Crazy Alchemist
A compendium of gods, demons, spirits, saints, and haunted places, from myth, faith, and ancient lore.
She gets one verse. Indra has killed the drought-serpent Vritra, and Vritra's mother lies beside him, struck down in the same fight. Her name means fluid, drop, running water. That word travelled further than she did: it is still audible in half the great rivers of Europe.
Mother of the gods at Ugarit, consort of the high god El, and the goddess two Iron Age inscriptions bless beside 'Yahweh and his asherah.' Her sacred pole stood in the Temple of Jerusalem until Josiah burned it. Whether she was Yahweh's wife or only her own faded symbol is still argued.
Camazotz (K'iche' *Cama Zotz'*, 'Death-Bat,' from *kame* 'death' + *sotz'* 'bat') is the bat-figure of the K'iche' Maya of the Guatemalan highlands, attested in the Popol Vuh. In that text the Hero Twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque descend into the underworld of Xibalba and face a sequence of trial-Houses, of which the fifth is the House of Bats (K'iche' Zotzihá). The twins hide inside their blowguns to escape the Death-Bat's wings; Hunahpu sticks his head out to see if the sun has risen, and Camazotz instantly cuts it off. The severed head is taken to the underworld ball court and used as the ball in the next game between the gods. The twins eventually trick the Lords of Xibalba and rise as Sun and Moon. The surviving K'iche' text of the Popol Vuh was written down in Latin script in the mid-sixteenth century, probably between 1554 and 1558, and was transcribed into Spanish by the Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez in Santo Tomás Chichicastenango beginning in 1701; the only surviving witness, the Ximénez bilingual manuscript, is now in the Newberry Library, Chicago, as Ayer MS 1515. The standard modern English translations are by Recinos, Goetz and Morley (Oklahoma, 1950), Dennis Tedlock (1985, revised 1996), and Allen J. Christenson (Oklahoma, 2003). The broader Mesoamerican bat tradition is older than the K'iche' text: a Zapotec bat-god jade-and-shell pectoral from a tomb at Monte Albán, c. 100 BCE to 200 CE, is now in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City; a monumental Late Classic bat sculpture (c. 600-900 CE) fell from Structure 20 on the Copán Acropolis and is now in the Copán Sculpture Museum. The bat survives as the identifying emblem of the Tzotzil Maya of Zinacantán in Chiapas, whose Spanish name comes from Nahuatl Tzinacantlan, 'place of bats,' and whose Tzotzil endonym is Sotz'leb, 'people of the bat.'
The Cailleach is the Gaelic hag-queen of winter, sovereign of the Scottish Highlands, the Hebrides, and the Irish southwest. The name derives from Old Irish caillech, 'the veiled one,' from caille 'veil,' itself a loan from Latin pallium (woollen cloak / veil); modern Irish and Scottish Gaelic both keep the word as the standard term for an old woman. Regional variants include the Cailleach Bhéara (the Hag of Beara, West Cork), the Cailleach Bheur (the Scottish 'sharp' or 'shrill' hag, blue-faced queen of winter), the Manx Caillagh, and Donald Mackenzie's 1917 literary version 'Beira, Queen of Winter.' The Hag of Beara on the Beara Peninsula is the most famous of the named Cailleachs: a natural rock formation at Kilcatherine, near Eyeries on Coulagh Bay, is identified in living folk tradition as her petrified body, turned to stone while she waited for her husband Manannán mac Lir, the sea-god, to return from a westward voyage. The Old Irish poem Aithbe dam-sa bés mora ('Ebb-tide has come to me as to the sea'), dated to the late-ninth or tenth century, is the most admired piece of Old Irish lyric verse and gives her voice. The Scottish Cailleach Bheur, in Donald Mackenzie's popularising 1917 description, is one-eyed, blue-skinned, white-haired, and has rust-red teeth; she herds the deer (the deer are her cattle) and strikes the earth with the slachdan, a magical staff or hammer, to harden it with frost. She washes her great plaid (tartan cloth) in the Gulf of Corryvreckan between Jura and Scarba as autumn turns to winter, and when she lifts it out clean and white the whiteness becomes the first snowfall. In Scottish tradition she rules from Samhain (1 November) to Beltane (1 May), when her power fades and she either turns to stone under a holly bush or transforms into the goddess Brìghde/Brigid for the summer. In Irish tradition the handover is at Imbolc on 1 February, with the surviving folk divination (if Imbolc is bright and sunny, the Cailleach is gathering firewood and winter will last another six weeks) the documented structural ancestor of the American Groundhog Day prediction. Gearóid Ó Crualaoich's *The Book of the Cailleach: Stories of the Wise-Woman Healer* (Cork University Press, 2003) is the standard modern academic treatment, framing her as the mythic prototype of the Irish rural wise-woman healer rather than as a degraded Celtic goddess.
Melchom appears in Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal (1863) as the demon who carries the purse, the paymaster of hell's civil servants, drawn by Louis Le Breton as a monkey-faced clerk at a desk with scales, a money bag, a meter stick of 95 centimeters and a kilo weight of 900 grams. The name is the Vulgate's spelling of Milcom, the national god of the Ammonites: the Bible has Solomon building him a high place and Josiah defiling it, and archaeology attests him independently, in the ninth-century BC Amman Citadel inscription (by a widely accepted reconstruction), on Ammonite seals, and in personal names built on Milkom. A securely documented Iron Age national god thus ends, by the nineteenth century, as hell's accounting department, and Le Breton turns the entry into open satire of the civil service.
Moloch (Molech, Milcom) is the deity the Hebrew Bible associates with child sacrifice, the 'abomination of the Ammonites.' Leviticus forbids giving children to Moloch, and Kings records a Topheth in the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem where children were 'passed through fire' to him, until King Josiah defiled the site; the valley's name, Ge-Hinnom, became Gehenna, a word for hell. The familiar image of a hollow bronze bull-idol heated with fire, its victims' cries drowned by drums, is a later rabbinic and medieval elaboration rather than the biblical text. John Milton placed Moloch first among the speakers in the infernal council of Paradise Lost, and Collin de Plancy's 1863 Dictionnaire Infernal drew him as a crowned, calf-headed king. Since Otto Eissfeldt in 1935, a major strand of scholarship has argued that the Hebrew mlk was not a god's name but a term for a type of child sacrifice, a reading John Day and George Heider contested and that remains unsettled.
The 58th spirit of the Goetia, a Great President of 36 legions. He comes as a flame of fire, then a man, and makes the conjurer marvelous in astrology and the liberal sciences. His distinctive office is to reveal the treasure that other spirits guard. Weyer's text says he hopes to return to the seventh throne after twelve hundred years, and that this is not credible.
The 60th demon of the Goetia, a Great Duke ruling 36 legions. He comes as a lion with griffin's wings and makes men skilled in all the handicraft professions, in philosophy, and in the sciences. The patron of the trades in a directory of binding-spirits.
King Laurin (Nain-Laurin, the Elf-king) is the dwarf-king of the Rosengarten in the medieval German poem Laurin, part of the Dietrich von Bern cycle. He rules an underground crystal kingdom and a famous rose garden, protected not by a wall but by a single silken thread, with a fixed penalty for anyone who plucks a rose: the loss of a hand and a foot. His power comes from a cap of invisibility, a belt granting the strength of twelve men, and armor tempered in dragon's blood. When he abducts the princess Similde, Dietrich von Bern and his companion Witege ride down the garden and, on Hildebrand's advice, strip the dwarf of his cap and belt and beat him. In revenge Laurin curses the roses so that none may see them by day or by night, forgetting dawn and dusk, which folklore ties to the alpenglow (Enrosadira) that still colors the Rosengarten massif in the Dolomites.
The nymphs were the nature-spirits of Greek religion, honored powers of springs, rivers, trees, and childbirth. Christian demonology filed them under the devil. Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal defines them bluntly as female demons whose name comes from the beauty of the forms they wear, and treats that beauty as a thin veil over the spirit of evil. The same tradition slotted them into the Paracelsian scheme of elemental spirits, the water-dwellers beside the salamanders of fire, the sylphs of air, and the gnomes of earth, and tied them to the ondines and nixes of German river-lore, the nymph of the Elbe combing her hair like a siren. However beautiful, the demonologists insisted, their kinship with Satan becomes manifest sooner or later, and death is the lot of any man they seduce.
Two small children are left in a forest with a flatbread and a gourd of water, and told to wait for a father who does not come. When the food runs out and they weep, a tiny man appears at the door, pretty as a doll, in a coat of blue silk with golden hair to his shoulders. He is a maljug, one of the benevolent little folk of the Croatian mountains, and he takes the children by the hand and leads them home through caves that shine like moonlight.
The tutelary house-serpent of South Slavic folklore, representing an ancestral spirit and bringing prosperity to the family under its protection.
An old blacksmith asks Death for one last meal of pears, and the moment she climbs his pear tree to pick them he traps her there with a word. While she hangs in the branches, no one in all the world can die. This is Smrt, the personified Death of South Slavic folk tale: a woman with a scythe who keeps a cave of life-candles and comes for each person at the appointed hour, and who is, all the same, something a clever man might outwit for a while.
A town on a lake must feed the dragon in its water every day, livestock and a living maiden, or the dragon comes ashore and eats whoever it catches. When the turn comes to the king's daughter, a hero waits for her at the water's edge. The lake heaves and the dragon rises with twelve heads, and they must come off one by one. This is the aždaja, the South Slavic dragon as pure appetite, a different creature from the zmaj the hero might himself be called.
On the third night after a birth, three women in white come to the cradle. The mother leaves out bread and salt and pretends to sleep. The women decree the child's whole life: how long it will live and how it will die. The eldest speaks last, and what she says cannot be unsaid. In one Slavonian tale recorded in 1867 there are seven of them, shaggy crones who come down the chimney, and the death they fix on the newborn finds him eighteen years later in an open field.
Jörmungandr, also called the Midgard Serpent (Miðgarðsormr), is the colossal sea-serpent of Norse mythology, one of the three monstrous children of the trickster god Loki and the giantess Angrboða, sibling to the wolf Fenrir and to Hel. Odin cast it into the deep ocean that surrounds all lands, where it grew so enormous that it encircles the whole world of Midgard and grasps its own tail, an image later readers have compared to the ouroboros. It is the appointed enemy of the thunder-god Thor, and the two meet three times in the surviving myths: on a fishing trip with the giant Hymir, where Thor baits a hook with an ox-head and hauls the serpent up before Hymir cuts the line in terror; at the hall of Útgarða-Loki, where Thor is challenged to lift a giant grey cat and raises only one paw, the cat being the serpent in disguise; and at Ragnarök, where Thor kills the serpent with his hammer but walks only nine paces before falling dead of its venom. The serpent appears in the Poetic Edda and Snorri's Prose Edda, and Thor's fishing for it was carved on Viking-age picture stones from Sweden to England.
The gashadokuro is a giant skeleton yokai said to be assembled from the bones and grudges of the unburied dead, soldiers and famine victims who received no funeral rites. It towers over the night landscape and announces itself with a clattering of dry bones. The name was coined by the occult writer Morihiro Saito in 1966, and the image was borrowed from Utagawa Kuniyoshi's c. 1844 triptych of Princess Takiyasha summoning a skeleton spectre at the ruined palace of Soma. Kuniyoshi's print depicted a scene from the Taira no Masakado legend. The skeleton in it has no name. The two were fused in the 1970s by yokai encyclopedists including Arifumi Sato, creating one of the most successful pieces of invented folklore in modern Japan. Its power comes from something older than any of them: the Japanese dread of the muenbotoke, the unmourned dead who have no living person to perform their rites.
Recorded near Varaždin in 1863, the sviećari are men who moved a boundary marker in life and are sentenced by God to walk those same field-edges after death. Each carries a great candle in place of a head; when two knock together the sparks fly like a burning juniper bush. They come at anyone who prays, and flee anyone who curses them.
The krasue (Thai กระสือ, often Phi Krasue) is a nocturnal spirit of Thai folklore that takes the form of a floating female head with the heart, stomach, and intestines still attached and trailing beneath it, lit by a faint glow. By day she lives as an ordinary woman whose headless body is concealed; at night the head detaches to hunt, and it must rejoin the body before daybreak or die. She feeds on blood and raw flesh, attacking cattle and chickens, and is most feared near pregnant women and newborns for the blood and afterbirth she craves. She is warded off with thorny branches and spiky bamboo, which snag her dangling organs, and she is killed by destroying the hidden body, cutting the entrails, or keeping her out until dawn. The krasue belongs to a wider Southeast Asian family of floating-organ spirits that share one creature-type across cultures: the Malay Penanggalan, the Balinese Leyak, the Indonesian Kuyang, the Khmer Ahp, the Lao Kasu, the Vietnamese Ma lai, and, as a distinct winged-torso variant, the Filipino Manananggal. The oldest written attestation of the type is the Malay Penanggalan in the Hikayat Abdullah, published in 1849; the Thai krasue's own record runs mainly through living oral tradition and modern Thai cinema, from Krasue Sao (1973) to Inhuman Kiss (2019).
The Huakaʻi Pō are the marchers of the night, the warrior dead of old Hawaiʻi walking the ancient trails between sunset and sunrise. They carry torches, beat drums, blow the conch (pū), and chant the oli. Their feet do not touch the ground and they leave no physical trace. Sightings are often preceded by sudden wind, mist, high surf, or thunder. They march on the lunar nights sacred to the four major gods (Pō Kāne, Pō Lono, the four Pō Kū, the three Pō Kāloa), with the 27th, Pō Kāne, the most-cited night. The earliest extended written treatment in English is in Kepelino's manuscript Moʻolelo Hawaiʻi of 1868, translated by Martha Warren Beckwith and published as Bernice P. Bishop Museum Bulletin 95 in 1932, with an appendix titled 'The Marchers of the Night.' The standard modern academic article is Katharine Luomala's 'Phantom Night Marchers in the Hawaiian Islands' in Pacific Studies 7:1 (1983). Survival rules are documented and specific: lie face-down on the ground in silence; recite your genealogy aloud so an ancestor among the marchers can claim you with the shout Naʻu, 'mine'; plant a hedge of ti leaves around the house. Kepelino's own 1868 rule for those who do not know their genealogy is to strip off your clothes and lie flat on your back so the marchers think you mad and pity you. The tradition is still a living belief in Native Hawaiian community, acknowledged by the Kamehameha Schools' own cultural-centre publications and by routing decisions on major infrastructure projects across the islands.
A large, unidentified creature reportedly living in the rivers and swamps of the Congo basin in Central Africa. Local Aka and Bantu communities describe it as the size of an elephant, with a long neck, a small head, and a long tail. Western explorers and cryptozoologists have interpreted the descriptions as a surviving sauropod dinosaur. Multiple expeditions to the Likouala swamp region have found no physical evidence. The creature remains one of the most persistent cryptozoological claims in the world.
A cryptid first reported in Puerto Rico in 1995, where livestock (especially goats) were found dead with small puncture wounds and apparently drained of blood. The name means 'goat-sucker.' Described as a bipedal creature with spines along its back, large dark eyes, and grey leathery skin. Sightings spread across Latin America and the US Southwest. DNA analysis of alleged chupacabra carcasses has identified them as coyotes or dogs with severe mange. The original Puerto Rican sightings remain unexplained.
A hominid-like creature reported by Mongolian and Central Asian herders in the Altai Mountains, the Caucasus, and the Pamir range. Described as shorter than a human, covered in reddish-brown hair, with a flat nose and heavy brow. Soviet and Russian researchers investigated reports for decades. Some identified it as a surviving Neanderthal population. No specimen has been recovered. The reports continue from herding communities across Central Asia.
He lives where the Magdalena narrows. His hair is matted, his beard is wild, his eyes glow in the dark, and he smokes a pipe. He tangles fishing lines, capsizes boats, and steals the catch. He seduces washerwomen at the river with music and gold. He guards the treasure beneath the rapids. Fishermen in Tolima leave tobacco at the water's edge before casting their nets and ask his permission to fish. His name may come from a Chibcha word for shaman: a real human role that became a myth after the people who held it were destroyed.
The Yamachichi (山地乳) appears in the Ehon Hyaku Monogatari (絵本百物語), a kaidan picture book published in 1841, the twelfth year of Tenpō. It is a mountain beast with a pointed, puckered mouth and dark fur, drawn to resemble a monkey. According to the text, it is the final stage of a transformation chain: an ordinary bat that lives long enough becomes a nobusuma, the gliding creature that smothers lamps and travellers on mountain roads; a nobusuma that lives longer still becomes a yamachichi and retreats into the deep mountains. From there it descends at night to steal the breath of sleeping humans. The outcome turns on a single condition: if someone witnesses the act, the sleeper's life is lengthened; if no one sees it, the sleeper dies the next day.
A girl's betrothed is away at the war, at the far end of the world, and yet every night he steps out of the dark onto her threshold and talks with her until dawn. The real soldier has not come home. The one who visits is a vilovnjak, a fairy in her lover's exact shape, and only she can see him. He does not leave when the real man returns. He clings to the woman, and to the next woman after her, until they die.
The huli jing (狐狸精, literally 'fox spirit') is the Chinese fox-spirit, with the most powerful form known as the jiuweihu (九尾狐, 'nine-tailed fox'). Variant terms: huxian (狐仙, 'fox immortal,' for benevolent or cult-worshipped foxes) and huyao (狐妖, 'fox demon,' for malicious manifestations). The earliest textual mention is in the Shan Hai Jing (山海經, Classic of Mountains and Seas, compiled c. 4th century BCE to 1st century CE), in the Nanshan Jing chapter, where a nine-tailed fox lives on Qingqiu Mountain, cries like a baby, eats humans, and whose flesh protects against gu poison. By the Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE) the white nine-tailed fox has become an auspicious omen of royal succession and is specifically linked to King Wen of Zhou's mandate, as recorded in Wang Bao's Wen Xuan passage. Eastern Han funerary stone reliefs of the Wu Family Shrines tradition (Shandong, mid-second century CE) place the nine-tailed fox among the attendants of the Queen Mother of the West. By the Tang, in stories compiled in the Song-era Taiping Guangji (977 to 978 CE, around eighty fox-spirit records), the huli jing has become a seductive shapeshifter who drains the yang essence of male scholars. The Ming-era vernacular novel Fengshen Yanyi (Investiture of the Gods, c. 1567 to 1619, traditionally attributed to Xu Zhonglin) reframes Daji, the legendary consort of the last Shang king, as a thousand-year-old nine-tailed fox sent by the goddess Nüwa to corrupt the king and destroy the Shang dynasty. By the Qing, in Pu Songling's Liaozhai Zhiyi (composed late 17th to early 18th century, first widely printed 1766), the fox-women are morally complex: some predatory and yang-draining, some genuinely loving wives who help the scholar pass the imperial examinations and raise his family. The 4th-century commentator Guo Pu gives the cultivation arc: 'When a fox is fifty years old, it can transform itself into a woman; when a hundred years old, it becomes a beautiful woman... when a fox is a thousand years old, it ascends to heaven and becomes a celestial fox.'
The gumiho (Korean 구미호, Hanja 九尾狐, literally 'nine-tailed fox') is the Korean member of the East Asian fox-spirit trio that also includes the Chinese huli jing and the Japanese kitsune; all three share the same three-character Sino-Korean compound for the most powerful form. A fox that has lived a thousand years accumulates enough spiritual energy to gain nine tails and the power to take human form, almost always as a beautiful young woman. In Korean folk tradition the gumiho is the morally darkest of the three cousins. She seduces young men and extracts their livers (gan), eating them raw; the canonical tale Yeou nui ('The Fox Sister'), preserved in at least 75 variants documented in South Korea, has a born-gumiho daughter who secretly kills the family's livestock at night to eat their livers and eventually devours her parents, with the three brothers escaping behind magical obstacles. Under Joseon-era Confucian influence (1392–1897) the gumiho was increasingly cast as deceptive, malevolent, or tragic; older Korean material, including the Samguk Yusa Vol. 4 entry on the monk Wonkwang, preserves a benevolent teacherly fox at Mount Samgi who urges Wonkwang to go to China to study Buddhism. The 21st-century Korean drama rehabilitation (My Girlfriend Is a Gumiho, SBS 2010; Gu Family Book, MBC 2013; Tale of the Nine Tailed, tvN 2020) recasts her as the sympathetic, romantically tragic figure many international viewers now recognise, working against five centuries of folk-tradition man-killer.
The kratt is a magical treasure-bringing servant of Estonian folklore, assembled by a person out of hay and old household and farm implements, then brought to life by a pact with the Devil, who takes three drops of the maker's blood, often at a crossroads. Once animated, the kratt flies through the night sky as a fiery trail (its names tulihänd and pisuhänd mean fire-tail and spark-tail) and steals grain, milk, money, and goods from the neighbours to enrich its owner. Its defining danger is that it must never be left idle: a kratt with no work turns on and kills the master who built it. Owners who wanted to be rid of one set it an impossible task, such as building a ladder out of bread, carrying water in a sieve, or threshing a field with no tools, and the kratt would labour at it until, unable to finish, it caught fire and burned to pieces, sometimes seen burning away across the sky as a fireball. The kratt belongs to a Baltic-Sea family of treasure-bringing and milk-stealing familiars that includes the Finnish para, the Swedish bjära, the Latvian pūķis, and the Lithuanian aitvaras. It is preserved in the great nineteenth-century Estonian folklore collections of Jakob Hurt and Matthias Johann Eisen, and it is the creature at the centre of Andrus Kivirähk's novel Rehepapp and the 2017 film November.
When a Slovenian family in Gorizia produced twelve sons by one father, the twelfth was born a Krstnik. On St. John's Eve all twelve brothers fought witches in the air, using leftover harvest stakes as weapons. The villagers around Görz dug their stakes deep in autumn so the witches could not arm themselves. The closest South Slavic structural parallel to the Friulian benandanti.
An agrarian fertility cult of the Friuli region in northeastern Italy. The Benandanti, meaning good walkers, were people born with the caul (the amniotic membrane still covering their head at birth). On the four Ember Days each year, they said their spirits left their sleeping bodies and traveled to fight the malandanti (witches and warlocks) in battles for the fertility of the crops. The Benandanti wielded fennel stalks, the malandanti fought with sorghum. If the Benandanti won, the harvest would be good. If they lost, famine would follow. When the Inquisition investigated them starting in 1575, the Benandanti insisted they were servants of God fighting evil. Over decades of pressure, the Church reclassified them as witches, and by the mid-seventeenth century the Benandanti themselves had begun confessing to sabbath attendance.
The divine eagle-man in Hindu and Buddhist mythology. Mount (vahana) of Vishnu. Born from an egg that incubated for five hundred years. His wingspan blocks the sun. He is the eternal enemy of the nagas (serpents) because his mother was enslaved by their mother. He freed her by stealing the nectar of immortality from the gods. Garuda is the national emblem of Indonesia, the symbol of the Thai royal family, and appears on coats of arms across Southeast Asia.
Mycale is a Thessalian witch from Greek myth, named in Ovid's Metamorphoses (Book 12) as the mother of the Lapiths Broteas and Orios and as a woman known to have often drawn the horned moon down from the sky by her incantations. She is a named example of the single most famous power ascribed to the witches of Thessaly in Greek and Roman literature, the drawing-down of the moon, a commonplace found in Aristophanes, Plato, Horace, and Lucan. Behind the folklore lies a documented figure, Aglaonice of Thessaly, an astronomer of the second or first century BC who could predict lunar eclipses and, by Plutarch's account, timed her 'drawing down' to coincide with them, letting other women believe she commanded the moon.
The dark scholar of Croatian and Slovenian folklore who supposedly studied twelve years of theology and a thirteenth year of black magic. He roams from village to village riding clouds and commanding dragons, threatening hailstorms if he is refused his customary demand of fresh milk.
Baba Yaga is the forest witch of East Slavic folktale, an old woman with bony legs and iron teeth who lives in a hut that stands on chicken legs and turns to face whoever speaks the right words to it. She travels in an iron mortar, using the pestle as a rudder and a broom to sweep away her tracks. Around her hut runs a fence built from human bones with a row of skulls along the top whose eyes glow at night. The first attested mention in print is in Mikhail Lomonosov's Russian Grammar of 1755; the first sustained narrative use is in Vasily Levshin's Russian Tales of 1780-1783; the iconography is codified for European readers by Alexander Afanasyev's eight-volume Russian Folk Tales of 1855-1863. Her canonical tale is Vasilisa the Beautiful, in which she gives the heroine a skull-lantern that burns her tormentors to ash. The standard modern study is Andreas Johns's 2004 Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale, which classifies her structural roles as donor, villain, and donor-villain often within a single story. The simple evil-witch reading is a later flattening.
Sirdon is the trickster of the Nart Sagas of the Caucasus, the Caucasian datum point on the deep Indo-European trickster line that runs through Prometheus, Loki, and Coyote. Half-Nart and half-something-else (his mother in different Ossetian variants is a daughter of the river-god Donbettyr, a witch, or a demon's daughter), he is mocked by warriors who could break him in half but none of whom can do without him. His most famous act is the worst and the most generative: after the Narts killed his sons in revenge for one of his thefts and served the boys to him boiled at a feast, he gathered the bones, stretched the dried sinews across a frame, and played the first song ever heard in the world. The Ossetian fændyr (twelve-stringed harp) is in the saga's own etiology his invention. He also engineered the death of the great hero Soslan by extracting the secret of his vulnerable knees, in a structural parallel to Loki engineering Baldr's death by extracting the secret of the mistletoe.
The most remote inhabited island on earth, 3,700 kilometers from Chile. Polynesian settlers arrived around 1200 CE and carved 887 moai, monolithic stone statues averaging four meters tall and twelve tonnes, from the volcanic rock of the Rano Raraku quarry. The statues were moved to stone platforms (ahu) around the island's coast, facing inland to watch over the villages. The civilization collapsed before European contact. The moai were toppled. Some have been restored. The island carries the question of what happened.
A network of over 300 kilometers of tunnels beneath Paris, converted from former limestone quarries into an ossuary beginning in 1786. The remains of approximately six million people were transferred here from overflowing Parisian cemeteries. The bones are arranged in walls: femurs stacked in rows, skulls placed at intervals in decorative patterns. A small section is open to the public. The rest, sealed and illegal to enter, is explored by cataphiles who navigate in darkness.
A small island off the coast of Dakar, Senegal, used as a slave trading depot from the 15th to the 19th century. The Maison des Esclaves (House of Slaves), built in 1776, contains the Door of No Return: a doorway opening directly onto the Atlantic Ocean, through which enslaved people were said to pass on their way to the ships. The scale of Gorée's role is debated among historians, but its symbolic importance as a memorial to the Atlantic slave trade is not.
A former British penal colony on the Tasman Peninsula of Tasmania, active from 1833 to 1877. Over 12,500 convicts were imprisoned here. The 'Separate Prison' imposed total silence: prisoners wore hoods when outside their cells, attended chapel in individual wooden boxes, and were referred to by number. The system was designed to reform through isolation. It produced madness. The site's ghost tours are the most popular in Australia.
Our Lady of Guadalupe is the image on the tilma kept in the basilica at Tepeyac in Mexico City, and the account of the four apparitions to Juan Diego in December 1531. The written apparition story surfaces late, in two books printed in 1648 and 1649, while the earliest hard paper about the shrine is a bad-tempered church quarrel of 1556. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, writing in the 1570s, recorded that the pilgrims walking to the new church still called the place by the name of the goddess whose temple had stood there, Tonantzin, and called that a satanic invention. This entry keeps his complaint in his own words, and keeps the question he raised open.
Stefan Uroš III, called Dečanski after the monastery he raised, was a king of the Nemanjić line, son of King Milutin and father of Tsar Dušan. The tradition holds that his father had him blinded and that Saint Nicholas restored his sight; historians doubt the blinding was ever complete. He founded the monastery of Visoki Dečani and won the battle of Velbužd in 1330. He was deposed and killed at the fortress of Zvečan, and the sources divide over whether he was strangled, drowned, or died on his own. Scholarship dates his death to 1331; the church tradition says 1336. The Serbian church keeps him as a martyr-king, a 'holy king', and his feast on 24 November is Mratindan, a day whose folk name came from Saint Martin and whose folk calendar keeps a wolf-shepherd.
Cosmas and Damian were brothers and physicians in Asia Minor, raised in the faith by their Christian mother Theodota. They healed the sick and would take no payment, since they kept the command 'freely you have received, freely give.' The tradition tells that Damian once accepted three eggs from a grateful woman, and Cosmas, who had vowed they take nothing, was so angered he asked to be buried apart; a healed camel is said to have spoken to reconcile them, and they were buried together at Fereman. Unlike the other saintly pairs of the same name, this pair died in peace. They are the patrons of doctors and pharmacists, invoked for healing, and in the Serbian lands their feast on 14 November is Vračevi, the day of the healers.
Mark is the evangelist behind the second gospel, traditionally the interpreter of the Apostle Peter, and by tradition the founder and first bishop of the church of Alexandria, where he was martyred. His symbol is the winged lion. In 828 two Venetian merchants stole his relics from Alexandria and carried them to Venice, hidden in a basket under salt pork so the Muslim officials would not search it, and Mark became the patron of Venice, his lion its emblem. In the Serbian lands his feast on 8 May is Markovdan, an old household slava and a day when no one works the fields, for fear of the hail the saint is said to carry.
Yin and yang are the two complementary aspects of Chinese cosmology: yin the shaded, receptive, cool side, yang the bright, active, warm side, neither one good nor evil. The swirling black-and-white diagram that stands for them is the taijitu, the 'diagram of the supreme ultimate.' Though the concept is ancient, rooted in the Yijing and Daoism, the familiar symbol is much younger: a diagram fashion of Song-dynasty Neo-Confucianism (Zhou Dunyi, 11th century) simplified into the interlocking spirals by the Ming author Lai Zhide in the 16th century, and adopted as a Western pop icon only in the 1960s. The same swirl, strangely, appears on Roman army shields around 430 CE, seven hundred years before the earliest Chinese diagram.
The Sanctum Regnum seal is the pact emblem reproduced in Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal to illustrate its entry on making a pact with the devil. It belongs to the Sanctum Regnum, the pact-making section of the Grand Grimoire (Le Dragon Rouge), the manual for summoning Lucifuge Rofocale and compelling him to hand over treasure. At the center of the disc is a scaled, clawed, many-legged creature, one of the beasts of evil; around it run alchemical and planetary characters and jagged strokes, and an outer ring of Latin. The Latin is Psalm 91:13, a verse of divine protection about trampling the powers of evil, printed here on a seal whose whole purpose is to bargain with them.
The pantacle, or pentacle, is the engraved talisman at the center of Solomonic magic. Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal calls it the thing the whole science of the Key of Solomon depends on, a disc inscribed with the ineffable names of God and used to command spirits. The seal illustrated in the 1863 edition is a hexagram, the Seal of Solomon, enclosed in a ring of Arabic writing, the Islamic-Solomonic layer that fed the Latin grimoires. The Dictionnaire even gives the recipe: made on a Wednesday in the first quarter of the moon, on virgin parchment, with three concentric circles of gold, cinnabar, and green, an exorcised ink and quill, a triangle carrying the words reformatio and transformatio, and the great name AGLA.
Each of the 72 spirits of the Ars Goetia has its own seal, a unique geometric mark the operator engraves in metal and wears as a lamen to compel the spirit. Weyer's 1577 demon catalog, the text the Goetia was built from, has no seals at all. The full set first appears in an English manuscript around 1687, and the versions everyone recognizes today were fixed by the Mathers and Crowley edition of 1904. The visual signature of Western demonology is younger than Shakespeare's plays.