Subcategories
Spirits
9 of 150 entries in Mythical Creatures. Click any to see everything it connects to.
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Spirits gathers beings with no fixed animal shape from traditions that otherwise share little: the Irish Banshee, whose wail warns of a coming death, the Djinn and the fiercer Ifrit of Islamic tradition, the Qareen, an Islamic constant companion spirit assigned to every person, and the Wendigo of Algonquian tradition, associated with winter, famine and insatiable hunger. The grouping is by absence of an animal or hybrid form, not by any relation among them.
Facts
Overview
What Defines This GroupingA cover term. "Spirit" is a translator's word: the jinn of Islamic cosmology, for one, are a created and corporeal species rather than disembodied spirits, and the beings collected here belong to unrelated traditions with little in common but the English label. 2 Peoples and Traditions CoveredAlgonquian-speaking nations of the northern woodlands and subarctic - distinct peoples, not one tradition - tell of the being English spells "wendigo". Basil Johnston writes of the Anishinaabe wiindigoo and of the ethics of hunger it carries. 3 Peoples and Traditions CoveredIslamic: the jinn are a created species named in the Qur'an, with the ifrit and the qarin among their kinds - part of Islamic cosmology rather than folklore about ghosts. 2Tradition: Islam Learn More
The Spirit Beings
This group holds spirit beings, the many kinds of non-corporeal or nature-dwelling beings of world folklore, from the guardians of place to the wandering spirits of wild and domestic spaces. They occupy the middle ground between the human and the divine.
The browser will find the spirit figures the atlas gathers here. The entries describe each being's nature and its role in the tradition that tells of it.
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