Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

On a cliff-face at Agawa Rock, where the granite drops sheer into the cold water of Lake Superior, there is painted in red ochre a creature that the Anishinaabe peoples of the Great Lakes have honoured and feared for uncounted generations: a great cat-like beast, horned, its back and long tail ridged with spines or plates like a saw, spikes down its spine — the Mishipeshu, the "Great Lynx," the underwater panther, master and monster of the deep waters. It is one of the most important beings in the whole cosmology of the Great Lakes nations, and one of the most precisely conceived. It has the body and snarling head of a cat — a lynx or cougar grown vast — but armoured with the scales of a serpent or fish , crowned with the horns of power, and ridged all down its spine and its enormous tail with copper spines; and it dwells in the deepest and coldest water — the depths of Superior above all, and the dangerous straits and rapids where the lakes pour into one another. It is t...

Anyone who has traveled the blackwater rivers of the upper Amazon knows the sight that founds this legend: on a still afternoon the river becomes a mirror so perfect that the world doubles — forest below forest, sky below hull, and the canoe hangs between two identical creations, one of them upside down. The ribereño peoples of the Peruvian Amazon, and the shamanic traditions that run through them, have always known what the mirror shows: not a reflection — a neighborhood . Beneath the rivers and the great lakes live the yacuruna — Quechua for "water people" — a complete nation under the water: cities of them, with streets and plazas and houses whose roofs are the shimmer we see from above — and their world is inverted : the yacuruna live upside down, their dwellings hanging into the depth as ours rise into the air, their day our night, their dry our wet, everything in their kingdom the mirror-twin of ours, reversed. They ride caimans as we ride horses; giant anacondas are ...

Where the Murray River ends its long crossing of Australia — spreading into the great shallow expanse of Lake Alexandrina before it finds the sea — the Ngarrindjeri people, whose country those waters have been for uncounted generations, have always known that the lake is inhabited. Not figuratively. Beneath the brown water and among the drifting islands of weed lives the Muldjewangk: a being — or, in some tellings, a whole race of beings — of the deep channels: immense, man-like above and fish-like below in the accounts that give it shape at all, though the deeper tradition prefers it shapeless — known not by its outline but by its grip . For the Muldjewangk's signature, the thing every telling keeps, is the hands : enormous hands, rising without ripple from beneath, that seize — a fishing line, a dangling foot, the rudder of a boat — and pull . Children of the lake country were raised on it in the plainest terms: the water's edge after dusk belongs to the Muldjewangk; swim wh...

On the River Conwy in North Wales, a little upstream of Betws-y-Coed, the water gathers itself into a deep, dark, slow-turning pool that has carried the same name for as long as Welsh has been spoken on its banks: Llyn yr Afanc — the Afanc's Pool. Tourists photograph it now for its stillness. The parishes around it, for the better part of a thousand years, knew it as the address of the most troublesome monster in Wales: the afanc — a creature of the deep pools that dragged down cattle and swimmers, that thrashed the river into flood when it pleased, and that proved, when the exasperated country finally rose against it, impossible to kill by any weapon made. The Welsh, being a practical people, did not kill it. They moved it — in the most extraordinary monster-removal operation in European folklore, involving one brave girl, a set of iron chains, and the two most famous oxen in Britain — and where they moved it, the tradition insists, it remains to this day: in a cold little lake...

Ask in the old valleys of the Basque Country who built the ancient bridge over the river — the impossibly old one, the one whose stones no parish record accounts for — and tradition has a ready answer: the lamiak built it, in one night, and they were paid in cornbread and cider, and they would have finished the last stone if the cock had not crowed. Ask who made the dolmens on the ridge, who combs the pools below the mill, who used to leave the flax spun when the farmwife left them supper — the same answer, always in the plural, always feminine: lamiak . They are the great fairy-people of the Basques: women beautiful beyond the ordinary from the head to the knee, sitting by rivers and cave-mouths in the half-light, combing their long hair with combs of pure gold — and below the knee, not women at all. In most valleys the lamia stands on the webbed feet of a duck; near the sea she tapers into a fish; here and there she goes on the hooves of a goat. The golden comb and the wrong feet: b...

Some spirits haunt a castle, some a crossroads, some a single crooked tree. Peg Powler haunts a river — the whole of it, from the peat hags of its moorland birth to the mudflats where it meets the North Sea — and not just any river, but the Tees, the old boundary water between Yorkshire and County Durham, and one of the most treacherous streams in England. She is a hag of the classic northern pattern: green-skinned in some tellings, green-haired in all of them, with long arms, an insatiable grudge, and one fixed occupation. Peg Powler pulls people in. Children especially, children who play too near the bank — and above all, the grandmothers insisted, children who profane the Sabbath by playing at the water's edge on a Sunday. She waits below the brown swirl of the current, patient as an eel, and when the small feet come within reach of the small hands, the Tees gains another soul. She never had a ballad, never a shrine, never a carved likeness. What she had was better: a river th...

Every child in the old West Riding of Yorkshire knew the rule, because every mother made sure of it: do not stand at the edge of still water. Not the beck, which chatters and moves and can be seen through. The still water. The mill dam with its skin of green weed, the flooded marl pit behind the hedgerow, the black peat pool on the moor that seems no bigger than a table and has no bottom that anyone ever found. Stand too long at the brink of a pool like that, leaning over your own reflection, and something that has been watching from below — patient, folded, the color of drowned leaves — will unfold. Two long, thin, sinewy arms will break the surface without a splash. Cold fingers will close around your ankle. And that, as the grandmothers said, will be the end of the tale. The creature was called the grindylow, and it belongs to Yorkshire and Lancashire the way the Kelpie belongs to the lochs of Scotland or the Vodyanoy to the millponds of Russia. It is a small legend, in one sens...

Along the whole Atlantic coast of Africa—from Senegal down past the Niger Delta to the Congo and beyond—and across the ocean wherever the diaspora carried its waters, one spirit presides over the meeting of the deep and the modern world. She is Mami Wata : Mother Water, in the coastal pidgin that named her; a spirit of the sea, the lagoons, and the great rivers, appearing as a woman of overwhelming beauty—long straight hair, light-dark unplaceable skin, eyes that hold the water's shine—often fish-tailed below the waist, and attended by her serpent , which she wears looped over her shoulders and rising between her breasts, as the famous image shows. Her regalia are the mirror and the comb : found on her shores, they must be treated exactly rightly, for they are her summons and her snare at once. And her portfolio is the one that makes her unique among the world's water-women: Mami Wata is the spirit of wealth in its modern, foreign, sea-borne form —of money, trade, cosmopolitan...

Her name is the oldest thing about her, and it is a complete theology in two Tupi words: y-îara — y , water; îara , lady, mistress, owner: the Mistress of the Waters . La Iara—Uiara, Mãe-d'água, the Water Mother, as the river peoples of Brazil also call her—dwells in the Amazon and its endless tributaries, in the river-beaches and the deep still bends; she is beautiful past all the beauty of the land: long dark (or copper-green) hair, skin of river-light, eyes that hold the surface's shine; a woman to the waist and fish-tailed below in the later tellings, wholly woman in the older ones; and her instrument is the one the world's waters have always used: song . On the hot afternoons and the moonlit nights she sits on a rock or a beach at the river's edge, combing her hair, and sings—wordless, or in words the hearer afterward cannot repeat—and the fisherman who hears her forgets the net in his hands, the wife at his hearth, the names of his children; he turns the canoe; ...

Japan's rivers and ponds are administered, in the old reckoning, by a creature that no other folklore quite managed to imagine: a being at once deadly and ridiculous, monstrous and punctilious, whose entire terrible strength depends on a saucer of water balanced on its own head . The kappa —"river child," one of the great tribe of yōkai that populate the Japanese uncanny—stands about the size of a child of six or eight; it is scaled or slimy, green or yellow, with webbed hands and feet, a turtle's shell on its back, a beaked, apish face, and, on the crown of its skull, a dish-shaped depression (the sara ) that must remain filled with water . While the dish is full, the kappa on land has the strength of many men—it wrestles horses into rivers, drags swimmers under, and defeats grown warriors. Spill the dish, and the creature is instantly helpless: paralyzed, dying, or reduced to abject pleading. And the classical method of spilling it is the most Japanese remedy in ...

The Russian village stood always between two sovereigns it had not elected. Behind it, the forest, with its bark-clad lord whose whistles bent the paths. Before it, the river or the millpond—and in the millpond lived the other one: the Vodyanoy , the Water One, old man of the deep pools. Bilibin drew him as the tradition described him: a bloated ancient with a beard of green weed and slime, fish-belly pale, sometimes scaled, sometimes finned, crowned with water-plants, riding an outsized catfish as a lord rides a stallion—for the catfish, the whiskered giant of the Russian rivers, was the Vodyanoy's own steed and messenger, and prudent fishermen threw the first of the catch back to him as a courtesy. He dwelt in the deepest hole of the river, under the mill-wheel by preference, in a drowned palace lit by a light that was not the sun; herds of drowned cattle grazed his underwater meadows; and in his crystal halls, said the strangest and most persistent of the traditions, he kept ro...