Vlog Ep.5 Wendigo

Vlog Ep.4 The Fleshgait

Vlog Ep 3 Were is the Hyena

Anubis and Xolotl

Anubis and Xolotl.
Egypt, Mexico and…Wisconsin…?

How vastly confusing! Where do we begin?
Let’s go with Wisconsin, shall we?

Aztalan State Park is roughly 50 miles due west of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
It’s Wisconsin’s premier archaeological site and no one knows for sure what befell the culture that once thrived here.

Aztalan State Park

“The people who settled Aztalan built large, flat-topped pyramidal mounds and a stockade around their village. Decades of archaeological research, including carbon dating and tooth samples found at the site that were traced back to Cahokia, have provided some clues to the culture that created these mounds. It was once a village and ceremonial complex of about 500 people that thrived between 1000 and 1300 AD before the site was mysteriously abandoned.” Source

It’s been theorized that the complex was built by Aztecs. Based for example, but not solely, on the name Aztalan itself.
The legendary ancestral home of the Aztecs is called Aztlán.
It is mentioned in several texts that the Aztecs migrated south from the city of Aztlán to Mexico where they came to settle and create their empire.

This is interesting for several reasons, but we are going to focus on the parts that are relevant to the Dogman phenomenon.

Windigo

When looking for information on the Windigo/Wendigo one is first informed that it is a creature from Algonquian lore, which is correct and straight forward.
After that one is given a mish-mash of mythology and peculiar descriptions of a creature who is pretty much impossible to make heads or tails of:

It’s a cannibal.
It’s a spirit of the North with a heart of ice and taller than the pine trees.
It’s a half man, half caribou creature.
It’s an evil spirit, emaciated, pale, crawling on all fours.

From Wikipedia

Can it really be all those things?
Could it be that The Algonquian peoples, who once inhabited most of Eastern and Middle Canada, as well as parts of the Eastern and Middle US, actually had several legends describing several creatures?
Could it be that through the years and generations, bits have been added, others forgotten?
Could it maybe even be that this Windigo has been taking on traits of other mythological beings as the lines between legends have been blurred by time?

To address the cannibalistic trait one must first remember that to be a cannibal one has to eat ones own species. A man-eating lion is not a cannibal. A lion-eating lion would be.
For the Windigo to be cannibalistic, in the sense that it eats humans, it would have to be human in the first place.
Cannibalism was an enormous taboo with the Algonquian peoples, yet the cold and the lack of food would sometimes drive people to these hideous acts.
The only way to make sense of something so senseless would then be if they were affected by an unclean, evil spirit.

Nowadays we call it Windigo psychosis. The insatiable desire to consume human flesh, even when other food is available.

The troll situation in Sweden

Sweden is the country with the worst cryptozoological climate I have found so far. We are Sweden, rational, scientific Sweden with the Nobel Prize and all that. How dare you assume there could be creatures out there not known by The Holy Science?!
Yet in the olden days, folklore and folk beliefs were extremely rife here. Just imagine the good old days when the legacy of Odin was law .
The Northland part of Sweden was the last to be integrated and converted to Christianity. The Asatru lived on up here for much longer and we fiercely resisted being forcefully converted. We may have chased an apostle sent from Bremen in Germany and stoned him to death after he destroyed some of our heathen altars and knocked over a few stones of blood sacrifice. This happened in 1060. We may also have done the same with a tax collector from Sweden proper in 1317 for daring to consider us a part of Sweden they could squeeze extra income from.
Eventually we were incorporated into Sweden proper but I think many of us in Northland still feel that the heathen savage is still in our genes, even though he’s suppressed by a thin layer of civilization.

Vittra

I’ve been immensely tired after my surgery and the BP thing but now I’m starting to finally feel a bit like myself again. I have however been thinking and even writing quite a bit during this time, drafts, that hopefully will become posts in the future. But this one will be about vittra, or they will never leave me alone…
I’ve had this feeling, and by feeling I mean obsessive compulsion, to write about vittra for a long time now. They come up in conversations, they pop up in things I read, even though I was really searching for something else. I keep stumbling over stories wherever I look, so, without further ado I give you…

Vittra

A vitter (plural: vittra) is a member of a species also known as the underground people. They are a folkloric belief here in Sweden, especially in the north and they are said to be living their lives parallel to us.
The vittra are mortal, they can die, just like us. They have children, just like us, they keep cattle, just like us, well, at least like us in the olden days. They have dogs. They are just slightly smaller than us in stature. They wear clothes, mostly grey, yellow and red from what I can gather.
If I should “translate” the old folkloric beliefs into modern views on the paranormal I would say the vittra live in another dimension, one very close to our own.

In the Hall of the Mountain King

I was reading about being spirited away by the Good People on Phantoms and Monsters.  Here in the North that same concept is called to be Bergtagen. Literally that means to be taken by the mountain.  The concept of being bergtagen was also used for someone who had been taken by trolls or vittra.

Immediately my mind went to The Hall of the Mountain King (above). The Mountain King was a natural spirit, an elemental who was said to dwell within the mountain, surrounded by his family and a court of trolls. He seemed to have a bad habit of stealing children when they happened upon his mountain. Young women were also a favorite of his as he, as most natural spirits, was a highly erotic being. The taken were treated to foods and beverages and if they ingested any of it they were stuck in the mountain or under ground. Often the people who had become taken were used as slaves, but it also happened that they formed romantic ties to the beings in the mountain.