Home » Sighted Elsewhere (Page 23)
Category Archives: Sighted Elsewhere
A Brief History of Werewolves
If you ever wanted a quick and easy introduction to werewolf-lore, this post from Just the Juicy Bits is a pretty good place to start. (H/T: Werewolves.com)
From it’s first written appearance in 1.A.D to the present day we have never lost our morbid fascination with this most changeable of creatures. Almost every established culture features tales of Werewolves, simply replacing the ‘wolf’ with the dominant apex predator of that society. The Egyptian God Anubis for example had the head of a jackal and there are Chinese legends depicting cursed individuals transforming into tigers at will.
Despite our familiarity with the Werewolf, our contemporary understanding of a creature transforming with the full moon howling at the night sky, is very different to the perception of the Werewolf in the 15th-17th centuries. During this period Werewolves were not a fairytale, but a real and present threat- unnatural beings associated with Satan in a time when religious persecution was rife. The accounts of the Werewolf Trials, which ran parallel to the Witch Trials, present us with insight into a politically unstable world shaped by religion, politics and fear.
Abracadabra
This is a bit more highbrow than I usually want to get around here, but I’ve recently become aware of a couple of interesting posts about the supposed meaning of Abracadabra.
First, Steve Caruso of The Aramaic Blog sets out to refute the idea that the term is originally Aramaic and means something like “I create as I speak.” This has been the dominant assumption for the past fifty years or so, but Steve sees little to commend it. Along the way, he shades into Harry Potter territory by noting Stephen Jay’s 1977 conjecture that the term “may be from the Aramaic: Avada Kedavra, ‘May the thing be destroyed.'”
Next, Jim Davila of PaleoJudaica writes a brief note to caution us against so quickly dismissing the Aramaic hypothesis:
Technically [Steve] is correct, but I think it’s a little more complicated. Steve acknowledges that the first part of the phrase, “Abra,” could come from the Aramaic word “to create,” although it is badly pronounced (but ancient Greek-speaking magicians were less than rigorous about such things) and that the middle part, “ca” could be a preposition meaning “as” or “like.” The problem is the last part, “dabra” which looks like an Aramaic form (with the emphatic ending “-a”) of the Hebrew (not Aramaic) word davar (דבר), “word” (not “I speak”). As far as I can tell, this Hebraism is not attested in Aramaic, but we should be cautious about this, since the Hebrew root was borrowed into Aramaic, as we see in the word dibbura (דיבורא), “speech, “utterance,” etc., in Rabbinic Aramaic (Jastrow, 295; Sokoloff, Palestinian, 144; Sokoloff, Babylonian, 326). If we allow for the possible similar (and otherwise unattested) borrowing of davar, Abracadabra could be a badly pronounced rendition of “I create according to the word” or the like. It seems entirely plausible to me that an ancient Jewish or Greco-Egyptian magician could have come up with this sort of cool-sounding incantation.
Magicians in the Hellenistic world seem to have frequently adopted words of power from other languages. That is how the Hebrew name for God became mixed up with Greco-Roman magic in a number of different forms and spellings. I think Jim is right that this is at least a plausible explanation for this almost archetypical magic word.
The Prehistoric World Was Rather Tolkienesque
Fifty thousand years ago or so, there were multiple species of humanoids on planet Earth. There were, of course, biologically modern humans: good old fashioned Homo sapiens sapiens. There were also, we now know, Neanderthals in northern Europe, Denisovans from Siberia to southeast Asia, and, most recently, the “hobbits” (Homo floresiensis) of the island of Flores in Indonesia. Sometimes these various groups traded with one another. Sometimes they fought one another. Occasionally—and the genetic evidence for this continues to mount—at least some of them *ahem* socialized with one another and produced viable offspring.
Some of this complexity is captured in a number of fascinating articles that have appeared recently at io9:
- How Did Neanderthal Genes Affect Humanity? Here Are Some Answers
- A Long Anthropological Debate May B on the Cusp of Resolution
- New Evidence Points to the Flores “Hobbit” as a Dwarf Species
I think the makings are there for a really interesting way to understand and depict the various races one encounters in fantasy fiction. How do these races differ from one another physiologically? What strengths and weaknesses do each possess? In fact, that is exactly how I went about fleshing out the various inhabitants of the Wonder: the true fae, dwarves, trolls, and little folk such as the yunwi tsunsdi.
For cultural/ethical characteristics and magical capabilities, I of course leaned heavily on mythology and folklore. I’m not trying to “explain” dwarves and the rest in anything like a scientific way, after all. But when looking for a bit of extra color, I was very happy to see what paleoanthropologists could tell me about some of humanity’s nearest kin.
Newfoundland Faery Traditions
Here is an awesome collection of online resources for Newfoundland faery traditions compiled by Dale Gilbert Jarvis and Nicole Penney.
Nicole Penney and I have been busy little elves this morning, working on a project we both love: Newfoundland fairylore!
We have had some requests from people about the tradition of fairies in Newfoundland and Labrador, so we’ve pulled together some links to online material that we think might be useful to people doing projects or heritage fair displays on the faerie folk, fairy belief, tradition and superstition.
Classic Irish Sagas
I don’t read Old Irish (the shame!), but it looks like the new archive Irish Sagas Online (University College Cork) also has scholarly articles in English as well as English translations of at least some of its content. It could be worth a visit for those of a historical bent. (H/T: Celtic Myth Podshow)
The Ophiotaurus
The most recent installment of Faith M. Broughan’s series on monsters in Greek mythology focuses on the Ophiotaurus. There is only one extant reference to this creature in all of Greco-Roman literature, but it does feature prominently in The Titan’s Curse by Rick Riordan.
Thirteen University Paranormal Research Projects
My alma mater is not on the list, fortunately. And I see they also forgot about Columbia University.
Steff Humm’s Desolation of Smaug Review
Steff Humm at Fantasy Faction has offered a thoughtful review of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.
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?
Darrell J. Pursiful 