Sharing Old Lore

Women are poisonous. They are safe until they get their periods, but after that the menses don't expel all of the poison, so they are dangerous. In particular, their hair is quite deadly. Proper women wear their hair up and covered, to protect others. You can be poisoned if someone puts a woman's hair in your food/drink.

Women are even more dangerous advert menopause, since they aren't expelling any of the poison any more. An old woman can kill a child by giving them a mean stare. This happens because eyes are wet, and so the poison can travel from eye to eye with a look.

Also, sperm is 100% responsible for babies. Women have zero part in the process other than being the location it takes place.
And I somewhat-accurately quote , "if a man ejaculated on a piece of sage and a cat eats the sage, a baby will grow in the cat's stomach."
>Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, "Women's Secrets"

That might be a plotline from MGS5.

This series, Copper, came out before MGS5. It has a real Homer feel to it, though, I'm certain I've seen it somewhere.

That whole show was so damn good.

-4 Strength
Alignment: Always Evil

Seeing a large black dog waiting patiently outside or near your home was a sign of imminent death for you or a relative.

There is an ancient fortress in Ireland called Emhain Macha with all of defenses built pointing inwards. The moat is inside the walls around the hillfort itself baffling archaeologists for years.

Its defense system is utterly pointless from a strategic point of view unless you were stopping something escaping...

Archaeologists tested this legend and x-rayed the hill and found huge rocks piled ontop of each other further down than they could see.

Legends say it was the entrance to the underworld and the locals filled the hole with great boulders and built a ritual fortress on top. Every year they assembled on Samhain to fight what emerged from the hole.

youtube.com/watch?v=l9kgkgJHRRs

history buffs, did people really not shave their pubes in 18th and 19th century?

That's also mirrored in western european changeling lore. Pretty old school way of explaining autism/mental deficiencies in kids (though occasionally adults could be accused of being a changeling. To "cure it" involves a lot of screaming, sometimes dangling the kid over a fire, and other such things liable to kill it. Much like africa circa right now, because of the superstition this was de facto legal up until sometime in the 19th century give or take.

I've been reading Welsh some myths lately. There's a lot of kind of standard romance stuff in them, but there are a few neat things:

>a cauldron that you can throw a dead man into and he will come out alive and whole, only mute
>to get revenge on an insult, a guy turns his whole household into mice in order to steal the grain of his rival before he can harvest it
>by interceding in a fight between a lion and a snake and killing the snake, a knight gets a lion as his companion
>a black wood-ward with one eye and one foot
>a silver bowl with chains which, if you splash water on a nearby marble slab, there will be a peal of thunder and then a torrential downpour that the adventuring knights only survive by hiding under their shields
>when searching for a stolen child, some knights have to go and question increasingly old and wise animals to learn where he is - a blackbird, a stag, an eagle, and finally a salmon
>a baby found in a leather bag meant for weirs (i.e. fish catching) that can speak from infancy and recite poems, claims he's as old as events in the Old Testament and lived three times over, and by reciting poems got every other bard of a rival king to be unable to do anything but say 'Blwerm' and nearly caused his castle to crumble from a storm.

And there's also the standard romance stuff - very rich people, tournaments and knight fights, slaying giants, you know the drill.

I have have a story from my close vicinity that is actually true, but also often exaggerated.
This is the factual version.
The story of the Bandit Heigl.
In 1816, Michael Heigl was born as the son of a day laborer.
He spent his youth beginning (but never finishing) to learn various trades and working in many vocations. Back then, he already had some issues with local law enforcement due to committing smaller thefts.
In 1843, he was arrested for being a roving trader without a license, but managed to flee from the courtyard and hid out in the wilderness of the Bavarian Forest area.
In the years following, he committed a number of raids in the vicinity.
Later on, someone called the "roude Res von Gotzendorf" (Red Theresa of Gotzendorf) joined him as an accomplice.
During this time, the now famous Räuber-Heigl-Höhle (Bandit-Heigl-Cave, pic related) was Heigls predominant hideout.
The bandits enjoyed great sympathy and support from the local populace, due to mostly focusing their raids on rich clerics and land owners.
The betrayal by a former comrade led to the discovery of his cavernous hiding spot and the arrest of the bandit Heigl in 1953.
In 1854, he was sentenced to death by beheading, but after an appeal to clemency, King Max II sentenced him to life in chains instead.
Later on in 1857, Heigl was killed by another prisoner, who used his ball and chain to beat him to death.

myth #1 - Sirtya
>there were supposedly a recluse race of humans in north Siberia. A mature sirtyan would look like a child and had pale skin and fair hair. They were supposedly excellent metalworkers and herbalists. According to locals they lived in a network of underground caverns. Locals told to Russian explorers during colonization era that these sirtya people came to their lands from northern Europe since they didn't like and couldn't compete with regular human warlike mentality.

myth #2 - ancestor worship
>in finnic pagan ways, people believed that dead people didn't cease to exist. Dead people would wander the land as ghosts. Ghost, whom their families had forgotten or neglected would turn feral. Thus each family religiously tended their family graveyard and some even kept an extra empty bed in their house in case a ghost of a relative wanted to get some sleep. People believed that in turn the ghosts would help living family members as best as they could with their limited means of interacting with the world.

myth #3 - source of mana
>also from finnic myths. Each person was believed to possess a pool of mana from which one could draw power from in order to accomplish extraordinary feats. The pool of mana would increase the longer one's beard and hair were. Also, one's dead relative ghosts also would boost one's mana. Mana was belived to emanate from the Underworld. Underworld was ruled by Mana, which in old finnic languages meant "The One From Below Ground". Finnish people know Mana as Tuoni for some reason.

pictured a scene where a bunch of heroes from the epic of Kalevala finally find the machine which produces gold, salt and food from thin air.

...

Sounds like it worked to me.

The Book of Imaginary Beings is a goldmine of interesting lore and mythology.

To the Annamites, tigers, or spirits who dwell in tigers, govern the four corners of space. The Red Tiger rules over the South (which is located at the top of maps); summer and fire belong to him. The Black Tiger rules over the North; winter and water belong to him. The Blue Tiger rules over the East; spring and plants belong to him. The White Tiger rules over the West; autumn and metals belong to him.

Over these Cardinal Tigers is a fifth tiger, the Yellow Tiger, who stands in the middle governing the others, just as the Emperor stands in the middle of China and China in the middle of the World. (That’s why it is called the Middle Kingdom; that’s why it occupies the middle of the map that Father Ricci, of the Society of Jesus, drew at the end of the sixteenth century for the instruction of the Chinese.)

Lao-tzu entrusted to the Five Tigers the mission of waging war against devils. An Annamite prayer, translated into French by Louis Cho Chod, implores the aid of the Five Heavenly Tigers. This superstition is of Chinese origin; Sinologists speak of a White Tiger that rules over the remote region of the western stars. To the South the Chinese place a Red Bird; the East, a Blue Dragon; to the North, a Black Tortoise. As we see, the Annamites have preserved the colours but have made the animals one.

The Bhils, a people of Central India, believe in hells for Tigers; the Malays tell of a city in the heart of the jungle with beams of human bones, walls of human skin, and eaves of human hair, built and inhabited by Tigers.

Can confirm, used to have a physical copy of a different version. No idea where that went, but thanks for re-adding it to my collection user.

In one of the volumes of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses that appeared in Paris during the first half of the eighteenth century, Father Fontecchio of the Society of Jesus planned a study of the superstitions and misinformation of the common people of Canton; in the preliminary outline he noted that the Fish was a shifting and shining creature that nobody had ever caught but that many said they had glimpsed in the depths of mirrors. Father Fontecchio died in, and the work begun by his pen remained unfinished; some years later Herbert Allen Giles took up the interrupted task. According to Giles, belief in the Fish is part of a larger myth that goes back to the legendary times of the Yellow Emperor.

In those days the world of mirrors and the world of men were not, as they are now, cut off from each other. They were, besides, quite different; neither beings nor colours nor shapes were the same. Both kingdoms, the specular and the human, lived in harmony; you could come and go through mirrors. One night the mirror people invaded the earth. Their power was great, but at the end of bloody warfare the magic arts of the Yellow Emperor prevailed. He repulsed the invaders, imprisoned them in their mirrors, and forced on them the task of repeating, as though in a kind of dream, all the actions of men. He stripped them of their power and of their forms and reduced them to mere slavish reflections. Nonetheless, a day will come when the magic spell will be shaken off.

The first to awaken will be the Fish. Deep in the mirror we will perceive a very faint line and the colour of this line will be like no other colour. Later on, other shapes will begin to stir. Little by little they will differ from us; little by little they will not imitate us. They will break through the barriers of glass or metal and this time will not be defeated. Side by side with these mirror creatures, the creatures of water will join the battle.

In Yunnan they do not speak of the Fish but of the Tiger of the Mirror. Others believe that in advance of the invasion we will hear from the depths of mirrors the clatter of weapons.

There's a Swedish tale that comes in variations all over the country in villages where there's an especially large stone around. The story generally goes that there was a giant/troll who hated the sound of the new church bells when christianity came to scandinavia, so he tried to throw a large rock at the church. He missed however and that's the reason the rock is there.

In the works of the famous eighteenth-century Swedish visionary, we read that Devils, like angels, are not a species apart but derive from the human race. They are individuals who after death choose Hell. There, in that region of marshlands, of desert wastes, of tangled forests, of towns levelled by fire, of brothels, and of gloomy dens, they feel no special happiness, but in Heaven they would be far unhappier still. Occasionally, a ray of heavenly light falls on them from on high; the Devils feel it as a burning, a scorching, and it reaches their nostrils as a stench. Each thinks himself handsome, but many have the faces of beasts or have shapeless lumps of flesh where faces should be; others are faceless. They live in a state of mutual hatred and of armed violence, and if they come together it is for the purpose of plotting against one another or of destroying each other. God has forbidden men and angels to draw a map of Hell, but we know that its general outline follows that of a Devil, just as the outline of Heaven follows that of an angel. The most vile and loathsome Hells lie to the west.

It's said that the first man to die every year becomes a sort of unseelie fay known as the Ankou. Taking the form of a gaunt specter the Ankou drives around a ghostly carriage pulled by skeletal steeds and armed with either a scythe or less commonly two smaller hand sickles. While not Death himself the Ankou serves as one of his servants collecting the souls that the reaper has missed. Each Anknou serves for exactly one year before being replaced and sent off to their final reward or punishment. There is an old story about how one Ankou became too engrossed in his duties and began to collect the souls of those who had not yet died. Seeing this Saint Peter came down and punished the creature by extinguished the blue fires that served as the Ankous' eyes. Ever since each new Ankou has been blind and have had to hunt their prey by listening to their wails and cries.

That's wonderfully creepy. I'll defiantly make use of it in some form. Defiantly one of the more obscure folk stories - I don't think any of my players will know quite how dire things are when fish start appearing in their reflections.

That's a real classic, user. Thanks for reminding me.

Another amusing swedish one is the story of the "lantern men". If you go out late at night you might see ghosts or phantoms stalking the woods around your little hamlet or village, looking for late night travelers or stray children to do god-knows-what to. Except there never were any ghosts, but neighbours seeing eachother running around with lanterns late at night and getting spooked.

Reminds me of an episode of Doctor Who from the latest season. Pict tribe is guarding some star-eating entity but they let it out to kill a Roman Legion. Which of course has disastrous consequences. But the star-eater's dimension has crazy time dilation so the last Pict guardian and the Roman survivors chase it back in there and fight it. They'll lose, but the fight will keep it away for an arbitrarily long time.

Every dusk as the sun sinks into the sea a great sea serpent that borders the world named Ogwis consumes the goddess Sehul and every dawn as the sun rises from the sea a great hero slits the belly of Ogwis and frees Sehul.

Soup-retard didn't want to eat his soup,
so he starved and died.
Good night children.

neat

interestingly, DC's been using a variation of that concept for a while now

...

...

...

there's some updating that needs to be done here, since some of this is cropping up in the current DC event Metal, but this covers most of the important parts

So Pyg is another Joker?

Or... wait... Joker and Pyg are a breeding pair of whatever lives in mirrors?

Europeans most likely didn't. But the ancient Egyptians and Romans would pluck all of their body hair. The Egyptians had this cool instrument that had two strings woven around each other, with scissor like handles. You open and close the handles, and the strings would wind and unwind, trapping individual body hairs in them and pulling them out. Basically, you can pluck all the hair off of your entire body in mere minutes. But the Romans wheren't as advanced in that area as the Egyptians. So what they did was simply have employees or slaves at public bathhouses who specialized in using tweezers to remove body hair.

what the fuck, dude

it's more that there's something inside Mirrors in the DC Universe that cause homicidal madness in people, with it being most prominent in Gotham cause the place is cursed as fuck

even more so now that we know that a multiversal demon named Barbatos has been manipulating events in the DC universe since the beginning of human history, both throughout the regular multiverse, and the recently revealed Dark Multiverse

I've always favored the interpretation that Gotham is literally Innsmouth, or more specifically is Innsmouth, Dunwich, Arkham, and Kingsport after a hundred years of urban sprawl, development, reconstruction, and gentrification. Thus, the asylum is the same, the Cobblepots have the Innsmouth look, and Waylon Jones's genetic throwback isn't to some scaled reptilian human ancestor, it's to the last generation of deep one hybrids, after the local fish population was scared off.

But the clear (sorry) interpretation seems to be that there was literally something in the reflections that became the Joker and Pyg. Both villains are completely different people than they were before they saw something in their reflection, with Pyg specifically saying you can see him in the mirror and the blank faced Joker painting his smile on in that last pic.

That said, as of late DC comics are a fucking mess with all the conflicting Visions they're having to accommodate. And Grant Morrison has some good ideas, but it's no secret why he's losing the Last War in Albion.

Here's a tidbit of the Scandinavian variety: It was said that if you gave your troll-child human food, the trolls would feed the human-child spiders and bugs and other trolly food. To make sure that your human-child was taken well care off you had to treat the troll-child like a troll would treat it; feeding it nasty foods and letting it sleep on sharp rocks and the likes.

I'm not terribly surprised, generally these myths are an excuse to not spend resources on an child that isn't likely to grow into a productive adult. Social stigma attached to the parents or otherwise.

I'll treat your tidbit in kind. In the african version I alluded at (something I read in a news article earlier this year), the children are referred to as devil babies and are believed to be a demonic curse as opposed to a child swap. There is only one cure, a ritual involving someone trained in the dark arts, and just leaving the baby to die under a tree, mostly the tree part. Technically they are supposed to turn into snakes and fuck off, but you're not supposed to stay and watch, so you know, just trust the magic man on this one.

In Slavic countries there were demons called Mamuna who did the same thing. The way to guard against them was to put a red ribbon on a child's bed. Fun fact: many people still do that.

Any moar stories, lads?

I want to keep this thread alive, but I have nothing to share.

Jesus Christ what the fuck

In German folklore, when hanged men die they ejaculate, and the ejaculate grows a humanoid plant called a mandragora. Alternatively, mandragora come from the blood of hanged men if you want to avoid the semen aspect. If you pull the mandragora out of the ground, it releases a scream powerful enough to kill everything within hearing range, so there's a bunch of procedures to carefully extract it. Supposedly, if a witch has sex with a mandragora, they'll give birth to a human-looking creature with no love or soul. Interestingly, some alchemy texts considered mandragora to be a kind of replacement for those alchemists that want a homunculus on a budget.

youtube.com/watch?v=JS91p-vmSf0

Der Erlkönig, a really spooky tale with a neat piano ensemble. A father and son are fleeing a force of the night. The son is obviously afflicted by the terrible creature and the father is desperately trying to save his boy. It's neat

>Supposedly, if a witch has sex with a mandragora, they'll give birth to a human-looking creature with no love or soul

that's metal

In portugal we have the adamastor, basically some giant dude made of water that supposedly stopped ships from crossing the cape of good hope

Does Adamastor break down to anything in Porto? Like "water master"??

You should read Hellboy if you haven't already. Concern yourself less with the lovecraftian myth arc and more with the side stories (which are influenced by fairy tales from all over the world).

>they'll give birth to a human-looking creature with no love or soul
So, a woman?

Roughly the plot behind the German novel Alraune, about a femme fatale who is in fact an alchemical plant monster. (Whence came the monstergirl of the same name.)

My favorite underused European myth is the Seven Against Thebes. It's almost certainly a direct source for 40k, has a man eat another man's face in front of Athena, and convinced Dante its [louche, pagan] author was a Christian.

If this thread still exists I'll babble about it affter dinner.

Vampires before Bram Stoker changed public view of them into charming dudes in sick capes.
They were crazy plague spirits that materialize outside their corpse then fly around the countryside maiming people and livestock, stealing their blood and sending it back to their body. People that get attacked and survive die of Devil AIDs 3 days later anyway then turn into more vampires.

Sorta like a mix of a Wendigo and a Chupacabra.

Stoker didn't change them into charming dudes. Have you ever read Dracula?
That shit is dark. He feeds a baby to his vampire harem. Not a child, a fucking baby.
And when the baby's mother comes crying at the door the next night he has her eaten alive by wolves.

Every scene in which he interacts with people shows them being visibly uncomfortable in a "I have a suspicion something very bad will happen if I piss this guy off" sort of way.
He was never charming; he was intimidating even when polite.

Fair enough. Should have used "Charismatic" then "Charming"

Same except here it's fairies not trolls that do that.

They were also a bunch of autists who were compelled to count all the grains of rice you threw in front of them. Doing so was a good escape tactic.

There's little difference with trolls sometimes.

Hot dicking metaphor.

I can't get over how fucking metal the Seven Against Thebes is. The gist of the plot: One of Oedipus's sons was exiled from Thebes by his brother. He ends up in Argos, marries the king's daughter, and goes to war against Thebes.

The war is led by PC-style champions. Adrastus, the elderly king of Argos, is the only survivor of the Seven. He rides an untiring horse given to him by Hercules and on his return to Argos he stops to found a temple to Nemesis. He is also possibly a slumbering plague god or death itself.

Capaneus is a giant atheist. He carries a shield bearing an image of a naked man engulfed in flame and holding a torch. It's inscribed. "I WILL BURN THE CITY." "[H]is spear, that he alone can throw, is a cypress standing stripped of leaves and pointed with iron"; his woven iron mail is "a work inspiring terror." At Thebes, he scales the walls during a thunderstorm and begins tearing them apart with his hands. He screams that all Zeus's lightning could only help him relight his torch...so Zeus incinerates him with lightning.

Amphiaraus (called in some medieval texts "the warlike bishop Amphiarax") is a seer who may have invented divination by fire. He sees that the war will end in disaster and death, but goes anyway. At Thebes his chariot is swallowed whole by the earth -- "he drops neither reins nor weapons, but, just as he was, drove his unshaken chariot down to Tartarus" -- and he achieves apotheosis, becoming a prophetic demigod.

There are more dudes! And also the theory that the whole story is a dimly remembered Babylonian epic about the plague god Erra. Fuck, go read Statius. He was trying to write an RPG campaign 2000 years ago and it somehow never took.

>Retarded or just strange kids would be said to be Trolls.
Anyone else think the ancient scandinavian may have been onto something here?

Isn't it fucking scary how history repeats itself?

...

...

Worse

Trolls are generally considered to be a type of fairy so it makes sense.

In Sweden, you'd need to hang a piece of iron over the cradle or bed. Trolls hate iron, as we all know.

Another ward was to hang a horseshoe over every door, because, again, iron.

> find
They didn't need to find it, they knew where it was. They wanted to steal it.

Just because one of them was a greybeard whom nobody wanted, and anotehr an autist who failed to keep his wife alive does not entitle them to steal the only reliable source of food and prosperity in the land of snow, cold and death

hehe xd

Word. And in real history, they also broke the myth of Spartan invincibility by slightly changing the usual phalanx tactics and sending the Sacred Band up against the Spartan elites.
They routed a Spartan army with inferior numbers, inflicted heavy casualties in the process, and reigned as top-dog Polis for a decade afterwards.

Sparta never recovered. By the time Phillip/Alexander conquered Greece, they didn't even bother to absorb Sparta.

Thebes is truly metal.

If a corpse is buried sitting up or held in a standing position (or any other way that is not lying down) it will become a malevolent spirit that kill those who are responsible for its improper burial. This spirit can walk through dirt and stone, multiply its own size by eightfold, is nearly impossible to kill, can curse people, can drive animals insane by its presence, can enter people's dreams, is accompanied by foxfire, and has the appearance of a bloated death-blue/black body.

Skyrim didn't do the abilities of Draugr any justice.

>Skyrim didn't do X any justice.
>X = Just about anything, really

Is his name cthulhu f'tagan?

>Supposedly, if a witch has sex with a mandragora, they'll give birth to a human-looking creature with no love or soul.
How is it distinguishable from any other German?

are you retarded?

There are some fun ways to protect yourself from evil spirits. For example, in Slavic mythology, if a Leshy (forest spirit) curses you to be unable to find your way out of the forest, you have to take off your clothes and wear them inside out to break this curse. If there's two people affected, they need to switch clothes then.

I like the one about Kappas in Japanese mythos. They have a small pool of water on top of their heads which is the source of their vitality on dry land and it would weaken them if they spill the water. So if you need to get rid of a Kappa, you should bow to it. Being very polite, it will bow back at you, spilling the water.

yeah like half of asian spirits are designed to teach children manners, or that they're going to die young. The shogunate would even spread ghost stories in the edo period because they were more effective than passing laws in distant rural areas, the yokai in question being variations on "if you don't have enough food it is totally not ok to just leave grandma in the woods to die" or "if there is a famine do not kill your children". So you really are focusing on the weakest aspect of the kappa, especially when they eat buttholes. Their favorite snack is just munching on an imaginary organ located in the human butt.

That said keeping the thread on theme, there are a ton of different folk remedies to avoid being poisoned. One of which I think is a great way to thematically bestow such a boon on a party. Frog or toad stones. Now these could be retrieved by removing them from the head of a still living frog which has lived a long life, I do not know how, historians do not know why, but a bolt of red cloth helps with that. Swallowed they'd act as an antidote, or they could be worn as jewelry to grant a resistance.

In reality they're fossilized fish teeth.

>So you really are focusing on the weakest aspect of the kappa
Fine then. Kappa mean you should stay away from the water.

>especially when they eat buttholes
So the moral of the kappa is, "avoid fisting"?

Buttholes user, buttholes. Why even bother focusing on any other aspect of the kappa? Go talk about grappas (the kappa's slightly edgier cousin) instead.
I mean that's probably a good idea, but I'm pretty sure there are other more specialized yokai for that. Like the hairy hand that reaches up from toilet to grab your butt. I bet that thing would teach that moral much better.

>inverted fortress to prevent mysterious evil emerging

this is an awesome idea for an adventure

Most historians agree that Germany took over two centuries to recover from the Thirty Years War, but Magdeburg, one of the largest cities in Germany at the time, became a perennial casualty

Tilly, the Field Marshall for the Imperial Army, laid siege to the city for months, knowing its symbolic importance and its strategic value.

Located on the Elbe River, Magdeburg would provide a launching pad for the coming contest against the Swedish army. Moreover, the city had been daring enough to form an official alliance with the Swedes.

The Imperial invaders seemed more devoted to Mammon than God,every eyewitness account attests to looting as a priority. With fire and sword wreaking their havoc, the loss of life was catastrophic. The evidence suggests that when the imperial troops torched the city; 20,000 inhabitants and a number of invaders who didn’t get out in time would perish on that godforsaken day. The enemy's cruelty, writes Otto von Guericke, was "due in part to their common hatred of the adherents of the Augsburg Confession."

The destruction of a great city like Magdeburg was an anomaly in the 17th century, and the "land of poets and thinkers" would not really know the meaning of total war until a few centuries later.