Malevolent forest god meme

While browsing I came across the Leshen from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Originally only a vaguely described forest god in Slavic mythology, the game depicts it with a naked deer skull for a head. This immediately invited comparisons to the Euro-American faux wendigo, because nowadays everything with a deer skull is confused with it.

In fact, “deer skull” is now pretty much the only meme modern Euro-American culture associates with the wendigo. Its origins in Algonquin folklore, its greedy nature, and even the obligatory cannibalism has been stripped away through successive memes. Now it is just another synonym for the generic goatman meme that pervades some creepypastas... but ultimately has its origins in European horned deities demonized by medieval Christianity into Baphomet and Satan.

I cannot blame modern internet culture for this. Blackwood, Roosevelt and Stephen King used the name “wendigo” to refer to generic vague malevolent nature deities who want revenge on the white man for despoiling their land. Sure, they almost certainly lacked access to proper sources but it is still annoying to the mythology pendant in my head. Classic anti-colonialist horror stories.

The developers of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt were Polish (a subgrouping of Slavic) and always draw a lot from Slavic mythology in the series, so I assume they devised their skeletal Leshy independently of Euro-American influence by taking inspiration from the original Wild Hunt and horned god motifs.

The Leshy and similar concepts has appeared in D&D and derivatives before.

• Dragon #239 depicts the Leshy as a forest fairy lord, a sort of superior to the dryads. The Pathfinder equivalent is the erlking, hamadryad, and manitou.
• Epic Level Handbook depicts the “LeShay” as a type of “noble eladrin.” (Eladrin are basically über elves and/or celestial fey, depending on edition.)
• Pathfinder depicts the leshy as druid pets made by animating bundies of sticks with bound spirits, since the erlking already took the forest lord niche. (Frustratingly, there are no rules for spirits in the games.)

Coincidentally, Pathfinder depicts the Inuit ijiraq similarly to the Witcher image of the Leshy. (Naturally the bestiary monster has nothing in common with actual Inuit folklore besides a couple of short bullet points.)

Although typically imagined as a singular forest god, the Leshy has occasionally been multiplied into a whole family of leshies (this is a common phenomenon for singular monsters in mythology). The name itself translates to “woodsman.”

In my research I came across the comparatively similar Keremet of Finno-Ugric mythology. “Keremet” refers variously to sacred groves, the demigods who inhabit them, and to a singular satanic figure (presumably due to Christian demonization).

Anyway, this has inspired me to (perhaps correctly) interpret the faux wendigo of Blackwood, Roosevelt, Derleth and King as a malevolent nature spirit more akin to the Slavic leshy or Finno-Ugric keremet.

I dislike the deer skull meme because demons already have a monopoly on the horned god imagery due to Christianization and the goatman meme is just a pointless multiplication of the horned demon meme. So I googled a depiction of the malevolent forest god which replaces the stale antlers with a fresher skeletal tree branch look. The whole skeletal imagery on multiple levels (skeletal body, skeletal head, skeletal branches) is just some really great detail work. See below:

Between this otshee manitou (Algonquin for “bad spirit”) and Ithaqua, I think I have my bases covered. Oh wait, I forgot! It turns out that someone in the creepypasta community coined the name “fleshgait” (possibly patterned after Inuit tuurngait) to refer to the Euro-American borrowings of Navajo skinwalkers and Algonquin wendigo, as well as the goatmen of Kentucky, Maryland and Texas. However, like any real mythopoeia, the meme has since taken a life of its own.

Although my research indicates that the name “fleshgait” was only coined within the past few years, random anonymous people on the internet are already inaccurately claiming it is an ancient creature of First Nations’ myths. I cannot hope to educate the internet about the truth, but this falsehood does help me in one way. For the longest time I wanted to sanitize the faux wendigo of its last remaining cultural artifact: the name. It seems easier to convince people to accept the use of “fleshgait” instead of “wendigo” or “skinwalker” if they think the former is an actual myth.

At some point I should like to write an ecology post on the fleshgait and how it figures in the myths of the generic fantasy viking counterparts.