Abstract

Sifting the Cinders of the Cathars

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 10 March 2003

Fairies

Thomas Keightley (The Fairy Mythology, 1880) notes and rejects the idea that Dwarfs were a memory of a short race defeated in the fifth to tenth centuries. They might have been an even earlier memory, of course. Anthropologists think fairies are a folk memory of the small brown megalith builders of Europe, who were displaced into the wild heathlands and moors by the invading Iranians. The Larousse Dictionary of World Folklore, sub voce “fairy”, says that fairies were “conquered peoples forced off their land to a precarious existence in the wild, making occasional surreptious raids” to eke out their frugal supplies. This might be so, but, the direct dealings that humans were said to have had with them in the Middle Ages, including intermarriage, suggests the concept was transferred to living human beings—Cathar refugees. After the twelfth century, and in the witch hunting period, the Christian authorities seem to have identified them as witches. Maureen Duffy, in The Erotic World of Fairy (1972), observes:

Not content with the Albigensian genocide, Lollard hunting, Jew-baiting and wars against the infidel, the Church was about to turn on the rural holders of fairy beliefs…

The Church conceded that angels and demons existed. It conceded that ghosts of the dead who were confined to Purgatory might reappear on earth until God got round to appointing them to their permanent place. The Church was more reluctant about fairies, and they are not considerd among the supernatural entities they permit. For the Church, if fairies did exist, they were demonic, like witches and heretics. A fairy tempting Perceval was turned into a puff of smoke by S Collen’s holy water—a popular theme of latter day vampire movies. Yet they were considered as Christians. Not by the Church, so by whom?

The fairy beliefs can now be seen to have been the same as those of the Albigenses, the people of Albi—the Cathars. Who else could fairies be in Christian Europe other than the heretics driven from their homes in fear? If this is so, how would the name fairy have been given to the Cathar refugees?

The word “fairy”, or rather “fata” in Italian, whence “fada” in Provençal, “hada” in Spanish, and “faée”, “fée”, in French, came into general use about the right time—during the 1200s. The proper meaning of the word “fairy” is from the Latin word “fata”, meaning fate, or “fatae”, Fates. It should not be surprising, then, that the “fada” or “fée” began being supernatural.

The Fates were three female spirits, who controlled everyone’s destiny, even the gods’, and so were perhaps senior or above the gods themselves, in a way, rather like the Persian concept of “arta”. Odin, in the Edda, explains that the three Fates are called Nornir, but there are far more than three of them. They go about in threes because they stand for past, present and future. There are three for each entity, of whatever race they are. It is in this role that fairies are invited to the birth or Christening of infants. They confer on to the child its destiny.

From about the thirteenth century, the word “fée” was increasingly applied to a woman skilled in magic—a witch! So, Keightley thought that the word “fae” came from the verb, “fatare”—itself derived from the word “fata”—meaning “to enchant”. The point of “faerie” was that it was an illusion. The Lady of the Lake’s lake was an illusion. Where the Lady lived was…

…so secret and so concealed, that right difficult was it for anyone to find, for the semblence of the said lake covered it so that it could not be perceived.

In Old French, the Franks being famously lazy speakers, and determined to get rid of superfluous consonants and syllables, “fatare” became “faer” or “féer”, still meaning to enchant, and from that came “fae” or “fay”, meaning an enchanter, and “faerie” and “féerie”, meaning enchantment, then the country of the fairies and its people.

The “fae” was thus an ambiguous being, sometimes thought of as a human woman with magical powers—in the Neapolitan Pentamarone of Giambattista Basile (1637), “fata” and “maga” are interchangeable—and sometimes as a different species, like a goddess or an angel or demon.

Economy of speech, like that of the French, lends itself to confusion, whether accidental or deliberate, by punning. The Old French had another “fay” with a different meaning and etymology. It meant “faith” and came from the Latin “fides”, by the same process of elision. A similar word was “fair”, from the Latin “feria” meaning a holiday, and there was the common French word “faire” meaning to “make” or “do”.

The Cathars were craftsmen, they made and did things, travelled to attend trades fairs to sell their wares, and they also were evangelical, at least originally, travelling in pairs to spread their faith, which was evidently strong. Today, the word “fairy” has been easily transferred to effeminate men, but in the thirteen century, there were several reasons why the Cathars could have been given the name fairy, whether jocularly or unkindly. It seems it stuck, but with the elimination of the heretics, its connexion with them was forgotten, leaving just some of their characteristics as clues.

It is also a strange coincidence, noted by Keightley—bearing in mind that “p” is often changed to “f”—that the Persian word “peri”, means a beautiful airy spirit, much like our fairies. The Persian Zoroastrians had a whole world of airy spirits called “fravashis”, from which the concept of “peris” might have derived (or vice versa). In Persian religion, everyone has a guardian angel or Fravashi (Y 26:4, 55:1) which descends from heaven to earth voluntarily to stand by them throughout their lives. Fravashis preserved order in the creation. As they fly like winged birds, they were represented by a winged disk with the person superimposed. The Persian “Peries” are in constant battle against the evil “Deevs”. Ahuramazda advised Zarathushtra to call them for help when he felt the need (Yt 13:19-20), and without their help the wicked Druj (Lie) would have destroyed both animals and people (Yt 13:12-13). The Fravashi is also the ideal that the soul should strives to emulate. The two merge at death (Y 16:7, 26:7, 26:11, 71:23, Yt 22:39). They live on nothing more than fragrance, reminding us of the Essenes who wanted to offer to God a sweet fragrance rather than a sacrifice.

Fravartish, a Median name in the line of Cyrus, and the name of one of Darius the Great’s opponents is rendered by the Greeks as Phraortes, showing the “v” is pronounced “ou”. In Pahlavi, “fravashi” becomes “fravahr”, rendered in the west as “feroher” or “ferohar”. “Feroher” is also astonishingly close to fairy in sound. Since the suggestion is that fairy is a name of people who followed a primitive Christianity, still much influenced by the Persian origin of Judaism and Mithraism, the links are suggestive, and far from impossible.

In an early northern poem about the biblical Judith and Holofernes dated about 900 AD, the heroine is described as “elf-shining”, taken to mean beautiful, but suggesting that “shining” was an elvish property. So elves sound something like the rays of the sun or sunbeams in Teutonic solar mythology, conceived as the god’s helpers or angels. “Elf” is the Teutonic word for a fairy, and so it came to be used of the Cathars in the same way.

In the fourteenth century, Chaucer used the words “elf” and “fairy” interchangeably. Chaucer and his friend and rival, Gower, were sickened by the corruption of the Church, and Chaucer plainly counterpoises the fairy world and the Church saying there are no more elves, only wandering friars who creep into ladies’ beds. Chaucer also, through the Wyf of Bath, sarcastically says fairies were driven out by the charity and prayers of the friars “thick as motes in a sunbeam”. The fairies driven out are the sunbeam polluted by the friars thick as motes in it, but in fact, the friars were the Church’s weapon against the heretics, and so Chaucer here is associating fairies with heretics.

The word “elf” (“aelvan”, “alvisc”, elvish) was used in Layamon’s Brut, the first English poem after the Norman conquest. In Germany, the creatures that were born of unions of witches and the Devil were called “elben”. Curiously, “alb” or “albi”, reminding us of the Cathars, is a German word for elf. Oberon, the king of the Fairies was originally Alberon in the medieval French romance, Huon de Bourdeaux, where he is the son of Julius Caesar and Morgan la Fay! The author must have been signifying an admixture of Roman and Celtic mythology in this. Celtic Britain was called Alba. The guardian of the Nibelung Hoard, in the Nibelungenlied of the thirteenth century, is Alberich, perhaps the same person. The name means “Elf King”.

Other German names are similar. Alfred is “Elf Counsellor”, and Albert is “Shining Elf”. In German, the word “elf” used in proper names in the form of “alp”, as in Alprecht and Alphart, was changed with the Christianization of the Germans, becoming “engel” (angel), yielding names like Engelrecht and Engelhart. It suggests that angels were considered a suitable Christian substitute for elves, and that elves were therefore thought of in the same way as angels.

Nennius says that the earliest name of Britain, and the one used by Pliny, Alba (Albion), was from Albina, the eldest of the Danaids. The German river Elbe is from the same source (Latin, Albis). It might be the association of Albi and Albion that tempted the troubadours to look to Albion for some of their inspiration, and that led on to the Golden Legend and the Arthurian cycle. Albina is white because she is the Goddess of barley and hence flour. She is another form of the white moon and cereal goddess, Diana.

Curious it is too, that the Cathar pope and the Bogomiles came from the Balkans where there are people called by the Greeks and Latins, Albanians, though it was not their own name for themselves. In Huon of Bordeaux, a reference is made to Prince Florimont of Albania, as the first love of Oberon’s mother, Morgan La Fée. A few hundred years later, she loved Julius Caesar and gave birth to Oberon. A fairy forgotten at the Christening cursed him not to grow after his third year—but promised him great beauty to make up for it—the beginning of the decline in size of the fairies. The other fairies present gave him other wonderful gifts. Here, Albania is obviously the country of the Albs or Elves. The French verse version is thought to be thirteenth century but the prose version was published in 1454.

Spenser in The Fairy Queen, derives the word “elf” from the word “life”. Prometheus made the elves and called them “elves” because they were alive! Perhaps, he was tongue in cheek, but both words are Anglo-Saxon, and derive from unknown old Teutonic originals, so perhaps there is some truth in it.

In Greece, in classical times, the role of fairies was taken by the various types of nymphs who dwelt in woods, mountains, springs, rivers and so on, and were depicted as beautiful women. The woodland nymphs were particularly considered as attendants of Artemis, the huntress, who was Diana. Titania, the name used by Shakespeare for the Queen of the Fairies, like Herodias, is an epithet of Diana. Ovid called Diana Titania, and Chaucer called her Proserpina. King James writes of a kind of spirit “which by the gentiles was called Diana, and her wandering court, and amongst us called the Fairy”. Gower makes no distinction in Confessio Amantis between Medea as a sorcerer or a witch, a fairy or a goddess.

She seemed no woman, but a fay:
Such powers to her charms obey,
She might be called a deity.

Finn Magnusen equated witches with Trolls and Nisses when he wrote:

And trolls, witches and nisses in each nook.

Milton speaks of “fairy elves whose midnight revels by a forest side or fountain some belated peasant sees”. Fairies and witches in revelling at midnight both acted in the same way. Both fairies and witches were said to be averse to salt. Both were said to entice ordinary people into their circles. Both had a reputation of not tolerating being spied on, and people avoided places favoured by fairies or witches, especially at night. It became a custom to leave food out for them so that they would not steal it. They were also thought to steal farming implements and seed corn, though these were usually returned, the farming tools carefully cleaned and sharpened.

Fairies were traditionally small, because the invading Aryans were taller than the heath folk, but they were mainly within the bounds of human size, and so it is for the fairies met as evil creatures of the Devil. Mainly the fairy of Romance was about human size, and from the time of Spenser’s The Fairy Queen and Shakespeare, they uniformly became tiny woodland creatures. Before, a fairy could be mistaken for an ordinary mortal, so stories of contemporary people meeting and even having sexual intercourse with fairies arise. In the Merry Wives of Windsor, Anne Page dresses herself as a fairy so that she could be taken for one, though she was a full-grown young woman. In Scotland, Ireland, and France, the fairy is of the size of an human being. Bessie Dunlop (1576) in Ayrshire saw eight women and four men fairies:

The men were clad in gentlemen’s clothing, and the women had all plaids round them and were very seemly-like to see.

She was told they were from the “Court of Elfame”. The “Queen of Elfhame” had visited her although she had not known who she was. The Queen was “a stout woman who came in to her and sat down on the form beside her and asked a drink at her and she gave it”. Fairies among the villagers were dressed like their neighbours, lest they should attract attention and so be recognised. Andro (Andrew) Man of the Aberdeen witches had lived for thirty-two years as the husband of the “Queen of Elphen”, by whom he had several children. In the Basses-Pyrénées in 1609, one could find in each village a Queen of the Sabbat that Satan chose as a special wife. The converts, after renouncing their old faith…

…take Satan as their father and protector, and the “Deviless” as their mother.

Jonet Drever in Orkney was convicted of fostering a child to the fairyfolk, whom she called “our good neighbours”. Her punishment was to be scourged from one end of the town to the other, and thereafter to be banished to the country, never to return under pain of death. This was the same punishment imposed by the Inquisition on Maria de Coccicas, a young woman of Lisbon, charged with heresy and tortured on the rack.

Margaret Murray says in most cases of witchcraft, from Joan of Arc in 1431 down to the end of the seventeenth century, the most damning evidence against the accused was knowing fairies! Confessing to knowing them usually guaranteed condemnation to the stake. Yet, the Plantagenet kings, from the south of France, where the Cathar heresy was strong, claimed a fairy ancestry! Shakespeare refers to the Plantagenet fairy origins in Henry IV where the king hoped to prove:

That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged
In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,
And called mine—Percy, his—Plantagenet!

Plantagenet was the name of the family who supplied the kings of England from Henry II to Richards III (1154-1455). The name is from the Latin meaning the broom plant (Planta Genista), supposedly because the founder of the line, Geoffrey of Anjou, wore a sprig of broom in his hat. Broom is always associated with witches. It is said, in the time of Henry III, a law was passed that prescribed the death penalty for “Kyllynge, wowndynge, or mamynge” a fairy, a law that suggets fairies were actual people and were given legal protection by the Plantagenets.

The people called fairies before about 1600 were not little gossamer winged creatures, but were in every respect human. Two allegedly green children, wandering lost in a cornfield and crying inconsolably, were found by reapers near Wolfpit St Marys (Woolpit?) in Suffolk, sometime in the mid-twelfth century in the reign of Stephen (1135-1154), according to an account of it by William of Newbridge, confirmed by Abbot Ralph of Coggeshall. They wore strange garments, spoke no English and lived only on broad beans. They were quickly baptized as Christians, but the boy pined and died. The girl survived to learn how to eat normal food. Ralph of Coggeshall, going by the word of her employer, Sir Richard de Calne, described her as loose and wanton in her conduct, but she eventually married.

She described where she had lived as inhabited by Christians and called S Martin’s Land, a place with no direct sun, only twilight, though a bright land could be seen across a broad river. Fairies, paradoxically, in view of their supposed demonic character, were generally supposed to have been Christians. Marie of France, who wrote in the twelfth century court of Henry II of England, relates The Lay of Yonec with its distinct affinities with Joseph and Aseneth. A lady is confined to a tower by her jealous husband, but the hero flies in to her as a great bird. She fears he is the Devil but he agrees to prove he is a Christian by assuming her shape and taking the Mass, something a demon could not abide, the Church taught. He was able to do this because he was the Fairy king, and so a Christian.

Paul Harris in The Fortean Times (1991) suggests the half-starved children had lived in fairly dense woods—whence their twilight world—by the river Lark, near the village of Fordham S Martin, where they had wandered into an old flint working and had emerged at another entrance, lost. He suggests they merely spoke a dialect that the locals did not recognize, but it seems unlikely that dialects could differ so much in proximate places even in those days. Woolpit is ten miles from Fordham S Martin, so the kids had walked a long way from home without coming across Bury S Edmunds which is only a mile or so from Fordham. Of course, they might have been told by their parents to avoid people, because they were probably children of Cathar or Waldensian evangelists, scratching an existence in the woods. Their language would have been that of Oc, and their natural complexion might have been the olive skin of Mediterranean people.

Thomas Keightley notes that the Anglo-Saxon word for a mushroom means “wolf’s fist”, a peculiar idea since wolves do not have fists. The puff ball mushroom is however called Puck’s foot in Iceland, and Puck’s fist in Old English works. He conjectures that the Anglo-Saxon mushroom is really an “elf’s fist” not a “wolf’s fist”, and that elves at some stage became wolves, by accident or design, in some of these words. If this is so, the Wolf Pits where the Suffolk children were found might have been Elf-Pits originally! Now they have become Wool Pits, it seems. Only a few miles to the northwest, still in woodland to this day, is the village of Elveden.

Geraldus Cambrensis having toured Wales, in 1188, reports a child’s description of Fairyland. The story is that of Elidurus, a priest who experienced it as a twelve year old boy. Later recollecting the events, he could never avoid shedding tears through his sense of loss. Playing truant one day, he was led away by some little men:

These men were of the smallest stature but very well proportioned in their make. They were all of fair complexion with luxuriant hair falling over their shoulder like that of women. They had horses and greyhounds adapted to their size [presumably ponies and whippets].

The description continues that they were vegetarians, took no oaths because of their great regard for the truth, and held no public worship for the same reason. All of these characteristics including the long hair denote them as Cathars. He tries to steal something from them, and fails but can never find them again.

Those who go with the fairies are never the same again, just as the Church made out that it was easy to be persuaded into heresy but impossible to follow the reverse path. In those days, it was not “Once a Catholic” but “Once a Cathar”. It was obviously a much more compelling belief than Catholicism.

Fairies mainly danced and hunted. They were thought not to work except as cobblers or tailors—meaning craftsmen. Eyewitnesses aver that the fairies spun and wove their own cloth, and the heretics were artisans, notably weavers. The fairy weavers used woollen yarn, most often dyed dark green or dark blue, the colours that some say were the colours of the Cathar Perfects’ robes, described by the inquisitors as black. They were indeed dark, especially the blue, and might have given rise to the idea of the black fairies. Irish and Scottish fairies are dressed respectably in black, and are called the Good People! Even so, white garments are often recorded, probably of linen bleached in the sun. Fairy stories tell of the fairies spreading their linen on the grass, and the whiteness of the fabric is admirable.

The fairy women were good spinners, just as good as human women, but it seems they often had no looms or only unsatisfactory ones, so they sought to weave on other people’s looms. The fairies entered a cottage and wove their cloth on the cottager’s loom. Other fairy tales are of fairy cobblers and such, who help save the poor man, or use his lasts and leave a gift. They sound like poor but honest people, scraping a living against adversity. Fairies were allegedly scrupulous in keeping a promise, unlike “mortals” who often cheated them. Truth and honesty were central to dualist faiths based on Zoroastrianism, for which “The Lie” was the Devil, as it was for the Essenes.

Fairy Beliefs

Fairy beliefs only come to light when humanity blinked its way out of the Dark Ages, notably in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The earlier invasions of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes into Britain and then the wider incursions of the Vikings, Scandinavian pirates, kept the northern gods alive when the established Christians would have preferred them dead. Odin was a Father God, and the earth seems to have been a mother goddess, Erce. Odin had twin sons, Balder and Hoder. It seems that the simple people, who had preserved a form of Christianity less refined than that of the established Church, identified with the northern gods, who seemed closer to their own concepts of Yehouah and his twin sons Satan and Christ, using them for poetical and musical inspiration.

Tacitus mentions a northern goddess called Nerthus, evidently also the earth, among the German tribes, and Bede mentions Eastre whose name was given to Easter. Nerthus was drawn on a ceremonial cart, like Christian Virgins still in many countries that have Easter processions. The heresies, particularly the witch cult seemed to retain a Nature Goddess, Diana or Herodias. This goddess has been almost entirely obliterated in modern Christianity. From the twelfth century, against some formidable objections by the schoolmen, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary was promulgated perhaps to counter the attractions of the now disappeared earth goddess.

The Christianity which established itself in Europe had the limited mythology of the gospels and the Jewish scriptures, but even these were not readily accessible to illiterate people, and establishment Christianity quickly made sure that most people were illiterate. Even for the literati, the language they had to read in was a foreign one and soon a dead one, so simply reading was not a sufficient skill for anyone wanting to read the bible. They had to know Latin too. Only priests had this training, and many of them were so abysmal at it that they could not even understand the Mass and the Lord’s Prayer. So, popular art could only be inspired by tales remembered from priestly sermons delivered in the vernacular, and whatever was remembered from classical or traditional mythology. Some sculptors and fine artists might have found inspiration in classical art, notably in the places where it could still be seen, but popular art knew nothing much of it.

Minstrels, storytellers, mummers and dancers had to find another inspiration, as well as facing the disapprobation of the Church, for the Church did not like anything that inspired the folk population to continue with these bad habits. Establishment Christianity was utterly opposed to dancing. When Iceland was converted to Christianity at the beginning of the twelfth century, the new bishop banned the dancing and ballad singing that the Northmen had used to pass the long winter evenings.

That fairy belief stems from Christian heresy is considered only long enough to reject it, yet its disapproval by the Church suggests that it echoed either heretical or Pagan sources. Folklorists have predominantly opted for northern Paganism, but there seems to be plenty of classical allusions as well as northern ones, generally pertaining to primitive solar beliefs. Many of the elements of fairy existed in the mythologies of the Greeks and Romans, but for the northerners, they were fresher in the mythologies of the Celts and Germans. In the extant records, it was Geoffrey of Monmouth who made some of the legends of the Celts into respectable history, and created an acceptable fairy lore through the Arthurian cycle. And the Celtic Church seemed to have retained more of the original simpler Christianity of the peasants than the version of Constantine and the state.

The poets and troubadours set their tales in the past so as not to seem to make accusations in the present—a time when the Catholic Church was getting increasingly fearful and callous. If the distance in time were not sufficient, the lays were often set in distant or imaginary places. The fairy stories were an alternative religion, and alternative mythology with different hopes and taboos from the Catholic Church. Those depicted as entering the fairy world are depicted as not to blame. They are enchanted. Those who return or are cast out, often pine to death—reminding us of the Essenes who could only eat grass if cast out of their community while holding on to their faith.

Chaucer (1343-1400), in The Wyf of Bath’s Tale describes a Britain of “many hundred years ago” which was full of fairies who were jolly company and loved to dance in the green fields. Robert Kirk, in The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies (1691), remarks that “their apparel and speech is like that of the people and the country under which they live”, and some were even lords and ladies. Note too that they were a “secret” commonwealth. These fairies sound more like a Christian sect than an alien species. Interestingly, the Jaloff people of the Island of Goree in west Africa near Dakar, had stories about the Good People, a white race, but one which dressed and acted according to Jaloff custom in most matters. Possibly some heretics in the twelfth century succeeded in escaping to west Africa.

Fairies were considered an enchanted company of beings, and “fairy” described their enchanting world before it was used to describe the people in it. It was an enchanted world, perhaps because the heretics, unlike the Catholics, were certain of ultimate salvation and so did not suffer the fear and guilt of the ordinary Christian. Cathars believed their own purity of behaviour signified the manifestation of heaven on earth, just as the original Christians took Jesus to be the first being to rise from the dead into immortal life.

Curiously, fairies were often identified with the dead and fairyland with the Underworld. Chaucer calls the Fairy Queen Proserpina (Persephone). Sir Olaf, in Sir Olaf in the Elf Dance, sees the elves dancing and is invited by each of them to join in. He refuses because the next day was his wedding day, but it turns out that he and his wife and mother are all dead! The Elf Woman and Sir Olaf is a different version. The Cathar heretics thought this world we live in to be Hell. There was nothing lower than earthly existence for them. Souls of the dead were either reborn when they were immature, or went on into heaven when they were mature enough and had been consoled. Cathar belief therefore ties in with fairy lore. Our world is of the dead.

In Sir Orfeo, Hades is Fairyland and Pluto is the Fairy King. comment The Church always made out that Satan was the god of the heretics because they accepted he was the god of the material world. Yet the heretics were in rebellion against the wicked god and his earthly agents including the Catholic Church, and sought only the light, through Lucifer, the Light-Bringer, who was the same as Christ and the archangel Michael. People might have no choice but to accept a wicked ruler, but they need not like him or obey him.

Sir Orfeo is the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice retold as a fairy story. Eurydice appears as Herodias (Heurodis) who falls asleep in an orchard and dreams that the Fairy King takes her to a glittering Fairyland. The Underworld glittering? It sounds quite the wrong description for a place of dead people. The King has a glittering crown cut from a single gemstone, his knights and ladies dress entirely in white and ride snow white horses. The Fairy King announces to Herodias that he would return the next day to take her for good. And so he does.

Sir Orfeo wanders the world as a minstrel living as a wild man while seeking Herodias. One hot morning, he sees the Fairy King hunting. Then, on another occasion, he sees Herodias among a group of sixty lady falconers who ride straight into a rock. He surreptitiously enters with them, and inside is a country bright as a summer’s day, with a green land and a castle of gold and jewels. The jewels glow like the sun at night giving the land a constant illumination. The castle gateman allows Sir Orfeo in, because he is a minstrel. The people within are “thought dead and are not”.

The Fairy King was impressed by Orfeo’s music and promises him anything he should wish. Naturally, he asks for Herodias, and the Fairy King, true to his word, as fairies, like Cathars, always were, allows her to return with the hero. The ending, unlike the classical story, is happy.

This fairy world of the dead is obviously not at all like Hades or Hell. It has to be heaven, therefore. It might be entered via a rock, but the epiphany of the sun god Mithras was from a rock. From the outside, where it could be seen by gods, the cosmos looked spherical like a rock or an egg. The sphere of the firmament was the inside view of it. Another world, therefore would be entered as if it were a rock. The heroine, Herodias, is again Diana. The name Herodias seems simply to mean “The Heroine”, or even more literally “She who is Heroic”, unless it is simply a corruption of Eurydice (Perfect Justice). Herodias is equated with Diana in the Wild Hunt right back into Roman times, but it is perhaps just a “heroic” title for a goddess. The biblical Herod chose to be called that, feeling he was “The Hero” or rather “He who is Heroic”, but the name Herodias associated with the Wild Hunt and therefore witches almost certainly has nothing to do with Mrs Herod.

Maureen Duffy admits that fairyland is “like all the mythological European heavens, and its activities are much the same as they are on earth except that they never pall”. Nor could they be allowed to because, in heaven, people are immortal, and eternity cannot be endured unless time is somehow different so that activity can never cease to be pleasurable. Those who return from Fairie often find that hundreds of years have passed, or conversely that a century in fairyland is only a single night in reality. Fairie, like Christ’s Kingdom of God, can be fleeting, turning to dust or dead leaves in a moment of doubt or dishonesty. This is, indeed, heaven—not the ludicrous place that modern Christians fill with crooks, liars and tricksters who have supposedly been saved. Christ was adamant that, at the least lapse, heaven faded away. That is Fairie. But Fairie was not only this spiritual place but the medieval poets also had it as the place where fairies of the human species dwelt, because people could have fairy wives and husbands.

Fairyland is therefore confused between being a concept of heaven, and a place on earth where the people with this particular heavenly concept live together. The post-mortem life of the Cathars could only be in a wonderful place, or back here on earth. Hell for them was the act of living on earth. They had no fiery or subterranean hell. Heaven could be entered by seeming to go underground to judge by the fairy tales. Heaven was obviously everywhere to a Cathar as it was to the Essenes who believed the whole world would become incorruptible and heavenly at the End Time. So, for a Cathar, it seems even a subterranean world was heavenly to a perfect soul.

Dead people eventually become the substance of the living, through their bodies fertilizing the land, a fact long known however imperfectly by the offering of sacrifices to the god of fertility. The most primitive of people, even Neanderthals, buried their dead in a foetal position, implying a rebirth. The ancient barrows were thought of as a belly swollen with life, and those with entrances were directed to the rising sun to allow its rays to penetrate the womb of the earth and initiate new life. Reincarnation, not resurrection seems the more natural belief.

Fairies lived in the wild uncultivated parts of the country, in lonely and mysterious spots—in enchanted places, glades, mounds, river banks, copses, stones, old buildings and bridges. Like Jesus:

The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.

Mt 8:20

Duffy writes:

Fairies also lived in wells, trees and water generally, on the tops of hills and in connection with standing stones.

These were secret places where they hid or met secretly. That would be expected of the traditional fairy but would also be true of witches, meaning Cathars trying to remain out of sight as best they could. Here were homeless travellers, later refugees. These are also the holy places of Zoroastrianism, the first of the patriarchal dualist religions, that Christianity had the heritage of, through the Essenes and Judaism. Fairy lore hints at a persistent memory of it.

Fairies, along with witches could bring impotence and infertility. This might have been true in a negative way. The Cathar heretics had medical skills that they used to benefit the people in their struggle against the evil lord of the physical world, Satan. Offending them might mean this help was withheld, and without it, animals and crops were more likely to die. From this perhaps grew the idea that animals could be bewitched.

Curiously, though fairies evidently married in some sense, since there was a fairy king and a fairy queen, they were considered infertile themselves. They needed to steal human children or copulate with a human being. This is an excellent memory of the Cathar ideal of chastity, derived from the Essenes. The perfect soul had no desire for sexual gratification. It was entirely a material desire and quite unnecessary for immortal spirits. So, Cathar Perfects eschewed any sexual indulgence. They did not condemn sexuality in lesser developed souls, but were clear that advanced souls resisted it. So, perhaps, the heretics, being more sincere than most Catholics, actually did resist sexual activity.

The Essenes in the monastic camps certainly rejected sex, as it seems the Therapeuts did too. Their numbers were maintained by recruitment and adoption from outside their ranks, just like the fairies! The Church, through books like the Malleus Maleficarum, spread the fear that human children would be stolen by witches, and crying or demanding babies substituted. With the end of the witch craze, this accusation transferred to Gypsies.

Fairies were also considered to be free of sickness and able to live longer than ordinary people, again like the Essenes, and those, in general, who live frugally but otherwise healthily. Fairies who did give birth often had to send for a human midwife, suggesting that they did not consider midwifery as a useful occupation. Nor could they have, if they thought the world was hell. Fairy children were often weak, ugly and hairy, symptoms perhaps of a near starvation diet. Yet the favour of fairies was considered particularly valuable at sowing and harvest times, and at births and marriages. On these occasions their blessings were sought, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or they had to be placated to avoid a curse.

Essentially, both the Cathars and the Catholics reflected their Essene roots in being against sex, but though the Cathars always seemed to take the principle of chastity most seriously, they apparently appreciated it was wrong to totally suppress sexuality. So, though the determination of the Cathar Perfects gave them the reputation of being blighters of fertility, they seemed to have a better understanding of the need for sexual expression and its psychology than the Catholics, and offered some opportunities for it, infrequent though they perhaps were. Through this, Catholic critics were able to say they were hypocritical about sex. Their own determination that personal chastity was necessary for purity and salvation gave them a reputation for being against fertility all together.

Fairy Tales

Thomas Keightley says that the people of the north believed:

All the various beings of the popular creed were once worsted in conflict with superior powers and condemned to remain until doomsday in certain assigned abodes.

These were the mountains and hills for the Dwarfs and Hill Trolls (Berg Trolde), the woods and forests for Elves, and seas, lakes and rivers for Mermaids and Mermen. The Germans considerd the Dwarfs to have been fallen angels, the self-same belief the Cathars had about themselves, and Keightley tells us that the Dwarfs of Germany are the Fairies and Elves of England. They were “of flesh and bones, like mankind, they bear children and die” but were thought to have additional powers including invisibility, a hint that they were adept at hiding. Keightley, who was an Irishman, explains that the popular belief in Ireland was also that fairies were fallen angels, who felt uneasy about their condition come the Final Judgement. Keightley adds:

Both Catholic and Protestant clergy have endeavoured to excite an aversion to these beings but in vain. They are considered as possessing considerable power over men and nature, and it is believed that though now unhappy, they will eventually “get salvation”.

It is just what the Cathars believed of themselves. Fairies, Dwarfs, Trolls, Elves sound, in short, more like names of an heretical sect than an alien species, and they were called, by a remarkable coincidence, if that is what it is, the Good People, like the Cathars.

In a Scottish story related by Hugh Miller, a young cowherd and his sister are the only two in a village one Sunday who have not gone to church. At twelve noon by the sun dial, a procession came past the cottage heading south up a hill. The people rode on shaggy ponies and were poor looking and stunted in growth, and wore long uncombed hair. As the final rider passed them, the boy called out asking who they were. “Not of the race of Adam,” was the reply. Then, “The people of peace shall no more be seen in Scotland”. Cathar mythology was that they were not of the race of Adam because they were really fallen angels waiting to rejoin God. Adam and his descendants were made by the Demiurgos, Satan. Moreover, they it was who were People of Peace and the Good People.

In the romance of Maugis d’Agrement et de Vivian son Frere, the fairy, Oriande la Fée, declares “by the God in whom we believe”, a curious expression, implying that the God might not be the same as the Christian God. Otherwise, she prayed “our Lord”, and has Maugis baptised, making her sound Christian. Cathars were Christians, but not Catholic Christians, the only type the agents of God on earth permitted at the time.

According to Torfaeus (cited by Keightley), writing at the end of the seventeenth century, of the opinion respecting the Dwarfs of a venerable Icelandic pastor, Einar Gudmund, he knew as a child:

I believe, and am fully persuaded that this people are the creatures of God, consisting of a body and a rational spirit; that they are of both sexes; marry, and have children; and that all human acts take place among them as with us: that they are possessed of cattle, and of many other kinds of property; have poverty and riches, weeping and laugbter, sleep and wake, and have all other affections belonging to human nature; and that they enjoy a longer or a shorter term of life according to the will and pleasure of God. Their power of having children appears from this, that some of their women have had children by men, and were very anxious to have their offspring dipped in the sacred font, and initiated into Christianity; but they in general sought in vain.

They “sought in vain” because of the deceitful attitude of Catholics towards them. Finnus Johanaeus describes the elves and dwarfs in some detail but as “figments”, “old wives tales”, and “ridiculous or perverse persuasions of our forefathers”, in The Ecclesiastical History of Iceland (1774):

It was believed as a true and necessary article of faith, that there are genii or semi-gods, called in our language Alfa and Alfa-folk. Authors vary respecting their essence and origin. Some hold that they have been created by God immediately and without the intervention of parents, like some kinds of spirits. Others maintain that they are sprung from Adam, but before the creation of Eve. Lastly, some refer them to another race of men, or to a stock of pre-Adamites. Some bestow on them not merely a human body, but an immortal soul. Others assign them merely mortal breath (spiritum) instead of a soul…

…they have a political form of government modelled after the same pattern as that which the inhabitants themselves are under. Two viceroys rule over them, who in turn every second year, attended by some of the subjects, sail to Norway, to present themselves before the monarch of the whole race, who resides there, and to give him a true report concerning the fidelity, good conduct, and obedience of the subjects; and those who accompany them are to accuse the government or viceroys if they have transgressed the bounds of justice or of good morals. If these are convicted of crime or injustice, they are forthwith stript of their office, and others are appointed in their place.

This nation is reported to cultivate justice and equity above all other virtues, and hence, though they are very potent, especially with words and imprecations, they very rarely, unless provoked or injured, do any mischief to man; but when irritated they avenge themselves on their enemies with dreadful curses and punishments.

The new-born infants of Christians are, before baptism, believed to be exposed to great peril of being stolen by them, and their own, which they foresee likely to be feeble in mind, in body, in beauty, or other gifts, being substituted for them… whence nurses and midwives were strictly enjoined to watch constantly, and to hold the infant firmly in their arms, till it had had the benefit of baptism, lest they should furnish any opportunity for such a change. Hence it comes, that the vulgar use to call fools, deformed people, and those who act rudely and uncivilly, changelings, and come of the Alfs.

They use rocks, hills, and even the seas, for their habitations, which withinside are neat, and all their domestic utensils extremely clean and orderly. They sometimes invite men home, and take especial delight in the converse of Christians, some of whom have had intercourse with their daughters or sisters, who are no less wanton than beautiful, and have had children by them, who must by all means be washed in holy water, that they may receive an immortal soul, and one that can be saved. Nay, they have not been ashamed to feign that certain women of them have been joined in lawful marriage with men, and continued for a long time with them, happily at first, but, for the most part, with an ill or tragical conclusion.

Their cattle, if not very numerous, are at least very proiftable They are invisible as their owners are, unless when it pleases them to appear, which usually takes place when the weather is serene and the sun shining very bright; for as they do not see the sun within their dwellings, they frequently walk out in the sunshine that they may be cheered by his radiance. Hence, even the coffins of dead kings and nobles, such as are the oblong stones which are to be seen here and there, in wildernesses and rough places, always lie in the open air and exposed to the sun.

They change their abodes and habitations occasionally like mankind; this they do on new year’s night; whence certain dreamers and mountebanks used on that night to watch in the roads, that, by the means of various forms of conjurations appointed for that purpose, they might extort from them as they passed along the knowledge of future events. But people in general, who were not acquainted with such things, especially the heads of families, used on this evening strictly to charge their children and servants to be sure to be serious and modest in their actions and language, lest their invisible guests, and mayhap future neighbours, should be aggrieved or any way offended. Hence, when going to bed they did not shut the outer doors of their houses, nor even the door of the sitting-room, but having kindled a light, and laid out a table, they desired the invisible personages who had arrived, or were to arrive, to partake, if it was their pleasure, of the food that was laid out for them; and hoped that if it pleased them to dwell within the limits of their lands, they would live safe and sound, and be propitious to them.

Reginald Scot, in The Discoverie of Witchcraft, regards it as within his brief to include fairies too. He describes Luridan, the “astral spirit” of the largest of the Orkney islands who lived in Jerusalem at the time of David and Solomon, when he was called Belelah. In The Book of Vanagastus, the Norwegian, Luridan was said to have been at war with fire. This is curious since “luridus” is the Latin word for a pale yellow, as if a flame were seen through thick smoke. The name “Belelah” must really be Belial, the Essene word for the Devil, and meaning something that is worthless. It looks as if it might have been Lucifer.

The verse Edda was eleventh or twelfth century and the prose Edda was thirteenth. Elves and dwarfs are among the main characters in them. Thomas Keightley cites one Thorlacius:

Our heathen forefathers believed, like the Pythagoreans, and the farther back in antiquity the more firmly, that the whole world was filled with spirits of various kinds, to whom they ascribed in general the same nature and properties as the Greeks did to their Daimons. These were divided into the Celestial and the Terrestrial, from their places of abode. The former were, according to the ideas of those times, of a good and elevated nature, and of a friendly disposition toward men, whence they also received the name of White or Light Alfs or Spirits. The latter, on the contrary, who were classified after their abodes in air, sea, and earth, were not regarded in so favourable a light. It was believed that they, particularly the land ones, the epichthonioi of the Greeks, constantly and on all occasions sought to torment or injure mankind, and that they had their dwelling partly on the earth in great thick woods, whence came the name Wood Trolls, or in other desert and lonely places, partly in and under the ground, or in rocks and hills. These last were called Bjerg Trolls. To the first, on account of their different nature, was given the name of Dwarfs, and Alve, whence the word Ellefolk, which is still in the Danish langurge.

The Pythagoreans, like the Essenes had views that were plainly strongly influenced by Persian religion. The dualist links with Gnosticism are also evident in the separation into Celestial and Terrestrial, broadly as Good and Bad. Light Elves were described in the prose Edda as brighter than the sun, suggesting they derived from sunbeams or glints of the sun in the woods, or off water and snow. It might also imply that the root of the word “elf” is the same as the Latin “albus”, meaning white. A title of Odin in the Edda is “har” meaning “high”, but a word close to the widespread word in the ancient near east “hur”, meaning sun.

The Scandinavian elves were fond of singing, playing music and dancing in the hills, woods and meadows, and the sounds could sometimes be actually heard in the evening. Danish masculine elves could sometimes be seen in summer basking in the sun, but the feminine ones were more often seen by moonlight. Scots and Shetlanders called the Trolls the Good People and the Good Neighbours. They married and had children, but were of small stature and wore green. They were fond of music and dancing, and Shetlanders say they hear them passing their doors playing on flutes. They were not free of disease but had wonderful cures and ointments.

The original German myths were all despoiled by Christianity, but some survived re-written in the Christian period as The Heldenbuch and The Nibelungenlied. The Elves have disappeared from the Christianized stories, but the Dwarfs remain, and indeed, the Elf King, Albrich, has become the Dwarf who guards the Nibelungen Hoard. The only remnant in German of the Elves is the word “alp” meaning a nightmare, “elfen” being a re-adaptation into German of the word elf from English.

In The Niberlungenlied, Siegfried gets the strength of twelve men by wearing a cape given him by Albricht, describd as a Dwarf. Sven Färling, the Scandinavian hero, takes a drinking horn from an elf maid who offers him the strength of twelve for its return. She keeps her promise but Sven also has the appetite of twelve. The Brothers Grimm considered that Sven and Siegfried (Sigurd, Sifret) were all the same hero. He is plainly enough a sun god.

The story in The Heldenbuch of the battles of Dietrich and the Dwarf king, Laurin, could almost be an allegory of the Catholic destruction of the Cathars. Perhaps, Laurin is another rendering of Lucifer. The Dwarf king has magic artifacts, a cape of invisibility, and a magic ring and girdle which give the Dwarf the strength of 24 men. Hildebrand advises Dietrich how to get these valuable things from the Dwarf king, and consequently the heroes finish up victorious. The Dwarf king, however, tricks the heroes into his own domain and imprisons them. The Dwarf queen, who was stolen from the humans, releases them for another mighty battle after which Laurin is humilated by having to earn his keep as a buffoon. Hildebrand was, in history, an eleventh century reforming pope (S Gregory VII), perhaps among the first to realise that the Catholics might lose out to the Cathars if they continued as they were.

The Brothers Grimm describe a Hillman who came to a dance at the celebration of a wedding. He asked to join the dance and his request was admitted, whereupon he politely wished everyone to be merry and joined in, dancing three dances in fine style. He rewarded each partner with a coin of unknown denomination, but evidently valuable, and the advice to be pious and good and to live like Christians. He suggested they should save their money, but to make sure they did not become proud, and to help their neighbours. The Hillman ate but only lightly, then in the evening asked to be ferried across the river. The ferryman agreed, and during the crossing asked for payment, complaining at the three pence offered. The Hillman warned him of arrogance, urging him to be pious and humble, then gave him a little stone to wear that would save him from drowning, and did so within a few weeks. Then the Hillman departed.

There seems little to this story other than to show the wisdom and saintliness of the Bergman, who seems in all respects to be a pious and wise human being.

A similar small man asked Count von Hoya to lend him his kitchen for a single night. The Count agreed and a travelling party of Dwarfs came the next night and prepared a feast for themselves using the facilities offered. The Count was rewarded with gifts that would bring good fortune so long as they were kept together. Having lost two of the items, the family eventually died out, but the last one remained with the last of the line, only disappearing when he died.

Dwarfs and Trolls were sensitive beings and would move on when offended. They hated the sound of church bells, and were particularly offended by human ingratitude. It was these things in the legends that led to them moving away from humans so that none are found today.

A farmer’s wife left the farmer’s breakfast for him—freshly made bread tied in a bundle. A Dwarf woman approached saying she was baking her own bread, and it would be ready at noon, but her children were already crying with hunger. Her request was to be allowed to take his, and she would replace it faithfully when her own was ready. The busy farmer agreed and the woman returned true to her word at noon with a white cloth containing piping hot bread. She said she would return later for the cloth. When she did, she briefly told the man that her kind were offended by the constant din of the forges, the uncouth swearing of the people, and their profanation of the sabbath. They had no choice but to leave.

Keightley adds in a footnote that Dwarfs would borrow beer, a whole barrel at a time, and carry it off on their shoulders. In a similar way in Scotland they would ask for a sack of meal, and carry it off directly. They always paid honestly for whatever they wanted. These people could not have been as fanciful, or as diminutive as later storytellers made out.

Some elves in southern German were called the Wood or Moss people. They wore green clothes and were so poor, they often came begging for food from the woodcutters, and sometimes would steal it. When they did, they always owned up and offered to pay by helping with the cooking or pot washing.

Late and highly Christianized stories have it that the Wild People of Southern Germany would actually go into Salzberg Cathedral at midnight to perform their devotions. If they did this, they could not have been Cathars, who abhored built churches. They might have been Christian Gypsies, but most likely the story has been tweaked to make the Christian heretics into Catholic Christians. Even Charles V appears in them as a type of King Arthur with an army of knights and lords waiting for Doomsday. Charles’s beard has already grown twice round the table at which he sits. When it grows round for a third time, the Anti-Christ, the End of the World and Judgement Day will be here. These stories were told by Grimm about 1782, and were made to pertain to a period about forty years before.

In one story, a Wild Woman wanted to take away a farmer’s son while he laboured in the field, but the farmer saw what was going on. The woman insisted that the child would be better off with her than at home and would be well looked after. The father was not persuaded, and the Wild Woman departed weeping bitterly. In another tale, a young cowherd was carried off, to be seen about a year later in a nearby district dressed in green. A search was set up, but the boy was never seen again. Here again, is the hint of a people, like the Essenes, who did not multiply adequately themselves—the explanation being their reluctance to have children and be responsible for providing a vehicle for a soul in the wicked world. They were desperately trying to keep up their numbers in this way, depending on the over-production of children in Catholic families to get a supply of unwanted infants. The Protestant Reformation, besides increasing the persecution, also reduced the supply of unwanted children.

The Dwarfs or Earth People of Switzerland were happy, joyous people who liked walking in the mountain valleys, and coming down in season to labour in agriculture. They were noted as being kind and generous, and for saving stray lambs, or leaving berries and brushwood for poor children to find. The valley people were, though, often unkind to them, playing tricks on them and treating them as a laughing stock. In one story, some of the Earth-Folk were accustomed to sitting on a rock to watch those who were labouring in the hay-making season. The locals built a large fire on the rock in the morning before they arrived and when it had been burning long enough to make the rock blisteringly hot, they swept away the cinders and ashes. The poor Dwarfs ran on to their resting place as usual and some were severely burned as a result. The story ends that they cried out in anger and despair, “O Wicked World! O Wicked World!” They added a plea for vengeance and then disappeared for ever. This sounds like an attenuated version of a mass burning.

In another story, the Dwarfs wore long mantles to hide their feet, while helping each year with the cherry harvest. A shepherd spread out fine ash in the orchard revealing that the Dwarfs had goose feet. Again, they were offended and withdrew to the higher valleys. The accusation of goose feet implies they were regarded as witches, and again there is a reference to ash, suggesting a witch hunt. Witches were accused of having cloven feet, and it seems that they might sometimes be distinguished by peculiar footwear. Divided toes on shoes were fashionable from time to time, and this might have been meant by cloven feet. Religious sects tend to be conservative in dress, so that the clergy of the modern Catholic and Anglican Churches still wear the clothes of a fourth century Roman. Again the story records the persecution and derision that drove these poor and pious people into the mountains to escape Catholic and then Protestant society.

Other stories might have been derived from mockeries of the Catholic Eucharist. A poor Christian sat at the edge of a wood starving. He prayed aloud to God in despair for a morsal of food, whereupon a passing Dwarf appeared before him saying his prayer had been heard. He gave the poor man a pouch, which he assured him would always keep him well fed, so long as he always shared his food with anyone who needed it. The Dwarf left and the poor Christian found in the pouch cheese, bread and wine—perhaps originally fish, bread and wine. He ate his fill, but the pouch remained full. Some weeks later, he sat before his hovel eating his fill from the pouch when a poor old and sick man stumbled by, and asked for a bite to eat and drink. The churlish Christian arrogantly refused. Instantly, the pouch and its contents decayed into dust. The magical food of Catholics did not make them into good Christians.

Ann Jeffries in 1626 describes fairies as “small people, all in green clothes” who “always appeared in even numbers”. They taught her surprising cures, and fed her from harvest time until Christmas. They angrily denied they were evil and “referred those who termed them such to Scripture”. Again the piety of these people does not surprise us but the detail that they always appeared in even numbers. The Cathars and Waldenses, carried Scripture with them at a time when few could read, and travelled on their missions in pairs!

Bovet describes a fairy fair related to him by “country people” in Somerset, near Taunton and Chard. The fairies were “men and women of a stature generally nearer the smaller size of man”. They wore red, blue or green and wore high crowned hats. Stalls for pewterers, shoemakers, and pedlars were mentioned as at any normal fair, and there were trinkets and fruit for sale. There was even a drinking booth! The observer knew it was not a regularly scheduled fair and so knew it must have been a fairy one. The story has it that anyone who enters a fairy fair loses sight of it, but can still hear and feel it about him. Riding out, allows it to be seen again, but the warning is that the intruder will suffer some permanent affliction or injury.

In Act V, Scene V of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare in a mysterious passage has Dame Quickly describing the fairies as:

You orphan heirs of fixed destiny.

Keightley surmises that “orphan” here really should be “elven”, or means that, but the Cathars saw themselves as having a fixed ultimate destiny—all would be saved, unlike the guilty Catholic—and their pious aversion to sexuality notably after the consolamentum, meant that, like the Essenes, they depended on conversion and adoption to keep up their numbers. Dame Quickly is soon talking about the “Garter” and “Hony soit qui mal y pense”, admittedly in connexion with knighthood, but an interesting conjunction.

King James, in Demonologie, says fairies did everything that natural men and women do. He thought it was like the Elysian fields and not to be believed by Children. Witches would go to their deaths having confessed that they had obtained from fairies such things as stones with beneficial properties.

In an interesting Scottish story, a clergyman  saw a man walking along the surface of a lake leading a retinue carying lights and playing instruments. Arriving at the lakeside by the minister, the attendants dispersed, and the man leading them in the feat of walking on water greeted him. The man was small and grey haired, and, in reply to the clergyman, he explained that he was one of the Good People. They had once been angels, but had been seduced into revolting against God by Satan and had been cast down to earth to remain until the End of Time. He wished to enquire of the vicar what their fate would be. It seems the clergyman asked the man to say The Lord’s Prayer, and each time he did, he said, “Which wert in heaven…” instead of “Which art…”. The clergyman seems to have concluded from this that Satan was his God and the Good People had no prospects of salvation at Doomsday. Hearing this the Good Man threw himself into the lake with a cry of despair.

The Lord’s Prayer was the main prayer of the Cathars, and all of their Perfects were considered as living Christs. They were called the Good People, as in this story, and here they are shown as effortlessly behaving like Christ in his most singular miracle. The Catholic Church insisted that the Cathars, though Christians, worshipped Satan under the name of Lucifer, and this story, which looks initially to be in praise of the Good People, ends up condemning them as Satanists. The logic of the original tale must have been that the clergyman asks the secret of walking on water, and is told by the Good Man it is doing God’s will, or some such formula. The clergyman declares he does it faithfully according to Catholic standards, and steps confidently on to the lake to end up plunging into it, unlike the fairy, who was truly good. The Christianization reverses the outcome in line with Catholic propaganda.

In another Scottish story, the allies of fairies are said to have been goats! Moreover, Welsh fairies, on a Friday night, combed their goats’ beards to make them decent for Sunday!

In the Isle of Man, the title, the Good People of the fairies, and the reason why they lived in the hills was that they disapproved of the vices of humanity living in the towns. A seaman put ashore at Douglas one winter’s night, decided to walk directly to his sister’s cottage instead of taking overnight accommodation in the town. Crossing the mountain, he heard the sound of a hunt, and he saw thirteen huntsmen pass in the moonlight. At his sister’s she expressed great relief that he had arrived safe, having encountered the Fairy Hunt. Again the gentle morality of the fairies is belied by the apparent fear of the sister. It is again incoherent propaganda.

A Welsh story with some hints at heresy is that of the young farmer who married a fairy woman but on condition that, if he laid hands on her three times in anger, she would leave forever. A few years later the fairy wife embarrassed the man at a Christening when she burst into tears, explaining, “The poor babe is entering into a world of sin and sorrow, and misery lies before it. Why should I rejoice?” He gave her an angry push, and she warned him that he had laid his hand on her in anger. A few year’s later the self-same child died and the couple attended the funeral. The fairy woman again seemed to the farmer to be behaving inappropriately, acting happily and joyously, and explaining, “The babe has left a world of sin and sorrow, and has excaped the misery that was before it, and is gone to be good and happy for ever and ever. Why then should I weep?” Again he pushed her in annoyance making the second time. Finally, the pair attended a wedding of a beautiful young girl and a rich old man. The fairy woman could not stop herself bursting into tears, explaining, “Summer and winter cannot agree. Youth is wedded to age only for gold. I see misery here, and tenfold misery hereafter as the lot of both. It is the Devil’s compact!” Pushed angrily for the last time by the angry farmer, the fairy wife disappeared and was never again seen, but her sons became famous healers. These three characteristics—despair at bringing a soul into the world, joy at its leaving and disapproval of marriage (the age difference being a possible Catholic rationalization) were Cathar ones, not Catholic.

Thomas Keightley admits that Spanish fairy lore was scanty, and that his Spanish correspondents frankly explained the absence of fairy tales in Spain, saying: “The Inquisition had long since eradicated all such ideas”. He is skeptical that this is so, and sarcastically notes: “As far as we can recollect, there were no prosecutions for Fairy-heresy”. Keightley had not considered the possibility that the heretics were themselves the fairies!

Palgrave tells one story—the tale of Don Diego Lopez who married a beautiful fairy woman whose condition was that he should never utter before her a “holy name”. One day his mastiff and Spaniel fought savagely, and the Spaniel tore out the throat of the mastiff, a plain symbol of the coming liberation of Spain from the Moors. In astonishment, Don Diego called out, “Holy Mary”, whereupon the fairy woman grabbed her children to speed back to the hills. Don Diego, just managed to hold on to his son, but the mother and daughter left. The story continues with Don Diego helping to free Spain from the Moors but getting captured while doing it. The son sought out his fairy mother in the mountains and she agreed to help recover his father, which she did, but was never then seen again. The eviction of the Moors and of the Fairy seem to be pointedly linked in this story.

The various pucks or nisses wore green or grey with red pointed hats. The Spanish clergy wore a long conical hat without a brim called, by Calderon, a “cucurucho”. In La Dama Duende (The Fairy Woman), the Duende dress rather like Capuchin monks with their cucuruchos. The Duende were considered, like fairies in many places, as fallen angels.

Gervase of Tilbury lived in Arles in the Camargue and wrote about men who were lovers of the Fadas, the fairies of Provence:

We have seen them live in great temporal felicity, who when they withdraw themselves from the embraces of these Fadas, or discovered the secret, lost not only their temporal prosperity but even the comfort of wretched life… When they married other women, they died before consumating the marriage.

Gervase seemed to think the Fadas were phantoms, but to be a lover of a phantom seems unlikely. Perhaps understandably in the Bouches du Rhone many of the fairies were water spirits, or the traditions about these are the only ones that the Inquisition allowed to survive. Elsewhere in France, the Fées would make use of the implements and animals of certain farms, apparently without permission but even so brought fortune on to them, the cattle thriving, and any implements used being polished and sharpened or repaired, if necessary, so as to be as good as new. They were kind and obliging and gave cakes to those they liked. These people sound like a type of outcast rather than phantoms.

The Fay Melusina was so famous that she had her own chronicle written in the fourteenth centiry and noble families claimed descent from her. Her father was said to have been the king of Albania, meaning Elf-heim, and her mother was another Fay. Circumstances led her mother to curse Melusina to be a serpent from the waist down on Saturdays only, and she had to find a husband who would agree to not seeing her on that particular day of the week. A count called Raymond agreed and she built the castle of Lusignan for him, as well as other fine castles. Regrettably, the children of the marriage were affected by the curse in some way, and were ugly or deformed, and a cousin suggested to Raymond it was connected with his promise to his wife. Raymond spied on his wife and saw that she was half snake. Melusina has to leave, withdrawing to Sassenage near Grenoble, and now wanders the air as a spirit, appearing only on certain occasions.

Here is a hint that Saturday was a special day for the Fairies, doubtless their Sabbath, and poses the question whether the Primitive Church and the Cathars kept to the traditional Jewish sabbath, when the established Church unified around the day of Sol Invictus. Interestingly, Lusignan was destroyed in 1574 for harbouring Huguenots.

From Pam

Mike, I have the following comments on: AskWhy! on Sifting the Cinders of the Cathars 7—Christianity Revealed

For Chaucer, Pluto is indeed the Fairy King, as can be seen in the Merchants tale. In “Sir Orfeo”, you are incorrect to state that the Fairy King is named Pluto, in fact his character is not named at all in the lay. However, Pluto is present in the story, as is Juno but they comprise Orfeo’s lineage.

In the Auchinleck MS see lines 43-46—“His fade was comen of King Pluto, And his moder of King Juno, That sum time were as godes yhold For aventours that thi dede and told.”—translated as—“His [Orfeo’s] father was descended from King Pluto, and his mother of King Juno, Who once were considered to be gods for adventures that they did and told.”

Many thanks for your observations. I shall look at the page again and correct it, or add your note to it.

Further Reading

• More on heretical beliefs
• More on dualistic solar belief, and sun gods as atoning saviours
• More on witches

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History