Folklore Sayings And Quotes

Many people say ‘Better to die’ until the time comes to do it,” Morozko returned.

Fiction is written with reality and reality is written with fiction. We can write fiction because there is reality and we can write reality because there is fiction; everything we consider today to be myth and legend, our ancestors believed to be history and everything in our history includes myths and legends. Before the splendid modern-day mind was formed our cultures and civilizations were conceived in the wombs of, and born of, what we identify today as "fiction, unreality, myth, legend, fantasy, folklore, imaginations, fabrications and tall tales." And in our suddenly realized glory of all our modern-day "advancements" we somehow fail to ask ourselves the question "Who designated myths and legends as unreality? " But I ask myself this question because who decided that he was spectacular enough to stand up and say to our ancestors "You were all stupid and disillusioned and imagining things" and then why did we all decide to believe this person? There are many realities not just one. There is a truth that goes far beyond what we are told today to believe in. And we find that truth when we are brave enough to break away from what keeps everybody else feeling comfortable. Your reality is what you believe in. And nobody should be able to tell you to believe otherwise.

Needless to say, they refused to submit to the Empire, conducting such a persistent guerrilla war that the Romans gave up hope of conquering Scotland, and the Wee Free Men remained both wee and free.

Studies [on the origin of fairy-stories] are, however, scientific (at least in intent); they are the pursuit of folklorists or anthropologists: that is of people using the stories not as they were meant to be used, but as a quarry from which to dig evidence, or information, about matters in which they are interested. ...with regard to fairy stories, I feel that it is more interesting, and also in its way more difficult, to consider what they are, what they have become for us, and what values the long alchemic processes of time have produced in them. In Dasent's words I would say: 'We must be satisfied with the soup that is set before us, and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled.' Such stories have now a mythical or total (unanalysable) effect, an effect quite independent of the findings of Comparative Folk-lore, and one which it cannot spoil or explain; they open a door on Other Time, and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, maybe.

An intelligent enemy,' he would say, stroking his beard as if it were a bristly pet, 'rather than a foolish friend.' Or, 'He learnt the language of pigeons, and forgot his own.' Or, the favourite of Jan Fishan Khan: 'Nothing is what it seems.

Comprehending and knowing better and deeper are the best guarantees we can have to attain ideas and criteria of our own; i.e. to stop depending on what other people say. In summary, to be freer to choose our own path in life.

Finally, I’d say to anyone who wants to tell these tales, don’t be afraid to be superstitious. If you have a lucky pen, use it. If you speak with more force and wit when wearing one red sock and one blue one, dress like that. When I’m at work I’m highly superstitious. My own superstition has to do with the voice in which the story comes out. I believe that every story is attended by its own sprite, whose voice we embody when we tell the tale, and that we tell it more successfully if we approach the sprite with a certain degree of respect and courtesy. These sprites are both old and young, male and female, sentimental and cynical, sceptical and credulous, and so on, and what’s more, they’re completely amoral: like the air-spirits who helped Strong Hans escape from the cave, the story-sprites are willing to serve whoever has the ring, whoever is telling the tale. To the accusation that this is nonsense, that all you need to tell a story is a human imagination, I reply, ‘Of course, and this is the way my imagination works.

When we say two bodies 'touch', what we mean (without knowing it) is that both electromagnetic fields are interacting to avoid physical interpenetration and ... that happens well before subatomic particles touch!

Black is not just for mourning as people say. It also symbolizes the end of one cycle and the beginning of another. Such as the phases of the moon...

After some cogitation, it is difficult not to agree with Herman Bondi (1919 - 2005), who in his book 'Relativity and Common Sense' says: ... The surprising thing, surely, is that molecules in a gas behave so much as billiard balls, not that electrons behave so little like billiard balls.

Did Owen say your grandmother was a banshee?" "He said she was 'wailing like a banshee,'" I explained. Dan got out the dictionary , then; he was clucking his tongue and shaking his head, and laughing at himself saying, "That boy! What a boy! Brilliant but preposterous!" And that was the first time I learned, literally, what a banshee was--a banshee, in Irish folklore, is a female spirit whose wailing is a sign that a loved one will soon die.

Some years ago I had a conversation with a man who thought that writing and editing fantasy books was a rather frivolous job for a grown woman like me. He wasn’t trying to be contentious, but he himself was a probation officer, working with troubled kids from the Indian reservation where he’d been raised. Day in, day out, he dealt in a concrete way with very concrete problems, well aware that his words and deeds could change young lives for good or ill. I argued that certain stories are also capable of changing lives, addressing some of the same problems and issues he confronted in his daily work: problems of poverty, violence, and alienation, issues of culture, race, gender, and class... “Stories aren’t real,” he told me shortly. “They don’t feed a kid left home in an empty house. Or keep an abusive relative at bay. Or prevent an unloved child from finding ‘family’ in the nearest gang.” Sometimes they do, I tried to argue. The right stories, read at the right time, can be as important as shelter or food. They can help us to escape calamity, and heal us in its aftermath. He frowned, dismissing this foolishness, but his wife was more conciliatory. “Write down the names of some books,” she said. “Maybe we’ll read them.” I wrote some titles on a scrap of paper, and the top three were by Charles de lint – for these are precisely the kind of tales that Charles tells better than anyone. The vital, necessary stories. The ones that can change and heal young lives. Stories that use the power of myth to speak truth to the human heart. Charles de Lint creates a magical world that’s not off in a distant Neverland but here and now and accessible, formed by the “magic” of friendship, art, community, and social activism. Although most of his books have not been published specifically for adolescents and young adults, nonetheless young readers find them and embrace them with particular passion. I’ve long lost count of the number of times I’ve heard people from troubled backgrounds say that books by Charles saved them in their youth, and kept them going. Recently I saw that parole officer again, and I asked after his work. “Gets harder every year,” he said. “Or maybe I’m just getting old.” He stopped me as I turned to go. “That writer? That Charles de Lint? My wife got me to read them books…. Sometimes I pass them to the kids.” “Do they like them?” I asked him curiously. “If I can get them to read, they do. I tell them: Stories are important.” And then he looked at me and smiled.

Your Midas touch on the Chevy door November flush and your flannel cure "This dorm was once a madhouse" I made a joke, "Well, it's made for me" How evergreen, our group of friends Don't think we'll say that word again And soon they'll have the nerve to deck the halls That we once walked through One for the money, two for the show I never was ready, so I watch you go Sometimes you just don't know the answer 'Til someone's on their knees and asks you "She would've made such a lovely bride What a shame she's fucked in her head, " they said But you'll find the real thing instead She'll patch up your tapestry that I shred

Sleeping Beauty is the worst fairy tale, pretty much any way you slice it. It’s aimless and amoral and chauvinist as shit. It’s the fairy tale that feminist scholars cite when they want to talk about women’s passivity in historical narratives. (“She literally sleeps through her own climax,” as my favorite gender studies professor used to say. “Double entendre fully intended.”)... ..Even among the other nerds who majored in folklore, Sleeping Beauty is nobody’s favorite. The romantic girls like Beauty and the Beast; basic girls like Cinderella; goth girls like Snow White. Only the dying girls like Sleeping Beauty.

I don't have a choice sahib. Artho hi kanya parakeeya eva father used to say" "What does it mean?" "It means a girl is another man's property and she is held in trust by her parents.

By the Hospital Lane goes the 'Faeries Path.' Every evening they travel from the hill to the sea, from the sea to the hill. At the sea end of their path stands a cottage. One night Mrs. Arbunathy, who lived there, left her door open, as she was expecting her son. Her husband was asleep by the fire; a tall man came in and sat beside him. After he had been sitting there for a while, the woman said, 'In the name of God, who are you?' He got up and went out, saying, 'Never leave the door open at this hour, or evil may come to you.' She woke her husband and told him. 'One of the good people has been with us,' said he. ("Village Ghosts")

Oh, Marya Morevna! Do you know how the church-folk call me, me and my daughter Gamayun, when they paint us on their ceilings? They call us archangels, and say that we live in heaven, where no vine of sorrow or memory grows. That is where I sent you, not to heaven—tscha! I know nothing of that place. But to a place like the ceiling of a church.

[W]hen the modern mythmaker, the writer of literary fairy tales, dares to touch the old magic and try to make it work in new ways, it must be done with the surest of touches. It is, perhaps, a kind of artistic thievery, this stealing of old characters, settings, the accoutrements of magic. But then, in a sense, there is an element of theft in all art; even the most imaginative artist borrows and reconstructs the archetypes when delving into the human heart. That is not to say that using a familiar character from folklore in the hopes of shoring up a weak narrative will work. That makes little sense. Unless the image, character, or situation borrowed speaks to the author’s condition, as cryptically and oracularly as a dream, folklore is best left untapped.

Many people in this room have an Etsy store where they create unique, unreplicable artifacts or useful items to be sold on a small scale, in a common marketplace where their friends meet and barter. I and many of my friends own more than one spinning wheel. We grow our food again. We make pickles and jams on private, individual scales, when many of our mothers forgot those skills if they ever knew them. We come to conventions, we create small communities of support and distributed skills--when one of us needs help, our village steps in. It’s only that our village is no longer physical, but connected by DSL instead of roads. But look at how we organize our tribes--bloggers preside over large estates, kings and queens whose spouses’ virtues are oft-lauded but whose faces are rarely seen. They have moderators to protect them, to be their knights, a nobility of active commenters and big name fans, a peasantry of regular readers, and vandals starting the occasional flame war just to watch the fields burn. Other villages are more commune-like, sharing out resources on forums or aggregate sites, providing wise women to be consulted, rabbis or priests to explain the world, makers and smiths to fashion magical objects. Groups of performers, acrobats and actors and singers of songs are traveling the roads once more, entertaining for a brief evening in a living room or a wheatfield, known by word of mouth and secret signal. Separate from official government, we create our own hierarchies, laws, and mores, as well as our own folklore and secret history. Even my own guilt about having failed as an academic is quite the crisis of filial piety--you see, my mother is a professor. I have not carried on the family trade. We dwell within a system so large and widespread, so disorganized and unconcerned for anyone but its most privileged and luxurious members, that our powerlessness, when we can summon up the courage to actually face it, is staggering. So we do not face it. We tell ourselves we are Achilles when we have much more in common with the cathedral-worker, laboring anonymously so that the next generation can see some incremental progress. We lack, of course, a Great Work to point to and say: my grandmother made that window; I worked upon the door. Though, I would submit that perhaps the Internet, as an object, as an aggregate entity, is the cathedral we build word by word and image by image, window by window and portal by portal, to stand taller for our children, if only by a little, than it does for us. For most of us are Lancelots, not Galahads. We may see the Grail of a good Classical life, but never touch it. That is for our sons, or their daughters, or further off. And if our villages are online, the real world becomes that dark wood on the edge of civilization, a place of danger and experience, of magic and blood, a place to make one’s name or find death by bear. And here, there be monsters.

Early Summer, loveliest season, The world is being colored in. While daylight lasts on the horizon, Sudden, throaty blackbirds sing. The dusty-colored cuckoo cuckoos. "Welcome, summer" is what he says. Winter's unimaginable. The wood's a wickerwork of boughs. Summer means the river's shallow, Thirsty horses nose the pools. Long heather spreads out on bog pillows. White bog cotton droops in bloom. Swallows swerve and flicker up. Music starts behind the mountain. There's moss and a lush growth underfoot. Spongy marshland glugs and stutters. Bog banks shine like ravens' wings. The cuckoo keeps on calling welcome. The speckled fish jumps; and the strong Swift warrior is up and running. A little, jumpy, chirpy fellow Hits the highest note there is; The lark sings out his clear tidings. Summer, shimmer, perfect days.

There is an old Arabic story about a man who hears Death is coming for him, so he sneaks away to Samarra. And when he gets there, he finds Death in the market, and Death says, "You know, I just felt like going on vacation to Samarra. I was going to skip you today, but how lucky you showed up to find me!" And the man is taken after all. Arthur Less has traveled halfway around the world in a cat's cradle of junkets, changing flights and fleeing from a sandstorm into into the Atlas Mountains like someone erasing his trail or outfoxing a hunter—and yet Time has been waiting here all along. In a snowy alpine resort. With cuckoos. Of course Time would turn out to be Swiss. He tosses back the champagne. He thinks: Hard to feel bad for a middle-aged white man.

Having to amuse myself during those earlier years, I read voraciously and widely. Mythic matter and folklore made up much of that reading—retellings of the old stories (Mallory, White, Briggs), anecdotal collections and historical investigations of the stories' backgrounds—and then I stumbled upon the Tolkien books which took me back to Lord Dunsany, William Morris, James Branch Cabell, E.R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake and the like. I was in heaven when Lin Carter began the Unicorn imprint for Ballantine and scoured the other publishers for similar good finds, delighting when I discovered someone like Thomas Burnett Swann, who still remains a favourite. This was before there was such a thing as a fantasy genre, when you'd be lucky to have one fantasy book published in a month, little say the hundreds per year we have now. I also found myself reading Robert E. Howard (the Cormac and Bran mac Morn books were my favourites), Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and finally started reading science fiction after coming across Andre Norton's Huon of the Horn. That book wasn't sf, but when I went to read more by her, I discovered everything else was. So I tried a few and that led me to Clifford Simak, Roger Zelazny and any number of other fine sf writers. These days my reading tastes remain eclectic, as you might know if you've been following my monthly book review column in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I'm as likely to read Basil Johnston as Stephen King, Jeanette Winterson as Harlan Ellison, Barbara Kingsolver as Patricia McKillip, Andrew Vachss as Parke Godwin—in short, my criteria is that the book must be good; what publisher's slot it fits into makes absolutely no difference to me.

For no matter whether the fairies are seen metaphorically or as real beings inhabiting their own real world, a study of them shows us that those who came before us (and many of that mindset still survive) realized that we are -- no matter what we may think to the contrary -- very little creatures, here for a short time only ('passing through,' as the old people say) and that we have no right to destroy what the next generation will most assuredly need to also see itself through. If only we could learn that lesson, maybe someday we might be worthy of the wisdom of those who knew that to respect the Good People is basically to respect yourself.

Cabinet is a conscious, explicit attempt to portray the Doctor himself as myth. “He’s a mischief, a leprechaun, a boojum,” says one character, bookseller and collector of incunabula, Syme. “The Doctor is a myth. He’s straight out of Old English folklore, typical trickster figure really.”29 Neither part of an ongoing narrative, nor specifically located within the series’ past, Cabinet is in a position to challenge the portrayal of the Doctor.

This crusading spirit of the managers and engineers, the idea of designing and manufacturing and distributing being sort of a holy war: all that folklore was cooked up by public relations and advertising men hired by managers and engineers to make big business popular in the old days, which it certainly wasn't in the beginning. Now, the engineers and managers believe with all their hearts the glorious things their forebears hired people to say about them. Yesterday's snow job becomes today's sermon.

To sum up: all nature-spirits are not the same as fairies; nor are all fairies nature-spirits. The same applies to the relationship of nature-spirits and the dead. But we may safely say that a large proportion of nature-spirits became fairies, while quite a number of the dead in some areas seem to take on the character of nature-spirits. We cannot expect any fixity of rule in dealing with barbaric thought. We must take it as it comes. It bears the same relationship to "civilized" or folk-lore theory as does the growth of the jungle to a carefully designed and meticulously labelled botanical garden. As Victor Hugo once exclaimed when writing of the barbaric confusion which underlies the creative function in poetry: 'What do you expect? You are among savages!

Mother-daughter relationships can be complicated and fraught with the effects of moments from the past. My mom knew this and wanted me to know it too. On one visit home, I found an essay from the Washington Post by the linguistics professor Deborah Tannen that had been cut out and left on my desk. My mom, and her mom before her, loved clipping newspaper articles and cartoons from the paper to send to Barbara and me. This article was different. Above it, my mom had written a note: “Dear Benny”—I was “Benny” from the time I was a toddler; the family folklore was that when we were babies, a man approached my parents, commenting on their cute baby boys, and my parents played along, pretending our names were Benjamin and Beauregard, later shorted to Benny and Bo. In her note, my mom confessed to doing many things that the writer of this piece had done: checking my hair, my appearance. As a teenager, I was continually annoyed by some of her requests: comb your hair; pull up your jeans (remember when low-rise jeans were a thing? It was not a good look, I can assure you!). “Your mother may assume it goes without saying that she is proud of you,” Deborah Tannen wrote. “Everyone knows that. And everyone probably also notices that your bangs are obscuring your vision—and their view of your eyes. Because others won’t say anything, your mother may feel it’s her obligation to tell you.” In leaving her note and the clipping, my mom was reminding me that she accepted and loved me—and that there is no perfect way to be a mother. While we might have questioned some of the things our mother said, we never questioned her love.

Get a raven’s heart, split it open with a black-hafted knife; make three cuts and place a black bean in each cut. Then plant it, and when the beans sprout put one in your mouth and say— “By virtue of Satan’s heart, And by strength of my great art, I desire to be invisible.” And so it will be as long as the bean is kept in the mouth.

And I would say this too. The rest of the United States knows next to nothing about the South. The present idea and picture which they hold of a people decadent and even obsolete through inbreeding and illiteracy – the inbreeding a result of the illiteracy and the isolation so that there is nothing else to do at night – as to be a kind of species of juvenile delinquents with a folklore of blood and violence, yet who, like juvenile delinquents, can be controlled by firmness once they are brought to believe that the police mean business, is as baseless and illusory as that one a generation ago of (oh yes, we subscribed to it too) columned porticoes and magnolias.

This is a book about America’s demons. Many of those demons are imaginary, but all of them have truths to tell us. A conspiracy story that catches on becomes a form of folklore. It says something true about the anxieties and experiences of the people who believe and repeat it, even if it says nothing true about the objects of the theory itself.

We can say the brotherhood of man, and pretend that we include the sisterhood of women, but we know that we don't. Folklore has it that women only congregate to bitch an absent member of their group, and continue to do so because they are to well aware of the consequences if they stay away. It's meant to be a joke, but like jokes about mothers-in-law it is founded in bitter truth.

While the sleep and euphoria-inducing qualities of this plant have also been known about for a long time, the idea that the poppy is a symbol of fecundity is an ancient one, especially in Anatolian folklore. "It has to be noted that the plant has always been referred to as a symbol of fertility in Anatolian folklore. Needless to say, the countless seeds contained in the poppy pod make it an ideal symbol of birth

If we have learned nothing else from myths, folklore and fairy tales, we should at least know this. If an old woman approaches you and asks for anything, or suggests anything, you always, always say yes, and thank you very much for asking. There is an almost zero chance that she is an actual old lady and not a goddess, a witch or an enchantress in disguise. You either change your offending behaviour immediately or – and this is the best-case scenario – you find yourself stuck in a castle full of singing furniture, with one erratic houseplant your only hope of salvation.

Dreams of invisibility are as old as folklore. By means of some talisman or potion, or with the help of the gods themselves, the corporeal presence of the hero is rendered insubstantial, and for the duration of the spell he may wander among his fellow men unseen. The advantages of having such a power can be rattled off for you by any child of ten. Whether slipping past dragons, eavesdropping on intriguers, and sneaking into treasuries, or plucking a pie from the pantry, knocking the cap off a constable, and lighting the schoolmaster’s coattails on fire, suffice it to say that a thousand tales have been told in acknowledgment of invisibility’s bounty.

In the life of Moses, in Hebrew folklore, there is a remarkable passage. Moses finds a shepherd in the desert. He spends the day with the shepherd and helps him milk his ewes, and at the end of the day he sees that the shepherd puts the best milk he has in a wooden bowl, which he places on a flat stone some distance away. So Moses asks him what it is for, and the shepherd replies 'This is God's milk.' Moses is puzzled and asks him what he means. The shepherd says 'I always take the best milk I possess, and I bring it as on offering to God.' Moses, who is far more sophisticated than the shepherd with his naive faith, asks, 'And does God drink it?' 'Yes,' replies the shepherd, 'He does.' Then Moses feels compelled to enlighten the poor shepherd and he explains that God, being pure spirit, does not drink milk. Yet the shepherd is sure that He does, and so they have a short argument, which ends with Moses telling the shepherd to hide behind the bushes to find out whether in fact God does come to drink the milk. Moses then goes out to pray in the desert. The shepherd hides, the night comes, and in the moonlight the shepherd sees a little fox that comes trotting from the desert, looks right, looks left and heads straight towards the milk, which he laps up, and disappears into the desert again. The next morning Moses finds the shepherd quite depressed and downcast. 'What's the matter?' he asks. The shepherd says 'You were right, God is pure spirit, and He doesn't want my milk.' Moses is surprised. He says 'You should be happy. You know more about God than you did before.' 'Yes, I do' says the shepherd, 'but the only thing I could do to express my love for Him has been taken away from me.' Moses sees the point. He retires into the desert and prays hard. In the night in a vision, God speaks to him and says 'Moses, you were wrong. It is true that I am pure spirit. Nevertheless I always accepted with gratitude the milk which the shepherd offered me, as the expression of his love, but since, being pure spirit, I do not need the milk, I shared it with this little fox, who is very fond of milk.

Folkloric dances in the metro, innumerable campaigns for security, the slogan “tomorrow I work” accompanied by a smile formerly reserved for leisure time, and the advertising sequence for the election to the Prud-hommes (an industrial tribunal): “I don’t let anyone choose for me”—an Ubuesque slogan, one that rang so spectacularly falsely, with a mocking liberty, that of proving the social while denying it. It is not by chance that advertising, after having, for a long time, carried an implicit ultimatum of an economic kind, fundamentally saying and repeating incessantly, “I buy, I consume, I take pleasure,” today repeats in other forms, “I vote, I participate, I am present, I am concerned”—mirror of a paradoxical mockery, mirror of the indifference of all public signification.

the disparity between Eastern and Western spirituality resembles that found between Eastern and Western medicine—with the arrow of embarrassment pointing in the opposite direction. Humanity did not understand the biology of cancer, develop antibiotics and vaccines, or sequence the human genome under an Eastern sun. Consequently, real medicine is almost entirely a product of Western science. Insofar as specific techniques of Eastern medicine actually work, they must conform, whether by design or by happenstance, to the principles of biology as we have come to know them in the West. This is not to say that Western medicine is complete. In a few decades, many of our current practices will seem barbaric. One need only ponder the list of side effects that accompany most medications to appreciate that these are terribly blunt instruments. Nevertheless, most of our knowledge about the human body—and about the physical universe generally—emerged in the West. The rest is instinct, folklore, bewilderment, and untimely death.

The wind was blustering again, whipping the curtains. Peter went over to close the window. The moon was now high on the eastern rise, radiant above the church where small water-cart clouds raced across the sky. About to fasten the window latch, his eye was drawn down to the garden. The fox stood under the apple tree looking up at him. The animal began to bark. Each monosyllabic yip and yap seemed to mimic human speech. By some strange power or spell, Peter could understand what the animal was saying. He heard the words loud and clear. ‘I-am Si-on,’ the fox barked. Man and beast looked unwaveringly at one another, neither moving a muscle. The wind stopped blowing, the curtains hung at rest. Peter leaned out the window. ‘What do you want from me?’ he called down. ‘Save-us-from-the-stea-lers,’ barked Sion. Peter’s mind reeled. It would be madness to believe he could understand what the fox was saying—lunacy to think he could commune with it! ‘I must still be asleep,’ he reasoned, closing the window. He sat down on the bed, folding his hands in his lap. But this is not a dream. Lying down, he pulled the bedcovers over himself. ‘Save-us! Save-us! Save-us!’ the fox kept barking from the garden.

But after he had been singing awhile, mist and shadows seemed to gather about him, sometimes coming out of the sea, and sometimes moving upon it. It seemed to him that one of the shadows was the queen-woman he had seen in her sleep at Slieve Echtge; not in her sleep now, but mocking, and calling out to them that were behind her: 'He was weak, he was weak, he had no courage.' And he felt the strands of the rope in his hand yet, and went on twisting it, but it seemed to him as he twisted, that it had all the sorrows of the world in it. And then it seemed to him as if the rope had changed in his dream into a great water-worm that came out of the sea, and that twisted itself about him, and held him closer and closer, and grew from big to bigger till the whole of the earth and skies were wound up in it, and the stars themselves were but the shining of the ridges of its skin. And then he got free of it, and went on, shaking and unsteady, along the edge of the strand, and the grey shapes were flying here and there around him. And this is what they were saying, 'It is a pity for him that refuses the call of the daughters of the Sidhe, for he will find no comfort in the love of the women of the earth to the end of life and time, and the cold of the grave is in his heart for ever. It is death he has chosen; let him die, let him die, let him die.

Hm? These cherry tomatoes... they've been dried. Right, Tadokoro?" "Y-yes, sir! Back home, winter can be really long. In the summer we harvest a lot of vegetables and preserve them so we can have them in winter too. Mostly by sun drying them. When I was little, I'd help with that part. That's when my Ma -um, I mean, my mother- taught me how to dry them in the oven. You cut the cherry tomatoes in half, sprinkle them with rock salt and then slowly dry them at a low temperature, around 245* F. I, um... thought they'd make a nice accent for the terrine..." "Right. Tomatoes are rich in the amino acid glutamate essential in umami. Drying them concentrates the glutamate, greatly increasing the amount of sweetness the tongue senses. In Shinomiya's case... ... his nine-vegetable terrine focused on fresh vegetables, with their bright and lively flavors. But this recette accentuates the savory deliciousness of vegetables preserved over time. Both dishes are vegetable terrines... ... but one centers on the delicacy of the fresh... ... while the other on the savory goodness of the ripe and aged. They are two completely different approaches to the same ingredient- vegetables!" "Mmm! This is the flavor that warms the soul. You can feel my darling Megumi's kindness in every bite." "For certain. If Shinomiya is the "Vegetable Magician"... ... I would say Megumi is... a modest spirit who gifts you with the bounty of nature. a Vegetable Colobuckle!" *A tiny spirit from Ainu folklore said to live under butterbur leaves* "No, that's not what she is! Megumi is a spirit who brings happiness and tastiness... a Vegetable Warashi!" *Childlike spirits from Japanese folklore said to bring good fortune* "Or perhaps she is that spirit which delivers the bounty of vegetables from the snowy north... a Vegetable Yukinoko!" *Small snow sprites* "It's not winter, so you can't call her a snow sprite!" "How come all of you are picking spirits from Japanese folklore anyway?

We then reached a fork in the valley. Should we go left or right? Dad called it left. I had a very powerful intuition that right was the choice we should make. Dad insisted left. I insisted right. It was a fifty-fifty call and he relented. Within two hundred yards we stumbled across a snowy track through the woods and followed it excitedly. Within a mile it came out on a mountain road, and within ten minutes we had flagged down a lift from a car heading up the hill in the darkness. We had found salvation, and I was beat. The car dropped us off at the gates of the garrison thirty minutes later. It was, by then, late into the night, but I was suddenly buzzing with energy and excitement. The fatigue had gone. Dad knew that I had made the right call up there--if we had chosen left we would still be trudging into the unknown. I felt so proud. In truth it was probably luck, but I learned another valuable lesson that night: Listen to the quiet voice inside. Intuition is the noise of the mind. As we tromped back through the barracks, though, we noticed there was an unusual amount of activity for the early hours of a weekday morning. It soon became very clear why. First a sergeant appeared, followed by another soldier, and then we were ushered into the senior officers’ block. There was my uncle, standing in uniform looking both tired and serious. I started to break out into a big smile. So did Dad. Well, I was excited. We had cheated a slow, lingering hypothermic death, lost together in the mountains. We were alive. Our enthusiasm was countered by the immortal words from my uncle, the brigadier, saying: “I wouldn’t smile if I was you…” He continued, “The entire army mountain rescue team is currently out scouring the mountains for you, on foot and in the air with the search-and-rescue helicopter. I hope you have a good explanation.” We didn’t, of course, save that we had been careless, and we had got lucky; but that’s life sometimes. And the phrase: “I wouldn’t smile if I was you,” has gone down into Grylls family folklore.

Long ago there was a little boy who lived in the wood with his father and his sister. One night, the three of them were out collecting firewood when they heard a low, delicate whimper. The father realised it was an injured animal and ordered the children to fetch water from the lake, whilst he followed the sound. Hours past but the father did not return. The children became fearful for their father’s safety and in their moment of fright, they disobeyed their father in order to find him. And find him they did. However, he was no longer the man he once was. Both his eyes were slit through their centre, oozing blood down the paleness of his face. His neck had been torn open. The entirety of his midsection was split but nothing, not one, single organ, seemed to be left within. Each limb still remained, however they had been dragged, with some exceptional force, in the opposite direction to which they were designed. The children screamed and ran, though the image of their father’s mangled corpse seemed to chase after them. They slept. Within the whisper of the wind came the sweet tune of a woman’s song. The little girl awoke to the feeling of happiness, security and motherly love that the song carried with it. She needed to find the woman it had come from. Leaving her brother, she took off into the wood to try and find the singer. The little boy quickly entered into a spit of panic when he found his sister missing. He didn’t know whether he should call out for her, look for her or wait. But waiting could mean the worst, he thought, and so he took off into the woods after her. He had searched everywhere, every dark corner and decrepit tree, before reaching the lake. The moon reflected off its black surface, which drew his attention to something bobbing within the ripples. It was a leg. When he caught sight of the foot, the boy fell to his knees. He recognised the shoe. It was his sister’s shoe; his sister’s leg. Soon enough, the other body parts came drifting to join the leg, forming a rough manifestation of what was once his sister’s living body. Firstly, there was a head facing down in the water, then arms seemingly blue under the moonlight, and lastly a torso coated in her favourite dress. He felt sick, lost, terrified to his very core. Just as thoughts of never being whole again began to pain his chest, the boy heard the snapping of a twig behind him. He dared to turn around but all he found was a small, black-furred wolf. The wolf approached him timidly, whining deep in its throat to say to the boy that he too was lonely and afraid. The boy put out his hand for the wolf to join him and they sat together. Perhaps he would be OK. Perhaps all that had happened had led to this; something new. He rustled the fur of his new friend, starting with its back then its ear before going under its snout. His hand touched something wet and sticky. He drew it from the wolf to get a better look, only to find a crimson substance now clinging to his small hands. Blood. The wolf turned on the boy as its eyes became a pale blue before thwack! He tore the boy’s face from his head…

In the years leading up to Hitler, many völkisch groups appeared in Germany; the English equivalent “folk” doesn’t quite convey the blend of mythology, folklore, legend, and nationalism that the German term suggests. Jung’s emphasis on history and myth, as well as his rejection of scientific materialism, made these groups sympathetic to his work, as opposed to Freud’s which, along with being Jewish, was reductionist. Although much has been made of it,29 Jung’s own connection, if any,30 to the völkisch movement is unclear. The only strong link is his friendship with the German indologist J. W. Hauer, who founded the German Faith Movement in 1932, a religious society aimed at replacing Christianity in German-speaking countries with an anti-Christian and anti-Semitic modern paganism based on German literature and Hindu scripture. Hauer, an ardent Nazi, hoped his movement would become the official religion of the Reich. Hitler, however, thought little of Hauer and laughed at his followers who “made asses of themselves by worshipping Wotan and Odin and the ancient, but now obsolete, German mythology,”31 a remark that says much about Hitler’s cynicism toward the völkisch ideology he nevertheless exploited to gain power.

For Penina Mezei petrify motive in folk literature stems from ancient, mythical layers of culture that has undergone multiple transformations lost the original meaning. Therefore, the origin of this motif in the narrative folklore can be interpreted depending on the assumptions that you are the primary elements of faith in Petrify preserved , lost or replaced elements that blur the idea of integrity , authenticity and functionality of the old ones . Motif Petrify in different genres varies by type of actor’s individuality, time and space, properties and actions of its outcome, the relationship of the narrator and singers from the text. The particularity of Petrify in particular genres testifies about different possibilities and intentions of using the same folk beliefs about transforming, says Penina Mezei. In moralized ballads Petrify is temporary or eternal punishment for naughty usually ungrateful children. In the oral tradition, demonic beings are permanently Petrifying humans and animals. Petrify in fairy tales is temporary, since the victims, after entering into the forbidden demonic time and space or breaches of prescribed behavior in it, frees the hero who overcomes the demonic creature, emphasizes Mezei. Faith in the power of magical evocation of death petrifaction exists in curses in which the slanderer or ungrateful traitor wants to convert into stone. In search of the magical meaning of fatal events in fairy tales, however, it should be borne in mind that they concealed before, but they reveal the origin of the ritual. The work of stone - bedrock Penina Mezei pointed to the belief that binds the soul stone dead or alive beings. Penina speaks of stone medial position between earth and sky, earth and the underworld. Temporary or permanent attachment of the soul to stone represents a state between life and death will be punished its powers cannot be changed. Rescue petrified can only bring someone else whose power has not yet subjugated the demonic forces. While the various traditions demons Petrifying humans and animals, as long as in fairy tales, mostly babe, demon- old woman. Traditions brought by Penina Mezei , which describe Petrify people or animals suggest specific place events , while in fairy tales , of course , no luck specific place names . Still Penina spotted chthonic qualities babe, and Mezei’s with plenty of examples of comparative method confirmed that they were witches. Some elements of procedures for the protection of the witch could be found in oral stories and poems. Fairy tales keep track of violations few taboos - the hero , despite the ban on the entry of demonic place , comes in the woods , on top of a hill , in a demonic time - at night , and does not respect the behaviors that would protect him from demons . Interpreting the motives Petrify as punishment for the offense in the demon time and space depends on the choice of interpretive method is applied. In the book of fairy tales Penina Mezei writes: Petrify occurs as a result of unsuccessful contact with supernatural beings Petrify is presented as a metaphor for death (Penina Mezei West Bank Fairytales: 150). Psychoanalytic interpretation sees in the form of witches character, and the petrification of erotic seizure of power. Female demon seized fertilizing power of the masculine principle. By interpreting the archetypal witch would chthonic anima, anabaptized a devastating part unindividualized man. Ritual access to the motive of converting living beings into stone figure narrated narrative transfigured magical procedures some male initiation ceremonies in which the hero enters into a community of dedicated, or tracker sacrificial rites. Compelling witches to release a previously petrified could be interpreted as the initiation mark the conquest of certain healing powers and to encourage life force, highlights the Penina.

In the long run, people of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did.” And of course, that is the folklore of the deathbed: No one dies wishing they’d spent more time at the office, but they do regret not having been up in a balloon, not seeing the Pyramids, not having pursued the girl. Gilbert argues that the reason we regret inaction more is that it’s easy for us to rationalize taking action, if only because we can say we learned something from the experience. We prefer to think of ourselves as courageous, if foolish, rather than cowardly and also foolish.

And that's all, my young friends. The legend spread on the winds of Mexico City and the winds of '68, fusing with the stories of the dead and the survivors and now everybody knows that a woman stayed at the university when its freedom was violated in that beautiful, tragic year. And I've heard others tell the story many times, and in their telling, the woman who spent fifteen days shut in a bathroom without eating is a medical student or a secretary at the Torre de Rectoría, not a Uruguayan with no papers or work or place to lay her head. And sometimes it isn't even a woman but a man, a Maoist student or a professor with gastrointestinal troubles. And when I hear these stories, these versions of my story, I don't usually say anything (especially if I'm not drunk). And if I am drunk, I try to play it down. That's nothing, I say, that's university folk-lore, that's urban legend, and then they look at me and say: Auxilio, you're the mother of Mexican poetry. And I say (or if I'm drunk, I shout): no, I'm not anybody's mother, but I do know them all, all the young poets of Mexico City, those who were born here and those who came from the provinces, and those who were swept here on the current from other places in Latin America, and I love them all.

When we came back to the sun deck, the party talk had swung around to the bones found at the end of the street. Carey was saying the police had been to ask her if there was anything she remembered that might help to identify the bones as her husband’s. “I told them,” she was saying, “that that rascal had run off and left me, not been killed. For weeks after he didn’t come back, I thought he might walk back through that door with those diapers. You know,” she told Aubrey parenthetically, “he left to get diapers for the baby and never came back.” Aubrey nodded, perhaps to indicate understanding or perhaps because he’d already heard this bit of Lawrenceton folklore.

I’m Captain Florida, the state history pimp Gatherin’ more data than a DEA blimp West Palm, Tampa Bay, Miami-Dade Cruisin’ the coasts till Johnny Vegas gets laid Developer ho’s, and the politician bitches Smackin’ ’em down, while I’m takin’ lots of pictures Hurricanes, sinkholes, natural disaster ’Scuse me while I kick back, with my View-Master (S:) I’m Captain Florida, obscure facts are all legit (C:) I’m Coleman, the sidekick, with a big bong hit (S:) I’m Captain Florida, staying literate (C:) Coleman sees a book and says, “Fuck that shit” Ain’t never been caught, slippin’ nooses down the Keys Got more buoyancy than Elián González Knockin’ off the parasites, and takin’ all their moola Recruiting my apostles for the Church of Don Shula I’m an old-school gangster with a psycho ex-wife Molly Packin’ Glocks, a shotgun and my 7-Eleven coffee Trippin’ the theme parks, the malls, the time-shares Bustin’ my rhymes through all the red-tide scares (S:) I’m the surge in the storms, don’t believe the hype (C:) I’m his stoned number two, where’d I put my hash pipe? (S:) Florida, no appointments and a tank of gas (C:) Tequila, no employment and a bag of grass Think you’ve seen it all? I beg to differ Mosquitoes like bats and a peg-leg stripper The scammers, the schemers, the real estate liars Birthday-party clowns in a meth-lab fire But dig us, don’t diss us, pay a visit, don’t be late And statistics always lie, so ignore the murder rate Beaches, palm trees and golfing is our curse Our residents won’t bite, but a few will shoot first Everglades, orange groves, alligators, Buffett Scarface, Hemingway, an Andrew Jackson to suck it Solarcaine, Rogaine, eight balls of cocaine See the hall of fame for the criminally insane Artifacts, folklore, roadside attractions Crackers, Haitians, Cuban-exile factions The early-bird specials, drivin’ like molasses Condo-meeting fistfights in cataract glasses (S:) I’m the native tourist, with the rants that can’t be beat (C:) Serge, I think I put my shoes on the wrong feet (S:) A stack of old postcards in another dingy room (C:) A cold Bud forty and a magic mushroom Can’t stop, turnpike, keep ridin’ like the wind Gotta make a detour for a souvenir pin But if you like to litter, you’re just liable to get hurt Do ya like the MAC-10 under my tropical shirt? I just keep meeting jerks, I’m a human land-filler But it’s totally unfair, this term “serial killer” The police never rest, always breakin’ in my pad But sunshine is my bling, and I’m hangin’ like a chad (S:) Serge has got to roll and drop the mike on this rap . . . (C:) Coleman’s climbin’ in the tub, to take a little nap . . . (S:) . . . Disappearin’ in the swamp—and goin’ tangent, tangent, tangent . . . (C:) He’s goin’ tangent, tangent . . . (Fade-out) (S:) I’m goin’ tangent, tangent . . . (C:) Fuck goin’ platinum, he’s goin’ tangent, tangent . . . (S:) . . . Wikipedia all up and down your ass . . . (C:) Wikity-Wikity-Wikity . . .

After the Apple executives left Xerox PARC, Jobs shared his idea. Apple had to change the course they were on. They had to invest in GUI. One of the executives, attempting to be a voice of reason, spoke up. “We can’t,” he said. He reminded Jobs that Apple had already invested millions of dollars and countless man-hours on an entirely different direction. Abandoning that work to ostensibly build a new product from scratch would add significant strain on the company. According to Apple folklore, the executive went on to say: “Steve, if we invest in this, we will blow up our own company.” To which Jobs replied, “Better we should blow it up than someone else.

I blinked. “What do you mean awake?” Bethany grimaced. “Don’t you know the story ordinaries tell about what happened to Merlin?” “Uh, no.” “I do,” said Eli. “There’re lots of different versions, but most say he was imprisoned in some kind of magical tomb by a witch named Niviane or some such.” I gaped at him, surprised by the depth of his knowledge on the subject. “What?” he said, shrugging. “I have sort of a thing for mythology and folklore.” Yeah, that might be even cuter than the cop stuff.

Horseman is the haunting sequel to the 1820 novel The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving and takes place two decades after the events that unfolded in the original. We are introduced to 14-year-old trans boy Bente “Ben” Van Brunt, who has been raised by his idiosyncratic grandparents - lively Brom “Bones” Van Brunt and prim Kristina Van Tassel - in the small town of Sleepy Hollow, New York, where gossip and rumour run rife and people are exceedingly closed-minded. He has lived with them on their farm ever since he was orphaned when his parents, Bendix and Fenna, died in suspicious and enigmatic circumstances. Ben and his only friend, Sander, head into the woodland one Autumn day to play a game known as Sleepy Hollow Boys, but they are both a little startled when they witness a group of men they recognise from the village discussing the headless, handless body of a local boy that has just been found. But this isn't the end; it is only the beginning. From that moment on, Ben feels an otherworldly presence following him wherever he ventures, and one day while scanning his grandfather’s fields he catches a fleeting glimpse of a weird creature seemingly sucking blood from a victim. An evil of an altogether different nature. But Ben knows this is not the elusive Horseman who has been the primary focus of folkloric tales in the area for many years because he can both feel and hear his presence. However, unlike others who fear the Headless Horseman, Ben can hear whispers in the woods at the end of a forbidden path, and he has visions of the Horseman who says he is there to protect him. Ben soon discovers connections between the recent murders and the death of his parents and realises he has been shaded from the truth about them his whole life. Thus begins a journey to unravel the mystery and establish his identity in the process. This is an enthralling and compulsively readable piece of horror fiction building on Irvings’ solid ground. Evoking such feelings as horror, terror, dread and claustrophobic oppressiveness, this tale invites you to immerse yourself in its sinister, creepy and disturbing narrative. The staggering beauty of the remote village location is juxtaposed with the darkness of the demons and devilish spirits that lurk there, and the village residents aren't exactly welcoming to outsiders or accepting of anyone different from their norm. What I love the most is that it is subtle and full of nuance, instead of the usual cheap thrills with which the genre is often pervaded, meaning the feeling of sheer panic creeps up on you when you least expect, and you come to the sudden realisation that the story has managed to get under your skin, into your psyche and even into your dreams (or should that be nightmares?) Published at a time when the nights are closing in and the light diminishes ever more rapidly, not to mention with Halloween around the corner, this is the perfect autumnal read for the spooky season full of both supernatural and real-world horrors. It begins innocuously enough to lull you into a false sense of security but soon becomes bleak and hauntingly atmospheric as well as frightening before descending into true nightmare-inducing territory. A chilling and eerie romp, and a story full of superstition, secrets, folklore and old wives’ tales and with messages about love, loss, belonging, family, grief, being unapologetically you and becoming more accepting and tolerant of those who are different. Highly recommended.

Saying NO is also an act of liberation!

So Disney merely has to stoop down to pick up reality as it is. 'Built-in spectacle', as Guy Debord would say. But we are no longer in the society of the spectacle, which has itself become a spectacular concept. It is no longer the contagion of spectacle which alters reality, it is the contagion of the virtual which obliterates the spectacle. With its diverting, distancing effects, Disneyland still represented spectacle and folklore, but with Disneyworld and its tentacular extension, we are dealing with a generalized metastasis, with a cloning of the world and of our mental universe, not in the imaginary register, but in the viral and the virtual. We are becoming not alienated, passive spectators, but interactive extras, the meek, freeze-dried extras in this immense reality show. This is no longer the spectacular logic of alienation, but a spectral logic of disembodiment; not a fantastic logic of diversion, but a corpuscular logic of transfusion, transubstantiation of each of our cells. An undertaking of radical deterrence of the world, then, but from the inside this time, not from outside, as we saw in what is now the almost nostalgic world of capitalist reality. In virtual reality the extra is no longer either an actor or a spectator; he is off-stage, he is a transparent operator. And Disney wins on yet another level. Not content with obliterating the real by turning it into a 3-D, but depthless, virtual image, it obliterates time by synchronizing all periods, all cultures in the same tracking shot, by setting them alongside each other in the same scenario. In this way, it inaugurates real time — time as a single point, one-dimensional time, a thing which is also without depth: neither present, past nor future, but the immediate synchrony of all places and all times in the same timeless virtuality. The lapsing or collapsing of time: this is the real fourth dimension . The dimension of the virtual, of real time, the dimension which, far from superadding itself to the three dimensions of real space, obliterates them all. So it has been suggested that in a century or a millennium, the old 'swords and sandals' epics will be seen as actual Roman films, dating from the Roman period, as true documentaries on Antiquity; that the Paul Getty Museum at Malibu, a pastiche of a villa from Pompeii, will be confused anachronistically with a villa from the third century B.C. (as will the works inside: Rembrandt and Fra Angelico will all be jumbled together in the same flattening of time); and that the commemoration of the French Revolution at Los Angeles in 1989 will be confused retrospectively with the real event. Disney achieves the de facto realization of this timeless Utopia by producing all events, past or future, on simultaneous screens, remorselessly mixing all the sequences as they would — or will — appear to a civilization other than our own. But this is already our civilization. It is already increasingly difficult for us to imagine the real, to imagine History, the depth of time, three-dimensional space - just as difficult as it once was, starting out from the real world, to imagine the virtual one or the fourth dimension.

She is always ready to bring to life feminine characters who are active, enterprising, and courageous, in contrast to the traditional concept of the Sicilian woman as a passive and withdrawn creature. (This strikes me as a personal, conscious choice.) She passes completely over what I should say was the dominant element in the majority of Sicilian tales: amorous longing, a predilection for the theme of love as exemplified in the lost husband or wife motif, so widespread in Mediterranean folklore and dating back to the oldest written example, the Hellenistic tale of Amor and Psyche told in Apuleius’ Metamorphosis (second century A.D.) and repeated through the ages in hundreds and hundreds of stories about encounters and separations, mysterious bridegrooms from the nether regions, invisible brides, and horse- or serpent-kings who turn into handsome young men at night.

As the field of folklore has demonstrated time and time again, there is nothing trivial about folklore or popular culture. These monsters reflect ourselves and tell us about our current fears and desires, showing that we all have the capacity to be monstrous—especially when we reject outsiders without reason. Moral contagion appears in at least two ways in these narratives: not only does the supernatural infect humans, but humans infect each other with fear, hatred, and anger as well. In considering these supernatural texts, we must reflect on what they say about us.

With a rose garden blanket thrown on her legs that matched her roosari, her scarf, she ran her liver-spotted hand across her left arm and said, “A hunter in Lorestan was hunting for wild goats. He spots one and chases it into a cave. He waited outside until the goat came out of the cave. When the goat finally comes out, he shoots it in the head and it dies on the spot. He approaches the goat and sees it had a wet goatee. He immediately knew there was water in the cave. So he went inside and after a fifteen-minute drop to the bottom he discovers a carved room filled with gold. There was so much gold that he could build an entire house with it. He starts to go back to the cave day by day to collect the gold. The people in his village figured there was something suspicious going on with the hunter so a few of them followed him once. They then discovered the hidden gold too. They all agreed that since he never shared it with the rest of the tribe, he should be killed. They killed him and started to take the gold themselves. Eventually all of the villagers dispersed throughout the country and the gold was nowhere to be found. Some say it is abroad and some say it is scattered all over the country. But what do I know? I never saw it because I lost both my eyes during the war.

Of course, I wasn't completely right in my own head. first off there was the Dream. Sheepishly, I dub it 'the Dream': 'The Dream of Golden Light' sounds like something cheesy from the annals of Chinese Folklore or the ramblings of some wake-and-bake New Age guru. Granted, 'The Dream' sounds a little pretentious, but what other options do I have? And you can't say, given the circumstances, that it doesn't warrant capitalization. Just count yourself lucky that I don't call it THE DREAM, in hysterical all caps.

So we may say that the Zoryas can all appear identical, but one has a malicious streak, and another is not a “biological” daughter of the Sea King at all, but a sister of the Sun. This contradicts the Nart Sagas, which portray Zerasha as a daughter of Dobettyr the Sea God. This could be an attempt to reconcile a celestial Balto-Slavic genealogy with an Iranian one, where the maiden was said to be the daughter of the Sea God. If she is a half-sister of the other Zoryas, then who is her mother? It’s probably in Romania where the parentage is most clear: The mother of the Woods is the mother of Zorila (Dawn), Murgila (Dusk), and Miazanoapte (Midnight).81 This “Mother of the Woods” or Mamapadurei is a figure of Romanian folklore who lives in a forest, in a hut that revolves on fowl’s legs, and a fence stuck full of skulls. She kidnaps children, and generally corresponds to Baba Yaga.

She walks so briskly that he nearly loses her. Shelf by shelf, the world rushes by in microcosm: Customs & Etiquette. Costumes & Fashion. This is a world, he realizes, she knows forward and backward, a map she’s traveled so many times she can draw it from memory. Here we are, she says. Folklore.

But really, why should the Cailleach matter now? Why should the other fierce and shining old women of European myth and folklore who populate the pages of this book matter? Why should any of these old stories matter? Aren’t they just ancient history? Nice to know, but irrelevant to our infinitely more sophisticated lives today? Well, they matter because the ways in which we think about aging depend on the stories we tell about it. How we think about aging women depends on the images we hold of them. And the images we hold of aging women today aren’t healthy. Truth is, there is no clear image of enviable female elderhood in the contemporary cultural mythology of the West; it’s not an archetype we recognize anymore. In our culture, old women are mostly ignored, encouraged to be inconspicuous, or held up as objects of derision and satire. But our old mythology and folklore tell us something very much more interesting: that it hasn’t always been so. In our more distant past, as of course in many indigenous cultures today, female elders were respected and had important and meaningful roles to play. They are the ones who hold the myths and the wisdom stories, the ones who know where the medicine plants grow and what their uses are. They serve as guides for younger adults; they’re the caregivers and mentors for the community’s children. They know when the community is going to the dogs, and they’re not afraid to speak out and say so. When they do, they’re listened to. Their focus is on giving back — on bringing out, for the sake of Earth and community, the hard-earned wisdom which they’ve grown within themselves.

The very idea that a demon—even Satan himself—could be reduced to the status of a moving planchette, performing tricks and answering trivial questions for a group of college students, is in itself a fundamentally comic concept, however many risks the tradition says accompany it.

It’s just that I want her to open up to my version of fairy tales, my melancholy stories from Japanese folklore. Where the endings are often bittersweet—emphasis on the “bitter.” Where it’s possible for, say, a girl with a dead mom and a deadbeat dad to triumph somehow, even if it means casting aside idealized notions of love and turning into a monster.

Of course not!" Wendy said. "Legend says they were created by God after the angels but before mankind. They were the Yin to the angels' Yang. All creation is about balance, according to folklore. When the angels were created good and benevolent, an opposite had to be created to balance the scales. An opposite as evil and malevolent as the angels were holy. As the myth asserts, anyway.

Some say that if you look deep into a cat's eyes you will see the world of the fairies.

There isn’t, incidentally, any such thing as an ancient Chinese curse saying, “May you live in interesting times.” The phrase seems to be a piece of invented Orientalist folklore coined in the 1930s by First Lord of the Admiralty Sir Austen Chamberlain, half-brother of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain who went off to Munich to appease Hitler. And let’s not be silly and forget that the Chamberlain brothers lived in much more accursedly interesting times than our own. What I thought was going on in the 2016 election cycle was a mere fight to the death between two fundamental American political ideologies.

And at the end of seven years the Queen of the Faeries pays a tithe to Hell,” Aikin finished, as he joined them. “That’s what it says in ‘Tam Lin’.

Location 2994 Grigori, D. The Watchers: Myth in Medieval Europe. Seraphim Press, Rome, 1755. Cal no: R999.318 CR! ========== Location 4345 "I'm sorry, did you say Grigoris?" "Oh yes, historians have traced them back to the Middle Ages. They were..." She paused, searching for the words. "A sort of research cluster, to put it in modern layperson's terms. They specialized in a certain type of fallen-angel folklore." ========== Location 4353-4354 | “There are different kinds of angels to specialize in?” ========== Location 4372-4372 | THE GRIGORI CLAN. ========== Location 4374-4374 | The Grigoris do not sleep. ========== Location 6214-6216 | She’s part of a secret sect. I should have realized it sooner, but the signs are very clear now. They call themselves the Zhsmaelim. ==========

Location 2994 Grigori, D. The Watchers: Myth in Medieval Europe. Seraphim Press, Rome, 1755. Cal no: R999.318 CR! ========== Location 4345 "I'm sorry, did you say Grigoris?" "Oh yes, historians have traced them back to the Middle Ages. They were..." She paused, searching for the words. "A sort of research cluster, to put it in modern layperson's terms. They specialized in a certain type of fallen-angel folklore." ========== Location 4353-4354 | “There are different kinds of angels to specialize in?” ========== Location 4372-4372 | THE GRIGORI CLAN. ========== Location 4374-4374 | The Grigoris do not sleep. ========== Location 6214-6216 | She’s part of a secret sect. I should have realized it sooner, but the signs are very clear now. They call themselves the Zhsmaelim. ========== ~~Fallen #1 by Lauren Kate

My jaw unhinges. “Venin are the stuff of fables. Like the book my father—” I blink. The letter. What had he written? Folklore is passed from one generation to the next to teach us about our past. Was he trying to say… No. That’s impossible. “They’re real,” Xaden says softly, like he’s trying to lessen a blow. “You’re saying people who can somehow tap into the source of magic without a dragon or gryphon to channel, corrupting their power beyond all salvation, actually exist.” I say the words slowly just so we’re crystal clear. “They’re not just part of the creation fable.