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Podcast: Bone and Sickle
Episode: Myth and Magic of the Smith
Description: Folklore of the blacksmith portrays him as a semi-magical figure, a wily opponent of the Devil, a mythic creator in classical and biblical narratives, and an embodiment of occult wisdom within certain secret societies and neopagan groups.
We begin with an audio snippet from the excellent 2017 horror-fantasy Errementari: The Blacksmith and the Devil, a cinematic elaboration of the Basque folktale, âPatxi the Blacksmithâ collected back in the 1960s by the Spanish priest and Basque ethnographer Jose Miguel Barandiaran.
This is one of dozens (perhaps hundreds) of variants of âBlacksmith and Devilâ tales found from Russia to Appalachia...