this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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Irish folklore has lots. Banshees are pretty famous. Itβs a ghostly wailing you hear at night. When you hear it someone dies.
One of the nicer stories is children cursed to be swans instead of people due to an evil stepmother. They end up outliving everyone and moving to the land of youth, as swans.
Fairies are evil.
Butterflies are a link to the other world.
Hell is cold, as a hot hell, like Christian hell, was considered to provide a small amount of comfort.
Dante's Inferno includes both hot and cold sections of Hell, with the cold ones being deeper (and thus worse)
Oh, I didn't know it was in Dante too. I'd always been led to believe it was in contrast to Christian versions of hell but he is kind of the definitive picture of a lot of Christian concepts of hell.
I'm pretty sure the bible never actually physically describes Hell in that way. The depiction of it that most people are familiar with is straight out of the Divine Comedy. I'm pretty sure the bible doesn't describe devils with red horns and pitchforks either. And it definitely doesn't describe angels as sexy humans with bird wings (more like Lovecraftian horrors)
I grew up Catholic and I was taught that Hell isn't even really a place you can go, it's more like the punishment of not going to heaven. Not sure if that's canon though, I haven't gone to church in like a decade.
There's a reason that angels in the Bible are always screaming "BE NOT AFRAID!" when they show up somewhere. It's because they know they look like Cthulhu's nightmares.
If anyone is interested look up Eddie Lenihan he tells some excellent stories of Irish Folklore. One that got me was of an aul fella and his friend going home from the put and one stayed at the other for a night cap. After one the friend went to go but he said not to, the other people are playing hurling ( a ball game) and not to disturb them. So they had another and the friend said the same but the man insisted.
The man left the house and jumped the gate across the road and landed into the middle of the field, no wall or gate. He could hear cheering and running etc but couldn't see the gate he came over. He walked and walked but recognised that he must have ten times the width of the field. He turned around and walked the way he came, he quickly came to the gate and jumped back over. He went to his friends door, his friend opened with a drink in hand. "They won't be long now but you won't get home until after they've finished"