folk tales – Bone and Sickle

The Fates

By boneandsickle | July 9, 2025

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:48 — 57.0MB)

The Fates of Classical Antiquity not only survived in the form of related fairy-tale figures but also as the object of superstitions and rituals associated with newborns. In South Slavic and Balkan regions particularly, these customs represent a surprisingly long-lived and genuine case of pagan survival.

We begin our episode examining the fairy godmothers of “Sleeping Beauty” as embodiments of the Fates. Mrs. Karswell reads a few key passages from the definitive version of the story included in Charles Perrault’s 1697 collection, Histoires ou contes du temps passé (“stories of times gone by.”) We learn how the fairies fulfill the historical role of godparents at the newborn’s christening. We also note the peculiar emphasis on the quality of what’s set before the fairies at the christening banquet, observing how a failure there leads the wicked fairy to curse the Sleeping Beauty.

Czech illustration — 1874 illustration by František Doucha for a Czech edition of Sleeping Beauty

We then explore antecedents to Perrault’s tale, beginning with the 14th-century French chivalric romance, Perceforest. A peripheral story in this 8-volume work is that of Troylus and Zeelandine, in which the role of Sleeping Beauty’s fairy godmothers are played by Greek and Roman deities, with Venus as supporter of Princess Zeelandine (and her suitor Troylus) and Themis cursing Zeelandine to sleep in a manner similar to Perrault’s princess. A failure to correctly lay out Themis’ required items at the christening banquet is again again responsible for the curse, though the awakening of Zeelandine by Troylus awakens is surprisingly different and a notorious example of medieval bawdiness.

Preceding Perceforest, there was the late 13th-century French historical romance Huon of Bordeaux, in which we hear of the newborn fairy king Oberon being both cursed and blessed by fairies attending his birth. From around the same time, French poet and composer Adam de la Halle’s Play of the Bower describes a banquet at which fairy guests pronounce a curses and blessings on those in attendance prompted again by their pleasure or displeasure at what’s set before them at a banquet. We also hear of the Danish King King Fridlevus (Fridlef II) bringing his newborn son to a temple of “three maidens” to ascertain the destiny pf the child in Gesta Danorum (“Deeds of the Danes”).written around 1200 by Saxo Grammaticus. And lest listeners think such appeals to the Fates were strictly a literary motif, we hear Burchard of Worms, in his early-11th-century Decretum, condemning the not uncommon among the Germans of his region of setting up offering tables for the Fates. By this point, the connection between how fairy godmother types are served at a banquet and offerings made to the Fates to ensure a cild’s fortune should be clear.

We then turn back to the Greek Fates, the Moirai (Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos) and the Roman Parcae (Nona, Decuma, and Morta). Particularly in the case of the Parcae, we hear examples of their connection to the newborn’s destiny in the celebration nine or ten days after the birth of the dies lustricus, during which offerings were made to the Fates.

The Three Fates by Bernardo Strozzi, late 17th c

We make a brief side-trip to discuss the Norns (Urðr, Verðandi and Skuld), the Germanic equivalent of the Fates. These are more distant cousins, not strongly associated with the newborn and his destiny, though we do hear a passage from the Poetic Edda, in which the Norns are present birth of the hero Helgi. We also hear a gruesome passage from the 13th-century Njáls Saga, in which the Valkyries weave out the fate of those who will die in the Battle of Clontarf.

The Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the Fates, the Wyrds, are also discussed, and we hear how the witches in Macbeth partook in this identity as the “Weird Sisters,” an association Shakespeare inherited from his source material, the 1587 history of Great Britain, known as Holinshed’s Chronicles.

We then turn our attention the Fates in Slavic and Balkan lands — the Rozhanitsy in Russia and Ukraine, the Sudičky among West Slavs, the Orisnici in Bulgaria, and the Ursitoare in Romania. As these customs survived into more recent times, there is a vast body of folklore to describe — much of it revolving around the setting up of offering tables and the communication of newborn’s destiny through dreams sent to mothers and midwives and confirmed by marks (visible or invisible) left upon the infant during their nocturnal visits on the third night after birth.

We also enjoy a couple entertaining folktales about Romania’s Ursitoare collected in the early years of the 20th century by folklorist Tudor Pamfile.

While such customs have since died out in Greece, customs related to the Moirai preserved into the early 20th century, as we hear in passages of John Lawson’s Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals, written in 1900.

We end with a brief look at christening parties in modern Romania, at which costumed Ursitoare play an increasingly major role, this paired with an introduction to the popular song “Ursitoare, Ursitoare.”

Romanian Fates attend a christening party. Ursitoare show by FormatiiNunta

Mélusine, the Serpent Fairy

By boneandsickle | February 18, 2025

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 55:51 — 63.9MB)

Mélusine is a female fairy of medieval legend. who suffers under a curse transforming her once weekly into a monstrous form. In various tales she becomes either a serpent or fish from the waist down, or fully transforms into a dragon. Mélusine can only break this curse via marriage to a mortal who is obliged to allow her certain secret freedoms. In return, her husband enjoys magical assistance and sees his fortunes flourish, at least until that day pact is broken.

The most famous version of this story, and the one to which we devote the bulk of the show is a French tale set down in 1387 by Jean d’Arras, Mélusine or the Noble Story of the Lusignans. The patron for whom he wrote, Duke Jean de Berry, belonged to the House of Lusignan, whose ancestral claims to the lands around Poitiers were portrayed by Arras as a matter of supernatural destiny involving the fairy.

We learn how Jean de Berry’s ancestor, Raymondin (Raymond) became engaged to Mélusine after a meeting at an enchanted fountain. Raymond is unaware that this encounter, and all that follows, is the subject of a prophecy set in motion by his accidental killing of his uncle. We hear the curious way in which this transpires, of Raymond and Mélusine’s wedding attended by a multitude of fairy folk, and of the building of Château de Lusignan through a sly collaboration of fairy magic, ingenuity, and human agency.

We then learn of Mélusine’s and Raymond’s offspring, all of whom are handsome and strong yet also betray their supernatural parentage via certain disfigurements — strange birthmarks, enormous stature, huge jutting teeth, or additional eyes. Much of Arras’ narrative is devoted to the sons’ heroic exploits, particularly as Crusaders in the Middle East, where the historical Lusignans gained lands and reputations, but our episode, focuses only only two sons, “Geoffroy Big-Tooth” and Fromont, whose stories are more intertwined with that of Mélusine herself.

Next comes the central drama, the breaking of the secret pact between Raymond and his fairy wife, which I’ll leave for you to enjoy without spoilers. Mrs. Karswell delivers a fine dramatic reading of this lengthier passage.

While that situation simmers, we hear how Geoffroy has returned from a giant-slaying adventure to discover that his brother, Fromont, is about to enter a monastery rather than devote himself to expanding the Lusignan empire. This doesn’t sit well with Geoffroy, whose disproportionately wrathful response is at once horrible and comic.

Reacting to the tragic fall-out of Geoffroy’s rampage, Raymond himself flies into a rage, accusing Mélusine of producing offspring supernaturally inclined toward evil. Cruel as his words may be, Mélusine seems to validate them, assuming a diabolical presence as she abandons their marriage, flying away from Castle Lusignan in the form of a dragon.

Finally, we examine the origins of the curse upon Mélusine, a strange backstory revealed through the discovery of a tablet in fantastic subterranean tomb, one which relates how she imprisoned her human father inside a mountain and installed there a giant as jailer.

Our episode then considers some folkloric parallels to the figure of Mélusine, a possible kinship with the Irish Banshee, the Scottish Bean-nighe or the Lavandières (“midnight washer women) of Brittany as well as earlier 13th-century literary sources for Arras’s tale including works by Gervase of Tilbury, Marie de France, Walter Map, and others.

By the late 15th century, the story by Arras had been retold by the French author Coudrette in a version that became broadsheet fodder for German publishers. We also hear how the tale was embraced in Luxembourg, where it attached to Siegfried, Count of the Ardennes, and the magical construction of Luxembourg Castle.

Finally, we look at some 19th-century retellings of the legend as German folktales, some of which made their way into Czech lands, where Meluzina’s doleful howling at her fate is heard in the moaning of winter winds. The show closes with a snippet of a modern Czech children’s song mentioning Meluzina, as an embodiment of the wind –“Vitr fouka do komina” (The wind blows in the chimney).

Glass-Coffin Girls

By boneandsickle | February 28, 2024

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 52:11 — 59.7MB)

The story of Snow White, as told by the Brothers Grimm, is only one of many narratives involving girls who have fallen into a deathlike state and are displayed in a glass coffins. In this episode, we examine the sordid details of the Grimm’s original 1812 version of the tale and compare it with analogous stories dating back to the 12th century.

We begin with a review of the Grimms’ original story, many aspects of which have been subsequently muddled and obscured not only by Disney but by later alterations made by the Grimms. These include the identify of the Evil Queen, the malevolence of her intent, the purported benevolence of the Huntsman, and particularly, the nature of Snow White’s resurrection.

"Snow White Receives the Poisoned Comb" Hans Makart (1872) — “Snow White Receives the Poisoned Comb” Hans Makart (1872)

After this, we have a look at the immediate predecessor to the 1812 story, a children’s play of the same name by the (unrelated) German author Albert Ludwig Grimm. Though it features dwarves who aid Snow White, a magic mirror addressed in rhyme, poisoned fruit, deception involving the heroine’s purported death, and glass coffin, it proves to be a very different story.

The next tale explored is the 1782 novella Richilde, by the German writer Johann Karl August Musäus. Surprisingly, the title character here, Richilde, is the wicked stepmother rather than her step-daughter Bianca, whose name in Italian (i.e., “white”) might be compared to “Snow White.” Set in medieval Brabant (Belgium), this one has Bianca courted by a prince whom the jealous stepmother hopes to see married to her own daughter. A further complication is presented by the fact that the prince here is already married.

We then take a look at the rarely mentioned Russian story, “The Tale of the Old Mendicants,” (my translation) published in the 1794 collection, An Old Song in a New Setting, or a Complete Collection of Ancient Folk Tales, Published for a lover of them, at the expense of the Moscow merchant Ivan Ivanov (my translation). In this one, the role of the Evil Queen is played by an innkeeper jealous that her guests have complimented the beauty of her daughter rather than her own. The alms-collecting monks of the title are used by the mother to deliver a poisoned shirt to the Snow White character, Olga the Beautiful.

Our next offering comes from the 1634 volume by Neapolitan writer Giambattista Basile, Il Pentamerone, or The Tale of Tales, the very first collection of fairy tales, with which the Brother Grimm were definitely familiar (and one featured in our earlier “Dark Fairy Tales” episodes, both One and Two ). The story in question is “The Little Slave,” which combines elements of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella. Here, the Snow White character, Lisa, again falls into a death-like swoon and is kept within not one but seven glass coffins in a locked room. The story resolves itself with the aid of a doll, a whetstone, and a knife.

Our earliest story paralleling Snow White, is quite a bit older — from the 12th-century, the Lai of Eliduc by Breton writer Marie de France. While serving a king in England, the Breton knight Eliduc falls in love with his lord’s daughter, Guillardun, who falls into a swoon during an ocean voyage. Eliduc (who is not exactly innocent when it comes to Guillardun’s condition) transports the body of his love back to France and keeps it on the altar of a deserted woodland chapel. In this case, the story resolves itself thanks to a very clever weasel.

After our more detailed examination of these strangely paralleled stories, we take a quick look at the wide range of more recent variants that were committed to print after the Grimms published their work and at a rather ugly controversy that engulfed German town, Lohr am Main, after it claimed to be the birthplace of the Snow White Legend.

Our episode ends with Mrs. Karswell’s reading a particularly dark and brutal tale about seven dwarves collected by Swiss historian and folklorist Ernst Ludwig Rochholz in his 1856 volume, Swiss Legends of the Aargau.

Animal Ghosts

By boneandsickle | May 16, 2023

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:27 — 32.6MB)

Tales of animal ghosts are usually relegated to the periphery of ghost story collections, but in this episode, we showcase this class of apparition. Our stories were collected in a volume from 1915 called Human Animals by Frank Hamel. It covers werewolves, animal transformations through witchcraft, possession by totemic animal spirits, and the phantom animals that haunt lonely roads, ancestral homes, and the storytellers’ imaginations.

The Colony of Cats

By boneandsickle | April 29, 2023

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:22 — 32.5MB)

Fairy tales featuring cats are generally pleasant. After our last show about malformed births, we thought, Andrew Lang’s story, “The Colony of Cats” might be a pleasant tonic, albeit one with a bizarre punishment sequence included. Published in 1909 in Lang’s Crimson Fairy Book, this story (read by Mrs. Karswell) seems to be a version of the tales discussed in our July 2022 show, “Heads in a Fountain, Bones in a Bag.” Lang provides no background on his sources, but it’s presented as an Italian tale.

Dark Fairy Tales II: Heads in a Fountain, Bones in a Bag

By boneandsickle | July 26, 2022

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 51:21 — 58.8MB)

Dark fairy tale elements including floating heads and bags of bones are featured in a family of tales classified under the Aarne-Thompson system as Type 480, “Kind and Unkind Girls.” Imaginative punishments and rewards for the kind and unkind characters in question are a further interesting element. The girls in these tales are always sisters or stepsisters, and a wicked stepmother (sometimes mother) is part of the formula.

Our first example is the English tale, “The Three Heads of the Well.” The fairy tale bears a strange connection to an earlier 11th-century British legend featuring as its heroine the Byzantine Empress Helena, here portrayed as the daughter of the mythical “Old King Cole” of nursery rhyme fame. Both legend and fairy tale are set to the town of Colchester in Essex, understood to be named for King Cole.

From “The Three Heads of the Well,” we learn that being polite to heads floating out of magic wells serves one well, while rude behavior is strictly punished. A curious element of the narrative is the request made by the floating heads that their hair be combed.

Our next tale, “Three Fairies,” comes from Giambattista Basile’s Il Pentamerone, or Lo cunto de li cunti (“The Tale of Tales), a source used in our previous episode for the story “Penta the Handless.” The tale involves an encounter with fairies living in a fantastic palace hidden deep within a chasm.

Basile’s tales are particularly noteworthy for their extravagant and playful verbiage, illustrated in several lengthy passages read for us by Mrs. Karswell.

In this tale, we learn the value of diplomacy in discussing the hair and scalp conditions of fairies. A second lesson: one must be particularly wary when allowing oneself to be sealed in a barrel.

Our next story, “The Fairies,” comes from perhaps the most famous collection of fairy tales pre-Grimm, Charles Perrault’s 1697 volume Tales of Passed Times, sometimes subtitled Tales of Mother Goose. This French story can be found in certain English-language collections under the title “Diamonds and Toads,” referring to what falls from the mouths of its kind and unkind girls respectively — a blessing or curse depending on the girls’ charity toward fairies disguised as mortals.

The Grimms’ story, “Frau Holle” is introduced with a snippet of the “Frau Holle Lied,” a children’s song describing the grandmotherly (and witch-like) Frau Holle shaking feathers from her featherbed to make the snow in winter, an element from the Grimm story.

As in the Perrault’s “The Fairies” the Kind Sister in “Frau Holle” is sent to fetch water, and ends up not in an enchanted chasm, but falling into an enchanted well, passage to a sort of parallel dimension in which ovens demand their bread be baked, apple trees their fruit be picked, and Frau Holle has all sorts of housework for the heroine to perform. The girl’s unkind sister, however fails miserably when confronted with identical tasks, and we see both the rewarding and punishing side of Holle, an aspect of the story that relates it loosely to the winter mythology of the Frau Holle/Frau Perchta figure I discuss in other shows and my book as inspiration for the Krampus.

The rewards and punishments doled out in “Frau Holle” are likely borrowed from Basile’s “The Three Fairies,” as you might be able to guess from these depictions:

We introduce our next iteration of this tale with a clip is from an English-dubbed version of the 1964 Soviet folklore film Morozko (or Father Frost) by pre-eminent Russian fairy-tale director Alexander Rou. The film weaves its own elaborate story around the bare bones of the classic tale “Father Frost” collected by Alexander Afanasyev in the 1850s. Here, goodness is demonstrated by the Kind Girl’s willingness to endure cold, a particularly Russian virtue.

Illustration of Father Frost from a 1932 volume

Our last story is the most obscure (and gruesome): “Rattle-Rattle-Rattle and Chink-Chink-Chink” from a 1919 collection by Parker Fillmore called Czechoslovak Fairy Tales. As with several of our stories, a key role is played by an all-knowing housepet who can speak.

We wrap up with a footnote to our first story, “The Three Heads of the Well” and its connection via an Elizabethan play, George Peele’s “The Old Wives’ Tale” to “Willow’s Song” from The Wicker Man (1973), all of which leads us into the bizarre folklore of an aphrodisiac charm known as “cockle bread.”

(NOTE: For details on the 2022 Bone and Sickle shirts and merch mentioned in the show, please visit boneandsickle.com, or go directly to our Etsy shop.)

Dark Fairy Tales I: The Girl with No Hands

By boneandsickle | July 1, 2022

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 52:03 — 59.6MB)

“The Girl with No Hands” is the name of a a folk-tale motif shared by a number of gruesome fairy stories in which the the amputation of the heroine’s hands allows her to escape death, the Devil, or a repugnant suitor.

(NOTE: For details on the 2022 Bone and Sickle shirts mentioned in the show, please visit boneandsickle.com, or go directly to our Etsy shop.)

We begin our show with a religious legend differing in narrative details but sharing the amputation theme. It’s a medieval story told in Eastern Orthodox lands of the terrible cost of bad manners at a funeral, specifically that of the Virgin Mary. As a further preliminary to our stories, we also offer a quick rundown on the Aarne–Thompson–Uther system of folk-tale classification, in which “The Girl with No Hands” is identified as ATU 706.

The oldest written example of this motif is the Italian story “Biancabella,” from Le piacevoli notti (“The Pleasant Nights”), a book published in two volumes between 1550 and 1553. The author, Giovanni Francesco Straparola, appears to have modeled his collection on Boccaccio’s Decameron as it uses a similar frame-story, Straparola’s involving characters pleasantly passing their nights (hence the title) in the telling of tales. Among the stories Straparola included, is the first version of “Puss in Boots.”

I won’t spoil listeners’ pleasure in hearing Mrs. Karswell read for you the original text but will divulge that its hand-losing heroine Biancabella shares a birth kinship with a serpentine fairy; also, that her hands are sacrificed in an effort to convince her wicked stepmother that her orders to execute her step-daughter have been carried out, and that guilty parties endure in the end a fiery foretaste of hell.

Our second story is “Penta the Handless” from Il Pentamerone (or “The Tale of Tales”) was written about a century later, in 1634, by the Italian poet Giambattista Basile. This collection of stories also makes use of the framing device, having the stories told by a group of courtiers attempting to cheer a melancholy princess. Among the 50 stories included are the first written versions of Cinderella, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and Hansel and Gretel.

In this story, Penta’s mutilation is self-inflicted as a means of repelling the incestuous advances of her brother. Her royal sibling has an exotic means of expelling her from the kingdom, namely, sealing her in a tarred chest and casting her into the sea (a motif that dates back to the plays of Euripides or even the story of the infant Moses).

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm provide a relatively late example of this narrative, one however that has provided the ATU #706 with a name:,”The Girl with No Hands.” The story is ncluded in the Grimm’s first 1812 edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen, i.e., “Grimm’s Fairy Tales.” Our Grimm segment, by the way, begins with a clip from the trailer for the 1962 film The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.

As an oral folk-tale, this German version dispenses with some of the detailed intrigues that mark its two Italian antecedents. Rather than a wicked in-law or brother, it’s the Devil, who tricks a down-on-his-luck miller into doing the gruesome deed. As is frequent in German stories collected by the Grimms, a magical forest-dwelling man also plays a role.

We also briefly discuss a few versions of the story published after Jacob & Wilhelm’s version — other German, Italian, and Hungarian tales which place blame for the amputation not on the Devil but on wicked family members. A gruesome detail included in a few of these mirrors a similarly faux-cannibalistic scene from the Grimms’ original “Snow White.”

We return to Russian for our final story, “The Armless Maiden,” one of the nearly 600 folk tales or skazki contained in the multi-volume Russian Fairy Tales collection compiled by state ethnographer Alexander Afanasyev between 1855 and 1863.

The heroine here is an orphan happily living with her brother until the day her brother takes a bride, as she turns out to be a witch, who is less than happy sharing the household with another female — and has a particularly brutal way of showing it. A strange example of sort Lamarckian evolutionary magic marks this one, with the armless maiden giving birth to a child with silver arms. A particularly gruesome manner of dispatching the sorceress is also a highlight.

We end the show with a Russian musical snippet from an electronic band from Moscow, a duo making music since 2013, under the name IC3PEAK. The song in question rather appropriately begins with the line “I come from a Russian Horror Fairy Tale” and further endears itself with the delightful Baba-Yaga-esque animation of its music video.

1895 edition of Afanasyev’s “Russian Fairy Tales”

Hellfire Clubs, Part One

By boneandsickle | March 30, 2022

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 50:24 — 57.7MB)

The Hellfire Clubs of 18th-century Great Britain were gatherings of upper-class libertines dedicated to hedonism, blasphemous jests and taboo activities expressing a cultural and political opposition to the Church. They were also the subject of lurid rumor and legend. In this episode and the next we attempt to tease out Hellfire Club fact from folklore.

We begin with a nod to the Hellfire Club of pop culture: a clip or two from a 1966 episode of the British espionage show, The Avengers, which imagines a Hellfire Club recreated in swinging London.

As a bit of context to the discussion, we then consider 18th-century Britain’s mania for forming clubs and fraternal orders, including London’s Kit-Cat Club, Beefsteak Clubs, and the Calf’s Head Club, the last celebrating the execution of Charles I with stunts and feasts organized around a calf head representing that of beheaded monarch. We also take a moment to consider the “rake,” (from the word “rakehell”) a distinctively 18th-century breed of aristocratic hell-raiser dedicating himself to womanizing, drinking, and gambling. Hellfire Club members were drawn almost exclusively from this class.

Broadsheet representing London Hellfire Club ca 1721

History’s first Hellfire Club was founded sometime around 1720 by Philip Wharton, 1^stDuke of Wharton. His case seems to be one of the apple not falling far from the tree, as we hear of some outrageous incidents of church vandalism in which is father, Tom Wharton, engaged.

While father and son shared anticlerical sentiments, young Philip’s rebellion against parental expectations allied him with the very Jacobites battled by his father, and resulted in a secret engagement to young girl beneath his class, as well as a stunt involving a bear cub.

Wharton’s connection to the Hellfire Club, (like what we know of the club itself) is extrapolated from rumors circulating in the popular press of the day. We hear some examples of this, claims about “Holy Ghost Pie” blasphemy at taverns, members serving diplomatic functions in hell, and the like.

However much the press tended to fictionalized the group, it was real enough to have drawn the ire of George I, who issued an edict in 1721 against the formation and meeting of clubs dedicated to blasphemy. Public opinion so strongly associated Wharton with such groups, that when the edict cae before the House of Lords (where he also served), he found it necessary to address the rumors, denying that they could apply to him, but at the same time voting against the measure.

Little mention was made of the Hellfire Club after this, and it seems Wharton redirected his interest to Freemasonry going on to become to Grand Master of the Premier Grand Lodge of England. However, his obstreperous nature soon saw him booted from this organization. Thus inspired, he went on to found another order, the Gorgomons, one which instead of mocking the Church, ridiculed Freemasonry. We hear a bit about that group from the text of organization a comical pamphlet illustrated by William Hogarth.

Dublin also was home to a Hellfire Club, founded in 1735 by Richard Parsons, 1st Earl of Rosse, an English-born member of the gentry of Ireland. More specifics are known in the case of this club, including core members (rakes all!) who are represented in a 1735 painting of the group meeting around a punch bowl. The presumptive location of this scene would be The Eagle Tavern on Dublin’s Cork Hill, and the drink likely scaltheen, a milk-punch strongly associated with the club.

Dublin site — Montpelier lodge believed to have been used by Dublin club. Photo: Joe King

Because Parsons owned an old hunting lodge on Montpelier, a mountain on the outskirts of the city, it’s also commonly presumed the group gathered there. While there’s no contemporary documentation confirming this, the romantic nature of the site all but demanded it be incorporated into the folklore. The building was in a state of partial ruin even in Parson’s day, and was constructed from stone quarried from an ancient pagan burial cairn on the hill.

We hear a few of the legends associated with Hellfire gatherings of Montpelier, including a longer tale of a devilish black cat related by Mrs. Karswell from the 1907 book, Sketches of Old Dublin.

The end of this Irish Hellfire Club seems to have had much to do with the vile reputation of a particular member, Henry Barry, 4th Baron of Santry. We hear of the homicide charges leveled against him as well as of another murderous incident, which may be the stuff of legend.

We also hear of a sort of spiritual resurrection of Dublin’s club in 1771 under the ironic name, “The Holy Fathers.” Despite the dark rumors swirling around this group, its founder, Buck Whaley was a popular character thanks to his larger-than-life adventures. We hear some tales of his extraordinary wagers and of the foolhardy journey that earned him the nickname, “Jerusalem Whaley.”

Though it’s not another Hellfire Club, we make a brief side trip to discuss, The Beggar’s Benison, an equally scandalous club — and not just by 18^th century standards.

Founded in 1732 in the Scottish town of Anstruther on the Firth of Forth, the Beggar’s Benison was a men’s fraternity obsessively devoted to sex, the sharing of erotic art and literature, dirty songs and toasts, and the presentation of frank lectures on sexual topics. We hear the tale told of is legendary founding by a particularly rakish version of James V, of the club’s rather shocking initiation rites, and of of the membership’s peculiar obsession with pubic hair.

We close with two tales detailing the ends of Philip Wharton of London’s Hellfire Club and Richard Parsons of Dublin — one tragic and the other comic.

Dublin Hellfire Club, James Worsdale, 1735

NOTE: Details on our Patreon raffle for the 15-disc set, All The Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium Of Folk Horror, are available at this link: https://www.boneandsickle.com/2022/03/30/patreon-raffle/

Bird-Women of Greece and Russia

By boneandsickle | September 18, 2021

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 47:18 — 54.1MB)

Bird-women hybrids of Greek legend and Russian folklore are uniquely ambivalent, sometimes bringing death and destruction and at others, prophetic wisdom and the joy of Paradise.

The two Greek species we treat are sirens and harpies, both at times described as having the bodies of birds and faces or upper bodies of human females.

Beginning with harpies — we hear a bit of audio from the 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts, which features a pair of stop-motion harpies created by Ray Harryhausen. While these are more batlike than birdlike, the animator’s tendency to conflate features is actually in line with various classical tales, which tend to disagree sometimes offering winged harpies, others not, and if birdlike, not necessarily featuring the heads of women. We hear some of these descriptions read by Mrs. Karswell.

As for sirens, while today they are regarded as equivalent to mermaids, originally they were bird-human hybrids. Thanks to the siren’s connection to the sailors they would seduce, an intuitive shift from bird to fishlike portrayals seems natural, but did not occur until late antiquity or the early medieval period. It seems likely that once this transition occurred the harpy’s image consolidated around the birdlike form no longer associated with the siren. Unlike the creature’s form, the siren’s song, which drew sailors to wreck their ships upon the rocks, has always been a defining attribute of the creature.

There’s something of a disconnect between ancient siren and harpy narratives and the creatures’ representation in visual art, with some of their traits more fixed in the latter than the former. In particular, sirens and harpies, along with other hybrids such as the griffin and sphinx, first appear in Greek culture as decorative embellishments on household items. These monsters, as discussed, were borrowings from cultures of the East, with the human-headed Egyptian ba bird being a likely origin for our avian figures.

Funerary statue of a siren, 4th C BC, National Archaeological Museum, Athens, Greece

The behavior of these creatures is primarily known from two ancient texts. In the third century BC, the behavior of harpies was defined by Apollonius Rhodius’s in his epic The Argonautica, while the actions of sirens were codified in Homer’s Odyssey from the 8th century BC.

The episode from the Argonautica involves the harpies suddenly descending from the sky to torment a the prophet Phineus, repeatedly sent by Zeus to snatch away his food.

Better known is Homer’s episode describing Odysseus tied to the mast listening to the siren song as his crew sails near, their ears providently plugged with wax. What’s not as often remembered, however, is the nature of the siren’s song, which promises not sexual reward, but omniscience.

The sirens’ offer to share the knowledge of the gods, and the danger inherent in hearing their song finds a precise parallel in narratives about the Russian bird-women we discuss, namely the Alkonost, Sirin, and Gamayun, all of which are said to reside in Paradise, or the realm of the dead. They are portrayed like the harpies and sirens as having the bodies of birds and human heads or heads and breasts but with the addition of crowns or halos.

The Alkonost and Sirin are said to be sisters, inevitably appearing as a complimentary pair in art and folk-tales, with the Alkonost presiding over the daylight hours, and the Sirin the night, the Alkonost bringing joy, the Sirin sorrow, etc. While the Alkonost is generally made the more positive symbol, both birds, through their song, can produce dangerous results. The song of the Alkonost shares a knowledge or experience of the divine that can induce ecstatic madness or a deathlike trance state. The same could be said for the Sirin, though in some instances it’s said to more literally said to abduct mortals into the afterlife.

"Sirin and Alkonost. The Birds of Joy and Sorrow" Viktor Vasnetsov, 1896 — “Sirin and Alkonost. The Birds of Joy and Sorrow” Viktor Vasnetsov, 1896

While the Sirin obviously derives its name from the Greek sirens, the Alkonost too has its origins in Greek mythology, specifically in the myth of the lovers Alcyone and Ceyx, the former lending her name (in Russian derivation) to the Alkonost.

For her effrontery of comparing their love to that of the gods, Alcyone (or sometimes both Alcyone and Ceyx) are transformed into birds, specifically kingfishers. As a bird, Alcyone was said by Roman writers to lay her eggs during a five-day period in the winter during which the winds are calmed — a source of our word, “halycon,” meaning a calm or happy interlude.

The Alkonost likewise is said to lay its eggs in the ocean during an interval during which the seas are calm, and is therefore associated with control over the weather. Superstitions found not only in Russia but further afield in Europe associate the kingfisher and dried kingfisher bodies used as charms to predict the weather.

The Sirin and Alkonost were also assimilated into Russia’s Christian culture, sometimes shown perched upon trees in Eden or as representations of the Holy Spirit. We hear of a particularly strange Russian tradition involving the bird-women called “Apple Savior,” involving the blessing of apples, Christ’s transfiguration in the Bible, and the singing of the Sirin and Alkonost, as well as a folktale involving the lovers Kostroma and Kupelo associated with the summer solstice and St. John’s Night.

The song of the Gamayun, like that of the Alkonost and Sirin, is a form of divine language though is less likely to be destructively overpowering and more associated with prophecy and happiness. For this reason, the creature, is also referred to as “The Bird of Happiness” or “The Bird of Prophecy.”

The Gamayun is also often said to have no legs as it is strictly a creature of the air or heavens and never lands. The source of this belief is actually related to a peculiar trade in preserved bird charms, as explained in detail.

The show winds down with some appearances of the Russian bird-women in 19th and 20th-century art, music, and film, including the 1897 opera Sadko by Rimsky-Korsakov, a musical treatment of a folkloric adventurer, merchant, and gusli-player from Novgorod. We hear a bit of the opera’s most famous aria often called “The Song of India” describing the exotic land where the Bird of Happiness may be found.

Our final segment is about Sadko, a 1952 cinematic adaptation of the opera by “the Soviet Walt Disney,” Aleksandr Ptushko, a film repackaged by Roger Corman in 1963 for American screenings as The Magic Voyage of Sinbad.

From "Sadko" (1952) — From “Sadko” (1952)

The Dybbuk

By boneandsickle | August 22, 2021

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 49:52 — 57.1MB)

A dybbuk is a “clinging spirit” of Jewish folklore, a ghost that can possess a human host.

Stories of dybbuks (pl. dibbukim in Hebrew for sticklers) date to the 16th century but have never traditionally included the idea of trapping a dybbuk in a box, a trope that only dates to a 20o3 eBay ad placed by a Portland antique refinisher Kevin Mannis. Although Mannis would later confess to having made up his listing’s backstory as a sort of creative experiment, the box has continued to be the center of an evolving mythology advanced first by its 2003 buyer, Jason Haxton. In 2016, the box was purchased by Ghost Adventure‘s TV personality Zak Bagans, for display in his Haunted Museum in Las Vegas. We open the show with some clips from a July 2020 episode in which Bagans opens the box.

The dybbuk-in-a-box trope was also furthered by the “based on a true story” 2012 horror film, The Possession, for which Mannis and Haxton served as consultants. We hear a clip from that film as well as a clip from the ridiculous 2009 dybbuk-without-a-box film The Unborn. The 2015 Polish film (in English and Polish) Demon is also recommended as a more traditionally European take on the dybbuk folklore, thanks in part to its incorporation of a wedding motif.

A wedding dance with Death from 1937 film.

The idea of a dybbuk appearing at a wedding is borrowed from a classic 1937 film from Poland, The Dybbuk, a cinematic adaptation of Russian ethnographer S. Ansky’s highly successful 1914 play by the same name. Described as a sort of Romeo and Juliet meets The Exorcist, this classic of Yiddish theater was first performed in Warsaw in 1920, but was quickly was translated into dozens of languages and performed throughout Russia, Europe and the United States, popularizing this previously obscure figure of Yiddish or Ashkenazi folklore.

The story of the dybbuk begins with a 16^th-century explosion of incidents in Safed (Tsfat) a mountain city in Northern Israel considered one of Judaism’s four holiest cities thanks to its role in the development of the Kabbalah and the particularly saintly occupants of its hillside cemetery.

The first and foremost figure in Safed’s association with Kabbalah is Isaac Luria, whose teachings are recorded by his student Chaim Vital in The Tree of Life, foundational text of Lurianic Kabbalism, the dominant school of Kabbalistic thought since the 16^th century. Luria’s school converted Safed into a sort of spiritual hothouse, characterized by extremes of devotion, asceticism, and visionary experience — an environment that has been tied to the proliferation of dybbuk encounters recorded in 16th-century Safed.

Of these Safed accounts, we hear two lengthier narratives said to have transpired in 1571 and 1572 read by Mrs. Karswell, Without revealing too much that could spoil the stories, there are a few commonalities worth noting — the fact that dybbuks have a strange method of leaving their human host and that their hosts needn’t always be human.

We also learn the Kabbalistic explanation for the dybbuks compulsion to take a human host. It’s related to the notion of gilgul, or transmigration of souls, a process which ideally moves from lower forms to higher as ordered by the principle of tikkun olam, the “repair of the world,” or rectification.

A brief story from Chaim Vital’s spiritual autobiography, Book of Visions, illustrates a phenomenon paralelling that of the dybbuk, namely, the ibbur, the spirit of a good but still to be perfected individual, who may return to earth and possess a human host to accomplish required mitzvahs. We also hear of a strange grave rjte said to provoke encounters with these heavenly beings.

Our show wraps up with audio clips from modern instances of dybbuk possessions and banishings performed by Jerusalem Rabbis David Batzri and Menashe Amon between 1999 and 2019.