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Apr. 27th, 2007 10:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nonionayLast night, I was at the university library until 11pm reading fairy stories. The weirdest one I read was a Cornish tale about Tregeagle. Tregeagle was a really, really bad guy, and when he died, he knew he was going to hell. So he paid a bunch of priests to pray for him. After he died, his ghost was called in to witness at this guys' trial. (There were a bunch of stories of priests summoning ghosts with a circle and all that.)
So now there's this nervous ghost loitering in the courtroom, terrified these demons are going to get him. The townspeople, being good people who don't want to see anyone, even an evil jerk like Tregeagle go to Hell, come up with a solution. Sort of. They cast a spell on him, so that he has to empty the water of a bottomless pool with a limpet shell with a hole in it. When he's done, he can be free. Or something like that. And as long as he's doing it, the demons can't get him. The story goes on with him doing his task for a while, freaking out, running off with demons on his tail, harrassing villlagers by being whiny and noisy, (NIMBY!) getting assigned a new task, over and over, until he finally gets sent to Land's End, where there's nobody to bother, and he can move sand around for all eternity.
Weird story. It manages to embody everything that was good and bad about old Catholicism. The theology alone would get them screamed at by protestants. Mortals co-opting the will of god, anyone? The necromancer priests would probably get themselves burned by Inquisition-age priests. Not to mention that, really, how valid is the word of a criminal ghost in a court of law?
But this is Cornwall, where all that crap hadn't seeped in yet.
Necromancer priests!
So now there's this nervous ghost loitering in the courtroom, terrified these demons are going to get him. The townspeople, being good people who don't want to see anyone, even an evil jerk like Tregeagle go to Hell, come up with a solution. Sort of. They cast a spell on him, so that he has to empty the water of a bottomless pool with a limpet shell with a hole in it. When he's done, he can be free. Or something like that. And as long as he's doing it, the demons can't get him. The story goes on with him doing his task for a while, freaking out, running off with demons on his tail, harrassing villlagers by being whiny and noisy, (NIMBY!) getting assigned a new task, over and over, until he finally gets sent to Land's End, where there's nobody to bother, and he can move sand around for all eternity.
Weird story. It manages to embody everything that was good and bad about old Catholicism. The theology alone would get them screamed at by protestants. Mortals co-opting the will of god, anyone? The necromancer priests would probably get themselves burned by Inquisition-age priests. Not to mention that, really, how valid is the word of a criminal ghost in a court of law?
But this is Cornwall, where all that crap hadn't seeped in yet.
Necromancer priests!
