Faery Lore

Recently, I was asked by Isabella Baucco if she could interview me about Faery for a paper she was doing for her folklore class in university, and I agreed. She also said that it would be fine for me to post it here — so, here it is.

Subject: Fae interview questions

Hello! Feel free to answer as many of these as you are comfortable with, in whatever order you would like! Thank you so much for your time, and I'm sorry about the rushed deadline!

When was the first time you came into contact with the fae, and what was that like?

I don't remember. It seems like they were always there. I suspect it was something like my granddaughter. I watched her pull herself up at the window and look outside when she was about six months old. She peered around out there and finally saw what she was evidently looking for. She giggled and waved at what she saw and promptly fell down, unable to stand up without holding on with both hands. She laid there, giggling and waving her arms and legs for a bit and then got back up. When she caught sight of what she was looking for again, she laughed more and bounced as well as she could, making little crooning sounds at what she could see, her eyes following it (or them) around. She was definitely seeing something, batting her eyelashes at them, and babbling as babies do when they are happy, with an occasional delighted shriek thrown in. I like to think that it must have been much the same for me. But now that she is 15 she doesn't remember that any more than I do.

How would you define the fae?

They are beings, as far as I understand it, who live at a different frequency than we do. Like the difference between ultraviolet light and higher frequencies of radiant energy and the light we humans see by. The same planet viewed at different "levels". I'm not a physicist and can't even begin to figure that out, but I take the faeries' word for it as they seem to think they know. I just know that they are there, and I have to be quite quiet inside myself in order to perceive them. However, I see them with my eyes like I see human auras simply as light. And like human auras, sometimes I see them, but mostly I sense them in other ways — scent, voices, sounds, melody. People vary in how we perceive these things, and I'm personally less clairvoyant than I am clairaudient and clairsentient. They seem to live much longer than we do for the most part, and they come in as many varieties as what we think of as "normal" earth creatures, plants, and other living beings.

Because of this, they perceive the world differently than we humans do. They have tried to explain and show me, but I suspect it's rather like me trying to explain mathematics to the cat. One of my cats is quite sure that she is due two crunchy treats before each meal — she knows that one is not enough and that three are exciting and special, but two are what she clearly expects. I get very accusing looks if there is only one left in the jar. Does she count 1, 2, 3? Or does she just know in some other way?

Sometimes I feel the frustration of the fae when they are trying to explain something to me, and I regret being so "hard of understanding" but it's how humans generally are. Fortunately, the fae don't give up easily and may try to explain things later in incomprehensible or funny dreams or other ways.

How are you able to tell when you have come into contact with fae?

For me, there is usually happy, bubbly, yet peaceful feeling or almost as if there is a lot of static electricity in the air. (You need to understand here that nearly everything I say about them is a sort of metaphor for the actual experience. It's not static electricity and it doesn't make sparks that sting, but that's the closest I can come to a description of it.) The air is buzzing without a sound? There may be a sense of presence akin to someone standing close behind you — you may not see or hear them, but you know that they are there.

It's tricky to maintain the necessary quietness inside myself when I'm sensing that exuberance all around. At the same time, I may see lights or hear voices or music or other sounds. There may be light touches to get my attention or the hum of healing energy. Often they tell me something I didn't know but needed to understand. Sometimes they make jokes — occasionally visual puns or other kinds of faery humor.

It's hard to explain this part — often their communications arrive as a burst of insight that is a mixture of emotions, words, and energy. To them, these bursts are the normal way to communicate, but to a human, they may require some mental unpacking to grasp all the layers of meaning, if in fact we ever do get it all.

How would you describe your emotional state during the experiences you have had? Are there any extremes/outliers?

Variable. It depends on what is going on. Is it serious or purely fun? Deep or playful? We humans tend to separate these mental and emotional states, but to the fae, they are not mutually exclusive. In fact, we have had long discussions about the way humans limit themselves to a linear one-thing-at-a-time in our perceptions while faery communication/perception is more holistic. A burst of faery insight may contain joy and sorrow both. They have argued that we miss the point of doing things when we separate play from work, insisting that all purposeful activities are both, and if they are not, we've got something quite wrong about why and how we're doing it.

How would you describe the fae you have encountered?

That's difficult too. An individual faery may make the impression of being nine feet tall, but to them (if I understand this correctly), it's more about intensity of presence than it is about physical size. In fact, they seem to find it confusing when I say something like "nine feet tall" as if they were limited to a specific size, space, or shape when really that isn't so. There is another thing here — let's take the human "aura" as an example. "Auras" are very fluid and changeable. They are the bioenergy field that exists through and extends beyond the human physical body — and extends through and around the bodies of animals, insects, and all the other things we consider to be living, physical beings made of matter. But if the physicists are correct, matter and energy are the same thing, but slowed down and compacted or faster and more free. If E=mc², this must be so. Nuclear weapons suggest this is true and that a little bit of "matter" can quickly be converted to a great deal of "energy".

Apparently, while humans perceive matter and energy as different things, the fae don't. It is all one thing. I just realized something! In many belief systems about the fae, they are regarded as the "Elder Folk" and as much older than the human species. We human and other earth beings could be a sort of Faery larva (or prenatal embryo) and may eventually (though the millennia?) grow up to be fae ourselves. That's a mind-boggling thought! Anyway, back to trying to describe the fae and how they explained that to me.

I could try to describe an individual fae. I could even draw a picture of one. BUT, as they have been quick to explain, that picture is just a metaphor for who they really are. What we "see" is a watered-down version of their personality and/or character. What we "see" as bodies or faces is a meeting point somewhere between our conceptions and projections and their reality. We see a particular kind of face/body that represents their character or personality as we (as individuals) would see that being. Another human might project a different face on that same person. For a simple example, I have heard a few people say that brown eyes are "warm" and blue eyes are "cold".

Having blue eyes myself, I don't agree, but I have heard it said more than once, usually said by brown-eyed people. To a person who believes that and is perceiving a warm faery personality, they would see the faery eyes as brown, whereas I, not believing, might see them as blue or even some color unlike normal human eyes. The same thing is true of all the features — we perceive personality in flesh, but we are not always correct.

A human may be quite ugly but be kind and friendly, a lovely person — or they may be physically beautiful and yet narcissistic or psychopathic. Yet often the way we perceive the fae is that we project the features and expression on the personality the fae are projecting. Confusing? Well, yes it is. Communication with faeries is frequently fraught with confusion, resulting largely from our own limitations and projections. If, because of our beliefs and attitudes, we want to see someone as scary, we will project what we percieve as a scary face on them, true or false.

Have you encountered different types of fae? How did these experiences differ?

Yes, I have. They may differ vastly — differing as much as experiencing a human versus experiencing a rock or a tree. This question either requires a book in answer or can't be readily answered at all. I hope the rest of my answers here will help compensate for the absence of one here.

How would you describe the energy of places where fae might be/where you have encountered them?

Again, they differ a great deal, depending on what is going on there. I need to say here that there are places we may experience the fae more easily, but the fae are, in fact, everywhere. But in places that are noisy, unpleasant, distressing, violent, we tend to be overwhelmed by these loud things and miss out entirely on the much more subtle presence of the fae. But they are still there.

Have you had any experiences that have stuck with you or changed your life?

Many, many, many.

What do you think the origin of the fae is?

I really don't know. If the legends have it right, they have been around a lot longer than we have. I'm even less certain, if possible, about the origins of gods and goddesses and the universe. We humans are just babes blundering about in the universal woods. I'm not even certain about our own origins. Wait. They did tell me something once. Let me see if I can find it.

... Ah, yes! I quote (This is what the faeries say, not me, this is all their knackerty knotion):

"In the beginning there were uncountable bits of faery consciousness floating, undifferentiated, through Space/Time. In fact, that consciousness is what Space/Time is. Just that. Nothing else.

"When Time began gathering momentum in its spin (because it was conscious and consciousness moves) the bits of faery consciousness began swirling around faster. Bits and bytes bumped into each other. They bounced off one another. Sometimes they came together so gently that they rested against there and stayed together. O Universe became like a 33+ dimension billiard table with infinitesimal balls of faery consciousness bouncing, rolling, hurtling through Space and Time. (Knowing the fae, I'd guess they were all making a sound like, "WHEEEEE!") Lumps of consciousness formed, and the bigger the lumps became, the more consciousness they had.

"One of the things that consciousness does is to spontaneously generate concepts and ideas — this is its natural function. Its other natural functions are to store and to play with those concepts. At first, they were fairly simple: bits of consciousness gathered into elementary particles. Humans have named some of them things like quarks (up, down, bottom, top, strange, and charm), leptons (electron, electron neutrino, muon, muon neutrino, tau, tau neutrino), bosons (the photon of electromagnetism, the three W and Z bosons of the weak force, and the eight gluons of the strong force) and others. Many more are hypothesized by humans, including the fabled graviton and, of course, all the realms of antiparticles and dark matter. The ones that humans have named correctly so far are Strange, Charm, and Tau, who are all kindly folk. Humans almost got Leptons right too, but, sadly, not quite. And the fae just laugh and laugh at Gluons until they start to sneeze and then they think very hard about cheeze and chocolate sandwiches to distract themselves.

"It is a natural principle that knowing the proper names of things gives one a certain power over them — not much, but some — so it behooves humans to get better at discovering the real and proper names as quickly as they can.)

"From the elementary particles came the ideas of composite particles, and suitable weddings were arranged, forming the composite particles and the elegant atoms, and then — the great triumph of the scintillating dance of molecules! Fast and faster, more conscious concepts were generated — and in a stroke of genius, the transcendent idea of Fire — of expansion, of radiation, of light. Then the newly conceived particles, atoms, and molecules discovered how to dawdle slowly enough to be gases, to become slower still and be liquids, and even to become so ponderous as to be solids, flowing so very slowly as to seem immobile to consciousnesses acting at human speeds. And all of this happened in the sea of faery consciousness for far longer than consciousness had ever expected it would.

"Balls of fiery faery consciousness grew into stars, which lived and died, sometimes explosively leaving behind the idea of ash — dust. The dust gathered to become stone, and stone gathered to become large masses, which in turn gathered the lighter dust like hydrogen and oxygen, nitrogen and other things, from heavy to light, from least radiant to most luminous. There seems to be no end to the possibilities — and all of it is one consciousness, dancing at many levels of awareness — loving, holy, erotic, passionate, magic, and reverential."

That is what the fae tell me, and they seem quite pleased about it all — mostly.

Are there any experiences that you would like to talk about?

Dozens. Hundreds, in fact. After all, I'm 80 and they've always been a part of my world. I'd like to tell them, and even though the fae 0ften insist that "doing good in the right way" makes us stronger, it's quite late and I'm tired and almost falling asleep on my keyboard. The cats have given up and gone to bed and the fae are looking a bit disapproving — they, too, seem to have enjoyed this, but enough is enough for the moment. They even look a little smug about it, possibly because of the embryo thing. Or something else — I don't know. But I do need to get to bed before the birds start waking up and making a musical ruckus in our forest here.

Good night, and good morning, Bella. And thank you.

Faery blessings to you,

Jessica

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Jessica Macbeth