Deadbutdreaming is delighted to welcome back David Halpin as a guest author. David is an Irish folklorist and author, who writes extensively about the faerie phenomenon from a Fortean perspective, and has produced a large corpus of work, much of which can be found on his excellent Facebook blog Circle Stories. The following triumvirate of articles originally appeared there, and are an investigation in to ‘the Otherworld around us’, looking at how the faeries interact with humanity via the landscape, the air, and through consciousness. Thanks to David for giving permission to republish these insightful articles.
The Otherworld Around Us
Mounds and Ancient Places
Something I have written about previously is the observation that we might interpret the concept of fairy mounds in both archaic and contemporary ways. For example, we once thought fairies emerged from a hole in the earth. Then, as we became more technological we considered the possibility that they might come from a hole in the sky or another dimension. Today, there is a further school of thought which posits that fairies come from the depths of our collective consciousness. Of course, no matter which of these explanations, if any, we might prefer, we still have to account for the consequences of the interaction.
One immediate reason for this is the description of fairy mounds as being both places of the dead and also places of living contact. Claude Lecouteux reminds us that this is an overlooked aspect of the mounds: ancestors, spirits, and the beings we call fairies are affecting forces that impact upon us. From an ancestral healing perspective, by participating in this interaction we also impact upon our own future paths. Within Asian folk-magic, and even formal Tibetan Buddhism, rim-né are the effects of spiritual forces upon the living. This can often result in unexpected physical and psychological interference following a visit to an ancient place. Indigenous Oceanic peoples also take this consideration seriously when visiting ancestral sites and memory in a way that, perhaps, Irish people have to recover again. Obviously, when we interpret these sites through the discipline of archaeology and history we may not have an opportunity to acknowledge the reality of metaphysical considerations, never mind incorporating protection rites from a folk-magic perspective.
This is nothing revelatory: after all, the person we get to fix our cooker is not usually the person we ask to cook a meal with it, as Gordon White once observed! Returning to Lecouteux again, he reminds us that old Norwegian Christian laws (Kristenret) condemned pagans for “believing in land spirits, whether found in groves or mounds or waterfalls.” He goes on to say that this distinction is important because it shows that there was not one particular high pantheon being worshiped, but instead localised “numinous forces” which were more important to the ordinary person and their life. There were also two very interesting expressions used to describe this type of interaction; “to believe in the hills” and “to believe in the mounds”. Writing in Ireland’s Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth, author Mark Williams tells us that in the 8th century Hymn of Fíacc we are told that the Irish used to worship the síde; they did not believe in the godhead of the true trinity. Whether this means they worshipped the beings emerging from the mounds, or the sites themselves, Williams writes, “Thus the original author of the Hymn may have meant that the pagan Irish used to venerate the mounds.” This is interesting when compared to those previous Norwegian expressions.
Writing about the mounds of The Boyne Valley, Williams also notes that, “Overall, it looks highly plausible, though at present unprovable, that there was a late-Iron Age cult focused on supernatural beings-whether gods, deified ancestors, or the spirits of the dead-associated with the mounds of the Boyne necropolis, and perhaps others as well.” Obviously, many of these sites are much older than Iron Age veneration and go back 5000 years in some cases. These places are still everywhere around Ireland even though so many have also been destroyed. With travel being so limited at the time, we can speculate that this probably means that we had countless local spirits and methods of veneration. Further testament to this might be how even today in societies where such beings and magic practices exist, this is the chaotic localised animism which seems to spontaneously and naturally occur.
An example of this is the Ulchi shamanistic tradition of passing down particular spells, prayers, and magical techniques through families, but there is also the room for new ways of interacting with the spirit-beings and forces, depending upon the practitioner. In this context, entering the supernatural realm from the same place does not mean that the traveller needs to follow the same direction or path once inside. I find it interesting that some see these places as having been communal and open to everyone, whereas throughout the world it seems more evidential that these were sites only open to the few. In this interpretation they are initiatory places, perhaps, and in order to meet with the ‘gods’ a neophyte or priest/priestess needed specific preparation: ceremony and secrets being important in this context.
Our Irish traditions also warn us continually of how dangerous it is to interact with the beings of the mounds. Inside these places a type of sensory deprivation may have meant that the art that surrounded a person (and, perhaps, entheogenic consumption) aided the transition to the Otherworld. It’s interesting to note some of the similar symbols found in caves said to be used for shamanistic-type journeying and those found at ancient Irish sites. Understanding these sites in this context as entrances to the Otherworld as opposed to farming calendars or tombs surely seems to be a valid argument.
The 5000 year old Orkney site, Maeshowe, for example, is now believed to have been a place where the Otherworld could be accessed aided by ritualised construction techniques. J van der Reijden of the University of Highlands and Islands Archaeology Institute, describes the oppositional nature of the side-chambers within the mound as being where the membrane between the human world and spirit world is breached. Similar claims have been made regarding monuments having consciousness-changing purposes such as the Heb Sed festival of ancient Egypt. This was a way for the king to renew his land and commune with the gods and goddesses dwelling in the spirit world. By entering the carefully built structures. the king was seen to have left the human world and travelled to the Otherworld. Again, when we consider that many of these places have alignments to equinoxes and solstices we might consider this further evidence for a non-farming purpose.
The stone circles of Gobekli Tepe predate farming by thousands of years and also had a ritual use involving stars, vibration and feasting. Giulio Magli, an archaeoastronomer at The Polytechnic University of Milan proposes that Gobekli Tepe was built to acknowledge Sirius, and possibly the moon. Vincenzo Orofino of the Universita del Salento has demonstrated that Gobekli Tepe also contains an alignment to the cross-quarter between the summer solstice and the autumn equinox. In other words, at the astronomical point we know in Ireland, at least today, as Lughnasadh. Again, a pre-farming alignment.
Sensory deprivation was also a hugely important aspect of the Eleusinian mysteries of ancient Greece, where initiates were brought into subterranean temples and caves where they would, following the drinking of a psychedelic brew, discover the meaning of life and death and know that consciousness could never die.
Although we might want to believe that the effort it took to build these ancient sites and monuments was for communal purposes, let us remember that this wasn’t the case with the Great Pyramid or the temples of Central and South America. We now know through genetic evidence that this most likely wasn’t the case in Ireland, either. Newgrange contained the remains of a dynastic elite who practiced incest much like other hierarchical ruling systems of ancient cultures. The oldest names of Newgrange are Síd in Broga and Brug Mac Ind Óc. These names mean ‘Mansion of the mound of the Otherworld’ and ‘Mansion of the Young Son’. Both seem to have more in common with a description of rebirth or elevated consciousness than farming.
The Air and Sky
Although many fairy encounters contain incidences of travelling through the air, and from fairy mound to fairy mound, the occasions where the fairies soar into outer space are few and far between. This is an often overlooked, and even misrepresented factor when trying to match fairy abductions to UFO encounters. However, the common links between soul-flight, shamanic journeying, fairy abductions, and, indeed, UFOs, are still tantalising. Writing in their paper, ‘Small Gods, Small Demons: Remnants of an Archaic Fairy Cult in Central and South-Eastern Europe’, Professor Éva Pócs, explains, “The typical fairy communication known from folklore accounts usually takes place in a characteristic space-time structure that is also a form typical of possession by the dead as it appears in this region.” This is an important consideration as a distortion of space-time is often reported by those who have such experiences. In fact, the trooping fairies sighted by many here in Ireland sounds quite similar, with a flow of airborne lights moving from ancient monument and site to another turning up frequently in our folklore
In this example from Co. Wicklow we have a very definite description of airborne fairy travel: “At this Rath in Krishuna it is said the fairies gather on certain nights. They ride on the wings of the wind and retreat at cockcrow to the rath of Mullaghmast in Kildare. The people of this neighbourhood are said to keep a black cock in order to defeat the more evil minded of the fairies and to preserve them from harm.”
This fairy wind seems to have the power to carry a person over the threshold between the fairy Otherworld and our own world. Sometimes people describe being transported in strange carriages and even upon brooms. These are lifted in the air and carried faster than seems possible. The destination, again, is dream-like, often, it seems, deliberately so, as if to mask another reality just below the surface, as in this example from Co. Longford: “Some time ago men were putting up hay in a field in Cam. A fairy wind came and took away the hay. A man threw his hat after it. He said it was lucky to do that – that the fairy wind wouldn’t do any harm, but when the wind settled there was a boy gone with it. One night when the boy’s father was going by Pat Cunningham’s fort, he heard fairy music, he went into the fort and found the boy.”
Robert Kirk, the 17th-century Scottish fairy folklorist, also wrote about such “secret paths” which a person might stumble onto and be then led to seeing the fair folk and maybe being captured for a while. Kirk interestingly describes the movement of fairies as “swimming in the air near the earth” which almost sounds like a travelling river of energetic consciousness, or a separate reality.
In his book, Spirit Paths: An exploration of Otherworldly Routes, Paul Devereaux tells us of an 18th-century witness to the fairy parade. They describe ‘the fairies’ as “…leaping and frisking in the air, making a path in the air.” John Keel, the American journalist and writer who studied strange phenomenon speculated that all otherworldly beings emanated from what he termed the ‘super-spectrum’. This was the range of the electromagnetic spectrum not usually discernible through ordinary human senses. Keel noticed that many accounts of UFOs, fairies, and demonic beings emerging into our reality were often accompanied by reports of them changing colours before settling on their physical form. This would sometimes take the form of coloured lights in the sky or the beings seeming to fly out from the rainbow itself. As Keel writes in his fascinating work, The Eighth Tower: “When men of ancient Greece and Rome saw what we now term UFOs, they noted that the objects changed colours, conforming to the known colour spectrum. So the word specter was born.”
Asian shamanistic techniques also use a type of rainbow-path to ascend into the upper worlds in order to contact both ancestor spirits and other forms of consciousness. In this account from 1671, from ‘The Troll Labour’ in Thomas Keightley’s, The Fairy Mythology, Illustrative of the Romance and Superstition of Various Countries (1850), a woman describes how a fairy asks for her help in delivering a baby and transports the woman upon the wind: “When she returned, she told me, that when she went with the man out at the gate, it seemed to her as if she was carried for a time along in the wind, and so she came to a room, on one side of which was a little dark chamber, in which his wife lay in bed in great agony. My wife went up to her, and, after a little while, aided her till she brought forth the child after the same manner as other human beings. The man then offered her food, and when she refused it, he thanked her, and accompanied her out, and then she was carried along, in the same way in the wind, and after a while came again to the gate, just at ten o’clock.”
When taken to the Fairy or Spirit Otherworld a person may be chosen to become a healer or communicator between the human and spirit world. One particular way this is achieved is by having magic stones or objects placed inside the persons body. In terms of parallels between medicine men/ women and the Irish bean feasa, this was deemed to bestow an ability to heal the sick, see future events and deal with ancestral spirits. Near Dromkeel stone circle in 1992 a local farmer, John McManus, described how he was taken from his home by four small figures. He awoke in a circular ‘room’ where he was given an electric shock and something was put inside him. He then found himself back in his house where the floor was covered in mud and stones.
Three years later McManus had another experience where he felt compelled to walk to his window and watch lights appearing to drift across the nearby mountains. He felt as if he had been drawn to witness in order to participate. This is a well documented aspect of fairy lore. In many cases it takes the form of fairies playing a hurling match which they cannot begin until a human interacts with them in some way. Staying with McManus, this example of an object being placed inside a person is reported in all indigenous cultures when recounting experiences with fairy-type beings. Sometimes the experience takes the form of a person feeling as if they are being cut into pieces only to be put together again. In other examples the object placed in the body becomes the instigator of new healing knowledge or psychopomp abilities. There is no requirement to deny the physicality of what has taken place except in contemporary Western culture.
Writing in Aboriginal Men of High Degree, A.P. Elkin describes an Australian Aboriginal account of a medicine man taken by ‘spirits’ into the sky world where an operation is performed on him by having quartz crystals inserted into his side. He could henceforth visit the sky and establish communication with the sky spirits and even be summoned by them. The Aboriginal tribes of The Southern Murray region reflect the same beliefs as other Australian indigenous people which they say have been passed down in oral form for over 60,000 years – Aboriginal cave art depicting these encounters with the sky-serpent spirits have been dated to at least 40,000 BCE.
Returning to Ireland, this account recorded in 1926 is interesting, “I was learning to speak Irish at the time. A gang of us would be sent over beyond Lough Gara every week to be taught by the master there. Some of us would go on bicycles and would often cycle home in the dark. We were nervous when we’d cycle by the lake as we would often see three lights skimming across the water. Sometimes the lights would appear in the trees at the lake edge and other times they would submerge beneath the water. Our parents put the lights down to the work of God. ‘Don’t worry about them, they’re only lost souls trying to get into heaven. They’re no harm.’”
The only frame of reference at the time was religion and lost souls, which in most cases was short-hand for fairies. This account from Wentzs’s The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries describes another airborne fairy encounter with multiple possible interpretations: “As they approached Listowel the doctor writes that he witnessed what he thought was the light of a house about a half mile ahead of him. On approach, though, the light began to behave in a very mysterious manner, “Moving up and down, to and fro, diminishing to a spark, then expanding into a yellow, luminous flame.” As they rode on, the doctor and his companion then saw two further lights behaving in a similarly bizarre fashion. The doctor tells us that the lights were six feet high and four feet wide and within each one was, “…a radiant being having human form.” The two lights then glided towards each other until they touched and the beings inside were able to walk between each light as if it was one individual orb.
Many Irish fairy encounters not only describe the fairies moving through the air but an entire fairy mound itself, which is seen to light up and spin, and at other times a parade of lights are seen to emanate from it and take off across the sky. This aspect has been documented at the rath situated near Keadeen, Co. Wicklow. In this example the lights also seem to foretell of a death: “One night about three years ago the Hartnetts who lived in Gardenfield were going to the fair in Drom and they saw a bright light shining over near Mrs. Dowling’s house. They said to themselves that it was very early Mrs. Dowling was up. Mrs. Dowling saw the same light that night moving up around Harnett’s house then it came down and it went into the fort and disappeared. That happened before Mr. Harnett’s death.”
Consciousness
The idea of a connected consciousness from which fairies emerge is but one possible explanation for their origin posited by some thinkers. Within this Otherworld lie infinite possibilities on the one hand, and, an already mapped out fate for all on the other. This factor often draws comparisons to some of the seeming contradictions which quantum mechanics displays. For example, a talent which demonstrates this type of prophecy was that of a seventh child being able to read the stars. In this case it is the foretelling of destiny which was likely consulted but perhaps there is a deeper purpose here in relation to more complex questions such as auspicious dates and conjunctions. These are tentative speculations but we do have folkloric evidence of this purpose in the Irish archives.
However, if fate is mapped out and there is nothing we can do about it, then why are fairies also associated with magic and interventions which might help someone avoid their fate? Also, not everyone can transmute these experiences and encounters into healing, art or writing, and there are many sad tales of people being driven mad or else considered deluded and who often ended up ostracised, shunned and even committed to mental asylums following an Otherworldly experience . Indeed, there are also many cases where the person begins to question their own sanity and they try to avoid the visions and communications. It can seem difficult to fathom why fairies might put a person in contact with such overwhelming consciousness overloads if these are the results. This leaves us with the enigma of fairy intervention (and purpose) to explain: why would the beings of the Otherworld pass on the wisdom in the first place if they know what it will do?
If, as some speculate, fairies are the emissaries of a higher consciousness that we are connected to, do we put their actions down to a deeper wisdom of our subconscious which seems to be triggering us to evolve at certain moments almost like the monolith appearing in the film 2001? However, it is the apparent agency and individuality of fairies which contradicts this way of thinking. Another consideration here is that within Irish fairy lore, for example, fairies often appear in the form of communal fears or concerns such as the association with the dangers of childbirth at a time when infant mortality and that of pregnant women was very high. There is an interesting reversal here, though, in that it is usually the human midwife who helps the supernatural being as opposed to the other way around. Another example of fairies being outside the limitations of human consciousness and time itself is how Irish tales of the Banshee often contain odd details such as the Banshee referring to generations of a family who have not been born yet, as if she is seeing events in the future. Again, does this mean that fate is always changeable or that there are fractal-like outcomes such as the many worlds hypothesis that fairies simply want to to shunt us between? If so, why?
Of course, as human beings, when not imprisoned within our tiny sliver of reception of the electromagnetic spectrum (From where all of our sensory input emerges) we are further restricted by the information our culture confers upon us even in the most subtle, yet restricting ways, such as tradition, rites and nativism. As Claude Lecouteux writes in his book, Demons and Spirits of the Land, “…the syncretic nature of these creatures has conferred upon them specificity so strong it conceals their origin.” So much for ever understanding fairy origins, or even purpose, in that case! The one constant in every explanation and interpretation is us, the experiencers.
So why are we so reluctant to venture inwards when contemplating fairies instead of creating vast and complicated supernatural spaces to accommodate their mysterious and contradictory nature? Or, are these non-physical and physical terrains the same? The ontological consequences of such questions are not detrimental to either human agency nor that of fairies, themselves. Instead we might consider this a symbiotic existence: the consciousness of whatever fairies are using the physicality of human beings to broach occasionally into our own existence and range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Huxley’s ‘Mind at large’ concept is a perfect example. This would also explain the odd encounters where fairies seem to need human beings to observe them before they can perform a specific task. Although many times this ‘task’ is a game or seemingly bizarre feat, perhaps this too is a matter of us simply being unable to process what is actually occurring and is instead broken down into base, recognisable actions.
The manifestation of an independent consciousness through another also echoes the idea’s of Dr Jeffrey Kripal when he speculated that: “But if we live in a different world where everything is somehow embedded in consciousness, and we’re highly evolved transmitters or receivers of this broader cosmic life, then suddenly the universe is a marvellous place, and we live in a naturally ecstatic, evolving conscious cosmos that is waking up to itself.”
This triumvirate has looked at some of the explanations and questions around fairies and the Otherworld. I just wanted to draw attention to the different ideas and opinions which emerge as we go deeper down the rabbit hole. In this way we can then approach more contemporary sightings and experiences with further insight. As I explained on a recent podcast, perhaps we should consider that we have arrived at a more sophisticated understanding now, in some ways. At one point we believed that fairies came from beneath the earth, then after the 1950s we began to contemplate the idea of them coming from a hole in space or another dimension. Today, we can at least entertain the idea that perhaps they emerge from a deeper part of consciousness itself, neither physical nor immaterial, and perhaps dare us to attempt to grasp such concepts in order to bring us forward into a higher understanding of ourselves.
Image and text © David Halpin.
Cover image is Boleycarrigeen stone circle, Co. Wicklow, Ireland.
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