The Cherokee tell how the Sun stopped every day at her daughter's house for her midday meal. People looking at her screwed up their faces. She told her brother the Moon that all the people were ugly, but he said they were beautiful, because they smiled at him. #MythologyMonday The Sun was jealous and decided to get hotter and hotter and kill all the people. The spirits of the mountain caves told the people their only hope was to kill the Sun, and turned two men into snakes, the Spreading Adder and the Copperhead. They lay in waiting for the Sun.

One summer night in 415 BCE, on the eve of a military expedition to Sicily, the city of Athens went to sleep under the protection of the gods. Notable among these was Hermes, the god of travellers, whose statues known as Herms stood in many public places, and outside homes. These stone guardians were simply rectangular columns, with a carved bearded head of Hermes at the top, and an erect phallus and testicles jutting out at groin level. When the Athenians rose the next morning, they discovered that persons unknown had gone through the city

#FolkloreThursday In the 1850s Michael Aislabie Denham collected a vast amount of folklore of the north of England, known as The Denham Tracts, including a list of supernatural creatures with which in earlier times "the whole earth was so overrun." This is his list. ghosts, boggles, bloody-bones, spirits, demons, ignis fatui, brownies, bugbears, black dogs, spectres, shellycoats, scarecrows, witches, wizards, barguests, Robin-Goodfellows, hags, night-bats, scrags, breaknecks, fantasms, hobgoblins, hobhoulards, boggy-boes, dobbies,

#FairyTaleTuesday From the Journal of Gerard Manley Hopkins 7 Feb 1875: I asked Miss Jones in my Welsh lesson the Welsh for fairy, for we were translating Cinderella. She told me cipenaper (Anglice kippernapper): the word is nothing but kidnapper, molded, according to their fashion, to give it a Welsh etymology, as she said, from cipio/ to snatch, to whisk away. However in coming to an understanding between ourselves what fairies (she says fairess by the way for a she-fairy) and kidnappers were, on my describing them as