When someone asks if you believe in faeries, but in a judgey way!
Let's begin by asking not if faeries exist, but of what substance they are, and what role they play in a conscious, living world. Faeries are real, or we wouldn't be speaking about them, but to see them you need to believe in them. To believe in faeries, you need to relax your definition of what's real and what isn't, and let more light into your vision of reality.
Do you believe in faeries? I always get asked this question. I realise it is often a trick question put to those who are 'into magick', which I suspect is something of a litmus test of whether, or not, you are to be taken seriously as a person. But it’s also one of my favourite questions, because it gets straight to the heart of the problem of ‘belief’, which has plagued, conditioned and spurred human consciousness since the dawn of civilisation.
Whether I manage a convincing answer depends on who’s asking. If I sense you are a kindred, I find it much easier to open up and elucidate, which often results in an enriching exchange of ideas and experiences. But if I sense a closedness where there could otherwise be openness, i.e., a disdain for what isn’t scientifically proven, then I can struggle to find the ramp to jump from, and take that trusting leap into the unknown.
Being and participating in everyday reality, you might agree, is like walking a tightrope between what is real and what isn’t. We are required to move forward in life with reliance and trust, i.e., with faith that what we’re doing and thinking is right and good. We must endure many things in the face of doubt; we accept certain things are true… believe in facts, even when we don’t have faith in them. This problem of belief has given us magic, science and religion, three pillars of thought which each arose to solve the mysteries of being, and offer up notions of what we ought to believe in. From religion, we received God; from science, we received material reality; from magic, we received faeries!
We understand that faeries are just one type of entity among a myriad of unseen, animistic and anthropomorphised aspects of nature, such as angels, elves and daemons. When I think about it, for me, at least, magic is more a matter of ‘faith’ and ‘practice’ than belief. Magical practice has the end of transforming the self and what is possible in one’s lifetime, by intentionally working to deepen, enrich, empower and enhance our interactions and experiences with the anima mundi (the world spirit). Faith is merely instrumental to the practice, and belief may come as a result, but neither is the end goal. This important difference sets magic apart from both science and religion, which both place a higher value on belief and truth as an end goal of their respective practices.
As part of my magical practice, I accept the concept of spirit, I participate in the myth and stories of faeries, evoking what they represent, as spirits of the ether which animate, transmit and transmute life force. I entrust the fairies with my hopes and fears, and secret desires, which I trust they deliver into the spirit world, where I trust God-like entities exist and the magic of creation happens. In this way, the faeries are a device I use to align myself with seasonal occurrences and harness the associated natural energies. I have a faith in the faery magic I practice and create.
This doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the realness of faeries, that I’m just conjuring them in my imagination for some delusional or superficial reaction. I conjure faeries through my interactions with aspects of the natural world they categorically belong to, by stimulating and inspiring my imagination and other faculties through my senses. I also have faith that faery magic leads to the enrichment and transcendence I desire, connecting me with phenomena greater and more meaningful than just a set of common emotional and biological experiences. A belief in faeries holds the cure to existential dread and other anxieties about purpose, meaning and mortal existence.
I would say to the one who asks, that I believe in faeries, as well as countless other spirits. If we can just relax our fears and assumptions about belief and truth, and allow ourselves to not be so fundamental about things having to be real, in a material sense, to be believed. Neither do you need to suppress your basic common sense about how the world works to find that faeries are easy to perceive and believe in. It's a matter of subjective truth, which just happens to range much further than the individual to have far reaching effects in culture and civilisation.
In our dreams, experiences and visions we may encounter inter-dimensional beings that are earthbound, who allow us to perceive spectral fractions of the anima mundi and its mechanisms. It is not supernatural, it’s just natural. Perceiving is not the same as seeing through just your eyes. Rather it’s a primeval knowing that is activated when more than one sensory experience is engaged at a certain time and place, and under certain conditions, resulting in a special kind of experience that is too often ineffable and unexplainable, but universally knowable.
I also accept the idea that we have been capturing the faery realm in imagery, patterns, musical rhythm, lyrics, stories, archetypes and symbols that play out in culture, manifested through consciousness. These ‘sightings’ are just fragments of one vast connected and wondrous unending tapestry, which makes up the soul of the living world.