Demons and Spirits of the Land Quotes

“The interpretation I propose here does not contradict the one I put forth in 1986, in which I demonstrated that behind the story of Grendel and his mother lay a tale about Germanic revenants. The current interpretation completes the former one, in fact, since any dead individual can turn into a local spirit and a great confusion reigned in the medieval mind between all these creatures whose boundaries were constantly shifting.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“Grendel is demonized to the fullest possible extent. He is an “evil doer and a demon from hell” (fyrene fremman feond on helle, 101),”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“Based on a considerable body of work, Henri Dontenville advanced the hypothesis, later echoed by Francis Dubost, that a “bond of parédrie” existed, in illo tempore, between the monsters guarding a wild space under a dual form, human and animal.1Parédrie refers to a relationship of two supernatural beings to one another, with the one accompanying or literally “sitting beside” the other (the term derives from Greek para, “next to, by,” and édra, “seat”). The accompanying spirit or creature can be termed a paredrus. In medieval literary works, a paredrus in human form would be a means of integrating the monster into the feudal world by using the narrative frameworks that were appropriate to the day and age.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“In the medieval romances the mountain spirit essentially assumes three forms: that of a monstrous beast who has settled there, that of a giant, and that of a knight responsible for misrule. While the monstrous animal sometimes dwells in a cave, the giant and knight reside in a castle, a rude enclosure built of branches, or a fort, but we should be aware that in these cases we are dealing with a feudalized form of the original supernatural being.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“3 Even today, the names of some peaks in the Alps testify to their former inhabitants; Alpine and Pyrenean legends attest to them ad infinitum,4 where this peak is nothing less than a petrified giant, that avalanche is the work of the land spirit, and the shepherds of the alpine summer meadows can all tell their own stories about encounters with the spirits.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“Like the forest, the mountain is an amazing conservation area for paganism and its beliefs.1 It should be recognized that it is the subject of countless myths. Quite often it is the cosmic mountain that connects the human world to that of the gods, revealing hell in its depths and heaven at its peak. It is the dwelling place for countless spirits that take the form of giants, dwarves, fairies, or monstrous animals. The mountain haunts the medieval imagination. Saint Augustine noted in his City of God (IV, 8) that the ridge of the mountains was under the protection of the goddess Collatina.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“Let us consider the features that allow us to see that the Merlin of the romances was undoubtedly once a forest spirit, an aspect that the authors largely concealed by making the seer the son of an incubus as a way to explain his powers. Merlin is the master of animals; he can take any form he pleases at will. Now we know that it is an identifying characteristic of spirits that they only take form to show themselves to humans. He has command over the elements and, most importantly, there is this one recurring motif: he cannot stay away for a long time from what we should consider his natural element.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“The Lancelot-Grail refers to the forest with evocative names such as the Adventurous, the Strange, the Lost, the Perilous, the Desvoiable (unmanageable), and the Misadventurous Forest. All the texts emphasize its disturbing nature with adjectives that recur repeatedly: oscure (obscure), sostaine (remote), tenebreuse (dark), estrange (strange), salvage (wild). Moreover, the forest is almost always long and wide (longue, lee) and extremely old (des tens ancienor).”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“Next to water, the forest is the great lair or refuge of land spirits. It is a haunted place, an outlying space full of violence; a site of exclusion; a refuge of outcasts and exiles as well as pagan beliefs; a place of marvels and perils; a savage, marginal, dreadful space; as well as a focal point of peasant memory. It is in the forest where we most often find those fountains and springs that were discussed in the previous chapter. The fairy Ninienne or Vivian loved to linger at the edge of the fountain of Briosques Forest, and Melusine and her sisters near the one in the forest of Coulombiers. Here roams the mythic wild boar, li blans pors, hunted by King Arthur’s knights; here is where the Mesnie Hellquin travels as do the hosts of Diana and Herodiades.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“The ancient Slavs called water spirits vily, meaning “fairies,” and a document of the Bulgarian emperor Constantine Asen (1258–1277) speaks of a “well of the fairies.” Pierre Gallais has just recently shown us in a new book that the fountain (or spring) is almost inseparable from the figure of the fairy.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“Some places better than others, however, have resisted the invasion and settlement of men. These include forests, mountains, waters, and more generally places that have been abandoned and returned to nature. On the fictional level, it seems a literary rehabilitation took place with a fictional transposition and specialization of the spirits that were “adulterated” this way. A connection is established between a personage and a place.1 This place would be haunted by that subject. This is how the forests became the habitat of beings grouped together under the names of “dwarves” and “giants,” and the waters became the home of fairies, sirens, and various disturbing, zoomorphic creatures that recent folk traditions have dubbed with a thousand different names.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“Thanks to these names, the terrae incognitae are gradually claimed; teetering on the border of civilization the unknown lands soon become islands. It is here that the land spirits find refuge and where they continue to dwell. The places that escape human control are quite stereotypical and essentially correspond to lands that are difficult to live in and to cultivate. This therefore causes a new natural distribution of spirits and places based on the inaccessibility of these spaces. So it is perfectly normal that the loca incerta, the dangerous places, would be forests, moors, mountains, as well as marshes and—as we shall see—bodies of water in general.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“A tree often stands right next to the main house in the Scandinavian countries. This tree is frequently a birch and is reputedly the home of the land spirit. The most common name for this spirit is gardvord, formed from gard, meaning “wall, boundary,” and later “estate”; and vord, meaning “guardian.” The tree is called boträ (bosträd), vårdträd (the “vord-tree”), as well as tomteträd and tuntré. This tree can be an oak, birch, elder, or elm and is considered to be the totem tree on which the family fortunes depend (Sweden), and the dwelling place of the tomtegubbe, another name for the land spirit. Offerings of food were placed at its feet and its roots were sometimes watered with milk.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“When the inhabitants of the house adopt them, or vice versa, the genii loci become guardians of the hearth, but it would be inaccurate to claim this is always the case because the tutelary spirit could also be the house’s former owner, who, after his death, was buried beneath the hearth or the threshold. However, I believe we need to pay close attention to where the spirit resides within the demarcated space. The household spirit lives inside the house, often near the fireplace or hearth; the land spirit lives outside. Whichever case it may be, I can also suggest as a hypothesis that the adoption of a spirit and its introduction into the house is a countermeasure intended to foil the intrigues of the genii loci.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“In Värmland, Sweden, the man or animal (often a sow) sacrificed during the construction of a church becomes the tutelary spirit of the place (kyrkrå or kyrkgrimen) responsible for maintaining the site’s sanctity and keeping watch over it.6 In Finland it is also said: “In every church a kirkrå can be found; it is the first person to have been buried in this spot.” The same claim is made there for cemeteries.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“among the Celts the theme of the center goes hand in hand with the sanctity of places. Every center is sacred.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“Once the domain has been marked out, it remains to build the living quarters and farm buildings, but one can never be entirely certain that all the local spirits have been dispersed, nor even certain that the sanctification and the patronage of the gods one worships is going to be more powerful than the powers wielded by these spirits. Cohabitation will therefore be arranged and a tacit contract with these spirits shall be drawn up. Depending on the nature of the space, the country, and the kinds of constructions, this contract can take a variety of forms.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“Furthermore, every sacred building was laid out according to a specific rite. A team of oxen opened furrows at the four points of a square starting at the southern side and working their way around it in a carefully defined order and direction. Moreover, the priests who read the auspices and auguries, after having divided up the celestial region (regions caeli) with the help of a curved staff, “freed and declared empty” the future building site. “What is then inaugurated is put in communication, in an effective symmetry, with the heavens . . . ; what is not inaugurated remains essentially earthbound,” notes Georges Dumézil.3 “The Italic temple,” says Eliade, “was the zone where the upper (divine), terrestrial, and subterranean worlds intersected.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“The animal guide is common to many cities. In Bern (Alemannic Switzerland) a she-bear (Bärin) guided the city’s founder, Berthold V, Duke of Zähringen, to a site where the goddess Artio was worshipped (as an inscription on an ancient bronze statue found there informs us). As we have seen, spirits often take on the appearance of an animal to guide humans to a site.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“The final theory, recently put forth by Philippe Walter, suggests that behind palu is the term pelu, meaning “hairy.” Chapalu would therefore take us back to the major figure of the wild man who, depending on the location, could also assume animal shapes.12 This is an interesting view of things because the wild man can be regarded as the carnival-like form of a spirit from an earlier time, and he is also a manifestation of the chaotic, natural forces that continually threaten human society.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“Many questions have been raised about the Chapalu and three theories have resulted. This monster is the fruit of Celtic traditions and would be identical to the Cath Paluc of the medieval Welsh Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin (Black Book of Carmarthen), which exists in a manuscript copied between 1154 and 1189.10 Here, too, the monster comes from the waters, this time those of the sea, and lays waste to the land, but he is slain by Arthur’s seneschal, Kay. Another interpretation sees palu as a form of Latin palus, meaning “swamp.” The cat would thereby be a marsh spirit or swamp demon.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“The spirits of the land—women, when it concerns a body of water—and the spirits of the mountains are the legitimate owners of these places and the masters of the animals, which can be viewed as their herds.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“Every colonization, settlement, and addition of a place to the civilized domain was therefore accompanied by rites that conferred a different sanctity to the space being appropriated and gave its owner legitimacy. If these rites were not heeded, the inhabitants of the place in question would treat the newcomers as intruders and threaten their livelihood, their mental health, and even their lives. Furthermore, the conquest was never definitive and whenever a farm, hamlet, temple, chapel, or castle was abandoned, it fell back into the power of the local land spirits.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“In fact the good dead and the spirits were distinct from one another originally. They were gradually merged together, and then combined with other creatures.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“If one refers to the texts, it is undeniably clear that the dead individual becomes a tutelary spirit of a specific location. In the Celtic sphere, the Triads in the medieval Welsh manuscript Llyfr Coch Hergest (Red Book of Hergest) say that the head of Llyr’s son, Bran the Blessed, was hidden in the White Hill of London with its head turned facing France. As long as it remained in that position, the Saxons could not oppress the island. The remains of Gwerthefyr (Guorthemir) the Blessed were hidden in the principal ports of this island and so long as they remained concealed there was no fear the Saxons would invade the country.11 Pomponius Mela tells how the Philaeni brothers had themselves buried beneath a dune to ensure Carthage took possession of a contested territory and, certainly, in order to become tutelary spirits. The place took the name of Arae Philaenorum.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“Such manifestations indicate that the place has been sanctified by the body of the deceased, and the reaction of both pagans and Christians when confronted by such an event is basically identical: a cult is formed. Beyond all differences due to era, country, or religion, beliefs are born and evolve in the same way.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“What we have seen regarding Silvanus can be extended to other rustic female creatures who are simply called agrestes foeminae, sylvaticae, and Matres Campestres, a definition encompassing nymphs, dryads, Diana, and Dictynne, as well as indigenous spirits.6 In Germany, sylvatica is regularly translated as “woman of the wood” (holzwîp), and dryad by “weeper of the wood” (holzmuowa). Diana and Dictynne were grouped together under the generic term of agrestes foeminae, which corresponds to the locution “wild women” in Middle High German.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“Silvanus followed the Roman army in its conquests and by virtue of his wild (or rustic and silvicultural) nature he assimilated the local spirits and even the gods. We know, for example, that he was integrated with Sucellus, the god of the mallet. He did not banish the indigenous deities but coexisted with them, which is often indicated in the label affixed to him and which connects him to a specific place. We find a Silvanus Poeninus in Tirnovo (Bulgaria), a Silvanus Cocidius near Hadrian’s Wall in Britain, and a Silvanus Sinquatis in Géromont (Belgium). In Spain we see a Silvanus Caldouelicos who guards hot springs.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“First and foremost, then, Silvanus means “Master of the Forest.” This is what Stacius and Servius claim. According to Horace, offerings of milk and fruit were given to him. Today it is accepted that Silvanus was a spirit of the wooded land bordering on clearings.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“Silvanus is regarded as the spirit of the fields and flocks, forests and plantations (Silvanus agrestis), as well as the guardian of boundaries (Silvanus orientalis) and homes (Silvanus domesticus).”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices