Faery Tale (8 page)

“Go into the forest at sunrise and gather the first dew from each blackberry bush that you see . . .”

Nope.

“You will need a small chime and a striker.”

You want
how much
for that thing?

And then there was my all-time favorite: “On the first day after a full moon, bury six white rose petals under an apple tree.”

Sure, I knew where to find white rose petals. But the last time I saw an apple tree in Central Park was . . . never. Other books included spells that called for such commonplace household items as red-tailed hawk feathers, six four-leaf clovers, hollyhock, or fresh—not bottled—spring water.

Poring over the books, I finally found some techniques that were a bit more city-friendly. With these in hand, my plan was to pull out all the stops for five New York days and nights; if there was any contact to be had with the faery realm in my apartment, contact there would be.

First of all, I wanted to know what faeries even
were
. Spirits? Pieces of our imagination? Living beings beyond our human field of vision? The word
faery
seemed somewhat limited as various creatures from the faery world came to light. Coleen had mentioned the dark elves. And the Mexicans considered the Alux to be faeries—but doesn't short, angry, deadly, and hairy bend your perception of the word a bit?

Every author presented a different theory on what faeries really were. The more I read, the more I realized I had no idea what exactly I was searching for in the first place. Worse, I began to realize that at the heart of a search for faeries lie important questions about reality, and the nature of our own existence, questions that are vital to uncovering any sort of truth relating to the existence or nonexistence of “faeries.” Rally had believed the Alux to be “little spirits.” As it turned out, other adults (and even scholars) had given the concept of faeries some thought, and over the past centuries had come up with some interesting theories.

There are five main theories I could find that attempted to explain faeries.

Theory one is the Pygmy Theory, which was presented by Scottish folklorist David MacRitchie in his book
The Testimony of Tradition
(1890)
.
He asserted that faery belief stemmed from a folk memory of a prehistoric, possibly Mongolian race of people who inhabited the British Isles and many parts of Continental Europe in ages past. When the Celts encountered these people during their expansion, they drove them into the mountains and wilds, where MacRitchie believed a few of them may have survived until relatively recent times—therefore explaining the sightings of “faery folk” by the peasantry that were documented from the 1880s onward. But if a pygmy race of humans had survived even into the
sixteenth
century, wouldn't we have discovered some sort of empirical archeological evidence of these wee humans by now?

Theory two is the Naturalistic Theory. In prehistoric times, early man was bowled over by natural events: rain, thunder, lightning, the violent shaking and moving of the ground, mountains spewing deathly hot lava, the glow of the moon, the burning heat of the sun, the twinkling of the stars. Our human brain searched for an answer, and the conclusion was that it all must be caused by something greater than ourselves—this, of course, sprouted the earliest seeds of religion. This theory is certainly reflected in faery lore. In the beautiful sloping hills of Connemara in Ireland, for example, faeries were believed to have been just as beautiful, peaceful, and pleasant as the world around them. But in the Scottish Highlands, with their dark, brooding mountains and eerie highland lakes, villagers warned of deadly water-kelpies and spirit characters that packed a bit more punch.

Theory three is known as the Druid Theory, which states that faeries are a folk memory of the Druids and their mysterious magical practices. When the Druids were forgotten, legends of the faeries sprang up from underground.This postulation was put forth by two different men, both reverends, in the early 1800s. It was later expounded on by a French-man, Alfred Maury, who in 1843 took it one step further and wondered if the resurgence in art and literature depicting faery women during the Middle Ages may have stemmed from a folk memory of female Druidesses. However, the roots of the human belief in faeries can be traced much further back than the disappearance of the Druids: it seems to reach even further back in the timeline to ancient Britain and Ireland. To me, it seems far more likely that faeries, like shoulder pads, simply come into fashion from time to time. In medieval times, there was a big resurgence, but we would witness yet another faery resurgence during the Victorian era.

Theory four is the Mythological Theory, which many modern authorities on Celtic mythology and folklore embrace. The belief is that fairies, as they are remembered today, are actually diminished figures of the old pagan deities of the Celts, transformed over time into lesser beings through folklore as a result of Christianization. Of all the theories I found this one to be the most compelling and hoped to explore it moving forward.

Theory five is invented by a man of great importance—or perhaps he was a man of importance who would become of
great
importance to me later—named W. Y. Evans-Wentz. At first glance it was easy to dismiss Evans-Wentz as a bit of a quack. He believed quite earnestly that faeries were invisible “intelligences or entities able to influence both man and nature,” according to his book
The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries
, published in 1911. However, the American-born author was a serious academic who'd earned both his bachelor's and master's degrees from Stanford, where he studied under William James and William Butler Yeats. He went on to study Celtic folklore and mythology at Oxford. While working on his dissertation, he became increasingly interested in, of all things, faeries. He began his exploration as a curious nonbeliever—not unlike myself. “When I set out from Oxford in June,” he wrote, “I had no certain or clear ideas as to what fairies are, nor why there should be belief in them. In less than a year afterwards I found myself committed to the Psychological Theory, which I am herein setting forth.”

The Celtic belief in faeries, as Evans-Wentz described it, was quite simple. Faeries were spiritual beings who dwelled in a spiritual realm, which has existed from prehistoric times until today in Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, and other parts of the ancient empire of the Celts. Evans-Wentz believed that if fairies actually existed (and his investigation had led him to believe that they did), they weren't supernatural at all. “Nothing which exists through the natural world can be supernatural,” he writes, “and, therefore, it is our duty to examine the Celtic Fairy Races just as we examine any fact in the visible realm wherein we now live, whether it be a fact of chemistry, of physics, or of biology.”

That's a pretty explosive statement for a turn-of-the-century Oxford academic. If delving in had made a believer out of Evans-Wentz, perhaps it could make a believer out of skeptical ol' me. And where better to begin than my own home?

In D. J. Conway's
Ancient Art of Faery Magick
, I discovered a spell to welcome house faeries into your residence. In the countryside of Scotland, England, Ireland, and Wales, people used to set out libations of milk, honey, or freshwater to welcome house-dwelling faery folk. As recently as sixty years ago, locals believed that once a house faery had taken up residence in your home, it would look after the family, bringing luck, good health, and even helping to keep the place tidy. If treated with proper consideration and respect, it was said that a house faery could also act as guardian or gatekeeper, protecting the home and its human dwellers from outside faery mischief or even harm.

Trying to think “faery,” I planned my Welcome Ceremony for midnight, a 'tween time. Conway suggested three different techniques:

I decided to do all three.

After work, I rushed to the supermarket to purchase the required items. And then, of course, I had to clean. Apparently there is nothing faeries detest more than a lazy, dirty housekeeper, so Conway advised that the first step to any invitation should be to clean your house. The danger being, a dirty home will not attract a
high-quality
house faery. But after giving this dilemma some thought, I decided to leave my relatively-tidy-just-don't-open-
every
-drawer apartment as it was. In my estimation, there couldn't be anything worse than tricking a lovely, neat, type-A sort of faery into living with the likes of me. I'd like a more tolerant faery, please.

At eleven thirty that night, I began my preparations. So far, I noted the cat was jumping at an invisible fly on the wall and tearing into the living room, only to tear back into the bedroom to claw at the mirror and make a terrible meowing sound. To be honest, as midnight approached, it was kind of freaking me out.

I stood in the kitchen, grating fresh ginger into a Pyrex bowl, then sprinkling ground cloves and cinnamon over the top as directed, mixing it together with my fingers. As I did, I began to feel oddly uncomfortable, as though someone or something was standing too close to me. I felt like I was being
watched
, and I began to get a bizarre case of the shivers. I've never really been a “shivers” kind of person, so the sensation was surprising. They ran from the base of my spine, up my neck, to the top of my head, and I experienced a series of five or six in a row. Often, I had read, when a faery is present, humans may experience something like this, but there was really no way to know whether I was in the presence of something paranormal, or whether this was simply a new manifestation of my (frequent) fear and neurosis. After all, wasn't every small noise making me jump?

I placed the dish in the oven, and as its scent began to waft throughout the house, I stood in the kitchen reading timidly:

“
Nikka, nakka, kolba,
min. You and I shall live as kin.”

I could feel my cheeks heat with embarrassment. Yet, underneath, there was a push to make the words my own. I tried it again to see if my mouth could find a comfort with it.

“
Nikka, nakka, kolba, min
. You and I shall live as kin.”

As I spoke, I imagined the scent traveling through the apartment as some kind of beacon, welcoming the entities into our home. The kitchen was quiet, save the hum from the cat's electric water fountain. What was I waiting for anyway? It wasn't like they were going to pop out of the elevator and ring the freaking doorbell, right? Moving into the living room, I checked the clock: 11:58. Lighting three candles on the coffee table, I set down an offering of ground ginger in one of my father's antique eggcups. Book in hand, I faced north—toward the new bagel place in my neighborhood, Fort Tryon Park, and the George Washington Bridge—and read:

I went to each of the four directions in turn, summoning the creatures as the spell directed. Conway had suggested concluding with an ancient seers' method to catch a glimpse of any faeries that might have entered the room during the reading, so peeking to be sure Eric wasn't watching, I lifted my right leg off the floor and stood on my left, while holding my right arm out straight from my body, my left arm at my side. My right eye was supposed to be entirely closed, while my left was allowed to squint. I managed to get myself in position and stood there wobbling for a full minute, spying around the room with my squinting eye. I felt completely ridiculous. Faeries aren't stupid. I felt like a five-year-old who covers both eyes, shouting, “I'm invisible, I'm invisible!” Disappointed, I blew out the candles, placed an eggcup filled with freshwater by each of our two faery homes, and crawled into bed.

The next morning I noticed a fruit fly in the bathroom, buzzing around my head. I usually only spotted them in the kitchen, or on rare occasions when they strayed as far as the living room. I'd read that faeries often shape-shift, and that one can differentiate faery from nonfaery by determining whether the animal or insect is behaving abnormally. But was this fruit fly behaving erratically? It kept dive-bombing my head, which was getting pretty annoying, but without an entomologist present, I was at a loss.

As I moved into the bedroom to get dressed, I was surprised to see a starling perched on the railing of the fire escape. Not a pigeon, a starling. I parted the sheer curtains, and it looked back at me until Willoughby the cat began to make her precursory chirping noises. At which point I burst into laughter and the bird flew away. Later, when I came home from work, I made sure to follow another piece of faery advice: don't acknowledge your house faeries directly. They don't like it. So I decided it would be best to check in with the cat.

“Hi, Willy girl! Were you a good girl today? Did you have fun hanging out with our
new friends
?” I looked at her expectantly. She had nothing to say for herself.

On Wednesday a heavy thermos fell from the top shelf of the cupboard when I opened it to grab a cereal bowl. As it came crashing down, just missing the cat's water, not to mention my toes, it made a real racket, and I let out a little scream of surprise.

Again I turned to my feline friend.

“Willy. Kitties are supposed to see these things. Tell Mommy if it was a faery.”

She tilted her little black head at me, her green eyes questioning.

“Willy. Blink once if it was a faery,” I commanded.