Spirits Rising From Their Grave

Ghost legends in Japan: The "Nails-Hand Lady" haunts schools in Japan. If you are in a bathroom and hear nails running along the other stall - stay still. The Nails-Hand Lady is coming for you. If you tell her she's beautiful, she'll make you a Nails Hand Lady. If you say she's ugly, she'll kill you, with her nails in her hands. If you say you think all women are beautiful, she'll thank you for respecting women, before killing you, with her nails in her hands.

Thing is, this is a folk tradition in the Welsh language, and that's the most important aspect of it. I feel partly responsible for this, because I accidentally became a bit of an expert on the topic of the Mari Lwyd in a post that escaped Tumblr containment, and I clearly didn't stress it strongly enough there (in my defence, I wrote that post for ten likes and some attention); but this is a Welsh language tradition, conducted in Welsh, using Welsh language poetic forms that are older than the entire English language, and also a very specific sung melody (with a very specific first verse; that's Cân y Fari). It is not actually a 'rap battle'. It's not a recited poem. It is not any old rhyme scheme however you want.

It is not in English.

Given the extensive and frankly ongoing attempts by England to wipe out Welsh, and its attendant cultural traditions, the Mari is being revived across Wales as an act of linguistic-cultural defiance. She's a symbol of Welsh language culture, specifically; an icon to remind that we are a distinct people, with our own culture and traditions, and in spite of everyone and everything, we're still here. Separating her from that by removing the Welsh is, to put it mildly, wildly disrespectful.

...but it IS what I'm increasingly seeing, both online and in real world Mari Lwyd festivals. She's gained enormous pop-culture popularity in recent years, which is fantastic; but she's also been reduced from the tradition to just an aesthetic now.

So many people are talking/drawing about her as though she's a cryptid or a mythological figure, rather than the folk practice of shoving a skull on a stick and pretending to be a naughty horse for cheese and drunken larks. And I get it! It's an intriguing visual! Some of the artwork is great! But this is not what she is. She's not a Krampus equivalent for your Dark Christmas aesthetic.

I see people writing their own version of the pwnco (though never called the pwnco; almost always called some variant on 'Mari Lwyd rap battle'), and as fun as these are, they are never even written in the meter and poetic rules of Cân y Fari, much less in Welsh, and they never conclude with the promise to behave before letting the Mari into the house. The pwnco is the central part to the tradition; this is the Welsh language part, the bit that's important and matters.

Mari Lwyd festivals are increasingly just English wassail festivals with a Mari or two present. The Swansea one last weekend didn't even include a Mari trying to break into a building (insert Shrek meme); there was no pwnco at all. Even in the Chepstow ones, they didn't do actual Cân y Fari; just a couple of recited verses. Instead, the Maris are just an aesthetic, a way to make it look a bit more Welsh, without having to commit to the unfashionable inconvenience of actually including Welsh.

And I don't really know what the answers are to these. I can tell you what I'd like - I'd like art to include the Welsh somewhere, maybe incorporating the first line of Cân y Fari like this one did, to keep it connected to the actual Welsh tradition (or other Welsh, if other phrases are preferred). I'd like people who want to write their version of the pwnco to respect the actual tradition of it by using Cân y Fari's meter and rhyme scheme, finishing with the promise to behave, and actually calling it the pwnco rather than a rap battle (and preferably in Welsh, though I do understand that's not always possible lol). I'd like to see the festivals actually observe the tradition, and include a link on the booking website to an audio clip of Cân y Fari and the words to the first verse, so attendees who want to can learn it ahead of time. I don't know how feasible any of that is, of course! But that's what I'd like to see.

I think it possibly varies by case - for example, as I say, I actually do love a lot of the Mari-Lwyd-as-cryptid art, I recognise that it's an evocative image, and it's fun to explore. One of my favourite pieces is this one:

Here's one from Shoggoth.net, where she is literally a cryptid:

And this is a fairly common motif:

And to be clear - I love all of these! These are great!

But equally, each of these is part of this overall make-her-a-cryptid trend. She's a creature in her own right; she's sinister; she represents the creep of untameable nature, the dead come to life, something that wants to get in. She has antlers in that last one, something horses do not have, but they feel... idk, correct? This is evocative of the Old God imagery, so she gets antlers. I have seen many antlered Mari Lwyd pieces at this point. It's a semi-common theme.

And if you google Mari Lwyd images, or even if you look in the Tumblr tag, this is the kind of artwork you get. Ancient, wild, untameable, sinister, thing-that-wants-to-come-in. It's fun! I do enjoy many of them!

But

There's a Welsh artist, Clive Hicks-Jenkins, and he has produced some amazing Mari Lwyd art over the years. Some of that is sort of cryptid-like, too. But he grew up as a child afraid of his dad doing the Mari and having nightmares about it, so is coming at it from an insider perspective, and I think you can tell. Most of his pieces make the human component clear:

And I think even the more nightmarish and abstract ones still, at their core, retain the idea that this isn't a magical creature from the woods of Annwfn but something constructed out of an actual horse and actual people:

Compare that to most of the Mari Lwyd art on Tumblr, and it's all "dark and wild creature representing the Old Gods"; because that's increasingly how she's known and seen.

And like. It's a hedonistic pageant figure who wants cheese and fun. She's not here to eat your children. She's here for fun and also fermented produce to get her bladdered. She is supposed to be silly. Her attendants - never mentioned, by the way, that's another thing - are fucking Punch and Judy characters. The pwnco isn't high art, it's not a faerie spinning riddles - those insults become "So's your FACE" type insults. It's supposed to be ridiculous, and stupid, and fun.

So it gets weird to me when people present her as a Dark Christmas alternative. Not appropriation necessarily? But certainly projection; she looks like an Old God kind of figure because she has a skull for a head, and she sings to come in, and if you phrase it like that, it can sound sinister and therefore like a very familiar type of aesthetic. I suppose it's then easy to project that aesthetic on, without even realising it. Plus, I think a lot of people like to try to reject the trappings of Christian culture including the iconography - things like Krampus and Mari Lwyd seem to run counter to them, so they get gleefully seized upon as anti-Christmas icons.

That said I would legit be much happier with all of the Sinister Old God shit if every artist who did it wrote the words "Wel dyma ni'n diwad gyfeillion diniwad, i ofyn am gennad..." in the air around their cryptid to include the Welsh. Like, that would genuinely go a long way to help the issue. Still weird! But much more respectful.

This is getting away from me! I shall finish by showing you all the absolute best Mari-Lwyd-as-cryptid art I have seen recently on Tumblr, though, which is this one:

The basic idea is that respectful performance of another culture's materials involves balancing two axes: Identity-Difference (i.e. how similar you treat the other culture's materials to your own) and Detachment-Commitment (how hard you try to faithfully reproduce that culture's materials). Going too far along these axes creates four "pitfalls" that the paper discusses.

In the case of Mari Lwyd I think you're getting a variety of positions. You're obviously getting the people who don't really want to look into it and just borrow the surface elements to make it a cryptid; they're detached from it, and viewing it as generically similar to their own culture, which Conquergood calls "The Custodian's Rip-Off".

However, I think you're also seeing the effects of people having the right amount of commitment -- wanting to treat it as its own specific tradition rather than just a cryptid -- but are still going wrong on the Identity-Difference axis in some way. Going too far into Difference is how you get people acting like it's ~spooky~ and impossible for foreigners to learn properly, so it simply has to be observed by outsiders; this is "The Curator's Exhibitionism". On the other hand, someone who goes the other way can overshoot into "The Enthusiast's Infatuation", which generally looks like the over-eager newbie who doesn't realise that there are certain cultural practises which are closed to them or take time to learn, and who doesn't acknowledge the differences between the culture they're meeting and their own.