by Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman

“The dead don’t walk. Except, sometimes, when they do.”
—T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead

In recent years, mushrooms have appeared in some very particular realms of speculative literature— horror and the Gothic. It turns out that mushrooms are the perfect vehicle for scary stories. Part of it is their sheer liminality. Despite all of our scientific advancements, we still don’t really understand them. They’re not exactly flora, not exactly fauna, but something entirely different—something that resists categorization.

What cannot be put into tidy boxes quickly becomes fodder for tales of horror. In high-theoretical terms, monsters frighten us because of their “hybridity”—they aren’t quite one thing or another, and the ambiguity is deeply unsettling. This is easy to see with classical monsters like Medusa or Scylla, whose beautiful human bodies are transformed by the addition of snakes or extra heads. Now hybrid composites, they are no longer entirely human, but they’re not animals either. They’ve become monstrous.

Mushrooms, which never fit into a neat category to begin with, are very ready to be made monstrous.

One of our favorite books that explore the sinister potential of the mushroom is T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead, a 2022 retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher.” As in Poe’s story, the narrator (here named Alex Easton) arrives at the home of their friend Roderick Usher and his sister, Madeline, only to see that the house is falling into ruin. Something is very wrong: While the reason for Madeline’s illness and the house’s decline is never made explicit in Poe’s story, Kingfisher places the blame squarely on the parasitic mushrooms that thrive in the unwholesome landscape. These are mushrooms that can literally move the dead, and when Madeline dies, she’s also reanimated by their power. Remember what we said about hybridity and monstrosity? Madeline becomes part woman, part corpse, mostly mushroom. Eat your heart out, Medusa.

Sylvia Moreno-Garcia’s superb 2020 novel, Mexican Gothic, takes the idea of mushroom-based life extension even further. Like What Moves the Dead, the story begins with our protagonist visiting an old Gothic home and finding it overrun with problematic mushrooms. Noemí, the book’s heroine, goes to check on her cousin Catalina, who has married into the English Doyle family. Noemí quickly realizes that their mansion is overtaken with mold, fungus, and rot, which disgusts her but seems to be weirdly acceptable to the Doyles.

It turns out that the house’s mushrooms have developed a symbiotic but decidedly sinister relationship with the Doyle family. They offer healing properties, but they also seem to sap something vital from the people who dwell in the house.

Eventually, Noemí discovers that the family patriarch, Howard, uses the fungus to grant him an incredibly long life. But what’s much worse is that the mushrooms also grant him dominance and power over all his family members. He has learned to literally take over the consciousnesses and bodies of younger family members through the mushrooms’ power.

So once more, a human fused with mushrooms proves to be bad news. Like the oppressive colonial powers in Mexico to which the Doyle mushrooms are deliberately alluding, it seems like an impossible situation, but Noemí’s solution is both satisfyingly dramatic and extremely warranted.

If you want to explore more sinister mushroom tales, other books that feature them include Stephen King’s Dreamcatcher (2001), Creatures of Want and Ruin by Maggie Tanzer (2018), Agents of Dreamland by Caitlín R. Kiernan (2017), and a collection of short stories entitled Fungi (2012), edited by Orrin Grey and Moreno-Garcia.

But be warned: After reading any of the books mentioned in this article, we doubt you’ll be able to look at a seemingly innocent portobello the same way again.

Feature Image:
The White Stag by Annie Stegg @anniestegg

You’re walking through the woods one day, just as twilight stars begin to shimmer through the leaves.

Everything seems quiet, still. Ahead, you hear the soft snap of a twig against a delicate hoof and look up into the gentle eyes of a doe. She is alone, as you are, but her stance betrays no fear. She gifts you with a steady, knowing gaze, then suddenly bounds away into the trees, vanishing as if she had never been there at all.

There’s something deeply magical about an unexpected encounter with a deer—they’re so much bigger than most of the other animals we tend to encounter on a regular basis, and yet they’re also elegant, careful, solemn, and graceful in their movements. It’s no wonder that these enchanting creatures appear so frequently in fairy tales, particularly stories of transformation.

In “Brother and Sister,” a fairy tale told by Giambattista Basile, Alexander Afanasyev, and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, among others, a young girl pleads with her thirsty brother not to drink from the enchanted springs they pass. The first spring murmurs that those who drink from it will transform into tigers and lions; the second promises that those who drink will become wolves. By the time they encounter a third spring, the brother cannot bear his thirst any longer. He drinks from the spring—and transforms into a deer. This fairy tale is a wild ride, involving a vengeful witch, a royal marriage, a ghost princess, a magical doppelganger, and an eventual restoration of human form to both the brother and sister (who is murdered and becomes a watchful spirit until her husband catches on). Read it, and you’ll find that the boy’s transformation offers many possible interpretations. Is it a punishment for his failure to listen to his sister, meted out by the evil witch that dogs their steps? Or is it a reprieve from responsibility or adulthood? His altered status could be a burden for his sister and freedom for himself. Or does it represent the children’s connection to the wood that becomes their home and sanctuary?

We find another brother transformed into a deer in “The Glass Coffin,” a story popularized by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and, later, Andrew Lang. Here, a tailor lost in the woods witnesses an epic fight between a great stag and a wild boar. After the stag wins, he scoops up the tailor with his antlers and brings him to a stone building that contains a glass coffin, inside of which lies a beautiful, very awake girl. The girl asks the tailor to please open the coffin and then reveals that the stag is actually her brother and the boar the wicked magician that enchanted them both. When the tailor and the girl emerge from the building, they find that the stag has been disenchanted, and they live happily ever after. Here the stag represents both power and dispossession. Once more, the form isn’t chosen freely, but the brother is able to defeat the magician and recruit help while in that shape.

We see many young girls, even princesses, transformed into deer as well. In Madame d’Aulnoy’s French story “The White Doe,” a princess is under a curse that forbids her from being touched by light for the first fifteen years of her life. When someone inevitably cuts open the coach that hides her away, she immediately transforms into a white deer and runs off. Her betrothed does not recognize her in her new form but becomes obsessed with chasing the new white deer in the forest. When he wounds her, he regrets his actions and brings her home, only to discover that she is his love—and she can transform back into her human self at night. He declares his love for her, the curse is broken, and they live happily ever after. Here, the transformation represents a barrier between the princess, her prince, and true love, one they must overcome together.

We see another beautiful girl transformed into a deer in the Scottish tale “The Enchanted Deer,” which Andrew Lang included in his Lilac Fairy Book. In this story, a young man agrees to shoot a deer that has been eating the corn belonging to a poor farmer and his wife. Every time he goes to shoot, the deer appears before him as a woman with long, dark hair. Eventually he gives chase, and the deer leads him to the home of a band of robbers. When they find and kill the hunter, she is able to bring him back to life. The leader of the robbers is so mad that when they find the hunter alive again, he orders his men to slay not only the hunter but also the men who were originally ordered to kill him … This continues until all the robbers are furious with each other, they get into an enormous fight, and all of them wind up dead. The hunter then comes back to life a final time through the help of the deer, and she takes him to the home of an old woman. Her curse is then broken, but the hunter falls into a magical sleep every time she tries to come to him in her human form, and she is forced to leave him after her third try. A great deal happens after the hunter and the deer-woman are separated, but the curse is eventually broken, they find each other again, and this story too ends happily. In a fascinating twist, the hunter must go on a long quest to recover his beloved, a plot usually reserved for women in Search for the Lost Husband tales.

Most of us long, on some level at least, to run free through the forest, to sip cool water from flowing streams, and to slip through the trees as silently as a shadow. Deer contain contradictions and possibilities. They’re prey animals, but they’re also strong and fast, delicate yet still powerful. Stories of deer transformation, even when they’re stories of curses, allow us to indulge a fantasy of fluid forms; we imagine that we’ve suddenly sprouted antlers and long legs for springing through the forest.

Many of these tales mention specifically that once the human characters transform, they cannot overcome their new urges to run with other wild creatures, to become part of the natural world in a way they never could have done before. In that spirit, we encourage you to go explore the woods yourself, perhaps even run a bit… you never know what you might become.

Imagine yourself in a library, surrounded by books, pens, and scattered papers.

Your ink-stained fingers furiously scribble notes as you study an ancient tome, its brittle pages revealing dangerous secrets beyond your wildest imagination. You can just make out the faint whispers of a piano somewhere nearby, and rain taps insistently against the stained-glass window looming over your desk.

That is the aesthetic, the mood, the vibe, of Dark Academia, which has exploded in popularity on Instagram over the past five years. But it’s connected to a lineage of stories that goes back hundreds of years. It’s not just an ambiance but also a genre and perhaps even a subculture. The motifs and set pieces—the building blocks that make up the substance of Dark Academia—are drawn from fictionalized, fantastic universities from an ambiguous past, plus a sensual appreciation for art, culture, and opulence. If you’re thinking of neo-Gothic buildings covered in ivy, floored in marble, and hung with priceless paintings everywhere, then you’re halfway there. Add a sense of mystery, ambition, luxuriance, nostalgia, secrets, and an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, and you’ve conjured Dark Academia.

Books like Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Maurice by E.M. Forster, and Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers formed the foundation for what would later become Dark Academia, but most people mark The Secret History by Donna Tartt as the first book to really cement the genre. A captivating story of murder, obsession, and philosophy, The Secret History would come to represent all the strongest aspects of what makes a book Dark Academia, setting the tone for the books in the genre that followed, like If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio and Bunny by Mona Awad.

While there’s always a glamor about Dark Academia, the stories at its base are fundamentally sinister: Our most prestigious institutions are revealed to be rotting from within, host to all manner of arcane forces and power-hungry intellectuals. Dark Academia stories often feature an outsider entering this exclusive world and being dazzled by it … until something goes horribly wrong. The characters that move through

and privilege. And perhaps most important, Dark Academia storylines explicitly explore the way that knowledge and intellectualism can enhance personal power.

There are some core values and ideas that underpin this genre and aesthetic:

• Knowledge is the ultimate power (but that power can come at a very high price).

• You should beware of hubris, that morality is a fluid concept.

• The humanities and classics are worthwhile pursuits (yes!).

• Luxury and sensuality are ideals worth chasing.

But too often, Dark Academia texts contain problematic implicit—and sometimes not-so-implicit—themes, such as nostalgia for a time when wealthy white men held almost all the power. The romanticization of higher education fails to acknowledge its real pitfalls, like the reliance on underpaid adjunct labor and the exclusion of women and people of color. These are not necessarily universal across the genre, but they form some ofthe assumptions that many people have about Dark Academia.

Writers and creators can either reinforce or subvert these concepts, entrenching or expanding generic and aesthetic expectations. Among the works we’d recommend are Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik, Babel by R.F. Kuang, A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid, and Vita Nostra by Marina and Sergey Dyachenko, if you’re looking for Dark Academia stories with a touch of magic!

In fact, it is more common than not for a hint of enchantment to creep into these stories—not surprising, when you consider how much they rely on mystery, esoteric knowledge, subversion, and scandal. So if you’re looking for haunted libraries, secret spells, and the kind of enchantment that seeks out the shadows, we invite you to grab a cup of your favorite tea and devour a Dark Academia book.

And if you don’t know where to start, might we recommend The Picture of Dorian Gray? Oscar Wilde would never lead you astray …

Photo by Priscilla Hernandez

“… a great lady, taller than any woman that Edmund had ever seen. She also was covered in white fur up to her throat and held a long straight golden wand in her right hand and wore a golden crown on her head. Her face was white—not merely pale, but white like snow or paper or icing-sugar, except for her very red mouth.” —from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis

When the air starts to turn crisp, the leaves fall, and the sun vanishes for long periods behind gray clouds, it’s easy to lose the inspiration to dress as your most magical self.

Soft hoodies and fleece leggings call to be worn under cozy blankets while sipping hot chocolate. But just because winter weather presents some challenges to enchanted dressing doesn’t mean there aren’t options for the discerning modern witch or fairy!

The best place to embrace a fae style in your winter clothing is undoubtedly a warm coat. We recommend you look for one in a rich, bold color that makes you stand out against the harsh elements! Look for embroidery, velvet, and faux fur trim for an extra dose of magic. A little silver embroidery across a dark wool coat can go a long way. If you’re feeling especially bold, you might even try a cloak instead of a coat. Cloaks are incredibly warm, and you really can’t beat them for drama.

Winter is the time to embrace contrasts in your clothes. Pair wool with lace, a fuzzy sweater with a skirt of sheer layers, or velvet pants with a filmy top. Color-wise, think particularly about employing colors that pop against each other, like red on white. (Picture the White Witch’s mouth on her pale face.) You can also try throwing in an unexpected color—like bright pink—to shake things up a bit!

With jewelry, it’s always tempting to go for all silver and clear or white stones like quartz, moonstone, and diamonds. This kind of jewelry recalls the shimmering snow, the bare trees, and the storms of the winter season. We’d recommend looking for pieces that incorporate branches to increase that effect. That said, don’t snooze on gold at this time of year—as the White Witch demonstrates, a golden wand and crown can be quite striking too.

Lastly, it’s hard to get around the fact that winter commonly means you have to break out your heavy boots. But even boots can contain a spark of enchantment. Seven-league boots aren’t a staple of fairy-tale clothing for nothing! Look for a pair that have a little something special to them—maybe it’s a pretty design sewn into their sides or a flash of color in the lining. If you have lace-up boots, you might consider swapping out the plain black or brown laces for something more fanciful. If none of those options work, a pair of fun, warm socks can really perk up your mood too.

In winter extremes, you might be tempted to throw on any old thing as long as it’s warm—but that doesn’t have to be your only option. Finding small ways to add a little magic to your cozy outfits can make a big difference when you’re facing the gloomy skies of winter!

Note: The line “cloaked in silver frost” appears in Lorraine Schein’s poem “To Chione,” published in the Winter Solstice 2018 issue of Eternal Haunted Summer.

Feature Image:
Illustration by Joseph Urban and H. Lefler for Märchen-Kalendar (1905)

A young girl lies in a glass coffin, alone in the woods, her black hair spread across her pillow. Her lips are as red as blood and her skin is as white as snow. She is neither dead nor truly alive. The shadows of the forest creep in closer as you watch her, wondering if she will ever awaken … and what she would do if she did.

Sounds like a passage from a gothic vampire novel, right? It is instead, of course, describing the fairy tale “Snow White,” a story so familiar that most people could tell you the plot without thinking twice. The truth is that fairy tales are often very gothic … and gothic literature frequently draws from fairy tales.

Our traditional fairy tales are a lot scarier than people tend to remember. They’re full of sinister encounters with wolves, dark forests, and fragile mortality. As the scholar Lucie Armitt puts it, “the child-devouring witches and ogres that lurk in the forest are an early introduction to the dangerous possibilities of the (only apparently) familiar, and one has simply to consider the imaginative impact of the house of sweets in ‘Hansel and Gretel’ or Granny’s bedroom in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ to recognize the abiding presence of gothic motifs, such as the sinister mansion or Bluebeard’s bloody chamber.” To Armitt’s list we’d also add the strikingly vampiric description of Snow White and the death-like enchanted sleep of the princess in “Sleeping Beauty.” Take a look at the following tales with fresh eyes and you’ll see what we mean:

• “Little Snow-White” by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
• “Little Briar Rose” by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
• “Hansel and Gretel” by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
• “Little Red Riding Hood” by Charles Perrault
• “Bluebeard” by Charles Perrault

Now that we’ve established that there are gothic elements in many of the traditional fairy tales you know and love, let’s flip the script and take a look at the 19th century gothic texts that draw from traditional fairy-tale narratives—you might be surprised at how many of them do! Gothic literature was at its height during this time, particularly at the beginning and the end of the century, and fairy tales were hugely popular as well. It makes sense that they would be combined to great effect! Consider classics like:

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (“Beauty and the Beast,” “Bluebeard,” “Cinderella”)
• Bleak House by Charles Dickens (“Sleeping Beauty,” “Little Red Riding Hood”) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (“Sleeping Beauty,” “Cinderella”)
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (“Cinderella,” “Snow White”) Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (“Sleeping Beauty,” “Beauty and the Beast”)

One of the most common and recognizable ways that we encounter gothic fairy tales today is through fairy-tale retellings. In other words, an author starts with a pre-existing fairy tale and puts their own unique spin on it, making it their own. Sometimes, that spin is distinctly gothic. The absolute queen of this strategy is Angela Carter, a British writer who published a collection of fairy-tale retellings called The Bloody Chamber in 1979. In these tales, Carter finds the “dread glamour” at the heart of traditional tales and cranks the volume up until they positively shimmer with gothic radiance. The Bloody Chamber changed the way people thought about fairy-tale retellings and the gothic, kicking off a tidal wave of reimagined stories that  continues to this day. We recommend:

• The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (various tales)
• Heart’s Blood by Juliet Marillier (“Beauty and the Beast”)
• The Shadow in the Glass by Jja Harwood (“Cinderella”)
• The Seventh Bride by T. Kingfisher (“Bluebeard”)
“Snow, Glass, Apples” by Neil Gaiman (“Snow White”)
• “The Maiden-Tree” by Catherynne Valente
(“Sleeping Beauty”)

Lastly, we absolutely love books about books. (We are giant nerds, can you tell?) And our favorites are often gothic books about books of fairy tales. There’s something so indulgent and magical to us about stories that center how books can make us feel—the way they can captivate and hold our attention, the way they carry secrets under their spines. The heroes of these stories are often obsessed with their books of fairy tales, and these books end up changing the course of their lives. And who among us hasn’t had a book change their life?

• The Hazel Wood by Melissa Albert
• The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton
• The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
• In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey

Turn the pages and step through the locked door, into dark forests and forbidden chambers. Hold the dread glamour close to your heart, alongside “once upon a time …”

Writing a list of our top five witches is surprisingly hard, but not for the reasons you might assume. It’s not that we can’t think of any good ones—the problem is that there are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of fascinating, powerful, enigmatic witches that live in stories and on pages! But since we’ve got space for only five, we’ve had to ruthlessly narrow down our list. What about, you might say, the wyrd witches from Macbeth? Or wise, star-crossed Serafina Pekkala from the glorious His Dark Materials trilogy? Agnes Nutter, Hermione Granger, Elphaba? Lilith, Hecate, Baba Yaga?

Y’all, we didn’t know how we were going to do it!

One thing we have done, however, is make sure that all the witches in this particular piece are distinctly literary. This meant that we had to strike Morgan Le Fay, for example, both because she’s a part of Arthurian legend and because there have been so many different literary takes on her character that we wouldn’t know where to begin without spiraling off toward Avalon. So against our natures, we are (mostly) ignoring the great witches of folklore for this particular piece. We also focused on literary witches that really shaped—and often pushed back on—the boundaries of what witches are like and what we expect from them.

So here are the five literary witches who have, for various reasons, stuck with and enchanted us the most—and made us think the most about what a witch can be.

Watho

Watho is the antagonist of an incredible (and incredibly weird) fairy tale by George MacDonald called “The Day Boy and the Night Girl” (1882). She is stunningly beautiful, with red hair and black eyes, and she has an insatiable desire to know everything. She also has what MacDonald calls a “wolf in her mind,” which might be a familiar, lycanthropy, or arguably even chronic pain, which occasionally overwhelms her. Don’t get us wrong, Watho is definitely a baddie—she’s very cruel to the child protagonists that she has kidnapped—but she’s also fascinating because she presents a model of the witch that we’ve rarely seen elsewhere. More of a mad scientist than a witch—she does experiments, not magic—Watho has an intense desire to understand the world around her, giving her an edge even among witches.

Glinda

While witches have always been complex creatures, unambiguously good witches are still relatively hard to come by. This is why Glinda, called the Good Witch of the South in L. Frank Baum’s Oz novels (1900–1920), was so revolutionary. Baum completely transformed what a witch could be by modeling Glinda on his mother-in-law, the well-known suffragist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage. Gage had famously postulated that the women burned as witches in the past had actually been scientists who represented too much of a threat to the status quo. In the novels, Glinda is a beautiful sorceress who protects and counsels Princess Ozma, employs a whole army of female soldiers, and, to be honest, is a lot more enigmatic and complex than her title would suggest. “Good” is a little too simplistic for witches anyway, don’t you think?

Granny Weatherwax

Esmerelda “Granny” Weatherwax is a force like no other in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels (1983–2015). Embodying the classic image of the witch, Weatherwax always wears her hat and demands the respect a witch of her status deserves. She’s smart, capable, and takes no prisoners. She always does what’s right and never suffers fools. As Prachett wrote, “people are riddled by Doubt. It is the engine that drives them through their lives. It is the elastic band in the little model aeroplane of their soul, and they spend their time winding it up until it knots. Early morning is the worst time—there’s that little moment of panic in case you have drifted away in the night and something else has moved in. This never happened to Granny Weatherwax. She went straight from asleep to instant operation on all six cylinders. She never needed to find herself because she always knew who was doing the looking.” We admit we have a special connection to this witch too. We once made a Weatherwax-inspired witch hat covered in fake fruit and tiny dragons for a favorite professor who reminded us of her!

Morwen

The Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia C. Wrede (1985–1996) is one of our favorite fairy-tale world parodies. In Wrede’s world, princesses and witches alike reject their stereotypical roles in favor of following their hearts. The witch Morwen is a friend of the main character, Princess Cimorene, and she has no time for the aesthetic trappings often associated with witches. She is intensely practical and thinks outdated ideas like pointed hats and overgrown gardens are ridiculous. Her home and gardens are very neat, thank you. She also has a variety of cats living with her (because why should a witch have only one familiar? Preposterous!) These novels are all about casting off who you’re supposed to be and embracing your true self, even if that self isn’t what others are expecting. Morwen’s a bit unusual, sure, but she’s definitely a powerful, awesome witch in her own right too!

Circe

We know! We can practically hear you screaming, “Circe is totally from Greek mythology, you cheaters!” And yes, you probably know Circe from The Odyssey, the Homerian epic where she appears as one of the dangers Odysseus must overcome on his long way home.

BY SARA CLETO AND BRITTANY WARMAN
Illustration: The Nightingale from Tales by Hans Christian Andersen (1911), by Heinrich Lefler and Joseph Urban

 

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Despite their reputation for being short, sweet, and simple, fairy tales can be magnificently enchanting, even decadent. Their lavish descriptions and beguiling atmospheres stay with you, informing your aspirations and understanding of luxury well into adulthood. We’ve put together a list of some of the most decadent tales out there, plus some of our favorite passages to give you a taste.

“The White Cat” by Madame d’Aulnoy

Madame d’Aulnoy is famous for her unbridled descriptions of beautiful rooms, beautiful clothes, and beautiful people. The Grimm brothers, who believed that fairy tales should be sparse, flat, and simplistic and who notably do not appear on this list, dismissed her tales out of hand for their extravagant wordiness. This, of course, makes them prime examples of what decadent fairy tales can be. For this list, we’ve chosen the tale “The White Cat,” a story that not only features several of d’Aulnoy’s loveliest passages, but also invites us into a world where cats live in the lap of luxury. Here, for example, is the description of a prince’s first sight of their castle: “Guided by the light he came to the gate of the most magnificent castle that could ever be imagined. This gate was of gold covered with carbuncles, the pure and vivid light of which illuminated all the neighborhood. It was this light which the Prince had perceived at a great distance. The walls were of transparent porcelain, of several colors, on which were represented the histories of all the Fairies from the beginning of the world to that day.” How gorgeous does that sound?

“Beauty and the Beast” by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve

The most famous versions of “Beauty and the Beast” (Madame Beaumont, and later Disney) provide only a glimpse of the glitz, glamour, and opulence on display in the oldest literary version, written by French novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in 1740. In Villeneuve’s tale, we get intricate descriptions of the Beast’s castle, otherworldly cabaret entertainments, and the extravagant fashion of the time. When Beauty and her father arrive at the Beast’s castle, they “found themselves in an avenue of orange trees. At the moment that they entered it the fireworks ceased. The illumination was, however, continued by all the statues having in their hands lighted torches. Besides these, lamps without number covered the front of the palace, symmetrically arranged in forms of true-lover’s knots and crowned cyphers, consisting of double LL’s and double BB’s. On entering the court they were received by a salute of artillery, which, added to the sound of a thousand instruments of various kinds, some soft, some warlike, had a fine effect.” Orange trees! An artillery salute! Excess! It’s much longer and more elaborate than what we usually expect from fairy tales nowadays, but that’s part of what makes it so enticing and decadent.

“The Fairies” by Charles Perrault 

This fairy tale, also known as “Diamonds and Toads,” is so decadent that “with every word [the kind girl] speaks, a flower or a precious stone shall fall from [her] mouth”! Also decadent? The tale’s obsession with morality. Decadence is often understood as a kind of decline, an excess or aesthetic with a moral dimension, and “The Fairies” is all about evaluating a pair of sisters for their morality… and rewarding or punishing them accordingly! The kind, helpful sister is rewarded for her good deeds with an abundance of diamonds, while the rude, lazy sister is fated to have vipers and toads fall from her lips whenever she speaks for the rest of her life.

“The Birthday of the Infanta” by Oscar Wilde

We couldn’t possibly write this list without including a tale from the master of decadence, Oscar Wilde. While any of his tales could probably make this list, consider this description of the sumptuous outfit of the Infanta herself in his tale “The Birthday of the Infanta”: “Her robe was of gray satin, the skirt and the wide puffed sleeves heavily embroidered with silver, and the stiff corset studded with rows of fine pearls. Two tiny slippers with big pink rosettes peeped out beneath her dress as she walked. Pink and pearl was her great gauze fan, and in her hair, which like an aureole of faded gold stood out stiffly round her pale little face, she had a beautiful white rose.” Pure opulence! The Infanta’s elegance, of course, conceals a heartless nature the reader only truly understands at the end of the story. “The Nightingale” by Hans Christian Andersen – Andersen’s tales are typically well known for their grim tragedies, not their decadence, but we think his story “The Nightingale” deserves a spot on this list. In the story, a wealthy emperor, with all the riches he can imagine, becomes enamored with the song of the simple nightingale. Instead of being happy with what he has, however, his attention shifts to a mechanical nightingale, “an artificial nightingale most like the real one except that it was encrusted with diamonds, rubies, and sapphires.” Believing the fancy version to be far superior to the original, the emperor realizes his mistake only on his deathbed—an example of the dangers of decadence gone too far!

And one last recommendation:

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

The fairy-tale retellings in Angela Carter’s collection The Bloody Chamber are the most truly decadent fairy tales we know. They are awash with an overripe luxury that has already begun to crumble and decline, yet still holds a spellbinding power. In “The Tiger’s Bride,” a retelling of “Beauty and the Beast,” the unnamed narrator describes arriving in the south after a life spent in the chilly north, saying, “Everything flowers; no harsh wind stirs the voluptuous air. The sun spills fruit for you. And the deathly, sensual lethargy of the sweet South infects the starved brain; it gasps: ‘Luxury! more luxury!’ But then the snow comes, you cannot escape it.” In her “Sleeping Beauty” tale, “The Lady of the House of Love,” the vampiric sleeping maiden lives in a ruined chateau whose decaying splendor only enhances the maiden’s unnatural beauty. These fairy tales are a gorgeous, entrancing exploration of decadence, so grab a copy and a goblet, curl up by a warm fire, and prepare to lose yourself in their magic.

What tales do you think are the most decadent? Are there any lavish descriptions that have taken root permanently in your imagination?

BY SARA CLETO AND BRITTANY WARMAN

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You’ve felt it when you’ve stood at the edge of the ocean, the sand pulling away from your feet with the tide. You’ve felt it at twilight, when the horizon goes pink and electric and then dims as the fireflies light up the sky.

You’ve even felt it each time you open your front door or press your nose to a cold windowpane.

Liminality.

Folklorists use the word liminality to talk about rites of passage and the ambiguity you feel when you’re halfway through them. You don’t have your pre-ritual status anymore, but you haven’t completed the transition to what you’re becoming yet either. Think of the couple halfway through a wedding ceremony—they’re not yet married, but they’re not exactly single anymore. Or think of students midway through their graduation ceremony, before they’ve moved the tassel on their fetching headwear or thrown said headwear high into the air. For that brief time, they’re caught between student and graduate, a metamorphosis in progress. They’re in liminal space.

The concept of liminality has been around since the beginning of the 20th century, but anthropologist Victor Turner is the one who really dialed it in with his essay “Liminality and Communitas.” He says that those in liminal space are “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony.” They exist, Turner says, in a “realm of pure possibility.”

More broadly, liminality is about thresholds and transformation. It’s when the moment of change crystallizes in the air, in your body, and in the world around you. Certain places—doorways, ruins, staircases, portals—frequently take on an air of the liminal. And liminal spaces are where magic happens.

Gateways between worlds, doorways, ruins, wherever you happen to be standing listening to the chimes of midnight as one day shifts to the next—these are our most potent places of enchantment. Fairyland, a certain enchanted wardrobe, the River Styx … any place that can hold multiple possibilities and aid transformation is a magical, liminal space.

Many of our fairy-tale and mythic heroines are steeped in liminality. Sleeping Beauty and Snow White hover for years in a twilight space that is neither life nor death but a deep and liminal sleep. Persephone, the goddess of spring and queen of the underworld, is able to move between the realms of the living and the dead, between seasons, and between the branches of her family. Persephone’s enduring popularity is, we think, largely due to her liminality. She can be a goth girl in a flower crown, the seed of possibility, a queen of multiple realms, and a way to encompass many, sometimes conflicting, desires.

Revel in the liminal spaces. Find them and linger. Watch the sun set, throw a window wide, make a wish at midnight, and dance in fallen autumn leaves. Read a tale about Persephone and enjoy a stolen nap. It is in these places, these times, where magic is waiting for you.

By Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman

“She was tall; —a queen might wear Such a proud imperial air;
She was tall, yet when unbound, Swept her bright hair to the ground,
Glittering like the gold you see
On a young laburnum tree.
Yet her eyes were dark as night, Melancholy as moonlight,
With the fierce and wilder ray
Of a meteor on its ray.”
From “The Fairy of the Fountains” by Letitia Elizabeth Landon

 

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When most people think about the great Romantic poets, six names come to mind—William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Keats. They are the big six, the canon, the names you’re most likely to find if you pick up a book entitled The Romantics. They’re also all men. What you’re less likely to find is the work of a brilliant woman named Letitia Elizabeth Landon. She was prolific, celebrated, even iconic—and she and her dazzling poetry have been all but erased from history.

Landon, who went by the pen name L.E.L., is commonly referred to as the Female Byron. Why? Because her work was wildly popular in her time—some say she was even more popular than Byron himself! Landon was a celebrity: mysterious, beautiful, witty, and clever. In their introduction to her Selected Writings, Jerome McGann and Daniel Riess go so far as to describe her as “a legendary figure of 19th century British culture,” and it’s hard to argue with them. She inspired love, hatred, jealousy, and even conspiracy theories.

Born in Knightsbridge, England, in 1802, Landon began publishing her poems when she was still a teenager. Her poetry was unapologetically feminine, full of flowers, birds, fairies, and distinctly female voices. She was also a savvy creator. Because her family largely depended on her poetry sales to survive, she was keenly attuned to what would sell, often putting more complex work aside in favor of the kind of sweet, simple poetry meant for annuals and gift books. Ironically the fact that she was smart enough to play to her market contributed to the dismissal of the poet and her work as “sentimental” and “unsophisticated” for more than a century.

More recently, however, scholars and poets have started to remember—and admire—L.E.L. Even the poems long criticized for their overtly feminine qualities have started to garner more interest. Some contemporary scholars now argue that her poetry frequently reveals a proto-feminist outlook that enriches our vision of the Romantics and the 19th century. Because Landon was particularly fascinated by magic and romance, her work also includes some of the earliest reworkings of traditional stories. And she often tells them through the eyes of silenced, forgotten, or maligned female figures. For example, Landon’s poem “The Fairy of the Fountains” (1835), first penned for a lighthearted Christmas gift book, has captured folklorists’ attention.

“The Fairy of the Fountains” is a reimagining of the story of the fairy Melusine, a tale you might already know, from her own perspective. The story exists in a few different variations, but it usually goes that a fairy falls in love with a human knight. She says she’ll marry him only on the condition that she must always be alone on the seventh day of the week. Of course, the knight grows curious, and then suspicious. When he breaks the taboo and spies on his wife, he learns that she has the lower body of a snake. Sometimes Melusine is furious at his betrayal and disappears, cursing him. Sometimes it is revealed that she herself is under a curse and must leave him now that he knows her secret, even though she wants to stay.

Though many Romantic poets take up the character of the femme fatale supernatural woman—think Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” or Coleridge’s “Christabel”—Landon’s treatment of the subject is far more sympathetic than any of the others. While Keats’s “faery’s child” seduces a knight to his doom and Coleridge’s Geraldine plots the downfall of a kingdom, Landon’s vision of Melusine transforms her from a stereotypical monster to the heroine of the story. Though Melusine’s body is monstrous, the fairy woman is revealed in Landon’s poem to be a complex, powerful, and fully realized woman with an amazing depth of emotions. Landon encourages her readers to feel pity for Melusine and even solidarity with her—not fear. In the period she was writing, this was an unconventional and enormously brave choice.

Landon died in Africa in 1838, only thirty-six years old, under mysterious circumstances that only added to her legend in her own time. Though she spent many years in relative obscurity, times are changing, and her star is rising. Soon, we hope L.E.L. and her poetry will claim their rightful place among the great Romantics.

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Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman are folklorists, authors, and teachers, as well as co-founders of The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic, which you can read more about at carterhaughschool.com.

Feature Image: CoralAntlerCreative:shutterstock.com

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BY SARA CLETO AND BRITTANY WARMAN

We were both in our twenties before we realized we’d been making altars all our lives. Instinctively, we cultivated tiny altars in the corners of our childhood bedrooms, on autumnal mantels, or even in our backyards. Altars are small, magical spaces filled with meaningful objects, and they can be dedicated to spirit, self, creativity, communication, and so much more. But because we’d only ever heard of altars in the context of religion, we didn’t realize what we were doing! When we finally heard a dear mentor describe how altar makers would piece together photographs and pictures, mementos and knickknacks, natural materials and sacred objects to make something truly special, even divine, a light bulb went off in our heads. As folklorist and witch-queen extraordinaire Kay Turner would say, “the very heart of altar making is a woman’s daily choice to engage with the sacred on her own terms.”

Personal altars are celebrations of whatever the maker holds most dear. They express something deeply intimate about the self and connect that expression to otherworlds, be they spiritual, emotional, creative, or otherwise. Many altars are deeply entwined with spirituality, but that doesn’t always have to be the case. For example, the author Erin Morgenstern makes an altar for each book she writes, gathering special objects she gives symbolic meaning to that are somehow related to her work in progress.

Personal altars have been around for centuries, and they appear all over the world. The best part is that anyone can make them! Should you wish to join this truly magical tradition, here are a few of our favorite tips for making a beautiful altar in your own backyard:

• Ask yourself what you want your personal altar to be about. Set your intention and keep it in mind throughout the process. Do you want to honor a particular spirit or season? Commemorate a loved one? Celebrate your creative practice?

• Embrace the spirit of the place where you are creating. If you live in Florida, work with palm trees and sand. If you’re already getting some snow, let the pine trees guide you.

• If you don’t know where to start, choose one object that has intense personal meaning to you—something that lights you up when you look at it and that anchors you in what you want to honor.

• Welcome evanescence. The natural world is in constant flux, and wind, rain, or even a whole lot of sunlight can change your altar. And that’s part of its beauty.

• Keep all the senses in mind, not just what you can see. How might you incorporate touch? Smell? Sound? Taste?

• Let your intuition guide you. There’s no wrong way to make an altar, and every personal altar is different. Let yours be a reflection of your heart without worrying about how it looks to anyone else.

• Try to draw from each of the four main elements—earth, air, water, and fire. For example, a single flower might represent the earth, a found butterfly wing could stand in for air, you can fill a bowl with water, and light a candle for fire. Let each sing to you in its own way.

• Is there something that you’re considering including in your altar … but you’re hesitating because it seems too weird?Maybe it’s a She-Ra action-figure? Or a bug toy with googly eyes that brings you joy? Include it! It’s meant to be there. Your “weird” is part of your unique magic.

• Don’t be afraid to bring a few things outside that usually live inside—a bit of fabric you don’t mind getting wet might provide just the right touch of color.

• Look for beauty in unexpected places. A rough bit of rock or a torn leaf may not seem like much at first glance, but look closer. There is a story there, and maybe it’s just the story your altar needs. When it comes right down to it, altars are magic. They are ways of making the deepest parts of your heart visible and connecting you to what you love and value most. If you’ve never made one before, give it a shot—you might be surprised at what you discover.