Creating Magic

When I perform a search for "fairy" on google.com, this is the first image that pops up. Known as the "Derbyshire Fairy," this distasteful little creature was actually a prop created by UK artist and illusionist Dan Baines as part of an April Fool's Day prank in 2007. Baines fabricated a website complete with a story of the "find" and DNA testing results before releasing the truth to hundreds of curious followers on April first. The first part of his statement caught my interest:

"Even if you believe in fairies, as I personally do, there will always have been an element of doubt in your mind that would suggest the remains are a hoax. However, the magic created by the possibility of the fairy being real is something you will remember for the rest of your life." (http://www.hoax-slayer.com/derbyshire-fairy-hoax.shtml)

It is this "magic created by the possibility of the fairy being real" that has prompted centuries of speculation on the subject. A thing does not need to be real, and certainly not provable, to have power. The effect of belief on the human psyche is its own kind of enchantment.

Fairies have not lost their place in pop culture. Baines admitted that even he could not have anticipated the response his project received from believers, and an image search for my presentation several weeks ago yielded literal millions of results. Today, however, fairies are relegated for the most part to the realm of children and crackpots, and the mummified hoaxes from the bottoms of gardens are a far cry from the dark beings of Medieval superstition. Several hours shuffling through powerpoint possibilities had me tearing my hair out in despair of finding a single picture of a pre-Shakespearean fairy. Popular literature has transferred them from the domain of legend to that of fiction.

Not all supernatural creatures can claim equal rights (angels and demons, for instance, retain their impact even today), and the church must be held at least indirectly responsible for the fairy's demise. During the Medieval period, the Roman Catholic Church banned fairy belief as too closely linked to paganism. After the Reformation, Early Modern Protestants blamed Catholics for encouraging fairy belief in order to cover their own misdeeds, and thus continued to shun it. To the church, fairies have always been the enemy. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the work responsible for the fairy as we know it, Shakespeare sidestepped the religious controversies of his day by concocting a frivolous group of sprites more mortal and approachable than the creatures of general lore. Whereas Marlowe and Milton incorporated angel and demons into serious, even moral, stories, Shakespeare's fairies were pure entertainment. From there, the creatures shrunk in size and significance to the mushroom-mounting, butterfly-winged pixies we know today.

Fairies have not always been the subject of kitsch and picture books, however. It may tell us something of fairy lore that I found my most informative source to date snugged in a dull-colored section of the library among books of Wicca and witchcraft. For the sake of this project, I would like to focus on the fairies lost to us since the 1600s, the fairies people actually believed in. Theirs is a history rich and confused and vaguely sinister, the stuff of energetic imaginations and fireside story hand-me-d0wns. These fairies provided hope, wonder, even rationality to an unstable world, and if they were not real, their pyschological magic certainly was.

(Pictures courtesy of http://www.hoax-slayer.com/derbyshire-fairy-hoax.shtml, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Study_for_The_Quarrel_of_Oberon_and_Titania.jpg, and http://www.flowerfaeries.com/myrea1.shtml.)