For those of you who were hoping for proof of an alien visitation, this is a disappointing end to the story. For those of you who know UFO stories to be a pile of hokum, it’s nice to be vindicated. But in both cases, if you will forgive me for saying so, you are making a curious assumption: that you know for a fact the ingredients of an extraterrestrial pancake.
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The world – and the British Isles especially – is rich in different types of fairy. To name but a sprinkling, there are elves, brownies, boggarts, hobs and pixies, from traditions and places as far removed as Germanic folklore, the Anglo-Scottish border and the bleak moorlands of Devon and Cornwall.
Modern folklorists have created meticulous taxonomies that distinguish between a pixie and a brownie, a boggart and an elf, establishing what is what and who is who in Faerie. Such taxonomies are fascinating to read, but a taxonomy is still a taxonomy, and detailed lists of names and descriptions won’t take us to Faerie.
In the golden days of the fairy faith, people would not put fairies into neat categories. A boggart was a bit like an elf who was a bit like a demon, and by the way, fairies were not easily distinguished from the dead: the boundaries were ever-shifting.
It seems bizarre to use a ‘scientific’ procedure to understand something that could never belong to science in any sense. We tend to believe that if something is real, then we can measure and classify it, and on the other hand, if we cannot measure and classify something, then that thing does not exist. Those who want fairies to be real, classify them; those who don’t, point at the impossibility of classification as another good reason for cynicism. Both approaches speak of fairies with the language of modernity – i.e. logic and reason. But this is not the language spoken in Faerie.
The adventure of Joe Simonton, he of the extraterrestrial pancakes, is described in Passport to Magonia, a book by Jacques Vallée, French-born computer scientist and astronomer-turned-ufologist. Though Vallée has impeccable scientific credentials (he was among those who worked on the first digital map of Mars), his ideas about UFOs are even stranger than you might expect. Aliens, he noted, act a lot like fairies do: in the case of Mr Simonton, for example, they exchanged food, a fairly common occurrence with the Good People.
Vallée thinks that fairies and aliens are different manifestations of the same something. It takes different shapes, depending on the people that it is interacting with. This mutable, shape-shifting character is nicely in line with the fairy lore we have been handed down, where fixed classifications did not exist. Once upon a time this something would take the form of a lady riding through a wild landscape, while in our technologically advanced society, where horses are out and technology is in, it takes the form of technologically advanced beings. Vallée published Passport in 1969, a heady time for psychedelic theories. The book became a subcultural classic, and it has been making ripples ever since.
An English writer, Patrick Harpur, put forward an even dreamier take on Vallée’s ideas in his strange masterpiece Daimonic Reality.
Harpur, like John Milbank, is convinced that nature is spiritual. They both draw on the idea that our world has a soul, a spiritus mundi. For Harpur, there are some enigmatic intermediaries between soul and matter, between the spiritus mundi and us. We have been calling them fairies, aliens and whatnot; he gathers them all under the umbrella term of daimon.
With daimons, any classification is doomed. Daimons can take the shape of a boggart, a brownie, a phantom black cat, an alien, and we will never be able to explain them or fully understand them, but we can ‘mull them over, mythologize, in the hope of making some sense of them’.7 Spirit is matter, matter is spirit, nature is us, we are nature.
Heady stuff. Milbank, Vallée, Harpur, they are all saying, albeit in very different ways, that there is something out there, a mysterious something we call ‘fairies’ for want of a better term.
That something is the custodian of our fifth key. But don’t worry – you will not need to believe that it is real in order to snatch the key from its clutches.
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I heard of someone who danced with fairies in Somerset, on a midsummer night. This story comes from Simon Young’s Fairy Census, and this time, it is a story that is very easy to believe. It happened at a festival, in a field in which people were drumming and dancing.
Two women appeared whom nobody had seen before. There was something about them. It was partly that they were very beautiful, but it was more than that. Their dance was hypnotic – they moved in ways that were entirely human, yet also not so. They did not invite anyone to join their dance, but nor did they create a barrier around themselves. They were happy in their own world.
As if in response to their dance, the drumming became louder and faster, and as if in answer to the drumming, a third figure appeared, a goblin. The women greeted his arrival with cries of delight. He started dancing with them, in a manner more forceful than theirs, but just as happy.
And then a fourth creature came.
Years later, our witness could only call it ‘the mudman’. This creature did not have any features to speak of: he was, our witness said, ‘just a vaguely humanoid flowing mass of soil, rock, and mud’.8 The women and the goblin cheered the mudman, dancing frenziedly around him. The mudman was an ancient, ancestral being – this much was clear.
And so it went on, the four creatures frolicking to human music, people moving around them, the drums beating their rhythms all through the night until dawn. But as the first rays of sunlight appeared, the quartet was nowhere to be seen, gone with the moon and the stars.
I said this story is easy to believe. The young man freely admits he had eaten seeds of the plant morning glory (Ipomoea violacea), which have a hallucinogenic effect. We can be quite sure that his friends had partaken of the same seeds. So now we understand why they saw the fairy women, and the goblin, and the mudman – don’t we?
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What you call ‘reality’ is, at the end of the day, neurochemistry: everything that exists, exists only, from your point of view, as a sophisticated network of chemical reactions and electric impulses within your body. When you die, that network stops functioning and ‘reality’ ceases to exist for you (there might be a different form of life after death, of course: we just don’t know). Drugs are chemicals that you temporarily add to the chemicals you already have in circulation. By changing the composition of your chemicals, you change your perception, and thus your reality.
It does not make any sense to say that an ‘altered’ neurochemistry shows us a ‘wrong’ reality. As far as we know, evolution has been driven by chance: it is only by chance that the chemicals in your body work the way they work. By messing with them, we are not doing anything that nature has not been doing since the Big Bang.
It is sensible to say the Somerset party-goer met fairies because he was stoned, but we shouldn’t infer from this that fairies are ‘only’ a hallucination. What if the chemicals had made his perceptions better, rather than worse? Or just different? Maybe the fairies had always been there, and the seeds of morning glory allowed the party-goer to see them at last.
If you resolutely do not believe in fairies, this idea might be hard to accept, in part because of something called Illusory Superiority bias. In a famous experiment, a group of American and Swedish students were asked to rate their driving skills: 93 per cent of the Americans and 69 per cent of the Swedes said that they drove better than average. The irony is there for all to see. But don’t laugh too loud, because you and I are just like those students. The bias that makes you think you are better than average is the Illusory Superiority bias. Like bacteria in our gut, we all have it.