There is a long and mysterious tradition of humans and faery
lovers. Many beautiful tales and songs are woven around this
theme: certain families are said, traditionally, to come from
both human and faery lineage, especially those associated with
healing, music, and the Second Sight. Writing in his notebook,
around 1692, the Reverend Robert Kirk stated that sometimes
his parishioners could pay no attention to Sunday morning sermons,
as they were exhausted by consorting with their faery lovers
during the previous night. This matter-of-fact statement is
especially curious because it is not a myth, a story of origins,
or a poetic hyperbole. He merely reports the consorting along
with many other aspects of the faery tradition. For Kirk, it
was a feature of life in the Gaelic culture of Scotland: people
made love with faery lovers until they were exhausted (1).
While Kirk reported with some sadness, but no polemic, the
Christian church in general railed against faery lovers, who
were supposed to drag humans into Hell, seduce men and women
and addict them to otherworldly pleasures draining their vital
forces, and to have many hidden agendas in their consorting.
A similar propaganda is found today in fundamentalist Islam,
whereby the jinn are said to seduce humans. Yet the old Sufi
traditions of the Middle East assert that a harmonious relationship
between human and jinn brings many spiritual benefits.
On the folkloric pagan side faery lovers were described as
being of unearthly beauty, highly sensuous, ecstatic, and (as
if the foregoing was not enough) the givers of remarkable gifts.
The gifts of poetry, music, weaving magical cloth, fertility,
the healing arts, prosperity, bounteous harvests on land and
sea, and passage into the paradisal faery realm. Little wonder
that the churchmen were uneasy, when they had the task of selling
sin, misery, and grim obedience to their flock.
Sometimes, of course, humans abused the faery gifts, and would
find dishonest ways to steal or coerce benefits from faery
lovers. The well- known stories and and songs of the Selchie or seal-people typically demonstrate this; a fisherman traps
a supernatural being, a seal woman, and forces her to be his
wife. To this day in Scotland there are families said to be
descended from such unions. This “stolen spirit bride” motif
occurs in a number of folktales, applied to varying situations.
The methods of entrapment vary, but the result is always the
same. The faery or spirit woman stays with the mortal man for
a period of time, bears children, teaches skills, brings luck,
then one day, accidentally as it seems, discovers a way to
undo the connection. In the seal stories she finds her sealskin,
which the fisherman has hidden, transforms back into a seal,
and leaps into the ocean. What always happens in such scenarios
is that the man falls in love with his faery woman, and when
she discovers how to leave him, he dies of a broken heart.
In the brief outline above I have summarized themes that occur
widely in European and Irish tradition, and found their way
to America in the folklore of the immigrants. Similar stories
are still being told today in the Appalachians.
To condense it all even further, we might suggest that we have
the folkloric positive (faery lovers and good and bring benefits)
and the religious negative (faery lovers are bad and bring
torment). There is a third area of tradition, in which the
human abuses the positive, seeking to obtain gifts through
coercion or deceit, but comes at last to love the faery consort,
and pays the price of death when she or he leaves.
Fiona Macleod, in the 19th century, writing master works such
as The Immortal Hour, a ritual drama of faery magic, often
suggested that the faery lover was, in truth, the soul element
of humanity, while the material elements were seated in the
relationship between the mind, sanity and madness, and human
desire (2). We will return to this theme shortly.
The Gifts of Faery Lovers
Tradition tells us that consorting with faery lovers brings
many gifts of both body and soul, sense and feeling, this world
and the other.
So far, we might think, so good. But what is the relevance
of all this consorting today?
There are significant implications for the spiritual and magical
life in our traditions of faery lovers. To understand these,
we must remove ourselves, at least temporarily, from the personal,
and look at the essential basics from a purely esoteric or
metaphysical standpoint. We can jump back in later, of course,
if we so wish.
The idea of faery and human lovers is about interaction, polarity,
exchange, between the human world and the spirit world. One
aspect of such relationships must be that the faery lovers
also gain something from the humans. This is seldom mentioned,
but if humans were dull tedious lovers with nothing to offer
but greed stupidity and deceit, why would the faeries have
spent thousands of years making love to them? Interaction,
polarity, exchange. Take it out of the personal, out of the
human idea of sex, and into that other realm, just a step away,
in which love and passion become creative spiritual forces.
This is where faery love occurs. And this is why there are
legends about human abuse, and the price that humans pay for
such abuse.
Through such interaction we have, in tradition, the related
concept of certain bloodlines, families, and races, that are
a mixture of human and faery.
Typically, the Celts are said
to be “fey”. Sadly this has resulted in commercial
exploitation and cultural asset-stripping in the neo-Celtic
world of popular music, art, and self-styled Celtic spirituality
today. Yet such whimsy seems to have little connection to Celtic
culture or tradition.
If we set aside idle fantasy and self-aggrandizing delusions,
what does it mean when a human is also, in part, a faery being?
It means that he or she is closer to the real living world,
the world in which humans, faeries, and living creatures are
merged together in love and harmony. That human may suffer
for this difference, in the hard artificial world of materialized
humanity, but he or she has to eventually realize that they
are not in any way unusual, but are, in fact, normal people
of planet Earth. It is the isolated antagonistic corporate
-greed driven human culture that is abnormal, not the soul
married to the faery realm and the green life of Nature.
Faeries and sex
So far we have talked about tradition, and the spiritual implications
of tradition. But what about the sensuous implications? Here,
I implore you, set aside whimsy, prettiness and Victorian sentiment.
There is nothing in the faery realm that matches the popular
delusions about faeries; they are not the product of Disney,
nor of repressed erotic mania (3).
Consider, if you will, ecstacy. Ecstasy! Everybody wants it,
few people find it. Faery lovers, we are told, bring ecstasy.
We, as earthly humans, seem to think of bliss or ecstasy as
either a) physical gratification, or b) spiritual escape from
the toils of the weary world. And we easily forget the dichotomy.
The secret of all this is touch.
Forget, for the moment, all the popular material on sex and
bliss, and consider this; when
you touch something, anything, you are making love with it.
A tree, a stone, the chair that you sit in as you read these
words, a loving friend, a faery being. Touch exchanges
energy.
The intensity of exchange when we inwardly touch faery beings
is that of the human orgasm.
While working with faery beings and humans in workshops or
gatherings, I often find that people will be cautious, at first,
about sharing some of their experiences after a vision, a meditation,
or a ceremony. Sometimes such experiences seem to be intensely
sexual. It is only when we realize that all touch, all connection,
is sexual, but that we do not own the sex in a human manner,
that we can truly understand the merging, the alliance, and
the ecstasy that is possible with faery-human relationships.
Yes, we make love with them, but in the sense that the entire
living world is making love, that the universe is generated
by eros; and certainly not in a humanocentric manner or in
the petty realm of selfish gratification.
The quality of Innocence
To come into the love that is possible in the relationships
between human and faery, we have to find our essential innocence.
The jaded knowningness and pseudo- technique mentality associated
with modern human sexuality is a dead end, and can even lead
to a spiritual mortification, a stunting of the soul through
constant self -referring greed. If we can rest in our essential
Being, that innocence which we all have within, we can commune
with, touch, love, the faery cousins and allies in clarity,
without ownership, without loss or pain.
This is nothing, more nor less, than the way we should relate
to all things.
1 The Secret Commonwealth of Elves Fauns and Fairies: Robert
Kirk, 1692. modern editions include a text published by the
Folklore Society, ed Stuart Sanderson, and Robert Kirk, Walker
Between Worlds, text with commentary, by R J Stewart, Element
Books 1989/ online edition at www.dreampower.com.
2 Fiona Macleod (William Sharp) The Immortal Hour Mosher, Maine,
1890, and in later editions of Poems and Dramas, Heinemann,
London.
3 The Erotic World of Fairy Maureen Duffy, Penguin, Harmondsworth,
various editions. To me this book is an example of how far
removed a popular psychological approach can be from the true
spirit of the faery realm: all faery tradition, we are told
by Ms Duffy, boils down to phallicism and suppressed sexuality.
Some years ago one of my mentors, Roberta Gray, read this book
and commented “ This is nothing to do with fairies…but
it is the erotic world of Maureen Duffy.” |