Fairies
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Chores being done or things being put away – an old sign of fairy presence was household chores being done while the family slept, or items being put away. The fey are generally known to prefer neatness, and some of them, especially house spirits, like to keep our homes and yards in order. Any helpful Otherworldly spirit can indicate its presence by aiding with anything around the home from minor things to more major ones that will keep things running more smoothly.
Your cat acting oddly – cats in my experience seem to be very sensitive to fairies. This can mean either that the cat seems to enjoy their presence or that the cat is flat out terrified of them. Either way, cats acting unusually freaked out can be an indicator of the Other Crowd being around. We are talking about cats here though so use your judgment as to what qualifies as a cat being unusually freaked out. Often it seems to mean the cat seeing and chasing something that you can’t see, particularly at a time when a flying bug wouldn’t be an option. On a related note horses also seem sensitive to fairies, should you have one.
Respecting Their Places
Many people lump nature spirits in with fairies and that is both true and untrue. Fairies are a broad category of beings and they can and do include both beings of this world and beings from the Otherworld that choose to come here. In the next chapter we will take an in-depth look at the Otherworld, but I want to discuss here the importance of showing proper respect to the locations in our own world that are associated with or claimed by the fairies, whether that means true nature spirits or not.
A land spirit or the spirit of a natural feature such as a tree or plant is strongly connected to the place it calls home. This is only logical really, as that physical place or object is for them like our body is for our soul – it acts like an anchor for the spirit in this world. If you think of it this way then it’s easier to understand why we should be careful and respectful of places that belong to these spirits. This doesn’t necessarily mean that all natural spaces should be inviolate, life after all is a cycle of growth and death and it can involve destruction, but just as we should show respect to the animals and plants we use for food, we owe respect to the natural places and the spirits that inhabit them. It’s also always good to keep in mind that nature spirits have the ability to influence the mood and atmosphere of a place, so happy nature spirits are always better than angry ones. Generally angry land spirits will express their feelings by making the area they influence unpleasant, causing the atmosphere of the area to be uneasy or unhappy, or cause bad dreams in people living nearby.
Respecting nature spirits is a straightforward proposition: don’t be needlessly destructive, don’t take down trees, move large rocks, or make any big changes to an area without giving the land spirits a bit of notice (I recommend a couple days, when possible), and don’t muck up natural places in your yard or local woods with human junk or refuse. If there is a particular nature spirit, such as that of a tree, that you want to connect to you can make offerings to it and talk to it. Offerings are also a good idea if you do have to do major landscaping or tree removal; honey works well, as does planting new growth or working to clean up any human messes.
Besides land spirits that exist as an intrinsic part of the world around us, there are also places that belong to the fairies that are spirits of the Otherworld. These are not land spirits and are not tied to the land in these places, but they have laid claim to them and feel a strong sense of ownership about them. Folklore and modern anecdotes show that interfering with or damaging places that belong to the fairies is a profoundly bad idea, and that they tend to respond in a fairly direct fashion. In Iceland both road construction and drilling that upsets the Hidden Folk tends to result in machinery breaking, ill luck, and strange happenings until the construction stops or the damage – usually to a boulder that is associated with them – is repaired. In Ireland folklore says that to interfere with a fairy tree or fairy hill can result in bad luck, illness, or even death. They are also not averse to destroying the offending human construction that is on their territory; one recent event in 2007 that made the news in Ireland was a series of telephone poles too close to a fairy hill, which kept mysteriously falling down.
Traditionally places that belong to the fairies are best left alone; it is unwise to interfere with them or build on them. There are many stories, not only in Ireland but also in Iceland, of people who damaged or dug into fairy places only to suffer great ill luck, illness, or even death. In some cases even going into a place that belonged to the fairies posed a risk; in one story from Ireland a young man interfered with a well that was known to belong to the Fair Folk and in response they cursed it; when the man next went to drink from it he fell in and drowned (Ballard, 1991). If you choose to visit them it is best to do so during the day and to be careful not to leave behind a mess. It’s also advised not to relieve yourself on the ground in the area, as that is known to offend them as well. Add to that a general suggestion not to say anything provocative in those areas, especially anything that belittles or questions their power or influence because they do respond to verbal insults. As long as you are careful not to break things, not to leave behind trash, and not to verbally provoke them, you should be alright.
Chapter 1
Fairyland
And do you not see that bonny road,
That winds about the ferny hillside?
That is the road to fair Elfland,
Where you and I this night must go.
The Ballad of Thomas the Rhymer
In my experience when we seek Fairy we always start by seeing the parts of it that most reflect ourselves and what we want to see. Perhaps that’s a greater truth of life in general, that we always see ourselves reflected first in the things around us, before we see those things as they truly are. And so when we hear people talking about Fairy and their experiences with it we will find a wide array of descriptions, from the frightening to the fantastic, the terrifying to the enticing. None of them are wrong, and none of them are exactly right either, and that’s your first lesson about Fairy: it is in all ways and always a contradiction.
There’s a wide array of teachings about Fairy in different spiritual contexts and most of them tend to treat the Otherworld as one homogenous place; this is understandable and difficult to avoid. I think there’s a huge need for caution though in not over-generalizing an individual’s perceptions and experiences into universal truths about Fairy. Because it isn’t like a single city that can be summarized neatly – rather it’s more an entire world with places of civilization and places of dangerous wilds; confusing one for the other won’t end well. Perhaps one person always goes to one place and has one type of interaction, and that’s fine, and passing along teachings based on that is fine, but that one place is not the sum total of what Fairy is, any more than Boston is what Earth is. The same holds true for the beings within it – becoming an expert in mice doesn’t give you any experience with wolves, if you understand what I’m saying, and vice versa. As we look at what and where Fairy is, keep this in mind and understand that when people talk about ‘Fairy’ they are either making broad generalizations, like we do when we say ‘Earth’ or the ‘mortal realm’, or else are meaning it in a specific sense, but using the general term.
Defining Fairyland
So, what then is Fairy? That is a complicated question, as there are many worlds besides our own, and the world of Fairy is only one of them, if indeed it is one single world. It goes by many names: Fairy, Fairyland, Elfland, Elfhame, Elphame, Elvenland, an Saol Eile (the Otherworld), and in other cultures there are places that may be analogous to the Celtic Fairy, such as Ljossalfheim. These places aren’t the same place, but they are similar in context as being the home of beings that are a type of fairy, in that case the Alfar.
The term Fairy is an old one for the land in which Otherworldly beings dwell, and indeed we see authors such as Chaucer using the generic term ‘elf’ for the inhabitants and the term Fairy for the place almost exclusively (Williams, 19
91). Although my own preference is to refer to the place as Fairy, capital ‘F’, and the inhabitants as fairies, lower case ‘f’, it is common in folklore – particularly Scottish – to see it referred to as Elfame or Elfhame. There are a variety of spellings given, but for convenience I am using the more modern version here. An older example can be found in this quote from the 16th century witchcraft trial of Bessie Dunlop: ‘The guid wichts who winnit in the court o’ Elffehame’ (the good creatures who dwelt in the court of Elfhame) (McNeil, 1956). In the Irish, the realm in which the Good People live is sometimes called An Saol Eile, which is usually translated as ‘The Otherworld’. However, ‘Saol Eile’ literally means the ‘Other Life’ and this is important to remember as we contemplate what exactly the Otherworld is.
The simplest definition of what Fairy is would be the place that fairies live, but that can easily become circular logic depending on how we are defining fairies. It may be easier to say that Fairy is a place that is a separate world associated with beings that would normally be considered fairies, where time runs differently, and where the presence of magic is considerably stronger than here. Folklore tells us that fairies may live in lakes, or hills, or mountains, but it was always less that they literally existed in the water or physical ground of those places and more that those places acted as doorways to the Otherworld. The nature of the Otherworld itself is not widely agreed on either in folklore or by scholars. In the oldest mythology, Fairy was a world full of fantastical things such as animals that could be killed and eaten one day and rise alive and whole the next morning. During the medieval period Fairy was often equated to a near Heavenly paradise, sometimes described with the exact same phrases found in ecclesiastical texts discussing Heaven, but gradually came to be associated more strongly with the land of the dead (Firth-Green, 2016). There was also an association of Fairy with Purgatory, reinforced by medieval stories that explicitly connected the two, although it was never clear that they were in fact the same place (Firth-Green, 2016). In the same way in the Irish material we see this idea hinted at with references to all souls of the dead having to go to Tech Duinn, the house of Donn, Donn being both a God and King of Fairy and his house being in the Otherworld. The only consistent thread to be found was a belief that, however similar Fairy may seem to our own world, it was a place foreign to living humans and inhabited by strange and uncanny beings.
I do want to clarify one point of confusion here that I often run across. The Otherworld, what I call Fairy, is not the only other realm of existence, and there are several other well-known ones that are often confused with or conflated with Fairy. The astral plane, for example, is not the same as Fairy, but rather is a different and unique place. The astral seems to be more closely connected to our world and more strongly influenced by it, while Fairy is connected to our world, but not as a mirror image or a place we can influence from within our world. The axiom that applies to the astral plane, ‘As above so below’, would not apply to Fairy, which exists independently from our reality in that sense. This is where it becomes important to remember that there are many other worlds besides our own, but they are not all the Otherworld of Fairy.
Time
One distinctive feature of Fairy is the flow of time; in most cases time in Fairy seems to move at a different pace than on Earth. We may see a single night go by in Fairy while years pass on Earth, or in one anecdote years passed for a man in Fairy while only minutes passed here (Briggs, 1976). We see a variety of stories where a person joins a fairy dance for what they believe is only a single night only to find at dawn that years, decades, or even a century has passed while they danced. In the tale of King Herla a single night of feasting in Fairy occurs while 200 years pass on mortal Earth (Briggs, 1976). There is no clear predictable pattern to this, however, and the fairies themselves seem exempt from the disjointed temporal effect, as they often and regularly cross between the two worlds, even maintaining friendships with mortals over the length of the person’s lifetime, without difficulty. The same is obviously not true for mortals, or at least not without fairy aid1, as we see many mortals doomed by their time in Fairy because they return to a world that is utterly changed from the one they left by nothing more esoteric than the passage of time.
Describing Fairy
Fairy has been described in many ways in folklore, from a world that is much like our own in its appearance to one that is quite fantastic in nature. One description says that Fairy has no sun, moon, or stars, and that all its springs contain blood, which flows there from the mortal world (Acland, 1997). The blood in the water could be a metaphor for the connection between fairies and the mortal dead, which we shall discuss in more depth later, or it could be meant to be interpreted literally. Blood has a lot of important symbolism, but it also very literally carries vital substances including salt, minerals and metals, and healing compounds. Fairy can be a wilderness or a massive city, wild or civilized. In one story from Pembrokeshire, a shepherd who travels to Fairy describes a shining palace with a variety of gorgeous gardens (Briggs, 1976). A Welsh description from an anecdote describes a great city with large houses where all the people never seemed to lack anything (Gwyndaf, 1991). It is often described as exceedingly fair, green, and pleasant, although also usually said to be in a perpetual twilight; the great halls are said to be rich and full of treasure and jewels (Acland, 1997). In the Irish myth of the Echtrai Nera it would seem that when it is summer in Fairy it is winter in our world, as Nera goes into a fairy hill on Samhain (Halloween) and is given a flowering branch from a fruit tree to prove his story when he leaves. In contrast, however, the Gesta Regnum Britannie describes Fairy as a land of perpetual spring, abundant in flowers and fruit, and without any illness or unhappiness (Firth-Green, 2016).
Finding Fairy
In the Irish sources it seems to be both a cohesive place that is not our world, and also a collection of related or contiguous places that are not here. Sometimes these are described as islands, or beyond the ninth wave, but most often the Otherworld is anchored in or reached through the sí, the fairy mounds, or other Earthly objects. It – or they – can be reached by sailing to the west (in Irish folklore), by finding doorways often in mountainsides, or by finding doors opened into fairy hills. Entrances to Fairy exist in marshes, caves, rocks, lakes, riverbanks, underground tunnels, and even in heavy mist (Gwyndaf, 1991). In some stories getting to Fairy is as simple as stepping through a doorway, while in others it can only be reached through an arduous and difficult journey.
Reaching Fairy in the stories can be easy or quite difficult. In some tales a person has only to step through an opening in a fairy hill or into a fairy ring to find themselves in the Otherworld, while in other stories a long and complex journey is involved. In the ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, Thomas describes traveling with the Fairy Queen on her white horse through a desert, wading through rivers, going where there is neither sun nor moon, and wading through blood up to the knee to get to Fairy (Acland, 1997). In one Welsh story a midwife is taken to tend a fairy birth by riding a white horse2 with the father-to-be along many paths, between a cleft in a split boulder, into a cave, and a great distance through darkness (Gwyndaf, 1991). We see the passage through darkness repeated in the story ‘Reinbrun’, where the eponymous protagonist must pass through gates in a hillside, ride through darkness, then cross a river to reach the fairy castle that is his destination.
Joining a fairy dance can lead to a person’s death, or may make years seem like a single night, but in many stories it is also a way that we see people being taken into Fairy (Briggs, 1976). One might note that this is a riskier method, and by no means a certain way to reach Fairy, and as well those taken in dancing do not always want to go. In the ballad of Childe Rowland the protagonist’s sister is taken unwillingly to Fairy after going counter-clockwise around a church, and the protagonist himself obtains entry to an elfin hall by walking three times counter-clockwise around it chanting: ‘Open door! Open door! And let me come in!’ (Acla
nd, 1997) This example from the ballad along with the stories about fairy rings may show us that moving counter-clockwise – what’s called ‘withershins’ in the source material – has a purpose and a power of its own that helps open the way to Fairy.
In contrast, in medieval belief the Otherworld could be reached in a person’s dreams, and interactions there were as real as those in the waking world (Bitel, 1991). Indeed, it is not an uncommon belief even into the modern period that Fairy can be reached in dreams and trances and that a person can be ‘away with the fairies’ as the saying goes even though they are still physically present in our world. One person in Ireland about a hundred years ago said it was possible for a person to go into a trance and be with the fairies for several hours or several days, or less commonly for years (Evans-Wentz, 1911). In such cases the person afterwards might have no memory of the events they experienced, or equally likely would claim no memory because they were under a prohibition not to speak of anything they had seen while among the Other Crowd. The idea that a person can be physically in our world, but also in Fairy, possibly in spirit or perhaps in some other sense, is an old well-established one. People who were believed to be taken by the Gentry would fall into trances, sometimes able to speak and relay information, but sometimes completely lost to mortal Earth for a time (Evans-Wentz, 1911). This process of entering Fairy in trances and dreams is no less valid or real than entering the Otherworldphysically. In the past it was taken just as seriously by people. It is very important to keep this in mind if you feel you might be having dreams about Fairy, going to Fairy in your sleep, or entering Fairy in trances as you must behave as if you are really there, with all the required caution and etiquette, in order to emerge safely again.