It was too dark to see clearly, or perhaps the figures didn’t want to be seen. The young man suddenly felt lost. Surely he couldn’t lose his way in such a small patch of woodland; and yet, he was not sure where he was any more: it had become even darker, and he couldn’t see the path.
There was something older than him in the branches, something age-old and ancestral; and perhaps it was an age-old instinct that dictated the young man’s response. For reasons he could not fully explain, he reached into his backpack, took out a small bell and tinkled it for a while. Then he left it on a branch as an offering. And now the woods were less dark, and his mind too, and he could see the path. He hurried home without looking back.
He returned the next day to find that the woods were just woods, small, unassuming and tame.
The bell was not there.
*
Throughout the Middle Ages, priests routinely identified fairies with demons, devils and witches.5 Clerics and elves were enemies – supposedly. Reality was more nuanced: their daily dealings happened in a grey area between hostility and alliance. What matters to us is that for a long time in history, a person who cavorted with fairies might be condemned but would not be ridiculed. Good citizens kept away from fairies, but not from the people who believed in them.
After having read Simon Young’s reports, I became curious about what a present-day religious thinker would have to say. So I went and spoke to a theologian, hoping that he would not consider me insane.
I should not have worried. John Milbank is an intellectually imposing figure, very outspoken. While he holds opinions that some might find difficult at times, he is also unfailingly gentle, an empathetic listener, and erudite in a gracious way that allows you to take notes without feeling stupid. As one of Britain’s leading theologians, he started a religious and philosophical movement called Radical Orthodoxy, based on the idea that we should return to ancient, numinous ways of understanding the Christian God, grounding them in our contemporary world. He holds unfaltering beliefs, but ‘fanciful’ is not a word you would ever use to describe him. He is an intellectual powerhouse with an unapologetic belief in the ‘supernatural’. He was exactly the person I needed to talk to.
For scheduling reasons, we didn’t manage to meet in person, and ended up having a chat about wonder, faith and fairies over Skype. Even so, John’s voice filled my study. It soon became clear he didn’t consider my questions to be insane, and I relaxed a bit, and felt my reality stretch.
We started chatting about nature, where fairies are often encountered. ‘People used to have a different relationship with nature,’ John said. ‘Nature was seen as having a symbolic value. It was like a book to read, and it was communicating something divine to us. It had a meaning. In the modern period, people have become more alienated. When we use the word nature, we mean by it something very… reductive.’ John echoed my own thoughts, albeit coming from a different perspective. ‘We think of nature as one thing, while before modernity they thought in terms of Creation, where everything is held together by God.’
I asked, ‘What do you mean?’
‘When they talk of Natura, in the Middle Ages, they think of her like a goddess, the immanent presence for God’s creation, if you like. It is a shaping power rather than just a thing.’
‘And fairies are part of it?’
At this, John chuckled. ‘It seems like in every culture they have this sense that there are other beings within nature, call them fairies or whatever, beings clearly distinct from God. Why is that? Even today, we still have people who report these things in the United Kingdom, and it would be the same if we looked at Italy, or Siberia, or anywhere else.’ John was clearly passionate about the topic; I could almost imagine his voice to be that of a medieval cleric called in to deal with these meddlesome creatures. ‘The question we must ask is, is that because people who are closer to nature have an awareness that it is animated? Are they alert, or deluded? Do these things not exist, or have many people simply lost a certain sensibility? Why is it that in the past people almost took it for granted that there were these wonderful creatures, and we don’t do that any more?’
‘What do you think?’ I asked.
He measured his words carefully before replying. ‘I have a suspicion,’ he said, ‘that we can’t ignore all these reports. Also, a suspicion that we have lost an ability to be aware of certain things. People felt that nature was alive, it was animate, and probably people were aware of more things, in nature, than we are now. Social scientists have come up with all sorts of incredibly convoluted explanations for why people thought these things, but I don’t think that those who lived in the past were stupid, I don’t think they were self-deluded. They had categories like unreal or pretend: they knew this stuff.’ John did not speak as a rival to fairies: to my ears it sounded as if old enemies were striking a truce against the rising tides of disenchantment.
The idea that nature has a soul, held together by God if you are Christian, or by some other principle if you are not, is very old and very widespread. As we found while looking for our fourth key, it is only with the Scientific Revolution in the West in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that we became convinced that the universe was a kind of watch.
Once you swap grids for stories and you start looking at the wild through a new set of eyes, there is a chance that you might peer into something truly exotic, and also that something truly exotic might peer back at you. And yes, I understand – fairies might be too exotic for comfort.
What about aliens, then?
*
Joe Simonton was sixty, and as far as we know he led a peaceful life in his home on the Eagle River, Wisconsin, where he farmed chickens. Late in the morning of 18 April 1961, he was lounging around his house, when he heard a noise. He went outside to discover that a chrome-coloured flying saucer had landed in his back yard.
A door opened in the saucer to reveal three men, who, Simonton would swear later, looked Italian. One of them even had a black suit. They were dark-haired and dark-skinned (as is the case with many of us from southern Italy), and they were thirsty. One of them was holding a jug, and through gestures, he made Joe understand that they would like some water.
Joe believed in hospitality, whatever the circumstances. He went back inside with the jug, and when he got back to the yard, he found that the three Italians from outer space had crowded around a kind of barbecue. They had not invaded his garden: politely, they were grilling inside their ship, on a flameless fire. Simonton gave them the water and asked for some of their food. I think he was more curious than hungry. Fair is fair: the Italians gave him three or four (here sources disagree) of the pancakes they were making. Then they closed the door and their ship took off, never to be seen again.
Joe ate one of the pancakes, but didn’t like it much (he said it ‘tasted like cardboard’). He then called the US Air Force, who – this being the early 1960s, a time of jittery obsession with flying saucers, fuelled by Cold War paranoia – decided to investigate. Experienced investigators talked to Joe and found him trustworthy. He was sincere, convinced of what he said, and besides, he had nothing to gain from inventing a UFO story, certainly not one so outlandish: when you make up a story that you want people to believe, you are better off glossing over smartly dressed Italians from outer space.
The Air Force sent one of the uneaten pancakes to the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Analysis revealed it to be made of ‘hydrogenated fat, starch, buckwheat hulls, soya bean hulls, wheat bran’. In other words, it was a pancake. To hammer the last nail in the UFO coffin, ‘bacteria and radiation readings were normal for this material’.6