neilrushton

The Faeries as Nature Spirits

“We see that the threshold that sharply divides the sense world from the supersensible world must be respected absolutely… one has to understand how to conduct oneself in both worlds; one may not carry over into one world the method of observation that is right for the other.” Rudolf Steiner, Perception of the Elemental World (1913).

The faeries can seem quite insane. In folklore they frequently kidnap people, abduct children, mesmerise night wanderers by drawing them into dancing circles, blind those who can see them, and generally adhere to a different set of morals to humans. In psychiatric terms, the faeries might be seen as suffering from a mass psychosis. But there is much more to their reality than their representation in folklore, which is usually burdened with the need to tell a story. In fact, it might be suggested that what underlies the folktale perception of the faeries is a deeper metaphysical authenticity. This is their existence as nature spirits.

In a series of lectures between 1908 and 1924, the Austrian spiritual philosopher Rudolf Steiner outlined his concept of these nature spirits (sometimes calling them elementals) and their fundamental role in ensuring the propagation of the natural world. Steiner took clairvoyance as a given reality, and 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 saw the supersensible as indispensable to the material world in the same way as consciousness is the necessary animating force to the physical bodies of humans. And he saw consciousness as the key to crossing the boundary between our world of the five senses and that of the nature spirits. He insists that ‘thought forms’ are the only way we are able to perceive the elementals and to understand what they are doing in nature, which he likens to unseen electricity bringing life to dormant machinery. To do this, 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).

This sounds much like a meditative state. It is certainly an altered state of consciousness, where thought forms take over from the five senses. Steiner insists that this is the only way to enter into the metaphysical world of the nature spirits. It’s a concept explored in more detail in my previous post, which links perception of faeries to shamanic trance and states induced by psychedelic substances: Shamans, Faeries, Aliens and DMT. But Steiner goes on to describe the specific elemental animating forces at work in the natural world when perceived clairvoyantly.

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 divides these into four main types corresponding to earth, water, air and heat/light. The gnomes are the earth spirits,

ef725862b633b5ce9e91baa03a656e8e — A Brian Froud Gnome

manipulating the plant genes from seed and root in the ground. Steiner describes them as pure intellect, simply knowing what is needed for the propagation of each genus, and wholly devoted to the process of new life and regeneration. Their modern representation as painted suburban statues is a mutation of their real form as chthonic entities, constantly working and moving the primal forces of metamorphosis in the earth.

Above ground the watery Undines look after the chemistry of growth, existing as amorphous beings in every drop of moisture, and clinging to leaf and bark to nurture

the vegetation in its proper form. Steiner asks us to look at a drop of water on a leaf and to put our thoughts into it completely, to the exclusion of all else. It moves, is absorbed, and reflects light, until its chemical compounds are integrated into the physical body of the plant. Within it are the Undines, visible if you are able to think them into existence.

The Sylphs are the nature spirits of the air, most familiar as aerial faeries, accompanying the pollinating insects and ensuring the transmission of life from male to female. They exist purely as agents of transference, without intellect or intent, but with an absolute commitment to bringing the life-force of nature from one place to the other by way of the air.

Finally, the Salamanders are the metaphysical components of light and heat. It might be suggested that their supernatural status has been compromised by modern quantum physics, which has made them into sub-atomic photons, which will only exist when they are observed by a conscious observer. They are the simplest of the nature spirits, corresponding to the photon as the most reduced life-force upon which all else is dependent.

PW-2013-07-24-Commissariat-photon — Photons or Salamanders?

Heady stuff? Well maybe, but Steiner’s metaphysics finds common ground with the compelling theory of Morphogenetic Fields propounded by the biochemist Rupert Sheldrake. This is a theory of formative causation in nature:

“Over the course of fifteen years of research on plant development, I came to the conclusion that for understanding the development of plants, their morphogenesis, genes and gene products are not enough. Morphogenesis also depends on organising fields. The same arguments apply to the development of animals. Since the 1920s many developmental biologists have proposed that biological organisation depends on fields, variously called biological fields, or developmental fields, or positional fields, or morphogenetic fields.” Rupert Sheldrake’s Morphic Fields.

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 essential in ordering life on earth, something that conventional science accepts in the case of gravitational waves or magnetism, but has a hard time with when it comes to life itself. Steiner’s thesis is that the nature spirits are anthropogenic representations of these morphogenetic fields, imposed upon them through the thought forms of the observer, who perceives them clairvoyantly. Call them what you will, but they exist, and are essential in maintaining reproductive life; they are a form of consciousness responsible for the creation and sustenance of matter. They are the memory of nature.

As a concrete example of the nature spirits (or morphogenetic fields) in action, we might take the example of the Findhorn Community in Scotland. This remarkable experiment was started in 1962 by an ex-RAF Squadron Leader, Peter Caddy, his wife Eileen and a colleague Dorothy MacClean. Due to straightened circumstances they moved to Findhorn near the Moray Firth, a barren, sandy piece of land, in a caravan, and attempted to begin cultivation. Although unknown to her at this point, Dorothy (who was a committed Presbyterian Christian) evidently had psychic clairvoyant abilities, and was soon communicating with the elementals, including the devas responsible for

d9b045078b4d725fe0ef7547f4d0b84f — The original Findhorn caravan

entire species of plants within the landscape. She passed on her communications to the Caddys, instructions and advice from the nature spirits, and within a year the dunes were transformed into lush vitality. Findhorn became famous for 40-pound cabbages, and within two harvests they had created a sustainable smallholding, even selling surplus produce in the local neighbourhood. Dorothy described the supernatural beings as energy forms, working behind the seen material state of the vegetation. She described the devas as holding:

“… the archetypal pattern and plan for all forms around us, and they direct the energy needed for materialising them. While the devas might be considered the ‘architects’ of plant forms, the nature spirits or elementals, such as gnomes or faeries, may be seen as the ‘craftsmen’, using the blueprint of energy channeled to them by the devas.”

Findhorn continued to flourish, and today exists as the Findhorn Foundation, a spiritual community that still relies on the precept of working with the nature spirits to ensure a sustainable organic environment in harmony with the fields of energy that have made it such a special place. It features in the 2013 documentary film The Fairy Trail: A Documentary about Nature Spirits by Till Gerhard and Britta Schmidtke, where Dorothy MacClean talks about the early days of the community, and how she was able to plug into the elemental world to the mutual benefit of humans and nature spirits.

Also featured in this documentary 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:

“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.” Marko Pogačnik’s website.

hqdefault (1) — Marko with a *lithopuncture* stone

So where does this leave us with the faeries? In some ways much of their representation in folklore is at odds with this discussion of them as nature spirits and elementals. Their folkloric mischievous immorality does not seem to correspond with the perception of them as energy fields feeding the vital life-force of nature. But this misses the point somewhat. The faeries of folklore and the nature spirits do fit in to a single phenomenon of supernatural beings that need to be observed, understood and propitiated by humans. If we don’t, an imbalance is created in nature; the energy of the elementals will die, or the faeries will cause us problems. They are two sides of the same coin. They are also usually invisible, ultra-dimensional beings only perceptible when the human brain re-tunes itself to an altered state of consciousness. Rudolf Steiner suggested that it is thought itself that makes them manifest, and that clairvoyance is the method for allowing our consciousness to cross the barrier between the sense world and the supersensible world. The faeries and the nature spirits live in the collective consciousness of humanity, only interacting with the material world when we fully accept them for what they really are.

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Steiner Rudolf 024-1908 — Rudolf Steiner

NB: Rudolf Steiner was prescient on many levels. When the proto-Nazi National Socialist German Workers Party gained strength in Germany after the First World War, he warned about the potential disastrous effects on Europe if they ever got into power. Hitler attacked Steiner on many fronts, including his unorthodox views, and accused him of being a tool of the Jews, while other nationalists in Germany called for a ‘war against Steiner’. In 1922 a group of National Socialists invaded a lecture he was delivering in Munich, in an attempt to physically attack him on stage, but Steiner gave them the slip through a rear entrance. He continued his warnings about their agenda until his death in 1924.

70333408 — The Findhorn Foundation today

Shamans, Faeries, Aliens and DMT

deadbutdreaming

Who are the faeries? In 1969, the astrologer and computer scientist Jacques Vallee, in his book Passport to Magonia, put forward the theory that they 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.

passport-to-magonia_0 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 phenomena, 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…

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Faeries on Film

Faeries are difficult to portray through the medium of film and documentary. They are too amorphous and difficult to pin down – a bit like in real life. They’re happier living in the consciousness of humans than being captured on celluloid. But some have tried, and so whilst not pretending to be an exhaustive list of filmic faeries, I thought I’d put together a list of some of my favourites, both dramatic and documentary. I hope you might find something new here, with all links embedded…

photographing fairies - cinema quad movie poster (1).jpg — *Photographing Fairies* (1997)

Photographing Fairies is a 1997 film directed by Nick Willing, based on the book by Steve Szilagyi. It’s also absolutely bloody marvellous. The plot (without spoilers) revolves around a photographer, Charles Castle (played by Toby Stephens) who is beset by grief and guilt after his new wife is killed in an Alpine accident just before the First World War. Hardened against any type of religion or spirituality, he returns from the trenches to his photography business in London. When a woman turns up at his studio with a photo of her daughter with a faerie, he becomes obsessed to find out the truth behind it, taking him on a journey right down the rabbit hole.

The main plot device rests on the faeries becoming manifest during altered states of consciousness, brought about by the consumption of a small white flower. This alters the perception of time and allows interaction with the faeries, who exist as luminous humanoids. The scene when Castle first takes one of the flowers is a cinematographic treat; unsettling, trippy, beautiful and moving all at the same time. He never manages to photograph the faeries, but he does come to the realisation that they are arbiters between the material world and transcendence from this world. In the words of Arthur Conan Doyle (who makes an appearance in the film) they are the handmaidens of the eternal.

4yOvcYSqcCr0GJE4Wvgd9KRPmot — *Fairytale: a true story* (1997)

Also made in 1997, but less dark and hallucinogenic, is Fairytale: a true story, directed by Charles Sturridge. It’s loosely based on the story of the Cottingley faeries, and is viewed from the perspective of the two little girls, Elsie and Polly, who discover and photograph the faeries living in the backwoods of their Yorkshire home during the First World War. The premise is that you have to believe in the faeries to see them, and that this is much more likely to happen if you’re a child. It’s pretty sentimental, but the faerie scenes are well executed, and there is a stellar cast, including Harvey Keitel as Houdini (yes, that Houdini) and Peter O’Toole as Arthur Conan Doyle. The final scene when the whole tribe of winged faeries turn up at the girls’ house (initially seen from the faeries’ perspective) is joyous and magical.

A different approach is taken in Kirk, a 2009 film by the (then) teenage director Michael Ferns. It won the Best Independent Feature Film at the Manchester Festival of Fantastic Films and is reviewed in depth by MJ Simpson here. It’s set in the Scottish Highlands in the late 17th century, and tells the story of the Reverend Robert Kirk, who wrote The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies (see The Secret Commonwealth for my take on the story). It takes a reductionist view of the story, where Kirk’s belief in faeries is wholly instigated by the parish femme fatale, Mary, who lures the married vicar with sweet talk of the faerie folk, much to the chagrin of his wife Abigail. Kirk’s acceptance of the faeries is made to seem delusional, but there is enough ambiguity to keep us wondering about what’s really going on, heightened by the subdued lighting and colour, which lends an ethereal tone to each scene. The faeries themselves never show up, but there are luminous dream sequences where Mary takes the part of the alluring faerie queen, intent on ravishing Kirk. If you know the story, you’ll know it ends badly, and if you have half a heart you’ll be wiping away a tear after a beautifully told tale with sensitive acting and a dynamic screenplay.

2524105a1b34fed56a26f2be7933ee61 — Icelandic faeries

Bringing us up to the 21st century are two documentaries that investigate the belief in faeries in Iceland. Huldufólk 102 (Hidden People) is a 2006 film, atmospherically underscored by indigenous musical luminaries Sigur Rós, Amina and Múm. One of the talking heads, historian Magnus Skarphedinsson, sets the tone right from the start when he states: ‘There is no doubt in my mind that there are two nations living in this country; the Icelandic nation and the invisible nation.’ This concept is maintained throughout the documentary, which films Icelanders from a range of backgrounds talking about the hidden folk and how they are an intrinsic part of Icelandic culture. It’s an excellent insight into how modern belief in the faeries pervades the society, and affects everyday life, from where to build roads (always avoiding the rock homes of the Huldufólk) through to the faeries incorporation into Christianity. Star of the show is the grizzled and wizened farmer þórleifur Hjalfason, who tells a story about the hidden folk burnishing and sharpening his knife – a common faerie-helper motif in folklore, made real at his remote Icelandic farm.

A bit more out there is the 2002 documentary Elves, Ghosts, Sea Monsters & ETs In Iceland – Investigation Into The Invisible World, which spreads a wide net over Icelanders’ belief in otherworldy beings in their landscape, mostly through the eyes of clairvoyants, who use their psychic abilities to shed light on the faeries and their customs. It’s a beautifully evocative piece of film-making, that brings out the mesmerising strangeness of the Icelandic environment, and presents a modern faerie belief that is deeply embedded and alive in the culture.

0dcb07509479c4acb65211a4fd9d3285 — *The Fairy Faith* (2000)

John Walker’s 2000 documentary The Fairy Faith takes a trip around the UK, Ireland and Cape Breton Island, Canada, to interview people who have had experiences with faeries. The photography is sumptuous and Walker uses Celtic music to draw us into a world where things are not quite as they seem. His narration is sensitive to the beliefs of the people interviewed and we are left with the impression that the faeries are just an inter-dimensional breath away. Highlights include Brian Froud talking about his fantastic faerie artwork, and Eddie Lenihan, the magnificently whiskered Irish storyteller, who tells it like it is (his website can be found here).

When Walker reaches Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, he goes with Marie-Rose and her daughter April, to a forest river to hear about their faerie encounter several years previously. It’s quite clear that they are authentic, and genuinely recalling the experience as best they can. The encounter consisted mostly of hearing music and singing — Marie-Rose was evidently afraid of the phenomenon and dragged her children away from the river and into the car to get away. As they drove away, April watched out the back window as a group of small faeries were: “jumping around in a circle, holding hands. They were singing… and dancing in a circle. They sort of mixed right in with the background, and I don’t know whether they were see-through or what.” For my take on the faerie circle dance see Going Round in Circles: The Faerie Dance.

a929eed6784a025187a93967605225f7 — *The Fairy Trail* (2013)

The Fairy Trail: A Documentary about Nature Spirits is a 2013 film by Till Gerhard and Britta Schmidtke. It takes a decidedly hippy turn, and looks at the faerie phenomenon from a Steineresque angle, with the emphasis on the faeries as nature spirits, interacting with people and the environment. Eddie Lenihan pops up again, but much time is spent at the Findhorn community in Scotland, where the relationship between the people and the nature spirits is an essential concomitant to the success of this unique place. There are several interviews with Dorothy MacClean, one of the original founders of the community in the early 1960s, whose matter of fact descriptions of working with the faeries is fascinating and convincing. The other interviewees are mystics, clairvoyants, environmentalists and witchy sorts, who help us get to the deeper meaning of our connection to the natural world, and the non-material elementals who are always there helping out, for those with the ability to sense them. Marko Pogacnik has a particularly interesting take on working with nature spirits, which includes earth acupuncture based on the hypothesis that this is what our prehistoric ancestors were doing with some of their stone monuments.

a1f6f1cd10bf4e4edd47807b746090f5 — *A Midsummer Night’s Dream* (1999)

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream faeries are given a full-on luvvy treatment in Michael Hoffman’s big-budget version from 1999. It’s lavish and true to script, but you get the impression that it was all just a jolly so the stars could spend some time in Tuscany. Here’s an excerpt from the New York Times review:

Michael Hoffman’s fussy production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is just such a parade of incongruities, with performances ranging from the sublime to the you-know-what. Hoffman has transported the play’s humans and fairies to Tuscany, where they switch partners under the influence of trickery from Stanley Tucci’s mischievous Puck.

But there’s no magic potion to banish the film’s awkwardness or make it more than a string of intermittent acting highlights. Puck’s “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” looks like an understatement under the circumstances.

There are some other film versions, notably from 1935 and 1996, but perhaps the wackiest version is from 1968, where participants seem to have got into the spirit of the times by partaking of certain psychoactive substances before filming. It’s wild… and Judi Dench appears naked and painted green. If you dare, you can watch it here.

And finally… There may be plenty of cartoon faeries on film, but I’m skipping Tinkerbell and her Disney friends (and definitely passing over Barbie: A Fairy Secret… apparently, Ken gets kidnapped) in favour of this corker from 1981. Faeries tells the story of a medieval mortal (named after the Irish folk hero Oisín) abducted to faerieland in order to help the good faeries see off the goblins, bogeys and hags, who have been causing trouble in the otherworld. The faeries are based on the illustrations of Brian Froud and Alan Lee from their classic book of the same name, and much attention to detail is paid to genuine faerie lore and folklore motifs, such as the hollow hills and the faeries’ circle dance. It’s made for children, but made by adults who have allowed psychedelic mushrooms to be part of their lives. It’s a must view.

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Addenda February 2017… The Faeries of Blackheath Woods I came across this short faerie film recently. It gives us an alarming visual description of faerie vindictiveness… one of their common folkloric traits.

For the films I’ve missed, you might want to take a look at the list of faerie films on the Fairy Investigation Society’s website here.

Elficología en España also has a You Tube site with some top faerie videos – check it out here.

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

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.

8263791_f520 — ‘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…

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.

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.

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.

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.’

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.

Their philosophy is that nothing dies or disappears, but that ‘everything goes in a circle’ and is refreshed and renewed in a cyclical evolution.

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.’

Their weaponry consists of flint arrows and they are afraid of iron.

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?

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

The Space-Time Continuum in Faerieland

Time moves differently in faerieland. Once they’ve got you to step through the veil to their world, you’re no longer constrained by the usual passage of time. You are, in effect, outside of time. Folklore is very consistent in its portrayal of this phenomenon, where characters setting foot into faerieland are transported into a distinct, separate reality, with its own laws of physics and its own space-time continuum. Why would this be? And what does it mean?

In the 1891 publication The Science of Fairy Tales, the folklorist Edwin Hartland devoted three chapters to ponder over The Supernatural Lapse of Time in Fairyland. He makes it clear that this motif is deeply embedded in worldwide folklore and mythology from a wide variety of chronological periods. He suggests that the consistency of the story elements involving the strange relative movement of time in faerieland, must stem from a common mythological theme, although he usually stops short of discussing this theme in favour of telling the actual stories. Within these supernatural lapse of time tales there are essentially three ways that time can behave in contradistinction to normal reality: 1. Time stops in the outside world, whilst in faerieland many years can pass with the human participant living a life of enjoyment or suffering with the faeries. The protagonist usually breaks a taboo of some sort and finds themselves back in the real world, where no time has passed. These stories are in the small minority. More often the time dilation moves the other way. 2. This can be quite a drastic shift, so that a character spending days or weeks in faerieland comes back to consensus reality to find decades or even centuries have passed, or, 3. that a few minutes caroling with the faeries turns out to be any length of time up to a year and a day, once they return to the world they came from. Here are examples of each type of time warp, taken from Hartland’s investigations.

1. Shepherds in Wales were commonly transported into faerieland, usually after joining the faeries in a circle dance (see Going Round in Circles for the faerie dance). One 19th-century tale has the lonely shepherd doing just that on a hillside, after which he finds himself in a glittering palace with pleasure gardens, inhabited by the faeries. He lives there for years, even taking the chance to get involved in some romantic attachments with the beguiling black-eyed female faeries. But despite being warned off the fountain, which is filled with gold and silver fish, in the middle of the main garden, he can’t resist overturning the prohibition, and one day, inevitably, he plunges his hands into the water for a drink. Pronto he finds himself back on the cold Welsh hillside with his sheep, during which no time at all seems to have passed.

As mentioned, this sort of time relativity in folklore is the exception to the rule; it usually works the other way round as in 2 and 3 below. Such a story type might represent an adventure experienced whilst in an altered state of consciousness, turned into a folktale that attempts to convey this unusual state of consciousness through conventional ideas about faerieland. The altered state might represent a waking hallucinogenic state or a dream, both of which can allow seemingly long passages of subjective time to take place in seconds or minutes in the real world. This faerie-tale

TNG_Poll_Inner_Light — Captain Picard as Kamin, in a mind-bending altered state of consciousness

concept was skilfully updated in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ‘The Inner Light’, when Captain Picard is rendered unconscious by an alien probe, and then – in his mind – experiences an entire lifetime on the planet Kataan, before finally being brought round on the bridge of the USS Enterprise 25 minutes after being knocked out (end clip from The Inner Light). The insinuation is that what happened in Picard’s mind was as real as his life as captain of the Enterprise, and that his consciousness had had a direct effect on material reality. But this is not the usual way time works in faerie-tales…

2. Hartland records an 18th-century version of the Irish story of Oisín as typical of the second type of time-lapse folktales, recorded throughout Europe and Asia. 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, summoning him to join her in her realm as her husband. Loved up, off he goes with her, and finds himself living in a paradise of perpetual summer, where all good things abound, and where time and death hold no sway. But soon he breaks a 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 mortals. She supplies him with a 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 decades have passed and that he is no longer recognised or known of. 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 the Tír na nÓg. In other variations of the story, the hero turns to dust as soon as his feet touch the ground of consensus reality.

faerietime7 — ‘Oisín and Niamh travelling to Tír na nÓg’ by Stephen Reid (1910)

These folktales seem to suggest that faerieland is the world of the dead, immune from the passage of time, and that return to the world of the living is not possible as the mortal body has aged and decayed in line with the physical laws of this world. In the Japanese tale of Urashima Taro, the hero, when returning home, is even given a casket by his faerie bride, in which his years are locked. When he opens it, his time is up.

These stories articulate a belief in an otherworld that is never heaven, but is apparently ruled over by a race of immortals who can exert control over the consciousness of an individual, who may believe themselves to still be in human form, but are actually already dead and existing in non-material form. It is ultimately the place where the faeries come from; a place untouched by the passage of time and physical death. It could even represent the collective consciousness of humanity made into an understandable form in the stories, immortal in nature and containing all wisdom and knowledge, as suggested in the Oisín tale.

This might be explained by seeing folktales of this type as representing a surviving pagan belief system of the afterlife. This afterlife did not follow the strictures of Christianity or other world religions, and provided an alternative view of what happens to consciousness after death. It is a view that was (in the West) superseded by Christian theology, but that may be surfacing in these folktales as remnants of the previous system of belief (a belief system that remained partially intact but operated underground for fear of religious persecution). The presence of faeries in this otherworld, and their ability to materialise in standard reality, suggests that they were an essential element in pagan ideas about consciousness and that they had a role to play when it came to death. In this theory the characters in the story play the part of messengers, telling us about the true nature of a timeless reality that is distinct and separate from consensus reality, and showing us that human consciousness disassociates from the physical body to exist in a parallel reality such as Tir na n’Og, where the faeries are in charge. This message is encoded in the stories.

The third type of time lapse usually has a less dramatic effect on the protagonist, as they return from an apparently short time in faerieland to a world advanced by either months, or more often by the magical time-span of a year and a day.

3. Hartland records a number of these types of tales from Britain. One was collected in the Scottish Highlands by the folklorist JF Campbell in the 1860s, and includes many of the typical elements. The story involves two men returning home from the town of Lairg, where one of them has just registered the birth of his child in the session books. They sit down to rest at the foot of the hill of Durcha, when music and merriment is heard from within a cavern in the hill. The new father can’t resist investigating and disappears into the hill. On returning home alone, his friend is accused of murder. But a ‘wise man’ suggests he should be able to clear his name by returning to the cavern a year and a day later. He does so, and when he sees a shadow in the cave entrance he grabs it, momentarily revealing his friend dancing in a circle with the music-making faeries. He pulls him out of the circle and the faeries are gone. ‘Could you not have let me finish my reel’ the former captive says, thinking he had only just started dancing with the faeries. He won’t believe that a year and a day have passed until he returns home to find his wife with their year-old child in her arms.

For a similar Welsh story see my previous post: Going Round in Circles: The Faerie Dance

Stories of this type rarely say much about the faeries doing the abducting, only that they seemed capable of drawing the participant out of their own world and into an alternative reality with a different space-time continuum. The year and a day motif is important and is a common time-frame appearing in medieval romances as the amount of time protagonists were given to succeed in quests. In The Golden Bough, Sir James George Frazer highlights the ancient global concept of the Divine King, who was to be ritually murdered after a period of time in charge, which was often a year and a day. The time period was also used in common law to substantiate the legal situation of unwed couples, and it was (in theory) the amount of time a person living under feudal serfdom needed to be absent from his lord’s manor to gain his freedom. Interestingly, a year and a day is also used in Wiccan and other neo-pagan traditions for the time of learning required before being initiated into the first degree. This may all suggest that the folktales of this type have the year and a day motif embedded within them as a message, conveying the idea that it is a magical time-frame. It was a symbolic time-marker for life quests, ruling over others, decisions being made, learning a tradition, securing a marriage, or gaining freedom as one year tips over into another. It was evidently deeply ingrained in both esoteric tradition and everyday life from an early date, rooted in the cycles of the natural world.

As is the case with this tale from the Highlands, these stories usually include a ‘wise man’ who knows that a year and a day is the time needed to free the abductee from the clasps of the faeries. This sounds like the cunning man recorded in Early Modern witch trials, amongst other sources, a type of magical practitioner steeped in esoteric knowledge, who operated within the constraints of Christianity, but who was evidently practising pagan sorcery. Emma Wilby in her 2005 book Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits convincingly puts these people (men and women) within an ancient shamanic visionary tradition, which had as its main remit an understanding of otherworldly spirits, including the faeries. Once again, we can see the folktale embedding these motifs into the stories, below the radar of religious censorship, so as to tell people the truth gleaned from gnostic shamanic beliefs that were evidently alive and well in pre-industrial societies. The repackaged 19th-century folktales were recording these traditions in coded language, perhaps not understood properly by their listeners, but hiding knowledge of metaphysical realities in plain sight, in the form of a good yarn.

The metaphysical realities these stories attempt to convey have formed a specific mythology that attempts to tell us about otherworlds beyond our own. These otherworlds may differ depending on the story but they are all, essentially, talking about transcendence beyond the physical world. And with transcendence the space-time continuum works in a different way, without the constraints of a world of matter, or with a linear time-flow. The inhabitants of this transcendent otherworld are the faeries, who seem to be able to make occasional appearances in our world, but whose own world is one of consciousness, whether a dream, an altered state, the collective human consciousness… or death. The message is that consciousness has no real need of a dimension of time, and that once freed from the physical world, consciousness is able to transfer to an alternative non-physical universe; a universe that used to be called faerieland. It is a pre-religious mythology pointing at a deeper reality, surviving in encoded form in these types of faerie-tales.

Fernanda, Faeries and Ravens

Here’s a short excerpt from the tale I’m writing. It is set in a psychiatric hospital in the west of England, 1970, and the ‘I’ is a folklorist.

The lack of light in this place is starting to cause me problems. They are the same problems that have attached themselves to me since she died, exacerbated now by the gloaming austerity of the buildings here; they lock out the daylight and cast everything in a pall of grey and brown. It’s been five days since my arrival and I haven’t seen the sun once. It has rained every day. At least that’s what my memory tells me. I might be wrong, I often am. But the view from my window confirms the grimness; the high Victorian facades soaked with rain from the outside and seeping the dampness of insanity from within. I’ve made a mistake coming here, I know it. The place has deprived me of the ability to hide my own desperation and grief. I’m surrounded by lunatics and those looking after them, all engaged in stripping away the illusion of normality and replacing it with the unfettered reality of human madness. There’s nowhere to hide, nowhere to retreat to. I’m immersed in it and my carefully constructed coping mechanisms are being dismantled. When there is a knock at the door my head swims for an instant and my hands start trembling as usual. But as Moore enters, the sudden horror of human contact subsides back inside, and, quickly, I’m able to put on my mask of acceptable social behaviour. I can also slip into a past tense…

‘Ahoy there,’ said Moore, inviting himself in, smiling as usual, ciggy in hand. ‘Ready for action?’

‘I guess. Is she still ok for this?’

‘Yep, she’s out in the vegetable garden talking with her faeries. But she knows you’re coming.’

I picked up my notepad and book, controlling my breathing and forcing the tension out of my body.

‘What’s that?’ asked Moore, nodding at the book in my hand.

‘It’s a motif index… Aarne and Thompson. Bit of a bible for folklorists – it codes and numbers all the different motif types from traditional stories. I had to… err, nick this volume from the reference library before I came.’

‘Ha, excellent. Well come on then, let’s see how many motif numbers you can jot down for Fernanda. I think you might be busy.’

We walked past the laundry building and oil tanks, then under the grey neo-gothic elevations of the chapel, dripping rainwater from their eaves high above.

‘Yeah, you’ll find Fernanda interesting,’ said Moore, chuckling as he always did. ‘She’s the only South American in the hospital… actually, she’s probably the only non-English person in the hospital.’

‘So why is she here?’

‘Chile. Something kicking off there – about to elect a Marxist called Allende apparently, and her family have cleared out and come over here.’ Moore affected a conspirational gesture. ‘But she’s already been here for a few years at school for some reason. The father found out she’d been having some problems, extracted her from said school and used his influence to get her admitted here. He’s some sort of diplomat or suchlike.’

‘So what are her problems?’

‘Delusional psychosis according to Dr Dawkins at mission control in there,’ he gestured back at the hospital, ‘but I think you might find that label a bit wide of the mark. I get the impression that she just genuinely sees things the rest of us don’t. But you’ll have to make up your own mind on that.’

We walked past the west end of the chapel, with the vegetable gardens in front of us. Moore stopped to light up a spindley-looking joint, took a drag and handed it to me.

‘This is your first field interview isn’t it?’ he said. ‘For your research I mean.’

‘It is, yeah.’ I could feel myself blushing. ‘My folklore has all been from books and lectures till now… bit embarrassing really.’

‘Well, this is where theory can become practice. Good place to start… in at the deep end with a psychiatric patient. If you can deal with her unusual behaviour patterns, you’ll find out a lot about the faeries, I’m pretty sure of that. Anyway, there she is over there in the red top, doing some weeding, or whatever it is you do in a vegetable patch.’

A couple of tokes on the joint calmed me a bit. I gave it back to Moore and went to find out just how mad my first ever interviewee might be.

***

The sun came out. A cloudbreaking ray fell over the gardens, picking out colours that hadn’t seemed to have been there a moment before. Fernanda’s hooded red top pulled her out of the background, made her seem physically separated from it. I walked over to her, hiding anxiety with a smile. She was crouching to place some nuts onto a tree-stump next to the vegetable patch, but saw me, stood up and stretched out her hands as though she expected me to take them in my own.

‘Hola.’

‘Hello. Fernanda?’

‘You’re just in time for the ravens. They are being called now.’

Her accent was slight but distinct. She looked through me somehow. But her eyes were smiling. She’d already taken some control.

‘They only trust me, but I think they’ll trust you too.’

She walked to the end of one of the garden paths and I followed. Closing her eyes she swayed whilst another ray of sun found her face, and I was able to take in her features unobtrusively. When she opened her eyes, they seemed black, iris and pupil, and I couldn’t tell what she was looking at.

‘Dos cuervos,’ she announced, ‘coming to us now.’

Sure enough, from the tree-line to the north, two ravens appeared and silently flew down onto a fence at the far end of the gardens. They tarried there, conspiring and ensuring their coast was clear before gliding down together to the tree-stump, where they put their beaks to work on the nuts. They hopped about taking some more nuts before retreating back to the fence.

‘Now observe,’ she whispered. ‘They will silently call their comrades.’

We stood in silence for about a minute, Fernanda staring into the middle distance, whilst I shuffled around hoping this wasn’t going to go on too long. Then I saw six more ravens appear above the tree-line, making their way towards us. They flew down in ragged tandem, alighted on the fence with the other two, then, two by two, drifted down to the ground and hopped over to the nuts on the tree-stump. We were only twenty feet from them, but they carried on as if we weren’t there. When they’d finished and were moving back to the fence, Fernanda crouched down. One of the ravens broke ranks and landed closer to us. It bobbed its head a few times in our direction, then flew off, taking the others with it back into the sky.

Fernanda stood up and said ‘I know you want to know about the faeries. Las hadas… they are the nature spirits, the elementals. They are everywhere.’

‘Do you see them now?’

She laughed, then smiled. I blushed.

‘The ravens see them. All animals do. The faeries fix themselves onto the minds of the ravens and then give them instant communication with others of their kind. The faeries summoned the ravens by riding on their minds… their thoughts. Hey my friends! come get the nuts at the tree-stump.‘

I chuckled. ‘But do you see them?’

She stared at me for the first time but said nothing. Instead she took my hand and led me round the vegetable patch to some spinach leaves. She got me to crouch down next to her, and pointed at the biggest leaf in the patch.

‘Stare at this green leaf’, she said. ‘Just stare at it for some moments.’

I complied. The leaf was crumpled a little at its top making a ball-like shape, and the longer I looked at it the more I started to see patterns in the natural chaos of its shape: first a green rose flower, then a scrunched up piece of green paper, which seemed to momentarily expand and contract before forming into a small childlike face. I started, looked again, and it was gone. There was just a snail-nibbled spinach leaf.

‘You see,’ she said. ‘They are here, but you just don’t want to see them. The faeries are part of the minds of the plants… the earth, the rocks, everything.’

I turned to her, she was close. I could see she meant it. But the usual rational stream of thought pulsed through my mind, first explaining the optical illusion of the crumpled spinach leaf, then aligning itself with the reasonable view that she must be delusional and making this up from within a damaged and beguiled mind. But even as the stream of rationality assured me this must be so, I knew it wasn’t.

‘You are a modern Western person my friend,’ she said, quietly. ‘You have grown up in a world of science and material things. It’s quite simple really. You’ve disconnected from Spirit. Once you disconnect you stop seeing what’s really there. If you were a child I would be able to show you. But you have grown up and disconnected. There is Spirit everywhere, but you can no longer recognise it.’

I fiddled with the motif-index volume in my hands, coming to terms with my abrupt perception of inferiority to someone everyone else here thought insane. And, as she looked through me, I was pretty sure she knew this.

‘I need to be alone now,’ she announced, standing up and running her hands through her black hair. ‘But if you can come again tomorrow, without your books, I will teach you about the faeries. I think you might be one who can be taught.’

Without another word, she packed her trowel into her little gardening bag, smiled and started off back to the hospital. She turned at the edge of the vegetable gardens and waved.

‘Mañana,’ she called.

I watched her disappear behind the chapel. It started to rain again.

‘Mañana indeed,’ I whispered, looking first at my unopened book and notepad, and then back at that plain old spinach leaf, now quivering under the raindrops. A raven passed overhead, cawing as if laughing at me. Mañana indeed.

Music video of Steven Wilson’s The Raven that Refused to Sing

Going Round in Circles: The Faerie Dance

“I realise we may not even have begun to understand what is going on with the phenomenon known as the fairy 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.” Graham Hancock, Supernatural (2005)

At the end of the excellent documentary The Fairy Faith, the narrator, John Walker, goes with Marie-Rose and her daughter April, to a forest river in Cape Breton Island, Canada, to hear about their faerie encounter several years previously. It’s quite clear that they are authentic, and genuinely recalling the experience as best they can. The encounter consisted mostly of hearing music and singing — Marie-Rose was evidently afraid of the phenomenon and dragged her children away from the river and into the car to get away. As they drove away, April watched out the back window as a group of small faeries were: “jumping around in a circle, holding hands. They were singing… and dancing in a circle. They sort of mixed right in with the background, and I don’t know whether they were see-through or what.”

This is an interesting modern testimony of a very common faerie practice, recorded by folklorists as motifs 261.1.1 – faeries dance in faerie ring, and 262.10.2 – faerie music issues from faerie ring. There are hundreds of stories that include this circular dancing favoured by the faeries, usually with the embedded idea that it’s dangerous to go near them, or even watch them, whilst they are doing it. The proliferance of this motif in faerie-tales suggests it has an important meaning, both to the faeries and to the deeper understanding of the story. It is like a hidden code, installed into the story for those who might look for it and learn from it.

One of the most common folktales of this type involves someone being trapped within the circle of dancing faeries, either by their own volition or by mistake. The Welsh tale Rhys at the Fairy Dance has many variants, and is a typical example of the tale. It tells the story of Rhys and Llywelyn, who, whilst walking home through a wood, were separated after Rhys rushed away when he heard some ‘enchanted music.’ Llywelyn goes home and leaves him, but when check is made next morning Rhys is still missing. Llywelyn is thrown into jail for suspected murder…

… Things remained thus for nearly a year, when a newcomer into the neighbourhood, who had some experience of fairy ways and customs, suggested that he and a company of neighbours should go with Llywelyn to the place where he had parted from Rhys. This was agreed to and they came to a faerie ring.

“This is the very spot,” said Llywelyn, “and hush, I hear music; melodious harps I hear.”

The whole company listened, but could hear nothing, and told Llywelyn so.

“Put your foot on mine, David,” said Llywelyn, whose foot was now upon the outward edge of the faerie circle, to one of the company. David put his foot on Llywelyn’s, and so did they all, one after another: and then they heard the sound of many harps in full concert, and saw within the circle a number. of little figures enjoying themselves vastly. They were dancing round and round the ring with hands joined, and among them was Rhys, footing it with the best of them. As he came whirling by, Llywelyn seized hold of his smock frock and switched him out of the circle, taking great care not to overstep the edge of the ring.

Full text of Rhys at the Faerie Dance – Thomas Keightley, 1870

Once out of the ring Rhys insisted he’d only been dancing for about five minutes, and that he was keen to continue. But the company took him home, and as happens in many of these stories, he became depressed, sickened and died soon after.

Another Welsh story tells of a shepherd playing his flute on a hillside:

“… when he was surrounded at a distance by little beings like men, who closed nearer and nearer to him until they became a very small circle. They sang and danced, and so affected him that he quite lost himself.”

Again, his perception of the singing and dancing lasting only minutes is dispelled when he returns home to find three weeks have passed.

These folktales were recorded in the 19th century, but they hold up a mirror to earlier beliefs and perceptions of what the faeries were and what they got up to. The stories of faeries dancing in circles also find common ground in eyewitness descriptions of the same time period, such as that of David Evans and a friend who, in 1862, 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.

From Janet Bord, Fairies: Real Encounters with Little People (1997).

Of course, it would be easy to dismiss both folktales and eyewitness sightings of dancing faeries as works of pure imagination and/or misperceptions of natural phenomena. But the universality of the circular dancing theme trumps such a reductionist view — there’s got to be more going on to the faeries dance to imprint the idea so vividly in the collective memory.

One theory is that the faerie dance was an otherworldy mimicking of circle dances attested to since the medieval period and earlier, such as in this Italian version from the 14th century.

800px-Lorenzetti_Good_Govt_Detail — The Allegory of Good Government by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Siena, 1340

The circle dance was certainly of ancient origin and common throughout the world. It would have been only a small leap of storytelling imagination to transfer the popular forms of dancing in a circle into the culture of the faeries. Modern circle dances such as the kalamatianos from Greece, the mayim mayim of Israel and the Catalonian sardana dance probably had their genesis in earlier forms, and give an idea of the energy, togetherness and social cohesion that can be achieved by linking hands, forming a circle and moving in a choreographed way to music and singing. A particularly interesting modern manifestation is the Sacred Circle Dance, brought from Eastern Europe in the 1970s by Bernard Wosien, first to the alternative community of Findhorn in Scotland, from where it has spread worldwide. Here is a video of the Findhorn Sacred Circle Dance in 2012. It’s not quite clear what the ‘sacred’ represents, but I think it might be bringing us a little closer to the meaning behind the faerie circle dance.

Many circle dances incorporate various ritualised elements, such as placing flowers in the centre, the passing of handkerchiefs between participants and adherence to numbered steps whilst dancing. These elements look like fossilized versions of earlier practices… practices that may have been about taking the participants of the dance into an otherworld through altering their states of consciousness.

The Saan people of Southern Africa continue to use the ritual circle dance of their ancestors for this very specific purpose. The archaeologist David Lewis-Williams describes the dance:

Saan rock art depicting a healing circle dance, c.1000 BCE

The most important Saan ritual was the healing or trance dance. These dances continue to be practised amongst San groups living in the Kalahari today. Dancers stomp in a circle around the campfire for many hours. The women clap the rhythm of the dance and sing powerful songs. After hours of stomping, some dancers start to slip into trance or half-trance. In this altered state of consciousness many have out-of-body experiences. They describe travelling to the spirit realm. The shamans push themselves towards an altered state of consciousness; they enter ‘half-death’. They attain ecstasy simply by means of their dancing, concentration and hyperventilation, with the help of the women’s insistent, complexly rhythmic singing and clapping.

This continuity of the circle dance in Southern Africa, unchanged in its basic format for millennia, may suggest how other circular dances developed elsewhere in the world. The dances of medieval and modern Europe may be remnants of an earlier form of prehistoric shamanic dance, designed to alter the state of consciousness of its participants, just as it still does for the Saan people. We cannot find a direct archaeological route into prehistoric ritual dance, but the Neolithic and Bronze Age stone circles of Western Europe are highly suggestive of monuments built for a ritual that involved circular movement.

cots3 — The Avebury Circle Dance from the TV series *Children of the Stones* (1977)

In the mind-bending 1977 TV series Children of the Stones (the sort of crazy 1970s children’s television that will leave you dropping your jaw if you’ve never seen it… you can give it a try here Children of the Stones full series), a secret sect uses the energy of the Neolithic stone circle at Avebury to create power for their own nefarious purposes. The painting shown here hangs on the wall of the sect’s leader, and is constantly referred to visually in the series. It shows the stone circle in its prehistoric heyday, a beam of light being generated from the centre by the whirling circular dancing of people. This might be a case of fiction getting close to the truth, with the idea that frenetic circular dancing was a technique to unlock an energy, whatever that energy might be. Folklore certainly embeds the notion that dancing is intimately associated with stone circles. Many stone circles come complete with a legend that the stones are petrified dancers, a pagan theme christianised by stating that the dancers were punished for dancing on the Sabbath. The Merry Maidens stone circle near St Buryan in Cornwall is a good example, where the story tells us that the nineteen stones are young girls turned to stone for non-observance of the Sabbath. In this case there are even two outlier stones, that take the part of pipers in the story (see A modern antiquarian’s view of the Merry Maidens).

800px-The_Merry_Maidens_Penwith — The Merry Maidens stone circle near St Buryan, Cornwall, c.2000 BCE

These petrification stories can be multiplied many times at other stone circles, especially in Britain. It’s not too much of an interpretative stretch to suggest that these folktales represent a mythic memory of one of their original purposes – circular sacred spaces for circle dancing. For whilst the stone circles would have been used for various purposes, their shape suggests rituals that saw the circle as sacred – a representation of wholeness and infinity that would have found manifestation in physical activity in and around them. A place to dance to music and singing may have been the main reason for their construction. And in shamanic cultures such dancing was just another method (either alongside or instead of ingesting psychoactive plants) to alter states of consciousness so as to be able to interact with the otherworld of spirit.

So what are the faerie circle dances? One neat theory is that the faeries are one and the same as our psychedelic prehistoric ancestors. Their intense circular dances have embedded them into certain parts of the landscape through the latent emotional energy they generated, to be tapped into by sensitive or stoned individuals in touch with the Collective Unconscious of humanity. The common folkloric motif of people finding themselves trapped within the circles is nothing less than a shamanic experience of travelling to a dimension of reality separated from our own only by a malleable membrane. The sense of unreality and time distortions that usually occur to the protagonists in these stories are very suggestive of an altered state of consciousness. They interact with otherworldly beings, they hear supernal music, and they become caught up in this world completely, to the extent that their perception of the passage of time is altered radically.

DSC_0094-Fungi-Fairy-Ring-Small-Close-Up-Mid-Ohio-625x625 — Psilocybin faerie ring

It is interesting that the grass circles known colloquially as faerie rings are caused by sub-surface fungal growth, and that many of these rings come complete with above-surface psychoactive mushrooms such as the amanita muscaria and psilocybin. These rings are intimately connected to the folklore of the faerie dance, acting as observable physical markers in the environment for the stories. And whatever the objective reality of the faeries dancing within the rings, the fungal association is highly suggestive that the human protagonists were able to collude with them after partaking of psychotropic mushrooms and entering a non-usual state of consciousness.

This takes us back to the point – what are these faerie-tales about circle dances trying to tell us? The circularity of the dance is evidently important and represents wholeness, oneness, eternity and a complete closed system. The circle may also represent what Graham Hancock calls ring portals, circles of energy providing access to and from this 4D world and whatever dimension the faeries hang out in. But the deep message seems to lie in the circle. These otherworldy faeries may be attempting to convey a message about the importance of understanding the never-ending circularity of life, wisdom better understood by our stone-age ancestors. The message might come in a folktale, or through a reported sighting… or you might find yourself in the circle after nibbling some mushrooms, and unable to resist the music and dancing of the little people who seem to have magically appeared within your reality.

Fairies_dancing_in_a_ring_woodcut — 17th-century woodcut of faeries in a circle dance outside their hollow hill, with an amanita muscaria mushroom in the foreground

The Deeper Meaning of Faerie-tales

‘Myth is a story that implies a certain way of interpreting consensus reality so to derive meaning and effective charge from its images and interactions. As such, it can take many forms: fabl…

Source: The Deeper Meaning of Faerie-tales

My Sister and her Faeries

My little sister, I lost her when she was just a child. One day we were together the next she was gone, suddenly and definitively. Her physical memory has become blurred into an arbitrary, flickeri…

Source: My Sister and her Faeries

The Green Children

The story of the the Green Children of Woolpit, Suffolk, has always been one of the strangest medieval folktales, and that’s up against some pretty stiff competition. If you don’t know it, it goes a bit like this…

The story is set at some point in the 12th century. The location is the village of Woolpit in Suffolk, England. One day during the harvest, the villagers discovered two children loitering around the ‘wolf pits’ (deep excavations designed to trap wolves, which at that time were still relatively common in England) and apprehended them. Apparently, they “had the form of all their limbs like to those of other men, but they differed in the colour of their skin, which was tinged all over a green colour.” They also could not speak English or any language known to the villagers, who escorted them off to a local lord, a knight by the name of Sir Richard de Calne. Here they were offered food but would not eat anything until some beans (probably either broad beans or a type of vetch, both common crops throughout the medieval period) were brought to them. They lived on such beans until they were eventually induced to eat other food within the manorial residence. In a short time the boy sickened and died, but the girl survived, lost her green colour, was baptised and was given a position of some sort within the knight’s household. One version of the story suggests that she was “rather loose and wanton in her conduct.”

The story then reports her words, after learning English, in response to questions about how the children arrived at Woolpit and where they came from. She asserted that they came from a land 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 from ours, and divided from it by a very considerable river.” On the day they arrived in Woolpit they had been tending their father’s flock (the insinuation is that they are siblings, although this is never directly stated) when they came upon a cave, from which they heard the sound of bells. They wandered into the cavern and after some time emerged into the Suffolk landscape where they were struck senseless by the excessive sunlight and unusual temperature of the air. Frightened and disorientated, they were caught by the harvesting villagers and so the story comes full circle.

What can be made of this story? For a medieval folktale it has the unusual quality of authenticity about it. There is no Christian moral, places and people are named, and it appears to be a unique incident, reported in the chronicles much as more everyday historical occurrences were mentioned. These two chronicles were those of Ralph de Coggeshall and William de Newburgh, both written in, or shortly before, c.1200, compiling both earlier texts and oral testimony. In Ralph’s case, some of the oral testimony came from the knight Sir Richard de Calne himself, and it is clear that both chroniclers made the effort to retrieve the story from villagers who were alive at the time of the incident. William puts the timeframe of the tale as within the reign of King Stephen (1136-54), but Ralph implies that it happened under Henry II (1155-89). Whatever the exact date, and whatever folktale motifs have been overlain on the story, this seems like a chronicled version of something that actually happened. So how can it be explained?

Prosaic Explanations In a concerted effort to dispel any supernatural elements from the story, Paul Harris (in a 1998 article for Fortean Times) put forward the theory that the children were Flemish orphans, displaced from their community after Henry II’s co-ordinated persecution of the Flemish population in Eastern England, culminating in a military offensive in 1173. Left to their own devices, they lived in the woods before wandering into caves (Harris suggests the Neolithic Grimes Graves in Norfolk), following tunnels and emerging near Woolpit, green through malnutrition and speaking a foreign language that the locals couldn’t understand. But as with many materialistic-reductionist explanations of strange stories, it is soon found to be baloney. Grimes Graves is 40km from Woolpit, there are no known tunnels extending beyond the locality and even if there were, they do not extend to the clay geology of northern Suffolk. Flemish immigration to Suffolk had been happening since the 11th century and so the linguistic argument also breaks down – the villagers would have been well-acquainted with the Flemish language, even if it were a dialect or (even more so) an Anglicised version of Flemish. And an educated aristocrat like Sir Richard de Calne would definitely have recognised their speech. Despite being cited as the most likely interpretation in several retellings of the story, it’s actually a non-starter.

Historian Derek Brewer avoids any such tortuous interpretative-bending, and reduces the story even further, suggesting that:

The likely core of the matter is that these very small children, herding or following flocks, strayed from their forest village, spoke little, and (in modern terms) did not know their own home address. They were probably suffering from chlorosis, a deficiency disease which gives the skin a greenish tint, hence the term “green sickness”. With a better diet it disappears.

The possibility of the children suffering from Chlorosis (or Hypochromic anemia) is an interesting hypothesis. This condition is usually caused by an iron deficiency and can tinge parts of the skin green, which will return to normal colour when the iron is replaced in the diet. This might explain the children’s colour and their losing it after starting to eat the local food. However, there is no historical mention of the condition before 1554, and even in the cases noted after this date the green colouration is restricted to parts of the body, such as around the eyes and neck. In most cases there is no discolouration. So although Chlorosis might offer an exceptional explanation for the children being green, it is reliant on their having been subject to a long period of malnutrition, which is not part of the story. If the explanation were that simple, why did they not tuck into the food they were offered on arrival at Richard de Calne’s household? We’ll come back to the colouration issue, but whatever the true explanation is, the green colour of the children cannot be taken as an independent part of the story, divorced from the other surreal elements. And let’s remember, this is a very surreal story.

Out-there Explanations In his 2012 book Children from the Sky, Duncan Lunan presents a highly unorthodox theory of alien intervention in 12th-century England. Lunan goes into considerably more historical detail than any other writer on the subject, and his close reading of the historical sources teases out the context of the story and the characters involved. Of particular importance is his interpretation of the original texts, pointing out the usages of language by the two medieval chroniclers, and how the original Latin has been skewed by later translators and story summaries. But the historical detective work soon gives way to a ‘speculative interpretation’ that suggests the Knights Templar (he identifies Sir Richard de Calne as a Templar) were in contact with an alien civilization, who were abducting humans to populate a colony world – a world where it was always twilight due to a synchronous orbit, and where genetically modified algae turned the inhabitants green. The green children were part of this colony and were accidentally transported to Earth due to a matter transmitter malfunction. Sound wackadoo? You bet. But the sci-fi angle taken by Lunan is a lot of fun and allows for some free-thinking speculation on the oddities of a story that refuses to fit in with a reductionist interpretation. A mind-bogglingly melodramatic National Geographic documentary has Lunan dashing around the Suffolk countryside in a Morris Minor in pursuit of the alien connection. You might want to take a look here: Ancient X-Files (from 25.50).

Folkloric Explanations The folkorist EW Baughman suggests the story is the only example in English folklore of the motif: Inhabitants of lower world visit mortals, and continue to live with them. It is certainly an inversion of the common faerie-tale motif of mortals travelling to faerieland and living there for various periods of time, either willingly or not. But the fact that the children come from underground is important, as the faeries were commonly thought to reside under the earth, usually beneath hollow-hills or burial mounds, but also in caves. The strange description of their world being always twilight also fits in with many folkloric descriptions of an underground faerieland. With this in mind, the story may be a jumbled attempt to overlay faerie motifs onto an historical incident. It does seem that both medieval chroniclers categorised the story as a faerie-tale that fitted in with their other accounts of supernatural beings interacting with humans. But the green children do not behave like folkloric faeries. They have none of the faeries usual attributes or magical powers. They really do seem like lost human children.

However, as usual with folktales, deeper meaning can be read into story by asking what it is telling us about the human condition. A follower of the Carl Jung school of psychoanalysis would immediately spot the archetype of the outsider/s (see The Deeper Meaning of Faerie-tales). The children were green, came from an unknown and strange land and spoke no known language. They represented an otherworldy intrusion into the regular, consensus reality of the 12th-century villagers, that may have been treated as a threat. In a time of Christian fundamentalism their fate may have been to be seen as demonic beings in need of persecution. Things could have ended badly for them. But they were also vulnerable and frightened, and the story is never about the threat of outsiders but rather of tolerance and kindness to them. As has already been discussed, there had been largescale immigration into eastern England through the 12th century, and communities would have been forced to come to terms with foreign ideas and behaviours within the space of two or three generations… sound familiar? In the case of the green children they were accepted, protected and then integrated into the dominant society. We can see the story as a folkloric method of teaching tolerance of outsiders by using an archetypal concept.

But instead of using real foreigners, such as Flemish immigrants, the story is made timeless and archetypal by turning the children into faeries. Their otherworldy status makes the tale bigger and more fundamental – it becomes a tool for teaching us about ourselves. The story embeds certain faerie motifs, such as their green colour. The most common colour of the faeries was green (usually their clothing, but also sometimes their food and their skin), and people hearing the tale in the Middle Ages (and beyond) would have automatically understood and accepted that they were associated with an otherworld, most usually represented as faerieland.

Whatever the deeper meaning though, the story is still strongly grounded in a specific time and location. Something material and real happened in a small Suffolk village in the 12th century, which will never be fully understood or explained, because so much of the story is strange and edged with the supernatural. Despite the uncommon and inverted motifs, it is in effect a faerie-tale that uses an historical event as a vehicle for telling a story with a lesson. But then that’s usually what faerie-tales do.

—–

A recent detailed and exhaustive examination of the story by historian and folklorist John Clark, with the original sources printed in full, can be found here: John Clark’s The Green Children of Woolpit. This correlates all the sources and secondary literature into a fully referenced article, that deals comprehensively with most interpretative aspects of the story. It will most likely become the standard reference point for all future discussion about The Green Children of Woolpit.

The cover image is by my friend and artistic colleague Katalin Polonyi.

Here is Paranormal Kativity telling the story of the Green Children of Woolpit: Paranormal Kativity tells the story of the Green Children of Woolpit

And finally, here are The Green Children singing about… well, The Green Children: The Green Children — Encounter

	Anonymous on A Faerie Correspondence
	Rick Finney on A Faerie Correspondence
	neilrushton on A Faerie Correspondence
	Rick Finney on A Faerie Correspondence
	Anonymous on A Faerie Correspondence
	neilrushton on A Faerie Correspondence
	Roy McCarthy on A Faerie Correspondence
	neilrushton on A Faerie Correspondence
	Anonymous on A Faerie Correspondence
	neilrushton on A Faerie Correspondence
	delectablystellar1f3… on A Faerie Correspondence
	neilrushton on A Faerie Correspondence
	bethnoir on A Faerie Correspondence
	neilrushton on Dr Francis Young’s spot-…
	Beelzebuddah ( previ… on Dr Francis Young’s spot-…

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