Claude Lecouteux > Quotes

“The texts are unanimous on one point: the dead do not like being summoned back.”
― Claude Lecouteux, The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind

“The great lesson of pagan and Christian texts can be spelled out in a few words: "Help the dead; they will return the favor.”
― Claude Lecouteux, The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind

“In the Hautes-Alpes region, it was still believed in 1962 that witches often assumed animal form and entered houses through the chimneys, keyholes, or cat doors. When in the form of a cat, it would sit on the chests of those who were sleeping and press down on them, preventing their breathing.”
― Claude Lecouteux, The Tradition of Household Spirits: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“We are better informed about Valholl than we are about Hel, undoubtedly because people preferred to envision heaven rather than hell. Valholl was a large, easily recognized hall. The rafters of the building were made of spears, it was covered with shields, and coats of mail were strewn across the benches. A wolf was hanging west of the doors, an eagle soared above the building, and the goat Heidrun, from whose udder flowed mead, could be spotted atop the roof. Odin did not live there. He resided in the Hall of the Slain (Valaskjalf) or the Sunken Halls (Sokkvabekk),* where he drank with Saga, a hypostasis of the goddess Frigg.”
― Claude Lecouteux, The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind

“In Old High German and in Old English, geist and gaest did not designate a revenant as geist and ghost do today, and scato, "the shadow, did not apply to phantoms. We can deduce from this that revenants were not evanescent: they were not images or mists, but flesh and blood individuals, which is confirmed by the Norse literature and the rare texts from other Germanic countries.”
― Claude Lecouteux, The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind

“a charming Estonian belief: “Thunder occurs when God, who is chasing the devil, catches and pulverizes him. Doors and windows are therefore shut during storms to deny the devil refuge in the house and prevent the latter from being struck by lightning.”
― Claude Lecouteux, The Tradition of Household Spirits: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“The noun fylgja, formed from the verb "to follow, to accompany" (fylgja), referred in some ways to an individual's double, comparable to the Egyptian Ka and the Greek eidolon. It was a kind of guardian angel that took the form of a female entity (fylgjukona) or an animal that protected the family or person it had adopted.”
― Claude Lecouteux, The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind

“In 1913, an old woman died in a village of the canton of Putzig (Prussia). The deaths of seven family members followed soon after, and it was declared that the deceased had not found rest and was drawing her relatives to her. Feeling himself going into a decline, one of the old woman's sons asked for advice from those around him. He was told to exhume the cadaver, decapitate it, and place the head between the feet. He followed this advice, and shortly afterward he said he was feeling much better.”
― Claude Lecouteux, The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind

“in Switzerland, it is said that “witches can slip inside through the keyhole” (Häxa chönid dör-ena schlüselloch döra schlüffa).”
― Claude Lecouteux, The Tradition of Household Spirits: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“Hel's kingdom seems to have been reserved for the common dead, especially those who were not slain by handheld weapons. Valhöll, however, welcomed the valiant. Originally located beneath the earth, the Hall of Warriors fallen in battle" was transported close to Asgard, the abode of the gods, and according to the Sayings of Grimnir, it occupied the fifth heavenly dwelling place, the World of Joy (Gladsheimr) There, every day, Odin chose the warriors who died in combat and shared them with Frigg (Freyja). It was believed that Valhöll had the Unique Warriors (Einherjar), the elite. It is easy to understand why the Germans dreaded to die bedridden; if they were at risk of this, they asked those close to them to mark their bodies with spears. In the Saga of Ynglingar (chapter 9) Snorri Sturluson says that the god Odin, seen here from a euhemeristic perspective, proceeded in this way, but it is surprising to see Njörd, a god of the third function, demanding to be marked with this martial sign.”
― Claude Lecouteux, The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind

“There are a number of dates for other times of the year, among which we have: Easter, Pentecost, Walpurgis Night (April 30–May 1) St. John’s Day (June 24), St. Peter’s Day (June 29), and St. Bartholomew’s Day (August 24). Some of this troop’s movements occur cyclically. It is said that the Wild Hunt appears during the meatless times of the Ember Days (first week of Lent, the week of Pentecost, third week of September, Advent),6 or that it returns every seven years.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Phantom Armies of the Night: The Wild Hunt and the Ghostly Processions of the Undead

“Next to water, the forest is the great lair or refuge of land spirits. It is a haunted place, an outlying space full of violence; a site of exclusion; a refuge of outcasts and exiles as well as pagan beliefs; a place of marvels and perils; a savage, marginal, dreadful space; as well as a focal point of peasant memory. It is in the forest where we most often find those fountains and springs that were discussed in the previous chapter. The fairy Ninienne or Vivian loved to linger at the edge of the fountain of Briosques Forest, and Melusine and her sisters near the one in the forest of Coulombiers. Here roams the mythic wild boar, li blans pors, hunted by King Arthur’s knights; here is where the Mesnie Hellquin travels as do the hosts of Diana and Herodiades.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“Klaus Beitl meticulously studied the People of the Night (Nachtvolk)—the dead, in other words—and he draws up a chart of these apparitions and their variants, noting that in the Voralberg in Austria, this name meant a troop of priests, black and horrific silhouettes that roamed the night where they could be either seen or heard, and that elsewhere this name was applied to the dead who sometimes were beneficent and sometimes were maleficent. When they were beneficent, the living person who encountered the dead was taught to play a musical instrument like a virtuoso. When they were maleficent, the living person was stricken with disease or blindness or was even carried off. Beitl notes that the appearance of this Night Host is wilder in the Swiss cantons of St. Gall, Glarus, and the Grisons, where it is not accompanied by music and its appearance heralds a death or an epidemic.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Phantom Armies of the Night: The Wild Hunt and the Ghostly Processions of the Undead

“The lexeme alb/alf-, “elf,” derives from the Proto-Indo-European root albh-, whose primary meaning is “white, clear” (cf. Latin albus). This root also underlies the name of the famous Central European river the Elbe and the Old Norse noun elfr, which means “river.” In Old High German, the swan is called alpiz and the alder, albari, a tree that prefers wetlands and areas near water. For now, we should keep in mind the essential element I hope to draw out of these texts: the family of creatures to which Alberîch belongs is closely connected to water in its two most ancient symbolic forms: life—associated with the animus—and death—nibel, nifl.”
― Claude Lecouteux, The Hidden History of Elves and Dwarfs: Avatars of Invisible Realms

“William bases his acceptance of the dead returning on a very ancient belief, which maintains that a man receives a certain duration of life at birth—seventy years, according to some—and is not able to reach the beyond until the assigned term has fully elapsed. Those who die prematurely are therefore condemned to roam the earth until that date.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Phantom Armies of the Night: The Wild Hunt and the Ghostly Processions of the Undead

“Aubéron owns a hanap, in which we can easily recognize a secularized form of the horn of plenty known from classical antiquity.”
― Claude Lecouteux, The Hidden History of Elves and Dwarfs: Avatars of Invisible Realms

“In the twelfth century, Hugh of Pisa wrote this in his etymological work Magnae derivationes: Many of the demons expelled from heaven live in the sea, the rivers, the springs, or the forests; the ignorant call them almost gods and offer them sacrifices. In the sea they are called Neptune, Lamia in the rivers, Nymphs in the fountains, and Diana in the forests.7”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“Norse mythology and the Western literatures recognize the dwarf as a skilled artisan and renowned smith. These creatures have crafted the most important objects owned by the gods: Thor’s hammer (Mjöllnir), Odin’s spear (Gungnir), Freyr’s boat (Skiðblaðnir), and Freya’s necklace (Brisingamen). In order to obtain this last object, Brisingamen, the goddess had to sleep with each of the four dwarfs that had made it. Dwarfs crafted the golden hair for Thor’s wife, Sif, and they forged the ring Draupnir and a boar with gold bristles (Gullinbursti). Each of these objects was endowed with magical properties, which strongly suggests that the dwarfs knew magic (although we should also note that smiths have always had the reputation of being part sorcerer, as Mircea Eliade has clearly shown50”
― Claude Lecouteux, The Hidden History of Elves and Dwarfs: Avatars of Invisible Realms

“The representatives of Greek shamanism are Abaris and Aristeus of Prokonnessos. It is said that Abaris came from the Hyperboreans, that is, from the extreme north of Scythia, and that he was sent by Apollo and gifted with the powers of healing and predicting disasters. He never ate, Herodotus tells us, and he walked Apollo’s arrow from one end of the Earth to the other. This miracle worker, whom Pindar makes a contemporary of Cresus, thus carries the arrow, the sign of magic air travel. The importance of this in the mythology and religion of the Scythians has been shown and its parallels to Siberian shamanistic rituals have been pointed out by Mircea Eliade. Using the name of Abaris as evidence, we can confirm, without great risk of error, that he belonged to the Avar race, a people of the Turkish family originating from the Caspian steppes, who were therefore in contact with central Asian shamanism. That, according to Herodotus, Abaris is Hyperborean simply connects him to the northern Asian shamanism of the small Ural-Altaic and Siberian tribes.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies: Shapeshifters and Astral Doubles in the Middle Ages

“We can, in fact, trace the very idea of divinity back to the great natural forces, the primordial, fundamental elements of our world that define us as much as they frighten us: water, sun, fire, earth—especially the earth, as we shall see—and their emanations, if I may refer to them in this way: wind, thunder, and so on. Among the ancient Scandinavians, a world closer to our origins than other more “time-worn” cultures, there are plenty of divine entities for literally expressing all these components (to give just one example, Thor has a name that literally means “thunder”). But we might prefer going back to the great ancestors, the founders of all our lineages, the sovereign dead responsible—it goes without saying—for our current existence. I don’t mean to imply that they are all keepers of great sacred secrets, though they have crossed the boundary and allegedly know what we expend such great effort to learn our whole life. I am only trying to emphasize the fact that they have undoubtedly “gone back to the land” and are now a part of its very substance: “homo-humus,” as Mircea Eliade liked to say, which is in no way contradicted by the fine old myth of Adam’s birth “from the dust of the ground” (Genesis 2:7).”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“the Welsh cleric Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis) recorded in his Itinerarium Cambriae (Journey through Wales), which he wrote around 1191. From the mouth of an old priest named Eliodorus, he heard a story that was based on an adventure his informant had allegedly experienced: When he was twelve, Eliodorus met two little men the size of Pygmies, who invited him to follow them underground. He accompanied them to their kingdom and became friends with the son of their king. He was able to travel between this other world and our own with no difficulty. One day his mother asked him to bring a gift back with him so he stole a golden ball from the subterranean beings. They pursued him and took it back. After this incident, Eliodorus was never able to return to their world.40”
― Claude Lecouteux, The Hidden History of Elves and Dwarfs: Avatars of Invisible Realms

“So man possesses Doubles, most often two of them. One, material and physical, has the power either to take on animal appearances or keep its human form; the other, spiritual and psychic, is also capable of metamorphosis, but appears mostly in dreams. These Doubles have the ability to reach the other world—or any place whatsoever in this world—in one or another of their forms, as soon as the body has been put to sleep, sent into a trance, or made to fall into catalepsy. It is difficult to distinguish precisely between the physical alter ego and the psychic Double, given that even our distant ancestors confused them, as has emerged from the evidence gathered over the course of this inquiry. Every ethnic group and every civilization thought of the Double in its own way, but within the geographic area we are working with here, all evidence seems to indicate that the foundation common to all forms of this belief is shamanism.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies: Shapeshifters and Astral Doubles in the Middle Ages

“Aubéron is a fascinating and mysterious figure who is positioned directly at the intersection of the traditions of yesteryear. “We get the sense that what we are dealing with,” writes Daniel Poirion, “is a legendary and probably folkloric type, but it is difficult to situate him between the Celtic and Germanic traditions.”
― Claude Lecouteux, The Hidden History of Elves and Dwarfs: Avatars of Invisible Realms

“Furthermore, every sacred building was laid out according to a specific rite. A team of oxen opened furrows at the four points of a square starting at the southern side and working their way around it in a carefully defined order and direction. Moreover, the priests who read the auspices and auguries, after having divided up the celestial region (regions caeli) with the help of a curved staff, “freed and declared empty” the future building site. “What is then inaugurated is put in communication, in an effective symmetry, with the heavens . . . ; what is not inaugurated remains essentially earthbound,” notes Georges Dumézil.3 “The Italic temple,” says Eliade, “was the zone where the upper (divine), terrestrial, and subterranean worlds intersected.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“If one refers to the texts, it is undeniably clear that the dead individual becomes a tutelary spirit of a specific location. In the Celtic sphere, the Triads in the medieval Welsh manuscript Llyfr Coch Hergest (Red Book of Hergest) say that the head of Llyr’s son, Bran the Blessed, was hidden in the White Hill of London with its head turned facing France. As long as it remained in that position, the Saxons could not oppress the island. The remains of Gwerthefyr (Guorthemir) the Blessed were hidden in the principal ports of this island and so long as they remained concealed there was no fear the Saxons would invade the country.11 Pomponius Mela tells how the Philaeni brothers had themselves buried beneath a dune to ensure Carthage took possession of a contested territory and, certainly, in order to become tutelary spirits. The place took the name of Arae Philaenorum.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“You should not believe at all in the people who wander at night [nahtwaren] and their fellows, no more than the Benevolent Ones [hulden] and the Malevolent Ones [unhulden], in fairies [pilwitzen], in nightmares [maren, truten] of both sexes, in the ladies of the night [nahtvrouwen], in nocturnal spirits, or those who travel by riding this or that: they are all demons. Nor should you prepare the table anymore for the blessed ladies [ felices dominae].”
― Claude Lecouteux, Phantom Armies of the Night: The Wild Hunt and the Ghostly Processions of the Undead

“In fact the good dead and the spirits were distinct from one another originally. They were gradually merged together, and then combined with other creatures.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“We can see how difficult it is to attribute to a specific god the phenomena connected to the passage of a nightly host. We have in fact too many putative patrons: Odin, Thor, Freyr! We should note that a detail from the painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder titled Melancholy (1532)25 depicts a fantastic aerial ride in which appear a wild boar ridden by an emaciated naked woman who bears a spear, a ram mounted by a Landsknecht, and a cow that carries a naked man and woman. In addition, we can note P. N. Arbo, who painted a Wild Hunt (Asgaardsreien, 1872) led by a bearded king who brandishes a hammer, in other words the god Thor.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Phantom Armies of the Night: The Wild Hunt and the Ghostly Processions of the Undead

“The Christian laws (Kristenret) of the Gulaþing assembly in Norway condemn the pagans for “believing in the land spirits (landvættir) whether found in groves or mounds or waterfalls.” This is an extremely important observation because it tells us that worship was not addressed to the high gods of the Germanic pantheon, but to the numinous forces closer to man, which therefore held a greater significance for his daily life.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices

“In Andorra, the Car dels difunts is almost identical to the cart of the Breton Ankou.”
― Claude Lecouteux, Phantom Armies of the Night: The Wild Hunt and the Ghostly Processions of the Undead