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SALAMANDERS (European)
See also FAERY
The salamander is a beautiful faery creature made of flame and air. It is an elemental, made from one of the four natural
elements: water, air, earth and fire. Elemental fairies live outside the laws of men and the customs of Faery, their behavior
dictated by the physical laws of nature.
Salamanders dance in human fireplaces. No other elemental lives so closely with human beings. Although a salamander can be
dangerous, setting unwanted fires, it can be helpful if coaxed to reside in a human hearth. A hearth lit by a salamander will
never go out, and its light and warmth will bless the family dwelling there.
The confusion over the word “salamander” started with medieval errors in transcribing Aristotle’s natural history. The powers
of the fire child were confused with the properties of the humble amphibian. It was believed that angry salamanders would
douse a fire by covering the sparks with their wet body. Asbestos was sold as “salamander’s wool”. True salamanders do not
grow wool; they use asbestos to knit exciting underwear.
SATYR (Greek and Roman)
Satyrs are half men and half goat, a larger, more mature version of the faun. They serve Pan, the god of nature, and Bacchus
the god of wine, but spend most of their time chasing nymphs through the woods.
Medieval lore turned Pan and his satyrs into the shaggy wild men of the woods. Medieval churchmen borrowed their horns
and hooves and gave them to the Christian devil.
SCYLLA and CHARYBDIS (Greek)
To be caught “between a rock and a hard place” or “between the devil and the deep blue sea” is to be trapped between
Scylla and Charybdis. These expressions are a race memory of two monsters described in Homer’s Odyssey. Charybdis
was a powerful whirlpool; Scylla was a nymph turned into a monster by jealousy. The two faced one another across a
narrow strait. If you avoided one, you sailed too close to the other.
Odysseus did his best to steer the middle path. His ship escaped the whirlpool, but snaky arms reached out from Scylla’s
rock and six men were shredded by the monster with a puppy’s voice.
Scylla had been a beautiful nymph, changed by the jealous witch Circe into a six-headed monster. She made a sound like
puppies yelping, as though terrified by what she’d become.
SEA SERPENT (Worldwide)
This is a generic term for any large marine animal of unknown origin. There are thousands of sea serpent sightings by reliable
witnesses. Some were certainly hoaxes, and some explained away as giant specimens of familiar creatures such as the eel,
giant squid, and ribbonfish. That would still leave a large number of sea serpents unexplained.
The author Bernard Heuvelman has sorted the unexplained sightings into at least nine categories of sea serpent. With new
species discovered every year—the megamouth shark, the giant jellyfish, the octopus—there might still be hope for a surviving
plesiosaur swimming around loose somewhere.
SELKIE (Celtic)
See also FAERY
The selkies are seal people that can take human form to visit the haunts of men. They wear sealskin costumes that that they
take on and off at will to transform from a sea to a land animal.
Lonely men and women have crept up on a selkie as it was changing, and hidden the seal skin, forcing the selkie to come into
their home as a husband or wife. Such marriages almost always end tragically, because even though the selkie might stay with
the mortal for many years, it will continue to look for its skin, and finding it, slip back into the sea. The ballad “The Great
Selkie of Sule Skerry” gives an example.
Such marriages are hardest on the children, provoking mixed loyalties. The selkie will use the children to find where the
spouse has hidden the sealskin. In some especially painful cases, the children follow the selkie parent into the sea.
SHMOO (The works of Al Capp, copyright Al Capp estate)
The shmoo was a delicious and obliging animal that very nearly changed the course of history. Shmoos were first discovered
in the American town of Dogpatch, birthplace of the cartoon hero Lil’ Abner. They were ham-shaped, smiling creatures, who
dropped dead from happiness if anyone looked at them hungrily. Boiled and fried shmoo tasted like chicken; grilled shmoo
tasted like steak. You could wear the hide and use the eyes as suspender buttons. Shmoos reproduce readily, as often as
required.
Such an endless natural resource might have wiped poverty and hunger, but the moneyed interests wiped them out to preserve
the status quo. An embittered Al Capp became a vile ranting dog of a Republican soon after. The ways of the human heart
are dark and rarely pleasant.
SIRENS (Greek)
The mermaids of the Mediterranean, the Sirens of Greek mythology, are lovely but treacherous. They lure men to their death
on dangerous reefs with their beautiful, hypnotic voices.
The hero Odysseus wanted to hear their music, though he knew it might drive him mad with longing. He put beeswax in the
ears of his men and had himself tied to the mast. When he heard the siren songs, he wept and cursed and begged to be
released so he could go to them; the deafened sailors rowed bravely on.
SNARK (The works of Lewis Carroll)
No one knows for sure what a snark looks like because no one has returned from a meeting with one.
We do know that snarks prefer to sleep in late, sometimes not breakfasting until five in the afternoon. We know that they are
served with greens and have a hollow, crisp taste similar to will-of-the-wisp. Snarks are slow to laugh at a joke, are fond of
bathing machines, and are handy for striking a light.
The method for catching snarks is given in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark:
But—and this is a big but—if the snark that you meet is a boojum—and they most always are—you will softly and suddenly
vanish away.
SOONER DOG (North American folklore)
The sooner dog is a breed noted, or rather, disdained, for its peculiar ways. It would sooner fight than eat, sooner sleep than
catch a rabbit. They are often found asleep on their feet, because although it may be too hot to lie in the sun, they are too lazy
to move into the shade.
SPHINX (Greek and Egyptian)
The sphinx is a creature with a human head and a lion’s body. The Egyptian sphinx is shown as male, wearing the headdress
of a ruler of Egypt. The great sphinx of Giza, 240 feet long and 66 feet long, stands guard over the pyramids. Egyptian
sphinxes usually wear the face of the ruler of their day, the pharaoh being the living representative of the god Horus on earth.
There is a theory that these statues were inspired by wind and sand-etched stones found in the desert.
The Grecian sphinx is female, asking riddles with a mysterious smile. The most famous was the sphinx met by Oedipus.
She asked travelers, “What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs at night?” She ravaged
and devoured those who could not answer. Finally Oedipus answered: “The creature is man, who crawls on all fours when an
infant, walks upright as an adult, and walks with a cane in old age.” They say she shrieked and jumped off a cliff when her
riddle was answered, a final mystery that frankly has this author plain baffled.
P.J. Farmer asserts in “Riders on the Purple Wage” that the sphinx had a sister who asked, “What, then, is man?” No one has
answered her question, at least not honestly.
"SPIN"
(American Political Slang)
"The Daughter of Time" is a famous short novel by Josephine Tey. A streetwise policeman is laid up in a hospital bed with a
broken leg. Proud of his ability to "read" human faces, he starts playing a game with himself to pass the time. Flipping through
a book of historical portraits, he tries to guess what kind of person is shown in each portrait before looking at their name.
The cop's faith in his ability is broken by a portrait of Richard the Third. He then uses his skills to investigate an old mystery:
was Richard really the "bunchbacked" monster who murdered the little princes in the Tower and murdered his way to the
throne?
In the western film, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance", everyone KNOWS that Jimmy Stewart killed the outlaw and he
rides to the US Senate on the basis of his heroism. When Stewart tries to expose the truth, he is told, "When choosing
between the Truth and the Legend, print the Legend."
People believe what they want to believe in spite of all evidence to the contrary. They WANT Richard the Third to be a
villain, though evidence suggests that the family of Henry VII framed Richard to support their own prestige. In the film, they
WANT Jimmy Stewart to be a pistol packing tough guy, and not just a lawyer who abhors violence. (Neil Gaiman suggests in
"1602" that any cure for Ben Grimm will always be temporary, since "Story" finds him more interesting with his affliction).
The theme in these stories speaks to the media-saturated culture of the 21st century. The common myths, superstitions and
political beliefs of a society can have terrible effects on the material world. We are all too familiar with what can happen: the
Salem Witch Trials, the McMartin preschool case, the Weapons of Mass Destruction that overpaid fools all KNEW were
there REGARDLESS of the objective facts presented by their intelligence services. Witness the numbers who STILL
perceive Bush and Cheney as warriors, in spite of their proving themselves as "chickenhawks": they themselves have admitted
that both had "other priorities" when called on to fight.
The effects of mass delusion can be ridiculous as well as dangerous. Witness the time wasted in Kansas over the mechanism
of evolution. When I behold a magazine cover showing the Flavor-of-the-Month Pinup boy or girl, there is a consensus on the
part of New York and Los Angeles that he or she is indeed the Sexiest Thing Alive. There is no objective fact behind this
assertion; they do not excrete more pheromones than others, they do not match the favored hip-to waist ratio. The masklike
perfection of their features are the result of surgery or lucky genes. We ourselves might not find them attractive, but the idea
that they ARE sexy is so pervasive that comedians can use their name as a shorthand phrase meaning "erotic". This is
manipulating the archetype. What happens to a culture that does this over and over again?
Edward Bernays, the father of advertising and mass manipulation, changed the Victorian taboo against female smoking by
distributing photographs of women of fashion and trend setters puffing away on cigarettes.
I am currently revising PANDORA'S BASEMENT, a novel that uses these themes in a "dark urban fantasy" context (ah, the
market that cannot perceive a thing until we impose categories on them).
This is a space for readers of this blog-- both of you-- to post your own examples of gross distortions between popular belief
and objective fact. For example:
"Everyone KNOWS That": Social Security will run out of money because people live longer than they did during the
Roosevelt administration. "The number of older Americans living now is greater than anyone could have imagined in 1935."
(souce: Jo Anne Barhart, current commissioner of Social Security.)
Inconvenient Facts: "The 1934 report of F.D.R.'s Commission on Economic Security, which laid the groundwork for the
Social Security Act, projected that 12.7 percent of Americans would be 65 or older by the year 2000. The actual number
was 12.4 percent." (sources: Social Security's official website and The New York Times 8/15/05.)
A seminal book describing these phenomena before the days of Bernays and Goebbels is "Extraordinary Popular Delusions,
or, The Madness of Crowds" by Charles Mackay. Heinlein says somewhere that in the Kingdom of the Blind, the one-eyed
man is in for a hell of a rough ride.
And Gary Larson has a cartoon somewhere called "Lemming Philosopher", with one little rodent asking as the crowd plunges
over a cliff: "Hey! Wait a minute! Can we talk about this first?"
Perception-- rather than truth-- has changed the course of recent history, but harsh reality will have the last laugh.
“(You) believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works
anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality –
judiciously, as you will – we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort
out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
--Unnamed senior adviser to President G.W Bush, summer of 2002, reported by Ron Suskind
SPRITE (European) See also FAERY
The sprite, also called the pixie, is a creature of air. It is one of the elemental faeries, whose natures are ruled by the four
elements of earth, air, fire and water. J.M. Barrie’s Tinkerbell is probably the best known of her species.
SQUONK (North American lumberjack tales)
The squonk is a wretched little animal, so homely that all it can bear to do is snuffle through the north woods sobbing at its
own ugliness. We all have days like that.
Paul Bunyan caught a squonk once and stuffed it in a sack, but by the time he got it home it had dissolved into a puddle of
tears.
T
“THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU MEET A STRANGER IN THE ALPS” (Unknown)
This bizarre euphemism was dubbed over a line from The Big Lebowski when broadcast on television. In the Coen brothers’
film, the actor John Goodman furiously beats a car to death while shouting “This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in
the ass!” The Goon Show logic of “This is what happens when you meet a stranger in the Alps!” has taken on a life of its own
in recent Internet culture.
THUNDERBIRD (Native American)
Stand in one place and turn to the four directions, and you see that the horizon is not a straight line, but a great circle curving
around the place where you stand. Between the earth and the dome of the sky live great invisible spirits called Thunderbirds.
The sound of their wings makes the rumble of thunder and lightning flashes from their eyes. The Plains Indians say the
Thunderbirds carry the lightning bolts in their claws, and hurl them like arrows.
Thunderbirds bring the rains. Their intentions are benevolent, but like any force of nature, they may kill men or damage crops
without meaning to.
Like the garudas of India, the thunderbirds are at war with the dark underworld powers of the underwater panthers.
Earthquakes, floods and terrible storms are caused by their battles,
The thunderbird may come to a man in a vision, to act as a spiritual guide and protector. All birds live between heaven and
earth, and so feathers are often used in spiritual artifacts because the birds may act as emissaries between humanity and the
powers above us.
TRITON (Greek and Roman)
Tritons are mermen to the female mermaids; that settles the question of where little mermaids come from.
Tritons attend the sea god Neptune, called Poseidon by the Greeks. They are shown sporting with dolphins and blowing
trumpets made from conch shells. With their matted beards, kelp-tangled hair and scaly bodies encrusted with barnacles, they
are clearly one of the wild things, perhaps related to the wild man.
TROLL (Scandinavian) See also FAERY
Trolls are large, carnivorous faery creatures, with muscles, hearts and heads hard as stone. Their appetites for billygoats gruff
and the flesh of humans and gnomes are already well known.
The sound of church bells will drive them away, and they may turn completely to stone if caught in the open by the rising sun.
TUATHA DE DANAAN (Celtic)
See also FAERY
The “Children of Danu” are Irish demigods. They were more than human, and may have faery blood in them. They retreated
under the earth long ago, to the faery-world of Tir Na N’og, in the hollow hills of the Sidhe. Many mortal heroes have
followed them there, such as King Arthur and Finn Mac Cool, and there they all wait, riding forth when the need is strongest.
The Tuatha De Danaan are sometimes confused with the older People of the Sidhe. They came to Ireland after the Sidhe, and
before the mortal heroes of the Fianna Finn.
All these folk—the faery creatures, and the mortal heroes who were asked to join their company—ride out on special nights
of the year, namely the great Celtic holidays:
These are powerful times when the veil between Faery and the mortal world is especially thin and strange things may occur
without our asking.
text and art copyright 1990, 2005 by Michael Fountain unless stated otherwise