Episode 126 – A Whole New World – Myths Your Teacher Hated

Episode 126 Show Notes

Source: Finnish Mythology/Chinese Folklore

This week on MYTH, it’s our annual New Year’s special. You’ll learn that a lot of strange things can come from bird eggs, that some babies look an awful lot like old men, and that it can be tough to chop down magic trees. Then, in Gods and Monsters, we’ll find some sweet New Year’s money inside a red envelope, as long as a demon doesn’t kill us first. A holiday tradition. This is the Myths Your Teacher Hated podcast, where I tell the stories of cultures from around the world in all of their original, bloody, uncensored glory. Modern tellings of these stories have become dry and dusty, but I’ll be trying to breathe new life into them. This is Episode 126, “A Whole New World”. As always, this episode is not safe for work.
The New Year is a time for endings and beginnings, for the cycle of creation. This has been something of a shit show of a year, so I wanted to focus on beginnings this time. This week’s story comes from the Kalevala, an epic Finnish poem written by Elias Lonnrot that still has a lot of cultural relevance in modern Finland. It’s a very, very long poem (as epic poems tend to be), so we’re going to focus on only the first two cantos, which cover the birth of the world.
Long ago, in the primordial time before time, there lived a maiden, a lovely daughter of the void. Her name was Ilmatar, which roughly translates to spirit of the air. She dwelt alone in the empty nothingness for ages. Eventually, the isolation and desolation began to wear on the lonely spirit and she grew sad and hopeless. Other than Ilmatar herself, the only things that existed were the endless expanse of air and the boundless depths of the ocean. Being utterly over the air, Ilmatar decided that the ocean would at least be a chance of pace. This joining of wind and water created a powerful storm that blew out of the east and whipped the waves into towering breakers capped in salty white. This is not the first time we’ve seen this imagery and it won’t be the last. This joining of the air and sea was more than poetic or metaphorical, it was a sexual joining of these two primordial forces in a very literal way, with the salty sea being a type of semen. We don’t have a severed Titan dick like we did back in our very first episode with Venus and Cronus, but the end result was the same. Ilmatar got knocked up.
Having spent their divine load, the storm winds and towering waves subsided again and returned to calmness. The maiden (who wasn’t really a maiden anymore) quickly became gravid. Being heavy with child, which was an especially upsetting condition for a creature who was literally a weightless spirit of air before this, Ilmatar no longer had the strength to climb back into the sky. Thus she was forced to make the best of things in the ocean and swam about as the newly-minted water mother. She roamed the seas in every direction, swimming here and there with no aim in mind. Pregnancy was super not comfortable for this airy spirit, but floating in the water gave her some semblance of her previous weightlessness.
Gods don’t have babies the way mortals do and one of the clearest indicators of that is their gestation period. Sometimes they can go from sex to baby in hours and others, like our dear Ilmatar, take much, more longer. In her case, longer is 700 years, which sounds like a shitty existence. Swimming only worked for so long and eventually, she began to weep openly towards the heavens. “Oh woe is me! Why must I be so unlucky? Why must I be so unhappy? I miss my home in the subtle, formless ether. Floating in the waves is better than nothing, but it’s not nearly as soothing as the sky. I hate being rocked by the endless waves and buffeted by the unceasing winds and knowing nothing but pain and sorrow.
“O Ukko (the god of the sky, weather, thunder and the harvest whose name means old man or grandfather), I wish I were still a sky maiden instead of a water mother. This watery world is cold and dreary and every motion is pain. Ukko, god of the heavens, I beg you to deliver me from my troubles! Come to me with the speed of a thunderbolt and save this helpless maiden.”
No sooner had she ceased her skyward prayers than a magnificent goldeneye duck appeared from high above and descended towards the former sky maiden. It winged its way back and forth clearly searching for a place to build a nest. She flew eastward then back to the west and circled around to the north and south but could not find a decent spot: no hills, no valleys, not the smallest patch of grass to build upon. Being a magic god avatar duck, this particular fowl can obviously speak because why not. “Where the hell am I supposed to build my nest? Should I build upon the wind? Should I nest upon the rolling waves? The winds would blow it away and the water would smash it to pieces.”
The daughter of the ether who had become the water mother heard this poor duck and took pity on her. She understood what it was like to be pregnant and in an inhospitable place. Floating near the surface, Ilmatar raised her knee up above the waves to give the duck a solid place to land. Still circling, the duck spied this surprising new spit of land (or god appendage, whatever) and thought that here at last was a perfect hill to build upon. I’m not sure if Ilmatar’s skin is grass-colored or if the duck was just desperate enough to see what she wants to see, but either way, she decided to land on the knee.
She built her nest (from what is not clear since there is literally no land in existence except for the spirit’s knee) and laid in it six eggs of gold and one of iron. That’s what happens when sky god bird avatars lay eggs. There’s no telling what’s inside them. The goldeneye duck then perched herself upon her eggs to hatch them as birds are wont to do. The two mothers stayed like this for a day, two, three days. The golden eggs began to heat the world around Ilmatar, began to heat the ocean water especially. It felt as though a fire was kindling on her knee, which is an incredibly painful thing to endure even for an air goddess who became an ocean goddess. Her knee was burning, her shoulders were burning, and fire was coursing through her very veins.
Unable to hold still any longer, Ilmatar shook herself, dislodging the precariously perched nest and smashing the eggs into the ocean far below. As you may know, when you hit water fast enough, it becomes as hard and unyielding as concrete. The eggs fell far enough to smash to bits when they hit the water and sank beneath the waves. Don’t worry, this is all part of the sky god’s plans. It seems like there could have been a less traumatic way to make this all happen, but sky gods are assholes, right?
The pieces didn’t simply vanish into the water but instead, they all came together into two large chunks. One became the vast expanse of the earth below and the other became the great vault of the sky above. From the white shells came the pearly moonbeams; from the yellow of the yolks came the golden rays of the sun; from the mottled part of the yolks came the glittering stars in the sky; from the dark part of the egg comes the puffy clouds. No part of the shattered eggs were wasted.
Time passed in this new creation, with the sun following the moon and day following night. The goldeneye duck had come in answer to Ilmatar’s prayers but she had still not given birth. Instead, the daughter of the ether continued to swim around in the great ocean as the water mother. She swam endlessly through the seas for another nine years until, in the summer of the tenth, she decided to do a little redecorating. For the first time since leaving the sky, Ilmatar raised her head above the water. She gazed about and decided to shape the land that had formed from the eggshell to a more pleasing image. She raised hills with her hands and made lakes with her feet; she dived down and created the underwater mountains and valleys that compose the ocean floor. Where she turned on her side, level, smooth banks rose up; where she turned her face, inlets and bays were made along the shores. She swam away from land a ways and floated on her back, raising up rocks in the waves and hidden reefs below the surface that have wrecked so many ships.
In this way, Ilmatar created the islands by fastening rocks to the ocean, painted the pillars of the sky in vibrant colors, raised up lush fields and forests across the land, and dotted the world in a checkerboard of different colored stones. So now we have a whole world but what we still don’t have is a baby. The child that would one day be renowned as the legendary singer Vainamoinen (the mythic hero of the main body of the Kalevala) still waited in Ilmatar’s womb, unable to behold any of it. He would be known as the god of chants, songs, and poetry. Now I said child, but that’s only in the broadest of senses. You see, Vainamoinen had lain undelivered in Ilmatar’s womb for so fucking long that he was no longer a baby. He wasn’t even a child. No, the unborn Vainamoinen had grown into a full-fledged adult in his maternal prison, having seen 30 summers and 30 winters without, you know, actually seeing any of it. The poem always describes him as old Vainamoinen, depicting him as an old, wise man.
I can’t say I blame old Vainamoinen for becoming disgruntled. Solitary confinement is a pretty hellish life for anyone old enough to have, you know, actual thoughts let alone form full, cogent sentences. He hadn’t seen any of the world, but he still had a rough outline of the most important bits and so he raised up a request to several celestial beings. “Free me, O Moon I pray. Free me, O Sun above. Free me, O Bear of Heaven (the constellation Ursa Major or the Big Dipper). Free me from this dreary prison, from this narrow, confining bed I have lain in for so long. I want to feel the warm waters of the ocean on my skin and feel the sand of the island shores beneath my feet. Free me to walk across the dry land and wander this new world. Let this ancient hero breathe the open air. Let me see the pearly Moon, the silver Sun, and the distant Bear in the scattered stars. Let me be free.”
Alas, the Moon refused to free him; the Sun would not deliver him (pun intended); and the Great Bear would not assist him. Since no one else would help, Vainamoinen decided that he’d just have to do it himself. He forced himself out of the goddess’ womb, pried open the cervix, dragged himself along the birth canal, and burst out of the divine vagina. With the toes of his left foot and the fingers of his right hand, he reached out and touched the salty ocean for the first time. The rest of him soon followed, and he was free.
Like his mother before him, Vainamoinen swam all throughout the ocean, exploring his brave new world. He spent five years resting in his watery environs, then three more years exploring the wider depths of the oceans. Finally, in the autumn of the eighth year, he decided he was ready to step out onto the shore for the very first time in existence. He found a vast barren island bereft of greenery and, not trusting his legs just yet, he crawled out onto the sand on his hands and knees. When he reached more solid, firm land, he finally put his feet beneath him and shakily rose to his feet. Holding his head high, Vainamoinen looked up at the silvery sunbeams and later the golden moonbeams (even though those colors are more traditionally reversed). He looked up into the night sky at the Great Bear above. Thus was the epic enchanter, that legendary bard finally born of Ether’s daughter Ilmatar to wander the world.
The first man lived for many years in this vast but empty world with nothing to do but ponder. He thought long and hard about how he could create a greater abundance and wider variety of plantlife. He clearly needed someone’s help to scatter and sow the seeds that would create the verdant world we know today. Eventually, he realized that there was only one entity in all of existence who was right for the job: Sampsa Pellervoinen, a fertility god who must be ritually awakened every summer. In the original folk poetry that predates the Kalevala, a magical device known as the Sampo was forged first by Ilmarinen, the divine blacksmith. It was an object described in many different, conflicting ways and said to bestow riches and good fortune upon its holder. Poet Elias Lonnrot changed the order when he wrote the Kalevala.
Sampsa was the first-born of the plains and prairies, a slender boy with a bag full of seeds. He seemed like the perfect person to come to Vainamoinen’s barren island and sow it with the seeds of the fields and forests. The story doesn’t say where Sampsa came from, he just kind of appears. He happily accepted this task and promptly headed out to the island to scatter seeds in every swamp and lowland. He cast acorns on the firm soil and fir trees on the mountains. Pines were planted on the hilltops, birches in the marshes, and shrubs in the valleys. He planted alders and lindens and willows, ash and hawthorn and juniper. The work of Sampsa Pellervoinen soon sprouted all across the island, growing tall and thick and green.
Vainamoinen stood on a towering peak and gazed out with satisfaction at Sampsa’s grand works. It all looked marvelous except for one small thing – the acorn had not yet grown into a mighty oak. Perplexed, the great poet stood there for three more days, but nothing sprouted. A week, and still nothing. The oak simply refused to leave her acorn dwelling. Unlike Vainamoinen, she was not impatient to be born (though it also hadn’t been decades for her yet).
Not sure what to do about that, he looked around the wide world and, way off in the distance, he spied four maidens. They were dancing in the ocean spray because they were water spirits, referred to in the text as water brides, whatever that means. Beyond them he saw a fifth standing on the sandy shore surrounded by colorful flowers and dewy grass. Farther inland from the narrow point she occupied, more were in the meadows mowing, raking, and otherwise tending the grassy fields and laying out the cut grains into windrows, long lines of raked grains laid out to dry in the wind.
From the depths of the ocean rose Mighty Tursas, a gigantic sea monster also known as Iku-Turso who may be the father of diseases along with Loviatar, the blind daughter of the death god Tuoni. In some stories, Tursas is also a god of war. He pressed upon the carefully gathered windrows and caused them to spark alight. These grains had been drying long enough that even a small spark was enough to cause an explosive pillar of flame that towered up towards the heavens and burned the windrows to ash in moments.
This wasn’t quite the utterly dickish move it looked to be at first, though. In the ashes of the grains, Tursas placed small, tender leaves and on those, he placed an acorn. As noted earlier, the acorn had previously refused to grow into an oak. With the fresh ashes of the grasses, these acorns had no such hesitation and promptly sprang up into a towering oak tree, tall and stately. I don’t mean tall like a normal tall tree, but tall like the Erdtree in Elden Ring is tall. It reached up above the very storm clouds, stopping the gentle drifting of the white puffy clouds, blocked out the rays of the sun, trapped the shafts of the moon, and killed the subtle light of the stars. Okay, so maybe it ended up being kind of a dick move after all.
Vainamoinen saw this problematic tree and, as he was wont to do, sat down and pondered the issue at great length. He had meant for this tree to grow for his own artistic vision, but the actual result was causing a great deal of harm. The lives of everyone in existence, man and hero and even those dwelling in the oceans would live much drearier, more depressing lives without any of the lights of the heavens. Clearly it needed to go, but how to kill an oak tree that literally reached up to the heavens? Was there a giant big enough to cut it down? Tursas might be up to the task but, since he was the one who sprouted the tree in the first place, Vainamoinen doubted he would be amenable to killing his creation. After much deliberation, he came up with a plan. “Kapé, daughter of the Ether and my ancient grandmother; Luonnotar, my nurse and most trusted assistant (even though we’ve never seen her do anything in this poem) – I beg the two of you, lend me the great powers of the deep ocean, the strength of the unyielding tides to uproot this mighty oak of evil. Help me to bring down this wicked tree so that the sunlight may shine again and the moonlight may glimmer.”
In immediate response to this fervent request, a form rose up from the ocean. You might be expecting some towering hero like the jagers from Pacific Rim, but you’d be way, way off. This little dude was about as tall as a woman’s hand was long, though the poem says he doesn’t belong to either the largest or the smallest. A cap of copper glittered on his head and boots of copper shone upon his feet. Gloves of copper encased his hands and a belt of copper encircled his waist. Yeah, there’s kind of a theme going here, so it should come as no surprise that the hatchet hanging at his waist was also made of, you guessed it, copper. This tiny weapon’s handle was as long as a woman’s hand (which I’ll remind you is this small lad’s own height) and the blade was as long as a finger is wide. This seems like an unlikely champion to take down the largest tree that ever was, but what else do you expect from a myth? Besides, looks can be deceiving.
Vainamoinen considered this odd-looking lad for a long moment. “Tell me, sir, be you mortal or divine? Tell me please your name and office, if you don’t mind. You have the bearing of a hero if I don’t miss my guess, although you’re barely as tall as a reindeer’s hoof.” The tiny hero didn’t respond, so Vainamoinen addressed him again. “If you’re going to force me to hazard a guess, I would say that you’re human although you must be part of a race of fairy-sized people who are already gone from this earth or at least well on their way. I can’t imagine your kin folk thriving in this big old world.”
At last, the tiny man responded to the old demigod. “As it so happens, I am both god and hero, hailing from the people that rule the vast and mighty ocean. I have come at your request to fell that pesky tree you seem to be having so much trouble with. I intend to bring the vile thing down and lop off its many branches with my trusty hatchet.” Vainamoinen laughed. “I’d pay to see that. I don’t doubt that you have a mighty heart, but there’s just no way that someone as tiny as you can hope to bring down such an enormous tree, let alone chop off the hundred branches scraping the heavens. It’s simply not possible.” The copper man laughed right back. “You’re only half right.”
Before Vainamoinen could ask what he meant, before he could even so much as blink, the copper lad had unfolded into a mighty giant to rival any of those monster-killing jagers I mentioned before (so maybe your image wasn’t so far off after all). With a single step, he left the ocean behind and stood upon the shore. With his head piercing the clouds trapped by the branches and his beard draping all the way to his ankles, he took out his ax and began to sharpen it with six huge blocks of sandstone and then seven blocks of a softer whetstone. Turning his incredibly broad shoulders towards the tree, he took three more steps, placing him beside the roots of the evil tree.
His first blow cracked the bark; his second cut deep into the wood; his third drew sparks from the oak, which was as strong as steel. Even as he drew back for a fourth swing, the tree began to topple over. Timber! The hundred branches shook the skies as it fell, and the whole earth rattled when it hit. The trunk extended out many miles to the east and the branches landed far away in the west. The leaves were scattered far to the south and the hundred branches to the north. None of that makes much sense logistically, but this is as much metaphor as physics, so just roll with it. Anyone who found and secured one of the hundred branches has gained for himself eternal good fortune. Anyone who snagged part of the tree’s canopy gained use of the master magics. The wood chips scattered by the copper blade flew out onto the vast ocean, rocked upon the rolling waves until the storm winds carried them to the Northland.
There lived in the Northland another fair maiden who, at this very moment, was washing her clothes in the waters of Pohyola and beating them dry against the rocks. She spied the chips and splinters of the fallen tree floating in the tide and, curious, she gathered them up in a bag and took them to the ancient courtyard to turn into enchanted arrows. These would go to a great magician and a skillful archer, but that’s beyond the scope of our story.
With the death of the sprawling oak tree, lots of other trees were able to sprout up in vast groves. Golden flowers grew in the meadows and herbs grew in the valleys, but the barley was not growing. Once more, this problem fell to Vainamoinen to solve. He considered it deeply, wandering down to the seashore to think better. There, where the ocean meets the sand, he found six seeds of golden barley and seven ripened kernels. He plucked them up and hid them away in his pouches made from squirrel and marten. He went out to the Osma hills and lowlands on the brink of the waters of the Kalew and prepared to sew the barley seeds.
Above him, a tiny titmouse (a type of bird) cried out across the hills. “Osma’s barley will not flourish nor the barley of Wainola unless the soil is made ready first, the forest leveled and the branches burned to ash.” Sighing at the cyclical nature of this whole thing, Vainamoinen made himself an ax to clear the forest. He felled the trees of all description excepting only the birch trees for the birds to perch in, sacred birds in sacred branches. An eagle flew down to question this particular decision, and Vainamoinen explained that he’d left them for he and his kin to perch in, which sounded great to the bird. The heavenly eagle therefore burst into flames that were fanned into a raging inferno by the north wind and the east wind until it burned all the trees except for the holy birch trees, leaving only dust and ash. You know, as eagles are constantly doing. Thus, the land was finally ready for the barley.
Bringing out his magical barley grains again, Vainamoinen scattered them on the ash-strewn ground. As he did, he chanted softly to himself. “I am sowing the seeds of life, sowing through my open fingers from the hand of the Creator into the enriched ashes of the soil. Ancient mother who dwells far beneath the earth, beneath the oceans, mother of fields and forest, grant your blessing to the seeds and the soils and give them the strength to sprout. The earth cannot yield ripe barley without a helping hand, so lend your strength to those who plow the fields. Ukko, god of the heavens who lives high in the Ether above, dispatch a cloud from the east and rain from the northeast, the west, and the northwest. From the south send a warm cloud that the rains may fall soft and gentle, spreading their honey across the fields so that the barley may ripen and rustle.”
Benevolent Ukko heard this prayer and held counsel with the other gods in the Ether. It was decided to answer this humble prayer and send the clouds and the rains. The fallow fields were soon ripe with the work of Vainamoinen. Seven days passed and, on the eighth day, Vainamoinen went out to survey his barley fields. He found it barely growing – which would be exceedingly fast in a normal field but was considered intolerably slow for a divine field. The blades were triple knotted and the ears were six sided. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. As he was doing so, a cuckoo bird flew down and once again asked why the silver birch tree was the only thing left standing and all the other trees had been cut down. Vainamoinen once again answered that the sacred trees were left as a nesting place for the sacred birds to perch in. All he asked in return was for the bird to sing melodiously so that its song would help the barley to ripen and enrich the Northlands and Kalevala (the lands where all of this has taken place, which is why the poem is named after it).
And thus had the barren world of vast oceans become a verdant thing of hills and valleys. There’s a lot more poem covering a lot of epic deeds and heroic figures but that’s beyond the scope of the creation myth, so we’re going to leave that for another day. Instead, it’s time for Gods and Monsters. This is a segment where I get into a little more detail about the personalities and history of one of the gods or monsters from this week’s pantheon that was not discussed in the main story. This week’s holiday antagonist is the demon Sui.
This story comes from the traditions of the Chinese New Year, which isn’t for another month but is thematically related enough to make the episode. If you’re at all familiar with Chinese traditions, then you might have seen the red envelopes that are given for New Year’s. Traditionally, married couples and the elderly give them out to unmarried youths and children and almost always contain money (anywhere from a few bucks to several hundred dollars worth).
There are a number of superstitions around the numbers used, with number beginning with 8 (the word in Mandarin is a homophone for wealth) or 6 (which is a homophone for smooth) but never 4 (which is a homophone for death) and is considered very unlucky (think 13 in a lot of Western countries). Odd numbers are also usually avoided since odd cash values are usually given at funerals. When received, they are not refused since that would mean you were out of luck for the new year. Once accepted, the envelope would be kept under your pillow for seven nights to symbolize good luck and fortune.
So red envelopes of cash are a pretty awesome tradition, but where did it come from? Well, long ago there lived a terrifying demon named Sui, whose name means year in Mandarin. He had horns and claws and scales and huge green eyes (though some stories say the eyes were red instead). Being a horrible demon, it of course did evil, vicious things wherever it went. What else would you expect from a demon?
Every year, on the eve of the Lunar New Year (which is when Chinese New Year is celebrated), the people would celebrate at home. The world was happy to see the end of the old year, with all its woes and worries, and even happier to see the beginning of the new one, full of promise and possibilities. In the liminal space between these two moments, Demon Sui would travel the world full of innocent children fast asleep in their beds. It would look into their windows and slink in through their doors to slither up to their beds. After a long, silent stare to make sure they were really sound asleep, it would stretch out its cold, scaly hand to touch their tiny snoozing heads.
If the Demon Sui touched a particular child’s head three times, that poor kid was cursed. The poor thing would wake up under that terrifying touch to see the even more terrifying visage of the grinning demon standing over it and would promptly scream in abject fear. The parents would rush in to comfort the shrieking child, but of course the demon was already long gone, so they would think the gibbering child’s terrified story simply a nightmare. By morning, the child would break out in a horrible fever. Any coherent words (assuming the child was old enough to speak) would break down into incoherent nonsense. For as long as the child lived, which generally wasn’t long, its brain would be aflame, leaving the child hallucinating and disconnected from reality. The few who survived never regained their wits.
For all that the Demon Sui was malicious and cruel, it was also completely timid. As such, he was far too cowardly to approach any children who were awake when he entered, since they could see him coming and scream for help. You’d think a demon would be capable of soloing a few measly mortals, but then that’s what makes him a coward. As it became widely known that the Demon Sui was on the prowl on New Year’s Eve, fearful parents would keep their children up during the night, which was known as shou Sui, or guarding against Sui.
As you probably know from either having children or at least from having been children, kids often fight super hard against going to sleep, especially when something cool is happening (like a New Year’s celebration). They flit and buzz around the room like a restless fly but, inevitably, exhaustion catches up to them and the sleepy kids finally crash out wherever they happen to be. If you’ve ever tried to move a kid who stayed up way too late, then you know how impossible it is to wake them up after they finally go the fuck to sleep. Thus, keeping the children awake overnight to protect them from Sui was incredibly difficult. They came up with all sorts of games and toys to try and help in this goal (some of which are still incredibly popular to this very day). The one that’s relevant to the story was a family that wrapped up some bright coins in a little envelope made of bright red paper, which reflected the lamplight in many interesting ways. It was great for catching the magpie interest of small children.
As good as the coin toy idea was, it still only managed to hold the child’s interest until about midnight, when the tiny tot finally collapsed into an exhausted slumber. The coins had fallen out of the envelope in the course of the child’s merriment, leaving them scattered across the floor. The parents, who had resolved to stay up all night to keep a watchful eye over their beloved child had also fallen prey to the late hour and fallen asleep in their chairs. The lamp, unwatched, had burned out, leaving the room dark.
Naturally, this seemed like the perfect opportunity for the Demon Sui to sneak in and work his dark magic. As he slithered across the darkened floor, a stray shaft of moonlight hit one of the scattered coins and reflected directly into the demon’s eye. The demon was as terrified of the light as it was of almost everything but sleeping, helpless victims and it promptly fled the room in utter terror. It wasn’t terribly quiet about it either, so the parents woke up from their fitful nap just in time to see the terrible demon beating a hasty retreat the fuck away. They raced over to check on their child to find it slumbering peacefully, safe and healthy.
The excited parents told everyone about the coins and the red envelope the next morning and how it had driven off the demon. It soon became a widespread tradition, which continues to this very day. In some versions of the story, they were normal coins with nothing special at all about them. In others, they were actually the famous Eight Immortals who had used Daoist magic to transform themselves into the appearance of the eight coins.
Thus disguised, they had hidden themselves in the home of a child they knew (through their magic) would be targeted by the demon. Sui had fled not from a simple moonbeam but from the sudden appearance of the Eight Immortals, who had dropped their disguises and appeared around the child in all their awesome, demon-slaying might. In that version, the demon is still too terrified to approach any envelope with coins to this very day because any of them might be the disguised Immortals setting another ambush. That money is known as ya Sui qian, which means money to gamble away at New Year’s but it is also a homophone for the phrase which translates to money for vanquishing Sui.
That’s it for this episode of Myths Your Teacher Hated. Keep up with new episodes on our Facebook page, on iTunes, on TuneIn, on Vurbl, and on Spotify, or you can follow us on Twitter as @HardcoreMyth, on Instagram as Myths Your Teacher Hated Pod, and on Tumblr as MythsYourTeacherHated. You can also find news and episodes on our website at myths your teacher hated dot com. If you have any questions, any gods or monsters you’d want to learn about, or any ideas for future stories that you’d like to hear, feel free to drop me a line. I’m trying to pull as much material from as many different cultures as possible, but there are all sorts of stories I’ve never heard, so suggestions are appreciated. The theme music is by Tiny Cheese Puff.
Next time, we’re heading to the wilds of Catalonia for magical cats. But not the Andrew Lloyd Webber kind. You’ll learn that giants can have really weird powers, that farm hands can have really bad luck, and that royalty can have really nice hair. Then, in Gods and Monsters, sometimes the smallest friends can have the biggest impact. That’s all for now. Thanks for listening.