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Atlas NoctisA nocturnal atlas of folklore

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The versions

The state of the site at each update, in numbers. It serves two purposes: knowing when a page was last touched, and being able to say precisely what was there and what was not at a given date. The account of what changed — including the things corrected because they were wrong — is in the corrections register.

487pages
150entries
127plates
18source checks

Chronology

DatePagesEntriesPlatesWhat changed
2 October 2026487150127Fifteen new entries and five new countries. Krampus, Chupacabras, Baba Yaga, Leshy, will-o’-the-wisp, selkie, Jersey Devil, krasue, manananggal, dullahan, pocong, El Silbón, El Cadejo, mula sem cabeça and La Befana; Austria, Puerto Rico, Thailand, Venezuela and Guatemala come in. The Italian detail maps now read the same source as the English ones.
26 September 2026446135127Eight new entries — Rificolona, tregenda, Valcamonica 1518, the witches of St John, Beati Paoli, accabadora, Spring-heeled Jack, Klabautermann — without a plate for now. And two corrections found by reading the data. The English search page leaves the sitemap and the index, like the Italian one; the Aosta Valley is a single entry in the atlas filters again. The page count goes down from 431 to 430 because of the first of the two.
21 September 2026431127127The ICF-42 in English. With en/icf-42/ every public page of the site exists in both languages. Only the private traffic log, which is not indexed, remains in Italian.
20 September 2026430127127Six new texts and the first pages in English. The exhumation record, six documented exhumations between 1700 and 2004 and the history of the word vampire; Who invented Samhain, the chain of attributions behind Halloween — Vallancey 1786, Rhŷs 1886, Frazer in the conditional — with the chronology of the attestations at the foot; The dead who bring the presents, the Italian feast of 2 November from Pitrè 1881 to the Sardinian animeddas, with the boundary between what is documented and what is merely repeated. Then three local pieces: The bridge the devil did not build, on the Devil’s Bridge at Borgo a Mozzano and on a legend without attestations; Who wrote the Tuscan tradition, where the chain of sources on 2 November ends on four cookery blogs; Lucca Comics is not a Halloween festival. The English version has opened as well: the atlas, the Method, the text on Samhain and all a hundred and twenty-seven entries — Italy, the world and pseudobiblia — the ten Currents studies, the eighteen source checks, all the texts, the thirty-seven country maps and the service pages, translated field by field from the data and not from the pages — interactive maps and search included, with an hreflang declaration on only those pairs that really exist. A bilingual 404 page that recognises the path, and an automated test of a hundred and three checks with a real browser. Five errors have been corrected, four of them found while translating: the definition of the Sibilla appenninica, the name of Katharine Briggs in the each-uisge, the citation of the Libro Rosso in the study on Jung and an ungrammatical sentence in the text on the Devil’s Bridge. Corrected the .ics button of the ICF-42 tool, which on the iPhone did not save the file. The full account is in the corrections.
4 September 2026210127127Nine new entries, the Gruppo di Ur, and the first articles. Four Italian entries on the rites the atlas did not have: la focarazza di Santa Caterina on the Grosseto side of Amiata, i vattienti of Nocera Terinese, Gl’ Cierv of Castelnuovo al Volturno for Molise, and le sorchie e la synagogue for Valle d’Aosta — where the name for witches in the lower valley, arèdje, comes from the Latin HAERETICUS: the vocabulary of learned persecution come down into the spoken language. Five new countries on the world map: the Serbia of the Habsburg reports of 1725-1732, which is the affair through which the word «vampire» enters the European languages; the Philippines with the aswang; Sri Lanka with Mahasona; Tanzania with Popobawa; Trinidad and Tobago with the soucouyant. Ninth study in the Currents: the Gruppo di Ur, with the table of pseudonyms divided between certain and conjectural attributions, the philological problem of the collection of 1955 — which is not the journal — and a correction to this site: on the Reghini-Evola break we had written that it «ends in court», and the papers say something more precise. Online too is the ICF-42, a self-observation questionnaire in forty-two questions plus three control items, tied to the study on the Fourth Way: it is filled in in the browser, it transmits nothing — no server, no cookies, no collection — and it is done again after ten days, because it is the comparison between two sittings that says something. It does not measure Essence and it has no calibration: it says so itself, at the top of the results. Lastly the Texts section has opened, for the articles that cut across several entries instead of stopping at one: the second is The red cap, on the twenty Italian names for the household sprite, where the feature that looks the most archaic — the spirit of the child dead unbaptised — turns out to be the most recent, because it needs baptism and limbo in order to exist. New too is the page Following the atlas: no newsletter, and the reason for it given at length. Under the bonnet, two things that will show only with time: the 127 plates are now declared in the sitemap with their alternative text, which did not happen before, and the counts in the titles of the maps are no longer written by hand — the one for Italy announced twenty-eight entries when there were already forty-one. Tenth study in the Currents: the Filipino anting-anting — the amulets, the orations and the repertoire of symbols, with a specimen dated 1884 at the quai Branly and a doctrine that can be read; and with the question everyone asks, whether the great eskrima masters really possessed them. The answer is that that link, as the sources stand, is a story the martial community tells about itself: attested by insiders, never by an archive or an outside editorial desk.
31 August 2026190118117The coordinates of myth, and eight new entries. The Coordinates section has opened: the The place box appears at the foot of the entries tied to a reachable spot, with access point, path, conditions and date of verification. Four entries have one. New Italian entries for three regions that were uncovered — Triora for Liguria, il Rutor for Valle d’Aosta, il drago della Valnerina for Umbria — plus i bozzi delle fate in Lunigiana. Three new countries on the world map: the Czech Republic with the vodník, the Netherlands with the witte wieven, Iran with the parì. Eighth study in the Currents: the Archeosofia of Tommaso Palamidessi. And the Echoes box, which gathers the verifiable reprises in books, films, music and video games — with the rule that a reprise without a source does not go in, but becomes a check. The two plates that had remained painterly, kuntilanak and Nachzehrer, have been redone as engravings: the first also had an error of content, because it showed the hole in the back — a feature the entry itself attributes to the sundel bolong and traces back to 1981. With this all the plates are in order. Lastly la spada di San Galgano, with the eighteenth source check: in the papers of 1185 the sword is planted in terram, not in the rock — and without that stone the bridge to the Arthurian legend does not hold.
21 August 2026176110109The atlas illustrated throughout. A hundred and nine entries out of a hundred and ten have a plate. Added the lastmod field in the sitemap and this page.
20 August 202617511099Three studies, four Italian entries, three yōkai. Jung, Evola and Taoism in the Currents; Gostanza da Libbiano, la Berta, the benandanti and la Sibilla appenninica; tengu, yuki-onna and amabie.
19 August 202616510397Seventy-two plates in a day. The illustrations leave Italy: from twenty-eight to ninety-seven illustrated entries. The seventeen source checks take an address each.
16 August 202614810328Anthroposophy, Scaligero, the checks. Two studies in the Currents, the source checks section, the line of definition at the head of every entry and the «Related by theme» block.
11 August 202614110328Twenty-nine countries. The gaps in the world map filled: South Korea, South Africa, Ethiopia, Turkey, Romania, Finland.
10 August 20261209428The world takes shape. From twenty to twenty-three countries, with the detail maps for each of them.
How to read the dates. Every address on the site carries in the sitemap the date of its last real change: the generator compares the fingerprint of the content with that of the previous pass and changes the date only if the text has really changed. The dates start from 21 August 2026, the day the mechanism was introduced — before that date the site kept no track of the change page by page, and to declare earlier dates would have been to invent them.

The numbers in the older rows are reconstructed from the corrections register and are to be taken as orders of magnitude: until 19 August the count of the plates was not noted at every pass.