What is the Old Hag nationality ?

Basilus_West · January 16, 2005, 1:25am

I’m very surprised by the number of people talking about the Old Hag. We don’t have this belief in France, and I had to come on this forum to heard about this legend.
The “sleep paralysis” trouble seems to be the source of many superstitions, which seems to differ according to the country. For instance, in UK, they have the Black Shuck, or Old Shuck, a large black spectral dog, and a lot of people experiencing SP are attacked by it. In USA, thousands of people believe they have been abducted by ET’s, etc.
In France, we don’t have such a specific legend , except for incubus and succubus, which can also be found in many other countries… French sleep-paralyzed people generally believe they are attacked by demons or ghosts.

So, I’ve some questions : what is the Old Hag “nationality” ? Or, more clearly, if you have been told by your mom or friends about it, what is your country ?
And a second question : if you weren’t told about Old Hag, is there a specific legend related to sleep attacks in your country ?

Siiw · January 16, 2005, 1:07pm

In Norway, the word for “nightmare” is “mareritt”. In the beginning, that word was used for those dreams where you wake up exhausted, and can’t move, etc. It means you have been “ridden” by a “mare” which is supposed to be some kind of evil spirit. She is female in the legend.

Cyrus · January 16, 2005, 3:01pm

In Estonian this thing is called “luupainaja”, what can be translated strictly as “bone obsessor” (or bone twister). It’s probably related with feeling of SP, where you cannot move your bones as someone is pressing you down, and hardening your breath.

If i remember correctly then Old Hag had English origns, but i might be wrong.

Basilus_West · January 16, 2005, 6:04pm

I’ve read somewhere that Old Hag origin was Canada and NewFoundLand, but I find it very questionable, as people there came from Europe. Or is it a mix between European and Indian legends ?

I like your legends very much. What a pity that we don’t have something like “mareritt” or “luupainaja” in France !
As far I know, the Baltic countries (and Finland?) were the latest christianized zones in Europe ( near 1100 ? ) and that’s why they have preserved a lot of old legends.

Qu · January 16, 2005, 9:11pm

in holland we have the ‘nachtmerrie’ that’s nightmare. I learned on a documentary that in the middle ages the nightmare was associated with demons attacking you in the night.
But before I saw that documentary i didn’t know that and the word ‘nachtmerrie’ had for me the meaning of bad dream.

interesting topic you have raised!

Sureal · January 16, 2005, 9:15pm

Bah, England is boring too. That dog thing you mentioned… never heard of it .

Basilus_West · January 16, 2005, 10:00pm

I’ve seen a homepage of a parapsychogist who collected apparitions of the black dog…

I can’t put the link, cause there is a forbidden word in it and the forum automatically changes it in ***

…and in Harry Potter, there is this black dog, too. But I probably made a mistake : this parapsychologist had SP experiences in which he always saw a black dog. I misunderstood this, and believed that this black dog always appeared in dreams. In fact, it seems to be a sort of ghost, like the hitchhiking “White Lady”.

BooDha · January 17, 2005, 12:08am

I never experience ‘the old hag’, but i have experiened a similar character when waking up in your bed while dremaing thing. It was actually the midget guy from jackass dressed up in the umpa lumpa constume from charlie and the chocalate factory, really strange shit, anyways i wasnt paralysed or anything, i was scared, got up a beat the shit outa the little focker,…do i need therapy?

Basilus_West · January 17, 2005, 6:44pm

I suppose it is not an old Swiss mythology… Nevetherless, I notice there is a “chocolate factory” in your hypnagogic hallucinations : that’s typically Swiss ! LOL !

Sureal · January 17, 2005, 6:49pm

Basilus: The Harry Potter refernce was what I was reminded of as well. Only, in HP it’s called a Grim, and I haven’t heard of that either…

BooDha: Sounds like an FA. In fact, I’m sure it is.

mystic · January 17, 2005, 7:09pm

Thanks for bringing up this great topic Basilus West!

I can’t recall any local legends about such a creature, but I’ve read somewhere about the Dweller on the Threshold who is most often seen during astral projection. I don’t know if it’s related to the Old Hag phenomenon, but it has some similar features:

A slightly more esoteric explanation:

A literary invention of the English mystic and novelist Sir Bulwer Lytton, found in his romance Zanoni. The term has obtained wide currency and usage in theosophical circles. In occultism the word “dweller,” or some exactly equivalent phrase or expression, has been known and used during long ages past. It refers to several things, but more particularly has an application to what H. P. Blavatsky calls “certain maleficent astral Doubles of defunct persons.” This is exact. But there is another meaning of this phrase still more mystical and still more difficult to explain which refers to the imbodied karmic consequences or results of the man’s past, haunting the thresholds which the initiant or initiate must pass before he can advance or progress into a higher degree of initiation. These dwellers, in the significance of the word just last referred to are, as it were, the imbodied quasi-human astral haunting parts of the constitution thrown off in past incarnations by the man who now has to face them and overcome them – very real and living beings, parts of the “new” man’s haunting past. The initiant must face these old “selves” of himself and conquer or – fail, which failure may mean either insanity or death. They are verily ghosts of the dead men that the present man formerly was, now arising to dog his footsteps, and hence are very truly called Dwellers on the Threshold. In a specific sense they may be truly called the kama-rupas of the man’s past incarnations arising out of the records in the astral light left there by the “old” man of the “new” man who now is.

mystic · January 17, 2005, 7:36pm

About the Old Hag, apparently it goes all the way back to the Sumerians:

It is not hard to see why demons, devils, and other beasties of the night have been blamed for these nocturnal ‘attacks’. Virtually all cultures with a written or oral history has some kind of form of SP they have reported, and with that a usually very colorul explanation as to why these things happen. SP is more commonly known as Old Hag, and the origin for this title may have roots as far back as the Sumerians. Ardat lili or Lilitu, an evil hag-demon, was said to have the power of flight, which she preferred to do at night when she would attack men in their sleep. But this myth is hardly unique, as many she-devils and hag-demons have, over time, made their presense known in mythology. They take credit for the nocturnal assaults for one reason or another.

Surprisingly, though, is the concistency of such reports made by societies and cultures with no previous knowledge of each other or their lore. The main details remain constant. A man or woman is attacked during the night, usually lying on their back, when an evil entity sits upon their body, causes paralysis, and even sometimes chokes or smothers it’s victim. Though their motivation may differ, (posession, revenge, or just wanting to upset the living) the attack remains strikingly similar. And these stories are not limited to western cultures, in fact, quite the contrary.

In Thailand people refer to being Phi um (ghost covered) and phi kau (ghost possessed), and these experiences include a feeling of pressure, paralysis, and something black covering the body. In Japan, kanashibara (“to tie with an iron rope”) is a common known and accepted experience. In the Far North one speaks of agumangia (Inupik) or ukomiarik (Yupik) in which “a soul” tries to take possession of the paralyzed victim. In Laos, da chor is described as follows: “You want to listen, you can’t hear; you want to speak, you are dumb; you want ot call out, you cannot; you feel you are dying, dying; you want to run away. You piss with fear in your sleep”

Basilus_West · January 18, 2005, 1:08pm

It goes probably back to the beginning of dreams…

About Lilith : she’s the source of the middle-age incubus/succubus legend, through the judaic mythology. In Sumerian texts, if I remember well, it was rather a demon of early children mortality. Later, (in the Talmud ?) it was told that she gives birth to little demons through the sexual relations she has with men in dreams.

Thank you for your information about the “Dweller on the Threshold” : I was just searching about it, but as I knew only the french translation, and didn’t know how to translate it back, I didn’t find anything. I didn’t know it came from the Bulwer Lytton’s Zanoni. Great information !

Dreammonger · January 19, 2005, 9:18pm

Dweller on the Threshold? Do they have to make this thing sound as scary as they possibly can? Yeah, so we’ve gotta get past this thing, but I’d feel alot better about it if it were called something like ‘Guy who gets in your Way’ over ‘Dweller on the Threshold’. ‘Dweller’ is a very scary word, as well as ‘Threshold’. They both hit chords in your mind that make you think of dark and scary things, at least for me anyway. ‘Dweller’ doesn’t make me thing of a jolly forest ‘dweller’ it makes me think of a dark, evil, shadow dweller! And ‘threshold’ doesn’t remind me of happy newlyweds, it makes me thing of ‘Death Grip’. ‘Thresh’ sounds like ‘flesh’ and flesh is a creepy word, and with the ‘thr’ instead of the ‘fl’ that makes it alot more scary, ‘T’ is alot scarier that ‘F’. ‘Thresh’ just say it, I promise you won’t think of good things. ‘Threshold’, I imagine the Grim Reaper’s cold hand pulling me down to Hell. Maybe I’m just crazy and pessimistic.

Qu · January 20, 2005, 11:02am

Hilarious reply and I totally agree

Maybe we should start the reformation now and rename the Old Hag/Dweller into : guy who gets in your Way It definately sparks a different reaction. And also the empowerment to actually defeat it like “hey! get out of my Way!” I like it

Basilus_West · January 22, 2005, 11:45pm

OK. I found what I searched on Internet at :
SP in Myth and Legend
I recommand you to read this article, it’s very interesting.

Thank you everybody for your help… especially Mystic, Siiw , Cyrus, Q, Sureal, BooDha and Dreammonger.

As nobody amongst the great number of Old Hag terrorized people replied about her origin, I suppose that they heard about her for the very first time on LD4all. That what I’ll said the next time I will be asked about this point : “Don’t worry, Old Hag is just an ol’ LD4all legend, it has never been heard about her somewhere else”.

More seriously : Old Hag is a NewFoundLand legend, and was called “Ar Rog”. I wonder what it means, and what language it could be ? It seems not to be gaelic…

Qu · January 23, 2005, 9:16am

Lol Basilus

I’ve put the old hag thing on LD4all after I heard about it in a documentary, and ppl mailed me about it as well, then i searched for more info, i only found one or two sites, so then i decided to put a little about it on LD4all.

Actually I thought it was something quite common and that i was the only one that heard it for the first time - so thanks for starting this thread and enlightenment

mystic · January 25, 2005, 10:50pm

Great article!

I’ve been doing a little research on the net. This is what I found:

From archiver.rootsweb.com/th/read/NF … 0959535323 :

The article from Firestone mentioned here (Firestone, M. (1985). The “Old Hag” sleep paralysis in Newfoundland. Journal of Psychoanalytic Anthropology, 8, 47-66) seems worth searching for. I’ve looked in the databases (mainly Webspirs) available here for the local intranet users, and I’ve found similar papers, all about the folklore behind the Old Hag. However, there isn’t any PDF file of them available online, so I’ll have to search for them in the main library. I think I might do that after my last exam (Friday in a week)

About Ag Rog… According to www.shadowbeings-movie.com/The_Legend/a_synopsis.htm it’s the language of Newfoundland, and it means “Old Hag”
Well… at least I guess this is the case because it’s listed amongst other terms, each with the language between brackets and with the translation:

Interesting to see Djinns are also mentioned. So there’s a connection between those magical spirits in the lamp and the Old Hag experience. Also the Fomori are interesting: they were ancient Old Irish seagods who inhabited Ireland at the time of the five Great Invasions (according to ancient lore, Ireland was invaded by five different races; some of them fought hard wars with the Fomori). Amazing how all this mythology can develop into something like an Old Hag myth…

From ojp.usdoj.gov/ovc/publicatio … /chap8.txt I got this:

The language of Newfoundland - an English dialect - stems from the origins of its inhabitants, being Ireland and English West Country. The English West Country lies in the Southwest of the UK, going from Cornwall, Devonshire, up to Hampshire, Gloucestershire and even Wales.

So I’d say Ag Rog is West Country-based Newfoundland English Also, could “rog” be derived from “rogue”? An etymologist would know

Basilus_West · February 15, 2005, 12:38am

I was rather surprised by the etymology they give for Incubus (Latin) and Cauchemar (French), so I made my own researches.

About incubus, they’re wrong. The meaning is clearly sexual. Incubo means “to lie upon” and succubo means “to lie under”. For instance, succuba means “concubine”.

About “cauchemar”, which nowadays means “nightmare, bad dream”. The etymology is not clear. In old french, it’s “cauquemare” : my dictionnary says it comes from “cauquer” (old french word which means “to tramble”) and from the dutch “mare”, a night ghost, like in “nightmare”. The word “cauquemare” comes from the region of Picardy, North of Paris.

What is more interesting, I found the old meaning of this term. In the middle of 19th century, “cauchemar” corresponds to the exact definition of what we call now “sleep paralysis” : a sleep trouble in which one thinks to be suffocated by a ghost.

More and more interesting : in the 17th century and before, “cauquemare” was feminine. It’s no more a sleep trouble, it’s a female person. Rabelais talks about “old and ugly cauquemares”.

In the “Demonomania of Witches”, by Jean Bodin, in 1580, we can read : “In the countries of Valois and Picardy, there are a sort of witches they call cochemares, and indeed Nicolas Noblet, a rich ploughman living in Hautefontaine-en-Valois, told me that, when he was a young boy, he often feels during the night such incubi, or “ephialtes” , which he called cochemares; and the morning after it happens to him, the old witch he was afraid of always came in his house asking for fire or anything else.”

So, probably the meaning was the same for “nightmare”, and other similar European terms, and at the beginning, a “nightmare” or “cauchemar” was a witch.

Cid_Silverwing · May 14, 2005, 5:09pm

I know this stuff is old, two months old, but why is the “Old hag” such a popular discussion?