Thank you to everyone who has supported Games From Folktales for 150 episodes! Here’s a little gift: the first edition of the Cornwall gazetteer I’ve been promising. Click to access cornwall-edition-1.pdf I call it the first edition, because at some point I hope to extend the section on saga seeds, and have a map professionally…
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Mujina by Lafcadio Hearn
This folktale by Lafcardio Hearn was used to create the minions of an enemy published in “Antagonists”. Mujina, by Lafcardio Hearn. On the Akasaka Road, in Tokyo, there is a slope called Kii-no-kuni-zaka,—which means the Slope of the Province of Kii. I do not know why it is called the Slope of the Province of…
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Cornwall: Traditions and Hearthside Stories of West Cornwall, Volume 1
Bottrell was one of the researchers that Robert Hunt used to flesh out his book, so his material has been already fossicked over, at one remove. Bottrell uses a lot more of the local dialect, and his colour text is better than Hunt’s. For example, all the descendants of Jack the Giant are shaggy because…
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Walking under Wittgenstein’s ladder
This week I’ve been thinking about Hermetic applications of Wittgenstein’s ladder, but to get there, I need to take three steps back. I hit upon the idea in Terry Pratchett’s books, where it’s called lie-to-children, which is taken from Cohen and Stuart. An example I can think of is when Neil Gaiman wrote a Doctor…
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Was Bonisagus an Epicurean?
A few weeks ago the blog discussed the weeping philosopher, Heralcitus. His parallel, the laughing philosopher Democritus, doesn’t have a lot of surviving work, but one of his followers was Epicurus, and he seems to have been a Hermetic magus before his time. Epicurius gets a bad rap in history. His name is used for…
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Washington Irving: Adventures of the German Student
I thought this story was folklore, but it turns out it’s fiction by Washington Irving. Statistics for the creature at the end. *** On a stormy night, in the tempestuous times of the French Revolution, a young German was returning to his lodgings, at a late hour, across the old part of Paris. The lightning…
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Cornwall: Looe Island
Looe Island is a potential covenant site that will be added to the material which is gradually being collected for a Cornish gazette for the Ars Magica roleplaying game. Much of this material comes from Alex Langstone’s book “From Granite to Sea” or from the Cornish folklore journal he edits “Lien Gwerin”. Looe Island has…
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Dunsany: Two Tales of Death
The Grim Reaper doesn’t get much of a look in in Mythic Europe: he’s a later artistic contrivance. The Romans had a God of Death, but the god of the process of dying, sadly for the order, was Hermes himself, in his role as psychopomp. I’ve split off a third story, “Death and the Orange”,…
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Losing the first comic strip
The Bayeux Tapestry was a piece of monarchical propaganda produced by the Normans after 1066 to explain to their side of the conflict to illiterates. It was made in England somewhere: although precisely where is not clear. We know this because structurally it is not a tapestry at all: it’s an embroidery, and the techniques…
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