quest for power pre-traveling-with-Sanzhang.
Anyway, I have literally zero chill when it comes to adaptations of Journey to the West and if given the opportunity I can and will corner you to talk about it ad nauseum. So listeners, what, if any, adaptation do you love best? Who’s your favorite and why is it Sun Wukong?
Episode 34: Food Lore | Show Notes
Amanda’s Notes:
https://ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/foodstudies/chapter/green-bean-casserole/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foodways
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fyqvRw5epvyYKIfr6FphbcEp3Hu5Tbm4/view
https://roadtrippers.com/magazine/kentucky-haunted-distilleries/
https://unbound.com/books/folklore/
https://unbound.com/books/a-gothic-cookbook/
Food! Ok, so my research for this one was a little convoluted and as is the case with most of my poor life decisions, it started with a book.
I checked out The Best American Food Writing Anthology - 2019 edited by Samin Nosrat from the library and have been slowly working my way through and the essays inside got me to start thinking about food as a reflection of culture rather than trying to find individual food folklore stories. And I know the stuff I found is probably 101 level anthropology or sociology stuff but I didn’t have the vocabulary for this idea before my research and maybe some of our listeners will also learn something today. Can’t know what you don’t know before you find out, right?
So first I want to define a new word I learned that is hitting on something in my brain so I feel like we may have brought this up in a previous episode and my brain decided to just not put in the effort to build the long term memory, “foodways”. Per the wikipedia article because that’s always my jumping off point, foodways are “the cultural, social, and economic practices relating to the production and consumption of food.” The term is often used to discuss the intersection of food in culture, traditions, and history.
So with that in mind, I found two articles by Lucy M. Long titled “Green Bean Casserole: Commercial Foods as Regional Tradition” and “Green Bean Casserole and Midwestern Identity: A Regional Foodways Aesthetic and Ethos”. These essays discuss the logic behind the tradition of the green bean casserole at the Thanksgiving table, specifically through the lens of cultural relativism, that is judging a practice by the function and meaning given to it by the culture it’s a part of, not judging based on the morals and values of your own culture.
Ok, so what I loved about this is the examination of why the midwest gravitates towards industrial food products and ease, in contrast with food traditions in, say, the American South that prioritize everything being made from scratch. So when you think about the midwest, sure once the swampy land in areas like northwest Ohio were drained in the 1800s the resulting available land was rich and fertile. But the midwest is home to some truly gnarly weather. Think cold cold winters, hot hot summers, and enough tornadoes to give the name “tornado alley” to a section of the midwest. So Lucy M. Long posits that this leads to a cultural view of nature as something to be tamed and controlled rather than worked with.
Enter canned foods and convenience foods. Not only are these the perfect example of “we controlled and contained the nature around us for our own use”, it plays on the Calvanist values of the dominant settler culture in the area. Consistent, easy foods that keep in the pantry guarantee that all food will be eaten rather than wasted.
There are more details and examples in these two articles so I highly recommend reading them if you are at all interested in learning more. This is just one of those topics that I am so so happy I found and learned more about because I don’t think I would have ever made the connection between canned foods and cultural views on weather, but now I have a rabbit hole I can’t wait to dive down in the free time I don’t have.
And of course, because I’m me, I had to find something a little on the creepier side. So to end my food in folklore segment I want to talk about bourbon distillery ghost sightings. Specifically today the reported ghost sightings at Buffalo Trace distillery here in KY. Author Liz Carey.
Buffalo Trace was founded in 1792 and claims to be the oldest continuously operating distillery in the United States. Colonel Albert B. Blanton was president of Buffalo Trace during Prohibition and kept the distillery in business by doing his best to corner the market on “medicinal” bourbon production. Remember, during Prohibition you could get a prescription for bourbon from your physician. And if you believe several staff members and visitors, Colonel Blanton never left.
Visitors and staff have reported hearing mumbled voices and sounds of people moving and milling about concentrated in the area where Blanton’s office was located. And when the show Ghost Hunters came to film they identified the ghostly presences as Blanton and several of his former employees.
Tour guide Lindsey Brewer recounted a tour she gave where she encountered something. She says she was leading a tour group of about 30 people in the rickhouse and discussing the reported ghost sightings when she heard a voice from behind her say the word “rye”. No one was behind her, she and the tour group were the only people in the rickhouse. And to make it even creepier, at least to me, the group agreed they heard it too.
So like, we’re going to go on a tour right? Frankfort’s not that bad a drive, my aunt used to commute every day. Let’s go share a drink with a ghost!
And since we are discussing food in folklore, there are two books that I am super excited for that I want to mention here so that we can all read them and talk about them together. Like a Graveyard Gals book club.
The first is A Feast of Folklore by Ben Gazur. The second is A Gothic Cookbook by Ella Buchan and Alessandra Pino with illustrations by Lee Henry. Both have been fully funded on Unbound and I am SO READY to read them. Man, if we ever do get our butts in gear and start a patreon I think a book club is 1000% in order.
Corinne’s Notes:
https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/type1626.html
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/food-myths-from-around-the-world
https://www.terriwindling.com/blog/2014/12/the-folklore-of-food.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolobok
https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/10rdzlf/hungarian_mythology_meets_urban_fantasy/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barleycorn
https://www.arcanum.com/hu/online-kiadvanyok/Lexikonok-magyar-neprajzi-lexikon-71DCC/k-72CDA/kenyer-panasza-a-72E4D/ (i ran this thru google translate)
I will be wildly honest, I had ZERO idea of where to start on Food Folklore. While I recognize the role of food in folk culture, it’s not really my thing? Which is a weird thing to say as someone who enjoys cooking and eating food from other cultures. BUT! About a week ago, I saw a tumblr post referencing “Bread magic” in Hungarian folklore. It was an extremely lyrical and evocative post and I knew I was gonna have to see if this was An Actual Thing(™). So I started searching, and while I found A LOT about folklore and folk traditions surrounding bread, I could not seem to find anything regarding this Hungarian bread magic. Thankfully, I’m stubborn as hell, and eventually found the tumblr post being discussed on a reddit forum (i never use reddit, so this was a surprising turn of events), and while some Hungarian members of the forum said they weren’t immediately familiar, some of the phrasing rang a bell. Someone linked to a Hungarian page that I had to run through Google Translate because I don’t read Hungarian, and the page referenced The Bread’s Complaint and The Devil and the Bread. Basically bread complains a ton about its lot in life. First its seeds are BURIED IN THE GROUND! The horror! When it sprouts, it’s cruelly cut down, threshed, and ground. It gets punched about (kneaded) and then thrown into a hot oven, and then it’s eaten. But worst of all, sometimes it gets baked TWICE! In the bread’s complaint, the bread is telling all of this to Jesus, who takes pity on the bread, and this is why some cultures don’t toast their bread. In the devil and the bread, the devil wants to take a poor person (or possibly that person’s child), and the person uses the bread as his spokesman. If the devil can endure all of the shit the bread endured, then sure, the devil can drag the person off to hell. To quote the way the Tumblr post ended it, “Until you do all these things and survive, you have no power here.” which is just. Chef’s kiss, really.
Interestingly! The same Reddit thread introduced me to a similar story in English and Scottish folklore- John Barleycorn. Though our buddy John Barleycorn is best known from poems and ballads, and instead of being about bread, he’s booze. Which. I love it. Scottish poet Robert Burns has one of the better known versions of the poem, and there are many, many recordings of the ballad and its variants.
Episode 32: Folklore in Pop Culture | Show Notes
Amanda’s Notes:
https://www.npr.org/2009/07/17/106728088/you-sexy-beast-our-fascination-with-werewolves
https://daily.jstor.org/depressed-people-arent-villains-nor-are-they-werewolves/
So for our first rendition of “Corinne and Amanda Take on Pop Culture” I am covering the history of werewolves as presented in pop culture. And I will be up front that this is an incredibly Euro-Centric, Western review because those were the rabbit holes I went down. And I’m stepping on your toes quite a bit, Corinne, and just going for European history because it’s my podcast and I can do what I want. Also content warning for discussions of mental health misinformation and stigmas ahead.
So first I found an article in jstor daily called “Depressed People Aren’t Villains – Nor Are They Werewolves” by K.C. Mead-Brewer. The article is well worth reading in full, and I’ll have it linked in my notes on our site when this episode goes live, going into the historical tendency to view mental health issues as a moral failing, which makes it much easier to remove societal responsibility. Medical treatment won’t expel the devil from your gray matter right, so why bother?
The article brings up the very long history of connecting the idea of werewolves with symptoms of mental disorders. “Johann Vincenti’s Liber de adversus magicas artes, a witchcraft text which was published in 1475, contained a chapter on werewolves in which it was stated that lycanthropy was a delusion produced by the Devil.” In the 16th Century writer Johann Weyer argued that werewolves were the mentally ill or demons masquerading as wolves. And that belief that mental illnesses are a result of demonic activity or moral failings is unfortunately not lost to antiquity. According to a 2012 Pew Research Survey, a majority of US adults believe in demonic possession, 63% of those believers being in the 18-29 range, so the risk of mental illness being blamed on an outside evil and the lack of proper medical care that can lead to is much higher than I think most of us want to admit. And this article closes with perhaps my favorite line “Misrepresentations of the nature of mental illness not only needlessly endanger and marginalize those suffering from mental disorders, but they also allow us to indulge in something that’s arguably immoral itself: a rich, delicious layer of willful ignorance.”
Now to move on to the much less depressing subject of the existential dread of the environment going to shit all around us. And yes, this does lead in to werewolves, pinky swear. So we’ve discussed briefly and ineloquently how the Victorian obsession with spiritualism and the My notes for this section are based on the article “The Werewolf and the Nineteenth-Century EcoGothic” by Janine Hatter.macabre came in part as a rejection of the hyper-rationalism that defined the Georgian period. The explosion of werewolf stories at the same time took the rejection of rationalism and folded in the new fear popping up across England of the loss of nature as people knew it during the Industrial Revolution. Werewolves are an effective rhetorical device for examining ecological issues because they have a long folkloric history that demonstrates them evolving with their changing environments.
It’s argued that werewolves in literature of the period are a way to focus on the permanence of nature and analyze humankind’s relationship with it. Werewolf stories of the time period were often set in the Middle Ages as a reaction to the rapid industrialization taking place. Remember, this was a huge upheaval. People were flocking to cities for the job opportunities, leaving behind the countryside. Wetlands in England were being drained to make way for “modern” farms and factories. The Victorian obsession with the “exotic” and wide reach of the British empire led to the introduction of invasive species of plants that started to out-compete native plants. Animals were going extinct or had their numbers dwindle dramatically as their habitats were destroyed. And none of this sounds familiar at all right? We’ve learned from the past and have stopped prioritizing businesses over the health of the planet, yes? Right?
And to finish it off, it’s argued that the landscapes themselves can be seen as lycanthropic in these stories. Not only is it nature sheltering (and in cases where the moon is the cause of the shift, creating) the werewolf, you can imagine the world itself growing its resentment towards mankind’s forced changes, anger building until the earth itself takes its revenge.
I had thought about going through werewolves in pop culture today but then I went down a rabbit hole and this is what you got. One day I might do some digging into theories behind when and why werewolves went from horrifying monsters to sex symbols and romance novel heroes but today is not that day.
Corinne’s Notes:
Sources:
Foster, M.D. (2015). The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore. University of California Press
Deborah Shamoon. (2013). The Yōkai in the Database: Supernatural Creatures and Folklore in Manga and Anime. Marvels & Tales, 27(2), 276–289. https://doi.org/10.13110/marvelstales.27.2.0276
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeGeGe_no_Kitar%C5%8D
Media cited:
Inu Yasha
Pokemon
Studio Ghibli (especially Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro)
Shadow of the Fox, Julie Kagawa
October Daye, Seanan McGuire
Red Winter trilogy, Annette Marie
Okay so I was INSANELY lazy and decided that my choice of “topics we’ve covered in pop culture” was going to be various yokai, just because I’ve gotten to talk about them before and also because I’m an avowed weeb and have been since I was like 14. So to set the scene, you also have to understand my first forays into anime and Japanese media.
Picture this: 14 year old me has just come out of Baxter Ave theater having seen Spirited Away with my new friends from high school. I have very little knowledge of Japanese culture and mostly I’ve just been dazzled by spectacle but WOW the guests of Yubaba’s bathhouse have just. Confounded me. I follow this up by getting DEEPLY obsessed with Inu Yasha, which introduces me to the concept of yokai in general. The fog lifts slightly, and I start learning how to do things like research the aspects of Japanese culture that I don’t understand. Little did I know that 20 years later I’d be recording podcast episodes on folklore and FINALLY have an opportunity to just gush over how much I love all this shit.
Our journey to how this connects to today’s topic actually started when I was researching kappa lore for the mermaid episode. While perusing sources, I found an article called “The Yokai in the Database”, which apparently also cited Inu Yasha, my first great anime obsession, so I downloaded it into the growing hoard of articles I’ve collected in a file called “pretentious folklore articles” (to note: the articles are not pretentious, I am). One of the primary points of the article is to connect the tendency of anime fans, known primarily in the west as otaku, though the word has a broader meaning in Japan, to collect and analyze data surrounding their favorite stories and characters in the grand tradition of compendiums of yokai that were written (which also calls to mind medieval bestiaries). Author Deborah Shamoon then expands into how in contemporary times yokai were brought to the popular imagination in one of two ways–via advertising, for one thing, and the works of Mizuki Shigeru, whose popular manga Gegege no Kitaro from the 1960s on helped reignite an interest in, and further categorizing of, yokai.
And that brings us to where some of my favorite depictions of yokai come in.
As I mentioned at the start, two of my earliest experiences with Japanese media were Spirited Away and Inu Yasha, both of which are deeply entwined with yokai, kami, and other aspects of Japanese culture.
In Spirited Away, you have young heroine Chihiro passing into the world of gods, spirits, and monsters, many of which are likely unfamiliar to westerners like us. My personal favorite has always been the sort of awkward but kindly daikon radish spirit, who is one of the first non-human-like spirits that Chihiro encounters. And of course there are the susuwatari, or soot sprites–leetle black fuzzballs that apparently eat sprinkles.
But let’s expand a little on this, and touch a bit onto other Studio Ghibli films. Hayao Miyazaki frequently has drawn upon yokai and other folklore topics for his works. Those lil susuwatari are actually first seen in My Neighbor Totoro, from 1989. And while I knew logically that the film Princess Mononoke also dealt heavily in folkloric themes, I did not realize how the title indicated those themes. In Michael Dylan Foster’s The Book of Yokai, he explains how Japanese language and literature has referred to yokai through the ages. “Yokai” as a signifier for “monster, demon, spirit, etc.” is actually fairly recent, being used in a scholarly sense in the Meiji era, and then becoming more popular in the twentieth century (especially from the works of the aforementioned Mizuki Shigeru). In the Heian period (late 8th century to the end of the 12th century), the most common word was in fact “mononoke”. To quote Foster’s book, “In the Heian period, for example, spooky and unexplainable ‘things’ were often called mono-no-ke… However we translate it, though, mono-no-ke during the Heian period indicated danger, uncertainty, and terror—something lurking out there, just beyond reach, intending to do you harm.”
If you could have seen my face when I read that and made the connection to Princess Mononoke’s title, it was very shocked Pikachu meme.
From there, let’s also touch on Inu Yasha, which also draws deeply from yokai lore. Our titular character is half dog yokai, which is sort of interesting in that there isn’t actually a ton of Japanese lore about dog yokai (as opposed to cats, foxes, tanuki, etc). But many other members of the cast and the villains they face are also drawn from classic yokai. In the VERY FIRST EPISODE there’s that damn centipede yokai who scared the actual bejesus out of me, and Amanda I regret to inform you that centipede yokai are actually a thing in Japanese folklore and I hate it also the “mukade” centipede is a real fucking centipede and I’m mad about it. Ahem. Also I just learned today (because of course I was finishing my notes the afternoon we recorded) I somehow never realized that Sango’s giant flying cat Kirara is a nekomata. Again with the shocked Pikachu face. And lastly on the hero’s side of things we’ve got Shippo, a very young kitsune.
And this brings me to a weird thing I’ve noticed, which is the use of kitsune specifically in Western literature. I can think of three specific examples, two of which are also romance novels. In terms of when I encountered them, the earliest is Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series, which includes Luna, who is described as being a kitsune. However, after the earliest novels, McGuire moved away from using non-European folkloric figures in that series, given that the worldbuilding she used included all the fae in her novels being descended from Oberon, Titania, and Maeve, which gets a bit awkward when you’re asserting that a Japanese folkloric figure is descended from three quintessentially European folkloric characters. I know it’s something she’s specifically talked about before.
Next we get into the romance novels because wow I freaking love fantasy romance. It’s a problem. A few years ago I read Julie Kagawa’s Shadow of the Fox trilogy, which a) is really fun, b) features a young half-kitsune woman as its main protagonist and c) really drove home just how much Japanese folklore I explicitly picked up from watching Inu Yasha. It’s set in the mythic past and is honestly a really fun read. I definitely recommend it. Also Julie Kagawa lives in Kentucky, and I’m always here to support local authors!
And then last year, I got sucked in by some very well done targeted advertising and tore through the Red Winter trilogy by Annette Marie. This romance trilogy is set in the modern day and features a young woman who’s destined to become the avatar of the okami Amaterasu, and rescues a fox who turns out to be a kitsune dude. There’s also a broody tengu character who I love because I know who I am. It does do a thing that I don’t love, where books are established as being set during a specific time period and then do fuck all with it as a setting. This isn’t the only time I’ve encountered it and it’s become such a pet peeve of mine in otherwise extremely enjoyable books.
And one last thought, because Hunter will yell at me if I miss this opportunity—while my encounters with yokai largely come from manga and anime, they’re also incredibly common in video games, even in series like Super Mario (the flying raccoon costume is in fact a tanuki costume). Of course, one of the biggest examples might be Pokemon (which also gets cited in The Book of Yokai!). Many, many pokemon are inspired by Japanese folklore, and of course there’s something nice and parallel between collecting all those pokemon and the “databases” of yokai mentioned in Deborah Shamoon’s article.
Episode 31: An Interview With Chelsea Pumpkins | Show Notes
Amanda’s Research:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/aug/28/witches-evil-outcasts-feminist-heroes-pop-culture
https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/the-eerie-rise-of-witches-at-the-movies/
https://fnewsmagazine.com/2016/02/beyond-bubbling-cauldrons-screen-witches-of-the-1990s/
So just really quickly I want to go over the rise of the witch in 90s pop culture. Just a little something because you know if we go a full episode without doing some research, they’ll take away our microphones.
So from what I understand, the way witches were portrayed in specifically American media in the 90s was a combination rejection of the Satanic Panic’s portrayal of all things occult being evil and ready to steal your kids and a cultural shift towards embracing feminine power.
We start the decade with The Witches and Hocus Pocus. Witches aren’t good here but they are portrayed in a comedic way as opposed to straightforward horror, and most interestingly these movies are targeted at children. Remember, the 80s were a major “think of the children!” moment where you were an absolute monster if you showed your kid something occult, and here in 1990 and 1993 respectively we have movies dripping in occult references being heavily marketed towards kids. Huge cultural shift there.
Next up in 1996 we get Sabrina the Teenage Witch and The Craft. Two sides of the high school witch coin here. Sabrina arguably being the sanitized version of the Craft’s “we are the weirdos”. Both are representations of the 90s new embracing of individuality, with The Craft leaning in to the grunge trend as well.
Then we hit 1997 with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1998 brings us Practical Magic and Charmed. And here is where I think the real emphasis on witchcraft as a reclamation of feminine power comes from. You think of these three and the powerful witches are incredibly feminine. No warts or wrinkles, just beautiful women kicking ass.
Where To Find Chelsea Pumpkins
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ChelseaPumpkins
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chelseapumpkins/
Cutthroat Queens: https://linktr.ee/cutthroathorror
Ahh That’s What I Call Horror: https://www.chelseapumpkins.com/ahh-thats-what-i-call-horror
Episode 30: A Very Merry Ghostmas | Show Notes
Amanda’s Notes
The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Stories
https://theconversation.com/why-ghosts-haunt-england-at-christmas-but-steer-clear-of-america-34629
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230623330_2
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/los-feliz-murder-mansion
“There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long long ago…”
Opening this up with a quote from the introduction Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Stories Volume 1: “To capture the Victorian ghost story experience is to whisper it by candlelight, to feel the tendrils of December’s chill reaching from the darkness”. I won’t spend this whole episode reading from this introduction, which is perfect for a quick primer on the evolution of ghost stories in Victorian England, but I couldn’t resist that quote! I really need to get the other volumes, I spent last December reading one story per night and it was just delightful.
This beginning is so disjointed. Turns out finding Christmas ghost stories from the US is trickier than I thought it would be! Could be me failing on search term bingo but such is life. I do have some fun tidbits about ghost stories in Victorian times though if you don’t have too much background there, is that ok? Kind of stepping on your toes there.
The Christmas literary annual came into popularity in the 1820s/1830s. These anthologies of poetry and prose came out in December, as you would expect, and were incredibly popular. And while they weren’t exclusively horror, ghost stories were definitely among the most popular. And fun fact! It’s estimated that as many as 70% of these Christmas ghost story authors were women!
Now, that’s not to say that the ghost stories published at Christmas were necessarily Christmas ghost stories. For an example I believe you’ll know Corinne, Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Pit and the Pendulum” was first published in the literary annual “The Gift: A Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1843”. So I’m imagining picking up a literary annual before Christmas Eve in 1842, then gathering in the sitting room with your family, nothing but firelight from the hearth and a few candles keeping the winter darkness at bay, experiencing that story for the first time as the most gregarious member of your family reads it out loud. The light flickering across faces as everyone imagines the pendulum blade coming closer and closer. That’s the sort of Christmas spirit I’m here for tbh.
Now, because I’m me. I couldn’t help but briefly include an allegedly true American Christmas ghost story that every true crime podcast on the planet has already covered: The Los Feliz Murder Mansion in L.A.
December 6, 1959, Harold Perelson murdered his wife with a ball peen hammer, brutally beat his teenage daughter, then killed himself with a combo of water, acid, and tranquilizer pills. I’ll let the true crime peeps go into the speculated reasons why because again, everyone and their brother has covered this case seven ways to Sunday at this point. We’re going to focus on the aftermath.
One year after the murder the home was sold to a couple who only used the over 5,000 sqft mansion as a storage facility. It’s said that they never even bothered changing the Perelson’s decor. Their son inherited the property in 1996 and also used the home entirely as storage.
Now, as you might imagine, an abandoned mansion with a tragic history invites all sorts of people to try to come inside, or at least a peek. And what people claim to have seen is eerie. Allegedly when you peer through those windows that haven’t been cleaned in decades you can see the stack of Christmas presents neatly wrapped under the decaying Christmas tree, waiting for the Perelson children to open them on Christmas Day. People who say they’ve trespassed claim to have seen a shadow moving in the house, or to have felt a presence watching them.
The property was sold in 2020 to a real estate investor who plans to renovate it finally so the unchanged family decor should be a thing of the past, though whether the ghosts evict themselves along with the stack of presents or stay to greet the new residents remains to be seen.
Corinne’s Notes:
Sources:
https://www.nypl.org/blog/2021/12/16/ghost-stories-for-christmas
https://carterhaughschool.com/10-spooky-ghost-stories-for-christmastime/
https://www.history.com/news/christmas-tradition-ghost-stories
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks08/0801051.txt → The Kit Bag
Okay first things first–I owe a huge amount of gratitude to Aaron from The Appalachian Folklore Podcast and need to issue a correction. During our last episode on Fakelore, I asserted that Welsh and English traditions like Mari Lwyd and The Hunting of the Earl of Rone are examples of fakelore. That is 100% incorrect. I misunderstood what I was reading and drew incorrect conclusions, and for that I apologize. I’m still very much a novice, and I’m grateful that Aaron was kind enough to provide links to help me better understand the topic. So, thanks Aaron!
Now! On to on-the-record proof that I willingly read ghost stories for this dang podcast! As we’ve already mentioned [I’m assuming this- Amanda does thrilling amounts of research], Christmas/the solstice/winter in general is a popular time for the sharing of spooky stories. Which totally makes sense to me- it gets dark early, and I get the appeal of sharing stories around the fire, even if I prefer wholesome and heartwarming to gruesome and terrifying because I’m a PANSY. And it’s a liminal time as you pass from the darkest days of the year and on towards the spring equinox and increasingly brighter days.
The Victorian era was a real heyday for spooky-ass tales at Christmas, especially as industrialization made books, magazines, and newspapers something that anyone could own. As History.com’s article on the subject puts it, This gave Victorians the opportunity to commercialize and commodify existing oral ghost stories, turning them into a version they could sell. Honestly, this in particular really reminds me of how the tradition of playing Hyakumonogatari in Japan combined with the development of printing presses made books full of ghost stories from Japan and abroad insanely popular, too!
According to Drs Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman, folklorists and founders of the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic (side note: I’ve been eying their courses for like a year now, I may finally invest in a couple for 2023…), another reason for the growing popularity of all things creepy and occult in the British Empire was “...that ghost stories offered fantasies of destabilization of the powerful, at a time when the British empire was at its height. And part of it is simply that legends are powerful ways of dealing with anxiety AND having fun, and they always have been!” While I might not agree that ghost stories are fun (again, I’m a coward lmao), I can absolutely understand wanting to imagine the mighty being toppled!
Fortunately for me, the tradition didn’t catch on quite as strongly in the United States. According to The Smithsonian Magazine, we can blame this on the Puritans. We can blame just. So Very Much on the Puritans for our weird-ass culture.
So in the spirit of the holidays, I read some Victorian ghost stories, one of which I will attempt to summarize! I was even good and DID NOT cheat by just summarizing A Christmas Carol badly.
First off, I read The Kit Bag, published in 1908 by Algernon Blackwood.
In this, our protagonist is a young lawyer who’s just successfully defended an accused murderer (who’s described as having a “bat-white” face, and I’m gonna have to look up bats in the UK because when I think bats, I think brown), and is getting ready to spend the Christmas holidays skiing and having fun in the Alps. He realizes he doesn’t have a “kit bag” (google tells me it’s similar to a duffel bag), and his senior partner at the law firm offers to have one dropped off at his home for him.
Our good dude gets home and gets the promised kit bag from his landlady, who’s received it for him, and gets to packing. Gotta love someone who waits ‘til last minute to pack. Couldn’t be me!
Anyway, this man fits HEROIC amounts of stuff into the bag- seriously I’m jealous of the capacity of this bag- and very quiet sounds from the rest of the house start to set him on edge. Y’all let me just say that Algernon Blackwood is good at building a sense of apprehension. Just. Listen to this sentence: “It is difficult to say exactly at what point fear begins, when the causes of that fear are not plainly before the eyes.” At one point, he thinks the way the bag has sorta folded on itself as he packs looks like the alleged murderer he defended. Then he thinks he sees someone on the landing of his building, and hears what sounds like someone stealthily making their way into his room. And YALL I HATE THIS. I READ THIS LATE AT NIGHT AND IT WAS AN MISTAKE. Instead of like. Calling the cops, or whatever. Our dashing young lawyer dude GOES INTO THE ROOM??? But of course it’s empty because we have to build that tension. BUT the bag isn’t where he left it! Dun dun duuuuuuun! He’s all like, “no, this is fine, everything’s fine” and goes to his sitting room to calm down by the fire. But of course instead he’s consumed with all the horrific imagery from the trial and is just completely spooked. But we’re British so he’s just gotta stuff all that shit deeeeeeep down and turn it into an ulcer later. He finally goes back to his room and GUESS WHAT THE BAG HAS MOVED AGAIN and it kinda looks like someone just hid behind it???? (seriously though, how big is this bag and where can i buy one??). He looks around but doesn’t see anyone but oh hey is there a bloodstain on that bag? In his panic to get away because he’s freaking right the hell out now, he manages to hit the light switch. This leads to scrabbling to turn the light back on, where he internally debates actually turning the lights on or not because you know what? Sometimes the dark is better because you can pretend everything is fine. He manages to turn the lights back on and SEES THE MURDERER IN HIS ROOM! He does what any sensible person would do and faints from sheer terror.
The next morning his landlady finds him and is like, “...did you not go to bed? Are you sick? Also your boss sent someone over.” The guy the boss sent over is EXTREMELY apologetic because whoopsidoodle, we didn’t bring over your boss’s spare kit bag! Just realized it! We accidentally gave you the kit bag that the alleged murderer’s victim was found in, sorry! Oh btw, the guy y’all defended killed himself as soon as he was released and left a note saying he’d rather be put away in the bag, the same as he did the woman he killed. And that’s just??? Where the story ends??? I hate it and if I have to know about it you have to, too.
Episode 28: An Interview With Laurel Hightower | Show Notes
Reading List Laurel Hightower recommends:
Where to find Laurel Hightower:
Twitter: @HightowerLaural
TikTok: @LaurelHightower
Instagram: @LaurelHightower
Website: LaurelHightower.com
Upcoming works:
Every Woman Knows This - short story collection
Silent Key - novel
Butcher Cabin Books
Episode 27: Old Wives’ Tales | Show Notes
Amanda’s Show Notes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_wives%27_tale
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children
https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2020/10/everyday-appalachian-superstitions.html
Alright, a topic I was super excited about, Old Wives Tales! Now, I’ll be honest, this research was TOUGH. When you do that initial google for “old wives tales” E V E R Y T H I N G is about pregnancy. “10 Old Wives Tales To Determine Your Baby’s Gender” “You’ll Never Believe What These Old Wives Tales Say About Your Pregnancy” etc etc. And I won’t lie, I just did not want to talk about those for an entire episode. But fear not, my pneumonia brain managed to find other avenues of research so let’s get to it.
Wikipedia defines Old Wives Tales as “a supposed truth which is actually spurious or a superstition.” These have been historically differentiated from other superstitions and urban legends by the fact that they are passed from women to young children and often center on topics that have traditionally been women’s concerns; pregnancy, puberty, herbalism, social concerns, etc.
Now on the “see also” list on that Wikipedia page we have “list of misconceptions” ok that makes sense. And then I saw the link for the Wikipedia page “lies to children”. And I HAD to know what sort of shade was being thrown there.
And of course, the truth isn’t any sort of callout, but it is interesting. A “lie-to-children” in the academic sense is, to quote Wikipedia, “a simplified explanation of technical or complex subjects as a teaching method for children and laypeople”. Basically, it’s like how when you first learn about atoms you learn about the proton, neutron, and electron. And then you get more advanced and start talking about matrix mechanics and quantum jumps and more things that I am not even remotely qualified to talk about.
That aside done, I did find an interesting chapter from a book called “Approaches to the Evolution of Language”. In the chapter titled “Old wives' tales: the gossip hypothesis and the reliability of cheap signals” the authors put forward the hypothesis that vocalized language evolved out of necessity as humans started traveling in larger family groups. The theory put forth is that nonverbal communication with a heavy focus on grooming, like we see in quite a few large mammalian social species even today, is how humans first acted. When the family group grew past a certain size it became more important to accurately convey complex information to people who weren’t eye-witnesses. As a quick aside, I also learned that current theory states we probably evolved singing vocalizations well before we evolved any sort of speech. Alright, back to it. It’s also theorized in this book that gossip and eventually old wives tales evolved as ways for unrelated humans to connect with each other and keep the community tied together.
Ok, backstory done, now I just want to touch on a few fun Old Wives’ Tales from Appalachia.
If you take a shower on the first couple days of your period you will die from your cramps. Can confirm, am dead.
A bird that flies into your house heralds a death in the family
If you don’t look at the body of a dead friend or family member you will go mad and believe they haven’t actually died
If a picture falls off the wall for no reason it means a death is coming soon
If you plant a coniferous tree you will die when it gets as tall as you are
It’s bad luck to kill a ladybug (which means our cat Steve! Is incredibly unlucky because he turns the underside of chair cushions into a ladybug graveyard if left to his own devices)
If you dream the same dream three times it will come true (which means any day now I’m going to turn into a mouse and ride a tricycle through a post-apocalyptic city while a godzilla sized cat stalks me)
Urine in the ear cures ear infections
Rain at a wedding is good luck for the marriage (so suck it Alanis)
Rub a penny on a wart to “buy” the wart. But you can never spend the penny or the wart will come back
So not my longest segment ever but that’s what I have for you!
Corinne’s Show Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_wives%27_tale
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/may/15/germaine-greer-old-wives-tales
https://www.farandwide.com/s/strangest-old-wives-tales-68d41f4f28ca42b1
https://academic.oup.com/book/25424/chapter-abstract/192570863?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Krebs, P. M. (1998). Folklore, Fear, and the Feminine: Ghosts and Old Wives’ Tales in “Wuthering Heights.” Victorian Literature and Culture, 26(1), 41–52. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25058402
LAMB, M. E. (1998). Engendering the Narrative Act: Old Wives’ Tales in “The Winter’s Tale”, “Macbeth”, and “The Tempest.” Criticism, 40(4), 529–553. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23124315
Okay so linguistically speaking, “old wives’ tales” refer to superstitions, generally folky wisdom passed from older women to younger women. According to the brief Wikipedia article, traditional old wives tales typically have a lot to do with morality, health, nutrition, fertility, pregnancy, and childbirth. The stories relating to morality are possibly closely aligned with what today we’d call Fairy Tales, a la The Brothers Grimm. However, contemporary usage lumps old wives tales in with general superstitions, so I’m uhhhhh taking some liberties. I also had kind of buck-wild crazy life stuff going on in the lead up to this recording session, so please forgive me for taking the route of least resistance. I promise I did try to research, lol.
-Tuesday the 13th is bad luck in Spain, rather than Friday the 13th! Some of this is due to the fact that Tuesday in Spanish is “martes”, and its root is connected to the Roman god Mars. Another reason given is that Constantinople fell in the 4th Crusades on Tuesday, April 13, 1204. 13 in general is seen as deeply unlucky in the west, but the Tuesday thing is uniquely Spanish. There’s even a common saying: “en Martes, ni te cases ni te embarques ni de tu casa te apartes” - On Tuesday, don’t marry, get on a boat, or leave your house
-The number 4 is bad luck in many East Asian cultures. Somewhat similarly to how many buildings in the west will avoid a 13th floor, buildings in East Asia often skip the 4th floor (of course, now I’m wondering if they number floors starting with 1 or ground then 1 like Europe does). This one I totally get though. In languages like Mandarin and Japanese, the words for 4 and “death” are homophones, though written differently.
-This one is an old wives’ tale from France, and I was actually told it while I was studying abroad, but I genuinely thought that my French classmates were just fucking with the poor dumb Americans: Stepping in dog poo with your left foot is good luck!
-Russia has a thing with the ground, y’all. So this first one actually cracks me up and speaks to my alcoholic little heart:
Putting empty bottles of booze on the floor is good luck! According to a few different sources I saw, this one dates back to the Napoleonic wars. Apparently, in French restaurants at the time, you would get charged for however many empty bottles of wine were on your table. SO! Russian soldiers would hide empty bottles on the floor
The other old wives’ tale, I actually learned from good friend (and show listener) Yuli- Yuli’s parents always told them that sitting on cold surfaces, especially the ground, can cause a woman to become infertal. From what I saw on a brief Google, this is a fairly wide-spread Old Wives’ Tale, especially in Eastern Europe.
Episode 26: Urban Legends pt 2 | Show Notes
Amanda’s Notes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creepypasta
https://time.com/2818192/creepypasta-copypasta-slender-man/
https://time.com/2818192/creepypasta-copypasta-slender-man/
We are back!!! Here we are with part two of our Urban Legend series. Let’s dive in.
So I mentioned last episode how modern day urban legends are by and large showing up on the internet, so I figured we would discuss some of those! I’ve left out the most obvious, Slenderman, because I want to do a real deep dive if I ever cover that. That would require two or three episodes of its own.
First, we’ll talk about Creepypastas. If you don’t know what a creepypasta is, it’s a brief, user generated story online intended to scare readers. These stories usually start out on forums where it’s understood that the stories are fiction, but they end up spreading out to the wider internet community and people start to believe they are true. Again, for an example of a creepypasta gone out of hand we see Slenderman.
There are four sub-genres of creepypasta that have grown organically as the stories appear. There are the Lost Episode creepypastas. These are stories of episodes of children’s shows that have the friend of a friend framing device twisted to something more like “does anyone else remember this episode of X tv show from the 80s/90s/insert target audience’s childhood”. In these stories you’ll get a description of an episode where either something creepy happens, like the famous Squidward suicide episode of Spongebob Squarepants creepypasta. You may get one where it’s a live action show but terrible things happened to the cast. Or terrible things happened to people who watched the broadcast, or remembering the episode leaves people feeling physically ill, etc.
Next we have the Video Game creepypastas. In these the stories center around video games with horrific elements, where the things happening in the games start spilling over into the realities of whatever characters are in the story. These can be caused by either supernatural elements or toxic AI issues. The most famous of these arguably being the Lavender Town Syndrome story, where the music from the Lavender Town part of Pokemon Red was leading to mass child suicides.
Next we have the psychotic killer creepypastas. These tell the story of someone bullied, or traumatized as a child and almost always left with a physical disfigurement of some sort who has a psychotic break and becomes a serial killer. The most notable of these would be Jeff the Killer, where the titular Jeff was bullied over and over, eventually beaten by his bullies and ending up in the hospital. After being released, Jeff slices his own face into a Joker smile and goes on a killing rampage, telling his victims “go to sleep” just before killing them.
And finally we have the supernatural monster creepypastas. These stories take monster ideas from traditional folklore and pop culture and rework them to fit the modern day. As these are stories on the internet, proceed with caution because I have run into several that do NOT treat these with any sort of cultural respect and some that are flat out offensive.
Now, I actually saw an interesting article from Time Magazine that in part, compared modern day creepypastas to chain letters and the chain emails that were everywhere in the days of dial-up internet. I just loved this line “chain emails were one of the first vehicles for web virality”.
I don’t have much in the way of connecting these to any more “traditional” urban legends, but I love that we are watching folklore unfold in real time and we have the tools to track the evolutions of these stories in real time.
Corinne’s Notes:
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_of_Kyiv
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/01/world/europe/ghost-kyiv-ukraine-myth.html
https://www.tnp.no/norway/panorama/5386-clown-craze-attack-spreads-to-norway/
https://www.usu.edu/today/story/usu-folklorists-say-creepy-clowns-2016-hottest-internet-trend
https://www.thelocal.no/20161012/creepy-clown-craze-puts-norwegians-on-edge/
https://www.vox.com/culture/2016/10/12/13122196/clown-panic-hoax-history
https://twitter.com/itolgensbakk/status/1570341262825488384
When Amanda put out the call recently asking for people’s favorite urban legends, Twitter fuckin’ DELIVERED. I owe a debt of gratitude in particular to Dr Ida Tolgensbakk, who told us about how the US Murder Clown legend had made its way to Norway, and then spread to Sweden as well. Obviously I had to do some googling and at least touch on the subject, right??
According to Dr Tolgensbakk, she first heard the story from her own kid in October 2016, before it started cropping up in papers around the country. Her daughter reported that a clown had killed a teen in the neighborhood. Later, reports started spreading that people were dressing as clowns and menacing others.
Now, in Norway at least, it does seem that people (especially teens) had heard about the creepy ass murder clowns and decided to scare the living daylights out of their neighbors. In response, some stores in the country stopped selling clown costumes entirely, says the translation of one newspaper that I read. In another English-language Norwegian news site, I read that teens in multiple cities were arrested after scaring folks whilst dressed as clowns, usually as their friends filmed on their phones.
In the US, in contrast, the VAST majority of creepy clown sightings were entirely fictitious. More people were arrested for filing false police reports than were people dressed as clowns doing illegal things. Not that people weren’t arrested for dressing up as clowns while doing illegal shit! Including here in Kentucky! Vox.com’s Aja Romano did a terrific write up when everything was going down, providing more context for the urban legend. This isn’t the first time that the creepy clown panic, or “Phantom Clowns”, as the phenomenon is better known as, has happened. It’s cropped up in cycles since the early 1980s.
Interestingly, since the creepy clown urban legends were big in 2016, members of the Digital Folklore Project at Utah State University actually posited that the terrifying carnies were being used to stand in as commentary surrounding the election, which is a take I am FASCINATED by (Side note, I also want to start following the Digital Folklore Project, because it sounds interesting as hell too).
I am now going to switch gears ALL THE WAY AROUND. Please get ready for some HELLA mood whiplash, because I found a very recent urban legend that’s been making the rounds.
In late February and early March of this year, a story started spreading around Ukraine about a fighter pilot who’d shot down at least six Russian aircraft during the first 30 hours of the attempted siege of Kyiv. Whomever this mystery pilot, known as the Ghost of Kyiv, was, they’d be the first certified Ace in decades. Air to Air combat just isn’t as frequent as it was during the First and Second World Wars. And the news was particularly triumphant during the extremely grim early days of the ongoing war on Ukraine.
Footage was even shared of the purported Ghost of Kyiv in combat, their MiG-29 outmaneuvering enemy planes.
Heck, even former Ukrainian president Poroshenko was tweeting about the Ghost of Kyiv. Some newspapers thought they’d even ID’d the pilot, believing it to be one Major Stepan Tarabalka (the New York Times notes that Major Tarabalka was an actual member of the Ukrainian armed forces who was killed in battle in March. He was 29 years old).
However, the world now knows as of April 30 of this year, the Ghost of Kyiv is just a legend. No such fighting ace actually exists. The story is as much propaganda as it is urban legend, but it filled a vital role in keeping spirits up amongst the citizens and soldiers of Ukraine in the face of an absolutely giant enemy
Plus misinformation of this type has played a vital role in the ongoing war efforts. Ukraine has been able to make massive inroads against Russia, pushing back the lines of the invading force.
Now, I had two primary reasons for wanting to discuss this story in particular. For one thing, it’s fascinating to see an urban legend that sprung up so recently, and because it’s important to continue paying attention to what’s going on in Ukraine. There’s so many concurrent tragedies going on in the world right now that it’s easy to lose sight of the ones that have been going on for awhile (looking at you, pandemic that still isn’t over, and the horrific flooding in Pakistan). But also, and this is so deeply nerdy of me, when I first saw it, I had an instant flashback to a short story I read as a young teen.
It was a story about the Blitz, and a group of English pilots being outmanned by Germans, when suddenly another formation of planes joined and turned the tide against the Germans. Over the course of the story, the POV character realizes that it’s actually King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table coming to guard Britain in its hour of need. I cannot at all remember the title of this story, and despite Googling the details I can remember I’ve never found the story again. But I remember reading it so clearly–sitting in the family room using the family computer in its computer hutch, so I had to have been no more than 15 or 16 when I read it.
But I had that same sense again when I was reading about the Ghost of Kyiv, raising spirits during Ukraine’s time of need.
Episode 25: Urban Legends pt 1 | Show Notes
Amanda’s Notes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_legend
https://louisvillehalloween.com/the-legend-of-pan-lives-in-the-heart-of-cherokee-park/
https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/kentucky/urban-legends-ky/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_in_the_backseat
And just in time for the creepiest month, we have a two-part series on Urban Legends! I am so excited about these episodes, you all don’t even know.
So first off we need to define what an Urban Legend is. Per wikipedia, an urban legend is “a genre of folklore comprising stories or fallacious claims circulated as true, especially as happening “a friend of a friend” or a family member.” It will often lean towards the scarier side of things, and will usually have some sort of cautionary element or moral lesson.
Like quite a bit of folklore, urban legends originally circulated via oral storytelling, the sort of “I heard from my friend who heard from her brother who heard from his friend…” etc etc, though now it can spread via pretty much any media.
The phrase “urban legend” as used in the folklore sense first appeared in print in 1968, with the phrase coming in to the pop culture lexicon in 1981 with the first in a series of popular books by English professor Jan Harold Brunvand, the first book of which was The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends & Their Meanings. And quick plug, if you all want some vanishing hitchhiker stories (which I would argue are the most famous American urban legends) go back and listen to episode three where we discuss quite a few of them.
Interestingly, social scientists in the past few decades have started tracking the popularity of various urban legends to explain social beliefs like attitudes towards crime, childcare, nutrition, transportation, and other choices that hit close to home specifically for the more traditional nuclear family homes.
And then I just have to throw this fact in before I talk through an urban legend or two for you. The United States Dept. of Energy now has a division called “Hoaxbusters” that deals with computer distributed hoaxes and legends, including the urban legend format of choice for the internet age, the creepypasta.
Now that we’ve got the history out of the way, I’m going to quickly talk about two urban legends. First up we have a classic, “The Killer in the Backseat”, which some listeners may also recognize as “High-Beams”. In this legend, a woman is driving alone in her car at night, followed closely by either a pickup truck or a semi. The mysterious truck driver tailgates the woman super closely all the way to either her house or a gas station, depending on the story, flashing his highbeams at irregular intervals. The woman is sure the driver has nefarious intentions. She finds out once she reaches her destination that the driver noticed a man with a large knife sneak into the woman’s backseat when she wasn’t looking, and the driver flashed the highbeams whenever the man lifted his knife to stab the woman.
In a variation on this, the woman stops for gas. When she goes in to pay, the pump flags a problem with her credit card. She goes in to see what is going on, when the attendant tells her he or she (the gender of the attendant changes depending on the telling) that the police are on the way because when the woman was busy with the pump the attendant noticed a man sneak into her backseat.
And a third version that I actually hadn’t heard of before has the woman driving when a person (usually a woman) runs out crazed with fear and bangs on the car. The woman eventually drives away, only to encounter the woman again. No matter how fast the woman drives or what direction she goes this person always shows up, banging the car. The woman calls the police, who agree to meet her at her home. When she meets them there, the officers find the killer in her car. The killer ends up confessing to a string of murders, and the person who kept banging on the car matches the description of one of his victims.
Versions of this story have been in circulation since at the least the 1960s, with a big boost in popularity when it was published in an Ann Landers column in 1982. And for those who don’t know what an Ann Landers column, thank you for making me feel old (or I guess for not having grown up in the U.S> stealing the newspaper from your parents which is less hurtful).
This one may be loosely based in reality! Which I hate! In 1964 an escaped murderer was found hiding in the backseat of a car, having snuck in when the operator wasn’t looking. But, this is an American urban legend and we are a lawless wasteland so in the real life case, when the driver noticed the murderer in the backseat he shot him dead.
The other urban legend that I want to very very briefly touch on is the Living Pan statue in Cherokee park here in Louisville, KY. And for those of you who have never visited here, Cherokee park (apart from being named by someone who fetishized Native Americans and named all the parks after peoples who never lived in this area) is stunning. It’s acres of hiking trails and bike trails in the heart of the city. It’s got a paved running path, lots of beautiful statues, and some good playgrounds. It’s also terrifying to drive through at night, which sucks because cutting through it is really convenient. There’s deer who might jump in front of your car, not a lot of light, lots of twisty winding roads, and just a general air of creepiness.
So it shouldn’t surprise us that one of the weirdest statues in the park has an urban legend attached to it. Per the legend, on full moon nights, the statue of the Greek god Pan at Hogan’s Fountain gets up and walks around. I can’t track the origins of this one. I can’t find when it first showed up in the pop culture lexicon, but it’s all over ghost hunter websites when you look up Louisville or Kentucky.
I did find a fun theory about where the legend may have come from though! The good people over at Louisvillehalloween.com went to Cherokee park on a full moon to see for themselves. And at first thought they couldn’t see the statue, though they could see the white base of the statue! The theory though is that because the statue is so dark it blends into the night since there’s no lighting around, and the contrast between the dark statue and the white base make it appear to have disappeared. But who’s to say, perhaps if you go to Cherokee park on a full moon and open a bottle of wine you’re offering will be deemed worthy of a visit from Pan himself.
And that is my segment!
Corinne’s Notes:
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanako-san
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuchisake-onna
https://yokai.com/kuchisakeonna/
Okay so this particular dive into urban legends can be SQUARELY blamed on my husband. Hunter was playing a video game inspired by the works of Junji Ito, horror mangaka extraordinaire. He GLEEFULLY started telling me about some of the more contemporary yokai being featured in the game, though he politely did not show me imagery. Junji Ito is a master of his craft but my god, even the cute comics he makes about how much he loves cats are unsettling.
Specifically, Hunter told me about kuchisake-onna, or the “Slit-mouthed” woman. An associate professor at Kokugakuin University, Iikura Yoshiyuki, considers her to be the first purely Japanese urban legend. Now, Kuchisake-onna traditionally appears as a beautiful woman whose mouth has been slit from ear to ear. How she got this way varies from story to story.
In early variants dating back to the Edo period, she was the mistress or wife of a samurai caught in adultery
In more contemporary versions of the story, the horrible cuts are caused by, among other things, a freak accident at the dentist
Side note, I’m already spooked by the dentist office, this DOES NOT HELP
Another modern variant says that a jealous rival woman fucked up her face.
So now this lady has a … is it appropriate to call it a Glasgow Smile when the recipient most patently Does Not live in Scotland?? Anyway, in death, the woman becomes an onryo, or malevolent spirit.
In the 1970s, a story started making the rounds in newspapers in Japan about a woman wearing a face mask approaching children and asking “Am I pretty?” and if the child answered in the affirmative, taking off her mask to reveal her mutilated face and saying “And now?”. Responding “No” in terror resulted in murder, saying “yes” got the victim mutilated in the same way as the apparition. The story TERRIFIED the schoolchildren of Japan, and lots of Parent Associations organized walking students to and from school to help assuage fears. Over time, things calmed down, especially as students shared the best ways to thwart kuchisake onna. You could respond with indifference, unfazed by her appearance and telling her that her looks are average. Or you could throw things at her to distract her while you escape–popular options include money or hard candy. Which, I’m just saying probably would distract me, too.
After the initial, viral spread of the story, things calmed down, but Kuchisake-onna stayed on the minds of researchers, especially once the concept of urban legends was introduced. To quote a 2019 article from Nippon.com, “The term “urban legend” came to Japan via a 1988 translation of American folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand’s 1981 book The Vanishing Hitchhiker. The up-and-coming Japanese researchers who conducted the translation are said to have wanted to overturn the idea in the academic world that oral literature meant only old tales and legends, and to open up the possibility of investigating the gossip and rumors of the contemporary city.”
Interestingly, Kuchisake-onna regained her popularity with the spread of the internet! The stories cropped up on forums and made their way into pop culture, ranging from appearances in manga and video games (World of Horror was the game Hunter played), as well as horror films (which I will never watch, thank you very much).
Speaking of pop culture, that’s actually how I first heard about the other contemporary yokai urban legend I decided to learn about! I was perusing the manga at Barnes and Noble and noticed a really weird title- Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun. I was like, “oh that’s a weird title!” and immediately put it out of my mind to go pick up the latest copies of Akatsuki no Yona instead. And then I started googling Urban Legends of the world and stumbled across Hanako-san! Who haunts toilets!
Typically Hanako is a young girl (though there are male variants, hence “Hanako-kun” – kun is an honorific used almost exclusively for young boys), whose spirit haunts a school’s bathroom. How she came to be haunting the bathroom varies between tellings, but it’s always tragic. Some of the most common variants are:
She was so severely bullied that she committed suicide in the school bathroom
She was killed by a parent (or another adult, usually a stranger if not her parent) in the school bathroom
Or she was a student during World War II who was hiding in the bathroom during an air raid.
After death she’s doomed to haunt the school toilets, where, students have been saying for decades, you can summon her. However, summoning her spirit is risky. You might get pulled to hell via the toilets which sounds extremely icky to me! Or if someone else enters the bathroom while you’re summoning her, a three-headed lizard will come scare you off. The whole three-headed lizard thing really seems to come out of left field for me, and other than seeing it mentioned in everything I read about Hanako-san, I’m still not sure what it’s deal is.
Much like Kuchisake-onna, Hanako-san has featured heavily in contemporary pop culture. In addition to the aforementioned “Toilet-bound Hanako-kun”, the ghostly child has featured in several other manga and anime, including one called GeGeGe no Kitaro, which I really need to check out– the author has been cited in SEVERAL scholarly works about Japanese yokai that I’ve read and I want to know more about her body of work.
One last side note: I found an Atlas Obscura article, link in the show notes, of course, and Japan has a genuinely astonishing number of yokai and ghosts who haunt bathrooms. Like. It’s shocking. And fascinatingly, folklorist Michael Dylan Foster equates this to bathrooms being a liminal space, which sort of blows my mind. To quote the article, “Foster describes bathrooms as liminal spaces in that they connect the normal, everyday world to a whole different realm, namely the sewer. “In that sense, the bathroom is a place of transition, and the toilet in particular is a portal to a mysterious otherworld,” says Foster. “Even though we generally flush things down, it would not seem surprising for something mysterious to come up through the toilet.”’
And that’s where I’m gonna leave you because wow I hate it? And I have no one to blame for this but myself.
Episode 24: Therianthropic Theories | Show Notes
Amanda’s Notes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therianthropy
https://www.samwoolfe.com/2021/06/part-human-part-animal-therianthropes-tricksters-human-nature.html
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1590-animal-headed-humans-appear-in-earliest-art/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10816-021-09523-9
Ok, let’s jump into this week’s topic, “Therianthropes”. I’m so excited about this one, I’m going some fun places with my research so buckle up.
Per the Wikipedia article on Theriathropes, a therianthrope is “the mythological ability of human beings to metamorphose into other animals by means of shapeshifting.” We have confirmation that the term started being used in folklore stories throughout Europe in the early 1900s, with some scholars believing the word came into use as early as 17th century werewolf trials.
Related to therianthropy we have the concept of “theriocephaly”, which is the folkloric depiction of animal headed humanoids. These include the animal headed forms of deities across culture (see our buddy Hermanubis from the coyote/jackal episode) and can be found as early as cave paintings from roughly 30,000 years ago depicting a bison headed humanoid. An aside, this drawing has been called “the Sorceror” by scholars and for some reason that just makes me happy.
So…as for shapeshifters in North American folklore…there are creatures that people familiar with the spooky side of folklore are probably expecting me to cover but out of both respect for indigenous people who have spoken out repeatedly about how distasteful it is for non-native folks to discuss them and my personal fear because if you call these shifters by their name you draw attention to yourself I am going to refrain from that. If you guys listening want those stories, maybe ask yourselves why your thrill seeking is more important than Native religious sovereignty. That’s something I’ve had to grapple with and I think we can all do better.
Stepping off of that soapbox for now, I will admit that that left me in a bit of a pickle about what to discuss this episode. So I started reading up on theories surrounding shapeshifters in folklore in general and I think you all are going to enjoy where we’re going.
So throughout folklore worldwide shapeshifting tends to be associated with religious leaders, often referred to as shamans but there is some disagreement in academic circles about what sort of religious structure includes someone who would be called a shaman. Broadly speaking, a shaman in this context is a religious leader believed to use magic for the purpose of aiding the community. And the ‘shapeshifting’ that we are referring to here isn’t necessarily fully transforming into an animal, it’s more taking on aspects of the animal being channeled in order to use abilities that humans either don’t have or don’t have in abundance. Like bear or jaguar strength, fox cleverness, owl wisdom, etc.
Now, one thing that is strikingly common with how shamans achieve this sort of shapeshifting worldwide is the need to enter into a sort of altered state of consciousness. So in some cultures you have a “trance” dance where members of the community dance with the shaman figure in movements designed to alter the mental state.
Today, we’re going to talk about what is subjectively the easiest way to get to an altered state, psychedelics. Specifically for the Americas, ayahuasca. It’s been noted in several modern first-hand accounts of ayahuasca users that, depending on your dose, you see yourself shifting into an animal shape while under the influence. To make this commonality even more oddly specific, people by and large see themselves shifting into some sort of large feline.
This lends some credence to the theory that Incan shamans regularly used plant medicine, or more colloquially, drugs, in religious rituals. For example, the ruins of Chavin de Huantar, an ancient ceremonial site in Peru, show stone carvings of someone mid-transformation between human and jaguar. One carving in particular shows this figure clutching a San Pedro cactus. And what does a San Pedro cactus have in decent quantities? Mescaline, a compound with psychedelic properties comparable to LSD and psylocibin.
I also found some fun comparisons between shamanism and trickster figures. Both shamans and tricksters are often seen as having the ability to take new forms, both are seen as able to cross the boundaries between worlds, and as we’ve discussed in our Fox and Coyote episodes, in North American indigenous folklore tricksters and shamans are both seen as figures who bring necessary knowledge to the community.
I know this research is a little all over the place but I personally love the comparison between trickster figures and shamans, and I even saw the hypothesis that the traditional court jester could be considered a contemporary shaman figure, and that the jester headwear is analogous to early human depictions of therianthropic transformations, ie that the headwear often looks like horns or rabbit ears sprouting from the jester’s head, but this is one podcast episode not an essay on shamanism through the ages so I’ll cut things off here.
Corinne’s Notes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therianthropy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Trois-Fr%C3%A8res
Joseph P. Laycock. (2012). “We Are Spirits of Another Sort”: Ontological Rebellion and Religious Dimensions of the Otherkin Community. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, 15(3), 65–90. https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2012.15.3.65
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsune#Kitsunetsuki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werehyena
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buda_(folklore)
Finneran, N. (2003). Ethiopian Evil Eye Belief and the Magical Symbolism of Iron Working. Folklore, 114(3), 427–433. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30035127
You may remember that in last week’s episode where we discussed werewolves that clinical lycanthropy doesn’t just refer (or even most frequently refer) to people who believe they have transformed (or are currently transformed) into wolves or dogs. It’s not at all the most common outcome.
And so it goes to follow that other forms of “were” creatures are often the focus of mythology and folklore. And if we’re working under the definition that a therianthrope is a being that transforms between a human/humanoid and bestial shape, you could lump selkies into the mix but since a) amanda already humored me by doing an entire episode on selkies and b) that would be cheating, I’ve dug into the topic a little more.
Belief in therianthropy seems to go back to the Neolithic era. There are some arguments that a carving from Les Trois Freres caves in France depicts a therianthropic figure. The art in question, a piece called “The Sorcerer” is WILDLY interesting, and its interpretation is open to TONS of debate, especially because it seems that the gentleman who made the most famous copy of the painting uhhhhh embellished a little bit (the whole saga is super fascinating, and his added bits are part of why “The Sorcerer” was often used as an anthropological argument for a sort of prototypical “Horned God” of the hunt. This is, alas, not the episode for me to dig into that, but you best believe that I added it to the content ideas queue).
I could also theoretically touch again on the “were-jaguars” of the Olmec culture, but again, it’s a topic I got to explore in our Big Cats episode–side note, I genuinely think that might be my favorite episode we’ve done?
SO OFF TO GOOGLE I WENT. And hold onto your butt Amanda because I found were-hyenas (and a couple of other things because I can’t focus on any one topic for very long)!
Were-hyenas are found most often in several African nations (especially Somalia, Eritria and Ethiopia, which is where I’ll be doing most of my focus), but also in the Arabian peninsula, the Levant, and other regions.
As the name implies, were-hyenas transform between human and hyena form. Unlike the European werewolf, not all were-hyenas start out human! Some are hyenas that can take on the forms of men.
In Ethiopia and Eritria, metalworkers are often associated with becoming were-hyenas, and are referred to as “Bouda”. In general someone who is Bouda is typically an artisan of some sort (often metalworkers) and also a hereditary sorcerer capable of laying the evil eye on someone in addition to being able to turn into a hyena. Why a hyena? In Ethiopian Evil Eye Belief and the Magical Symbolism of Iron Working, the author Niall Finneran explains that the animals are associated with being “dirty, evil scavengers”.
One way that these were-hyenas terrorize the neighbors is to dig up the corpses of recently deceased Christian men and women to eat.
Oh, did I mention? Historically metal workers in Ethiopia are Jewish, and it’s often a family trade. So uh. Basically were-hyenas in this region of the world are a new spin on blood libel.
So now that we’ve bopped through that bummer, I’ve got one other thing I’d like to touch on! In modern times, I think it’s fair to point out that otherkin are often (but not always) a form of therianthropy.
At first I wasn’t really clear on what differentiates Otherkin from other groups like furries. From my understanding (and please don’t castigate me if I’m wrong, I’m basing this off the information I was able to find, I’m genuinely not trying to be a dick), while furries are furries, otherkin feel that they are in some ontological, non-biological sense, not human. And this sense of “other” isn’t necessarily that they feel part animal in some way, it can also be fae, or angelic, or even alien. Physically they are human but it’s often described as their “souls” being other.
I ended up reading a really fascinating article on “otherkin” as a framework for a contemporary spirituality, even though people who ID as otherkin don’t necessarily think of it as a religious framework. But whether or not it’s considered as a spiritual or religious movement, the development of contemporary Otherkin communities does derive a lot of its movement from New-Age counterculture movements, especially development of Pagan communities in the United States in the 1960s, and having an opportunity to grow and expand and encompass more ways of being once the Internet acted as an intermediary for people to gather and converse.
I’m just really fascinated by this extremely contemporary example of “therianthropy” in a sense (and I’m using it in an extremely broad sense here) when the concept itself goes back so far into pre-history, if we take the example of the “The Sorcerer” from Les Trois Freres as evidence of therianthropy as well.
Episode 23: Werewolf Weirdness | Show Notes
Amanda’s Notes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rougarou
https://www.mythicalcreaturesguide.com/loup-garou/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soucouyant
https://ancestralfindings.com/american-folklore-louisiana/
https://thesupernaturalfoxsisters.com/2018/05/15/monster-of-the-week-the-rougarou/
We are back!!!! I think I speak for both of us when I say I can’t think of a better topic to open the season with than this one : Werewolves. Are you ready? Let’s do it.
So for this topic I had to get an American werewolf classic, the Loup Garou, also referred to as the rougarou. So when I first thought about covering the rougarou for this episode I, like a fool, for some reason thought that this legend was pretty localized to the Cajun Acadiana, aka in and right around New Orleans. I thought rougarou I thought Cajun accents, swamps, humidity that has you feel like you’re drowning on land, that sort of thing. But boy was I wrong!
The loup garou, and yes I will continue switching which name I go by because I haven’t decided which one I like better, was brought to the New World by way of the French stories of the loup-garou which first popped up in the middle ages. Loup - coming from the French word for “wolf”, and garou being a French word analogous to “werewolf”. So naturally the myth exists in Louisiana, Quebec, and various nations in the Caribbean. And we’ll get back to the Caribbean myths here in a bit, for now we’ll focus on the classic Cajun variety wolves.
The only commonality in rougarou stories in Louisiana is that the monsters are big and hairy. Appearances vary quite a bit amongst accounts. It may appear like what we in the West first think of when we hear werewolf. The wolf-man hybrid, long fangs, drool, yellow eyes, hunching over as the bones contort into a perversion of a mammalian skeleton, etc. But sometimes, and I’ll dive into some theories about this next episode actually, they appear as wolf or dog headed humans.
And there are some myths where it’s not a wolf at all. When you think about the swamps in and around New Orleans do you know what you probably don’t consider? Wolves. Because wolves aren’t native to that area of the country. So there are some myths, especially the more modern ones, where the rougarou is something more reptilian when it transforms. I don’t know about you, alligators are terrifying enough as it is, I don’t need to imagine them as supernatural monsters as smart as humans. Absolutely not, take those dinosaurs back to the Jurassic please and thank you.
There are a few different ways that tradition tells us a person can turn into a rougarou. The person can be bitten by an existing one, pretty bog-standard werewolf myth there. They can be cursed by a witch. Under this story a person must hide their rougarou nature for 101 days, at which point the curse is lifted. If they tell anyone or anyone spies them in their rougarou form they will be cursed to be a rougarou for the rest of their life.
The rougarou’s motivations for it’s bloodthirsty actions are manifold. First, it’s said that the transformation itself can cause the rougarou to lose track of its own mind, falling prey to a baser animal instinct. The rougarou could itself be a sorcerer bent on using its supernatural abilities to terrorize others. And then my favorite, because I am me and we are both too Catholic to pass it up, the rougarou will chase down and attack any Catholic, especially any child, who doesn’t observe Lenten restrictions. Oh, you ate a chicken nugget on a Friday between Ash Wednesday and Easter? This here abomination is going to tear your liver out and drain your blood because that’s what Jesus would do. Or something. In fact, according to this story, a Catholic who lapses during Lent for seven years in a row would automatically become a rougarou. Which, um…..whoops. Guess I’ve just been ignoring those transformations when they happen to me.
Before I move on from Louisiana, I do have to say there is one fool-proof method to keep yourself safe from a Loup-garou - frogs. The beasts are terrified of all frogs. So I guess keep a frog as a pet and never leave your house and you’re golden.
Ok, so moving on to the Caribbean. Again, a colonized area with pretty heavy French influences. Throughout the Caribbean you will hear tales of the soucouyant, a bloodsucking fiend that primarily attacks children. The soucouyant is a shapeshifting vampiric monster that disguises itself as an elderly woman before shifting into its “true” form to feed. That form varies across the Caribbean depending on who you ask. Sometimes the woman stays the same but is suddenly flying around on a mortar and pestle. Sometimes she shifts into a ball of white light before launching itself down to feed. And in Haiti the creature is referred to as a loogaroo, and transforms into a beast before draining your blood dry. Much like with Eastern European vampire traditions, you can draw a circle of rice around your house in order to dissuade the soucouyant from entering, as it will be compelled to count each individual grain before it moves any further.
And that is my segment!
Corinne’s Notes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wulver
Eberly, S. S. (1988). Fairies and the Folklore of Disability: Changelings, Hybrids and the Solitary Fairy. Folklore, 99(1), 58–77. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1259568
https://www.shetlandmuseumandarchives.org.uk/blog/the-real-story-behind-the-shetland-wulver
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_lycanthropy
So my intent here was to be as wholesome as possible because I always know that Amanda lives to scare the crap out of me. Because of that, when I first started brainstorming what I wanted to research in terms of lycanthropy, my first thought was about a tumblr post I saw years ago.
In Scotland, this post explained, there’s a variant of the werewolf who lives in the Shetland Islands, is largely gentle and harmless, and is known for leaving fish for poor families. This is wildly charming so obviously I had to dig in.
For the most part, this summation of the wulver is accurate! The wulver was first written about in the 1930s by a folklorist named Jessie Saxby, herself a native of the Shetlands. Per her telling, the wulvers is humanoid, with a hairy/fur covered body, and the head of a wolf. The wulver lives in a cave and spends most of its time fishing and generously shares its catch with poverty-stricken families. The site Folklore Thursday also indicates that the wulver is known to sit outside the houses of the terminally ill and mourn.
However! Contemporary folklorists largely believe that this may be another instance of fakelore. There just isn’t enough evidence that the wulver was a common figure in Shetland folklore. In fact, the Shetland Museum and Archive have traced where Jessie Saxby came up with the idea. In their write-up about the origin of the wulver, they mention early work from the late 19th century by a named scholar Jakob Jakobsen making a connection between place-names in the Shetlands with “wul-” as a prefix to the Norse “alf”, which means elf. If you’ll recall from earlier episodes (like Selkies), there’s a not insignificant amount of cultural crossover and sharing between the Norse and Celtic cultures. So basically Jessie Saxby looked at Jakobsen’s research, said to herself “I reject your reality and substitute my own” and then wrote a bunch of folklore fanfiction, which has become increasingly popular in the almost century since she wrote her work.
So on the one hand, I’m super bummed that Scotland didn’t have traditional tales of a kindly wolf-man making special deliveries of fish to households (Sidenote, I know Scotland is largely Protestant, but how useful would that be during Lent??). But on the other? Clearly this is an indication that writing fic is more beneficial than society told me it was.
As I did my usual googling around, I also came across mentions of the faoladh (pronunciation: fwey-leh, f sound more japanese than english), a lycanthrope from Ireland. Until the last wolf was killed in the 18th century, Ireland was known for its wolf population, so perhaps it’s unsurprising that they’re home of a beastie that transforms between man and wolf. The faoladh may be better known for English speakers as the Werewolves of Ossory- which was a historic kingdom in southern Ireland. The werewolves there were extremely fierce warriors in one variant of the story, who could put on wolf-skins and become wolflike themselves. In another variant of the story, these were people cursed by St Patrick as “a divine punishment for wickedness”. So either every seven years or for a period of seven years, folks would turn into wolves because apparently they were dicks to God?
In yet another variant on that particular story, it was one man and one woman from the region who’d be transformed for seven years and then transformed back and be allowed into the community as another man and woman left to take on the curse. In this variant, there’s a story about a werewolf coming to a priest to ask for last rites for his mate, showing the priest that it definitely wasn’t blasphemy to give the dying wolf communion, because look it’s just an old woman under a wolf-skin. Which. Okay? That’s kinda sad, to be honest.
Anyway, the connection between wolves and warriors in Ireland is pretty common and was used heavily in Irish literature, so the frequently warlike nature of the faoladh is perhaps unsurprising.
I’m now going to veer somewhat off course to touch on another topic or two I stumbled across. So remember with the wulver story, I said most folklorists now believe this to be an instance of fakelore? In the late 1980s, folklorist Susan Schoon Eberly speculated that the Wulver could be an individual with a congenital condition called Hunter syndrome, which (among other things) can cause distinct facial features. While contemporary folklorists disagree with this assessment, her article Fairies and the Folklore of Disability is well worth the read. I’ve linked to the JSTOR copy of the article in my sources.
ALSO APPARENTLY THERE IS IN FACT CLINICAL LYCANTHROPY?
I was just scrolling through wikipedia when the hyperlinked phrase “Clinical Lycanthropy” reached out and slapped me in the face. Obviously I had to dig in.
It turns out that clinical lycanthropy is a form of psychosis, not currently linked to any particular disorder in the DSM-V, though there is diagnostic criteria–largely self-reported by those suffering from psychosis during moments of lucidity, or witnessing animal-like behavior in the patient. People who are diagnosed with clinical lycanthropy believe that they have transformed into an animal, either in the past or at that moment. Interestingly, the diagnosis isn’t limited to “human-to-wolf” experiences. Apparently wolf-like and dog-like behaviors are a minority. Please note, this diagnosis is EXTREMELY rare. Also the use of mental illness in horror has a gross history. I’m not trying to pull this in to be like “ooh here’s my spooky bit”, I just did not expect to see the word “lycanthropy” in a clinical/psychiatric context.
Episode 22: Cryptid Chic | Show Notes
Amanda’s Notes:
https://louisvillehalloween.com/the-legend-of-pope-lick/
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/pope-lick-trestle-bridge
https://cryptidz.fandom.com/wiki/Pope_Lick_Monster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Lick_Monster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Cryptids
Oh my goodness it’s our season finale! I can’t believe we’re already 22 episodes in, that is bonkers to me. So, we couldn’t finish out our first season without covering one of our favorite bits of modern folklore, cryptids. I am so excited for this episode.
To begin with, let’s define “cryptid”. Per Wikipedia, “the term cryptid is used by proponents of cryptozoology, a pseudoscience, to refer to beings that cryptozoologists believe may in fact exist but have not yet been discovered.” Notable cryptids that folks may have heard of are the yeti, BigFoot, and Mothman. Sidenote, shoutout to our friends over at Spooky Appalachia, if you join their discord server you get occasional clips or screengrabs from the live cam at the Mothman statue in West Virginia. Also, their site has covered a pretty wide variety of cryptid and supernatural stories.
For this episode I thought about covering beings like Mothman, or the Jersey Devil, or Bigfoot before remembering that there is a cryptid much closer to home for the two of us Corinne. I’m bringing us all right here to the Louisville Metro area to talk about the Pope Lick Goat Man.
Alright, to begin with we need to go back to the 1930s when, so one legend goes, a man named Colonel Beauregard Schildknecht, a man who never actually served in any military anywhere, was the owner and ringmaster of a circus that traveled all over the Southern United States. His reputation was….not great. He was known in the carnie circles as a liar, a cheat, and there were rumors that his group of Freaks, Geeks, and Carnies were as quick to murder a demanding patron or rival performer as they were to entertain. So you know, all around good start to this.
One night when the circus was in Maryland, the bearded lady stumbled across a crying baby left abandoned in a crate near her tent. When she unswadled the child she screamed. This child had fur covering his lower body from the waist down, legs tapering into cloven hooves. On his forehead were little nubs which grew into horns as he grew up. The Colonel took one look at the baby and dollar signs flashed in his eyes. The Colonel took the child in and he became part of the circus sideshow attraction.
Our unsavory Colonel, as you can probably guess, wasn’t exactly Father of the Year material. He kept the child chained inside a metal cage when not actively running a show, and the other circus members would poke at the child, throw things at him in the cage, spit in his food, etc. Oddly enough, in an outcome no one could possibly have anticipated, the goat man’s temperament wasn’t exactly sunshine and roses.
One dark and stormy night the circus was on a train heading to a performance in Louisville when the train went over the Pope Lick Trestle Bridge. Corinne, have you ever been past the bridge? It’s soooo far off the ground. Even without the goatman legend I find that bridge terrifying. So anyway, that dark and stormy night lighting hit the tracks on the bridge, derailing the train. In the crash, the goatman’s cage was broken open, and he took his revenge on the other survivors, including the Colonel, rending them limb from limb in a bloody mess.
Now, that’s just one origin story. Other stories state that he’s the product of a farmer who wanted to practice the occult, so said farmer had improper relations with a goat on his farm and presented that offspring in a ritual sacrifice, allowing the spirit of Baphomet to inhabit the goat/human hybrid, giving that demon a vessel with which to torment the earth. I prefer the circus story because I’m a sucker for a revenge story and lack of bestiality but that’s just me.
As far as sightings go, that’s where this gets weird. In the legends and the stories passed around everyone knows the goatman is half goat/half human. Everyone knows that it can mimic voices and lure you over while sounding like your own mother if wanted. And everyone knows that one look at the monster will leave you so frightened you would rather jump off of the trestle bridge than be in its presence for longer than a moment. But I can’t find a single instance of anyone claiming to have seen the goatman in person.
And for me, that’s what makes this such an interesting cryptid. People claim to have seen Bigfoot, or Mothman, or the Jersey Devil, or Chupacabras. And there’s even alleged photographic proof of those. And hoaxes or not, it points to a certain amount of complacency about the cryptids themselves. Sure Bigfoot is probably dangerous, but people have no issues trying to get close enough to take a picture and claiming they’ve succeeded.
The Pope Lick Goatman is more sinister. More than a dozen deaths on or near the Pope Lick Trestle Bridge have been attributed to the Goatman’s presence since 1980. People constantly go “legend-tripping”, the term for people searching out the truth behind cryptids and urban legends, to the bridge and no one even claims that a blurry photo of something in the bushes or on the edge of the creek below the bridge might be the goatman. I don’t know why, but that’s the most unsettling part of the whole legend to me. Cryptids are meant to exist in 90s Weekly World News magazine style photos, right next to headlines about Batboy. They shouldn’t just be stories told around a fire for decades, flitting around the edges of tragic deaths as recently as 2019.
And before I close out, I have to clear up a common misconception. For some reason it’s often said that the bridge is out of commission. That is a lie. As many as 20 trains go across that bridge daily. The deaths on the bridge are less likely to come from a goatman’s terrible visage than they are from people legend-tripping and then jumping to avoid getting hit by a train. Appreciate the legend, go look at the park nearby, walk under the bridge, go to the acre wide outdoor escape room themed about the circus Goatman legend that takes you up next to the bridge. But don’t climb 50 feet up a wooden bridge frequented by machines who literally cannot care about your life or death. And that is my segment!
Corinne’s Notes:
Sources:
https://gizmodo.com/a-field-guide-to-cryptids-from-europe-and-africa-595809722
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:European_legendary_creatures
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolpertinger
https://gizmodo.com/rabbits-with-horns-meet-the-human-papillomavirus-5795996
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptozoology
Dendle, P. (2006). Cryptozoology in the Medieval and Modern Worlds. Folklore, 117(2), 190–206. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30035486
Chesnut, L. (2013). Neocolonial Scenarios in the Syfy Channel’s “Destination Truth”: Scientific Discovery, Tourism, and Ethnography. Studies in Popular Culture, 35(2), 129–154. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23416339
I’m gonna get a little bit funky with my cryptid of choice, and then we’re gonna talk about cryptozoology a bit in general because there’s some weird stuff out there!
To be honest, I very specifically wanted to pick a European cryptid because cryptid hunting can get a little….colonizer-y (more on that later). So we’re gonna go with the Jackalope’s Bavarian cousin, the wolpertinger. I swear I did not pick this guy just because his name is fun to say. Though that was uhhhh definitely a consideration, not going to lie.
The wolpertinger is a fucked up lil rabbit or hare, one that usually has wings, antlers, and sometimes the body of a squirrel? There’s a hilarious image on the wikipedia page of an Albrecht Durer painting of a hare that’s been modified to look like a wolpertinger, and it’s honestly given me so much life. There’s also a taxidermied “wolpertinger” on the same page that looks like the bastard child of a platypus and a furby and I do not like it. I just don’t.
There are actually variants all across Germanic Europe. Beyond alternate spellings of the wolpertinger’s name, there’s also an Austrian version called the raurakl. Now unfortunately for us, the wolpertinger is pretty solidly a “hoax animal” and outside of folklore prooooobably doesn’t really count as a cryptid anymore.
That said there may be a scientific explanation for why horned bunnies and hares crop up so frequently! Scientists like Richard Shope and his colleague Francis Rous in the 1930s heard reports from hunters about “horned rabbits” and were able to acquire samples from hunting parties. Through some pretty clever tests they determined that whatever was causing the horns was probably a virus. Rubbing samples of the virus on otherwise unaffected rabbits caused “horns” to grow on them as well. Injecting the samples into the rabbits caused extremely aggressive cancer. Shope’s colleague Rous actually went on to win a Nobel prize from his research linking certain viruses to cancer. Anyway, eventually these growths were linked to papillomavirus- and this research was also the springboard that linked HPV to cervical cancer (with the added bonus of “researchers realized that nuns are less likely to get cervical cancer than married women”). So that’s your vaguely horrifying but also sort of cool science fact for the day!
Now, I do want to talk cryptozoology a little more in general because while I love it and it’s super cool, it *can* be a gateway to some pretty unsavory stuff.
One of the hallmarks of cryptozoology is that it pretty much flat out rejects classic academia. While some cryptozoologists will hew closely to the scientific method, most of them aren’t trained zoologists. And to be clear, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing! Not having a degree in zoology doesn’t mean you can’t contribute to science! There are so many cool citizen scientist projects out there to support! Go check them out! But on the whole, cryptozoology isn’t really there for Big Science. Interestingly, there’s a surprising link between subsets of cryptozoology and New (or “young”) Earth Creationism - some folks looking for living dinosaurs are basically in it to disprove contemporary paleontology and biology because it’s not Biblically Accurate.
Cryptozoological research lets people poo poo the knowledge and understanding of academia and feel like cool iconoclasts. It also borrows HEAVILY from the aesthetic of the age of exploration- you’re out in the unexplored wilderness looking for charismatic megafauna! So cool! So dangerous! Except a lot of the Western framework for this kind of “adventuring” is pretty colonialist in nature. That “Age of Exploration” aesthetic honestly hasn’t aged well. Which is a pity because it looks so cool to me.
And I don’t want to sound like I’m shitting all over cryptozoology! The world that seemed so big when we were very young is actually very small and fragile and interconnected and it’s okay to want to dream that not everything has been discovered yet and that there are ecosystems that late stage capitalism haven’t completely destroyed! To quote scholar Peter Dendle: “Cryptozoology thus fulfils an important role: it represents a quest for magic and wonder in a world many perceive as having lost its mystique”
To be fair, we are still discovering tons of new things! It’s just that usually those things are beetles, not like. Previously undiscovered primates. Honestly, if there are any undiscovered megafauna left, they’re probably at the bottom of the ocean and they can stay there because the ocean is terrifying. Mad props to anyone who’s studying it because I could never.
Episode 21: Scavenger Stories
Amanda’s Notes
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/coyote-america-dan-flores-history-science
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote_(mythology)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote
https://pestpointers.com/amazing-coyote-facts-and-things-you-didnt-know/
https://www.historynet.com/coyote-american-original/
Alright, for the final episode in our animal folklore series we are talking about coyotes and jackals, and I will get into how the two relate. And it turns out it’s not just because we needed to make sure Corinne had access to myths for this episode.
So a bit of biology and history before we get into the folklore portion of my segment. The canid family of animals evolved in North America about 5 and a half million years ago. While many canid species such as wolves, jackals, and wild dogs left via land bridges, coyotes never left the North American continent. Physically, modern coyotes are closest to golden jackals amongst the different canid species. There’s only a 4% genetic difference and evolutionarily they only split apart 800,000 years ago, which is the blink of an eye, relatively speaking. So yeah, our episode topic totes makes sense and wasn’t laziness at all.
So growing up, believe it or not, I read whatever available book on mythology and folklore I could find. Shocking, right? And in that sort of zealous research that only a 9 year old can do, I learned that in Native American folklore (you know, the generic Native folklore that definitely is the same across the continent) coyote is a trickster character a la Reynard in France or Anansi in West Africa. I imagine that’s a similar belief that you have, yeah? Because that’s what’s available in surface level stories.
But surface level colonizer retellings of stories are never really accurate, are they? Looking further, Coyote as a mythological figure only shows up in mythology in the region that is modern day California, which makes sense when you understand that coyotes did not migrate East of even the Great Plains until the late 19th Century. And in those original myths Coyote doesn’t really fit the trickster role. He never does anything to teach humanity a lesson. Instead, Coyote exists as a benevolent teacher or mentor for humanity, with the most important task he carries out being the introduction of fire.
Now, because I’m me I wanted to figure out when and why the myths switched from benevolent mentor to lecherous, spineless trickster. And the answer, naturally, is fucking white people. See, in the fall of 1804 Lewis and Clark made it to present day South Dakota where they encountered a coyote for the first time. At first they thought it was a fox, but after they shot one and looked at it up close they decided it must be some sort of wolf. They named it a prairie wolf and that’s what coyotes were called for most of the 19th Century. Fun fact! Learning that bit of history while doing research for this episode made certain passages of Little House on the Prairie make sooooo much more sense in retrospect. That introduced coyotes into United States consciousness, but the beginning of their reputation as a pest came from an even less likely source than Lewis and Clark. Care to guess?
It was our buddy, originator of the Great American Novel himself, Mark Twain. In the 1870s Twain wrote the book Roughing It in which he gives a four page rant about coyotes, saying in part “the meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede”. By the 1920s the publication Scientific American started referring to coyotes as “the original Bolsheviks”.
Around this time, coyotes began getting hunted with as much creative cruelty as possible, termed “the archpredator of our time”. Fun fact, coyotes mostly eat berries and small rodents. Archpredator they are not, but other anti-predator campaigns had about eradicated wolves in North America so I guess when fascism is on the rise killing innocent animals is what you have to do to keep your mind off of it. Well, pre-Netflix. I’m avoiding the rise of fascism worldwide by watching Stranger Things, no animals harmed in the making of this decline of Democracy.
It was in the 20s as well that contemporary folklorists started twisting Native coyote myths. This is when the reinterpretation of these myths as Reynard style tricksters began when the folklorist was feeling generous, actual coward sexual predator Coyote was the less kind reinterpretation.
And that reputation stayed in place until around the late 1960s. It took Disney making a series of pro-coyote short films and Warner Bros. introducing Wile E. Coyote to help the animal start making its comeback as another part of nature, not a pest to eradicate.
And now for just some quick facts about coyotes. Coyotes, while originally confined to the Western half of the continent, have now been found as far east as New York and have even been found on the other side of the Panama Canal. Coyotes to the east of the Mississippi are on average 10-15 pounds larger than their Western counterparts, which according to genetic testing is due to generations of inbreeding with wolves. And there’s a very real chance that coyotes were almost domesticated at some point, to the same level we believe cheetahs were domesticated. And that’s my segment!
Corinne’s Notes:
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coyote
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_animal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anubis
https://www.realmofhistory.com/2022/06/27/anubis-history-mythology-jackal-god/
https://www.worldhistory.org/Anubis/
https://exhibitions.kelsey.lsa.umich.edu/jackal-gods-ancient-egypt/index.php
Stefanović, D. (2013). THE “CHRISTIANISATION” OF HERMANUBIS. Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte, 62(4), 506–514. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24434042
So before I could really dig into jackal mythology, which had secretly been my plan all along (insert evil laugh here), I did have to double check that coyotes’ range doesn’t extend outside of North America. Thankfully, it does not! So I did not have to change my plans, nebulous though they were. I did, however, learn that at one point in time coyotes were referred to as “American jackals”, since they fill roughly the same ecological niche and in the grand scheme of things are pretty closely related. So that’s cool! I learned new biology things! My mom and mother in law will be proud!
So, let’s do a wee bit of background on jackals before we go further. Jackals are wild canids, closely related to wolves, coyotes, and domestic dogs. There are three main species, the black-backed jackal and the side-striped jackal, both of which are fairly closely related and mostly found in sub-Saharan Africa, and the golden jackal, which ranges through western Asia, the Indian subcontinent, and into Europe. And here I find I have to drag myself. I recently read a YA romance novel set in a fictional version of France, where the characters referenced a “golden jackal” typically found east of the region they were located. I, being me, assumed that this was a made up thing??? It was being largely presented as a sort of mythological creature, in my defense. I sent several indignant texts to Amanda upon learning that no, golden jackals are real animals, the author was accurate about their range, and I’m still mad at myself about the whole situation.
ANYWAY. In a lot of western literature, jackals will crop up as trickster figures. Y’all know I love a good trickster, but instead I’m going to focus a little more on their role in Egyptian mythology. Buckle up because we are going to go for a bit of a ride here. My research took a swerve I was NOT expecting.
As any kid who had an Ancient Egypt phase can tell you, jackals are frequently associated with the god Anubis, who is a god of mummification and the dead. He played a hugely important role in helping souls reach the afterlife. Anubis is frequently represented as a man with the head of a jackal–or, probably a jackal. Maybe. Because here’s the thing: the way Anubis is represented doesn’t look a ton like the jackals that could conceivably be found in and around Egypt. Remember before how I mentioned before that two species of jackal are from sub-Saharan Africa? The jackal that chills out in the region near Egypt, the golden jackal, actually looks more like North American coyotes than how Anubis is typically represented. Even more notably, Greek writers often referred to Anubis as being dog-headed. Despite this, we’re going to roll with my baby understanding of Egyptology and continue to refer to Anubis as looking like a jackal.
There actually aren’t a ton of extant myths about Anubis. Depending on the time period, he might be a son of Ra, or of Osiris, sometimes his mother is Bastet (which I find hilarious, since she’s a cat-headed goddess) or sometimes Isis. But since he played such an integral role in guiding souls along to the afterlife, from overseeing the mummification process to the weighing of the heart to determine if the soul was slated for punishment or not, there is a TON of art that features him. Like, just loads.
Okay, so here’s where my research started getting kinda. Not what I expected.
Anubis was also like, WEIRDLY popular with Greeks and Romans after they successively conquered Egypt. The Greeks and Romans took one look at this funky lil jackal-headed deity and were like, “You made this? I made this.” What’s sort of weird about their adoption of Anubis is that for Greek and Roman cultures, deities who had both human and animal features were kind of passe. Those kinds of deities were for barbarians, not their Modern and Enlightened worship. But, much like their adoption of Isis, cults sprang up to worship him, where his role as a psychopomp often got him conflated with either Hades or Hermes (or sometimes Cerberus, because he’s a dog, geddit??). Anubis was so commonly conflated with Hermes that a weird, merged version of the deity (usually with like, Hermes’ winged sandals and a dog by his side) was developed, with possibly the WORST portmanteau ever: Hermanubis. Let’s just have a moment of silence for that. Because it’s just horrible. I hate it.
As I’m perusing this information, being silently aghast at the name “Hermanubis”, I saw another phrase that just baffled me. To quote the Egyptologist Salima Ikram: [Anubis] became associated with Charon in the Graeco-Roman period and St. Christopher in the early Christian period…
And I was like, “wait, St Christopher? The guy we talked about in the hitchhiking ghosts episode? The same St Christopher my mom keeps a holy medal of in her purse?” And the answer is yes. I’ve linked to one of the articles I read on JSTOR about it, but in rough summary, the idea is that a) St Christopher is sometimes mentioned as having a dog face???? Why is this something I never learned in 16 years of Catholic School??? And b) there was often imagery of Anubis with the moon, which was associated with Osiris and rebirth, which somehow got combined with the story of St Christopher carrying the Christ Child across that river, and Christ is ALSO associated with rebirth so conflate these two stories and profit? I guess??? I don’t even know. I don’t know that we’ve got enough time to unravel my state of surprise. This is just. Not where I saw my research going. But that’s where I ended up! I hope you are as confused and entertained as I am!
Episode 20: Big Cats in Folklore
Amanda’s Notes:
Corinne’s Notes:
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguars_in_Mesoamerican_cultures
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERTXJMaGltg
http://www.famsi.org/research/kerr/articles/friction_drum/
Saunders, N. J. (1994). Predators of Culture: Jaguar Symbolism and Mesoamerican Elites. World Archaeology, 26(1), 104–117. http://www.jstor.org/stable/124867
https://www.penn.museum/sites/expedition/jaguar-cult-downs-syndrome-were-jaguar/
Murdy, C. N. (1981). Congenital Deformities and the Olmec Were-Jaguar Motif. American Antiquity, 46(4), 861–871. https://doi.org/10.2307/280112
Robicsek, F. (1983). Of Olmec Babies and Were-Jaguars. Mexicon, 5(1), 7–19. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23759045
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger#Myth_and_legend
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_in_Chinese_culture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Symbols
When we first started discussing an episode on Big Cats, I asked Amanda if she wanted to take Central and South America as well as US and Canada for her segment, and she was EXTREMELY gracious and allowed me to take Central and South America so that I could talk about Jaguars.
Please note, Jaguars are 100% on the list of things I want to pet that will kill me. But they’re so gorgeous and I just want to pet one! AHEM.
To dive right in, jaguars play a key role throughout mesoamerican cultures, especially for the Aztec, Maya and Olmec peoples of what is now modern day Mexico and into the rest of Central America. Often, the ruling class would be closely associated with jaguars, including wearing jaguar pelts as part of their regalia, or including “jaguar” in the names they took as rulers. Jaguars were also frequently linked to spiritual leaders. However, Nicholas Saunders notes in his article “Predators of Culture: Jaguar Symbolism and Mesoamerican Elites” that relying on older scholarship has added some pitfalls into determining how these different cultures from different time periods viewed jaguars (and themselves)- a lot of scholarship uses a very euro-centric views regarding big cats (i.e. OBVIOUSLY the [insert culture here] viewed jaguars the same way that europeans view tigers/lions/leopards), and also from a presumption that the Olmec culture was a “mother culture” from whom the Maya and Aztec directly drew all of their beliefs and culture. That said, there’s compelling evidence that both the Maya and the Aztec used jaguar iconography very similarly, especially with regards to ideal traits of warriors and with their association with powerful rulers/spiritual leaders
Anyway, as I was perusing the wikipedia page on Jaguars in Mesoamerican culture, I spotted a reference to Olmec “were jaguars”, which are depictions of human faces with somewhat feline features, to a greater or lesser degree. And like, if you say the word “were jaguar” to me, of course I’m gonna dig into it! And actually the theory behind “were jaguars” is not at all what I expected! The prevailing theory, going back to the 1930s, is that these figurines represent individuals born with cognitive and genetic disabilities, such as Trisomy 21 (more frequently known as Down Syndrome), hydrocephalus, and even spina bifida. Because their features are “different”, it’s presumed that the Olmec believed that these children were born as the result of a human and a jaguar having sex, and may have had some sort of spiritual significance. I’ve linked a few articles, but please be aware that some of the language used is outdated and struck me as unkind and dehumanizing. I did link another article that summarily refutes that theory (again with the outdated, unkind, and dehumanizing language), and instead posits that at least some of these “were jaguar” or “jaguar children” statues are just… statues of children. So ultimately the “were jaguars” of Olmec culture are a great big *shrug* it seems. I kind of went off-piste with this one y’all, but to be honest, you never quite know what rabbit hole you’re going to go down when you fire up Google.
One final note on this bit of my research- I’ve linked a few places to a reference I found to the Maya Jaguar Drum, which is a really fucking cool bit of Ethnomusicology. In a piece of Maya art discovered in modern day Guatemala, there was an image of a musician playing a unique stringed instrument - this is the only evidence of a stringed instrument in any pre-European contact cultures in the Americas so that’s the first really cool thing. The string itself is connected to a drum, which makes this particular instrument also a friction drum, another instrument type not known to be used in indigenous cultures in the Americas. Ethnomusicologists were able to recreate the instrument and play it based on the image. And when played, it makes a sound almost identical to the growl of a jaguar. Just. How amazing is that?
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Going to shift gears yet again and also talk about Tigers because ya girl loves charismatic megafauna, and also I’m still salty that my mom has gotten to touch a tiger and I haven’t (my mom was head of PR at the zoo in the 1980s, she got to do a ton of unbelievably cool shit in her line of work, and I will never be as badass as she is).
I don’t know why I didn’t initially think of tigers when we decided to do Big Cats in mythology, until I was FORCIBLY reminded that East Asia actually has a lot of myths about tigers when Byakko, the Japanese variant of one of those myths appeared in the YA romance novel I was reading.
Which myth am I referring to? The white tiger who represents the cardinal direction west and the season of autumn. While he’s known as Byakko in Japanese, in Chinese he is better known as Baihu (which quite literally means White Tiger), and is one of the four “Guardian Constellations”-- one for each of the cardinal directions. Baihu’s stripes on his forehead are shaped to make the hanzi “wang”, which means king. The oldest known representation of Baihu comes from about 5300 BCE from a tomb in Henan Province.
Some other cool notes about the white tiger include:
It was believed that a tiger had to live 500 years before it turned white
White tigers appear when the reigning emperor is good and just OR if there’s peace throughout the world
Tigers in general are considered protector figures, which I love a lot
Art of tigers is a frequent motif on tombs, because they’re meant to chase away evil spirits
They’re also meant to chase away what’s referred to as the three disasters: fire, thieves, and ghosts.