Fairies Quotes

“the stories told about fairies seldom have anything to do with Christianity or its morality. Fairy justice is untempered by mercy, fairy truth is untempered by forgiveness, fairy fate is untempered by providence. Fairies allowed pre-Christian ways of thinking about the world and about morality to survive into the Christian era.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“Another theme of this book has been the complex relationship between fairies and Christianity – and, indeed, with religion in general. That relationship is not, in my view, characterized primarily by hostility – for, as we saw in chapter 2, intermediate spirits are themselves emanations of Near Eastern monotheism, and an inclusive and expansive monotheism is conceptually capable of accommodating (and even celebrating) a diverse ecosystem of spiritual life. But because Christianity, from an early date, tended to adopt a dualistic view of transmundane beings as good angels or evil demons, intermediate beings struggled for a place in a Christian cosmology.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“Much ink has been spilled in arguing that the fairies are really gods, or really the dead, or really populations of half-remembered primitive people. But it is equally easy to believe that the experience of living alongside fairies is foundational to human experience. I would propose that fairies – just as much as gods, angels, ghosts, and so on – are a basic category of the human experience of the supernatural.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“As C. S. Lewis noticed, fairies never quite fit into any system or cosmology. They are cosmic misfits, embodiments of the incorrigibly weird. As Jeremy Harte puts it, fairies are ‘the irregular supernatural’.1 Fairies are sui generis.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“But, as we have seen, the English word ‘fairy’ referred originally not to an entity, but to a place and a state of being: faerie, which signified not just an otherworld realm but also the condition of being under enchantment.96 Fairies are enchantment, because faerie is a synonym for enchantment, and enchantment will always find a way to take on a life of its own. We might even find ourselves face to face with it.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“GenAI casts its own kind of fairy glamour, making that which is unreal seem real and tricking the eyes. On one interpretation, it risks plunging us into a digital fairy-tale forest where we are no longer able to reliably distinguish between the human and the non-human, the AI-generated and the ‘real’. Paradoxically, then, the most advanced technology we possess has the potential to breathe new life into the fear of deception by non-human intelligences, one of the oldest of human instincts.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“We know computers and programs do not really think and are really without personality, but somehow it is easier to speak of them as if they were person-like. Indeed, the advent of generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is further blurring the boundaries between human and non-human consciousness. If the computers of the past raised questions about the ‘ghost in the machine’, 21st-century technology raises the possibility of fairies in the machine – unpredictable entities dwelling in the uncanny valley of a GenAI that draws on the sum total of human creativity yet somehow creates something beyond the human. The recurrence and consistency of GenAI ‘hallucinations’ suggests, to some, the presence of mischievous consciousnesses that somehow inhabit this new digital space – like the ‘glitchtokens’ in ChatGPT described by Ed Prideaux, which seem to be AI-generated archetypes of good and evil: a moon goddess called ‘Leilan’ and a goblin-like being called ‘petertodd’.94 These are entirely artefacts of GenAI, which seemingly manifest as if they have an independent life. Perhaps McKenna’s machine elves have migrated from ‘DMT space’ to take up residence in ‘AI space’.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“In an animist (or neo-animist) worldview, fairies are a kind of radical ostension of personification: they are an outward and real manifestation of the human tendency to endow the non-human with personhood. As I noted in chapter 1 above, personification seems to function within such worldviews as a mode of perception: the animist who treats all living things (and even perhaps non-living things) as persons may experience and encounter ideas, abstractions, emotions, and so on as persons too. To most of us, this is an entirely alien way of viewing the world, but it was less alien to people in the ancient world.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“Ian Cuthbertson has put forward the idea of ‘fluid enchantment’, ‘in which individuals partially, ironically or playfully engage with magical or supernatural beliefs … without fully adhering to these beliefs’.91 Yet the possibility of playful semi-engagement with belief (as a kind of performance, perhaps) seems to presume that belief does not arise from being confronted with direct experience. It seems to start from a world that is disenchanted, in which people long for enchantment – rather than from a world that is already enchanted, in which people lack the concepts and vocabulary to process and articulate the ‘impossible’ experiences they have. This does not mean that people’s interpretations of their extraordinary experiences are always correct – and, as any psychologist will tell you, interpretation is built into the very structure of experience itself – but the weight of testimony makes it hard to cling to the idea that fairies are mere cultural constructions or products of story or imagination. There is something, whether within us or outside us, that witnesses are directly experiencing.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“Chris Gosden argues that, whether we recognize it or not, we inhabit ‘sensate ecologies’ where the boundary between the self and nature is not wholly impermeable.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“It is not just the ‘usual suspects’ (religious believers and adherents of alternative spiritualities) who now advocate re-enchantment; some atheists and humanists also regard it as an urgent imperative, on the grounds that only a reawakened sense of wonder and awe before nature and the animal world is likely to motivate a cultural shift away from humanity’s path of ecological destruction.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“Yet, as Harpur argues, the daemons have never gone away; they simply manifest in different ways – as the neuroses of depth psychology, in mysterious big-cat sightings or crop circles, in dream and nightmare. All of these things are ‘daimonic’ (or, we might say, animistic) because they retain ‘intimations of autonomous life’, distinct from mere imagination. Nature manifests itself to us as ‘impersonal, objective, inhuman and soulless’ because we choose to perceive nature in that way – but at the edges of our knowledge, nature still manages to trouble our certainties, the true nature of reality seems unclear, and it is not even obvious whether we are observing the cosmos or the cosmos is observing us.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“The historical theory that fairies are an expression of animism was a key theme of this book’s first chapter, but the idea that a kind of animism lies in humanity’s future (and present) as well as in its past is one that has been gaining ground in the last thirty years. In his 1994 book Daimonic Reality, Patrick Harpur claimed that ‘[T]he same world-view existed everywhere in pre-Christian times and still exists in non-monotheistic cultures. It even exists, against the odds, unofficially – instinctively – among groups and individuals in our culture.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“Of course, from a ‘Tolkienian’ or ‘Chestertonian’ point of view, the fact that people tell stories about fairies is itself significant, for stories express profound truths; consigning fairies to story is not so much a way of distancing them from reality as a way of processing their reality and the reality of a spiritual world as a whole that we now have no way of approaching outside the framework of story. On this reading, people in Europe and America LARP as fairies at fantasy conventions not because they are childish and hopelessly disconnected from reality, but because our culture denies people any other recognized outlet for engaging with an aspect of reality that some yearn for and feel profoundly.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“Among advocates of a countercultural and re-supernaturalized Christianity there are still those who view fairy lore in a positive light. The American Christian philosopher David Bentley Hart, writing in 2013, contemplated the existence of fairies, and argued that ‘the sciences might perhaps have something to say about [fairies], if a proper medium for investigating them could be found’.76 Hart’s openness to fairies seems to derive from his rejection of a ‘hierarchy of hypostases’ mediating between the world and God; Hart’s God is wholly transcendent, and ‘transcendently present in all beings’, and does not express his power ‘in lesser principles’. This conception of the divine opens up the possibility of a less hierarchical and more chaotic ecosystem of spiritual creatures, perhaps even including fairies.77 Other Christian conservative authors such as Richard Beck and Rod Dreher have likewise called for a reenchanted Christianity – even if fairies are not uppermost in their vision of Christianity’s future.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“– such as the metaphysics espoused by the philosopher Graham Harman, which ascribes reality even to the objects of the imagination.68 In such thinking, familiar distinctions between reality and fiction, imagination and perception, subjective and objective are elided. People experience things that are simultaneously ‘real’ (even to the point that others can experience them, too) and generated from the imagination. As the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari speculated, we may be surrounded by ‘incorporeal domains of entities we detect at the same time that we produce them, and which appear to have been always there, from the moment we engender them’.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“In an effort to explain the DMT elves, Davis appeals to Bruno Latour’s notion of ‘beings of metamorphosis’ who lack sustained continuity of being, seemingly appearing and disappearing because they inhabit other modes of being.67 But while most people might be minded to be dismissive of the experiences of those who use psychedelics because they had those experiences while using psychedelics, for McKenna the very fact that psychedelics were seemingly necessary to unlock such experiences was evidence of their significance. Drugs such as DMT did not create illusions but rather unlocked Aldous Huxley’s ‘doors of perception’, implying that a realm lay beyond those doors that was inhabited by life forms of its own.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“Yet, in truth, neither aliens nor cryptids really have what it takes to be fairies. They are defined by their otherness, and by their inaccessibility to human investigation. Even if their uncanniness lies, in part, in their dim resemblance to humanity, they are too different from us to be mirror populations like the fairies; they do not share or mimic our social life, as fairies do.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“There are those, of course, who dispute that the occupants of UFOs come from outer space at all, even if the UFOs are seen in the sky. Aliens need not be construed as extraterrestrials. Alien activity may be manifested more chthonically, and the interpretation of crop circles as caused by aliens might be seen as an attempt to synthesize UFO mythology with traditional fairy lore. There is even the possibility that the aliens emanate from human consciousness itself, in a kind of projection of a subjective experience into reality. In these scenarios, the aliens do appear more like fairies, as David Luke speculated: ‘the aliens themselves may actually be elves, but they are more intra-terrestrial than extra-terrestrial, or perhaps even trans-terrestrial – that is, they are not actually outside, but then inside is the wrong term as well’.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“Fairies emerge from the earth, they live in the earth, and they are tied to it. Fairies are chthonic beings.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“The notion that ‘aliens’ (whether understood as extraterrestrials or not, but always associated with UFOs) are the fairies of modern times is one so often repeated in books about fairy lore that it has become a cliché. In Purkiss’s view, ‘aliens are our fairies’ because we are still unable to tolerate uninhabited space of which we are ignorant, and feel the need to populate it with beings who mirror ourselves.46 For our ancestors, that space might have been the woods, hills, uncultivated meadows, and the terra incognita at the edge of maps, while for us it is outer space. Aliens, in Purkiss’s view, ‘work … as early modern fairies did, canalizing our most potent fears and desires, beliefs and disbeliefs’, particularly when it comes to the abduction of children.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“Under the influence of Gerald Gardner’s belief that the fairies were the witches, some contemporary Pagans have come to believe that they are partly of fairy ancestry, and that this accounts for clairvoyant gifts or a latent attraction to Pagan spiritualities and magic.38 These beliefs perhaps feed into the phenomenon of fairy cosplay and live-action roleplaying (LARPing), a feature of contemporary American culture that crosses the cultural boundaries between Pagan spirituality, fantasy fandoms, and LGBTQ+ subcultures.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“In modern Paganism, however, the idea of fairies as separate beings is far from absent. As Sabina Magliocco explains, ‘[Pagans] are interested in fairies precisely because of their presumed link to an earlier world-view in which the cosmos was alive with energies, animated by spirit beings – in other words, enchanted and ensouled.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“Murray subscribed to the ‘pygmy theory’ of fairies, identifying them as an ‘aboriginal’ population who went into hiding and preserved their prehistoric religious traditions. In fact, since the ‘fairies’ preserved the witch-cult, the fairies were witches,29 and thus Murrayite historiography actively demythologized fairy lore. The fairies were actually human, traditional fairy lore was degraded collective memory, and the idea of fairies as non-human supernatural beings was excluded by definition.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“Nevertheless, the Fairy Census does raise questions about whether seeing fairies is a more common experience than society generally acknowledges – because people either have no frame of reference within which to categorize their experiences, or are too fearful of mockery to share them.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“Fairy magic is not entirely dead in Europe, and Judit Kis-Halas has documented the practice of a traditional healer named Erszike in the village of Rádfalva in southern Hungary. Erszike became a healer owing to experiences during a ‘fairy illness’ or ‘fairy possession’, and she subsequently offered to help others by means of angelic and fairy magic. Yet, while Erszike might seem like a throwback to an earlier phase of Hungarian village life, her clients come from all strata of society and she is happy to make use of modern ‘New Age’ materials in her traditional healing practice (indeed, this willingness to make use of any available source of magical power arguably makes Erszike more traditional).18 In truth, there is no such thing as a pure and unspoilt fairy tradition that can help us distinguish authentic from inauthentic expressions of fairy lore.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“There is nothing solemn and po-faced about the fairy tradition, which has always had an element of playfulness and self-mockery to it; fairies are beings of folklore, not religion. As Art Leete and Vladimir Lipin found among the Komi hunters of the Urals, jokes about forest spirits and magical practices did not mean the hunters did not believe in them.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“However, in the pitting of elves against development and modernity, we see a departure from the elves’ traditional place in Icelandic society as a mirror population – for, as Icelandic elf-seers report, the elves of modern Iceland live the lives of Icelanders of two or three centuries ago. They are no longer keeping pace with their human counterparts.14 It is worth noting that this fairy eschewal of technology seems not to be universal, as the incident of the Wollaton gnomes testifies – a mass sighting of gnomes driving cars and chasing children around Nottingham’s Wollaton Park in September 1979.15 But Iceland’s elves are not just a way to sell the country to outsiders; they are also the ‘superlative Icelanders’ who ‘incarnate heritage and tradition’, ensuring that, regardless of social changes, Iceland remains always the same on some unseen level.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“Ármann Jakobsson identifies the ‘Icelandic tourist elf’ as a distinct type of ‘fakelore’, whose history and meaning are vastly simplified and who has little connection with traditional Icelandic folklore.10 Matthias Egeler, meanwhile, has drawn attention to the advent of ‘Reykjavík fairies’ who are essentially ‘New Age fairies’ transplanted to Iceland, and have no precedent at all in Icelandic folklore. Typical of this trend was the self-declared fairy psychic Erla Stefánsdóttir (1935–2015), who claimed to be able to map the elves of Iceland, regularly appeared on TV, and helped form international perceptions of Iceland’s supernatural fauna. But Stefánsdóttir drew on Theosophical ideas and dreamt up beings such as blómálfar (flower fairies) who owed more to Cottingley than they did to Icelandic folklore.”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History

“Unfortunately, the Society’s early records were destroyed in the Blitz in 1940, but Craufurd wrote down his own reminiscences in 1957. He recorded that the group carried out experiments between 1927 and 1932 communicating via psychic radio and automatic writing with nine ‘marsh fairies’ who were supposed to guide them to archaeological remains – a strange fusion of the traditional role of English fairies as guardians of treasure with technology and Spiritualism.126 In spite of the loss of its archive, the FIS just about survived the Second World War; indeed, among its most famous members was a key figure in that conflict – Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, who commanded RAF Fighter Command in the Battle of Britain, but also believed fairies were essential for the growth of vegetable life.127 After the War, Dowding feared the onset of battle between gnomes, fairies, and human beings in Ireland.128 Curiously enough, Dowding’s interests were not the fairies’ only involvement with the RAF in the Second World War – pilots belonging to Clan MacLeod reportedly carried photographs or small pieces of the ‘Fairy Flag of Dunvegan’ (a flag supposed to have been given to a chieftain by the fairies, and kept at Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye).”
― Francis Young, Fairies: A History