Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

On the night roads of El Salvador and Guatemala—by the river fords above all, and the public washing-places, and the ravines where the road dips away from the houses—a man riding late may see exactly what a man riding late most wants to see: a woman bathing in the moonlight , or walking ahead of him with a washerwoman's basin, long black hair to her waist, figure flawless, face always somehow just turned away. If he is the kind of man the night is fishing for—the married man out prowling, the seducer, the drunk with appetite—he follows. She lets him. She leads him off the road, ford by ford, ravine by ravine, always a little ahead, always about to turn—until the settlement lights are gone and the dogs are out of earshot; and then she turns. Under the beautiful hair is the face of a horse —or a bare skull, in the harder tellings—and the scream, the pounce, or the sheer sight of her does the rest: men are found days later mad, mute, fevered, jugados —"played with"—or found...

Between Silesia and Bohemia the Giant Mountains—the Riesengebirge, the Krkonoše—rise in long treeless ridges where the weather changes character in minutes: sun, then wall-fog, then hail out of a blue morning, then sun again upon the drenched traveler. The old people of both slopes knew the author of that meteorology by name, though they were careful where they spoke it. He is Rübezahl : lord of the range, keeper of its herbs, treasures, and tempests—a mountain spirit of no fixed shape, appearing now as a gray monk, now as a woodcutter, a huntsman, a journeyman on the path ahead, a log across the stream, a toad, a cock, a cloud; in Schwind's great painting he strides his ridge as a wild staff-bearing giant with the face of a man interrupted mid-thought. He is, by the unanimous testimony of five centuries of tales, the moodiest power in German legend : generous past all reason to the poor, the honest, and the courteous—his gifts of leaves and stones turn to gold at the mountain...

Most legends of the hidden helpers are told in the present tense: the tomte still keeps the farm, the knockers still tap in the mine. Cologne's is told in the past, and that is its whole terrible point. Once—so runs the legend fixed forever in August Kopisch's beloved 1836 poem, which every German child still learns—the citizens of Cologne did not need to work . By night, while the city slept, the Heinzelmännchen came: little men a span high, industrious as bees, who finished every trade's labor before dawn. The carpenter's beams were sawn, joined, and raised; the baker's bread stood in golden rows; the butcher's sausages were stuffed, the wine-cooper's casks bound, the tailor's senator's-coat stitched to the last buttonhole. The craftsman of Cologne, says the poem with affectionate malice, could lie on his bench and be lazy : the work did itself, or seemed to. No wages were asked; no thanks were possible, for the little men had one law, the univer...

Lithuania was the last country in Europe to accept Christianity, and its folklore keeps, better than any of its neighbors', the temperature of the elder world. Its greatest tale—told in hundreds of recorded variants, taught to every Lithuanian child, raised in bronze at Palanga by the sea—is Eglė žalčių karalienė : Eglė, Queen of Serpents; and it is not, despite its nursery ubiquity, a children's story. It is a tragedy of marriage between the shore and the deep, built with the cold symmetry of the old Baltic mind, and it ends with a mother turning her own children and herself into trees —an ending the tradition regards not as horror but as the only dignity left, which tells the reader at once what kind of country the tale comes from. At its center are four instruments: a grass-snake in a sleeve, a secret name, a betrayal extracted from a child by whipping, and the ancient identity—nowhere else so explicit—of persons and trees . The Snake in the Sleeve Three sisters bathe in ...

The Amazon and its thousand tributaries are inhabited by an animal that seems designed by the river to unsettle its people: the boto , the great pink river dolphin— Inia geoffrensis —flesh-colored, long-beaked, warm-blooded, sociable, given to following canoes and surfacing beside bathers with an attention that feels, every river-dweller will tell you, personal . Around that uncanny attention the ribeirinho world built the most famous legend of the Brazilian waters. On festival nights—the June saints' feasts above all, when the riverside villages string lights and dance— the boto comes ashore as a man : tall, pale or red-tinted, charming beyond any local rival, dressed all in white, and always—the detail every telling guards like a jewel—wearing a hat, which he never removes , because beneath it his transformation is incomplete: the crown of his head still carries the blowhole . He is the finest dancer at the feast; he drinks, courts, and chooses the prettiest girl; he walks her t...

Deep in the beech-woods of the Pyrenees, where the Basque country climbs toward the ridgelines, the old shepherds located a neighbor whose name is a plain job description: Basajaun — basa , wild; jaun , lord— the Lord of the Wild . He is huge, powerfully built, covered in hair to the knees, with a mane that falls to his waist and one foot, in some valleys, round as a hoof or turned like a beast's; his lady is the Basandere , the wild woman; and his home is the high forest and the caves. Met suddenly on a mountain path he is terrifying—and the whole strangeness of his tradition, the thing that sets the Basque wild man apart from every hairy giant in the world's mountains, is what the shepherds say next: he is a protector . When the storm is coming, or the wolves are moving, the Basajaun shouts and whistles across the high pastures to warn the flocks and the men; sheep, the shepherds swore, shake their bells all at once when he passes near, and then the shepherd may sleep, for ...