Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Among the Ewe people of Togo and southeastern Ghana, the most feared creature of the night is also one of the smallest lights in it. The adze is a vampiric being that flies through the dark not as a bat or a bird but as a firefly — a drifting spark of cold light, small enough to pass through a keyhole, under a door, through the gap where the thatch meets the wall. No lock built by human hands can exclude it. Once inside, it settles upon the sleeping — children above all — and drinks: blood, in the plain telling; the life itself, in the deeper one. Those it feeds upon sicken and waste, and the wasting looks, to the daylight eye, like any of the fevers that haunt the tropics. But the adze is more than a nocturnal parasite, for in the Ewe understanding it does not simply exist in the night — it inhabits people . The adze lives coiled inside a human host, a sorcerer or an unknowing vessel, and the firefly that slips through the keyhole is the appetite of a neighbor, gone out hunting while...

Ask after the most feared creature of Philippine folklore and one word answers from Luzon to Mindanao: aswang . Yet ask what an aswang is, and the answer dissolves into a dozen shapes — for the aswang is not a single monster but a whole taxonomy of dread, an umbrella word sheltering viscera-suckers and corpse-thieves, were-beasts and self-segmenting witches, under one name. What unites them is more terrible than any particular form: the aswang is a neighbor. By day it is a quiet villager — most often a woman, soft-spoken, perhaps a little reclusive, perhaps notably fond of attending wakes — and by night it hunts the community it lives in, craving above all the unborn child in the womb, the newborn, the sick, and the freshly dead. Spanish friars were already recording terror of the aswang in the sixteenth century; centuries of sermons, cinema, and electric light have failed to retire it. In parts of the Visayas and Mindanao it remains, quite simply, believed. A Taxonomy of Night Folk...