The faeries mean different things to different people. There is a great range in their taxonomy; they can be the archetypal characters found in faerie tales, folkloric entities existing in a liminal reality, animistic nature spirits responsible for the propagation of flora, and a host of culturally-coded modern beings, including, but not limited to, extraterrestrials and certain creatures that can manifest during altered states of consciousness. Despite the 20th-century Disneyfication of the faeries, they have retained many of their traditional ontologies, which has allowed their incorporation into some new interpretations about their authenticity as a phenomenon – as both a fossilised folk belief system, and as a potential dynamic epistemological reality in contemporary culture.

The faeries are a global phenomenon, and while there are many and various geographic types, there is a consistency in the taxonomic nature of these otherworldly entities. The Aarne-Thompson index of folk literature lists nearly 500 motifs related to faeries from all over the world, which can be augmented by subsequent folktale indices from culture areas not covered by the Aarne-Thompson index (most specifically in the 2004 enlargement of the index by Hans-Jörg Uther to include more international tale-types), perhaps doubling the number of motifs. All of these motifs recognise the faeries as a distinct (though widely varied) class of metaphysical being – a class that appears to have been interacting (through folklore and via an apparent supernatural agency) with human societies for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The following analyses concentrate on British and European faerie types, in an effort to get under the skin of why their supernal presence has been so ubiquitous in history and why they appear to be still in attendance in Western culture. This is a difficult task; the faeries are elusive and hard to pin down. They always seem to be at the periphery of cultural vision, only disclosing themselves when conditions are right and when we are willing to accept them at an intellectual, metaphysical, spiritual or empathetic level. They certainly exist as a concept, but are they allegorical devices, useful folktale plot characters, the essence of nature, or supernatural entities? Maybe they are all these and more, but we’ll begin with an examination of their place in traditional faerie tales, where usually the meanings and morals of the stories are more important than the faeries themselves.

Faerie Tales

In fact, many faerie tales don’t seem to have any faeries in them at all. The extensive collection of faerie tales collected by Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early 19th century contain over 200 individual stories, but only just over half of them contain recognisable faeries as part of the plot. The term ‘faerie’, as often as not, was simply a referral to

various supernatural elements in the story. So some of the most famous of the Grimms’ faerie tales such as Rapunzel and The Golden Bird include witches and therianthropic shape-shifters, which may bring the stories into the faerie-orbit, but they do not incorporate any folkloric faerie characters. Conversely, perhaps the most famous of all faerie tales, Cinderella, was updated by the Grimms to include a ‘faerie godmother’ as a crucial part of the plotline, where their earlier sources were more ambivalent about the nature of this supernatural entity.

But faerie tales are always more than the sum of their parts. Whether or not there are recognisable faeries present in the plot, the stories invariably contain allegorical meanings, which usually include supernatural elements to give them a timeless and transcendent quality, which opens them up to a wide range of interpretations. One of the first scholars to apply an interpretative rubric to faerie tales was Edwin Sidney Hartland in his 1891 book The Science of Fairy Tales: An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology. He drew on a global corpus of faerie tales, most significantly the widespread stories of ‘Swan Maidens’, in an attempt to assess what they were attempting to convey about the nature of the human condition. While some of Hartland’s 19th-century conclusions can seem eye-wateringly colonialist to a modern reader (he presumed non-European stories of this type ‘degenerate and savage, relics of degraded primitive races’) he was attempting to see beyond the story and into the meaning; something that had not been attempted before. He interpreted the Swan Maiden stories (where a female swan transforms into a human, marries a man, who then breaks a taboo thereby releasing her back to her natural – or supernatural – element where she is lost to him) as didactic tales, informing the listener/reader about the pitfalls of wishing for something beyond your station, and that codes and conventions must be adhered to, otherwise there will be negative consequences. This was new thinking in the 19th century; a realisation that the tales contained some deep-set wisdom and could be used as tools for cultural and psychological cultivation and learning. This was always an implicit aspect of faerie tales, and one of the reasons why the stories have endured over the centuries. Before their collection and dissemination in literary form from the 18th century they would have been transmitted as an oral tradition, and their longevity in this form is probably in large part due to the fact they held embodied wisdom and coded sapience.

One method that has been used to break down the code and extract the wisdom is Jungian analysis. Carl Jung (1875-1961) initiated the premise that, like the content of dreams, aspects of faerie tales are designed to reveal cosmic truths, often taking the form of archetypes, which reside in a Collective Unconscious and are made available to humans when distilled through stories that have taken form over centuries. One of the primary adherents to Jung’s psychoanalytical application to faerie tales was Marie-Louise von Franz (1915-1998) who collaborated with him and then after his death, took the processes he had developed much further by employing interpretations of the stories’ archetypes in a systematic way, covering a wide range of faerie tales in her extensive published works. Her analytical methodologies have been cultivated further by a range of psychologists, writers and folklorists in an attempt to extricate deeper meaning from the tales. The psychologist and Jungian scholar John Betts describes the approach:

“Fairy tales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes. Therefore their value for the scientific investigation of the unconscious exceeds that of all other material. They represent the archetypes in their simplest, barest, and most concise form. In myths or legends, or any other more elaborate mythological material, we get at the basic patterns of the human psyche through an overlay of cultural material. But in fairy tales there is much less specific conscious material, and therefore they mirror the basic patterns of the psyche more clearly.”

Archetypes are central to this interpretative approach, where the faerie tale characters are manifestations of implicate humanity. So archetypes such as the hero, the great mother, the trickster, the fair maiden are found consistently in the stories, playing out roles that mean more than what they have been reduced to in the plotlines. These archetypes are especially prevalent in the corpus of medieval Arthurian stories, where the faeries incorporated into the narratives (such as Morgan le Fay and the Lady of the Lake) are always supernatural arbiters of wisdom, alchemy and power. They are representatives of a greater metaphysical reality, who infringe upon the chivalric plot devices to provide a cosmic quality to the stories.

Particularly interesting are the applications of the anima/animus archetypes to faerie tales. These are easily spotted in stories about faerie brides, such as the ‘Swan Maidens’ or ‘Lake Faeries’ where the otherworldly female faeries are representative of a supernal feminine ideal, made into one with their mortal husband, before their inevitable separation. These stories are most often about how a man needs to find and understand his inner feminine, with the intrinsic warning that certain actions will destroy that understanding.

The animus counter of this can be found in the intriguing story Cherry of Zennor, a Cornish faerie tale collected by the folklorist Robert Hunt in 1865. Cherry is the fair maiden who finds herself lured into faerieland by a handsome gentleman (her animus) where she encounters a series of archetypal characters, including the innocent child, and the great mother (here playing a malevolent role). She breaks a taboo (this a symbol rather than an archetype) of using ointment that enables her to see the female faeries who her gentleman has been dallying with, and thus loses him and is returned to consensus reality on a windswept hillside. This story had evidently been passed down orally through generations before Hunt committed it to the folkloric record, and for the most part it was probably just seen as an entertaining story, set at some indefinite (but recognisable) place in the past. It may even have been recounting an actual incident, transformed into a plot-driven story over time. But overlaying a Jungian analysis allows us to see that there is a reason why it survived – it was conveying, with the use of archetypes, fundamental aspects of the human condition. There is, as in all faerie tales, a cosmic quality to the inherent parts of the story.

Cherry of Zennor is also interesting in that it incorporates, as an essential part of the story, otherworldy, supernatural entities that are recognisable as folkloric faeries. As previously discussed, this is not always the case with faerie tales, and this becomes an important distinction to make when assessing the taxonomy of the faeries. Stories like Cherry of Zennor are in some ways a ‘crossover’ between traditional faerie tales and folklore – where the boundaries are often indistinct and tenebrous. This grey area is where the allegorical nature of faerie tales becomes remodelled into the magical realism of folklore.

Folkloric Faeries

The differences between faerie tales and faerie folklore are indeed subtle, with a big overlap. But once the archetypes and allegories are dropped we usually find that most of the faerie folklore becomes anecdotal in nature – there might be a basic plotline but the stories are brought into a sharper, more realistic focus by them being presented as real incidents, recognisable to the end user of the tale. And in so doing, the folklore is more successful in portraying the faeries as a distinct class of beings, discernible as a specific metaphysical taxonomic, who interact with humanity in a particular way. They take many folkloric forms, but the consumer of the testimonies is never in doubt that these are the supernatural entities known as the faeries.

Here’s one such testimony from 1862, recounted by Janet Bord in her 1997 book Fairies: Real Encounters with Little People. David Evans and Evan Lewis were walking in the hills of Carmarthenshire in Wales when they saw a troupe of about fifty ‘small people’ walking up a hillside. When they reached the top they formed into a circle…

“… After dancing for a short time, one of the dancers turned into the middle of the circle, followed by the others, one by one till they appeared like a gimblet screw. Then they disappeared into the ground. After a while one of them reappeared again, and looked about him in every direction as a rat, and the others followed him one by one and did the same. Then they danced for some time as before, and vanished into the ground as they had done the first time.”

This fits into the common folktale motif of faeries dancing in a circle (Aarne-Thompson F261) and is in many ways typical of testimonies recounting folkloric faeries. There is no story, no plot; it is simply an anecdote of a strange encounter, where the word of the observer is all we have to go on. In his 2005 book Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, Graham Hancock uses this example among other similar scenarios from the folkloric record to discuss this particular aspect of alleged faerie behaviour: “I realise we may not even have begun to understand what is going on with the phenomenon known as the faerie dance. Still, I repeat my suggestion that it feels like some sort of technology for jumping between worlds, and in particular for entering and leaving this one.”

However, while wanting to take the testimony at face value – and apply an interpretation onto it – Hancock accepts that the hermeneutic understanding of these folkloric anecdotes is problematic. While such anecdotes have not been overlain with the tiers of allegorical storytelling found in faerie tales, they are always subjective. The encounters cannot be repeated under experimental conditions – they are spontaneous incidents, recorded from the memory of the witness (the fact that in the above example two witnesses reported the same phenomenon does strengthen the veracity of the report). And this is how most of faerie folklore is constructed. From a scientific point of view the authenticity of the testimonies is unprovable and can be safely relegated to a folk belief system that plays no part in a modern materialist/reductionist worldview. It is a scientific outlook that is applied to anecdotal evidence of all types of phenomena, where if an incident is not repeatable then it lacks any verifiable reality. This attitude (termed physicalism by the philosopher Bernardo Kastrup), however, denies the evident reality that almost every aspect of human experience is comprised of a series of anecdotes, and that a prima facie rejection of the evidence of subjective observation, from wherever it comes, is not a viable way to understand a phenomenon, especially non-ordinary phenomena such as encounters with metaphysical entities.

And there is certainly a heavy dataset of subjective evidence contained in the folklore record when it comes to faerie encounters. This stretches back in the literature to the medieval period where English chroniclers such as Ralph de Coggeshall, Walter Map and William de Newburgh, writing in the later part of the 12th century, routinely related ‘marvels’ as related to them from a range of sources. The most well-known is the story of ‘The Green Children’, recorded by both Coggeshall and Newburgh, where two mysterious children turn up in the Suffolk village of Woolpit via a cave, apparently from an otherworld: “where all the inhabitants had green skin, ate only green food, and that there was perpetual twilight. Moreover, a certain luminous country is seen, not far distant… and divided from it by a very considerable river.”

But this strange story is rather atypical of the usual short anecdotes about faeries recorded by the chroniclers. A more typical example is given by Newburgh, who recounts a story told to him by ‘a reliable person’, where a somewhat inebriated horseman comes upon a prehistoric burial mound known as Willy Howe (Humberside), at night only to be drawn into it via an opening, where he finds a band of faeries in the midst of a revel. He joins in, but when handed a silver goblet to drink from he remembers the warnings against consuming faerie food or drink (evidently a well-established tradition as early as the 12th century), and threw out the contents before making off with the goblet. Interestingly, the goblet was said to have eventually made its way to the household of King Henry II, where it circulated as a curiosity among his court.

Such literary records of folkloric faeries are almost certainly only a fragment of the oral tradition that would have been transmitting these tales through the medieval period and beyond. Just as the more formulaic faerie tales began to be collected and indexed from the 18th century, so too was the anecdotal folklore. The folklorists doing the collecting and recording often amalgamated the two into single volumes, without making a distinct differentiation. But by the late 19th century anecdotal faerie folklore became better recognised as a specific genre in and of itself. A prime example of the collection and publication of a broad-spectrum of this type of narrative faerie folklore can be found in WY Evans-Wentz’s 1911 book The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. This classic study was based on Evans-Wentz’s three-year journey around Britain, Ireland and Brittany, where he collected a vast corpus of folklore from mostly rural countryfolk, at a time when belief in the faeries was still embedded in the (Celtic) culture. The lore he assembled covered an eclectic range of accounts, sometimes first-hand and sometimes passed down from previous generations. But most of them were simple anecdotes relayed by people who believed in the reality of the faeries, whatever that might entail. Typical of many of the testimonies given to Evans-Wentz was this one from John Nelson, an elderly man from Ramsey on the Isle of Man:

“My grandfather, William Nelson, was coming home from the herring fishing late at night, on the road near Jurby, when he saw in a pea-field, across a hedge, a great crowd of little fellows in red coats dancing and making music. And as he looked, an old woman from among them came up to him and spat in his eyes, saying: “You’ll never see us again”; and I am told that he was blind afterwards till the day of his death. He was certainly blind for fourteen years before his death, for I often had to lead him around; but, of course, I am unable to say of my own knowledge that he became blind immediately after his strange experience, or if not until later in life; but as a young man he certainly had good sight, and it was believed that the fairies destroyed it.”

This particular example plugs into the common motif (Aarne-Thompson motif F362.1) of being blinded (or partially blinded) by the faeries as a means to prevent the mortal in question being able to see them. He came across the motif again in Ireland, where Bridget O’Conner from Cloontipruckilish, Co, Clare, gave testimony about a midwife from her grandmother’s generation:

“This country nurse was requested by a strange man on horseback to go with him to exercise her profession; and she went with him to a castle she didn’t know. When the baby was born, every woman in the place where the event happened put her finger in a basin of water and rubbed her eyes, and so the nurse put her finger in and rubbed it on one of her eyes. She went home and thought no more about it. But one day she was at the fair in Grange and saw some of the same women who were in the castle when the baby was born; though, as she noticed, she only could see them with the one eye she had wet with the water from the basin. The nurse spoke to the women, and they wanted. to know how she recognised them; and she, in reply, said it was with the one eye, and asked, ‘How is the baby?’ ‘Well,’ said one of the fairy women; ‘and what eye do you see us with?’ ‘With the left eye,’ answered the nurse. Then the fairy woman blew her breath against the nurse’s left eye, and said, ‘You’ll never see me again.’ And the nurse was always blind in the left eye after that.”

Evans-Wentz also found evidence from all the locations he visited that the faeries were often thought of as dead ancestors. The belief that the faeries were intimately connected to the dead seemed to be especially prevalent in Ireland and Brittany, where time and again Evans-Wentz was given the view that they were one and the same, summed up by an unnamed Dublin engineer talking about the folk traditions in his home county: “The old people in County Armagh seriously believe that the faeries are the spirits of the dead; and they say that if you have many friends deceased you have many friendly faeries, or if you have many enemies deceased you have many faeries looking out to do you harm.”

In Brittany the faeries were known as fées or corrigans, and usually seem to have been understood as ancestral spirits, often appearing to warn of, or to predict, death. Evans-Wentz found many folktales about the fées and the dead in and around the village of Carnac, where there are extensive remains of prehistoric megalithic stone rows and burial chambers. M. Goulven Le Scour was a source of many traditions, although, once again, her testimonies were usually drawn from the past:

“My grandmother, Marie Le Bras, had related to me that one evening an old fée arrived in my village, Kerouledic (Finistère), and asked for hospitality. It was about the year 1830. The fée was received; and before going to bed she predicted that the little daughter whom the mother was dressing in night-clothes would be found dead in the cradle the next day. This prediction was only laughed at; but in the morning the little one was dead in her cradle, her eyes raised toward Heaven, The fée, who had slept in the stable, was gone.”

Further study of Evans-Wentz’s collection demonstrates that many of the motifs later coded in the Aarne-Thompson index seem to have been regularly played out in the anecdotal testimonies given to him by his interviewees. This makes the hermeneutics of these narratives difficult to unravel. As with much of the faerie folklore collected in the 19th and 20th centuries, it is almost impossible to get under the skin of what is real eye-witness testimony recounting something that happened, and how much overlay has been placed on the stories by socio-cultural belief systems. There is evidently a belief in the genuine existence of supernatural entities interacting with humanity, but what is the ratio of received wisdom to actuality? This is an important qualifier for all folklore, and something that Evans-Wentz was well aware of in his assessment of the testimonies he had collected. We’ll come back to this significant point in the discussions below, on ‘modern faeries’ and ‘the faeries as nature spirits.’

One recent publication that has grappled with the question of the role and reality of folkloric faeries is Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies – 500AD to the Present, which distills, in great detail, the wealth of evidence that goes to make up the folkloric and historical archive of human-faerie encounters. Despite the title of the book, the remit extends to the Americas, and Simon Young’s chapter on the faeries of the Atlantic coast of Canada is particularly illuminating. He points out that Newfoundland has been a particular melting pot for faerie folklore, probably attributed in part to its colonisation by populations of Irish and Scottish immigrants in the 19th century, who brought with them a deeply embedded belief in, and understanding of, the faeries. Young recounts one anecdote from 1900, where a newspaper reported a man being ‘carried away by the fairies’ in the capital city of St John’s. The report described the man as being ‘subject to extraordinary hallucinations’ but that he was also ‘a steady, sober and industrious man’, and then added that he had previously taken been taken by the faeries ‘through bogs, marshes, rivers and heavy woods’ until he was found in an exhausted state. This sounds like a person who his ancestors would have described as having second-sight or clairvoyance; another important element in faerie encounters that will be explored further below.

Young is able to apply a three-level ‘barometer’ to the large number of faerie encounters transmitted in Newfoundland folklore, a gauge that might easily be applied to European testimonies as well, from the medieval period through to the 21st century, and is a good summation of how the faeries usually fit into anecdotal narratives:

“Level one is that of sensing fairies: fairies are seen dancing, fairies are heard playing music, we even have one case where fairies are smelt. Level two is low level interaction without lasting consequences for humans. Here the witness might be misled or their horse might be rode by the fairies at night or the fairies might steal food. The third level is intense interaction with fairies, with lasting consequences for any humans involved. This interaction includes, humans marrying fairies, humans being kidnapped or ‘changed’, magical contracts in which fairies give a sorcerer’s powers to humans, or servile relations in which fairies do farm or house work.”

Another interesting theme through the book is how the evidence of place-names demonstrates how deeply ingrained into the socio-cultural consciousness were the faeries. Particularly interesting is the large number of Pūca place-names recorded throughout England and Wales. Puck became the trickster in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream, but his ontological history goes much further back than the 16th century, and he might be seen as a representative type of faerie, prone to leading people astray, particularly in marshy areas, where he might appear as a light, sometimes interpreted as an ignis fatuus or will-o’-the-wisp. Francesca Bihet discusses the French version of the name used in the Channel Islands: pouques, and their intimate connection to prehistoric megalithic structures pouquelayes, where faerie activity was often reported. ‘Hob’ was another faerie name fossilised into the landscape. Richard Sugg describes the Yorkshire faerie place-names: “This was a world in which the numerous fairy place names (from Hobcross Hill and Hob Holes, through various Hob Lanes, to Sheffield’s Grymelands and Kexborough’s Scrat Hough Wood) were much more than pretty folklore. The fairies really were there beneath your feet.” And Simon Young identifies 32 verifiable faerie place-names in Cumbria: “These 32 are precious because they give us some sense of how Cumbrian fairies were imagined, not by the folklore professionals, but by local people. There is nothing as democratic as a place-name.”

This faerie folklore is interesting in its own right as cultural history. There is a vast archive of centuries-long testimony from people who claim to have interacted with entities that are not normally recognised as part of consensus reality. These interactions have not been wrapped up in allegorical faerie tales, but have instead formed their own corpus; the interacting faeries have their own taxonomy. The folkloric faeries have definitely been perceived as real by generations of people, but modern (physicalist) sensibilities are constrained to view the stories as either hallucinations, misrepresentations of natural phenomena, tales told by and for uneducated and gullible people, magical wishful thinking, descriptions of dreams, plain mumbo-jumbo, or a combination of the above. But fortunately the faeries are not consigned to a folkloric past – their metaphysical presence appears to be alive and well in contemporary culture, and even experiencing a resurgence of interest, as some modern philosophical and scientific hypotheses (see the final section below) have begun to question the fundamental nature of reality and our understanding of it. These new views of reality may just be allowing the types of beings found in faerie folklore to gravitate back into our cosmological perspective.

Modern Faeries

Experience reports of faerie encounters are certainly not limited to the folkloric past. The taxonomic continues to the present day, often morphing into new typologies, but still recognisable as faeries. Like the faeries who appear in folklore, most modern types find their way into public consciousness via anecdotal testimonies – they are subjective experiences, reliant on the honesty, memory and reliability of the person making the report. But there are lots of them, and such a large testimonial dataset must smooth out the statistical spikes of the hermeneutical issues somewhat; the experienced phenomenon has to have, at the very least, some kind of conceptual metaphysical reality.

One such dataset was registered in Marjorie Johnson’s Seeing Fairies, first published in English in 2014. Johnson (acting on behalf of The Fairy Investigation Society) collected over 500 anecdotal descriptions from people who claimed to have seen or interacted with faeries, and compiled them together with her own experiences, mostly from the 20th century. Some of her correspondents were Theosophists, with an avowed history of clairvoyance. But the majority were not, and their honest appraisals of seeing faeries are usually singular events in their otherwise non-clairvoyant lives. Their subjective anecdotes remain contentious as scientific evidence, but they are a fascinating collection of experience reports. The faeries described range from traditional folkloric types to metaphysical nature spirits, and are occasionally described as the delicate, genteel winged faeries of Victorian invention (which were then codified as Tinkerbell in JM Barrie’s 1904 play and 1911 novel Peter and Wendy, before becoming a Disney icon). An example of the type of report included in Johnson’s volume (slightly abbreviated) is from a Mr Hugh Sheridan, whose encounter was in Ballyboughal, Co. Dublin, Ireland, in 1953. He was walking across fields between his workplace and home at dusk:

“… and when nearing the corner of one of the fields I heard a tittering noise. At first I thought it was some of the other men who had gone on before me and who might be intending to play some prank. However, I noticed immediately afterwards what looked like a large, greenish tarpaulin on the ground, with thousands of faeries on it. I then found there were a lot more around me. They were of two sizes, some about four feet high, and others about eighteen or twenty inches high. Except for size, both kinds were exactly alike. They wore dark, bluish-grey coats, tight at the waist and flared at the hips, with a sort of shoulder cape… the covering of their legs was tight, rather like puttees, and they appeared to be wearing shoes. I started on the path towards home, and the faeries went with me in front and all around. The largest faeries kept nearest to me. The ones in front kept skipping backwards as they went, and their feet appeared to be touching the ground. There were males and females, all seemingly in their early twenties. They had very pleasant faces, with plumper cheeks than those of humans, and the men’s faces were devoid of hair or whiskers… None of the faeries had wings. They tried to get me off the path towards a gateway leading from the field, but just before I reached it I realised they were trying to take me away, so I resisted and turned towards the path again. [After slipping into, and getting out of a dry a ditch, still surrounded by the faeries] I moved towards home with the faeries round me, and they kept the tittering noise all the time. In the end I got to a plank leading across a ditch from one field to another, and suddenly all the faeries went away. They seemed to go back with the noise gradually fading. At one time I had reached out my arms to try to catch them, but I cannot be sure whether they skipped back just out of reach, or whether my hands passed through them without feeling anything. They were smiling and pleasant all the time, and I could see their eyes watching me. When I got home, I found I was about three-quarters of an hour late, but I thought I had been delayed only a few minutes. While the faeries were with me, I had the rather exciting feeling like being on a great height, but I was in no way afraid. I would very much like to meet them again.”

This testimony includes several traditional folkloric motifs, including attempted abduction and an unexplained lapse of time, and would fit in with anecdotes from the previous century. The faeries are diminutive humanoids, interacting with a person in what appears to be an altered state of consciousness. Johnson’s volume contains many similar experiences, but it has been updated recently by a new census into faerie sightings conducted by Simon Young and The Fairy Investigation Society. It includes c.500 reports from all over the world, although the majority are from Britain, Ireland and North America. While Johnson’s survey was restricted to mostly cases from the mid 20th century, the new census (published as a free downloadable document in January 2018) contains encounters from the 1960s (with a few predating this) through to the present day, with the majority post-1980. In the introduction to the census, Simon Young explains how the publication takes a different tack to Johnson’s work: “Marjorie Johnson wanted to prove that fairies exist. I do not have this ambition. I, instead, want to get a better understanding of who sees fairies and under what circumstances by looking at the stories and the sightings.” And while contributors to the census were given the opportunity to state what they thought their experiences represented, there is no editorial evaluation into the sightings. This analytical but interpretation-free approach allows the reader to reach their own conclusions about the anecdotal accounts, and provides us with a large dataset of faerie encounters that appear to be authentic appraisals of numinous experiences, which (for the most part, and depending on the honesty of the reporter) defy rational, reductionist/physicalist explanations.

The census contains a wide range of encounter types, and needs to be read in full to understand the broad phenomenology contained in the data. The people making the reports represent a wide social cross-section and, as in Johnson’s study, while some acknowledge a previous interest in parapsychological phenomenon, most of the respondents are simply reporting a one-off experience that appears to involve faerie entities. Here are two examples from the census, which give a flavour of what were evidently numinous experiences for the people involved. The first is from Hampshire, England by a male who at the time of the sighting was in his 50s (all the census entries are anonymous):

§57 “It was a late Summer’s day in 2007, and we had been walking the dog back through woodland at Chilworth. We were in a clearing, when I spotted what looked like a tree rushing across fields towards us, and as it crossed the path before us into the next field, I could see there was a friendly, smiling face in the bark. We both had the same experience and described it to each other the same way. It was about ten feet tall. The dog stopped and looked up at it too.”

The respondent also added to the report their own feelings during the experience: “joyful… relaxed, on a walk; loss of sense of time, profound silence before the experience, hair prickling or tingling before or during the experience, and a sense that the experience was a display put on specially for you; unusually vivid memories of the experience.” There are several themes here that correspond with many faerie encounters: the relaxed mindset of the experiencer, the sense of time slippage, and the surreal incident involving an apparently supernatural entity, all of which combined to produce a particularly lucid memory.

The second example is from Somerset, England, and was described by a female in her twenties. The experience happened during the 1990s:

§114 “Friends had gone ahead and I straggled behind. As I turned a corner, it was misty. The mist had a weird glow. As I walked into the low mist there was a procession. Around three feet tall. With lanterns! But in the mist, I paused and they saw me. They came forward and I waited for them to pass. They passed. I have never taken drugs and was not on any alcohol. This was the weirdest experience. It lasted three to five minutes. By [the] time I got back to cottage my friends were concerned as I was away for around forty-five minutes! Very strange. They looked medieval in dress. But their clothes were covered by the mist at times.”

As per the first report, the respondent also reported that there was a profound silence before the experience, and that her hair was prickling or tingling before and during the event. She also suggested that there was a sense that the experience marked a turning point in her life. These experiences demonstrate that, just as in historic folkloric anecdotes, the faeries can take many forms, and their appearance may have as much to do with the unique awareness of the individual human consciousness as to an objective reality. But any objective absolute must be filtered through through a subjective lens, and although there is an extensive spectrum of entities reported in the census, there is a commonality of experience; it does appear the beings described are of a generic taxonomy – they are faeries.

This generic quality gets pushed to the limit when we attempt to incorporate into the taxonomy two other possible manifestations of modern faeries; that is the entities encountered by people while under the influence of psychedelics, and (perhaps even more controversially) aliens. The faerie-types experienced by people who have altered their states of consciousness with a range of psychedelics has been explored in some detail in previous posts:

Altered States of Consciousness and the Faeries

‘Aliens, Insectoids, and Elves! Oh, My!’ by Jon Hanna

‘Visions and Pablo Amaringo’ by Loes Modderman

Some Faerie Metaphysics

These investigations point out there is a clear correlation between the faerie-like creatures that turn up during psychedelic episodes (most especially with the compound N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT)) and the faeries reported in folklore and modern encounters. Some of the best clinical evidence for these correlations remains the research study conducted between 1990 and 1995 in the General Clinical Research Center of the University of New Mexico Hospital, by Dr Rick Strassman, which found that volunteers on the study injected with varying amounts of DMT underwent profound alterations of consciousness. This involved immediate cessation of normal consciousness and transportation to a different realm of reality with divergent physical properties, and inhabited by a range of creatures described as elves, faeries, lizards, reptiles, insects, aliens, clowns (yes, clowns) and various therianthropic entities. One woman even describes a pulsating entity that she called ‘Tinkerbell-like’. The experiences, especially at higher doses, represented to the participants a parallel reality that was ‘super real’, not a hallucination, not a dream, but a substantial built reality with full sensory interaction + telepathy. The results of the study were published as DMT: The Spirit Molecule in 2001.

The experience reports from the study are irrational, absurd, frightening, illogical and surreal. There is no question of any of the volunteers physically leaving the hospital bed during their experiences, but for all of them (without exception) the DMT-world was every bit as real as the one their minds left behind. After the injections participants frequently talked about ‘blasting through’ or ‘breaking through a barrier’ after which they found themselves in a realm with its own laws of physical space and movement, and its own inhabitants.

There are dozens of recorded experiences from the study, and the participants are all engaging in a non-physical reality directly with their consciousness, seemingly separated from their physical selfs. Some of the experiences agree in type to certain aspects of the faerie phenomenon. But what the research demonstrates is that under the right conditions, human consciousness can operate within a distinct and separate universe inhabited by a range of apparently autonomous entities. These entities may be one and the same as the metaphysical beings recorded in folklore and modern faerie encounter anecdotes, by people who were describing the beings encountered during various types of altered states of consciousness, brought on either actively or passively.

Since c.2010 there has been a quickly-growing literature devoted to the faerie-types appearing in the DMT-world, and however uncomfortable it may be for people who have not taken the psychedelic to accept any authenticity in the accounts, the consistency of the experience reports should make us take notice and accept them as a dataset worthy of analysis. While it may seem a stretch to equate folkloric or modern faerie encounters with the entities that turn up in a chemically-induced reality, the data insinuates very strongly that there is a parallel equivalence, which needs to be taken seriously.

Perhaps even more difficult to accept is the relationship between certain types of faerie behaviour and the modern phenomenon of alien abduction. Again, this has been considered in previous posts:

Shamans, Faeries, Aliens and DMT

Some Faerie Metaphysics

The first person to suggest a definitive link between the the reports of faerie experiences and alien encounters was the astronomer and computer scientist Jacques Vallée. In his 1969 book Passport to Magonia he put forward the theory that the faeries were one and the same as the alien beings who had been purportedly abducting people around the world for a couple of decades by that date. His hypothesis is that there is a commonality to the experiences reported in alien abduction scenarios, and the reports of interactions with faeries in folklore. He suggests the aliens and the faeries are essentially the same phenomenon, tuned through the cultural receptors of the time and then interpreted accordingly. He makes special reference to the regular motif in faerie folklore of the abduction, by various means, of humans by faeries. There’s a lot of data here – it’s the commonest motif in faerie folklore, and continues to be reported in anecdotal testimonies. For a variety of reasons humans are taken to an alternative faerie reality, either as midwives or nurses for faerie children, as servants to the faeries, for sex, as punishment or reward, or just because the faeries feel like it. These motifs, of course, coincide with many aspects of the consistently strange phenomenon of alien abductions, reports of which have grown at an exponential rate since the early 1950s.

In his 2005 book Supernatural, Graham Hancock expanded on Vallée’s data to investigate the close links between folkloric faeries and alien abduction cases. By 2005 the abduction phenomenon contained a massive amount of testimonies, perhaps as many as a million reports, and a large percentage of them bear a striking resemblance to aspects of faerie abductions from folklore. This is especially noticeable in the cases/tales of hybrids/changelings where both the faeries and the aliens seem intent on improving their species’ pedigree with humans. Hancock writes: “We can say that the focus of this evolving experience in all the forms in which it is documented – whether spirits, fairies or aliens – has been on sexual and reproductive contact between supernatural races and humans, and on the creation of hybrid offspring to ‘strengthen the stock’ of the supernaturals.”

This theme has been examined in great detail by Joshua Cutchin in his 2018 book Thieves in the Night: A Brief History of Supernatural Child Abductions. He examines the folkloric changeling stories in relation to alien abductions (concentrating on child abductions) and makes the case for some form of continuity: “… there is a strong thread of commonality running through the phenomena, which may identify the perpetrating entities as coming from the same source… The parallels between aliens and faeries are remarkable and extend deeply into the lore surrounding paranormal child abduction. The means and motivations behind both phenomena imply a shared ontological reality…”

But this source, or ontological reality, remains a problem. Is it metaphysical, psychological, cultural, a currently unknown aspect of physical reality, or an admixture of all these? We’ll come back to this question, but first, there is one more faerie taxonomy that needs to be discussed as it is one that fills up a lot of space in the literature, and has perhaps become the preeminent modern interpretation of what the faeries might really represent.

The Faeries as Nature Spirits

In the Fairy Investigation Society’s census, the most common interpretation among the respondents as to what their encountered entities represented was that they were some form of nature spirit. This was especially the case when the experience happened in a natural environment. The faeries in this guise appear as an embodied morphogenetic force in nature, ensuring the propagation of vegetation. Their metaphysical input is as important as physical needs in the environment. It is interesting that many of the respondents seemed to feel this intuitively, even when they had no knowledge of the historic precedences of incorporating faeries into the dynamic life-forces of nature.

There is, indeed, a long tradition of the faeries representing the non-material forces of nature, essential to its propagation. The 16th-century alchemist Paracelsus (1493-1541) developed an epistemology of these beings, describing the spirits connected to all parts of the natural world, both living and inanimate. He took much of this from ancient Greek beliefs in the deification of the landscape, but developed a new, tightly-coded typology of elementals. In effect, his concept was close to what we might describe as Animism, which has been defined as the belief that a spiritual consciousness pervades everything and that there is no separation between matter and the energy of spirit. This allows incorporeal beings such as nature spirits into a worldview, manifesting as metaphysical representatives of the physical world. Animism is the preeminent belief system in indigenous cultures and may be seen as the original global proto-religion from which all other orthodoxies developed. Its residue can be traced through Christian Europe, where a belief in non-canon supernatural entities persisted under the radar throughout the medieval and Early-Modern periods, showing up most clearly in the records of witch trials and ecclesiastical tracts that attempted to root it out. Indeed, Paracelsus was on quite thin ice in his promotion of such animistic concepts, and he twice had to refute allegations (though never made formally in an ecclesiastical court) of sorcery. His elemental nature spirits would have been simply designated as demons by the Church, and he had to couch his terms carefully, always ensuring in his writing that what he was describing was the work of God.

WY Evans-Wentz touched on the possibility that the Celtic belief in faeries was a form of implicit Animism, but it was primarily through the Theosophist movement (from the late 19th century) that the concept of a metaphysical realm responsible for the wellbeing of the natural world gained a wider understanding. One of the prime-disseminators of the nature spirit hypothesis was the Austrian Rudolf Steiner. In a series of lectures between 1908 and 1924 he outlined his hypothesis of how a range of supernatural entities (usually termed elementals and with no reference to Animism) acted within nature and how a human observer might interact with them. This was dependent on altering consciousness. In this case the metaphysical technology was clairvoyance; an ability to perceive a non-material reality existing alongside, but in constant synergy with, the material world. Steiner attempted to explain the mechanics of clairvoyance, when a person must transform their usually passive thought forms into something more dynamic. In normal consciousness thoughts:

“… allow themselves to be connected and separated, to be formed and then dismissed. This life of thought must develop in the elemental world a step further. There a person is not in a position to deal with thoughts that are passive. If someone really succeeds in entering the world with his clairvoyant soul, it seems as though his thoughts were not things over which he has any command; they are living beings… You thrust your consciousness into a place, it seems, where you do not find thoughts that are like those in the physical world, but where they are living beings.” Rudolf Steiner, ‘Perception of the Elemental World’ (1913).

Steiner goes on to describe the specific elemental animating forces at work in the natural world when perceived clairvoyantly in what he calls the Supersensible World. The elementals in the Supersensible World exist as a range of beings, from devas, which are responsible for entire autonomous landscapes, through to the smaller nature spirits charged with the growth of vegetation. Steiner (basing his epistemology on that of Paracelsus) divides these into four main types corresponding to earth (Gnomic), water (Undines), air (Sylphs) and heat/light (Salamanders). This is the faerie realm recognised as a domain of nature spirits, existing as a non-material autonomous reality that crosses over with ours, and which can be accessed via a clairvoyant altered state of consciousness. Steiner thought everyone has this innate ability, but they had to be taught how to use it, as it had somehow become almost forgotten amongst humanity.

But Steiner’s vision of the faeries as nature spirits has found many adherents in modern times, and a brief perusal of recent literature and websites devoted to the faeries seems to confirm that a majority of people interacting with these entities do so using some form of clairvoyant ability, and that when they do, the faeries are nature spirits. A good example is Marko Pogačnik, a Slovenian artist and ‘earth healer’, who travels the world to connect with the nature spirits, in order to communicate with them and heal damaged landscapes. His overview of how he works with the intelligence in nature is best found in his 1996 publication Nature Spirits and Elemental Beings, where he describes tuning into the morphogenetic fields surrounding landscapes and individual components within them. One of the ways he heals these landscapes is through what he calls lithopuncture, art installations of standing stones, meant to act upon the earth in the same way as acupuncture works on the human (or animal) body. This links us clearly to prehistoric morphological designs, such as stone circles and rows. Marko suggests that our prehistoric ancestors were full-time collaborators with the nature spirits, and were using their own lithopuncture partly to induce harmony and regulation to their surrounding environments. Post-industrial ignorance of the invisible intelligence in nature has created a disconnection with natural landscapes, much to the detriment of all life and the earth’s biosphere itself:

“The rational scientific paradigm has, during the last two centuries, imposed upon humanity a pattern of ignorance towards those beings and dimensions of life that do not know physical appearance and yet are inevitable for life processes to run and to evolve. My effort as an artist and a human being is to get intimate experience of those invisible dimensions and beings, and share the experience and knowledge about the invisible worlds of Earth and Universe with my fellow human beings to change that extremely dangerous pattern that ignores the sources of life itself.”

Pogačnik’s meditative clairvoyance penetrates the materiality of nature and sees what is happening at a metaphysical level; a level where the elementals appear in a vast variety of forms, but usually adhering to the general forms outlined by Steiner. Pogačnik’s incisive, easy and honest style of description allows for a deep insight into the cosmic reality of the mechanisms of interaction with these faerie nature spirits. He describes how seemingly innocuous changes to the natural environment can cause a potentially negative impact on the elementals who constitute the metaphysical aspect of that environment. His natural clairvoyant abilities enable him to contact the faeries and to resolve issues with them – even something as simple as moving a compost heap in a garden might force the elemental inhabiters of the compost to an unfamiliar environment, where they might cause mischief as a reaction to their perceived persecution. He suggests that these beings of a different order are unable to follow our rationalised thinking: “Their consciousness works on the emotional level. They think the way we feel, and the opposite is also true: our mental level is like a foreign language to them.”

Like Steiner, Pogačnik suggests that all humans have the congenital ability to enter a state of consciousness that will allow interaction with the nature spirits, but that this requires a lowering of the mental threshold. If we want faerie interaction our ingrained reductionist belief system needs to be dissolved or suppressed, and we must enter a meditative state, free from the usual intrusions of normal rational thinking. Perhaps one reason why it is children who so often see and interact with faeries is that this rationality is as yet not fully formed and ingrained; their consciousness is simply more able and prone to slip into a daydream state, where there is less separation between the physical and the metaphysical.

Human Consciousness and the Faeries

And this brings us back to the root of faerie epistemology. How have they managed to survive for so long as a recognisable taxonomy, apparently able to evolve between allegoric archetypes, folkloric characters, and metaphysical entities ranging from aliens to nature spirits? While there may, initially, seem little similarity in their archetypal manifestations in faerie tales and the creatures encountered in an altered state of consciousness brought about by the consumption of DMT or through clairvoyance, they may in fact be coming from the same place. This place is evidently reliant on human consciousness, but consciousness that is removed from the everyday consensus reality. A Jungian analyst would describe the archetypal characters found in faerie tales as real representatives of human consciousness – they are aspects of ourselves that can be accessed at a transpersonal level through the stories. A DMT-advocate might also describe the entities encountered in an altered state as exemplars of our awareness operating at an enhanced level, where exist entities that are not able to interact with us in our usual reduced state, perhaps correlating with the testimonies of folklore, where people’s perception of reality had been altered, albeit in a less radical fashion. A Theosophist might suggest that being able to enter a meditative state and lower the mental threshold allows a connection with both archetypal concepts and metaphysical beings operating within the environment, and that in fact they may be (almost) one and the same thing. But how can this be rationalised? How can we incorporate these concepts into theoretical frameworks that may explain the longevity of the faeries?

A materialist/reductionist would suggest that this cannot be done, because any perception of faeries is not viable as it operates outside of the known reality based on well-established laws of physics. But there is currently much subversiveness to this traditional viewpoint in science and philosophy, and we can perhaps apply two new (although they are both based on older concepts) theoretical approaches, which may help explain why the faeries (along with a range of other parapsychological phenomena) may be allowed back into our worldview.

Idealism. Idealism is a philosophical theory first posited by George Berkeley (1685-1753) and expanded upon by Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804) and other German philosophers of the 19th century such as GWF Hegel (1770-1831) and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). They were all codifying ideas initially expressed by Plato, and (unbeknown to them) were channeling concepts deeply embedded in Buddhist, Taoist and Hindu philosophical/spiritual traditions. While attacked and relegated to the philosophical fringes in the West during the late 19th and 20th centuries, the theory of idealism has recently been revived and reinvented as a legitimate conceptual framework by a number of philosophers and theoretical physicists, among them Bernardo Kastrup and Amit Goswami. Kastrup has applied an interdisciplinary methodology and worked with a number of quantum physicists to theorise that the tenets of idealism are the best explanation for how reality works, as opposed to any materialist explanation, which supposes that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain. The basic tenet is that Mind (not the material brain) is the ontological primitive, making material reality a product of consciousness, not the other way round. There is a single universal consciousness and we are sub-sets of it. Without it or us, there is no physical reality. The theoretical physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) expressed this as: “The total number of minds in the universe is one. In fact, consciousness is a singularity phasing within all beings.” In his book Why Materialism is Baloney, Kastrup uses the insightful analogy of whirlpools in a river to make this cosmic idea accessible. The river is the universal consciousness while individual whirlpools exist within it, representing separate, localised consciousness. The whirlpools are made up from the river and are dependent upon it for their existence, but their interface with it is limited, and they seem to exist as autonomous formations. The whirlpools are symbolic of individual consciousness; apparently existing in their own right and absorbed by inward-looking self-awareness, while in actuality they are part of a bigger, connected whole – the oneness of the river.

While differing in certain respects, idealism has much in common with Jung’s Collective Unconscious where are found the archetypes that make their way into faerie tales. Using the whirlpool analogy, each whirlpool is able, when conditions are met, to incorporate parts of the larger river, thus informing itself of a greater reality outside of its self-localisation. The river (universal consciousness or the Collective Unconscious) is the over-mind containing all knowledge, which can be imparted to the individual whirlpools under certain circumstances (such as the telling of faerie tales or supernatural entity encounters). And if consciousness is a singularity then our localised minds can only have a limited perception of the greater reality, which allows in a multiplicity of parapsychological possibilities such as telepathy, precognition and clairvoyance – available to us when we are able (by whatever means) to transcend the locality. While Animism sees all things as conscious to some degree, idealism places this within an overall metaphysical context, with a potential limitless store of ideas. Anything that has been imagined in the history of human consciousness (including what would usually be thought of as supernatural entities) finds form here and at particular moments can manifest into what we normally experience as our physical reality, a reality that is utterly dependent on irreducible consciousness. The faeries thus become representatives of aspects of a collective human mind, made recognisable as a specific taxonomy by being culturally coded for centuries through folklore, storytelling and numinous encounters.

The theory of idealism finds support in experimental data from quantum physics. The well-known double-slit experiment appears to demonstrate that in the quantum world quanta exist as nothing but waves of potential – a superposition – until collapsed into particles by human observation; and that particles that have been introduced to each other become intrinsically entangled, and can then ‘communicate’ at any distance at faster than light speed. Einstein called this ‘spooky action at a distance’, but a number of recent experiments have clearly demonstrated that entanglement is a true, measurable phenomenon, although the mechanism for the communication between particles remains unknown. Scientists such as Dean Radin have suggested (with much experimental data) that entanglement may be at the root of parapsychological events, most especially telepathy and clairvoyance, but also anomalous interactions with non-human (or supernatural) entities. While there is ongoing debate about the true nature of these quantum effects, and their application in the super-atomic world, they do provide the possible explanation that consciousness (not matter) is primary and that (as per idealism) our local minds are connected to a vaster network of non-local reality, not dependent on the standard laws of physics. This is a transcendent reality that is perhaps being manifested in manageable forms by faerie tales, folklore and modern anecdotal encounters with faerie entities. It is almost as if we were living in a simulation, where some greater consciousness is allowing us to see beyond our own solipsistic horizons by implanting supernatural creatures into our physical reality in an attempt to expand our understanding of how things really work. This leads to a second theory that may help elucidate how human consciousness is interacting with the faeries.

Simulated Reality Hypothesis. The notion that we are existing in a simulated virtual reality has been a trope of science fiction, popularised most effectively in the work of Philip K Dick and the influential film The Matrix. However, the idea that experienced reality is an illusion is not new. The first millennium mystic teachings of the Gnostic Christians suggest that humanity has been trapped in a deception – a copy of reality – perpetrated by the Demiurge and his minions the Archons, and Indian Vedic texts articulate the concept of māyā, whereby the gods are able (for a variety of reasons) to create a physical reality that conceals the true metaphysical reality. But these modern and ancient doctrines of a simulated reality have received new input in recent years, updating the concepts to create a technologically coherent hypothesis that suggests our physical reality has been modelled, much like we have modelled digital realities with computers. If there is any viability in the hypothesis, then supernatural entities such as faeries are suddenly mainstreamed; made almost unavoidable in a physical world that has been constructed as a program, and where there are probably ‘glitches in the matrix.’

Using the simulated reality hypothesis outlined by the philosopher Nicholas Bostrom in 2003 as a baseline, scientific luminaries such as Elon Musk (interestingly, the Gnostic name for the fabricated reality was Elon) and Neil deGrasse Tyson have both recently suggested that the reality we think of as ‘base reality’ could be nothing more than an inconceivably (to us) advanced computer program, and that we are simply coded players in that program believing ourselves to be conscious. The cosmologist Max Tegmark and the theoretical physicist James Gates have discussed how our universe is based on a rigid set of mathematical laws, and that the coding of those laws seem to appear in quantum measurements in the real world, and also in information technology. Gates remarked: “In my research I found this very strange thing. I was driven to error-correcting codes—they’re what make browsers work. So why were they also in the equations I was studying about quarks and electrons and supersymmetry?” This feeds into the NASA scientist Rich Terrile‘s idea that quantum particles/waves are the equivalent of digital bits in a computer – the basic units of information upon which everything else is built: “It is feasible that the universe we think of as material reality is simply a holographic construction based on a quantum program that has been simulated much as we have simulated (in a vastly more low-level way) computer games with interacting characters.”

The ex-NASA scientist Tom Campbell is also an adherent of the simulated reality theory, but his expanded hypothesis contends that our universe is a sub-set of a ‘Nonphysical-Matter Reality’ (NPMR). The NPMR is a greater reality with its own constituent metaphysical laws and can be accessed in dreams, out-of-body experiences and altered states of consciousness, when consciousness is able to detach itself from the constraints of the usual laws of physics. Campbell describes it as a ‘different data stream’ but one that contains (and controls) our own mathematical material universe. What would usually be considered as paranormal events in our physical reality are normal in NPMR, and when it leaks into our 3D world via non-ordinary states of consciousness, the results appear mystical or magical. This includes entities that appear to have their own autonomous state, but are actually the results of our own limited consciousness attempting to decipher them within the bounds of our own experience. Within this theorem certain supernatural entities are metaphysical constructs from a greater reality (the NPMR), appearing into our world under certain conditions, and culturally coded to show up as specific taxonomies – one of which can be recognisable as faeries.

Final Thoughts

Idealism and the simulated reality hypothesis both suggest that there is something unknown to us controlling our reality. And while they are both theoretical constructs they have a very evident analogy, which is available to us all: dreams. A dream is an absolutely convincing simulated reality, where our avatar engages with a universe that it believes to be the base reality. Only when we awake and transcend from the dream do we realise that the dream was a sub-set of an over-mind, which has managed to create a virtual reality and populate it with images and characters from our subconscious. It is only a short conceptual jump from this analogy to the dream hypothesis, whereby what we recognise as waking reality becomes a consciousness sub-set, much in line with Campbell’s NPMR theory.

This is a fundamentally important point when attempting to understand why the faeries might exist, at whatever ontological level. Experiencing the faerie taxonomy does seem to derive from people plugging into a bigger metaphysical reality, theoretically articulated by Jung’s collective unconscious, the philosophy of idealism and the simulated reality hypothesis. Whether this is drawing archetypes from a collective unconscious into faerie tales or experiencing the entities in some form of altered state of consciousness, the interface appears to rely on us transcending our individual minds in a variety of ways. The faerie taxonomy itself seems to have been millennia in the making and is apparently evolving as our human condition evolves. The faeries (in all their forms) have become a persistent phenomenon, and seem to be an intrinsic aspect of human consciousness, purveyors of the message (explicitly or implicitly) that our material physical reality is dependent on a non-physical reality that pervades our universe and perhaps even contains it.

***

The Fairy Investigation Society is currently extending its survey of faerie encounters with a new census, details of which can be found here.

The role of faeries in modern fiction pop culture, from Tolkien to gaming lore, has been omitted here, even though these fictional creations are often formulated using traditional and modern concepts of what the faeries are. Deadbutdreaming may broach this topic in a future post, but for anyone interested in this aspect of folkloric evolution here is a recent concise and insightful article by Morgan Daimler: ‘Irish-American Witchcraft: Fairies, Tradition & Popculture’, with her full downloadable presentation on the subject from a recent conference (‘Popular Culture and the Deep Past: Fairies and the Fantastic’) at The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the Ohio State University here.

For changing taxonomic concepts of faeries in the visual arts over the centuries see: The Art of Faerie.

*In an effort to retain clarity, I specifically did not include any discussion of Panpsychism here, even though it is closely related to both Animism and Idealism as a theory. Here is a good effort to unravel the semantic differentiations by Fizan.

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