Faun, incubus, and satyr?

According to the Malleus Maleficarum, the faun, incubus, pan, and satyr are different names for the same demon. Medieval Christianity demonized the image of the rustic god Pan, which inspired the popular depiction of the devil with goat features. In fantasy gaming, the incubus and satyr are depicted distinctly (the faun is rarely depicted separately from the satyr, and the pan is nonexistent).

I think a way to represent this in fantasy gaming would be if the incubus monster was created from the faun or satyr by some means. Perhaps a faun or satyr who turns evil becomes an incubus, or vice versa? There are any number of ways to represent this transformation.

Adaro: ghost, merman, and sprite of the Pacific islands

The adaro is a malevolent ghost in the folklore of the Melanesian. When a person dies, their better half or aunga passes on whereas their worse half or adaro remains behind. The adaro becomes a malevolent ghost that assumes the form of a shark-like monster. They travel across rainbows and waterspouts, and kill men by throwing fish (often described as flying and venomous).

According to Encyclopedia of Beasts and Monsters in Myth, Legend and Folklore by Theresa Bane, they lived on the sun but visited earth by riding rainbows and waterspouts during sun showers. They could be friendly, visiting people in dreams to teach song and dance. They were often malicious, knocking people unconscious and only waking them if placated with an offering of a flying fox. Their chief was Ngorieru, who haunted the shore of San Cristobal.

Like a lot of folkloric monsters, their traits varied wildly by region. Students of comparative mythology may note superficial similarities to the hún and pò of Chinese folk religion.

In Pathfinder, they became malevolent merfolk with shark features. 3.x statistics emulating the folklore were posted at The Worlds of Mankind.

I find the original Melanesian monster way more interesting than a generic shark-themed merman, mostly because it doesn't pretend to have a pseudo-naturalistic ecology by virtue of being a ghost and its habits of crossing rainbows, riding ocean tornadoes, and throwing venomous flying fish sounds pretty cool. Finding a flying fox to cure an unconscious victim sounds like a pretty quick plot hook.

"Adaro/Anguiliian" by Azel/Atolm

What do you call a mermaid with an octopus half?

Years ago I wrote a post about how the neologism "cecaelia" commonly used for octopus-mermaids on the internet is actually meaningless gibberish. I still believe that, but in this post I wanted to play with folk etymology.

The girl's name Celia is a short form of both Caelia ("heavenly") and Cecilia ("blind, dim-sighted"). The otherwise gibberish name "cecaelia" sounds like it might be a play on these names.

Caelius ("heavenly") and Caecilius ("blind; invisible") were both Roman family names. Perhaps the name of the species is actually something like cilophyte (see my old post for an etymology analysis), but some families of cilophytes have surnames like Caelius or Caecilius. After some confusion while talking with fishermen, the surnames end up being mangled and mistakenly refer to the entire species.

Or perhaps the name derives from a phrase like "Ecce Caelia!" meaning "Look Caelia!" (where Caelia is the person being addressed) or "Here is Caelia."

Or it might be derived from caelo ("I carve") + -ia (abstract suffix), meaning something like "carvery."

Of ogres and orknies

Ogres and orcs are standard monsters in fantasy gaming, drawing from their depictions in Tolkien's Middle Earth and European fairy tales. The etymology of orc and ogre is a bit more complicated than that, however.

Orcus

The words ogre and orc descend from the word Orcus. Orcus was a Greco-Etruscan god of the underworld, whose name literally translates to "oath." He punished perjurers and accompanied the goddess Dike ("justice"). His appearance changed dramatically over time.

In D&D, the name Orcus is applied to a demon prince of the undead. Not only is he infamous for employing the undead, he is even rumored to have created them in the first place.

Orcs and orknies

The word orc, as used by Tolkien, descends from Old English compounds orcþyrs and orcneas (plural). The  morpheme þyrs means "monster, demon, giant," and the morpheme -neas means "corpse." The morpheme orc has additionally been speculated related to orca, thus meaning "sea monster."

However, nobody is sure of the exact meanings. The orcneas have been various translated as "evil spirits," "demon corpses," "devil corpses," etc. I suppose that, if you were making a pun on the various etymologies, it could be translated as "sea devil" or "sea corpse."

C.S. Lewis' The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe mentions "orknies" (singular is apparently “orkny”) as one of the monstrous races that joins the White Witch's army. This is clearly an Anglicization of orcneas! This should not be surprisingly, as Lewis and Tolkien were friends.

Ogres and orchi

Another descendant of Orcus is the Italian orco (plural orchi), translating to "ogre, orc." The orchi of fairy tales were hairy beasts, quite unlike the ugly human portrayals of ogres. It is here that the two general archetypes of "brute" and "lord" appear. Strange as it may seem, the enchanted prince in Beauty and the Beast is an example of the latter.

©2008 EricCanete

The word ogre has several derivatives created by adding suffixes. An ogress is "a female ogre," an ogret or ogrillon is "a young or small ogre," ogrette is a synonym for ogress or ogret, ogrish or ogry means "resembling or pertaining to an ogre," ogrishly means "like an ogre," and ogrism means "the character or manners of an ogre."

You might notice that D&D used the name ogrillon for a hybrid of orc and ogre. It is actually a loanword from French that refers to the child of an ogre. So I suppose that the D&D monster's context would be true if taken literally.

Comparative mythology

In anthropology and comparative mythology circles, the word "ogre" is used to refer to any man-eating giant in folklore. It includes European ogres, Arabic ghouls, Persian divs, Algonquin baykok and wendigo, Japanese oni, Indian rakshasa, etc. This is completely different from the D&D usage, obviously.

I noticed a few interesting parallels between different ogre myths:

• Orcus is a god of the underworld. The orknies are (potentially) demonic corpses. The Athabaskan wechuge and Japanese oni are demons of the underworld that visit Earth to eat humans. The oni are subjects of Enma, the great king of hell.
• Orcus is a god of oaths who punishes perjurers, yet his namesake refers to cannibal giants. The Algonquin wendigo sometimes arises as a result of someone being cursed for breaking the taboo against cannibalism.

I feel inspired to devise my own mythos that references all of these. Maybe something like Pellatarran orcs? Eh, I can always figure it out later!

Genies of the lamp

In Arabic folklore, genies were incredibly powerful beings. They had incredible riches and magical powers. King Solomon bound a number of them into objects like rings and lamps. If the binding was permanent, then the genie would be forced to serve whoever held the prison. This was typically phrased as granting their master's wishes, i.e. orders.

At some point, popular culture forgot that genies were powerful in their own right and started depicting them as being given arbitrary wish granting by their imprisonment itself. It became a common convention for a master to be limited to three wishes before the genie's lamp magically whisks itself away to find a new master (or, less commonly, releases the genie). In many cases the genies were no longer depicted as a race but as human beings who were magically imprisoned and empowered.

Even D&D fell prey to this, as it employs a bizarre compromise between these two diametric opposed approaches. D&D genies are powerful magical beings in their own right, but they also have the limited ability to cast the wish spell on behalf of mortals. The part about being imprisoned in lamps, rings or other small objects is completely ignored for whatever reason, because D&D always warps its inspirations like that. Tradition!

This is ultimately a re-skinning of the Grimms' fairy tale "The Fisherman and His Wife." In that tale, a prince was inexplicably cursed into the form of a talking fish with the ability to arbitrarily grant wishes. People bound into lamps and thereby granted arbitrary wish granting are the same formula. So many stories have put their own variations on this formula so I can't make too many generalizations. The "wish granted by demon in exchange for your soul" is a common variation, for example.

While the tropes of "powerful being forced into servitude" and "arbitrary wish granting" are sufficient on their own, I feel that combining them waters down the whole concept. It raises the question of why these powerful D&D genies can arbitrarily grant wishes in the first place and why they don't seem to exploit that for their own benefit. Arbitrary wish granting only makes sense if you want a monster to be much weaker than it would be if it could arbitrarily warp reality, or if the source of the wish isn't important to the story. If the monster is already a high level monster and some kind of absurdly rich sovereign, like the noble class genies who grant wishes in the rules, then the wish granting becomes a bit superfluous.

Anyhow, I'm surprised that the "human cursed into wish-granting genie trapped in lamp" trope doesn't seem to show up in fantasy gaming. It sounds like a really good plot hook. What about having both in the same story? On one hand you have powerful genies who are imprisoned and forced to serve whoever holds their prison. On the other you have wish-granting lamps that enslave some hapless mortal as a glorified user interface. How do you suppose they would feel about one another?

Demons of the katardi family

So I had an idea for a monster. The premise of this idea is that the "wendigo" mentioned in Stephen King's Pet Sematary (the novel and both movies) was not a wendigo. Instead, I posit that this cemetery demon was the same sort of demon as seen in the Evil Dead movies.

Jud is the one to imply the the soured ground is haunted by a wendigo. Given that he is not Mi'kmaq and probably heard distorted versions of the folklore, he could have easily been wrong about the nature of the demon. Just like Blackwood and King themselves!

The cemetery demon displays none of the characteristics of a wendigo as it appears in Algonquin stories. It is not limited to acting during the winter, but acts year round. It is not motivated by greed or gluttony, but by more generic malevolence. It does not go around killing and eating people, nor possessing victims to do the same. Instead, it torments its victims with misfortunes, psychological manipulation and (as of the 2019 movie adaption of Pet Sematary) vivid hallucinations a la The Shining or Poltergeist. It possesses and reanimates the dead, using them to terrify and torment the living a la The Evil Dead or The Exorcist.

Stephen King's The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon featured a "god of the lost" who fans conflate with the cemetery demon from Pet Sematary, but there is no evidence of this in the story itself. Both demons appear and behave completely different. In the novel, the god of the lost appears as a wasp-faced demon that torments lost travelers with paranormal SFX until they die of exposure. Perhaps more importantly, the supernatural events of the novel are ambiguous and could have been entirely imagined by the protagonist. Only the 2019 movie adaption of Pet Sematary suggests any similarity when it adds hallucinations to the demon's repertoire. Addendum 10/4/2019: The "god of the lost" is similar to "Oz the Gweat and Tewwible," an imaginary demon that Rachel conceived to represent the influence of evil, the specter of death, and the bad luck inflicted upon the family by the presence haunting the cemetery.

In the Evil Dead movies, the "kandarian demon" possesses both the living, the dead, inanimate objects and trees as "deadites" in order to torment and kill people. Much like the cemetery demon needs victims to bury bodies on its burial ground before it can reanimate, the kandarian demon needs to be invoked by spells from the Sumerian Book of the Dead before it can possess victims.

There is a funny coincidence that I have to share! In the script for Within the Woods, a short film intended to pitch The Evil Dead to studios, the kandarian demon was called "Tinga." It was described as an spirit that protected the Native American burial ground (as if we did not see that trope a bazillion times). When the protagonists violated the grave of a medicine man, it killed and possessed victims as deadites.

Sound familiar?

Thus, I was inspired to make a connection between the cemetery demon and the kandarian demon. The reanimated dead in Pet Sematary are not wendigo zombies, but deadites!

Which brings me to another idea...

In an early draft of the script for The Evil Dead, the demons are described as members of the katardi family. The katardi inhabit forests and, while dangerous and omnipresent, cannot possess victims unless invoked or resurrected by reciting spells from a six-volume book of the dead. Only the high priests of the Ca'n Dar tribe were allowed to have these books, because they alone could control the demons.

Forest demons named katardi, huh? The common thread between the cemetery demon, the god of the lost, and the kandarian demons is that they inhabit forests, display crazy SFX, and have arbitrary prohibitions. In Minnesota, tales told to tourists describe the "wendigo" as a protector of forests. Is that a solid basis for imagining a new family of demons? Seems good enough to me!

Addendum 11/6/2019: YSDC CthulhuWiki has a page on deadites. It made the same connections.

The sa'ir, a forgotten monster

The sa'ir is a weird monster that appeared only briefly in 2e as part of the lamia’s ridiculously convoluted ecology (ridiculously convoluted ecologies were extremely common in the days of AD&D). It is a lion with a goat's hooves and horns. It was never referenced again, and 3e seemingly introduced male lamia which rendered its existence superfluous. That has not stopped conversions to 5e, however.

The name immediately stood out to me because I recognized it as probably derived from the biblical sa`iyr (also sâʻîyr, sâʻir). As an adjective the word means "shaggy," as a noun "he-goat." By analogy, the word is translated as "faun" or "satyr."

In Isaiah 34:14, the sa'ir ("wild goat") is mentioned alongside the lilith ("screech owl") as one of the many beasts inhabiting the desert and night. As Lilith is the name of a night-haunting demon in Mesopotamian myths that fulfills the same archetype as the lamia of Greek myth, I suspect this is where the game's writer got the idea to introduce the sa'ir as a monster related to the lamia/lilith.

Otherwise, the sa'ir appears to be an invention of the game's writer, derived from the biblical verse plus the lamia as described by Topsell and depicted in Tudor heraldry. However, there are a couple of heraldic and artistic monsters that loosely resemble it and might have influenced its design:

• The chatloup (French for "cat-wolf") is a fantastic beast with the face of a cat, the body of a wolf, and the horns of an antelope. 
• The theow (also thoye, thos) is a fantastic beast with the body of a mastiff or wolf, cloven hooves and a bovine muzzle and tail. Dragonlore #71 speculates that it was the result of careless copying transforming depictions of normal wolves into bovine beasts.
• The homeric Chimera was described as having the body of a goat, the head of a lion, and the tail of a dragon/snake. Further variations on this design might add horns to the lion's head.

I do not really see a reason to revive it as a relative of the lamia. At least in my campaign setting, the lamia are the transformed souls of scorned lovers in loose accordance with their mythological origins and not a self-reproducing race that arbitrarily serves a demon lord. Even in the biblical verse, it was only intended as one of the creatures inhabiting the same environment as the she-demons, not a relative.

I can imagine reviving it in other capacities, however. Maybe it is a mad wizard's experiment, as lazy game's writers are wont to resort to for explanation? Maybe it is a variant of the aberrant beasts spawned by the chimera? Maybe it is the male counterpart to the female chimera? Maybe it is a liocorno related to the bicorn and unicorn? Maybe it is related to the chatloup and theow, just another fantastic beast that is natural to fantasyland? Maybe, as its name suggests, it is a relative of the satyrs?

There are any number of possibilities.