The Connection between Faeries and Prehistoric Sites

The Faeries and Prehistoric Sites in Folklore and Modern Testimonies

There is a deep connection between the faeries and prehistoric sites throughout Britain, Ireland and Western Europe. This connection is recorded in the folkloric record and in modern testimonies, suggesting a metaphysical linkage that may provide a deeper understanding of the faerie phenomenon. The oldest recorded story of human interaction with the faeries at a prehistoric site comes from the 12th-century chronicler William of Newburgh. In his Historia rerum Anglicarum, William chronicles the historical timeline of events during the reigns of Stephen and Henry II, but included in the chronicle are numerous marvels; stories from local folkloric traditions, including the famous tale of The Green Children, and also discursive tangents in to subject matter such as revenants – revived corpses, sometimes described as medieval vampires. One story related by William appears to have been with him since his childhood, and involves a faerie encounter at the late-Neolithic/early-Bronze Age burial mound called Willy Howe in the East Riding of Yorkshire:

In the Yorkshire province, not too far from the place of my birth [Bridlington], a miraculous thing occurred, which I have been familiar with since my childhood. There is a village some miles away from the North Sea, near which famous waters, which are generally known as Gipsey, gush out of the ground in a number of springs… One day a rustic of the village just mentioned, went to visit one of his friends in a neighbouring village, the road to which lay near a tumulus, a road, therefore, which we may easily suppose people would not then willingly choose to pass at night. However, the love of beer, which was then even more powerful than at the present day, kept the rustic visitor until a late hour at night, and when at length he started on his way home he was all the happier for his entertainment. As he approached the tumulus he was astonished to hear merry sounds issuing from it, which betokened that it was occupied by a party who were feasting. Wondering who could have come to that lonely spot to enjoy themselves at such an hour, he approached nearer to the mound, and then, for the first time, he saw a door open in its side. Our rustic friend, who was well mounted, rode boldly up to this door, looked through it, and beheld, inside, a spacious building, brilliantly illuminated, and a large company of men and women seated at a magnificent entertainment. As he stood there staring at the door, one of the cup-bearers, seeing him, approached and offered him the cup to drink. Now it must be remarked that, according to the doctrines of faerie lore (for these were faeries), when a mere mortal approached their assemblies accidentally, the faerie-folk always offered some of the liquor they were drinking, and if it were taken, the consumer immediately lost all power of returning home, and was carried away into faerieland. But the rustic of East Yorkshire was too wise for that, for he poured the contents on the ground, and, grasping firmly the cup, started off at full gallop. The faerie feasters rushed from the tumulus, and gave chase; but the horse of the fugitive was a good and swift one, and almost by miracle he reached his village in safety, and secured his valuable prize. In the end this goblet of unknown material, unusual colour, and unfamiliar shape, was bestowed on King Henry I, and later delivered to David, King of Scotland. It was later returned to King Henry II and has remained in the royal treasury.

Willy Howe was evidently still attracting folkloric resonance in to the 20th century, when the reverend William Smith, in his 1923 publication The Ancient Springs and Streams of the East Riding of Yorkshire, recounted a tale from the indeterminate past where a man was befriended by a female faerie on the mound and promised a guinea each day if he would meet her there. He was sworn to secrecy about the contract, but eventually told some friends, after which there were no more guineas and he was punished (although Smith gives no details as to what the punishment was) by the faerie occupants (a common folklore motif).

While the Willy Howe story recorded by William of Newburgh may be the earliest correlation of the faeries to prehistoric burial mounds, there are many more examples, which while not collected until the 18th and 19th centuries, had evidently been collating through the oral tradition for many centuries. In his 1976 publication Folklore of Prehistoric Sites in Britain, the archaeologist Leslie Grinsell catalogues a considerable number of folkloric faerie encounters at prehistoric sites, most of them Bronze Age burial mounds (barrows). He even produces a distribution map, which demonstrates clusters of stories in Scotland, the Midlands and the North-West and South-West of England.

Much of the folklore recorded by Grinsell is associated with faerie music being heard at the burial mounds, usually including an allegorical lesson being learnt or a gift being given to the person who heard the tunes. For instance, a man who built his house on Mingulay Dun, in Barra, Outer Hebrides, had to move away after being persistently kept awake by the sound of faerie pipes and refrains, but stayed long enough to learn some of the tunes. Bincombe and Whitcombe in Dorset both have Music Barrows, where the sound of faerie fiddles and flutes may be heard at midday – fitting in to the common motif of experiencing the faeries being temporally constrained to a certain time of day. There are also many cautionary tales associated with faeries and barrows, such as the cup taken by a man who encountered a faerie feast on the barrow called Fairy Hill at Orrisdale on the Isle of Man: “A fairy offered the passer-by a drink from a silver cup, but he threw out the contents and the faeries disappeared, leaving the cup in his hand. He sought advice from his priest who persuaded him to present the cup to Kirk Malew Church for use at communion. It was later noticed that whenever the cup was used there, those who drank from it went mad afterwards, and so the use of the cup was abandoned.” But the faeries also have a benevolent role to play in stories surrounding their presence at prehistoric burial mounds. At Pixies’ Mound, Stogursey, Somerset, a ploughman on his way to work noticed a broken peel (a wooden shovel for baking cakes) on the barrow. He mended it and replaced it where he found it. When he returned from work the peel was gone, and in its place was a freshly baked cake, interpreted as a reward from the faeries for repairing their implement.

Grinsell records over sixty folkloric stories of this type in Britain, a number that could be multiplied several times if a modern assessment based on new research were to be carried out (Janet Bord’s 2004 book The Traveller’s Guide to Fairy Sites is the most up to date assessment, which takes the number of sites to about a hundred). The allegorical, motif-ridden overlays of all the folkloric examples should not distract from the very real correlation to an idea of the faeries and their relation to prehistoric sites – the historic tradition evidently made a connection between supernatural entities and ancient burial mounds. The deep association in many traditions of the faeries and the dead (the ancestors) may be one reason for this, and will be discussed below.

In Ireland the association is made explicit; the faeries (aes sídhe) are ‘the people of the mounds’, although many of the legends attached to these sites are more mythologically derived compared to British folklore. Prehistoric burial mounds such as Sidhe Finnachaidh, Sidh-ar-Femhin and Brí Léith are sites utilised within the Mythological Cycle of Irish stories and poetry, which link faerie royalty with prehistoric burial mounds. So, while the Irish stories contain more grand narratives than the British folklore, the point remains that there is an intimate link between the mounds and the faeries in folkloric/mythological narratives throughout Britain and Ireland.

However, Jeremy Harte makes the valid point that faerie hills are not always burial mounds and that perhaps the folkloric prerogative was to house the faeries under any prominent hill or mound for the purposes of a narrative rather than any close correlation between prehistoric burial locations and the faeries. Indeed, two of the most famous faerie hills are natural and not burial mounds. These are Doon Hill at Aberfoyle, where the Rev. Robert Kirk consorted with the faeries and met his death in the late 17th century, and the Faerie Hill of Sithean Moor on Iona, which has a long association with the faeries, and was also the location of the mysterious death of a young occultist by the name of Marie Fornario in 1929. But it remains true that most ‘mounds’ in the folkloric record are Neolithic or Bronze Age barrows, which suggests an intimate link between these sites and the faeries, and also a deep recognition of this among the people who were perpetuating the stories in the historic period.

While burial mounds seem to be the most popular faerie haunts in the folklore, there are also many records of faerie interactions at other prehistoric sites. Stone circles most commonly have the attached folkloric motif of being people petrified into stone for some misdemeanour (most often dancing on the Sabbath), but sometimes there are faerie correlations. Fingal’s Cauldron Seat is a small Neolithic stone circle on Machrie Moor, Isle of Arran, which, in the folklore, the Irish giant Finn set up to hold his cauldron. One of the stones has a perforated hole, of which the 19th-century historian John McArthur notes: “… was probably associated with some old superstition or religious ceremony, now forgotten. The hole is sufficiently large to admit the two fingers, and runs perpendicularly through the side of the column… The perforated column was believed to contain a fairy or brownie, who could only be propitiated by the pouring of milk through the hole bored in the side of the stone.” And at the Rollright stone circle in Oxfordshire there is a persistent folkloric story that the faeries emerge from a hole in a rock in the former quarry close to the King Stone to dance around the stones during full moons. It is interesting that in both these cases it is a hole in the stone that leads down to a faerie space, insinuating that (as with the burial mounds) the faeries are usually to be found underground.

Mitchell’s Fold stone circle in Shropshire is associated with an interesting piece of folklore that has the attributes of ancient oral tradition, even though it only first appears in the record during the 19th century. Leslie Grinsell summarises the legend in his booklet Mitchell’s Fold Stone Circle and its Folklore (1980): a local famine was alleviated by a faerie (in some versions faeries), who was able to generate a white cow that gave copious amounts of milk. One night a malicious witch named Mitchell milked the cow through a sieve and the displeased faeries turned her to stone and built the circle around her to prevent her from ever escaping. The folktale is even commemorated in a 19th-century pillar carving in the local church of Middleton-in-Chirbury. This particular legend certainly has the hallmarks of a magical tradition being filtered through later folklore, and may retain a folk-memory of the stone circle being used by its Neolithic builders as an interventional container for whatever negative energies they perceived in the landscape – more of which below.

There are other prehistoric stone circles, which have either been designated as faerie rings, such as Hjaltadans (Shetland), or which have specific stones known as the faerie stone, as at Hordron Edge (Derbyshire), although it is difficult to know how far these designations go back beyond the 19th century. Likewise, in Brittany there appears to be a deep connection between faerie folklore and megalithic sites, which are frequently designated as stones of the corrigans or fée (the usual Breton terms for faeries). Dee Dee Chainey discusses the collections of some of these tales by the 19th-century folklorist Paul Sébillot:

One story was collected by Sébillot in 1881 from a local gardener about a megalith sited between Saint-Didier and Marpiré (Ille-et-Vilaine), and it is shown to have strange origins: ‘The faeries took the biggest stones of the country and carried them in their aprons; then they piled them one on top of the others to build their houses.’ Another dolmen, near the wood of Rocher in Pleudihen, was similarly made by the faeries by carrying rocks in their aprons according to the local people.’ It’s interesting to note that, in contrast to the megaliths as homes for the faeries, a ‘white-haired farmer’ spoke of a menhir (peulvan) called la Pierre Fritte, saying that the fairies erected such things for those souls who had done good in their life, and whose ashes could remain ‘safe from the malice and destruction of time’ where ‘they came at night to talk with the dead.’

Three decades after Sébillot’s collection of stories the American anthropologist WY Evans Wentz also recorded the faerie beliefs of the Bretons in his 1911 publication The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. Many of the stories he collected centred around the extensive landscape of Neolithic stone rows, dolmens and menhirs near the village of Carnac in southern Brittany. One description of the faeries’ activities was given to him by Marie Ezanno (then 60 years old) of Carnac village:

‘The corrigans are little dwarfs who formerly, by moonlight, used to dance in a circle on the prairies [the land containing the megalithic structures]. They sang a song the couplet of which was not understood, but only the refrain, translated in Breton: “Di Lun (Monday), Di Merh (Tuesday), Di Merhier (Wednesday).” ‘They whistled in order to assemble. Where they danced mushrooms grew; and it was necessary to maintain silence so as not to interrupt them in their dance. They were often very brutal towards a man who fell under their power, and if they had a grudge against him they would make him submit to the greatest tortures. The peasants believed strongly in the corrigans, because they thus saw them and heard them. The corrigans dressed in very coarse white linen cloth. They were mischievous spirits (espirits follets), who lived under dolmens.’

Evans-Wentz discovered that the Breton belief in faeries very much correlated them with the dead, much more so than in the other Celtic countries from which he collected testimonies. Carnac was the nexus of this, evidently due to the extensive range of prehistoric megaliths, which, while not properly understood in their archaeological context, were understood to be abodes of the ancestral dead. For the people of southern Brittany at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, the faeries and the dead were one and the same thing.

These folkloric examples demonstrate an innate understanding in traditional communities that the faeries were often to be found inhabiting prehistoric ritual sites. Most frequently they were underneath the mounds and stones, suggesting they were part of an Otherworld marginally disconnected from consensus reality. But the stories are often overlain with allegorical storytelling and motifs, which has allowed them to become somewhat subsumed in to a whimsical past, with limited relevance to any understanding of the metaphysical reality of the connection. However, encounters with faeries at prehistoric sites are not limited to the folklore. Modern experiences are numerous, and usually take the form of straightforward testimonies, without any formulated diegesis. My own experience at West Kennet Long Barrow, Wiltshire in 1996 is described in a previous post: Some Personal Reflections on Interfacing with the Faeries. This is a somewhat similar experience to that described by Jo Hickey-Hall on her Modern Fairy Sightings podcast at the La Pouquelaye de Faldouet Neolithic passage tomb (dolmen) on Jersey. The fascinating aspect of this experience is that it was reprised by another woman at the same site. The faerie entity appeared as a small, gnome-like creature (described as playful and mischievous) that appeared briefly at the dolmen before flickering out of existence. Whilst there was no apparent message or deep interaction from the experience, both Jo and the woman suggest the encounter allowed a turning point in their lives, and that the interface was important in their understanding of the possibilities of the existence of incarnate entities. Unlike the folkloric stories, there is no storytelling overlay – it is simply an experience of a faerie-type entity at a prehistoric site.

There are also several experience reports at prehistoric sites in the Fairy Investigation Society’s census, compiled by Simon Young between 2014-17. The following is worth reproducing in full, as it captures the ethereal quality of many sightings, and the effect on the participants. It happened at the Boskednan Nine Maidens stone circle in Cornwall in the early 2000s, and is report #22 in the census:

My husband and I were having a hike in the area, near Morvah. We had parked the car and walked to the Men-an-Tol, then down to the Men Scryfa which is a standing stone dating from the early medieval period. We were going back to the track to head up to the Nine Maidens stone circle, when we saw a man running down the hill. When I say run, think of those dreams when the land flies beneath you with each step; he was moving like this over the heathy ground. He stopped and looked at us, and my husband waved. He grinned and waved back, then continued to run at this incredible pace in an easterly direction until he was out of sight. He was the same sort of height and build as a slim human, with shoulder-length hair which was the colour of haematite. It was a metallic dark grey. He wore olive green trousers and a long sleeved top, but the cut was very unusual, not like anything that would be commonly bought in a shop. It had a hand-made look to it, with an odd style. I felt a bit spooked by this appearance, and husband and I chatted about how strange he had looked whilst we reached the top of the hill and the Nine Maidens. As we reached the site, the weather began to change; from being a clear sunny day, a strong wind blew up from the west and brought with it a fair deal of cloud and fog. There was a purple/grey hue to this. We explored the circle for a few minutes, and joked about having gone through a portal. As soon as we stepped out of the circle, the wind died down, the clouds cleared, and it was a bright sunny day again. Whilst we walked back towards the car, we were talking about the strange events, and joked that we hoped the car was still there, and that seven years had not passed!

Prehistoric Faeries: Landscape, the Ancestors and Altered States of Consciousness

There is evidently a link between the faeries and prehistoric sites in Britain, Ireland and Europe. In many ways this is a direct correlation between the faeries and death in the form of the ancestors. Most (perhaps all) prehistoric sites were created as memorials for the dead. The burial mounds are the most obvious examples (even though they would have been used for other ritual purposes apart from burial), but megalithic stone circles and rows and individual standing stones were also, in part, memorials for the ancestors. The relationship between these sites and the faerie phenomenon is important, and is based on a blurring of the difference between the faeries and the dead. Evans-Wentz explicitly states that, in the Celtic countries where he collected his information, they were often understood to be one and the same thing: “The animistic character of the Celtic Legend of the Dead is apparent; and the striking likenesses constantly appearing in our evidence between the ordinary apparitional faeries and the ghosts of the dead show that there is often no essential and sometimes no distinguishable difference between these two orders of beings, nor between the world of the dead and faerieland.”

It is perhaps then not surprising that much faerie folklore and modern faerie encounters have gathered around these sites. The folklore that portrays the faeries as inhabiting the land of the dead shows them as representatives of the past and what is gone. In the same way as a memory of someone dead can be conjured up in consciousness before disappearing into the subconscious, so the faeries are able to make appearances in our collective stories (based on experiences) that attempt to understand death and its connection with life. Their somewhat wacky behaviour perhaps exemplifies our fear of the unknown — they live in an undiscovered country, and have their own customs and rules. But it’s a place that can be accessed and brought into our comprehension of reality — physically and metaphysically — so as to come to terms with death, both our own and of others.

Our prehistoric ancestors were evidently intent on marking certain parts of the landscape with megalithic and other structures for a variety of ritualistic reasons, but primarily to interface with the transcendent world of the dead. If the folklore of these sites is resonant with the faerie phenomenon, then perhaps it is a folk-memory of what the prehistoric builders of the sites were attempting to capture. It is possible that the faeries (in all their forms) are remnants of an indigenous belief-system, which have continued to manifest through time, appearing to us not only in folklore, but as a metaphysical component of reality. The prehistoric sites are like lightning rods – retaining a non-material energy of consciousness within their structures that may allow us to tap in to the same experiences as those who built them. This is not the same as the old anthropological model suggested by Evans-Wentz et al., that hypothesised the faeries are the memories of prehistoric ancestors. Rather, it is the idea that the faeries are part of a collective human consciousness, first realised thousands of years ago, and still prevalent, especially at nodal points such as burial mounds or megalithic structures.

This might be taken further by suggesting that faerie entities (whether representatives of the dead or not) exist in their own standalone non-physical reality, and are able to interact with our own physical reality when certain conditions are met. Much of the folkloric record about faerie encounters, as well as modern testimonies, infer that the participant(s) is engaged in the experience during an altered state of consciousness. This consciousness state can be induced by a variety of means, and can vary from slight tweaks in everyday perception through to dramatic changes brought about by psychedelic states. Faerie folklore often includes coded language to suggest that there is an alteration in the reality field, which allows the faeries to interface with human consciousness; likewise in modern testimonies. If this is true in historic folklore and modern encounters, then it is likely to be true for our prehistoric ancestors who were constructing the sites where so many faerie interactions have been recorded.

The shamanic cultures of the Neolithic and Bronze Age were certainly adopting various strategies to alter their state of consciousness for ritual purposes, and while there is no direct archaeological evidence for psychotropic plant/mushroom use in prehistoric Britain and Ireland, a recent study from Es Càrritx, in Menorca, using UHPLC-HRMS to examine hair strands from the Bronze Age detected the alkaloids ephedrine, atropine and scopolamine, confirming the use of psychotropic plants at this time. It is likely that British and Irish contemporaries of these Mediterranean peoples were also making use of various psychotropic plants and mushrooms, which were widely available at this time. But whatever technique was used by prehistoric people to alter their states of consciousness, the state itself is probably an important element of why they spent so much time and effort constructing megalithic structures and barrows in specific landscapes. Whilst these sites were built in reverence to the dead ancestors, it can be suggested that they were also located at nodal points – almost like landscape acupuncture – to induce encounters with representatives of the Otherworld, whether these were the dead, faeries or other forms of intelligent entities, which were not ordinarily part of physical reality. If this were the case, then perhaps the energy of these prehistoric sites resonates through time, and if we are in the appropriate state of consciousness, we too can tap into the same perceptive field, which may manifest as encounters with faerie-type entities. This in turn may alter and inform our understanding of reality and of death, much as it may have done for our prehistoric ancestors.

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The cover image is from the television series Children of the Stones (first aired on ITV in 1977). Artist not identified.

The interaction between archaeology and folklore is only touched upon in this article, but Tina Paphitis has written a thoughtful essay titled ‘Folklore and Public Archaeology in the UK’, which investigates the interaction (and lack of interaction).

Dead but Dreaming the novel is available now.

I also have an essay in the new publication Fairy Films: Wee Folk on the Big Screen (ed. Joshua Cutchin), which is a deep-dive into the 1997 film Photographing Fairies.

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The Faerie Taboos

taboo [ta·​boo | tə-‘bü] NOUN
A social or religious custom prohibiting or restricting a particular practice or forbidding association with a particular person, place, or thing.

Taboo motifs are common in both traditional faerie-tales and folklore. In traditional tales they can form the centrepiece of the plotline; the crux that everything turns on, usually marking a change in state from supernatural to natural or vice-versa. In more anecdotal folklore their function is also often central to the didactics of the testimony. Whether the action takes place in a faerie Otherworld with a human placed under the edicts of a taboo, or whether it is a faerie in consensus reality imposing unbreakable taboos on humans, the motif appears to represent a fundamental premise concerning the interaction between physical and metaphysical reality. It would seem the taboo is a coded message that may help unlock the meaning of the tales and folklore. But the code is usually deeply embedded and buried beneath metaphors and symbolism that often appear too layered and hidden to elicit any explanation as to the purpose of the taboos. They are most often surreal and even absurd parts of tales and folklore. So are these taboo motifs inserted into stories simply as useful plot devices and to invoke a sense of magical realism in folk tales, or do they have a more profound significance, locked into the transpersonal memory of folklore as hermeneutic tools to interpret aspects of reality and the human condition?

Taboos in Faerie-Tales and Folklore

Faerie-tale taboos come in many forms but in essence, they represent prohibitions invoked by faerie entities that cannot be broken. Invariably, they are broken and the consequences are as promised. These consequences are nearly always (though not exclusively) detrimental to the human protagonists of the stories. The motif is ancient and finds its way into several early-medieval Irish tales, the most well-known being Oisín in Tír na nÓg, which includes a double-taboo. Oisín is a poet of the Fianna, and falls asleep under an ash tree. He awakes to find Niamh, Queen of Tír na nÓg, the land of perpetual youth, inhabited by the Tuatha Dé Danann, summoning him to join her in her realm as husband. He agrees and for three years he finds himself living in a paradise of perpetual summer and where time and death hold no sway. Oisín and Niamh even have three children together. But soon he breaks the taboo of standing on a broad flat stone, from where he is able to view the Ireland he left behind. It has changed for the worse, and he begs Niamh to give him leave to return. She reluctantly agrees but asks that he return after only one day with the mortal inhabitants. She supplies him with a magical black horse, which he is not to dismount, and ‘gifted him with wisdom and knowledge far surpassing that of men.’ Once back in Ireland he realises that three hundred years have passed and that he is no longer recognised or known. Inevitably, he dismounts his horse and immediately his youth is gone and he becomes an enfeebled old man with nothing but his immortal wisdom. There is no returning to the faerieland of Tír na nÓg. In other variations of the story, the hero breaks the taboo and turns to dust as soon as his feet touch the ground of consensus reality.

‘Niamh meets Oisín’ by PJ Lynch

Medieval prose and poetry from Britain and France also used the taboo motif frequently, usually within the Arthurian cycle of stories, which often involved a faerie Otherworld as an essential component of the mythos. Chrétien de Troyes’s romance Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, is the earliest text example (12th century), where Yvain (like Oisín) falls in love with the Otherworldly faerie, Laudine, and lives with her in a magical land. After a time, he leaves to return to his own world under her stipulation (the taboo) that he returns after a year and a day. He fails to do so and is therefore rejected by her and prohibited from re-entering the faerie Otherworld. In the 14th-century Middle-English romance Sir Launfal by Thomas Chestre (based on the 12th-century Lanval by Marie de France) Launfal is undone by uttering the name of his faerie lover Tryamour (a theme explored below), who had previously bestowed gifts on him – including a faerie horse, an invisible servant and a self-replenishing bag of gold coins – and promised to come to him whenever he wished, provided he adhered to the taboo of never naming her to another human. Once he has uttered her name (to Queen Guenevere no less) and broken the taboo, she comes to him no more and the gifts she has given him disappear.

This Arthurian mythos was plugging into earlier Celtic stories, which may have dated from at least the 8th century in written form and to the pre-Christian era in oral tradition. So the regurgitation of the taboo motif through the Middle Ages demonstrates a continuation of its Pagan metaphysical significance, even if the composers of the stories in the later medieval period were not fully aware of the coded meaning of the motif. They may have been using it as a useful magical plot device, but they were, in fact, perpetuating an ancient symbolic motif that was an intrinsic part of stories where a faerie Otherworld formed part of the narrative.

Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann (1855)

The taboo motif evidently continued to form part of evolving oral folklore in the post-medieval period until the stories began to be recorded in the 19th century. When Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm recorded their traditional European faerie-tales in the early 19th century about a third of them incorporated a taboo motif. The motifs found many forms but are all recognisable as magical prohibitions. In Cinderella, the midnight curfew is the prohibition invoked by the ‘fairy godmother’, which allows the heroine to maintain an aura of glamour to achieve her goals, but which has a defined time-period before the magic is taken away. When Cinderella breaks the curfew/taboo she has to quickly escape the constructed reality, losing her slipper as she does so, and thereby setting up the rest of the story. In Little Brother and Little Sister, a witch (a common propagator of taboos in faerie-tales) sets up the prohibition to the siblings of drinking from streams. The taboo is communicated telepathically to the sister every time her brother is about to drink from a stream: First, he will be turned into a tiger and the next time into a wolf. He resists the urge to drink but at the third stream breaks the taboo, drinks and is turned into a roebuck. This allows the story to continue along the theme of sibling love with magical realism embedded in the narrative, but only because it has been countenanced through the symbolic breaking of the taboo, which is the arbiter of the magical situation.

The Grimms’ Rumpelstiltskin was a version of a story that was paralleled in the English Tom Tit Tot. Here the put-upon and imprisoned heroine is aided in her duties of spinning flax by an ‘imp’. But his aid comes with the condition that she will need to guess his name before a year and a day otherwise she becomes his. She eventually hears him yabbering his name beneath her prison window and so on the final night she is able to repeat his name and avoid being taken from the natural to the supernatural. This story is embedded with the taboo motif of ‘not naming’ (a theme returned to below). A supernatural entity imposes the taboo in a form of competition, which is won by the heroine. She has broken the taboo, in this instance, to her benefit.

By the time most of these classic faerie-tales were collected by folklorists in the 19th century, they were being recorded alongside less structured types of folklore, which often incorporated localised events and known people (usually from the past but not always) overlain by a story narrative. Taboos are frequently found in this type of folklore, as exampled by the Cornish story Cherry of Zennor, collected by Robert Hunt in 1865. Cherry is a young girl about to enter service in the locality of her home in Zennor. But as she finds herself on a lonely hill she is taken to an alternative reality through the persuasions of the ‘master’; a faerie entity. She finds the faerie world much more to her liking than the one she left and is pleased to stay there under the spell of the master. She is obliged to look after the master’s child and to anoint his eyes each day with an ointment, which she is told to never apply to her own eyes. Once she breaks this taboo she is able to see the faerie realm in its completeness and the faeries that ‘seemed to swarm everywhere.’ But she is soon found out for contravening the prohibition and is escorted back to the windswept hillside. Her breaking the taboo had given her temporary cosmic vision, but the price had to be paid in the expulsion from a magical reality.

‘Girl and Faeries’ by Brian Froud

The magical ointment motif is common in this folklore type, where the human protagonist is most often a midwife who is persuaded to help out the faeries. She is usually given access to the ointment for washing the babies while being warned not to apply it to her eyes. When she (inevitably) self-applies the ointment the realm of the faeries becomes clearly visible. The most frequent punishment for breaking this taboo was to be blinded at a later date when the ability to see the faeries was revealed to one of their own. In some folklore, this is watered down so that the midwife only has her ability to see the faeries taken away while retaining her natural sight.

Swan Maidens and Lake Faeries

The many folktales about swan maidens and lake faeries always contain a specific taboo implemented by the supernatural being while living in physical reality. While the swan maiden stories are Europe-wide, lake faerie folktales seem concentrated in Britain and especially Wales. Once again, there is a crossover quality about these stories, where a recognisable environment and a not-too-distant past is overlain with certain classical faerie-tale archetypes and symbology. The standard scheme of the stories is that the supernatural female is lured from her watery existence by a male, either through a ruse or by charm. They are married and will usually have children together. But at some point, a taboo is broken and she deserts her husband to return to the water, which always seems to represent the portal between the physical world and a non-material reality.

The most detailed of these folktales is the Welsh tale The Lady of Llyn y Fan Fach, which though only recorded in the 19th century contains named personages that appear to date the origin of the story to the 12th century. In this tale, a young farmer called Gwyn regularly frequents Llyn y Fan Fach, where he pastures his cattle. One day he sees a golden-haired woman, combing her locks and using the lake as a mirror. He woos her and she agrees to marry him. But there is a faerie taboo attached: “Silver and gold cannot buy me. Your love is beyond price so I will marry you and live upon Earth with you until you give to me three causeless blows. The striking of the third blow will be the breaking of our marriage contract. I will leave earth and we shall be parted forever. Do you accept?” He does.

Their marriage prospered and they had three sons, but inevitably the three blows were dealt over time, all as accidents: a playful flick on the shoulder with a glove, a tap on the arm and then a third touch when the faerie wife displays joy at the funeral of a neighbour’s infant. She explains that she still sees with the eyes of the Otherworld and that her joy was that the child had transcended the pain and suffering of mortality. But when the third blow is struck she returns to the lake, with her dowry, and disappears below the surface. Distraught, Gwyn follows her, drowning himself in his grief.

Once again, the taboo motif is central to the narrative arc of these folktales. It always represents the jointure between the physical and the metaphysical, and its breaking will sever whatever link has been made between the two. The taboo appears to be a coded message embedded in the folklore, which is perhaps purveying the idea that any interaction with a metaphysical reality has to have a subsequent consequence. The taboo is the key that locks or unlocks the door joining the natural with the supernatural.

More Folkloric Taboos

The taboo was evidently an important element of many folk tales but it is also a vital part of many folk beliefs existing outside structured tales. These beliefs often manifest in anecdotal folklore, where the lore doesn’t need a story loop. One long-standing folk belief was that mortals should not consume faerie food or drink if they ever found themselves in a faerie reality. This was a taboo – to break it meant to leave the physical world and stay in the faerie Otherworld. It is a motif that can be dated back to the 12th century at least, when the chronicler William of Newburgh recounted a story told to him by ‘a reliable person’, where a somewhat inebriated horseman comes upon a prehistoric burial mound known as Willy Howe (Humberside), at night only to be drawn into it via an opening, where he finds a band of faeries in the midst of a revel. He joins in, but when handed a silver goblet to drink from he remembers the warnings against consuming faerie food or drink (evidently a well-established tradition as early as the 12th century), and threw out the contents before making off with the goblet.

The taboo against ingesting anything from the faerie world found its way into many of the 19th- and 20th-century folklore collections. WY Evans-Wentz collected anecdotes with the motif throughout the Celtic world in the early 20th century. In Brittany, the faeries were frequently associated with the dead and if a mortal consumed offerings of food when inhabiting their world, s/he would have to stay there. And a seer in County Sligo told Evans-Wentz, “that once the faeries take you and you taste food in their palace you cannot come back. You are changed to one of them, and live with them forever.”

‘A Faerie Banquet’ by John Anster Fitzgerald (1859)

There is also a prevalent motif of the faeries not liking to be named. This has resulted in the faeries being euphemised with tags such as ‘The Good People’, ‘The Other Lot’, ‘The Fair Folk.’ The motif comes from faerie-tales such as Tom Tit Tot, but it is retained within folklore as a general taboo: the faeries do not want to receive human appellations. Evans-Wentz found the majority of people in all the regions he visited reluctant to name the faeries as such. In Wales, the term was usually the Tylwyth Teg (Fair Family) and several testimonies collected by Evans-Wentz suggested that as long as they were euphemised as such they would remain on good terms with humanity. Too much investigation into what they really were was likely to invoke their hostility.

This feeds into the folkloric idea of the faeries requiring privacy. They usually liked to choose their own time of interaction with humanity and often dealt retribution on those who pried too deeply into their affairs. They lived in a different dimension and it was private, with taboos to protect its autonomy and to ensure a limited transaction between the natural and the supernatural. These taboos are everywhere in the folklore. But where are they coming from? What is generating them as essential elements in so many faerie-tales and in much of the folklore? What do the taboos mean?

The Coded Meaning of the Faerie Taboos

19th-century proto-anthropologists such as W. Robertson Smith, Sir James Frazer, and Robert R. Marett, applied the word taboo mostly to the religious customs of pre-industrial indigenous peoples. For them the taboo acted as a socio-religious code, most often used to control access to the supernatural. Sigmund Freud adapted their ideas to compare mentally ill patients in early 20th-century Europe to indigenous people, and he retained the colonialist language in his primary thesis on the subject: Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913). Freud suggested (like his predecessors) that indigenous societies were ‘degenerative’ through their inclusion of magic in everyday life. They were delusional and the delusion was kept in check partly through the elites controlling access to the source of the magic by imposing taboos – prohibiting general social inclusion into Mysteries. Freud compared the indigenous mindset to the ‘neurotic’s’ disorder. The ‘neurotic’ is unable to assimilate the social taboos against breaching ‘normal’ behaviour and will develop according behaviour patterns, usually described as mental illness.

Franz Steiner consolidated a lot of this anthropological and psychological data but argued, in his 1956 book Taboo, that the taboo was not exclusive to preliterate societies but was alive and well in the industrial West. Steiner separates religious and political taboos from those that appear to be socially sanctioned and appear organically. But he makes the important observation that there appears to be a core attribute to most taboos, in that they: “have been originally inspired by awe of the supernatural, and that they were intended to restrain men from the use of that of which the Divine power or powers were jealous.” Taboos were devices that helped keep the supernatural from being too accessible. They were warning signs.

These writers seldom touched upon the taboo motif in faerie-tales or folklore despite its ancient presence in the stories. As a folklorist, Evans-Wentz was perhaps more able to consolidate the anthropology of his time with his own insights into the folklore and the living faith in faeries at the beginning of the 20th century:

“Irish taboo, and inferentially all Celtic taboo, dates back to an unknown pagan antiquity. It is imposed at or before birth, or again during life, usually at some critical period, and when broken brings disaster and death to the breaker. Its whole background appears to rest on a supernatural relationship between divine men and the Otherworid of the Tuatha De Danann; and it is very certain that this ancient relationship survives in the living Fairy-Faith as one between ordinary men and the fairy-world. Therefore, almost all taboos surviving among Celts ought to be interpreted psychologically or even psychically, and not as ordinary social regulations.”

As the taboo survived in folklore for centuries it suggests the motif was central to understanding the relationship between the humans who were the main elements of the stories, and their relationship to the supernatural world, regularly manifested through the agency of the faeries. The taboo motif was most often included at the intersection between physical reality and the supernatural. This could work both ways, even in the same story; so whereas Oisín was a part of the supernatural world when he broke his first taboo, his second taboo was committed in consensus reality and closed off his access to the Otherworld. Launfal also closed off his access to the non-physical world by breaking his taboo, and Cherry of Zennor’s chance of staying in the faerie Otherworld away from the harsh realities of her physical life was curtailed when she broke the ointment taboo. These taboos represent the marker-points in the stories where there is a breach between the physical and the metaphysical. The actuality of such a breach is coded in the taboo, which expresses a real transcendent experience in the metaphor of language in a story.

The flat stone Oisín stood on, despite it being taboo to do so, is a symbol of the intersection between material reality and non-material reality, illustrated in plain-form in the story where Oisín is able to behold the physical reality of Ireland and the faerie Otherworld at the same time as long as he remains on the stone. The taboo stone is the link between the worlds but interaction with it also marks the central moment of transition from one reality to another. And the lesson is usually that the supernatural world is not something to be accessed indefinitely by mortal humans. There are entrenched cosmic protocols that seem to legislate against the prolonged joining of natural and supernatural. The taboo acts more as a moment than a thing in the stories – contrasting realities and forcing choices on the protagonists. And in the folklore where the use of an ‘ointment’ is the subject of taboo, there is perhaps a clue that there are compounds that can alter a state of consciousness and so facilitate interaction with an ulterior reality. But their use is sanctioned – they are taboo. The folklore seems to project a consistent message via the taboo motif: We are not supposed to access the supernatural. Under special circumstances, access will be allowed but there will always be a price to pay, and this will be arbitrated by the breaking of a prohibition – the taboo. But is there anything to glean from this folkloric message? What are the modern faerie taboos?

In the Fairy Investigation Society’s 2017 census of faerie encounters, there are over 500 testimonies. They are anecdotal and carry no story arc and so it is no surprise there are no taboos in the narratives. Their anecdotal nature does not allow for any heavy symbolic features. But perhaps the nature of the taboo is just operating at a different level in these modern testimonies. The taboo has become the fear of talking about the faeries and thus confirming a belief in supernatural entities. All of the census correspondents remain anonymous and even then many felt the need to reiterate during their testimonies that they were not intoxicated or mentally ill. This is the case in much modern testimony of people who believe they have experienced a faerie encounter. The fear of ridicule, or worse, acts as the socially sanctioned taboo, which may hinder or prevent people from making a disclosure. This applies to most parapsychological phenomena. Our culture has adopted materialism as its primary ideology and anything psi or supernatural is deemed inadmissible and the product of delusion, misapprehension, hallucination or fakery. This outlook permeates all parts of Western society and so a person claiming to have encountered anything supernatural risks placing themselves outside of accepted, conventional social-norms. This is especially the case with faeries, who have a peculiar niche in the supernatural hierarchy, mostly due to their transition from folkloric creatures to amorphous winged beings in the 19th and 20th centuries. In today’s world talking about encountering faeries has a specific taboo placed on it – the faeries have a particular quality of otherness that is different from other psi phenomena such as UFOs, ghosts, precognition, telepathy etc. There is something deeply subversive about disclosing an encounter with a supernatural life-form that, according to the folklore, appears to have been around for millennia, but which has been marginalised to children’s lore for at least a century. The disclosure has become the taboo that will have consequences for the purveyor, and just as in the tales and folklore this modern taboo is at the intersect between physical and metaphysical.

The metaphysical/physical intersection in ‘The Flammarion Engraving‘ (c.1888)

The taboo motif seems almost to operate as an archetype – a prohibition that is always in place to prevent too much contact between the natural and the supernatural. In faerie-tales and folklore, a taboo-breakage is the means to take a human out of the Otherworld or to take a faerie out of this world. The stories need the taboo key, and the key always ends up locking the door between different realities. Modern faerie-encounter anecdotes have a social taboo placed on them created by a fear of discussing such supernatural interaction, thus stifling any chance to understand them. In all cases, the taboo manifests as an apparently inherent barrier between physical and metaphysical. The breaking of a taboo is the moment where the necessary closure between natural and supernatural is maintained. The coded message seems to be that while we live we can only have limited contact with any transcendent reality. Any transgression of the taboos that hold the contact in place will sever the link – the taboo acts as a metaphysical control-mechanism. From the faeries’ perspective of needing and requiring only limited contact with humans, the taboos have been very effective.

A Faerie Taxonomy

The faeries mean different things to different people. There is a great range in their taxonomy; they can be the archetypal characters found in faerie tales, folkloric entities existing in a liminal reality, animistic nature spirits responsible for the propagation of flora, and a host of culturally-coded modern beings, including, but not limited to, extraterrestrials and certain creatures that can manifest during altered states of consciousness. Despite the 20th-century Disneyfication of the faeries, they have retained many of their traditional ontologies, which has allowed their incorporation into some new interpretations about their authenticity as a phenomenon – as both a fossilised folk belief system, and as a potential dynamic epistemological reality in contemporary culture.

The faeries are a global phenomenon, and while there are many and various geographic types, there is a consistency in the taxonomic nature of these otherworldly entities. The Aarne-Thompson index of folk literature lists nearly 500 motifs related to faeries from all over the world, which can be augmented by subsequent folktale indices from culture areas not covered by the Aarne-Thompson index (most specifically in the 2004 enlargement of the index by Hans-Jörg Uther to include more international tale-types), perhaps doubling the number of motifs. All of these motifs recognise the faeries as a distinct (though widely varied) class of metaphysical being – a class that appears to have been interacting (through folklore and via an apparent supernatural agency) with human societies for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The following analyses concentrate on British and European faerie types, in an effort to get under the skin of why their supernal presence has been so ubiquitous in history and why they appear to be still in attendance in Western culture. This is a difficult task; the faeries are elusive and hard to pin down. They always seem to be at the periphery of cultural vision, only disclosing themselves when conditions are right and when we are willing to accept them at an intellectual, metaphysical, spiritual or empathetic level. They certainly exist as a concept, but are they allegorical devices, useful folktale plot characters, the essence of nature, or supernatural entities? Maybe they are all these and more, but we’ll begin with an examination of their place in traditional faerie tales, where usually the meanings and morals of the stories are more important than the faeries themselves.

Faerie Tales

In fact, many faerie tales don’t seem to have any faeries in them at all. The extensive collection of faerie tales collected by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early 19th century contain over 200 individual stories, but only just over half of them contain recognisable faeries as part of the plot. The term ‘faerie’, as often as not, was simply a referral to

Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann (1855)

various supernatural elements in the story. So some of the most famous of the Grimms’ faerie tales such as Rapunzel and The Golden Bird include witches and therianthropic shape-shifters, which may bring the stories into the faerie-orbit, but they do not incorporate any folkloric faerie characters. Conversely, perhaps the most famous of all faerie tales, Cinderella, was updated by the Grimms to include a ‘faerie godmother’ as a crucial part of the plotline, where their earlier sources were more ambivalent about the nature of this supernatural entity.

But faerie tales are always more than the sum of their parts. Whether or not there are recognisable faeries present in the plot, the stories invariably contain allegorical meanings, which usually include supernatural elements to give them a timeless and transcendent quality, which opens them up to a wide range of interpretations. One of the first scholars to apply an interpretative rubric to faerie tales was Edwin Sidney Hartland in his 1891 book The Science of Fairy Tales: An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology. He drew on a global corpus of faerie tales, most significantly the widespread stories of ‘Swan Maidens’, in an attempt to assess what they were attempting to convey about the nature of the human condition. While some of Hartland’s 19th-century conclusions can seem eye-wateringly colonialist to a modern reader (he presumed non-European stories of this type ‘degenerate and savage, relics of degraded primitive races’) he was attempting to see beyond the story and into the meaning; something that had not been attempted before. He interpreted the Swan Maiden stories (where a female swan transforms into a human, marries a man, who then breaks a taboo thereby releasing her back to her natural – or supernatural – element where she is lost to him) as didactic tales, informing the listener/reader about the pitfalls of wishing for something beyond your station, and that codes and conventions must be adhered to, otherwise there will be negative consequences. This was new thinking in the 19th century; a realisation that the tales contained some deep-set wisdom and could be used as tools for cultural and psychological cultivation and learning. This was always an implicit aspect of faerie tales, and one of the reasons why the stories have endured over the centuries. Before their collection and dissemination in literary form from the 18th century they would have been transmitted as an oral tradition, and their longevity in this form is probably in large part due to the fact they held embodied wisdom and coded sapience.

One method that has been used to break down the code and extract the wisdom is Jungian analysis. Carl Jung (1875-1961) initiated the premise that, like the content of dreams, aspects of faerie tales are designed to reveal cosmic truths, often taking the form of archetypes, which reside in a Collective Unconscious and are made available to humans when distilled through stories that have taken form over centuries. One of the primary adherents to Jung’s psychoanalytical application to faerie tales was Marie-Louise von Franz (1915-1998) who collaborated with him and then after his death, took the processes he had developed much further by employing interpretations of the stories’ archetypes in a systematic way, covering a wide range of faerie tales in her extensive published works. Her analytical methodologies have been cultivated further by a range of psychologists, writers and folklorists in an attempt to extricate deeper meaning from the tales. The psychologist and Jungian scholar John Betts describes the approach:

“Fairy tales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes. Therefore their value for the scientific investigation of the unconscious exceeds that of all other material. They represent the archetypes in their simplest, barest, and most concise form. In myths or legends, or any other more elaborate mythological material, we get at the basic patterns of the human psyche through an overlay of cultural material. But in fairy tales there is much less specific conscious material, and therefore they mirror the basic patterns of the psyche more clearly.”

Archetypes are central to this interpretative approach, where the faerie tale characters are manifestations of implicate humanity. So archetypes such as the hero, the great mother, the trickster, the fair maiden are found consistently in the stories, playing out roles that mean more than what they have been reduced to in the plotlines. These archetypes are especially prevalent in the corpus of medieval Arthurian stories, where the faeries incorporated into the narratives (such as Morgan le Fay and the Lady of the Lake) are always supernatural arbiters of wisdom, alchemy and power. They are representatives of a greater metaphysical reality, who infringe upon the chivalric plot devices to provide a cosmic quality to the stories.

Particularly interesting are the applications of the anima/animus archetypes to faerie tales. These are easily spotted in stories about faerie brides, such as the ‘Swan Maidens’ or ‘Lake Faeries’ where the otherworldly female faeries are representative of a supernal feminine ideal, made into one with their mortal husband, before their inevitable separation. These stories are most often about how a man needs to find and understand his inner feminine, with the intrinsic warning that certain actions will destroy that understanding.

The animus counter of this can be found in the intriguing story Cherry of Zennor, a Cornish faerie tale collected by the folklorist Robert Hunt in 1865. Cherry is the fair maiden who finds herself lured into faerieland by a handsome gentleman (her animus) where she encounters a series of archetypal characters, including the innocent child, and the great mother (here playing a malevolent role). She breaks a taboo (this a symbol rather than an archetype) of using ointment that enables her to see the female faeries who her gentleman has been dallying with, and thus loses him and is returned to consensus reality on a windswept hillside. This story had evidently been passed down orally through generations before Hunt committed it to the folkloric record, and for the most part it was probably just seen as an entertaining story, set at some indefinite (but recognisable) place in the past. It may even have been recounting an actual incident, transformed into a plot-driven story over time. But overlaying a Jungian analysis allows us to see that there is a reason why it survived – it was conveying, with the use of archetypes, fundamental aspects of the human condition. There is, as in all faerie tales, a cosmic quality to the inherent parts of the story.

Cherry of Zennor is also interesting in that it incorporates, as an essential part of the story, otherworldy, supernatural entities that are recognisable as folkloric faeries. As previously discussed, this is not always the case with faerie tales, and this becomes an important distinction to make when assessing the taxonomy of the faeries. Stories like Cherry of Zennor are in some ways a ‘crossover’ between traditional faerie tales and folklore – where the boundaries are often indistinct and tenebrous. This grey area is where the allegorical nature of faerie tales becomes remodelled into the magical realism of folklore.

Folkloric Faeries

The differences between faerie tales and faerie folklore are indeed subtle, with a big overlap. But once the archetypes and allegories are dropped we usually find that most of the faerie folklore becomes anecdotal in nature – there might be a basic plotline but the stories are brought into a sharper, more realistic focus by them being presented as real incidents, recognisable to the end user of the tale. And in so doing, the folklore is more successful in portraying the faeries as a distinct class of beings, discernible as a specific metaphysical taxonomic, who interact with humanity in a particular way. They take many folkloric forms, but the consumer of the testimonies is never in doubt that these are the supernatural entities known as the faeries.

Here’s one such testimony from 1862, recounted by Janet Bord in her 1997 book Fairies: Real Encounters with Little People. David Evans and Evan Lewis were walking in the hills of Carmarthenshire in Wales when they saw a troupe of about fifty ‘small people’ walking up a hillside. When they reached the top they formed into a circle…

“… After dancing for a short time, one of the dancers turned into the middle of the circle, followed by the others, one by one till they appeared like a gimblet screw. Then they disappeared into the ground. After a while one of them reappeared again, and looked about him in every direction as a rat, and the others followed him one by one and did the same. Then they danced for some time as before, and vanished into the ground as they had done the first time.”

Circle Dance by Erin Lale

This fits into the common folktale motif of faeries dancing in a circle (Aarne-Thompson F261) and is in many ways typical of testimonies recounting folkloric faeries. There is no story, no plot; it is simply an anecdote of a strange encounter, where the word of the observer is all we have to go on. In his 2005 book Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, Graham Hancock uses this example among other similar scenarios from the folkloric record to discuss this particular aspect of alleged faerie behaviour: “I realise we may not even have begun to understand what is going on with the phenomenon known as the faerie dance. Still, I repeat my suggestion that it feels like some sort of technology for jumping between worlds, and in particular for entering and leaving this one.”

However, while wanting to take the testimony at face value – and apply an interpretation onto it – Hancock accepts that the hermeneutic understanding of these folkloric anecdotes is problematic. While such anecdotes have not been overlain with the tiers of allegorical storytelling found in faerie tales, they are always subjective. The encounters cannot be repeated under experimental conditions – they are spontaneous incidents, recorded from the memory of the witness (the fact that in the above example two witnesses reported the same phenomenon does strengthen the veracity of the report). And this is how most of faerie folklore is constructed. From a scientific point of view the authenticity of the testimonies is unprovable and can be safely relegated to a folk belief system that plays no part in a modern materialist/reductionist worldview. It is a scientific outlook that is applied to anecdotal evidence of all types of phenomena, where if an incident is not repeatable then it lacks any verifiable reality. This attitude (termed physicalism by the philosopher Bernardo Kastrup), however, denies the evident reality that almost every aspect of human experience is comprised of a series of anecdotes, and that a prima facie rejection of the evidence of subjective observation, from wherever it comes, is not a viable way to understand a phenomenon, especially non-ordinary phenomena such as encounters with metaphysical entities.

And there is certainly a heavy dataset of subjective evidence contained in the folklore record when it comes to faerie encounters. This stretches back in the literature to the medieval period where English chroniclers such as Ralph de Coggeshall, Walter Map and William de Newburgh, writing in the later part of the 12th century, routinely related ‘marvels’ as related to them from a range of sources. The most well-known is the story of ‘The Green Children’, recorded by both Coggeshall and Newburgh, where two mysterious children turn up in the Suffolk village of Woolpit via a cave, apparently from an otherworld: “where all the inhabitants had green skin, ate only green food, and that there was perpetual twilight. Moreover, a certain luminous country is seen, not far distant… and divided from it by a very considerable river.”

‘The Green Children of Woolpit’ by Katalin Polonyi

But this strange story is rather atypical of the usual short anecdotes about faeries recorded by the chroniclers. A more typical example is given by Newburgh, who recounts a story told to him by ‘a reliable person’, where a somewhat inebriated horseman comes upon a prehistoric burial mound known as Willy Howe (Humberside), at night only to be drawn into it via an opening, where he finds a band of faeries in the midst of a revel. He joins in, but when handed a silver goblet to drink from he remembers the warnings against consuming faerie food or drink (evidently a well-established tradition as early as the 12th century), and threw out the contents before making off with the goblet. Interestingly, the goblet was said to have eventually made its way to the household of King Henry II, where it circulated as a curiosity among his court.

Such literary records of folkloric faeries are almost certainly only a fragment of the oral tradition that would have been transmitting these tales through the medieval period and beyond. Just as the more formulaic faerie tales began to be collected and indexed from the 18th century, so too was the anecdotal folklore. The folklorists doing the collecting and recording often amalgamated the two into single volumes, without making a distinct differentiation. But by the late 19th century anecdotal faerie folklore became better recognised as a specific genre in and of itself. A prime example of the collection and publication of a broad-spectrum of this type of narrative faerie folklore can be found in WY Evans-Wentz’s 1911 book The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. This classic study was based on Evans-Wentz’s three-year journey around Britain, Ireland and Brittany, where he collected a vast corpus of folklore from mostly rural countryfolk, at a time when belief in the faeries was still embedded in the (Celtic) culture. The lore he assembled covered an eclectic range of accounts, sometimes first-hand and sometimes passed down from previous generations. But most of them were simple anecdotes relayed by people who believed in the reality of the faeries, whatever that might entail. Typical of many of the testimonies given to Evans-Wentz was this one from John Nelson, an elderly man from Ramsey on the Isle of Man:

“My grandfather, William Nelson, was coming home from the herring fishing late at night, on the road near Jurby, when he saw in a pea-field, across a hedge, a great crowd of little fellows in red coats dancing and making music. And as he looked, an old woman from among them came up to him and spat in his eyes, saying: “You’ll never see us again”; and I am told that he was blind afterwards till the day of his death. He was certainly blind for fourteen years before his death, for I often had to lead him around; but, of course, I am unable to say of my own knowledge that he became blind immediately after his strange experience, or if not until later in life; but as a young man he certainly had good sight, and it was believed that the fairies destroyed it.”

This particular example plugs into the common motif (Aarne-Thompson motif F362.1) of being blinded (or partially blinded) by the faeries as a means to prevent the mortal in question being able to see them. He came across the motif again in Ireland, where Bridget O’Conner from Cloontipruckilish, Co, Clare, gave testimony about a midwife from her grandmother’s generation:

“This country nurse was requested by a strange man on horseback to go with him to exercise her profession; and she went with him to a castle she didn’t know. When the baby was born, every woman in the place where the event happened put her finger in a basin of water and rubbed her eyes, and so the nurse put her finger in and rubbed it on one of her eyes. She went home and thought no more about it. But one day she was at the fair in Grange and saw some of the same women who were in the castle when the baby was born; though, as she noticed, she only could see them with the one eye she had wet with the water from the basin. The nurse spoke to the women, and they wanted. to know how she recognised them; and she, in reply, said it was with the one eye, and asked, ‘How is the baby?’ ‘Well,’ said one of the fairy women; ‘and what eye do you see us with?’ ‘With the left eye,’ answered the nurse. Then the fairy woman blew her breath against the nurse’s left eye, and said, ‘You’ll never see me again.’ And the nurse was always blind in the left eye after that.”

Evans-Wentz also found evidence from all the locations he visited that the faeries were often thought of as dead ancestors. The belief that the faeries were intimately connected to the dead seemed to be especially prevalent in Ireland and Brittany, where time and again Evans-Wentz was given the view that they were one and the same, summed up by an unnamed Dublin engineer talking about the folk traditions in his home county: “The old people in County Armagh seriously believe that the faeries are the spirits of the dead; and they say that if you have many friends deceased you have many friendly faeries, or if you have many enemies deceased you have many faeries looking out to do you harm.”

In Brittany the faeries were known as fées or corrigans, and usually seem to have been understood as ancestral spirits, often appearing to warn of, or to predict, death. Evans-Wentz found many folktales about the fées and the dead in and around the village of Carnac, where there are extensive remains of prehistoric megalithic stone rows and burial chambers. M. Goulven Le Scour was a source of many traditions, although, once again, her testimonies were usually drawn from the past:

“My grandmother, Marie Le Bras, had related to me that one evening an old fée arrived in my village, Kerouledic (Finistère), and asked for hospitality. It was about the year 1830. The fée was received; and before going to bed she predicted that the little daughter whom the mother was dressing in night-clothes would be found dead in the cradle the next day. This prediction was only laughed at; but in the morning the little one was dead in her cradle, her eyes raised toward Heaven, The fée, who had slept in the stable, was gone.”

Further study of Evans-Wentz’s collection demonstrates that many of the motifs later coded in the Aarne-Thompson index seem to have been regularly played out in the anecdotal testimonies given to him by his interviewees. This makes the hermeneutics of these narratives difficult to unravel. As with much of the faerie folklore collected in the 19th and 20th centuries, it is almost impossible to get under the skin of what is real eye-witness testimony recounting something that happened, and how much overlay has been placed on the stories by socio-cultural belief systems. There is evidently a belief in the genuine existence of supernatural entities interacting with humanity, but what is the ratio of received wisdom to actuality? This is an important qualifier for all folklore, and something that Evans-Wentz was well aware of in his assessment of the testimonies he had collected. We’ll come back to this significant point in the discussions below, on ‘modern faeries’ and ‘the faeries as nature spirits.’

One recent publication that has grappled with the question of the role and reality of folkloric faeries is Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies – 500AD to the Present, which distills, in great detail, the wealth of evidence that goes to make up the folkloric and historical archive of human-faerie encounters. Despite the title of the book, the remit extends to the Americas, and Simon Young’s chapter on the faeries of the Atlantic coast of Canada is particularly illuminating. He points out that Newfoundland has been a particular melting pot for faerie folklore, probably attributed in part to its colonisation by populations of Irish and Scottish immigrants in the 19th century, who brought with them a deeply embedded belief in, and understanding of, the faeries. Young recounts one anecdote from 1900, where a newspaper reported a man being ‘carried away by the fairies’ in the capital city of St John’s. The report described the man as being ‘subject to extraordinary hallucinations’ but that he was also ‘a steady, sober and industrious man’, and then added that he had previously taken been taken by the faeries ‘through bogs, marshes, rivers and heavy woods’ until he was found in an exhausted state. This sounds like a person who his ancestors would have described as having second-sight or clairvoyance; another important element in faerie encounters that will be explored further below.

Young is able to apply a three-level ‘barometer’ to the large number of faerie encounters transmitted in Newfoundland folklore, a gauge that might easily be applied to European testimonies as well, from the medieval period through to the 21st century, and is a good summation of how the faeries usually fit into anecdotal narratives:

“Level one is that of sensing fairies: fairies are seen dancing, fairies are heard playing music, we even have one case where fairies are smelt. Level two is low level interaction without lasting consequences for humans. Here the witness might be misled or their horse might be rode by the fairies at night or the fairies might steal food. The third level is intense interaction with fairies, with lasting consequences for any humans involved. This interaction includes, humans marrying fairies, humans being kidnapped or ‘changed’, magical contracts in which fairies give a sorcerer’s powers to humans, or servile relations in which fairies do farm or house work.”

Another interesting theme through the book is how the evidence of place-names demonstrates how deeply ingrained into the socio-cultural consciousness were the faeries. Particularly interesting is the large number of Pūca place-names recorded throughout England and Wales. Puck became the trickster in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream, but his ontological history goes much further back than the 16th century, and he might be seen as a representative type of faerie, prone to leading people astray, particularly in marshy areas, where he might appear as a light, sometimes interpreted as an ignis fatuus or will-o’-the-wisp. Francesca Bihet discusses the French version of the name used in the Channel Islands: pouques, and their intimate connection to prehistoric megalithic structures pouquelayes, where faerie activity was often reported. ‘Hob’ was another faerie name fossilised into the landscape. Richard Sugg describes the Yorkshire faerie place-names: “This was a world in which the numerous fairy place names (from Hobcross Hill and Hob Holes, through various Hob Lanes, to Sheffield’s Grymelands and Kexborough’s Scrat Hough Wood) were much more than pretty folklore. The fairies really were there beneath your feet.” And Simon Young identifies 32 verifiable faerie place-names in Cumbria: “These 32 are precious because they give us some sense of how Cumbrian fairies were imagined, not by the folklore professionals, but by local people. There is nothing as democratic as a place-name.”

La Pouquelaye de Faldouet Passage Grave, Jersey

This faerie folklore is interesting in its own right as cultural history. There is a vast archive of centuries-long testimony from people who claim to have interacted with entities that are not normally recognised as part of consensus reality. These interactions have not been wrapped up in allegorical faerie tales, but have instead formed their own corpus; the interacting faeries have their own taxonomy. The folkloric faeries have definitely been perceived as real by generations of people, but modern (physicalist) sensibilities are constrained to view the stories as either hallucinations, misrepresentations of natural phenomena, tales told by and for uneducated and gullible people, magical wishful thinking, descriptions of dreams, plain mumbo-jumbo, or a combination of the above. But fortunately the faeries are not consigned to a folkloric past – their metaphysical presence appears to be alive and well in contemporary culture, and even experiencing a resurgence of interest, as some modern philosophical and scientific hypotheses (see the final section below) have begun to question the fundamental nature of reality and our understanding of it. These new views of reality may just be allowing the types of beings found in faerie folklore to gravitate back into our cosmological perspective.

Modern Faeries

Experience reports of faerie encounters are certainly not limited to the folkloric past. The taxonomic continues to the present day, often morphing into new typologies, but still recognisable as faeries. Like the faeries who appear in folklore, most modern types find their way into public consciousness via anecdotal testimonies – they are subjective experiences, reliant on the honesty, memory and reliability of the person making the report. But there are lots of them, and such a large testimonial dataset must smooth out the statistical spikes of the hermeneutical issues somewhat; the experienced phenomenon has to have, at the very least, some kind of conceptual metaphysical reality.

One such dataset was registered in Marjorie Johnson’s Seeing Fairies, first published in English in 2014. Johnson (acting on behalf of The Fairy Investigation Society) collected over 500 anecdotal descriptions from people who claimed to have seen or interacted with faeries, and compiled them together with her own experiences, mostly from the 20th century. Some of her correspondents were Theosophists, with an avowed history of clairvoyance. But the majority were not, and their honest appraisals of seeing faeries are usually singular events in their otherwise non-clairvoyant lives. Their subjective anecdotes remain contentious as scientific evidence, but they are a fascinating collection of experience reports. The faeries described range from traditional folkloric types to metaphysical nature spirits, and are occasionally described as the delicate, genteel winged faeries of Victorian invention (which were then codified as Tinkerbell in JM Barrie’s 1904 play and 1911 novel Peter and Wendy, before becoming a Disney icon). An example of the type of report included in Johnson’s volume (slightly abbreviated) is from a Mr Hugh Sheridan, whose encounter was in Ballyboughal, Co. Dublin, Ireland, in 1953. He was walking across fields between his workplace and home at dusk:

“… and when nearing the corner of one of the fields I heard a tittering noise. At first I thought it was some of the other men who had gone on before me and who might be intending to play some prank. However, I noticed immediately afterwards what looked like a large, greenish tarpaulin on the ground, with thousands of faeries on it. I then found there were a lot more around me. They were of two sizes, some about four feet high, and others about eighteen or twenty inches high. Except for size, both kinds were exactly alike. They wore dark, bluish-grey coats, tight at the waist and flared at the hips, with a sort of shoulder cape… the covering of their legs was tight, rather like puttees, and they appeared to be wearing shoes. I started on the path towards home, and the faeries went with me in front and all around. The largest faeries kept nearest to me. The ones in front kept skipping backwards as they went, and their feet appeared to be touching the ground. There were males and females, all seemingly in their early twenties. They had very pleasant faces, with plumper cheeks than those of humans, and the men’s faces were devoid of hair or whiskers… None of the faeries had wings. They tried to get me off the path towards a gateway leading from the field, but just before I reached it I realised they were trying to take me away, so I resisted and turned towards the path again. [After slipping into, and getting out of a dry a ditch, still surrounded by the faeries] I moved towards home with the faeries round me, and they kept the tittering noise all the time. In the end I got to a plank leading across a ditch from one field to another, and suddenly all the faeries went away. They seemed to go back with the noise gradually fading. At one time I had reached out my arms to try to catch them, but I cannot be sure whether they skipped back just out of reach, or whether my hands passed through them without feeling anything. They were smiling and pleasant all the time, and I could see their eyes watching me. When I got home, I found I was about three-quarters of an hour late, but I thought I had been delayed only a few minutes. While the faeries were with me, I had the rather exciting feeling like being on a great height, but I was in no way afraid. I would very much like to meet them again.”

This testimony includes several traditional folkloric motifs, including attempted abduction and an unexplained lapse of time, and would fit in with anecdotes from the previous century. The faeries are diminutive humanoids, interacting with a person in what appears to be an altered state of consciousness. Johnson’s volume contains many similar experiences, but it has been updated recently by a new census into faerie sightings conducted by Simon Young and The Fairy Investigation Society. It includes c.500 reports from all over the world, although the majority are from Britain, Ireland and North America. While Johnson’s survey was restricted to mostly cases from the mid 20th century, the new census (published as a free downloadable document in January 2018) contains encounters from the 1960s (with a few predating this) through to the present day, with the majority post-1980. In the introduction to the census, Simon Young explains how the publication takes a different tack to Johnson’s work: “Marjorie Johnson wanted to prove that fairies exist. I do not have this ambition. I, instead, want to get a better understanding of who sees fairies and under what circumstances by looking at the stories and the sightings.” And while contributors to the census were given the opportunity to state what they thought their experiences represented, there is no editorial evaluation into the sightings. This analytical but interpretation-free approach allows the reader to reach their own conclusions about the anecdotal accounts, and provides us with a large dataset of faerie encounters that appear to be authentic appraisals of numinous experiences, which (for the most part, and depending on the honesty of the reporter) defy rational, reductionist/physicalist explanations.

The census contains a wide range of encounter types, and needs to be read in full to understand the broad phenomenology contained in the data. The people making the reports represent a wide social cross-section and, as in Johnson’s study, while some acknowledge a previous interest in parapsychological phenomenon, most of the respondents are simply reporting a one-off experience that appears to involve faerie entities. Here are two examples from the census, which give a flavour of what were evidently numinous experiences for the people involved. The first is from Hampshire, England by a male who at the time of the sighting was in his 50s (all the census entries are anonymous):

§57 “It was a late Summer’s day in 2007, and we had been walking the dog back through woodland at Chilworth. We were in a clearing, when I spotted what looked like a tree rushing across fields towards us, and as it crossed the path before us into the next field, I could see there was a friendly, smiling face in the bark. We both had the same experience and described it to each other the same way. It was about ten feet tall. The dog stopped and looked up at it too.”

The respondent also added to the report their own feelings during the experience: “joyful… relaxed, on a walk; loss of sense of time, profound silence before the experience, hair prickling or tingling before or during the experience, and a sense that the experience was a display put on specially for you; unusually vivid memories of the experience.” There are several themes here that correspond with many faerie encounters: the relaxed mindset of the experiencer, the sense of time slippage, and the surreal incident involving an apparently supernatural entity, all of which combined to produce a particularly lucid memory.

‘Tree Spirits’ by Brian Froud

The second example is from Somerset, England, and was described by a female in her twenties. The experience happened during the 1990s:

§114 “Friends had gone ahead and I straggled behind. As I turned a corner, it was misty. The mist had a weird glow. As I walked into the low mist there was a procession. Around three feet tall. With lanterns! But in the mist, I paused and they saw me. They came forward and I waited for them to pass. They passed. I have never taken drugs and was not on any alcohol. This was the weirdest experience. It lasted three to five minutes. By [the] time I got back to cottage my friends were concerned as I was away for around forty-five minutes! Very strange. They looked medieval in dress. But their clothes were covered by the mist at times.”

As per the first report, the respondent also reported that there was a profound silence before the experience, and that her hair was prickling or tingling before and during the event. She also suggested that there was a sense that the experience marked a turning point in her life. These experiences demonstrate that, just as in historic folkloric anecdotes, the faeries can take many forms, and their appearance may have as much to do with the unique awareness of the individual human consciousness as to an objective reality. But any objective absolute must be filtered through through a subjective lens, and although there is an extensive spectrum of entities reported in the census, there is a commonality of experience; it does appear the beings described are of a generic taxonomy – they are faeries.

This generic quality gets pushed to the limit when we attempt to incorporate into the taxonomy two other possible manifestations of modern faeries; that is the entities encountered by people while under the influence of psychedelics, and (perhaps even more controversially) aliens. The faerie-types experienced by people who have altered their states of consciousness with a range of psychedelics has been explored in some detail in previous posts:

Altered States of Consciousness and the Faeries

‘Aliens, Insectoids, and Elves! Oh, My!’ by Jon Hanna

‘Visions and Pablo Amaringo’ by Loes Modderman

Some Faerie Metaphysics

These investigations point out there is a clear correlation between the faerie-like creatures that turn up during psychedelic episodes (most especially with the compound N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT)) and the faeries reported in folklore and modern encounters. Some of the best clinical evidence for these correlations remains the research study conducted between 1990 and 1995 in the General Clinical Research Center of the University of New Mexico Hospital, by Dr Rick Strassman, which found that volunteers on the study injected with varying amounts of DMT underwent profound alterations of consciousness. This involved immediate cessation of normal consciousness and transportation to a different realm of reality with divergent physical properties, and inhabited by a range of creatures described as elves, faeries, lizards, reptiles, insects, aliens, clowns (yes, clowns) and various therianthropic entities. One woman even describes a pulsating entity that she called ‘Tinkerbell-like’. The experiences, especially at higher doses, represented to the participants a parallel reality that was ‘super real’, not a hallucination, not a dream, but a substantial built reality with full sensory interaction + telepathy. The results of the study were published as DMT: The Spirit Molecule in 2001.

The experience reports from the study are irrational, absurd, frightening, illogical and surreal. There is no question of any of the volunteers physically leaving the hospital bed during their experiences, but for all of them (without exception) the DMT-world was every bit as real as the one their minds left behind. After the injections participants frequently talked about ‘blasting through’ or ‘breaking through a barrier’ after which they found themselves in a realm with its own laws of physical space and movement, and its own inhabitants.

There are dozens of recorded experiences from the study, and the participants are all engaging in a non-physical reality directly with their consciousness, seemingly separated from their physical selfs. Some of the experiences agree in type to certain aspects of the faerie phenomenon. But what the research demonstrates is that under the right conditions, human consciousness can operate within a distinct and separate universe inhabited by a range of apparently autonomous entities. These entities may be one and the same as the metaphysical beings recorded in folklore and modern faerie encounter anecdotes, by people who were describing the beings encountered during various types of altered states of consciousness, brought on either actively or passively.

Since c.2010 there has been a quickly-growing literature devoted to the faerie-types appearing in the DMT-world, and however uncomfortable it may be for people who have not taken the psychedelic to accept any authenticity in the accounts, the consistency of the experience reports should make us take notice and accept them as a dataset worthy of analysis. While it may seem a stretch to equate folkloric or modern faerie encounters with the entities that turn up in a chemically-induced reality, the data insinuates very strongly that there is a parallel equivalence, which needs to be taken seriously.

Perhaps even more difficult to accept is the relationship between certain types of faerie behaviour and the modern phenomenon of alien abduction. Again, this has been considered in previous posts:

Shamans, Faeries, Aliens and DMT

Some Faerie Metaphysics

The first person to suggest a definitive link between the the reports of faerie experiences and alien encounters was the astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallée. In his 1969 book Passport to Magonia he put forward the theory that the faeries were one and the same as the alien beings who had been purportedly abducting people around the world for a couple of decades by that date. His hypothesis is that there is a commonality to the experiences reported in alien abduction scenarios, and the reports of interactions with faeries in folklore. He suggests the aliens and the faeries are essentially the same phenomenon, tuned through the cultural receptors of the time and then interpreted accordingly. He makes special reference to the regular motif in faerie folklore of the abduction, by various means, of humans by faeries. There’s a lot of data here – it’s the commonest motif in faerie folklore, and continues to be reported in anecdotal testimonies. For a variety of reasons humans are taken to an alternative faerie reality, either as midwives or nurses for faerie children, as servants to the faeries, for sex, as punishment or reward, or just because the faeries feel like it. These motifs, of course, coincide with many aspects of the consistently strange phenomenon of alien abductions, reports of which have grown at an exponential rate since the early 1950s.

In his 2005 book Supernatural, Graham Hancock expanded on Vallée’s data to investigate the close links between folkloric faeries and alien abduction cases. By 2005 the abduction phenomenon contained a massive amount of testimonies, perhaps as many as a million reports, and a large percentage of them bear a striking resemblance to aspects of faerie abductions from folklore. This is especially noticeable in the cases/tales of hybrids/changelings where both the faeries and the aliens seem intent on improving their species’ pedigree with humans. Hancock writes: “We can say that the focus of this evolving experience in all the forms in which it is documented – whether spirits, fairies or aliens – has been on sexual and reproductive contact between supernatural races and humans, and on the creation of hybrid offspring to ‘strengthen the stock’ of the supernaturals.”

This theme has been examined in great detail by Joshua Cutchin in his 2018 book Thieves in the Night: A Brief History of Supernatural Child Abductions. He examines the folkloric changeling stories in relation to alien abductions (concentrating on child abductions) and makes the case for some form of continuity: “… there is a strong thread of commonality running through the phenomena, which may identify the perpetrating entities as coming from the same source… The parallels between aliens and faeries are remarkable and extend deeply into the lore surrounding paranormal child abduction. The means and motivations behind both phenomena imply a shared ontological reality…”

But this source, or ontological reality, remains a problem. Is it metaphysical, psychological, cultural, a currently unknown aspect of physical reality, or an admixture of all these? We’ll come back to this question, but first, there is one more faerie taxonomy that needs to be discussed as it is one that fills up a lot of space in the literature, and has perhaps become the preeminent modern interpretation of what the faeries might really represent.

The Faeries as Nature Spirits

In the Fairy Investigation Society’s census, the most common interpretation among the respondents as to what their encountered entities represented was that they were some form of nature spirit. This was especially the case when the experience happened in a natural environment. The faeries in this guise appear as an embodied morphogenetic force in nature, ensuring the propagation of vegetation. Their metaphysical input is as important as physical needs in the environment. It is interesting that many of the respondents seemed to feel this intuitively, even when they had no knowledge of the historic precedences of incorporating faeries into the dynamic life-forces of nature.

‘A Nature Spirit’ by Paul Woodroffe for the 1905 edition of Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’

There is, indeed, a long tradition of the faeries representing the non-material forces of nature, essential to its propagation. The 16th-century alchemist Paracelsus (1493-1541) developed an epistemology of these beings, describing the spirits connected to all parts of the natural world, both living and inanimate. He took much of this from ancient Greek beliefs in the deification of the landscape, but developed a new, tightly-coded typology of elementals. In effect, his concept was close to what we might describe as Animism, which has been defined as the belief that a spiritual consciousness pervades everything and that there is no separation between matter and the energy of spirit. This allows incorporeal beings such as nature spirits into a worldview, manifesting as metaphysical representatives of the physical world. Animism is the preeminent belief system in indigenous cultures and may be seen as the original global proto-religion from which all other orthodoxies developed. Its residue can be traced through Christian Europe, where a belief in non-canon supernatural entities persisted under the radar throughout the medieval and Early-Modern periods, showing up most clearly in the records of witch trials and ecclesiastical tracts that attempted to root it out. Indeed, Paracelsus was on quite thin ice in his promotion of such animistic concepts, and he twice had to refute allegations (though never made formally in an ecclesiastical court) of sorcery. His elemental nature spirits would have been simply designated as demons by the Church, and he had to couch his terms carefully, always ensuring in his writing that what he was describing was the work of God.

‘Paracelsus as Alchemist” by John Augustus Knapp (1928)

WY Evans-Wentz touched on the possibility that the Celtic belief in faeries was a form of implicit Animism, but it was primarily through the Theosophist movement (from the late 19th century) that the concept of a metaphysical realm responsible for the wellbeing of the natural world gained a wider understanding. One of the prime-disseminators of the nature spirit hypothesis was the Austrian Rudolf Steiner. In a series of lectures between 1908 and 1924 he outlined his hypothesis of how a range of supernatural entities (usually termed elementals and with no reference to Animism) acted within nature and how a human observer might interact with them. This was dependent on altering consciousness. In this case the metaphysical technology was clairvoyance; an ability to perceive a non-material reality existing alongside, but in constant synergy with, the material world. Steiner attempted to explain the mechanics of clairvoyance, when a person must transform their usually passive thought forms into something more dynamic. In normal consciousness thoughts:

“… allow themselves to be connected and separated, to be formed and then dismissed. This life of thought must develop in the elemental world a step further. There a person is not in a position to deal with thoughts that are passive. If someone really succeeds in entering the world with his clairvoyant soul, it seems as though his thoughts were not things over which he has any command; they are living beings… You thrust your consciousness into a place, it seems, where you do not find thoughts that are like those in the physical world, but where they are living beings.” Rudolf Steiner, ‘Perception of the Elemental World’ (1913).

Steiner goes on to describe the specific elemental animating forces at work in the natural world when perceived clairvoyantly in what he calls the Supersensible World. The elementals in the Supersensible World exist as a range of beings, from devas, which are responsible for entire autonomous landscapes, through to the smaller nature spirits charged with the growth of vegetation. Steiner (basing his epistemology on that of Paracelsus) divides these into four main types corresponding to earth (Gnomic), water (Undines), air (Sylphs) and heat/light (Salamanders). This is the faerie realm recognised as a domain of nature spirits, existing as a non-material autonomous reality that crosses over with ours, and which can be accessed via a clairvoyant altered state of consciousness. Steiner thought everyone has this innate ability, but they had to be taught how to use it, as it had somehow become almost forgotten amongst humanity.

‘The Elementals’ by Josephine Wall

But Steiner’s vision of the faeries as nature spirits has found many adherents in modern times, and a brief perusal of recent literature and websites devoted to the faeries seems to confirm that a majority of people interacting with these entities do so using some form of clairvoyant ability, and that when they do, the faeries are nature spirits. A good example is Marko Pogačnik, a Slovenian artist and ‘earth healer’, who travels the world to connect with the nature spirits, in order to communicate with them and heal damaged landscapes. His overview of how he works with the intelligence in nature is best found in his 1996 publication Nature Spirits and Elemental Beings, where he describes tuning into the morphogenetic fields surrounding landscapes and individual components within them. One of the ways he heals these landscapes is through what he calls lithopuncture, art installations of standing stones, meant to act upon the earth in the same way as acupuncture works on the human (or animal) body. This links us clearly to prehistoric morphological designs, such as stone circles and rows. Marko suggests that our prehistoric ancestors were full-time collaborators with the nature spirits, and were using their own lithopuncture partly to induce harmony and regulation to their surrounding environments. Post-industrial ignorance of the invisible intelligence in nature has created a disconnection with natural landscapes, much to the detriment of all life and the earth’s biosphere itself:

“The rational scientific paradigm has, during the last two centuries, imposed upon humanity a pattern of ignorance towards those beings and dimensions of life that do not know physical appearance and yet are inevitable for life processes to run and to evolve. My effort as an artist and a human being is to get intimate experience of those invisible dimensions and beings, and share the experience and knowledge about the invisible worlds of Earth and Universe with my fellow human beings to change that extremely dangerous pattern that ignores the sources of life itself.”

Lithopuncture by Marko Pogačnik

Pogačnik’s meditative clairvoyance penetrates the materiality of nature and sees what is happening at a metaphysical level; a level where the elementals appear in a vast variety of forms, but usually adhering to the general forms outlined by Steiner. Pogačnik’s incisive, easy and honest style of description allows for a deep insight into the cosmic reality of the mechanisms of interaction with these faerie nature spirits. He describes how seemingly innocuous changes to the natural environment can cause a potentially negative impact on the elementals who constitute the metaphysical aspect of that environment. His natural clairvoyant abilities enable him to contact the faeries and to resolve issues with them – even something as simple as moving a compost heap in a garden might force the elemental inhabiters of the compost to an unfamiliar environment, where they might cause mischief as a reaction to their perceived persecution. He suggests that these beings of a different order are unable to follow our rationalised thinking: “Their consciousness works on the emotional level. They think the way we feel, and the opposite is also true: our mental level is like a foreign language to them.”

Like Steiner, Pogačnik suggests that all humans have the congenital ability to enter a state of consciousness that will allow interaction with the nature spirits, but that this requires a lowering of the mental threshold. If we want faerie interaction our ingrained reductionist belief system needs to be dissolved or suppressed, and we must enter a meditative state, free from the usual intrusions of normal rational thinking. Perhaps one reason why it is children who so often see and interact with faeries is that this rationality is as yet not fully formed and ingrained; their consciousness is simply more able and prone to slip into a daydream state, where there is less separation between the physical and the metaphysical.

Human Consciousness and the Faeries

And this brings us back to the root of faerie epistemology. How have they managed to survive for so long as a recognisable taxonomy, apparently able to evolve between allegoric archetypes, folkloric characters, and metaphysical entities ranging from aliens to nature spirits? While there may, initially, seem little similarity in their archetypal manifestations in faerie tales and the creatures encountered in an altered state of consciousness brought about by the consumption of DMT or through clairvoyance, they may in fact be coming from the same place. This place is evidently reliant on human consciousness, but consciousness that is removed from the everyday consensus reality. A Jungian analyst would describe the archetypal characters found in faerie tales as real representatives of human consciousness – they are aspects of ourselves that can be accessed at a transpersonal level through the stories. A DMT-advocate might also describe the entities encountered in an altered state as exemplars of our awareness operating at an enhanced level, where exist entities that are not able to interact with us in our usual reduced state, perhaps correlating with the testimonies of folklore, where people’s perception of reality had been altered, albeit in a less radical fashion. A Theosophist might suggest that being able to enter a meditative state and lower the mental threshold allows a connection with both archetypal concepts and metaphysical beings operating within the environment, and that in fact they may be (almost) one and the same thing. But how can this be rationalised? How can we incorporate these concepts into theoretical frameworks that may explain the longevity of the faeries?

A materialist/reductionist would suggest that this cannot be done, because any perception of faeries is not viable as it operates outside of the known reality based on well-established laws of physics. But there is currently much subversiveness to this traditional viewpoint in science and philosophy, and we can perhaps apply two new (although they are both based on older concepts) theoretical approaches, which may help explain why the faeries (along with a range of other parapsychological phenomena) may be allowed back into our worldview.

Idealism. Idealism is a philosophical theory first posited by George Berkeley (1685-1753) and expanded upon by Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804) and other German philosophers of the 19th century such as GWF Hegel (1770-1831) and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). They were all codifying ideas initially expressed by Plato, and (unbeknown to them) were channeling concepts deeply embedded in Buddhist, Taoist and Hindu philosophical/spiritual traditions. While attacked and relegated to the philosophical fringes in the West during the late 19th and 20th centuries, the theory of idealism has recently been revived and reinvented as a legitimate conceptual framework by a number of philosophers and theoretical physicists, among them Bernardo Kastrup and Amit Goswami. Kastrup has applied an interdisciplinary methodology and worked with a number of quantum physicists to theorise that the tenets of idealism are the best explanation for how reality works, as opposed to any materialist explanation, which supposes that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain. The basic tenet is that Mind (not the material brain) is the ontological primitive, making material reality a product of consciousness, not the other way round. There is a single universal consciousness and we are sub-sets of it. Without it or us, there is no physical reality. The theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) expressed this as: “The total number of minds in the universe is one. In fact, consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings.” In his book Why Materialism is Baloney, Kastrup uses the insightful analogy of whirlpools in a river to make this cosmic idea accessible. The river is the universal consciousness while individual whirlpools exist within it, representing separate, localised consciousness. The whirlpools are made up from the river and are dependent upon it for their existence, but their interface with it is limited, and they seem to exist as autonomous formations. The whirlpools are symbolic of individual consciousness; apparently existing in their own right and absorbed by inward-looking self-awareness, while in actuality they are part of a bigger, connected whole – the oneness of the river.

While differing in certain respects, idealism has much in common with Jung’s Collective Unconscious where are found the archetypes that make their way into faerie tales. Using the whirlpool analogy, each whirlpool is able, when conditions are met, to incorporate parts of the larger river, thus informing itself of a greater reality outside of its self-localisation. The river (universal consciousness or the Collective Unconscious) is the over-mind containing all knowledge, which can be imparted to the individual whirlpools under certain circumstances (such as the telling of faerie tales or supernatural entity encounters). And if consciousness is a singularity then our localised minds can only have a limited perception of the greater reality, which allows in a multiplicity of parapsychological possibilities such as telepathy, precognition and clairvoyance – available to us when we are able (by whatever means) to transcend the locality. While Animism sees all things as conscious to some degree, idealism places this within an overall metaphysical context, with a potential limitless store of ideas. Anything that has been imagined in the history of human consciousness (including what would usually be thought of as supernatural entities) finds form here and at particular moments can manifest into what we normally experience as our physical reality, a reality that is utterly dependent on irreducible consciousness. The faeries thus become representatives of aspects of a collective human mind, made recognisable as a specific taxonomy by being culturally coded for centuries through folklore, storytelling and numinous encounters.

The theory of idealism finds support in experimental data from quantum physics. The well-known double-slit experiment appears to demonstrate that in the quantum world quanta exist as nothing but waves of potential – a superposition – until collapsed into particles by human observation; and that particles that have been introduced to each other become intrinsically entangled, and can then ‘communicate’ at any distance at faster than light speed. Einstein called this ‘spooky action at a distance’, but a number of recent experiments have clearly demonstrated that entanglement is a true, measurable phenomenon, although the mechanism for the communication between particles remains unknown. Scientists such as Dean Radin have suggested (with much experimental data) that entanglement may be at the root of parapsychological events, most especially telepathy and clairvoyance, but also anomalous interactions with non-human (or supernatural) entities. While there is ongoing debate about the true nature of these quantum effects, and their application in the super-atomic world, they do provide the possible explanation that consciousness (not matter) is primary and that (as per idealism) our local minds are connected to a vaster network of non-local reality, not dependent on the standard laws of physics. This is a transcendent reality that is perhaps being manifested in manageable forms by faerie tales, folklore and modern anecdotal encounters with faerie entities. It is almost as if we were living in a simulation, where some greater consciousness is allowing us to see beyond our own solipsistic horizons by implanting supernatural creatures into our physical reality in an attempt to expand our understanding of how things really work. This leads to a second theory that may help elucidate how human consciousness is interacting with the faeries.

Simulated Reality Hypothesis. The notion that we are existing in a simulated virtual reality has been a trope of science fiction, popularised most effectively in the work of Philip K Dick and the influential film The Matrix. However, the idea that experienced reality is an illusion is not new. The first millennium mystic teachings of the Gnostic Christians suggest that humanity has been trapped in a deception – a copy of reality – perpetrated by the Demiurge and his minions the Archons, and Indian Vedic texts articulate the concept of māyā, whereby the gods are able (for a variety of reasons) to create a physical reality that conceals the true metaphysical reality. But these modern and ancient doctrines of a simulated reality have received new input in recent years, updating the concepts to create a technologically coherent hypothesis that suggests our physical reality has been modelled, much like we have modelled digital realities with computers. If there is any viability in the hypothesis, then supernatural entities such as faeries are suddenly mainstreamed; made almost unavoidable in a physical world that has been constructed as a program, and where there are probably ‘glitches in the matrix.’

Using the simulated reality hypothesis outlined by the philosopher Nicholas Bostrom in 2003 as a baseline, scientific luminaries such as Elon Musk (interestingly, the Gnostic name for the fabricated reality was Elon) and Neil deGrasse Tyson have both recently suggested that the reality we think of as ‘base reality’ could be nothing more than an inconceivably (to us) advanced computer program, and that we are simply coded players in that program believing ourselves to be conscious. The cosmologist Max Tegmark and the theoretical physicist James Gates have discussed how our universe is based on a rigid set of mathematical laws, and that the coding of those laws seem to appear in quantum measurements in the real world, and also in information technology. Gates remarked: “In my research I found this very strange thing. I was driven to error-correcting codes—they’re what make browsers work. So why were they also in the equations I was studying about quarks and electrons and supersymmetry?” This feeds into the NASA scientist Rich Terrile‘s idea that quantum particles/waves are the equivalent of digital bits in a computer – the basic units of information upon which everything else is built: “It is feasible that the universe we think of as material reality is simply a holographic construction based on a quantum program that has been simulated much as we have simulated (in a vastly more low-level way) computer games with interacting characters.”

The ex-NASA scientist Tom Campbell is also an adherent of the simulated reality theory, but his expanded hypothesis contends that our universe is a sub-set of a ‘Nonphysical-Matter Reality’ (NPMR). The NPMR is a greater reality with its own constituent metaphysical laws and can be accessed in dreams, out-of-body experiences and altered states of consciousness, when consciousness is able to detach itself from the constraints of the usual laws of physics. Campbell describes it as a ‘different data stream’ but one that contains (and controls) our own mathematical material universe. What would usually be considered as paranormal events in our physical reality are normal in NPMR, and when it leaks into our 3D world via non-ordinary states of consciousness, the results appear mystical or magical. This includes entities that appear to have their own autonomous state, but are actually the results of our own limited consciousness attempting to decipher them within the bounds of our own experience. Within this theorem certain supernatural entities are metaphysical constructs from a greater reality (the NPMR), appearing into our world under certain conditions, and culturally coded to show up as specific taxonomies – one of which can be recognisable as faeries.

Final Thoughts

Idealism and the simulated reality hypothesis both suggest that there is something unknown to us controlling our reality. And while they are both theoretical constructs they have a very evident analogy, which is available to us all: dreams. A dream is an absolutely convincing simulated reality, where our avatar engages with a universe that it believes to be the base reality. Only when we awake and transcend from the dream do we realise that the dream was a sub-set of an over-mind, which has managed to create a virtual reality and populate it with images and characters from our subconscious. It is only a short conceptual jump from this analogy to the dream hypothesis, whereby what we recognise as waking reality becomes a consciousness sub-set, much in line with Campbell’s NPMR theory.

This is a fundamentally important point when attempting to understand why the faeries might exist, at whatever ontological level. Experiencing the faerie taxonomy does seem to derive from people plugging into a bigger metaphysical reality, theoretically articulated by Jung’s collective unconscious, the philosophy of idealism and the simulated reality hypothesis. Whether this is drawing archetypes from a collective unconscious into faerie tales or experiencing the entities in some form of altered state of consciousness, the interface appears to rely on us transcending our individual minds in a variety of ways. The faerie taxonomy itself seems to have been millennia in the making and is apparently evolving as our human condition evolves. The faeries (in all their forms) have become a persistent phenomenon, and seem to be an intrinsic aspect of human consciousness, purveyors of the message (explicitly or implicitly) that our material physical reality is dependent on a non-physical reality that pervades our universe and perhaps even contains it.

***

The Fairy Investigation Society is currently extending its survey of faerie encounters with a new census, details of which can be found here.

The role of faeries in modern fiction pop culture, from Tolkien to gaming lore, has been omitted here, even though these fictional creations are often formulated using traditional and modern concepts of what the faeries are. Deadbutdreaming may broach this topic in a future post, but for anyone interested in this aspect of folkloric evolution here is a recent concise and insightful article by Morgan Daimler: ‘Irish-American Witchcraft: Fairies, Tradition & Popculture’, with her full downloadable presentation on the subject from a recent conference (‘Popular Culture and the Deep Past: Fairies and the Fantastic’) at The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the Ohio State University here.

For changing taxonomic concepts of faeries in the visual arts over the centuries see: The Art of Faerie.

*In an effort to retain clarity, I specifically did not include any discussion of Panpsychism here, even though it is closely related to both Animism and Idealism as a theory. Here is a good effort to unravel the semantic differentiations by Fizan.

Interpreting the Faeries

This is a trip through some of the interpretations that have been cast over the faeries during the last hundred years or so. I get the impression that many folklorists are reluctant, even scared, to pin their true feelings to the mast when it comes to saying what the faeries really are. It’s pretty easy to recount folktales and faerie-stories… but what do they mean, and where do they come from? Some people are more willing than others to stick their necks out… here’s a personal choice of some of the best published interpretations of the faeries. It’s not comprehensive, but I think these works are essential if you’d like to come to some sort of understanding about what the faeries are and why they have persisted in our culture.

A brilliant place to start is with Katherine Briggs’ An Encyclopedia of Fairies from 1976. Katherine Briggs (d.1980) was president of the Folklore Society between 1969 and 1972 and wrote extensively about the folklore of the faeries, including An Anatomy of Puck, which was an adaptation of her Oxford D.Litt. thesis on 17th-century faerie literature. An Encyclopedia of Fairies correlates a wealth of (mainly British and Irish) traditions of the faeries, covering both the stories and anecdotes. It’s a skilful overview of the phenomenon, that doesn’t shirk from ontological discussion of subjects such as ‘the origin of the fairies’ and ‘time in fairyland’… not subjects that were much discussed when she was writing in the 1970s, mainly because to do so was to give some credence to the reality of the faeries beyond their folkloric representation. But the main emphasis of the book is to summarise the hundreds of different faerie types and stories. It is authoritative, beautifully written, well referenced, and is a route into a deeper understanding of why the faeries are such an important element of British and Irish folklore. Unfortunately, it’s been out of print for a while and is difficult to find for less than £50. But if you can procure a copy, you’ll soon realise that it is a prime reference book for beginning to understand the faeries and where they come from. The New York Times Book Review said: “If myths are both the food and fruit of the imagination, then Katherine Briggs has prepared a banquet. There seems to be no end to the information in this enchanted almanac.”

More international in scope, and wonderfully illustrated (by Claudine and Roland Sabatier), is The Complete Encyclopedia of Elves, Goblins and other Little Creatures by Pierre Dubois (1992). Dubois has a very playful style of writing that matches the subject matter perfectly, and he covers an extraordinary range of faerie types from around the world, co-ordinated into sections that describe each entity alongside an illustrative story. The description usually includes the ‘behaviour’ of the faerie in question. Typical of Dubois’ tone is this entry for the behaviour of The Mimi, supernatural entities of the aboriginal Australians…

“As we have seen, these elves from the middle worlds are benevolent, hospitable, and gracious. But they are also amongst those elves with a sensitive, versatile and quick-tempered nature – quite suddenly, they can change a serene environment into a disaster zone if someone has dared to stand on a sacred stone, pick their favourite herb, or dirty the water they came to draw in the evening. The Mimi keep kangaroos, pythons, koalas, opossums, and crocodiles as humans keep cats and dogs. So anyone who lays a finger on them is regarded by the Mimi as damaging their pets.”

It seems possible that it is the Mimi that are invoked in the aboriginal rock shelter paintings from Kimberley, Western Australia, c.10,000 BCE (see Shamanic Explorations of Supernatural Realms: Cave Art – The Earliest Folklore for a discussion of the faeries as subjects of prehistoric cave and rock art).

The Mimi, Kimberley, Australia, c.10,000 BCE

Briggs and Dubois are indebted for many of their interpretations of the faeries to the folklorists of the 19th and early 20th centuries. One of these was Edwin Sidney Hartland (1848-1927) whose The Science of Fairy Tales: An Enquiry into Fairy Mythology (1891) is one of the first studies that attempts to place the faeries in an anthropological context. Whilst couched in somewhat sonorous Victorian language, this volume dissects various aspects of faerie lore, such as the changeling and faerie midwife stories, and what Hartland calls ‘the supernatural lapse of time in fairyland’. Hartland is happy to recount the requisite folktales in full, but he provides a constant running commentary on the possible meanings and originations of the stories. It’s an essential primer, both for a window into 19th-century views of the faeries, and as the earliest attempt to understand the phenomenon, using the anthropological toolkit of the 1890s.

Two decades later WY Evans-Wentz went one step further by applying his interpretations of the faeries on fieldwork he carried out himself. The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries was published in 1911, and was based on Evans-Wentz’s journeys through the Celtic realms of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall and Brittany, between 1907-11, where he collected stories and anecdotes about the faeries from the rural populations. His language can occasionally seem archaic and quaint, but there is no doubt that he imbued himself in the Celtic communities that he spent time with during his years of travels amongst them. He had the time, that a modern anthropologist/folklorist could only dream of, to visit these communities and spend time with them, soaking up their stories and anecdotes, which revealed so much about the deeply ingrained belief in the faeries and the way these entities interacted with consensual reality. In doing so, he gained a great admiration for the rural people he came across, who would tell it like it was.

“The great majority of men in cities are apt to pride themselves on their own exemption from ‘superstition,’ and to smile pityingly at the poor countrymen and countrywomen who believe in fairies. But when they do so they forget that, with all their own admirable progress in material invention, with all the far-reaching data of their acquired science, with all the vast extent of their commercial and economic conquests, they themselves have ceased to be natural… they have lost all sympathetic and responsive contact with Nature, because unconsciously they have thus permitted conventionality and unnaturalness to insulate them from it.”

This quote is from the introduction to The Fairy-Faith, and it sets out Evans-Wentz’s stall. He was on the side of the rural peasantry who were the repository of the vast wealth of folklore represented in their tales of the faeries. He recognised the innate importance of what they were conveying, and was not shy about convincing his reader of the authenticity of what they told him, even if it was anathema to the conventual scientific and materialistic wisdom of his age. But by the time Evans-Wentz made his tour of Celtic countries between 1907-11, the general belief in faeries was waning. By cataloguing rural stories, anecdotes and theories about the faeries, just before WWI tore apart many of the traditional ways of life, and by doing it in such an open-minded and empathetic manner, he has left us with a rare treasure mine of Celtic faerie data.

Evans-Wentz spends much time discussing seership and the second-sight that was usually necessary to interact with the faeries. This was taken to another level by the Austrian spiritual philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who, in a series of lectures between 1908 and 1924, outlined his concept of the faeries as nature spirits (sometimes calling them elementals) and their fundamental role in ensuring the propagation of the natural world. Steiner called second-sight clairvoyance, and took it as a given reality. His language is sometimes difficult and obtuse, but his descriptions of the inter-penetrating of the physical world with the spiritual world is compelling, and points towards a deeper, cosmic understanding of the nuts and bolts of how the world really works. He terms consensus reality as the sense world, and the spiritual realm as the supersensible world. For Steiner, the supersensible world exists as a field of energy devoid of matter, but which constantly interacts with the physical sense world. What exists in the supersensible world is in effect a fifth dimension of reality upon which our own four dimensions rely, and which is essential to the well-being of all life, but can only be perceived by clairvoyance. It is this special faculty that allows people to recognise how the worlds of matter and spirit intertwine.

Steiner’s theosophist ideas gained traction through the 20th century, and helped shape a new vision of the faeries as elemental forces of nature, that stripped them somewhat of their folkloric mischievous immorality. By 1952 Geoffrey Hodson was able to take this concept further in his book The Kingdom of the Gods. For readers with a materialistic disposition, this work may be a step too far, and will certainly require a re-tuning of the Western mindset to accept what he is conveying. But Hodson is very clear in his description of a hierarchy of metaphysical beings, which exist alongside physical reality and interact with it. Without this hierarchy there is no life. Hodson uses his clairvoyance to investigate the phenomenon gnostically, and takes us into a dense world of cosmic vitality, introducing several Eastern mystical traditions to explain his direct experiences with nature spirits. One such is Fohat:

“Fohat is the universal constructive Force of Cosmic Electricity and the ultimate hidden power in this universe, the power which charges a universe with Life, with Spirit; it is described as the Will and the Mind, the very Self, of God. This supreme force is in all creatures. When specialized and enclosed within the spinal cord of man it is called Kundalini, or the power that moves in serpentine path; hence its other name the Serpent Fire.”

Also from the mid 20th-century theosophist tradition (although not published in English until 2014) is Marjorie Johnson’s Seeing Fairies. Johnson (acting on behalf of the Fairy Investigation Society) collected over 500 anecdotal descriptions from people who claimed to have seen or interacted with faeries, and compiled them together with her own experiences. Some of her correspondents were Theosophists, with an avowed history of clairvoyance. But the majority were not, and their honest appraisals of seeing faeries are usually singular events in their otherwise non-clairvoyant lives. Their subjective anecdotes may be contentious as scientific evidence, but they are a fascinating collection of experience reports. The faeries described range from traditional folkloric types to metaphysical nature spirits, occasionally morphing into the delicate, genteel winged faeries of Victorian invention.

Perhaps that should be Victorian re-invention. The best overview of what happened to the faeries in popular consciousness during the 19th century is Carole Silver’s Strange and Secret Peoples from 1999. She marshals evidence from a range of sources in an attempt to explain how the pre-Victorian folkloric faerie traditions were appropriated by artists and writers through the 19th century, and remoulded into a new vision of what they were and what they meant. Part of this movement spawned the image of faeries as tiny, incandescent creatures with wings – unknown before the 19th century – which has in turn informed our own disneyfied faeries of modern popular culture… the Tinkerbell effect. But there was much more to the re-invention than this:

“That the Victorians were utterly fascinated by the faeries is demonstrated by the art, drama. and literature they created and admired. Their abiding interest shows in the numerous, uniquely British faerie paintings that flourished between the 1830s and the 1870s – pictures in part inspired by nationalism and Shakespeare, in part as protest against the strictly useful and material, but in either case, as attempts to reconnect the actual and the occult.”

As with most academic studies of the faeries, Silver is willing to go only so far into an investigation of the origins of the faeries themselves, and their potential real presence in the material world. But such restraint is not shown by Carlo Ginzburg in his monumental 1989 book Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath. Whilst the main subject matter is the witches’ sabbath in the medieval and Early Modern periods, Ginzburg recognises the essential role the faeries play in accounts of the sabbath. His use of historical sources to recreate what was really going on at the sabbaths is deeply impressive, and he has single-handedly overturned previous cultural historical theses, that the sabbath was simply an imaginary construct of the ecclesiastic and secular elites to close down on perceived heretics and maintain control over subversive groups. The sabbaths were real, and Ginzburg goes into detail as to how and why the faeries were included in these sacred rituals, facilitating ‘ecstasies’ and accompanying the witches on their metaphysical journeys. This eventually brings us to Ginzburg’s main hypothesis, that the sabbath was a survival of Eurasian prehistoric shamanism. The ‘ecstasies’ were brought about through group altered states of consciousness that enabled the witches to partake in a metaphysical reality for magical purposes… they were travelling to the otherworld, accompanied by their faerie familiars, just as Eurasian shamans had done. Ginzburg convincingly argues the case for continuity from prehistoric shaman to medieval/Early Modern witch.

In her compelling 2005 book Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits: Shamanic Visionary Traditions in Early Modern British Witchcraft and Magic, Emma Wilby takes up the baton from Ginzburg and looks in detail at the role ‘familiars’ played in British witchcraft. These were the faeries, associated with both witches and ‘cunning folk’ (white witches). Titus L’s review sums up the trajectory of the work:

“Wilby’s hypothesis is that the faerie encounter narratives of cunning folk and witches recorded in the early modern witch trials, evidence a surviving trend of folk beliefs extending unbroken from a pre christian shamanic world view. Shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award, 2006, the author makes an overwhelming case for the long term existence of an ancient British-Shamanic tradition. She also re-configures our understanding of witches and cunning folk as animist shamans embedded in local communities. This is an iconoclastic reversal of modern academic opinion that witches experience of spirits and their attested narratives were either the product of mental illness or more likely perhaps an enforced or contrived collusion between the often illiterate prisoner and their elite and educated religious inquisitor. That magical practitioners across the length and breadth of Britain had stood up in courtrooms and persisted in telling long and involved stories about faeries despite the fact that in doing so they often knowingly condemned themselves to death, demonstrates in as definite a way as could be possible the conviction, integrity and respect with which the cunning folk regarded their familiar spirits… the faeries.”

Wilby’s work is indeed iconoclastic, and has opened the way for a more esoteric and unconventional take on the faeries amongst academic folklorists and anthropologists. Her 2010 follow up book The Visions of Isobel Gowdie, goes even deeper into the concept of witchcraft as a survival of shamanism, using the compendious records from the trial of the Scottish witch Isobel Gowdie (and her compatriots) in 1662. These records are replete with confessions that talk about faerie familiars and zoomorphic witches, and they give us an unparalleled view into patterns of metaphysical belief in the 17th century. Wilby has an unerring ability to differentiate the real words and beliefs of the accused from witch trial documents, from the presumptions imposed on them by the persecuting Christian elites. Her work makes it very clear that in 17th-century rural communities the faeries were an accepted phenomenon, who played an essential role in the spiritual beliefs and practices of the population; under the radar of Christianity, until the witch hunts caught up with them.

But this metaphysical understanding of the faeries can be taken even further. If we step out of the halls of academia we find some truly cutting-edge interpretations of who the faeries are, and their intimate connection with a prehistoric shamanistic tradition. In his 2005 book Supernatural, Graham Hancock puts forward the hypothesis that the shamanistic cultures of the Stone Age were interacting with entities that to all intents were the same as the faeries of folkloric tradition. Around 30,000 years ago there was an explosion of symbolism in human culture, primarily represented by cave art. This cave art is usually located in hard to access underground spaces that must have had significant meaning for the artists and those who would have been experiencing these strange images by torchlight. And strange they are. Much of the cave art represents therianthropic beings, that is half human, half animal shape-shifters. Hancock makes the convincing argument that these cave paintings were produced to represent reality as perceived in an altered state of consciousness. Twenty years ago this idea was anathema to anthropologists, but since the work of the anthropologists David Lewis-Williams, Thomas Dowson and many others, the theory has tipped over to become an accepted orthodoxy. There are motifs by the hundred in the cave paintings that correlate with the visionary states of people in an altered state of consciousness, brought about most especially by the ingestion of a psychotropic substance. The basic premise is that the shamans of these stone age cultures transported themselves into altered states of consciousness and then painted the results of their experiences — experiences that frequently included therianthropic beings that coincide with descriptions of faeries in the historic period.

Hancock was building on work done by the astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallée, who, in his 1969 book Passport to Magonia, suggested that the folkloric faeries were one and the same as the alien abductors of the 20th (and now the 21st) century. His hypothesis is that there is a commonality to the experiences reported in alien abduction scenarios, and the reports of interactions with faeries in folklore. He suggests the aliens and the faeries are essentially the same phenomenon, tuned through the cultural receptors of the time and then interpreted accordingly. He makes special reference to the regular motifs in faerie-tales of the abduction, by various means, of humans by faeries. There’s a lot of data here – it’s the commonest motif in faerie folklore. For a variety of reasons humans are taken to faerieland in the stories, either as midwives or nurses for faerie children, as servants to the faeries, for sex, as punishment or reward, or just because the faeries feel like it. They were also keen on abducting babies, and replacing them with changelings; wizened old faerie creatures who would usually die before the end of the story if a ruse to return the human baby wasn’t discovered. These motifs, of course, coincide with many aspects of the monumentally strange phenomenon of alien abductions, reports of which have grown at an exponential rate since the early 1950s. Vallée uses a range of evidence to tie-up faerie abductions from folklore and alien abductions from modern reports, and goes as far to state:

“… the modern, global belief in flying saucers and their occupants is identical to an earlier belief in the fairy-faith. The entities described as the pilots of the craft are indistinguishable from the elves, sylphs and lutins of the Middle Ages. Through the observations of unidentified flying objects, we are concerned with an agency our ancestors knew well and regarded with terror: we are prying into the affairs of the Secret Commonwealth.”

The Secret Commonwealth was the term coined for the faeries by the Reverend Robert Kirk in a manuscript of 1691, and Vallée spends much time in the book linking the descriptions given by Kirk of the faeries to the portrayals of aliens from the 1950s onwards. Whatever you may think of the alien abduction phenomenon, it is clear that there is much consistent evidence to support Vallée’s claims. It’s a classic book, written (like Graham Hancock’s books) outside the remits of academia, and therefore free to break free of conventions, and tell us some truths without the constraints of academic orthodoxy.

Serena Roney-Dougal takes this theme of the faeries as external agents of interference in human culture and runs with it in her 2002 book The Faery Faith: An Integration of Science with Spirit, which pulls in a range of interpretations to get to the bottom of who the faeries are and their place in the world. It’s a nice blend of New-Age thinking and science, and covers a wide range of ideas, from Jungian analysis to quantum theory, written in luminous prose and with an evident understanding of the elusive nature of the faeries when we attempt to pin them down to a materialistic existence.

Finally, special mention needs to be made of the classic 1978 book Faeries by Brian Froud and Alan Lee. This is a playful, illustrative romp through faerie-lore, based on the descriptions given by Katherine Briggs in her Encyclopedia of Fairies. Froud and Lee capture the essence of folkloric faeries in their intense and atmospheric images of faeries from Britain and Ireland, always with the prescribed conviction that they are acting on ‘inside information’. There are no gossamer-winged faeries here… they’re real and vital, and the consistent republications of the volume prove the popularity of their vision. Take a look at any website about the faeries, and you’ll find some of their illustrations there. It probably ranks as the bestselling faerie book ever.

There are reams of other books about the faeries, not to mention the ever-spiralling online presence covering faerie-lore in all its aspects, but this summary is intended as an overview of what I think are the best interpretative studies of what the faeries are, where they come from, and what their stories mean. Most of the books discussed here also have good reference sections for further reading. But the faeries are elusive; interpretations can be made, but we’re always left with the distinct impression that we have not quite got to the bottom of things… and that we probably never will.

Froud and Lee Faeries

A companion piece, looking at filmic representations of the faeries, can be found here: Faeries on Film.

For more books on the faeries take a look at the extensive list on the Fairyist website here. If any readers think there are other books essential to the interpretation of the faeries, not  discussed in this article, then please do leave a comment below.

The cover image is by Polish artist Valentin Rekunenko.

Altered States of Consciousness and the Faeries

“Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness that are entirely different.” WILLIAM JAMES

Physicalism vs Consciousness

What are the faeries? Where do they come from and where do they go when they’re not interacting with their human observers? Folklorists are usually ambivalent about the faeries; they are likely to keep their distance from them, so to speak. Whilst happy to record and discuss the beliefs of people who tell stories and anecdotes about them, most folklorists speak the language (at least in official publications) of the reductionist, materialist worldview that has held sway in Western civilisation for the last few hundred years, and they’ll be nervous about assessing the potential actual reality of metaphysical beings. In the materialist’s world, faeries simply cannot exist. They must be reduced into a categorised cultural belief system, and any discussion of them will usually (but not always, as we shall see) be couched in the accepted language of scientific rationalism. This creates a problem for any folklorist (or anybody else) who wants to look behind the stories and investigate the possibility that the faeries can be incorporated into our consensus reality as a genuine phenomenon. The philosopher Bernardo Kastrup calls this outlook Physicalism, and suggests, in a recent article: The Physicalist Worldview as Neurotic Ego-Defense Mechanism, that it has created a disconnect in our ability to truly understand reality, due to its insistence that consciousness is secondary to matter:

“A worldview is a narrative in terms of which we relate to ourselves and reality at large. It is a kind of cultural operating system that gives us tentative answers to foundational questions such as ‘What are we?’ ‘What is the nature of reality?’ ‘What is the purpose of life?’ and so on. Although many different worldviews vie for dominance today, the academically endorsed physicalist narrative defines the mainstream, despite its many difficulties. This reigning worldview posits that physical entities outside consciousness are the building blocks of reality. Consciousness, in turn, is supposedly an epiphenomenon or emergent property of certain complex arrangements of these entities. As such, under physicalism, consciousness must be reducible to physical arrangements outside and independent of experience.”

Kastrup also suggests this has created a schism and conflict between academics trained in the belief system of Physicalism and large sections of society who have been effectively railroaded into accepting an orthodoxy that denies their intuitive understanding of reality based on consciousness. This orthodoxy is well entrenched, especially when it comes to supernatural entities such as the faeries, but researchers such as Kastrup,  Graham Hancock, Rick Strassman and Serena Roney-Dougal have begun to challenge conventions by reinstating consciousness as the primary mover and creator of reality. When this is done, entities such faeries are allowed back into the universe as an authentic phenomenon, and if we start to look in the right places, we begin to find that they are indeed everywhere… we just need to know where to look, or more accurately how to look.

The Electromagnetic Spectrum, Dark Matter and Dark Energy

The Electromagnetic Spectrum

As David Icke is always reminding us, our normal waking consciousness experiences less than 0.05% of the entire electromagnetic spectrum, with visible light being less than 0.1% of this. If we take into account the current scientific hypothesis that this electromagnetic spectrum itself composes less than 10% of the universe, with the mysterious Dark Matter and Dark Energy taking up the rest, then we are at a good starting point to understand that our version of reality is extremely compromised. We may have the technology to utilise the unseen wavelengths in the spectrum, but they are not accessible to our ordinary consciousness, whilst Dark Matter and Dark Energy (which, remember, supposedly make up over 90% of the universe) are totally inaccessible to our technology, and remain for the moment, nothing more than theory based on the by-product of mathematical equations. We also have to take into account the recent theoretical mind-bender that the universe may actually be a hologram, put in place by (depending on who you listen to) a supreme being, aliens or future versions of humans, the latter option coming from NASA scientist Dr Rich Terrile. With this level of uncertainty about the reality we inhabit, and in order to gain an understanding of the world in which we live (and the unseen entities that may exist alongside us), we might be advised to fall back on the only known certainty allowed us: consciousness.

The Origins of the Faeries in Altered States of Consciousness, from c.35,000 BCE

Our earliest known artistic portrayals of the world, and how human consciousness interacted with it, come in the form of cave paintings from all parts of the globe, starting c.35,000 BCE (see Shamanic Explorations of Supernatural Realms: Cave Art – The Earliest Folklore for a detailed look at cave paintings as folklore). Many of these cave paintings include humanoids and therianthropes, otherworldly entities that have been recorded alongside geometric imagery, stylised animals and landscapes. They are in effect our earliest known folklore. But what state of mind were our Palaeolithic ancestors in when they were painting these strange entities in often difficult to access caves and shelters?

Therianthropes in a ‘sky boat’ from cave paintings in Harrismith, South Africa

The anthropologist David Lewis-Williams has made the convincing argument that these cave and rock-shelter paintings were produced by shamanic cultures to represent reality as perceived in an altered state of consciousness. Twenty years ago this idea was anathema to anthropologists, but since the work of Lewis-Williams, and many others, the theory has tipped over to become an accepted orthodoxy. There are hundreds of motifs in the cave paintings that correlate with the visionary states of people in an altered state of consciousness, brought about most especially by the ingestion of a psychotropic substance. The basic premise is that the shamans of these Palaeolithic cultures transported themselves into altered states of consciousness and then painted the results of their experiences on the walls of caves and rock shelters — experiences that frequently included therianthropic beings and supernatural humanoids that correlate in many ways with later faerie types.

Rock shelter paintings from Kimberley, Australia, c.15,000 BCE

Cave paintings at Pech Merle, France, c.25,000 BCE

Lewis-Williams’ research includes collected data from laboratory experiments with people who had taken various psychedelic substances to alter their states of consciousness. The close correlation between the visual imagery recorded during these sessions, and the Palaeolithic cave art convinced him that there was a fundamental link between them,

Petroglyph, Utah, US, no date

manifesting through consciousness itself. Most prevalent were the entoptic images, typically experienced during the early stages of a psychedelic episode. These are most often dots, spirals and geometric patterns that appear within the visual range of the tripper, but also include time-lapse imagery, most often termed tracers. Cave paintings are replete with this entoptic imagery, suggesting a universality of neuropsychological experience across time and geographical areas. Lewis-Williams sees this as convincing evidence that our prehistoric ancestors were using psychotropic plants and mushrooms in order to gain a state of consciousness that was fundamentally important to them.

Cave painting from Altamira, Spain, c.20,000 BCE

In his 2005 book Supernatural, Graham Hancock makes extensive use of Lewis-Williams work, as well as his own ethnographic studies, to investigate further into the concept of cave art as shamanic recording of different realities through altered states of consciousness. Hancock suggests it was no accident that these cave paintings began to appear when they did, that is between 30-35,000 years ago, just as anatomically and neurologically modern humans asserted their predominance across the Paleolithic world. He goes as far as to propose that the cultures these peoples instigated were fundamentally predicated on an understanding of the world and reality brought about by mind-altering psychedelic plants and mushrooms. A Physicalist view would assert that whilst shamanic cultures may be accessing a subjective hallucinogenic reality, this reality is simply delusional, the result of neurophysiological changes brought about by chemical changes in the brain, as a result of the ingestion of psychotropic compounds. The ‘entities’ portrayed in the cave paintings are all simply conjured up by compromised human minds. But recent research (with Graham Hancock at the forefront) disputes this view. There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that much historic folklore can be related intimately to the type of stories being told in cave art by Palaeolithic shamans, with which the descriptions are often remarkably similar. Writers such as Carlo Ginzburg and Emma Wilby have argued that there is a direct link between prehistoric shamanic storytelling and the folklore embodied in classical, medieval and later periods, that often incorporate entities such as nymphs and faeries; supernatural beings that interact with humanity when the conditions are right. Those conditions may well be reliant on the human participants undergoing an altered state of consciousness as a result of the ingestion of psychedelic compounds. There is certainly a preponderance of mushroom imagery associated to historic depictions of faeries, most especially the highly psychedelic red and white Amanita Muscaria (fly agaric) mushroom, and the psilocybin mushroom, both prevalent in Europe and Asia. If these historic folkloric manifestations of interactions with supernatural entities can be linked to the cave art of prehistory and preliterate societies, then we have a continuation of relationship with an alternative reality over a very long period of time.

17th-century English woodcut showing faeries dancing in a circle outside their hollow hill, with the fly agaric mushroom prominent, and the face of a ‘spirit’ in the tree

Historic Faeries from Altered States

Katherine Briggs pointed out in The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, that many of the British faerie motifs repeated in stories and anecdotes through the centuries to the present day were already in place during the medieval period. When folklorists began to collect these stories in earnest from the 19th century onwards, they found a belief in faeries amongst the rural population that was probably very close to the medieval belief and understanding of what faeries were and how they interacted with humanity.

Preacher telling off people for believing in faeries, c. 1390

Many of the stories include situations where the protagonist interacts with the faeries in what seems an altered state of consciousness: Faerieland doesn’t comply to Newtonian physics, it is consistently inhabited by strange humanoids and therianthropes (the faeries), and there are mountains of recurring story motifs that are highly suggestive of an autonomous reality being described. But this is not consensus reality, this is the folklore recording stories from people operating outside consensus reality. They may have got there by a variety of means apart from the ingestion of psychotropic plants or mushrooms, many of which are part of the plot device in the stories: dancing in circles, sitting out on cold hillsides, crying emotional tears, becoming panicked whilst lost… there are many ways these stories drop clues as to what’s really going on. The folktales about faeries have been overlain with much allegorical storytelling, but at their root the realities they describe are of people in altered states of consciousness, perhaps not too far from the realities experienced by the cave painters.

When WY Evans-Wentz travelled around the Celtic world at the beginning of the 20th century, collecting stories and anecdotal experiences about the faeries, it was clear that most of his interviewees rated clairvoyance as the best way of altering the conscious state to a position where it could interact with the faeries. Seership or second-sight was the method of entering, or at least viewing, an alternative reality inhabited by a relatively consistent cast of characters. He met one such (un-named) Irish clairvoyant in Rosses Point, County Sligo. This seer talks about various types of faeries that inhabit the landscape of Sligo, “making them sound like a cross between nature spirits and mystical visions.” But Evans-Wentz was just as interested in the mechanics of interacting with the faeries as he was with the stories themselves. How did the seer interface with them?

“I have always made a distinction between pictures seen in the memory of nature and visions of actual beings now existing in the inner world. We can make the same distinction in our world: I may close my eyes and see you as a vivid picture in memory, or I may look at you with my physical eyes and see your actual image. In seeing these beings of which I speak, the physical eyes may be open or closed: mystical beings in their own world and nature are never seen with the physical eyes.”

Evans-Wentz then asked him what sort of state was he in when he saw the faeries…

“I have seen them most frequently after being away from a city or town for a few days. The whole west coast of Ireland from Donegal to Kerry seems charged with a magical power, and I find it easiest to see while I am there. I have always found it comparatively easy to see visions while at ancient monuments like New Grange and Dowth, because I think such places are naturally charged with psychical forces, and were for that reason made use of long ago as sacred places. I usually find it possible to throw myself into the mood of seeing; but sometimes visions have forced themselves upon me.”

The rural people interviewed by Evans-Wentz consistently affirm that clairvoyant alteration of consciousness was the best sure-fire way to see the faeries. By the time Evans-Wentz visited these communities, there was a sense that the number of people gifted with second-sight was dwindling; cutting down on communication with the faeries. But at the same time as these rural communities were feeling the increasing pressures of modernism, The Theosophical Society (first founded in 1875) was reacting against the rise of Physicalism, by attempting to incorporate metaphysics into an understanding of reality. And their prime metaphysical technology was clairvoyance. The Theosophist Rudolf Steiner attempts to explain the mechanics of clairvoyance, when a person must transform their usually passive thought forms into something more dynamic. In normal consciousness thoughts:

“… allow themselves to be connected and separated, to be formed and then dismissed. This life of thought must develop in the elemental world a step further. There a person is not in a position to deal with thoughts that are passive. If someone really succeeds in entering the world with his clairvoyant soul, it seems as though his thoughts were not things over which he has any command; they are living beings… You thrust your consciousness into a place, it seems, where you do not find thoughts that are like those in the physical world, but where they are living beings.” Rudolf Steiner, Perception of the Elemental World (1913).

Steiner goes on to describe the specific elemental animating forces at work in the natural world when perceived clairvoyantly in what he calls the Supersensible World. The elementals in the Supersensible World exist as a range of beings, from devas, which are responsible for entire autonomous landscapes, through to the smaller nature spirits charged with the growth of vegetation. Steiner (basing his epistemology on that originally developed by the 15th-century alchemist Paracelsus) divides these into four main types corresponding to earth (Gnomic), water (Undines), air (Sylphs) and heat/light (Salamanders). This is the faerie realm, existing as a non-material autonomous reality that crosses over with ours, and which can be accessed via a clairvoyant altered state of consciousness. Steiner thought everyone has this innate ability, but they had to be taught how to use it… it had somehow become almost forgotten amongst humanity.

This idea finds common ground with the recent work of biochemist Rupert Sheldrake, who proposes that morphogenetic fields are the formative causation allowing life on earth. Sheldrake’s description of this organising principle behind the natural world is issued in the language of biochemistry, but in effect, what he postulates is the same as Steiner’s vision of nature spirits in action. There are invisible forces that are as essential in ordering life on earth as accepted non-material forces such as gravity. Steiner saw nature spirits as anthropogenic representations of these morphogenetic fields, imposed upon them through the thought forms of the observer, who perceives them clairvoyantly.

Inspired by the Theosophist movement, Marjorie Johnson (acting on behalf of the Fairy Investigation Society) collected over 500 anecdotal descriptions from people who claimed to have seen or interacted with faeries, and compiled them together with her own experiences in the book Seeing Fairies.  Some of her correspondents were Theosophists, with an avowed history of clairvoyance. But the majority were not, and their honest appraisals of seeing faeries are usually singular events in their otherwise non-clairvoyant lives. Their subjective anecdotes may be contentious as scientific evidence, but they are a fascinating collection of experience reports. Noticeable is how often the person writing about their experience includes details about their state of mind at the time. This is frequently (though not always) a non-usual state: they were out of breath, sleep deprived, depressed, afraid, ill, etc., before their experience. Muriel Golding, for example, was living in Leeds in 1927 and suffering from insomnia after a bout of flu. Whilst unable to sleep one night: “she saw on her pillow a little creature of goblin type, not more than a foot high. He seemed to be wearing blue and white pantaloons and a little jacket, and he had a curious small, mischievous face. He was laughing at her, but she couldn’t believe that he was really there and shut her eyes. When she opened them, there he was still, and he kicked up the bedclothes, put his face on the pillow, and winked at her. Then he vanished.”

Marjorie’s collection strategy wouldn’t cut the mustard with a modern folklorist, but the anecdotes are examples of human experiences with faeries, many of which have close correlations with altered states of consciousness. The question remains, what are the faeries? If they are metaphysical beings, how does human consciousness interact with them, and where is the meeting place?

The Faeries and DMT

The answer may lie with a substance called N,N-Dimethyltryptamine – DMT. This molecule is one of the main active ingredients in the Amazonian Ayahausca brew, but it is also produced endogenously in everyone’s brain, potentially (but not definitely) in the pineal gland. It’s usually safely dispersed around the brain and body for functional duties, but it seems that under certain circumstances, it can be released in higher quantities, causing an altered state of consciousness. There is some evidence that this can happen during a frontal lobe epileptic seizure. The late and great Terence McKenna was an enthusiastic user of the synthesized form of DMT to access different realities, and coined the term ‘self-transforming machine elves’ for the creatures he regularly found there. He can be heard talking about them here: Terence McKenna and the self-transforming machine elves.

As if to confirm Terence’s assertions, a research study conducted between 1990 and 1995 in the General Clinical Research Center of the University of New Mexico Hospital, by Dr Rick Strassman found that volunteers on the study injected with varying amounts of DMT underwent profound alterations of consciousness. This involved immediate cessation of normal consciousness and transportation to a different realm of reality with divergent physical properties, and inhabited by a range of creatures described as elves, faeries, lizards, reptiles, insects, aliens, clowns (yes, clowns) and various therianthropic entities. One woman even describes a pulsating entity that she described as ‘Tinkerbell-like’. The experiences, especially at higher doses, represented to the participants a parallel reality that was ‘super real’, not an hallucination, not a dream, but a substantial built reality with full sensory interaction + telepathy. Strassman published the results as DMT: The Spirit Molecule, and there is a lucid documentary summarising the study.

The experience reports from the study are irrational, absurd, frightening, illogical and surreal. It’s worth reading the book or watching the documentary to get the full range of what are incredible records of accessing very different realities. There is no question of any of the volunteers physically leaving the hospital bed during their experiences, but for all of them (without exception) the DMT-world was every bit as real as the one their minds left behind. After the injections participants frequently talked about ‘blasting through’ or ‘breaking through a barrier’ after which they found themselves in a realm with its own laws of physical space and movement, and its own inhabitants. Here is an abbreviated version of one of the volunteer’s description of his experience; 50 year old Jeremiah. After hurtling through a void he found himself:

“… in a nursery. A high-tech nursery with a single Gumby, three feet tall, attending me. I felt like an infant. Not a human infant, but an infant relative to the intelligence represented by the Gumby. It was aware of me but not particularly concerned… Then I heard two or three male voices talking. I heard one of them say “he’s arrived.” … I was in a big room… there was one big machine in the center, with round conduits, almost writhing – not like a snake, more in a technical manner. The machine felt as if it were rewiring me, reprogramming me… This is real. It’s totally unexpected, quite constant and objective… an independent, constant reality… I’m lucid and sober.”

A DMT World

There are dozens of recorded experiences from the study and, like Jeremiah, the participants are all engaging in a non-physical reality directly with their consciousness, seemingly separated from their physical selfs. Some of the experiences agree in type to certain aspects of the alien abduction phenomenon, which does indeed hold many similarities to certain faerie motifs (discussed in more detail here: Shamans, Faeries, Aliens and DMT and in David Luke’s article Discarnate entities and dimethyltryptamine (DMT): Psychopharmacology, phenomenology and ontology). But what the research demonstrates is that under the right conditions, human consciousness can operate within a distinct and separate universe inhabited by a range of apparently autonomous entities. These entities may be one and the same as the metaphysical beings recorded in cave art and folklore, by people who were describing the beings encountered during various types of altered states of consciousness. The faeries may change superficially through time, adapting to the expectations of the culture they are part of, but if it is human consciousness they are interacting with, this is no surprise. Underneath the cultural masks, the faeries begin to reveal their true selfs.

Physicalism vs Consciousness II

There are many reasons why folklore about the faeries exists, and it certainly seems that interacting with them during an altered state of consciousness is one of them. Are they real experiences? They are subjectively real, but what is the objective reality? A Theosophist clairvoyant would suggest that we need to override our five senses with a dynamic type of consciousness that commands prominence over the material world. They would probably agree with Aldous Huxley’s description of a universal consciousness being ‘Mind at Large’ and that the brain is a ‘reducing valve transceiver‘, that can be retuned by a variety of methods. Huxley did this with Mescaline and LSD.

The brain certainly gives us a very limited view of what is actually going on around us. Altering the transmission to the brain seems to allow non-material consciousness more of a free rein. As in a dream (though not the same as a dream) an altered consciousness is able to construct metaphysical realities. It is able to communicate with the entities it finds there, and bring back a report. The relative consistency of the inhabitants of this alternative reality may suggest that they live there all the time, non-physical, and only able to interact with our physical world when conditions are right for a consciousness. This is the crux: does consciousness create physical reality, or is consciousness an epiphenomenon of the brain? If the former, then the realities experienced in altered states of consciousness can be accepted as true, with their own autonomous existence. If the latter, then whilst entities such as the faeries may be subjectively real, they do not exist objectively within the electromagnetic spectrum. This is the Physicalist view. Although even Physicalism has to adhere to its own rules and allow for the hypothesis that over 90% of the universe consists of non-physical form: Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Maybe that’s where the faeries are, waiting to be found.

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The featured images at the top and bottom of the article are made by a Dutch artist called Dalila Ammar. Her innovative and thought-provoking art can be found here: Lilamar Art Facebook Page and here: Lilamar Art website. Please check out her wonderful artwork…

After writing this article I came upon Jon Hanna’s analysis of metaphysical entity contact amongst people who had definitely altered their state of consciousness, through a variety of psychedelics. It’s an interesting read and It can be found here: Aliens, Insectoids and Elves! Oh, My!

Distancing Ourselves from the Faeries

“The piskies, thought of as little people who appear on moonlight nights, are still somewhat believed in here. If interfered with too much they are said to exhibit almost fiendish powers. In a certain sense they are considered spiritual, but in another sense they are much materialized in the conceptions of the people. Generally speaking, the belief in them has almost died out within the last fifty years.” Richard Harry from Mousehole, Cornwall, quoted in WY Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (1911).

There is a common thread running through the collected folklore of faeries. Stories and descriptions are frequently couched with the explanation that they happened, or were believed to have happened, a generation or several generations previously. You can find this time and again in the collections of 19th- and 20th-century folklorists, where they come across people willing to tell tales about the faeries, but who locate the action in their ‘grandparent’s time’ or at some indistinct period in the past. Depending on the source, this is usually explained as being because the faeries have drifted out of consensus reality, either due to them not being able to exist alongside humans as they used to, or because humans no longer believe in them. There is a large crossover between these two ideas. This may also be due to the storytellers covering themselves in the face of possible ridicule from the perceived modernistic notions of the folklorists collecting the stories. Whilst there is plenty of evidence for a strong belief in the reality of faeries amongst various types of communities up to the present day, this doesn’t necessarily mean they are going to share this belief openly with outsiders. It’s less problematic for them to use time to give some distance between themselves and the implicit or explicit belief in supernatural beings.

The Fairy Tree by Richard Doyle

Slightly surprisingly, this vernacular tactic can be traced back to the Middle Ages. In 1452, thirty-four French villagers were questioned by an ecclesiastical commission about a ‘faerie tree’ (arbor fatalism, gallide des fees) in Domrémy, as part of the process of overturning Joan of Arc’s conviction at the hands of the English/Burgundian Gestapo twenty years earlier. In the face of her inquisitors, Joan herself had offset her own belief in the faeries by apportioning it to her godmother, who had apparently seen the faeries gathering at the tree. And, even though they were under no threat from the commission (quite the opposite in fact), none of the thirty-four interviewees would admit in a belief of the faeries, or that they had ever seen them at the tree. Instead, they informed the commissioners that ‘they had heard that in the old days faeries were said to have been seen there.’ As the villagers would have been well aware of the Spanish Inquisition’s requirement for questioning of anyone who confessed to a belief in faeries, this was probably understandable. But the fact that there was a ‘faerie tree’ to begin with, suggests that there was an ingrained belief in the faeries and their gathering places amongst the 15th-century peasantry.

Richard Firth Green, in his 2016 book Elf Queens and Holy Friars, digs deep into the medieval vernacular belief in faeries, mostly by utilising the surviving texts of mystery plays, to demonstrate that there was a widespread acceptance of the faeries as a supernatural race of beings who interacted with humans on a regular basis. He makes the convincing argument that this was a popular cultural reaction to the ecclesiastical conception of faeries as minor-demons. But other medieval commentators and chroniclers were not so quick to dispatch the faeries to the work of the Devil. In the 12th and 13th centuries, English luminaries such as William of Newburgh, Walter Map and Ralph de Coggeshall wrote extensively about the faeries, without portraying them as demons. William and Ralph both recounted the story of The Green Children (see my take on this here: The Green Children) as a real faerie-story that actually happened, and William tells the story of a 12th-century Yorkshire rustic, who stole a cup from a faerie revel inside a hillock, and then goes on to retrace the subsequent history of the cup (of unknown material) until it ends up in the household of King Henry I. These stories were told as genuine occurrences, by educated men, with a certain acceptance of a supernatural realm that was neither Christian nor diabolic. But again, even here the chroniclers are careful to locate the action in the past, to places and societies slightly removed from their own. This is suggestive of a nervousness amongst the medieval educated class when talking about faeries, but also that accounts of the faeries and their engagement with humans were embedded in the culture, even though it’s difficult to penetrate below the writings of the elite class to that of the vernacular.

By the time of the heyday of folkloric collection in the 19th and early 20th centuries, we find the vernacular popular culture mimicking the circumspection of the medieval chroniclers. Faced with an educated, modern folklorist, the parochial purveyors of stories about the faeries seem to have instinctively distanced themselves from the actual events of the stories. The rural people evidently had a deep belief and understanding of how the faeries operated, but when asked to recount their anecdotes, they would tend to disassociate themselves from this conviction by placing the stories in an indefinite period in the recent past. The faultless folklorist, Katherine Briggs gives an example of this from late 19th-century Somerset, which also includes an explanation for why the faeries may have made themselves scarce from everyday interaction with humans. The story is a common folklore motif (F388 in the Aarne-Thompson Index) of the departure of the faeries, told in c.1900 but recounting something that happened a few generations previously:

The farmer of Knighton Farm on Exmoor was on friendly terms with the faeries. They used to thresh his corn for him and do all manner of odd jobs around the farm, until his wife, full of good-will, left suits of clothes for them as a reward. As per usual with the faeries, this was a taboo, and they had to leave. But the faeries evidently still resided in the neighbourhood and retained their affection for the farmer. One day, after the local church bells were hung and rung, an elder faerie made himself manifest to the farmer.

“Will you give us the loan of your horses and cart,” he said.

The farmer was cautious as he’d heard how the faeries could use and abuse horses.

“What do you want them for?” he asked.

“I want to take my kind out of the noise of those ding-dongs, as we cannot stand them.”

The farmer trusted the faeries, who moved over the hill and out of the neighbourhood, and when the two old pack-horses trotted home they looked like beautiful and healthy two-year olds.

Apart from suggesting that the faeries were unable to co-exist with Christianity, this story demonstrates nicely an explicit reason why the faeries have disappeared from a locality, leaving us with an impression that they are real, but that at some point in the past they have removed themselves from everyday intercommunication with humans. This idea extends into the later 20th century, as the Isle of Man folklorist Margaret Killip describes: “The true believers, if they may be called that, for they are never consciously so, require no audience, and in fact possess knowledge they may never tell to anyone. They are far more likely to keep it hidden, but if inadvertently they let slip a hint of familiarity with a supernatural dimension, the person listening experiences a strange sensation, as if a glimpse had been given of a country heard of but hitherto unrealised.”

Indeed, in modern times, a belief in, and knowledge of, the faeries can find distance in anonymity as well as time. In his brilliant 2010 book Somerset Faeries and Pixies: Exploring Their Hidden World, Jon Dathen finds out that there is a vibrant living tradition of faerie-lore in the county, and he allows his interviewees much time and space to give their detailed stories of encounters with the faeries. The people he interviews, however, do not place their stories in the past; they are anecdotes recounted by the people who have experienced them, but none of his interviewees were willing to be identified beyond their Christian name. This appears to be a defence mechanism against their perception of an established orthodoxy that takes a scientific worldview, which does not include supernatural beings. They were simply afraid of ridicule. One intriguing tale is told by ‘Frank’, who had farmed his Somerset land since the second world war, and suggested that the faeries were to be found everywhere, but that people needed to slow their pace of life to encounter them. He describes a winter night when all the family except him were asleep. Hearing noises in the kitchen he crept downstairs. His description of the event is worth quoting in full, as it encapsulates the strangeness of many chance meetings with the faeries:

The fire was raging as if some soul had jiffied it up a bit, so that was the only light in the room. There perched in front of the fire, perched on a three-legged stool was a strange little creature about the size of a cat. I sort of froze. Gave me a turn it did, but I peered and peered trying to make it out. For all the world it looked like a hare done up in clothes as if it were a little old man. He or it had his legs drawn up and his head resting on his knees, with his hands clasped in front of his shins. I edged in the room on all fours to get a better look. Great big long hairy feet with long toes. He had little grey trousers on, and a collared shirt that was too small, a green waistcoat, and on his head a sort of cap, but his face… it was ugly, half hare half human, big bulgy wide hare eyes, a long twitchy nose, plenty of whiskers sticking out all ways, and long hairy ears sticking downwards from either side of his cap… I stood up and made a noise doing so. The little thing turned then, and I don’t know who was more surprised and frightened. He opened his mouth in alarm and there were two big buck hare teeth in there. He said, ‘Ohw,’ as if mortified to be caught out. I thought how ugly and strange he was, but he looked scared so I spoke, ‘Hello, what are you doing here?’

The little thing looked at me and said one word: ‘Cold’. Then he flew from the stool and ran on his hind legs really fast for the door. Before I could rouse myself to move, he was through it and away. I sprang to the door and looked out after him. I saw his queer little shape hightailing it up the road towards the copse. Then he was gone… I’ve since heard tell of hare type pixies from other people, but then hares are magical creatures.

The rational response is that Frank was indeed asleep and dreaming, but he reiterates that this was definitely not the case; he was lucid and the adrenaline was coursing through him. This might suggest he experienced the faerie in an altered state of consciousness, perhaps as the result of a natural surge of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, a compound released regularly (probably) through the pineal gland in the brain, but which, under certain circumstances, can flood the brain, causing reality to be observed in a remodelled fashion (I investigate this concept in more detail here: Shamans, Faeries, Aliens and DMT).

But as with Dathen’s other interviewees, Frank was nervous about telling the story and quickly changed tact to talk about some older faerie anecdotes, told to him by his father. This sort of discountenance is a common feature of people recounting modern faerie encounters. Unlike encounters with their technologically updated manifestations, extraterrestrial aliens, confrontations with faeries are beyond the pale within the mainstream. They’ve been safely delegated away to children’s stories, cartoons, folktales and as arbiters of psychological allegories and metaphors. They cannot be allowed safely into our five-sense consensus reality. So if they are not distanced into the past, the observer needs to find the distance of anonymity between themselves and the observation.

With an increasing understanding and interest in non-usual states of consciousness, the spiritual aspects of the natural world, and the strange alternative reality of the quantum realm, this distancing is starting to change. The reductionist, materialistic scientific worldview that has imposed itself on humanity for the last few hundred years is being broken down as a growing number of people explicitly and implicitly investigate aspects of reality that do not fit in with the mainstream paradigm. Despite the degraded reputation of faeries, they appear to be making a comeback, without the need to distance them into an indefinite past or to be embarrassed about describing encounters with them. It seems that they were perhaps here all along… just waiting to be rediscovered for what they really are.

Here is a nice forum for discussion of Modern Fairy Sightings.

Evans-Wentz’s Celtic Faeries

“If fairies actually exist as invisible beings or intelligences, and our investigations lead us to the tentative hypothesis that they do, they are natural and not supernatural, for nothing which exists can be supernatural; and, therefore, it is our duty to examine the Celtic Fairy Races just as we examine any fact in the visible realm wherein we now live, whether it be a fact of chemistry, of physics or of biology.” WY Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries

Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz (1878-1965) was the sort of character who could only have thrived at the beginning of the 20th century. He’s probably best known these days for bringing the first translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead (the Bardo Thodol) to the West. But prior to his travels in Tibet, Nepal and India, he was a self-styled American gentleman (i.e. independently funded) polymath, and between 1907-11 his incarnation was as a folklorist, who travelled around the Celtic bastions of Ireland, Brittany, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall and the Isle of Man, collecting, analysing and interpreting the ‘faerie faith’ in these places. His work was published as The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries in 1911, and it remains one of the most important testimonies of the belief in faeries amongst the Celtic peoples, collected at a time when for the majority of the rural population in these areas, faerieland was a bona-fide reality, to be revered and feared in equal measure.

His language can occasionally seem archaic and quaint, but there is no doubt that he imbued himself in the Celtic communities that he spent time with during his years of travels amongst them. He had the time, that a modern anthropologist/folklorist could only dream of, to visit these communities and spend time with them, soaking up their stories and anecdotes, which revealed so much about the deeply ingrained belief in the faeries and the way these entities interacted with consensual reality. In doing so, he gained a great admiration for the rural people he came across, who would tell it like it was.

“The great majority of men in cities are apt to pride themselves on their own exemption from ‘superstition,’ and to smile pityingly at the poor countrymen and countrywomen who believe in fairies. But when they do so they forget that, with all their own admirable progress in material invention, with all the far-reaching data of their acquired science, with all the vast extent of their commercial and economic conquests, they themselves have ceased to be natural… they have lost all sympathetic and responsive contact with Nature, because unconsciously they have thus permitted conventionality and unnaturalness to insulate them from it.”

This quote is from the introduction to The Fairy-Faith, and it sets out Evans-Wentz’s stall. He was on the side of the rural peasantry who were the repository of the vast wealth of folklore represented in their tales of the faeries. He recognised the innate importance of what they were conveying, and was not shy about convincing his reader of the authenticity of what they told him, even if it was anathema to the conventual scientific and materialistic wisdom of his age.

Anna Brahms – A Faerie Gathering

Evans-Wentz travelled on foot, visiting remote villages and farmsteads throughout the Celtic countries he visited, as often at night as by day, and would frequently take advantage of his hosts’ hospitality for days at a time, so as to hear as many stories as possible. He would take a local translator with him sometimes, as many of the informants spoke only their native Celtic language. The impression is gained of an extremely affable chap, who, by his own admission, gained the confidence of the countryfolk he visited by dint of being an American and not English! Those opening up to him with traditional stories were most often the oldest people of the communities, and whilst many of the stories were either contemporary or dating back to their youth, others were handed down to them from their parents and grandparents, taking the timeline back as far as the late 18th century. Some are first-hand accounts, whilst others are anecdotal, but there is a strong consistency in themes and motifs, that suggest a folklore ingrained into the belief-systems of those telling the stories. Their reality was physical and psychological, with no apparent need to separate the two.

His natural starting point was Ireland, where he found belief in the faeries (commonly termed aes sídhe in Ireland) most vigorous and unquestioned amongst the rural communities. The following excerpt gives a taste of the evidence and Evans-Wentz’s style of transcription, made especially interesting through its setting at the Neolithic passage tombs of Newgrange and Knowth:

“Between Knowth and New Grange I met Maggie Tinunons carrying a pail of butter-milk to her calves. When we stopped on the road to talk, I asked her, in due time, if any of the ‘good people’ ever appeared in the region, or about New Grange, which we could see in the field, and she replied… ‘I am sure the neighbours used to see the good people come out of it at night and in the morning. The good people inherited the fort.’ Then I asked her what the good people are, and she said:- ‘When they disappear they go like fog; they must be something like spirits, or how could they disappear in that way? I knew of people, who would milk in the fields about here and spill milk on the ground for the good people; and pots of potatoes would be put out for the good people at night.'”

Newgrange Neolithic passage tomb, and home of the faeries

Evans-Wentz collected a multitude of these types of anecdotes, but he also sought out ‘seers’, the members of communities who could give him first-hand accounts of interactions with faeries. He met one such (un-named in the text, but evidently George William Russell, aka “AE”) Irish mystic in Rosses Point, County Sligo. This seer talks about various types of faeries that inhabit the landscape of Sligo, making them sound like a cross between nature spirits and mystical visions. But Evans-Wentz was just as interested in the mechanics of interacting with the faeries as he was with the stories themselves. How did the seer interface with them?

“I have always made a distinction between pictures seen in the memory of nature and visions of actual beings now existing in the inner world. We can make the same distinction in our world: I may close my eyes and see you as a vivid picture in memory, or I may look at you with my physical eyes and see your actual image. In seeing these beings of which I speak, the physical eyes may be open or closed: mystical beings in their own world and nature are never seen with the physical eyes.”

Evans-Wentz then asked him what sort of state was he in when he saw the faeries…

“I have seen them most frequently after being away from a city or town for a few days. The whole west coast of Ireland from Donegal to Kerry seems charged with a magical power, and I find it easiest to see while I am there. I have always found it comparatively easy to see visions while at ancient monuments like New Grange and Dowth, because I think such places are naturally charged with psychical forces, and were for that reason made use of long ago as sacred places. I usually find it possible to throw myself into the mood of seeing; but sometimes visions have forced themselves upon me.”

The Fairy Glen near Uig, Isle of Skye

In Scotland Evans-Wentz travelled extensively through the Highlands and Islands collecting stories about the faeries. There is a sense that here, as opposed to Ireland, the belief in faeries had diminished amongst the most recent generation, and many of the tales and anecdotes relate to the person’s parents or grandparents. In Uignisb on the Isle of Skye, he came across Miss Frances Tolmie, who had a wealth of faerie-tales from an unspecified period shortly before the present. It includes this one about refusing faerie hospitality. It includes many common motifs and encapsulates well the capricious nature of the Highland faeries:

“Two women were walking toward the Point when one of them, hearing churning going on under a hillock, expressed aloud a wish for some buttermilk. No sooner had she spoken than a very small figure of a woman came out with a bowlful and offered it to her, but the thirsty woman, ignorant of fairy customs and the penalty attending their infringement, declined the kind offer of refreshment, and immediately found herself a prisoner in the hillock. She was led to an apartment containing a chest full of meal and a great bag of wool, and was told by the fairy that when she had eaten all the meal and spun all the wool she would be free to return to her home. The prisoner at once set herself to eating and spinning assiduously, but without apparent result, and despairing of completing the task consulted an old man of very sad countenance who had long been a captive in the hillock. He willingly gave her his advice, which was to wet her left eye with saliva each morning before she settled down to her task. She followed this advice, and gradually the wool and the meal were exhausted. Then the fairy granted her freedom, but in doing so cursed the old man, and said that she had it in her power to keep him in the hillock for ever.”

There were more incidents of vindictiveness amidst the faeries from the Isle of Man, where Evans-Wentz found pockets of the rural population with a firmly entrenched understanding of the faeries. John Nelson, an elderly man from Ramsey, told a story with the familiar motif of being blinded by the faeries (Aarne-Thompson motif F362.1):

“My grandfather, William Nelson, was coming home from the herring fishing late at night, on the road near Jurby, when he saw in a pea-field, across a hedge, a great crowd of little fellows in red coats dancing and making music. And as he looked, an old woman from among them came up to him and spat in his eyes, saying: “You’ll never see us again”; and I am told that he was blind afterwards till the day of his death. He was certainly blind for fourteen years before his death, for I often had to lead him around; but, of course, I am unable to say of my own knowledge that he became blind immediately after his strange experience, or if not until later in life; but as a young man he certainly had good sight, and it was believed that the fairies destroyed it.”

The faeries in Wales were usually called Tylwyth Teg, and much of the testimony taken during Evans-Wentz’s Welsh visits concerned their nature, and what they were supposed to be. We’re left with the impression of an amorphous race of spirit beings, who usually tolerate humans in their own environment, but who are quick to vengeance for any perceived wrongs. Through an English translator, John Jones of Pontrhydfendigaid told Evans-Wentz:

“I was born and bred where there was tradition that the Tylwyth Teg lived in holes in the hills, and that none of these Tylwyth Teg was taller than three to four feet. It was a common idea that many of the Tylwyth Teg, forming in a ring, would dance and sing out on the mountain-sides, or on the plain, and that if children should meet with them at such a time they would lose their way and never get out of the ring. If the Tylwyth Teg fancied any particular child they would always keep that child, taking off its clothes and putting them on one of their own children, which was then left in its place. They took only boys, never girls.”

Evans-Wentz interviewed more church ministers in Wales than elsewhere, and it is interesting to note their more rationalised, folkloric tone compared to the village natives. The Rev. TM Morgan, vicar of Newchurch parish, two miles from Carmarthen, was keen to impart a Christian veneer to the faeries but was able to convey a range of faerie folklore gleaned from his parishioners over many decades:

“The Tylwyth Teg were thought to be able to take children. ‘You mind, or the Tylwyth Teg will take you away,’ parents would say to keep their children in the house after dark. It was an opinion, too, that the Tylwyth Teg could transform good children into kings and queens, and bad children into wicked spirits, after such children bad been taken–perhaps in death. The Tylwyth Teg were believed to live in some invisible world to which children on dying might go to be rewarded or punished, according to their behaviour on this earth. Even in this life the Tylwyth Teg had power over children for good or evil. The belief, as these ideas show, was that the Tylwyth Teg were spirits.”

When Evans-Wentz visited Cornwall, he found a much reduced contemporary belief in faeries (usually termed pixies throughout Cornwall and Devon). Most of the stories he recounts are more evidently overlaid with storytelling tropes, and usually relate to an indefinite past. But he did hear from Miss Susan Gay of Falmouth, who articulates, what was then, a modern and novel metaphysical explanation of these entities derived from the ideas of the Theosophical Society, which had evidently made an impression on Miss Gay in the west of Cornwall:

“The pixies and fairies are little beings in the human form existing on the ‘astral plane’, who may be in the process of evolution; and, as such, I believe people have seen them. The ‘astral plane’ is not known to us now because our psychic faculty of perception has faded out by non-use, and this condition has been brought about by an almost exclusive development of the physical brain; but it is likely that the psychic faculty will develop again in its turn… It is my point of view that there is a basis of truth in the folk-lore. With its remnants of occult learning, magic, charms, and the like, folk-lore seems to be the remains of forgotten psychical facts, rather than history, as it is often called.”

In Brittany Evans-Wentz found that the belief in faeries was intimately woven in with the belief of the spirits of the dead, most commonly termed Corrigans in Breton:

“Like the fairies in Britain and Ireland, the Corrigans and the Cornish pixies find their favourite amusement in the circular dance. When the moon is clear and bright they gather for their frolic near menhirs, and dolmens, and tumuli, and at cross-roads, or even in the open country; and they never miss an opportunity of enticing a mortal passing by to join them. If he happens to be a good-natured man and enters their sport heartily, they treat him quite as a companion, and may even do him some good turn; but if he is not agreeable they will make him dance until he falls down exhausted, and should he commit some act thoroughly displeasing to them he will meet their certain revenge.”

The association of prehistoric sites and faerie activity in Brittany is taken fully on-board by Evans-Wentz, and he highlights the myriad of faerie folklore surrounding Carnac, location of a potent prehistoric landscape of stone rows and burial chambers, as evidence for a mutated ancestor worship; a preservation of deep-seated spiritual beliefs manifesting in the faerie folktales. Especially interesting is the testimony from Madame Marie Ezanno, who lived in Carnac and relayed several narratives of the local corrigans. Note the mention of mushrooms (an implicit reference to the method of seeing the corrigans?), the ritualistic silence during the dance, and the belief that they lived under prehistoric burial mounds:

Prehistoric stone rows at Carnac, Brittany

“They whistled in order to assemble. Where they danced mushrooms grew; and it was necessary to maintain silence so as not to interrupt them in their dance. They were often very brutal towards a man who fell under their power, and if they had a grudge against him they would make him submit to the greatest tortures. The peasants believed strongly in the corrigans, because they thus saw them and heard them. The corrigans dressed in very coarse white linen cloth. They were mischievous spirits (espirits follets), who lived under dolmens.’

Less than half of The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries is taken up with testimonies. For the remainder Evans-Wentz applies the anthropology of his day in an attempt to explain the specific ethnology of Celtic faeries. He does this through an examination of the written faerie-lore, and then an assessment of the prevalent learned opinions on the reasons for belief in faeries, and the origins for these beliefs. These interpretations run the gamut, and although some of the archaic anthropological terms uses by Evans-Wentz can be disconcerting, he takes us through the main ideas about how the faerie faith was originated and propagated:

• The faeries are a folk memory of a pre-Celtic race, who lived in liminal environmental areas. This might explain faerie motifs such as kidnapping babies and replacing them with their own changelings. Evans-Wentz suggests that the continuation of changeling-type stories represents the depth of this Celtic folk memory, and retained its power even when the faeries had become non-human spirits.
• The faeries are dwindled gods, and their stories are corrupted vestiges of Pagan nature worship rituals.
• The faeries are fallen angels, trapped on earth after the Fall.
• The faeries are the spirits of the dead. Especially in Brittany, but also throughout the Celtic countries, this was probably the commonest belief of the rural people who told and disseminated the stories.
• The faeries are simply a different race of metaphysical beings, who interact with humanity on their own terms.

Sensibly, Evans-Wentz comes to the general conclusion that they are all right. But they only work as parts of a whole, where the entirety of faerie belief is constructed from a complex range of influences over large spans of time. And Evans-Wentz consistently emphasises the need to fully understand ‘visions’ of the faeries seen through second-sight or altered states of consciousness, and to incorporate them into any interpretation, because the majority of the stories he heard were either told by seers, about seers, or about someone in an altered state of consciousness. In conclusion he even goes as far as to say: “Fairyland exists as a supernormal state of consciousness into which men and women may enter temporarily in dreams, trances, or in various ecstatic conditions; or for an indefinite period at death.”

Evans-Wentz was well-versed in contemporary theosophist ideas about the true nature of reality, and the part the faeries had in it. Whilst he didn’t attempt to use theosophy to explain the faerie faith, he was open to their idea of using seers and mediums to connect with metaphysical entities, if their testament helped to explain the folklore and the reality of the faeries. Once he began his field research and encountered these seers and mystics first-hand, he became even more convinced that these people were (and had been for centuries) conveying legitimate information about the faeries by altering (purposely or not) their states of consciousness and interacting directly with a metaphysical environment.

But by the time Evans-Wentz made his tour of Celtic countries between 1907-11, both people with the second-sight, and the general belief in faeries was waning. By cataloguing rural stories, anecdotes and theories about the faeries, just before WWI tore apart many of the traditional ways of life, and by doing it in such an open-minded and empathetic manner, he has left us with a rare treasure mine of Celtic faerie data.

WY Evans-Wentz in Tibetan regalia, c. 1919

The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries has been republished several times, but the full text can be viewed online through the Sacred Texts website: WY Evans-Wentz, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries

The Origins of the Faeries

The website Ancient Origins have been kind enough to add me as a guest author. Below is a link to a new article The Origins of the Faeries.

The faeries appear in folklore from all over the world as metaphysical beings, who, given the right conditions, are able to interact with the physical world. They’re known by many names but there is a conformity to what they represent, and perhaps also to their origins. From the Huldufólk in Iceland to the Tuatha Dé Danann in Ireland, and the Manitou of Native Americans, these are apparently intelligent entities that live unseen beside us, until their occasional manifestations in this world become encoded into our cultures through folktales, anecdotes and testimonies. In his 1691 treatise on the faeries of Aberfoyle, Scotland, the Reverend Robert Kirk suggested they represented a Secret Commonwealth, living in a parallel reality to ours, with a civilization and morals of their own, only visible to seers and clairvoyants. His assessment fits well with both folktale motifs, and some modern theories about their ancient origins and how they have permeated the collective human consciousness. So who are the faeries, where do they come from, and what do they want?

Here are the article links:

Part 1 – The Origins of the Faeries: Encoded in Culture

Part 2 – The Origins of the Faeries: Changes in Perception

Author Profile

The Secret Commonwealth

‘Does a photon exist prior to it’s detection? No, it does not exist until it is detected, according to the current understanding of quantum physics. Up to that point, there is only the photon wave function. Ironically, as soon as it is detected, it no longer exists. It vanishes at the moment it appears! For that reason, I prefer to think of the photon as an event, not as a thing.’
Richard Muller, Prof Physics, UC Berkeley, from Now, The Physics of Time.

The tale of the Rev. Robert Kirk and his Secret Commonwealth, is very peculiar. When read carefully, the text of his 1691 manuscript describing the faeries of Aberfoyle, Scotland gives many clues as to the reality of what he calls the Subterraneans, and how people were able to perceive them and interact with them. Much of the discussion in his text centres around people with the ‘second sight’, An Dà Shealladh in Gaelic, and their ability to sense the faerie world, which was apparently occupying the same space as consensus reality, but would only interact with it under special circumstances. We’ll take a look at this aspect of faerieland later on, focusing on the connection between matter and consciousness and where the faeries fit in. But first, who was Robert Kirk, why was he writing about supernatural races on earth at the end of the 17th century, and what happened to him?

Robert Kirk was the church minister at Aberfoyle in the southern Highlands of Scotland from 1685 to his death at age 48 in 1692. He was also (apparently) the seventh son of a seventh son – a sure sign that he should be carrying the requisite clairvoyance in his genetic makeup. A year after penning The Secret Commonwealth, his body was found on the Faerie Knowe at Aberfoyle, a hill he frequented often in life to consort with the faeries whose customs he describes in the book. His will is dated a day before his death, and the folklorist immediately became the subject of folklore, as rumour spread that he’d been abducted by the faeries for giving away too many of their secrets in his book. The plot

Kirk’s grave at Aberfoyle

thickens when we discover that not only does his grave not contain his body, but that there is a tradition of him appearing in ghostly form to a friend at the christening of his (Kirk’s) posthumous child, with a wheeze to escape faerieland, where he was apparently being held captive. The stunned friend failed to throw a dirk (an iron knife) over the spectral Kirk as pre-planned, dooming the reverend to remain with the faeries, who had taken him into the Faerie Knowe and left a stock or doubleman as his fake body. But the mysterious circumstances of Kirk’s demise pale next to what he had been writing about in The Secret Commonwealth. In his manuscript (not published until 1815) he lays out who the faeries were and who could see them, crystallising what would appear to be a coherent (and matter of fact) belief in the faeries in this part of the Scottish Highlands in the 17th century. The work certainly gives the impression of an educated man (Kirk was the first to translate the Bible into Gaelic) simply describing a supernatural race of beings, much in the way as he might have described a foreign civilisation. And they were quite evidently mad, bad and dangerous to know.

‘Their changeable bodies are somewhat of the nature of a condensed cloud and best seen at twilight.’

Intriguingly, Kirk is less interested in telling folktales than in giving an overview of what these creatures are and how they live. In this, his manuscript is unique and unusual. He calls them Subterraneans, and tells us that they are halfway between humans and angels. Here’s a summary of Kirk’s treatise on the Secret Commonwealth…

1. They have ‘light and fluid bodies’ much as a condensed cloud or ‘congealed air’, which are mostly visible at dusk. They can appear and vanish at will, and their ‘chameleon-like bodies swim in the air near the earth with bag and baggage.’ Their ‘spongeous bodies’ are pure like air and they feed by sucking out the essence of human food, leaving the material remnant behind.
2. They live in the earth, either in small hillocks or in subterranean caves. Their dwellings are large and beautiful, but usually invisible to human eyes. These houses are lit by lamps that burn continuously without the need for fuel.
3. Their civilisation once lived above ground before humans inhabited the land, and Kirk notes that ‘the furrows still visible on very high hills’ were the work of the faeries.
4. At each quarter of the year, they travel to a new place, as they are nomadic and unable to stay in one place for too long. It is usually at these times that they are encountered by humans who ‘have terrifying encounters with them.’
5. They are divided into tribes and like humans, they have children, marriages and burials. But Kirk suggests that they may only do this to mock our own customs. Likewise, their language and dress mimic the local people. They have an aristocracy but no religion.
6. Their philosophy is that nothing dies or disappears, but that ‘everything goes in a circle’ and is refreshed and renewed in a cyclical evolution.
7. They will happily steal human children, wet-nurses and midwives for their own ends and are prone to the ‘irregularities of envy, spite, hypocrisy, lying and dissimulation.’
8. Their weaponry consists of flint arrows and they are afraid of iron.
9. Kirk also suggests that the faeries can be ‘double-men’ or ‘co-walkers’ for humans – that is, each human has a double amongst the Subterraneans, who will ‘haunt them as a shadow’, whether they know about it or not.

Kirk’s treatise goes a long way to depict the faeries, who appear in less descriptive form in countless folktales through the centuries. The impression given is of an intelligent race of beings who do not usually manifest as material beings, but who can interact with humans through various means. The constant theme is that they inhabit our space and time but engage with the material world in a different way to us. They are immaterial. And as far as we know, there is only one immaterial thing in the universe that we can be certain of: consciousness. So is this where the faeries are residing? Kirk’s discussion about the second sight (An Dà Shealladh) is highly suggestive that this is where they are to be found.

Second sight appeared to be a relatively common phenomenon amongst the Scottish Highlanders in Kirk’s time. It is frequently associated with visions of the future, but Kirk concentrates on their ability to interact with the faeries. The seer with second sight is ‘put in a rapture, transport, and sort of death, as divested of his body and all its senses.’ This might correlate with a dream or an altered state of consciousness, where reality is observed and participated in without the usual constraints of the laws of physics. The second sight is a type of shamanistic vision that is dependent on a change in consciousness. Once the change is made, the faeries become real to the observer. But where are they coming from?

Richard Muller’s quote at the top of this post is an important clue to getting behind the faerie phenomenon that Kirk describes with such attention to detail. In the quantum world, the wave function of a photon does not exist until it is observed, when it becomes a particle. But then it vanishes. Muller makes the simple but mind-bending point that this makes the photon an event, not a thing. This is also how consciousness works – it is not a thing, it is a series of events with no material residue. It exists alongside what we think of as material reality, but it never stays there, it is non-local and transient. Kirk’s faeries behave like a photon in a wave function, or a thought in consciousness – they live there waiting to be observed and detected by someone who is able to plug deeper than usual into their own, or the collective, consciousness – those with the second sight, or those in an altered state of consciousness. This would explain the similarities of the faeries to their human counterparts at any time in history (their dress, language etc.), and may also suggest that the faeries have (at least sometimes) transformed into high-tech aliens in recent times (see Shamans, Faeries, Aliens and DMT).

So was Kirk describing a phenomenon conjured up through the consciousness of both himself and the Highland seers from who he received his information? Maybe, although that simplifies things. By describing the customs of the Subterraneans he was depicting events, not things. These events couldn’t be pinned down as material phenomena and recorded in any rational or scientific procedure; they were the product of people who were able to alter their state of consciousness to the point of perceiving realities not usually perceptible. These realities did, and do not, consist of material things, but they were, and are, as real as immaterial events… just as in consciousness or the sub-atomic world. If I were really pushing the boat out, I might even suggest that ultimately, the faeries exist in the quantum world, unseen and implicate, and only turn up in our world when someone with the requisite skills (second sight) observes them there. They are a fundamental part of our reality but normally hidden: a secret commonwealth. I wonder what the Rev. Robert Kirk would think about that?

Don’t mess with the faeries…

For a trailer to the 2009 film Kirk, see Kirk trailer (2009)