As I continue my Sisyphean task of compiling 130 pages of material from my notes app into coherence, here’s a quick slush pile of random wikipedia links that I’ve saved.
1. The Mistress of the Copper Mountain
Russian folkloric figure associated with the Gumyoshevsky mine in the Urals (which has been around since the mid-2nd millennium BCE!). Wears a malachite gown and can take the form of a lizard. Oral lore first appearing in print in compilations by Pavel Bazhov in the 30s.
2. Dinanukht
Half-man, half-book character from Mandaeism. Has a rivalry with another half-man-half-book, ascends to the heavens at some point. Public-domain Weiss, is what I am getting at here.
3. Classifications of Fairies
Surprisingly light compared to classifications of demons, which is a bit disappointing. If you combine them all you can get something more robust, though this would be no closer to correct than anything else.
- Norse: Ljosalfar vs Dokkalfar
- Scottish: Seelie vs Unseelie
- Thomas of Cantimpre: water / earth / subterranean / aerial.
- John Walsh: white, green black
- Yeats: trooping vs solitary
4. Bluecap
A British mine-spirit that appears as a blue flame. Folklore says that miners would leave a wage off in a side tunnel to keep them happy, which is a nice little detail.
5. Ourang Medan
Ghost ship: responders to an SOS somehwere in Indonesia (or the South Pacific) find the crew dead with eyes open and terrified expressions, ship catches fire while being taken back to port and sinks. Story first appeared in Italy and the UK in 1940 and is pretty solidly bullshit as far as facts go but fucking excellent as far as spooky imagery goes.
6. Haoma
A plant used in Zoroastrian ritual, though Europeans and Americans knew it primarily from mythological sources and got it in their heads that it was a hallucinogen. There’s no real reason to think it’s anything but ephedra, which grows in Central Asia acts as a stimulant and is still used in ritual by Zoroastrian today.
7. The Indestructibles
The ancient Egyptian name for two stars (now called Kochab and Mizar) that orbited the north pole give or take 4500 years ago. Currently reside in the Dippers due to the normal process of stellar procession, but at the time were so reliable as markers that the Great Pyramid is aligned with them (or where they used to be) so that the dead Pharaoh could look up and out at the stars that never set.
8. Panchaia (island)
An island in the Indian Ocean and home to a multi-ethnic collectivist utopia, according to extremely fragmentary quotes from Euhemerus’ Sacred Histories. Apparently Euhemerus was one of those guys who was big on interpreting myths as having rational sources and historical roots (Zeus being a venerated king of Crete is the prime example given).
9. Meropis
A parody of Atlantis (Even bigger! Even more advanced! Even more special!) that attempts to invade Hyperboria with a ten-million man army and ends up going home when they realize the Hyperboreans are just so god damn lucky that sacking and looting the place isn’t worth the effort and cost.
10. Ancient Mesopotamian Underworld
A vast lightless cavern, ruled over by Ereshkigal and Nergal from their palace of Ganzir. The dead eat only dust, and drink libations poured by the living.
11. Geshtinanna
Sumerian goddess who served as the “scribe of the underworld”; brother of Dumuzi (and thus sister-in-law to Inana). Scholars don’t have enough material to paint a full picture of her, her cult, or her exact role in religion, but the bits and pieces we do have are more than sufficient as a springboard.
12. Aleriel, or A Voyage ot Other Worlds
Victorian sci-fi novel featuring a multi-planet tour of the solar system and some truly terrible art for the modern reprint. Relies on a fun but very discredited theory of solar system development where the outer planets are younger than the inner ones and so are “less advanced” (ex, dinosaurs on Saturn)
13. Trisyllabic Laxing
Phonological process in English where tense vowels & diphthongs become lax monopthongs if followed by two or more syllables. Compare “serene” with “serenity”.
14. Jomolhari (typeface)
A font for Tibetan, in case you ever needed one.
15. Sound Correspondences Between English accents
Not as useful as I’d like, as my regional accent (Western PA English) isn’t represented on the tables.
17. Kwakʼwala
A Wakashan language from the Pacific Northwest, which I tagged because it has traits similar to what I want for my Proto-Indo-European reconstruction (very rich consonant inventory, very few vowels).
18. Indo-European_Sound_Laws #Consonant_clusters)
A mostly-useful (it does have some significant gaps, as you can plainly see) reference for what turned into what in which languages.
19. Bundahishn
A Middle Persian compendium of Zoroastrian cosmology. Looks to be very thorough, considering the chapter list provided. There’s an English translation from 1897, and two much more recent ones from 2020 and 2024.
20. Book of Arda Viraf
Another Middle Persian Zoroastrian text, this time about a guy Wirāz who takes a huge dose of sacramental drugs and alcohol, ascends to the heavens, chills with Ahura Mazda for a bit, does some Hell-tourism, all the hits. The bits that stood out to me were “heaven is an idealized version of your mortal life” (better than vaguely described divine bliss, honestly) and the presence of places outside of heaven (the star, sun, and moon tracks, which are great names) where virtuous non-Zoroastrians go.
21. Western Allegheny Plateau (ecoregion)
Preliminary research for a challenge from the speculative evolution subreddit where you have to make a seed world using only organisms natively found within two miles of your home. I am unlikely to ever actually do this
22. List of mammals of Pennsylvania
See above.
23. Garab Dorje
A figure from Tibetan Buddhism who I found through the “see also” section of Merlin’s page, where he’s described as the result of a nun’s miraculous birth: this is a minor element in what is otherwise extremely esoteric Buddhism, that I can’t make heads or tails of.
24. Išpakāya
This is the Akkadian form of the Scythian name Spakāya, belonging to a Scythian king in the 7th century BCE. it’s a diminutive / affectionate / hypocoristic form of spaka, the word for dog. This is relevant because it turns out that the name “Conan” is also a diminutive / affectionate / hypocoristic form of “dog” - since we don’t have any real data on the historical Cimmerian language Scythian will have to do, but this is sufficient to dodge the rights-vultures at the Howard estate. Roll in with Spakāya the Scythian or the Hound of Cimmeria and you’re both gucci and slightly historically accurate.
25. Tomoe Gozen
A likely fictional lady samurai who shows up in the Heike Monogatari. Kills some dudes, drops the head of a rival commander at her liege’s feet, retires to a monastery and lives into her 90s. Can’t go wrong with the classics. (Also, Tomoe is best gal in Bushido Ball.)
26. Ayodhya (Ramayana)
Legendary city said to be founded by Manu the first man and birthplace of Rama. The actual real-life city of Ayodhya has been beset a long back-and-forth between Hindus and Muslims over a particular site where a mosque got torn down because it was supposedly built on the site of a Hindu temple that had gotten torn down and now there's a new temple at the site, but the whole conflict is one of those extremely suspicious things where the concrete history only goes back to the early-mid 1800s.
27.List of PIE Roots by Distribution
An extremely handy resource for an extremely small number of people, this lists a decent number of PIE roots according to what families they are found in. Which is, for whatever reason, not standard in online PIE resources.
28. English Phrasebook
For conlang sentence translation.
29. 成
A kanji meaning “to become” or “to do something”. I have absolutely no idea why this was saved in my notes.
30. Khamar-Daban Incident
1996 incident that resulted in the deaths of six Kazakhstani hikers south of Lake Baikal. Autopsy declared it to be hypothermia, the one surviving member said the others had one by one started convulsing, foaming at the mouth, and bleeding from the eyes and ears.
With this and some other cleanup, I'm now down to a tidy 123 pages of notes.
ReplyDeleteThis is of course separate from my 180 page draft document, which is in turn separate from my current notebook.
The fairy categories are appealing, there's certain something there.. but it's not a lot is it?
ReplyDeleteI like the Thomas of Camtimpre set being kinda location based not elemental, but drawing parallels it does make it interesting that Fire is a thing of humans... idk... but then like, will'o'wisps and the bluecap in your other link just down the page...
As for Green Black White I'm always fond of colours being used for fae classification, the symbolic and associative boundaries are big enough to be fun but not so wide as to have no use as distinctions.
Yeah, colors are my favorite as well.
Delete"Immaculate Constellation" is a great name to slap at the header of a Majestic-12/Global Occult Coalition/Men in Black document where everything underneath is redacted.
ReplyDeleteYeah someone was having a bit of fun that day.
DeleteAleriel, or A Voyage ot Other Worlds, as a concept was pretty much lifted wholesale for the GDW RPG: Space 1889.
ReplyDeleteI am currently running a Western campaign set in Oregon ~1880. I took your first entry (The Mistress of the Copper Mountain) and I am currently brainstorming (with ChatGPT) a scenario involving a proto-socialist commune of Russian immigrants managing a copper mine.
ReplyDeleteAn excerpt:
🌀 Weirdness Level: Low-Key Supernatural / Psychological
- Strange dreams spread slowly to PCs or translators.
- The malachite glows faintly under moonlight, only visible to certain individuals.
- Patterns in the rock resemble a feminine form—seen only by those working alone.
- Feodor draws the same curved spiral in dirt every day—resembles both a seam map and a stylized eye.
- Optional: The mine has a deep chamber—sealed decades ago—rumored to house a malachite statue of Her. Stepan wants to open it.
Azathoth's plagiarist brother is not welcome in these here parts.
DeleteThe classification of demons being so much more complex is probably because occultists were inspired by government/church bureaucracy and hierarchy.
ReplyDeleteMedieval Christians seem to assume “Catholic church and/or feudal system but with upside-down names” for Hell.
The Chinese and Indian take on demons is apparently quite “red tape” (something Exalted takes and runs with).
Although I think the depiction of the fair folk social order is something of a parody of aristocrats and their etiquette.
I think for Faeries much of that might be a latter invention - like the whole Summer / Winter Courts thing was invented by Jim Butcher.
DeleteFor demons the thing I find super-wild is how few of them are female - like you'd think the misogyny of the time would go hard on the monstrous feminine, but it seems that too is a modern invention.
the mistress of the copper mountain is such a classic, but even more so generally ural folktales fuck so much, most of them are very early industrial age and therefore read surprisingly similar to lots of american folktales
ReplyDeleteI'll have to keep an eye out for more!
Delete