Twilight of the Godlings Quotes

“Just as human encounters with the ‘almost human’ great apes expose the nature as well as the shortcomings of human beings, so past encounters with the culturally constructed ‘almost human’ are revealing of human nature. It may be that cultures that have largely abandoned or hopelessly caricatured the stories we tell about these almost human beings, consigning them to the nursery or to literary and cinematic fantasy, have lost an important means of negotiating humanity’s relationship with the environment and with ourselves. But whatever tides of belief may have receded in the society of contemporary Britain, there are still brief moments of stillness when, somehow, the natural environment inexplicably seems to be gazing back. It is at those times that the words of Ovid may still be apt: numen inest, ‘a spirit is in it’.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“Yet the cryptozoologists’ longing to believe that we share our world with mysterious, almost-human beings is also a kind of denial. Rather than grappling with the difficult question of how we relate to real-world sentient animals of near-human intelligence, human beings take refuge in cultural constructions of imagined, hidden beings who always lie beyond the fringe of scientific knowledge, or beyond our ability to detect them, like the monsters who people the edges of old maps. Our reluctance to rethink our relationship to the animal world seems, in turn, to be just one expression of a broader dysfunctionality in humans’ interaction with our natural environment. As Chris Gosden has argued, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not, we dwell within ‘sensate ecologies’ that include other non-human sentient beings, and ‘it is often difficult to say where the body stops and its surroundings start’.26 It is increasingly clear that the unease many people feel at the exploitation of sentient animals, the felling of ancient trees or the poisoning and destruction of habitats is moral and spiritual as well as emerging from a sense of global civic responsibility or a self-interested, pragmatic fear for the survival of the human species as we lay waste to non-renewable resources.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“The observation that aliens, alien abduction narratives and UFO encounters are the modern equivalents of encounters with fairies has been made so often that it is almost a cliché of writing about fairy belief.24 Yet aliens are really more like angels or demons than fairies. They are inhabitants of a completely different realm, characterised by their difference rather than by their similarity to human beings. It is the longings of cryptozoology, and in particular the desire to believe in human-like cryptids, that more nearly match the fairy lore of the past; like fairies, cryptids are imagined to co-exist on earth with human beings, even if they are hidden from us, and they represent the almost-human rather than the radically different.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“While Roman state religion has little meaning to modern Britons, and the gods of Olympus are little more than characters in children’s stories, the appeal of godlings like the nymphs seems to remain – in part, perhaps, because it is rooted in the landscape itself rather than culturally specific religious abstractions.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“When he visited the Roman fort at Papcastle, the eighteenth-century antiquary William Stukeley went so far as to make an offering to the nymphs, pouring a libation of wine into a spring,3 and the sight of modern offerings of coins inside the patera (the dish-shaped depression) of a Roman altar is a common sight at Roman sites throughout Britain. The interpretation of such apparent ritual activities at ancient sacred sites is a subject of academic debate, but just as Stukeley felt compelled in some way to honour the spirits of place, so many modern visitors find themselves offering some token recognition of the sacredness of a location in the landscape. Yet it is noteworthy that, for Stukeley at Papcastle in the eighteenth century and for the Vindolanda Trust in the twentieth, the cult of the nymphs as spirits of place became the focus of re-constructions of Roman religion rather than, say, the burnt offerings of cattle to Jupiter.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“Britain’s folkloric beings have been through many adaptations, re-fashionings and re-inventions – and at this distance in time it is often difficult to distinguish which of these has occurred. The spirits of Iron Age Britain, whoever and whatever they truly were, were made to conform to the patterns of Roman religion; then the gods of Roman Britain, demonised by Christianity, were re-fashioned by folklore into the little-understood godlings of post-Roman Britain and Anglo-Saxon England, before the Norman Conquest occasioned yet another re-invention based on an imagined or constructed ‘British’ past. By the fourteenth century, the elves of medieval England included traces of other forgotten beings, and a fairly coherent idea of a fairy otherworld was beginning to form. The elves or fairies were embodied, morally ambivalent beings, living in a realm beneath the earth and possessing powers of magic; exempt, at least in part, from the passage of time, they were nevertheless occasionally in need of human beings.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“Fairies may or may not be survivals of pre-Christian animism in some attenuated form, but they certainly embody the survival of a pre-Christian mode of thought in which fate, rather than divine providence, determines human destiny. Fatalitas, whether understood as the enactment of destiny or as enchantment, and characterised by brutal fairy justice, stands as a counterpoint to the merciful providentia of Christ’s economy of salvation. In this sense, the answer to the question ‘Are fairies pagan?’ must be yes – they are beings who belong in the pre-Christian world,”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“It has been the argument of this book that a plausible history of Britain’s godlings – albeit with a number of problematic lacunae – can be told in the longue durée from the Iron Age to the late Middle Ages. The ‘small gods’ of Britain are supernatural beings with a history, once we are prepared to accept that they are culturally constructed beings with a place both in folklore and learned culture, and influenced by the interaction and interplay of both.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“The belief that godlings are always on the way out may be down to the low or unclear status they enjoy within religious cosmologies; even in Ovid’s Fasti, the numen Faunus is unsure whether he will have any power to influence Jupiter. The chthonic di nemorum, the gods of the groves, always occupy a position subordinate to the celestial Olympians, and then subordinate to the Olympians’ transcendent Christian successor as supreme deity. The theory advocated by Emma Wilby and Michael Ostling that godlings represent and embody a more basic substratum of animistic belief beneath later polytheisms is not without merit, although it is largely unproveable. In the specific case of Roman religion, godlings of nature do indeed seem to be older than the Greek-influenced official pantheon, but projecting this Roman situation onto Britain is perilous.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“Older characteristics acquired by elves/fairies in the Middle Ages included their penchant for stealing children (borrowed from the lamiae of the ancient world); their helpfulness in the home (acquired, perhaps, from the Lares and Penates) – including, sometimes, less welcome poltergeist-like activity; their desire to have intercourse with men and women, especially in wild places (borrowed from the fauns, dusii, incubi and succubi) and, of course, their association with fate and destiny – extending into the realm of magic and enchantment – derived ultimately from the Parcae. Furthermore, the Middle Ages crystallised the idea that the fairies lived in an otherworld kingdom (usually underground), an idea that seems to have originated in Welsh folklore and British belief. Occasionally, the fairies were portrayed as diminutive in stature, and the idea that they were dangerous persisted from the threatening Anglo-Saxon elves.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“Those beings that came to be known as ‘elves’ and later ‘fairies’ in medieval Britain were a composite cultural creation whose origins are probably to be found in a synthesis of British (that is, Breton, Welsh and Cornish) and English popular culture that occurred in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest. It is not so much that the fairies were a novel creation at this time, but that the word ‘elf’ proved resilient (for whatever reason) at a time when the range of supernatural beings people believed in seemed to be contracting.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“William Stapleton’s attempted conjurations of the spirit Incubus in Norfolk, a few miles away from where, eleven centuries earlier, devotees of the god Faunus-Incubo had performed esoteric rites in his honour provides an apt illustration of the limitations and opportunities of history in the longue durée. On the one hand, explaining the causal relationship between these two ritual acts is a difficult and complex task, perhaps yielding no definitive answer; but on the other, and setting aside questions of causal relationship, a comparison of these two moments separated by many ages shows that they share much in common – even down to a preoccupation with magical rings and the offering of sacrifice. This does not mean that the paganism of fourth-century Norfolk ‘survived’ into the sixteenth century, of course, but it does point to the existence of deep and persistent cultural currents drawing religious believers to transgressive ritual practices invoking and placating beings connected with buried treasure, prophecy and good fortune.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“One of the first fairies to be conjured in English magic may have been Sibylla or Sibyllia; a form of conjuration of Sybilla appears in Cambridge University Library MS Add. 3544, a working magician’s grimoire dating probably to the 1530s, where she is identified as a ‘prophetess’ but not named as a fairy.125 In the 1580s Reginald Scot explained that Sibylia was ‘a sister of the fairies’,126 but the use of the name for fairy characters goes back at least to the fifteenth century, when the French writer Antoine de la Sale wrote about a visit to a cave that, he was told, would give him access to ‘the paradise of Queen Sibyl’ (who is clearly the fairy queen).”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“When the monk William Stapleton conjured spirits in Norfolk in the 1520s one of them was called Oberion, echoing the name of Shakespeare’s fairy king in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; (c. 1595/1596);121 the same spirit was also conjured by a group of Yorkshire treasure-hunters in 1510.122”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“As early as the fifteenth century, a verse tract on alchemy portrayed the Fairy Queen, named as Elchyyell, as a revealer and teacher of alchemical secrets.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“Magic in medieval Europe was often both highly transgressive and deeply conservative: transgressive in its willingness to invoke beings whose veneration was forbidden, such as pagan deities and apocryphal or invented angels; and conservative in its preservation of earlier religious practices as magical rites. Whether or not we view magic as a degraded or degenerate form of religion – which is a controversial thesis – it is clear that a belief or practice that may have originated in religion may be preserved in magical tradition, shorn of its religious meaning.118 Yet the existence of magical traditions, in and of itself, need not be of any religious significance; the appearance of garbled Arabic prayers in medieval British grimoires, for instance, does not mean British magicians were Muslims.119 This kind of religion-to-magic transformation is one available model for explaining medieval fairy belief; the ‘faerie’ (the enchanted and enchanting ones) were embodiments of the idea of magic itself, and they perpetuated pagan gods and godlings in a vestigial form, but as magical rather than as cultic figures. Fairies are thus better understood as artefacts of medieval magic rather than artefacts of deviant religiosity,”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“As we have seen, the very word ‘faierie’ in Middle English had the double meaning of the fairy realm and the state of enchantment, and Owen Davies has argued that the fairies provided a way for unlearned magical practitioners to account for their powers,”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“The conjuration of fairies in ritual magic (as opposed to the conjuration of demons common in medieval clerical magic) was largely a phenomenon of the late sixteenth century (and thus beyond the scope of this book),114 but it was rooted in much older medieval fantasies of a fairy magic practiced in literature by women (even if real-world learned magic was practised almost entirely by men).”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“the morally ambiguous fairies may have provided an outlet for the classicising impulse under a different and genre-appropriate guise. Thus Sir Orfeo of Winchester takes the place of Orpheus, and the Fairy King stands in for Pluto/Hades in Sir Orfeo. It is clear that some of the fairies of romance are little more than thinly veiled Classical gods, such as Chaucer’s fairy king and queen in The Merchant’s Tale, named Pluto and Proserpina, while Morgan le Fay bears many characteristics of Circe and Medea.113 It is possible, therefore, that one of the many versatile literary purposes of fairies in medieval romance was to introduce figures with the capacity to act like Classical deities while keeping them at arm’s length from the contested realm of theology.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“Katharine Briggs believed that the fairies of romance had begun life as humans possessed of magical powers, and observed that ‘It is rather paradoxical that the word “fairy” now generally used to describe non-human and non-angelic creatures should have been first used about the illusions conjured up by these human enchantresses’.109 Briggs was right that, until the fifteenth century, the word fée/fay was more often used as a participle (meaning ‘enchanted’) than as a noun, and its use is thus not reliably diagnostic of whether beings so described were human or nonhuman entities.110 Fairies were simply ‘enchanting/enchanted ones’.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“Another kind of English supernatural being mentioned by Gervase is the ‘gyant’, which sounds a great deal like many of the equiform bogies of later English folklore: There is in England a certain kind of demon, which they call in their speech ‘Gyant’, like a one-year-old foal, standing on its hindlegs, with sparkling eyes. This kind of demon very often appears on streets, in the very heat of the day or around sunset. And any time it appears, when there will be danger in that town that day or night, having run about the streets it provokes the dogs to bark; and while it simulates flight, it draws the dogs after it in the vain hope of following it. This illusion constitutes a warning of fire to the inhabitants, and thus this dutiful kind of demon, while it terrifies those who catch sight of it, puts the ignorant on their guard by its arrival.97 The English (or Norman French) name ‘gyant’ that Gervase gives for this being is rather surprising, since there is no indication in Anglo-Saxon lore that giants ever took an equine form, nor in the medieval giant lore discussed in Chapter 4 above.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“The Buchedd Collin, a Welsh life of St Collen dating from 1536, shows the extent to which Annwn was synonymous with fairyland and Gwyn ap Nudd with the king of the fairies in late medieval Wales. Although this particular story was recorded on the eve of the Reformation, it may well draw on earlier tales: As [St Collen] was in his cell one day, he heard two men talking about Gwyn ap Nudd, and saying that he was the King of Annwn (the Under-World) and the Fairies. Collen put his head out, and told them to hold their peace, and those were only demons. They told him to hold his peace, and, besides, he would have to meet Gwyn face to face. By-and-by Collen heard a knocking at his door, and in answer got the reply, ‘It is I, the messenger of Gwyn ap Nudd, King of Annwn, bidding you to come to speak with him on the top of the hill by mid-day’. The saint persistently refused to go day after day, until at last he was threatened with the words, ‘If you don’t come, Collen, it will be the worse for you’. This disconcerted him, and, taking some holy water with him, he went. On reaching the place, Collen beheld there the most beautiful castle that he had ever seen, with the best-appointed troops; a great number of musicians with all manner of instruments; horses with young men riding them; handsome, sprightly maidens, and everything that became the court of a sumptuous king. When Collen entered, he found the king sitting in a chair of gold. Collen was welcomed by him, and asked to seat himself at the table to eat, adding that beside what he saw thereon, he should have the rarest of all dainties, and plenty of every kind of drink. Collen said, ‘I will not eat the tree-leaves’. ‘Hast thou ever’. asked the king, ‘seen men better dressed than these in red and blue?’ Collen said, ‘Their dress is good enough, for such kind as it is’. ‘What kind is that?’ asked the king. Collen said that the red on the one side meant burning, and the other, cold. Then he sprinkled holy water over them, and they all vanished, leaving behind them nothing but green tumps.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“While Angana Moitra has argued that the Fairy King is partly an evolution of Pluto/Hades and partly a ‘creole’ entity (following Jane Webster’s approach to Romano-British religion),”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“One of the earliest appearances of the Fairy King in English literature is in the Middle English poem Sir Orfeo, whose earliest surviving manuscript can be dated to around 1330.84”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“in Geoffrey’s portrayal Merlin’s father is a sublunar daemon – a category of being rooted in Platonic philosophy and developed by the philosopher Xenocrates, who succeeded Plato and Speusippus as head of the Academy of Athens. Xenocrates divided the cosmos into the supercelestial realm of the gods, the celestial realm of the stars and planets and the sublunar realm inhabited by daemons and humans. Daemons were intermediate between gods and human beings, possessed of both divine power and human affections – and consequently daemons could be good or evil.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“Richard Firth Green has shown convincingly that the word incubus, in most medieval contexts, was the standard word for a fairy rather than the specifically demonological term it later became.46 As we have seen, incubus was essentially a synonym for faunus as far as Isidore of Seville and the Church Fathers were concerned. Until the elaboration of a theory of demonic artificial insemination by Thomas Aquinas,47 an embodied spirit that was capable of intercourse with men or women was, by definition, a member of that intermediate class of beings between the purely spiritual fallen angels and human beings – and therefore a fairy.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“The terms ‘elf’, ‘elves’ and ‘elvendom’ continued to be used in medieval English until the borrowing of the French words fée and féerie into English in the fourteenth century (as ‘fay’ and ‘faerie’) – and indeed ‘elf’ continued to be used as a synonym for ‘fairy’ even after the widespread adoption of the French term. By the early modern period ‘faerie’ (properly the realm of the fays, or the state of fay enchantment) had become conflated with ‘fay’ to produce the word ‘fairy’.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“Normans were already in contact with Breton literature at the time of the Conquest, which seems to have intensified interest in an imagined ‘British’ past which would give birth, in time, to the phenomenon of Arthurian romance.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“Around a third of the knights who fought alongside William I at Hastings were not Normans but Bretons, and many Breton nobles and knights received English lands from the Conqueror. Bretons who settled in Devon and Cornwall and on the edge of Wales found themselves in contact with Cornish- and Welsh-speaking populations, at a time when the Brittonic languages were probably mutually comprehensible.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings

“While the supernatural was ever present in the late medieval world, it was also often present as a rather mundane reality. For example, rites of exorcism were deployed in medieval England against toothache or as forms of domestic and agricultural pest control, but rarely for their original purpose of liberating demoniacs from the power of the devil.11 In the same way, what little evidence we have for popular fairy belief suggests that the threats and opportunities represented by the fairy realm were a mundane part of life, and this may be one reason fairy belief was rarely reported until the late Middle Ages.”
― Francis Young, Twilight of the Godlings: The Shadowy Beginnings of Britain's Supernatural Beings