The shaggy one

After a recent post about the "Beast of Gévaudan," an undeniably real creature that slaughtered between sixty and a hundred of the inhabitants of Lozère département in south-central France during a three-year period in the middle of the eighteenth century, a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link with the message, "What is it with French people getting eaten by monsters?  It's a wonder any of your ancestors survived."

My initial reaction was that plenty of other cultures have legends of human-eating monstrosities -- the Algonquian Wendigo, the Jötunns of Scandinavia, and the Japanese Yama-Uba are three that come to mind.  But I hadn't heard about any French ones other than the aforementioned Beast, so I decided to check out the source he sent.

The link was to a reference in a book by Carol Rose about creatures of legend, and was about La Velue de la Ferté-Bernard.  La Velue translates to "the shaggy one," but if you're thinking about some friendly, sheepdog-like animal, you'll need to revise your mental image.  La Velue haunted the region around the River Huisne, in northwestern France -- so at least it picked on a different bunch of peasants to terrorize than the Beast of Gévaudan did -- and is described as being the size of an ox, with an egg-shaped body, and having long green fur through which poison-tipped quills protruded.

Oh, and it could either cause floods, or shoot fire from its mouth.  Possibly both.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons PixelML, La Velue, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Folklorist Paul Cordonnier-Détrie did a great deal of research into people's beliefs about La Velue, and published a book on it in 1954.  Apparently the consensus is that it rampaged throughout the region in the fifteenth century, eating people and livestock and causing fires and/or floods (whichever version you went for earlier).  Like the Beast of Gévaudan, the thing proved remarkably difficult to kill.  It even made its way into the city of La Ferthé-Bernard, and when challenged, retreated into the River Huisne, but arrows and other weapons had little effect on it.  La Velue, says Cordonnier-Détrie, is "of the same family as the Tarasque of Provence," another human-eating monster, this one resembling the unholy offspring of a lion and a snapping turtle.

So okay, maybe French people did have more problems than most with being eaten by monsters. 

In any case, like the Beast of Gévaudan, eventually La Velue met its match.  It made the mistake of grabbing a "virtuous young woman" called l'Agnelle ("Little Lamb"), and her fiancé understandably objected to this, so he drew his sword and struck the monster in the tail.  Whether he knew this would work or it was just dumb luck isn't certain, but either way he hit the one vulnerable part of the monster, and it "writhed in agony and then died."  The victory over La Velue was the cause of much rejoicing, and the site where it supposedly happened -- near the old Roman bridge in the village of Yvré-l'Évêque in Sarthe département -- hosted a yearly festival commemorating the young man's bravery that persisted well into the eighteenth century.

The bridge in Yvré-l'Évêque where La Velue met its doom [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Le Mans, Pont Roman d'Yvré l'évêque, CC BY 3.0]

So, what are we to make of this?

Unfortunately, the answer is "probably not much."  Unlike the Beast of Gévaudan, whose existence and murderous tendencies are extremely well-documented in primary sources from the time, La Velue seems to be a lot more tenuous.  There isn't much in the way of contemporaneous source material to go by; most of it is in the realm of "back in the day there was this terrifying monster...", which honestly doesn't carry much weight.

On the other hand, it's curious how specific the legend is about the places it lived and died.  It makes you wonder if there was some kind of creature attacking people back then, that later got embellished and inflated (and equipped with fiery breath and poisonous quills), and became La Velue by a process of accretion.

We'll probably never know.  But it does make for an interesting story.  Good enough that a version of it ended up in Jorge Luis Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings (although under the Spanish name of "La Peluda").

In any case, if you live in France, I can only hope you're not still having to deal with monsters.  The world's crazy enough these days without worrying that you're going to be eaten by a shaggy green thing, or a giant crazed wolf, or a lion-turtle hybrid, or whatnot.  Me, if I thought those things were still around, I probably wouldn't ever leave my house.

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Writing's on the wall

I was chatting with my friend, author and all-around cool person K. D. McCrite, a couple of days ago about superstitions.

It probably won't come as any surprise that I'm not superstitious.  About the only time that particular irrationality raises its ugly head is in my occasional conviction -- usually when I'm already in a foul mood -- that inanimate objects are conspiring to get in my way, fall out of my hand, break, or otherwise further fuck up my day.  My logical brain tells me that this is probably because I'm in a bad temper and more prone to being careless and rough with handling things, but sometimes it really does seem like the various objects around me have decided to infuriate me out of nothing but pure malice.

Other than that, though, I'm inclined to consider superstitions so bizarre that it's incomprehensible that anyone would have come up with them in the first place.  K. D. mentioned that growing up in rural Missouri, she used to hear that if you dropped a dishrag, company was coming.  Same thing, apparently, if your nose itches; but only a few states south, where I grew up in southern Louisiana, your nose itching means you're going to kiss a fool.  We didn't have one for company coming, at least not that I recall; but if you've got company and you want them to leave, all you have to do is stand a broom up in the corner near the front door.

Of course, my guess is that if your company knows the superstition, and they see you standing a broom up in the corner, they'll get pissed off and leave.  So this might fall into the "self-fulfilling prophecy" department.

Spurred by that discussion, I started looking into various superstitions in different cultures, and man, there are some weird ones, making the bad luck brought by black cats, broken mirrors, and walking under ladders sound positively normal.  Here are a few I came across:

• If you wear red, you're more likely to be struck by lightning. (Philippines)
• If you say "rabbit rabbit" as your first words after you wake up on the first day of the month, you'll prosper. (northern England)
• If you're out drinking with friends, and you're ready to leave, don't say "this is my last drink."  If you do, you'll die soon, and it really will have been your last drink. (Cuba)
• Running a fan in a closed room while you sleep will kill you. (South Korea)
• Don't toast someone with water, or you're cursing them with bad luck. (Germany)
• Whistling indoors will summon a demon. (Lithuania)
• Standing chopsticks upright in your rice bowl is extremely rude, because the crossed chopsticks look like the Japanese character for the number four, which is supposed to represent death. (Japan)
• Don't shake hands or kiss across a threshold, or you will eventually fall out. (Russia)
• Having two mirrors facing each other on opposite walls opens a door for Satan. (Mexico)
• If you're giving a knife or something else sharp as a gift, it can sever the relationship; so the recipient is supposed to give you a penny in return, so that it's a purchase, not a gift. (Denmark)
• If you walk backwards, it's bad luck, because you're showing the devil which way you were going. (Portugal)
• Stepping in dog shit is good luck, but only if you do so with your left foot. (France)
• You should always enter a room with your right foot.  Especially if you've just come from France. (Spain)

(My sources for the above, if you're curious, are here, here, and here.)

I wonder how the hell these superstitions started.  I know that for some superstitions, the origin is in the religious beliefs of the culture; the practice of throwing spilled salt over the left shoulder actually dates from Roman times, where salt was a valuable commodity -- in fact, the English word salary comes from the Latin word meaning salt -- and spilling it was considered careless and wasteful.  To make up for it you were supposed to give a pinch of it to the household spirits, the Lares and Penates, who hovered around behind you watching you eating dinner.

Because that's not creepy at all.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons © Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar / CC BY-SA 3.0, Saleros - 5394, CC BY-SA 3.0]

But for some of them, it's hard to imagine any events that could have led to the conviction that they were true.  I mean, "rabbit rabbit?"  Did people in medieval England try various animal names every day until they found a combination of animal and day of the month that preceded their having a good day?  And I'm sorry, stepping in dog shit is not in any sense auspicious.

I own three dogs and I know whereof I speak.

It does bear mention that there are a few completely bizarre-sounding superstitions that have at least semi-logical origins.  In northern Germany, for example, there's an old belief that when a baby is born, the grandma is supposed to kiss the baby's forehead, and if she tastes salt, the baby will be sickly and die young.  This seems ridiculous -- until you find out that northern Germany has the world's highest incidence of the genetic disorder cystic fibrosis, which has as one of its symptoms extremely salty sweat.

Another one that has a genetic origin is the old prohibition amongst the Basques -- especially the women -- against marrying non-Basques.  While on the surface this seems like the usual insularity and cultural/ethnic purity nonsense, there's more to it.  Similar to the German belief, the superstition here is that a Basque woman marrying a non-Basque man will be cursed to have their children die in infancy.

Which turns out to have a kernel of truth.  The Basques have the highest incidence in the world of the Rh negative blood allele, a recessive gene that causes people who are homozygous (who inherited a copy from each parent) to lack a particular protein in the blood.  This causes no health effects for the person; but if a Rh-negative woman conceives an Rh-positive child, there's a good chance of Rh incompatibility syndrome, where the mother's immune system recognizes the blood protein in the child to be foreign, and proceeds to destroy the baby's blood cells.  And this is only possible if the father is Rh-positive -- meaning (probably) non-Basque.

So unlike just about every other prohibition against marrying outside of your culture, this one does have a basis in reality.

But the majority of superstitions admit of no easy explanation other than accident and confirmation bias.  And you'd think all it would take is one or two counterexamples -- people who slept soundly in a closed room with a fan running and woke up perfectly healthy, for example -- to make people say, "Oh.  I guess that's not true, then.  What goobers we are."

For some reason, though, that doesn't seem to happen, and I'm at a loss to explain why.

In any case, these beliefs are interesting from an anthropological standpoint, even if they're a bit maddening to the skeptics of the world.  There are about a million others I didn't mention (further supporting the Senegalese maxim that "there are forty different kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of common sense).  If you know any especially funny, weird, or cool ones, leave a note in the comments.  But now, I need to go fix myself some breakfast.  I hope the coffee maker and the microwave aren't in cahoots again.  They don't like me, for some reason.

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Footprints in the snow

My puppy Jethro is currently convalescing from knee surgery, following an ACL injury caused by an over-enthusiastic wrestling match between him and his best friend Rosie.  The surgery went well, and a week and a half later he's back to his usual ebullient self, but will be on serious exercise restriction for another month and a half.

This means that instead of letting all three dogs out into our big, fenced back yard, I have to take Jethro out on leash several times a day, starting when I get up, usually around 5:30 AM.  And when I brought him out a couple of mornings ago, I saw in the glow of the front porch light that there was a fresh coat of snow on the ground -- further evidence that the First Day of Spring doesn't mean that much here in upstate New York.

I was still dressed in my robe and slippers, and when Jethro was done outside we retreated gratefully back into the warmth of my office.  The morning dawned bright and clear, and the temperature quickly climbed into the mid-forties.  When I looked out of the window later in the day I could still see the line of footprints I made while taking Jethro out earlier, but the effects of the Sun had widened them from the clear indentations of a human wearing rubber-soled slippers into diffuse, open blobs -- and it immediately put me in mind of one of the most peculiar legends of Merrie Old England.  Perhaps you've not heard of it; if not, you may find it an interesting tale.

Early in the morning on February 8, 1855 (so the story goes), the people of five small towns in south Devon -- Topsham, Lympstone, Exmouth, Teignmouth, and Dawlish -- woke to find a line of footprints in the snow.  The London Times of February 16 reported on the story in detail:

It appears that on Thursday night last there was a very heavy fall of snow in the neighborhood of Exeter and the south of Devon.  On the following morning, the inhabitants of the above towns were surprised at discovering the tracks of some strange and mysterious animal, endowed with the power of ubiquity, as the foot-prints were to be seen in all kinds of inaccessible places -- on the tops of houses and narrow walls, in gardens and courtyards enclosed by high walls and palings, as well as in open fields.  There was hardly a garden in Lympstone where the footprints were not observed.

The track appeared more like that of a biped than a quadruped, and the steps were generally eight inches in advance of each other.  The impressions of the feet closely resembled that of a donkey's shoe, and measured from an inch and a half to (in some instances) two and a half inches across.  Here and there it appeared as if cloven, but in the generality of the steps the shoe was continuous, and, from the snow in the center remaining entire, merely showing the outer crest of the foot, it must have been convex.

The creature seems to have approached the doors of several houses and then to have retreated, but no one has been able to discover the standing or resting point of this mysterious visitor.  On Sunday last the Rev. Mr. Musgrave alluded to the subject in his sermon, and suggested the possibility of the footprints being those of a kangaroo; but this could scarcely have been the case, as they were found on both sides of the estuary of the Exe.

At present it remains a mystery, and many superstitious people in the above towns are actually afraid to go outside their doors at night.

What is oddest -- and has been reported in multiple sources from the time -- is that the perpetrator, whatever or whomever it was, seemed unperturbed by obstacles.  The line of footprints walked right up to the bank of a river, and resumed on the other side as if it had walked straight through the running water.  Walls didn't slow it down, either; witnesses say that the footprints indicated it had simply stepped over the wall, as the imprint in the snow showed no change in depth from one side to the other (as it would have if the perpetrator had climbed up one side and then jumped down).  The footprints went in more or less a straight line, with only minor deviations, apparently to glimpse into the windows of houses it passed (*shudder*).  The most conservative reports claim the line of prints extended for sixty kilometers, far too much for one person (or creature) to cover in a single night.

The snow, as it melted, accentuated the strangeness of the prints, just as it did with the slipper-prints in my front yard.  The resemblance to a cloven hoof, with its suggestion of the devil, became more pronounced, and the fear grew to near hysteria.  Fortunately (or unfortunately, for those of us who like to know the solutions to mysteries) the events were never repeated, and never satisfactorily explained.

A sketch of the footprints, as drawn by several people who saw them first-hand

The Devonshire footprints were credited by some as a visitation not by Satan, but by one of his uniquely English cousins -- Spring-heeled Jack.  The first reported sighting of Spring-heeled Jack was in London in 1837 by a businessman walking home from work. The gentleman described being terrified by the sudden appearance of a dark figure which had "jumped the high railings of Barnes Cemetery with ease," landing right in his path.  The businessman wasn't attacked, and was able to keep his wits sufficiently about him to describe a "muscular man, with a wild, grinning expression, long, pointed nose and ears, and protruding, glowing eyes."

Sort of like the love child of Salvador Dali and Mr. Spock, is how I think of him.

Others were attacked, and some were not so lucky as our businessman.  A girl named Mary Stevens was attacked in Battersea, and had her clothing torn and was scratched and clawed, but survived because neighbors came to help when they heard her screams.  The following day Jack jumped in front of a coach, causing it to swerve and crash.  The coachman was severely injured, and several witnesses saw Jack escape by leaping over a nine-foot-high wall, all the while howling with insane laughter.

Several more encounters occurred during the following year, including two in which the victims were blinded temporarily by "blue-white fire" spat from Jack's mouth.

Although publicity grew, and Spring-heeled Jack became a character of folk myth, song, and the punch line to many a joke, sightings became less frequent.  Following the footprints in the snow-covered Devonshire countryside in 1855, there was a flurry of renewed interest (*rimshot*), but the last claimed sighting of Spring-heeled Jack was in Lincoln in 1877, and after that he seems to have gone the way of the dodo.

As intriguing as both stories are, all of the evidence points to pranksters (and, in the case of Mary Stevens, an unsuccessful rapist).  With the Devonshire footprints, the length of the track line is almost certainly an exaggeration, or at best a conflation of tracks from different sources -- a few of them by a hoaxer to get things going, followed by people blaming every human or animal track they see in the snow afterward on the mysterious walker.  As far as Spring-heeled Jack goes, I'm not inclined to believe in Jack's phenomenal jumping ability, except in cases where Jack jumped down off a wall -- that requires no particular skill except the agility to get up there in the first place, and after that gravity takes care of the rest.  It seems to me that a combination of nighttime, fear, a wild costume, and the witnesses' being primed by already knowing the story creates a synergy that makes their accuracy seriously in question.

The fact remains, however, that both of them are very peculiar stories. I remember reading about the Devonshire footprints when I was a kid (I didn't find out about Spring-heeled Jack until later), and the idea of some mysterious non-human creature pacing its way across the snowy English countryside, silently crossing fields and farms and streets and rivers, peering into the windows of homes at the sleeping inhabitants, was enough to give me what the Scots call the "cauld grue."  Still does, in fact.  Enough that I was glad when the fitful March sunshine finally eradicated my slipper-prints in the front yard -- which goes to show that even a diehard rationalist can sometimes fall prey to an irrational case of the creeps.

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Sleight-of-hand

Some time ago, I wrote a post about the (in)famous sort-of anthropologist Carlos Castaneda, author of bestsellers like The Teachings of Don Juan and Journey to Ixtlan.  Castaneda was, to put not too fine a point on it, a charlatan, who invented a pastiche of supposed Indigenous Mexican beliefs involving a "separate reality" that could be accessed by using hallucinogenic plants.  He got filthy rich from it, amassing a cultlike following of people who wanted to tap into this alleged source of esoteric wisdom.

He was also a fine storyteller.  In fact, in my high school and college days, I was taken in for a time.  There was something compelling about the tales he told.  And in my post, I concluded that it was a pity he didn't just admit up front they were fiction.  They'd have lost nothing in their vividness and impact -- and we wouldn't be in the horrid situation where there are still college anthropology courses where Castaneda's work is taught as legitimate scholarly work in ethnology and indigenous religious studies.

Put simply, truth matters.  It might seem sad that the universe isn't set up so as to include glowing coyotes who visit you and have conversations wherein you learn eternal wisdom, but I'm much more inclined to agree with my grandma, who observed, "Wishin' don't make it so."

What I didn't know when I wrote the Castaneda piece, however, is that this is far from the first time this sort of literary bait-and-switch has happened, and taken in large numbers of people who you'd think would have known better.  And this brings us to the Scottish poet James Macpherson.

Macpherson was born in Ruthven in 1736.  His youth was a turbulent time in his home country.  The disastrous Battle of Culloden happened when he was ten years old.  This was followed by the horrifying "Highland Clearances," during which the victorious British leaders did their damndest to break the Scottish clan system, forcing the immigration of tens of thousands of Highlanders to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States.  This undoubtedly ignited nationalistic fervor and cultural pride in the young Macpherson; after spending a good ten years in hiding, he attended the University of Aberdeen and the University of Edinburgh, where he became obsessed with Scottish folklore, history, mythology, and poetry.

In 1760 and 1761, he published two works -- Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and the more famous epic poem Fingal.  Neither of these, he said, was his own original work; they were translations, the latter from a poem authored (and then passed down orally) by the ancient Scottish poet Oisín (anglicized as Ossian).

Oisín was a bard, Macpherson said, son of another famous poet and musician --  Fionn mac Cumhaill (anglicised to Finn McCool), who was the great-grandson of a druid named Nuadat who was in the service of Cathair Mór, high king of Ireland during the early second century C.E.  So this would have put Oisín (at a guess) some time in the middle of the second century.

And, Macpherson pointed out, there are historical markers in Fingal and his other alleged Oisín-authored poem, Temora, that support this; they mention a Roman emperor named "Caracul" and a commander named "Caros," which Macpherson said line up with the (real) figures of Caracalla (188-217) and Marcus Aurelius Mausaeus Carausius (ca. 250-293).

So if these really did represent an oral tradition, it was pretty astonishing; it had lasted, preserving significant details, for fifteen hundred years.

When Macpherson published his books, they had an incredible impact.  Napoleon, Diderot, and Thomas Jefferson were huge fans; the last-mentioned said that "Ossian was the greatest poet that has ever existed," and that he planned to learn Gaelic so he could read them in the original language.  Thoreau wrote, "The genuine remains of Ossian... are in many respects of the same stamp as the Iliad."  Felix Mendelssohn's symphonic work Fingal's Cave and Niels Gade's tone poem Echoes of Ossian were directly inspired by Macpherson's supposed translations.

The Oisín cycle was also a major influence on the rise of Celticism -- the renewal of interest in all things Celtic, often coupled with dramatic romanticization of the culture of the Celts (something that still hangs around today; consider how many New Age spiritual books claim to have their basis in the teachings of the druids, when in fact we know next to nothing about what the druids and their followers actually believed).

It also was the basis of dozens, possibly hundreds, of works of art:

Ossian Singing by Nicolai Abildgaard (1787) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Not everyone was impressed, however.  English author and polymath Samuel Johnson said the pieces were "forgeries... the grossest imposition as ever the world was troubled with" and called Macpherson "a mountebank, a liar, and a fraud."  When asked, "But Doctor Johnson, do you really believe that any man today could write such poetry?" he replied, "Yes.  Many men.  Many women.  And many children."

This, of course, caused an immediate firestorm in Scotland.  No Englishman could dare utter such words against someone who had become something of a national hero.  The controversy raged for decades, with most of it devolving into "he is too" and "he is not" shouted back and forth across the River Tweed.  It wasn't until the late nineteenth century that blood had cooled sufficiently for someone finally to ask, "Well, what evidence do we have?" and started cross-checking it against other collections that had been made of Scottish oral history, tradition, and folklore.

The upshot: some scraps of the Oisín legends were actually part of the oral tradition in the Scottish Highlands.  (No one doubts, for example, that Fionn mac Cumhaill was a real figure of legend.)  But Fingal, and especially Temora, were mostly an invention by Macpherson himself.

That's not to say they aren't beautiful in their own right.  William Paton Ker, the Scottish-born professor of literary history at Oxford University, said, "all Macpherson's craft as a philological impostor would have been nothing without his literary skill."

But you have to wonder why Macpherson wasn't content to publish them under his own name.  Instead, he stretched the truth to the snapping point; his detractors say outright that he lied.  Did he believe that his work would never receive the publicity it deserved without his attributing it to a legendary authorship?  Or did he want to lend credence to a vision of a quasi-historical time in Scotland when it was powerful, stable, and producing works of timeless beauty?

It's impossible to parse the motivations of someone who's been dead for over two hundred years, but it does strike me as a shame -- just as with Castaneda, what could have been a dramatic and inspiring work of fiction has forever been tarnished because its author falsely claimed it to be true.  (Well, in Macpherson's case, that it was an authentic piece of folklore.)

The truth matters, or it should.  It's easy to condemn those who lie to cover up ugly behavior; what about liars who create wonders?  Even Castaneda, although late in life he succumbed to the desire for power, sex, and money, started out simply creating a fascinating and gripping fictional tale that, shockingly, millions of people ended up believing.

I can't help but find the whole thing sad.  The world is a hard, cold place sometimes, and we need beautiful stories to buoy us up in the all-too-common troubled times.  When the creators of those stories turn out to have engaged in nothing more than literary sleight-of-hand, it feels like a betrayal.

However inventive they are, it's a lie I find very hard to excuse.

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Real mythology

Being in the midst of the holiday season, I'm seeing a lot of people posting about various traditions and rituals and celebrations.  But inevitably, this means that there are also people denigrating other people's traditions.  Like the person I saw on social media going on an extended rant about Kwanzaa, the main gist of which was "it's completely made up."

I threw gasoline on the fire by commenting, "Boy, do I have bad news for you about every single other holiday."

Feeling like your own beliefs are the right and true and reasonable ones, and those of the other eight-billion-odd people in the world aren't, raises arrogance to the level of performance art, but a lot of people don't seem to see it that way.  Apropos of others' beliefs, I tend to fall back on the tried-and-true rule of "don't be a dick."  Because, after all, 99% of what people believe has absolutely zero effect on me personally, nor, for that matter, on anyone I care about.  You want to pray to a deity on Saturday?  Fine by me.  You choose not to eat meat on Fridays?  Okay.  You think there are dozens of different gods, and not just one?  Cool.  Or no god at all?  Equally fine.

As long as you're not demanding that other people believe the same way, trying to force them to live by your rules, or (worse) running around killing people who don't, I've got no quarrel with you.

It does create a problem for the anthropologists, however, who are trying their hardest to understand it all.  Belief is an extremely powerful motivator to behavior, and in my egalitarian, "An it harm none, do what thou wilt" approach, it's hard to see what actually constitutes a belief system.  How do you categorize something when there are eight billion different versions?

The problem comes into even sharper focus when you try to pin down whether something is even a belief or not.  There's a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to pseudomythology, which are myths that aren't real (differentiating them, apparently, from the myths that are real).  For example, this became a significant problem when anthropologists tried to study the beliefs of pre-Christians in the Slavic and Baltic regions, because prior to Christianity most of those folks had no written tradition.  Jan Łasicki, a Polish historian and theologian who in 1615 published a book with the rather self-righteous title Concerning the Gods of Samagitians and Other Sarmatians and False Christians, gave the names of seventy-eight gods supposedly worshipped in what is now Lithuania.  The consensus is now that Łasicki wrote down pretty much whatever anyone told him without question, meaning that it included deities who were the informants' personal invisible friends, and undoubtedly a few that were the result of of "There's this wingnut named Łasicki asking around, make sure to tell him the tallest tale you can think of -- he'll believe anything."  Worse, some seem to have been made up by Łasicki himself, to pad his numbers.

Mythical Creatures by Friederich Justin Bertuch (1806) [Image is in the Public Domain]

But the same sort of thing is still happening today.  In 2013, a poll found that the seventh-largest claimed religion in England is "Jediism."  Yes, Jedi, as in Star Wars.  In 2016, a guy who makes magic wands made the news because he wouldn't sell them to Harry Potter fans, because he says his wands really can cast magic spells, and he didn't want to cheapen his own reputation.  There's apparently a sizable crowd who think that The Lord of the Rings is actual history, and The Silmarillion is basically their answer to the Bible.  Don't even get me started about people like Carlos Castaneda, who fabricated an entire religion that he (falsely) claimed represented Indigenous beliefs from Mexico, and now -- almost thirty years after his death -- there are still people who teach his books as if they were real religious texts, and believe his "non-ordinary reality" is actually true.  I would be remiss in not including Scientology on the list.  Strangest of all, there are people who think that H. P. Lovecraft's books should be shelved on the non-fiction aisle, and are one hundred percent certain that Cthulhu and Tsathoggua and Yog-Sothoth and the rest of the gang are actually out there bubbling in the loathsome slime of eldritch primordial chaos, waiting for the humans to chant magic words with lots of apostrophes and zero vowels, which will let them back in.

Me, I find this last one a little hard to fathom.  I mean, at least the others I mentioned aren't actively trying to destroy the entire universe.  But having read a lot of what Lovecraft wrote, mostly what I remember is that even the people who were on the side of Azathoth et al. always ended up getting their limbs pulled off and their eyeballs melted.  I find it difficult to understand why people like Wilbur Whateley were always so eager to bring back the Elder Gods.  Me, I'd do everything I could to keep them out there in the nethermost wastes of infinite cosmic darkness where they belong.

If I actually believed in them, which brings us back to my original point.  What does it take for something to be looked upon as an "actual belief system," whatever that means?  Consider, for example, "Neo-Druidism," which took off in England, Scotland, and Wales in the eighteenth century.  People took it totally seriously (and some still do), dressing up in robes and taking part in magic rituals and whatnot, because they claimed they were resurrecting the beliefs of the ancient Celts even though we honestly have almost no idea what the ancient Celts actually believed.  Evidently even Paul Bunyan was never actually a "folk hero" that people in the upper Midwest told stories about; he was the invention of a guy named William Laughead, who wrote stories and claimed they were retellings of folklore, and bunches of people believed it.  This phenomenon is so common the anthropologists have even come up with a name for it.

They call it "fakelore."

So where do you draw the line?  Or do we even need to?  A lot of this seems to be driven by our desperate need to categorize things, the same as our artificial (and awkward) definition of the word species in science reflects not an actual reality about the biological world but an interesting facet of our own psychology.

I don't know if I have an answer to any of this.  Most of the time I tend not to worry about it.  Like I said before, my general approach is that you can believe in whatever you want.  As far as I'm concerned, you can believe that the universe is under the control of a Giant Green Bunny From The Andromeda Galaxy if you like.  As long as you don't run around swinging machetes at non-Bunnyists, or demanding that Intelligent Design Bunnyology be taught in public schools, then knock yourself out.

I guess the bottom line here is really tolerance.  It's a hard old world, full of strife and difficulty and grief, and we should be doing whatever we can not to make it harder.  If you've landed on a model for Life, the Universe, and Everything that brings you peace and comfort, that is awesome.  I've often wished I could find one.  So much of what I see of human behavior just strikes me as baffling.  I've felt, pretty much all my life -- to borrow Oliver Sacks's pithy phrase -- "like an anthropologist on Mars."  I'm still searching for something to make sense of it all.

In any case, I hope you're enjoying the holiday season, whatever form that takes for you.  As long as it doesn't involve waking Cthulhu up.  I may be tolerant, but I draw the line there.

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The weeping woman

Yesterday's post, about the remarkable similarities between mythological gods and goddesses in cultures widely separated in space and time, prompted my cousin Carla, who lives in New Mexico, to ask me if I'd ever heard of La Llorona.

I responded that she sounded familiar, but I couldn't recall any details.

"It's a legend all over the Spanish-speaking parts of North, Central, and South America," she explained.  "I think there's a version in Spain, too.  Each culture has a slightly different take on her, but basically, she's the Weeping Woman' -- someone who was involved in a tragedy, and now as a ghost can be heard crying in the night.  Sometimes, rarely, seen as well.  If you hear her, you're in deep trouble.  So next time y'all come visit, if you're out for a walk at night and hear a woman crying, haul ass right outta there."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Statue of La Llorona in Xochimilco, Mexico, 23 September 2015, KatyaMSL, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International]

Like the gods I wrote about yesterday, La Llorona has astonishingly deep roots.  The 1519 Florentine Codex, one of the most important extant documents about pre-colonial Mesoamerican history and beliefs, speaks about a crying woman as a fearful portent:

The sixth omen was that many times a woman would be heard going along weeping and shouting.  She cried out loudly at night, saying, "Oh my children, we are about to go forever."  Sometimes she said, Oh my children, where am I to take you?"

There's an even earlier parallel in Aztec mythology, the goddess Cihuacōātl -- who gave birth to a son Mixcōātl but abandoned him at a crossroads.  Cihuacōātl comes back to the spot at night, hoping to find him but only finding a sacrificial knife instead.  She can be seen and heard there weeping for him.  (It ended happily enough for Mixcōātl; he was rescued, and grew up to be the god of the hunt.)

La Llorona has, like the gods I discussed yesterday, evolved a bit from her presumed roots -- although wherever you find the story, there are plenty more similarities than differences.  In a typical version, she was the wife of a rich ranchero who found out her husband was cheating on her, and in a fit of insane rage drowned their children in a river.  Immediately remorseful, she threw herself in as well, but her spirit is unable to find peace -- she now haunts the riverbank, clad in a dripping white dress, wailing miserably.

The regional differences are fascinating.  In Mexico, she's mostly considered a monstrous figure, and her sin of drowning her children unpardonable (despite her provocation).  Interestingly, the rise of feminism in Mexico has led to some women identifying with her, and considering her the victim rather than the villain -- further evidence that attitudes toward beliefs can change over time.  In Guatemala, the legend has it that La Llorona was a married woman who got pregnant from another man, and drowned the baby when it was born to avoid her husband finding out.  In Ecuador, she's a tragic figure whose lover died, and she went insane and drowned their children -- and now, her disembodied spirit searches perpetually along the riverbank for them.  In Venezuela, she's a bereft mother whose children died of a sickness, and was driven so mad by grief that she's still looking for them in the afterlife.

Carla was right, there's even a version in Spain, which I find curious if the legend has Indigenous Mesoamerican roots; a woman named Elvira (not that Elvira) who led such a tragic life that she gradually becomes a wraith-like, weeping specter.  There's no mention of children or water -- common themes in the other iterations -- so I wonder if this one is "genetically" connected to the others, or only related because of there being an image of a crying woman.

After all, there are also parallels to similar legends in other cultures, particularly the Slavic Rusalka -- a malicious water-spirit sometimes said to be the lost soul of a drowned woman, who will grab handsome young men while they're swimming and drag them to their deaths -- and the Bean Sí (usually anglicized to Banshee) of Irish mythology, a wailing woman whose cries herald the death of a family member.  Unlikely these have any direct connection to the La Llorona stories, although considering how far back the roots of cultural cross-fertilization sometimes go, I do wonder.

In any case, there's another example of the evolution of folklore for your entertainment.  Something to keep in mind if you're ever out on a dark path near a riverside, and you hear crying.  Me, I still haven't quite recovered from finding out about the Black-eyed Children (I was so traumatized by this urban legend that I wrote an entire trilogy of novels about it so you can be traumatized, too).  In fact, given all the creepy things that supposedly roam at night, maybe it's better you just stay inside your house where it's safe.

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Weirdness one-upmanship

Thursday's post -- about a strange legend from England called the "fetch" and similar bits of odd folklore from Finland, Norway, and Tibet -- prompted several emails from loyal readers that can be placed under the heading of "You Think That's Wild, Wait'll You Hear This."

The first submission in the Weirdness One-Upmanship contest was about a Japanese legend called Kuchisake-onna (口裂け女), which translates to "the Slit-mouthed Woman."  The Kuchisake-onna appears to its victims as a tall, finely-dressed woman with long, lustrous straight black hair and the lower part of her face covered, carrying either a knife or a sharp pair of scissors.  She comes up and says, "Watashi wa kirei desu ka?" ("Am I pretty?")  This is also kind of a pun in Japanese, because kirei ("pretty") sounds a lot like kire ("cut").  In any case, by the time she asks the question you're kind of fucked regardless, because if you say no, she kills you with her knife.  If you say yes, she lowers her face covering to show that her mouth has been slit from ear to ear, and uses her sharp pointy object to do the same to you.

The only way out, apparently, is to tell her, "You're kind of average-looking."  At that point, the Kuchisake-onna is foiled.  It's a little like what happens if a vampire tries to gain access to the house of a grammar pedant:

Vampire: Can I enter your house?

Pedant:  I don't know, can you?

Vampire: *slinks away, humiliated*

So if you're ever confronted with a Kuchisake-onna, it will be the only time you'll ever come out ahead by telling someone "Eh, you're okay, I guess."

A man about to meet his fate at the hands of a Kuchisake-onna. The three women on the left don't seem especially concerned.  (From Ehon Sayoshigure by Hayami Shungyōsai, 1801)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Kuchisake-onna has made multiple appearances in movies, anime, manga, video games, and at least one mockumentary that was taken seriously enough that people in Gifu Prefecture (where the film was set) were cautioned by one news source not to go outdoors after dark.

The second reader who contacted me asked me if I'd ever herd of the Panotti.  I speculated that it was some kind of Italian finger food that was a cross between pancetta and biscotti, but of course that turned out to be wrong.  The Panotti were a race of humanoids with extremely large ears who appeared in Pliny the Elder's book Natural History.  The reader even provided me with a picture:

A, um, Panottus as pictured in the Nuremberg Chronicle (1493)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

The Panotti, said Pliny, lived in a place called -- I shit you not -- the "All-Ears Islands" off the coast of Scythia.  The guy in the picture looks rather glum, though, doesn't he?  I guess I would, too, if I had twenty-kilogram weights hanging from the sides of my head.

A reader from Hawaii wrote to tell me about a legend called the Huakaʻi pō, which translates to "Nightmarchers."  This extremely creepy bit of folklore claims that dead warriors will sometimes arise from their graves and march their way to various sacred sites, chanting and blowing notes on conch shells.  Anyone who meets them will either be found dead the next morning, or will soon after die by violence.  The only way around this fate is to show the Huakaʻi pō the proper respect by lying face down on the ground until they pass; if you do that, they'll spare you.

That'd certainly save me, because if I was suddenly confronted at night by a bunch of dead Hawaiian warriors, I'd faint, because I'm just that brave.

The reader wrote:

People still sometimes plant rows of ti trees near their houses, because the ti is sacred in Hawaiian culture and the Nightmarchers can't walk through them.  Otherwise the Nightmarchers will walk right through your walls and suddenly appear in your house.  So without that protection, even staying indoors isn't enough.

Last, we have the Mapinguari, a cryptid from Brazil that I'd never heard of before.  The reader who clued me in on the Mapinguari commented that he would "rather meet a fetch, or even a tulpa, than one of these mofos," and when I looked into it I can't help but agree:

A statue of a Mapinguari in the Parque Ambiental Chico Mendes, Rio Branco, Brazil [Image credit: photographer Lalo Almeida]

These things -- which kind of look like the love child of Bigfoot and a cyclops -- also have an extra mouth where their belly button should be, because apparently one mouth isn't sufficient to devour their victims fast enough.  They're denizens of the Brazilian rain forest, and the name is thought to come from the Tupi-Guarani phrase mbaé-pi-guari (mbae "that, the thing" + pĭ "foot" + guarî "crooked, twisted"), because in some versions of the legend their feet are attached to their legs backwards so anyone seeing their footprints and trying to flee in the opposite direction will get caught and eaten.

So anyhow, thanks to the readers who responded to Thursday's post.  I guess we humans never run out of ways to use our creativity to scare the absolute shit out of each other.  Me, I'm just as glad to live in upstate New York, where I'm unlikely to run into Kuchisake-onna, Panotti, Huakaʻi pō, or Mapinguari.  Around here the main danger seems to be dying of boredom, which I suppose given my other choices doesn't seem like such a bad way to go.

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Double take

I ended up going down a rabbit hole yesterday -- not, honestly, a surprising nor an infrequent occurrence -- when a friend of mine asked if I'd ever heard of an English legend called the "fetch."

I had, but only because I remembered it being mentioned in (once again, unsurprisingly) an episode of Doctor Who called "Image of the Fendahl," where it was treated as kind of the same thing as a doppelgänger, a supernatural double of a living person.  And just so I can't be accused of only citing Doctor Who references, the same idea was used in the extremely creepy episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker called "Firefall," wherein an obnoxious and arrogant orchestra conductor ends up with a duplicate who also has the nasty habit of killing people and setting stuff on fire.  The scene where the actual conductor has figured out what is happening, leading him to take refuge in a church -- and the double has climbed up the outside wall and is peering in at him through the window -- freaked me right the hell out when I was twelve years old.

Anyhow, the fetch (in English folklore) is attested at least back to the sixteenth century, but it may derive from a much older legend, the Norse fylgjur.  A fylgja is a spirit that follows someone through their life -- the name comes from an Old Norse verb meaning "to accompany" -- and can take the form either of an animal or a woman (the latter, regardless of the sex of the person; a man's fylgja is never male).  This in turn may be related to the Old English concept of a mære, a malicious, usually female, spirit that visits you at night, and is the origin of our word nightmare.

I ended up looking for similar legends in other cultures, and turns out there are a lot of them.  One example is the Finnish etiäinen, a double that can only be vaguely glimpsed on occasion, and frequently precedes a person in performing actions (s)he later does for real.  You might catch a glimpse of your significant other opening and then closing a cabinet door in the kitchen, then when you look again, there's no one there -- and you later find out that (s)he was in an entirely different part of the house at the time.  But twenty minutes later, (s)he goes into the kitchen, and opens and closes the same cabinet door.

Apparently, appearances of the etiäinen aren't considered especially ominous; there's usually no special significance to be extracted from what actions they perform.  It's just "something that happens sometimes."  Not so the tulpa, a being originally from Tibetan folklore that was eagerly adopted (and transformed) by western Spiritualists.  Originally, the tulpa was a ghostly stalker that would attach itself to a person and follow them around, generally causing trouble (the name seems to come from the Tibetan sprul pa སྤྲུལ་པ་, meaning "phantom").  But once the Spiritualists got a hold of it, it turned into something you could deliberately create.  A tulpa is a creature produced by the collective psychic energy of a group of people, that then takes on a life of its own.  Prominent Spiritualist Alexandra David-Néel said, "Once the tulpa is endowed with enough vitality to be capable of playing the part of a real being, it tends to free itself from its maker's control," and relates the experience of creating one that initially was benevolent (she describes it as "a jolly, Friar-Tuck-type monk"), but eventually it developed independent thought, so she had to kill it.

Is it just me, or is this admission kind of... unsettling?

In any case, we once again have a television reference to fall back on, this time The X Files, in the alternately hilarious and horrifying episode "Arcadia," in which Mulder and Scully have to pose as a happily married couple in order to investigate a series of murders (Mulder embraces the role enthusiastically, much to Scully's continuing annoyance), and the tulpa turns out to create itself out of garbage like coffee grounds and old banana peels.

And if you think that just plain tulpas are as weird as it gets, there are apparently people who are so addicted to My Little Pony that they have tried focused meditation and lucid dreaming techniques to bring to life characters like Pinky Pie and Rainbow Dash.  This subset of the community of "bronies" call themselves "tulpamancers" and apparently honestly believe that these characters have become real through their efforts.  I'm a big believer in the principle of "You Do You," but the whole brony subculture kind of pushes that to the limit.  Lest you think I'm making this up -- and let me say I understand why you might think that -- here's an excerpt from the Wikipedia article on "brony fandom:"

The brony fandom has developed a fandom vernacular language known as bronyspeak, which heavily references the show's content.  Examples of bronyspeak terminology include ponysona (a personalized pony character representing the creator), ponification (transformation of non-pony entities into pony form), dubtrot (a brony version of dubstep), brohoof (a brony version of brofist), and brony itself.

The next obvious place to go was to look into the fact that apparently, a lot of "bronies" want the My Little Pony characters to be real so they can have sex with them, but I drew the line there, deciding that I'd better stop while I was (sort of) ahead.

Well, ahead of where I would have been, anyhow.  I'm shuddering when I think about the searches I already did, and the insanity they're going to trigger in the targeted ads on my social media feed.  I can only imagine the horror show that would have ensued if I'd researched imaginary friend brony sex.

I don't even like thinking about that.

It's a sacrifice, but I do it all for you, Dear Readers.

So anyhow, thanks just bunches to the friend who asked me about fetches.  You just never know where discussions with me are gonna lead.  I guess that's the risk you take in talking to a person who is (1) interested in just about everything, and (2) has the attention span of a fruit fly.  

You may frequently be baffled, but you'll never be bored.

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The legend of the lost sister

The difficult thing about any sort of historical research is that sometimes, the evidence you're looking for doesn't even exist.

In my own field of historical linguistics, for example, we're trying to determine what languages are related to each other (creating, as it were, a family tree for languages), figuring out word roots, identifying words borrowed from other languages, and reconstructing the ancestral language -- based only on the languages we now have access to.  There are times when there simply isn't enough information available to solve the particular puzzle you're working on.

The further back in time you go, the shakier the ground gets.  You'll see in etymological dictionaries claims like "the Proto-Indo-European word for 'settlement' or 'town' was *-weyk," but that's an inference; there aren't many Proto-Indo-Europeans around these days to verify if this is correct.  It's not just a guess, though.  It was reconstructed from the suffixes -wich and -wick you see in a lot of English place names (Norwich, Warwick), the Latin word vicus (meaning "a village in a rural area"), the Welsh gwig and Cornish guic (which mean approximately the same as the Latin does), the Greek word οἶκος (house), the Sanskrit viś and Old Church Slavonic vĭsĭ (both meaning "settlement"), and so on.  Using patterns of sound change, we can take current languages (or at least ones we have written records for) and backpedal to make an inference about what the speakers of PIE four thousand years ago might have said.

Still, it is only an inference, and the inherent unverifiability of it sometimes leaves practitioners of "hard science" scoffing and quoting Wolfgang Pauli, that such claims "aren't even wrong."  I think that's unduly harsh (but of course, given that this is basically what my master's thesis was about, it's no surprise I get a little defensive).  Even so, I think we have to be careful how hard to push a claim based on slim evidence.

That was my immediate thought when I read an article by Jay Norris, of Western Sydney University, in The Conversation.  It was about the mythology associated with my favorite naked-eye astronomical feature -- the Pleiades.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Rawastrodata, The Pleiades (M45), CC BY-SA 3.0]

Norris and another astronomer, Barnaby Norris (not sure if they're related, or if it's a coincidence), have authored a paper that appeared in a book in 2022 called Advancing Cultural Astronomy which looks at a strange thing: in cultures all over the world, the Pleiades are associated with a collection of seven individuals.  They're the Seven Sisters in Greece, and also in many indigenous Australian cultures, for example.  And Norris and Norris realized two things that were very odd; first, that even on a clear night, you can only see six stars with the naked eye, not seven; and in both the Greek and Australian myth, the story involves a "lost sister" -- one of the seven who, for some reason or another, disappeared or is hidden.

So they started looking in other traditions, and found that all over the world, in cultures as unrelated as Indonesian, many Native American groups, many African cultures, the Scandinavians, and the Celts, there was the same tradition of associating the Pleiades with the number seven, and with one of the group who was lost.

They then went to the astronomical data.  They found that the stars in the Pleiades are moving relative to each other, and that a hundred thousand years ago there would have been seven stars visible to the naked eye in the cluster, but in the interim two of them moved so close together (from our perspective, at least) that they appear to be a single star unless you have a telescope.  That, they say, is the "lost sister," and is why cultures all over the world have a tradition that the group used to have seven members, but now only has six.

And this, they said, was evidence that the myth of the Pleiades is one of the oldest stories humans have told.  At least fifty thousand years old -- when the indigenous Australians migrated across a grassy valley that (when the sea level rose) became the Bay of Carpentaria -- and perhaps as much as a hundred thousand years old, when the common ancestors of all humans were still living in Africa and (presumably) shared a single cultural tradition.

It's a fascinating claim.  I have to admit that the commonalities of the myths surrounding the Pleiades in cultures all over the world are a little hard to explain otherwise.  Still, I can't say I'm a hundred percent sold.  I know from my work in reconstructive linguistics that chance similarities are weirdly common, and can lead to some seriously specious conclusions.  (Long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall my rather brutal takedown a few years ago of a guy named L. M. Leteane, who used cherry-picked chance similarities between words to support his loony claim that the Pascuanese -- or Easter Islanders -- were originally from Egypt, as were the Olmecs of Central America, and both languages were descended from Bantu.)

So as far as the claim that the story of the Seven Sisters is over fifty thousand years old, count me as interested but unconvinced.  I think it's possible; it's certainly intriguing.  But to me, it's too hard to eliminate the simpler possibility, that the "loss" of one of the stars in the Pleiades was noted by many ancient cultures -- separately, and much more recently -- and became incorporated into their legends, rather than all the legends of the Pleiades and the lost sister coming from a single, very ancient ancestral story.

But it'll give you something to think about, when you see the Pleiades on the next clear night.  Whatever the origins of the myths surrounding it, it's awe-inspiring to think about our distant ancestors looking up at the same beautiful cluster of stars on a chilly, clear winter's night, and wondering what it really was -- same as we're doing today using the tools of science.

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