Large Fierce Mammal

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. ~ Dark Sentiments Season 1 – Day 17

Systems of human belief that formed absent any Abrahamic religious influence tend to share the common trait of including people as being one among Nature’s creatures instead of above all by divine edict. They seek to understand the forces and phases of Nature within the context of motives and behaviours shared by Humans and other living things alike, and in so doing, grasp how simultaneously simple and profound everything is in its connectedness.

Whatever its basis, all systems of belief seem to share some sort of concept of an immortal life force that dwells in living things. While the Abrahamic group assigns this “soul” exclusively to human kind, others find spirits dwelling in places and things; some grand and powerful, and others that are tiny, even seemingly insignificant.

Spirits seem, for the most part, to concern themselves with their own affairs, in concert with Nature and their own expression of the Way of the Wild. Only things that have become unsound so they can no longer be that way themselves will attract their enmity. A tangible comparison can be found if you watch a Deer walk through a field of wild flowers on a Summer’s day. You will see it going about its business heedless of the scores of Bees that are momentarily disturbed by its passing. Likewise, the Bees will buzz away fussily, to either find another flower or re-alight on the one just vacated as soon as the interloper is gone. By comparison, something that due to age, infirmity, illness, or wrongheadedness, like an irrationally fearful human, can easily attract the defensive side of a Bee’s nature with painful results.

And then there are the spirits that seem born out of the Human condition. Notwithstanding such an unstable foundation from which to spring, not all of them mean harm, although their interpretation of right and wrong may be wildly divergent with that of the average “man in the street”. The Tomte, of which I have previously written, is a shining example well known in Scandinavian lore, and that I have found my own clan of much closer to home.

Some, though, are not unlike the Bees whose enmity is directed toward energies that aren’t in keeping with Nature’s Ways. I began tonight’s Dark Sentiment with a passage from our archives regarding one such particularly vile spirit, and when next we convene, we will take a look at another with remarkably similar methods.