Following in from my post Demons Incubi and Succubae another group of naughty and often horny supernaturals are spirits, faeries and ghosts.Simone Francis on Substack is a reader-supported publication.
Simone--I love reading these "behind the scenes" pieces about what influences your work. I'm on record as a fan of your preternatural/demonic stuff, which I addressed at length before. The realm of the faeries, ghosts and such is another grouping of beings rooted in myth and folklore, but I submit their link with literature--and the erotic specifically--is far more pronounced and accessible to modern audiences via the Great Romantics and traditional Gothic Horror and Romance (which are often so intertwined within the same work that they can't be distinguished--"Dracula" was considered a pornographic novel when Stoker released it (and I'm sure there are Philistines today--most likely here in the God-Fearing USA--who still think so), though that doesn't touch upon these creatures per se. As for Faeries having an erotic, seductive quality--to my mind, Yeats' immortal "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" fits the bill--the seductive being is actually some sort of vampiric being who has lured him with her charms, while sucking his life and soul from him, which he learns when he's crossed into her deadly realm, seeing the wilted shades of fellow victims. There's actually not much distance between the "faery" and the vampire as far as modus operandi when you get to the Romantics--they pretty much do the same thing--trick/seduce, lead to ruin. The vampiric faery is usually interchangeable with a female, the vampire with a male. Coleridge's "Christabel" comes to mind here.
But going back to the traditional folklore, you really wanted to stay on the good side of the "wee folk." The term "stroke" for a cerebro-vascular accident is rooted in the old folk belief of the "fairy stroke," the notion that if you were involved with fairies, elves, or similar beings, and crossed them--by deceit, or denying them rights to use your water or land, or even just being unkind to them when they were totally kind to you, these beings--chthonian and hence total masters of the magic and infernal arts (maybe because they were closer to the netherworld?)--could "strike" you with a wasting or sudden paralysis--taking away your speech and movement (which, obviously, happens in stroke victims)--or even your life. And of course, they could just screw with your crops, kill your cattle, or take your newborn child and exchange one of their own--the old "changeling" tale.
Your going back to traditional myth and folklore for some of your work--to find erotic foils for your human characters, is a brilliant take on the genre. I'm also grateful that you haven't used space aliens--please don't! You're one of the most polished and elegant purveyors of erotica out there, Simone, and it's because of workmanship and your distinctive, "otherwordly" style, which pierces the veil between the visible and invisible realms, and I think that stylistic choices like yours represent is a revival of storytelling that's intrinsically human--an archetypal belief that the erotic and spiritual realms are neither mutually exclusive, nor adversarial moral "teams" representative of Good and Evil locked in and eternal dualistic struggle of neurotic fear. Just another way of viewing "Being," as only creatives can do.
Thank you John for another well informed comment. I will admit there is occasionally a reference or word I have to look up (this time it was chthonian ) but your comments are a great help in focusing my writing.
With reference to space aliens; I used to read a lot of science fiction but I prefer the idea that my preternatural/demonic characters are entwined with life on earth rather than being completely alien. There is a reference in 'The Iron Tongue of Midnight' to the, without giving too much away, non human characters' world arriving on earth from another dimension eons ago, but that's as close as it gets. I am considering a re-write of the book and then publishing it as a serial on Substack.
"Iron Tongue" is part of the Simonian corpus (can't call it the "Franciscan" corpus, because then it'll get confused with Francis of Assisi, and that's open a whole can of serpents we don't even want to imagine) I have yet to explore. But I've been reading a biography of H.P. Lovecraft lately. A very strange man, a horrible, racist person, haughty, an aristocratic poseur from a blue-blooded bankrupt family, a Freudian marvel of sexual repression and nest of riddles, yet one of the most imaginative writers of horror, sci-fi, and the "weird tale" ever, credited by nearly every modern horror writer (Stephen King, Thomas Ligotti, et al) as an inspiration at some level. His "Chthulu Mythos" tales, in which a shadowy group of beings called "The Old Ones" are the actual rulers and creators of earth, the human race, the cosmos--it's not very consistent, and varies from story to story. Generally, these are slimy, octopus-like, reptilian beings (the man had a phobia of seafood and sea creatures--there you go), distinguished for a surfeit of powerful tentacles (Freudianism!!!) and hidden, subterranean cities built of megaliths, covered in slime (lots of slime in his stories--creatures covered in green slime or ooze, dead creatures dissolving into white slime (Freud!), green slime, gray slime--humans slowly morphing into gelatinous blobs after encountering weird substances--plus he created these strange tales of cave explorers who make a wrong turn in a cave and end up in a fantastic realm of weird, enlightened beings, with a highly evolved society, transportation, mythology, etc.--as I said, a very odd but creative man. He was a convinced atheist, and his whole thing was that these "Old Ones" were alien beings from another dimension, some remote part of the universe, etc., who were totally indifferent to humanity--didn't respond to prayers or pleas, supplicatory worship, despite quite elaborate ceremonial and ritual devised to placate them over the centuries, including human sacrifice (in New England, of all places). So, Lovecraft is pretty wild, and went very wild with the whole multi-dimensional beings thing.
Simone--I love reading these "behind the scenes" pieces about what influences your work. I'm on record as a fan of your preternatural/demonic stuff, which I addressed at length before. The realm of the faeries, ghosts and such is another grouping of beings rooted in myth and folklore, but I submit their link with literature--and the erotic specifically--is far more pronounced and accessible to modern audiences via the Great Romantics and traditional Gothic Horror and Romance (which are often so intertwined within the same work that they can't be distinguished--"Dracula" was considered a pornographic novel when Stoker released it (and I'm sure there are Philistines today--most likely here in the God-Fearing USA--who still think so), though that doesn't touch upon these creatures per se. As for Faeries having an erotic, seductive quality--to my mind, Yeats' immortal "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" fits the bill--the seductive being is actually some sort of vampiric being who has lured him with her charms, while sucking his life and soul from him, which he learns when he's crossed into her deadly realm, seeing the wilted shades of fellow victims. There's actually not much distance between the "faery" and the vampire as far as modus operandi when you get to the Romantics--they pretty much do the same thing--trick/seduce, lead to ruin. The vampiric faery is usually interchangeable with a female, the vampire with a male. Coleridge's "Christabel" comes to mind here.
But going back to the traditional folklore, you really wanted to stay on the good side of the "wee folk." The term "stroke" for a cerebro-vascular accident is rooted in the old folk belief of the "fairy stroke," the notion that if you were involved with fairies, elves, or similar beings, and crossed them--by deceit, or denying them rights to use your water or land, or even just being unkind to them when they were totally kind to you, these beings--chthonian and hence total masters of the magic and infernal arts (maybe because they were closer to the netherworld?)--could "strike" you with a wasting or sudden paralysis--taking away your speech and movement (which, obviously, happens in stroke victims)--or even your life. And of course, they could just screw with your crops, kill your cattle, or take your newborn child and exchange one of their own--the old "changeling" tale.
Your going back to traditional myth and folklore for some of your work--to find erotic foils for your human characters, is a brilliant take on the genre. I'm also grateful that you haven't used space aliens--please don't! You're one of the most polished and elegant purveyors of erotica out there, Simone, and it's because of workmanship and your distinctive, "otherwordly" style, which pierces the veil between the visible and invisible realms, and I think that stylistic choices like yours represent is a revival of storytelling that's intrinsically human--an archetypal belief that the erotic and spiritual realms are neither mutually exclusive, nor adversarial moral "teams" representative of Good and Evil locked in and eternal dualistic struggle of neurotic fear. Just another way of viewing "Being," as only creatives can do.
Thank you John for another well informed comment. I will admit there is occasionally a reference or word I have to look up (this time it was chthonian ) but your comments are a great help in focusing my writing.
With reference to space aliens; I used to read a lot of science fiction but I prefer the idea that my preternatural/demonic characters are entwined with life on earth rather than being completely alien. There is a reference in 'The Iron Tongue of Midnight' to the, without giving too much away, non human characters' world arriving on earth from another dimension eons ago, but that's as close as it gets. I am considering a re-write of the book and then publishing it as a serial on Substack.
"Iron Tongue" is part of the Simonian corpus (can't call it the "Franciscan" corpus, because then it'll get confused with Francis of Assisi, and that's open a whole can of serpents we don't even want to imagine) I have yet to explore. But I've been reading a biography of H.P. Lovecraft lately. A very strange man, a horrible, racist person, haughty, an aristocratic poseur from a blue-blooded bankrupt family, a Freudian marvel of sexual repression and nest of riddles, yet one of the most imaginative writers of horror, sci-fi, and the "weird tale" ever, credited by nearly every modern horror writer (Stephen King, Thomas Ligotti, et al) as an inspiration at some level. His "Chthulu Mythos" tales, in which a shadowy group of beings called "The Old Ones" are the actual rulers and creators of earth, the human race, the cosmos--it's not very consistent, and varies from story to story. Generally, these are slimy, octopus-like, reptilian beings (the man had a phobia of seafood and sea creatures--there you go), distinguished for a surfeit of powerful tentacles (Freudianism!!!) and hidden, subterranean cities built of megaliths, covered in slime (lots of slime in his stories--creatures covered in green slime or ooze, dead creatures dissolving into white slime (Freud!), green slime, gray slime--humans slowly morphing into gelatinous blobs after encountering weird substances--plus he created these strange tales of cave explorers who make a wrong turn in a cave and end up in a fantastic realm of weird, enlightened beings, with a highly evolved society, transportation, mythology, etc.--as I said, a very odd but creative man. He was a convinced atheist, and his whole thing was that these "Old Ones" were alien beings from another dimension, some remote part of the universe, etc., who were totally indifferent to humanity--didn't respond to prayers or pleas, supplicatory worship, despite quite elaborate ceremonial and ritual devised to placate them over the centuries, including human sacrifice (in New England, of all places). So, Lovecraft is pretty wild, and went very wild with the whole multi-dimensional beings thing.