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La Llorona, the Weeping Woman who drowned her children and walks the waterways forever, is neither purely Aztec nor purely European but a mestiza convergence of the goddess Cihuacóatl, La Malinche, and the European White Lady. A field study in how a borderland culture stores its grief, guilt, and warnings.
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The jinn, the hidden ones of pre-Islamic Arabia, were morally ambivalent spirits of the desert waste places. Islam neither destroyed nor demonised them, but reckoned them a parallel accountable people, distinct from the malevolent devils and fiends. A field study in concealment, absorption, and the categories no cosmology fully holds.
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Across the Indo-European world, the dead crossed a river to the Otherworld, ferried by a silent old man past a spotted, many-eyed hound. Reconstructed from Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Greek, Roman, and Iranian survivals, this shared afterlife proves the common ancestor of the later Underworld, Heaven, and the modern parallel universe.
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An archival study tracing the figure of Merlin from the sixth-century wild-man seers of the Welsh and Scottish North through Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century literary construction to the enchanter of romance, examining the historical, folkloric, and anthropological layers that constitute one of Britain’s most enduring legendary figures.
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An examination of Glastonbury as a layered palimpsest of belief, tracing its evolution from Iron Age marshland and pagan otherworld through the Arthurian grave, the Joseph of Arimathea tradition, and monastic ruin, to modern reenchantment—a study of humanity’s enduring compulsion to sanctify the landscape.
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On the Diminishment of the Numinous: A Chronicle of the Fae from Primordial Dread to the Gilded Cage
An archival study in the anthropology of the vanishing folk There is a particular quality to the silence that gathers at the edge of a wood at dusk—a hush that is not the absence of sound but its withholding, as though the trees themselves have agreed to keep a secret. For the greater portion of…
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A scholarly chronicle of the will-o’-the-wisp, tracing the marsh-light across European fens, the American South, and Asia. Examines its natural chemistry, its funereal folklore, its role as omen and lure, and its near-extinction with the draining of the wetlands that once gave it life.
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A scholarly examination of the simbi, the Kongo water-spirit that survived the Middle Passage to become the serpent-lwa of Haitian Vodou and the cymbee of the drowned South Carolina Lowcountry. Tracing cosmology, catastrophe, and reclamation, this field study reads the spirit dwelling at the threshold between the living and the dead.
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A scholarly field study of the Nûñnë’hï, the immortal “People Who Live Anywhere” of Cherokee tradition. Examines their sacred Appalachian geography, distinction from the Little People, the Spirit Defenders of Nikwasi, the euhemerist debate, and their mournful withdrawal into the land following the Trail of Tears.
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An anthropological chronicle of Las Lechuzas, the witch-owls of Mexican and South Texas folklore. This field study traces their linguistic roots, contested materiality, celestial lore, and the dark feminine archetype they embody, examining how borderland communities encoded fear, transgression, and reclamation into the silhouette of a nocturnal bird.