Faeries

June 21, 2019

Of course I love faeries. No surprises there, but is it rational to believe in them?

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle the inventor of the supreme rationalist and drug addict ‘Sherlock Holmes’ did (when you have eliminated the impossible, what’s left however unlikely must be the truth.)

As did H G Wells.

Should we trust the rationalists?

Rene Descartes ushered in the age of rationalism because an angel visited him in a vision and told him to. Sir Isaac newton was a keen alchemist as well as the founder of modern science.

Stephan Pinker is a high priest of Wicca and likes to run sky clad on full moons..

Ok I made up the last one.

for Carl Jung faeries were energetic beings that had somehow broken loose from the collective unconscious or something, wether that means they actually exist or not is not clear.

For Terry Pratchett and Stephan Baxter all supernatural creatures have leaked through from other dimensions. Terance Mckenna said something similar about the machine elves.

Do they only exist if you believe in them, is it a case of perspective? Your faery is my body of unexplained electro magnetic energy or my primordial image transformed into conscious or mythological form.

I like all faeries, I love the impossibly twee creations of Mary Cicely Barker and Ido Rentoul Outhwaite as well as the dark complex visions of Tolkien, Lee and Froud.

Tolkien hated the idealised fairies of the late Victorians and Edwardians preferring the complex Nordic and European Faeries that reflected the dark unpredictable nature of nature and the human psyche.

As an illustrator many practical problems occur;do their dresses have to be specially made to allow for their wings? were are all the male fairies? How do they reproduce?

I believe it was Mary Cicely Barker who said “when a flower becomes so breathtakingly beautiful that it cannot die it becomes a faery” or something similar.

Tolkien would be fuming . There is however something archetypically female about faeries, they represent the unpredictable , chaotic force of nature, it is easy to fall asleep for one hundred years in Faery, be turned into a frog or lured to your death by a will ’o’ the wisp

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