These posts accumulate quite fast.
1. Dictionary of the Khazars
A 1984 novel by Milorad Pavić that tells its multi-headed century-spanning alternate-history story through dictionary format. I’ve not read it but I really should, since it sounds 110% like my kind of shit. Though right now it seems my bets are either borrowing the low-quality scanned pdf from Internet Archive or snagging it through interlibrary loan.
2. Quinametzin
From Aztec mythology via the Codex Mendieta; six giant sons of Mixcoatl, who survived the flood that destroyed the world of the Fourth Sun and then founded the cities and peoples of the Fifth.
3. Ḫulbazizi
“Evil be gone” or “the evil is eradicated”; the final phrase of Sumerian and later Alkkadian exorcism incantations.
4. Ofuda
Wood or paper talismans used in both Shinto and Japanese Buddhism.
5. Haida Manga
This is predominantly the work of Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, and while the article doesn’t have any visual examples a quick google search brings up some striking comic work.
6. Esplumoir Merlin
A hut / cottage / tower / castle etc where Merlin transforms into a bird or back into a human.
7. Barlaam and Josaphat
A popular medieval saints’ tale about a prince who escapes the seclusion of his father’s palace for a life of ascetic piety that, by the time Caxton printed it, would have been an English translation of a Latin translation of a Greek translation of a Georgian translation of an Arabic translation of a Middle Persian translation of a Sanskrit text about the early life of Siddharta Gautama. So the Buddha is canonically a saint in both the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, though I don’t think either would admit to it.
8. Menocchio
A miller executed by the Roman Inquisition in 1599 for a sundry list of heresies, including:
- The only sin is harming one’s neighbor.
- Blasphemy only hurts the blasphemer.
- Mary wasn’t a perpetual virgin.
- The pope has no special spiritual privilege beyond an ordinary righteous man.
- As the afterlife is God’s domain and fully outside of human influence, there’s no reason to pray for the dead and the living should focus on helping the living.
- Sacraments are all human inventions to make money; God gives baptismal grace to everyone directly at their birth.
- Marriage was established by men, not God; an exchange of vows is all that is needed and anything more is just business.
- Anyone can become a priest through study (the practice of ordination being just another business)
- The use of Latin in court trials is a way for the rich to oppress the poor, since the accused usually don’t know what they’re being accused of or how to defend themselves.
- “God has given the Holy Spirit to all, to Christians, to heretics, to Turks, and to Jews; and he considers them all dear, and they are all saved in the same manner.”
- The universe started as an undifferentiated coagulation of the four elements in a state similar to a block of cheese, and that God and the angels emerged from it like worms (from said block of cheese).
Dang, Menocchio, leave some wins for the rest of us.
9. Al-Wakwak
An island from medieval Islamic literature, supposedly located in the seas east of China. The inhabitants are all women who grow on a tree like fruit, and while I can’t say this is directly related to Elden Ring it certainly feels appropriate.
10. Youdu
Capital city of the underworld in Chinese mythology; I think there’s a fun contrast to be made here with Pandemonium as rival cities, dual cities, or even the same city in different periods or under different administrations.
11. Alyoshenka
I fucking love this article. It’s just some Russian creepypasta that has somehow had a dedicated wikipedia article for 20 years, with all the vague, unsourced, unverifiable claims that this would entail. you could easily use it as a case study of how to spot bad information and spurious claims while doing online research. It reads like a bad first attempt at an SCP article and annoying as that can be, you can develop a certain fondness for the really impressive flops. It’s the sort of bad shortform horror fiction that makes me go “oh man I could probably make a good version of this”.
12. Category: Yokai
An inclusion that requires no justification; everyone should have a list of yokai on hand.
13. Dionysiaca
A late-Classical epic poem about the life and accomplishments of Dionysus, including his military expedition to India, written in Greek sometime in the 400s AD. It’s the longest surviving poem in Greco-Roman literature at over 20,000 lines in 48 books, survives in what appears to be its completion, and somehow no one knows or talks about this. There are only two English translations that I can find, with the oldest still being from 1940.
14. Caribbean Shaktism
The British system of indenture in India saw a sizable population of Tamils deported to the Caribbean. They brought their religious practices with them, which have developed on their own into a syncretic tradition that holds Kali-Mariamman as the primary manifestation(s) of Shakti. A historical curiosity that I never even considered, and a good reminder that the world is a big mixed-up bag of stuff.
15. Lake Uniamési
An enormous apocryphal lake in east-central Africa, believed to be the source of the Benue, Nile, Congo and Zambezi rivers by European missionaries for a brief period in the mid 1800s. Was most likely a misinterpretation of the African Great Lakes.
16. Pas-ta’ai
A festival held by the Saisiyat people of Taiwan to commemorate and appease the spirits of a tribe of dwarves who had feuded with the Saisiyat’s ancestors. Has had something of a modern resurgence, though that has come at the cost of disruptive tourists.
17. Herxheim (archaeological site)
Archaeological site in Germany and former home of a neolithic cannibal death cult.
The Herxheim mass-grave is estimated to hold the remains of at least 500 individuals, with many of them originating a noteworthy distance from the site; recovered bones display cuts and fractures in consistent enough patterns to indicate methodological killing, post mortem butchering, and consumption. Skulls were converted into vessels, long bones were cracked open and scraped clean of marrow. With so many foreigners among the dead, they had to have either travelled there intentionally or brought there by force.
And all of this is packed at the tail-end of Herxheim’s history: after about 300 years of habitation and a further 50 years of human sacrifice, the site was abandoned and never reclaimed.
18. Temagami Magnetic Anomaly
A magnetic anomaly in eastern Ontario generated by a large geological structure of unknown composition and origin (though it’s probably from a meteor impact depositing a shit-ton of iron). I like the name, it's got an excellent ring to it.
19. Huang Bamei
You win at piracy by retiring with your head still on your shoulders: “Two Guns” Huang Bamei not only did that, but did it so recently that she’s got a photograph on her Wikipedia page. She died in 1982! Got her start smuggling salt with her father, then worked up to running her own operation, got caught, dodged execution, got recruited by the Nationalists to fight the Japanese, went back to piracy, got cornered by the government again, got pardoned, the Nationalists recruited her again to fight the communists, and then finally retired from piracy in Taiwan. Turned down the CIA’s attempt to recruit her and successfully sued Shaw Brothers Studio over a film depicting her as a collaborator with the Japanese.
20. Zapam Zucum
Goddess of carob trees in the folklore of the Aymara and Diaguita people of Argentina / Chile / Bolivia. Looks over infants laid down in the shade while their mothers work. Described as having dark skin, hair, and eyes, white hands, and - the article seems keen to point this out - big ol’ gazongas.
21. Zaqqum
A tree at the center of Hell in Islamic tradition; its fruit is shaped like demon heads and boils sinners from the inside when eaten. I’m honestly surprised that “inverse of the Tree of Life” took this long for me to find, it’s a natural mythic extension to Eden.
22. Eglė the Queen of Serpents
A figure from Lithuanian folklore; Eglė is a human woman who marries the king of serpents and together they have three sons and a daughter. After completing some impossible tasks (as is tradition) Eglė leaves the serpent’s palace to visit her family, at which point her brothers gang up, learn the means of summoning the serpent king from Eglė’s daughter Drebulė, and kill the serpent to prevent Eglė from returning to the sea. In grief Eglė transforms her children into oak / birch / ash / aspen trees, and then herself into a fir.
And also she’s a character in Elden Ring, I guess. I don’t really see the resemblance, there’s nothing remotely applicable between the two stories. It’s not like Elden Ring has a character who probably fucked a snake and is associated with a big tree that generates a considerable amount of sap / resin like a pine tree would and oh…
23. List of Hoaxes on Wikipedia
Since everything on Wikipedia is CC-BY-SA, all of these hoaxes have inadvertently been added to a sort of shared alternate history, and I think that’s neat. Most of these are stubs or minor blurbs, but there are probably a few that could be expanded into a bit of nifty flash fiction.
24. Chinese Characters of Empress Wu
A series of alternative Hanzi characters that saw some use for a time during the reign of Wu Zeitian, though the mandate evaporated as soon as she died. They’re all in unicode, as is right. Most of them are for fairly important words (sun, monarch, person, etc), which fits with their invention as a sort of linguistic show of force.
25. Medieval Runes
The descendent of the Younger Futhark, used throughout Scandinavia up until the early modern period even after the introduction of the Latin Script in the 1200s. Would be a great pull if you want a script for a game; it’s recognizable but not just copying Elder Futhark because Tolkien did it, and there are more letter variants to work with (to handle the historical development of new sounds)
26. Manungal
Sumerian goddess of prisons, name translates to “great princess”. Felt like an interesting dichotomy. The article points out that, given the place and time, the goddess of prisons would be pretty merciful compared to the mutilation and / or summary execution you’d normally get in the era of Hammurabi.
27. List of Aesop’s Fables
And these are just the ones with Wikipedia articles! The Perry Index has 725 of them, and I honestly had no idea there were so many. They’re so ubiquitous as a thing people just know about that it fades into the cultural background radiation, which is certainly a shame I should remedy. While odds are good that Aesop might have been a character stories were attributed to out of convention or convenience, that’s useful inspiration in its own right.
28. Matilda Joslyn Gage
A woman with one hell of a resume. Abolitionist, feminist, suffragette, journalist, author, critic of religion, campaigner for indigenous rights, etc etc. Also the mother-in-law of L. Frank Baum.
29. Zana of Tkhina
One of those cases where it feels like reality is copying some of my notes.
It’s the mid 1800s: A strange woman is found wandering the woods of Abkhazia: tall, dark-skinned, covered in thick reddish-brown body hair, and seemingly unable to speak. She’s captured, sold as a curiosity multiple times before, and ending with Edgi Genaba of Tkhina. She lives outdoors on the Genaba estate until her death in the 1880s, survived by four children; anything more than general details is lost to time.
The locals at the time considered her an abnauayu (a wild-man); Soviet cryptozoologists Alexander Mashkovtsev and Boris Porshnev thought she was a surviving neanderthal or some other relict hominid. Their excavations of the Genaba family cemetery in the 1970s exhumed the body of her youngest son Khwit (d.1954), and a woman's body that had been buried without a coffin. That body was not conclusively identified (via DNA analysis) as Zana until 2021. Modern scholars think the most likely explanation is that she was Afro-Abkhazian (a diaporic community descended from east African slaves brought to the region by the Ottomans) and had congenital generalized hypertrichosis, causing both her body hair and apparent intellectual disability.
Khwit and Zana's skulls remain in Moscow; the rest of Zana's body was stored in the Sukhumi Museum of Natural History until it was destroyed during the 1992 war in Abkhazia.
It’s not a happy ending. I doubt the middle or beginning were particularly happy, either. The article says that Zana's four children were born under “unclear circumstances”, and while that doesn't necessitate the worst possible outcome I don't think the odds are in favor of history cutting her a break.
Still. In my mind's eye I can see the neanderthals wander out of the woods one evening when no one was watching, and Zana slips away with them to live happy and free in the mountains till the end of her days. It’s bullshit, but sometimes you need a bit of bullshit to get through the day.
A toast to Zana; she deserved so much better than she got.
The Commons Section
1. Titan Sea Map
CC-BY 2.0 (Peter Minton)
Solid campaign world map right there, maybe slap a few islands down and you're good to go.
2. World Map with Separatist Movements
CC-BY-SA-4.0 (Vojtěch Pokorný)
A map of the modern world if every entry on the Wikipedia list of active separatist movements (as of Jan 2023) succeeded. Excellent fuel for some alternate history scenarios even if you just pick a couple.
3. Historical map Orkneyar
Public Domain (Unknown artist)
Map of the Orkney Islands for Adventure magazine. Terrible resolution, basically unreadable, but would be easy to blow up and trace over.
4. Creature hyena
CC-BY-3.0 (David Revoy / Blender Foundation
I love how much this absolutely isn't a hyena and yet feels the most hyena it's possible to be. Bet it has an absolutely fucked up laugh.
5. Wooly mammoths near the Somme River
Public Domain (Charles Robert Knight)
A mural for the American Museum of Natural History. knight has loads of other great vintage paleoart, I went with the mammoths because of course I did.
6. Font de Gaume
Public Domain (Charles Robert Knight)
Human paleoart gets graded on a pretty sharp curve, but this is a solid one.
7. Gothmog, Lord of Balrogs
CC-BY-4.0 (Álvaro Fernández González)
Now I'm not entirely certain where CC fanart falls on the spectrum of yea or nay, but this is a nice menacing balrog.
8. Sigmund
Public Domain (Arthur Rackham)
Used this one for my PDLOTR project. Leave it to Rackham to make some incredible art of some truly godawful subject matter.
9. Setebos
Public Domain (Joseph Urban)
Design work for a 1916 performance of the masque Caliban by the Yellow Sands. That's a dungeon if I've ever seen one.
10.Warrior
CC-BY-4.0 (David Revoy)
The boob plate isn't going to pass armorer's muster, but you can do far worse for anime-vibe art.
11. Lia Turtle
CC-BY-4.0 (David Revoy / Blender Foundation)
If it's not obvious yet, David Revoy has a lot of CC art on Wikimedia Commons.
12. Maastricht Book of Hours, BL Stowe MS17 f200v
Public Domain (Unknown artist)
Nun with animal legs, bigass sword, and a no-nonsense expression. Figure that will be of interest to the readership of this blog.
13. BlankMap-Philippines-noborders
Public Domain (Howard the Duck)
Certain someone can find a use for this.
14. Ekko (Echo)
Public Domain (Theodor Kittelsen)
All of Kittelsen's work is PD and all of it is fantastic. His main page has a gallery.
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