The Science of Faeries (Part III)

In The Science of Faeries Parts I and II I discussed the historical background of the science of faeries, recounted a fairy sighting of my own, and listed a number of theories about what faeries really are, be they hoaxes, folk memories of long-lost tribes, or real creatures.

In this final part, I will discuss what Evans-Wentz called the "Psychological Theory", and what I prefer to call the "Psychic Theory" to avoid confusion with theories that discuss the subconscious mind.  At the time "The Fairy Faith of Celtic Countries" was written, the words "psychic" and "psychological" were often synonymous.

Evans-Wentz spent many years traveling the Celtic countries and cataloging their beliefs and fairy sightings.  He noted the similarities between them all, and concluded that there is another world, a forth dimension.  Beings who exist in that world cannot be seen with physical eyes, but can be seen with psychical eyes.  Seers, those who practice the art of seeing, or who have a natural talent for it, can easily see these forms.  Non-seers, in the presence of such a being, may sense it in some way, beyond sight.  Seeking some explanations for this, our imaginations will go to work.  Our minds will offer up some vision, based on our context, our cultural frame of reference, and thus we will "see" a fairy without truly seeing it.  According to Evans-Wentz:

The visualization of the non-seer is a makeshift, a psycho-physical reaction to a purely psychical stimulus.

and:

It is that all such apparitional appearances ... are equally due to a telepathic force exerted by an agency independent of the percipent.  This outside force to whom it is thus transmitted, and causes him to project out of some part of his own consciousness (which part may have passed over into the subconsciousness) a visualized image already impressed there.  The image has natural affinity or correspondence with the outside stimulus which arouses it.

Thus the creature you see will be based in large part upon the culture of the region you were raised, but may also have something to do with the nature of the creature itself.  While looking at the same fairy, a Scottsman would see a redcap.  A troll for the Norwegians.  The Welsh would see a coblynau, and in Brittany (an area of northern France) would rank higher in corrigan sightings.  Leaving the Celtic countries, an Arab might see a djinn, an Inuit may see an ijiraq, and in Japan, they would see a kappa.

All of these creatures, and many hundreds more, look and act very different from one another, and yet ofttimes their behaviors are described as the same: Capricious, likely to steal away children and replace them with one of their own, likely to mess with your sense of time, equally able to curse or bless you on a whim, and so on.

In some cases, Evans-Wentz concludes that these are nature's memories, an energy residue of some past event, that can be re-witnessed or sensed and seen in our own way.  But he is quick to point out that most fairy sightings seem to be of autonomous beings.  On this, he states:

Fairies exist, because in all essentials they appear to be the same as the intelligent forces now recognized by psychical researchers, be they thus collective units of consciousness like what William James has called 'soul-stuff', or more individual units.

And given the ubiquitous fairyland stories, he concludes that "fairyland exists as a super-normal state of consciousness into which men and women may enter temporarily in dreams, trances, or in various ecstatic conditions."  Our eye for dreams and religious experiences is thus the same as our eye for fairies.

I began this series by stating that I am a skeptic.  I still am.  It is more likely that fairies are a folk-memory of a long forgotten tribe that is sometimes perpetuated by hoaxes and hallucination.  I am as willing to believe that my own fairy-sighting was the product of an overactive imagination as it was a projection of my mind onto a being of energy to explain what I could sense but could not see.

Nevertheless, the latter explanation holds a certain magic, a meaning that goes beyond the happy accident that is evolved human life.  Part of me wants to believe... Do you?

The Science of Faeries (Part II)

In The Science of Faeries Part I, I discussed the historical background of the study of fairies and fairy lore.  As promised, I will now discuss the major theories and schools of thought about what faeries are.  

But first, I will recount the time I saw a fairy.  It was the magical summer of 1997, the best time of my life, and the worst time of my life.  I was going through a number of hardships, but I also had a great set of friends.  We had well-developed imaginations, and even though we all came from different religious backgrounds and had different beliefs, each of us passionately believed in the unseen.  My most unexplainable experiences (both positive and scary) happened that year.

We were adventuring in Eastern Washington, north of our home town, and decided to visit Palouse Falls.  We hiked above the falls, where the small river has carved a beautiful canyon.  The very rocks seemed to cry out in joy at our presence. We saw hornets as long as my index finger, and one of the boys cut his hand on basalt shale, but that didn't stop us from trekking along the railroad tracks, down the long slope, and into the canyon.

Here the river broke into several smaller streams, forming a microcosm of mini-canyons and tiny waterfalls.  I stood at the bottom of one of these tiny falls, and that's when I saw it: a tiny bridge spanning the gap over the water, and a 2 inch winged fairy sitting on the arch.

How I saw it is difficult to explain.  I only half saw it with my eyes.  The other part of me knew it wasn't there, and that I merely imagined it.  It was as it my mind projected it outward until it existed.  Another way to put it is that it seemed as if something was there, but the only way I could perceive it was with my imagination.  It was not light that hit my eyes, but some other form of energy that I both sensed and created in a feedback loop of viewer/creator. 

Sound crazy?  When I read Evans-Wentz's "The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries", that is exactly how many others described it, 100 years ago. I also saw similar descriptions of modern-day fairy sightings in the documentary The Fairy Faith (2000).

Does that mean I believe in faeries?  Maybe.  I'm not sure.  I am a skeptic, after all.  But I do know that something important happened that day.  Even if it was all in my head, that's meaningful.

Which leads us to the theories.  Some of these are scientific, some pseudo-scientific, and some flat out religious.  Listed in reverse order of Occam's Razor (which states that the simplest explanation fitting the facts is most-likely to be true):

The Materialist Theory - Fairies are physically real beings that live under hills or in forests.

The Theological or Hades Theory - In the context of Christianity, fairies are real, and they are are demons, fallen angels or the unjudged souls of the dead.

The Psychic or "Psychological" Theory - Evans-Wentz's favorite.  Fairies are some form of energy-beings that we can sense but not "see", so we perceive them by projecting our expectations.  An Irishman would see a selkie.  An Arab would see a djinn.  Someone from India may see a deva.

The Pygmy Theory - Fairies are a folk-memory of an undiscovered prehistoric diminutive race that were driven out of Celtic lands by invading European Homo Sapiens.

The Mythological/Druid Theories - Fairies are a folk-memory of the Celtic pagan gods or the Druids.  They are a way of talking about subjects otherwise censored by the encroaching culture of Christianity.

The Animistic/Naturalistic Theory - Fairies are a cultural remnant of pre-monotheistic beliefs in animistic spirits as a way to explain the world, and/or a subconscious projection of animistic symbols a la Carl Jung.

The Pathological Theory - Fairies are entirely imagined, hallucinated, a result of misfiring neurons or diseased minds.

The Delusion and Imposture (Fraud) Theory - As with mediums and psychics, those who claim to see fairies are out to hoax us for fun and profit.

Evans-Wentz does not discuss all of these (not all had been postulated in his time), but he does rule out several: The Pygmy Theory, The Mythological and Druid Theories, Naturalistic Theory, and Delusion/Imposture Theory.  He favors what he called the "Psychological Theory", which I call the "Psychic Theory" to avoid any confusion with Jung's Archetypes and Collective Unconscious.

He spends a good deal of time discussing this theory, so I'd like to spend more time on that.  Stay tuned for the Science of Faeries Part III in two weeks!

Guest Post at IUF - The Science of Faeries Pt. 1

I have another guest post over at the Indie Urban Fantasy blog.  This is the first of a mutli-part post on faeries!

Here are the first few paragraphs: 

The "science of faeries". An oxymoron? 

Not really. 

Don't get me wrong.  I am quite the skeptic, a big fan of James Randi and Christopher Hitchens.  All of this is fantasy, right?  The only scientists who believe in fairies are pseudo-scientists.  

But there was a time in the past when credible scholars did give credence to the possibility of the existence of faeries.

It was the time of rampant mysticism, the revival of the occult, the heyday of séance and mesmerism.  Nikola Tesla performed feats of magic with electricity, letting a million volts arc visibly through his body in public displays.  Science fiction dawned with writings about living monsters being created from dead tissue and explorers finding giants and dinosaurs far beneath the earth.  (Could one argue that Urban Fantasy was the original form of science fiction?)

During this era, almost nothing was known about the realities of our world...

Click here for the rest!

The Science of Faeries (Part I)

The world is not only stranger than we suppose, it is stranger than we can suppose. -- J.B.S. Haldane, evolutionary biologist

The "science of faeries". An oxymoron? 

Not really. 

Don't get me wrong.  I am quite the skeptic, a big fan of James Randi and Christopher Hitchens.  All of this is fantasy, right?  The only scientists who believe in fairies are pseudo-scientists.  

But there was a time in the past when credible scholars did give credence to the possibility of the existence of faeries.

It was the time of rampant mysticism, the revival of the occult, the heyday of séance and mesmerism.  Nikola Tesla performed feats of magic with electricity, letting a million volts arc visibly through his body in public displays.  Science fiction dawned with writings about living monsters being created from dead tissue and explorers finding giants and dinosaurs far beneath the earth.  (Could one argue that Urban Fantasy was the original form of science fiction?)

During this era, almost nothing was known about the realities of our world.  Knowledge we now take for granted was merely conjecture.  The airplane had not been invented.  The nature and composition of the moon and the planets were pure speculation; Venus was thought to be populated by intelligent life.  Penicillin had not yet been discovered, nor were there adequate means for storing food long term, nor were phones common, nor did electric appliances exist.  It was a time of discovery and invention.  Wide-eyed scientists left no stone unturned in looking for the next big breakthrough.

This was the zeitgeist during which scholars legitimately studied faeries.  

Some of the most credible people of the time, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) participated in fairy investigations, and the now-defunct Fairy Investigation Society had members like Walt Disney.  No one knew and few suspected that the Cottingley Fairies were a hoax.

Anthropologist Walter Evans-Wentz thankfully took the time to travel all the Celtic countries around the turn of the 20th Century.  He gathered the dying and complex lore of a people who genuinely believed in fairies.  They lived their daily lives with superstitions that acknowledged the pervasive and ever-present fae, the way today people operate with knowledge that the internet exists.  Set out the milk, make a sigil before milking the cows, do not refer to them by name lest they hear.  That's the hill where the fair folk keep their fort, and do not disturb that clump of trees.

These were not tales that begin "Once upon a time in a land far away," but rather "I saw the good people and hundreds besides me saw them fighting in the sky" which was said to cause the 1847 famine, and "my husband...often saw the gentry going down the hill to the [sea] strand."

These stories are documented exhaustively in Evans-Wentz's book, "The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries".  They are accompanied by a number of scholarly theories and conclusions drawn from the author's experience and these first-hand accounts.

In Part II of The Science of Faeries, I will describe the major theories and schools of thought that explain the gentle folk.  Some are more scientific than others.  Of course I will detail Evans-Wentz's favored theory, which is my own personal favorite, which I partially base my stories on.  I will also describe my own encounter with a fairy. 

The Science of Faeries Part II and Part III...