Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

When a black storm came over the mountains of Asturias — the kind that turns the afternoon green-dark and sends the cattle bawling for the barn — the old farmers of that steep northern country did not curse the sky. They looked up into the boiling underside of the cloud and addressed a person. Somewhere up there, they knew, riding the thunderhead the way a herdsman rides a half-broken horse, was a small, ugly, irritable man in a wide black hat and a cloak of skins, with a beard like wet smoke and a temper like the hail he carried in his saddlebags. The Asturians called him the Nuberu — the cloud-man, the storm master — and their neighbors in Galicia knew him as the Nubeiro, and everyone from the Bay of Biscay to the mountain passes agreed on the essentials: the weather was not a thing. The weather was somebody . And somebody, with the right mixture of church bells, prayers, and country hospitality, can be dealt with. The Man in the Cloud Green Spain is a land where the weather is de...

Colombia's Andean countryside—coffee slopes, cloud-forest, the wild montes between the farms—answers to a mistress, and the campesinos of Antioquia and the old Caldas country can describe her exactly. La Madremonte —Mother Mountain, Mother Forest; Marimonda or Madre de agua 's inland sister in some districts—is a towering woman dressed entirely in living vegetation : robes of leaves, branches, moss and vines, a hat or crown of green from under which glowing eyes burn in a face no one sees clearly—and those who have seen more report they wish they had not. She dwells in the deepest thickets, at the springs and the sources of the quebradas; her cry in the storm—a shriek riding the wind on the wild nights—is the storm's own voice; and her jurisdiction, exercised with a matron's implacability, is threefold. She punishes the trespassers of boundaries : the land-thieves who move fences and markers, the squatters on others' titles, the shifters of boundary-stones—these...

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...