Blue-Footed Musings

For the last time referring to the previous post about mythical whosiewhatsits, this final addendum should leave us feeling extremely well-educated on the subject.

A will-o’-the-wisp is a light that appears over marshy ground. It is thought to be caused by combustion of marsh gases. Legend says that you should never follow the light because it will deliberately mislead you. I found seven other terms describing the same phenomenon, and since I like to make lists, too, here they are.

Ignis fatuus (Latin), literally “foolish fire”
Corpse candle (Welsh)
Friar’s lantern
Jack o’ Lantern
Spunkie (Scottish)
Walking fire
The Fair Maid of Ireland

Now for the remaining weird words: a cluricaune is pretty much the same thing as a leprechaun, a kobold is a German gnome that lives and works underground, a wili is a vampirish Slavic fairy (according to Wikipedia.com), a nix is a water spirit, and inui are . . . well, inui are probably something, but I have no idea what. I could not find any references to them anywhere. If I ever find out what they are, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, I’m going to make up a definition for them and say that inui are from ancient Roman legend: fat supernatural beings that do nothing but eat cheese all day.

Good-bye, all you fairies, demons, goblins, and other weird whosieswhatsits!

Harking back to Tuesday’s strange list, the next set of unfamiliar words is the French section: follets, lutins, and magots. According to my French-English/English-French dictionary, follet is just an adjective meaning “playful,” but an esprit follet is a sprite or elf. A lutin is also a sprite or elf. A magot is a grotesque Chinese figure, an ugly person, or a Barbary ape. I’m not sure which of the three meanings was intended for magot, since none of them seem particularly mythical or supernatural. Perhaps the author was referring to something so ugly as to be monstrous.

That’s three more words that are at least partially understood, and another book that has proven its worth.

Were you puzzled by a lot of the words in Tuesday’s post? I was, and I just can’t stand not knowing the meaning of a word. I absolutely have to look up the ones that I didn’t recognize and even the ones I recognized but don’t know much about.

Let’s go backward through the list and start with deevs, peris, ghouls, jinns, marids, and afrits. To make a long story short, they are all demons, fallen angels or descendants of fallen angels, and they are all of Arabian or Persian origin. To make a short story long, read on.

My research began with “deev,” which I found to mean the same as “daeva.” Both words sound a lot like “devil,” don’t they? You betcha. My 1948 edition of The Reader’s Encyclopedia says that a daeva is “one of certain malignant demons of Persian mythology, ferocious and gigantic spirits under the sovereignty of Eblis.”

So who’s Eblis? Here’s a story you’ve heard before. God wanted the angels to worship Adam. Eblis (a.k.a. Iblis), who was a jinn, refused, saying, “Me thou hast created of smokeless fire, and shall I reverence a creature made of dust?” Needless to say, God didn’t care for that attitude. He turned Eblis into a Sheytan (or Shaitan) who then became the big bad daddy of all devils. In other words, Eblis is Satan and the deevs are his minions. If you are a fan of the original “Battlestar Galactica,” you may recall a character called Count Iblis who turned out to be the Devil.

Jinns are demons of Arabian mythology. There are several types of jinn, the most powerful of which are the marids, followed by the afrits. Ghouls are jinns that rob graves and feed on corpses.

Last but not least, peris are beautiful, winged descendants of fallen angels. They are not allowed into Paradise until they do penance. In “Paradise and the Peri,” by Thomas Moore (1779-1852), a peri was told that she would be allowed into Heaven if she brought the “gift most dear to the Almighty.” She tried several gifts that didn’t work. Finally, she brought a guilty old man to Heaven’s Gates, and when the man wept in repentance, she offered the man’s tear and the gates opened.

That’s six words we now know more about, proving that it sometimes pays to have dusty old tomes kicking around the house. I think The Reader’s Encyclopedia has just earned a permanent home on my bookshelf.

One of my favorite lines from The Water-Babies is this one about St. Brandan.

“Then he and his friends got into a hooker . . .”

Now, now. Get your mind out of the gutter. A “hooker” is a boat, which you might have been able to guess from context if you had read the whole paragraph! 😉

And that, my friends, is it for The Water-Babies, which now goes back to its shelf to rest for another 20-30 years.

There are many lists in The Water-Babies. Let’s turn one of them into a game.

Give yourself 1 point for each mythical creature that you recognize from the list below. The maximum possible score is 31.

. . . who assured every one who found himself the better or wiser for the news, that there were not, never had been, and could not be, any rational or half-rational beings except men, anywhere, anywhen, or anyhow; that nymphs, satyrs, fauns, inui, dwarfs, trolls, elves, gnomes, fairies, brownies, nixes, wilis, kobolds, leprechaunes, cluricaunes, banshees, will-o’-the-whisps, follets, lutins, magots, goblins, afrits, marids, jinns, ghouls, peris, deevs, angels, archangels, imps, bogies, or worse, were all pure bosh and wind.

What was your score? I got 23!