Mythical Trail: Changeling Traditional Cache
Idaho Druids: Between the damage by the soda springs fire, ongoing roadwork burying caches, all the horses are gone now, to residents just taking caches, it's time to archive.
Mythical Trail: Changeling
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In Scottish and Irish folklore, fairies were believed to steal newborn babies and leave an evil fairy or changeling in the newborn’s place. The changeling looked human, but its spirit was moody, nasty, and difficult. Often it was sickly or physically deformed. There were several ways to protect babies from being switched for a changeling. In Scotland, a baby’s father would create an invisible barrier to repel fairies by walking around the house seven times, following the east to west direction of the sun. Or he could place a knife in the baby’s cradle as a physical barrier to fairies. It was important not to leave a cat alone with a newborn, since cats were considered to be servants of evil creatures or fairies. With the coming of Christianity, mothers were taught to baptize a newborn within a day or two so that it would be protected against fairy-snatching. If parents suspected their child was a changeling, they could try to trick it into admitting it was a fairy. One Manx legend from the Isle of Man, described in Bob Curran’s The Creatures of Celtic Myth, concerns a tailor who moved in with a family who had a changeling who appeared unable to eat, talk, or walk. But whenever the family went out the changeling would dance, sing, and play the fiddle. The tailor informed the family of the infant’s strange behavior, but they didn’t seem to care. They liked the child the way he was. A parent could also try to drive the changeling away, which, according to folklore, would force the fairies to return the stolen child. However, the methods of getting rid of a changeling were often fatal: for instance, holding it on a shovel over a hot fire or feeding it poison. While most changelings were infants, they could be adults, too. Some folk stories tell of normal, cheerful women who suddenly began acting strangely, refusing to talk or move, rocking for hours by the fire, or simply sitting still for many months or years, and then one day, just as suddenly, returning to normal. Mothers of newborns, it was said, especially needed protection from fairies, who might kidnap them as wet nurses to provide a human mother’s milk to cure their sickly fairy babies
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