Real Crime Stories/Paranormal Hauntings

Faeries: Mythical or Real?

Demoted pagan deities

At one time it was thought that fairies were originally worshiped as minor deities, such as nymphs and tree spirits, and with the burgeoning predominance of the Christian Church, reverence for these deities carried on, but in a dwindling state of perceived power. Many deprecated deities of older folklore and myth were repurposed as fairies in Victorian fiction.

Fairies as demons

A recorded Christian belief of the 17th century cast all fairies as demons. This perspective grew more popular with the rise of Puritanism among the Reformed Church of England (Anglicanism). The hobgoblin, once a friendly household spirit, became classed as wicked goblin. Dealing with fairies was considered a form of witchcraft, and punished as such. In William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Oberon, king of the faeries, states that neither he nor his court fear the church bells, which the renowned author and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis cast as a politic disassociation from faeries. In an era of intellectual and religious upheaval, some Victorian reappraisals of mythology cast deities in general as metaphors for natural events, which was later refuted by other authors (The Triumph of the Moon, by Ronald Hutton). This contentious environment of thought contributed to the modern meaning of 'fairies'.

Spirits of the dead

One belief held that fairies were spirits of the dead. This derived from many factors in common of various folklore and myths: same or similar tales of both ghosts and fairies; the Irish sidhe, origin of their term for fairies, were ancient burial mounds; deemed dangerous to eat food in Fairyland and Hades; the dead and fairies depicted as living underground. Diane Purkiss observed an equating of fairies with the untimely dead who left "unfinished lives". One tale recounted a man caught by the fairies, who found that whenever he looked steadily at a fairy, it appeared as a dead neighbor of his. This theory was among the more common traditions related, although many informants also expressed doubts.

A hidden people

There is a theory that fairy folklore evolved from folk memories of a prehistoric race: newcomers superseded a body of earlier human or humanoid peoples, and the memories of this defeated race developed into modern conceptions of fairies. Proponents find support in the tradition of cold iron as a charm against fairies, viewed as a cultural memory of invaders with iron weapons displacing peoples who had just stone, bone, wood, etc., at their disposal, and were easily defeated. 19th-century archaeologists uncovered underground rooms in the Orkney islands that resembled the Elfland described in Childe Rowland, which lent additional support. In folklore, flint arrowheads from the Stone Age were attributed to the fairies as "elf-shot", while their green clothing and underground homes spoke to a need for camouflage and covert shelter from hostile humans, their magic a necessary skill for combating those with superior weaponry. In a Victorian tenet of evolution, mythic cannibalism among ogres was attributed to memories of more savage races, practising alongside "superior" races of more refined sensibilities.

Elementals

A theory that fairies, et al., were intelligent species, distinct from humans and angels. An alchemist, Paracelsus, classed gnomes, and sylphs as elementals, meaning magical entities who personify a particular force of nature, and exert powers over these forces. Folklore accounts have described fairies as "spirits of the air".

Characteristics

Much folklore of fairies involves methods of protecting oneself from their malice, by means such as cold iron, charms (amulet, talisman) of rowan trees or various herbs, or simply shunning locations "known" to be theirs, ergo avoiding offending any fairies. Less harmful pranks ascribed to fairies include: tangling the hair of sleepers into fairy locks (aka elf-locks), stealing small items, and leading a traveler astray. More dangerous behaviors were also attributed to fairies; any form of sudden death might have stemmed from a fairy kidnapping, the evident corpse a magical replica of wood. Consumption (tuberculosis) was sometimes blamed on fairies who forced young men and women to dance at revels every night, causing them to waste away for lack of rest. Rowan trees were considered sacred to fairies, and a charm tree to protect one's home.