Fairies take to the witches’ broom

The academic study of fairies and fairylore has had a chequered past, but this examplary book thows a new light on ‘experience anomalies’ and the relationship of fairies and witches

Magical Folk Eds: Simon Young & Ceri Houlbrook Gibson Square 2018 Hb, illus, notes, £16.99, ISBN 9781783341016

The study of fairies is critically dependent upon the reports of people who have experiences of fairies and the implications of those encounters – ‘close encounters’ to use the ufological parallel. A belief in the reality of fairies might not be necessary in all cases because we can find encounters which have taken the witness completely by surprise. Nevertheless, alongside the growing archive of personal accounts and narratives of encounters with fairies, there is a complementary field of study of beliefs in and about fairies, which draws upon anthropology, geography, cultural and sociological contexts as well as such ‘official’ theories about the nature and existence of fairies provided by local religion, theosophy, spiritualism and, above all, received folklore.

The scholarly study of fairies has, until recently, long endured a gauntlet of ignorance, derision, superstition, official scorn, and academic neglect. Yet we know that people still report seeing them regardless of whether anyone else takes them seriously. Are they mad? Deluded? Fraudulent? Are they so easily deceived by misidentification and misunderstanding of some natural phenomena? Significantly, a typical fairy witness tries to test whether their experience is an illusion only to end up realising that the intensity, apparent reality, startling behaviour of the entities, and overall strangeness of their experience has affected them in some way emotionally. We have centuries of myth, lore

and tradition informing our mental picture of what fairies are but there is nothing standard about fairies. Indeed, they are manifesting in such varying sizes, forms, and behaviour that it is sometimes difficult to see their relationship to locality is that of the anciently respected genius loci.

During the Victorian era, there was a degree of public awakening to the subject, the highlights of which were the blooming of folklore as a serious subject for academics and the publication of such influential works as those of Evans-Wentz, Hartland, and Yeats. After WWI, the burgeoning of both Spiritualism and Blavatsky’s Theosophy provided a ‘modern’ and more acceptable foundation for the very ancient belief that fairies were somehow associated with the dead. It is no coincidence that the invention of photography was quickly assimilated to both Spiritualism and fairy-hunting (vide the Cottingley fairy pictures which came to light via the Theosophists). At the same time, a strand of rationalism (that goes back to those men who founded the Royal Society) interpreted fairylore as a folk-memory of encounters with long-vanished Picts or even extinct races of dwarfs. After WWII, British folklorists returned fairy studies to the sphere of cultural and social heritage.

At this point, Simon Young reminds us, in the mid-20th century, the barely-understood forms of British and Irish fairies were led off, Pied Piper style, to Hollywood. There they were deprived of their ancient aura of spiritual and physical menace and re-shaped to serve commercial exploitation. The French folklorist Michel Meurger “dumbing down and exploitation proved a turn-off for academic interest in fairy encounters” has elsewhere highlighted how Nordic writers and artists, steeped in the folklore of central and northern Europe, were recruited by Disney to provide authentic imagery for their most famous cartoon movies.

Against this background, the Fairy Investigations Society (FIS) was founded in 1927; but, from 1950 it was developed and run by its secretary Marjorie T Johnson; and in its last years by the encyclopædist Leslie Shepard (an early supporter of

FT). A tireless propagandist for the reality of fairies, Johnson and her FIS colleagues instigated an ambitious project to collect British accounts of fairy sightings from published records, recorded folklore narratives and from readers’ letters in newspapers. In 2013, Simon Young – this book’s main editor – a successfully published historian and a regular contributor to FT – established, online, The Fairyist (fairyist. com) as rallying point for modern interest in the topic. As he took up the challenge of locating the files of the defunct FIS, Young explained that “the old FIS was exclusively for those who believed in fairies; the new FIS is a secular version for all those who have an interest in fairylore, be they believers or ultraskeptics”.

Following his successful location of the old FIS archives, Simon Young finished Marjorie Johnson’s work by completing the publication of Seeing Fairies: From the Lost Archives of the Fairy Investigation Society, Authentic Reports of Fairies in Modern Times in 2014. The following year, Young and his colleagues launched the most extensive public poll and survey of matters to do with fairies and fairylore, including welcoming accounts of sightings, since Johnson’s FIS poll 60 years previously.

The double-whammy of dumbing-down and commercial exploitation inevitably proved a major turn-off for academic interest in genuine fairy encounters and, inevitably, the general public were lulled into regarding the subject as one for children with over-active imaginations, minds too dull to discern errors of perception, or stolid types who were way too credulous. Authentic narratives of encounters with fairies never really went away; they were – as happened throughout human history – simply never openly reported. Or rather, if they were reported at all, it was to local newspapers, or as sub-texts in other accounts of rural life, or hiding beneath the words of accounts in (for example) the Celtic languages (Gaelic, Cornish, Welsh).

Today the situation is different and developing along several exciting fronts. Firstly, there is a recognition of the relationship between fairies and witches. Previously regarded as adjacent or separate subjects, fresh light on the nature of witches’ familiars seems to

show familiars and fairies to be fairly interchangeable (although witches tended to use demons for the Devil’s work and fairies for influencing natural processes). The rump of this process is evident, for example, in the Irish tradition of Fairy Doctors who mediate between human society and the fairies, these ‘doctors’ filling, in all other respects, the traditional role of witches. Secondly, there is a shift in emphasis from studies of superstition and belief to studies of authentic narratives of claimed personal experience. Thirdly, and most importantly, there is growing acceptance of the hypothesis of parallels between the person at the heart of the fairy encounter – especially someone who regularly sees and interacts with fairies (like the Fairy Doctors) – and those we might call spontaneous shamans. Technically ‘shamanism’ proper applies to the ecstatic mediums of Siberia, but anthropological studies of cultures worldwide show people on the fringes of local societies undergoing processes corresponding to the ‘election’ of a shaman, his behavior, his relationship with ‘supernatural entities’, his use of psychoactive concoctions, and ecstatic journeys to the Otherworld. The experiences of some witches, encounters with fairies, demons or today’s aliens all display elements of shared phenomenology, ontology, epistemology and eschatology. In other words, fairy experiences can be legitimately studied as authentic (if unusual) ways of knowing and interacting with the world.

To some extent, this expansion of fairylore studies is due to the new generations of post-WWII folklorists who are not boggeddown in the stultifying narrow academic debates of previous eras, but are willing to enlarge the subject by importing data, insights and methods from recent advances in the arts, sciences and social sciences. The new folklorists have been wonderfully positioned – like forteans – to make the most of the increasing number of newspaper archives that are being digitised and made available online. Using the latest online research techniques, digital data-miners

are unearthing the kind of fascinating new narratives included here; many never before accessible to scholars.

Magical Folk is the first wholly new study of British and Irish fairylore in more than half a century. While the first 14 papers each explore a different geographical or cultural region of Britain and Ireland, the last three follow the belief across the Atlantic to examine the relocated fairy believers in New England, the eastern coast of Canada and Irish America. This makes perfect sense, as we now know that each wave of rural immigrants to the New World – especially after the Scottish Highland clearances and the famine that triggered the Irish diaspora – took their beliefs and traditions with them. That these beliefs (and the experiences they inform) are still active in the imagination of the modern descendants of those immigrants, was demonstrated by David Hufford’s study of the experience of being ‘hagridden’(i.e. ‘night paralysis’, in The Terror That Comes in the

Night, 1982). The contributions in Magical Folk show, similarly, that the fairies – whatever they may be or represent – are still at work in the collective imagination.

This book is a perfect example of a revitalising folklore, even more so now that encounters with fairies, demons, aliens and poltergeists can be seen as different cultural adaptations that share a similar spectrum. As forteans, we wholeheartedly congratulate Dr Young and his colleagues for breathing new life into this venerable subject with their learned enthusiasm, shining new light upon what we call ‘experience anomalies’.

Magical Folk is an early taste of the success of the ‘Fairyists’; this time not so much from those who see fairies as from the new generation of academics, folklorists and others who think about them and what they mean. Regrettably for such detailed material there is no index, but this can be remedied in a new edition.

It is, nevertheless, vital and exciting reading for forteans and we look forward to further volumes. Bob Rickard