We cover here the range of material that comes under folklore and cultural tradition, including legends, customs, folk magic and others
North Yorkshire’s West Witton, home to the quasi-sacrificial ‘Burning Bartle’ ceremony every August 24, is certainly an atmospheric village, as Jan Reese recalls In the late 1960s, when I was in my teens, I spent most of my holidays at a hotel in Wensleydale. My aunt, Renee Stansfield, was landlady of the Fox and […]
Should we take seriously legends about ‘retribution’ coming to humans who violate ritual sites? Robert W E Farrah has been wondering the same thing… It was during the campaign to stop a Christian ‘Millennium Monument’ being erected in the vicinity of Mayburgh henge (see NE 84 and 85) that I was reminded that my own
The Legend of Mayburgh Henge Read More »
Richard Thornhill on the strange shenanigans that made a man into a god in ancient Japan, and a legend that recalls Britain’s ‘screaming skulls’ and Lleu Llaw Gyffes As I cycle to work through the Otemachi banking district of central Tokyo, I pass the Masakado Kubizuka (‘Masakado Head-Mound’), a little square of garden, with a
Taira no Masakado: Rebel god of Tokyo Read More »
Hawaiian petroglyphs and the general cultural sanctification of stones in parts of Polynesia have not received a great deal of attention in British earth mysteries magazines, but Graeme Chappell’s report on the carvings he and Paul Bennett located in Northumberland
There is life in the stone and death in the stone…: Petroglyphs of Hawaii Read More »
Japan’s indigenous quasi-pagan religion, Shinto, has preserved sacred space in city and countryside, in many cases since prehistory, and the result is some of the most powerfully numinous places that one will encounter. Here, Richard Thornhill writes of such a shrine in one of the world’s most urbanised environments Hakusan Jinja is considered one of
Urban Spirit: Tokyo’s Hakusan Jinja Read More »