Dark Sentiments – Day 17
Posted By Randy on October 17, 2010
The Wendigo – I will call it that but there are many iterations of its name – is a malevolent forest spirit that comes in winter. It needs human flesh to feed but can only slake its hunger by possessing a human that it then uses to hunt, kill, and devour its prey. The Wendigo comes to us through the spiritual teachings of the Algonquian people, and it’s said that when stalking its victims it has the ability to remain forever behind and out of sight. As the prey finally senses its presence, even the quickest turn of the head will never catch sight of it until too late.
Most powerful in times of hunger and famine, the Wendigo waits and hunts in the bleakest and most remote parts of the North American wilderness, ready for the solitary traveler with the right combination of fatigue, hunger, hopelessness, greed, weakness, and desperation. Most of all it loves weakness and greed, and such is its ravenous hunger that when it strikes, all known to its host, and any it meets along the way are at risk until none are left to tell the tale.
Basil Johnston, an Ojibwa scholar, describes the Wendigo’s appearance thus:
“The Wendigo was gaunt to the point of emaciation, its desiccated skin pulled tautly over its bones. With its bones pushing out against its skin, its complexion the ash gray of death, and its eyes pushed back deep into their sockets, the Wendigo looked like a gaunt skeleton recently disinterred from the grave. What lips it had were tattered and bloody [….] Unclean and suffering from suppurations of the flesh, the Wendigo gave off a strange and eerie odor of decay and decomposition, of death and corruption.”
I am privileged to know Master At Arms James Albert Keating, a man with whom I share a great deal of common sentiment, dark and otherwise, and while we’ve never met in person, we correspond regularly. The only thing wrong with Jim is he doesn’t live closer.
Jim has a passionate, intense, rough and ready style to his writing. I love it, and he sometimes posts articles by others with cloth of a similar cut. A while back, he posted an article on his MAJAAK World website on a topic related to today’s dark sentiment. Relax and enjoy A Draught of Darkness. Just click the title to go there. Shades of the Wendigo, the Sasquatch, and Grendel, all rolled into one.
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[…] Dark Sentiments – 2010 we looked at the Wendigo phenomenon, and the strange case of Vincent Weiguang Li and Tim McLean in particular. In Dark Sentiments […]
When I was a child I truly loved:
Unthinking love as calm and deep
As the North Sea. But I have lived,
And now I do not sleep.”
? John Gardner, Grendel