Old Mermaids Healing Works

Who Are the Faeries? What are the Faeries?

These kinds of questions always stop me cold. How do I answer them? It’s like asking me to describe a breeze that comes up suddenly on a hot summer day or the feeling I get when I glance outside at dusk and see sweet golden light. It’s difficult to explain in words, but if you’ve felt or seen either, you know instantly what I’m talking about.

When I was a girl, I read any fairy tale or myth I could get my hands on. I began writing when I was very young; one of my first stories was “Lily Goes to Fairyland.” I loved the mystical and magical, the unseen and unknown. I knew that we were not seeing or hearing everything that was happening around us. I could feel the beat of another world—another world that was my world.

I was most comfortable where the wild things lived. I knew that was where the faeries lived, too. In the holes in trees. In the pool of water in an oak leaf on the ground. In every single flower that bloomed and whispered secrets to me.

But after a while, I forgot all that. I grew up.

When my goddesschild was very young, I took her out into the woods. To my surprise, I began telling her about the faeries. We got very still. We felt the breeze on our cheeks and hands. We felt the ground beneath our feet. We breathed the forest in and we breathed the forest out. The quality of the air and light changed, and we knew the fey folk were with us. I haven’t looked back since.

So many books have been written about the faeries. Every other person has an opinion about what a faery is or isn’t. I’m not so much concerned with the “pedigree” of faeries. All peoples on the planet, as far as I can tell, have believed in something “invisible” at one time or another. The closer to the land they were (and are), the more they are able to comfortably commune with and rely on these invisibles. They are connected to and with the natural world.

In some cultures, these invisibles are actually visible and have their own Otherworld, similar to Fairyland. In the Amazon, for instance, an entire world lives beneath the river; it is inhabited by pink dolphins (boto) who come onto the land as beautiful people who seduce (mostly) women and sometimes take them back to the land of the pink dolphins.

In some parts of the world, each river, mountain, hill—every place—has a spirit, dragon, fairy, deva, or some other kind of nature spirit guarding it.

Often when people talk about faeries, they’re thinking of the Celtic faeries. Some scholars believe these faeries are actually the Ancestors and belief in the faeries was a form of ancestor worship. Others say the faeries were a powerful god-like race called the Tuatha Dé Danann—the people of the goddess Danu—who eventually left Ireland to go into the mounds, behind the veil, into the Otherworld. They come out now and again; when the veil is thin we can see and interact with them. They are sometimes called the Sidhe (pronounced “shee”).

When I studied Faery doctoring, we talked about the faeries as the creative life force of the planet. They live here with us and beyond us, forever keeping the energy flowing: Their job is to maintain a balance between the spirit world and the physical world. They are our cousins. They are the ever-young energy of our planet.

Samuel Butler Yeats said about the faeries, “Everything is capricious about them, including their size.”

It was considered bad luck (and dangerous) to call a faery by his/her real name. Instead they became the little people, the good neighbors, or the wee folk.

In Celtic countries, even today, people who have faery faith—those who believe in faeries—seek out the help of faery doctors when they are ill. These faery doctors can determine whether their illness was caused by faery influence. Then they seek out their faery allies to help cure the patient.

Tom Cowan, who teaches Faery Doctoring, believes that the “faery doctor—like the shaman or the druid—re-appears in every age to meet the needs of the times. Every age must, therefore, come to its own understanding of the faery world and its relationship to it…The Sidhe need human allies and human energy to help them preserve Nature’s vitality, just as we need their cooperation to heal individuals suffering from faery-related illnesses.”

I can’t pin down exactly what the faeries are. I love and respect them. I try to work with them to co-create healing and energy and a sustainable world.

Every time I see a hummingbird, I think of the folk. This is not because the hummingbird is tiny: Faeries can be any size. I think of the faeries when I see a hummingbird because they are so beautiful and powerful, just like our good neighbors. They are so certain of what they need and want, just like the fey. Every time I see a hummingbird, I am filled with such joy, and I am so glad I live in a world where hummingbirds exist. Where hummingbirds and faeries exist.