An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Fairies and Witches

The relationship between the world of witchcraft and the world of Faerie has always been close; so close, indeed, that it is not easy to draw a precise boundary in these enchanted lands, and to say where one world ends and another begins.

Some writers, notably Margaret Murray, have advanced the theory that the ’fairies’ were actually the aboriginal people of these islands, the Little People of the Hills. These small, dark people, displaced by the waves of incoming Celtic settlers from the Continent, took refuge in remote places. They lived in huts roofed over with green turf, an effective form of camouflage which made their dwellings seem at a distance like little hills. They feared the iron weapons of their conquerors, and would flee at the sight of them. But they had subtle and deadly weapons of their own; small, sharp arrowheads of flint, poisoned so that even a slight wound from one of them could be fatal; and, even more dreaded than their ’elf bolts,’ the powers of their heathen magic, the uncanny and unholy glamourie that their conquerors feared.

Their friendship was capricious; but, once bestowed, they were faithful, and would work hard for those they liked, seeking no more reward than bowls of simple food, left out for them overnight. However, they had two characteristics which their Celtic neighbours found strange and disconcerting. They were people of the night, who would move and work in darkness, or by moonlight; and they preferred to wear little or no clothing, or the least that the climate would permit.

Respectable housewives who tried to get their small, dark servants to wear decent clothes, were rewarded by ’Brownie’ spurning their well-meant gifts of wearing apparel, and going off in a huff.

It is a remarkable fact that in the Ashdown Forest area of Sussex, as late as the nineteenth century, there were, according to local traditions certain small, dark forest-dwellers, clannish, reserved and odd in their ways; and one of their oddities was that they wore little or no clothing when in their own environment. People were afraid to pass through the forest alone, especially at night, on account of these ’yellow-bellies’, or ’pikeys’, as they were called.

The ’pikeys’ were certainly not supernatural beings, however. They were perfectly material humans; and there were certain public houses in the forest they were known to frequent. They had a sort of ’bush-telegraph’ among themselves, and the presence of any stranger was immediately noted and intelligence passed around, with remarkable quickness. People were rather afraid of the ’pikeys’. They were also known as ’diddikais’; and this word really means a travelling person with some Romany blood. However, these people did not travel; they were forest-dwellers and always had been.

Their descendants are still to be found in the Ashdown Forest area; though now more or less absorbed into the rest of the community. People like this, living in isolated parts of the country, must have been very much like what Margaret Murray conjectures the fairies to have been.

There are many stories contained in the evidence given in the old witch trials, especially in Scotland, of association between witches and fairies. Some of these stories are very circumstantial. Someone goes to a fairy hill and is welcomed inside. They meet the fairy king and queen and are given food; though the presence of small cattle, ’elf bulls’, running around at the entrance to the fairies’ dwelling, is rather disconcerting.

Inside, they see people making the deadly ’elf bolts’, the flint arrow-heads to be dipped in poison. They also see the fairies concocting herbal salves and medicines. They are given instruction in the fairies’ herbal cures; but they are threatened that if they talk too much, and betray their hosts’ confidence, it will be the worse for them.

There are also strange hints they hear, that every seven years the fairies “pay a teind to hell”; that is, one of their number dies as a human sacrifice. There are even whispers that a ’mortal’ may be kidnapped and used for this purpose, instead of one of their own.

The fairy women give birth to children; and a mortal midwife is sometimes called on, in these circumstances, to render aid. Nursing mothers are kidnapped, to be wet-nurses to fairy children; and pretty, fair-haired mortal babies are stolen, and a wizened dark-faced changeling left in their place.

People are thoroughly afraid of the fairies, and propitiate them by calling them the ’Good Neighbours’, the ’Good Folk’, or the ’People of Peace’. About all these features of fairy-lore, there is nothing necessarily supernatural. They could all refer to members of another race, small indeed in comparison to the rest of the population, but not too small to intermarry with them. There are a number of stories of mortals who married fairies; though the marriages seldom lasted, because the wild Little People of the Heaths refused to adapt themselves to the others’ ways.

It is interesting in this connection to note the actual derivation of the word ’heathen’. It means, in fact, the People of the Heath; just as ’pagan’ derives from paganus, a countryman, a rustic. The original heathens and pagans were people who kept to the old lore of the countryside, and the old gods and spirits of Nature, while the more sophisticated town-dwellers dwellers had adopted more ’civilised’ forms of religion.

An important source of information about Scottish witch trials in which fairies are mentioned, is Sir Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (John Murray, London, 1830). From this book we see that association with the fairies featured in the accusations made in the trials of Isobel Gowdie (1662), Bessie Dunlop (1576), Alison Pearson (1588), and John Stewart (date not given). One Andro Man was also accused of associating with the Queen of Elfin, “who had a grip of all the craft”; and Thomas the Rhymer, the famous prophet, gained his psychic powers by favour of the Queen of Faerie, as the old ballad tells us.

In fact, the leading female witch of a Scottish coven was evidently called the Queen of Elphame; a word which is simply the Scottish version of the Old Norse Alfheim, the country of the elves, or Fairyland.

The word ’fairy’ itself derives from the Old French faerie, meaning ’enchantment’. The Realm of Faerie is the realm of enchantment and magic; hence another reason for its association with witches.

It is evident that the fairy lore of the British Isles is made up of a number of different strands. There are actual memories of the Little People of the Hills, as described above; but there is also the fairy who is quite evidently a spiritual creature, a spirit of Nature, and the story of an adventure in the Realm of Faerie which is actually a description of a vivid psychic experience.

In addition to these features of fairy lore, there is the idea of the Fairy Host as being composed of the souls of the unbaptised, or of those who were ’too good for hell, but too bad for heaven’. Such hosting fairies, who rode past on the rushing wind, were the spirits of the pagan dead, and they were led by gods and heroes of the past.

The Realm of Faerie is often conceived of as being a beautiful but uncanny place which is underground, actually within the earth. It is curious in this respect to compare this belief with the Eastern stories of Agharti.

The antiquarian Thomas Wright, in his essay “On the National Fairy Mythology of England” (in Essays on England in the Middle Ages, Vol I, John Russell Smith, London, 1846), tells us:

The elves have always had a country and dwelling under ground as well as above ground; and in several parts of England the belief that they descend to their subterraneous abodes through the barrows which cover the bones of our fore-fathers of ancient days is still preserved. There were other ways, however, of approaching the elves’ country, and one of the most common was by openings in the rocks and caverns, as we find in the poem of Sir Orfeo, and in the tale of Elidurus, told by Giraldus. The great cave of the peak of Derby was also a road thither, and Gervase of Tilbury has preserved a tale how William Peverell’s swineherd ventured once to descend it in search of a brood-sow; and how he found beneath a rich and cultivated country, and reapers cutting the corn. The communication, however, has long been stopped up; and those who go now to explore the wonders of the cavern find their progress stayed by the firm impenetrable rock.

Sometimes, however, stray beings from this underground country appeared in the world of men. Such, for instance, as those described in the weird tale of the Green Children, which is averred as truth by two old English chroniclers, William of Newburgh and Ralph of Coggeshall; though the first-named says it happened in the reign of King Stephen, and the latter that it took place in the reign of Henry II. Gervase of Tilbury also mentions it.

The story goes that two mysterious children, a boy and a girl, were found by peasants at a place called Wolfpitts, in Suffolk. They were lost and weeping; they wore strange garments; and their skin was green. They could speak no English, nor at first would they eat anything except green beans. They were taken to the house of Sir Richard de Calne and cared for. However, the boy sickened and died; but the girl accustomed herself to eating earthly food, and gradually lost her green colour, took on human colouring and learnt our speech.

She said that they came from an underground country, where all the people were green-skinned like themselves. No sun was perceived there; but the land was lit by “a brightness or shining, such as would happen after sunset”. She and her brother had been following some sheep or small cattle, and arrived at a cavern. They were lured onward by a sweet sound, like the ringing of bells, and wandered on through the cavern until they came to its end. “Thence, emerging, the excessive brightness of our sun and the unwonted, warm temperature of our air astonished and terrified them. And for a long time they lay upon the edge of the cave.” There they were found as aforesaid.

The girl was baptised, and remained as a servant in the house of Sir Richard de Calne. “She showed herself very wanton and lascivious”; but eventually settled down and married a man at King’s Lynn, in Norfolk. A strange tale of unsolved mystery!

The wanton young lady from this underground Elfland was only following the traditionally amoral nature of the fairies. The Reverend Robert Kirk, Minister of Aberfoyle in Scotland, also wrote of their naughtiness: “For the Inconvenience of their Succubi, who tryst with Men, it is abominable”.

Robert Kirk’s book, The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies (Scotland, 1691; reprinted with introduction by Andrew Lang, David Nutt, London, 1893), is one of the most curious works to be met with on this subject; the more so as its author was reputed, in the next year after its publication, to have been carried away by the fairies himself. He was walking one evening upon a fairy hill near the manse, when he fell down in a fit or swoon, and was taken for dead. He was accordingly buried in the churchyard of Aberfoyle; but after the funeral his ghost appeared to one of his relations and said that he was not really dead, but a captive in Fairyland. He gave directions as to how he could be liberated. His ghost, he said, would appear at the christening of his posthumous child; and if his cousin Grahame of Duchray would throw his dirk over the head of the appearance, Robert Kirk would be restored to the world of the living. The ghost was indeed seen at the christening; but his cousin was so astonished that he failed to throw the dirk, and the Minister remained in the fairies’ power.

Given Mr Kirk’s known interest in fairies, and in the second sight, with which his book also deals, it was inevitable at that place and period that such eerie tales should be told of him. However, his book certainly exists; and written as it was only twenty-nine years after the trial of Isobel Gowdie, the Scottish witch whose testimony about her association with the fairies has so intrigued many writers on this subject, it seems to tell against the theory that the fairies were an actual race of aboriginal people.

Robert Kirk’s fairies are definitely spiritual beings, “of a middle Nature betwixt Man and Angel”. Their bodies are made of “congealled Air”, which can be made to appear or disappear at pleasure, and are most easily seen at twilight. He calls the fairies “that abstruse People”, and refers to them as “Subterraneans”. Those who have the second sight can see the fairies, especially at “the Beginning of each Quarter of the Year”, at which time the fairies change their habitations, and travel abroad.

The quarters of the year to which Mr Kirk refers are the old Celtic divisions of the year, Candlemas, May Eve, Lammas and Halloween, when all kinds of uncanny beings were abroad, and when the witches held (and still hold) their Great Sabbats. This belief in fairy activity at these times is also found in Ireland.

He notes that the fairies have tribes or orders among themselves, and live in houses, which are sometimes visible and at other times not so. “They speak but little, and that by the way of whistling, clear, not rough.” They had births, marriages, and deaths among them; and even sometimes fought among themselves.

“They live much longer than wee; yet die at last, or at least vanish from that State. ’Tis ane of their Tenets, that nothing perisheth, but (as the Sun and Year) every Thing goes in a Circle, lesser or greater, and is renewed and refreshed in its Revolutions; as ’tis another, that every Bodie in the Creation moves (which is a sort of Life); and that nothing moves, but has another Animal moving on it; and so on, to the utmost minutest Corpuscle that’s capable to be a Receptacle of Life.” How Mr Kirk obtained this strange glimpse into the secrets of the fairies, he does not tell us; but one receives the impression from his book that he was deeper in mystic things than he cared to state plainly.

About actual witchcraft, he tells us discreetly little; but he says, “The Tabhaisver, or Seer, that corresponds with this kind of Familiars, can bring them with a Spell to appear to himself or others when he pleases, as readily as Endor Witch to those of her Kind.”

A man called John Walsh, of Netherbury in Dorset, confessed to having converse with the fairies when he was examined upon accusations of witchcraft in 1566. He made a detailed and interesting confession, containing many particulars’ about his magical practices, which was printed under the title of The Examination of John Walsh (John Awdeley, London, 1566). It refers to his relations with the fairies as follows: “He being demanded how he knoweth when any man is bewitched, he saith that he knew it partly by the fairies, and saith that there be three kinds of fairies, white, green and black, which, when he is disposed to use he speaketh with them upon hills whereas there is great heaps of earth, as namely in Dorsetshire. And between the hours of twelve and one at noon, or at midnight, he useth them, whereof, he saith, the black fairies be the worst.”

My own opinion is that the fairy creed is a composite of several factors: actual spirits of nature whose presence can sometimes be perceived, but who usually share this world invisibly with humans; souls of the pagan dead, who take the third road that the Fairy Queen showed to Thomas the Rhymer, “the road to fair Elfland,” away from either the Christian heaven or the Christian hell; and folk-memories of aboriginal races, now mostly vanished. There may be a fourth factor, the very old and apparently world-wide belief in a hidden land or underworld within the earth.

All these different strands have become intertwined, until they are like the twisting magical knots upon some old Celtic or Saxon carving, with strange faces and forms peeping out between. And because they were of the pagan and forbidden side of things, the old gods of paganism and witchcraft became their natural rulers. Hence, as King James I noted in his Daemonologie, the goddess Diana was regarded as Queen of Faerie; and the witches of Italy in their magical legends recorded in Aradia, sometimes called the goddess Fata Diana, ’Fairy Diana’.

Her personal representative, the high priestess of a witch coven, was called after her ’the Queen of Elphame’. Hence it is not always easy to distinguish in these old tales between the Queen of Elphame who is a mortal woman, and the visionary lady on a milk-white steed that True Thomas saw as he lay on Huntlie Bank.