Eldritch: Lessons 010

Oh my goodness guys, I’m so lucky that power stayed on in my area… The snow storms knocked people’s power out for days in some places around here.  However, I lucked out, and that means I was able to get the comic done on time, and even manage to clean up some little messes here and there.

So, um… I’m sorry if the various colored word-bubbles are distracting.  I do actually have a reason for doing it, and it’s based upon a couple of things… one of which I’m not going to talk about quite yet, but the other is a term I heard in Music Appreciation class back when I was in college: Tone Color.  This term refers to the qualities of a sound that distinguishes it from other sounds, even when they’re emitting the same musical pitch… For instance, the difference in sound between someone playing a C note on a flute, and someone singing a C note.  While timbre means the same thing, really, Tone Color caught my imagination as an artist, because one of my projects in Color Theory was to interpret a song into shape and color. 

Now… regarding astral projection and fetches…  Since America is “The Melting Pot” I’ve combined elements of both Native traditions and European ones.  For instance, in Native traditions, I don’t recall ever reading about someone who is an actual spirit guide, rather than people having them around as separate entities. However, in Europe, the concept of the Fetch developed.  Now, I’ve seen this term be used to mean a few different things, however, in some tales, the Fetch is something of an astral duplicate, or even simply the form the spirit takes when it leaves the body for a while. (For more information on this, please see Claude Lecouteux’s Witches, Werewolves and Fairies). Oftentimes, should these Fetches be corporeal, as opposed to ethereal, then they could be injured, and the same injury would appear on the physical body of the person to whom the fetch belonged.  In many of these stories involving the spirit leaving the body and wandering about for a while, the spirit takes the form of an animal, like a mouse, or a butterfly… or, In Dylan’s case, a coyote.  This way, I can have a spiritual creature that is still anchored to an actual, physical person, so there’s still that material sort of interaction and familiarity, but it also allows me to include a Native belief and character I’m quite fond of.  Dylan isn’t quiiiite the trickster-fool of myth… but then again, his advice did lead Faith to folly earlier, and somehow, that folly not only ended up being okay, but lead her to turn to those who could help her.  I’m sort of going about this in a round-about way, I suppose.

Something, randomly, that I find interesting, is just how similar the Fetch is to our modern term of Astral Projection.  The more I and others look into myth, the more and more I see the same elements crop up over and over again (A la Campbells’ Hero With a Thousand Faces).For instance, in Brakius’s Historia Norwegiae, Johann Frischius tells the tale of a Laplander who could bring back news from far away, by sending his spirit out and visiting far-off places.  This sounds remarkably simplar to our modern Remote Veiwers.  And of course, at one time, belief in the Fae Folk was common… they could appear as glowing lights in the night, and sometimes whisked people away.  More than one author has noticed the strange similarity to modern time’s aliens. I just find it interesting how it appears that we keep reinventing the same supernatural phenomena to suit the interests and terms of the day.