SOME DISTURBING THOUGHTS ABOUT FAERIES

[KittyLane]

individual discernment. The views and opinions expressed by the authors
are their own, and are not necessarily the views and opinions of Home
Circle or its members. All copyrights are held by the respective authors.
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DARK GREEN - SOME DISTURBING THOUGHTS ABOUT FAERIES
© Jeremy Harte 1998
Originally published in the White Dragon, Samhain 1998

The sleep of reason produces monsters; inversions, caricatures of what
we know to be right and sensible. Sometimes the fancies of the night
seem more substantial than the sober thoughts of daytime. The dreams of
a folklorist are especially subject to this kind of inversion. Consider
two magazine pieces published by that Victorian litterateur, Grant Allen
of Haslemere. One is a serious contribution to folklore scholarship,
while the other is its dark parody. But the night-time version is far
more revealing. It says a great deal about the mind of its author; but
it also tells us something about a hidden strand in twentieth-century
paganism.

Novelist, freethinker and evolutionary theorist, Allen was much in tune
with the spirit of his times, and had mastered an easy style which could
be turned to most themes. In a piece for the Cornhill Magazine he
addressed the subject of fairies. It was very curious that the English
peasantry should believe with such tenacity in creatures who did not
exist; at least, as far as he was concerned they did not exist. What
could have inspired the idea of fairies? They were a little people, who
used flint arrowheads and dreaded iron. That suggested Stone Age man,
about whom so much had recently been discovered. They were to be met
with in grassy hillocks, the ancient burial mounds of that people. So
fairies were the ghosts of Neolithic man, dimly remembered and feared by
subsequent races. QED, thought Grant Allen, or at least the rational
side of him did.

But there was another side to him, which had its say in a short story
written ten years later. Rudolph Reeve, 'a journalist and a man of
science' - which means a transferred version of the author himself - is
staying at a country house in the New Forest. A long barrow dominates
the neighbouring heath. At supper, the little girl of the house - who
has been listening to old rustics and gypsies, contrary to her mother's
instructions - tells how lights are seen on the barrow at night, and
that something can be felt down there, faint and dim, clutching at the
living. The guests retire for bed, Rudolph among them, once he has taken
a sleeping draught - a preparation of cannabis. He overestimates the dose.

Waking in the night, he feels compelled to return to the old mound on
the heath, to walk around it widdershins, and to call on it to open. The
black passage into the hills opens up for him, and he is at once
surrounded by the ghosts of savages - naked, hideous and cruel. They
urge him on towards their leader, a skeletal figure, who is waiting to
drink the hot blood of the living. Shadowy cords bind him fast: Rudolph
feels the savages rush at him with their flint knives, whose blades are
not ghostly but real. With an effort, he pulls out his own knife, which
being iron repels the elfish creatures, and stumbles out of the mound
onto the open heath, where he collapses until found by a search party
the next morning.

Odd dreams to haunt the imagination of a freethinker and materialist.
Grant Allen's interest in the fairy domain seems to have been revived by
two books, both of which came out the year before Pallinghurst Barrow
was written, and which are both woven into its narrative. One is the
English Fairy Tales of Joseph Jacobs, which includes a retelling of the
legend of Childe Roland, the young prince who goes in search of his
sister - who has been abducted by the King of Elfland - and finds her in
a green hill. Jacobs discusses this hill in the context of Maes Howe and
other chambered tombs.

'You've seen MacRitchie's latest work, I suppose?', says one of the
guests at dinner. The other book of the moment, The Testimony of
Tradition , was an attempt to explain the fairies on rational grounds.
They were a stunted hairy race, driven into wild places by the more
successful iron-wielding warriors of later tribes; their earth-houses,
built like hut-circles roofed over with turf, looked like little hills
or barrows, and so inspired the tradition of their living underground.
MacRitchie worked out his ideas with infectious enthusiasm; fairies who
enter a houses through a chimney are a misunderstanding of primitive
Picts swarming in and out of their houses through the smokehole, and so
on. The theory raised a stir among members of the Folklore Society, and
there was much argument for and against it until a later generation of
researchers grew weary of attempts to explain away legends in this
fashion. MacRitchie had pillaged details out of context and piled them
together in a composite narrative, a technique later brought to
perfection by Margaret Murray, but one which ceased to command much
assent from scholars.

MacRitchie's theory aimed to strip away the supernatural glamour from
fairyland and leave a historical residue behind. Curiously, the most
cogent opposition to it came from a fellow Scot - Andrew Lang - who was
the only member of the Folklore Society with a commitment to psychic
research. Having admitted to himself that supernatural claims might be
genuine, he was less likely than his colleagues to be charmed by a
theory which could only give them the status of truth by recasting them
as historical misunderstandings. The Testimony of Tradition is, on the
face of it, a sensible historical hypothesis. And yet by claiming that
fairies are in some sense real, it prompts some much more subversive
readings. Grant Allen had picked up on these. He was not the only one.

William Gregg was a professor of ethnology - a fictional one: we are
back in a short story, this time by Arthur Machen. 'But amidst these
more sober and accurate studies I always detected a something hidden, a
longing and desire for some object to which he did not allude'.. He has
found an ancient stone with strange lettering on it, and on learning
that the same writing has been found on the grey hills of the Welsh
border, he moves house to Monmouthshire. There Gregg plunges into the
study of fairy lore, and soon realises that the playful and charming
tales told of the little people were merely a disguise for something
older and far more grim. The abductions and murders attributed to them
were real enough, and have been occurring from a remote period until the
present day. Soon after, he insists on taking as servant an idiot boy.
This child was born about eight months after his mother had been found,
weeping like a lost soul, on the grey hills. He is subject to fits, in
which he talks a strange jargon, to which the professor listens
intently, and whose words are neither Welsh nor English. At length,
after the longest of the boy's fits, he is carried into Gregg's study,
and there in the still of the night the professor speaks the words which
bring the idiot child into awareness of his true ancestry, which is
subhuman, formless, and possessed of supernatural powers. Vindicated in
his hypothesis, Gregg sets out the next morning for the grey hills: and
is heard of no more.

After this, the Little People took hold of Machen's imagination; as well
as this account in The Black Seal, they feature in The Great God Pan ,
where there is more of the demon and less of the fairy in their
character. In The White People they are invoked by a young girl,
innocently unconscious of the horrible things with which she is trading.
Slowly, her nurse is teaching her certain dances and games - old country
customs, which have queer effects; and, growing up in a lonely country,
she has no contact with the outside world who can tell her what she is
really doing.

Wild and lonely country, which lies at the heart of all these
narratives, is particularly prominent in No-Man's Land , John Buchan's
reworking of the theme. Buchan follows MacRitchie in favouring a Scots
setting, and also in excluding the supernatural from the story. Graves
of St. Chads, an Oxford man, is talking to one of his students about
traditions of the Brownie and the Picts. He is shown an eccentric's
scrapbook, one which starts with extracts from local folklore, but
continues with newspaper cuttings reporting the disappearance of young
girls, and the horrible deaths of men in lonely shielings. Thoughts of
this recur to him as he goes on a fishing holiday to a mountainous
district on the edge of the Highland Line. The old shepherd with whom he
is lodging tells stories of faces in the mist and footsteps round the
house at night; he is almost driven mad by the thought that there are
devils in the hills, and by way of proof he shows what has been left
during a raid on his sheepfold - a stone arrowhead. The adventure
continues with Graves' capture by the Folk of the Hills, and his
imprisonment in the caverns which are their hiding place. The sister of
his friend the shepherd is also brought into these underground chambers;
she is prepared as a human sacrifice, but at this climactic moment the
hillside is shattered by a rockfall, and they both break free. In
Oxford, Graves is met by universal disbelief, and he destroys himself in
repeated attempts to return to the hills in search of proof.

The Folk in Buchan's story are a natural race of men; and yet everything
about the way in which they are presented hints at something more eerie.
Their small outlines, rough and hairy, are seen fleetingly against a
background of darkness and mist; they inspire a frantic loathing and
dread. MacRitchie's work, which set out to strip away superstitious
accretions from a real origin, has been subverted: here, the members of
his Pictish race are described as if they were devils incarnate.

Surprisingly, the next scholarly work in the series - one which does
purport to deal with incarnate devils - paints a very prosaic picture of
them. In The God of the Witches , Margaret Murray's view of the
Neolithic survivors is a domestic one. True, she speaks of the fear and
horror which they inspired among town-dwellers, but the home life of the
fairy race is much more humdrum. They sit milking their cattle, or
spinning within the shelter of their turf-covered huts; occasionally
they drop in on a villager to run off some weaving on the loom or borrow
a cup of oatmeal. A little under the average height, they are
nevertheless dressed in contemporary clothes, more or less elaborately
according to rank, and can mingle with a crowd of villagers without
suspicion. There is often intermarriage between the two communities. In
the Tudor period, the fairy folk become completely absorbed into the
main population, after their traditional pastures have been taken over
by the expansion of sheep-farming.

This is a far cry from Buchan's hellish dwarfs, but there is better yet
to come. Writing as an amateur anthropologist - and as someone with
practical experience of natives in the jungles of Malaya - Gerald
Gardner was content to accept everything that his predecessors had
written about the ways of the little people of the heath. The
underground huts, the matriarchal queen, the poisoned flint arrowheads:
all the usual references feature once more in Witchcraft Today .
Following Murray - and Charles Leland's Aradia before her - he takes it
for granted that the race of fairies was also that of the witches. With
each invasion of the land, the dispossessed were driven into the
abandoned places, and every stratum from Stone Age tribesmen to the last
pagans found themselves in a common bond. Unlike the earlier scholars,
Gardner was convinced that the little heath people really had strange
powers. Isolated from the world, ancient and inbred, they had kept the
skills in magic which were once the common property of primitive man.
Arthur Machen had said much the same thing, only his language was that
of the supernaturalist, whereas Gardner used the breezy scientific terms
of parapsychology. And how does he come to know these things about the
ancient race? Because he has seen them. After centuries of intermarriage
and secret survival, the blood of the little heath people flows in the
veins of witches in the New Forest coven. Gerald Gardner, Doctor of
Philosophy, has met and danced with the fairies.

So the line between day and night, scholarship and fiction, ceases to be
a boundary. The Gardner who writes Witchcraft Today is also the author
of High Magic's Aid , and both books are about the same thing. But then
supernaturalist fiction has always relied on the language of scholarship
to lend it authority. Sometimes this is a mere trick of style, like
Buchan's meticulous citation of passages from the fictitious Allerfoot
Advertiser to report the doings of his frightful Folk. Sometimes the
literary technique conceals something deeper. The scholar's search to
understand - to collate fragments, to uncover a pattern - there is
something occult about this. M.R. James, with his haunted antiquaries,
understood it well. The bibliophiles and dons in his stories do not
encounter the supernatural by accident, but go looking for it, unwisely
deciphering old manuscripts, and investigating ruins that had better
remained untouched. A story like The Treasure of Abbot Thomas is divided
between the learned fancy of a Latin cryptogram, and the description of
what it leads to: which is something old, and deformed, and underground
- but these are themes with which we are already familiar.

James was himself a working antiquary: he is not setting out to
denigrate his own profession. But the search for knowledge, whose
details he could so easily imagine, served irresistably as a metaphor of
the quest for forbidden knowledge. What is true for James' erudite
gentlemen applies even more to the protagonists in Arthur Machen, who
deals explicitly with occult enquiries. 'A somewhat extensive course of
miscellaneous and obsolete reading had done a good deal to prepare the
way... I was now and then startled by facts that would not square with
orthodox scientific opinion, and by discoveries that seemed to hint at
something still hidden for all our research'. That sounds uncommonly
like pagan scholarship, or even earth mysteries. 'More particularly I
became convinced that much of the folk-lore of the world is but an
exaggerated account of events that really happened, and I was especially
drawn to consider the stories of the fairies...' But Professor Gregg, as
we have seen, did not live to publish his results in The Ley Hunter or
Fortean Times .

Moreover, the occult search itself often feels as if it were an image of
something else - particularly in Machen, whose narratives are charged
with a fearful yet enticing mystery, a vile degrading secret, that is
somehow a very physical secret. In short - and after all, this is the
1890s - he is playing with ideas of sexuality. Not that this explains
everything. The descent into the fairy's hole is more than an oblique
reference to sex, and in any case our great-grandparents can hardly have
been as mixed up over the whole business as this suggests, or we
wouldn't be here today. But there are certainly key emotions associated
with sexuality which for Machen lie at the heart of the mystery, and his
Little People are, among other things, the demon partners of the
Sabbath. This becomes yet more disturbing, especially for the modern
reader, when the story centres on a child. The girl in The White People
is being coached in odd, slightly repellent games by a trusted adult,
who takes advantage of her innocence. In this way she is initiated -
into magic, as it happens; but it could easily be an initiation of the
other sort.

Revulsion can take many forms. John Buchan - who wouldn't have
recognised a sexual sub-text if it rose up and hit him - speaks
repeatedly of the horrors of being close to his Folk, of being touched
by them. They are an ancient, degenerate race, and it is this that both
panics and excites the hero, in a way that adds emotional stimulus to an
otherwise naturalistic narrative. It is clear that the beauty of the
clean Scots moors is being violated by the presence, hidden underground,
of deformed natives. If there is imagery of sex and the body here, it is
mediated at second hand through the much more powerful language of
nationalism and racial purity. The nation is a body whose recesses are
being contaminated by the presence of unclean things, things that ought
to have stayed in the remote past or, failing that, the Colonies. For
many years archaeologists had been thrilling their readers with the idea
that here - in Hampstead, Hove and other unlikely places - primitive man
had once capered and shrieked in his cannibal orgies. That was all
safely long ago. But what if it were not? When Grant Allen's hero sees
what lies in the old barrow his first thought is that 'they were
savages, yet they were ghosts. The two most terrible and dreaded foes of
civilised experience seemed combined at once in them'.

This is the deep horror behind the many horrors of H.P. Lovecraft. He
writes of archaic, monstrous inhabitants of wild places, found in
caverns beneath the hills and among the stone circles which crown the
hills of New England - Lovecraft's New England, at any rate. Something
can be gleaned of their nature from local folklore, and they are eager
celebrants at the rites held on those hills around the bonfires of May
Eve - a night when people disappear, and are not seen again. So far we
are on familiar ground: Lovecraft, like Grant Allen, has obligingly left
a paper trail of references to earlier works, and The Great God Pan and
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe are among them.

But it is racial decay which forms the mainspring of his tales. The
villagers in The Dunwich Horror have sunk into a sordid stew of
imbecility, perversity and disgrace: even so, they are a cut above the
witch Whateleys, whose intercourse with strange things on the hills has
bred a half-human youngster with an unhealthy interest in the
Necronomicon . In The Shadow Over Innsmouth , the townsfolk have
degenerated so far that they are intermediate between man and fish. The
voodoo worshippers in The Call of Cthulhu are a low type of mongrels,
mentally aberrant, and easily captured as they cavort naked between a
blazing bonfore and the corpses of their victims. There is a peculiarly
American spin to all this. Lovecraft cannot decide which he dreads more,
cross-breeding with the blacks, or inbreeding among the whites who, left
behind in the westward march of progress, have got themselves mixed up
with old Indian traditions.

There is a great deal in The Call of Cthulhu which simply follows the
anthropological ideas of the time. Sir James Frazer would have seen
nothing odd in collating traditions from the West Greenland coast, a
ritual practised in the swamps of Louisiana, and carvings on a Pacific
island to make some point about primitive man. The results, admittedly,
would have surprised him: but the idea of interpreting the early history
of the race through archaic survivals was not new.

The shadowy implications of survival in folklore - the thought that
tradition may refer to things which it is better not to know about - are
present in other writers. Algernon Blackwood peoples the landscape of
The Trod with various rural types who pass on hereditary secrets about a
fairy path on the moor, where women vanish. The topography of the story
is not dissimilar to that of No-Man's Land : here, too, a train carries
a young sportsman northwards, the fertile Midlands give way to bleak
moorland, the locals drop hints that all is not as tranquil as it might
seem on the hills. Empty landscapes - indeed, almost any rural
landscapes - can be frightening to those who are not used to them. Many
townspeople retain a subliminal faith in what might be called the Wicker
Man theory of country life. Those rustics may seem all right on the
surface, but in the winter, when the tourist season is over, they get
together where no-one can see them and perform ancient rites. Probably
involving someone's disappearance. That, after all, is just what they
used to say about the Jews and the gypsies, in the days when they were
socially marginalised - and country people are marginalised now.

Not everything about fairies is charming; and when people write stories
in which the secret people are brought in to act out their innermost
dreams and fears, the results can often be more revealing than was
intended. Academic scholarship, of course, is not intended to be
revealing - but it is; and the theory that fairies were a surviving race
would never have enjoyed the popularity which it did, had it not
appealed subconsciously. It inspired a whole genre of literature, but
more importantly, in its last years it inspired a myth. It is the story
of an old man, a great enquirer into ancient things, who lived in a
house on the borders of a vast and empty heath. In that wilderness there
was an eerie stump of a dead tree, beneath which he used to sit and mull
over tales of days gone by, when magic was worked by the mysterious race
of the wise. All this time, though he did not know it, he was seen by
the secret watchers of the elder race; and the time came when they took
him to join them... But he did not vanish from this earth, as others had
done before him. Indeed, Gardner continued to deal with his publishers
from the same New Forest address. Which is probably just as well for
modern witchcraft.