Thirteen University Paranormal Research Projects
My alma mater is not on the list, fortunately. And I see they also forgot about Columbia University.
Sunday Inspiration: “Safe”
“Is—is he a man?” asked Lucy.
“Aslan a man!” said Mr Beaver sternly. “Certainly not. I tell you he is the King of the wood and the son of the great Emperor-beyond-the-Sea. Don’t you know who is the King of Beasts? Aslan is a lion—the Lion, the great Lion.”
“Ooh!” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he—quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”
“That you will, dearie, and no mistake,” said Mrs Beaver; “if there’s anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they’re either braver than most or else just silly.”
“Then he isn’t safe?” said Lucy.
“Safe!” said Mr Beaver; “don’t you hear what Mrs Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
—C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
Jogaoh: Iroquois Fair Folk
Masked Iroquois dancer
The Iroquois Confederacy was made up of the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, and Mohawk tribes. In the folklore of all of these are stories of the jogaoh. Like the nunnehi of the Cherokee, jogaoh are generally more favorable toward humans than their European counterparts. (The Cherokee and the Iroquois are actually distantly related; the Cherokee language is in fact classified as “Southern Iroquoian.”) The Fair Folk of the Huron-Wyandot peoples, another Iroquoian group, are of a similar nature.
Their name is sometimes translated as “dwarves,” “pygmies,” or “little people.” They often appear as tiny humanoids, perhaps only inches tall. As with most Fair Folk, however, appearances can be deceiving as some of these beings are expert shapeshifters.
These beings are actually an alliance or confederacy of three distinct “tribes.”
Gahongas
Of the three tribes of jogaoh, gahongas most often have dealings with humans. They inhabit rocks and rivers. In Huron-Wyandot lore, these beings are able to come and go through living rock. Guardians of streams, they dwell in caves along the banks. They are especially concerned with fishing. They direct the movements of fish, give them shelter in their deep-water caves, and protect them from those who would over-fish their waters. They can command a fruitful or a barren fishing season, and frequently punish wrongdoing with famine.
Gahongas are sometimes called “stone-throwers” because of their love of a particular game that involves tossing large stones back and forth. They thus possess incredible strength, far in excess to what might be expected given their size. In fact, is is said that “they can uproot the largest tree by a twist of the hand, and hurl massive rocks into the rivers, to lift the waters when floods threaten” (William M. Beauchamp, Iroquois Folk Lore [Dehler, 1922] 46).
Gahongas sometimes visit mortals and lead them to their dwelling-places, where they challenge them to feats of strength. Other mortal visitors are instructed in the Gahongas’ magical secrets: mysticism, exorcism, and dances. As with many stories from Europe, when these visitors return to the mortal realm, they may discover that many years have passed, while it seemed to them they were only gone for a short while.
Gandayahs
Gandayahs are associated with plants and plant growth. As a kindred of the fruits and grains, they are the most favored of humankind and most beloved by them. They are beings of sunshine who bring joy and happiness to mortals. In the springtime, they hide in dark, sheltered places and coax the earth to bring forth its fruit. Then, in the summer, they wander over the fields, tinting the grains and ripening the fruits. They also fend of blights and diseases of plants that threaten the harvest.
In times of drought, the Iroquois might search in the wilderness for small cup-shaped hollows in the soft earth. These are fashioned into “dew cup charms” meant to attract the gandayahs and coax them to begin their work.
It is said that they are especially fond of strawberries. According to one legend, an evil spirit once stole the strawberry plant and hid it under the ground for centuries until it was finally rescued by a sunbeam, who carried it back to the mortal world. Ever after, the gandayahs have kept a special guard over this fruit, the ripening of which marks the beginning of their yearly work.
They frequently visit the mortal realm in various forms, especially birds. If they come as a robin, it bodes good tidings. An owl, however, is a word of warning that an enemy is coming to deceive. A bat denotes a life-and-death struggle close at hand. Even harmless insects and worms might bear important messages for the attentive mortal to discern.
Ohdowas
These beings are devoted to hunting. Although they are small, they are sturdy and brave. They dwell deep beneath the soil in subterranean realms where no sunlight penetrates. Many different kinds of animals inhabit this land, many of which are dangerous to mortals. The ohdowas strive to prevent the poisonous serpents and other grim creatures from reaching the surface of the earth. Beauchamp explains,
In the dim world where the Oh-do-was live are deep forests and broad plains, where roam the animals whose proper abode is there, and though all that live there wish to escape, yet both good and bad, native and captive, are bidden to be content and dwell where fate has placed them. Among the mysterious underearth denizens are the white buffaloes, who are tempted again and again to gain the earth’s surface, but the paths to the light are guarded, and the white buffalo must not climb to the sunlight, to gallop with his brown brothers over the plains. Sometimes they try to rush up and out, and then the Oh-do-was rally their hunters, and thin out the unruly herds with their arrows. ‘Tis then that a messenger is sent above to tell the sunlight elves that the chase is on, and the earth elves hang a red cloud high in the heavens, as a sign of the hunt. Ever alert for signals the Indian reads the symbol of the red cloud, and rejoices that the Little People are watchful and brave. (48)
In addition to protecting the surface world from monsters, ohdowas are also the “warriors” of jogaoh culture, charged with hunting down wrongdoers and bringing them to justice.
The Wild Hunt
Imagine a horde of ghostly hunters, sounding their horns as they ride through the countryside at night on black horses (and sometimes black stags) behind black dogs with eerie, glowing eyes. Such a ghostly experience is common to European folklore, but especially in the most northerly countries. It is called the Wild Hunt, and Dan McCoy has posted an excellent brief summary of the legend.
As McCoy explains, the Wild Hunt (also called Odin’s Hunt, Odin’s Army, the Terrifying Ride, etc.) is usually said to take place in midwinter, the coldest and darkest part of the year. Those who came upon it by accident were caught up in the ghostly procession. Others, witches and such, might join in voluntarily in a kind of astral projection.
The leader of the Hunt is variously named and variously described, but the Hunt is most often associated with the god Odin or Wotan in Germanic lands.
What is the meaning of the Hunt? As McCoy explains, it has strong ties to death and the cult of the dead:
In the body of lore surrounding the Wild Hunt, we find a number of themes that connect it powerfully with the dead and the underworld. For one thing, there’s the ghostly character of the hunters or warriors themselves. Dogs and horses, animals that were closely associated with death (amongst a great many other things), were almost invariably present. In some accounts of the Hunt, the riders can hardly, if at all, be distinguished from land spirits, who were themselves often conflated with the dead, as if the two were thought of as being in some sense one and the same. Finally, for the ancient Germanic peoples, the worlds of the living and the dead were especially permeable during midwinter, which goes a long way toward explaining why this troop of apparitions haunted the land during that particular part of the year. In the words of Claude Lecouteux, “[T]he Wild Hunt fell into the vast complex of ancestor worship, the cult of the dead, who are the go-betweens between men and the gods.”
It was as if the very elements of midwinter – the menacing cold, the almost unrelenting darkness, the eerie, desolate silence broken only by the baying winds and galloping storms – manifested the restless dead, and the ancient northern Europeans, whose ways of life and worldviews predisposed them to sense the spiritual qualities in the world around them, recorded the sometimes terrifying fruits of such an engagement with the more-than-human world in their accounts of the Wild Hunt.
Steff Humm’s Desolation of Smaug Review
Steff Humm at Fantasy Faction has offered a thoughtful review of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.
Deer People: Native American Forest Folk
Several Native American peoples have legends of a half-deer, half-human being that lives in the forest and is sometimes dangerous to humans. In the Southeast, the Choctaw tell of a mischievous deer man called kashehotapolo. Cherokee folklore has a shapeshifting “deer woman.” These two apparently have little in common except their deer-like attributes and the general part of the world in which they live.
The kashehotapolo love to frighten hunters in the woods but are otherwise more mischievous than malicious.They inhabit the marshes and swampy woodlands. The Choctaw say these beings screech and wail as they dash past lone hunters at lightning speed.
What does a kashehotapolo look like? Reports vary. Some say its true form is an antlered humanoid, although it can take the form of an ordinary deer. Others report the creature has an undersized head. Yet others say he has a shriveled face, the body of a man and the legs and hooves of a deer. This confusion about its appearance is explained by the Choctaw by saying the creature ran so fast that few ever saw it clearly enough to clearly state what it looked like.
In contrast to the Choctaw deer man’s mostly harmless demeanor, the Cherokee “deer woman” is a seductive shapeshifter. They are able to assume the form of a deer, although they may retain some deer characteristics even in human form (most often possessing hooves instead of human feet). Although they can be helpful to women, especially those hoping to conceive children, they are often dangerous to men. Men who are adulterous or promiscuous are their favorite targets. Deer women might lead such men to their deaths or else leave them to pine away from lovesickness.
Deer women are also found in the folklore of the Great Plains. In the Lakota language, they are called Anukite (“double face”) or Sinté Sapela Win (“black-tailed woman”). Plains legends tend to paint them as irredeemably evil. In Cherokee and other eastern folklore, however, they can be helpful to humans, although they are still considered dangerous and unpredictable.
Sunday Inspiration: Friendship
There are some things you can’t share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.
—J. K. Rowling
Maine’s Goatman
I knew there were (supposedly) goatmen in Maryland and, of course, Fisherville, Kentucky (just outside Louisville, where I used to live). I hadn’t heard they ranged as far north as Maine. Here is the scoop from Peter Muise of the New England Folklore blog:
The story goes something like this. Back in the 1950s a Cherryfield man was driving his truck through the woods outside town. He was a local and had spent most of his time hunting, fishing, and logging in the forests of Maine. Those decades of experience didn’t prepare him for what he encountered that day.
He had filled up his gas tank before he left home that day, so he was very surprised when his truck came to a gradual stop on a lonely road. His gas gauge read empty.
He got out and checked the tank. It indeed was empty. He checked the bottom of the truck but couldn’t see a leak, and he didn’t see any sign of gas dripping on the road. He was annoyed and puzzled, but when he got out from beneath those truck those emotions turned to surprise – and maybe a little terror.
Standing in the middle of the road was a man who was half-human and half-goat. His lower body and legs were naked, hairy and shaped like a goat’s, while his torso was human-shaped and covered in a flannel shirt. Goat horns grew out of his head and his ears were pointed like an animal’s. Other than the flannel shirt, the goatman looked like a mythological satyr or the Greek god Pan.
I wonder if all these New-World satyrs have a big family reunion somewhere?
Grandmothers of Fantasy Fiction
Nyki Blatchley has a great follow-up at Fantasy Faction to Leo Elijah Cristea’s previous post on the “grandfathers” of fantasy, highlighting classic female fantasy writers (up to about 1980) from Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley to Marion Zimmer Bradley and Anne McCaffery. He concludes,
Today, whatever inequalities still remain, fantasy written by women is too common to need any special note. It’s unlikely, though, that this would have been possible without pioneers like Shelley, Nesbit, Moore, Norton, LeGuin, Bradley and the rest. They deserve to be honoured for what they made possible, as well as for the classic quality of their works.
As with the aforementioned post from Cristea, this one is definitely worth a read.
Darrell J. Pursiful 