Gnome’s Words

Sitting amid the bric-a-brac of generations of seafarers before him, fisherman and museum curator John Bhaba Jeaic Ó Confhaola of Galway, Ireland, tried to describe a word to interviewer Manchán Magan. The word, in the Irish language, was for a three-bladed knife on a long pole, used by generations of Galway fishermen to harvest kelp. Ó Confhaola dredged it from his memory: a scian coirlí. “I don’t think I’ve said that word out loud for 50 years,” he told Magan. It was a sentiment that Magan would hear again and again along Ireland’s west coast. This is a place shaped by proximity to the ocean: nothing stands between the sea and the country’s craggy, cliff-lined shores for roughly 3,000 kilometers, leaving it open to the raw breath of the North Atlantic. […] Early last year [2020], Magan […] began collecting coastal words from towns along the west coast, in an effort to preserve them. […] The recordings make up the Foclóir Farraige, or Sea Dictionary: an online database of recordings and definitions sorted by their regional origin. Magan also recently published a selection of words in an illustrated book. […]

Yet the words are often much more than utilitarian. They carry a sense of poetry, and a perspective on nature. There is the town of Donegal’s mada doininne, a particular type of dark cloud lining the horizon that foretells bad weather. The word, literally translated, means “hounds of the storm.”

Or bláth bán ar gharraí an iascaire, a description of choppy sea from the county of Galway that means “white flowers on the fisherman’s garden.” […]

A coastal Irish speaker, walking the beach at night, might have equally expected to hear stranach (the murmuring of water rushing from shore), or the whisper of caibleadh (distant spirit voices drifting in over the waves).

They knew the ceist an taibhse (the question for the ghost) – a riddle used to determine if someone they met along the way was human or supernatural.

Many words describe ways of predicting the weather, or fishing fortunes, by paying attention to birds or wind direction; to the sea’s sounds; or to the colors in a fire. […]

Ó Baoill and Magan both point out that preserving Ireland’s traditional coastal vocabulary is especially important in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss. Take a word like borráite, from Carraroe village, which describes a rocky offshore reef found in the area. Kelp once grew on these reefs in abundance, tangling with other seaweed species and providing refuge for fish. Due to climate change and overfishing, however, Magan says that a borráite today would host neither kelp nor many fish.

“Contained within that word is the entire ecosystem that was in that area,” Magan says. Words like this, he hopes, can both remind us of what we have lost and reconnect us to what we might still preserve.

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Some good and/or interesting (or hokey) ‘examples’ included for most resources. tryin to organize & share stuff that was floating around onenote.

Journals (open access) – Folklore, Occult, etc

Culutural Analysis - folklore, popular culture, anthropology – The Mythical Ghoul in Arabic Culture

Folklore - folklore, anthropology, archaeology – The Making of a Bewitchment Narrative, Grecian Riddle Jokes

Incantatio - journal on charms, charmers, and charming – Verbal Charms from a 17th Century Manuscript

Oral Tradition – Jewish Folk Literature, Noises of Battle in Old English Poetry

Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics – Nani Fairtyales about the Cruel Bride, Energy as the Mediator between Natural and Supernatural Realms

International Journal of Intangible Heritage 

Studia Mythologica Slavica (many articles not English) – Dragon and Hero, Fertility Rites in the Raining Cave, The Grateful Wolf and Venetic Horses in Strabo’s Geography

Folklorica - Slavic & Eastern European folklore association – Ritual: The Role of Plant Characteristics in Slavic Folk Medicine, Animal Magic

Esoterica - The Journal of Esoteric Studies – The Curious Case of Hermetic Graffiti in Valladolid Cathedral 

The Esoteric Quarterly

Mythological Studies Journal

Luvah - Journal of the Creative Imagination – A More Poetical Character Than Satan

Transpersonal Studies – Shamanic Cosmology as an Evolutionary Neurocognitive Epistemology, Dreamscapes

Beyond Borderlands  – tumblr

Paranthropology

GOLEM - Journal of Religion and Monsters – The Religious Functions of Pokemon, Anti-Semitism and Vampires in British Popular Culture 1875-1914

Correspondences - Online Journal for the Academic Study of Western Esotericism – Kriegsmann’s Philological Quest for Ancient Wisdom 

– History, Archaeology

Adoranten - pre-historic rock art

Chitrolekha - India art & design history – Gomira Dance Mask

Silk Road – Centaurs on the Silk Road: Hellenistic Textiles in Western China

Sino-Platonic - East Asian languages and civilizations – Discursive Weaving Women in Chinese and Greek Traditions

MELA Notes - Middle East Librarians Association

Didaskalia - Journal for Ancient Performance

Ancient Narrative - Greek, Roman, Jewish novelistic traditions – The Construction of the Real and the Ideal in the Ancient Novel

Akroterion - Greek, Roman – The Deer Hunter: A Portrait of Aeneas

Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies  – Erotic and Separation Spells, The Ancients’ One-Horned Ass

Roman Legal Tradition - medieval civil law – Between Slavery and Freedom 

Phronimon - South African society for Greek Philosophy and the Humanities – Special Issue vol. 13 #2, Greek philosophy in dialogue with African+ philosophy

The Heroic Age - Early medieval Northwestern Europe – Icelandic Sword in the Stone

Peregrinations - Medieval Art and Architecture – Special Issue vol. 4 #1, Mappings 

Tiresas - Medieval and Classical – Sexuality in the Natural and Demonic Magic of the Middle Ages

Essays in Medieval Studies  – The Female Spell-caster in Middle English Romances, The Sweet Song of Satan

Hortulus - Medieval studies – Courtliness & the Deployment of Sodomy in 12th-Century Histories of Britain, Monsters & Monstrosities issue, Magic & Witchcraft issue

Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU

Medieval Archaeology – Divided and Galleried Hall-Houses, The Hall of the Knights Templar at Temple Balsall

Medieval Feminist Forum  – multiculturalism issue; Gender, Skin Color and the Power of Place … Romance of Moriaen, Writing Novels About Medieval Women for Modern Readers, Amazons & Guerilleres

Quidditas - medieval and renaissance 

Medieval Warfare

The Viking Society - ridiculous amount of articles from 1895-2011

Journals (limited free/sub/institution access)

Al-Masaq - Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean – Piracy as Statecraft: The Policies of Taifa of Denia, free issue

Mythical Creatures of Europe - article + map

Folklore - limited free access – Volume 122 #3, On the Ambiguity of Elves

Digital Philology -  a journal of medieval cultures – Saracens & Race in Roman de la Rose Iconography

Pomegranate - International Journal for Pagan Studies

Transcultural Psychiatry

European Journal of English Studies  – Myths East of Venice issue, Esotericism issue

Books, Texts, Images etc. – Folklore, Occult etc.

Magical Gem Database - Greek/Egyptian gems & talismans [x] [x]

Biblioteca Aracana - (mostly) Greek pagan history, rituals, poetry etc. – Greater Tool Consecration, The Yew-Demon

Curse Tablets from Roman Britain - [x]

The Gnostic Society Library – The Corpus Hermeticum, Hymn of the Robe of Glory

Grimoar - vast occult text library – Grimoires, Greek & Roman Necromancy, Queer Theology, Ancient Christian Magic

Internet Sacred Text Archive - religion, occult, folklore, etc. ancient texts

Verse and Transmutation - A Corpus of Middle English Alchemical Poetry

– History

The Internet Classics Archive - mainly Greco-Roman, some Persian & Chinese translated texts

Bodleian Oriental Manuscript Collection - [x] [x] [x]

Virtual Magic Bowl Archive - Jewish-Aramaic incantation bowl text and images [x] [x] 

Vindolanda Tablets - images and translations of tablets from 1st & 2nd c. [x]

Corsair - online catalog of the Piedmont Morgan library (manuscripts) [x] [x]

Beinecke rare book & manuscripts  – Wagstaff miscellany, al-Qur'ān–1813

LUNA - tonnes from Byzantine manuscripts to Arabic cartography

Maps on the web - Oxford Library [x] [x] [x]

Bodleian Library manuscripts - photographs of 11th-17th c. manuscripts – Treatises on Heraldry, The Worcester Fragments (polyphonic music), 12 c. misc medical and herbal texts

Early Manuscripts at Oxford U - very high quality photographs – (view through bottom left) Military texts by Athenaeus Mechanicus 16th c. [x] [x], MS Douce 195 Roman de la Rose [x] [x]

Trinity College digital manuscript library  – Mathematica Medica, 15th c.

eTOME - primary sources about Celtic peoples

Websites, Blogs – Folklore, Occult etc.

Demonthings - Ancient Egyptian Demonology Project 

Invocatio - (mostly) western esotericism

Heterodoxology - history, esotericism, science – Religion in the Age of Cyborgs

The Recipes Project - food, magic, science, medicine – The Medieval Invisible Man (invisibility recipes)

Morbid Anatomy - museum/library in Brooklyn

– History 

Islamic Philosophy Online - tonnes of texts, articles, links, utilities, this belongs in every section; mostly English

Medicina Antiqua - Graeco-Roman medicine

History of the Ancient World - news and resources – The So-called Galatae, Gauls, Celts in Early Hellenistic Balkans; Maidens, Matrons Magicians: Women & Personal Ritual Power in Late Antique Egypt

Διοτίμα - Women & Gender in Antiquity

Bodleian Library Exhibitions Online – Khusraw & Shirin, Hebrew Manuscripts as a Meeting-Place of Cultures

Medievalists – folk studies, witchcraft, mythology, science tags

“Time and again I tell myself,

I'll stay clean tonight

but the little green wheels are following me…

oh no, not again”

Let them go, let them be ghosts.

                No, I said, make them stay, make them stone.

Designs for the Front and Back Cover of “L’Evangile de Notre Seigneur Jesus-Christ selon Saint Pierre”, c. 1895

“Be so deeply in the Now that the compulsive, story-making voice generated by your thinking mind falls utterly silent.” 

~Anon I mus (Spiritually Anonymous)

“Do not allow your attention to be sucked into the chaos of your endless mental activities and miss the greatest opportunity to tap into your limitless potential.  The Divine lives inside of each and every one of us, it is the light of Cosmic I Am.”

Let the lover his mistress's beauty rehearse,

And laud her attractions in languishing verse;

Be it mine in rude strains, but with truth, to express,

The love that I bear to my bonny Black Bess.

--

From the West was her dam, from the East was her sire;

From the one came her swiftness, the other her fire;

No peer of the realm better blood can possess

Than flows in the veins of my bonny Black Bess.

--

Look! Look! How that eyeball glows bright as a brand,

That neck proudly arches, those nostrils expand;

Mark that wide flowing mane, of which each silky tress

Might adorn prouder beauties - though none like Black Bess.

--

Mark the skin, sleek as velvet and dusky as night,

With its jet undisfigured by one lock of white.

That throat branched with veins, prompt to charge or caress, -

Now is she not beautiful, - Bonny Black Bess?

--

Over highway and byway, in rough and smooth weather,

Some thousands of miles have we journeyed together,

Our couch the same straw and our meal the same mess,

No couple more constant than I and Black Bess.

--

By moonlight, in darkness, by night or by day,

Her headlong career there is nothing can stay;

She cares not for distance, she knows not distress:

Can you show me a courser to match with Black Bess?

--

Once it happened in Cheshire, near Dunham, I popped

On a horseman alone, whom I suddenly stopped.

That I lightened his pockets you'll readily guess,

Quick work makes Dick Turpin when mounted on Bess.

--

Now it seems the man knew me: "Dick Turpin," said he

"You shall swing for this job, as you live, d'ye see"

I laughed at his threats and his vows of redress,

I was sure of an alibi then with Black Bess.

--

The road was a hollow, a sunken ravine, -

Overshadowed completely by wood, like a screen;

I clambered the bank, and I needs must confess

That one touch of the spur grazed the side of Black Bess.

--

Brake, brook, meadow and plowed field Bess fleetly bestrode,

As the crow wings her flight we selected our road.

We arrived at Hough Green in five minutes or less, -

My neck it was saved by the speed of Black Bess.

--

Stepping carelessly forward, I lounge on the green,

Taking excellent care that by all I am seen.

Some remarks on time's flight to the squires I address,

But I say not a word of the flight of Black Bess.

--

I mention the hour - it's just about four -

Play a rubber of bowls - think the danger is o'er,

When athwart my next game, like a checkmate at chess,

Comes the horseman, in search of the rider of Bess.

--

What matter details? Off with triumph I came.

He swears to the hour, and the squires swear the same.

I had robbed him at four! While at four they profess

I was quietly bowling -- all thanks to Black Bess.

--

Then one halloo, boys, one loud cheering halloo,

To the swiftest of coursers, the gallant, the true.

For the sportsman unborn shall the memory bless

Of the horse of the highwayman - bonny Black Bess.