11–14 of 14 posts
This reminds me of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, that’s the only book I’ve read that treats fairies in the sense they are described here.
Every few days this Tumblr post comes to my mind: https://yudkowsky.tumblr.com/post/185387711470/bunjywunjy-ye... bunjywunjy: > yesterday for April Fool’s my workplace had > a short training article on recognizing computer-generated > faces from real ones and one of the tricks mentioned was > “count the teeth” and I just wanted to say that it’s both > ironic and kind of horrifying how society has unwittingly > cycled…
I dunno about ghosts being a Christian thing. In anime you see ghosts and talk about ghosts all the time (telling ghost stories around the fire, or somebody who got a house cheap because it was thought to be haunted, or the giant robot cops who seem to help ghosts go to rest as often as they put criminals behind bars) The mythology and nature of the stories doesn't seem very different from western ghost stories but t…
I dunno about ghosts being a Christian thing. In anime you see ghosts and talk about ghosts all the time (telling ghost stories around the fire, or somebody who got a house cheap because it was thought to be haunted, or the giant robot cops who seem to help ghosts go to rest as often as they put criminals behind bars) The mythology and nature of the stories doesn't seem very different from western ghost stories but t…
Agreed that ghosts being uniquely Christian isn’t a strong claim, but I think it makes sense in the context of considering possible pre-Christian origins of fairy stories. It could have been stated better, but I read it less as a claim that only Christians have ghost stories but rather exploring why fairy stories fit uneasily in Christian cosmology.
Possibly because fairy stories come from primarily animist and polytheistic cultures. In Christian cosmology, everything not human either explicitly serves God or Satan - outside the material world, as either angel or demon, black or white. But faeries can be good and evil, like humans, and they suggest a third "grey" order of supernatural domain (that of nature itself.) They can inhabit a world which is not our world, but also neither Heaven, nor Hell. Christianity cosmology doesn't really have room for that kind of ambiguity.