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Xochipilli

- The god of art, dance, games, beauty, music and flowers in Aztec mythology. Known as the “Flower Prince”.

Lundy was always an excellent musician, but never attempted to make a living with his music. He liked to play to entertain himself. For example, he got into the habit of taking down the fiddle after supper was finished, a practice he continued to enjoy into his old age. He worked mostly as a farmer, but by no means exclusively. He was also employed as a blacksmith, a violin and watch repairman, and a dentist, although he just referred to it as “pulling teeth.”

My friend picked up a recording of this fiddle player from a junk shop. It was recorded by the Library of Congress in the 1940s, but apparently it represents some of the oldest fiddle tradition on record, because Lundy was an old man by that point and rarely changed his repetoire. He had learnt the fiddle and his tunes from an older fiddler, Green Leonard, who was active in Grayson County in the earlier part of the nineteenth century. The record, therefore, is about as close as we’re going to get to hearing American folk music as it was played in that era.

That friend of mine has moved to Berlin, and I’d love to get a copy of these recordings. If anyone out there owns the record, “Emmett W. Lundy – Fiddle Tunes From Grayson County, Virginia”, it would make my year if you could record the LP to MP3 and send it my way. Or alternatively, if you’d be willing to sell the record, please get in contact with me.

Psychopomp

A strange, surprisingly frequently occuring character in religions and mythologies. The “guide of souls” to the land of the dead, the Charon. According to Jung, the psychopomp archetype is the mediator between the conscious and unconscious realms. Thus a shaman can be regarded as a sort of living psychopomp.

Nasreddin Hoja was standing in a field when a passerby quizzed him, asking what the people in the next village down the road were like.

“Well, what did you think of the people in our village?” he asked the stranger.

“Block-headed, lazy, stupid and rude, if you must know,” replied the traveler.

“That’s probably how you’ll find them in the next village, too,” said the Hoja.

A little later, another passing stranger struck up a conversation with Nasreddin Hoja. He too asked what the people in the next village were like.

“How did you find the people in this village?” countered the Hoja again.

“Warm-hearted, smiling, gentle and hospitable,” answered the stranger.

“Then that’s how you’ll find them in the next village, too.”

Shamanistic remnants in Hungarian folklore - pretty interesting, pretty esoteric.