“The water dragon keeps our river safe. Their legacy is sweet clear
water and lush crops and Tar seeping from the blood of those that seek
them out. You can even see their work on their flesh. The poisons
they’ve absorbed for centuries shift across their skin in bursts of
color as they walk the festival, gently inspecting things with golden
whiskers. The elders say to make our offerings pretty and our
conversation pleasant as we give thanks.

But we must never touch them.

And we especially must never search out the source of the lovely, lonely, singing we hear during the summer rains.”

Ad Camp on patreon asked for something that was fun to look at, but not to touch. so have a dragon.

bogleech:

There’s almost nothing about her on google but in this book of Inuit mythology we just read about
the spirit Erdlaversissoq, who will kill you if you laugh at her.

And that’s a challenge because she has a humongous giant ass and dances around singing “great is my ass, great is my ass,” stopping to bend over and lick her own buttcrack between verses.

Her butt also has “a family of sea scorpions dangling from it” (I have no idea what they’re translating as “sea scorpion” unless they mean the venomous fish) and also there’s a nose in the middle of her forehead

Another story from the same book (”A Kayak Full of Ghosts”) has a woman who only ever meets shitty worthless men until one day a disembodied skull rolls into her house, and magically turns into a sexy man just long enough for them to “couple wildly.”

He turns back into the skull and then brings her exactly the food she was craving.

…And that’s it, that’s the entire story. She marries the skull, which turns into a sexy dude and feeds her whenever she wants, happily ever after.

big bones don’t lie – griffins

brokenbuttbones:

skittlesfairy:

toffeecape:

awed-frog:

[If you found my blog because you’re curious about Greek people mixing up prehistoric bears and demigods, this post is for you. I studied archaeology with a focus on other things, and the research on this topic goes back decades, but imo the best book on how dinosaur bones influenced mythology is Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters. I strongly suggest you support this amazing historian and buy her stuff – she’s a great writer and she specializes in folklore and geomythology, it doesn’t get much cooler than that – but if you can’t and you’re interested in the subject – well, I believe scientific knowledge should be shared and accessible to everyone, so here are a few highlights. Part one of six.]

Griffins: a very mysterious mystery

“A race of four-footed birds, almost as large as wolves and with legs and claws like lions.”

The one thing you need to know about griffins is that they don’t really fit in anywhere. They have no powers, they don’t help heroes, they’re not defeating gods or anything like that. Technically speaking, they’re not even monsters – people thought griffins were legit – real animals who lived in Central Asia and sat on golden eggs and mostly killed anyone who went near them. And okay, someone might say, ‘Frog, what’s fishy about that? People used to be dumb as rocks and there’s plenty of bizarro animals out there, anyway’ and yeah, that’s a very good point – except for one thing. See, what’s creepy about griffins is that we’ve got drawings and descriptions of them spanning ten centuries and thousands of miles, and yet they always. look. the. freaking. same.

Like, here’s how people imagined elephants.

This is insanely funny and probably why God sent the Black Death to kill everyone, but also pretty common tbh, because a) people want to feel involved, b) people are liars who lie and c) it’s hard to imagine stuff you’ve never seen. So the more a story is passed around, the more it’s going to gain and lose details here and there, until you get from dog-footed hairy monkey of doom to plunger-nosed horror on stilts. But griffins – art or books, they’re consistently described as wolves-sized mammals with a beaked face. So that’s what made Adrienne Mayor go, Uh.

And what she did next is she started digging around in Central Asia, because that’s the other thing everyone agreed on: that griffins definitely lived there and definitely came from there. And this is where things get really interesting, because as it turns out, on one side of the Urals you’ve got Greeks going, ‘Mate, the Scythians, you know – they’ve got these huge-ass lion birds, I’m not even shitting you rn’ while on the other side of the Urals – wow and amaze – you’ve got Siberian tribes singing songs about the ‘bird-monsters’ and how their ancestors slaughtered them all because they were Valiant and Good.

(This according to a guy studying Siberian traditions in the early 1800s, anyway, because you know who writes stuff down? Not nomads, bless them: dragging around a shitload of books on fucking horseback is not a kind of life anyone deserve to live.)

And anyway, do you know what else those Mighty Ancestors did? They mined gold sand, and they kept tripping over dinosaur bones because that entire area is full of both things and some places are lucky like that. And in fact, the more excavations were carried out in ancient Scythian settlements, the more we started to realize that those guys were even more obsessed with griffins than the Greek were. Hell, some warriors even had griffins tattooed on their bodies?

And it’s probably all they ever talked about, because that’s when griffins suddenly appear in the Mediterreanean landscape: when Greek people start trading (and talking) with the Scythians.

(Another important note here, not that I’m not bitter or anything: something else those excavations are showing is that Herodotus was fucking right about fucking everything, SO THERE. Father of lies my ass, he was the only sensible guy in that whole bean-avoiding, monster-fucking, psychopathic and self-important Greek ‘intelligentsia’ and they can all fuck off and die and we don’t care about temples Pausy you dumb bitch we want to hear about the tree people and the Amazons and the fucking griffins goddammit. Uuugh. /rant)

So anyway, Scythian nomads had been hunting for gold in places with exciting names like ‘the field of the white bones’ and basically dying of exposure because mountains, so Herodotus (and others) got this right as well: that successful campaigns could take a long-ass time, and very often people just disappeared, never to be heard from again. What everybody got less right: the nomads and adventurers and gold miners weren’t killed by griffins, because by the time they started traveling into those mountains, ‘griffins’ had been dead for hundreds of thousands of years. What they did see, and what was sure to spook the fuck out of them, were fossils – and, more precisely, protoceratops skulls, which can be found on all the major caravan routes from China all the way to Uzbekistan and are so ubiquitous paleontologists call them ‘a damn nuisance’.

And guess what they look like.

Just fucking guess.

[Left: a golden griffin, Saka-Scyhtian culture; right: psittacosaurus skull, commonly found in Uzbekistan and the western Gobi.]

Also, fun detail if you’re into gory and painful ways of dying: many of the dino skeletons are found standing up, because the animals would be caught in sand storms and drop dead. So basically you’d be riding your horse and minding your own gold-related business when all of a sudden you see the empty sockets of a beaked something staring at you and yeah – as a reminder, the idea of evolution was not a thing until Darwin, so any Scythian or Siberian tribesman seeing something like that would assume there was a fairly good fucking chance of a live whatever-the-hell-this-is waiting for him behind the next hill. And that’s what he’d say to Greek traders over a bowl of fermented mare’s milk: to stay the fuck away from those mountains, because griffins, man, they’re fucking real and there’s hundreds of them and anyway, maybe write that down if writing’s something you’re into, never saw the point myself but eh, to each his own, right, and cheers, good health, peace and joy to the ancestors.

Man, don’t you just love mythology?

(How fossils influenced mythology: part two, Cyclops, will be up soon.)

Review of the book Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes by Cody O’Brien.

cheskamouse:

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

esso-is:

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

between-stars-and-waves:

marzipanandminutiae:

snarkymonkeyprime:

talkingcinemalight:

my-abibliophobia:

To sum up this book in a single sentence – “What would happen is Deadpool wrote a mythology book.”

Yeah, this guy-

Wrote a book. Here are some examples of why I think this.

GREEK MYTHOLOGY

The Greek creation myth.

The story of Hephaestus god of Blacksmithing and Aphrodite Goddess of Love.

The story of the Minotaur.

NORSE MYTHOLOGY

Norse creation myth.

Odin orders Loki to steal Freyja’s necklace. He does. This is so in character for both of them Freyja instantly knows who to blame.

EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY

Ra gets mad at humanity and creates Sekhmet Lion Goddess of Killing Stuff.

How Isis retrieves her huband’s coffin from the support pillar it got stuck inside.

MAYAN MYTHOLOGY

How to try and kill the god Zipacna and fail.

CHRISTIANITY MYTHOLOGY

How God made Eve from Adam’s rib.

The story of how King Solomon judges proper maternal instinct.

HINDU MYTHOLOGY

Men ask Shiva to stop Kali’s murder rampage.

And this is how he does it.

JAPANESE MYTHOLOGY

The Goddess Izanami gives birth to the whole island of Japan.

A story about Tanuki.

AFRICAN MYTHOLOGY

Creation myth

SUMERIAN MYTHOLOGY

Creation myth

The Epic of Gilgamesh: Being born

The Epic of Gilgamesh: Meeting his best friend.

NATIVE AMERICAN MYTHOLOGY

Do I really need to explain why I feel the Merc with a mouth was involved in the retelling here?

I have this book. I’ve read it about ten times and I love it.

@systlin

This guy has a whole website

It’s called Better Myths, and it is a GIFT

I need this book!

@infernoking @d20-darling @askkakuro @thefingerfuckingfemalefury @windows-operating-system

“Daedalus, who is a fantastic genius inventor with no sense of right and wrong…”

I lost it at that line 😀

im Rabbit

AMAZING

I know a book I need now. =)

thebuttkingpost:

Greek mythology: aren’t the god great they only sexually harassed my wife and turned one of my children into a stag beetle this week

Norse mythology: dînghïr œne nüt got his name when he killed a lizard the size of every mountain in the world without Odin’s permission so Odin thought it would be funny to punish him by making him fart so hard one of his nuts flew off

gluklixhe:

ironbite4:

fluffmugger:

crazythingsfromhistory:

archaeologistforhire:

thegirlthewolfate:

theopensea:

kiwianaroha:

pearlsnapbutton:

desiremyblack:

smileforthehigh:

unexplained-events:

Researchers have used Easter Island Moai replicas to show how they might have been “walked” to where they are displayed.

VIDEO

Finally. People need to realize aliens aren’t the answer for everything (when they use it to erase poc civilizations and how smart they were)

(via TumbleOn)

What’s really wild is that the native people literally told the Europeans “they walked” when asked how the statues were moved. The Europeans were like “lol these backwards heathens and their fairy tales guess it’s gonna always be a mystery!”

Maori told Europeans that kiore were native rats and no one believed them until DNA tests proved it

And the Iroquois told Europeans that squirels showed them how to tap maple syrup and no one believed them until they caught it on video

Oral history from various First Nations tribes in the Pacific Northwest contained stories about a massive earthquake/tsunami hitting the coast, but no one listened to them until scientists discovered physical evidence of quakes from the Cascadia fault line.

Roopkund Lake AKA “Skeleton Lake” in the Himalayas in India is eerie because it was discovered with hundreds of skeletal remains and for the life of them researchers couldn’t figure out what it was that killed them. For decades the “mystery” went unsolved.

Until they finally payed closer attention to local songs and legend that all essentially said “Yah the Goddess Nanda Devi got mad and sent huge heave stones down to kill them”. That was consistent with huge contusions found all on their neck and shoulders and the weather patterns of the area, which are prone to huge & inevitably deadly goddamn hailstones. https://www.facebook.com/atlasobscura/videos/10154065247212728/

Literally these legends were past down for over a thousand years and it still took researched 50 to “figure out” the “mystery”. 🙄

Adding to this, the Inuit communities in Nunavut KNEW where both the wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were literally the entire time but Europeans/white people didn’t even bother consulting them about either ship until like…last year.

“Inuit traditional knowledge was critical to the discovery of both ships, she pointed out, offering the Canadian government a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when Inuit voices are included in the process.

In contrast, the tragic fate of the 129 men on the Franklin expedition hints at the high cost of marginalising those who best know the area and its history.

“If Inuit had been consulted 200 years ago and asked for their traditional knowledge – this is our backyard – those two wrecks would have been found, lives would have been saved. I’m confident of that,” she said. “But they believed their civilization was superior and that was their undoing.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/16/inuit-canada-britain-shipwreck-hms-terror-nunavut

“Oh yeah, I heard a lot of stories about Terror, the ships, but I guess Parks Canada don’t listen to people,” Kogvik said. “They just ignore Inuit stories about the Terror ship.”

Schimnowski said the crew had also heard stories about people on the land seeing the silhouette of a masted ship at sunset.

“The community knew about this for many, many years. It’s hard for people to stop and actually listen … especially people from the South.”

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/sammy-kogvik-hms-terror-franklin-1.3763653

Indigenous Australians have had stories about giant kangaroos and wombats for thousands of years, and European settlers just kinda assumed they were myths. Cut to more recently when evidence of megafauna was discovered, giant versions of Australian animals that died out 41 000 years ago.

Similarly, scientists have been stumped about how native Palm trees got to a valley in the middle of Australia, and it wasn’t until a few years ago that someone did DNA testing and concluded that seeds had been carried there from the north around 30 000 years ago… aaand someone pointed out that Indigenous people have had stories about gods from the north carrying the seeds to a valley in the central desert.

oh man let me tell you about Indigenous Australian myths – the framework they use (with multi-generational checking that’s unique on the planet, meaning there’s no drifting or mutation of the story, seriously they are hardcore about maintaining integrity) means that we literally have multiple first-hand accounts of life and the ecosystem before the end of the last ice age

it’s literally the oldest accurate oral history of the world.

Now consider this: most people consider the start of recorded history to be with the Sumerians and the Early Dynastic period of the Egyptians. So around 3500 BCE, or five and a half thousand years ago

These highly accurate Aboriginal oral histories originate from twenty thousand years ago at least

Ain’t it amazing what white people consider history and what they don’t?

I always said disservice is done to oral traditions and myth when you take them literally. Ancient people were not stupid.

Source: unexplained-events

my students react to greek mythology

thoodleoo:

“no offense but why would you follow dionysus if that means you have to party in the woods” “why wouldn’t you?”

*after learning about the chimera*“dude what you can’t be a lion AND a goat AND a dragon that’s too many”

“in fairness, if apollo wanted to date me, i’d turn into a tree too”

“she can’t be his wife, she’s his sister” “that didn’t stop zeus”

*after learning medusa gave birth to pegasus” “OUCH????”

“is there anybody zeus didn’t get pregnant”

“like seriously i had to make a mythology family tree for english class and it’s literally all zeus”

“hera’s kind of a jerk” “dude she literally threw her kid off a mountain because he was too ugly what did you expect

“why is everything about horses”

“oh, he starts eating people! typical”

“so basically you shouldn’t ever interact with a bull in ancient greece ever”

vincisomething:

doctorsdemons:

whitedarryl:

asatira:

elfgrove:

mmemento:

leaper182:

bead-bead:

the-writers-ramblings:

i cant even make it past the table of contents im laughing too hard

WHAT IS THIS BOOK!?!

It’s called “Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes: A No-Bullshit Guide to World Mythology”
By Cory O’Brien, and it looks highly entertaining. 😀

Gilgamesh: THE ULTIMATE BROMANCE

Give it here, now.

Sweet Fluffy Gods why is there not an audiobook version?

I need to find this book.

The first time Iv’e wanted to read something since Metro 2033.

guy

guys…look what we did 😀

I want this book

Source: thewritersramblings

Loki and Children

sdnht:

trickerydickerydock:

I have been having some thoughts about the original mythological
Loki and the thought that has been on my mind most is this:

Loki is

1. Surprisingly great with kids

2. Is addicted to parenthood

Let me explain.

As to the first bit, well, yeah, it’s surprising. Or it should
be at first glance. Because, seriously, this is fucking Loki. Standing
in close proximity to him for longer than a minute is bound to result in theft,
arson, a splash of bloodshed for color, and at least one confused party waking
up in bed with the fucker. He’s a chaotic, manic, and generally hazardous force
to be reckoned with.

To us. That is, adults.

Mortals, gods, giants, trolls, dwarves, et cetera–but only
those who are mature.* *Read: there is Something to be Gained from conning,
seducing, or otherwise messing with us. Whether it’s to save his own skin, or
to get some sweet petty vengeance, or to steal a bauble, or to satisfy some
carnal itch, or to just fuck up somebody’s day for the Hel of it, Loki only
ever targets those he can take something worthwhile from.

And what is there to take from kids?

Plenty of folks on his extremely extensive Enemies List have
children, of course. No one in the Norse mythos was especially mindful of
dropping their seed. So. Children.

Children–easy to fool, easy to make a hostage, easy to charm
and siphon their parents’ secrets and treasures from–should be great big
bullseyes to the God of Mischief and Trickery and Assorted Other Unscrupulous
Things. Yet there isn’t a single Edda or snippet of lore in which Loki makes cruel
use of them. Not once.

But what’s the big deal? Most of the rude and/or villainous
characters in Norse mythology don’t bother with harassing kids either. Except
in the case of stories like Loka
Táttur.

Loka Táttur is a tale about how a farmer loses a bet with a
vicious troll who swears to kill the farmer’s little boy. The farmer calls upon
three gods in turn. Odin, Hoenir, and Loki. Odin and Hoenir both disguise the
boy and hide him away, but the troll is too clever and each time manages to
sniff out the boy’s hiding place. Ultimately it is Loki who hides the kid–pulling
an Idunn-in-a-Nutshell gag and hiding him as a speck on the eye of a flounder
in the water–and then, rather than stepping back as Odin and Hoenir did from
their work, he sits in his boat and lets the troll see him.

The troll, being suspicious, asks what Loki’s business is. Only
fishing, obviously. The troll demands to join him. Lo and behold, they bring up
a wealth of flounders, including the one where the boy’s hidden. Loki manages
to change the boy back to his true shape and hide the kid behind his back
without the troll noticing. As Loki brings the boat back to shore, and to the
farmer’s boathouse with the latter’s doors open, Loki tells the boy to run
through the boathouse. He goes, the troll gives chase, and the troll becomes
wedged in the entryway.

At which point Loki proceeds to chop off the troll’s legs and
stick an iron stake in the bastard’s skull. Then he walks the kid back home. The
grand payoff for Loki after all this?

The boy is safe. The troll is dead. The End.

Huh.

Now, much as Loki may have been the catalyst for a lot of
corpses pre-Ragnarok–see his business with Thor getting his hammer back and
leading more than one giant into a death trap–Loki is actually very rarely, if
ever, one to get his hands dirty by killing a victim himself. Even Baldr was
done in by an arrow he aimed with blind Hod’s fingers. So why did Loki
personally orchestrate this plan in such a grisly way? For what gain?

What, other than the satisfaction of personally slaughtering the
would-be child-killing prick troll?

In a less bloody narrative, we see his hand in getting Thialfi
and Roskva, a pair of mortal siblings, taken into Thor’s service. While the
exact ages of the two aren’t mentioned, they are young enough to still be in
the care of their parents. When Thor and Loki are travelling it’s their father
who invites them under their roof. Thor’s goats are slaughtered for the evening
meal and–in some tellings–it is Loki who entices the son, Thialfi, into
breaking a leg bone to taste the marrow. When morning comes and Thor resurrects
his goats, one has a broken leg.

Thor’s visibly pissed—never ever
a good thing–and so the family offers to make some compensation.

Loki, coughing through his hand: ThialfibroketheboneheshouldpledgeservicetoThor

Thialfi: Uh–

Loki, clearing his throat: Alsotakethesistertwoforonedeal

Rosvka: But I didn’t do anything—

Loki, en sotto voce: Kids, consider your options. Teensy
mortal lifetime of toil on Midgard, harvesting dirt and snow on one hand.
Potentially immortal lifetime, I don’t know, scrubbing giant blood off Mjolnir in
Thor’s hall on Asgard on the other. Verdict?

Both: Sold.

Loki: Excellent! Really, Thor, you’re a master dealmaker,
a born barterer, I’m in awe.

Thor: Wh—

Loki: AND WE’RE BACK TREKKING LETS GO

Cue laugh track.

Point being, Loki has been shown to purposefully go
out of his way to help kids because…because. Yet how does this translate to the
idea of him being good with kids?

I ask this purely hypothetically and am trying not to
laugh as I do, because really. Really.
How in the hell is a kid not going to be entertained by the Norse god of
revelry and recreation?

Oh yeah, that bit’s often left off the résumé.

Loki, God of
Mischief, is also God of Recreation. Play, in other words. Because playtime is
a thing that is Chaotic rather than a product of Order, and so Loki is
naturally all over it. There are some who even credit him with having added
that trait to the first humans, Ask and Embla, while Odin, Vili, and Vé were
carving them and breathing character into their souls.

On top of that, he’s also the god of flyting—poetic shit-talking.

So we have a shapeshifting, storytelling,
magic-wielding, game-spinning, trickster god who can also teach young ears
every bad word they could ever hope to learn, and he’s expected not to be a hit with kids? This is all
without even mentioning the fact that Loki is a bit of a hyperactive attention
hog all on his own. What better audience for him than a gaggle of credulous
little onlookers who are too young to sneer at his antics rather than take
delight in them? Children are wee balls of mischief themselves, muddled in with
imagination and wonder and an eagerness to be wowed or made to laugh themselves
into weeping.

All of which brings me to point number two:

Loki is a kidaholic.

Like, even though a lot of his and/or her sleeping
around the Realms can be chalked up
to an insane libido, there’s also just the sheer number of kids they’ve
produced to factor in. Maybe more than even Odin or Thor could boast. At least
half being born from Loki herself. Not because Loki was helpless against the
workings of nature—it’s impossible to believe that Loki wasn’t smart enough or powerful enough to get around producing
new Lokisons and Lokisdottirs with every other bedmate—but because Loki wants more kids. There will never be
enough kids.

The guy’s got a case of severe paternal/maternal
hoarding going on. I mean

Loki: I need another one.

Odin: You really don’t.

Loki: You’re right. I need two other ones.

Odin: I am positive that you do not.

Loki: Three. Triplets. Need them. Right now.

Odin: Loki.

Loki: Four? Four. Definitely four.

Odin: Loki, please.

Loki: Yeah, let’s go with four. I can give or get. I’ll
flip a coin.

Odin: Loki, as Allfather, I am expressly forbidding
you to impregnate or be impregnated for at least a century.

Loki: Fine.

Odin: …

Loki: …I’ll settle for three.

Odin: What did I just
say?

Loki: Three’s a good number, isn’t it? All good
things come in threes. You and your brothers—

Odin, fighting an aneurysm: You and your brothers—

Loki: So you agree!

Odin: I did not—

Loki: Three it is!

Odin: Loki—

Loki: Be back when I feel like it

Odin: Loki—

Loki: Give my love to Sleipnir

Odin: LOKI—

Loki, pantsless, vaulting over the wall, cartwheeling
towards Jötunheimr’s Ironwood forest: Bye

It’s in that Ironwood that he meets Angrboda and
fathers a giant wolf, a giant snake, and the literal corpse-faced queen-goddess
of the dead by her. Being that Loki’s scope of attractiveness/aesthetic acceptability
is elastic enough to let all sorts of species between his legs, I find it hard
to believe that his kids’ unique looks would repulse or even faze him. They’re
his children. Therefore they’re great.

And we all know how that happy family
ended up. Ditto his second family with Sigyn and his two little twin boys.

Enter Ragnarok, warfare, general Bad
Times, and so on.

Anyway.

Comical as it is to envision a Loki who cringes at
the notion of parenthood and/or fears his more monstrous children, I just don’t
believe it lines up with what we know of the Loki of myth.

Myth Loki is a god who would spend hours entertaining
a child, simply entertained that the child is entertained.

Myth Loki is also
a god who would hunt down and methodically dismember whichever idiot
thought it would be okay to make a child cry within said god’s earshot.

Huh! This didn’t occur in my mind cus many fairytales and myth don’t have a concept of parenthood but I love this suggestion, Loki being a kidaholic, very, very much! I’m totally on it.

regional differences

aprilwitching:

asokkalypsenow:

aprilwitching:

seekingwillow:

tielan:

bemusedlybespectacled:

theactualcluegirl:

copperbadge:

hyvetyrant:

idiopathicsmile:

pfdiva:

vulgarweed:

adramofpoison:

idiopathicsmile:

“oh hey,” she said, “it’s a really touristy area, but since you’re gonna be passing through anyway, you might as well stop by pier 29, see the dragons. also, there’s a—”

“hold on,” i said. “i knew your city had mountains, but. dragons? uh, actual living dragons?”

“dude, it’s not a big deal. they’re there all the time. of course they’re majestic and everything, but they’re loud and cranky and mostly they lie around eating garbage. now and then the city council will talk about trying to make them roost somewhere else, but—”

“dragons,” i repeated. i knew it was making me sound like a rube, but it was a lot to take in. “you live in a city that has dragons.”

“no, it’s cool, we used to go see them when i was a little kid. it’s worth doing. but that whole area is mostly dragon-themed gift shops, and the commercialization is kind of a bummer. also, sometimes a dragon will melt somebody’s car and it’s a whole problem.”

“fairytale-style, giant scaly fire-breathing dragons.”

“honestly, i forget other cities don’t have them?” she said. “there’s a few other sites on the west coast where they gather. portland calls them wyverns, but that’s a portland thing.”

“chicago’s got, like, bunnies and songbirds,” i told her, “but otherwise it’s just your typical vermin. pigeons, rats, sphinxes—”

“sphinxes? what the hell.”

“oh, yeah, they nest in the el tunnels. sometimes a fucking sphinx will flap down out of nowhere, bring the whole train to a halt until the front car answers a riddle.”

“that sounds exciting,” she said.

“it’s the worst. your train winds up being twenty minutes late, and you just have to hang out hoping somebody up there read their mythology. there’s supposed to be a program where the conductors get trained in riddling, but i don’t know. rahm emmanuel keeps saying it’s not a budget priority.”

“huh,” she said. “guess the grass is always greener and all that. but on some level, it’s nice to remember that even with all these big box stores, the country still has some variety left in it.”

“yeah, did you know that in rhode island they call water fountains ‘bubblers’?” i said.

“whoa, seriously?”

“i read it somewhere. crazy, right?”

“crazy.”

i am here for urbanized mythological creatures

Switzerland has a lot of dragons, but dragons have long since moved on from collecting gold. There’s a purply-scaley one that roosts behind the Mad Mex that refuses to stop hoarding signposts. The city uses banners for the main roads and sells a lot of maps.

Golems love cities–with their stone buildings and sidewalks. There are strict laws about what one is allowed to say to them, because golems tend to be rather literal and very obedient. There’s always one kid who thinks he knows better. He doesn’t.

OH MY GOD THE CHICAGO SPHINXES, DON’T GET ME STARTED. Here’s the thing. When you buy your Ventra card at the machine – which is another one of Rahm’s scams, leasing that out to a private company, wtf was he thinking – it’s supposed to have the answer to the riddle on it, right? The sphinx is supposed to scan the bar code and let the train through.

that never fucking happens. Especially on the Blue Line which is down for maintenance all the time and constantly switching tracks and running shuttles, which means half the time you’ve got a sphinx that came over from the fucking Orange Line or some shit and is full of riddles that only the Irish mooks from Bridgeport understand. Or it’s in Polish only. Or it’s got a glitch that makes it stutter and if you interrupt it, it’ll get snippy and bite your head off. LITERALLY. They hush it up but it happens. Businesses lose millions from sphinx-related tardiness every year.

And then there’s a case back in ‘96 when it was proven after the fact that the “wrong” answer the Red Line Sphinx got was actually A PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE REGIONAL VARIATION but by then, the Sphinx had already eaten half a car full of drunken Cubs fans. I know, not much of value was lost there, BUT STILL.

You think SPHINXES are bad? Detroit has imps, thousands of them, and you know what they love? Buses. You know the major form of public transit in Detroit is? BUSES. So the drivers have to literally shoo away imps at every fucking stop, making them 30 minutes late, an HOUR late, and it’s not like there’s anything you can DO, because they’re all leftover from when the car companies were big, and ALL OF THOSE FUCKERS CLOSED.

So of course there were hundreds of orphaned imps, and they kept SAYING they were going to reopen the factories, or at least get some good junkyards, but nooooooooo, they never did, so the imps just bred and bred, and now they’re all over every bus and it’s not like you can ever count on getting anywhere on time and long story short, I’d take a sphinx over imps ANY day.

yeah as someone who did high school and college in michigan and now lives in chicago, i have to say that as far as the age-old sphinxes vs imps debate goes, they’re both terrible in different ways. the imps are way more common and they probably have a wider total reach, and oh my god nothing like trying to board a bus already covered in those little suckers when said bus is already forty minutes late—

(sidenote: ugh people from bloomfield hills saying stuff like “well if i lived in detroit, i’d have the sense to carry around a nice heavy club or walking stick—” yeah dude good luck with your walking stick against two dozen imps)

but the sphinxes. let’s not, uh, sugar coat this: the sphinxes don’t just slow commuters, they kill people. and yes, if you know the riddle, you’re fine. but what if someone else offers their answer first? what if you get some overly cocky freshman philosophy major who takes it upon himself to answer for the whole car?

i think in the back of our minds, all chicagoans know that rahm emmanuel’s administration isn’t gonna lift a finger until one of the sphinxes goes after a wealthy tourist and it makes national news. and even then, we’ll get, like, flashy riddle-solving software installed in all the red line trains, and maybe the brown line, but no way is it gonna cover the whole infrastructure.

basically if you ever need to take the green line or the pink line, you wanna start studying your classical mythology and folklore fucking yesterday.

@copperbadge do puns work on Sphinxes as well as riddles?

You bet your sphinxter they do.

(Sphinxes hate that one but they’re obliged to honor it.)

I heard they sometimes get bad Selkie problems in Monterey Bay…

It was so weird moving to the South and then to the Midwest after growing up in New England because apparently everywhere else unicorns are a big joke to people? I get it, New Hampshire has the lowest teenage pregnancy rate because we’re all a bunch of virgins, ha ha like I’ve never heard THAT one before, but seriously, you try growing perennials when every year the goddamn unicorn herd comes through and eats all your bulbs. MY BACK YARD IS NOT YOUR PERSONAL TULIP BUFFET, LIGHTFOOT.

The Bunyips have a fondness for the sewers. Which is really something when you’re down at Bondi for an early-morning dip and find that the damn beach is closed because another Bunyip has gone for a swim in the sewerage outlet and then waded back in to shore. Oh, sure, the outlets are supposed to be distant enough that the effluent doesn’t come back to shore, but the damned council who proposed it didn’t think about what was going to happen to all those Bunyips who were missing the swamps that got drained when they built Kingsford Smith Airport in Botany Bay. Sure, a population of nearly 10,000 bunyips is going to make do with a couple of waterways that mostly reek of industrial waste. Not. BRILLIANT TOWN PLANNING, Sydney Council. FUCKING BRILLIANT.

On the other hand, for something really spine-crawling, I suggest you look up “Rio Tinto Mining vs. The Quinkins (Imjim). Cape York, 1985.” That was a clusterfuck and a half – the extra half-clusterfuck got added when they tried to bring the military in to ‘solve the problem’. Fourteen of the children have never been recovered, the roads up into the property are impassable, and the closest you can get is within five klicks by air, land, or sea before all the instrumentation goes haywire. The last chopper to try a landing got a mayday out before readings said it plummeted like a stone.

Also, have you seen the sheer idiocy of a government trying to prosecute local spirits who aren’t going to turn up in court for one and wouldn’t recognise your white man’s law even if they did? Not one of the better periods of Australian government.

I suppose Baltimore has it easy, somewhat? Maybe? Cause the people who get in trouble the most with the mermaids are well, tourists. And there’s SIGNS up. All over. Heck, there’s signs in BRAILLE!

But of course you’ll get the drunk, handsy college boys going down to the Inner Harbour cause some older one wants to initiate a freshman, and some freshman thinks it’ll be cheaper than a strip club to see ‘free’ bare boobs.

It’s like none of them read anything to know that above those boobs, behind those lips are a whole bunch of sharp pointed teeth the better to eat them with.

But mostly it’s the tourists who do read the signs, and don’t go hanging over into the water, or trailing fingers from the water-taxi into the water; But who refuse to wear proper sanctioned ear plugs. Some of them just bring their own which aren’t strong enough to block out the sirens. But others just…. don’t believe for some reason?

I don’t know. But it’s in the news a lot when it happens and some tourists will inevitably say they didn’t think the earplugs were important, cause mermaids are beautiful and nice.

Disney has a lot to make up for – not that it’ll ever do it. But. A lot.

And then there’s the other thing. All the jokes about how they ‘thought the city with mermaids would be Seattle’, nudgenudge, wink wink.

And someone has to smack them down with; how many lost women tossed overboard by the slave trade did Seattle get drifting into their harbours in the under-currents? If there’s no proper bodies for mermaids to lay their eggs, there’s no mermaids.

I used to live in Canton, and there’s lovely apartments there. It’s just a touch expensive for the soundproof glass, y’know? But still, early Saturday morning, watching the mermaids float and sun themselves can actually be pretty, if you’re three stories up, a hundred or more yards from the water and with good soundproofing; all the brown and bronze and I saw a red tail once. She was gorgeous, dark skin, red tail, upper body all muscled like a dancer.

so having grown up in pennsylvania and north carolina, i thought i was prepared when i moved to florida for school last year. “after all,” i thought, “how different can a skunk ape really be from a bigfoot?”

well, i still don’t know the answer to that question, because it turns out florida is a really big state, and the particular area i moved to hasn’t seen a skunk ape in over twenty years (though, thanks to breeding programs and conservation efforts, i hear they’re thriving elsewhere).

what i have encountered is basilisks.

they are everywhere in central florida, apparently, and nobody even thought to mention them to me before i moved.

“i’m sorry,” my floridian roommate apologized a few weeks into our cohabitation. “they’re just such a standard part of the background for me. they don’t seem worth freaking out over, to be honest.”

now, i was freaking out, but it turns out the greater basilisks we all know and fear from legends, campfire stories, and the occasional sensationalistic news report only live deep in the swamps. they rarely bother humans. the slithery little guys i’d been seeing out of the corner of my eye on my morning walks– vivid red or gold scales, about the size of a pigeon– are comparatively harmless. yes, if you make direct eye contact with one, it causes an unpleasant pins-and-needles sensation in your arms and legs that can last all day, plus a transient feeling of dizziness and nausea. but it’s not going to paralyze you, let alone turn you to stone. and it’s pretty hard to accidentally make eye contact with a lesser basilisk, anyway. they aren’t confrontational animals; they’ll only try to meet your gaze and stare if they think you’re attacking them or something. (i do worry a little about my second roommate’s dog– she’s been zapped a couple times trying to chase and catch the poor things and, well, she’s a dog, they don’t learn from that kind of experience.)

anyway, turns out most people around here kinda like the lesser basilisks. unlike their large and lethal cousins, they’re mainly insectivores, and they love to eat mosquitoes and roaches. good for pest control!

Ah yeah I’ve heard y’all have problems with basilisk on your side of the state! Hope your roommate’s dog can be kept away from them.

I know the skunk ape population has been on the rise again especially in the national forest in the middle of the state. Who knows, they might migrate back into your area soon!

But as for my area we’ve been having real trouble with the sea serpents lately. They hang around the waterways and rivers during breeding season.

Not that they themselves are the problem I think it’s more people not respecting their habitat. It’s at least once a year some jackass is speeding with a boat in a no wake zone and they’ll cut up their backs pretty bad, even with all the scales. It’s a real shame, especially the juveniles. There’s programs to rescue and rehabilitate them here but it’s hard to get every one, and that’s just the ones that get spotted.

Though I gotta say I’m proud of the legislation we have protecting their nests. People get arrested if they disturb them and we gotta cover the lights on the beach during the hatching season so they can wriggle down to the ocean okay.

All the tourists around here are scared of them and I gotta admit we do have a high attack frequency. My sister’s friend has a friend who got bit by one last year. But I still think it’s cause there’s more tourists in the oceans and the poor things mistaking them for fish or a shark or something. They’re predators and they’re hungry but they’re not man eaters or anything. And they sure are pretty if you catch a glimpse of them, their scales are mostly blues and greens but they’re also always a little iridescent! All those documentaries pretending they’re stone cold killers make me sad

oh, i know! it’s like that shark week baloney– even the discovery channel likes to pretend they’re these vicious, unstoppably bloodthirsty things, like the Terminators of the natural world or something. sure, i guess that makes some people more interested in them, but it also makes a lot of people way more scared of sea monsters than they need to be. most attacks on humans aren’t even fatal, if i’m remembering the statistics right.

mermaids are actually way more dangerous than sea monsters– as someone mentioned upthread– but are there 6-volume cult classic horror movie franchises about killer mermaids with a taste for human flesh? pretty sure there aren’t! (i’m talking about those Behemoth From Butcher’s Bay flicks from the 80s and 90s, of course. i mean, they’re pretty entertaining! but they’re also not what you would call scientifically accurate. at all.)

yeah, i get worked up about this stuff, sorry. where i’m from, bigfoots get a similar bad rap– and they aren’t even predators! there have been all of four confirmed bigfoot attack deaths in the state of pennsylvania, ever, out of like nine attacks total, and all of them involved someone hunting or otherwise antagonizing the bigfoot. well, except for one that might have had rabies, back like a hundred years ago. i think people are just creeped out because, well, they are big– and they kinda look human? like, they’re too close to the uncanny valley to be charismatic megafauna. or whatever.