Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Highland tradition is precise about the animal: as large as a dog, black as the inside of a chimney, with one white spot on its breast — and not a cat at all. The cat-sìth (in Irish, cat sí ): the fairy cat of the Scottish Highlands, a creature the old people of the glens regarded not as a beast but as a person of the other world — a fairy in feline form, or, in the darker strand of the tradition, a witch transformed, walking the moors on her own business. It arched on the boundary of two worlds exactly as a cat arches on a wall: at home on both sides, owned by neither. The Highlanders treated every large black cat with corresponding diplomacy, for one could never be sure — and on one night of the year, and at every wake in the glen, the diplomacy became urgent, because the cat-sìth had two known interests in human affairs: the milk and kindness of Samhain, and the souls of the newly dead. The Watcher at the Wake The most serious business of the cat-sìth was conducted in the prese...

A juvenile grey seal swimming in the Farne Islands, UK. The grey seal (Halichoerus grypus) is the animal most closely associated with the Selkie legend: its large, dark eyes, its habit of watching from the rocks, its uncanny intelligence and its apparent comfort in both water and land have made it the obvious candidate for the folk tradition of seal-people who can shed their animal form. On the remote islands of Orkney and Shetland, on the western coast of Ireland, in the Faroes and along the Norwegian coast, the grey seals know something about the people who watch them from the shore. They can feel the attention. They turn their great dark eyes toward you with an expression that is, unmistakably, one of recognition — not the blank animal awareness of most wild creatures, but something that seems to go deeper, something that seems to remember. And if you watch long enough, particularly at dusk on a lonely beach with the wind off the sea and the tide coming in, you begin to underst...

The Kelpie — Herbert James Draper, 1913. The water horse in its most seductive aspect, appearing as a beautiful young woman emerging from the river: the lure made flesh, the danger dressed in invitation, the moment before the glamour breaks and the thing beneath is revealed. By the riverbank, grazing in the mist at the edge of the water, there is a horse. It is more beautiful than any ordinary horse — larger, sleeker, its coat glistening with a dampness that might be river water or might be something else, its mane hanging heavy and wet. It stands perfectly still as you approach. It does not shy or bolt when you reach for its back. And when you are seated on it — when you feel the extraordinary strength of the creature beneath you — the mane closes around your hands like something alive and will not release you, and the horse turns toward the deep water and walks in, and does not stop. This is the Kelpie — the each uisge in Scottish Gaelic, meaning "water horse" — one...