water spirits
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The Kappa, the dish-crowned water-imp of Japanese folklore, is a cheerful modern mascot concealing a feared river-demon that drowned children. This field study recovers its dark authentic heart — the drowning, the shirikodama, the bow that spills its life — and its role as a loving warning, within a living yokai tradition.
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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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The Kalûnga Line marks the watery threshold in Bakongo cosmology dividing the living from the ancestral dead. This archive traces its cosmogenic origins, cosmogrammatic geometry, devotional observances, and haunting survival across the Atlantic diaspora, where enslavement recast the ocean itself as the boundary between worlds.