In the novel American Gods, Neil Gaiman quotes Richard Dorson: “One question that has always intrigued me is what happens to demonic beings when immigrants move from their homelands. Irish-Americans remember the fairies, Norwegian-Americans the nisser, Greeek-Americans the vrykólakas, but only in relation to events remembered in the Old County: When I once asked why such demons are not seen...
Some people just love fakes. When I was working on medieval genealogies at Geni.com I was bowled over by the number of people willing to go to the mat for information they found online or got from Grandma. No other evidence to back it up. Most often their reasoning was something along the lines of “no one would say it if it weren’t true” and “there must have been an oral...
I think we could file this one under “proving the obvious”. Some South American Indians share DNA with some Polynesians. And the connection goes back way before European contact. I was a fan of Thor Heyrdahl when I was a kid. I must’ve read Kon-Tiki a dozen times. That’s the one where he built a raft and sailed from Peru to Polynesia because he thought the Pacific Islands...
July 1, 2020 I have now brought in two more old websites — hauridna.wordpress.com and underawesternsky.wordpress.com. It will take some time to get everything cleaned up again but this should be the last of the web fragments I intend to import. October 18, 2019 Website should be up and functional, although many broken links remain. I’m shifting content related to neo-paganism to a...
Napoléon said history is a pack of lies, agreed upon. Actually that’s not exactly right. He said, “Mais qu’est alors cette vérité historique, la plupart du temps? Une fable convenue.” Translated, that would be “What then is the truth of history, generally? A fable agreed upon.” But he didn’t claim originality there. It’s been a popular idea, both...