Faerie twilight? Why they still matter to us

by William Pattengill

I suppose an American trying to write something useful about faeries is like an Irishman writing about baseball: it’s just not something that comes naturally. As a mere four-year resident of this island, I don’t have the lifelong associations with the subject that a native could, which I have come to see as an advantage rather than a hindrance. One thing that is very clear to me after these four years is that the relationship between the world of Faerie (the classical term for what has been “cutesified” as “fairyland”) and our merely human world is on the rocks, to put it mildly. Both they and we are suffering in our different ways from the rupture of an ancient and mutually beneficial bond that had existed since prehistoric times but is jeopardised (as is so much else!) by our throwing out the “old ways”, baby and bath water, for the shiny promise of salvation by….what shall we call it? The worship of Big Science, of consumer goods, of the coolest instagrammable moments? I’m afraid that our faeries are falling prey to the same misguided notions of progress that are plaguing societies and ecosystems the world over and spawning agribusiness, climate chaos, addictive social media, ad nauseam.

I feel it is my newly acquired civic duty to provide this easy-to-digest and hopefully enlightening crash course in what I might call “fairy lore” if the brush of modernism had not coloured it in shades of myth. Since the unravelling of this country’s time-honoured oral traditions around the dawning of the last century, how we have come to learn anything at all about Faerie has become random, arbitrary and willy-nilly. Since you have no longer been hearing the old stories told around the fire, I have no clue as to how you know anything at all about them and worse yet, if you even give two hoots, to use an appropriately anachronistic expression.

“Why should I care about any of this?” you may ask, and rightly so. Because it is my contention that there are great spiritual and possibly even therapeutic benefits to at least embracing the possibility that there is “something” to them, and that we may not ever be able to scientifically or rationally understand what that “something” actually is. And that it’s ok not to know! Thanks to the advent of the Post-Truth Era of alternative facts, the question “Are faeries real?” is blessedly irrelevant. I believe that to be a full participant in Irish culture one should at least know enough about Faerie to form your own opinion, and not rely on those of others….oh, but isn’t that what the oral tradition was all about? Never mind, let’s move on.

The closest thing we have to an origin story is one you all should know, and it is brilliant in my opinion, but in case you were absent that day, here is my condensed version: during the many cycles of invasions in the distant misty yesteryear, your Celtic ancestors defeated the resident tribes of the Tuatha De Danann (TDD) who apparently already had one foot in the world of the supernatural. Seeming to be in a weak bargaining position, they yielded rule over the surface world to the Celts and settled for rule over the underworld as an alternative to quitting the island entirely. The Celts (who technically were early blow-ins, that quaint but possibly xenophobic and nationalistic term stigmatising newcomers) probably thought they had a clean victory…but the TDD were also Druids and turned the tables on their cocky conquerors by magically shifting their physical frequency to a different channel that enabled them to inhabit BOTH worlds, being undetectable to the mortal Celts (and we, their descendants), passing from above to below and back again at will through the portals of their former dwellings, the ringforts that remain with us today. With this transition, they forever rendered futile our attempts to question their “reality”.

Since the abandoned fortified farms known as ringforts were found to contain buried human remains, the faeries have always been associated with the spirits of the deceased. From what I have gathered, the distinction was clearer before the arrival of Christian monks and their new-fangled blow-in concepts of heaven, hell, and the afterlife that they hoped would replace the pagan superstitions. To their credit the missionaries did not conduct a heavy- handed campaign to eradicate belief in Faerie; they pursued the less violent tactic of compromise, rebranding them as “fallen angels” who, during Satan’s failed rebellion, managed to crash land on earth instead of falling all the way

down into the mouth of Hades. Wouldn’t it have been fascinating to hear what those old-time faeries thought of their new public image?

It apparently did get into the minds of their human counterparts to the extent that many believed that the faeries became obsessed with the hope of salvation, which God had denied them as punishment for their disloyalty, and that come Judgement Day they would cease to exist altogether (Beare, 1996), hence their legendary crankiness. Here is another tangle of Christian and pagan beliefs: the only way the poor faeries could expect to improve their future chances was to boost their red blood cell count over the centuries - somehow the Druids didn’t foresee this necessity - and “pass” for human under the gaze of St. Peter on that fateful day. How were they to work this medical miracle you may ask? (Don’t bother looking it up in the Bible). By stealing human infants or children, and replacing them with faerie “changelings” of course, and then letting nature take its course. Since they were still somewhat human, marriages and births initiated by faeries were just part of how things were done. The ancient belief that they were also the cause of all sorts of misfortune during pregnancy, birth, and infancy was partially overlaid by the newer Christian concerns about immortality. The Church sought to offer its services to provide its own means of magical protection, assuring its flock that holy water, crucifixes, and blessings would ward off home-grown faerie evil as well as its Euro-imported devils and demons. Another gold star awarded for creativity to the Christian forefathers!

The Church, the farmers and the faeries maintained a relatively peaceful (leaving out politics of course) coexistence over the many centuries since St. Patrick’s arrival and the nineteenth century. It was probably some comfort for farmers to blame them when things went wrong with pregnancies, childbirth, and health (of humans, animals, and crops) that were beyond mortal control. However, they were soon the objects of all sorts of unwanted attention, as their very nature came into conflict with the new dominant paradigm. I found several online entries for ethnographical research, collections of first or second-hand encounters, and old tales of dubious veracity, conducted between 1871 and 1937 in the western counties. These were well-intentioned efforts to preserve the treasures of the oral tradition before they slipped into the dustbin of history; however their focus was purely scientific, and they presented their findings as myths not actual events.

The State-sponsored survey of 1937 by the Irish Folklore Commission intended to promote a proud new national identity by showcasing the rich heritage that had endured in spoken or sung form for millennia, towards “the shaping of a distinct Irish nationality” (Kruse, 2012, p. 6). Geography had been a help in the preservation of Faerie belief: the remoteness of the rural counties in those days was such that the faerie- friendly countrymen were quite distrustful of the urban Irish scholars seeking interviews, believing they were tax collectors, Scotsmen or British. Similarly, for reasons too complex to address here, most of the country was spared a forced participation in the Industrial Revolution that urbanised much of the North. It could be said that Ireland’s development has jumped from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, from farming to tech, causing the poor future-shocked faeries’ heads to spin!

While the hope of the Folkloric Survey was to present to the world a new State maturing beyond the superstitions of the past, Ireland’s first president, Douglas Hyde, claimed to have seen a horse in a field turn into a woman, and Samuel Beckett has described a faerie he met in a Dublin street. So much for the “maturing” culture! (Magan, 2014).

To counteract the commodification of the transcendent and restore Faerie to its rightful place in the cosmos, we have the parallel work of W.B.Yeats’ The Celtic twilight, his gathering of tales from the same remote areas, published in 1893. His mission shared with the folklorists a desire to preserve, but as a poet and philosopher his treatment of his subjects and their contributions was far more sympathetic and open-minded. He valued Faerie belief as a vital element of native spirituality that he hoped could provide a refuge from both the rising tide of modernism and the invasive theologies of Christianity.

The world is I believe more full of significance to the Irish peasant than to the English. The Faerie population of hill and lake and woodland have helped to keep it so. (Yeats, 1893, p. 104)

Though he never visited Ireland, nor met Yeats, Carl Jung was simultaneously mining the same vein of the occult from a different direction. No stranger to the supernatural, he had his own mystical experiences and controversial conclusions about them. He was inspired to consider one such event a

…phenomenon of solitude, ie a compensatory hallucination common to hermits for example, and people who spend a long time in solitude: in their minds, they re-produce the company that is lacking in real life……However since Jung is aware that ‘premonitions or visions often have some correspondence in external reality’ he finds it equally convincing to think that his solitude might have sharpened his senses in such a way that he was able to perceive the actual procession of souls of the dead... (Mills, 2014, p. 6)

during a night spent in his tower on Lake Zurich. This passage prompted me to imagine Jung and Yeats comparing notes before a cosy turf fire in Sligo: Jung seems to be able to embrace the dual nature of the faeries with ease. He had “an entirely positive understanding of ‘primitive man’ who is still in touch with the forces of nature that Western (urban) man has lost” (Mills, 2014, p. 6). Besides the solitary farmers and shepherds, Jung believed that individuals of a highly sensitive and intuitive nature (such as himself) could perceive energies hidden from the majority, with a lower threshold to the collective unconscious. To him, the supernatural being was an archetype that “has an autonomy that can seize you…a deified and reified superior construct” that “emanates from a collective psyche or mind that is the origin or ground of their existence” (Mills, 2014, p. 6). Unbelievers, put that in your pipe and smoke it! (an anachronistic and misguided phrase from the days when smoking a pipe was believed to aid in thought, never mind the cancer).

The twin dynamos of Jung and Yeats have given Faerie and its kindred spirits a lifeline to a rock that stands above the swirling waters of doubt and disbelief that threaten so much of our “old ways” of being in the world. It is there for those who wish to take it in hand, but for many it is as appealing as an old clothesline. While the legendary Irishman and Austrian were at work in their respective spheres, other forces were steadily grinding away at the faeries’ stature and viability. The ranks of their believers were obviously decimated by the Famine and the subsequent emigrations, but also by “progress” in general. As recently as 1960, 55 per cent of all Irish lived in the rural counties, while today the magnetic pull of the cities (hello Dublin!) has lured almost two out of every three of us into the urban lifestyle (macrotrends.net, n.d.).

An unfortunate and bizarre incident in 1895 gave a great propaganda victory to the British-owned press and dealt a blow to both the reputations of the Irish and the Fae with no chance of rebuttal. A farmer in Tipperary was convinced by well-meaning relatives that his sickly wife had been stolen by the faeries and replaced with a changeling (not just a fate of children apparently); they were certain that if he burned her body, his wife would return in human form, as per “How to foil the changeling scam.” He complied, but no wife reappeared, and he was arrested and tried for murder. The tragedy was exploited by the press for all it was worth and held up as a glaring example of Irish backwardness and brutality, throwing in a highly inappropriate charge of witch-burning on top of things. Hard to believe that this occurred just over a century past (Bourke, 2001).

“Development kills folklore” is a short and cruel contemporary truism that I scooped up along the way and then lost the reference to, but I’ll claim it as my own if anyone asks, thank you. A classic example: the Rural Electrification Scheme of the 1940s-1950s could be seen as the Light of Reason banishing the Darkness of Ignorance, but I doubt the faeries would want to hang out in a farmyard illuminated by industrial-strength wattage anyway. Much of the agricultural handiwork that had been traditionally overseen and evaluated by the faeries for compliance with their wishes was also mechanised during that time. Furthermore, the advent of radio and tv quickly usurped the role of the evening storyteller or Seanchai and filled the rural airwaves with all manner of progressive ideas, one being the understanding that Faerie was now part of the backwardness and superstition that are companions to poverty and ignorance. The same message was amplified by the ever-expanding access to public education.

Fortunately, not everyone of influence was willing to abandon the Fae despite the swelling pressure to do so. In 1959 Dermot McManus, who was an intimate friend of Yeats, and identified himself as a folklorist as well as a historian, compiled his own collection of Faerie encounters but restricted the sources to people that he either knew personally or were determined to be credible by other reliable references. No hand-me-down tales this time around! In his book Middle Kingdom, he “endeavoured to pull the subject out of the morass of nonsense and counter-nonsense and to get it into the realm of logic, where it can be examined coolly and sympathetically” (MacManus, 1959). Instead of the stereotypical earthbound and isolated farmers, his sources tended to be more educated and cosmopolitan than those subjects of earlier surveys.

In a chance encounter with a member of a paranormal research team, I learned that his group was recently called to investigate poltergeist-like phenomena at a new home in County Cork. Their instruments did not register any unusual data but when they checked old aerial photographs, they saw that the house had been built over a ringfort, which, as any fairy-respecting farmer will tell you, is asking for trouble.

Most Irish people have some instinctive belief in the world of the faeries even if it sometimes has to be has to be excavated carefully from under a veneer of busy modernity. (Lenihan, 2003)

Contrary to the dominant paradigm, trying to know everything about the world we inhabit in an analytical sense may be more difficult than we would like to believe, and it may also impoverish our spirits while trying to satisfy our need for control. Big Science continues to amaze us with new discoveries about things we always thought we understood: the ways trees and fungi communicate and help each other, the way the natural environment affects our emotions and nervous systems, forcing us to re-examine old certainties. The faeries offer us a wonderful exercise in transcendence, stretching our minds to reach beyond the “merely explainable” and embrace their dual existence as a Zen koan in both this material world and their supernatural plane, in a perfectly balanced contradiction.

No one should be surprised that these efforts to organise a mini-module on this subject have resulted in a dizzying zig-zag dash through the centuries with nothing to wrap up in a neat package and tie with a bow. Instead, I leave you with this thought:

…if you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to step outside of that tiny terrified box of rightness…and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe, and be able to say, ‘Wow, I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong.’ (Schulz, 2011)

William Pattengill is a member of the editorial board and an occasional contributor to Inside Out. After retiring from the home renovation business, he has enjoyed the opportunity to return to his roots as a journalist.

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