KALLINKANZARI

KALLINKANZARI

"It was of no use to demonstrate to such opponents that the Vermont myths differed but little in essence from those universal legends of natural personification which filled the ancient world with fauns and dryads and satyrs, suggested the kallikanzari of modern Greece, and gave to wild Wales and Ireland their dark hints of strange, small, and terrible hidden races of troglodytes and burrowers."

H.P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer In Darkness

The kallikantzaroi are monstrous beings, black, hairy, sometimes gigantic, sometimes very small, usually equipped with animal-like limbs: donkeys' ears, goatish paws, equine hooves. They are often blind or lame; they are invariably males provided with enormous sexual organs."

"They pounce on anyone they see, overwhelm them and with their nails (which are clawlike and very long because they never cut them) scratch their face and chest and left on the ground half-dead."
 Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches' Sabbath