Folk, Faerie, Pagan, Catholic: Part 2

Faeries are Christians.

‘At the first performance of J.M Barrie’s Peter Pan on December 27th, 1904, no one knew what to expect when, after Tinkerbell’s death, Peter asked the audience, “Do you believe in fairies? If you believe, wave your handkerchiefs and clap your hands!” An anxious Barrie had told the orchestra to be ready to lay down their instruments and clap their loudest when that moment came. But when it did come, the audience burst into such overwhelming applause that the actress playing Peter Pan burst into tears and had to leave the stage for a few moments to compose herself.’

I have borrowed the above paragraph from the chapter entitled “The Green Man and the Invisible Country” from my book Sophia in Exile. I don’t exactly know why, but after reading that last sentence, I also started to tear up and had to compose myself before returning to writing. Now, why is that? Maybe it happened to you, too.

Despite the patina of Enlightenment hubris that still infects Western Civilization, a very real belief in faeries and related beings persists. And I don’t see why not. Indeed, the legends, folktales, myths, and religious texts from every area of the world attest to the real presences of such—as is also the case with a worldwide flood, giants, and dragons (not to mention other allegedly “mythical” beasts). The one exception seems to be the Bible, both Old and New Testaments. But seems is the operative word here.

One would think that the mention of faerie-like creatures would find its way into the Bible; after all, the Flood, giants, and dragons made it in. And even in the way of prohibition or warning—you’d think faeries would show up. And maybe they do, but you have to read between the lines. Some suggest, for instance, that Ephron, the figure from whom Abraham buys the land and cave (Machpelah) where he would bury Sarah, was really the goat-footed god Pan—or at least a close relation—as the name “Ephron” means “fawn-like.” (I know it’s a different kind of faun/fawn. You get the idea.) Some commentators, almost always Protestants enamored with Messianic Judaism, argue that Ephron was a bad guy—which a reading of Genesis does not support, especially in the Septuagint translation wherein Abraham acknowledges that Ephron is “on my side.” In fact, Ephron comes off as of a generous spirit: he offers the land as a gift, but Abraham insists on paying.

David Bentley Hart—a big faerie guy—in this great essay, doesn’t see any incompatibility between Christian faith and belief in faeries and points to Colossians 1:20 as Pauline affirmation of the inhabitants of those who populate the Invisible Country.

“For it pleased the Father that in [Christ] should all fulness dwell; and, having made peace through the blood of his cross, by him to reconcile all things unto himself; by him, I say, whether they be things in earth, or things in heaven.” (Colossians 1:19-20)

Hart also points out the many, many instances of scriptural affirmation for the existence of faeries given by the seventeenth-century Scottish clergyman and scholar, the Rev. Robert Kirk in his mysterious and important study The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. And, although a Presbyterian, Kirk, like Hart, was all in with the faeries—even though legend has it that they may have spirited him away to their Otherworld for spilling too many of the proverbial magic beans about them.

And for our Catholic and Orthodox brethren, who can also get a bit precisian when it comes to toeing the catechetical party-line, no less a figure than Origen attests to the presence of the invisible country in Contra Celsus—and in a positive manner:

“The water springs in fountains, and refreshes the earth with running streams...the air is kept pure, and supports the life of those who breathe it, only in consequence of the agency and control of certain beings whom we may call invisible husbandmen and guardians.”

So this was kind of a long way for me to say I don’t see what the big deal is. And plus, I’ve seen into that world upon occasion. And so did my father. And so has my eldest daughter. We are hardly alone. (I write about this at some length in Sophia in Exile.) Scientific materialists, of course, but also Christian precisians (the same cast of losers who outlawed dancing and beer and Christmas once upon a time) are incredulous about such things, but as W.Y. Evans-Wentz writes in his magisterial study (still the best thing ever written on the topic) The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries (1911): “The spirit creatures cannot be stuffed and put into museums, like rare animals and birds, whose existence we might doubt of is we had not seen them there.” They don’t respond well to the comedy of scientific interrogation—other than to laugh. Evans-Wentz, who wrote the book as his doctoral dissertation at Oxford University (yes, you read that right), also explains his understanding of the geography of the Invisible Country:

“Most of the evidence also points so much in one direction that the only verdict which seems reasonable is that the Fairy-Faith belongs to a doctrine of souls; that is to say, that Fairyland is a state or condition, realm or place, very much like, if not the same as, that wherein civilized and uncivilized men alike place the souls of the dead, in company with other invisible beings such as gods, daemons, and all sorts of good and bad spirits. Not only do both educated and uneducated Celtic seers so conceive Fairyland, but they go much further, and say that Fairyland actually exists as an invisible world within which the visible world is immersed like an island in an unexplored ocean, and that it is peopled by more species of living beings than this world, because incomparably more vast and varied in its possibilities.”

Here’s the thing, though: I say the faeries are Christian. That is, they believe in Christ (and, obviously, Sophia). But for them belief is not a matter of assenting to this or that doctrinal confession, but a matter of experience. For example, in De defectu oraculorum, the Roman historian Plutarch tells the story of a sailor named Thamus who heard a voice at the time of the crucifixion of Christ. It said, “Thamus, are you there? When you reach Palodes, take care to proclaim that the great god Pan is dead.”

The early Christian historian Eusebius argued that this mysterious utterance was proof that the ancient gods (Pan the one most venerated by the agrarian peasantry), were no more as a result of Christ’s death and resurrection. There is another tradition, however, that suggests the voice was actually speaking of Christ and was horrified at the death of the God of Nature, that the God of Zoë could die. I am in the latter camp.

And so was the goddess of my idolatry, the English poet and author Eleanor Farjeon. I love her so much it hurts. You might not know of her (not enough do!) but she wrote of the most beautiful song lyrics ever in the tune that Cat Stevens cast as “Morning Has Broken.” In her marvelous book Trees, Farjeon draws a picture of Christ as “the Hoofed One” who has a dialogue with Chronos, god of time. Chronos is deadly serious, rational, a precisian. Not so his interlocutor:

“Have you then found a bigger star than mine?” cried the Old One in alarm. “With many moons and brighter hoops of fire? What were you doing while we were raking the firmament?”
“Dancing, Old Bones, dancing.”
“And where?” 
“On earth, with man my brother.”

Farjeon, who late in life converted to Catholicism, was a lifelong (and even after her entrance into the Church) Catholic pagan. She discovered an organic Christianity that reached her through nature and poetry; entering the Church at seventy was but a formality. As she writes, “For since the divine Pagan dares to exist in harmony with the eternal spirit, trees, which are the temples of Pan, are also prophets of God. He laid his secret within all his creations as they passed through his hands.” Seriously, who, including the faeries, wouldn’t want a God like that? And, as Pan himself told the charter member of the Findhorn Community, R. Ogilvie Crombie, once upon a time, “I am the servant of Almighty God, and I and my subjects are willing to come to the aid of mankind.” Even Pan admits he’s a Christian.

But, if you’re suspicious of Pan, talk to C.S. Lewis, here in the essay “Myth Became Fact”:

“God is more than a god, not less; Christ is more than Balder, not less. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘pagan Christs’: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t.

“We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic—and is not the sky itself a myth?— shall we refuse to be mythopathic? For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: perfect myth and perfect fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher.”

This is not to say that, as in the human world, the Invisible Country doesn’t contain more than a few bad hombres (called the legions of “Anti-Pan” in Ogilvie’s conversations with Pan). And some are just—in accordance with the all the stories—full of mischief. For instance, when Mike Sauter and I interviewed James Tunney about the Secret Commonwealth, the mischievous ones knocked my internet out for a while during the interview—then hid my car keys under the bed! And James later reported that they overflowed his bathtub. Stuff like that.

This sensibility is heavily apparent in my latest collection of poetry, Mythologies of the Wild of God, so I will leave you with a poem that hopefully conveys something of this (and which starts with that quote from Origen as an epigraph):

HYMNS

“the water springs in fountains, and refreshes the earth with running streams...the air is kept pure, and supports the life of those who breathe it, only in consequence of the agency and control of certain beings whom we may call invisible husbandmen and guardians.” ~ Origen 

I.
Sheltered by the garden’s wall
     A shadowed well springs from the earth
Circled with holly, bay, and yew,
     Offering waters clean and pure. 
On the bordering stones of the cistern
     Lie coins and medals and beads.
All is stillness, all is silent
     All is holy, all is green.

II.
In the dream a woman offers me a wreath of cedar, 
Holding it so I can see through its open center. 
Where all is transfigured. 
Where all is dance. 
Where everything awaits its return 
To the world through the charm of making.

III.
Christ of yew tree.
Christ of holly.
Christ of maple.
Christ of beech.
Christ of cherry.
Christ of cedar.
Christ of willow.
Christ of larch.
Christ of alder.
Christ of apple.
Christ of oak tree.
Christ of birch.

IV. 
The pieces of song, the fragments of tunes 
     You made but released to the wind:
They live in the joyous singing of stars
     Where the return to the wild begins.

All is stillness, all is silent
     All is holy, all is green.