My mid-month newsletter has a roundup of esoteric & weird stuff in the news section, so my free opening article is folkloric this time. Hope you enjoy and are surviving January! TITAA #62.5: Fairies and DoomFairy Forgery & Summoning - Straw Bears - Urban Ghosts - Many Game Links - Roach Bots
Oof, I have had one day to do this, and a lot to cover as usual. The TOC:
Recent Fairy FindingsA whole thimbleful of fairy stuff climbed into my open tabs this past 2 weeks, and since this mid-month issue is weirder, I’m leaning in. I even did a bit of research in the 2 hours I had free this week. First of all, the sarcasm: ‘Fairy porn’: is this booming erotica genre an insult to Wales? in The Guardian. “Some of these raunchy fantasy novels borrow heavily from Welsh mythology - prompting concerns about misrepresentation.” Then the procedural generation of fairy art: It’s The Andy Warhol Lottery, But You Don’t Know If You Won (via Matt Ingram). Here’s a Warhol sketch:
It was bought for $20K by “MSCHF… a Brooklyn, NY-based art collective known for its creative destruction.” (They also worked on the Satanic Shoes with L’il Nas.)
They sold them for $250 each and sold them all. A kind of performance art of its own, although evidently intended to dispute the idea of provenance. They made a lot of money on this stunt. Samim (meditative tech poster) asked an LLM how to summon a fairy and posted the long report: How to summon a fairy. (Fun fact, it showed up in a Perplexity search when I asked this same question out of curiosity.) It is more a new-agey roundup of, uh, stuff, than a folklore record. Which is a thing I care about! And can talk about mid-month! So I ran over to my shelves and bookmarks and checked what I had on hand. Firstly, possibly most related to Samim’s result, is Ramsey Dukes’ entertaining “How to See Fairies: Discover Your Psychic Powers in 6 Weeks.” Dukes is not a crazy charlatan although he titles his books to sell to the credulous; he’s a smart thinker about esoterica. Briefly, “fairies” for him are kind of “nature spirits,” or auras, which you can perhaps train yourself to see; his inspiration come from theosophist Geoffrey Hodson’s description of his ability to see all manner of fairy (and spiritual) being. A book of Hodson’s called “Fairies at Work and Play,” is available in the Internet Archive or Amazon. This book contains reports of the fairy folk he saw, and their varietal descriptions. Incidentally, he believed the Cottingley fairy pictures of 1917 were real — there is a good writeup of that hoax here in Wikipedia, which contains the unexpected wrinkle that one girl claimed the last of their 5 pictures was real, despite admitting they faked the rest. (Here I want to gesture vaguely at the wonderful The Trickster and the Paranormal, by George Hansen, which I learned of from the Weird Studies podcast.)
Moving on from seeing to summoning: I’ve been collecting books of the folklore research of John Kruse, an enthusiastic documenter of British fairy lore. I found a couple pages in two of his books (British Fairies and The Darker Side of Fairy). Some ways to see them, although maybe not summon, include:
As reasons for summoning, evidently a lot of people have wanted to have sex with fairies (pointing back up to the romantasy fairy porn article on the intro?). Or one may want a fairy servant, as in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but we know how that goes. Kruse says there are broadly two methods, using wands and crystal balls and the right spell, and otherwise exploiting their own magic to reveal them. He reports one tricky long ritual that relies on collecting their used bath water scum. There are two fabulous academic works on the topic of summoning, which I shall leave here and talk more about this topic on my resurrected blog, which I want to use for spillover from here (look for tag “titaa”): Frederika Bain, The Binding of the Fairies, 4 Spells, and Communing With Nature: Fairies in English Ritual Magic and Occult Philosophy, 1400-1700 by Samuel Hogan (a dissertation from 2024). In the latter, I see some of Kruse’s references, too, in more glorious detail. Welp, onto the news… There is stuff on summoning ghosts in the Weird & Esoteric folklore section, and some ways in which it can go wrong, too!... Subscribe to Things I Think Are Awesome to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of Things I Think Are Awesome to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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среда, 15 января 2025 г.
TITAA #62.5: Fairies and Doom
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