The rule of the house
Method
I sign myself Frater Custos. Circumstances require me not to sign otherwise: the repercussions if my identity were known would be serious, and they would fall on things that have nothing to do with these pages. I will not return to the subject.
What I write, I stand behind entirely. A name guarantees nothing — it does not guarantee a university chair, let alone a pen name. Sources guarantee, and so does an explicit statement of what they are worth. That is the only authority this site claims.
With one limit, which belongs here and not hidden at the bottom. Today every entry gives author, work and year: enough to go and look, not enough to open the book at the right page. Edition consulted, chapter or page, and a link to the scan where one exists, I am adding entry by entry, starting with the grade A entries, where the promise weighs most. Until that work is finished, «verifiable» here means traceable: the citation tells you where to look, the exact page you still have to find yourselves. I would rather write it than let you discover it.
If I get a date, a source or an attribution wrong, write and tell me. I correct in public, with the date: the corrections all sit in the register of corrections, including a note of what it used to say.
The four grades
A — documented Historical ethnographic collections, dialect dictionaries, trial records, peer-reviewed studies. Material somebody recorded while the belief was still alive.
B — partly documented The core is real, but the record is late or passes through an author's pen. True, with an intermediary in the way.
C — weak Findable almost only on blogs and tourist sites. It stays in the atlas, flagged: knowing that an entry was born the day before yesterday is worth as much as knowing an old one.
L — authorial invention Not folklore. Literature, with an author, a month of writing and a magazine issue number. It lives in a separate section, and there it stays.
The three rules
Every entry declares its grade. The Fojonco is largely an invention of the 2000s, complete with a prize competition announced by a winery in 2003 for anyone who photographed it. It is in the atlas, with its red letter showing. A documented pseudo-tradition is ethnographic material just as much as a real one; lying about its age is not.
The evidence is not the interpretation. That the anguane are Celtic water deities demonised by Christianity is a reading, and it circulates everywhere as fact. That the Kingdom of the Fanes is an ancient Ladin myth handed down intact is false: the unified saga comes out in 1932 from the pen of Karl Felix Wolff, and Ulrike Kindl has shown that it fuses three independent narrative cores. Saying so takes nothing away from the saga. It takes something away from whoever sells it as an artefact.
The reality check is not a verdict. Where a documented phenomenon stands behind the story — sleep paralysis, tuberculosis, a bird of prey mistaken for something else, a Neolithic rock-cut tomb — you find it at the foot of the entry, in a box of its own. It reports what has been established today, and distinguishes what is settled from what is only the prevailing hypothesis. It is neither a hunt for the credulous nor a defence of them: the two camps select their evidence in exactly the same way, in opposite directions. Where there is nothing solid, the box does not appear — and what is open stays open.
«I don't know» is an answer. For some entries I have found no early attestations. For others the sources contradict one another on the numbers. It is written in the entry, where anyone can read it.
Two clarifications, to close the questions before they open. Custos here means keeper of an archive: the one who keeps the papers in order and answers for them. I speak for no order, I represent no tradition, and where I report a doctrine I say so.
Of traditions that are not mine — the Diné first of all — I describe the ethnographic context and the history of their extraction, not the narrative content: those communities regard the material as not to be handled, and the foundational literature of the 1940s is today discussed in anthropology for the way the data were obtained. The same applies, on a smaller scale, to the «Cherokee» origins attributed to the Wampus cat and to the Brown Mountain Lights: fabricated by non-Native authors, the first in 2003, the second in 1938.
Where to start without me
For anyone who wants to check for themselves, the Italian collectors, in order of date: Michele Placucci (1818), Antonio Morri (1840), Antonio De Nino (1879-1897), Caterina Pigorini-Beri (1889), Giuseppe Pitrè (1889), Gennaro Finamore (1890 and 1894), Giggi Zanazzo (1907-1908), Ernesto de Martino (Sud e magia, 1959; La terra del rimorso, 1961 — both translated into English), Ernesto Giammarco (1968-1979), Carlo Ginzburg (Storia notturna, 1989, in English as Ecstasies), Alfredo Cattabiani, and Italo Calvino for the tales. Most of the nineteenth-century collections are out of copyright and scanned.
And, older than all of them, one line from the Edict of Rothari of 643: chapter 376 forbids killing a woman accused of being a striga, quem dicunt mascam, and adds that the thing is in no way credible. Thirteen hundred years ago somebody was already putting on record that those accusations did not stand up. Everything else comes from there.