366 Celt: A Year and A Day of Celtic Wisdom and Lore. Carl McColman
heaven. A kind of “Switzerland” of God’s court, the beings who would become the fairies sided neither with God nor with Lucifer when the latter revolted against the Almighty. They didn’t exactly deserve the punishments of hell, but neither were they in a position to remain in heaven—so the Archangel Michael sent them to the earth to live in the twilight state of fairyland.
But a more compelling theory about the origin of the fairies comes from Irish myth. It seems that the Celts, as the first mortals to arrive in Ireland, engaged in battle with the Tuatha Dé Danann (the legendary tribe of gods, goddesses and heroes) when they arrived. The battle left no conclusive winner, so the Celts and the Tuatha Dé Danann struck a deal: the mortals would live above ground, while the magical beings would retreat to a subterranean (subconscious?) world beneath the surface of the land. Hence, they become the Daoine Sídhe, the people of the fairy mounds. So here we see the fairies not as some morally questionable heavenly rejects—but as the ancient ancestors, the shining and divine and immortal beings of the Celtic lands.
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Nowadays, when most people think of fairies, neither fallen angels nor ancient gods come readily to mind. Many people today regard the fairy phenomenon as the conscious intelligence of the spirits of nature—whether that means spirits associated with specific plants or animals, or spirits linked to a place, or simply spirits who are somehow more linked to the natural world than we clumsy humans are. Given their history of living underground, the fairies appear to be chthonic spirits, that is to say, spirits of the deep earth—not to be confused with the celestial spirits of the sky and beyond, traditionally seen not as fairies but as angels. Fairy theorist R.J. Stewart suggests that fairies are the next step up the evolutionary ladder beyond humans; presumably one of the benefits of occupying a higher rung on the Darwinian ladder is a natural ability to live in closer harmony with nature. At any rate, just as angels are the messengers from the heavenly realm, fairies seem to play an oblique latter-day role as the messengers from mother earth.
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But if fairies are the ambassadors who can help human beings to live in greater harmony with our natural environment, what does that say about how we have commercialized and trivialized the good people? Perhaps the process of transforming fairies from fearsome otherworldly spirits to charming garden sprites coincided with the changing way that modern humankind has regarded our habitat. To the pagan Celts, nature embodied the sovereignty of the Goddess; in the Christian view, nature has often been seen as something amoral and fearsome that needed to be mastered; while in today’s post-modern, secularized world, nature has become our neglected mother, whom we ignore to our peril. And just as we have tamed nature from powerful goddess to mistreated earth mother, so we have tamed the fairies, reducing them to plastic statues available for thirty dollars at your neighborhood boutique. Granted, angels have suffered a similar fate. Maybe we need to reconsider: it won’t be until we respect the spiritual beings in our cosmos again, that we will likewise truly respect the nature that sustains us.
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The question of respect for the fairies is well illustrated by the popular folktale of the fairies and the hunchbacks—which is not unique to Celtic lands, but is certainly a favorite among Irish storytellers. The tale recounts how a hunchback falls asleep one night on a fairy mound, only to encounter the good people; he is kind to them and helps them compose a song, and for his civility they magically remove his hunchback. He wakes up a healed man, and cheerfully makes his way to town. Another, more naturally mean-spirited hunchback sees him, and learning what happened to him goes and spends the next evening on the fairy mound. He encounters the same troupe of fairies, but treats them abusively and makes poor suggestions on how to improve their songs. Angered, the gentry “reward” him by taking the hump from the first man and adding it onto the back of the second, making his back far more hunched than before. It’s a story with an apparent enough moral: treat the fey folk well, and be treated well yourself. The implications for how we relate to nature are not hard to discern.
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Belief in fairies might be a lovely and charming aspect of the Celtic tradition, but it is something that can be taken too far. Dozens of children in the nineteenth century were burned or even killed when their superstitious parents held them over the fire, certain that they were “changelings” or fairy imposters, left behind when the gentry had kidnapped their actual babies. Supposedly the way to make such a changeling admit the truth would be to hold it over an open fire—a foolhardy practice with often disastrous results. Nor was this torture limited to babies; in 1895 a group of men in County Tipperary were arrested after they had killed a woman named Bridget Cleary, burning her to death in a misguided effort to purge her of malignant fairy influence. In the twenty-first century, it is easy to distance ourselves from such superstitious crimes; but we shouldn’t be too smug. Most people today have just as many irrational, superstitious, or scientifically unverifiable beliefs as did the peasants of Ireland a century ago. We need to be clear that, no matter what we believe, some things are non-negotiable—such as treating others with dignity and kindness. “Thou shalt not kill” is not an optional mandate, after all!
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What is the future of the fairy-faith? Like so many aspects of the Celtic world, it is an endangered thing, thanks to the march of secular beliefs and the mass media into every corner of rural life. Today it seems that more upper-middle-class new age consumers are likely to believe in the fairies than their rural forebears. And whde the Irish farmers of old basically tried to keep from running afoul of the gentry, our postmodern shamans eagerly seek to contact them through guided meditations and trance journeys. That may not be such a bad thing, especially if it leads to a greater sense of the dependence that humankind has on the environment. But it’s a new chapter in the world of the fairies. Just as the Tuatha Dé Danann went underground and Celtic paganism changed forever, so now as the fairies are transformed from fearsome metaphors of the chaos in nature to charming spirit guides and purveyors of subjective wisdom, a transformation is happening from which there can be no return.
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