Way into Faerie

CHAPTER ONE

ON BEING FEY

I am a fey type, myself. I know that I am supposed to apologize for that – as though such unworldliness were forever and always a very bad thing, and bound to lead to terrible slipshod thinking or some kind of weirdness. I have to tell you that I feel passionate about correcting this impression. True, some of us can fall into a state of whimsicality, but there are a great many more of us who are both fey and unsentimental. Here is just one example of what it can be like.

Mrs Eldridge, a fey woman, leans out from her bedroom window one evening and looks at the moonlit garden, which is graced by an apple tree, not now in leaf. She hears an owl cry and she watches a star. She senses that her Otherworldly kin are very near and yet much too far away, and that the everyday World that we live in can be all too alienating. (Well, think of all those news broadcasts that are inaccurate, to say the least; and how there is too much brutality in the World; and how so much is done in a bureaucratic way that is inefficient and inhuman.)

Mrs Eldridge struggles with the complexity of the simplistic life we are now being encouraged to lead. When she wants something like a book – Mrs Eldridge is very fond of books – she whistles like a thrush and then she speaks a short rhyme. And she knows that, as a result, very soon the book will appear in a local shop or else be loaned to her with no further trouble. Yes, she knows that she can easily and cheaply order the book online, but she prefers to live in a World with proper bookshops. She also knows that any spell she casts may shape her life in ways that are not immediately obvious, for good or ill. For that which lives in the light must cast a shadow. And a gain must be balanced by a giving. (It is because she is so Otherworldly that she has become nobody’s fool.)

‘Oh, this human life,’ she thinks now. ‘So many people as predatory as any owl or shark, yet far less innocent. And oh, these endless newspapers and screens busily withholding information while trying to tell us all what we should believe.’

Mrs Eldridge bids her fey spirit to unfold. She bids it to prevail throughout her life, with its feet like those of a heron or swan and its wings like willow swaying in the wind. This is a spirit aware of itself as a part of the natural World, and yet it is a human spirit as much as is the more conventional kind. But sometimes she fears that there is not enough strength in it; not enough to withstand all that passes here for normality.

‘Be what you really are,’ the elves whisper to her. ‘Therein lays your power. Reach out in spirit to all kindred spirits – therein lies survival (your spirit unbroken). Tend to your own hearth and cast your spells to heal and to bless – therein lies success.’

‘Just whistle like a bird and speak a magical rhyme? And use enchantment for good, knowing I am supported in spirit by other fey people?’ asks Mrs Eldridge.

‘Just be in communion with us. If you ask the elves to bear witness to your spells, that will be enough to make your spells effective and to bring help from the Otherworld. Just sing like a bird inside your soul, unheard by any human ears, and speak a spell while you wave your wand. This has always worked before. Why doubt it now? Why doubt the strength of spirit that is in Nature?

‘Just imagine silver shoes on your feet, hidden by the brown boots you wear over them, and know that you walk in two Worlds at one and the same time: the Otherworld and the everyday World of living humanity.’

‘Who am I,’ asks Mrs Eldridge, ‘that I should be as strong as you say and yet so incongruously placed? There are others like me, other fey people; I am not alone. But we often feel overwhelmed by the clamour of hectic life. Remind me – what are we doing here? And what is this realm of ruthlessness, insanity and greed? I mean, tell me why are we here?’

Oh, that heart-rending question! It must have been asked in the Dark Ages and beyond then in old Atlantis, and at times and in places that no one now has ever heard of. Perhaps it is eternal.

‘Sing, Mrs Eldridge! Chant and bespell in your own way. Help to make all more well. Perhaps you will find an answer. But don’t get too distracted by too many human anxieties. Look up at the stars. We are all – humankind, elves, trees, planets, seas, all creatures – made out of starfire. We are all one. In this knowledge, the healing spell for your World is truly begun. So chant your spells for healing and peace. You are a long way from understanding the heart of all human Mysteries; or the true worth of this often noble, crass, violent, caring, insane and creative dominant species. But you know enough to bespell for good, and so to do your best. And so let all worries cease. Winter is always followed by spring, however long that winter season. (Sometimes, it may take many thousands of years.) The song of the lark is eventually heard in the sky instead of owl-cry or the moan of the wind, or the cries of dying soldiers, or silences.’

Like Mrs Eldridge, I have often felt as if there were another order of reality to which I belong rather more than to this one. Somewhere both beautiful and strange and yet entirely familiar. And how I long for it!

To say that there is such a place is to invite ridicule. And yet the folk traditions of lands all over the World, along with shamanic teachings, do tell us so. Here in Britain, it has been called Annwn, Elphame, ‘the Land Behind the North Wind’, and many other names: to the Irish, it is Tír na nÓg, ‘the Land of the Ever Young’, or Tir Tairngiri, Tir na Sorcha, Mag Mell or Hy-Brasil; to the Norse, it was Faroe (‘Faerie’) or ‘the Land of the Hella cunni’; to the Germans, ‘the Land at the bottom of Mother Holle’s Well’.

Faerie … the Otherworld. The fey feel at home with this – or, at least, with the idea of it. I am speaking here of a craving for that which is spoken of in some old tales and ballads; those concerned with life and death, blood and snow-light, sun in a forest glade, meetings with dwarves, a boat made of glass, a horse bearing fifty silver bells plaited into his mane, shape-shifting, enchantment. It is an entirely natural place and our ancestors felt that this is where the dead go. You might call it ‘the Soul of Nature’. But what has it got to do with being a fey type?

The Scots used to call people fey if they could see or sense spirits or hear spirit messages. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term fey means ‘fated to die’. Therefore, someone close enough to the Otherworld to see visions, meet spiritual presences, and perhaps to foretell the future. Well, we are all fated to die, eventually. And so does this mean that there is a bit of the fey in each of us, however hidden? Yes, I do think so; and it does not depend upon being close to death. (I have, myself, been fey since I was a small child and I am now in my sixties.) But many people stamp on this feeling within themselves; they suppress it, ignore it. Perhaps they fear being seen as cranky, or perhaps they cannot find the time for something they fear might undermine their ability to be practical. But if, reader, you are of the type to whom a gentle psychic awareness seems both natural and enriching, then the fey in you is not clamped down. It is awake and alive and active, even if in quite small and seemingly undramatic ways, such as the ability to sense when a friend is going to phone you or visit. Or the fact that you can always feel the psychic atmosphere in any house whether or not there are people living there. This is not because you are close to death – you may be a long way from that – but because you are closer than most to Otherworldly reality and do not actually see that as somehow opposed to this World. Your life includes the liminal dimension as well as the everyday and the mundane. You sense, and you may see or hear, Otherworldly reality, but you do love life. In spite of all the horror and the banality reflected in newspapers and on the internet – and in spite of the insanity of damage caused to the environment – you may be passionate about this living World. Here. In fact, in my experience, most fey people are very involved with life and are often enthusiastic about their latest creative project or career move or romance. We do not tend to become cynical.

However, we who are fey may not find this World’s reality at its most shallow at all comfortable. And our perspective and skills may not always be easy for other people to understand. Still, there are a surprisingly large number of us and most of us feel that we are here for a purpose that can make sense of our struggle.

If we bravely explore the threshold area between this and the Otherworld, and even explore the Otherworld itself – at least in our dreams and visions – we may then more easily see what that purpose is. We may also develop our own fey abilities and knowledge in the process.

Fey people have always existed. In earlier cultures many of us would have been respected as wisewomen, cunning men, shamanic healers or seers. Some have been able to see or sense angels. (The poet William Blake did this.) Many have been inspired as artists by seeing the numinous within Nature. Others have sometimes heard voices of the dead or have seen them as apparitions or else in visions. Nowadays, many who do conventional and even arduous mainstream jobs have an awareness of spirit presences and a sense of being guided. Most are highly sensitive to the spirit of place.

Historically, none of this was connected with any particular set of beliefs, and nor is it now. Back then (in Britain and throughout Europe), a fey person could be a Pagan or a Christian. Nowadays, they could be one of these or a ‘New Ager’; they could be a Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Spiritualist – even agnostic. Being fey is about how you are made rather than about your brand of beliefs. Though, of course, some forms of spirituality – principally Paganism and Spiritualism – have supported fey people while other belief systems often have not.

In Britain today, the spirituality of a fey person may be quite anarchic and entirely private and have no basis in any organized religion. So it can be a secret spirituality that informs the fey type and this may be largely experiential. It has often been perceived as a threat by people who like ideas (and other people) to be tied down and under control and by the organizations that such people have created.

Meanwhile, in much of today’s World, fey people (and those hidden bits of the fey in everybody) have been thoroughly marginalized.

So I write this book after mustering my courage and my defiance to suggest ways in which we might understand Otherworldly realities without abandoning common sense or congratulating ourselves that we belong to a special group. And to suggest ways in which we can understand how our perceptions and psychic skills can serve life.

In Britain, mainstream opinion in these reductionist times is quite adamant that there is no Otherworld to understand (no place you could see or walk around in, anyway). There may be other dimensions, as quantum physicists have told us, but these have nothing to do with anything psychic. And your state of mind and your type of awareness have no effect upon your physical reality (in spite of Schroedinger’s famous cat). Neither the living nor the dead can pass into any other dimension of Nature than this one here.

Yet opinion is still divided about what we