Little People

I have to confess to never having seen a fairy, pixie or gnome. When I was 5 or 6 years old however and living in the Park Cities, I firmly believed in them. We lived in a rented house next to a park with a duck pond, a wonderful place to grow up, and our back yard abutted on the park. I would go walking through the park looking for duck eggs to throw around. Anyway, near the fence abutting the park we had a tool shed of some sort, and a gap between the shed and the fence, and in this vicinity I was sure lived little people of some sort. I never saw them, perhaps never even visualized them as people-like exactly, but I was sure that they were there, that I liked them, and was pretty sure they liked me. This was in contrast to the gnomelike beings who lived in the house, who I didn't care for and I often accused of stealing my toys. Again I never saw them, but I was sure that tiny malevolent beings were responsible for the unexplained absence of my things. Having two younger brothers, it is entirely possible that tiny malevolent beings WERE responsible. ;)

Little people are one of those universal constants found in the mythology of people around the world, from Native Americans, Irish and Greeks to the Philippines, Indonesia and the Hawaiian Islands. Partly, like my missing toys, some of it can be explained by the human tendency to blame others when we misplace our things, or when something breaks. The "gremlins" which were blamed for equipment malfunctions during WWII, and the Dryer Gremlins who we halfheartedly blame for the fact that we only have one of each pair of socks, are other examples. Clearly, having only one sock from each pair wasn't OUR fault, it is some mysterious conspiracy of the cosmos. ;) Small sock-loving black holes distort the space-time continuum to nom on our socks. My mom, who has senile dementia, has poop gremlins. She can pull down her trousers and look at the load in her diapers and then look at me with a perfectly straight face and say, "I didn't do that." ;) Little people clearly were responsible.

Some little people like brownies and hobs are Christianized survivors of old household gods like the Roman lares, the Anglo-Saxon cofgodas, and the Germanic kobold. These in turn evolved mostly from ancestor worship, which was widespread in the neolithic world. The idea is that one's ancestors would look after the hearth and home if you treated them right, which is exactly how brownies, hobs and kobolds were perceived. Treat them right, and they look after you. There was a time, in some places not that long ago, when a seat by the fire was always reserved for such entities. Some, like the Tomte of Scandinavia, are still part of local customs: in the Tomte's case, part of Christmas customs. Others made their homes in mines or on ships at sea, and other places where people lived in dangerous conditions. Others were perceived to be of a definitely wilder sort, and either didn't care for the company of people or were outright dangerous to them. These were most likely survivors of ancient spirits of place, places where you might propitiate the local spirits with offerings but you definitely wouldn't want to meet one. When people became Christianized, they put different names on them: not gods but fairies or spirits. Necks, water spirits, were one: in the Bronze Age in Europe, vast quantities of goods were sacrificed in bogs and fens to the local water deities. These deities however, being at the gate to the Underworld, were to some extent dangerous beings and were often blamed for accidental drownings. With the advent of Christianity, people's thoughts about such beings didn't disappear but took on a less religious aspect or sometimes a demonic aspect.

It is very difficult for us today to place the word "god" on such beings, used as we are to the idea of one omnipotent omnicient immortal god. However in ancient times, even very local and specific gods of specific places were sacrificed to, and nobody thought they were omnicient or omnipotent, or immortal either. Even major gods warred among themselves and could die. In fact, the deaths of gods make up some of the most important stories in ancient mythologies. Marduk vs. Tiamat, Zeus vs. the Titans, and Ragnarok, the future death of the entire Norse pantheon. For the word "god" in pagan or animistic cultures, it might be best to substitute the concept of beings of the Underworld or some other dimension of reality, of varying powers, some of whom might be perceived as fairly important to the functioning of the Universe and others not.

Getting back to little people, walking in nature one often sees things happening, as it were, out of the corner of your eye. Things you might not have a ready explanation for. You may hear music that shouldn't be there and be unable to find its source. You may feel someone is watching you. Things pop out of the ground and go back into the ground before you identify them. Most of these things, like the Dryer Gremlins that steal your socks or the Toy Gremlins that stole my childhood toys, have perfectly prosaic explanations. Fairies, charming though they are, are at least mostly other phenomena misunderstood.

Mostly; I am unwilling to say always. I am agnostic on fairies per se. As much as they are often artifacts of human psychology, they are also pointers to the boundary of the Underworld or Otherworld, a world present but not readily perceived. It is usually called the Underworld because the clearest analogy to it is the soil: the dead go to it and new plant life springs from it. The past is present in it, literally in the form of fossils. It is the hidden part of the present. The future is planted in it as a farmer plants seeds. It is not cut off from the world like the Judeo-Christian heaven, but not readily accessible from the visible and normal world either. As it were, just beyond the corner of your eye. For the ancients, it is where the ancestors lived and continued to inform and feed into (and sometimes on) the world of the living. It's where today's dreams dwell on the way to becoming tomorrow's realities. I usually refer to it as the Dreaming.

Now, am I merely being poetic when I refer to the Underworld? In some form it is a near universal human constant, and people all through history and presumably prehistory did not find it at all difficult to believe. Part of the problem lies in our relatively modern myth of sequential time: that the previously manifest world causally produced the currently manifest world at a different tick of sequential time. So then the past that caused the present is entirely gone, as the future will replace the present, making it entirely gone. Tick, tick, tick: the past is replaced by the present which will be replaced by the next sequential present. This is not however how we experience time. We experience time as a continually morphing present which is never divided into static instants. Since the past has nowhere to go but the present and the future has nowhere to come from except the present, this gives rise to the idea that the world is divided into manifested and unmanifested parts, revealed and hidden parts, and that the past exists in this unmanifested part and the future also arises from this unmanifested part. This view of time was also one of the revelations of some of the phenomenological philosophers like Heidegger: being continually reveals itself and hides itself at the same time, and this continual morphing in the moment is time. So for instance when a Roman made an offering at the Umbilicus Urbis Romae, the symbolic center of ancient Rome and gate to the Underworld, or when an ancient Briton sacrificed to an ancestor, the effect of the offering wasn't viewed as being displaced in time but in place. From the manifest to the unmanifest world, and the commerce would operate in the other direction as well.

Ultimately this idea of the Dreaming or the Underworld will remain alien to most people because this idea of sequential time and sequential causality is hammered so fully into our heads that we literally can't think differently.

While I have never and might never see a fairy (nor do I expect to), in a moment of whimsy I made a little fairy house for them in the back yard, from pieces of bark and stones with pecan shells and acorn shells as furniture. It was a wonderfully ancient-feeling thing to do. I felt that someone 20,000 years ago might have done the same sort of thing. It's the sort of thing I'd like to do more often. A house for unknown little things to perhaps move in and make themselves comfy. ;)