‘AND YOU’LL BE FAIRIES
ALL’: A VERY BRIEF TREATMENT OF THE NATURE OF FAIRIES AND THEIR ORIGINS
I’ve
been noticing lately that a great many of my friends appear to have a strong
affinity for things fairy. They claim to
have access of one kind or another to fairy realms, an intimate relationship
with fairies or even to be spiritually akin to these residents of the
Otherworld. A few boldly proclaim a
genetic link with fairies (or elves or pixies, etc.), while others enjoy
assuming the imagined garb and both anatomical and personality traits of these
most elusive of creatures. Still others
have concocted a ‘fairy faith’, which presumes to know the underlying culture
of the fairy race, up to and including their remarkably liberal sexual practices. Mass celebrations of the ‘fairy phenomenon’
such as the annual Faerieworlds in Eugene,
Oregon, and a series of popular
books and novels for adults and young adults are a testament to the
ever-increasing popularity of the subject.
While
I’m encouraged by this upsurge in interest in the ‘wee folk’, I’m also
disturbed by some of the current trends.
Why? I mean, what could be more
harmless and enjoyable than to subscribe to any of the modern notions regarding
fairies? They are a peaceable lot, and
engender an appreciation of and respect for Nature. So what’s to complain about?
As
always, my concern as a Reconstructionist (for such I have been accused of
being!) is for the evident loss of original meaning and significance. The fairies we are being presented with today
are the end product of several generations of obfuscation and
mythologizing. The elves and other
‘little peoples’ of the pagan world were early on subjected to the usual Christian
influences. If the Church could not
extirpate a folk belief or custom, it sought to bring such under its aegis by
transmuting the said belief or custom in such a way as to make it at least
marginally acceptable to Church doctrine.
Thus we end up with quaint but wildly inaccurate origin stories, e.g.
the fairies are Eve’s unwashed children.
To
these early Christian alterations – which were not static, but continued to
evolve over the centuries – we must add the romantic fancies conjured during the
Victorian period. In many ways, the
Victorians provided the fairy mythology with its Golden Age. Paintings, highly literary fairy tales,
collections of folk tales, etc., all contributed to a new vision of the fairy
folk and their realm. In 1917 the now
famous Cottingley Fairies photographs were made public. Jones and Froud’s Lady Cottington’s Pressed
Fairy Book can be traced in its conception to the Cottingly Fairies and their
Victorian predecessors. Creations such
as J.M. Barrie’s Tinkerbell (1904) became the models for what we now think of,
for better or worse, as fairies. These are really more generic nature spirits
than fairies proper and so are usually associated with the more beautiful and benevolent
aspects of Nature, such as flowers, butterflies, sunlight, moonbeams, stars,
snowflakes, rainbows and the like.
Some
older books contain material that reflects genuine oral folk traditions
concerning fairies. The scholar and
writer Ari Burke has recently reminded me of Lady Gregory’s Visions and Tales
of the West of Ireland. Also worth reading are the works of Thomas Keightley,
Robert Kirk, Katherine Mary Briggs, Sir John Rhys and Walter Evans-Wentz. More recent academic studies of folktales
offer unexpurgated versions when possible, as opposed to the earlier accounts
that were altered for the sake of ‘art’ and the sensibilities of the time, and
categorize the motifs according to the index of Stith-Thompson types. What emerges from a study of these sources is
the marked AMBIVALENCE our ancestors evinced towards the fairies and their
realm. I had been thinking of exactly
this word when scholar and author Ari Berk independently used it in the course
of private correspondence. Such ambivalence is understandable once we come to
grips with the fact that the Land
of Fairy is not only a
Happy Otherworld, but the Place of Death as well.
Death
is a frightening thing to most of us, no matter how much we may be
philosophically resigned to it. There is
a large measure of latent fear in many, if not most, of the stories involving
fairies. In fact, perhaps the primary
purpose of a fairy tale is to take the mystery and dread out of death by
applying a soothing symbolism. What is
otherwise our primal fear becomes a magical and wondrous entertainment. Yet always beneath the fairy glamor is the
grave and the worm. We all know that when fairies dance they leave rings of mushrooms
in their wake, but few of us care to dwell on the fact that mushrooms are
primarily chthonic organisms that feed off dead or decaying matter.
In
folktales, often the death of a loved one is masked over by euphemistically
presenting it as an "abduction" by fairies, i.e. a loved one is
secretly carried away to the fairy hill.
The otherwise inexplicable death of cattle would be blamed on "elf-shot",
and numerous other calamities that might befall a rural community were often
laid at the feet of the residents of the Sidhe.
Babies born "not right", i.e. deformed or mentally deficient,
were believed not to be the issue of human parents, but were instead thought to
be changelings substituted by the fairy folk for the originally normal
infants. Such changelings would often
perish prematurely, reaffirming the link that existed between them and the
world of the dead.
Any
careful scrutiny of legitimate fairy lore inevitably shows a certain
identification of the barrow mound, the place of communal entombment. Readers
may object to this declaration, but it is, nevetheless, true. In our day and age, we no longer deify our
dead, whether they be noble or commoner.
But in ancient times, ancestral spirits were powerful Otherworld
entities that could work good or ill.
The Romans regularly set up dedication stones to the Dis Manibus, the “Divine
Spirits of the Departed”. Several such
stones have been found in Britain. Festivals were held at various times of the
year to honor and propitiate these divine ancestors.
Once
we “read between the lines” of early fairy mythology, we thus have two primary
components for a true origin of fairies: the ancestral spirits within the
communal barrow mound, and the gods within the same mounds. Can we more clearly define the precise
relationship between these two very different and perhaps confused or conflated
groups of beings?
I
believe so. It all comes down to an
apparent IDENTIFICATION of the ancestral dead with the deity. If a man by virtue of his undergoing a
sacrificial death literally BECOMES the god, what happens to the dead within
the fairy hill? The answer may lie in an
examination of stories that tell of the visit of the living to the Otherworld,
and of a comparison of the salient points of such stories with burial practices
and rituals enacted during propitiation of the dead.
In
the classic account of a visit to the Fairy Hill, a man enters the hill to find
himself surrounded by feasting, drinking, dancing and general merriment. There is almost always an injunction against
partaking of fairy hospitality of any kind, as this would condemn the visitor
to an eternity within the Otherworld. We
learn that “Fairy Time” runs contrary to mortal time, in that only a short
period spent within the Fairy Hill corresponds to the passage of many years in
the human world.
Firstly,
we know from archaeology that grave goods, especially for the noble dead,
included all kinds of food and drink.
These grave offerings were meant to ‘translate’ into similar items in
the Otherworld, where the spirits of the dead would feast upon them. They were thus intended for the dead, NOT for
the living. If a living man were to partake
of them, that means, quite simply, that he himself has died and joined the
ranks of the ancestral spirits. Hence
the injunction against eating or drinking while in the land of fairy.
We
have accounts of Celtic and Norse gods feasting and drinking in their
Otherworld halls and such halls are often associated with burial mounds. But there may be another kind of feast held
at Fairy Hills – that of the living, held during important festivals to honor
the dead. We might imagine a midwinter
procession of a community arriving at a passage grave whose opening was aligned
to one of the solstices. The community
would enter the passage with the sun’s light.
Libations would be poured into stone basins (like those actually found
in the Irish Newgrange) and food offerings left for the spirits and/or the
gods. As midwinter was also the time of
rebirth of the sun, it is not inconceivable that the ancestral spirits
occupying the same Otherworld hill were thought to be reborn as well. A sharing of rebirth with the sun god may
have contributed to a belief that the dead literally became “One” with the
god. This is not as far-fetched a notion
as it may seem; today, Christians believe that by partaking of the blood and
body of Christ, a meal replicating Jesus’s own consumption of bread and wine at
the Last Supper, implies that they will resurrected as he was and hence enjoy
eternal life. I have elsewhere put
forward the idea that the body of Christ symbolizes the sun, while his blood represents
the sun’s light. It was this light that
filtered down the barrow mound passage at midwinter, striking the interior of
the Fairy Hill where the ancestral dead resided. When the light moved past the midwinter point
and no longer entered the heart of the hill, the sun had been reborn. Might it not have taken with it the spirits
of the ancestral dead?
The
seasonal corollary would have occurred at midsummer, when the strength of the
sun reached its maximum power and then began to wane. This point in the calendar would mark a sort of
death of the sun, and some passage graves or stone circles mark this solstice
as well. We might compare this to the
placement of a dead person within the barrow, where the deified spirit would
await its rebirth and joining with the sun (?) at midwinter. This simplified picture would be made more
complex if we accept what appears to be a two-fold division of the sacred year
between two aspects of the sun god – one whom rules from midwinter to midsummer
and another who rules from midsummer to midwinter. Such a two-fold division is made manifest in
many myths. There may thus have been two
major seasonal deaths and rebirths.
In
the later Norse system, as in the Celtic, the division of the year was later
made at the beginning of Summer and the beginning of Winter, rather than at the
solstices. I’ve discussed this
seasonal/calendar change in detail in my appendix on the ogham alphabet in my
book “The Mysteries of Avalon: A Primer in Arthurian Druidism.”
Time
does not exist for the dead. The dead
don’t age. They are eternal in the same
sense as the gods are eternal. Hence,
time does not exist in the fairy mound.
But it continues to tick by in the mortal world, as anyone returning to
it will discover.
[Sleep
also can be a metaphor for death; thus we find Arthur and his men asleep in
various hills. Silence, too, is a
hallmark of the dead, as the dead don’t speak.
We find silent dead men in the Tower of Glass in Nennius and in the
“castle” of the Maimed Fisher King, where Perceval remains otherwise unaccountably
tongue-tied during the Grail Procession.]
While
the above is speculative, and can be more fully illustrated with a great many
examples, I hope this abbreviated discussion will aid those seeking a proper
understanding of the nature and origin of fairies. I always feel that we owe it to our
ancestors, whether we choose to deify them or not, to attempt to obtain as
clear a vision as possible of how they themselves perceived the world – and the
world that comes after. Otherwise, we
are doing them a disservice. We are
intentionally CHOOSING to forget the knowledge and wisdom they developed over
millennia and applied to their daily lives.
Instead we should try to the best of our ability to honor and respect
their religious practices, even if in our modern scientific age we are not
wholly able to adopt them.
In
summary, then, I would say that fairies were originally the deified spirits of
the dead, who may have been thought to become one with a deity or deities. The Fairy Hill was at one and the same time
the location of the Otherworld or, more precisely, was either a PORTAL to the
Otherworld or a physical locality that symbolized the Otherworld. I tend to favor this last interpretation,
i.e. the barrow mound represents the earth into which the sun sets and from
which it rises. As such, the Fairy Hill
was not only a house of the dead, but a palace of the gods and of the ancestral
spirits.
We
must disavow ourselves of the conceit that we can dance around with fairies or
BE fairies. These are things we can
engage in only once we have passed over to the spirit realm. And I, for one, am not yet ready to travel to
the land of fairy! I may go out to the
family mound on a bright, sunny day to commune with my ancestors, to honor them
in whatever poor fashion I have at my disposal.
Those blessed with shamanic gifts or the Second Sight may be capable of
more intimate relations with Otherworld spirits - but they still acknowledge
them as such, and are well aware of their potential for ill as well as for good.
But it is presumptuous for us to attempt to lay claim to that which does not
yet belong to us. One might almost say
that to do so is a sacrilege of a uniquely pagan sort.
Eventually,
death comes to everyone, of course. We
join at last in the revelry of our ancestors within the earth, feasting and making
merry for time without end. As the poet
Robert Graves said, ‘And you’ll be fairies all’ (Cherry Time, 1918).
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