Fakelore is inauthentic, manufactured folklore which is created in the hope that it will be accepted as genuine and/or legitimate. The term was coined in 1950 by the folklorist Richard Dorson to describe material like the Paul Bunyan tales. Though they were marketed as campfire stories that loggers passed down, they were created by professional writers in the employ of a lumber company [1]. Folklore is the body of verbal expressive culture, including tales, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs current among a particular population, comprising the oral tradition of that culture, subculture, or group. ... Folkloristics is the formal academic study of folklore such as fairy tales and folk mythology in oral or non-literary traditions. ... Richard Mercer Dorson (1916-1981) was an American folklorist, author, professor, and director of the Folklore Institute at at Indiana University. ... Paul and Babe in Bemidji, Minnesota Paul Bunyan is a mythical lumberjack in tall tales. ...

Urban myths are sometimes called fakelore, though the 'fake' is here taken as a reference to the unreality of the events described and not to an intent to fabricate. Urban legends are a kind of folklore consisting of stories often thought to be factual by those circulating them (see rumor). ...

Historical Fakelore

• One common story attributed to a young George Washington is generally now recognized as fakelore. Washington is said to have cut down a cherry tree, then admitted to the act, stating, "I cannot tell a lie." This is still taught in many American schools despite long consensus amongst historians that the tale is fakelore meant to instill patriotism and good behaviour in children. ^{[citation needed]}

• There exists a claim that the abusive term faggot for a homosexual man derives from the homosexual victims of Inquisition burnings being named after the faggots of wood piled under them. While homosexuals were burned by the Inquisition and victims at that time were sometimes referred to as 'faggots' there are no known examples of the term being applied exclusively to homosexuals before the early 20th century. The origin of the American slang term remains disputed with possible derivations from the aforementioned burning, 'faggot' as a term for a shrewish woman or an underclassmen required to run errands for a senior morphing into a reference to homosexuals, and several other unproven theories. [2]. A popular explanation for the word "fag" is that it originates in United Kingdom public schools. The slang name for a cigarette in UK slang is "fag" even today. Since pederasty and boy love in form of homosexuality was a "public secret" in the UK public schools, and as British schoolboys often expressed homosexuals smoke cigarettes, real men smoke cigars, the US exchange students who observed the word "fag" and the homosexual practises in UK public schools, they associated the word "fag" expressing actually a cigarette to a homosexual male. The word "fag" was then expanded into "faggot", of which it originates.

This article is the current U.S. Collaboration of the Week. ... Defense of the homeland is a commonplace of military patriotism: The statue in the École polytechnique, Paris, commemorating the students involvement in defending France against the 1814 invasion of the Coalition. ... Look up faggot in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Since its coinage, the word homosexuality has acquired multiple meanings. ... The term public school has different (and in some cases contradictory) meanings due to regional differences. ... A lit cigarette A full ashtray. ... The term pederasty embraces a wide range of erotic relations between adult males and adolescent boys. ... Four cigars of different brands (from top: H. Upmann, Montecristo, Macanudo, Romeo y Julieta) An airtight cigar storage tube and a guillotine-style cutter A cigar is a tightly rolled bundle of dried and fermented tobacco, one end of which is ignited so that its smoke may be drawn into...

Christian fakelore

This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims.
Please help Wikipedia by adding references. See the talk page for details.

Christianity has also been subject to various similarly constructed tales, especially during times of religious conflict. Some examples of Christian fakelore include: Image File history File links Stop_hand. ... Christianity is a monotheistic religion centered on the life and teachings of Jesus as recounted in the New Testament. ...

• Easter has its detractors within Christianity. The majority of the Christian fakelore regarding Easter erroneously associates the holiday with the Babylonian goddess Ishtar, based on a superficial similarity between her name and the holiday's. This fakelore claims that Easter was chosen in spring to coincide with a pagan fertility celebration and attributes all Easter customs to that celebration. In the countries where Easter celebrations originated (the Levant and Mediterranean countries), the holiday is not known as "Easter". Instead, it is known by some variant of the word "Pascha" (a word similar to the Hebrew word for Passover; Pesach). The Jewish Passover is also a spring festival, and the celebration of Easter in the spring is a continuation of the older Jewish custom.

• Alexander Hislop's The Two Babylons, which constructs an elaborate argument based on nineteenth century interpretations of classical mythology to demonstrate that Nimrod and Semiramis were the prototypes and founders of every non-Christian mythology. Hislop wished to show, first, that every religion other than Protestant Christianity was attributable to a diabolical conspiracy; second, to attempt to reconcile the known diversity of human myths and pagan religions with the creationist account of early monotheism and two human ancestors who knew the God who made them; and most importantly, to discredit the Roman Catholic Church by claiming that its Mass, its saints, and veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary perpetuated the rites of Nimrod and Semiramis.

• Similar anti-Catholic fictions were produced during the nineteenth century, including the Awful Disclosures of the Hôtel-Dieu Nunnery by Maria Monk, and Charles Chiniquy's 50 Years in the Church of Rome.

• Roman Catholicism has not been immune to the construction of fakelore. In 1969, the liturgical calendar of the Roman Catholic Church was revised. In this revision, many well known saints were dropped from the list of saints held up for veneration by the Roman Catholic Church, and their saint's days demoted to "purely local observances," on the grounds that there was no convincing evidence that they had ever existed. Among the saints dropped in this reform were popular ones such as Catherine of Alexandria, Margaret of Antioch, and Christopher. (It is widely but erroneously believed that George was also removed from the calendar. Today, his memorial is celebrated on April 23, as can be seen by consulting any modern day missal or breviary.) The memorial of St. Catherine of Alexandria on November 25 was restored to the Calendar in 2005.

• The veneration of relics has given rise to many charges that at least for early saints, many of the relics were inauthentic. The authenticity of many of these relics, and the tendency to move, and even to break up and distribute the bodies of venerated persons, has given rise to much controversy; some popular saints have duplicate body parts claimed to be in different locations.

• Apocryphal Christian literature exists that purports to fill in perceived gaps of the canonical Gospels with pious additions. Some of these texts, like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, portray Jesus as animating clay models of birds; or killing playmates in a fit of pique and then reviving them, or killing people who accidentally touched him — all conceits worthy of a Ray Bradbury story.

This article is about the Christian festival. ... Christianity is a monotheistic religion centered on the life and teachings of Jesus as recounted in the New Testament. ... Babylonia was an ancient state in Iraq), combining the territories of Sumer and Akkad. ... Ishtar (Arabic: عشتار) is the Assyrian counterpart to the Sumerian Inanna and to the cognate northwest Semitic goddess Astarte. ... The Levant Levant is an imprecise geographical term historically referring to a large area in the Middle East south of the Taurus Mountains, bounded by the Mediterranean Sea on the west, and by the northern Arabian Desert and Upper Mesopotamia to the east. ... The Mediterranean Sea is an intercontinental sea positioned between Europe to the north, Africa to the south and Asia to the east, covering an approximate area of 2. ... Passover (Hebrew: פסח; transliterated as Pesach or Pesah), also called ×—×’ המצות (Chag HaMatzot - Festival of Matzot) is a Jewish holiday which is celebrated in the spring. ... Alexander Hislop (Born at Duns, Berwickshire, 1807; died Arbroath, 13 March 1865) was a Free Church of Scotland minister famous for his outspoken criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church. ... Original cover of The Two Babylons, which alleges that many of the Roman Catholic churches doctrines and ceremonies came from ancient Babylonian culture. ... Classical mythology usually refers to the religious legends and practices of classical antiquity: Greek mythology; Roman mythology; Greek religion; and Roman religion. ... In the Bible and in legend, Nimrod (Standard Hebrew נִמְרוֹד Nimrod, Tiberian Hebrew נִמְרֹד Nimrōḏ), son of Cush, son of Ham, son of Noah, was a Mesopotamian monarch and a mighty hunter before the Lord. He is mentioned in the Table of Nations (Genesis 10), in the First Book of Chronicles, and... Semiramis (c. ... Protestantism is a movement within Christianity, representing the splitting away from the Roman Catholic Church during the mid-to-late Renaissance in Europe—a period known as the Protestant Reformation. ... This proposed logo for the US Information Awareness Office was dropped due to fears that its Masonic symbolism would provoke conspiracy theories. ... The Creation of Light by Gustave Doré. In Abrahamic religions, creationism is the belief that humans, life, the Earth, and the universe have a miraculous origin in a supreme being or deitys supernatural intervention. ... Monotheism (in Greek μόνος = single and θεός = God) is the belief in the existence of one God, or in the oneness of God. ... It has been suggested that portions of this article be split into a new article entitled Adam. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Catholicism. ... Mass is the term used to describe celebration of the Eucharist in the Western liturgical rites of the Roman Catholic Church, in the Anglo-Catholic tradition of Anglicanism, and in some largely High Church Lutheran regions: in Scandinavian countries the main non-Eucharistic Lutheran service is also known as the... A saint is, broadly defined, a holy person. ... (Latin veneratio, Greek δουλια dulia) In traditional Christian churches (for example, Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy), veneration, or veneration of saints, is a special act of honoring a dead person who has been identified as singular in the traditions of the religion, and through them honoring God who made them and... Blessed Virgin Mary A traditional Catholic picture sometimes displayed in homes. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Alternative meaning: Nineteenth Century (periodical) (18th century — 19th century — 20th century — more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 19th century was that century which lasted from 1801-1900 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar. ... A fictionalized engraving of Maria Monk, in a nuns habit, holding a baby. ... A fictionalized engraving of Maria Monk, in a nuns habit, holding a baby. ... Charles P. Chiniquy (30 July 1809 — 16 January 1899) was an anti-Catholic Presbyterian preacher. ... 1969 (MCMLXIX) was a common year starting on Wednesday (the link is to a full 1969 calendar). ... The liturgical year, also known as the Christian year, consists of the cycle of liturgical seasons in some Christian churches which determines when Feasts, Memorials, Commemorations, and Solemnities are to be observed and which portions of Scripture are to be read. ... Saint Catherine of Alexandria, known as Saint Catherine of the Wheel and The Great Martyr Saint Catherine (Greek ) is a figure claimed to have been a noted scholar in the early 4th Century who, at the age of only 18, is said to have visited the Emperor Maxentius and to... Margaret, with her palm of martyrdom, escapes the dragon Saint Margaret, also known as Margaret of Antioch, virgin and martyr, was formerly celebrated by the Roman Catholic Church on July 20. ... Saint Christopher is a saint venerated by Roman Catholics, listed as a martyr from the reign of the 3rd century Roman emperor Decius (reigned 249 - 251). ... Saint-George is a municipality with 695 inhabitants (as of 2003) in the district of Aubonne in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland. ... A relic is an object, especially a piece of the body or a personal item of someone of religious significance, carefully preserved with an air of veneration as a tangible memorial, Relics are an important aspect of Buddhism, some denominations of Christianity, Hinduism, shamanism, and many other personal belief systems. ... The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ... The Biblical canon is an exclusive list of books written during the formative period of the Jewish or Christian faiths; the leaders of these communities believed these books to be inspired by God or to express the authoritative history of the relationship between God and his people (although there may... For other uses, see Gospel (disambiguation). ... The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is a non-canonical Christian text that was part of a popular genre of the 2nd and 3rd centuries— a miracle literature of Infancy gospels that was both entertaining and inspirational, written to satisfy a hunger for more miraculous and anecdotal stories of the childhood... Jesus (8-2 BC/BCE — 29-36 AD/CE),[1] also known as Jesus of Nazareth, is the central figure of Christianity. ... Orders Many - see section below. ... Ray Bradbury in 1945. ...

Neopagan Fakelore

The neopagan movement has seen several instances of fakelore: Neopaganism (sometimes Neo-Paganism, meaning New Paganism) is a heterogeneous group of religions which attempt to revive ancient, mainly European pre-Christian religions. ...

• An example of neopagan fakelore is the account of how the square dance resulted from an imposition of Puritan repressive values on the witches' circle dance. This serves the dual purpose of characterising the Puritans as censorious and joyless "squares" while perpetuating the idea that the witches' traditions were able to survive under different guises.

• In recent years, the familiar red and white colours of Santa Claus have been erroneously attributed to Coca-Cola, which popularised the image rather than creating it [3]. Neopagan fakelore attributes these colours either to 'blood on the snow' or to an alleged shamanic practice in which reindeer would be skinned and their hide worn inside out, thus creating a red garment with white fringes. A neopagan monologue broadcast on radio, The Mendip Shaman, popularised this belief [4]. As the characteristic red and white Santa only evolved in the 1920s, attributing these colours to shamans skinning reindeer is clearly inaccurate.

• The name Eostre is sometimes mistakenly held to be the origin of the word oestrogen, perhaps following a wilful association of Easter eggs with human egg cells. In actuality, the term is known with certainty to be derived from the Greek 'oistros', originally meaning 'gadfly' but evolving into a description of frenzied desire (cf. Plato's Republic, "...driven and drawn by the gadfly of desire...").

• One of the myths which links Eostre to the Easter Bunny might illustrate how some neopagan fakelore works backwards from a presumed origin. There is little historical evidence of a goddess named 'Eostre' or 'Ostara', but the Venerable Bede attested to her past worship and Jakob Grimm claimed to have found evidence of her in German traditions. A myth in which she transforms her pet bird into a rabbit that then lays eggs for children is of uncertain ancestry, but has no report older than 1990 (Sarah Ban Breathnach, 'Nostalgic Suggestions for Re-Creating the Family Celebrations and Seasonal Pastimes of the Victorian Home'). Some have suggested that this myth and another where Eostre was described as having the head of a hare, even though there are no images of animal-headed deities in Anglo-Saxon art, were invented recently and circulated among neopagans as the 'real origin' of Easter.

• A number of Wiccan, NeoPagan and even some "Traditionalist" groups have a history of spurious "Grandmother Stories" - usually involving initiation by a Grandmother, Grandfather, or other elderly relative who is said to have instructed them in the secret, millennia-old traditions of their ancestors. As this "secret wisdom" has almost always been traced to recent sources, or been quite obviously concocted even more recently, most proponents of these stories have eventually admitted they made them up.

Square dance is a folk dance where four couples (eight dancers) begin and end each sequence in a square formation, with one couple on each side of a square. ... The Puritans were originally members of a group of English Protestants seeking purity — further reforms or even separation from the established church — during the Protestant Reformation. ... This article is part of the Witchcraft series. ... A common portrayal of Santa Claus. ... The wave shape (known as the dynamic ribbon device) present on all Coca-Cola cans throughout the world derives from the contour of the original Coca-Cola bottles. ... A shaman doctor of Kyzyl. ... It has been suggested that Ostara be merged into this article or section. ... Estrogens (also oestrogens) are a group of steroid compounds, named for their importance in the oestrus cycle, functioning as the primary female sex hormone. ... It has been suggested that Ostara be merged into this article or section. ... A porcelain Easter Bunny The Easter Bunny (sometimes known controversially as the Spring Bunny in some parts of the United States) is an imaginary or mythical rabbit which leaves gifts for children at Easter (or at springtime). ... Bede, commonly known as the Venerable Bede, (c. ... Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm (January 4, 1785 – September 20, 1863), German philologist and mythologist, was born at Hanau, in Hesse-Kassel. ... The famous parade helmet found at Sutton Hoo, probably belonging to King Raedwald of East Anglia circa 625. ... This article is about the Christian festival. ...

See also

• Christian mythology
• Folk etymology

Christian mythology is a body of stories that explains or symbolizes Christian beliefs. ... Folk etymology (or popular etymology) is a linguistic term for a category of false etymology which has grown up in popular lore, as opposed to one which arose in scholarly usage. ...

References

• Liturgia Horarum, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2000.
• Textus Inserendi, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2005.