"The Hero with a Thousand Faces"

[fiefoe]

The stories are dazzling:

• A young girl named Sujata came and presented milk-rice to him in a golden bowl, and when he tossed the empty bowl into a river it floated upstream. This was the signal that the moment of his triumph was at hand.
• On the second side were sixty myriads, three thousand five hundred and fifty angels, each bearing a crown of fire for each individual Israelite...
• Chinese princess: "She hath a nose, like the edge of a burnished blade and cheeks like purple wine or anemones blood-red... the water of her mouth is sweeter than old wine; its taste would quench hell's fiery pain. <> 'She hath wrists which, did her bangles not contain, / Would run from out her sleeves in silver rain.'"
• Hottentots ogre: A dangerous one-legged, one-armed, one-sided figure - the half-man - invisible if viewed from the off side, is encountered in many parts of the earth. {And I thought Gu-Long made it all up.}
  
• Russian 'Wild Women': They fling their breasts over their shoulders when they run.
  
• Irish hag: with her sickle of a greenish looking tusk that was in her head, and curled till it touched her ear, she could lop the verdant branch of an oak in full bearing .. a wrinkled and freckled belly, variously unwholesome; warped crooked shins, garnished with massive ankles and a pair of capacious shovels; knotty knees she had and livid nails.
• "When Saint Peter observed that his daughter, Petronilla, was too beautiful, he obtained from God the favor that she should fall sick of a fever...
  
• Navaho: The bearer of the sun strode into his home, removed the sun from his back, and hung it on a peg on the west wall of the room, where it shook and clanged for some time, going "tla, tla, tla, tla."

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