“The Irish countryside is a place where the past and present are not separate; they are interwoven with each other. The fairies are not fantasy but the living remnants of a forgotten past.”

W.B. Yeats

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All art by Kinuko Y. Craft, https://www.kinukoycraft.com/

People often ask about the motivation behind fairies leaving changeling children and abducting humans. Well, it’s hard to give definitive answers to these questions, although there is a metaphysical argument which posits that fairies envy human souls and consciousness; that we have the ability to transcend death, or move onto an afterlife, in a way that they never will. However, looking at indigenous traditions regarding similar beings which have not been Christianised, I do not think that this is the answer, either. Examples of this include tantalising hints in fairy encounters of their ability to move between physical and non-physical realms, traverse time itself, and, indeed reincarnate into future lives.

The short answer is that we don’t know why these deeds have been part of their eternal interaction with us, although there are sometimes hints regarding tasks they have humans carry out while in the fairy realm. These might be to nurse a fairy child or perform a certain talent, for example. (It is well known that fairies admire humans who excel in pursuits such as music and sport.) However, considering the fact that fairies, themselves, wield powers and abilities that we human beings are in awe of, it is still a puzzle as to why they seem to need us to fulfil such tasks in the first place.

The problem is that ambiguity is a concept that many today are unhappy to settle upon. In occult and wisdom traditions, though, not knowing is part of the journey. And, indeed, often the answer. In my own opinion, popular culture, having smothered and hijacked fairies, demands instant gratification and closure in order to consume, discard, and move on. Fairies, though, are otherworldly, through and through, in the most literal sense. Why can’t we accept that their motivations may always be inaccessible to our sense of reason, and the answers something outside of our current understanding?

If we allow ourselves to accept that fairy motivation is mostly beyond our comprehension, then we can retain the respect and caution, while not falling into the trap of defining them as good fairies or bad fairies. Like last weeks post regarding The Bright Lady and whether she is haunting or guarding a particular place, sometimes, what appears to be an aggressive act may well be an intercession, enacted to protect us from ourselves.

We also have a history of warnings in our folklore about fairy consequences: don’t step into the fairy circle whether it be a ring of mushrooms or a group of ancient stones, for example.
And, we also have instances where people actively seek to enter the Otherworld and deliberately visit a place associated with spirits and fairies in order to commune or seek a gift of some sort. It’s hard to know how this will be received by themselves, of course.

Take this account from Co. Mayo, for example, where it seems the good people not only take someone who has disrespected their fairy fort, but then bequeath her a very odd fate.
“There was a woman living in Kilavalla who had a big washing of sheets. She spread them on the bushes where there was a fort. In the morning the clothes were all sprinkled with blood. She got sick that night and died a few nights after. Her ghost was often seen round the fort.”
https://www.duchas.ie/en/cbes/5215809/5214400/5233675

There are a couple of observations to note about this account. Firstly, the fairies seem to have used blood to visit a sickness upon the woman for her transgression. Was this their own blood? If so, what does that tell us about their physicality? There are many accounts of somebody becoming ill having disrespected a fairy fort but usually the method of punishing is magical and supernatural as opposed to something as visible as leaving blood on sheets.

The second interesting motif here is that the woman then became one of the dead and haunted the fairy fort. As you will know from reading many of the posts on this page, there are crossovers between the fairies and the dead even though the exact relationship is both vague and confusing.

So, as we can see, the ways and motivations of the good people are very difficult to understand. My argument is that unless we begin to separate the original, ancient-seeming beings we know as fairies from the religious shackles and interpretations which bind their motivations, we will always be viewing their actions from a skewed perspective.

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