Ironing Out Old Superstitions

So, in my last blog I touched briefly on the Christianization of fairy defense. Fairy beliefs, however, date from a period long before Christianity, and many anti-fairy techniques remain from that time.

Most of us have probably heard about the effect of iron on fae creatures. A few holdouts may even still hang horseshoes over their doors to bring good luck, a tradition stemming from the belief that elves, fairies, and the like cannot bear the touch of iron, and will not enter a doorway so protected. This idea carries throughout European fairy culture. Despite its popularity, I have always found it to be a rather random superstition. As a matter of fact, many believe it could be rooted in prehistoric conflicts between Stone Age Neolithic tribes and their Iron Age counterparts. For instance, when the Celtic peoples expanded into the British Isles, they would have encountered the Picts*, still using flint arrowheads to the Celt's iron axes. To the less technologically advanced culture, such unknown weaponry would have indeed seemed magical (Ashliman 32).

I hope I do not stray from the meat of the topic here, but I find the scientific and historical reasoning behind certain superstitions to be completely fascinating. I like to think that supernatural beings may exist, or at least that they may have existed at some point, but if they do not, I would like to know why we should ever think they did. Besides, if we can weed out the explainables, perhaps we can delve to the heart of things, if indeed there is a heart. With luck, still beating at the center of these superstitions is something which simply cannot be explained. And so we hope.

*Is "pixie" derived from "Pict"? I feel as though I read that somewhere. Now I need to look it up. Wikipedia, my love!

(Picture courtesy of http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en-commons/thumb/3/3f/180px-Horseshoe_lucky_on_door.jpg.)

Crossing Boundaries

I cannot recall if I have ever personally eaten a hot cross bun, but I think it is fair to assume that we are all at least familiar with the food. Who would have imagined that a pastry should be a holdout from lost fairy culture? But that is exactly where my research has led me. According to D.L. Ashliman, in Fairy Lore: A Handbook (p. 31), the telltale sign of the cross was initially carved into the unbaked rolls to protect against theft by elves of questionable character.

This brings up several interesting points, the most obvious of which is the perpetual struggle between lore and religion. It should be clear by now that we cannot engage in any practical discussion of the Early Modern supernatural without factoring the Christian Church into the equation, and if they could not quench fairy belief, they were determined to establish them as an enemy. To be fair, the fairies had always been dangerous - for they were wild and could not be trusted - but that did not keep adventurous young boys from hoping that they might discover elvish treasure, or housewives from trying to snag a brownie’s help. To the pious, however, revulsion of the cross would have labeled fairies an evil thing without their ever needing to give further proof of it. It relegated them to the realm of vampires and werewolves. The Church fueled earlier superstition in order to further its own ends, assuring people that the surest defense against fairy pranksters was to live a moral and devout life.

Small wonder that the Church should have felt itself to be in competition with the fairies. I would not be surprised if the reason that pagan concepts of them held out as long as they did had to do with their approachability. To the common people who believed, life would have offered few opportunities for breaking the cycle of the mundane. The possibility of the supernatural was their “out.” But what were their options? Few would summon demons and risk the fate of Doctor Faustus, yet the popular view of God was distant at best. Emphasis was on escaping judgment rather than reaping rewards, and certainly not rewards in this life. People may have served God, but they could not interact with him. Fairies assumed the middle ground, neither too evil nor too good. In fact, they were probably the most anthropomorphic of the supernatural beings of European tradition, feeling human emotions like anger, jealousy, love, and loyalty to their own, and experiencing human lusts and desires. They were relatable.

It is possible that people’s determination to allow for a magical being with which they could interact led to certain discrepancies in the beliefs. The term “fairy” was used to describe any creatures from water nymphs to royal elves to leprechauns, and meant, loosely, “a spirit being.” On the other hand, fairies were able to have sexual intercourse with humans, and numerous rituals involved leaving them offerings of human food. Obviously they had some substance, and were even, to a degree, confined to the dictates of physicality. In fact, their most notable magical power, recurring throughout the stories, seemed to be the ability to make things appear other than they really were. In this sense, fairies seem little more extraordinary than first-class illusionist, it is often unclear at what point “us” becomes “them.” In an effort to make them more “real,” did they become perhaps less believable. In other words, what does a spirit want with a hot cross bun?



(Picture courtesy of http://fullhomelydivinity.org/images/hot_cross_bun.jpg.)

The Rationalization of Despair

I have read Hamlet in its entirety once before*, and most of my memories of the text are of a lot of jumbled drama and angst. Of course, those elements are as prominent as ever as I read it for the second time, but the semester's discussions have given me an entirely new view of it as a supernatural story, and how that relates to emotionality.

Throughout history, we have attributed to the supernatural what current science cannot explain. My personal research on Renaissance fairy belief has verified this fact again and again. However, most believers in fairy stories were of the peasant class, and the physical phenomena they could not understand (circular mushroom formations, disabled children, etc.) were probably at least partially explainable by the science of the time; it was simply barred to them from lack of education. The more we can explain rationally, the less room we retain for supernatural superstition. Useful as this may be to the advancement of logic, it is unfortunate for storytellers, who must work with a continually limited sphere of imagination to suspend disbelief. The class for which Shakespeare wrote was probably unconvinced by his fairies, and intentionally so. However, even they may have found the ghost of Hamlet's despair less easy to reject.

I have never experienced the death of a close family member, but I have dealt with depression in its milder forms. If there is anything to bring the possibility of a malevolent "something else" within grasping distance, that is it. It is like developing a parisitic twin in one's spirit, something not quite human that leeches away at reason and goodness. Even understanding the psychology of it, it is confounding, and psychology as we know it it is one of the newest forms of science. It is likely that the elite Shakespearean audience would have been at least as troubled by these emotional extremities as those who face them today.

Can we really blame the ghost for Hamlet's madness? After all, he shows signs of a deep disturbance before ever laying eyes on what he believes to be his murdered father's spirit. But it is the ghost justifies what ensues, providing some semblance of redemption for Hamlet's unnatural mania. It is hard to comprehend what inspires a human being to trigger a bloodbath, even as an act of retaliation, but it happens, and not entirely infrequently. It is both easier and safer to believe that these unfortunates are prompted, than to cope with the possibility that such potential could lie within all of us.

*I have, however, read the famous soliloquy about a thousand times, as my former roommate had an obsession with Shakespeare and a penchant for memorization, and developed a habit of scribbling it on all available surfaces as a sort of nervous habit.

An Airy Spirit

Friday night I attended Shakespeare's The Tempest by the Blowing Rock Stage Company. Since the dialogue was Shakespearean but the performance was current, the show's portrayal of spirits and sorcery offered insight into both Renaissance and modern concepts of the supernatural. I took special note of the character Ariel, described only as "an airy spirit" and considered one of the most difficult of Shakespeare's characters to interpret.

When I read The Tempest myself several years ago, I would not have classed Ariel as a fairy, but to be fair, that assumed the modern approach to fairies as tiny winged sprites. Ariel seemed to me more ethereal, even angelic, than creatures of that sort. Several times in my recent research, however, I have seen Ariel listed among Shakespeare’s fairies, and upon watching Blowing Rock’s rendition of the show, I find it simpler than I expected to draw connections between Ariel and, say, Puck.

The character Ariel is generally androgynous, and this one was played by a woman (Caitie L. Moss). She spoke in a high, childish voice, and her energy separated her immediately from the human characters, for she was a dancer, and constantly bending and twisting in a jerky manner that made her otherness believable. She dressed in greens and browns, with leaves twined about her, and her nose and lips were painted black for an almost animal appearance. These earthy associations put me in mind of the Pagan spirits upon which a great deal of Medieval fairy lore was based, and at one point Ariel even played a pipe that begged reference to Pan (a Greek god with the shape of a satyr), who influenced images of Robin Goodfellow, or Puck.

In the play, Ariel is servant to the magician Prospero, who rescued the spirit from a cloven pine where it was imprisoned by a witch upon failing to fulfill her obscene commands. Fairies often correlate with witches, according to traditional lore, and it is through the fairies that the witches gain their power. Likewise, Prospero's power as a magician seems to be enhanced by, if not dependent on, his ability to control spirits. It is in fact Ariel who stirs up the tempest for which the play is named, as well as guiding the shipwrecked passengers according to Prospero's wishes.

Though Shakespeare did not write Ariel to be a fairy in the same way that Puck, Oberon, and Titania are fairies, I think it is fair to count the airy spirit among their number for lack of a better alternative. After all, fairies are, by their simplest definition, spiritual beings, and Ariel cannot be an angel, as it serves man, or a demon, as it was too pure to obey the witch Sycorax.

Like the fairies of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Ariel seems to be based more on Shakespeare's imagination than on any specific fairy lore. In the version I watched, Ariel was for the most part lighthearted, even comic, fitting with Shakespeare's break from a darker supernatural tradition (though some of this may have been the director's interpretation). The fact that it serves a man may also relate to Shakespeare’s mortalization of fairies. For instance, the fairy queen Titania is deceived into falling in love with Bottom (a man with an ass’s head) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the fact that she can be at the wrong end of a spell puts her on par with humans. This sort of tactic disassociates Shakespeare’s immortals from the creatures banished by the Church and wrapped up in its ideology. Because Ariel is both enslaved and released by Prospero, its own power is limited, making it more safely presentable to the church-going public.

The effects of Shakespeare's efforts to make the fairy more human-friendly exist to this day. The Blowing Rock Stage Company took a humorous approach to the magical elements of The Tempest with colorful sprites and corny special effects. Such is the legacy that the magic of an older age has left to us. Ariel, like other sprites of our day, does not exist to warn or even to teach, but to amuse.

(Picture courtesy of http://www.blowingrockstage.com/shows02.php?rid=131.)

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.)

When the Fair Sex Goes Bad

As one of the feminine persuasion, I find it quite obvious that the The Faerie Queene was written by a man. It is the first work we have read this semester that allows women a leading role in its narrative, and oh, what a curious role they play. Sometimes Spenser's ladies seem almost as "other" as the fairies themselves.

I first started mulling over these ideas with the discussion of Errour earlier this week. That the monster should be female is unextraordinary; that her "other halfe did womans shape retain" (Canto 1, line 124) is worth considering. The untried knight's first adversary is not only feminine, but shaped in part as a human female. This put me immediately in mind of Milton's Sin. We were not assigned to read Book 2 of Paradise Lost, but I mistook it for Book 1 and winded up swallowing a good deal of extra text one day several weeks ago, where I came across this tantalizing character. "Sin" happens to be an attractive woman from the waist up and a vile, scaly beast from the waist down. Sound familiar? Errour is another bizarre hybrid of woman's body and tangled tail. A footnote to line 126 informs us that the description draws from both classical and biblical monsters. Apparently this is a fairly popular image. But why a woman?*

I notice nobody mentioned the fact that Errour lives in a cave. At the risk of sounding Freudian, I must point out that caves tend to be associated with female sexuality. It is an interesting set-up for RedCrosse's first battle, considering what is to beset him later. Dreams of Una's infidelity chase him from her, and the bulk of Book 1 deals with the results of their separation. Shortly thereafter, the false Fidessa/Duessa lures him with her lustful passions, so that he eventually finds himself rotting in a giant's dungeon for her sake.

However, we cannot neglect another invaluable female figure, Una herself. Una represents truth, purity, and innocence. "Her angels face" (3, 33) glows like the sun itself, and "Did never mortall eye behold such heavenly grace" (3, 36). The implications seem to be that Una is barely mortal herself. Certainly she seems to ride above mortal passions. While RedCrosse leaves her over a dream, she runs to his rescue apparently untouched by anything but forgiveness for his fling with Duessa. She is near superhuman in her goodness.

It is interesting that while duality is a woman (Duessa), so is unity (Una). While Lucifera, Queen of the House of Pride, is a woman, so is Gloriana, the Fairy Queen herself. In The Faerie Queene, it often seems that if Everyman is a man, Everyother is a woman. Women represent extremes both good and evil. They are the angels and the demons of this story.

Come now, are we really so intimidating as all that?

* To be fair, there are only two gender options, unless we really want to get creative, available to monsters as well as people. While it is not necessarily unreasonable to make much of portrayals of femininity in literature, one must take into account that sometimes a woman is just a woman.

Once Upon a Time

I'm beginning to notice an interesting trend in this epic recipe: temporal distance. Epics are always "back then," aren't they? I bit my lip at the first lines of Spenser's The Faerie Queene with the realization that we must really be getting into the old stuff, only to realize upon further consideration that Edmund Spenser was a contemporary of Marlowe and Shakespeare. All those "welnigh"s and "yclad"s are no more than a bunch of dramatic effect.

Dr. Staub mentioned earlier this week that Spenser used this ridiculous archaic language to evoke images of an earlier age, of knights and jousts and chivalry. That much makes sense to me. My question is, why would he want to?

Of course Spenser is not a unique case. Milton chose to write his epic about the beginnings of man; and while modern epics do not even presume to situate themselves in this world, Tolkien's Middle Earth bears closer resemblance to a medieval society than to his own. We are apparently unable to fathom such depth or grandeur within our limited frame of reference. In The Faerie Queene, Spenser commented not only on such weighty concepts as good and evil, but on the reign of the current monarch, Queen Elizabeth; yet even that modern topic he found the need to mask in legends of bygone days. The current reality simply wasn't glorious enough. It never is.

Actually, I first started thinking about these things while researching Early Modern fairy belief for my presentation. According to one of my sources, fairy belief to the educated has always been a thing of the past. It is difficult to pinpoint the lore of a specific time because those who recorded the lore at that time would have called it the remnant of an earlier time. Few can admit to, or even recognize, any personal experience with the supernatural. But that doesn't mean we are ready to give it up.

So I wonder, do we perhaps distance it in order to make it more believable? Of course we do not believe in fairies. Maybe not even angels or demons. Not now, anyway. We know better. But a supernatural story holds no power over us unless there is a trace of truth to it, a faint smidgen of possibility, and fiction is not the same thing as a lie. By relegating the supernatural to an earlier age, "it cannot happen" becomes "it could have happened." It is our method of tricking our disillusionment.

And it works. Why? Because the past itself travels through stories - whether those stories are the pages of a journal or chipped pieces of pottery - and stories are tricksy things to begin with. William Shakespeare was a real historical figure, but I have not seen or heard or felt him, and for all I know he may be an elaborate fraud invented a couple hundred years ago to confound my generation (already we suspect half the plays attributed to him). The past is half unreal as it is, and it is not so large a leap from the actual Shakespeare to the possible Arthur to the impossible fairy queen.

The blissfully ignorant need no such schemes. They may really believe that fairies steal their children or that serpent women hide in caves in uncharted woods, and this fulfills their need for "other." Those of us who know better (most of us nowadays) may grow out of fairy tales, but we cannot grow out of the need for them. So we stick them into the olden days where maybe, just maybe, men really are knights who really are brave and chivalrous, and ladies really are pure and beautiful, and battles are glorious and royal fairies come traipsing into one's life every so often to ensure it has a Purpose. Can't disprove it, right? And we're desperate.

(This whole blog is a tangent, unfortunately. I hope that counts.)