Fairies are Real

Why believing in fairies is important to the ecosystem

Earth Sensory Perception is a subsection of Our Uncertain Future and a compilation of essays on connecting intuitively with the natural world. These essays are free to all for the first two weeks before going behind a paywall for paid subs only.

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Santa Claus Versus Fairies

Before my daughter started high school, in the years before the 2020 pandemic, we used to travel a lot, about three months out of the year. Often, we spent holidays abroad. We figured out how to make Xmas and Chanukkah work in multiple lands. In some places, like Quenca, Equador, Christmas was built into the culture, a multi-day parade of people from villages across the country right outside the door of our little apartment. In other places like, Bali, Indonesia, there wasn’t so much going on. There were no Christmas lights decorating houses, no parades, and no Santa Claus with children lined up to sit on his knee. That might have been what made precocious ten-year-old Flora suspicious.

A couple days before Christmas, after I purchased local artisan toys to wrap in paper and assign to Santa, as was customary for our overseas holidays, Flora turned to me and asked if Santa existed.

“Tell me the truth,” she said, looking me straight in the eyes, “the absolute truth.”

This was a moment of reckoning. Do I continue to lie to this very intelligent child, knowing she will find out soon enough? Do I continue to justify my lie with half-truths about the “spirit of Santa in all of us” some such bullshit? Or do I give her what she is asking for and tell her the truth?

“No,” I confessed solemnly, “Santa is not real.”
“What?!” she exclaimed. “Why did you tell me? You should have lied.”
In that moment my heart broke. Seriously, that may have been one of the worse heartbreaks of my adult life. I could see that something broke in her too, her belief in magic. I stomped on her childhood imagination, her dreams of magical lands and mythical creatures. I was the worst mother ever.

“This means the Easter Bunny doesn’t exist either,” she concluded sadly without needing me to agree.

Oh no, I destroyed her innocence. I should have known better. Of course she didn’t want the truth. She was ten after all, and too smart to still believe in Santa Claus unless she was in conscientious denial. She wanted to believe. She wanted me to lie to her.

And that’s when I blurted out with all sincerity, “But fairies really do exist!”

She looked reasonably suspicious.

“I swear it!”

And I meant it. I have always believed and continue to believe in fairies. I’ve seen them with my own eyes. They’re everywhere. Not like Tinkerbell humanoids with translucent wings, but like glitter, puffs, flits and sparks (and sometimes translucent wings). You’ve probably seen them too, whether you knew it or not.

I’m not alone in my belief.

The Fairy Queen Takes an Airy Drive in a Light Carriage, a Twelve-in-hand, Drawn by Thoroughbred Butterflies, color wood engraving by Richard Doyle

Fairies Exist Across Cultures: More than Folklore

Across Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe, fairies and “hidden folk” have long lived through folklore and deeply embedded cultural beliefs. They are understood as powerful ethereal beings linked to the land and often existing in a parallel Otherworld. For many people who still follow the old ways, fairies are not myth, but real, albeit illusive, beings. Examples include the Irish aos sídhe, Scottish fair folk, Scandinavian elves and landvættir, huldufólk in Iceland, and Southeastern European figures like samodivi and tündér. These beings are often tricksters who can bless or harm, using illusion, shape-shifting, and deception. Because of this, people historically adjusted behavior around well-known fairy places, avoiding certain fairy forts, lone hawthorns, mounds, springs or wells, leaving offerings for protection, blessings, or healing, and fearing bad luck if sacred spots like burial mounds were disturbed.

In Northern New Mexico where I live, there are traditional stories of duendes, brought over from the Iberian Peninsula, little goblin-like beings that lurk in closets or under beds and trouble people at night. Like fairies, duendes occupy the space between the living and the spirit world. They are also tricksters. Duendes are often treated as unpredictable house or nature spirits, so people are careful not to mock them, disturb their spaces, or wander carelessly where they are believed to dwell. Apologies are spoken aloud or offerings are left to calm the spirit and restore balance if needed.

Little People in Indigenous Cultures

Many Indigenous cultures across North America have traditions of “little people,” each nation with its own names, stories, and teachings around them, examples include Jogah among the Iroquois, Canotila among the Sioux, Memegwesi among Anishinaabe, and many others. These beings are often described as tricksters and protectors of nature who can help, teach, or punish humans depending on how they are treated. Some Native nations describe little people as guardians of specific places or resources, while others see them as intermediaries between the human and spirit worlds who may appear in visions or dreams.

When I apprenticed to a Cherokee shaman in my early twenties out of college in Woodstock, New York, we always created a spirit plate before every meal. Gathering a bit of every dish, we placed it on a plate and left it outside in the forest as an offering to the little people and other unseen spirits to share in our meal and continue their support. Cherokee believe in the Yunwi Tsunsdi, “Little People,” small nature spirits who live in the woods and mountains, like dwarfs or fairies.

One day I told the shaman about my reoccurring childhood nightmare in which little people piled me with blankets as I sunk deeper and deeper into the Earth. “I knew you were connected to the Little People,” he said. “They were trying to take you to the underworld.” Perhaps this is why I am such a believer. I don’t need to be rationally convinced. I know in my heart. I can feel it. They are with me sometimes in certain spots. They call to me, mischievously, and though I greet them kindly, I usually flee in the other direction.

Fairies and Earth Magic

Fairies and the like are deeply connected to the Earth and the natural world. They are elemental beings rooted to the land. I don’t believe it is a coincidence that cultures across the world believe in fairy-like creatures who live in the liminal space between our world and the spirit world.

Austrian philosopher‑mystic, educator, founder of Waldorf schools, and prolific author Rudolf Steiner also believed in fairies, which he called elemental beings, such as gnomes, sylphs, undines, and pixies. In his series of Anthroposophy lectures, he makes it clear that he believes that not only through intuition can we connect with the elemental folk but that they want to be of assistance to us, acting as representatives to the divine. He believed that we could not be truly connected to the spiritual world if we were not connected to the nature spirits. Steiner says, “Elemental beings are servants, helpers, messengers ‘below’ of the spiritual hierarchies ‘above’… Everything solid, liquid, aeriform and fire… but in all this condensed matter there is everywhere a spiritual element that rests enchanted in it!”[1]

Though our modern lives don’t make room for magic, unless it is for children and usually tied to consumerist holiday traditions, many cultures continue to believe and honor fairy traditions. In the past, people knew them and used their powers to benefit the whole Earth, but now they suffer from neglect. Their realms are harassed and destroyed while we abuse the Earth. By connecting with the fairy realm and the elemental beings in our landscape we are honoring the natural world, stewarding care, and inviting in more earth magic.

How to Connect with Fairies

1. Locate spaces in your local landscape where the fae folk reside. These are generally threshold places like river bends and confluences, old trees, springs, crossroads, and liminal edges where one terrain shifts into another. Use your intuition. If you sense a space to be magical or sacred, if it gives you goosebumps or heebie jeebies, if you see something spritely out of the corner of your eye as you pass, if the light shifts when you near, if the wind chimes like bells, it is safe to infer this is a fairy place.

   

2. Treat these areas as sacred sites and be careful not to disturb them too much. Avoid damaging trees, blocking fairy paths, or upturning ancient stones.

3. With the intention of meeting fairies at the front of your mind, sit quietly, listen to birds and water, notice small changes in light and weather. Open your liminal awareness, allowing your senses to sharpen, your body to relax, your eyes to soften.

4. In the book Nature Spirits & Elemental Beings by Slovenian land artist, geomancer, and UNESCO Artist for Peace Marko Pogačnik, he writes, “To perceive elemental beings and environmental spirits in the original quality of their lives, one should approach them on the level of feeling.”[2] Direct your awareness through your heart and try to tap into how the elemental beings are feeling or might feel in such a place.

5. Leave simple offerings like water, food, songs or flowers as gratitude toward the land.

6. Perhaps create art from your encounters like poems, drawings, earth altars or photographs. In this way, you can create a new living fairy lore for your local land embedded in your lived modern experience, not just an old foreign tale.

7. Read works by folklorists and historians of fairylore to learn more about how experiences, stories, and places weave together.

• Katharine Briggs – Briggs’s Dictionary of Fairies (also published as An Encyclopedia of Fairies)

• Bomgiizhik Isaac Murdoch – The Power of the Little People

• Simon Young (ed.) – Magical Folk: British and Irish Fairies, 500 AD to the Present

• Marko Pogačnik – Nature Spirits & Elemental Beings: Working with the Intelligence in Nature

• Morgan Daimler – Fairies: A Guide to the Celtic Fair Folk

• W. B. Yeats (ed.) – Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

• John Bierhorst (reteller) – The Deetkatoo: Native American Stories About Little People

• Ray John de Aragón – Enchanted Legends and Lore of New Mexico: Witches, Ghosts, and Spirits

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[1] AnthroWiki. (2021, September 20). Elementary being. https://en.anthro.wiki/Elementary_being

[2] Pogačnik, M. (1996). Nature spirits & elemental beings: Working with the intelligence in nature. Findhorn Press.

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