Wolf Moon? What Wolf Moon?

As America got all excited about the Super Wolf Blood Moon, I, the resident pedant, asked myself, "In what culture is the January moon called the Wolf Moon anyway?" I mean, I'm a huge folklore nerd, and I can't remember hearing of the Wolf Moon before.

It isn't Germanic; the old German calendars call this either "Winter Month" or "After Yule." It isn't Celtic. It isn't Roman or Greek or Chinese.

All the popular web sites ginning up enthusiasm for the Super Wolf Blood Moon refer to the Old Farmer's Almanac, which is a dubious source but does include some old American lore drawn from Indians. American Indians certainly did name the moons. However, none of the versions I am familiar with have a Wolf Moon in the winter. Most of the eastern tribes called it something like Ice or Cold or the Sun is Weak or The Moon of Staying Inside. So I did a bit of searching and found this site that lists a whole bunch of Native American calendars (e.g., Choctaw, Moon When the Old Fellow Spreads the Brush; Pueblo, Moon of the Cedar Dust Wind), but precious little about wolves. The Potawotami call the moon after midwinter the Bear Moon, I suppose because that was when they hunted hibernating black bears; in other calendars, and the ethnography of the Cherokee, that is February. The only calendar on this site that mentions wolves is a generic "Sioux" list that has Wolves Run Together for January, but since Sioux is a name for a language family, not a particular tribe or tradition (Lakota is Hard Moon), I am skeptical of the provenance.

This astronomy site says Wolf Moon is Ojibwa, but all the other sources I have found say their January moon was called The Great Spirit Moon, so again I am dubious.

I am not denying that some Native people somewhere, sometime called the January moon the Wolf Moon, but obviously it was not the most common name. Many more people named this month for its most obvious characteristic, the temperature. This whole business of the Wolf Moon seems to have been gotten up by nineteenth-century publishers to sell almanacs.

Hmph.

Shamanism, Daoism, and the Kargaly Diadem

The Kargaly Diadem is a magnificent golden artifact from a nomad tomb in the Tian Shan region of Kazakhstan. In 1939 it was "found by chance in a heavily disturbed burial in a crevice in the Kargaly valley." In 2012 it was part of "Nomads and Networks," a traveling exhibit of objects from Kazakh museums that toured the US and Europe. Oddly the museums hosting that exhibit did not feature it among the highlights you can see online, and the Times also ignored it. I discovered it last month while perusing a Tumblr of random beautiful objects. It dates to between 200 BCE and 100 CE.

What got me about this diadem is this figure. What is that? It looks like a sprite from one of the Victorian fairy books. And riding a dragon? Did that action ever appear in art before 1880?

And there are more such figures on the diadem. Who are these mysterious beings riding deer and goats through this fantastic forest?

I searched around online but all I could find were a couple of references to the catalog for the Nomads and Networks exhibition. Not seeing any alternative, I ordered a copy, and it came today. It is magnificent and full of strange lore.

The catalog told me that Chinese sources of the Han Dynasty make frequent mention of the Wusun, a nomadic people who were often Chinese allies against more hostile tribes such as the Xiongnu (Huns). The tombs in the Kargaly Valley show strong Chinese influence and may represent the Wusun leadership. In 105 BCE a Han princess married the Wusun king, taking with her "imperial carriages, clothing, and equipment for royal use, and a rich store of gifts," perhaps including jewelry like this diadem. (Illustration shows a gold plaque from the Tenlik Mound, thought to be a Wusun burial.)

The catalog calls the sprites "winged furry creatures," and it suggests that they resemble Yuren, "winged people", from the art of Han China. The Yuren were one species of Xian, "Immortals," beings who populate heaven. This sent me scurrying around the web looking for sources on the Yuren. I eventually found just what I was looking for, a 2011 article by Leslie Wallace titled "Betwixt and Between: Depictions of Immortals (Xian) in Eastern Han Tomb Reliefs," which you can find on JStor. Sadly the illustrations are these low-resolution black and white things, but the text is marvelous.

Wallace writes:

Immortals (xian 仙) are depicted as feathered sprite-like or dragon- or snake-tailed figures climbing stylized mountains or floating in swirling cloudscapes on tomb reliefs from the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE). These images represent immortals as transient figures moving through an intermediate realm where they are often joined by deer, tigers, dragons, birds, heavenly horses (tianma 天馬), and other animals. 

Wallace

analyzes the physical hybridity of immortals, their transitory existence, and their role as shaman-like intermediaries, demonstrating that Eastern Han representations of immortals repeatedly emphasize their liminal nature and close connection to the animal world. Their position betwixt and between physical forms and realms of existence was the basis of their spiritual power, enabling them to assist the deceased in their transcendent journey to paradise.

There is a Han encyclopedia called Shanhaijing, "Classics of Mountains and Seas", which seems to be the Chinese version of Pliny the Elder. It describes several classes of hybrid beings, including the Yuimin or "feathered people."

The earliest textual  source describing immortals as winged creatures is found in Yuan Yu, "The Far-Off Journey," a poem from the famous Chuci or "Songs of the South", a compendium first written down around 100 BCE.

Having heard this precious teaching I departed,
And swiftly prepared to start on my journey.
I met the winged ones on the hill of Cinnabar;
I tarried in the ancient land of Immortality.
In the morning I washed my hair in the Valley of the Dawn,
In the evening I dried myself on the shores of heaven.

The early Daoist immortals were much like ancient shamans. (Modern illustration above.) They flew through the air, often mounted on animals like these dragons; they journeyed to heaven and the land of the dead; their travels were often fueled by sacred mushrooms. On their journeys they met many strange peoples, including the Yuren, whose prominence in tomb art suggests that they inhabited the borderlands of death through which all souls passed.

More Chuci:

I visited Fu Yue on a dragon's back,
Joined in marriage with the Weaving Maiden,
Lifted up Heaven's Net to capture evil,
Drew the Bow of Heaven to shoot at wickedness,
Followed the Immortals fluttering through the sky,
Ate of the Primal Essence to prolong my life.

So from this mountain tomb comes a remarkable object indeed, a golden crown woven with spirit beings from the mystic realms where shamans wandered. Its inspiration is Chinese, but it may actually have been made on the Steppes, which means that Wusun artisans shared this lore with the Chinese. Perhaps they had a different interpretation of these beings from the Shamanistic netherworld, but then again perhaps their new queen explained it all to them. Was she a priestess herself, a wanderer in those lands? Surely whoever wore this diadem engaged in rites related to those shadow realms even if she did not journey there herself. But it is more fun to imagine the queen or her daughters donning this crown as they inhaled the sacred smoke or chewed the sacred mushrooms, preparing for the long journey into the twilight lands in search of wisdom, or to guide lost souls toward their final homes.

Ghosts have been Clanking Chains for a Long Time

Pliny the Younger (61-113 AD), Epistles 7.27.5-12

There was a house at Athens that was large and roomy, but infamous for its pernicious atmosphere. Through the silence of the night the sound of iron would come, and, if you listened more keenly, the clanking of chains would echo, first at a distance, then near at hand. Soon a phantom would appear- an old man worn away with starvation and squalor, his beard long, his hair bristling; he bore fetters on his feet and chains on his hands, which he would shake. Then the inhabitants would spend gloomy, ill-omened nights awake in fear; sickness would follow on their wakefulness, and then, as their dread swelled, finally death would come. For even during the day, although the apparition had departed, the memory of it would pass before their eyes, and their fear lasted longer than the fear’s causes.

Subsequently the house was deserted and condemned to emptiness, given over entirely to that monstrous apparition; nevertheless it was advertised, in case someone ignorant of so great an evil should wish to purchase or rent it.

Words for Things Best Unmentioned

Linguists have a term, "taboo deformation," for words people use instead of the proper one when the thing to be named is best left unmentioned:

A great example of this is the word “bear,” in English. “Bear” is not the true name of the bear. That name, which I am free to use because the only bear near where I live is the decidedly unthreatening American black bear, is h₂ŕ̥tḱos. Or at least it was in Proto-Indo-European, the hypothesized base language for languages including English, French, Hindi, and Russian. The bear, along with the wolf, was the scariest and most dangerous animal in the northern areas where Proto-Indo-European was spoken. “Because bears were so bad, you didn’t want to talk about them directly, so you referred to them in an oblique way,” says linguist Andrew Byrd.

H₂ŕ̥tḱos, which is pronounced with a lot of guttural noises, became the basis for a bunch of other words. “Arctic,” for example, which probably means something like “land of the bear.” Same with Arthur, a name probably constructed to snag some of the bear’s power. But in Germanic languages, the bear is called…bear. Or something similar. (In German, it’s Bär.) The predominant theory is that this name came from a simple description, meaning “the brown one.”

In Slavic languages, the descriptions got even better: the Russian word for bear is medved, which means “honey eater.” These names weren’t done to be cute; they were created out of fear.

It’s worth noting that not everyone was that scared of bears. Some languages allowed the true name of the bear to evolve in a normal fashion with minor changes; the Greek name was arktos, the Latin ursos. Still the true name. Today in French, it’s ours, and in Spanish it’s oso. The bear simply wasn’t that big of a threat in the warmer climes of Romance language speakers, so they didn’t bother being scared of its true name.

More Nonsense about the Number 13

Jonah Goldberg provides a sad roundup of false theories about why the number 13 is unlucky:

Dossey traces the fear of 13 to a Norse myth about 12 gods having a dinner party at Valhalla, their heaven. In walked the uninvited 13th guest, the mischievous Loki. Once there, Loki arranged for Hoder, the blind god of darkness, to shoot Balder the Beautiful, the god of joy and gladness, with a mistletoe-tipped arrow.

"Balder died and the whole Earth got dark. The whole Earth mourned. It was a bad, unlucky day," said Dossey. From that moment on, the number 13 has been considered ominous and foreboding.

There is also a biblical reference to the unlucky number 13. Judas, the apostle who betrayed Jesus, was the 13th guest to the Last Supper.

Meanwhile, in ancient Rome, witches reportedly gathered in groups of 12. The 13th was believed to be the devil.

Thomas Fernsler, an associate policy scientist in the Mathematics and Science Education Resource Center at the University of Delaware in Newark, said the number 13 suffers because of its position after 12.

According to Fernsler, numerologists consider 12 a "complete" number. There are 12 months in a year, 12 signs of the zodiac, 12 gods of Olympus, 12 labors of Hercules, 12 tribes of Israel, and 12 apostles of Jesus.

In exceeding 12 by 1, Fernsler said 13's association with bad luck "has to do with just being a little beyond completeness. The number becomes restless or squirmy."

No, really, it does not. Jonah, I thought better of you than this. The real explanation is not hard to find. Heck, it's on wikipedia.

Goldberg compounds the problem by linking to that awful Mental Floss "Thirteen reasons people think the number 13 is unlucky" article, which has 13 more incorrect explanations.

Sigh. I suppose I'm going to be fighting this one for the rest of my life, just like pepper and rotten food.

Folk Art from the Winterthur Museum

The Winterthur Museum in Delaware's Brandywine Valley has an amazing collection of Fraktur, that is, drawings on paper by Pennsylvania Germans. I found this one on pinterest with no source and eventually traced it back to Winterthur, which started me on this project. It is by Bernhard Misson, a fraktur artist and schoolmaster who taught in Bucks County. It dates to 1800-1825.

A work by the "Rockhill Artist," 1830-1850.

A baptismal certificate from 1798. Here you can really see that this tradition draws on medieval art, especially in the faces of the lions and the birds at the bottom. I suppose the influence came from church painting rather than manuscripts.

Anonymous, 1820-1840. I don't love the human figures in this naive style, and of course a lot of it is Christian and very didactic. But I love the color, the animals, and the abstract forms.

This is not fraktur but a fabric drawing, made with swatches of cloth, but obviously in the same tradition.

Not a tame unicorn. 1795-1830. Notice what the artist has done with the heraldic family tree.

Anonymous, 1800-1820. Many, many more in the museum's online collection.

Do Australian Raptors Spread Fires?

This is fascinating:

When the dry season spreads over the tropical savannas of Australia’s Northern Territories, rangers start watching for the so-called firehawks: flocks of black kites, whistling kites and brown falcons that hunt near bushfires, snapping up small animals flushed out by the smoke and sparks.

If a fire begins to flicker out, locals claim, some of the birds will keep it going by carrying burning sticks to new locations.

“We get a lot of humbug” from the birds, said Robert Redford, a ranger who is an Aboriginal Australian. “We make firebreaks, and sometimes that bird makes another fire and he makes a lot of trouble.”

“He do a lot of damage for us sometimes, and rangers have a hard time firefighting with all that.” . . .

Now two scientists have published a compendium of these stories:

Over the course of two years, Bob Gosford, an ornithologist, and Mark Bonta, an assistant professor of earth sciences at Penn State Altoona, and their colleagues team collected older ethnographic reports and conducted detailed interviews with six eyewitnesses, including Aboriginal firefighters and academics.

They told stories of raptors stealing burning twigs from cook fires and transporting the brands up to a kilometer (about a half mile) away. One firefighter reported seeing a flock spread a wildfire all the way up a small valley.

A cattle station caretaker described a small group of raptors moving a fire front across a river, resulting in a blaze that wiped out much of the station infrastructure.

I love this sort of folklore. Sometimes it turns out to be true, and sometimes not. Nobody has yet posted a clear video of a hawk doing this, so for now it is best to be cautious. You can imagine why frustrated firefighters would try to blame the birds that always hover around fires for making their jobs harder. But to me this seems well within the intelligence of birds, so I don't see why it couldn't be true.

Stonehenge Backwards

Everybody knows that Stonehenge points toward the midsummer sunrise. Which it does, viewed from a certain angle. In the computer rendering above, the midsummer sunrise is along the line extending toward the upper right.

But what if the monument actually pointed in the other direction? Because if you follow the line that extends toward the lower left, that points toward the midwinter sunset. (Isn't astronomy cool? No wonder people used to be so obsessed with it.) This photograph of a model shows how impressive it might have been to watch that sunset through the tallest trilithon.

There is other evidence that Stonehenge was mainly a midwinter temple. Deposits of sheep and cow bones from feasting have been found nearby, and they seem to have been butchered in winter, not summer. The other grand neolithic monuments of the region (e.g., Newgrange in Ireland) are generally focused on midwinter astronomy.

Plus, the European tradition as a whole just puts a lot more emphasis on the midwinter solstice than midsummer; compare Christmas to St. John's Day or July 4th to get the general idea.

Obviously we don't know and may never, and anyway the monument could equally well serve both functions. But sometimes I find it fascinating  to turn  things around and look at them from the opposite direction.

Pygmies and Cranes

This little Roman mosaic appeared on the auction market last month. It depicts a dwarf wrestling a crane, one of my favorite ancient obscurities. The oldest mention of this theme in in the Iliad:

And when each of them was marshaled with their leaders,
the Trojans went with a shriek and a war-cry,
like birds, just as the shriek of cranes arises in the sky,
the ones who, fleeing storm and endless downpour,
fly with a shriek over the streams of Okeanos
bringing slaughter and death to Pygmy men;
high in the air, they provoke dread strife;
but the Achaeans went in silence, infused with might,
eager in their hearts to protect one another.

Which is interesting partly because this passages uses the battle of pygmies and cranes to explain something else, as if the battle of pygmies and cranes were a familiar thing like a storm or the other natural phenomenon that Homer used in his similes.

There are many depictions in ancient art; this is the famous Francois vase, dating to around 560 BCE and signed by the painter Kleitias. Notice that the "pygmies" are small but well-proportioned men, not dwarfs as in the later Roman examples. There are several other depictions of them riding goats.

That great repository of ancient fake news, Pliny's Natural History, says this:

Beyond these in the most outlying mountain region we are told of the Three-Span (Trispithami) Pygmae who do not exceed three spans, that is, twenty-seven inches, in height; the climate is healthy and always spring-like, as it is protected on the north by a range of mountains; this tribe Homer has also recorded as being beset by cranes. It is reported that in springtime their entire band, mounted on the backs of rams and she-goats and armed with arrows, goes in a body down to the sea and eats the cranes' eggs and chickens, and that this outing occupies three months; and that otherwise they could not protect themselves against the flocks of cranes would grow up; and that their houses are made of mud and feathers and egg-shells. Aristotle says that the Pygmies live in caves, but in the rest of this statement about them he agrees with the other authorities

The battle of pygmies and cranes is a very weird notion, and I have never come across any sort of explanation for it. But it must be very ancient, since it is known in China and North America as well as Europe. This scholarly article, dense with Greek and words that look English but make no more sense to me than the Greek does, connects Homer's simile to a dance done in early Athens in which the dancers imitated cranes. I am unconvinced, but if it were true that would be kind of cool, because crane dances have been done by people around the world from Lapland to Australia.

I suppose it doesn't really have to mean anything; maybe it's just a strange story that catches people's imagination, as it has caught mine, and thus got remembered. But it seems to have endured for 13,000 years, since before people crossed to the new world, so I wonder.

Foundations Laid in Human Sacrifice

Korean archaeologists have reported finding two skeletons dating from the 5th century CE under the walls of the Wolseong, or Moon Castle, in Gyeongju in South Korea, the capital of the former Silla kingdom. They appear to be victims of human sacrifice. According to the press release, such foundation sacrifices are widely attested in Korean folklore, but this is the first archaeological evidence.

It fascinates me that stories about this practice are so widespread. It is said to have been done for the walls of Copenhagen and the temples of the Maya, for Stonehenge and Great Zimbabwe, for the Kremlin in Moscow and the dikes of Holland. Strasbourg Cathedral is supposed to have required the sacrifice of two brothers, Cologne Cathedral seven sisters. For the Aztec such numbers would have been pathetically inadequate; their great temple was supported by the sacrifice of at least 10,000 victims. In Japan it was called Hitobashira (人柱 ), the human pillar.

A sacrificial victim was found under the walls of Gezer in Palestine, one of the most ancient stone cities, and another at Megiddo where the great battle of Armageddon was prophesied to be fought. The archaeologists who found these burials were not surprised, because several such sacrifices are described in the Bible. After he destroyed the city, Joshua said, "Cursed be the man that riseth up before the Lord and buildeth the city of Jericho; he shall lay the foundation thereof in his firstborn, and set up the gates in his youngest son." A little further on the story tells us that the man who rebuilt the city did did exactly that, sacrificing his eldest and youngest sons to make the city safe from God's wrath. When the walls of Megiddo were rebuilt in Byzantine times the builders included several small silver statues of men within the masonry, a distant echo of the original practice.

Nor was this limited to people who built in stone; Northwest Coast Indians were said to have buried a slave beneath the center post of every great house, and the Maori of New Zealand had a saying that every building of importance stands on a sacrifice.

In both Europe and Japan (at least) many buildings are said to be haunted by the ghosts of these victims. The brothers Grimm collected such a story about the castle of Höxter. Maruoka Castle in Japan is haunted by the ghost of the one-eyed woman who was sacrificed to made the castle endure.

Why? The most common explanation given by old-school anthropologists was that every place belongs to some spirit that dwells there, and which must be appeased by a gift to allow any building to take place. Thus traditional Bedouin used to pour a little sheep's blood on the ground before erecting a tent, saying, "Permission, O possessor of this place."

I wonder if it might have something to do with the ancient habit of building temples or sanctuaries around the graves of leaders, which might have made foundation on a grave seem natural.

At any rate these stories are amazingly widespread and common, and archaeology provides evidence that they rest on a real and grim history.

Staigue Stone Fort

In Kerry, near the southwestern tip of Ireland, not far from the village of Sneem, at the head of a lovely valley running down to the sea, is the Iron Age stone fort of Staigue.

It was built between 300 and 400 CE and occupied through the glory days of pagan Ireland, the lost age of kings and druids, of chariot-riding heroes and famous lovers, of cattle raids and the bards who sang of them.

The stone walls are 4 m (13 ft) thick at the bottom and rise up to 5.5 m (18 ft) high in places; the interior of the enclosure is 27.4 m (90 ft) in diameter. Outside the wall is a ditch that is now 8 m (25 ft) wide and up to 1.8 m (5 ft) deep. There is only one entrance. Archaeologists turned up rather little when they investigated the interior, but they did find evidence of copper smelting.

Reconstruction of the fort that appears on the interpretive sign nearby. In places like this lived the famous kings of ancient Erin.

In 1815 it was being used as a cattle pen when the property was purchased by a certain F.C. Bland, who fell in love with it and may have made some repairs:

When the traveller…first approaches it, he experiences a sensation of disappointment…But when he enters it, he is struck with astonishment; and his imagination almost instantly transports him to distant ages lost in remote antiquity. He vainly endeavours to figure, in his ‘mind’s eye,’ the beings who erected it, their manners, habits, and costume; until, ‘lost and bewildered in the fruitless search,’ his mind returns to sober investigation, again to lapse into conjecture. This effect is not lost by familiarity—I have visited it a hundred times, and have always experienced the same sensation. 

Print by Robert O'Callaghan Newenham, 1830, part of a series on the ancient monuments of Ireland.

The place has long been the subject of folk tales. And it remains so, which I pass along because I regularly read that the Irish oral tradition is dying out, and it is not:

Recounting a folktale from the Caherciveen area, writer Sigerson Clifford described a football match between the fairies of Staigue and their counterparts in the similar stone fort of Cahergal.

“In the White Strand west of Cahergal the Good People used to play football matches in the bright moonlit nights of olden times…there was a man called Coneen Dannihy who heard the ree-raw and the roola-boola and the whistling one night when he was going home late from fishing, and off he marched to take a peep at them. It was a match between the Fairies of Cahergal and the Little People from Staigue Fort in Caherdonal, and Cahergal were two goals behind and it only wanting five minutes to full-time.”

As the story plays out, Coneen is recruited to play for the Cahergal team, and becomes the hero of the match for the fairies. But when his mother, fearful of the powers of the “little people,” conspired to make him late for the next match, he was struck mad by the fairies, “and stayed in the middle of the blankets for nine months, in spite of priest, midwife and doctor.” 

Quarantana, Widow Of Carnevale

One of Rod Dreher's readers spent Holy Week in Bari in southern Italy, where he took these pictures. He writes:

I asked a local what it was. And he called her a ‘Quarantana’. Apparently she’s Carnevale’s widow…they have a ‘funeral’ for Carnevale (represented as a fat man) on Ash Wednesday and the black-clad Widow (symbol of Lenten deprivation) gets hung up, carrying a spindle of thread (to represent the brevity of life), a fish (as traditionally no eating meat during Lent) and a piece of fruit (representing the coming spring) with feathers stuck in it (6 black ones for each week of Lent and one white one for Easter; one black feather gets plucked out each week).

Delightful.

Busojaras

Great article and set of photographs in the Times on the Hungarian festival of Busojaras, in which people dress up as demons to scare away winter:

The festival is rooted in the local Sokci community, an ethnographic group of mostly Croatian Slavs. According to legend, when the Ottomans occupied Hungary in the 16th century, the townspeople fled to the nearby marshlands where they met an old Sokci man who promised that they’d soon return to their homes. He told them to carve masks and prepare for battle. When the masked, sheepskin-clad townspeople reappeared in the midst of a winter storm, the Ottomans thought they were facing demons and fled before sunrise. As a result, Busojaras has come to symbolize a way to scare away winter itself — and it’s no longer just Sokci people who participate. Now, every February, tourists flood Mohacs to take in the spectacle.

Busos wear masks carved out of willow and dyed with animal blood; no two are the same. Groups made up of family and friends get together during the year to plan, and, during the festivities, eat, prep, costume and process together. The town council supports the festival by providing Buso groups with funding to assemble their elaborate costumes. “As a Buso, you cannot be recognizable,” said Aron Rozsahegyi, who has been part of the group since 1992. “Fully dressed, you feel this sense of freedom and the force of history rising within you.” Oliver Rozsahegyi, the group’s founder, works at a local auto repair shop, but he also carves masks in his free time. “I find that you can tell who has carved a certain mask because it always looks a little bit like the carver,” he said. (His own mask looks vaguely like him.)

Besides looking wild, the Busos also act wild, shouting and banging on things to make as much noise as possible, harassing spectators, and (a recent favorite) mocking anyone trying to take a selfie.

Busos crossing the Danube, part of the Hungarian ritual.

I love these traditions. Yes, they are now put on for tourists. But that does not mean the ancient meanings are lost. If you ask me what that meaning is, I answer that it has nothing to do with Hungarian history or the history of any particular place, and little with God or the gods. It is partly about the seasons, but more about what people feel when they mask their faces and dress up as demonic beings. This is from Charles Fréger's book on the whole European tradition of dressing up as Beast Men for Carnival or the New Year:

A man "assumes a dual personality," says Antonio Carneiro, who dresses as a devilish careto for Carnival in Podence, Portugal. "He becomes something mysterious."



The festival is about recognizing the different sorts of being we feel within in us, and that we see in the world around us: cruelty and kindness, hate and love, winter and summer. It is about experiencing, for a little while, a different identity and a different reality, one more tied to ancient archetypes than to the drab concerns of our daily lives.

American Folk Art

Fighting Cats, c. 1890.

Weathervane, c. 1850.

Odd Fellows Rods, carved wood, c. 1860.

Great Blue Heron, carved wood on metal stand, c. 1900.

Riding Goat, c. 1923.

The World of Work, c. 1940.

Found Object Rocking Chair, c. 1950.

All from The Michael and Julie Hall Collection of American Folk Art at the Milwaukee Art Museum