Category Archives: Folk Beliefs

“Some Stuff About Fairies”

Nationality: German, Polish, Irish
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Omaha, Nebraska
Performance Date: April 29th, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Arabic, Hebrew

I. To keep fairies away, you keep iron around—because fairies are “allergic” to iron, which is where putting a horseshoe above a door came from (because fairies can’t come through a door if it’s got iron on it).

II. Rings of mushrooms—those are fairy rings, and at night fairies come out to dance in them and you’re not supposed to walk through them, because if you do the fairies will take you away and leave a changeling in your place…

III. Changelings are like fairy babies put in the human world because fairies want human children so they leave fairy babies, or fey, in their place.

I vaguely remember a story where a girl is a changeling and nobody knows it for a really long time, but eventually they figure it out and the reason there’s a changeling, and the way they figure out she’s a changeling is because she’s allergic to iron.

 

How did you come across this folklore: “I probably got this through family or read these things somewhere, but I’m not sure… possibly my grandmother told me.”

Other information: “these are just some general things I’ve heard about fairies, individually, not necessarily forming a coherent story.”

These are just bits and pieces of existing folk beliefs, supposedly deriving from the Irish tradition/”fairy faith,” but handing them down, even in this fragmented form, keeps them alive and shows the resilience of folk beliefs against mainstream or popular culture, which has trivialized these beliefs into commercial and often comical representations (such as Disney’s Tinkerbell character).

Healing With An Egg

Nationality: Mexican, Afro-Caribbean, Native (South) American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Prosser, Washington
Performance Date: April 13th, 2013
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

This is one of the weird things he (my stepdad) actually did when we were kids…

So he would grab and egg and if we were sick, he would rub us down with alcohol and then rub us down with the egg wherever it was aching/hurting… focused on that one spot. So like for a headache, a stomachache, or if they had a leg injury—like issues where they couldn’t walk, and then he also had sage and a lot of other plants (that’s the only one I can remember by name), that he would burn, so it was kind of like incense and the smoke from that would also be spread over your hair and body. It was an actual like clump or branch, not small—but a bundle of sage, yerbabuena (I don’t know what the name of the plant is in English, but it translates from Spanish into “good herb”) and a few others. He would get a glass, usually like a taller glass, so you could see the different densities of the egg, and the cloud—the whites, and… depending on the shape of that, he could see what made you sick, like he would “read” it. I told him people did that during the Salem witch trails and died for it, but he really (thought) he could read it.

 

How did you come across this folklore: “I refer to these as “sketchy stories from my (step)father/sketchy things he did when I was a kid…”

Other information: “My dad has a lot of stories like these, but my mom was big on not sharing them, or letting us hear them—so I heard this in my teens, when were allowed (finally) to ask and he would actually answer… my mom said it would invite bad people/things to us or something…”

The healing comes from the idea that the egg will absorb the pain/sickness, which will then be transferred into the contents of the egg, and then be revealed in the glass to tell a reader the source of the pain/sickness. There are a number of groups that link eggs and healing, especially by way of transference. Folk medicine, although not based on any empirical scientific evidence, can still be effective, which is why many traditional practices are still practiced.

The Patron Saint of Mexico City

Nationality: Mexican, Afro-Caribbean, Native (South) American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Prosser, Washington
Performance Date: April 13th, 2013
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

This is one of our saints, and the mini-story of how he became a saint…

He was named for Guadaloupe, kind of like the virgin Mary; she was a great virgin or something… but she’s different, not like any of the saints that we (Catholics) have, she’s more distinctly Native American, her symbol is these thorny thorny roses that only grow in the deserts in Mexico.

Anyway, the man left and she came to him, and when he came back he tried to tell everybody what had happened; what he had seen and what she had said to him. But he was an Indian so no one believed he’d seen a virgin, and he went to her and she told him as long as he had faith, everything would work out. So he returned to his people again, and told them that everything would be good, that they would be blessed by God if they were faithful…

After he spoke, on his poncho appeared an image of the virgin, and then out form under it fell roses––her special thorny symbolic roses––a sign that she was actually there. And then people believed him…

Now she’s like the patron saint of Mexico City and that’s what our nativity stories and stuff were based on afterwards.

 

How did you come across this folklore: “I refer to these as “sketchy stories from my (step)father”/sketchy things he did when I was a kid…”

Other information: “My dad has a lot of stories like these, but my mom was big on not sharing them, or letting us hear them—so I heard this in my teens, when were allowed (finally) to ask and he would actually answer… my mom said it would invite bad people/things to us or something…”

This shows the incorporation of religion into folk mythology, where eventually no one questions its truth, which is transcended by its meaning. If you remain faithful, things will work out. This story actually bears strong resemblance to a traditional biblical story (for example, Moses in the Old Testament). The way my informant found out about this piece of folklore also reflects the conflict between mainstream society and minority folk groups, in this case the folklore was hidden from the second generation to protect them from being stigmatized.

Dia de los Muertos

Nationality: Mexican, Afro-Caribbean, Native (South) American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Prosser, Washington
Performance Date: April 13th, 2013
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

When we made the offerings for Dia de los Muertos, we left out water. I asked other families, and they told me you customarily leave oranges, and bread, and you leave salt in the shape of a cross to symbolize something good for the returning dead. You also light a candle for each person that had died in your family, so they could find their way back to you during the festival of the dead… I have all of these aunts and random people, tons of them, on my mom’s side, and eight on my dad’s side, so it was a lot of candles. But I didn’t understand about the water, so I asked my dad for the explanation…

Water represents light, like a lighthouse, leading them (the dead), asking them, showing them the way like a beacon, making sure they go to the right house.

Also you’re not allowed to put out the candles, they HAVE to die out themselves. But as for the water, dad said that if you saw bubbles in it the next morning, you know that they visited… I believed it as a kid, but I’m pretty sure it always had bubbles, no matter what…

 

How did you come across this folklore: “I refer to these as “sketchy stories from my (step)father”/sketchy things he did when I was a kid…”

Other information: “My dad has a lot of stories like these, but my mom was big on not sharing them, or letting us hear them—so I heard this in my teens, when were allowed (finally) to ask and he would actually answer… my mom said it would invite bad people/things to us or something…”

This ritual is almost like a more spiritual version of what kids are taught to do for Santa, leaving out cookies the night of Christmas Eve and in the morning there would be bitemarks or crumbs as evidence that he had visited. But Dia de los Muertos is not quite as commercialized of a holiday, and unlike Christmas, offers another opportunity to connect with the dead.

The Turtle and the Great Spirit

Nationality: German, Polish, Irish
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Omaha, Nebraska
Performance Date: April 29th, 2013
Primary Language: English
Language: Arabic, Hebrew

It goes something like this…

The Great Spirit wanted to create a world with animals and people, so he asked the Turtle to come up to the surface so he could build on the turtle’s back. But he wasn’t able to finish, so he just had the mountains and the valleys and the land created. So he went to sleep, and he dreamed of the animals and people crawling and walking and flying on and above the earth and he didn’t like what he saw in his dream… but when he woke up and discovered that his dream had populated the earth, it had turned out to be good…

 

How did you come across this folklore: “This is something I researched for a school project a while ago.”

Other information: “It’s a message to young children of the tribe—I don’t remember which tribe it is, maybe Abenaki? to pay attention to their dreams, because that is what created them.”

This is another example illustrating how the story within the constructed-truth of a myth doesn’t matter as much as the lessons embedded in, setting up some moral value for people, in this case, listening to dreams because a dream is how they originated.