Incubi and Succubi

Henry Fuseli, An Incubus Leaving Two Girls

It will have been noted from my last posting on fairy lovers that they are, in the British Isles, predominantly female- other than the northern Scottish tradition of male selkies, who will form sexual relationships with human women and father children. 

Older literature often makes reference to incubi and succubi, male and female spirits or demons who take on human form to lie with women and men at night.  These beings have ancient roots, both classical and in the Middle East, and are clearly not identical (or even closely related) to our own faery lovers.  This notwithstanding, the terminology has come to be used indiscriminately (as with nymphs and satyrs) so that there may be some confusion between the two.  Reginald Scot included incubus amongst his list of fairy beings in the Discoverie of Witchcraft of 1584 (in Book 7 c.15 and the ‘Discourse’ c.11). Scot was generally sceptical about all supernatural phenomena, though, and it is very clear from the ‘Shepherd’s Dream’ in William Warner’s Albion’s England (1612) that the poet was inclined to suspect that the incubus, “that begets dadlesse babes on girles asleepe” was just a cover for a much simpler explanation for pregnancies out of marriage.

British faery lovers tend to be involved on a longer-term basis with human partners, rather than simply using them for sexual purposes, but there is some native evidence for a purely carnal faery visitant.  I have previously described the nightmare or hag, a species of being that has also been identified more narrowly with Mab and even Puck.  These are the best known, but not entirely the only, examples of succubi in British tradition. (Note that Reginald Scot regarded the nightmare as a purely physical affliction though).

In Robert of Gloucester’s Metrical Chronicle (composed between about 1260 and 1300) there is an account given of the conception of Merlin.  His mother described how an unknown but very handsome man used to come to see her at night and, in due course, she found herself pregnant- never having slept with a man.  Amazed by this story, the king sought his counsellors’ advice, and they confirmed that there were ‘wights’ called elves (both male and female) who were known to act like this and to visit men and women at night. 

“Þe clerkes sede þat it is in philosofie yfounde

Þat þer beþ in þe eyr an hey ver fram þe grounde  

As a maner gostes wiȝtes as it be

& me may þem ofte an erþe in wilde studes yse

& ofte in mannes forme wommen hii comeþ to

& ofte in wimmen forme hii comeþ to men al so

Þat men clupeþ eluene & parauenture in þis manere

On of hom in þis womman biȝet þis child here.”

This passage is, in fact, fairly easy to read. NB: the letter þ is simply ‘th’ whilst ȝ functions as a ‘y’ or sometimes as a guttural ‘g.’  The verb ‘clypeth’ simply means ‘call.’

“The clerks said (to the king) that it’s accepted by science

That there are, high in the air and far above the ground,

Beings that resemble ghosts

(Whom you can often see in wild, wooded places

And who often come in the shape of men to women

And who in women’s form visit men too)

That we call elves; perhaps in this way

One of them got this woman here pregnant with this child (Merlin).”

Robert of Gloucester was, almost certainly, a learned monk, and his background and education may well have shaped his Chronicle.  Furthermore, he was elaborating the legend of Merlin’s birth that had already been told by Geoffrey of Monmouth and several others.  We may wonder, then, whether this is a literary and scholastic view of elves or derives from folk belief. Notably, from the previous century there’s a story of a handsome fairy male who seduced a young woman at Dunwich (Life of William of Norwich, by Thomas of Monmouth).

However, the religious text titled Dives and Pauper, which dates to about 1405, very much confirms that the conceptions of elves set out by Robert of Gloucester reflect a more popular belief.  In the twenty-first chapter we are told how:

“The fende … may transfigure hym into lykenesse of man or woman by sufferaunce of god, for mannys synne and womans. And the fendes that tempt folk to lecherie be moste besy to appere in mannys likenes & womans to do lecherie with folk & so bringe them to lecherye. And in speche of folke: they be cleped elvys, but in Latyne whan they appeir in mannis lykenes: they be cleped Incubi. And whane they appier in lykenesse of wymen: they be cleped succubi…”

The idea of fairy men appearing in women’s beds and seducing them in fact proved to be a long lasting one.  Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, was the offspring of just such a union, according to the story of his Mad Pranks and Merry Jests, published in 1628.

Rather more interesting is the account of Goodwin Wharton (1653-1704) of his dealings with a woman called Mary Parrish and her contacts in the fairy kingdom of Lowlands, which lies beneath Hounslow Heath, west of London.  The story is mainly one of a wealthy man being cheated by a woman who holds out hopes of faery power, but it has a sexual element too.

Parrish told Wharton that the recently widowed faery queen, Queen Penelope LaGard, had taken a fancy to him and wished to marry him and make him the new king of Lowlands.  Although plans for face-to-face meetings kept falling through, Wharton had proved so irresistible to Penelope that for some weeks she had secretly visited him at night and had sex with him whilst he was asleep.  Despite his unconscious state, they had intercourse multiple times nightly, a revelation that explained the great tiredness and backache that had recently afflicted him.

Thinking about this, Wharton realised that he remembered one occasion on which they had had sex three times in a row; on the third occasion, the queen had “sucked up her breath” just as they both reached orgasm, the effect of which had been to extract “the very substance of the marrow” from his bones, leaving him drained nearly to the point of death.  This statement accords well with traditional medical beliefs, that saw sperm as a special kind of ‘marrow’ or vital energy.  Queen Penelope was exactly like a succubus, sapping Wharton’s strength.

Fuseli, Queen Mab and Two Girls

For more details on the subject of faery loves, see my new book Love and Sex in Faeryland.

Fairy lovers- passion and peril

Brian Froud, ‘The Leanan-Sidhe,’ from Faeries

As many humans have discovered, having a faery lover can prove to be a terrible burden and strain.  Although you might initially feel a great sense of joy, pride and accomplishment, this often vanishes as the true cost of your lover becomes apparent.

The attraction is simply explained.  Fairy women are renowned to be great beauties– which is why, in Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, the Roman general greets the Egyptian queen as a “great fairy” (IV, 8).  To describe her as a fae is the only way of doing justice to her looks.  As well as beauty, fairy lovers and wives can bring advantages, such as supernatural skills and knowledge, but they can be demanding and jealous lovers too.

The Manx female fairy called the lhiannan shee is a very good example of this.  Dora Broome (Fairy Tales from the Isle of Man 36) describes one such lhiannan shee.  She woes her chosen man by leaving him a chest full of gold and a golden length of mermaid’s hair, but she also hangs around his home, sighing and trying to catch his eye, which the man knows could be fateful for him.  He decides to get married, thinking that this will put her off, but the plan doesn’t work.  The fairy woman continues to hang around, disturbing the newly wed couple, until the husband eventually catches sight of the fairy’s lovely face looking through the window.  She was “more beautiful than moonlight on water or the first primrose in Spring.”  The man falls under her spell instantly and abandons his wife for seven years.  When he finally returns, his wife has remarried and her first husband has been reduced to a white haired, haggard wreck- and can never escape his fairy pursuer. 

Broome says that the charms against a lhiannan shee are to say the Lord’s prayer quickly if you glimpse her and to always carry with you a magical object, such as twig of cuirn (rowan or mountain ash) or a fish bone called a bollan.  Both are highly effective at repelling fairies, apparently.  Powerful protection is needed, though, because “the face of the Fairy Woman is lovelier than a dream and lonelier than a sea-bird’s cry.”   

In another story, The Fisherman and the Ben-Varrey, Broome describes how a mermaid with lovely blue eyes and golden hair has a similarly bewitching effect on a poor man.  She gives him a chest of old golden coins and the sound of her voice as she sings on the rocks on the shore is so enticing that he would join her and drown had it not been for his wife locking the door.  The money turns out to be a curse, because everyone assumes it must be stolen, whilst the family end up poorer than ever because the fisherman stops fishing, believing he has wealth for life.  By luck, all the money is lost- which lifts the spell- but it’s clear that sooner or later the ben-varrey would have claimed him.

The lhiannan shee’s influence upon a man can be malign, causing him to waste away and to lose his wits and friends.  For example, a large burly man took up with a fairy woman.  He started to share all his food and drink with her, often putting his cup behind him so that she could drink (even though no-one else saw her).  As time passed, he began to laugh and talk to himself when alone (or so it seemed to others).  He also became paranoid about people trying to listen in to his conversations with her- although he claimed that the shee girl was telling him when he was being spied upon. It is particularly dangerous to speak to one, as it puts you at her mercy: in late Victorian times a man described meeting one in the fields near Rushen on Man and being very tempted to chat to her because she was so charming and lovely, but he knew not to do so because a friend of his had done this and had then been haunted by her, with the shee woman even following him into pubs and drinking his beer.

In 1904, a Manx author was able to identify at least half a dozen known lhiannan shees on the island. One at Glendowan was living with a man; another at Sorby had been seen chasing her husband and several others had been sighted wandering (or prowling) on their own, for example at Port Erin, where she was seen walking up the mountain.

The lhiannan shee is especially notable for the fact that she pursued and attached herself to men.  This proximity often came to be termed ‘haunting’ because it was too intense and obsessive and, both on Man and in the Highlands, there are stories of men who fled overseas to escape their fairy lovers, only to find that they had followed them across oceans. The Scottish and Manx shee women are extreme cases, but any fairy relationship can prove burdensome and demanding for the human partner. In Wales, as is known from numerous stories, winning the fae woman in the first place can be difficult (see the accounts about tempting them with bread) and the marriage is almost always subject to strict obligations or taboos. Normally, these involve keeping iron away from the fairy female, but there’s a very similar tale told of Dolgellau pool. A fairy would bathe there on summer evenings and Hugh Evans dared to spy on her- and fell in love. She consented to marry on the stipulation that he would allow her to continue to go off alone at nights and never interfere or ask questions about this. He agreed, but then became consumed with curiosity and tried to follow her one night. Hugh fell and broke his leg doing this and, once she had nursed him back to health, she left him forever.

In one Scottish story, the relentlessness of the fairy attachment is starkly revealed. A shepherd heard pipes playing and had to follow the sound of music. He was drawn onwards for weeks, months, seasons, living on roots and berries as he wandered. Finally he crossed the sea and, on the far shore, was met by a piper dressed in green who invited him to accept the love of a faery girl who had seen him with his flocks and had lured him to this place.

Many of the faery lovers I have described in previous posts can seem more passive, assigned the sorts of roles and attitudes allocated to women in the past.  On the surface this may be true, but it underestimates their power and planning.

Hans Zatzka

I have several times before mentioned the fairy women Tryamour in the story of Sir Launfal.  She is not unique.  In the Lay of Graelent, for example, the young knight is riding in a forest one May day when he comes upon a naked maiden bathing in a fountain, with her clothes hanging nearby on a bush.  He seizes them, in response to which she calls him by name and asks him to at least leave her shift. Graelent relents and allows her to come out of the water and dress, but then he’s overcome with lust and “did with her what he pleased.”  After what amounts to a rape, he begs her pardon, which she grants, before revealing that she had gone to the forest with the express intention of meeting him.  She then offers him fine clothes and money on condition that he binds himself to her and keeps their relationship secret.  Ultimately, the lady raises Graelent from death and disappears with him (strongly suggestive of Arthur and Morgan le Fay and clearly indicative of her fairy nature). This final departure to fairyland is repeated in Sir Launfal.

The Lay of Guingamor is quite similar.  The knight is hunting in a forest when he finds a maiden bathing in a spring and combing her hair (rather like a mermaid).  She is “long limbed and softly rounded” and, once again, he snatches her clothes to bring her within his power.  As before, though, it seems that her presence is far from accidental.  She addresses him by name and promises him love and gifts.  Guingamor then accompanies her to her palace, where a stay of three days lasts for three hundred years in human time.  These distortions in time as a familiar feature of passage between dimensions.

Finally, the lay called Le chevalier qui fist parler les cons et les culs involves another hunting knight discovering three nymphs bathing in a fountain.  They are “so seeming wise and beautiful, one might surmise that they were fairies in mortal guise.”  As soon as the knight’s squire sees the fays’ “white charms, their pretty bosoms, haunches, arms” he (yet again) snatches their clothes and rides off.  It is his master who restores their dresses to them, in return for which he is granted three powers- to be welcome everywhere and to be able to make “parler les cons et les culs” (to make cunts and arses talk…). A bizarre gift, but there you go…

It will have been noted from the previous paragraphs that fairy lovers are, in the British Isles, predominantly female.  Whereas Ireland has the gean cannah, the love talker, as a male equivalent to the leanan-sidhe, there are really no equivalent terrestrial beings in Britain.  There is, however, the northern Scottish tradition of male selkies, who will form sexual relationships with human women and father children.  Often, though, these relationships are brief and, not uncommonly, they’re non-consensual.  Selkie men seem prone to impregnating human women and abandoning them (see my posting on the chapter on selkies in my book Beyond Faery and, too, the ballad the Selkie of Sule Skerry).

Further Reading

There’s more discussion and examples of the lhiannan shee in my book Faery whilst in Beyond Faery I give extended consideration to the problems of human relationships with merfolk. My new book, Love and Sex in Faeryland, examines this subject at length.

‘Leanan Sidhe’ by Starfire-666 on Deviant Art, after Brian Froud in Good Faeries, Bad Faeries.

Pan & Nymphs in ‘The Lore of Proserpine’

Rodolphe Julian, Pan

Recently I reread Maurice Hewlett’s fantastic collection of fairy tales from 1913, Lore of Proserpine, and was reminded of the author’s rather idiosyncratic view of fairies and classical nymphs.  In his taxonomy, there is little difference between the two.  I might add that the book is also suffused with the cult of the Great God Pan, a aspect of paganism that had considerable vogue amongst artists, musicians and writers during the late Victorian period and the first decades of the twentieth century, as I have described in my new book The Great God Pan and as I also mentioned last year in Nymphology.

The Lore of Proserpine is fiction, but it purports to be a record a series of episodes over the narrator’s life when he had faery encounters.  The earliest was when he was a school-boy in his early teens and saw a dryad in a woodland glade.  He describes how:

“I was now looking upon a Dryad. I was looking certainly at a spirit informed. A being, irradiate and quivering with life and joy of life, stood dipt to the breast in the brake; stood so, bathing in the light; stood so, preening herself like a pigeon on the roof-edge, and saw me and took no heed.

She had appeared, or had been manifest to me, quite suddenly. At one moment I saw the avenue of lit green, at another she was dipt in it. I could describe her now, at this distance of time—a radiant young female thing, fiercely favoured, smiling with a fierce joy, with a gleam of fierce light in her narrowed eyes. Upon her body and face was the hue of the sun’s red beam; her hair, loose and fanned out behind her head, was of the colour of natural silk, but diaphanous as well as burnished, so that while the surfaces glittered like spun glass the deeps of it were translucent and showed the fire behind.  Her garment was thin and grey, and it clung to her like a bark, seemed to grow upon her as a creeping stone-weed grows…”

The dryad had emanated, he believed, from the oak trees of the wood, and shared some of the trees’ characteristics.  We meet another dryad much later in the book, this time associated with an oceanid.  Hewlett tells the story of a family living on the wild Cheviot Hills on the English-Scottish border.  The mother of the family had been brought home by her sailor husband.  Her origins were never discussed, but they seem clear from the fact that:

“It was told that until Miranda King was brought in, sea-birds had never been seen in Dryhopedale. It was said that they came on that very night when George King the younger came home, and she with him, carrying his bundle and her own. It was said that they had never since left the hamlet, and that when Miranda went out of doors, she was followed by clouds of them whichever way she turned.”

In turn, Miranda’s son brings home a dryad he has discovered and fallen for in a wood deep in the hills.  He had been to the wood before, but “He had had a fright, had been smitten by that sudden gripe of fear which palsies limbs and freezes blood, which the ancients called the Stroke of Pan, and we still call Panic after them.” However, driven by a deep need and identification, he overcomes his terror and goes back to the wood to find dryad wife.  His mother confirms the two women’s affinity: “I am of the sea and she of the fell, but we are the same nation.  We are not of yours, but you can make us so.”

A strange, dramatic struggle follows in which the ‘King of the Wood’ (Pan), tries to reclaim his handmaiden from the young shepherd who has abducted her.  He nearly succeeds and the girl, called Mabilla By-the-Wood, was nearly “resumed into her first state” (in other words, she nearly became the spirit of a beech tree once again) but her husband pursues and rescues her.

In some respects, then, nymphs only look like humans.  Hewlett’s nymphs are animalistic, soulless beings- but they can be transformed to something more like a human woman through marriage to a human man. Describing Mabilla By-the-Wood, he says that:

“her eyes were large, grey in colour, but, as I have said, unintelligent, like an animal’s, which to us always seem unintelligent…  Everything about her seemed to him to be quite what one would have expected, until one came, so to speak, in touch with her soul. That, if it lay behind her inscrutable, sightless and dumb eyes, betrayed her. There was no hint of it. Human in form, visibly and tangibly human, no soul sat in her great eyes that a man could discern.”

Franz Stuck, Pan beobachtet Kentaurenpaar

Pan is present in the story as the mysterious and violent King of the Wood, possessive of the spirits of the trees. Hewlett also recognises the deity’s suzerainty over terrestrial fairies. As he says, “Pan in potent in nearly all land solitudes,” whilst Artemis “is certainly ruler of the spirits of the air and water.” He continues:

“The legions of Artemis are all female, though on earth men as well as women worship her; the legions of Pan are all male, though on earth he can chasten women as well as men. But Pan can do nothing against Artemis, nor she anything against him or any of his. The decree or swift deed of either is respected by the other. They are not, then, as earthly kings, leaders of their hosts to battle against their neighbours. Fairies fight and marshal themselves for war; Mr. Wentz has several cases of the kind. But Pan and Artemis have no share in these warfares. Queen Mab is one of the many names, and points to one of the many manifestations of Artemis; the Lady of the Lake is another.”

Here we have references to the division of the woodland folk into Pan and his satyrs and the various nymphs. We also have Mab and the Lady of the Lake treated as, to all intents and purposes, nymphs or naiads. Artemis is the Greek goddess of the wilderness, wild animals and the moon. Her Roman equivalent was Diana, who was very often linked with fairies and whose name was frequently interchangeable with Titania. These passages from the Lore of Proserpine are clear evidence of the confusion between classical and native myth to which I alluded at the start. This is something by no means unique to Hewlett, and is by no means a recent phenomenon, but it was a rich source of inspiration.

Penny Ross, Spring Fairy

Elsewhere in his book, Hewlett quotes Plato’s Phædrus: “Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place….” and then continues “Beloved Pan! My knowledge of Pan was of the vaguest, and yet more than once or twice did I utter that prayer wandering alone the playing field, or watching the evening mist roll down the Thames Valley and blot up the elm trees, thick and white, clinging to the day like a fleece. The third Iliad again I have never forgotten…” He, like so many public school boys of his generation, absorbed the Greek classics at a young age and often knew them better than their own native traditions. Confusion and cross-fertilisation were almost inevitable. Nevertheless, Pan was a real presence for Hewlett, like so many other writers of that period: “I had had good reason to know the awfulness of Pan.”

I have examined Pan, nymphs and fairies in previous postings. I shall return to the content of Hewlett’s Lore of Proserpine in the near future. I have also discussed Pan in literature and art on one of my other WordPress blogs– especially my dedicated site for all matters related to nymphs: see Nymphology blog.

Bouguereau, Nympha & Satyr

Great God Pan & Faery

I am very pleased to announce the publication of my latest book, The Great God Pan, by Green Magic Publishing, who back in 2017 were kind enough to publish my first fairy study, British Fairies.

The origins of the latest book lie partly in the research I did for 2020’s Nymphology, but also in my wider reading of fantasy writers such as Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen.  As some readers will already know, Machen himself wrote a story called The Great God Pan; the title wasn’t his, it comes from ancient legend, so I felt entitled to use it too!

The new book, Great God Pan, is a study of the development of the cult of Pan, tracing its origins from ancient Greece and following the faith through the Renaissance to late Victorian times, when it had a major revival.  This period is the main focus of the book, with reference to writers such as Oscar Wilde, Aleister Crowley, Dion Fortune and others.

Moony, Enchanted Wood

Now, you’d be entitled to think that the goat god Pan hasn’t got a lot to do with fairies, but the situation’s rather more complex than we might expect.  Let’s start towards the end…

In 1878 Walter Besant published the short story Titania’s Farewell.  As the title tells us, the story’s focus is the departure of the fairies from British shores, something witnessed by a human who finds himself surrounded by the fairies late one night in the New Forest.  Reflecting the next day on his enchanted experience, the narrator asks himself:

“Reality! Ideal! Why, which is which? The old nature worship goes on as ever.  Great God Pan never dies.”

He seems to be very clear in his own mind that fairies are nature spirits and that they are intimately linked by this to Pan himself.  The fairies of the story, in fact, don’t quite see it as simply as this. Addressing his court, King Oberon says that the fairies can’t flee from Britain to either Greece or Italy.  This is because those places are:

“haunted by beings far different from ourselves- Bacchus and his noisy crew.  You would not like to associate with him.  Satyrs there are- monsters of most uncomely appearance and their manners are detestable.  Dryads there are in the woods, and Naiads by their fountains; but you would not like them.  They drowned fair young Hylas.  When did we drown fair youth?” 

The British fairies can’t go to these Mediterranean lands, then; they are ‘Teutonic elves’ as Oberon says.  But they can’t go to Germany either, because there the woods are full of goblins and they’ve filled up their buildings with “clumsy plaster casts of the Fauns of the Latin hills.”

All of this leaves Oberon sounding very much like a jingoistic Victorian English gentleman, for whom all foreigners are simply frightful, with their beastly artistic pretensions and artistic temperaments. 

John Philip Wagner, Little Pan’s Dance

In truth, British faery folk weren’t always seen as being so very different from classical beings, as I described a long time ago in a post on the impact of the Renaissance on the British fairy faith.  For example, in The Faithful Shepherdess of 1609, John Fletcher described ‘fairy ground’ where the fairies dance in these terms:

“No Shepherd’s way lies here; ‘tis hallowed ground;

No maid seeks here her strayed cow or sheep,

Fairies, fawns and satyrs do it keep.”

The influence of Greek and Latin legend actually dates much earlier than that.

We can, in fact, go right back as early as St Augustine’s City of God, of the early fifth century.  He briefly discusses some Gaulish fairies called dusii, whom he treated as being identical with “Silvans and Pans, commonly called incubi, [who] often misbehave towards women and succeed in accomplishing their lustful desires to have intercourse with them.”  These are beings who seduce human women, usually coming to them when they are asleep at night, and in their highly sexed nature they link backwards to Pan, inveterate pursuer of nymphs in the groves of Arcady, and forward to the faery lovers of more modern times.

St Augustine’s ‘pans’ might also be called fauns or wood sprites.  In about 1000, Bishop Burchard of Worms laid down a penance for any country people who expressed belief in the existence of such ‘sylvans’ or satyrs or who made offerings to them.  A later English version of this same text, dating from the 13^th century, repeated the same warnings, but called them fauns.

In the twelfth century Thomas of Monmouth described how a young virgin living in Dunwich in Suffolk was assaulted at night by a spirit in the form of a handsome young man who appeared in her bedroom and sought to tempt and seduce her.  He’s called “one of those beings whom they call fairies and incubi [faunos dicunt et incubi.]”  As this shows, faun and fairy were interchangeable words.

These country spirits may have Latin names, but they are very plainly what we’d call fairies, as is the case with John Lydgate’s Troy Book, written during the fifteenth century and first published in 1513.  He refers to the:

“diverse goddis of þe wodis grene [who]

Appere þere, called Satiry,

Bycornys eke [too], fawny and incubi,

þat causen ofte men to falle in rage.”

The ‘rage’ to which Lydgate refers is, of course, the panic that Pan can induce in flocks, herds and people.  The Troy Book was based on Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae (A History of the fall of Troy), from which Lydgate inherited his “multos satiros faunosque bicornes” (many satyrs and two horned fauns).

These fauns/ fairies of the Middle Ages behaved in all the ways that remain familiar to us today.  As well as trying to seduce suitable boys and girls, they offered rich goods that were only glamour, they liked to play tricks on humans and they also took children and left changelings. 

Into early modern times, the terminology remained interchangeable.  As I’ve discussed before, Reginald Scot in The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584)made a list of supernatural beings that included “satyrs, pans, fauns… nymphs… incubuses;”  William Prynne in Histrio-Matrix of 1633, a Puritan attack on the theatre, complained of people dressing up as “Satyres, Silvanes, Muses, Nymphes, Furies, Hobgoblins, Fairies, Fates… which Christians should not name, much less resemble.”

As these last examples remind us, fairies and nymphs were consistently conflated or confused, as I’ve discussed before in postings and in Nymphology.  These associations further embed into British faerylore the conjunction of fairies with girlish sexuality- something which can also be seen in much of the art associated with pan and the satyrs.

The intermingling of classical and native beings continues even to this day.  For example, in his book Good Faeries, Bad Faeries, Brian Froud included Pan in the good half and a ‘Small Pan or Slight Panic,’ in the bad section. The former, ‘Poetic Pan,’ can materialise in many different places and, if humans come into contact with him, will arouse in them erotic impulses, abandonment to poetic emotions and intense feelings of spiritual connection to nature. Froud warns us, however, to take care, “for his influence is overwhelming.”  In the second half of the book, the small Pan is the “irresistible child of the great Pan himself [who] hides himself away in secret nooks and crannies, ready to leap out in pursuit of the unwary (especially pretty young girls and attractive goats).  His presence causes minor pandemonium and slight panic, so be cautious of things that pop out suddenly from hidden places.”

John Philip Wagner, Little Pan

I am also posting articles related to this book one of my other WordPress blogs, John Kruse blog.

Faery Charms- Magical Deeds and Words

‘I saw the banshee flying, wild in the Wind of March…’ Florence Susan Harrison, 1912

I recently described how we can use a variety of substances and objects as charms against fairies.  In this posting, I look at how some actions and words can have a like effect.

Some of the effective actions will be familiar to readers from wider magical practice.  For example, drawing a circle around yourself- especially if an iron or steel point is used to do this- will guard an individual from a range of harms, including malign fairies  Making the sign of the Christian cross is widely believed to be effective in the same manner as, of course, are Christian prayers or the invocation of holy names, typically the trinity, but also individual saints.

Some actions are less explicable.  For example, there is a very peculiar (and frustratingly incomplete) account recorded in Charles Rogers Social Life in Scotland (1886).  He describes how the fairies abducted the wife of the miller of Menstrie but how, when riddling meal one day at the door of his barn, he stood in a particular stance or posture that had the effect of breaking the spell and recovering his spouse.  Rogers doesn’t expand on this, leaving us desperate for details.

More typically, it was forms of words that were effective against the faes (over and above simply blessing yourself and calling on god).  Volume III of Alexander Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica (Gaelic Songs) of 1900 contains a range of spoken charms that offer protection against fairies.  Many of these are addressed to individual saints, including as Brigit, Mary, Michael, Peter, James, John and Columba.  Their assistance is sought either against generalised perils or to help with specific threats.

For example, on waking in the morning you can pray to “Ward off the bane of the fairy women” (these ban sith were plainly seen as a persistent danger, as several prayers are concerned with them); the fairies of the knolls (siodach nan cnoc) are also mentioned.  The sith folk as a whole were seen as especially threatening on Thursdays (when a blessing could be intoned against them) and at the time of death, when a person might prayer to be shielded against the evil of the fairies (bho arrais nan sidh). 

More precisely identified risks include fairy arrows or darts (which are mentioned in several prayers) and the fairy host or sluagh.  One notably vivid prayer to Brigit seeks her blessing to ensure that:

“No seed of the fairy host shall lift me,

Nor seed of airy host shall lift me.”

“Cha tog siodach mi

Cha tog sluagach mi”

As well as people, household items and equipment might be protected, as in this blessing for a loom against gruagachs and fairy women: “Bho gach gruagach is ban-sith.”

William Mackenzie also recorded Gaelic Incantations that he heard on the Hebrides before 1895.  He came across a charm against injuries to the spleen and liver by fairies as well as more comprehensive charms guarding against the ‘nine slender fairies’ (‘s air naoi bean seang sithe) or against a more pervasive malign fairy influence:

“We repudiate their evil tricks,

(May) their back be to us,

May their face be from us,

Through merit of the passion and death of our saviour.”

The Mona Miscellany of 1873 records a very similar incantation from the Isle of Man that was to be said at night to protect a home from fairy incursions:

“The peace of God and the peace of man,

The peace of God on Columb Killey,

On each window and each door,

And on every hole admitting moonlight,

And on the place of my rest

And the peace of God on myself.”

Directly comparable to this is a grace that was recorded from a resident of Skye, Farquhar Beaton, during the 1840s, when he was one hundred years old.  Nightly he prayed for protection for the old and young, wives and children, sheep and cattle against the ‘power and dominion of the fairies’ (o churnhach agus cheannas nan sithichean).  Some might perhaps question the credulity of the people saying such prayers, but as Beaton himself said- “My own two eyes beheld them; my own two ears heard them” (Mo dhu shuil fein a chunnaic iad; mo dha chluas fein a chual iad.)  He’d seen the threat and he was taking no chances…

One thing to bear in mind with all of these charms, I am sure, is the need to repeat them in the exact form in which they have been formulated.  The Isle of Man also supplies a very good example of this, which is to be found in Dora Broome’s Fairy Tales of the Isle of Man.  A man wanted to find a fynoderee to help cure his sickly cow and his wife told him a charm to repeat to lure one out of a tree and into his power:

“Fynoderee, fynoderee

Come down, for I can see.”

The being would then follow the husband anywhere, but she warned him to cross himself three times immediately afterwards, for fear of butcheragh (witchcraft, or bad magic).  Of course, the husband forgot the gesture to go with the words, and bad luck followed: his cow recovered, but it then disappeared along with the fynoderee- and all the other animals and birds living on the farm.

A fynoderee, after Brian Froud

For more on protections against faeries, see my Darker Side of Faery (2021). My Manx Faeries examines the fynoderee and other beings from the Isle of Man in more detail.