* Egg curing. This is a folk medicine technique wherein an uncooked egg is rubbed over the patient's naked body. If used to dissipate fever or evil curses, the malady is supposedly sucked into the egg, and it's then buried in a stream. (I'd wager that it'd be bad to cook the egg and eat it. Something might be made of that.) If used for diagnostic purposes, the egg is split open and examined by a haruspex.
* Moonstone. An examination of the folkloric properties of moonstone; its divinatory properties, that in some cultures it brings good luck, that in others it brings terrible luck if it isn't your birthstone.
* Soul-bird. A bird born in the forest at the same moment an infant is born, and the fate of the one depends on the fate of the other.
* Lauma. The New Guinean belief that a soul leaves a man at death and has an independent existence thereafter, something that can also happen temporarily, causing illness in the living person.
* Eagle dance. An Indian dance mimicking an eagle's flight, often associated with weather or battle magic.
There. Anyone who can't whip up an evocative scenario incorporating all of those elements isn't trying hard.
(The book's out of print, but you can find it in abundance on Amazon for as low as $8. That's less than you'd pay for a hamburger at a restaurant these days. Heck, you can even find the 1949 edition for sale.)
Oh man!
ReplyDeleteThe Soul-bird thing is EXACTLY what Griffons are in my world.
It's a long story, but in short: There're some floating islands over a very dense, very large, very dangerous jungle. The horned catfolk below fight an endless war with the wingless bird-like people from the islands above. The wingless bird-like people are born at the same time as a griffon egg hatches in the jungle, the griffon is the soul-mate of the baby. If the bird-like person dies, the griffon dies, but the reverse isn't true. Because of that, there's a whole culture around the father diving in the jungle to retrieve the baby griffon when he knows it's time, and of castes - people without griffons are subcitizens because they can't move effectively in and between the floating islands and giant pillars that the entire race live.
I never thought that this existed as folklore in real life.
Heh, coming in late on this one, but yeah: just about anything like that you can imagine someone else has imagined, somewhere down the years. Professional folklorists even have a numbering system where motifs are catalogued; Cinderella, for instance, is 510A, a subset of the "Persecuted Heroine" motif. Get your hands on the index (http://oaks.nvg.org/folktale-types.html is a reduction of it online) and there are all manner of plots and folklore elements at your fingertips!
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