SUMMA FAERYOLOGICA, part one

I suppose that the honest way to begin these last few posts is to simply admit that I'm prejudiced. I'd REALLY like this forbidden topic to have some "external reality" about it. That is: it is not we humans just making it all up, by whatever conscious or unconscious means our own anomalous minds are capable of. But I can't fool myself into thinking this or that without giving the quest a genuine try. The difference between reading Diarmuid MacManus and Charles de Lint is starkly clear to me. So, several years ago, stimulated by wonder and also the peculiar thought that some were pushing that my own favorite anomaly (UFOs) was "just" Faery in modern dress, I started that quest. 

The first thing that I noticed on this quest was that it wasn't going to be anywhere as orderly nor robust-in-credible encounters as searching out UFOs. For every investigated fairy incident there were probably a thousand such UFO incidents. Even if I admitted (as I did) that the proper way to compare the relative richness of credible information between the two would be to compare the fairy cases to UFO Close Encounters, the overabundance on the UFO side is still hundreds to one. But the path was through this forest, so why not just go and see what, if anything, was there? 

Was there a hypothesis to use as an intellectual clarifying guide? In UFOlogy, the proper hypothesis is this:
   
"Is there supporting evidence for the existence of advanced aerial technology in our atmosphere which exhibits characteristics beyond those of which we humans (Military, Scientists, et al) were capable of at the time of the incidents' occurrence?"

When one phrases the "UFO question" like that (note that there is no mention of aliens, extraterrestrials, nor any causal agency --- you have to add that into your own head if you want to), the serious UFO researcher can almost SHOUT out a robust "YES!!!" Is there any such Faery hypothesis like this? 

To create such a statement one would have to know at least something about that word "Faery" wouldn't one? And then one would have to take the tempting causal agencies out of the hypothetical research question. As, at least originally, a stone-ignorant rookie, I couldn't yet do that. 

           

The above pictures are a small part of what had to happen in order to attempt any slight comprehension of an anomalous field as complicated as UFOs. I had to really immerse for a long time to even hope for any clarity. As I said, the great quality of the cases helped me make little progress, but it was the immersion in the literature that --- well, this isn't "scientific", but when you do that, you begin to get an intuitive feeling for the whatever-it-is. So, particularly here in the pursuit of Faery, my only real hope for an approach was to just dive into all of the literature and hope for the intuitions to come. So, this I did. 

By the way, as soon as I got really into the readings, the most powerful impression that anyone should get (in my opinion) is that it is flat clear to the reader when one is reading a "fairy tale" like an elaborate around-the-peat-fire story vs a straightforward encounter incident. Both of these types of "tales" appear within the same covers of most of these books. Thankfully the separation of these stories is easy --- maybe the only easy thing about this research project. 

As those of you know who have been reading the previous (how many were there?) postings in the blog , the result of all of that immersion was The Leprecat. Leprecat (The Little People Case Catalog) had ten three-ring notebooks of encounter claims. Within those pages were about 500 case references. Added to that, The Fairy Census of Simon Young chipped in with 600 case claims. Janet Bord's book contributed more, etc etc. Though some of this overlapped, this journey encompassed over a thousand claims. Even then, it paled in comparison with my own UFO files (about 4000 SELECTED reports and good ones generally) plus CUFOS' files and the USAF Project Blue Book cases et al. But reading "just"a thousand claims is not "just" nothing. I'm not embarrassed about only reading a thousand claims. But before I start throwing out soft "conclusions", I just want every reader to know from where such comments are coming. The resource base is not ideal, but maybe just enough. (Of course reading the earlier blog posts would also help anyone to better understand. :=} )

DO CREDIBLE CASES EXIST IN ENOUGH NUMBERS TO INDICATE THAT THERE IS A REAL ANOMALY HERE? 

I assessed all of these claims with my UFO researcher cap on, and came up with 50-52 cases (not including things like Black Fairy Dog claims) which I felt deserved my confidence that they were reported honestly, accurately, trustworthily. They had at least some levels of investigation/ interview, and knowledge of witness that bespoke Credibility. That is not a huge number out of all of those thousand or so claims. But, and here comes the first of the feeling-immersion statements: that amount of credible cases is enough for me. Those "fifty" cases are not only impressive to me, but they also match a very much larger pile of cases which, though they lack the strict bona fides which a researcher desires, in their accumulation they add to my confidence that we have a legitimate anomaly here and one which has persisted for many centuries. That's a big claim by me, but it's how reading all of those leprecat reports feels. I wouldn't stand in front of a typical academic meeting and defend too much of this to-the-death, but in front of a sympathetic audience I think I'd have the courage to do it. 

The "50" more acceptable case reports turn out to serve as a foundational core for perhaps a couple hundred more which have no real red flags from the claimants, and which fit well in detail and behavior with the original 50. It takes faith, but there may well be a big enough pile of these claims to support some type of reality. 

WHAT REALITY? DO THE CASES INDICATE THAT THE EXPERIENCES TAKE PLACE OUTSIDE THE "IMAGINATION?" 

The answer here is the same sort of cautious "Yes." Once one accepts the assertion that witnesses are generally honest in attempting to describe their experiences, then answering this next question is pretty straightforward. This is because many of these incidents are witnessed by multiple witnesses AND at very close range. It requires a VERY flexible and hard-to-buy counter hypothesis to assert that multiple persons have the same up-close "hallucinations" or other weird mental quirks simultaneously. I realize that debunkers love to put out speculative B.S. like this, but if the human race was THIS prone to serious detachment from reality, I do not think we would have made it this far. 

When the University of Colorado's "Scientific Study of UFOs" was funded by the US Air Force in 1966-69, it was faced with the similar problem of assessing "reality" for that subject. The de facto project administrator, Robert Low (picture to our left), thought hard about how to proceed. 

He made the remarkable statement that the UFO problem was really a nested set of three questions: 1. Do credible cases exist to indicate that there is a true anomaly here? and 2. Do cases exist that indicate that the aforementioned anomaly is "externally real", i.e. the subject matters exist outside the mere images in the human reporters' minds? Low said that he already had seen enough evidence to answer both of these questions "YES." 

The third question was: Are these UFOs "extraterrestrial?" On that he felt that such an answer was too far removed from science's methods to allow any honest response. 

If I stand beside Bob Low (which I would consider an honor), and substitute "Faery Folk" for UFO in the three nested questions, I will answer the questions in the same way that he did. "Faery Folk" claims, whatever their deeper reality base, are a justified anomaly, and whatever-this-is is "externally based." BUT what the deeper agency is which lies underneath these encounters, must remain a question. 

If the audience will allow me to stop my assertions at that point, then I'll acknowledge my further ignorance BUT MAKE SOME SOFTER SUGGESTIONS about the deeper realities which could underlie this stuff. This is where the "Immersion Intuitions" take over from the more cautious approach. 

THE REMAINING QUESTIONS IN THIS AREA.

These are some of the ideas that I'd like to foist upon you in the rest of this post and the next:

1. What do the witnesses see as far as the entities and their behaviors are concerned?
2. Is there any substantial change in entities and behaviors across the decades?
3. Are the entities winged?
4. What did the Olde People of the old cultures think that these things were? 
5. If really pushed, what would I say that my own preferred hypothesis was? 
6. Do I think that Faery and UFOs are the same thing, or even closely resemble each other? 

I'm going to leave off this post with the entity galleries from the cases that I felt had stronger investigation/credibility. Staring at them for a bit sort of answers some of the questions above. I'll have more to say about each of the questions next time, but for now --- the fun of the pictures will do.

 Till next time ....

A Recent "Popular" Case: A Big Jump Forward In Time

          
           THE RECENT CASE OF CUTTING A SHADOW

I'm violating my previous pattern of Little People posts today. The reason is that the case I'll discuss is sort of running rampant around Fairyworld conversations and has popped up in my communication exchanges in three different ways over the last few days. SO .... I feel moved to write it up here and talk, just a little, about it. Hopefully you'll like the approach.

Where this case came from: There is a wonderful Canadian documentary which was mentioned on this site by a reader. It is entitled THE FAIRY FAITH and it is by John Walker who did a great job. 

There are lots of interesting things therein. But one, this case, stands out. 

I didn't catch the year (sometime within the past ten --- whoops just found out that the documentary isn't really brand new, so, place this case in about the 1990s) near Glasgow, Scotland at a place called Fairy Hill  (Perthshire) a single man, a laborer, was doing something that he often does and enjoys: walking on the hills and enjoying Nature. Out of a clear sky, he was surprised by the development around him of a dewy fog, complete with a beautiful rainbow. He was thrilled by the atmosphere --- delighted by what he felt was a privileged moment. 

As he reached the crest of a small decline, the Sun broke through and cast his shadow down the hillside. He stood there now hearing enchanting harp like "fairy music."

Then something even more strange: Down the hill, near the head of his shadow, stood a little four foot tall man. He seemed to nod at him. But more so: there near him at the feet of his shadow, knelt a female version of the man. The two had tanned faces, he bristly facial hair without a true beard. The texture of their skin seemed "wizened." They wore small sewn caps and badly stained leathery clothes, as if somehow they had spent time in a boggy place. AND most alarming of all, the female was apparently attempting to cut away his shadow from his shoes.

The witness yelled "OYE!!" and the two fairy folk just popped out of existence, or at least out of sight.

This witness appeared on the film in an attitude and presentation which was one of the best I've ever seen. HIGHLY impressive as a good commonsense even-keeled fellow, who anyone would like and trust. I liked him and it.

........... but what could this shadow business have been about? No one could know the meaning of this of course, but we can throw a few ideas out.

In the Greek world, and following the Roman world, there was The Land of Shades --- Shadows --- something so fundamental to the nature of human beings that they were almost the equivalent of "the Soul" or "the Ghost" or some extremely significant revenant or left-over of the person post-Death. Such ideas exist in cultures all over the world --- Japan, Africa, ... nearly anywhere. The connection which almost all the old cultures felt between the person's shadow and the person's life in this world was seemingly obvious. Some cultures even felt that when you lay down to sleep, your shadow absorbed into your body while your consciousness temporarily left the world.

In Japan, there also was an idea that there existed creatures which did not have shadows at all. These creatures were felt to be "demons", but my reading of these demons is that they are more like "tricksters" than devils. In that, they might even be thought of as Celtic people thought of some of The Little People.

Do Little People have shadows? Or are they part of a parallel appearing but non-physical form of reality, which is not founded upon the textbook physical laws (like, light interrupted  by matter creates a shadow.)

All of that is me BSing about things that I cannot know well enough to have earned an opinion. But, taken with that humility, one can still daydream about a denizen of a world without shadows (Faery) symbolically cutting off a human's shadow. Could such an action be seen as a precedent for taking the human away into fairyland? Or, was this fairy "kidding" to just mess around with a person as a trickster would do?

That's all I've got for now. The case is a very neat one, and worth putting out there.

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Walker Between The Worlds???

Today let's take a look at the so-called Minister of Fairyland, the reverend Robert Kirk, a Scottish denizen of the 17th century. The above is supposedly a draft scribble for the title page of his famous-to-come essay entitled THE SECRET COMMONWEALTH. The essay or mini-book supposes to reveal almost any detail about the Fairy World that an inquirer would desire. This book has risen to rock star status, I'd say even Cult status, among fairy-world aficionados. 

My intuition was that this was a bit too good to be true, even if my essential attitude is to root for these things. I decided NOT to read Reverend Kirk's work until I'd done a LOT of work with Little People encounter cases, so I'd have something to compare with the details of the famous book. So for seven or eight years (or however long I've been chasing Faery world incidents) I didn't crack the pages. Now, several hundred cases in, it's time. 

What do we know? 

To my reading, we don't really know a lot about Robert Kirk. He was obviously intelligent, and driven to learn about folklore matters in his area. He wrote copious notes in small journals. It is believed that in one of these journals the original book was written, but, again to my reading, we don't have the exact journal containing the whole thing --- though some of his rare journals do exist and a few seem to have original notes related to this book. 

Kirk seems to have been one of those ministers who was strongly affected by the double-whammy of witch trials and demonology, and the upsurge of atheism in the London and Edinburgh environs. His researches appear to be driven by a desire to oppose these trends --- note that in all of this he is almost exactly a clone of Richard Bovet, who lived almost coincidentally to Kirk. Well, OK. None of that is really germane to what we're doing here. Despite the vague origins of Kirk and the written book, what matters is whether the contents add anything to our studies. 

What's in the book?? 

Despite being primed for a stunner of a read, I could barely get through the pages. Why? It's probably MY problem, but I couldn't feel that any of the text was anything but some guys telling Kirk stories that he swallowed whole. 

I hope that I'm not coming across flippantly on this --- those of you who know me know that's not my style and I'm one of last guys to shake my head negatively on these anomalistic claims. But I cannot find anything in this book which impresses me as good evidence ... of anything.

Why? I'll give a short list:
1. Kirk tells us that he is basically sold on his informants. Kirk himself seems not to have his own direct experiences. His informants are entirely of one type. So far this is not necessarily a problem.
2. Every informant tells Kirk that he has not acquired his information in any "normal" way. He has not seen nor heard any of his information in a normal state of consciousness. This is the point at which I begin to get really nervous. 
3. These informants go into trances or ecstasy. While in these altered states these reporters said that they could see into the Fairy World, see many things that the rest of us could not, even if we were standing right beside them. These sessions of "Second Sight" into the alternate reality included complete interactions ... particularly verbal communication and revelations of esoteric truths. 

.... uh .... OK .... this is getting hard to relate to, and essentially impossible to regard as evidence. 

Let's take "evidence" first: This sort of claim is not only second hand but complicates itself by asking us to believe in a second debatable anomaly: Clairvoyance.  I am not put off generally by "clairvoyance" (I've had persons in my own family who occasionally "see around corners." But they cannot do it on call).  I have seen no studies of clairvoyance which suggest that anyone can simply carry the talent into any moment.... particularly in vividly interactive detail like a living episode. 

These tales sound like the claims of modern day trance-control mediums or like the UFO claimants called the contactees. I've read many of these trance sessions in these other fields and never would this technique be honored by investigators as a proper evidentiary technique. 


Why not? The claims are always conveniently out of reach of any of the rest of us simple mere mortals. 

But surely I'm prejudiced. Surely it is the content of these revelations which should be judged to the good or ill. OK. I'll keep giving this "the benefit." What about content? 

The drawing above from an old English chapbook shows a fair number of elements of the fairy faith. There are the circle-dancing folk in their tall hats, the fairy residence "under the hill", the Old Green Man in the tree representing the force and cycles of Nature, and a fairy mushroom. 
Even though bits of such ideas occur in Kirk, there is one huge problem. Kirk's informants say that "we" cannot see these things --- only those with second sight. My library of 300 folklore books begs to differ --- wildly. 

Kirk's informants tell us that the fairies are significantly superior to us in every way, and they are not physically substantial but made of some sort of condensed air-like spirits. Almost none of the reported encounter cases in my Leprecat indicate anything vaguely hinting that. Well, maybe Kirk's clairvoyants see a different class of fairy than the rest of us do. 

If so, we'd have the following: Unnamed believe-me-or-not tale-tellers weaving stories which don't really match what the rest of us think we've experienced, printed in a book by an almost unknown writer with very large emotional reasons for wanting to present evidence for a Spirit-filled anti-atheist creation. 

OK. Maybe I'm overstating. I'm VERY unconvinced though. There's a big difference between the case of Bovet and Kirk. Bovet goes to real "ordinary" people, interviews them, names them usually, and receives multiple witnessing or support, while getting details that match hundreds of other tales. Off-center or not, I'll take Bovet every time. 

I apologize for this entry. I'm probably off in some major ways and I don't like skewering sacred cows, but .... even the "celebrated" story of Kirk coming back in Spirit form to state that he didn't die but is now with the fairies is based upon the flimsiest of fairy silk. 

I promise to do better the next time. We have plenty upon which to base a picture of a world of Faery as a respectable concept. You've seen cases already. More to come ... next time?


I'll leave you with a piece of very good writing (fiction) by a gentleman named Kevan Manwaring, who captures better than Kirk the romance of the Minister of Fairyland,

" I sit in the near-dark of my chamber, gazing at the black mirrors which surrounded my bureau. They seem to catch the available light, gradations of black-upon-black, like Dr Dee’s scrying glass. I might as well be a necromancer, for do I not dabble with fallen angels, with invisible spirits and occult powers? Within my own parish I would have been burnt as a witch, were such a thing still common. The terrible executions stopped half a century ago, but the crime of witchcraft is still a capital offense. I doubt most would look mercifully upon my research into the secret commonwealth. In my defence I would argue that the existence of the Subterraneans, and of esoteric communications between mortals, is proof of the celestial hierarchy and God’s glory. All my efforts have been to this one aim in this, in a secular and corrupt age. "