Tag: fairies

Pixie Problems, or Working Things Out with the ‘Cousins’ (3)

On By Chas S. Clifton4 Comments
If these are what the “cousins” want, then they can have them.

Part 1 Here

Part 2 Here

Skittles to me are M&M’s low-rent relative, and Gummi Worms look like they should be threaded onto a lead-head jig and used to catch largemouth bass — except the fish might just spit them out. (I am sure that someone has tried.)  But per Byron Ballard’s advice, “the cousins” get them every new Moon. And sometimes a demitasse of coffee or a shot of bourbon.

I wrote to her in early March,

After I sent you the photo of the snail of shiny things and the plate of candy, it did indeed snow, snow that is just starting to melt now.  I looked out the back door this morning, and the plate was off the backside of the retaining wall,
lying on the ground.

When I checked, yes indeed, fox tracks.

The fox apparently prefers Skittles to Gummi Worms.

Do you depend on woodland creatures to remove the offerings after Those Critters have presumably sampled  their essence?

So somewhere there was gray or red fox with a sugar rush. Byron replied,

Poor fox! Yes, generally critters take the food away or it composts itself.

What do they want? Hmmm. My best guess is they want attention, they want a relationship and they want to be entertained and amused.  Just like us.

Anne Johnson commented, “I don’t leave much candy, preferring to eat it myself, but I fling every kind of shiny object at those lil’ cousins. For awhile I’ve had peace in my household.”

Our household too has been more peaceful, but there are still oddities. When we went to Texas for a week in early April, I took down the birdfeeders because the bears were waking up, and a bear would happily smash the feeder to get the sunflower seeds. One feeder hung by a short length of shiny chain. When we came back, the chain was gone. It was too heavy for any but a big bird, and why would a mammal (raccoon? gray fox?) climb up and get a steel chain? Foxes are notorious for stealing things like teddy bears and dog toys, but steel chain? Oh well.

In his chapter on “Offerings” in Six Ways: Approaches & Entries for Practical Magic, Aidan Wachter writes,

Some spirits I have worked with also like tea, coffee, and some like milk. I think the best way to proceed is by following the hints the spirits give and then seeing what happens. Some spirits are decidedly into alcohol and tobacco, some find these offensive. If you like, you can sit with the pendulum or cards and ask questions as to what might be a good offering.

I think the most direct way to think of offerings is as offering nourishment or food. Sometimes this is outright food, and many I know who bake, bake for the spirits. I tend to give offerings of unbroken eggs, tortillas, chili sauce, fruit, flowers.

It is a good to consider candles as food for the spirits as well. Candles are a solid energy source (wax, but this is also true to oil in oil lamps or even wood for a fire) that is largely consumed by burning. As it is consumed, it is transformed from solid matter into heat, smoke, ash, and carbon. This transmutation allows and spirits and powers to feed on these energies and their subtle nature (p. 80).

Six Ways has more content in 167 pages than a whole shelf of typical Craft books. I recommend it unreservedly. Wachter, however, is writing about more than just household “pixies” here. So in the next post I might set one foot into the swamp of faerie taxonomy.

Continue to Part 4

Pixie Problems, or Working Things Out with the ‘Cousins’ (2)

On By Chas S. Clifton6 Comments
The snail with a few shiny things and a candle to get their attention.

Part 1 here

Anne Johnson responded promptly. Since the shrine is a minute’s walk from the house, she suggested putting out more shiny objects closer in.

I repurposed an odd birdfeeder shaped like a snail into a pixie-feeder (trap?). I put some shiny things in it (some broken silver spoons, a singleton silver earring) in it and sat it on a retaining wall outside the back door. Since this was in December, it kept getting snowed on.

Then she referred me to a specialist, Byron Ballard, the “village witch” of Asheville, North Carolina. As it happened, I had met Byron in person, so I felt OK about writing to her. Here is part of my email to her (spoiler: more things disappear):

Oh, and recently a carabiner with keys to the “bear boxes” on several scout cameras that I keep up in the national forest disappeared.

When I opened my toiletries bag during last week’s campout, there were the keys. Now there could be a naturalistic explanation: last December we took Amtrak to Virginia to visit M’s brother and other East Coast relatives who came to his house near Charlottesville for a few days.

It could be that I put those keys in my pocket when I replaced batteries in the security camera at the guest cabin (about 100 yards from our house), then ended up taking them on the train.

Finding them in my pocket, I would have put them in the toiletries kit, along with my house/car keys, just to empty my pockets during the trip.
Then I never used the toiletries kit again until last weekend.

I was sitting in this tent, three hours’ drive and a little distance on skis away from home, when I found the one set of keys.

BUT . . . there were *two* sets of keys to the bear box padlocks, and both disappeared. I now have one, which is great. I don’t have to hike out with big bolt cutters and take off the old locks.

It is POSSIBLE that I moved the second set of keys, but I checked the two places where I store spare keys, and they were not there.

Byron, whose classes at festivals, etc. include one called “Little Altars Everywhere,” responded with a long, humorous email, of which this was part:

The problem is likely caused by the spirit folk I call the Cousins, who are generally benevolent but frequently mischievous. My suggestions are these:

Feed them outside your house. Contrary to received knowledge, these folks like strong coffee and hideous candy. Think of the sort of artificial color/flavor candies like Swedish Fish and neon gummi worms.  If it catches your eye but you probably wouldn’t eat it, they will love it. Skittles work but I go for amusing shapes–gummi fried eggs or circus peanuts or root beer barrels.

Feed them near where your “shinies” are.  If you have dogs, you can bury the candy. Or put it high up where your dogs can’t reach it.

Do this for several days and I think you will be rewarded with an atmospheric condition I which the air and the energy around the feeding area feels like champagne bubbles.  Fizzy and bright.

After the initial introduction, you can cut back on the feeding to once a month. I do it on the new Moon so I can keep track of it.

If you are offering a drink, which I recommend, find a beautiful little glass or cup to leave it in.  You have already discovered that they like to go into things.  Like cats, they are often “gozindas” (goes into) or “gozondas (goes onto). They appreciate small boxes–round ones like oatmeal boxes are the favorites of my folks.

You are basically bribing them to behave the way you want so that when they slip and steal the corkscrew, you can go out to the feeding site with one bright Skittle and tell them they can have more when the corkscrew is returned.  The important thing to remember is they are not malicious, only curious and enthusiastic.

Soon I was at a Target store down in Pueblo with a shopping list:

  • Water filter
  • 4-foot extension cord
  • Skittles or ?

I did not even know exactly what Skittles were, but I found them —and Gummi Worms — in the candy aisle soon enough.

Read Part 3 Here

Pixie Problems, or Working Things Out with the ‘Cousins’ (1)

On By Chas S. Clifton5 Comments
Lonely Norwegian spoon.

It all started with a fork, an antler-handled serving fork of clean Scandinavian design, part of a spoon & fork set that my parents bought while visiting Norway in the early 1990s and later gave to M. and me at Christmas. We liked them and used them nightly for salads and other dishes.

Then after several years the fork disappeared. Our house is not large—a little under 1,000 sq. ft. on the main level —and we looked all over the kitchen and adjacent living/dining room, — pulling out drawers, furniture, and appliances — but never found it. Things happen.

I don’t do a lot of how-to Pagan writing. When it comes to magick-working, I hold with the “keep silent” part of the “magician’s (or witch’s) pyramid.” But I wanted to share this story, which is not over yet, in case anyone gains anything from reading it. I expect it to spread over three or four blog posts.

So the fork was gone and time passed, and then “they” decided to step up their game early this past winter. I say “they” because there seemed to be deliberate mischief in what was happening. Read on.

We usually drink wine with dinner, so we have — had — this particular corkscrew for years. That evening, I could not find, neither in its drawer nor on the dining table. I just shook my head and pulled out my Swiss Army knife, which has a corkscrew. Problem solved.

That corkscrew, incidentally, is still missing, five months later.

Then last Friday, she went looking for a little plastic dish with a lid (think very small leftover dish, a quarter-cup capacity) that she uses when taking her own homemade almond butter to the coffeehouse to put on bagels. She has used this particular dish for several years, because she can slip it into a purse. It should have been in the dish rack. It was not. We both looked. I cleared the dish rack of clean dishes.

The next day, there was the lid — only the lid — lying in the center of the dish rack.

She had laughed when I blamed “the pixies” for the missing corkscrew. Now she was not laughing.

The bottom of the dish showed a couple of days later — in a cupboard of empty jars and storage containers — inside another lidded container.

And then the lid disappeared again, and M. found it in the pages of a magazine on the living room floor.

Pagan blogger Anne Johnson — in the sidebar as The Gods Are Bored — writes about the fairies now and then, and she and I are keypals sharing common interests in blogging and vultures, so I wrote to her with the story that I have given here.

She had blogged earlier about putting out shiny things for them, and in fact, I had put some old pieces of jewelry etc. on the outdoor shrine altar, whereupon they promptly disappeared.

Yet something more was needed. What did “they” want?

Read Part 2 here

UFOs, Bigfoot, and Economic Development in the Coal Camps

On By Chas S. Clifton1 Comment
Some Rockvale residents are not too welcoming.

Three little towns in Fremont County, Colo., are referred to collectively as “the coal camps.” Rockvale, Coal Creek, and Williamsburg all housed coal miners of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I don’t know when their populations originally peaked — maybe in the 1920s.

They had a reputation for insularity, partly due to ethnic and language issues. Many of the miners were Italian or Slovenian or of other Eastern European origin. Meanwhile the county seat, Cañon City, was a stronghold of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan—the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic incarnation of the KKK. You can see how there might have been some conflict.

When M. and I lived in Fremont County in the late 1980s, these three town could almost have been called “ghost towns.” With house prices low there, we considered buying in Rockvale or Coal Creek, but unlike Cañon City with its several irrigation systems serving town lots, small orchards, and truck farms, the coal camps were bone dry, not good for gardeners at all.((The word “truck” in “truck farms” does not refer to the transportation truck, which is derived from Latin for wheel, but rather from the old north French word troquer, which means “barter” or “exchange”. The use for vegetables raised for market can be traced back to 1784 and truck farms to 1866. [Wikipedia]))

In my mind, inhabitants of Rockvale, for instance, were either old Italian ladies — widows of the aforesaid coal miners — or people with a front yard full of old cars and motorcycle parts, several pit bulls, a couple of pickup trucks and a Harley, and a general attitude of “Leave me the **** alone.”

Plus one real talented sculptor whom we knew. Mixed in there were some people who just found the coal towns to be a cheap place to live, as we almost did.

And some of them are fans of “the unexplained.”  Earlier this month, local newspapers reported an upcoming three evenings of story-swapping devoted to UFO (July), ghosts (August), and Bigfoot (September).

These hair-raising events are sponsored by the Rockvale Development Committee, which was formed in February 2018 to help the town recover from recent setbacks. The focus of the Rockvale Development Committee is to raise funds while providing positive community building events and experiences.

At $5 admission, they raised about $100 from a group of middle-aged to elderly locals, plus three teenagers, sitting on folding chairs in the tiny community building. Stories were swapped, and some of them were good ones — in other words, they defy rational explanation.((I have had one literal “unidentified flying object” experience, and I was able to explain it rationally, but it took me a couple of years to duplicate the original circumstance.))

One that did not involve “flying objects” struck me as highly strange. The speaker had been a teenager in the late 1960s, living in mostly agricultural Weld County in northern Colorado. One winter evening at dusk he was walking from a neighbor’s house back to his family’s farm, a route he took often. He passed an irrigation canal with a concrete-block pump house beside it as he turned onto a little dirt road. There was a car parked by the pump house — he thought it looked like a black mid-1960s Ford Mustang, with someone in the driver’s seat.

As he walked past and behind the car, he said, he looked at its interior from the rear. The interior was full of many sparkling multi-colored lights, far beyond the usual dashboard display for a Sixties car. This strange sight frightened him, and he started running

Then his cousin came along in his truck and offered him a ride. Their conversation was something like this:

Speaker: Did you go by the pump house?

Cousin: Yeah.

Speaker: Did you see a car parked there?

Cousin: I didn’t see any car.

Meanwhile people traded truisms like “There’s so much that can’t be explained in this world” or “Some talk about it, some don’t” or “The Indians saw a lot more than we do” or “There’s millions of planets out there.”

But here is what bothers me, as an orthodox Jacques Vallée-ian, is that people hold only one or two hypotheses.

  1. The “visitors” are from another solar system, flying here in physical spaceships.
  2. The so-called spaceships are actually secret military experiments.((This group had no problem with secret military experiments, as long as the taxpayers get their money’s worth.))

Both hypotheses are mechanistic. But consider what Vallée was writing years ago (via Wikipedia):

By 1969, Vallée’s conclusions had changed, and he publicly stated that the ETH was too narrow and ignored too much data. Vallée began exploring the commonalities between UFOs, cults, religious movements, demons, angels, ghosts, cryptid sightings, and psychic phenomena. Speculation about these potential links were first detailed in Vallée’s third UFO book, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers.

As an alternative to the extraterrestrial visitation hypothesis, Vallée has suggested a multidimensional visitation hypothesis. This hypothesis represents an extension of the ETH where the alleged extraterrestrials could be potentially from anywhere. The entities could be multidimensional beyond space-time, and thus could coexist with humans, yet remain undetected.

When we get to the ghosts and Bigfoot events, will people make these links?

Rockvale may have some hostile residents, but it has no monster — nothing along the lines of Nessie, Mothman, or the Jersey Devil. Towns that do have monsters can use them for economic development, just like a saint’s grave or the temple of a god.

“A Search for Mysteries and Monsters in Small Town America: How Monster Festivals Became American Pilgrimage Sites,” an article on Smithsonian.com by religion scholar Joseph Laycock, connects sightings with the human hunger for mystery.

Many find legends like the Lizard Man [of Bishopville, South Carolina] enthralling. But some become obsessed, longing to know more about something both mysterious and frightening. In these monster hunters, I see elements of religion. . . . Here I see another connection to religious traditions. Pilgrimage has always been an economic phenomenon, and many medieval towns depended on stories of local miracles to draw pilgrims. By inviting in the cryptozoology tribe, today’s small towns are celebrating aspects of local culture that were once pushed to the periphery or mocked. But like the medieval towns of the past, their local economies are getting a nice little boost, too.

Read the whole thing. And keep looking up.

In the Land of Fairy, Don’t Eat the Pentagram Pizza

On By Chas S. Clifton

You have heard that advice, right? Don’t eat the food that the Good Neighbors — or however you want to describe those beings whose reality intersects ours — might offer you, or you might be there with them a very very long time.

In Morgan Daimler’s view of the Fairy cities of today, there might be some tempting restaurants. Hmm.

“Modern Fairyland, or Experiencing the Otherworld as a 21st Century City”

It is true that modern pagans seem prone to describing and viewing Fairy through a primitive lens. When people talk about experiences there they are usually couched in terms of wilderness and wild places or occasionally of settings that may be described as historic such as castles or cottages. And that is not to say that these places can’t be found in Fairy just as we can find these places in our own world, because they certainly do exist both here and there. But there is a definite and noticeable favoring of the sorts of Otherworldly scenery that correlates with the places in our own world people tend to say we are most likely to find Themselves as well. Many pagans talk of Fairy as if it were one vast forest or Europe stuck in medieval times.

In the middle of grieving the effects of gentrification on her street, Anne Johnson gives some thought to the Faeries: “Faeries aka Fairies Are Real.”

So you say, “What do faeries look like?” And I answer, “What have you got?” There are as many varieties of faerie as there are of biological life in the apparent world. Some faeries are human shaped and sized, some are tiny, some look like animals, some like birds, and some are just beams of light. Be careful if you make eye contact, because they like to distract. And whatever you do, show them respect. Even the “critter” ones. Call them “Ladies and Gentlemen,” or “your majesties.”

Related: John Beckett talks about different modes of experiencing the Otherworld here:

Once you’re there, stick to your plan. Not every Otherworldly resident is your friend. Some will try to distract you or co-opt you. Some may try to eat you. Go directly where you intend to go, and don’t trust anyone you don’t know. When you’re done, come back promptly.

Letter from Hardscrabble Creek is not one of the Pagan blogs that he recommends, so if you are reading this, you must have wandered into the woods.

True Fact: There are more than twenty blog posts with the tag “Pentagram Pizza.” Enough weirdness to save in the refrigerator overnight and eat for breakfast! Just click on the tag “pentagram pizza” below.

I’m Here to Fill your Krampus-tide Stocking

On By Chas S. Clifton2 Comments
Don’t forget to leave a penny for Krampus! (Maine State Museum).

Krampus likes lots of odd, pointy, and weird things, so let’s go . . . .

• Was a genuine 11th-century Norse penny found in Maine dropped by a Norse explorer, or is it part of a long-time hoax? But would   “Egil Ketilson” have been carrying money? Where was he going to spend it, Skraeling-Mart?

• The initiates of Mithras also kept their secrets well. But they left some buildings, and people try to figure out the religion from those.

• “I realized that if I designed my metal band, it would definitely be a pagan feminist folkcore band, which is a Swedish/Norwegian style of metal music. It’s really ambient and loud even though it’s not using as much electricity-style [sic] instruments. I realized that I didn’t know anything about paganism. I was grabbing onto it because it seemed logical for this brand of metal. Slowly, over the years, I started researching goddesses and figuring out that in paganism there is a lot of mathematics and numerology. That instantly peaked [sic] my curiosity because I like working with numbers.”

Being avante-garde these days is such a lot of work.  And you have to learn about runes and electricity and stuff. (Does anyone still say “avante-garde”?)

• “Your eyes appear to have a magical power all of their own”? “You operate at a lower body temperature than the people around you.” You might be descended from Fairies.  Yeah, sure, tell it to Krampus.

More Confirmation about Bigfoot

On By Chas S. Clifton

I read this article in the Colorado Springs Independent and a paragraph jumped out at me:

She learned about her [Nepalese] people’s animistic prayer traditions, and had shamans explain to her that yeti aren’t the silly abominable snowmen of cartoon legend, but actually shape-shifters and guardians of the mountains. At their urging, Lepcha now carries ginger in her pocket while traveling, so the yeti won’t disturb her.

Shape-shifters. Part of the faery folk, and not necessarily our friends, as I have suggested before — also here). That is why I think that people who go out in the woods and look for “tree structures” are doing it wrong, although I am sure they have a great time.

On the other hand, although “ghost” is an odd choice of words, these people might be on to something (link to YouTube video).

How Do You Feel about Faeries?

On By Chas S. Clifton
Prof. Magliocco
Prof. Magliocco

NOTE: The survey is now closed. Prof. Magliocco received more than 500 responses quickly, and they exceeded the number that the university’s Institutional Review Board “allowed.”
From Sabina Maglicco at California State University, Northridge, comes this request for help with a survey:

My latest project involves research into the lore of fairies, fae, sidhe, and similar beings from a variety of cultural traditions in contemporary Paganisms.  I’ve posted a survey at the link below; please feel free to take it and share with other like-minded individuals. Respondents must be 18 years of age or older, and identify as practitioners of one of the modern Pagan religions.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Fairies_in_Contemp_Paganisms

I can endorse the quality of her work—she is also the author of Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America as well as an article, “Who Was Aradia: The History and Development of a Legend” and numerous reviews in The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies.

Fairies Infest British Woodland, Control Measures Planned

On By Chas S. Clifton

From the BBC:

Hundreds of fairy doors have been attached to the bases of trees in Wayford Woods, Crewkerne.

It is claimed the doors have been installed by local people so children can “leave messages for the fairies”.

Can something be too twee? Yes, it can. And remember, fairies are not always your friends.

Why “Aliens” Might Be Invisible

On By Chas S. Clifton5 Comments

Magonia, the review blog of esoteric books (0r should that be, books on esoterica?), recently revisited two books on Unidentified Flying Objects from the 1950s by Morris K. Jessup, the first writer, they say, to use the term “UFO” in a commercial publication.

Ah, those were the days, I take it, when the assumed evidence for the reality of alien spacecraft was growing steadily. Soon we would know the truth! Governments would be forced to admit that there was Someone Else! Perhaps a disk-shaped spacecraft would float down onto the White House lawn — or in Red Square, why not? — and a being would step out, proclaiming, “We come in peace.”

Or, conversely, the aliens would not be peaceful, and Earth would have to put aside its wars and rivalries to unite in a battle to save humanity. We have all seen book and movie versions of these possible scenarios, going back to War of the Worlds in 1897, at least.

Astronomers have now found — by calculation if not direct observation — many planets that orbit their suns not too close and not too far — the habitable zone — and which, therefore, could possibly contain life “as we know it.”

But getting there is the thing. With our chemically fueled rockets, which are limited in size, even a trip to Mars would take half a year or more. And right now, that would be a one-way trip — although some people are still volunteering. It did not take so much fuel for astronauts to escape the Moon, but Mars would require quite a bit more.

“Hyperdrive” and “warp drive” are science-fiction plot devices, not technology that is anywhere in sight.

So when it comes to actual physical aliens visiting us, I see only two possibilities:

1. They travel slower than the speed of light, which means that they either have incredibly long lifespans or that they have learned to  “hibernate” while traveling for many years.

2. They travel faster than the speed of light using a sort of “hyperdrive.” But if they can do that, what else can they do?

They would have no need to land a spaceship on the edge of town, leaving scorched spots on the ground, drop a ladder, and climb down wearing silvery suits, looking for someone to put on their operating table and probe.

Instead, their technology would so far ahead of ours that it would seem invisible to us. And so might they. We would not even know that we had been observed.

That blog’s name, Magonia, pays homage, I am sure, to French astronomer Jacques Vallée and to the name of a land in the clouds., taken from a medieval French tale. Vallée borrowed the name when he wrote Passport to Magonia, introducing his “interdimensional hypothesis.”

Briefly, it states that the Visitors/Fairies/aliens etc. are not from Out There but from In Here, “visitations from other ‘realities’ or ‘dimensions’ that coexist separately alongside our own.”

Maybe they live in Icelandic boulders, or as someone in a dream once told me, “inside the walls.” Either way, they should not be disturbed. Contact with them can be extremely upsetting.

This idea has long made more sense to me than the idea of physical “flying saucers” coming chug-chug-chug through interstellar space. Now you see them, now you don’t.