Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Between the Isle of Lewis and the northwest coast of the Scottish mainland runs a strait of cold, quarrelsome water called the Minch — and in the middle of its narrower southern reach, like a fist of black basalt shaken at passing ships, rise the Shiant Islands: the "enchanted isles," in the Gaelic, cliffed with columns of dark rock and screaming with seabirds. The channel beside them bears a name that is a warning in itself. Scottish charts of the old days called it the Sea-stream of the Blue Men, and the sailors of the Hebrides would tell you, without a smile, exactly who was meant. For these waters — and in all the wide world, only these waters — belong to the Blue Men of the Minch: man-shaped spirits the color of deep water, who swim with the torsos of athletes breaking the waves, who sleep in the sea-caves in calm weather, and who rise in the running swell to seize ships — unless the skipper can beat their chieftain at poetry. There is nothing else quite like them in ...

Stand on any open ground in North America — a prairie in Dakota, a beach on Vancouver Island, a granite shore of Lake Superior — and watch a summer storm come in, and you will understand why half a continent agreed on the shape of its greatest spirit. The anvil cloud spreads like a wingspan measured in miles. The first far-off rumble arrives in slow, heavy beats, unmistakably like something enormous flying toward you. Then the eye of the storm opens — one blinding flash — and closes again. The peoples of North America, from the whale-hunters of the Pacific coast to the corn-planters of the Southeast, looked up into that violence and saw not chaos but a creature: a bird beyond all birds, whose wingbeats are the thunder and whose glance is the lightning. They called him, in a hundred languages, some word that the traders eventually rendered into English as Thunderbird . He is one of the very few mythological beings shared across nearly the whole of a continent. The Lakota of the plains...

In the storm-country of southern Africa—the Eastern Cape of the Xhosa, the Zulu lands, the highveld where the summer thunderheads build like white mountains and the lightning kills more people than almost anywhere on earth—the bolt from the cloud is not a discharge. It is a bird . The impundulu —the lightning bird of Xhosa, Zulu, and Pondo tradition; inyoni yezulu , "the bird of heaven"—is a great bird, white or black-and-white in most tellings, the size of a man when it chooses; and the thunderstorm is its visitation: the lightning is the flash of its descent —the beat of its wings is the thunder, the bolt its talons striking—and where lightning strikes the earth, there, say the traditions, the bird has landed and laid its egg in the ground . The scorched pit at the strike-point conceals it; and the egg of the lightning bird is an object of terrible ambivalence: a thing of power for the healer who knows how to take it—the strike-site's soil and the egg figure in the old...