Domovoy

You could bake cookies in the shape of stars or serve foods that offer a pop of flavor, like a salad with citrus or duck with cranberry sauce.

I like to create holidays in times of the year that can feel slow, so last January, I hosted a Domowik gathering at my apartment.

I'm Polish on my mom's side, and in Slavic folklore, the Domowik is a mythical gnome or house sprite who lives behind your hearth and takes care of your home while you sleep.

So I ordered a little domowik figurine online, cooked traditional Polish food like pierogis and pickled beets, lit some candles, and then my friends and I offered crumbs and coins to the domowik, asked him to protect the house, and talked about a memory that reminded us of home.

For me, what was driving the gathering was the importance of home as a sacred space, and also my desire to invite my friends into it.

This ensures that the Näkk, a people-eating water spirit, is nice and full before you take a dip.

Meanwhile, in Slavic mythology, the household spirit known as the Domovoi is often appeased with candy, cookies, or simply a saucer of sugar.

These snacks keep the spirit from harming you and even incentivizes it to stick around as your home's protector.

Ancient Greeks offered the goddess Hecate cakes decorated with torches every new moon.

The plan right now is for these episodes to trade places with a mundane magic episode every other month.

So one month we might be talking about an actual witchcraft practice, and then the next we get to sit down together and learn why people in the Scottish countryside were apparently leaving cream out for a tiny hairy man who would do their chores, but also might abandon them forever if they gave him pants.

which is exactly the kind of information I want occupying space in my brain.

And for our first Fae and Folklore episode, we're starting very close to home.

You'll hear solitary fae versus trooping fae, light versus dark, good folk, fair folk, we folk.

But these classifications are often regional, overlapping, contradictory, or much newer than the actual stories themselves.

So for this series, I'm not going to pretend we can create one giant supernatural filing cabinet and neatly sort everything into it.

Today, we're simply focusing on domestic spirits, supernatural beings whose folklore specifically connects them with human households.

It's a fox spirit.

Like, you know, it reminded, not reminded me of, I think they're playing with the same mythology like Slavic mythology Catherine Arden's The Winter Night Trilogy I forget how to say it or how it's spelled Domovoi like the house spirit so this is the fox is the house spirit so it's very much attached to so it's not made of fox but it's in like a wholesome way rather than a creepy way and there's a girl sort of walking into this dome castle and these onion domes as well are very like sort of Russian kind of eastern style um and uh so some one of my friends who listens to this podcast friend of the podcast um she doesn't like the fact and yesterday she went on quite a rant about it because I told her that I was reading this uh that all of Sophie Anderson's books have the same kind of cover so the same vibe the same font the same sort of yeah the silvery bits and the Yeah, the bits.

So she was a hater.

Oh, right, okay.