#I really like religious history and folklore and that’s sort of what really got me into Shazam

[apollo18]

Concept: the justice league finds out that Blaze and Satanus, the rulers of hell, are kids of their ‘even more of a boy scout than Superman’ coworker’s “boss” and think Shazam is the Christian God. They ask Billy really vague questions that lead Billy into confusing them even more and they become convinced that Marvel’s Wizard guy is God with a capital G and Marvel’s either an angel or the second coming of Jesus.

Meanwhile Shazam doesn’t even know what the Bible is and his knowledge about religion is so outdated he still thinks Solomon’s Judaism is new age and not worth his time to research such a ‘fad’ religion, but he knows humans will make a religion out of anything as well as bastardize existing ones and very well could have mixed up actual tales that involve him, his allies, and his children into some sort of melting pot of a religion.

So when someone finally asks Marvel outright if his “boss” is God, Billy goes ‘wait… old guy in white robes and sandals, with long white hair and a beard… lives in space… aka the “heavens”, whose a ghost(Holy Spirit), and knows everything(historama)??? I need to dig deeper into this hold on guys’ and goes off to ask the wizard.

So when Billy asks the Wizard he just tells Billy “well, my boy, if so many things match up, maybe it is so and the tales of myself and my champions grew so estranged from their origins or mixed in with other beliefs that it can explain the things that aren’t true to our reality.”

Then The Canonical Character To The DC Universe, Jesus of Nazareth, shows up.

[hallowpen]

The plan was to start watching The Sign by divvying up the series into two episodes per day until I could finish. Well…that plan went completely out the window and I ended up binge watching the entire thing in one go. So, as I try to gather my thoughts, I wanted to sort of get my feelings out there on what I thought was an incredible show before I finally unfilter the tags (as to avoid any outside influence on my opinion).

Let me preface this by saying that this is going to be an incredibly bias opinion given my cultural upbringing and background (I'm half-Thai and I've spent almost half of my life living in Thailand), so please take that into account before reading any further. I metaphorically removed my western-lensed glasses while watching this series and preferred to watch as a Thai viewer, which probably made the more confusing or difficult parts of the show a lot easier to swallow. So, yes, I will admit that the show was not perfect by any means, but I was able to overlook a lot of its shortcomings given the parts that had been done so well and what this series could mean for Thai QL media going forward.

My goddess, where do I even start…

I'm a sucker for the reincarnated/fated lovers trope, so the show had me before it even started. What I absolutely loved the most about the romance and the A+ chemistry was that it didn't dominate or singularly drive the story, which was refreshing to see. It gave room to explore the fantasy/mythological elements of the show, the investigatory plotlines (which we'll get to later), and the relationships of the characters surrounding the "main leads".

Episode 3, my beloved, was what solidified my trust in this series and served as the foundation for the personalized experience I curated in my continued viewing. First off (and a bit of a side note), seeing Yoshi show up as Sand just made my heart super happy. I've been following her off and on since 2018, and she was one of the only things I actually liked about หมอ มือ ใหม่… but I digress. Behind the main story (and maybe even because of it), this episode was, for all intents and purposes, a love letter to Thai culture and its religious mythology. Which, when you consider how much international draw a BL series can hold, is truly momentous. International viewers got to experience the Bang Fai Phayanak (the naga fireball festival) that occurs every Wan Ok Phansa (the last day of what is considered Buddhist Lent) and the significance it holds over Thai history and culture. Using this as the stepping stone to establish the importance of the series' reliance on naga folklore…brilliant! The episode was also the viewers' introduction to the Buddhist idea of the cyclical intermingling of karmic fates. How the implications of an interdependence on one fate more than the others would later define the relationship between Phaya, Tharn, and Chalothorn…genius! All of this!? In one episode…of a BL!? I was overwhelmed by a sense of cultural gratitude and pride, that I still can't quite shake. I think Saint knew exactly what he was doing when he chose to adapt this series and I love him even more for it.

Aside from the cultural dependency and relevance, the show delivered so much beyond that as well. The production quality sailed high above previous BL standards and, in turn, lent itself to beautiful visuals and cinematography.

The casting! Billy and Babe's chemistry was just so *chef's kiss*. I knew Billy would absolutely smash it in the role of Phaya, but I often forgot that this was Babe's first ever acting role. It was an undertaking, that you could tell, he did not take lightly. Heng!? Wow! What a performance! He's been a staple in every Idol Factory series thus far, but he really nailed the purely villainous role of Chalothorn. Gap as Yai? No notes. He was able to flesh out what could have been a very one-dimensional character. Tack and Poom as Khem and Thongtai were a welcome levity inbetween, what was otherwise, a more weighty plot.

If I had to address any gripes I had with the series, there were only two that really stood out:

1) I wish the moments/conversations between Tharn and Chalothorn that eventually led to Tharn's return hadn't happened off-screen. There was a lot left to be resolved that could have been explored in that instance. But using my own inference based on Tharn as a character, his relationship with Chalothorn, and the core of his personality, I could kind of piece together how that ending came to be.

2)The lesser intriguing elements of the investigation storylines were shaky, at best. (If you were looking for the show to have a firm western-influenced ACAB agenda, then I'm sorry to say you were setting yourself up for disappointment. As much as I selfishly wanted it to be, this series was never going to be that show, it's a Thai drama.) From a Thai perspective, it made sense that the "copaganda" aspect of the series focused on the incompetency and inefficiency of a police force where justice is often informed by wealth and greed. I got an idea of what the show's stance on the matter was supposed to be but the overall plot and its consistency got lost somewhere within the final execution.

Other than that, I was left feeling satisfyingly content with where the series landed and I will continue to highly recommend it. It's easily one on my top five favorite Thai BL dramas and just Thai dramas in general! And…

There is such a rich history of mythology and folklore left for the show to still sink its teeth into: the garuda of it all, the pre-existing feud between the naga and garuda and why that is… Aside from a few minor specificities that were missing from naga folklore (their exclusion didn't really detract from anything, but it could have served to benefit non-Thai viewers), all of that could be addressed in a second season. Which, at this point, seems pretty likely 🤞🏾🤞🏾🤞🏾 and would be HUGE in the BL world.

PLEASE, LET IT HAPPEN! 🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾

[karmiya]

I actually do a lot of research and am collecting what may one day be an entire bookshelf's worth of reference books, so I thought I'd share one. This is my pride and joy, at least as far as research goes:

To Live as Long as Heaven and Earth is a translation of the Shenxian Zhuan, a series of biographies of Daoist immortals by Ge Hong. The (extensive) introduction by Professor Campany also includes a lot of the translator's own research, drawing on various sources in order to provide a good overview of practices attributed to Daoists in common folklore. If you're interested in the Xianxia and Wuxia genres and their origins, I think this is an invaluable English-language text. Its focus is entirely on traditional beliefs, but through it you can see just how much of the modern fantasy genre in China is based entirely on traditional folklore.

The images of talismans, for example, are extremely familiar to any viewers of modern fantasy dramas or donghua. These look very similar to the talismans we see in the Modao Zushi donghua, don't they?

This is a really interesting little section describing levels of ascendance. It's a lot simpler than modern novels with their million stages of core formation, isn't it? (Though, to be fair, most novels I read are by authors who don't care to get into that level of detail and focus on characters and storytelling, thank goodness!) The 'tianxian' sound a bit like heavenly officials in more recent stories, don't they, whereas the dixian are regular immortal cultivators who still live on earth. The use of shijie (corpse simulacrums) meanwhile, seems to mainly be maintained as a means of faking one's death, not as a means of escaping the notice of the officials of the underworld!

The main paths of immortality outlined in Ge Hong's work are: internal cultivation, external cultivation (alchemy), the arts of the bedchamber, and diet. The first three are very familiar, but I've noticed that diet-based cultivation shows up much more rarely in modern stories. I can only immediately think of Ye Baiyi from Word of Honour, who begins to age again after descending from the mountains and imbibing mortal food once more.

One thing I found interesting is that most accounts of immortals flying either depict them doing so under their own power, or placing a talisman within a bamboo staff and flying on that (or sending some poor soul on a sudden trip across the country!). Flying swords seem to be a much more modern convention.

One thing that's really amusing to me is how much energy the author (Ge Hong, not the translator) dedicated to poking fun at Confucius and Confucianism. Even though the three major religions eventually became known as the Three Teachings and are in modern terms viewed as very harmonious and complementary, historically there was often a huge amount of religious tension. Confucians and Daoists bickered with each other a lot, and then Buddhists got into the fray as well as Buddhism became more and more popular in East Asia. While Buddhism was present in China in Ge Hong's time, it had yet to reach its later popularity; this is probably why Buddhism is barely mentioned in Ge Hong's writing. There are a few indirect references and borrowings from Buddhist tales, and Professor Campany posits that some were intentionally used in competition with Buddhism, while others may have been added by later compilers/transcribers of the text who were Buddhists themselves.

A lot of Cnovels depict this sort of religious tension (Thousand Autumns is a good example), and it's really interesting to see that in these translated historical texts. Even though there are plenty of texts I can't get access to and/or wouldn't be able to read in the original language, there is a huge amount of English-language and translated scholarship on Chinese history available. A lot of it is fascinating to read from a perspective of a fan of Chinese fantasy, since the genre draws so heavily on real history and folklore.

[saints-who-never-existed]

you had quite a compelling thought going in your tags of that bridglar gifset about loving something that cannot love you back... it would be a pleasure to hear the rest of what you had to say about it

I don't know that my thoughts on this are fully formed quite yet, but I'll tell you what I'm thinking so far and I'll start on a personal note.

-

I've always been fascinated with mythology and folklore - that fascination informed my artistic practice back when I was properly practising and is a huge part of the reason that I then progressed into the field of history and heritage.

As fascinated as I was, though, I found that I didn't actually believe in any of it which got me thinking - what does inspire that kind of feeling in me? That belief? That sort of religious-level ecstasy?

The simple answer was the great outdoors, the landscape itself.

I ascribed my own personal mythology to the landscape around me and ended up pursuing a literal artistic pilgrimage through key locations in the Highlands near my home back in Scotland which culminated in climbing my own personal 'Holy Mountain'.

(That was literally a decade ago and, let me tell you, my toes still haven't fully recovered from all that hiking!)

-

Which is all to say that when it comes to the idea of loving an entity that cannot love you back, I wonder, now that I've thought more on it, if perhaps it's a matter of perspective and expectation?

Yes, it's sad to think of how much those men would've loved the sea itself and how the sea did not, could not love them back. How it was the sea itself that doomed them, at least in part.

I think a lot about how they possibly could have reconciled that but then I remember my own experiences in the landscape, the love I feel for it and the joy it continues to bring me. And I think perhaps that you just don't and shouldn't love something of that magnitude in the first place for anything else but what it is or with any expectation that it'll love you back.

As I touched on in the tags of that earlier post, most of those men would have been at sea since their childhood/youth and built their entire lives around it, would've known it intimately.

So yes, while the sea is a cruel mistress who could not love them back, I think that there's perhaps a more positive spin to be found here.

That there's perhaps something quite beautiful and profound and, dare I say, holy, in the notion that they would've known full well the unloving, cruel, and capricious nature of the sea and that they would've carried on loving her regardless.

-

I've waffled on long enough now so I'll end on a more historical/Terror-specific note and say that I think there's also a really interesting conversation to be had about colonialism/empire vs the sea/landscape.

Though the men don't love the empire itself per se, their lives have been defined by it and everything they've done within their careers has served it in some way. Yet at the end of the day, it is just another entity that, for lack of a better phrase, doesn't love them back, doesn't care for them at all.

The key distinction to be made here, I think, is one of 'can't' vs 'won't'.

It's sad that the sea doesn't love or care for you, yes, but that's only because the sea is a natural entity that cannot love or care for anything. Think of how, despite it all, the love still endures for Peglar and there is at least something approaching closure for him as result. Even as he's dying he still loves Bridgens and he still loves the sea, even after all it's put him through.

To live your life, however willingly, in service of an entity like colonialism/empire is another thing entirely though. That's a man-made entity that doesn't care for you not because it can't but because, quite frankly, it doesn't fucking want to. An entity that had the choice and the power to care for you and chose not to. Think of James Clark Ross, for example, and the way his face drops when he realises that, despite everything that's happened and everything they've given in service of it, the Admiralty and the Empire still care more about finding the Passage than finding the men lost to it.

Now that's a tragedy!

[ilikereadingactually]

Wrath Becomes Her

Wrath Becomes Her by Aden Polydoros

this book really whetted and renewed my appetite for stories about golems. what rich possibility and history and lore they present!! and Polydoros digs into some of that, in ways i found satisfying for this particular narrative and in ways that made me want more on the topic generally.

we've got Vera, waking up and learning what it's like, and what it means, to be human and to be not-human; we've got her "father," who created her in the image of his dead daughter Chaya; we've got Akiva, who Vera remembers fondly through Chaya's memories. and we've got so many Nazis to fight, because it's Lithuania in 1943, plus an exciting surprise enemy toward the end of the book that i won't spoil. there's a lot going on, and a lot of it is frightening and awful--rightfully so, in a book happening during the Holocaust.

but my favorite parts were the quieter moments: Vera trying to sort out her own personhood from Chaya's memories, Vera and Akiva's strange and intense relationship, the people and situations they encounter along their journey that bring into question what humanity is, and what makes a monster, and what difference individual choices and efforts can make. all of this was handled with gravity, but lightly--never too bogged down, just prompting some questions and suggesting some answers in a way that felt particularly resonant coming from a trans author (and somehow also quietly spoke just to me about being non-religious, only half Jewish, and having a facial scar)

and that ending!!!!!!! just as heartwrenching and complicated as the whole book was, but condensed into a juicy nugget of pain and hope.

the deets

how i read it: an e-galley from NetGalley, yet again. i'm adding this one to my "to buy" list, i want to have it on the shelf!

try this if you: are into Jewish folklore, dig Holocaust stories in which at least a bit of vengeance is gotten, like sad and messy endings, or go wild for stories that question and examine selfhood and human nature. (also if you were an FMA fan and were, like me, into the Conqueror of Shamballa movie in spite of its problems? this book is only vaguely connected subject-matter-wise but gives me the same vibe somehow)

maybe skip this if you: need to avoid Holocaust stories. i mean i guess that's obvious, and this one is not super duper graphic, but you know.

some lines i really liked:

I emerged from the grove with the man's blood sticky and still warm on my hands, feeling strangely distanced, as though a vital sense was missing from me. It was the feeling of being set out to dry on old vellum, unable to move, no eyes or mouth or ears yet. And yet aware. And alive.

---

There were people everywhere, some resting on mattresses set up in the halls or just piles of blankets and pillows. They seemed less like people than like a scribe's recollection of people he--I--had once known. Ghosts becoming.

---

Stranger still that I should feel at home here, even though I had never walked these cobblestone streets in my own life. But in many ways, it was like touching the calligraphy on my wrists. Vilna was a part of me. It was sunken deep below my surface.

pub date: October 10, 2023!

[izartn]

I feel like my understanding of catholics as a sort of atheist in Spain, is very different than that of most of usa-people here on tumblr.

There are the weirdos ultra-catholics who do go to church on Sundays, are the minority, and are the sort of people to vote PP or Vox. May be passionatelly many -ism or the casual sort that hasn't thought beyond themselves on their lives. Honestly, there's a weird disconnect between right wing thoughts and actual religion here; most of the right wing thinking is a result of Franco being a catholic dictator but nowadays almost nobody goes to church, so being a bigot doesn't mean you go to church or believe in God, although your ideas are very much originating there.

There are the run of the mill, calls themselves catholics bc they got baptized and did the communion, may or may not married by the church bc aesthetics (and this is honestly the reason most of the time kid you not. To be fair, the church are gorgeous so I get it XD), cries on Holy Week seeing their virgin, Jesus or othe Ron the procession, doesn't give much more of a thought to doctrine except when they get stupid about it. Honestly kinda hilarious, and the big percent of religious people in Spain, for a certain definition of religious.

May or my not be baptized and may or may not done the communion, but they're anti-church and/or atheist which means they only get out to see the procession on Holy Week because it's folklore and traditional, and look it's all very emotive and spiritual anyways. To be fair, those are very pretty and the music or the silence (depending on the hermandad) is amazing and specifically made to get to you. Go to YouTube if you don't belive me. Will sing villancicos to baby Jesus without much thought in 24th December. Will also go through the motions of all the catholic celebration bc. Why not? Will maybe think about the whole contradiction of a pais laico and the mayor holidays being catholic festivities, but not eat their heads overmuch.

Has been born into a atheist family, which given Franco died on the 70's, has probably also a story of a little political leftist activism. Or their parents where on the third tier and didn't bother with getting their kids baptized or into the religion class at school, so they're going through the motions of Christmas and Holy Week through a weird lens of "this is a funny tale we commemorate just because". This kind most likely sees Holy Week as super annoying for urban mobility reasons, looks at costaleros as if they're insane for the damage they do to their backs voluntarily, at the penitentes as if they're crazy for letting church police them with guilt and generally admit the whole thing may be beautiful aesthetically and a valid expression folklore, but it could be done more sensibly and without causing national collapse, and you could extend the same treatment to other big religious minorities, but they usually don't have many alternatives for a spring break, so Holy Week for the whole country it is. May celebrate Christmas bc its family time but not connect it to religion or know much of the mythology. Ah the glories of being somewhat culturally catholic but not religious in Spain. <-btwen the previous and this is me, yay!!!

The third and forth tier, and maybe half on the second recognize religion at school as it is now is stupid, but as most things in this country, the issue is plagged by lethargy and kids are still given catholic religion since age 3, even though it's optional so like. Ugh.

Those same tiers are the ones most likely to have on a church or cathedral for art or history turism reasons.

As this post is about the catholics in Spain I finish it here. There are lots of other people too, but I don't now much about them so. Not getting there.

This is my subjective opinion as someone who lives in Andalusia and got such a whiplash on the bautism on my young cousin on my father side, that I went 0.0 what. (I really didn't recognize or identified anything of the ritual, so it was very novel for me. Very anthropologist approximates a new culture approach to the thing).

If you think I overemphasized Holy Week, I want you to come here to see a city here on la madrugá del cautivo and tell me that again to my face. Wild.

[honourablejester]

Celtic Pantheon/Campaigns (5e D&D)(Long Post)

Okay, so I’m just going to get this out there, because every time I glance at the Celtic Pantheon in the PHB I do giggle a bit. Mind you, it’s not anyone’s fault, but a couple of centuries of academics bundling stuff together under ‘Celtic’ has mightily confused just about everything, and it really shows here.

(Note: I have no academic qualifications regarding Celtic mythology/history/folklore whatsoever, I’m just Irish and grew up with a lot of the Irish myths and legends as a kid. This also means I know very little about the Welsh and other Celtic myths, just to say that in advance. This is all just what I’m familiar with from growing up and a little bit of research, and might have errors)

This post is also brought to you by my idly scanning lfg posts for Celtic campaigns and seeing a lot of historically inspired Celts-vs-Romans campaigns which is … doubly funny to me if they’re using the PHB pantheon list. This is because, as you’ll see in a minute, the majority of the PHB list uses the Irish gods and we … didn’t have those. Romans. We didn’t have them. So. Heh.

(We had Roman traders, especially around the Waterford area, it’s a relatively quick hop over from Wales/Cornwall, and we have evidence of Roman … tourists, probably? There are Roman offerings at various Irish prehistoric religious sites, in the Midlands especially. So we did have Romans, in the sense of we met them, but we didn’t have Romans, in the sense of invasion by the Roman Empire)

So. The thing about the PHB ‘pantheon’. It’s kind of borrowing gods from several different Celtic pantheons. ‘Celtic’ covers a lot of distinct regional cultures that are believed (I think for primarily linguistic and archaeological reasons) to be descended from an original proto-Celtic culture. For extra fun, there aren’t many primary historical sources for most of them, as in Celts writing about themselves and their faiths. Most of the texts we have are either medieval Christian (a lot of the Irish and Welsh) or Roman (a lot of the Gaulish, Iberian, Germanic, Brythonic), so there’s a lot of cross-cultural influence and interpretation muddling it up in there before you ever get to celtic-vs-celtic.

So they’re all Celtic, but they’re all very distinct in terms of stories, culture and the attributes of their gods. There are some gods that were broadly shared under similar names between various of the regional pantheons (Lugh and Brigantia are two examples), although they could be very different in portrayal between, say, the Irish and Gaulish stories. (Where the PHB uses one of these, I’m going with what name they’re using for guidance)

(The various attributes given to them by the PHB are a different muddle of influences again, with I think a lot of it being straight D&D invention, but that’s its own story)

So, to have a look at the D&D breakdown:

5e PHB Celtic Pantheon

Arawn  (Welsh)

Belenus  (Gaulish/Romano-British)

Brigantia  (Gaulish/Romano-British)

Diancecht  (Irish)

Dunatis (???)(Can’t find or remember this guy at all. Only thing I’ve got is that the Irish for ‘fort’ is ‘dún’, so maybe Irish?)

Goibhniu  (Irish)

Lugh  (Irish)

Manannan Mac Lir  (Irish)

Math Mathonwy  (Welsh)

Morrigan   (Irish)

Nuada  (Irish)

Oghma  (Irish)

Silvanus  (???)(Don’t know at all. I’m going to guess continental because I think ‘silva’ is the latin for ‘forest’, hence ‘Transylvania’ or ‘Beyond the Forest’, so the dude has a latin name)(… looking this up, he’s actually straight-up a Roman god, okay then)

The Daghdha  (Irish)(I usually see it spelled ‘Dagda’, mind)

This all shakes out as follows:

Irish: Daghdha, Diancecht, Goibhniu, Lugh, Manannan, Morrigan, Nuada, Oghma

Not Sure/Maybe Irish?: Dunatis

Welsh: Arawn, Math Mathonwy

Gaulish/Romano-British: Belenus, Brigantia

Straight Roman: Silvanus

So that’s more than half the list being figures from Irish mythology. And that … there’s nothing wrong with using them for an Asterix-and-Obelix Romans-vs-Celts sort of campaign. I mean, it’s your own private fantasy game, not a history lesson. Go nuts! It just … reads oddly to me. Heh. Historically speaking, very few people with Irish names calling on Irish gods would have had much cause to fight Romans. Not on any large scale, anyway.

Campaign Inspirations:

I’m going to just say, though. If you want a more historical and/or mythological feeling Celtic campaign. You have a couple of options. I’d say the easiest thing is to just look up the specific pantheons and cherry-pick your gods from there (there’s a handy Wikipedia list here)

If you want continental Romans vs Celts a-la Asterix and Obelix, use the Gaulish/Brythonic list.

If you want Romans vs Celts more along the lines of various modern interpretations of King Arthur, use the Gaulish/Brythonic and/or Pictish lists.

If you want Celtic more along the lines of full Arthurian, Excalibur, BBC Merlin, ‘dragons, druids, knights and romance’, a lot of actual Arthurian legend used Welsh myths as a base, so it’s a nice start, then throw some Brythonic on top (particularly if you want to do an 80s Robin Hood on it and throw in Cernunnos/Herne the Hunter in). If your setting is more of a fully mixed ‘Medieval England’ sort of setting, Robin Hood, King Arthur, etc, you can mix and match a whole bunch of folklore and mythology of various sources, Welsh, Roman, Norse, etc. (Alan Garner is a fantasy author who does this very well, if you want a high-fantasy example)

And if you want Celtic as in Irish myth to match the names …

If you’re going relatively low-fantasy for a more historical feel, use the Irish pantheon, and the sources you want to inspire the setting would be the Cattle Raid of Cooley and the Fenian Cycle/stories of Fionn Mac Cumhaill and the Fianna. The Five Kingdoms of Ireland (Ulster, Connacht, Leinster, Munster and Meath, with the High King sitting at Tara in Meath) makes a pretty good setting.

If you’re going more high fantasy, like the Arthurian example, use the Irish pantheon, and you want the Book of Invasions and the Battle of Magh Tuireadh as inspiration. Setting elements you can have here are the Five Kingdoms of Ireland, the Four Cities that the Treasures of Ireland came from, Tir na nOg, and the Otherworld. (Note on the four cities and their treasures: they were each guarded by a legendary bard (poet/scholar/mage), so you could go classic archmage wizard or you could throw in some high level NPC bards for fun)

There’s some very cool magic items in Irish myth too, like the aforementioned four treasures, the magic pigskin (waterskin) Lugh had the sons of Tuireann quest for (heals all wounds, but charges of various healing spells per day would probably work), the sword Fragarach (I think other D&D editions had a version, but I’m particularly interested in its sword of truth aspect that forces anyone threatened by it to tell the truth), Cuchulainn’s Gae Bolg spear, aka Belly Spear (which is made from a bone of a sea monster and is nasty – it basically grows barbs/spines once it’s in someone’s body), and basically every item ever owned/gifted by Manannan Mac Lir, who is basically the Irish god of giving away cool magic items (as well as sea god, trickster god, elder god, and the god often in charge of starting quests). If you need a quest-starter god or a god to litter magic items around your world, Manannan Mac Lir is your dude.

If you want a fantasy author that I quite like who does great loosely-based-on-Irish-myth high fantasy, I would say Michael Scott, particularly (from my reading) the De Danaan tales and Tales of the Bard. I also grew up reading Cormac Mac Raois’ Giltspur trilogy, which is an awesome kid’s portal fantasy involving some Wicklow kids winding up in Tir na nOg and fighting the forces of the Morrigan, but that’s pretty much impossible to get outside Ireland, I think.

And I promise I’m not only saying this because I personally feel like a low-fantasy ‘historical’ campaign is about the least interesting thing you could do with any of the Celtic pantheons. Honest.

[baby-witch-eli]

Quantifying my Craft

I found this lovely post by @breelandwalker, who I totally recommend checking out, and it inspired me. My cards and horoscopes have been pushing me to reflect on my goals lately so this is exactly what I needed right now! I decided I'd give it a go.

Broad Concepts

I like to follow western traditions; Celtic traditions in particular are near and dear to my heart. This is why I chose to focus my worship in the Celtic Pantheon, and I'm currently working on building a relationship with Brigid. I would consider myself an eclectic, although divination and nature magic are my two main areas of focus. While I like to ask others for advice while I learn, magic is something I prefer to practice on my own. I've only been practicing since late January, interestingly enough I started around Imbolc. So far I've found intentions are the most important aspect of witchcraft and it has helped me greatly to practice intention in all aspects of my life.

Working Space

I began constructing an altar to Brigid yesterday. Frustratingly enough, my mother is going to have me put away all my small little items and decorations tomorrow as we're trying to sell our house. We won't be moving for a few more months though. I'm hoping I'll be able to keep the altar up but I'll look into online altar options if needed. I already keep an online altar to myself on an app called #SelfCare that I would highly recommended.

Right now my altar to Brigid has a white candle in a green holder; a sailor's knot I wore around my wrist until it started to come undone; a silver bell for music and creativity; the first piece of pottery I ever painted; a picture book of the traveling I did around Michigan a few years ago; an empty journal I hope to fill with art and poems dedicated to her; and a beaker (cauldron stand-in) I dedicated by burning a sigil in that holds nineteen white rose petals and a whisker my cat lost. I'm charging a carnelian and working on a piece of fox, the spirit guide she sent me, embroidery to add to the altar. It's positioned on top of an organizer I have on my desk, which is pushed up against a window.

There's a spot under my porch I wanted to use for meditation but I discovered I'm too jumpy and distractible to meditate outdoors. I don't like having my eyes closed when out of the open and I have an exaggerated startle response. Instead, I find it better for me to meditate in the bath. Sitting in water at least ankle deep with the lights off, after everybody else has gone to sleep and when the moon can shine through the window, is the ideal place for me to sit and follow a guided meditation. I find meditations that take me on a journey through my astral space are the most effective.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to have my own space where I can freely spread my altars and workspaces throughout the house. I want to be able to fill it with plants and books and cards and candles. While I'm at home trying to avoid suspicion from my Christian family, I just have to make the most of what I have.

Tools

My first deck is on the #SelfCare app. I call it my "Familiar Deck" as that's the one I'm most connected with. It's brutally honest, which I love. My second favorite deck is the "blue-eyed" deck I use for my Daily Draw. Another brutally honest deck and one I find to be very accurate. When asking Brigid questions, I prefer to use the Yes/No deck. It gives you your answer and is also good at accurately conveying "secondary," not yes/no, messages. You'll notice all of them are online and that's because, once again, I live with my Christian family and must be covert.

I have a quite a few crystals as I, thankfully, was interested in collecting them when I was younger. The tumbled crystals I have are small and few; most of my crystals are raw. I keep forgetting to charge them when there's a full moon out. I'll have to set a reminder or something to that effect. At the very least, I'm happy that I don't have to bother with trying to obtain any without my parents becoming suspicious. One of these days, I'd love to start collecting rings and wear several. It's also silly little dream of mine to get an onyx pendulum someday.

As far as books go, I bought a beautiful journal I've dedicated as my grimoire. It's dark blue with shiny, gold space decals. I would love to collect witchy books but I don't have money and I couldn't get away with it while living at home. I hear there's an excellent discord that stores witchy books and I think it's something I'll look into. For now, my information comes from my internet research. Thankfully, I did debate for several years, so I know how to find sources from accurate cites, but it certainly takes a lot of work to find good information that way.

The Year

I’m interested in learning more about the Wheel of the Year and incorporating it into my practice. Imbolc is especially important to me, as I worship the goddess Brighid. I missed it this year but I hope to celebrate it in the future. I have yet to study the important of dates outside of astrology so I’ll have to make sure I study it more.

History of My Magic

Honestly, I’ve always felt a very strong pull towards magic. I was raised in a very religious family though so I was always afraid that answering the call would condemn me. I grew up reading as many fantasy stories as I could, connecting with any animal I was able to, and spending as much time in the woods or by water as I could. The woods and the water have always felt full of magic to me and inspired me to want to practice witchcraft. Ever since I was little, I’ve had a great fondness and affection for the moon and stars. I’ve also always felt very drawn to Celtic folklore, magic, and Irish culture. I have distant family ties to Ireland and even though it’s a relatively minor aspect of my heritage, it’s always felt the most important to me. Movies like Song of the Sea and Brendan and the Secret of Kells helped tighten my bond with it. I even started learning as much as I could about the Fae after some books I read piqued my interest. I’ve always been the kid who kept a firm belief in magic even after all my friends “outgrew” it.

It took me a long time to finally answer the call to magic. Like I said, I was raised in a religious household. My grandparents even accused me of being a witch when I went through my Harry Potter phase! It actually made me rather pleased. There were a few times I came very close to beginning practicing witchcraft but I shied away for fear of Hell. It wasn’t until I finally was able to distance myself from the church earlier this year that I decided to start practicing magic behind my parents’ back. I’m very glad I did.

Progress

I’ve only been practicing for a few months. I’ve been very busy with college so it’s been pretty lax so far. I’m trying to build some sort of consistency. The end of the semester is a bad time for that, for sure. I’ve really connected with astrology and tarot-reading. Learning about the symbolism of different bugs and animals has also been something I’ve honestly also done, so it’s nice to be able to incorporate that into my practice. Dragonflies have always been signs of good luck for me (or bad omens, as the one time I saw one dead was one my Grammy found in her garage; she showed it to me a month or so before she passed away from cancer).

Recently, I began meditation. I met my spirit animal, a brown-eyed fox, who I ended up learning was sent by the goddess Brighid to guide me. I contacted Brighid about twice and set up an altar for her. The first time I heard her speak to me was when she was telling me I don’t drink enough water (I haven’t met with her since I pulled an all-nighter for college and I’m sure she’s not particularly pleased with that). I’m hoping to get back into my meditative practice soon. I’ve also needed to meditate to ask about a crow or raven that my sister and I kept crossing paths with while going out to lunch together. I’m not sure if it’s a sign of something or if the Morrigan wants to contact me. I’ve also heard the name Cernunnos repeated in my head lately so I’ve wanted to look into him too. I didn’t think I’d have anything to do with deities after my experiences with Christianity but Brighid quickly changed my mind.

Final Notes

I actually started writing this post a week or so ago but life got crazy. I’m in the last few weeks of my Freshman year of college, so it’s hectic. Right now I’m staying at a cabin in the mountains over the weekend, so I’m hoping this will give me the chance I need to wind down and reconnect with Brighid and my higher self. I’m hoping to get a daily routine going for my practice over the next few weeks.

[livlepretre]

I started watching TVD while season 5 was airing, and I loved it. I was so excited when I caught up, but quickly started losing interest. As a person who despises pregnancy plot lines that should be impossible and make no logical sense in canon, The Originals was always a lost cause for me. I also hated the oocness of the characters. I begrudgingly made my way through season 6 of TVD and honestly couldn’t make it through the first few episodes of season 7. At that point in time, I didn’t like the conflicts, how the show kept breaking its on mythology rules, and how most characters were acting out of character. I think it’s a total shame because I absolutely adore this universe and the characters attached to it. Canon divergent fics like yours allow me to enjoy what could have been. So, did you watch TVD all the way through? Did you watch The Originals? If not, what was the straw that broke the camel’s back and what plot lines and character arcs would you have liked to see on the show/shows? How would you have preferred the show to end? Finally, what kind of thoughts do you have when you hear crazy stuff that happened (ex. Caroline having Ric’s kids and him being in unrequited love with her or Legacies having their characters fight gargoyles, dragons, etc.. throughout Mystic Falls while Damon and Elena’s kids are still in town raising their own kids) Cuz sometimes I read things and I’m like WTF? Who thought this made sense?

Okay, wow, I love that you asked me these questions, because as it turns out I have been bugging my RL friends with my tormented TVD takes for years now. I’m going to put everything under a cut though because this answer promises to be very long. 

Edit: This got sort of stupid long. Read at your own risk haha. 

So, I think to answer this, I have to address the things I love so much about TVD and why I’m still thinking about it/writing fic for it years and years after it lost me. I’m going to take this chronologically because there’s a lot to unpack. 

What I loved

My introduction to TVD was over the summer before season 2 aired; I remember seeing the promotional materials on the CW before I left for college the fall before, and writing it off (which: fair of me, those season 1 promotions were abysmal). But luckily my sister, God bless her, understood me better than I understood myself and made me sit down and marathon the first season with her. I made fun of it pretty hard until the episode where Vicki got turned, and then an episode later got staked, which shut me up and got me paying attention. At some point over the course of the season that show went from haha laugh at it to holding my throat and there are sooo many good reasons for this. I remained hyperfixated throughout seasons 2-4, which I would religiously watch just as soon as I could pirate them. 

The thing about TVD was that it was, for several years, a master class in narrative structure. What I mean by this is that it did two things very very very well: 

1) one thing always led organically to the next -- the thing that actual kicks off the plot in TVD is Damon coming to town to open the tomb. From that point on, he opens the tomb, which leads to the tomb vamps escaping, which leads to Katherine taking notice, so she comes to Mystic Falls, which leads to others discovering Elena, which leads to Elijah, which leads to Klaus, and the other Originals. Very neatly done, and a wonderful, fast way of constantly shifting the action in believable and organic ways 

2) they had this thing where they would announce something cataclysmic, like opening the tomb or sacrificing the main character, or even dropping the veil in season 4/again (?) in season 5, and in most shows, the whole point would be to avert those things-- but TVD has this way of announcing the doom and then forcing us through it. 

There were other things-- stakes were high (ha! pun!) -- Vicki could get staked midway through season 1, Jenna could get killed in the sacrifice, and they could sweep the rug out from under you by having the whole premise of what you THOUGHT you understood about the show turn out to be untrue-- the first big instant of this was the certainty that Katherine was actually in the tomb and if the tomb was opened that Damon would save her-- finding out she was never in there at all was mind-boggling. Another really excellent moment I recall was 2x09-- so, the thing is, one of the biggest mysteries in the show up until that point was “Why does Elena look exactly like Katherine?” We knew/suspected she was a descendent, and the term doppelganger was bandied about, but it felt really shocking to have it LITERALLY be used in the mythology (to see your doppelganger is a sign of certain death, which it IS how CREEPY!) and then in 2x09, everything gets turned on its head AGAIN when we discover “it’s not that Elena looks like Katherine, it’s that Elena and Katherine look like someone else”-- the idea that KATHERINE is a doppelganger was earth shattering. This show. 

Also the way that the show played with audience expectations? Like, in 1x04, the audience expectation would be for Elena to be angry at Stefan and not trust him after Damon (or was it Caroline? It’s been years since I’ve watched) says some stuff intended to set her against Stefan. But instead she figures it out fast and comes back to slap Damon and apologize to Stefan. It was an early sign that the show would jump over the expected hurdles. One of the brilliant things it does too is play with the horror genre. The characters (in the early seasons) were some of the smartest on tv because they were genre savvy, and they thought like a real person would and not like a character so often-- I remember being amazed by how often they jumped over the obvious pitfalls and came to sound conclusions. 2x12 The Descent sticks out to me-- Elena versus the mad dying vampire. Also the entire daggering sequence in 2x16 is God tier, as well as Elena’s bargain with Elijah in 2x11. Hmm and also the way the show would even play with expectations based on the fact that it’s a show? The fact that Katherine and Mason were working together is still one of the greatest plot twists of all time in my opinion, not because of how left field it is or wild or anything, but because it should have been totally obvious but our expectations of season premiers made it totally camouflaged! Like, yes, Mason and Katherine DO show up at the exact same time... in 2x01, which is a season premier, so we as an audience know and expect that new characters will be introduced in that episode. The fact that the show knew that and played us for fools will always go down as a favorite moment for me. 

Well. Needless to say there are countless other amazing things. The darkness of the show and its commitment to exploring vampirism as a curse, and oddly a very human one, was mesmerizing. Damon breaking Jeremy’s neck. “I miss being human. I miss it more than anything in the world.” Elena slow moral decay. The shock and horror when Caroline is turned. The relationships between the brothers. The way that the gang can’t ever sit easy with each other-- that Bonnie sees how Damon and Stefan are a poison, how everyone lies to Tyler and it hurts him so he hurts them-- Katherine’s doomed history? Tragic. Beautiful. Amazing. 

I remember the fandom was a very different space in those early seasons too. The show was just so dreamy and frightening and dark. It was like a very bad dream you couldn’t wake up from and maybe also didn’t want to. The fics were kind of gloomy and frightening and people were much more willing to explore the monstrous side of the show. 

So. The issues that I had. 

The very first thing I remember feeling a twinge of unease about was when they put Katherine in the tomb in 2x07 only to take her out again in 2x09. I remember her getting sealed up in that tomb in 2x07 was HORRIFYING but also??? Brilliant? Justice? Amazing? It was taking out a villain when and how they said they were going to do it and I loved it. I didn’t quite like how she kept being an active role in the story, no matter how much I adore Katherine as a character, because it destroyed the impact of her in that tomb at all. If it were me, I would have put her in that tomb and saved her as a character, only to take her out like seasons down the road when the audience may have mostly forgotten about her and she could have been a secret ace. 

There were other ultimately minor things in season 2-- the sun and moon curse being a fake, for example-- which at the time ruffled me a bit but I was willing to just brush it off because, well, season 2 of The Vampire Diaries is unspeakably good. 

I went into season 3 with the same level of hyperfixation as I had in season 2 (read: immense). And those first 6 episodes were pretty damn near perfect, with 3x05 being like the horrible culmination of everything I, already a klaulena shipper, could ever want. 

My first sign that things were going in a weird direction was 3x07, Ghost World. I remember that episode feeling... weaker. Like, what was the point of Lexi having Elena torture Stefan? That didn’t seem to do anything at all. The Other Side stuff is something I pretty much disliked at the time but at this point I’m so used to it that I accept it as a kind of limbo space mostly for vampires (and also witches? but hopefully more pleasant and less of a wasteland of eternal wandering for witches than it is for vampires). 

3x08 Ordinary People was an abomination and I still hate it and everything built on it. So, at the end of season 2, Elijah says his family comes from Eastern Europe. A nice, normal answer that makes sense. It also dovetailed really well with Slavic vampire folklore, so there was a great tie in that felt right with the meta-awareness of the show (it was for a while very much so a vampire show about vampire shows, and the diaries were part of that meta level writing). The idea that they were VIKINGS in VIRGINIA in this random WEREWOLF SETTLEMENT gives me such a migraine that I don’t think I can go into it here. I hate it with an unflinching fury. I think I used the “Mikaelson” name once or twice in FE and I hate myself for that more than anything else I’ve ever done in my writing. It makes no sense and betrays the writers as not even having a very vague idea of history and it is like fingers on a chalkboard for me. My fingers, feeling all of that horrible chalky friction. ELIJAH THERE WERE NO WILD HORSES IN AMERICA A THOUSAND YEARS AGO. WHY ARE YOUR NAMES HALF VIKING AND HALF HEBREW EXCEPT FOR THE RANDOM GERMAN NAMES. WHY WHY WHY. 

Deep breath. 

The other thing I really hated in that episode was Rebekah’s “it’s a protection spell of course.” 

Honestly I think that was the actual sword plunging into TVD’s heart and the show just slowly bled out from there and I was so shocked and betrayed by that that it just took me years of trying to stop the hemorrhaging before I finally accepted that it was a mortal wound. 

You have to understand that I continued to watch seasons 3 and 4 the way an abandoned dog will wait for its owner to return. I just couldn’t help myself. It had been my favorite favorite show (and sort of still is?)

Well. Why did I hate this protection spell thing so much. TVD had made it very clear in the early seasons of the show that becoming a vampire was BAD. It was a fate worse than death. The whole angst of season 1 relies on us feeling the TRAGEDY when Giuseppe murders his sons and they become vampires. Because vampires in TVD aren’t inhuman, per se; they’re still the same person, they still have their souls, their consciences, their moralities... they’re just also saddled with this insatiable burning thirst for human blood that drives them to commit the very worst deeds, that drives them down these dark paths of horror and soul-scouring guilt as they repeatedly succumb, over and over and over and over again, to their worst impulses, until they finally stop caring and become monsters in truth. Until they forget about the simple warmth of a human connection, of good things like love and friendship and family. TVD made it clear that to be a vampire was to be in hell. It’s why Damon promises Stefan an eternity of misery. It’s why the group responds with HORROR when Caroline is turned in 2x02. It’s why Damon’s confession in 2x12 rips at our hearts, and why the stakes are so high when we wonder whether Elena will be a vampire at the end of season 2. The show is very clear that it’s not actually becoming a vampire that makes us monsters, but the actions we take once we become vampires that make us monsters... but that those actions are also nearly inevitable and precipitous once the transition occurs. It’s really tragic. 

I remember the summer before season 3 aired the fan spaces were all abuzz with speculation about “what could Klaus have done that was so bad that not only was the vampire curse inflicted on him, but also on his entire family?” (that was the prevailing theory for how he could be the “first” Original vampire-- he was the one who had actually done whatever the thing was that had precipitated what was OBVIOUSLY a vengeance curse.)

Ordinary People was like LOL! NOPE! Joke’s on you for thinking we were going to actually discuss self-destructive behavior and the human psyche through the metaphorical lens of vampirism ;) 

There were definitely other things in season 3 that bugged-- the serial killer thing was hard to follow (and I tend to criticize anything that’s hard to follow for any viewer watching week to week, while also paying close attention... because that means it’s probably not well enough explained), the white oak stake bridge was LOL fine, it did lead to some epic stakings by our boy Matt tag-teaming with Elena and Stefan, and I did enjoy the idea that the whole bloodline dies... anyway, I digress. 

The flashbacks started being a problem in season 3. In season 1 & season 2, the flashbacks basically all told a continuous B storyline. In season 1, of course, we have 1864, in that gorgeous blue cast. We get a little additional information of that in season 2, and it’s amazing. But then in season 2, the B story is 1492, in that golden cast, also amazing. 

After that the flashbacks that start in season 3 are pretty random. We don’t have stories being told in the past throughout the season, but instead, random one-offs in random colors telling random stories. Not bad, per se, but definitely less affecting and much less cohesive and meaningful. 

Here’s the big big big issue with season 3: Klaus. 

The whole point of the season was to kill Klaus. It was explicitly stated. 

Every other season, once the motivation was stated, the show went through with it: open the tomb, stake the tomb vamps, take down Katherine, find a way to save Elena during the sacrifice, etc. 

Now, as everyone knows, I love and adore Klaus. But I also sort of hate him because I think the writers loved him too much and they wrecked the show a bit with him. They wanted to create drama with a “kill Klaus!” arc but there was never that much tension in it because I was certain from 3x12 onward that they never would. (well, I was stunned when he got staked at the end of season 3 and I just sort of whispered, “good” to my empty dorm room at the time-- but that was short-lived). It really really really took the wind out of the show’s sails when they didn’t stake him by season’s end, so the MOST major thing I would have done would have been to kill him off somehow at the end of season 3. 

If they didn’t kill him off, they should have devised a way to make peace/have Team Mystic Falls need him and him need them much earlier and much more concretely than they ever did. With the way things played out in actuality, our protagonists failed to do the one thing protagonists MUST do: take defining action. All of their actions in season 3 are completely for nothing, and that makes the whole thing fall apart. 

This also brings me around to something that will surprise absolutely no one: I have a lot of problems with the way that klaus x caroline was handled. I think it COULD have been done convincingly, but the writers were lazy/were very clearly just trying to get Klaus a ship because the actor is hot, and so they gave us the horse drawing, and the prom dress, and the ball gown, and frankly, a list of villain decay moments that I just... don’t know what to do with. And the ship pretty much ruined Caroline’s character because the whole point of her was that she was so much deeper and kinder than anyone gave her credit for, even than she gave herself credit for, but the ship was like LOL! NOPE! (I have a lot more on this written elsewhere in my blog) Also my boy Tyler got cut out of a HUGE amount of this show to make room for this ship, which was lousy. 

My last thought about season 3 is that this is when the characters-- especially Damon-- started to really decay. Rewatching early seasons of the show is WILD because Damon is WEIRD. He is so other and off-putting-- beautiful, but very very strange-- it’s in the way smolderholder held himself, the way he spoke, all the little things that sent little alarm bells ringing. He was delightfully inhuman. 

I vividly remember the stupid chipmunk argument in... 3x16? somewhere around there-- with Stefan in some back alley in Mystic Falls and I was just??? That was the moment I realized that all of those things about Damon’s acting that had appealed to me had vanished. I think the writers were trying to make him more likable/humanize him so he could be the main love interest, but it was very frustrating to me. 

Moving on to season 4. I was actually into the sire bond because it was difficult and problematic and felt to me like a chance to explore more complex issues through the “vampire” metaphor the way the show had done in earlier seasons. (I know this storyline is pretty much hated, but my stance is: if you don’t want dark, problematic, uncomfortable, and toxic storylines, don’t watch vampire genre tv shows. That simple!) 

I don’t mind the idea of the “cure” and I don’t even mind the Hunter thing/that Jeremy could be a Hunter (although I found the coincidence dumb). 

ACTUALLY what I would have liked VERY MUCH would be for Elena to go through most of her season 4 storyline-- becoming a vampire, having Jeremy die and her turning off her emotions, then going on her evil vampire rampage and actually killing and hurting innocents, only THEN for her to have the cure forced on her after like a year of being a vampire. The defining arc of Elena’s character in the early seasons is her moral decay-- Katherine is the warning of what Elena will inevitably become if she continues down the path she’s on-- so it would be fascinating to see her go DOWN that path, very far, and then to have her become human again-- and have her actually have to deal with the horrors she committed. (I have a bit of a theory that vampires have one foot over the veil into the realm of death, and maybe this, if anything, makes it easier for them to forget their humanity/become truly monstrous, but that becoming human again would slam all of that into the front and center again)-- it would be a way for Elena to actually have to confront her story arc-- what path is she going to go down? Is she going to continue her slide into callousness and monstrosity? Or can she turn it around? Must she give up the Salvatores to do that? 

I don’t really mind the season 4 Silas content. Will say that once again the inclusion of any of the Originals in season 4 is pretty useless which is frustrating to me, and their place in the TVD narrative in general is an annoying dead-end. 

However, I do think that Silas introduces a big shift in TVD: their need for a yearly big bad. As I mentioned above, TVD was always “one thing leading to another” -- starting with Silas, they started introducing yearly Big Bads (Silas, the Travelers, Kai) that were arbitrary and frustrating and were the thing that most broke me out of my suspension of in-universe belief. The idea that the show would need a big bad was a fundamental misunderstanding of the narrative structure of the first 3 seasons by the writers in those later seasons. 

You asked what the straw that broke the camel’s back was and I can tell you, it was this: 

I laughed myself sick and that was the last time that TVD was appointment television for me. I call this the Party City Greek costume. 

I did eventually marathon season 5 well after it was over, and even though a lot all of the ways the show retconned itself drove me insane, it was overall fun just to watch for the drama and the pace. 

My biggest problems with season 5... 

This was around the time that Bonnie was dead then alive then dead then alive... I can’t actually keep track any more at this point what’s up with our girl 

Stelena pretty much disappeared. 

I actually think one of the bigger problems in the show was that the show was stronger when it was mostly about Damon, Stefan, and Elena, and at some point they gave more equal screen time to other characters which ended up meaning that I spent a lot of screen time with characters I just didn’t care about (ENZO) 

UGH THE DOPPELGANGER STUFF

So, if you’ve read my fics, you know I spend a huge amount of time parsing the mechanics of the doppelganger, how the magic around it might work, what the implications are, etc. 

I CAN’T STAND what happened to the doppelganger stuff in season 5! UGH. HOW DOES TOM WHAT’S HIS FACE EXIST? DID STEFAN HAVE A BABY WHEN HE WAS 15?!? Seriously!!! HOW!!!! Because it’s real clear in canon that only DIRECT line descendants create doppelgangers! 

ALSO. The Amara thing. Just stop it. 

This actually leads to a pretty major issue: TVD had a bad habit of establishing really exquisite doomed histories and then wrecking them with too much information later. 

The story of Tatia Petrova is a masterpiece in doomed, tragic, romantic mythology. Teenage girl falls in love with two brothers and so their parents decide to use her as the blood sacrifice for their creepy curse “protection spell” and so they murder her-- you get the image of how terrified she must have been, dragged out of her home in the middle of the night, trapped, maybe dying slowly, how she dies for loving too much, for being just a little too wild, a little too trusting-- and how that curse echoes down the ages. The idea that that act of savagery somehow created the doppelganger line. The Amara thing (as well as the Originals revelation that Elijah killed Tatia) gut the impact of that TVD myth-- which was a strong one in the imaginations of the viewers. 

And the idea that vampire doppelganger blood is useful for anything??? I can’t. The WHOLE POINT of season 2 is that Katherine turns herself into a vampire to avoid the sacrifice! We are explicitly told-- you can’t be two things at once, if you become a vampire, you negate your identity as a witch or a doppelganger or whatever-- literally the WHOLE PLOT of season 2 centers on how useless Elena’s blood would be if she were turned! And now Stefan is in on this? NOPE. I’m out. 

Anyway, another myth that got wrecked in season 5 was the Katerina Petrova myth. Part of her tragedy is that she never even gets to hold her baby. Is the idea that her baby grows up and has a normal life and Katerina never even gets to find out anything about her. That she completely loses this one thing that might have humanized her. And then of course the great tragedy in England that ultimately destroys her. I really hated meeting Katherine’s daughter, because it reversed the pathos of Katherine’s past and rendered it emotionally inert. And also Nadia sucked. 

The Travelers were fun enough but also they made no sense (DOPPELGANGER VAMPIRE BLOOD) but most especially I hated the idea that Katherine was a Traveler just WHY 

I got... partway through season 6, although, I couldn’t tell you where exactly I stopped watching for no particular reason. 

I remember really enjoying Tyler x Liv and the way that they made Tyler human again, and brought Alaric back, etc at the end of season 5-- it felt like such a fresh reboot to everything and it’s one of the things that TVD does really well. 

That Thanksgiving episode sticks out to me as a train wreck though because I realized that the central conflict had absolutely nothing to do with any of the characters I actually cared about, and was instead about the twins... whom I liked, but not really any more than I liked the Martins in season 2, you know? 

Also vampire blood being unable to cure cancer sounds arbitrary to me. 

As for how I would have preferred the show to end? 

Hmm. Well. I think it should have ended sooner-- this “the show is really about these two brothers” is just incorrect. The show was about the two brothers and Elena. It was about that triangulated relationship. I think that even if Elena ended up with one or the other at any given point in the show, the other third point in that triangle should have stuck around-- I’ve always disliked Stefan slinking off in season 5 because it tears apart the foundation of the show. 

I have no idea how it should have ended. I guess? the ending? was okay? I’ve never actually seen it. 

On to the Originals... so, the magical pregnancy didn’t really bug me because there are plenty of fandoms where vampires can procreate/I guess if Klaus is part werewolf, he has a foot closer back to the mortal coil, and vampire bodies in TVD have heartbeats, are warm, digest food, etc, so it was like, fine, sure. 

I would say I watched... some of season 1? and I watched most of season 2? I watched whatever I needed to watch for fic research basically, and have a very confused sense of what happened on that show. I’m always skeptical of anything set in New Orleans though because no one ever seems to leave the French Quarter which is so preposterous because the Quarter is probably smaller than Mystic Falls. But anyway. The tribrid thing has never made sense, but I just sort of rolled with what I’ve heard about the Originals? I really love Marcel and think he was actually the protagonist of the show, whereas Klaus was definitely the antagonist. (I just can’t bring myself to side with Klaus on pretty much anything...) 

Okay I think this ties up all of your questions/most of my thoughts except for maybe... what I find absurd. 

To answer that: every time I learn something new I am stunned and my jaw drops in a literal guffaw. For example, today reading your ask was the first time that I found out that Ric was unrequited in love with Caroline (although, former student carrying her former teacher’s children also makes me uncomfortable). As far as I know from seasons 7-8, Damon sleeps with someone named Crystal, Caroline somehow magically carries Alaric’s children with their dead witch mom (and apparently Alaric is in love with Caroline while that happens?), Matt might be a cop, Damon and Stefan fight the literal devil and Katherine is their queen, Bonnie and Enzo??, Caroline and Stefan get married, what’s a Jeremy Gilbert, maybe Damon sets Elena’s fake coffin on fire?, Damon kills Tyler (WHICH IS UNACCEPTABLE), there are witches who are vampires called Heretics, and also there are Sirens and maybe Mama Salvatore is one. The end. Every time I learn something new it’s the most amazing thing I have ever heard and I can’t imagine how it could be so, but I accept it. 

Am I missing anything? 

Legacies is so beyond my comprehension that I just have to roll with everything I hear. God Bless Matt Davis for leading that cast. 

[stereostevie]

‘Exuma’ at 50: How a Bahamian Artist Channeled Island Culture Into a Strange Sonic Ritual by Brenna Ehrlich

The performer known as Exuma channeled his Bahamian heritage into a captivating 1970 debut. Fans and participants look back.

Chances are, you’ve never heard a boast track quite like “Exuma, the Obeah Man,” the opening song off Exuma’s self-titled 1970 album.

A wolf howls, frogs count off a ramshackle symphony, bells jingle, drums palpitate, a zombie exhales, all by way of introducing the one-of-a-kind Bahamian performer, born Tony Mackey: “I came down on a lightning bolt/Nine months in my mama’s belly,” he proclaims. “When I was born, the midwife/Screamed and shout/I had fire and brimstone/Coming out of my mouth/I’m Exuma, the Obeah Man.”

“[Obeah] was with my grandfather, with my father, with my mother, with my uncles who taught me,” Mackey said in a 1970 interview, referring to the spiritual practice he grew up with in the Bahamas. “It has been my religion in the vein that everyone has grown up with some sort of religion, a cult that was taught. Christianity is like good and evil. God is both. He unlocked the secrets to Moses, good and evil, so Moses could help the children of Israel. It’s the same thing, the whole completeness — the Obeah Man, spirits of air.”

The music world is hardly devoid of gimmicks, alter egos, and adopted personas. But Mackey’s Exuma moniker, borrowed from the name of an island district in the Bahamas, was never just that — he lived and breathed his culture, channeling it into a debut album so singularly weird, wonderful, and enchanted that it’s not surprising it’s remembered only by the most industrious of crate-diggers. A cuddly Dr. John dabbling in voodoo Mackey was not; Exuma is a parade, a séance, a condemnation of racist evils.

“The eccentricity of [Dr. John’s 1968 debut] Gris-Gris is, like, ‘Let’s roll a fat joint,'” says Okkervil River frontman and devout Exuma fan Will Sheff. “The eccentricity of Exuma is more like PCP.” Sheff became hip to Exuma when his former bandmate Jonathan Meiburg (singer-guitarist of Shearwater) happened to hear “Obeah Woman,” Nina Simone’s 1974 spin on “Obeah Man.” Sheff was entranced by Exuma’s debut, especially the sincerity of its lyrics and Mackey’s whole-hearted earnestness. “There’s something about when somebody is very devoutly religious, where you trust them not to sell you something,” he tells Rolling Stone. “I mean, they may be trying to sell you their religious beliefs, but their religious beliefs are so vitally important to them that they kind of stop trying to sell themselves.”

“He was unique. He was good,” says Quint Davis, producer of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, where Exuma became a mainstay later in his career. “He was like a voodoo Richie Havens or something.”

Macfarlane Gregory Anthony Mackey grew up in Nassau, Bahamas, steeped in both Bahamian history and American culture. Each Boxing Day, he witnessed Junkanoo parades — a tradition dating back hundreds of years and commemorating days when slaves finally had time off — replete with music, masks, and folklore. At the movies, accessed with pocket money earned from selling fish on weekends, he saw performances by Sam Cooke and Fats Domino.

“Saying the word ‘Junkanoo’ to most Bahamians gets their hearts beating faster and their breathing gets shorter and faster,” Langston Longley, leader of Bahamas Junkanoo Revue, has said. “It’s hard to express in words because it’s a feeling, a spirit that’s evoked within from the sound of a goatskin drum, a cowbell, or a bugle.”

“I grew up a roots person, someone knowing about the bush and the herbs and the spiritual realm,” Mackey told Wavelength in 1981 of his life back home. “It was inbred into all of us. Just like for people growing up in the lowlands of Delta Country or places like Africa.”

In 1961, when he was 17, Mackey moved to New York’s Greenwich Village to become an architect, according to a 1970 interview, but he abandoned that dream when he ran out of money. He then acquired a junked-up guitar on which he practiced Bahamian calypsos and penned songs about his home. “I started playing around when Bob Dylan, Richie Havens, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Richard Pryor, Hendrix, and Streisand were all down there, too, hanging out and performing at the Cafe Bizarre,” Mackey recalled in 1994. “I’d been singing down there, and we’d all been exchanging ideas and stuff. Then one time a producer came up to me and said he was very interested in recording some of my original songs, but he said that I needed a vehicle. I remembered the Obeah Man from my childhood — he’s the one with the colorful robes who would deal with the elements and the moonrise, the clouds, and the vibrations of the earth. So, I decided to call myself Exuma, the Obeah Man.”

Mackey’s manager, Bob Wyld, helped him form a band to record his debut album, including Wyld’s client Peppy Castro of the Blues Magoos. “It was like acting. Like, ‘OK, I’ll take a little alias, I’ll be Spy Boy,’ and all this kind of stuff,” Castro tells Rolling Stone. All the members of Mackey’s band adopted stage names, which wasn’t that strange to Castro, who originated the role of Berger in the Broadway show Hair.

“Then I met Tony and then I got into the folklore and I started to see what he was about — this history of coming from the [Bahamas],” he adds. “It was great. It was inventive. We would do a little Junkanoo parade from out of the dressing room, right up to the stage. It was about the show of it all. Coming from somebody who wanted to learn music in a more traditional form, that was kind of cool.”

The band recorded Exuma at Bob Liftin’s Regent Sound Studios in New York City — where the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and Elton John also laid down tracks — giving the bizarre record a slick sheen. Mackey once said that the music came to him in a dream, and he set the mood in the studio accordingly. “It was so free form. We turned the lights out, we’d put up candles, he’d get on a mic and he’d just start going off and singing crazy stuff and we followed it,” Castro says. “You would go into trances. In those days, I was a little hippie, so yeah, we’d be smoking weed there and getting high. It became a séance almost. It was like, ‘We’re going into this mode and we’re going to see where it takes us.’”

“There were no boundaries with Tony,” he adds. “It was free for him. It’s kind of like what people felt like when they played with Chuck Berry. If you talk to any of the musicians who played with Chuck Berry, you just had to be on your toes because he would change keys in the middle of the song. But there was also the spiritual stuff, you know, just the crazy voodoo-ish stuff. It was just so free for him.”

Everyone Rolling Stone talked with for this story compared Mackey to Richie Havens, but the similarities only really extend to, perhaps, Havens’ role in the Greenwich Village scene and the rich quality of his voice. “You can put on Dr. John and Richie Havens and water the plants. It’s good background music,” Will Sheff says. “But if [Exuma’s] ‘Séance in the Sixth Fret’ comes on shuffle, you’re going to skip it. It’s active listening; it sends a chill down your spine.”

Exuma is a kind of aural movie — fitting, as Mackey went on to write plays — that starts off boastful and proud with “Obeah Man” then descends into darker territory. The second track, “Dambala,” is a melodic damnation of slave owners: “You slavers will know/What it’s like to be a slave,” Mackey wails, “You’ll remain in your graves/With the stench and the smell.”

“It reminds me of Jordan Peele movies — movies that deal with sort of the black experience, a collective trauma,” Sheff says of the song. “He’s cursing a slaver and there’s something so intensely powerful about that.”

Then there’s zombie ode “Mama Loi, Papa Loi,” a frankly terrifying story of men rising from the dead, featuring guttural yelps and groans. “Jingo, Jingo he ain’t dead/He can see from the back of his head,” Mackey sings. That leads into the comparatively peppy “Junkanoo,” an instrumental that recalls the parades of the musician’s youth. Things get dark again with “Séance in the Sixth Fret,” which is just that — a yearning ritual in which the band calls to a litany of spirits. “Hand on quill/Hand on pencil/Hand on pen/Tell me spirit/Tell me when,” Mackey intones. The more accessible “You Don’t Know What’s Going On,” follows, leading into epic prophecy “The Vision,” which foretells the end of the world: “And all the dead walking throughout the land/Whispering, Whispering, it was judgment day.”

The strange, gorgeous record was released on Mercury Records, and at the time, the label had high hopes for its success, as it was apparently getting solid radio play. “The reaction is that of a heavy, big-numbers contemporary album,” Mercury exec Lou Simon said at the time. “As a result, we’re going to give it all the merchandising support we can muster.” But the album apparently failed to break through, and Mackey left Mercury in 1971 after releasing Exuma II. His legacy lived on in the corners of popular culture: Nina Simone covered “Dambala” as well as “Obeah Man,” with both tracks appearing on It Is Finished, a 1974 LP that failed to take off. Mackey himself went on to drop still more albums but mostly operated in a quiet kind of obscurity.

“What he didn’t have was the commercial base, you know, the formula,” Castro says by way of explanation. “Let’s face it, the music business is very fickle and it boxes you in. And if you’re going to join that world, it’s in your best interest to commercialize yourself and to come up with a formula that works. He didn’t have that formula.”

Mackey did find a home, though, at the newly minted New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival in 1978, an atmosphere that seemed more in keeping with his spiritual aesthetic than mainstream radio. “New Orleans is the most receptive place in the world to the artist, this music spirit that flies around in the air all the time waiting to be reborn and reborn,” he told Wavelength in 1981.

“He was a Caribbean Dr. John, so to speak,” festival producer Davis says. “When I heard [his album], I said, ‘Well, that’s us.’ This guy with feathers on his head, his big hat. Everybody loved him and he became part of the festival family.”

“I think he was the first Caribbean act that we had,” Davis adds. “I hesitate to say that he was a trailblazer because there weren’t a lot of people following in his footsteps.”

[aion-rsa]

Reading beyond the veil: Paranormal book Recommendations From the Pros

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Don’t cross the streams. Never take your hands off a Ouija board without first saying “Goodbye.” The undead has to be invited in. Kill it with fire. Shoot it in the head. Wolfman’s got nards.

When it comes to the entertainment of the unexplained, or paranormal pop culture, humans live in a world(s) populated by all manner of preternatural, supernatural, otherworldly, and extradimensional phenomena. But entertainment also tells us there are rules that bring order to the abnormal – whether it’s a ghost or demon, alien or sasquatch, werewolf or vampire, or even a troll or fairy.

Yet behind every silver bullet solution that makes it into a script, there is typically a wealth of academic study that’s both complicated, and sometimes contradictory. From folklore to grimoire, anthropology to parapsychology, researchers have attempted to document and take a serious look at topics slightly askew from the norm. They are the real-world counterparts of Dr. Spengler, Dr. Van Helsing, and Father Merrin.

(And, perhaps unlike those fictional “experts,” many researchers would likely tell you the more they read up on these topics, the clearer it becomes there is more unknown than known, and more theories than rules.)

With that in mind, we reached out to a few notable figures and esteemed colleagues within the paranormal community to offer reading suggestions that go beyond what pop culture tells us about the unexplained. The following list is a guide for those inspired by the movies and TV shows to take a longer look through the veil, under the bed, at the stars, and into the forest.

Amy Bruni

(Host/Executive Producer, Travel Channel’s Kindred Spirits; Author, Life With The Afterlife):

ESP, Hauntings and Poltergeists: A Parapsychologist’s Handbook by Loyd Auerbach

“While I think it’s highly important to have a library of paranormal books, and to form your own research and investigative methodologies, I almost always recommend Loyd Auerbach’s ESP, Hauntings and Poltergeists: A Parapsychologist’s Handbook as a must have. 

It was published in 1986, and is widely cited as one of the books that inspired many of today’s most well-known investigators to investigate the way they do. A good number of Loyd’s methods and theories still ring true, as well as his healthy dose of skepticism. It’s not the type of investigation you see on television, that’s for sure, but it’s got some great ideas to help distinguish between what could be an actual haunting vs a perceived haunting.”

Grant Wilson

(Host/Executive Producer, A&E’s Ghost Hunters):

Morphic Resonance & The Presence of the Past: The Memory of Nature by Rupert Sheldrake

“Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., and former research fellow of the Royal Society, guides us through his journey to discover if our memories exist outside ourselves, and how that idea could affect our view on how the entire universe operates. Sheldrake gently opens the mind to this idea with solid thinking, educated speculation, and sound experimentation. More than just a mental exercise, his theory proposes that all self-organizing systems, from crystals to human society share a common memory which guides their collective form and behavior. Basically, the more people learn something, the easier it is for others to learn. Which, if true, would have huge implications in the field of paranormal research, not to mention the fields of biology, chemistry, physics, psychology, and sociology. If our memories are collectively shared and stored outside our own brains, are ghosts simply some sort of manifestation of shared memories? I recommend this book to anyone looking to draw their mind out of the box we so comfortably live in and reshape how we think about well, pretty much everything.”

Jeff Belanger

(Author, Writer/Researcher, Ghost Adventures; Host, New England Legends podcast, and TV series):

Confessions of a Ghost-Hunter by Harry Price

“Published in London in 1936, this is a must-read to see how far paranormal investigation has come (and how little it’s actually changed in almost a century). In the book, Harry Price (1881 – 1948) explores some of his favorite cases, how to test a spirit medium, spirit photography, and he delves into his methods of investigating including equipment, trigger objects, interviews, and theories. Harry Price is the original ghost hunter.

Read it for free online here: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.218596/page/n9/mode/2up

Ghosts: True Encounters with the World Beyond by Hans Holzer

Parapsychologist Hans Holzer (1920 – 2009) helped usher the paranormal into the mainstream with his many books and media appearances. Originally published in 1997, Holzer profiles some of his favorite cases and the first-hand experiences encountered by the witnesses he interviewed. By 97’, Holzer had reached the age and point of his career where he believed he pretty much had everything figured out. Though I don’t agree with all of his theories or ideas on the afterlife, I tip my hat at his confidence on spelling out the unknown.”

Bryce Johnson

(Actor; Co-host, Bigfoot Collector’s Club podcast):

Where the Footprints End, High Strangeness and the Bigfoot Phenomenon Volume I: Folklore by Joshua Cutchin and Timothy Renner

“What in the hell is really going on with Bigfoot? Is this just a flesh & blood creature like most think, or is there something more “paranormal” taking place? It’s a great question, and one that Cutchin and Renner (both outside-the-box thinkers) tackle head on. It’s hard to deny that these guys are onto something, and after having read it, I don’t think that I can ever go back to thinking that Sasquatch is just an unconfirmed North American Wood Ape. Instead, what if the big guy/gal is more like a wilderness poltergeist? A “Wildnesgeist” if you will. A term coined by the authors. And while the term does not exactly roll off the tongue, it certainly could help explain the strange lights and orbs, sudden dematerialization, telepathic mind-speak, and the countless varieties of size, shape and colors reported with Bigfoot sightings. Books like the aforementioned are an integral piece of the puzzle if we ever wish to get to the bottom of what is really taking place on this strange planet of ours, and perhaps what Vallee did for the UFO phenomenon, Cutchin & Renner could do for the Bigfoot Phenomenon. Overall Rating 4 Bigfeet out of 5!”

M. Belanger

(Comparative religious studies author, The Dictionary of Demons; Paranormal Investigator, Paranormal State, Portals to Hell):

Poltergeist by Colin Wilson

“For those doing research into ghosts and the paranormal, Colin Wilson should be on your bookshelves right next to Hans Holzer. In addition to his landmark eponymous survey, The Occult, Wilson produced numerous books exploring psychic and paranormal phenomena over his decades-long career. My personal favorite is Poltergeist, which explores the concept of destructive hauntings. Extensive, cross-disciplinary research is a hallmark of Wilson’s work, and this book is no exception. Poltergeist includes theories about what these “noisy ghosts” really are, explores psychological and supernatural implications of their manifestations, and recounts numerous documented cases of the phenomena from the ancient through the modern world. Throughout the book, Wilson blends perspectives from psychology, anthropology, folklore, and mythology together with dedicated reporting of modern experiences. I keep my copy next to Harry Price’s book on the same subject.

The Phantom World by Augustin Calmet

“For a deeper dive into the folkloric roots of many of our modern beliefs about ghosts, hauntings, and even vampires, it is worth the search to score a copy of Augustin Calmet’s treatise on the apparitions of spirits and on vampires, often titled simply The Phantom World. This chunky tome covers a wide variety of hauntings, retelling experiences as they were relayed to Calmet himself, often through other members of the clergy. As a French Benedictine monk, Calmet was viewed as an authority on the supernatural and the miraculous, and although he does not apply much in the way of critical analysis to the stories he receives, the fact that he was able to record and publish these tales at all makes up for what modern readers might consider a fairly superstitious nature. As with Glanvill’s Saducismus Triumphatus, it is important to keep in mind that clergy effectively filled the role of paranormal investigators during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, collecting, verifying, and disseminating the accounts of their parishioners. Without their writings, credulous as they may in hindsight seem, we would have little access to any record of these strange and frightful encounters. Calmet’s work is of special value because it is one of the fist treatises to collect a wide variety of European vampire encounters, including some of the stories that have proven seminal to vampire folklore as we understand it today.

Demoniality by Lodovico Sinistrari

The final volume I would recommend for modern investigators is a slim treatise produced by another member of the European clergy, this time a Franciscan priest by the name of Lodovico Sinistrari. Sinistrari is arguably where we derive most of our beliefs about incubus and succubus demons, and he collects both his theories on these creatures and several compelling tales in his book, Demoniality. It is a quick and fun read — if, like me, learning about demons is your definition of fun.”

Margee Kerr, Ph.D.

(Sociologist; Author, Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear):

On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears by Stephen T. Asma

“Hailed as “a feast” (Washington Post) and “a modern-day bestiary” (The New Yorker), Stephen Asma’s On Monsters is a wide-ranging cultural and conceptual history of monsters — how they have evolved over time, what functions they have served for us, and what shapes they are likely to take in the future.”

Richard Estep

(Author, Haunted Healthcare; Travel Channel’s Paranormal Night Shift):

This House is Haunted by Guy Lyon Playfair

“In a field that’s chock full of sensationalist books, Guy Lyon Playfair’s This House is Haunted is a breath of fresh air. One of the few comprehensive accounts of a poltergeist-type haunting that runs from the very first incident through to the end, Playfair’s book is a masterclass on how to investigate the paranormal. There’s no drama, no theatricality; seasoned investigator Playfair and his partner, Maurice Grosse of the Society for Psychical Research, examine the strange goings-on in a small house in Enfield with a critical eye, always seeking out rational explanations and debunking whatever they can. This House is Haunted works as a page-turning narrative, but also contains a wealth of information for today’s paranormal enthusiast. As such, it deserves a much wider audience.”

Brian J. Cano

(Paranormal Investigator; Travel Channel’s Paranormal Caught on Camera):

The Encyclopedia of Ghost & Spirits by Rosemary Ellen Guiley

“To me, this is a must-have in any serious paranormal library. It references an impressive amount of material, and I use it often. There may be a name or concept that sounds familiar to me and when I need a refresher, it’s the first tome I reach for. Invariably, as I turn the pages, I get sucked in, and end up delving into many other entries.  It’s like an academic supernatural “choose your own adventure”!

How to Hunt Ghosts: A Practical Guide by Joshua P. Warren

“This gem of a guide is perfect for anyone looking to get their feet wet in paranormal investigating. It is thoughtful, comprehensive and delivers the necessary information for anyone to begin doing the work while walking the fine line between skepticism and belief. I’ve recommended it many times over the years and the guide has held up to this day.”

Buy How to Hunt Ghosts: A Practical Guide on Amazon

Ryan Sprague

(Author, Podcast Host, Somewhere In The Skies; Co-host of Mysteries Decoded on the CW):

Communion by Whitley Strieber

“In the 1980s, author Whitley Strieber was best known for his horror novels such as The Hunger and Wolfen. But below the surface of his fictional works was a story so visceral and bizarre, that it would change the course of his career thereafter. This was the 1987 best-seller, Communion. Many are familiar with the now-famous book cover of a beige-colored alien with big, black orbital eyes. But the contents of the book is what truly stays with readers. The story of a man struggling with fractured memories of being taken in the night by what he calls “visitors” and experimented on. The raw and traumatic string of events is what packs the biggest punch in the book. But even stronger are the bigger questions to be asked of this supposedly true story: If we are not alone, and we are being visited, what do these visitors want, and to what lengths will they go for their true agenda? Communion is well written, brutally honest, terrifying, beautiful, and profound in the most alien of ways. It ushered in the alien abduction controversy for many years to come and has ingrained itself into the annals of both pop culture and UFO history forever.”

Buy Communion on Amazon

Lynne S. McNeill, Ph.D.

(Folklorist; Author, Legend Tripping: A Contemporary Legend Casebook):

Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live and Lucifer Ascending by Bill Ellis

“These two books present a folklorist’s perspective on the kinds of traditions and phenomena that paranormal investigators are interested in. His perspective highlights that folklorists aren’t looking to debunk or prove anything — they simply want to understand the cultural role that these ever-popular topics are playing.”

Buy Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live on Amazon

Ty Gowen

(Paranormal Investigator, Haunt ME):

Ghost Hunter by Hans Holzer 

“This may not be an obscure text in paranormal circles, but that doesn’t make it any less important. Holzer existed in a liminal time for the paranormal, when the obscure community was in the direct center of a century-long shift between the popularity of the Spiritualism of the late-1800s, and its Hollywood resurgence in the mid-2000s.

This book chronicles some of Holzer’s cases while researching in NYC, as well as providing his commentary. This commentary is particularly important to those studying the field. We’re able to get a snapshot of what early research and curiosity were like, before it was tainted by the entertainment industry. It can be a bit dry, but that is part of the appeal; the book isn’t meant to dazzle or secure ratings. It might not be for everyone, but it was definitely a gateway book for me.

Honorable mention (because it’s fiction) is Ghost Stories by Roald Dahl. He read 749 short stories and narrowed it down to 14 for his book, and they’re great! Who knew the guy who wrote BFG was so macabre!” 

Buy Ghost Hunter on Amazon

Aaron Sagers

(Creator, ParanormalPopCulture.com; Paranormal Journalist, Paranormal Caught on Camera, Paranormal Lockdown; Co-Executive Producer/Host, Paranormal Paparazzi; Co-Host, NightMerica Podcast):

The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel

“Journalist John Keel remains a giant in the paranormal field, and for me personally, he was the first person whose work I discovered that connected the dots between multiple phenomena. He’s described by some as a UFOlogist, but I think he’s so much more. Before it was a 2002 movie that did wonders for the Chapstick brand, The Mothman Prophecies was Keel’s 1975 book that documented strange sightings around Point Pleasant, West Virginia – which culminated with the lethal collapse of the Silver Bridge in 1967. Yes, this book discusses the winged thing (Cryptid? Demon? Alien? Ultraterrestrial?) eyewitnesses described in Point Pleasant, and gives historical and folkloric context to it, but Keel goes deeper into the story. Though he does have his own conclusions, the author’s journalistic approach, and open-mindedness, served as an inspiration and starting point to me within this strange world. For a second helping of Keel, I’d recommend Operation Trojan Horse.

Buy The Mothman Prophecies on Amazon

A History of Ghosts: The True Story of Seances, Mediums, Ghosts, and Ghostbusters by Peter Aykroyd

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Notice that last name? Yes, Peter Aykroyd is the father of Dan Aykroyd, aka Ray Stantz, Ghostbusters co-writer, UFO aficionado, and entrepreneur of the metaphysically themed Crystal Head vodka. Dan inherited his love of the paranormal honestly, coming from a family of prominent Spiritualists, and in this book, his father discusses the Aykroyds’ role in the belief system popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Though it can be a dry read at times, and is not a collection of spooky ghost stories, History takes the reader on a tour of an era of living room seances, mediums, charlatans, eccentric characters, and famous names. I also think there are a lot of parallels to the age of Spiritualism, and the one we’re in now, where reality-TV paranormal programming continues to be a popular genre, and many people seek life answers in the supernatural world.”  

Buy A History of Ghosts: The True Story of Seances, Mediums, Ghosts, and Ghostbusters by Peter Aykroyd on Amazon

The post Reading beyond the veil: Paranormal book Recommendations From the Pros appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[dantays-inferno]

Hidden meanings in Taylor's Apple Music interview

Why the fan in the background?

Historically, women in Western cultures have purportedly used fans to communicate coded messages. Read more on the Sotheby's website, which includes this excerpt from a 19th century pamphlet on the meanings of different fan motions:

The fan is behind Taylor's head and open wide, which would mean "wait for me" and "don't forget me."

This may seem like a ridiculous conjecture, but we all know Taylor loves to leave secret messages, and I've noticed she's a big history and antiques buff. She seems to be into 19th century and has even mentioned it being a an inspiration for the aesthetic of folklore/evermore. Plus, the article was on Sotheby's, an auction house/art dealer which I imagine she's worked with given her impressive antiques collection.

Intriguing.

But there’s more art...and it gets more interesting...

The small statue appears to be a religious icon of some sort, probably a saint. As I thought about the statue throughout the day, a lyric from a Sara Bareilles song on her 2019 album Amidst the Chaos sprang to mind:

Could I rest here for a while

Near that medal 'round your neck

St. Jude's wearing a smile

He wouldn't mind I bet

I can't go face the world

My bones won't hold me up

So tell the saint of lost souls where to find me

Softly sleeping

Here in the deep end of someone who loves me

(she is such an incredible artist...really underrated. She sang "Brave" with Taylor on the Red tour and has collaborated with Jack Antonoff, so I think it's reasonable to believe Taylor has listened to her work.)

Anyways, I had been running on the theory that the statue was probably Mary since it looked like some kind of saint, but she's usually represented as the Madonna, with baby Jesus. Then I wondered...if St. Jude is the patron of lost causes and evermore is one big tribute to relationships just stalling out (and folklore seems to be a lot of knowing the end is near but trying to patch things up), maybe the statue IS St. Jude. There was also an album by Justin Townes Earle last year "The Saint of Lost Causes" which got some critical praise.

Anyways, there is a book of Jude in the New Testament, and one of the first things mentioned is the Israelites in the Egypt. What is to Taylor's left? A fresco of Egypt (you can see pyramids in some shots.) I think the painting is meant to clarify which saint the statue is.

In addition (this is a more dubious guess), St. Jude is sometimes depicted with a flame over his head, and the flowers sort of give that vibe. But Taylor also seems into Victorian flower language, so maybe it's something to do with that.

To me, Taylor is saying that though she knows he feelings for whoever she wrote the letter mentioned in the very raw song "closure," are probably a lost cause, she prays they are not and begs the person not to forget her, but to wait for her.

I feel you, Tay. Jude will probably be my patron saint when I join a convent in a few years once I’ve finally given up on finding reciprocal love.

Anyways, if you read our blog, you probably know who we think the object of her affections is, but I'll just leave it at that.

Prayers to St. Jude for Taylor 🙏 evermore seems to come from a place of raw pain.

[notyourmothersspellbook]

I tried all the FAQ links I saw, and tried searching FAQ on your blog, but none of them work on the app. I am exclusively mobile and the site just opens the app.. is there an easier way I can access it?

I’ll put it here below the read more

FAQ

What is Witchcraft?

Most basically, witchcraft is an ongoing practice where you develop skills used to perform spells in order to enact real world results. There are, of course, different paths of witchcraft with different rules and beliefs.

Is Witchcraft a Religion?

Nope. Unlike something like Wicca, which involves the worship of certain energies/deities, witchcraft does not require the worship of any god, spirit, entity, or energy. Anyone can practice witchcraft regardless of religious affiliation. In fact, almost all religions can be drawn on and used in your craft (yes, even Christianity which is used frequently in folk practices).

Can Anyone be a Witch?

Absolutely. While some traditional paths require a kind of initiation ritual, the witchcraft that I discuss here on this blog does not. Anyone can practice magic and can practice witchcraft. As a result, if you choose to identify yourself as a witch then you’re certainly free to do so. Magic is a skill that is learned and anyone can learn it.

Can Men be Witches?

Yes. The term “witch” is an historically gender-neutral term and has been since its inception. While you’re free to identify your practice however you like, witch is the term used for male, female, and gender-non-conforming magic practitioners.

What Type of Witch am I?

You may have seen some witches choose to identify themselves as green witches, storm witches, kitchen witches, etc. These terms are sort of like genres so that you know what kind of magic the witch focuses on primarily. A divination witch, for instance, focuses their practice around divination and so would be a good resource for questions about tarot or pendulum readings. You don’t have to identify yourself at all and you’re free to identify with multiple genres or focuses as well. You can consider yourself a kitchen witch and a plant witch if your craft is interested in both of those things. Don’t get so tied up in labelling your practice - the terms are only meant to be a helpful way of finding information and like-minded witches, but if they’re unhelpful or restrictive then feel free to not bother with them.

What Resources do you Recommend?

I don’t often recommend many books just because there are so many different paths and options. However, some books that I do recommend are: Mrs. B’s Guide to Household Witchery (available online and good for beginners), Southern Cunning’s Folkloric Witchcraft in the American South, anything written by Gemma Gary, anything written by Sarah Anne Lawless, The Silver Bullet by Hurbert Davis, A Deed Without a Name by Lee Morgan, Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits by Emma Wilby, Signs, Cures, and Witchery,The Extremely Large Herbal Grimoire (available online), America Bewitched: The Story of Witchcraft After Salem, Witches, Ghosts, and Signs: Folklore of the Southern Appalachians, The Curious Lore of Precious Stones, and A Grimoire for Modern Cunning Folk.

I also recommend watching Molly Roberts on Youtube as well as checking out Ben Lucas’s videos on learning Tarot.

Where do I Start?

I suggest starting with your surroundings, which is what influenced most historical witches. What plants grow in your area? What resources can you find within an hours walk of your door? What is the dirt like where you live? What can you grow? Where are the dead of your town remembered? What is the history of your space? What are  local folklores or beliefs? When do the seasons change where you live? What is the weather like? What are you near in terms of land and water?

Begin with local legends and stories, begin with the feel of the land and the seasons, listen listen listen to what they’re all telling you. And then, begin with what you need. If you were drawn to the craft because you need work and money, then don’t waste time learning divination first. Dive in to the spellwork that you need at the moment. You’ll make mistakes. These are learning moments.

How do I Know if a Spell has Worked?

Whenever you perform a spell, you should write down what you did and when. That way, you’re able to track what you notice in the coming days/weeks/months. If I perform a beauty glamour on Saturday morning and realize that Sunday night nearly everyone I pass is complimenting me, that means that I got results, but that maybe they took too long to manifest. So it’s back to the drawing board to see how I can make my spell more specific. Experimenting and seeing what works and what doesn’t is the best way to learn and grow your practice.

What is a Grimoire?

It’s a place for witches to keep important information and spells. Some use a blog, some use a notebook or journal, but really it can look like whatever you need. As long as it’s useful to you then the rest isn’t as important.

Do I Have to Work with Gods/Spirits?

Not necessarily. Witchcraft isn’t a religion so you don’t have to think about, believe in, or work with any gods. And while spirits are called on to help provide information, guidance, and power you don’t necessarily have to do direct spirit work especially just starting out.

What are Witch Sabbats?

Popularized by Wicca, the Wheel of the Year is a list of witch-related holidays that are meant to coincide with the seasons. They fall on equinoxes, solstices, and their mid-way points. They mostly borrow from old Celtic holidays, but today we use them to celebrate particular aspects of the year, the season, and our craft. Depending on where you live the sabbats may not line up with your seasons, but it can be nice to have a day to celebrate with other witches around the world. The sabbats are Yule, Imbolc, Ostara, Beltane, Litha, Lughnasadh, Mabon, and Samhain.

Can I Curse People?

That is your prerogative. Many people will try to misquote the “rule of three” at you, but the fact is that witchcraft has traditionally and historically been about targeting others for revenge and one’s own gain for a long time. While cursing should probably be a last resort after you take mundane action to address the situation, it is your responsibility to decide if it’s something you want to do or not. You don’t get to police others’ decisions and in return you decide what’s ethical for yourself.

[zombee]

@pitirres okay -

WNYC does really good stuff in general, it seems to me they build their products with their hosts (instead of building the products and asking the hosts to adapt)

2 DOPE QUEENS is a comedy podcast. great for laughs, hosted by two black women, and a hugely intentionally diverse line up of stand ups & guests

SOOO MANY WHITE GUYS is the spinoff of one of the hosts of 2DQ. host interviews non cis straight white men, excepting one token a season. i thought it’d be along the same lines as 2dq, peen jokes etc, and those are defo there - but i didn’t expect to connect with these guests so intensely, and be challenged in my worldviews. phoebe robinson is a masterful interviewer and gets better each season.

for pop culture, i like METIS IN SPACE, which is two canadian metis women speaking about indigenous rep of all kinds in sci fi/fantasy media. the definition of this expands as the seasons continue. they’re funny and perfect for someone like me who likes to learn about identity around nerdshit.

similarly PRETTY FOR AN ABORIGINAL is two australian ladies, but it’s much more of a traditional “let’s talk about the issues” podcast. still delightful though, and i picked it up because my novel is set in australia and i wanted to make sure i brushed up on multiple perspectives.

if you like steven universe, tamora pierce, or the queen’s thief series, su has the official STEVEN UNIVERSE PODCAST, tammy has TORTALL RECALL, queen’s thief has ATTOLIAN ARCHIVES. oh, and THE GOOD PLACE PODCAST (the official one) is fucking amazing

for pop culture, i like WONDERFUL!. a husband and wife talk about wonderful things they love. it’s a great pick me up, feel good show.

dunno if you count this as pop culture or politics, but i also am loving OH NO! ROSS & CARRIE where the hosts take on claims of the supernatural, religious fringes, and suchlike. they attended scientology classes and got acupuncture and visited a pet psychic, in the eps i’ve listened to so far, that sort of thing. they’re affable and skeptical in equal measures, and you can defo pick and choose based on your own interests.

similar is SAWBONES, a “marital tour of misguided medicine.” doctor and her comedian husband tackle all kinds of Bad Medical History, so not for the weak-stomached, but still technically rated pg-13 (no swears basically). the back catalog stuck to mostly long-gone ideas & topics, but recently they’ve moved into more, i guess, controversial? topics, and that might scratch your pop culture/politics itch as well.

so those are my more specific recs, but then here are my generals that i just Really Love and Think A Lot of People Should Listen To (originally typed on reddit hence the grammar lol) -

NARRATIVE/STORY BASED -

The Adventure Zone: The podcast that got me into podcasts. Three brothers and their dad, with varying degrees of Dungeons and Dragons experience, set out to fill time so one of them could take a leave of paternal absence from their more famous podcast, My Brother My Brother and Me. What starts as dick jokes somehow turns into this incredible, character-driven, thrilling, mindful fantasy epic. I wept through the last dozen or so episodes. And, they did a 2.5 hour finale, so they could end on episode 69. The duality of TAZ. If you struggle with the more purely sophomoric content on the first arcs, my rec is to start with arc three, Petals to the Metal.

Alice Isn't Dead: A truck driver searches across America for the wife she had long assumed was dead. In the course of her search, she will encounter not-quite-human serial murderers, towns literally lost in time, and a conspiracy that goes way beyond one missing woman. The American landscape is its own character, it's only three total seasons and we're three episodes into season 3. So good.

Welcome to Night Vale: Small desert town radio show, except the town is a hotbed of eldritch activity. Very Lovecraftian, except hysterical and not horribly racist (the opposite, in fact!)

Bubble: post-apocalyptic radio play. hilarious and scathing.

MUSIC BASED -

Heat Rocks - The Podcast: Two hosts interview a third party on their personal "heat rock," an album they have a deep love for, for whatever reason. I despaired that my lack-of-knowledge of albums before 2010 would hinder my enjoyment of this podcast, but then I realized I could just listen to them before the episode.

Dissect - A Serialized Music Podcast: Long-form version of the above. One season, one album; each episode, a song. First season is To Pimp a Butterfly, second is My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Third and current season is Blonde.

BARDIC GOODNESS -

The Myths and Legends Podcast: Writer and host stitches a narrative from myth/legend/folklore etc. Tells you about his research and where the versions differ, and is just generally a great writer and funny and engaging. Really took to heart crit and slowly expanded his repertoire beyond Western/white stuff, so there is some really obscure (for me) stories in there that I love alongside more typical Norse mythology or Arthurian tales or what have you.

Fictional Podcast: Same premise as above, but with classic lit. I don't ever want to read Dante's Inferno, but I for sure want to hear someone dad joke their way through fake arguments about the place of Greco-Roman allusion in a Christian text. Also pretty new, if you're like me and Have To Start At The Beginning No Matter What.

[thefloatingstone]

Hello, i'm sorry for bothering but could you please elaborate on that post where you talked about being nostalgic for Scandinavia? It had me a bit curious, like, why here of all places? To me it's probably a very mundane place since i live in here, so i have a hard time imagining it being interesting to anyone else. (Got to admit it's a bit flattering though, especially when my country is mentioned.)

Many reasons I think. Now as I said, I’ve never actually been there so my knowledge is probably extremely superficial and I apologise for that. But really like...

1: The kind of nature you guys have.

I live in South Africa, and although it is very varied in what its wilderness looks like, going from Lion King looking savannah to bright green mountains to windswept white beaches to tropical banana growing regions... the one thing it does NOT have is forests. At all. The biggest tree I’ve ever seen growing here is like 3 storeys tall at most. I was visiting Northern California last year and got to see Redwoods for the very first time and actually got to see what a forest environment looks like, and I was obscenely jealous that people could really LIVE in places like that. I also studied in Vancouver for 2 years and in the summer we would often go hiking in a local nature reserve. My country is just too dry to support plants of that size.

It’s more than just the trees themselves though. It’s the other wildlife among it as well. Just the general plants I’ve seen in photos and films. It looks so lush and alive.

But it’s also the landscape itself.

We just.... don’t have things like this.

2: The history and folklore.

My knowledge here is extremely lacking, I admit, but Scananavia as a whole, as in ALL the countries that are considered “Scandanavian” by the very virtue that its people have been living there for a very long time, just has a history and folklore and a mythos. And this may sound like some weird fairy tale thing which might be unfair but like... please understand. South Africa was established by the Dutch as a trading port and its Afrikaans population is largely made up of either Dutch settlers or French refugees who had the French taught out of them in schools in favour of Dutch (long story). South Africa as a country does not have a “folklore” or a “history” as any single Scandinavian country would. We have a history dating back many hundreds of years, but that’s exactly what it is, a history of a few hundred years. Mainly of fleeing refugees or Dutch settlers or British Colonialism. And although I have the deepest sympathy for my ancestors fleeing French religious oppression as well as more recent grandfathers and grandmothers suffering famine and concentration camps, the history is all tied up in what my ancestors could bring here from their home countries, or what they had to struggle against to survive once they got here. And there’s not much beyond that.

As for Folklore... we don’t have any of our own. We have what out ancestors brought from Europe, but its become eroded by time it feels like, becoming the generic Aesops fables and Grimm’s fairy tales with nothing of its own to set it apart.

We have native African folklore, But... how can I explain... as a descendant of Europeans, African folklore does not feel like it “belongs” to you, you know? It’s not “your” folklore. And there’s an acute feeling of “your” folklore and history lying “somewhere else”. Granted for me personally it would be France, the Netherlands and Scotland, mostly, rather than anything Scandinavian, but with no folklore at all, you feel almost like you could look at all folklore and traditions and gravitate to those that speak to you personally. In my case I simply like what I’ve been able to find regarding Scandinavian folklore and such. It’s difficult to find more of it out here, but what scarps I’ve been able to find have fascinated me, and I want to learn more of it.

3: The temperament of the people

As I said, my understanding is very superficial and perhaps if I were to one day visit I’d find it the complete opposite, but from what I’ve seen, the Scandinavian people just seem to be more in-line with how I’d enjoy a social structure operate. People it seems leave each other alone. What I mean is regular on-the-street people will not push themselves into your personal space just because you dared to step outside your home. And as a result, people actually do stuff outside their homes. The outside environment is just as much a place you can spend time as inside you own home. Without the threat of violence, or being approach by strangers and harassed, or having strangers in your space and demanding your attention. I dunno. Like I said I may be completely off with this one simply because I haven’t experienced it, but I just get the impression people are not so likely to feel that because you’ve left your house you are obligated to interact with every person you meet.

But also, much like the Netherlands, there’s a weird familiarity there for me as well. I need to actually start learning it, but I’ve been told many of the languages, especially Danish, is very close to my own home language. On top of this, there are small traditional things I’ve seen in documentaries and interviews and such which I can just recognise as being familiar to me. And again... this is difficult to explain but it’s also the feeling that that culture is not only IN countries like Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway etc, but that that culture is FROM those countries. It’s hard to explain, but there’s a large over-hanging sense here, and its been here for almost as long as I can remember, that my culture doesn’t ‘belong’ in my own country. It’s something imported long ago and has become its own thing, so it HAS no other place of its own, but it’s not FROM here, either. It’s a culture from somewhere else, and as time marches forward, it seems South Africa as a country does not want it around any more either. South Africa wants to be African, and who can blame it for that? But I don’t know where that leaves me.

At the same time though, my culture is also in many ways something I don’t relate to either. it’s too traditional in many ways, in a bad way. extremely religious. Extremely locked in what it believes Gender roles should be. Extremely forged in racism. Extremely ‘farmers of a harsh environment’.

This is kinda getting away from me, but again its difficult to explain. I guess it’s a feeling of ‘if the only place you belong doesn’t want you, you might as well focus on any place you feel drawn to emotionally’ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

4: Completely superficial ‘it just looks nice’ reasons.

All the traditional outfits and festivals are always attractive to me.

The food is really attractive to me.

The houses are attractive to me.

The cities are attractive to me

The rural towns are attractive looking to me

etc etc

5: the thing everybody will mention like healthcare, education etc etc etc.

and 6:

Almost all Afrikaans South Africans look at other countries to escape to if we could. Most go to Australia, but I have not found it was somewhere I felt at home at when I visited it. There was just something about it that made it feel uncomfortable to me. Some people look at England, and although England is great, I dunno... I like England fine. Maybe it’s just not as ~*exotic*~ in my mind or something stupid like that. As I said, my experience is rather limited. So maybe the very reason I’ve never been to any of the Scandinavian countries is exactly why they’re more attractive or something :/. Some Afrikaans people go to the Netherlands. Honestly I’d be more than happy to live there too.

The problem is... you can’t really get away from South Africa either. Not unless you have a lot of money or already have family somewhere else or your family hasn’t lived here that long which means you can get an ancestral passport. Or you have some sort of trade job that could make you useful (plumbing, engineer, mechanic, etc etc) None of these things apply to me. I barely make any money, my family’s been here for hundreds of years, our only other family live in Australia, and I’m an animator and my moms a poet, both of which are artist’s jobs, and other countries have their own artists. They have no interest in others.

So I guess it boils down to “if its anywhere but here; why not imagine living somewhere pretty, safe, and stable?”

Anyway... I’m sorry if none of that makes sense.

I’m aware its just a fantasy and doesn’t actually reflect reality at all in any way. but that’s the best answer I can give.

Maybe on some level tho, I just wanna run away from myself in a way too >__> not realising no matter where you live, you’re still there with you.

[forksofwisdom]

What do you think witches and mermaids would have been like in the Twiverse? Do you think SM should have included other species?

Despite being a very pragmatic person, I am obsessed with mythologies of any kind, and I loved this idea so much that I took the time to do some research! And BOY did it get out of hands!

Note that I’m not a professional and most of my knowledge comes from scouring the internet, which is fraught with misinformation and I barely scratch the surface for the sake of brevity. I do mention things from my own culture - Icelandic folklore to be exact - but I encourage you to tag onto this post if you have something to add or want to make a correction! :D

I think SM kept a very narrow scope because she never intended Twilight to be anything more than a teenage romance between Bella and Edward. I for one am happy that she didn’t branch out beyond vampires, wolf-shifters, and the Children of the Moon because she was already on thin ice with her appropriation of the Quileute Tribe’s creation story. 

I also think that including more too many species and characters would have overwhelmed SM. Her side characters have spotty backstories, and I have a feeling that she wrote most of their history as an afterthought. Why else would SM have only mentioned Esme’s past in the Official Guide and not included the crucial information that Esme met Carlisle while she was STILL human in the story? 

If I’m honest, I would have loved to see different ending for New Moon and have SM do more character development in Eclipse. Bella’s quick recovery from her crippling depression was unrealistic in my opinion and her desperation to spend the rest of eternity with the Cullens seemed so shallow considering the fact she knew next to nothing about them and their past.

That being said, I still have some headcanons now that you got me thinking about this. I’m fascinated with the idea that some myths and legends around the world were born from encounters with real supernatural beings. 

Shapeshifters

Based on SM’s idea about the Quileute spirit warriors, there should be more types of shifters in the Twiverse since the Quileutes weren’t the only ones who founded their belief on having descended from wolves. 

Therianthropy is the mythological ability of human beings changing into animals via shapeshifting. This concept has been around for centuries, dating back so far that there are cave paintings that depict the transformation of men into animals. (x)

One of the most popular types of shapeshifting seems to be changing into wolves, and subsequently, there are a LOT of werewolf myths or The Children of the Moon as SM refers to them. (I’ve already written an entire post dedicated to them so I won’t talk about them here.) 

I won’t go much farther into Origin Stories than I have above since it’ll take over the entire post. There are so fricking many different tales, especially about randy gods - seriously, it’s wild - that it’s difficult to decide what would lead to becoming a Shifter and what would be considered fables in the Twiverse.

For the sake of clarity, I have made a short list below which includes a few types of shapeshifters from different cultures that people may be familiar with:

· In Chinese Mythology, it is believed that all things are capable of acquiring human forms through shapeshifting. There are the Huli Jing, which is a nine-tailed fox spirit, from which the Japanese derived their Kitsune (any fellow Naruto fan here???) and the Korean Kumiho.

· Selkies are a favorite of mine (Please watch Song of the Sea - I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cried during that movie) since they sometimes feature in Icelandic myths. Selkies are primarily thought to be women who live in the sea as seals but shed their coats and turn into humans on land. They aren’t able to shapeshift without their coats. Most of the tales aren’t happy and are about men who steal the selkie’s coats and hide them to coerce the woman into marriage.

· Nāga from Indian religions are thought to sometimes shapeshift from snakes, most often King Cobras, into humans.

Witchcraft

Witchcraft is tied to many religions, but as an atheist, I only have a layman’s knowledge of the practices that are still in use today. I’m highly skeptical when it comes to spiritual healing in real life, and I’m not at all a fan of the cult cultures that frequently surround religion.

Here’s a brief history lesson: 

Witches were the women who served the goddesses in the earliest centuries of human civilization and were revered throughout their communities. In the ancient civilizations of the Middle East, priestesses trained in the sacred arts and partook in the holiest of rituals. They were seen as benevolent, and wise women who helped deliver babies, and saw to people’s health.

What’s interesting about them is that they are so clearly understood to be positive figures in their society. No king could be without their counsel, no army could recover from a defeat without their ritual activity, no baby could be born without their presence. (x)

The fear of witches stems from the deep-seated misogyny born from male-centric and monotheistic religions such as Christianity and Judaism. The panic spread to Europe and spiked to a level of hysteria with the outbreaks of plagues. (x) Witch-hunts, especially in Central Europe, resulted in the trial, torture, and execution of tens of thousands of victims. About three-quarters of whom were women. (x)

Witch-hunts still claim thousands of lives every year, especially in developing countries that have an inadequate education system. (x) I recommend watching this documentary if you’re interested in learning about a Tanzanian witch-hunt that happened in 2017.

Keeping this gruesom history in mind, I think there would be hidden communities of witches and warlocks in the Twiverse. I’m not here to dictate what sort of magic they would use - I’ll leave the world building up to the writers!

Here are just a couple of examples of witchcraft:

· Shamanism is a practice that involves a practitioner reaching altered states of consciousness to perceive and interact with a spirit world and channel these transcendental energies into this world. (x)(x)

· Druidism is a spiritual or religious movement that generally promotes harmony, connection, and reverence for the natural world. (x) You can learn more about modern Druidry here: (x)

· Wicca is contemporary witchcraft and is one of the fastest-growing religions in the Western world today. (x) Wicca spirituality is earth-based enlightenment. Note that not all Witches are Wiccans. (x) I’m not a practitioner myself, but I quite like the idea of being more in tune with yourself and nature. You can take a test here if you’re curious to see whether Wicca would work for you.

In Iceland, we had what we called Völva (seiðkonur or seiðkarl, depending on the gender) who were seers. Most of their practices were based on herbalism and the use of runes. 

For those of you who are curious about Norse Mythology which hasn’t been altered by the likes of Marvel and Hollywood, I recommend reading Völuspá, which literally translates to Prophecy of Völva. It’s the fundamental source for the study of Norse Mythology because it tells the story of the creation of the world to Ragnarök (end of the world). You’ll also have the chance to learn some freaky shit about Loki - like that time he gave birth to a eight-legged horse - and see that he wasn’t really that much of a dick compared to the other gods *cough* Óðinn *cough* - also Þór once gatecrashed a wedding by dressing up as the bride. 

Mermaids

· Mermaids are sometimes associated with perilous events such as floods, storms, shipwrecks, and drownings. In other folk traditions, they can be benevolent or beneficent, bestowing boons or falling in love with humans.

The Little Mermaid (the H.C Andersen version) happened in the Twiverse and that is a fact!

· Sirens! (You thought I could go through an entire post without mentioning Greek Mythology??? Think again!) They were beautiful but dangerous creatures that lured the sailors with their beautiful voices to their doom, causing the ships to crash on the reefs near their island.(x) This connection to the sea is why many confuse them with mermaids when instead they were believed to be a combination of women and birds.(x)

I can totally see them chilling on Greek islands singing their songs and luring horny sailors to their demise.

Miscellaneous

· Huldufólk (hidden people) played a crucial part in Icelandic folklore. They were the spirits of the land and shouldn’t be confused with fairies. Huldufólk wore normal Icelandic clothing and used the power of words to cast spells on people - either blessing or a curse, depending on how they judge the person’s behavior. They lived inside the stones. To prevent any naughty behavior, it’s said that Huldufólk would kidnap infants and replace them with wizened old elves that pretended to be normal children. They would behave like wild brats, kicking and screaming, and nothing but a good beating could bring back the human child.

These oral tales were used to prevent many children from wandering away from human habitations and instilled fear and respect for the harsh powers of nature. (x)(x)

Contrary to popular belief, Icelanders don’t actually believe in the existence of elves, or anything tbh, we just like to mess with foreigners. So if you’re a tourist then “YES, I am a believer in elves. HoW DarE yOU qUeSTioN my FAith! You dare sit on our precious boulders? Tainting the sacred houses of our elves by touching them with your filthy behind!”

· Tröllskessur (mountain trolls) are usually female, hence skessur. Trolls turn into stone if the sunlight hits them and their tales were used to explain the natural phenomena in Icelandic nature, f.ex. a stone caught between two pillars or the outlines of a face on the side of mountains. (x)

Tröllskessur are extinct in my headcanon but I just think it’s nifty if these stories were true in the Twiverse. 

· DRAGONS! 

Don’t fight me on this!! I have no idea how they would be kept hidden in the Twiverse but they’re out there!

· Spirits (as in the soul) and Yōkai

I’ve watched Spirited Away too many times to leave them out of the Twiverse. They’re probably out there chilling somewhere in a Supernatural Spa Resort…

This was a fun question to answer, anon! Thank you for sticking with me to the end of this post! The sleep deprivation got to me in the end… ಥ∀ಥ