Supernatural
Nature Spirits
Fairies
World Folk Tales

Faery

Here are a couple methods I've used to experience faeries:

1) Turn off your TV, radio, computer, cell phone, etc. 2) Go outside, to a place where it is hushed and untamed -- forest, meadow, creekside, ocean beach, mountain, your own garden. Note: if you go really far out to the wilds, remember that while you may be engaged in a totally non-rational activity, you should never be stupid. Keep all your wood-wise skills about you. Otherwise, don't go out so far. 3) There are traditional times of the year to seek faeries, at least those of European origin: May Day (May 1) and All Hallows Day (November 1) are the biggies, with runners-up at the Solstices: Midsummer (June 21) and Yule (December 21 -- how do you think that "jolly old elf" business started?). The old Celtic method of reckoning time is from night to night -- thus May Eve, Midsummer Eve, Halloween, and Yule Eve are "it." In practice, I've found that you have a good couple days on either side of the holiday when "the veil is thin," as folklore says. 4) I've also had good luck under a full moon, any time of year. Daytime works too. My favorite time (and very traditional) is the gloaming, when the sun has set but it's not yet dark. (Unfortunately, it's also mosquito time.) 5) Good idea to bring a small offering: flowers, food, ribbons, shells, pretty pebbles, silver coins, a poem written out. To this day, if you visit the old places of Britain and Ireland, you will find venerable trees by wells or standing stones with ribbons and rags tied as offerings to their branches. Lore has it that faeries don't like iron/steel, and are quite partial to milk. Native American spirits are said to prefer tobacco or cornmeal. Use your imagination. Carry your offering until you come to a place that feels "right" to leave it. If at ocean or creek, you might toss your offering into the water, or sail it on a little bark boat. Alternatively, I do a service for the land when I'm out walking in daytime, like pick up trash at the beach or pull out alien thistle seedlings in the hills. The land appreciates it, and that's what counts. 6) Quiet yourself. Quiet your mind. Be fully present. Pay attention to what's around you. Breathe deep. 7) Be aware of your peripheral vision. Practice "owl vision," an exercise I learned from Starhawk, one of my teachers: Hold both arms out to your sides and wiggle your fingers. Now move your arms back or forward slowly, til you can just see *both* hands while your eyes look ahead. This is your field of peripheral vision. Get to know it. As you walk, be in full awareness of what's on your sides, in soft focus. 8) Practice walking like a slithery cat, slowly, on silent paws. Your object isn't to stalk anything, but to blend in and connect to the energies here; to not be a big, noisy, blundering stranger to the place, whom everything runs away from. You may want to stop and sit -- if you are motionless, hushed, and patient, it takes about 20 minutes for the forest to forget you're there, and everything to go on as usual around you. 9) Okay, you're here, the place is right, the timing's right, you're quiet, and you're paying attention. Now what? Now it's luck, and intention. Walking or sitting, get yourself fully grounded to the place you're in. Acknowledge the seven directions: north, east, south, west, above, below, and "here," center. Attune yourself to the spirit of the place, the genii loci. Respectfully ask to make a connection. Specify that you seek to meet a faery who would be a helper, an ally, a healer, and a true friend. Then be patient, see what you can intuit. Stay focused, and if your mind wanders, gently bring it back. I've honestly never heard of anyone who saw faeries in full-color, physical flesh. Spirits will signal themselves in other ways, for instance, with distinct flashes of light in your peripheral vision. If you sense a strong presence, one option is to close your eyes and ask if the faery will appear to you in your mind's eye. (Just because you see it "inside" doesn't mean it's not real.) You may ask questions, seek advice. Listen, really truly listen, but remember that, like humans, faeries can vary in their wisdom. In any case, be alert to the unusual and synchronistic. I have seen odd patches of rainbow light exactly when and where I looked up, a flaming meteor shoot across the north star just when I acknowledged the north, and yes, those fascinating peripheral-vision lights. Wonderfully strange things have happened that left me no doubt that I made contact of one sort or another. Once I even saw the end of a full rainbow, right *there.* I thought, well you never know, pots of gold and all, and walked over -- and of course, it shifted the moment I approached. Never let it be said that the fey folk don't have a sense of humor. 10) Another method is to commune with a plant spirit. (Gardeners and herbalists especially like this one.) Find yourself an attractive plant or tree. Sit down beside it. Go through the same centering, acknowledging, and attuning as above. Gently touch the plant, sniff it, study it. Close your eyes and try to energetically "enter" it. With the spirit's permission, let yourself merge with the plant. Possibly, the plant spirit may take a faery form and appear in your mind's eye. Listen to what it may tell you. Ask the plant spirit if it has any healing properties. Sometimes you may connect with the deva of an individual plant, sometimes with the totem spirit of all that species. Note: don't get too spaced out doing this. One of my dear and normally wood-wise teachers, while teaching a workshop, sent us out to look for our plants, went off herself in a trance-y state, and unified with a lovely, emerald-green patch of poison oak. 11) Always, always, formally end a faery connection. When finished, say thank you, and really let yourself feel gratitude. If you haven't yet made your offering, this is a good time. You may want to honor a spirit presence with a song (faeries are very fond of music). Your spirit being may want to give you a song to remember, or last words of wisdom, or perhaps something else. Say goodbye. Open your eyes if they were closed, invigorate your breathing, stretch, move. Be sure to fully come back to your own personal boundaries, pat the edges of your body, say your own name. It's easy to get spaced out doing this kind of work; be firm about pulling yourself back together and orienting yourself exactly. When I get home, I always write in my journal any details I want to remember. As much as I think I won't forget, I will. 12) Yet another method to connect with Faery is through dreams. There are the night-time sleep dreams (chance-y, but very magical when it happens), and there are "awake dreams" which include meditation, visualizations, and full trance. To bring myself a sleep dream, I meditate on my intention (whom I hope to contact and why), perhaps read appropriate stories or myths, tell myself that I wish to dream of Faery before/while I fall asleep, and see what happens. In truth, sometimes nothing. And sometimes I've had amazing dreams with no prep at all. For "awake dreams" from your nice comfy house, adapt the steps in 9, 10, and 11, above. A steady, soft drum beat helps immensely-- you can get cassette tapes to play so you can relax. You can simply lie down and go for it, or light candles and get fancy. Be sure to ground yourself, acknowledge the directions, and so on. Close your eyes. Strongly visualize your favorite place in nature. When it feels very real, then follow the same steps as above.

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

--W.B. Yeats

I do not say, "I believe in faeries," although I do. I'm an educated, mostly respectable person, after all. And "belief" is an slippery concept. There are some who will believe I'm nuts. And if not outright crazy, then surely self-deluded, fanciful, naive, or at best eccentric. But that's their belief.

A rubbing by Karin Morris, Second Spirit Figure at Kullet Bay, near Ladysmith, B.C. of a group of petroglyphs carved on a sandstone rock face on the northside of a small secluded pool in the forest adjacent to a shell midden.

Truth is, the world of Faery exists whether I believe or not. At least, I believe so. If I say anything at all, it's something like: "Yes, of course they're there. Open your eyes. Be silent and listen. Pay attention to what's just beyond the threshold of perception... See?"

Start with the folklore of many thousands of years, from every part of the world, that acknowledges the natural world as alive. Every tree and rock, every creek and cat, every bird and butterfly has a soul. Or look at it the other way around: there are infinite souls embodied in a physical form, tuned to the frequency of, say, "redwood" or "elephant." And go one step further: there are also spirits -- conscious souls -- with their own shape and form, who live in their own non-physical reality, and sometimes step into ours.

Faeries. Spirits of the land. Devas of the garden. Nymphs of the woods and mermaids of the ocean; giants of the mountains. All of them are inhabitants of the Faery realms, with a tentative foot in ours.

A very important distinction: we are not talking about Tinkerbell. No cutesy, tiny Victorian fairies, please, with glittery gossamer wings. (Notice the different spelling -- we'll use "Faery" with an "e" when discussing the real thing.) Our ancestors, who knew a thing or two, saw most faeries as human-size, often bigger, and treated them with great respect. Faery lore is found across the world, from Asia to America, and is particularly thick in old Europe (perhaps only because it's better documented). One theory goes that as Christianity advanced in Europe, so did the image of the faery folk shrink and become sentimentalized. Literary treatments, from Shakespeare's time on, reflect how the powerful Goddesses and Gods of ancient Pagan eras gradually became wee little darlings who sat at toadstool tables, drinking dewdrops from flower goblets. This sort of creature is unknown in the traditional lore. But you will find, should you look for them (perhaps this Midsummer Eve, for Shakespeare had that part right) that faeries may appear in whatever form and size you expect. Their presence seems to spark within our imaginations, so that they become clothed in our human expectations. But that is only clothing. They have their own existence. They have their own agenda. Sometimes they like and help humans. Sometimes they don't. They are shapeshifting tricksters., and whether or not they are "nice" or not varies greatly, just as it does among humans.

"The Mermaids Come up In Extraordinary Numbers" by Flora White illustrating Peter Pan by Sir James M. Barrie,
1987 edition, dilithium Press, Ltd.

They are much connected to nature, of that much I am certain. They do not care for civilization. You find them in the wild -- and in your wild, true dreams. They appear in the liminal places, the edges, betwixt and between, at twilight, at gateways and crossroads, at the shoreline, in one's peripheral vision. The places where one thing ends and something else begins. It's rare that faeries will stay in urban areas, perhaps only in the oldest overgrown gardens. That's why so few modern people sense faeries anymore -- we mostly live in cities, the world of traffic and street lights and loud TVs, corporate rulers and stolen elections. The wild lands are abstract, unseen, something to be tamed with pesticides and industrial logging and oil drilling. And too, our ever-so rational disbelief closes the door. How can anyone believe in something that most cannot see?

If you did not believe in wildflowers, paved and sprayed everywhere, then you wouldn't see them either. Too few of us live out in the far hills and meadows, go walking in places lit only by moonlight. We don't know how to slip silently through the woods anymore. Our busy monkey brains don't want to hush. Too rarely do we enter our dreams with open minds and hearts, and the intent to remember. To sense the Faery world, modern people first need to be quiet. We need to remember that the natural world is alive and sacred, and mystery is our guide. We need patience. It takes time, attention, and clearness to tune in to another "channel." To see ourselves first as spirals and whorls of energy. Then to connect and interconnect with other energies -- nature, and more. To touch the Whole, the All, the Divine -- whatever we may call that Power underneath all powers. If your rational mind balks, then tempt it with the art of physics, which "believes" that we are each a collection of atoms and the emptiness between atoms, held together by attraction. Each one of us simultaneously dances life, dances death. With a little practice, the idea of Spirits of the Land is not so far fetched. And then -- then! -- we begin to see...

I have a model for my students, people of all ages, mostly city dwellers, but all of them yearning to see. The universe, I tell them, is like a immense club sandwich. There are layers of reality, like layers of turkey and cheese and lettuce and tomato. And in normal human living, we exist mostly in the mustard layer. Maybe a bit of the mayo, if we're really perceptive. The trick is to sense the entire sandwich, even if it's too huge, too deep to see with human eyes. To "believe" that the sandwich exists. To reach out for the cheese and tomato realities. To understand that while the mustard reality is delicious and spicy, it is not the All. We are one part of the Whole .

Spirit beings exist outside of time and ordinary, mustard reality. That's why they are hard for us to sense. They like it that way. They are of the Otherworld. This is not a science fiction setting, but a place known to rambling old shamans, imaginative small children, and the occasional middle-aged mystic. The Faery reality existed before the Whole sandwich was separated into "real" and "unreal" layers. Consider that humans evolved over the last couple million years on an already ancient planet. For most of our existence, we recognized a numinous world, where time was dreamtime and the Otherworlds existed alongside our own, into which we too could step, if only we found the gateway. Humans were connected to the Whole she-bang. It's only over the last couple thousand years -- really, the last couple hundred (hundred!) -- that rationalism, that invention of our clever monkey minds, separated humanity from the rest of the cosmos. At the top of the chain, apart and arrogant. Personally, I think it's a fad. I don't think it will last. Rationality is a useful tool as far as it goes, but it just won't cut the mustard.

Yet I too have grown up in the culture of rationalism. I don't mention Faery in average company, less someone should inquire about how long I've been off medication. Maybe Faery is all "only" my imagination, my belief system, but if so, nearly all ancient and indigenous humans join me there. I prefer to think of it as intuition, based on my small experience and spiced with yearning.

There is something in the yearning for Faery that opens the way. In ordinary human reality, in the asphalt world, I am blind. But in the dreaming reality, in the wild, yearning for mystery, for the feathery touch of magic on the back of my neck, something changes. I've been blessed with occasional contact -- some fleeting, some sustained -- and I ache for more. Traditional lore is very clear: once you've been touched by Faery, your perception changes forever.

Many's the faerytale of the lass or lad who stumbles upon, or is drawn into, or goes to seek, the Otherworld. It is an encounter with mystery, and perhaps chaos. Through this contact, comes transformation. Vasalisa of old Russia sought fire from the fey crone Baba Yaga, and returned successful, but with the unlooked-for ability to weave perfectly. True Thomas of medieval Scotland was seduced by the Faery Queen herself and served her seven years before returning to the human world as a bard and prophet, whose tongue never lied. Etaín of ancient Ireland was once of Faery, but lost her way and was reincarnated a thousand years later as a human. When her Otherworldly lover found her, it took only one kiss from him, and human Etaín remembered everything. In ancient Australia, the brave Winjarning brothers were captured by the flying Keen Keeng people, from whom they gleaned holy chants and dances to bring back to their own tribe. A Maori man named Kahukura happened upon a moonlit beach where the faery folk were fishing, and tricked for himself their fishnet, the first for humans. In medieval China, the drunkard Ch'un Yu Fen fell asleep under a tree and was transported to Faery, marrying the princess there. After happy years, he awoke to find that only minutes had gone by in the human world -- and that sobered him for good. In the older French versions of Cinderella, it was the ancestral spirit of her dead mother, living in an ancient tree, who led Cinderella to her adventures and fortune.

Further Reading

For further reading, I recommend these for starters. Out of print books can be found in used book stores (the hunt is half the fun). Or try online at one of the largest used bookstores anywhere -- and an independent bookseller! -- Powells.com. • Any of the books by dedicated folklorist Katharine Briggs, especially "An Encyclopedia of Fairies," Pantheon Books, 1976. • Eliot Cowan has a great book on working with plant totems: "Plant Spirit Medicine," Swan Raven & Co, Newberg, OR, 1995. • An amazing early study is folklorist W.Y. Evans Wentz's "The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries," first published in 1911, reprinted a couple times. As a graduate student of Stanford around the turn of the last century, Evans Wentz went out to the field (rather literally) and interviewed all the old folks he could find who still believed in, and saw, faeries. Later in his career, he was the first Westerner to translate the "Tibetan Book of the Dead." • R.J. Stewart is a Scot now living in Northern California, and someone I consider a serious authority on Faery. His books tend to be a bit rambling and esoteric, but there's a lot of excellent material -- I suggest skipping bits when it get sloggy. "The Underworld Initiation," Aquarian Press, England, 1985. "Earth Light," Element Books, 1992. "The Living World of Faery," Gothic Image, England, 1995. R.J. Stewart also has a very interesting website, dreampower.com, where he's made available the full text of two rare books about Faery. • W.B. Yeats does wonderful things with traditional stories in "Irish Fairy and Folk Tales" (reprinted many times). And his early poetry is full of authentic, magical faery lore. • Read the old faerytales, of which there are numerous collections, particularly Andrew Lang's. Consider them not just as cute kid stories, but as imaginative code that kept alive elder beliefs.

Ancestral spirits. Nature spirits. Demoted Goddesses and Gods. Tricksters. All the above. It is a highly varied race that you seek, should you seek them out.

A rubbing by Karin Morris, Skeletal Form at Petroglyph Park, Nanaimo, B.C., one of several rock carvings of animal spirits on a treed knoll above the mouth of the Nanaimo River.

And why should you? Different people will have different reasons. Curiosity. Delight. Meaning. A desire to know mystery in our prefabricated lives. Yet, a new reason has evolved, one never before seen in the relationship between Faery and human. At its basis is a new and terrible truth: current Western civilization has run smack into the limits of growth, and unless checked soon, the ecological balance of our planet will collapse. It's not theory, it's not gloom-and-doom scare tactics, it's fact. Put that in your rationalist bonnet and tie it. If our world, our sweet delicious mustard layer burns out, does that ruin the rest of the cosmic sandwich? I don't know. But I do know that this is Faery's Earth too, that they care deeply about the natural world, and we are allies in halting the destruction. Allies -- it's a marvelous concept. The rising tide of activists and many quiet supporters on the sidelines have already, very seriously, been calling on Spirit allies to help in the work (that's another fact).

They are people who understand a new paradigm. Healing the Earth is necessary to the survival of our species, and many thousands of other species, since we have the astonishing capacity to destroy more than just ourselves. But healing the Earth means much more than recycling and driving less. It also means healing our connection to the Earth, and to all her beings. To realize in our guts that we humans are not separate. We gain and give so much by connecting to Spirit in all its forms. We find balance, wholeness, new energy, deep strength, and awareness. We give back our human ability to be the main actors in this mustardy world of physical reality, and take the actions that allow other beings a peaceful existence.

"Gil-galad was an Elven-king. Of him the harpers sadly sing the last whose realm was fair and free between the Mountains and the Sea." a verse of a ballad from The Fellowship of The Ring by J.R.R.Tolkien

See companion piece Faery Lore, Folk, and Fine.

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