Folklore Era Quotes

On the conversion of the European tribes to Christianity the ancient pagan worship was by no means incontinently abandoned. So wholesale had been the conversion of many peoples, whose chiefs or rulers had accepted the new faith on their behalf in a summary manner, that it would be absurd to suppose that any, general acquiescence in the new gospel immediately took place. Indeed, the old beliefs lurked in many neighbourhoods, and even a renaissance of some of them occurred in more than one area. Little by little, however, the Church succeeded in rooting out the public worship of the old pagan deities, but it found it quite impossible to effect an entire reversion of pagan ways, and in the end compromised by exalting the ancient deities to the position of saints in its calendar, either officially, or by usage. In the popular mind, however, these remained as the fairies of woodland and stream, whose worship in a broken-down form still flourished at wayside wells and forest shrines. The Matres, or Mother gods, particularly those of Celtic France and Ireland, the former of which had come to be Romanized, became the bonnes dames of folklore, while the dusii and pilosi, or hairy house-sprites, were so commonly paid tribute that the Church introduced a special question concerning them into its catechism of persons suspected of pagan practice. Nevertheless, the Roman Church, at a somewhat later era, reversed its older and more catholic policy, and sternly set its face against the cultus of paganism in Europe, stigmatizing the several kinds of spirits and derelict gods who were the objects of its worship as demons and devils, whom mankind must eschew with the most pious care if it were to avoid damnation.

Let us come to the point now. It would be nice to hold on to the common belief that the UFOs are craft from a superior space-civilization, because this is a hypothesis science fiction has made widely acceptable, and because we are not altogether unprepared, scientifically and even, perhaps, militarily, to deal with such visitors. Unfortunately, however, the theory that flying saucers are material objects from outer space manned by a race originating on some other planet is not a complete answer. However strong the current belief in saucers from space, it cannot be stronger than the Celtic faith in the elves and the fairies, or the medieval belief in lutins, or the fear throughout the Christian lands, in the first centuries of our era, of demons and satyrs and fauns. Certainly, it cannot be stronger than the faith that inspired the writers of the Bible—a faith rooted in daily experiences with angelic visitation.

In the popular folklore of American history, there is a sense in which the founders’ various achievements in natural philosophy—Franklin’s electrical experiments, Jefferson’s botany—serve as a kind of sanctified extracurricular activity. They were statesmen and political visionaries who just happened to be hobbyists in science, albeit amazingly successful ones. Their great passions were liberty and freedom and democracy; the experiments were a side project. But the Priestley view suggests that the story has it backward. Yes, they were hobbyists and amateurs at natural philosophy, but so were all the great minds of Enlightenment-era science. What they shared was a fundamental belief that the world could change—that it could improve—if the light of reason was allowed to shine upon it.

«el jazz es como un pájaro que migra o emigra o inmigra o transmigra, saltabarreras, burlaaduanas, algo que corre y se difunde... es la lluvia y el pan y la sal, algo absolutamente indiferente a los ritos nacionales, a las tradiciones inviolables, al idioma y al folklore: una nube sin fronteras, un espía del aire y del agua, una forma arquetípica, algo de antes, de abajo, que reconcilia mexicanos con noruegos y rusos y españoles, los reincorpora al oscuro fuego central olvidado, torpe y mal y precariamente los devuelve a un origen traicionado, les señala que quizá había otros caminos y que el que tomaron no era el único y no era el mejor, o que quizás había otros caminos, y que el que tomaron era el mejor, pero que quizá había otros caminos dulces de caminar y que no los tomaron, o los tomaron a medias, y que un hombre es siempre más que un hombre y siempre menos que un hombre, más que un hombre porque encierra eso que el jazz alude y soslaya y hasta anticipa, y menos que un hombre porque de esa libertad ha hecho un juego estético o moral, un tablero de ajedrez donde se reserva ser el alfil o el caballo, una definición de libertad que se enseña en las escuelas, precisamente en las escuelas donde jamás se ha enseñado y jamás se enseñará a los niños el primer compás de un ragtime y la primera frase de un blues, etcétera, etcétera..»

La magia era un fuoco dal profondo. Bruciava sotto la pelle. Medea la percepiva agitarsi dentro di sé: ardeva, bramava la verità sopra ogni cosa, reclamava l'abbandono degli albori alienanti in cui si celava. Sembrava in trappola, proprio come si sentiva lei in quel mondo di memorie sepolte ma mai sopite.

Legends and mythology have always played a vital role in shaping the identity and cultural heritage of civilizations. The Klassikan Empire is no exception, as it is steeped in a rich tapestry of mythical tales and folklore that have been passed down through generations.

One of the reasons I enjoy being with Finlay is his ability to read landscapes back into being, and to hold multiple eras of history in plain sight simultaneously. To each feature and place name he can attach a story - geological, folkloric, historical, gossipy. He moves easily between different knowledge systems and historical eras, in awareness of their discrepancies but stimulated by their overlaps and rhymes. Scatters of stones are summoned up and reconstituted in his descriptions into living crofts. He took me to a green knoll in Baile n Cille in mid-Lewis, and recalled for me the scene in 1827 when a Reverend Dr MacDonald had gathered 7,000 people around the knoll for a mass conversion to Calvinism. A crag-and-tail outcrop of gneiss in the moor drew him back into the Holocene and an explanation of how, after the glaciers had retreated from the Western Isles around 12,000 years ago, the peat began to deepen in the lees of the exposed rock-backs. To Finlay, geography and history are consubstantial. Placeless events are inconceivable, in that everything that happens must happen somewhere, and so history issues from geography in the same way that water issues from a spring: unpredictably but site-specifically.

But the roots of Vietnamese civilization stretch back much farther, to the centuries before the Christian era when Chinese chroniclers wrote of the “hundred Viets”—an assortment of non-Chinese peoples scattered across the Red River Delta in the North. (“Viet” in Chinese meant “those from beyond”—foreigners.) Off and on for a thousand years, Chinese rulers sought to conquer these groups, and Vietnamese folklore is filled with the stories of heroes and heroines who led resistance against them.

todo eso en una música que espanta a los cogotes de platea, a los que creen que nada es de verdad si no hay programas impresos y acomodadores, y así va el mundo y el jazz es como un pájaro que migra o emigra o inmigra o transmigra, saltabarreras, burlaaduanas, algo que corre y se difunde y esta noche en Viena está cantando Ella Fitzgerald mientras en París Kenny Clarke inaugura una cave y en Perpignan brincan los dedos de Oscar Peterson, y Satchmo por todas partes con el don de ubicuidad que le ha prestado el Señor, en Birmingham, en Varsovia, en Milán, en Buenos Aires, en Ginebra, en el mundo entero, es inevitable, es la lluvia y el pan y la sal, algo absolutamente indiferente a los ritos nacionales, a las tradiciones inviolables, al idioma y al folklore: una nube sin fronteras, un espía del aire y del agua, una forma arquetípica, algo de antes, de abajo, que reconcilia mexicanos con noruegos y rusos y españoles, los reincorpora al oscuro fuego central olvidado, torpe y mal y precariamente los devuelve a un origen traicionado, les señala que quizá había otros caminos y que el que tomaron no era el único y no era el mejor, o que quizá había otros caminos y que el que tomaron era el mejor, pero que quizá había otros caminos dulces de caminar y que no los tomaron, o los tomaron a medias, y que un hombre es siempre más que un hombre y siempre menos que un hombre, más que un hombre porque encierra eso que el jazz alude y soslaya y hasta anticipa, y menos que un hombre porque de esa libertad ha hecho un juego estético o moral, un tablero de ajedrez donde se reserva ser el alfil o el caballo, una definición de libertad que se enseña en las escuelas, precisamente en las escuelas donde jamás se ha enseñado y jamás se enseñará a los niños el primer compás de un ragtime y la primera frase de un blues, etcétera, etcétera.