Betwixt and between

“The Fairy Faith: In Search of Fairies” is a Canadian documentary about modern belief in fairies. It´s available on YouTube. On the negative side, the documentary is incredibly dragging and somewhat badly edited. Another problem is that many of the persons interviewed speak with heavy Irish accents – at least, that´s a problem if you live outside the Green Island or some of it expatriate communities. Part of the documentary was therefore near incomprehensible to me. On the positive side, the topic is interesting, even somewhat fascinating. The people interviewed are British, Irish, Anglophone Canadian and Mikmaq (a Native people in Canada). It seems the belief in fairies haven´t changed much since the good old days. It´s intriguing that it even exists today!

Non-believers usually picture fairies as sweet little girls with angel wings (think Tinkerbell), but this is about as far as you can get from the traditional beliefs. “Real” fairies are believed to be small and human-like, but there the similarity to petit angels ends. The fairies are often dangerous. They can abduct people, cast spells on them, or cause car accidents. They do dance and have fun, but usually don´t want to be seen by us ordinary mortals. The fairies are associated with certain places in the landscape, such as sacred trees, Bronze Age burial grounds, and the like. The documentary interviews an activist in Ireland who tried to stop the local authorities from cutting down a tree he believes is a “fairy fort”! While most eye witnesses describe the fairies as humanoid (some look like nude girls), the documentary also features a painter who sees them as more monstrous and vaguely animal-like. A few benign encounters with the little people are also recounted.

But are the fairies really real? What is the epistemological status of fairy encounters? The interviewees who reflect on this argue that they are neither “objective” nor “subjective”, but somewhere in between. The fairies live in the realm of imagination, the same realm where poets and painters dwell. Presumably, “imagination” here refers to something like Coleridge´s conception of it, or perhaps to Harpur´s notion of a daimonic reality. One of the witnesses claim that she lost her ability to see the fairy around the time she was 19 years old, while another says “you see them through your heart”. A surprisingly large number of the true believers haven´t seen fairies at all. However, I suspect that the imaginal explanation is modern, “Western” and somewhat intellectual. The Mikmaq retell uncouth fairy stories which certainly sound objective in character. An occultist would probably explain fairies in terms of the astral and etheric dimensions of reality, and their shape shifting as a kind of astral glamour. In other words, fairies are really real. So, apparently, are leprechauns…

Personally, I find the idea of having to share this planet (or the Green Island) with a race of dangerous dancing abductors downright intolerable, so I can´t say I turned into a true believer in the phenomenon just yet. And if I ever see them, I´m going to stash large amounts of iron and silver at my bug out location. 

Let´s hope “the little people” really are imaginal.