Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

This chronicle has raised, from Persia, a nightmare that pays its ransom in gold; let it raise now, from the same tradition, one of the most beautiful beings in all the world's folklore — the peri (the pari of the Persian tongue, which gave English its "fairy" by a long road). The peri are spirits of light and air and beauty : winged, radiant, exquisite, gentle, fragrant beings — the loveliest of all the intermediary spirits of the Persian imagination, benevolent, associated with grace and beauty and the sweetness of the world; and yet, in the deep tradition, they are fallen — not devils, not evil, but fallen from grace , spirits who sinned or erred and were shut out of paradise, and who now exist in a state between the earth and the heaven they lost, working, across long ages, their slow way back . They are the enemies of the div , the dark demons of the Persian cosmos, whom they war against endlessly; they are creatures of pure light against the div's darkness; ...

Of all the immortals that legend has set walking through the centuries, one alone carries his immortality as a gait . He has no castle, no mountain, no sleeping-crypt; his whole estate is the road. The medieval world called him by many names—Cartaphilus, Buttadeus, Juan Espera-en-Dios in Spain, Isaac Laquedem in the Low Countries, and at last, fatefully, Ahasverus —but Europe knew him generically as the Wandering Jew : the man who, on the morning of the Crucifixion, refused the Cross a moment's rest, and received in exchange an eternity without one. His legend is the strangest of the deathless tales because its terror is so small and so total at once: not fire, not torment—merely the inability to stop . He cannot sit long; he cannot lie down for more than a spell; chairs, hearths, beds, and graves decline him equally. He walks. He has been walking, by his own account, since the year 33. And wherever he appeared—and he appeared , in sworn testimonies, for five hundred years across ...

Somewhere in the hills of Thuringia—tradition fixed it at last upon the Hörselberg, a bare whale-back of limestone east of Eisenach from whose caves a strange roaring was said to issue—there is a mountain with a court inside it. Not a court of dwarfs or dead emperors, as German mountains usually keep, but something far more dangerous: the exiled goddess of love herself, holding eternal session in the warm dark. When the old gods fell, the medieval imagination did not believe they had died; it believed they had moved indoors . Venus, evicted from her temples, took the freehold of a hollow hill, and there, among music and unaging pleasures, she received the occasional mortal guest. The most famous of them was a knight and singer whose name the ballads give as Tannhäuser —a historical minnesinger of the thirteenth century, a real poet of wandering life and confessed appetites—and his legend, brief as a ballad and deep as a well, turns on three things: a mountain you may enter, a pardon y...

The great ballads of Scotland are not gentle, and the greatest of them all—child ballad thirty-nine, the tale of Tam Lin —is a story with blood under its fingernails. It concerns a maiden who breaks a prohibition, a man held captive by the Queen of Fairies, a tithe paid to hell every seven years, and a rescue accomplished not by sword or prayer but by the oldest and hardest of all magical operations: holding on . It is, beneath its briars and bridles, the most complete initiation text in British balladry—and it is one of the very few in all the world's rescue-literature in which the armed and endangered party is the man, and the descending savior is a pregnant girl with her skirt kilted above her knee. Carterhaugh and the Forfeit The ballad opens with a public warning, sung as if nailed to a church door: let no maiden go to Carterhaugh —a real wood, still standing where the Ettrick meets the Yarrow below Selkirk—for young Tam Lin haunts it, and takes from every visitor a forfeit...

Off the Cape of Good Hope, where two oceans grind against each other and the weather turns murderous without apology, sailors for three centuries reported the same impossible sight: a seventeenth-century Dutch East Indiaman under full press of canvas, beating into the teeth of a gale that no ship could sail against, her hull glowing with a light that belonged to no lantern. She never made port. She never sank. She was the Flying Dutchman , the most famous phantom of the sea, and the law of her legend was simple and terrible: the ship that hails you is doomed, and the doom is contagious. To sight her was to expect fouled water-casks, dead men in the rigging, letters to be delivered to persons long deceased—and, perhaps, no landfall at all. The Captain Who Cursed the Wind The legend crystallized around a name: Vanderdecken —"of the decks"—captain out of Amsterdam for the Dutch East India Company, though some tellings prefer Falkenburg, and one persistent tradition names the...