title: Anansi

type: oral-tradition

summary: The Akan trickster spider whose stories travelled the Atlantic and shaped diasporic storytelling.

body:
Anansi (Kwaku Ananse) is a spider and trickster of Akan oral tradition from present-day Ghana. In the best-known cycle he bargains with the sky god Nyame to become the owner of all stories — which is why folktales themselves are sometimes called 'Anansesem' (Anansi stories).

Carried across the Atlantic in the memory of enslaved West Africans, Anansi survived and adapted throughout the Caribbean and the Americas, becoming a figure of cunning and quiet resistance for the powerless. The tradition is fundamentally performative — told aloud, with call-and-response — so no single written text is canonical.

culture: Akan (Ashanti) and West African diaspora

region: Ghana; Caribbean; Americas

transmission: oral

confidence: documented

contributor: seed


title: Baba Yaga

type: folktale

summary: The ambiguous Slavic forest crone — neither simply villain nor helper — who lives in a hut on chicken legs.

body:
Baba Yaga appears across Slavic folklore as a fearsome old woman living deep in the forest in a hut that stands on chicken legs and turns to face visitors. She flies in a mortar, steering with a pestle and sweeping her tracks with a broom.

What makes her distinctive is moral ambiguity: she may devour the unwary, but she also tests and aids heroes who show courage, courtesy, or cleverness. Folklorists read her as a threshold guardian between the living world and the otherworld. Because tellings vary widely by region and teller, she resists any single definitive characterization — a feature, not a bug, of living oral tradition.

culture: Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and others)

region: Eastern and Central Europe


title: La Chasse-galerie

type: legend

summary: A Québécois legend in which lumberjacks make a pact with the devil to fly home by canoe on New Year's Eve.

body:
On New Year's Eve, lumberjacks isolated in a winter logging camp long to see their sweethearts. A pact with the devil lets their canoe fly through the night sky — but only under strict conditions: they must not speak the name of God, must not touch the cross of any church steeple, and must not get drunk. If a single condition is broken, the devil claims their souls.

The tale braids Christian fear with older European 'wild hunt' motifs, carried to New France and reshaped by the realities of the forest camps. It circulated orally for generations before Honoré Beaugrand fixed a written version in 1892 — which is itself only one telling among many.

culture: Québécois / French-Canadian

region: Québec, Canada

label: Honoré Beaugrand, 'La Chasse-galerie' (1892)


title: La Corriveau

summary: A real 18th-century woman whose gibbeted execution turned her into an enduring Québécois ghost figure.

body:
Marie-Josephte Corriveau was tried and hanged in 1763 for the murder of her second husband. Under the British military regime, her body was displayed in an iron gibbet cage at a crossroads near Lévis — a public, foreign punishment that seared itself into local memory.

Fact decayed into folklore. In the oral tradition she became a witch and a vengeful spirit, her iron cage said to swing and clatter at night, chasing travellers. The historical record and the legend diverge sharply — which is precisely what makes her a case study in how a community metabolizes trauma into story over generations.

region: Lévis, Québec, Canada

confidence: corroborated


title: Le temps des sucres

type: custom

summary: The Québécois maple-sugaring season and the social ritual of the sugar shack.

body:
In late winter, when days warm above freezing and nights still drop below, maple sap begins to run. Families and communities gather at the cabane à sucre (sugar shack) to boil sap into syrup and share a heavy seasonal meal — eggs, beans, ham, pancakes, all drowned in syrup.

The signature treat is tire sur la neige: hot syrup poured in ribbons onto clean snow, then rolled onto a wooden stick as it sets into soft taffy. The practice descends from Indigenous knowledge of tapping maples, adopted and ritualized by settlers, and survives today as much as a social season as a food process — a marker that winter is finally breaking.

transmission: mixed