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Antlered Beasts

Kondoru

Beloved of Ra
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Dec 5, 2003
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Meaning Cervids.

Cant get them mixed up with anything else...I cannot tell you if `Horncraft` excludes Antlers though!

One naturalist said that if we had no Deer, then the idea of an animal that grows complex organs every year, then casts them, only to grow a more complex set would be pure sf!
 
The modern (creepypasta) incarnation of the wendigo has grown antlers – a feature not present in the folklore as far as I'm aware.

latest

 
Thats interesting.

I never thought about such a beast; always thought they were poor old bigfoot or an exiled human who had gained supernatural and feral powers?

(Why that didnt encourage people to get exiled I dont know?)

Obviously, if the Wendigo had extraordinary recuperative/regenerative powers it would need antlers in order to advertise them to potential threats.

Either that or its a sexual selection thingy...do Wendigos worry about sex?

Just wondering.
 
The modern (creepypasta) incarnation of the wendigo has grown antlers – a feature not present in the folklore as far as I'm aware. ...

This dis- or mis-association of antlers and / or other animal features to the wendigo runs deeper than Euro-derived New World folklore.

The Native American (primarily Algonquin-related) groups from which the wendigo stories came didn't characterize the wendigo as a material monster or cryptid at all.

Instead, the wendigo was consistently described in terms of a human possessed to eat human flesh - almost always explained as emerging during famine conditions but sometimes additionally glossed as resulting from influence (e.g. manipulation; curse) from an ephemeral spirit entity encountered in dreams or visions.

In the cases where such a spirit entity was allegedly involved this entity was sometimes characterized as being a, or a variant of a, particular animal's guardian or representative spirit.

The mutation of the wendigo spirit into a generalized Evil One motif, and further into an allegedly material monster / cryptid, occurred among the Euro-colonists and their descendants.

For the Native Americans the wendigo represented a form of human possession or psychosis. There were isolated cases or folkloric lineages in which Native American stories alluded to giants who killed and ate humans, but these were described as mythic / spirit entities (rather than material monsters or cryptids) who inspired or instilled the wendigo mania in ordinary humans.
 
I know next to nothing about the subject...Sanderson wrote something, -cant recall.

And a guy known as Grey Owl (A Fortean beast himself) was called the Wendigo by the father of an Indian girlfriend.

(He wanted her to go to a good school; not off trapping with a feral Englishman...)
 
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