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are also Christian interpretations that fairies are fallen angels.
According to Alexander Carmichael in Carmina Gadelica “some
of the angels seduced by Satan were not prominent in his councils,
but might rather be counted his dupes. When Michael hurled the
hosts of Satan out of Heaven they were followed by an almost
endless stream of these comparatively innocent victims of his
unholy eloquence. The Shining Host of Heaven was thinning rapidly,
and the Son, seeing the danger, cried out: 'Father, Father, the
City is being emptied!' God raised his hand; the gates of Heaven
closed, the seduced angels stopped bewildered and recollected
themselves, and those who were already descending stopped in
their tracks, some in the sky, some in the sea, some on mountains
and in woods, some further on their way towards Hell, in bowels
of the earth, and the foremost angels, wholly committed to evil,
in the burning lake.”
The Scandinavian assessment of
the fairy fate is different, and is told in a legend about Eve hiding some of
her children in the woods. “After the fall Adam and Eve settled
down to domesticity and were the parents of a large number of children,
so many that Eve was ashamed of them. On day God, walking through
the world, called on Eve and asked her to present her children
to Him. Eve sent half of them to hide and brought out those she
thought most presentable; but God was not deceived. 'Let those
who were hidden from me, ' He said, 'be the hidden people.'”
The Irish believe that the
fairies are a previously conquered society, the Tuatha De Danaan (People of
the Goddess Dana), who were driven into hiding when the Celts invaded Ireland.
The Pagan gods of the Tuatha, skilled in building and magic, went underground
to live in the tombs and mounds they had built. Hidden from sight, they grew
smaller in the popular imagination until they turned into fairies.
In “Theories
of Fairy Origins” the author quotes Lewis Spence, who “makes
a fair and detailed examination of the various theories about the
origin of fairy beliefs, as spirits of the dead, deified ancestors,
elementals or nature spirits, the memory of aboriginal races, diminished
gods or totemic forms. He mentions but dismisses the theory that
they may be a blend of all these, and in the end concludes that
the weight of evidence makes it likely that the fairies are sprung
from the feared and venerated dead. Many aspects of the fairy beliefs
may be plausibly accounted for by this hypothesis: for instance
the small size of the fairies, for in primitive times the soul
was commonly thought of as a miniature form of the man which came
out of his mouth in sleep or trance and had to return to the body
before he could become conscious...They can take the form of birds
or beasts, but every time that they resume their proper shape they
are a little smaller than they were before.”
In Wales, fairies are thought
to be a race of invisible spiritual beings living in a world of
their own. Some people also believe that fairies were originally local gods
or nature spirits that dwindled in majesty and size over time.
Diane Purkiss
in her book, At the Bottom of the Garden, writes eloquently about fairies and
their place in helping humans deal with their fear of the dark woods and universal
darkness. Men and women growing up in ancient cultures faced different demons
and obstacles to growing up. They both faced “Gorgo” the symbol of
pure fear. Gorgo is the violent cry of those killed, the death grin, the gnashing
teeth, head thrown back, howling at the sky. Warriors in Greece had to stand
firm in the face of terror; only children were allowed the luxury of terror.
Boys in Greece were raised to be warriors, and therefore face down “demons
of the nursery.” To be a warrior is to be willing to stare down the gorgon
of fear, someone who has transcended the space of childhood. Bad fairies and
demons were those boys who could not grow up, because they had died young, their
souls returned to capture other young souls to keep them company. Kubu is described
as a Greek Peter Pan, a demon that can not face the demons to grow up. Peter
Pan was a boy who could never grow up, never to be named or fed by his mother,
because he had flown away, to avoid growing up. Purkiss writes, “Peter
has been trapped in an endless babyhood. He is called Betwix-and-Between, a being
caught between unlife and life. Like Kabu, he takes to stealing children, as
he was ‘stolen’. In all his incarnations, Peter Pan
is a nursery demon feared by mothers, who kidnaps children and
steals them away.”
The boy must face down his fears
as a warrior and the girl does the same in ancient worlds as she grows up to
face childbirth. A woman in labor can be compared to a man on the battlefield.
Before there was anesthesia, and life saving hospitals, women were at the mercy
of luck to survive what was a bloody, dangerous event for herself and child.
Both a warrior and a woman giving birth are likely to die a young, bloody death. “Pregnant
and lactating women take on the vulnerability of the child to terrors
as long as their bodies are one with the body of the child. All
demons preyed particularly on childbearing women and their infants.
And yet childbirth and the successful rearing of the child to maturity
represented a triumph over death as great as any enacted on the
battlefields of Troy.”
The female equivalent of Peter
Pan is a fairy demon, in the Sumarian Culture are called ardat-lili demons, girls
who died before they married or bore children, and died before completing their
life. They have a thirst for other children’s blood and ardat-lili
were blamed for premature births, miscarriages, and childhood deaths
due to disease.
In all near
subsistence cultures the lives of children are always at risk. Fairies were
a way of thinking and talking about child health and child illness, and the
powerful feelings of responsibility, love and fear that such ill children could
cause. Basic to all these stories is the idea that a sick child is somehow
taken, somehow no longer owned by the mother who bore it but by some other
mother. The fairies are too powerful to fight and they often bring benefits
to the parents in exchange for taking the child away. |
