My colleague David Halpin has produced another corking article on the fabulous Ancient Originswebsite. It’s about the mass vision of angels at Fatima in Portugal in 1917. It’s an historical event that has received much attention from luminaries such as Jacques Vallée, David Icke, Jim Marrs, Joaquim Fernandes and Graham Hancock, but in this article David puts an innovative slant on things, as you will see.
In early spring 1916 three local shepherd children, Lúcia Santos and her cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto reported that they were visited by an angel on several occasions. These visits later became known as and attributed to the Roman Catholic title – Our Lady of Fatima, or the Virgin Mary. As word of this spread, thousands of people flocked to the area to visit the children and the location of the event. It was said the visitor had promised a miracle for October 13 the following year.
During the Miracle of the Sun event on October 13, 1917, over 80,000 people witnessed an event at Fatima where a bright disc-like object spun through the sky and swooped over the crowds below. The disc radiated colored lights and is said to have emitted heat before returning to the clouds.
“If fairies actually exist as invisible beings or intelligences, and our investigations lead us to the tentative hypothesis that they do, they are natural and not supernatural, for nothing which exists can be supernatural; and, therefore, it is our duty to examine the Celtic Fairy Races just as we examine any fact in the visible realm wherein we now live, whether it be a fact of chemistry, of physics or of biology.” WY Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries
Walter Yeeling Evans-Wentz (1878-1965) was the sort of character who could only have thrived at the beginning of the 20th century. He’s probably best known these days for bringing the first translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead (the Bardo Thodol) to the West. But prior to his travels in Tibet, Nepal and India, he was a self-styled American gentleman (i.e. independently funded) polymath, and between 1907-11 his incarnation was as a folklorist, who travelled around the Celtic bastions of Ireland, Brittany, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall and the Isle of Man, collecting, analysing and interpreting the ‘faerie faith’ in these places. His work was published as The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries in 1911, and it remains one of the most important testimonies of the belief in faeries amongst the Celtic peoples, collected at a time when for the majority of the rural population in these areas, faerieland was a bona-fide reality, to be revered and feared in equal measure.
His language can occasionally seem archaic and quaint, but there is no doubt that he imbued himself in the Celtic communities that he spent time with during his years of travels amongst them. He had the time, that a modern anthropologist/folklorist could only dream of, to visit these communities and spend time with them, soaking up their stories and anecdotes, which revealed so much about the deeply ingrained belief in the faeries and the way these entities interacted with consensual reality. In doing so, he gained a great admiration for the rural people he came across, who would tell it like it was.
“The great majority of men in cities are apt to pride themselves on their own exemption from ‘superstition,’ and to smile pityingly at the poor countrymen and countrywomen who believe in fairies. But when they do so they forget that, with all their own admirable progress in material invention, with all the far-reaching data of their acquired science, with all the vast extent of their commercial and economic conquests, they themselves have ceased to be natural… they have lost all sympathetic and responsive contact with Nature, because unconsciously they have thus permitted conventionality and unnaturalness to insulate them from it.”
This quote is from the introduction to The Fairy-Faith, and it sets out Evans-Wentz’s stall. He was on the side of the rural peasantry who were the repository of the vast wealth of folklore represented in their tales of the faeries. He recognised the innate importance of what they were conveying, and was not shy about convincing his reader of the authenticity of what they told him, even if it was anathema to the conventual scientific and materialistic wisdom of his age.
Anna Brahms – A Faerie Gathering
Evans-Wentz travelled on foot, visiting remote villages and farmsteads throughout the Celtic countries he visited, as often at night as by day, and would frequently take advantage of his hosts’ hospitality for days at a time, so as to hear as many stories as possible. He would take a local translator with him sometimes, as many of the informants spoke only their native Celtic language. The impression is gained of an extremely affable chap, who, by his own admission, gained the confidence of the countryfolk he visited by dint of being an American and not English! Those opening up to him with traditional stories were most often the oldest people of the communities, and whilst many of the stories were either contemporary or dating back to their youth, others were handed down to them from their parents and grandparents, taking the timeline back as far as the late 18th century. Some are first-hand accounts, whilst others are anecdotal, but there is a strong consistency in themes and motifs, that suggest a folklore ingrained into the belief-systems of those telling the stories. Their reality was physical and psychological, with no apparent need to separate the two.
His natural starting point was Ireland, where he found belief in the faeries (commonly termed aes sídhe in Ireland) most vigorous and unquestioned amongst the rural communities. The following excerpt gives a taste of the evidence and Evans-Wentz’s style of transcription, made especially interesting through its setting at the Neolithic passage tombs of Newgrange and Knowth:
“Between Knowth and New Grange I met Maggie Tinunons carrying a pail of butter-milk to her calves. When we stopped on the road to talk, I asked her, in due time, if any of the ‘good people’ ever appeared in the region, or about New Grange, which we could see in the field, and she replied… ‘I am sure the neighbours used to see the good people come out of it at night and in the morning. The good people inherited the fort.’ Then I asked her what the good people are, and she said:- ‘When they disappear they go like fog; they must be something like spirits, or how could they disappear in that way? I knew of people, who would milk in the fields about here and spill milk on the ground for the good people; and pots of potatoes would be put out for the good people at night.'”
Newgrange Neolithic passage tomb, and home of the faeries
Evans-Wentz collected a multitude of these types of anecdotes, but he also sought out ‘seers’, the members of communities who could give him first-hand accounts of interactions with faeries. He met one such (un-named in the text, but evidently George William Russell, aka “AE”) Irish mystic in Rosses Point, County Sligo. This seer talks about various types of faeries that inhabit the landscape of Sligo, making them sound like a cross between nature spirits and mystical visions. But Evans-Wentz was just as interested in the mechanics of interacting with the faeries as he was with the stories themselves. How did the seer interface with them?
“I have always made a distinction between pictures seen in the memory of nature and visions of actual beings now existing in the inner world. We can make the same distinction in our world: I may close my eyes and see you as a vivid picture in memory, or I may look at you with my physical eyes and see your actual image. In seeing these beings of which I speak, the physical eyes may be open or closed: mystical beings in their own world and nature are never seen with the physical eyes.”
Evans-Wentz then asked him what sort of state was he in when he saw the faeries…
“I have seen them most frequently after being away from a city or town for a few days. The whole west coast of Ireland from Donegal to Kerry seems charged with a magical power, and I find it easiest to see while I am there. I have always found it comparatively easy to see visions while at ancient monuments like New Grange and Dowth, because I think such places are naturally charged with psychical forces, and were for that reason made use of long ago as sacred places. I usually find it possible to throw myself into the mood of seeing; but sometimes visions have forced themselves upon me.”
The Fairy Glen near Uig, Isle of Skye
In Scotland Evans-Wentz travelled extensively through the Highlands and Islands collecting stories about the faeries. There is a sense that here, as opposed to Ireland, the belief in faeries had diminished amongst the most recent generation, and many of the tales and anecdotes relate to the person’s parents or grandparents. In Uignisb on the Isle of Skye, he came across Miss Frances Tolmie, who had a wealth of faerie-tales from an unspecified period shortly before the present. It includes this one about refusing faerie hospitality. It includes many common motifs and encapsulates well the capricious nature of the Highland faeries:
“Two women were walking toward the Point when one of them, hearing churning going on under a hillock, expressed aloud a wish for some buttermilk. No sooner had she spoken than a very small figure of a woman came out with a bowlful and offered it to her, but the thirsty woman, ignorant of fairy customs and the penalty attending their infringement, declined the kind offer of refreshment, and immediately found herself a prisoner in the hillock. She was led to an apartment containing a chest full of meal and a great bag of wool, and was told by the fairy that when she had eaten all the meal and spun all the wool she would be free to return to her home. The prisoner at once set herself to eating and spinning assiduously, but without apparent result, and despairing of completing the task consulted an old man of very sad countenance who had long been a captive in the hillock. He willingly gave her his advice, which was to wet her left eye with saliva each morning before she settled down to her task. She followed this advice, and gradually the wool and the meal were exhausted. Then the fairy granted her freedom, but in doing so cursed the old man, and said that she had it in her power to keep him in the hillock for ever.”
There were more incidents of vindictiveness amidst the faeries from the Isle of Man, where Evans-Wentz found pockets of the rural population with a firmly entrenched understanding of the faeries. John Nelson, an elderly man from Ramsey, told a story with the familiar motif of being blinded by the faeries (Aarne-Thompson motif F362.1):
“My grandfather, William Nelson, was coming home from the herring fishing late at night, on the road near Jurby, when he saw in a pea-field, across a hedge, a great crowd of little fellows in red coats dancing and making music. And as he looked, an old woman from among them came up to him and spat in his eyes, saying: “You’ll never see us again”; and I am told that he was blind afterwards till the day of his death. He was certainly blind for fourteen years before his death, for I often had to lead him around; but, of course, I am unable to say of my own knowledge that he became blind immediately after his strange experience, or if not until later in life; but as a young man he certainly had good sight, and it was believed that the fairies destroyed it.”
The faeries in Wales were usually called Tylwyth Teg, and much of the testimony taken during Evans-Wentz’s Welsh visits concerned their nature, and what they were supposed to be. We’re left with the impression of an amorphous race of spirit beings, who usually tolerate humans in their own environment, but who are quick to vengeance for any perceived wrongs. Through an English translator, John Jones of Pontrhydfendigaid told Evans-Wentz:
“I was born and bred where there was tradition that the Tylwyth Teg lived in holes in the hills, and that none of these Tylwyth Teg was taller than three to four feet. It was a common idea that many of the Tylwyth Teg, forming in a ring, would dance and sing out on the mountain-sides, or on the plain, and that if children should meet with them at such a time they would lose their way and never get out of the ring. If the Tylwyth Teg fancied any particular child they would always keep that child, taking off its clothes and putting them on one of their own children, which was then left in its place. They took only boys, never girls.”
Evans-Wentz interviewed more church ministers in Wales than elsewhere, and it is interesting to note their more rationalised, folkloric tone compared to the village natives. The Rev. TM Morgan, vicar of Newchurch parish, two miles from Carmarthen, was keen to impart a Christian veneer to the faeries but was able to convey a range of faerie folklore gleaned from his parishioners over many decades:
“The Tylwyth Teg were thought to be able to take children. ‘You mind, or the Tylwyth Teg will take you away,’ parents would say to keep their children in the house after dark. It was an opinion, too, that the Tylwyth Teg could transform good children into kings and queens, and bad children into wicked spirits, after such children bad been taken–perhaps in death. The Tylwyth Teg were believed to live in some invisible world to which children on dying might go to be rewarded or punished, according to their behaviour on this earth. Even in this life the Tylwyth Teg had power over children for good or evil. The belief, as these ideas show, was that the Tylwyth Teg were spirits.”
When Evans-Wentz visited Cornwall, he found a much reduced contemporary belief in faeries (usually termed pixies throughout Cornwall and Devon). Most of the stories he recounts are more evidently overlaid with storytelling tropes, and usually relate to an indefinite past. But he did hear from Miss Susan Gay of Falmouth, who articulates, what was then, a modern and novel metaphysical explanation of these entities derived from the ideas of the Theosophical Society, which had evidently made an impression on Miss Gay in the west of Cornwall:
“The pixies and fairies are little beings in the human form existing on the ‘astral plane’, who may be in the process of evolution; and, as such, I believe people have seen them. The ‘astral plane’ is not known to us now because our psychic faculty of perception has faded out by non-use, and this condition has been brought about by an almost exclusive development of the physical brain; but it is likely that the psychic faculty will develop again in its turn… It is my point of view that there is a basis of truth in the folk-lore. With its remnants of occult learning, magic, charms, and the like, folk-lore seems to be the remains of forgotten psychical facts, rather than history, as it is often called.”
In Brittany Evans-Wentz found that the belief in faeries was intimately woven in with the belief of the spirits of the dead, most commonly termed Corrigans in Breton:
“Like the fairies in Britain and Ireland, the Corrigans and the Cornish pixies find their favourite amusement in the circular dance. When the moon is clear and bright they gather for their frolic near menhirs, and dolmens, and tumuli, and at cross-roads, or even in the open country; and they never miss an opportunity of enticing a mortal passing by to join them. If he happens to be a good-natured man and enters their sport heartily, they treat him quite as a companion, and may even do him some good turn; but if he is not agreeable they will make him dance until he falls down exhausted, and should he commit some act thoroughly displeasing to them he will meet their certain revenge.”
The association of prehistoric sites and faerie activity in Brittany is taken fully on-board by Evans-Wentz, and he highlights the myriad of faerie folklore surrounding Carnac, location of a potent prehistoric landscape of stone rows and burial chambers, as evidence for a mutated ancestor worship; a preservation of deep-seated spiritual beliefs manifesting in the faerie folktales. Especially interesting is the testimony from Madame Marie Ezanno, who lived in Carnac and relayed several narratives of the local corrigans. Note the mention of mushrooms (an implicit reference to the method of seeing the corrigans?), the ritualistic silence during the dance, and the belief that they lived under prehistoric burial mounds:
Prehistoric stone rows at Carnac, Brittany
“They whistled in order to assemble. Where they danced mushrooms grew; and it was necessary to maintain silence so as not to interrupt them in their dance. They were often very brutal towards a man who fell under their power, and if they had a grudge against him they would make him submit to the greatest tortures. The peasants believed strongly in the corrigans, because they thus saw them and heard them. The corrigans dressed in very coarse white linen cloth. They were mischievous spirits (espirits follets), who lived under dolmens.’
Less than half of The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries is taken up with testimonies. For the remainder Evans-Wentz applies the anthropology of his day in an attempt to explain the specific ethnology of Celtic faeries. He does this through an examination of the written faerie-lore, and then an assessment of the prevalent learned opinions on the reasons for belief in faeries, and the origins for these beliefs. These interpretations run the gamut, and although some of the archaic anthropological terms uses by Evans-Wentz can be disconcerting, he takes us through the main ideas about how the faerie faith was originated and propagated:
The faeries are a folk memory of a pre-Celtic race, who lived in liminal environmental areas. This might explain faerie motifs such as kidnapping babies and replacing them with their own changelings. Evans-Wentz suggests that the continuation of changeling-type stories represents the depth of this Celtic folk memory, and retained its power even when the faeries had become non-human spirits.
The faeries are dwindled gods, and their stories are corrupted vestiges of Pagan nature worship rituals.
The faeries are fallen angels, trapped on earth after the Fall.
The faeries are the spirits of the dead. Especially in Brittany, but also throughout the Celtic countries, this was probably the commonest belief of the rural people who told and disseminated the stories.
The faeries are simply a different race of metaphysical beings, who interact with humanity on their own terms.
Sensibly, Evans-Wentz comes to the general conclusion that they are all right. But they only work as parts of a whole, where the entirety of faerie belief is constructed from a complex range of influences over large spans of time. And Evans-Wentz consistently emphasises the need to fully understand ‘visions’ of the faeries seen through second-sight or altered states of consciousness, and to incorporate them into any interpretation, because the majority of the stories he heard were either told by seers, about seers, or about someone in an altered state of consciousness. In conclusion he even goes as far as to say: “Fairyland exists as a supernormal state of consciousness into which men and women may enter temporarily in dreams, trances, or in various ecstatic conditions; or for an indefinite period at death.”
Evans-Wentz was well-versed in contemporary theosophist ideas about the true nature of reality, and the part the faeries had in it. Whilst he didn’t attempt to use theosophy to explain the faerie faith, he was open to their idea of using seers and mediums to connect with metaphysical entities, if their testament helped to explain the folklore and the reality of the faeries. Once he began his field research and encountered these seers and mystics first-hand, he became even more convinced that these people were (and had been for centuries) conveying legitimate information about the faeries by altering (purposely or not) their states of consciousness and interacting directly with a metaphysical environment.
But by the time Evans-Wentz made his tour of Celtic countries between 1907-11, both people with the second-sight, and the general belief in faeries was waning. By cataloguing rural stories, anecdotes and theories about the faeries, just before WWI tore apart many of the traditional ways of life, and by doing it in such an open-minded and empathetic manner, he has left us with a rare treasure mine of Celtic faerie data.
Here is a new article on Ancient Origin‘s Premium site. The full article requires subscription but there is an extended preview on the free to view site. It investigates the nature of Palaeolithic cave art, its folkloric motifs, and the altered states of consciousness that ancient shamans used to access supernatural realms, bringing back with them messages that were encoded within the cave art…
Around 30-35,000 years ago there was an explosion of symbolism in Paleolithic human culture around the world, primarily represented by cave art. This cave art is usually located in hard to access underground spaces that must have had significant meaning for the artists and those who would have experienced these strange images by torchlight; And strange they are. Whilst many of the images are naturalistic images of humans, mammals and birds, there is also extensive representation of therianthropic beings, that is part human, part animal shape-shifters. There are also many beings that seem to be distorted humans, perhaps better described as humanoid. These images suggest that the Paleolithic artists were attempting to tell stories and incorporate messages and meaning within the stories, which they deemed important. The fact that many of the beings represented in the cave art are of a supernatural quality is symptomatic of what we might call folklore.
Here’s something a little off-faerie kilter, but actually intimately connected to them. My colleague in all things esoteric, David Halpin, has just published some of his recent research into prehistoric stone circles on the Ancient Origins website. His intriguing hypothesis is that, amongst other uses, the stone circles acted as pregnancy calendars for the communities that used them.
Stone circles were almost certainly used for a variety of purposes, both metaphysical and practical. In a previous post, Going Round in Circles: The Faerie Dance, I suggest that they were partly utilised for shamanic dance rituals, designed to alter the state of consciousness of participants. 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. 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
The Avebury circle dance from the TV series Children of the Stones (1977)
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. 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 (including David’s pregnancy calendar), 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 one of the main reasons 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. One neat theory is that the faeries are one and the same as our psychedelic prehistoric ancestors. Their intense circular dances have embedded themselves 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.
Anyway — here is David’s excellent article, linked below…
Even today, giving birth can be one of the most dangerous moments in a woman’s life. In ancient times it would have been even more so. Matriarchal societies would have tried to ensure the safest environment possible for expectant women. By placing individual marker stones or stakes within a permanent calendar circle of immovable stones aligned to yearly points, a due date could be predicted and prepared for. But how could this knowledge have been forgotten?
Syd Barrett has always been a major influence for me; a lost genius amidst the tumultuous cultural times of the late 1960s. I even managed to slip him into my novel Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, as an oracle of wisdom to my deranged protagonist. It’s no secret that he was an enthusiastic user of LSD, but probably less well-known (apart from amongst his fan-base) that his very irregular head often interacted with the world of the faeries.
Probably the best biography of Syd is Rob Chapman’s Syd Barrett – A Very Irregular Head,published in 2010. Chapman goes to some length in analysing Syd’s early influences, and how they translated into the first Pink Floyd album Piper at the Gates of Dawn in 1967. The very name of the album is taken from a chapter in Kenneth Graham’s Wind in the Willows, where Rat and Mole take a distinctly mystical journey downriver, and encounter the god Pan playing his pipes in tune with the natural world around him: “in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, Mole looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight.” Chapman suggests that Graham’s influence ran deep with Syd, whose ideas about transcendentalism and pantheism came largely from the author’s works. This is confirmed by Syd’s compatriot Emily Young (potentially the inspiration for the Floyd song See Emily Play), who suggested that Syd brought the faerie-tale influences from his childhood into his adult songwriting: “That English Robin and Puck and Goodfellow thing. The slightly whimsical faerie quality that he had, always reading Wind in the Willows. He thought the trees have secrets… I think he was absolutely in touch with that.”
Syd also tapped into other influences, most notably Lewis Carroll and Hilaire Belloc. These were authors who were reacting against the somewhat puritanical children’s literature of the 19th century, by creating subversive stories, deeply entrenched in traditional faerie-tale motifs, but then adding surreal tones on top. This was just in keeping with what Syd was attempting to do with Pink Floyd in 1967, when the cultural zeitgeist was flipping its lid. He was at the forefront of the British psychedelic revolution, but much of his outlook and lyrics were informed by the whimsical longing for an extended childhood, where the influences of Graham, Carroll, Belloc et al. were pervasive. His on-off girlfriend at the time, Libby Gausden, suggested that he got all of his lyrical ideas from these authors and a few pocket books of English nursery rhymes. She also talks about him recreating scenes from his favourite stories when they went for excursions into the country. Whether Syd’s increasing use of LSD informed his interaction with the natural world and the faerie entities he transformed into song, is not known, but is certainly a possibility. There is little doubt that much of the musical and lyrical content of Piper at the Gates of Dawn evolved from psychedelic states, imbuing the record with an otherworldy enchantment, punctuated by the arcane whimsy of Syd’s influences. Outside of the cosmic rock-outs of Astronomy Domine and Interstellar Overdrive, the album is overwhelmingly Syd’s vision of a faerie-tale world, in the English tradition. This is not all fey whimsy though. Matilda Mother is a good example of a faerie-tale laced with hints of darkness:
There was a king who ruled the land.
His majesty was in command.
With silver eyes the scarlet eagle
Showers silver on the people.
Oh Mother, tell me more.
Why’d’ya have to leave me there
Hanging in my infant air
Waiting?
You only have to read the lines
They’re scribbly black and everything shines.
Across the stream with wooden shoes
With bells to tell the king the news
A thousand misty riders climb up
Higher once upon a time.
Wandering and dreaming
The words have different meaning.
Yes they did.
For all the time spent in that room
The doll’s house, darkness, old perfume
And fairy stories held me high on
Clouds of sunlight floating by.
Oh Mother, tell me more
Tell me more.
In Flaming, Syd explicitly takes on the persona of the faerie ‘mad with joy’:
Alone in the clouds all blue
Lying on an eiderdown.
Yippee! You can’t see me
But I can you.
Lazing in the foggy dew
Sitting on a unicorn.
No fair, you can’t hear me
But I can you.
Watching buttercups cup the light
Sleeping on a dandelion.
Too much, I won’t touch you
But then I might.
Screaming through the starlit sky
Traveling by telephone.
Hey ho, here we go
Ever so high.
Alone in the clouds all blue
Lying on an eiderdown.
Yippee! You can’t see me
But I can you.
And in The Gnome, we’re left in no doubt about the subject matter. The other members of the band wanted it left off the album, but Syd was having none of it. It’s quirky and childlike, and will always raise a smile:
I want to tell you a story
About a little man
If I can.
A gnome named Grimble Crumble.
And little gnomes stay in their homes.
Eating, sleeping, drinking their wine.
He wore a scarlet tunic,
A blue green hood,
It looked quite good.
He had a big adventure
Amidst the grass
Fresh air at last.
Wining, dining, biding his time.
And then one day – hooray!
Another way for gnomes to say
Oooooooooomray.
Look at the sky, look at the river
Isn’t it good?
Look at the sky, look at the river
Isn’t it good?
Winding, finding places to go.
And then one day – hooray!
Another way for gnomes to say
Oooooooooomray.
Ooooooooooooooomray.
After Syd left Pink Floyd in 1968, his solo work became more oblique, and less obviously influenced by faerie-tale motifs. Effervescing Elephant (from the 1970 album Barrett) retained the animation of a Belloc pastiche, but Syd’s ever-increasing use of LSD took him into more obscure musical and lyrical territory. In fact, his lovely 1970 song Golden Hair (from the album The Madcap Laughs) might be seen as a book-end to his fascination with faerie-tales, English whimsy and nursery rhymes. He used the words of James Joyce (from his 1907 Chamber Music) to close a door on his past: “My book is closed, I read no more.” Tom Stoppard used this at the beginning of his 2006 play Rock ‘n’ Rollto great effect:
Lean out your window, golden hair
I heard you singing in the midnight air
my book is closed, I read no more
watching the fire dance, on the floor
I’ve left my book, I’ve left my room. For I heard you singing through the gloom
singing and singing, a merry air
lean out the window, golden hair…
Syd Barrett died in 2006, a crazy diamond, who has left a considerable cultural legacy, not least in his English psychedelic faerie-tales, which shone brightly for a brief but beautiful period at the end of the 1960s.
Here’s something a little different. Dr Dinah Roe is a Senior Lecturer in 19th-century literature at Oxford Brookes University. She has just produced this truly insightful introduction to Christina Rossetti’s 1859 mind-bending poem Goblin Market. Is it just the wild imagining of a drugged-up Pre-Raphaelite, a treatise on lesbian incest, a feminist tract, or a vision of the more sinister aspects of the faeries? Maybe all of the above. Rossetti certainly captures the maleficent essence that is often prevalent in faerie-tales. Evidently, she seems quite familiar with the metaphysical realities of these supernatural entities, and weaves them into a dark, dreamlike poem that is both revolutionary for the time and deeply personal. It remains one of the most authentic poetic manifestations of the Otherworld. Dinah Roe’s text is reproduced here (it is freely available through the Creative Commons License), followed by the full text of the poem.
***
Poem Summary
Set in a fairytale world and exploring themes of temptation, sacrifice and salvation, ‘Goblin Market’ tells the story of a fraught encounter between sisters Laura and Lizzie and evil goblin merchants. When Laura exchanges a lock of her golden hair for the chance to taste the goblins’ enchanted ‘fruit forbidden’, she deteriorates until she is ‘knocking at Death’s door’. Her sister Lizzie offers to pay the goblins ‘a silver penny’ for more of their wares, which she hopes will act as an antidote to Laura’s malady. The goblins violently attack Lizzie, smearing their fruits ‘against her mouth’ in a vain attempt ‘to make her eat’. After the goblins are ‘worn out by her resistance’, Lizzie returns home, and Laura kisses the juices from her sister’s face and is restored.
Form and genre
On first reading ‘Goblin Market’, eminent Victorian critic John Ruskin declared that Rossetti’s ‘irregular measures’ were the ‘calamity of modern poetry’ and that she ‘should exercise herself in the severest commonplace of metre until she can write as the public like’.[1] Ruskin’s tin-eared critique unwittingly identifies one of ‘Goblin Market’s’ greatest strengths: its experimental form. A poem whose compelling narrative is animated by a surprising lyric energy, it never conforms to a set rhyme scheme or metrical pattern. For instance, the goblin merchants’ cries in the opening lines tempt not through lavish verbal description, but through form.
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpeck’d cherries,
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheek’d peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries;-
James McPartlin
The sing-song rhythm of alternating dactylic and trochaic feet mimics the sound of street vendors hawking their wares, while the rhyme scheme eschews traditional corresponding rhyme words in favour of the incantatory repetition of ‘berries’ and a seductive sibilance that hints at the fruits’ dark properties. What is essentially a shopping list is transformed by the musical qualities of Rossetti’s technique, anticipating Walter Pater’s Aesthetic creed that ‘all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music’.[2] Drawing on the conventions of a variety of literary genres including the gothic, fantasy, biblical, children’s literature and fable, Rossetti creates a disorienting fairytale atmosphere that is simultaneously seductive and alienating.
Context
Rossetti wrote this poem in 1859 while volunteering at the St Mary Magdalene Penitentiary for ‘fallen women’ in Highgate. Dedicated to the reform and rehabilitation of prostitutes, this Anglo-Catholic institution was remarkable in the period for its conviction that women who had transgressed sexually could be redeemed. Biographers and critics have argued that the themes of temptation, sexual exchange and sisterly redemption in this poem are influenced by its poet’s experience working as an ‘Associate Sister’ at Highgate.
The poem first appeared in Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). Rossetti’s skilful and original blend of sound and sense delighted critics and readers alike, although critical plaudits initially exceeded commercial sales. Its fairytale cadences led the Spectator to declare it ‘a true children’s poem’, yet the paper also noted that its adult themes of
Arthur Rackham
temptation, transgression and redemption also appealed to a mature readership.[3] The poem was greeted with rapturous applause when the publisher Alexander Macmillan read a manuscript version out loud to a working men’s society in Cambridge. Rossetti herself was not writing for children during this period, emphatically declining to contribute to a children’s book on the grounds that ‘children are not among my suggestive subjects’.[4] Literary admirers included Algernon Charles Swinburne, Alfred Tennyson and Lewis Carroll, whose Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland (1865) was partially inspired by the poem. Rossetti returned the compliment in 1874, writing a book of children’s stories entitled Speaking Likenesses, which she hoped would imitate Carroll’s success in the booming children’s market.
Heidi Burton
Illustrations and design
The manuscript version is dedicated to Rossetti’s older sister Maria, but the influence of Christina’s painter-poet brother Dante Gabriel is more obvious in the published text. He convinced his sister to abandon her somewhat cloying original title, ‘A Peep at the Goblins’, provided illustrations from ‘Goblin Market’ for the volume’s frontispiece and title page, designed the binding and advised her on page size and the type of paper to be used. He was also involved in the design of the second edition in 1865, correcting the jawline of one of the sleeping sisters in the title page illustration.
A founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of artists who were particularly interested in the interactions of words and images in general and of poetry and art in particular, Dante Gabriel had previously illustrated William Allingham’s The Music Master and an edition of Tennyson’s poems published by Moxon in 1857. Christina was aware that her brother’s commercial savvy and artistic skill contributed to the success of her first volume of poetry, writing that she preferred her brother as illustrator of her works ‘to the world in general’.[5] As Lorraine Janzen Kooistra has persuasively argued, ‘Goblin Market’ is a landmark publication in the history of English illustration, influencing book design and illustration from the mid-19th century to the present day. The poem has been illustrated upwards of 20 times, ranging from the more traditional Laurence Housman (1893) and Arthur Rackham (1933) gift-book editions to the Pacific Comics version by John Bolton (1984). The detailed surviving correspondence between both Rossetti siblings and Alexander Macmillan about the production of Goblin Market and Other Poems reveals the extent to which the Rossettis shared an artistic vision and exercised control over their work. This Pre-Raphaelite collaborative spirit is also evident in Arthur Hughes’s illustrations for Christina’s later book of children’s verse, Sing-Song (1872), some of which were based on the poet’s own pencil drawings.
Interpretations
Initially received as a moral allegory about the dangers of giving in to temptation, the poem was recast by feminist classic The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) as a parable of female resistance and solidarity. By contrast, in 1973 Playboy Magazine presented the poem as unambiguously pornographic; the text was accompanied by a Kinuko Craft illustration of the goblin attack on Lizzie that left little to the imagination. ‘Goblin Market’ continues to appeal to a popular audience; it has been set to music many times and adapted as a play by Polly Pen and Peggy Harmon in New York (1986) and Nick Hedges in London (1995).
The 20th-century revival of interest in the poem opened the floodgates for Feminist, Marxist, Freudian, Queer Theory and New Historicist critiques which variously interpreted the poem as a warning about the dangers of a free-market economy, a protest against hazardous practices in 19th-century food-adulteration, a Christian tale of sacrifice and salvation, a parable of lesbian empowerment, a fable about anorexia, an expression of incestuous yearning and a tribute to the delicious oral and aural pleasures of poetry itself. ‘Goblin Market’ has continued to thrive in the academic marketplace. The poem continues to attract critical interpretations and artistic adaptations as colourful and diverse as the goblin merchants’ wares, challenging Christina Rossetti’s surely disingenuous claim that she ‘did not mean anything profound by this fairytale’.[6]
Footnotes
[1] John Ruskin to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 24 January, 1861, Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. by Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl, vol. 2 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 391.
[2] Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Literature (London: Macmilllan, [1873] 1913), p.140.
[3] Spectator 12 April 1862, 414-15, quoted in Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), p.282.
[4] Christina Rossetti to Unknown Recipient, 7 March 1862 in The Letters of Christina Rossetti, ed. by Antony H Harrison, vol. 1 (Carolottesville: University Press of Virginia), p.159.
[5] Ibid., p. 232.
[6] William Michael Rossetti, ‘Notes’ from The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti (London: Macmillan, 1904), p.459.
Ravven78’s Goblin Market
Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti (1859)
Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
“Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries,
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries; –
All ripe together
In summer weather, –
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly;
Come buy, come buy:
Our grapes fresh from the vine,
Pomegranates full and fine,
Dates and sharp bullaces,
Rare pears and greengages,
Damsons and bilberries,
Taste them and try:
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright-fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye;
Come buy, come buy.”
Evening by evening
Among the brookside rushes,
Laura bowed her head to hear,
Lizzie veiled her blushes:
Crouching close together
In the cooling weather,
With clasping arms and cautioning lips,
With tingling cheeks and finger-tips.
“Lie close,” Laura said,
Pricking up her golden head:
“We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?”
“Come buy,” call the goblins
Hobbling down the glen.
“Oh,” cried Lizzie, “Laura, Laura,
You should not peep at goblin men.”
Lizzie covered up her eyes,
Covered close lest they should look;
Laura reared her glossy head,
And whispered like the restless brook:
“Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie,
Down the glen tramp little men.
One hauls a basket,
One bears a plate,
One lugs a golden dish
Of many pounds’ weight.
How fair the vine must grow
Whose grapes are so luscious;
How warm the wind must blow
Through those fruit bushes.”
“No,” said Lizzie: “No, no, no;
Their offers should not charm us,
Their evil gifts would harm us.’
She thrust a dimpled finger
In each ear, shut eyes and ran:
Curious Laura chose to linger
Wondering at each merchant man.
One had a cat’s face,
One whisked a tail,
One tramped at a rat’s pace,
One crawled like a snail,
One like a wombat prowled obtuse and furry,
One like a ratel tumbled hurry scurry.
She heard a voice like voice of doves
Cooing all together:
They sounded kind and full of loves
In the pleasant weather.
Laura stretched her gleaming neck
Like a rush-imbedded swan,
Like a lily from the beck,
Like a moonlit poplar branch,
Like a vessel at the launch
When its last restraint is gone.
Backwards up the mossy glen
Turned and trooped the goblin men,
With their shrill repeated cry,
‘Come buy, come buy.’
When they reached where Laura was
They stood stock still upon the moss,
Leering at each other,
Brother with queer brother;
Signalling each other,
Brother with sly brother.
One set his basket down,
One reared his plate;
One began to weave a crown
Of tendrils, leaves, and rough nuts brown
(Men sell not such in any town);
One heaved the golden weight
Of dish and fruit to offer her:
“Come buy, come buy,” was still their cry.
Laura stared but did not stir,
Longed but had no money.
The whisk-tailed merchant bade her taste
In tones as smooth as honey,
The cat-faced purr’d,
The rat-paced spoke a word
Of welcome, and the snail-paced even was heard;
One parrot-voiced and jolly
Cried “Pretty Goblin” still for “Pretty Polly”;
One whistled like a bird.
But sweet-tooth Laura spoke in haste:
“Good folk, I have no coin;
To take were to purloin:
I have no copper in my purse,
I have no silver either,
And all my gold is on the furze
That shakes in windy weather
Above the rusty heather.”
“You have much gold upon your head,”
They answered all together:
“Buy from us with a golden curl.”
She clipped a precious golden lock,
She dropped a tear more rare than pearl,
Then sucked their fruit globes fair or red.
Sweeter than honey from the rock,
Stronger than man-rejoicing wine,
Clearer than water flowed that juice;
She never tasted such before,
How should it cloy with length of use?
She sucked and sucked and sucked the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;
She sucked until her lips were sore;
Then flung the emptied rinds away
But gathered up one kernel stone,
And knew not was it night or day
As she turned home alone.
Lizzie met her at the gate
Full of wise upbraidings:
‘Dear, you should not stay so late,
Twilight is not good for maidens;
Should not loiter in the glen
In the haunts of goblin men.
Do you not remember Jeanie,
How she met them in the moonlight,
Took their gifts both choice and many,
Ate their fruits and wore their flowers
Plucked from bowers
Where summer ripens at all hours?
But ever in the moonlight
She pined and pined away;
Sought them by night and day,
Found them no more, but dwindled and grew gray;
Then fell with the first snow,
While to this day no grass will grow
Where she lies low:
I planted daisies there a year ago
That never blow.
You should not loiter so.”
“Nay, hush,” said Laura:
“Nay, hush, my sister:
I ate and ate my fill,
Yet my mouth waters still:
Tomorrow night I will
Buy more;’ and kissed her:
“Have done with sorrow;
I’ll bring you plums tomorrow
Fresh on their mother twigs,
Cherries worth getting;
You cannot think what figs
My teeth have met in,
What melons icy-cold
Piled on a dish of gold
Too huge for me to hold,
What peaches with a velvet nap,
Pellucid grapes without one seed:
Odorous indeed must be the mead
Whereon they grow, and pure the wave they drink
With lilies at the brink,
And sugar-sweet their sap.”
Golden head by golden head,
Like two pigeons in one nest
Folded in each other’s wings,
They lay down in their curtained bed:
Like two blossoms on one stem,
Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow,
Like two wands of ivory
Tipped with gold for awful kings.
Moon and stars gazed in at them,
Wind sang to them lullaby,
Lumbering owls forebore to fly,
Not a bat flapped to and fro
Round their rest:
Cheek to cheek and breast to breast
Locked together in one rest.
Early in the morning
When the first cock crowed his warning,
Neat like bees, as sweet and busy,
Laura rose with Lizzie:
Fetched in honey, milked the cows,
Aired and set to rights the house,
Kneaded cakes of whitest wheat,
Cakes for dainty mouths to eat,
Next churned butter, whipped up cream,
Fed their poultry, sat and sewed;
Talked as modest maidens should:
Lizzie with an open heart,
Laura in an absent dream,
One content, one sick in part;
One warbling for the mere bright day’s delight,
One longing for the night.
At length slow evening came:
They went with pitchers to the reedy brook;
Lizzie most placid in her look,
Laura most like a leaping flame.
They drew the gurgling water from its deep.
Lizzie plucked purple and rich golden flags,
Then turning homeward said: “The sunset flushes
Those furthest loftiest crags;
Come, Laura, not another maiden lags.
No wilful squirrel wags,
The beasts and birds are fast asleep.’
But Laura loitered still among the rushes,
And said the bank was steep.
And said the hour was early still,
The dew not fall’n, the wind not chill;
Listening ever, but not catching
The customary cry,
“Come buy, come buy,”
With its iterated jingle
Of sugar-baited words:
Not for all her watching
Once discerning even one goblin
Racing, whisking, tumbling, hobbling –
Let alone the herds
That used to tramp along the glen,
In groups or single,
Of brisk fruit-merchant men.
Till Lizzie urged, “O Laura, come;
I hear the fruit-call, but I dare not look:
You should not loiter longer at this brook:
Come with me home.
The stars rise, the moon bends her arc,
Each glow-worm winks her spark,
Let us get home before the night grows dark:
For clouds may gather
Though this is summer weather,
Put out the lights and drench us through;
Then if we lost our way what should we do?”
Laura turned cold as stone
To find her sister heard that cry alone,
That goblin cry,
“Come buy our fruits, come buy.”
Must she then buy no more such dainty fruit?
Must she no more such succous pasture find,
Gone deaf and blind?
Her tree of life drooped from the root:
She said not one word in her heart’s sore ache:
But peering thro’ the dimness, nought discerning,
Trudged home, her pitcher dripping all the way;
So crept to bed, and lay
Silent till Lizzie slept;
Then sat up in a passionate yearning,
And gnashed her teeth for baulked desire, and wept
As if her heart would break.
Day after day, night after night,
Laura kept watch in vain
In sullen silence of exceeding pain.
She never caught again the goblin cry,
“Come buy, come buy”; –
She never spied the goblin men
Hawking their fruits along the glen:
But when the noon waxed bright
Her hair grew thin and gray;
She dwindled, as the fair full moon doth turn
To swift decay and burn
Her fire away.
One day remembering her kernel-stone
She set it by a wall that faced the south;
Dewed it with tears, hoped for a root,
Watched for a waxing shoot,
But there came none.
It never saw the sun,
It never felt the trickling moisture run:
While with sunk eyes and faded mouth
She dreamed of melons, as a traveller sees
False waves in desert drouth
With shade of leaf-crowned trees,
And burns the thirstier in the sandful breeze.
She no more swept the house,
Tended the fowls or cows,
Fetched honey, kneaded cakes of wheat,
Brought water from the brook:
But sat down listless in the chimney-nook
And would not eat.
Tender Lizzie could not bear
To watch her sister’s cankerous care,
Yet not to share.
She night and morning
Caught the goblins’ cry:
“Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:” –
Beside the brook, along the glen,
She heard the tramp of goblin men,
The voice and stir
Poor Laura could not hear;
Longed to buy fruit to comfort her,
But feared to pay too dear.
She thought of Jeanie in her grave,
Who should have been a bride;
But who for joys brides hope to have
Fell sick and died
In her gay prime,
In earliest winter time,
With the first glazing rime,
With the first snow-fall of crisp winter time.
Till Laura dwindling
Seemed knocking at Death’s door.
Then Lizzie weighed no more
Better and worse;
But put a silver penny in her purse,
Kissed Laura, crossed the heath with clumps of furze
At twilight, halted by the brook:
And for the first time in her life
Began to listen and look.
Laughed every goblin
When they spied her peeping:
Came towards her hobbling,
Flying, running, leaping,
Puffing and blowing,
Chuckling, clapping, crowing,
Clucking and gobbling,
Mopping and mowing,
Full of airs and graces,
Pulling wry faces,
Demure grimaces,
Cat-like and rat-like,
Ratel- and wombat-like,
Snail-paced in a hurry,
Parrot-voiced and whistler,
Helter-skelter, hurry skurry,
Chattering like magpies,
Fluttering like pigeons,
Gliding like fishes, –
Hugged her and kissed her:
Squeezed and caressed her:
Stretched up their dishes,
Panniers, and plates:
“Look at our apples
Russet and dun,
Bob at our cherries,
Bite at our peaches,
Citrons and dates,
Grapes for the asking,
Pears red with basking
Out in the sun,
Plums on their twigs;
Pluck them and suck them,
Pomegranates, figs.” –
“Good folk,” said Lizzie,
Mindful of Jeanie:
“Give me much and many:” –
Held out her apron,
Tossed them her penny.
“Nay, take a seat with us,
Honour and eat with us,”
They answered grinning:
“Our feast is but beginning.
Night yet is early,
Warm and dew-pearly,
Wakeful and starry:
Such fruits as these
No man can carry;
Half their bloom would fly,
Half their dew would dry,
Half their flavour would pass by.
Sit down and feast with us,
Be welcome guest with us,
Cheer you and rest with us.” –
“Thank you,” said Lizzie: “But one waits
At home alone for me:
So without further parleying,
If you will not sell me any
Of your fruits though much and many,
Give me back my silver penny
I tossed you for a fee.” –
They began to scratch their pates,
No longer wagging, purring,
But visibly demurring,
Grunting and snarling.
One called her proud,
Cross-grained, uncivil;
Their tones waxed loud,
Their looks were evil.
Lashing their tails
They trod and hustled her,
Elbowed and jostled her,
Clawed with their nails,
Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,
Tore her gown and soiled her stocking,
Twitched her hair out by the roots,
Stamped upon her tender feet,
Held her hands and squeezed their fruits
Against her mouth to make her eat.
White and golden Lizzie stood,
Like a lily in a flood, –
Like a rock of blue-veined stone
Lashed by tides obstreperously, –
Like a beacon left alone
In a hoary roaring sea,
Sending up a golden fire, –
Like a fruit-crowned orange-tree
White with blossoms honey-sweet
Sore beset by wasp and bee, –
Like a royal virgin town
Topped with gilded dome and spire
Close beleaguered by a fleet
Mad to tug her standard down.
One may lead a horse to water,
Twenty cannot make him drink.
Though the goblins cuffed and caught her,
Coaxed and fought her,
Bullied and besought her,
Scratched her, pinched her black as ink,
Kicked and knocked her,
Mauled and mocked her,
Lizzie uttered not a word;
Would not open lip from lip
Lest they should cram a mouthful in:
But laughed in heart to feel the drip
Of juice that syruped all her face,
And lodged in dimples of her chin,
And streaked her neck which quaked like curd.
At last the evil people,
Worn out by her resistance,
Flung back her penny, kicked their fruit
Along whichever road they took,
Not leaving root or stone or shoot;
Some writhed into the ground,
Some dived into the brook
With ring and ripple,
Some scudded on the gale without a sound,
Some vanished in the distance.
In a smart, ache, tingle,
Lizzie went her way;
Knew not was it night or day;
Sprang up the bank, tore thro’ the furze,
Threaded copse and dingle,
And heard her penny jingle
Bouncing in her purse, –
Its bounce was music to her ear.
She ran and ran
As if she feared some goblin man
Dogged her with gibe or curse
Or something worse:
But not one goblin skurried after,
Nor was she pricked by fear;
The kind heart made her windy-paced
That urged her home quite out of breath with haste
And inward laughter.
She cried, “Laura,” up the garden.
“Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me;
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men.”
Laura started from her chair,
Flung her arms up in the air,
Clutched her hair:
“Lizzie, Lizzie, have you tasted
For my sake the fruit forbidden?
Must your light like mine be hidden,
Your young life like mine be wasted,
Undone in mine undoing,
And ruined in my ruin,
Thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden?” –
She clung about her sister,
Kissed and kissed and kissed her:
Tears once again
Refreshed her shrunken eyes,
Dropping like rain
After long sultry drouth;
Shaking with aguish fear, and pain,
She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth.
Her lips began to scorch,
That juice was wormwood to her tongue,
She loathed the feast:
Writhing as one possessed she leaped and sung,
Rent all her robe, and wrung
Her hands in lamentable haste,
And beat her breast.
Her locks streamed like the torch
Borne by a racer at full speed,
Or like the mane of horses in their flight,
Or like an eagle when she stems the light
Straight toward the sun,
Or like a caged thing freed,
Or like a flying flag when armies run.
Swift fire spread through her veins,
knocked at her heart
Met the fire smouldering there
And overbore its lesser flame;
She gorged on bitterness without a name:
Ah! fool, to choose such part
Of soul-consuming care!
Sense failed in the mortal strife:
Like the watch-tower of a town
Which an earthquake shatters down,
Like a lightning-stricken mast,
Like a wind-uprooted tree
Spun about,
Like a foam-topped waterspout
Cast down headlong in the sea,
She fell at last;
Pleasure past and anguish past,
Is it death or is it life?
Life out of death.
That night long Lizzie watched by her,
Counted her pulse’s flagging stir,
Felt for her breath,
Held water to her lips, and cooled her face
With tears and fanning leaves:
But when the first birds chirped about their eaves,
And early reapers plodded to the place
Of golden sheaves,
And dew-wet grass
Bowed in the morning winds so brisk to pass,
And new buds with new day
Opened of cup-like lilies on the stream,
Laura awoke as from a dream,
Laughed in the innocent old way,
Hugged Lizzie but not twice or thrice;
Her gleaming locks showed not one thread of grey,
Her breath was sweet as May,
And light danced in her eyes.
Days, weeks, months, years
Afterwards, when both were wives
With children of their own;
Their mother-hearts beset with fears,
Their lives bound up in tender lives;
Laura would call the little ones
And tell them of her early prime,
Those pleasant days long gone
Of not-returning time:
Would talk about the haunted glen,
The wicked, quaint fruit-merchant men,
Their fruits like honey to the throat
But poison in the blood;
(Men sell not such in any town):
Would tell them how her sister stood
In deadly peril to do her good,
And win the fiery antidote:
Then joining hands to little hands
Would bid them cling together, –
“For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather;
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands.”
Here’s another short excerpt from the tale I’m writing about a folklorist’s visit to a psychiatric hospital in England during the summer of 1970. It is the next scene with my Chilean exile Fernanda, following on from Fernanda, Faeries and Ravens…
I was alone again. Albe, Moore and Scrope had disappeared up-country somewhere leaving me in my quarters with nothing but the sound of the ticking clock, marking out the minutes and hours; creating time to reflect on the deficiencies of my life to date. What was I doing here? I’d swapped the intolerable isolation of my university research for the unendurable confinement of this lunatic asylum. As the days had dripped by, I recognised the old symptoms re-emerging: dulled vision, stomach cramps, endemic procrastination, and a growing fear of going outside and interacting with people. I was even beginning to suspect that the hospital orderlies had all been infected with the insanity that they dealt with on a daily basis. It was usually the timbre of their voices; the merest hint of derangement that spoke of exposure to madness over a prolonged period. It was worse in the male staff. They all seemed to exhibit a disquieting emptiness in their tone, as if they were reading from a script, like bad actors. Maybe it was because they were suspicious of me. Maybe they wondered what I was doing here as well, and were acting accordingly. I went over each conversation with them since I’d been here, further instilling the the shaky paranoia that had made itself at home with me. This was not good. I had to break out from this cycle of thought before I went to meet Fernanda, otherwise I might have one of my flip-outs. Christ, they might even put me on a ward if that happened.
I pulled myself up to the desk and poised my fingers over the Olympia that Moore had loaned me, to put my notes in order. I knew I wasn’t going to manage to do anything, but the act of intention distracted me from incessantly thinking the worst of everything. I rolled the sheet of paper up and locked it in position. I stared at it for a few moments, then typed: My sister… I’m so sorry. Please come back… . My breathing shallowed and the usual tears welled up. I yanked out the paper, screwed it up and flung it over the room. One thing was for sure, she wasn’t coming back.
***
I made my way out to the vegetable gardens in the late afternoon. The sun was shining for once, but the wind took the heat out of it. In my head I went over some of the faerie motifs from the Aarne-Thompson index, agitated, and wondering if Fernanda would come up with anything beyond her neurotic imaginings about nature spirits. I stopped for a moment behind the laundry building, closed my eyes and pictured her. My hands shook a little. I steadied my breathing and walked on.
She was sitting on the tree stump where she fed the ravens, eyes closed, head bowed, her hands clasped together as if in prayer. I coughed before I reached her, so as to not startle her. She waited until I was a few feet away and slowly raised her head. She kept her eyes closed for a moment, then opened them; black and watery.
‘Hola,’ she said, continuing to stare ahead.
‘Hey Fernanda. Nice day… bit windy.’
God, what did I sound like? Why did I always make personal contact so uncomfortable? She didn’t seem to notice, but when she turned to look at me the curve of her lips suggested that she was reading my awkwardness perfectly.
‘It’s not a good day my friend. There is some bad news.’
I tensed up, shoulders and stomach. She observed me for a few seconds, and her words began to echo inside my head somehow. At that moment I was quite sure she was putting them there herself, negating the need to say anything else by reinforcing what she had already said by direct, wordless communication.
‘Telepatía,’ she whispered, standing up, close to me, her black eyes still pooled with tears. ‘I know you don’t believe, but it’s true anyway.’
‘I’m not quite sure what to believe Fernanda. Why is there bad news?’
‘There has been a suicide.’
‘Really? In the hospital?’
‘No, here. In the cobertizo.’
She motioned to the tool shed on the edge of the gardens. My pulse quickened.
‘A faerie has ended her life there… she did it for you.’
I stared at her, looking for something that would abbreviate her words in her face. There was nothing there.
‘Fernanda, please don’t play games with me. I can’t deal with this sort of thing right now.’
She moved closer to me and stroked back some hair that had fallen over my eyes.
‘We know you’ve been thinking about ending your life my friend. We know how sad you’ve been. She did it so you do not have to. It was a selfless act. Las Hadas have no ego. This one soaked up your sorrow and and ended her existence so that you can continue. She knew your life must carry on, but there had to be a sacrifice. The sacrifice was her life.’
A head-rush dulled my vision for a moment. My hands were shaking so much I put them behind my back instinctively.
‘Fernanda, I… I… .’
‘You must come and see. It is tragic but it is beautiful. You must come and see… come.’
She reached round, took my hand from behind me and led me, unresisting to the shed.
***
We walked back slowly to the main building of the hospital hand in hand. We didn’t speak, but I could hear her lilting voice in my head, sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish: it’s ok… you’ll be ok. It was meant to be… mantener la calma. In between her words I tried desperately to rationalise what I’d just seen. But every attempt failed. What I’d seen was not rational, it was absurdly irrational, but as real as the neo-gothic walls of the hospital in front of us. I was going to have to overhaul my understanding of the nuts and bolts of this world. It had just been forced upon me. There was no choice. The only choice was acceptance.
She left me at the door with a kiss on the cheek but no words. I wondered why it was she who was going back to the ward instead of me. If I told Dr Dawkins what I’d just experienced, he’d probably commit me on the spot.
In my head I heard Fernanda’s voice again: she is dead but dreaming. Soñando.
‘My sister or the faerie?’ I said out loud. There was no response. I walked, unseeing, back to my quarters.
The website Ancient Originshave been kind enough to add me as a guest author. Below is a link to a new article The Origins of the Faeries.
The faeries appear in folklore from all over the world as metaphysical beings, who, given the right conditions, are able to interact with the physical world. They’re known by many names but there is a conformity to what they represent, and perhaps also to their origins. From the Huldufólk in Iceland to the Tuatha Dé Danann in Ireland, and the Manitou of Native Americans, these are apparently intelligent entities that live unseen beside us, until their occasional manifestations in this world become encoded into our cultures through folktales, anecdotes and testimonies. In his 1691 treatise on the faeries of Aberfoyle, Scotland, the Reverend Robert Kirk suggested they represented a Secret Commonwealth, living in a parallel reality to ours, with a civilization and morals of their own, only visible to seers and clairvoyants. His assessment fits well with both folktale motifs, and some modern theories about their ancient origins and how they have permeated the collective human consciousness. So who are the faeries, where do they come from, and what do they want?
Here is a recent article by David Halpin, a colleague of mine who writes extensively, and excellently about esoteric subject matter, including the faeries. It is published on the Ancient Originswebsite, where he is a guest author.
“… the realm of fairy or the crypto-terrestrial is more often encountered through places considered sacred or having an alignment of some kind in relation to auspicious days in the yearly cycle, such as solstices, equinoxes and new moons. In many legends passed down from oral traditions the liminal moments at dusk, between sunset and moonrise, are when the ethereal forms of these beings are best seen.”
an a very small figure of a woman came out with a bowlful and offered it to her, but the thirsty woman, ignorant of fairy customs and the penalty attending their infringement, declined the kind offer of refreshment, and immediately found herself a prisoner in the hillock. She was led to an apartment containing a chest full of meal and a great bag of wool, and was told by the fairy that when she had eaten all the meal and spun all the wool she would be free to return to her home. The prisoner at once set herself to eating and spinning assiduously, but without apparent result, and despairing of completing the task consulted an old man of very sad countenance who had long been a captive in the hillock. He willingly gave her his advice, which was to wet her left eye with saliva each morning before she settled down to her task. She followed this advice, and gradually the wool and the meal were exhausted. Then the fairy granted her freedom, but in doing so cursed the old man, and said that she had it in her power to keep him in the hillock for ever.”
published in 2010. Chapman goes to some length in analysing Syd’s early influences, and how they translated into the first Pink Floyd album Piper at the Gates of Dawn in 1967. The very name of the album is taken from a chapter in Kenneth Graham’s Wind in the Willows, where Rat and Mole take a distinctly mystical journey downriver, and encounter the god Pan playing his pipes in tune with the natural world around him: “in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, Mole looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, 
gleaming in the growing daylight.” Chapman suggests that Graham’s influence ran deep with Syd, whose ideas about transcendentalism and pantheism came largely from the author’s works. This is confirmed by Syd’s compatriot Emily Young (potentially the inspiration for the Floyd song See Emily Play), who suggested that Syd brought the faerie-tale influences from his childhood into his adult songwriting: “That English Robin and Puck and Goodfellow thing. The slightly whimsical faerie quality that he had, always reading Wind in the Willows. He thought the trees have secrets… I think he was absolutely in touch with that.”
into song, is not known, but is certainly a possibility. There is little doubt that much of the musical and lyrical content of Piper at the Gates of Dawn evolved from psychedelic states, imbuing the record with an otherworldy enchantment, punctuated by the arcane whimsy of Syd’s influences. Outside of the cosmic rock-outs of Astronomy Domine and Interstellar Overdrive, the album is overwhelmingly Syd’s vision of a faerie-tale world, in the English tradition. This is not all fey whimsy though. Matilda Mother is a good example of a faerie-tale laced with hints of darkness:
The 20th-century revival of interest in the poem opened the floodgates for Feminist, Marxist, Freudian, Queer Theory and New Historicist critiques which variously interpreted the poem as a warning about the dangers of a free-market economy, a protest against hazardous practices in 19th-century food-adulteration, a Christian tale of sacrifice and salvation, a parable of lesbian empowerment, a fable about anorexia, an expression of incestuous yearning and a tribute to the delicious oral and aural pleasures of poetry itself. ‘Goblin Market’ has continued to thrive in the academic marketplace. The poem continues to attract critical interpretations and artistic adaptations as colourful and diverse as the goblin merchants’ wares, challenging Christina Rossetti’s surely disingenuous claim that she ‘did not mean anything profound by this fairytale’.[6]
