Dear All
I am starting on a paper for the Folklore Society's AGM in April on Urban
Folklore. My original abstract is relatively simple for a very nice topic -
early examples of folklore on mystery braids in horses manes linked to
witches and fairies that have reached the modern day almost intact, how the
folklore may have started, how it is perpetuated today by press, police and
ignorance, and how social networking may be ending this long running myth.
Much as I wanted to avoid this, and though the link is yet small, it seems
the subject is merged at the edges with the understandable hype and fear
round horse mutilations, and how they are linked to Satanism in the press. I
have added 4 links below, one shows how detailed such accounts are, the next
shows how totally unconnected Pagans are linked to it, in this case taking
photos from Cornwall's village Witches’ web site and adding them in, and the
next two links show what may be a source for the mysterious St Winebald's
Day, apparently one of ritual sacrifice on which one may expect one's horses
to be slaughtered. It seems like it is the old chestnut of fundamentalists
and recovered memory nutters feeding press with such calendars, in which
they include modern Pagan dates, in which case there may be new urban
folklores starting with echoes of the SRA events of the late 20th century.
However, unlike the braiding which seems to be simple “wind knots” rather
than “witch knots”, there have been reports of horrible animal mutilations
over the years that do seem to be ritualised in some ways, this is probably
the activity of sinister nutters, but what kind of nutter and why?
I would value comments on any aspect of this from people on this forum, and
particularly those who are scholars of contemporary Satanism, could you
comment on these calendars please, I have never heard of half these
"festivals", are any of these dates celebrated, is there any link with
modern Satanic rites and any of these purported saints days, revels, feasts
etc?
Many thanks
Melissa
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