October 2009

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Do you believe in fairies?

Whether you believe in them or not, clearly some who think they’re experts in fairy lore are anything but, as Charlie Coventry explains. (The author wrote the original article in Gaelic, and has translated it into English for G&LH. If you would like to see the original Gaelic, click here.)

“Do you believe in fairies?” Peter Pan calls out to the children at the pantomime. “Yes!” they answer and Tinkerbell is saved from death.

That’s how we remember it from our own childhood, and that’s how it happened in J M Barrie’s own time. But today actors can’t be so sure if they’ll get the right response. Although it isn’t so certain whether today’s children believe in fairies, there are adults in Britain who not only believe in fairies but believe that they themselves are fairies, or, as they say, everybody has a “faerie nature”.

Eurofaeries are a group who started in the USA under the name of “The Radical Fairies”. Their aim was to gain human rights for gay people, but probably, naturally, since we know how narrow views are in the Bible Belt, they turned to belief in fairies and “paganism”.

From time to time I had seen the name of the Eurofaeries on the Internet, and during Christmas – or Yule as they call it – in 2006 I was with them in Featherstone Castle in Northumberland. Although most of the building as it can be seen today is Victorian, it started in the thirteenth century as a defensive tower belonging to a family called Featherstonehaugh.

Harry Potter

It was empty until the man who now owns it bought it and repaired it. Groups such as Eurofaeries use it. To tell the truth, it isn’t all that difficult for the imagination to see fairies or ghosts in the stone corridors or on the crooked narrow stairs, and, if you are a reader of the Harry Potter books, it isn’t too hard to think you’re in the great hall at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

When we reached the castle, who was there to meet us but Tinkerbell himself (yes, himself). It was the week in which they were celebrating the winter solstice with a ceremony in which a fire was lit. The interesting questions about these “pagan” ceremonies are where they come from, whether they have a foundation in any religion or whether they are made up. In this ceremony, the lighting of the fire, there was a prayer to Earth and Heaven, but Earth was the father and Heaven was the mother.

Now, as every classical scholar knows, according to the Greek myth, life was created by the union between Ouranos (Heaven, male) and Gaia (Earth, female). If we look at the grammar of modern European languages, Heaven is masculine and Earth is feminine.

Once the fire had been lit there were more words “in the oldest language in the world”, Sanskrit. Now, it may be the oldest recorded Indo-European language, but how can we be sure it is the oldest language in the world? If I meet the Eurofaeries again, I may get the chance to tell them that it was Gaelic that Adam and Eve spoke in the Garden of Eden.¹

Next morning, a candle was lit in the castle and it was looked after by one Vestal Virgin. That’s right, one Vestal Virgin. “She” was male, and Tinkerbell didn’t know that there were nine of them. I’m not sure whether pagans know what religion the Vestal Virgins belonged to. As part of this ceremony, everybody was asked to bring a scarf or a piece of cloth of scarf length, and they were tied together in a circle in which everything would take place.

Brave – or daft?

At midnight on the day of the winter solstice there was another ceremony, which we can be sure wasn’t Celtic because they were putting down candles in an anticlockwise circle, which was getting smaller and smaller towards the centre. After the candles were put down, each man began to walk round until he reached the centre, where he put water from a bowl onto his face as if he were baptising himself. Gradually, some of the group began performing the ceremony naked. Weren’t they brave (or daft, according to your opinion), since it was so cold even inside the castle?

Every evening there was a “heart circle”, where everybody had the chance to tell how he was feeling or what had happened to him during the day. A magic (literally “druidic”) stone would go round, the talisman, in an anticlockwise circle, and, when it came to somebody, he had the chance to speak.

There was a ceilidh, although they didn’t know the word, and because we were in a castle – although it wasn’t near that time of year – I told them a version of the story of the Lughnasda musician associated with Rothesay Castle (above). I told them about the sacrifice to Lugh in the old Celtic religion, and everybody jumped.

Here there was a point about people today who believe in fairies and that they themselves are fairies, that their picture of the fairies doesn’t come from oral tradition but from books that were read in the Victorian nursery. They have never heard that green is the colour of the fairies and that bad luck would come to anyone who wore green clothes, and they didn’t know that fairies didn’t have wings in oral tradition.

Bronze Age burial place

Although Eurofaeries know the fairies are little people, they know nothing about archaeology. When the Celts, tall fair-haired people, reached Britain, they saw little dark Iberian people who were in the Bronze Age, and this is the reason why they say the fairies can’t pass cold steel. It would also be interesting to find out whether these people knew that archaeologists had discovered that the fairy hill is a Neolithic or Bronze Age burial place. It would probably be expecting too much of them to know that sidh in Old Irish meant “mountain” and later the inhabitants of the mountains, the fairies.

Among the Eurofaeries some follow Druidism. They think the druids raised the standing stones, just as our own ancestors did. It is clear that they haven’t read books on archaeology. There is a real mixture of beliefs among the Eurofaeries. Some, like Cherie Blair, read crystals, and others follow witchcraft – but white witchcraft – and they know nothing about the hunting and burning of witches after the Reformation.

If you go to a Eurofaeries meeting, you will meet shamans. Shaman is a Siberian word for somebody who can fall into a trance, when his soul will leave his body to rise to heaven to converse with the gods about, for example, whether the time is right for hunting. The spirits will speak in the shaman’s body, sometimes in the voice of an animal, and at other times in a strange language, which no one in the tribe understands. That is the real shaman in Siberia or among the natives of South America or probably in other countries.

But in Eurofaeries they teach shamanic rituals. I didn’t see a ritual at Featherstone, but early in 2007 there was a series of programmes on television, Trust Me, I’m a Healer, and the first was about a shaman.

Herbal hallucinations

Now, maybe Siberian shamans do practise medicine, but we can be sure they aren’t like the one on the programme. First he put on a special costume, and, from the banks of the Amazon, he was making a medicine to create a hallucination from herbs. If it is true, as some people think, that the druids of Iron Age Britain were shamans, if they had such herbs we can be sure that they didn’t come from beside the Amazon.

And there was something else: when he was in his trance, if he really was, he was reciting verses from the Koran! Now we know that the Koran wasn’t written till many centuries after the period of the druids in the Celtic countries, and since our own Iron Age ancestors were illiterate – and this is also true of cultures where shamans can still be found – he shouldn’t have known about written literature.

This man went on with his anachronisms. He had to visit a patient in another town, and what did he do? There are two things that could happen if he was a real shaman. He could take the form of an animal to help him, or he could go into a trance to send his spirit to the invalid. But he drove in a car!

He was speaking about the Chief Druid of Britain, but was there such a person in the Iron Age? When the patient wasn’t cured, he made the presenter of the programme go with him to a stream with a bottle with a genie in it. He opened the bottle to let the genie out, and said that they might perhaps see a fairy, but they didn’t.

You probably already know a story of this type. That’s it: the story of Aladdin in the Arabian Nights. Maybe the stories came from oral tradition at first, but they were written down, and we know them in translation. Again, the word genie didn’t reach the languages of Europe until the stories had been translated from Arabic.

It is uncertain what modern “pagans” believe or how much they know about the religions of the ancient world. Since they started in America, they probably don’t know anything about the subject.

An American (female) Christian was asked if she knew anything about Dionysus or Mithras. “I know nothing about these pagan deities,” she boasted in an interview on the documentary film, The God Who Wasn’t Really There. Did she think they belonged to a religion that still existed? If “pagans” are so ignorant about the gods of Greece and Rome, those of us who are involved in Celtic scholarship should find out what they know about what happened at Beltane or Lunasdal.

But, in conclusion, however ignorant Eurofaeries are about real fairy lore,² they are happy with their dreams, and maybe, if Celtic language scholars teach them, they will reach real knowledge of fairy lore and even become fluent in the Celtic languages.