Mythology Part I

I’m thinking about doing four of these. The first is a comparison of fairies and aliens. I also want to talk about angles and dragons, the melding of past mythological creatures to create new ones, such as chupacabra, and maybe one about computers.

Mythology is an evolving thing. It must be to suit us. Whatever we don’t understand, we speculate about. Eventually that speculation turns into stories. We then repeat the stories until it becomes accepted fact. But a myth isn’t just a story to explain things, it’s also a mirror. You can learn everything you need to know about a culture by studying its mythology. You can see our fears and dreams, our laws, what we worship and what we despise. That’s why myths change. Modern humans have a completely different mind set from medieval humans. We no longer understand life in the castle. But we still know terror can come when least expected.

On the surface, fairies and aliens appear to be two different beings with nothing in common. But look a little closer and you’ll find they’re not so different after all.

Fairies to Aliens
Fairies- steal babies and leave changelings
Aliens- abduct women who later learn they are pregnant. Weeks/months later the woman discovers she is no longer carrying a child
Fairies live in mushrooms
Aliens fly about in a UFO which is mushroomed shaped
Fairies- steal cow’s milk
Aliens- cause mysterious death or strange behavior of livestock
Fairies- fairy rings
Aliens- crop circles
Both are associated with patterns of bright light
Fairy- from another realm
Alien- from another world
Both come at night (usually)
Fairy- repelled by iron
Alien- protect your brainwaves with tinfoil so they can’t read your mind
Both have time loss or missing time when people encounter them. For example, your car breaks down on a lonely road around midnight. You see a bright ball or light coming down from the sky. It disappears. You fix the car and drive away. The clock on the radio now says 5am. It only took an hour to fix the car. Where were you?
Compare that with a person walking through the forest at night. He sees a light through the trees. He follows it and comes to fairy party. He watches for a while and then continues home. His family has been worried sick because he was gone far longer than he should have been. He thinks the trip took one day and one night. The family says he’s been gone a week.
Both have a culture that is superior to ours. Fairies have finer food and more beautiful women. Aliens have mastered space travel with faster ships. Fairies have a magick we cannot understand and aliens have a science we have not discovered.

I think both are reactions to advancements. I think fairies were supposed to be the things you came across if one went too far into nature. I think the church was supposed to be the “safe” place and nature was everything untamed and ungodly, so it was best not to travel too far into the forest. The alien reaction is the same kind of mindset, only now nature is safe and technology is dangerous. Point too many satellites in the wrong direction and draw the attention of aliens. Both represent sticking with the known world and keeping our heads in the sand so we don’t have to face what we don’t understand.

Well there you go

I tried to make a post about how many aunts and uncles I have. But I got confused and lost count. Now you know for sure that I come from a real old time Southern family.

Darkness

Maybe I watch too many movies. Maybe I read a few too many horror books. Maybe I am just the victim of my own over-active imagination, but I gotta tell you it is no fun waking up to a shadow in the corner.
First the corner of room with the door appeared darker than the rest of the bedroom. There’s lots of reasons of that, so I didn’t worry about it. But then the darkness sort of…condensed.
It became a cloud, a very black cloud hovering in the corner of my room and I didn’t like looking at it, but I liked having my back to it even less. It wasn’t a constant thing, so there were still explanations for it. So I still didn’t worry, I just woke up feeling vaguely uneasy.
But then I woke up three nights in a row from a sound sleep and my first thought was that something was in the room with me. Last night I woke up and saw a shadow in human shape and worse, it had a face.
I saw eyes. It was gone quickly, but it unnerved me.
Still, there may be logical reasons to see such a thing. I’m sure someone is scoffing right now and muttering under their breath about how I’ve been dreaming. But I wasn’t asleep. And I’m sure someone else will mention the headlights of passing cars make for some unusual apparitions, but my window is covered. Actually, the headboard is blocking it because the street light is so bright that midnight looks about like 7am. I covered up the window very well.
There’s a few other things about that concern me. One that it’s been going on so long and two that terrified as I may be, I immediately fall asleep again. In the morning I have forgotten all about it until the next night when it happens again. And finally there’s those very vivid and sometimes violet dreams.
So today I took action. I am a practicing Witch and I will NOT be afraid to sleep in my own bed. I will NOT tolerate uninvited beings in my house.
I cleaned the house. Then I swept. I sprinkled salt. I burned incense, candles, and sage. I used my rattle to break up negative energy. Tonight I sleep in a cast circle.
Take that, shadow.

What Are We Doing in This Hand Basket, and Where are We Going?

Who is to blame when the neighborhood is full of drug addicts?
It was nice enough when I moved in. Of course, the previous tenant sold drugs, but she moved out and I moved in, so that was an improvement, wasn’t it?
Then Stupid’s boyfriend, Drunk, moved in. He had just got out of prison, so naturally he went to stay with his Honey.
Wanda was next. The pain became unbearable. So she took more pills. And still more pills. Is it her fault for taking so many? Or the doctor’s for prescribing them? Or does blame lie with the abusive husband who makes her life hell? Is it a genetic thing? After all, Wanda’s daughter is a crack whore.
Then finally, the drug dealers moved in. Oh it all started innocent enough, just one family renting a trailer. But gradually the children stopped coming home. The wife stopped coming home. Now only the man comes over in the dead of night to harvest the pot.
How can people be blind to this? My landlord must know. He can see no one is ever home. What does he think? Doesn’t he wonder why nothing ever breaks in that house?
Doesn’t the housing authority check up on things? They pay half the rent. Wouldn’t they require that the house actually be occupied?
Where is the police? Does America set itself up for a drug culture by being a free country? Would this problem even exist if the police regularly checked the houses? What if they could enter a home and poke though the dresser drawers? What then? Would we be free or jailed?
My boyfriend told me that I live in the Meth Capitol of the World. How can he see this on the news and I have no clue? Is it true? It is really a problem? Is it larger than one drug house, a wife-beating drunk, and one pill head?
What about the cars parked in the early morning hours before sun rise? Are the drivers innocent? Are the waiting to take someone to work? Who has to go in at 3am? What else could they possibly be doing in a trailer park before dawn? I can’t think of a single legitimate reason to sit in the car on a frosty morning with only a street lamp for company. I can’t think of anything worth getting up for to sit in the cold and the dark.
Is it somehow my fault? Am I asleep/blind to my environment? Am I supposed to be doing something? If so, why isn’t anyone listening to me?
I don’t have any answers, except be careful where you sleep, lest you awaken to the jostling of a hand basket.

The Legend of the White Oak Runner- Proven

There are a great many things in the South that are considered to be fiction. Indeed, we Southerners like to exaggerate, even lie, because we love a good story, and the more twists and turns the story takes, the better. When listening to a Southern story teller spinning their craft, it is best to remember that he knows it’s true because he made it up himself.
But in every story is some small grain of truth. Therefore I offer you my own eye-witness account of the white oak runner.
For those of you who are poor dumb Yankees and have no idea what I’m talking about, a white oak runner is a snake. Being a Southern snake it is particularly frightening and fierce. It is aggressive and some say, just plain mean. Of course it is venomous.
Now should you bother to look in any field guide of Southeastern snakes, you will discover that there are (supposedly) only four venomous snakes- the rattlesnake, the copperhead, the corral snake, and the cottonmouth. Since the “experts” don’t list the white oak runner, most people assume it doesn’t exist.
But I have seen it.
Before I delve into the horror of that hot summer day, let’s look at the name.
Runners are fast. So snakes that seem to move especially quick are called runners, like the black runner, which is sometimes called the black racer.
White oak is a kind of oak tree with rounded leaves. You can tell the difference between white oaks and red oaks by looking at the leaves. Red oaks have pointed leaves. Remember it this way- the Indians, the Red Men, hunted with arrows, which are pointed, and the White Men hunted with bullets, which are rounded.
So the white oak runner is a very fast moving snake that presumably makes its habitat in or around oak trees. Unfortunately my snake was in the dryer vent.
It was a hot day. I don’t remember how old I was. I was playing with the hose pipe. (This was in the days before water conservation) I saw what I thought was an over-sized bug and I sprayed it.
It was not a bug, it was the head of a snake and he had one unblinking eye fixed on me as he flicked his tongue in and out, in and out.
I ran screaming into the house. My mother heard the word “snake” in between my screams and she assumed a chicken snake was outside, so she promptly went and got her hoe to chop off its head because that is how Southern Ladies kill snakes, poisonous or not.
She calmly turned off the hose and waited by the dryer vent for a few minutes. Nothing happened. Becoming impatient, she called her father, who had a very simple solution- turn on the dryer. When the snake gets too hot, he’ll come out.
Mom thought that was an excellent idea, so she turned on the heat and went out to wait. In just a few short moments the snake began slithering out. And out. And out. And out. When she had four feet of snake and still no tail in sight, she began to fear that she had too much snake and not enough hoe. Thinking it would be better to kill before the snake had the advantage of free movement, she chopped down with all her might.
And was blinded by the muddy water that splashed her face.
Now she has an angry snake that she can’t see and one pitiful little hoe.
Mom said at this point she yanked off her glasses and tried to clean them on her mud soaked shirt. With vision partially restored, she realized she was completely alone. Not another living thing was the yard. No dog, no chickens, I had bailed a long time ago, and Dad was at work.
I don’t really know what happened. There was lots of yelling and hissing and splashing and chopping noises. It was all terrifying and it seemed to last forever, but of course it couldn’t have been but about 30 minutes or so because just as Mom came in still trying to clean her muddy glasses on her even muddier shirt, my grandfather drove up.
Apparently, the lure of a snake was just something Papa couldn’t resist. So he drove all the way out to the country just to see it. (This was also before the days of $4 a gallon gasoline) He jumped out of his truck and shrieked, “That’s a white oak runner! You shouldn’t have messed it! That’s the most poisonous snake there is!”
I’d like to tell you that’s the end of this story. A few months later, after my father had gone to work, my mother came and woke me up. “I have something to show you.”
There in bucket we used for carrying out ashes was a small snake. Black and white and very familiar. “Doesn’t it look the same?”
It did. She had killed it with the fireplace poker as she was leaving the kitchen. In the semidarkness of the living room, she had nearly stepped on it.
Beware the white oak runner!

Bats

I spend a lot of time on the porch at dusk. I like the falling darkness and the cool air. But mostly, I like the bats.
Bats are misunderstood. They are not evil. They are not waiting to attack you or land in your hair. They aren't crazy and they aren't vile creatures.
What they are is efficent. A bat can consume its weight in insects every night. I like anything that gets rid of bugs. I like spiders too, but that is another post.
A bat is Nature's pesticide without the harmful poison. A whole colony of bats is a blessing. Besides, they are so ugly they are cute.
Every evening as the sun sinks lower, the bats begin the flutter. First one, then suddenly there are two, then three, and then I lose count as they disappear into the shadows only to flutter over my roof.
I'm not sure where this colony resides. I suspect the barn in my neighbor's cow pasture, but I just don't know. I've never seen the entire colony swarming out for the night's feeding. I never get up early enough to see them flying home. It's a nice little mystery to mull over, as I'm sure the bats wonder why I sit on the porch.