Abstract
This introduction to the volume surveys the history and anthropology of Christian conceptualizations of fairies, nature spirits and other “small gods.” It does so through a consideration of two tendencies of the fairies: their recession or vanishing into the pagan past and their survival as Christian demons or superstitions. The chapter argues that “small gods” are constructed as pre-Christian survivals but are best understood as objects of Christian metacultural reflection: they function to define but also trouble the margins of Christendom.
They now commingle with the coward angels,
the company of those who were not rebels
nor faithful to their God, but stood apart
The heavens, that their beauty not be lessened,
have cast them out, nor will deep Hell receive them—
even the wicked cannot glory in them
—Dante, Inferno 3.39–44
They don’t exist
Except in our imaginations
Which aren’t any less real
Than the lives that we’re making.
—Nathan K., “Ghosts”
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Notes
- 1.
Eliade, Cosmos and History, 145–146.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate; “Where the Spirits Dwell.”
- 4.
Cohen, “Monster Culture”; Mittman, “Introduction”; Steel, “Centaurs, Satyrs, and Cynocephali.”
- 5.
Brauner, “Cannibals”; Cervantes, Devil in the New World; Mills and Grafton, eds., Conversion; Marshall and Walsham, eds., Angels; Redden, Diabolism; Braham, “Monstrous Caribbean.”
- 6.
Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf; Green, Elf Queens; Goodare, “Seely Wights”; “Boundaries”; Hutton, “Witch-Hunting”; “Early Modern Fairy”; Marshall, “Protestants and Fairies”; Ostling, Devil and the Host; Ostling and Forest, “Goblins, Owles and Sprites”; Wilby, Cunning Folk.
- 7.
Stewart, Demons and the Devil; “Creolization”; Stewart and Shaw, eds., Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism; Robbins, “Dispossessing the Spirits”; “Globalization”; “Enchanting Science”; Chua, “Conversion”; Harvey, ed. Contemporary Animism; Blanes and Espírito Santo, eds., Social Life of Spirits; Wood, “Spirits of the Forest”; Telban, “Struggle with Spirits.”
- 8.
Anonymous, Nędza z Biedą, 4r.
- 9.
We find a similarly hybrid “skrzatek czart” [hobgoblin devil] in an early eighteenth-century witch trial: see Pilaszek, Procesy, 439. For the range of overlapping meanings of skrzatek in Polish folkloric materials, see Dżwigoł, Słownictwo mitologiczne, 23–24.
- 10.
Ostling, Devil and the Host, 195–237.
- 11.
Mark 5:9, and see Crossan, Jesus, 88–91.
- 12.
Murray, “Witchcraft,” 91.
- 13.
Robbins, “Crypto-Religion,” 421.
- 14.
Cohen, “Monster Culture,” 4.
- 15.
Sacks, Hallucinations; Davies, “Nightmare Experience”; Dudley and Goodare, “Outside In or Inside Out”; Chua, “Soul Encounters,” 7; Aragon; “Missions and Ommisions”; Magliocco, this volume. I take this subjective reality to be the point of Nathan K.’s “Ghosts,” noted in the epigraph.
- 16.
We have known since Saussure that river ≠ fleuve, the English term contrasting by size to stream while the French contrasts by outflow to rivière; yet speakers of both languages have only the most trivial difficulties understanding the semantic extension of the two terms.
- 17.
Avian taxonomy cannot be separated from symbolic systems, as Bulmer reminds us in his seminal “Why Is a Cassowary Not a Bird?”
- 18.
From a vast literature, see Christina Larner’s classical statement about the witch as ascriptive category: Larner, “Crime of Witchcraft”; cf. Jackson, “Witch as a Category.”
- 19.
Lohmann, “Supernatural,” 178.
- 20.
Purkiss, “Sounds of Silence,” 83.
- 21.
Harris, “Eternal Return,” 52; cf. Ostling and Forest, “Goblins, Owles and Sprites.”
- 22.
G. S. Kirk, Nature of Greek Myths, 20.
- 23.
Astrid Lindgren, Pippi Longstocking. With just a little imaginative work, similar arguments could be made for other red-headed girls, such as Anne of Green Gables.
- 24.
Aragon, “Missions and Omissions”; see also Espírito Santo and Blanes, “Introduction,” 13–15.
- 25.
Hafstein, “Elves’ Point of View,” 89.
- 26.
Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate, 13.
- 27.
Harris, “Enchanted Entities,” 114.
- 28.
Brückner, Mitologia polska, 218.
- 29.
Moszyński, Kultura ludowa, part 1 vol. 2s. 494.
- 30.
Young, “Against Taxonomy,” 223.
- 31.
Williams, “Semantics of Fairy,” 471.
- 32.
Simpson, “Ambiguity of Elves,” 81.
- 33.
Ibid., 82.
- 34.
Briggs, Vanishing People, 26; cf. Green, Elf Queens, 4.
- 35.
Tucker, “Syncretism and Conservation,” 115.
- 36.
Descola, “Societies of Nature,” 114; cf. Schneider, “Spirits,” 27.
- 37.
Similar ambivalences beset Islamic understanding of the jinn and their mode of intermixture with local preternatural beings: see, e.g., Parkin, “Entitling Evil”; Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits.
- 38.
I borrow the term “other-than-human persons” from Hallowell’s classic “Ojibwa Ontology.”
- 39.
On the hegemonic domestication, classification, and demonization of amorphous and ambivalent “nature spirits” see especially Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate, 19–30.
- 40.
Tomlinson, In God’s Image, 19 and passim.
- 41.
Briggs, Vanishing People, 7–8; cf. 49–51.
- 42.
Pina-Cabral, “Gods of the Gentiles,” 46.
- 43.
Eliot, Prufrock, 16.
- 44.
Keats, Lamia, Part II vv. 230, 236; in his Poetical Works.
- 45.
Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much with Us” vv. 9–14; in his Poems, vol. 1.
- 46.
Milton, “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (1645) vv. 184–188, in his Poems. The “Ode” follows a tradition going back to early Christian apologists such as Justin Martyr, who “presented Christ’s birth as a moment of triumph over magic” (Bailey, “Age of Magicians,” 4).
- 47.
See Pócs’ chapter, this volume, and Meyer, “Mami Water.”
- 48.
Schneider, “Spirits,” 24. Not least among the virtues of Schneider’s argument must be counted her insistence on continuities between demonological and Enlightenment discourse, despite their seeming opposition. Both, she reminds us, made condemnation of what Schneider calls “rural animism” a central concern (48).
- 49.
Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing, 20; quoted in Tomlinson, In God’s Image, 207.
- 50.
Hafstein, “Elves’ Point of View,” 96–98.
- 51.
Rieti, Strange Terrain, 51, 181.
- 52.
Henderson and Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief, 24; cf. Purkiss, “Sounds of Silence,” 83; Swann, “Politics of Fairylore,” 451; Magliocco, this volume.
- 53.
Scot, Discouerie, 153.
- 54.
William Cleland, Effigies Clericorum, quoted after Henderson and Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief, 25.
- 55.
Ibid., 28.
- 56.
Yeats, Celtic Twilight, 208.
- 57.
Hafstein, “Elves’ Point of View,” 94–95.
- 58.
Brückner, Mitologia polska. More recently, Bruce Lincoln has suggested that organized pantheons themselves are often the product of the rationalizing or Christianizing critique that accompanies the demise of the gods they comprise: see Lincoln, “Nature and Genesis.”
- 59.
Jolly, “Medieval Magic,” 16–17.
- 60.
Keller, “Comment on Robbins,” 23.
- 61.
Quoted after Wilby, “Witch’s Familiar,” 284. For a similar case in Scotland, see Martin, “Devil and the Domestic,” 83.
- 62.
For a differing interpretation of this famous trial, see Goodare, “Boundaries,” 148–149.
- 63.
Wilby, “Witch’s Familiar,” 302.
- 64.
Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica 4.16.20 (Eusebius here mistranslates Ps. 96:5, “For all the gods of the nations are idols”).
- 65.
Briggs, Vanishing People, 8.
- 66.
Wilby, “Witch’s Familiar,” 287; MacCulloch, “Mingling”; Macdonald, “In Search of the Devil.” Similarly in Poland, the devil not infrequently appeared to accused witches in suspiciously fairy-like form—in red boots and a red cap like a gnome: see Ostling, Devil and the Host, 200; Wojcieszak, Opalenickie Procesy.
- 67.
James VI, Daemonologie, 57, 65.
- 68.
Green, Elf Queens, 14.
- 69.
Redden, Diabolism, 97–98; Mills, Idolatry and its Enemies, 240; Stewart, Demons and the Devil, 105.
- 70.
In some ways puck might be an unfair example, his ambivalence attributable to creolization. Like the fairy and the goblin, he is the product of the conflation of (at least) Germanic and Romance antecedents (Williams, “Semantics of Fairy”; Hutton, “Making of the Early Modern,” 1142). But similar situations of creolization (on which see Stewart, “Creolization”) underlie the imagination of fairylike beings worldwide.
- 71.
Latham, Elizabethan Fairies, 227–228; Ostling and Forest, “Goblins, Owles and Sprites.”
- 72.
William Cartwright, The Ordinary (ca. 1635) act 3 scene 1, in his Life and Works.
- 73.
Ben Jonson, Love Restored; Reginald Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), 85; Rowlands, More Knaues Yet? (1613).
- 74.
Latham, Elizabethan Fairies, 37.
- 75.
Christiansen, “Some Notes.” For a recent version of this argument, see Simpson, “Ambiguity of Elves.”
- 76.
Sacks, Hallucinations, 6, 39. Note however that “small gods” are frequently of human size or larger, their “smallness” a matter of ontological rather than physical stature.
- 77.
Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds; “Spiritual Beings”; cf. the “spontaneous animism” imagined by Edward Tylor (Hanegraaff, “How Magic Survived,” 374). Although Guthrie’s cognitive theory provides too thin a soil to ground the complex theologies, cosmologies and ethical systems of world religion, it might help to explain the background hum of animistic, anthropomorphizing experience from which beliefs about fairies and their ilk might arguably arise.
- 78.
Flint, “Demonization of Magic”; Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate, 1–26; cf. Lincoln, “Nature and Genesis.”
- 79.
Those pre-Christian beings that manage to remain “big” after Christianization (the Great Goddess assimilating to the Virgin Mary in Rome; Pachamama following a similar trajectory in the Andes; St. Michael and St. Nicholas taking on aspects of the thunder-god Perun in the east Slavic world; the principle Yoruba orishas hiding behind the masks of Catholic saints in Santería and Candomblé) remain largely outside the purview of the present volume.
- 80.
Gunnell, “How Elvish?”
- 81.
Aragon, “Reorganizing the Cosmology,” 360–363.
- 82.
Cf. Tomlinson, In God’s Image, 40. Methodist missionaries in Fiji appropriated the term kalou (spirit being) for their god, now rendered paramount with the addition of a definite article: na kalou—“the Spirit-being.” The other kalou are recategorized as tevoro and timoni (devils and demons), against whose depredations one invokes God’s help.
- 83.
Robbins, “Conversion,” 78.
- 84.
Ibid., 69–74; “Crypto-Religion,” 419.
- 85.
Stewart, Demons and the Devil, 11; “Syncretism and Its Synonyms,” 57.
- 86.
Mills, “Naturalization,” quotation at 507; cf. Gose, “Converting the Ancestors.”
- 87.
Buccola, Fairies, 84.
- 88.
Meyer, “Mami Water,” 289.
- 89.
Schmitt, Holy Greyhound, 7; cf. Green, Elf Queens, 11–41.
- 90.
Robbins, “Globalization,” 127.
- 91.
Ibid., 128–129; cf. “Conversion,” 68; Meyer, “Beyond Syncretism.”
- 92.
This is the provocative thesis of Jane Schneider’s foundational “Spirits and the Spirits of Capitalism”; see also Robbins, “Dispossessing the Spirits”; “Continuity Thinking”; “Enchanting Science”; and Meyer, “If You Are a Devil”; “You Devil.” Michael Wood explores a case of such severed reciprocity in his chapter below. For a portrait of a society that regrets having severed such ambivalent ties, see Brunois, “Dream Experience.”
- 93.
Robbins, “Conversion.”
- 94.
Robbins, “Crypto-Religion,” 417–418.
- 95.
Meyer, “Beyond Syncretism,” 58; cf. “If You Are a Devil.”
- 96.
Meyer, “Mami Water,” 387–390. The literature on Christian “negative cults” in Africa is vast: in addition to sources already cited, see Comaroff and Comaroff, eds., Modernity and its Malcontents; Stewart and Shaw, eds., Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism; Meyer, Translating the Devil; “Witchcraft and Christianity”; Engelke, “Discontinuity”; “Past Pentecostalism.”
- 97.
Frankfurter, “Where the Spirits Dwell,” 45.
- 98.
Green, Elf Queens, quotation at p. 1.
- 99.
Meyer, “Mami Water.”
- 100.
E.g., Liliequist, “Sexual Encounters with Spirits”; Robbins, “Properties of Nature,” 181.
- 101.
Ginzburg, Night Battles.
- 102.
Henningsen, “Ladies from Outside”; “Witches’ Flying.”
- 103.
Čiča, “Vilenica and Vilenjak”; Pócs, Fairies and Witches, 243; “Order of St Ilona”; Goodare, “Seely Wights”; Wilby, Cunning Folk.
- 104.
One can observe such a journey in Ginzburg’s trajectory from the strictly delimited Night Battles to the millennium-traversing speculations of his Ecstasies. For critique, see Willem de Blécourt, “Return of the Sabbat.”
- 105.
Goodare, “Seely Wights,” 211.
- 106.
Wilby, Cunning Folk.
- 107.
Henningsen, “Witches’ Flying,” 64.
- 108.
Moses Pitt, Account of one Ann Jeffries, 19; quoted after Buccola, Fairies, 171.
- 109.
Green, Elf Queens, 19–20; Cannell, “Introduction,” 27.
- 110.
Ostling, Devil and the Host, 236; Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie, 15.117–118, 42.
- 111.
Harris, “Eternal Return.”
- 112.
Robbins, “Conversion.”
- 113.
Schmitt, Holy Greyhound.
- 114.
Ibid., 21.
- 115.
The proverb goes back at least to the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (ca. 730 CE) chap. 15. It is current in Poland, Russia, and Greece, and perhaps elsewhere: Krzyżanowski, Mądrej głowie; Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief, 43; Stewart, Demons and the Devil, 160.
- 116.
Meyer, “Beyond Syncretism.”
- 117.
Aragon, this volume.
- 118.
Chua, “Conversion,” 516; cf. Schneider, “Spirits.”
- 119.
The traditional tale follows a pattern first seen in medieval romances such as Le Jeu d’Adam and Huon of Bordeaux, in which a fairy curses a young child because it was improperly summoned. Briggs, Vanishing People, 141–142.
- 120.
Ibid., 151–161.
- 121.
Thomas Rymer, quoted after Harte, Fairy Traditions, 129.
- 122.
See e.g., Briggs, “Realms of the Dead”; Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead.
- 123.
The story first appears in Jerome’s fourth-century Life of St Paul. See Steel, “Centaurs, Satyrs, and Cynocephali,” 257–258. As a migratory legend (Christiansen ML 5050, “The Fairies’ Prospect of Salvation”) it can be found throughout the folklore of Christian Europe; e.g., Lindow, “Näck.” I thank Terry Gunnell for this reference.
- 124.
Hafstein, “Elves’ Point of View,” 89; Hutton, “Making of the Early Modern,” 1141; Green, Elf Queens, 2; Harris, “Enchanted Entities,” 119.
- 125.
Dante, Inferno 3.39–44.
- 126.
Green, Elf Queens, 23–27; Agrippa, Occult Philosophy, 3.18 [400]; Gunnell, “How Elvish?”; Briggs, Vanishing People, 30–31; Valk, “Descent of Demonic Beings”; D. Simonides and J. Ligęza, Gadka za gadką, 57–58; Macdonald, “Always Been Christian,” 156–157.
- 127.
Espírito Santo and Blanes, “Introduction,” 13–15.
- 128.
Michael Ostling, “Witches’ Herbs” s.v. pokrzyk and przestęp.
- 129.
Taussig, Devil and Commodity Fetishism; cf. Moszyński, Kultura ludowa, 2.2.7: “it was often impossible to determine, whether one had to do just with a coin or with the demon (evil spirit) ‘hidden in the coin.’”
- 130.
Goodare, “Boundaries”; Harris, “Enchanted Entities,” 119–123; Maxwell-Stuart, “Strix”; Serpell, “Guardian Spirits.”
- 131.
William Cartwright, The Ordinary (ca. 1635), Act 3 scene 1, in his Life and Works.
- 132.
Isaiah 13:20–21; Spenser, Epithalamion (1595), in his Minor Poems; cf. Ostling, Devil and the Host, 230–232; Ostling and Forest, “Goblins, Owles and Sprites.” Similar blurrings of “real” animals with “intangible” nature spirits could be multiplied, even if one restricts oneself to avifauna: the nightjar or goatsucker, a bird associated with milk-theft and witchcraft throughout its European range—also called a puck in England, and associated in an early modern Polish text with the house-elf or uboże; the German Nebelkrähe, both a nocturnal bird and a vampiric demon; the Celtic badhb, both a hooded crow, a witch, and a fairy woman; the owl/witch/night-demons common in African witchcraft belief, and so on. See Williams, “Semantics of Fairy,” 460–461; Sowirzalius, Sejm piekielny, vv. 1161–1162; 56–57; Zika, Exorcising Our Demons, 481, 85; Needham, “Synthetic Images.”
- 133.
Liliequist, “Sexual Encounters with Spirits,” 160; see also Green, Elf Queens, 13–14.
- 134.
Webster, Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft; quoted after Clark, “Demons and Disease.”
- 135.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this speculation tended to be replaced with racialist speculations—e.g., about the supposed origin of fairy belief in an alleged race of pigmies inhabiting the British Isles before the Celts, or in Linnaeus’s suggestion that “Hottentots” might be hybrids of chimpanzees (homo troglodytes) and homo sapiens: see Briggs, Vanishing People, 33; Henderson and Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief, 20–25; Liliequist, “Sexual Encounters with Spirits,” 164.
- 136.
Stewart, Demons and the Devil, 119.
- 137.
Hobbes, Leviathan, 7.
- 138.
Oldridge, “Fairies and the Devil,” 1–4.
- 139.
Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft, 113.
- 140.
Richard Corbet, Faeryes Farewell, quoted after Latham, Elizabethan Fairies, 63.
- 141.
Buccola, Fairies; Marshall, “Protestants and Fairies”; Hutton, “Making of the Early Modern”; Oldridge, “Fairies and the Devil.”
- 142.
Thus several early modern plays (Wily Beguiled, The Devil Is an Ass, Grim the Collier, The Buggbears) feature Robin Goodfellow as a “Pug,” a harmless devil, even an “amiable spirit.” See Latham, Elizabethan Fairies, 224.
- 143.
Urbańczyk, “Wokabularz,” item 360, 25.
- 144.
Brückner, “Średniowieczna poezja,” 25.
- 145.
Brückner, “Przesądy i zabobony,” 345. Cf. a second sermon suggesting that such offerings of food were made every Thursday: Ibid., 341. Both anonymous sermons paraphrase Stanisław of Skarbimierz, “De superstitionibus.”
- 146.
Sowirzalius, Sejm piekielny, vv. 1161–1162; 56–57; cf. Anonymous, Postępek, 117.
- 147.
Anonymous, Czarownica powołana, 5–6.
- 148.
Roździeński, Officina ferraria, vv. 1472–1476; 64.
- 149.
Milton, “L’Allegro” vv. 105–108, in his Poems. Cf. e.g. Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1.
- 150.
Smith, “Introduction.”
- 151.
Gordon, “Superstitio.”
- 152.
Robbins, “Continuity Thinking,” 33; cf. Pina-Cabral, “Gods of the Gentiles.”
- 153.
Personal memory of a symposium on the “Nature of God” at Trinity College, University of Toronto, in the Fall of 2000. On the semantics and pragmatics of the phrase “ghosts and goblins,” see Ostling and Forest, “Goblins, Owles and Sprites.”
- 154.
Glanvill and More, Saducismus, 14.
- 155.
Quoted after Roden, “Coming of the Fairies.”
- 156.
Purkiss, “Sounds of Silence,” 83; Tolkien, “Fairy-Stories.”
- 157.
Thompson, “This Gay Tribe.”
- 158.
Christiansen, “Some Notes,” 101; Swatos and Gissurarson, Icelandic Spiritualism, 48–49; Hafstein, “Elves’ Point of View”; Gander, “Road Project.”
- 159.
Robbins, “Crypto-Religion,” 416–417; “Paradoxes of Global Pentecostalism,” 228.
- 160.
Robbins, “Paradoxes of Global Pentecostalism,” 221; cf. “Continuity Thinking”; “Crypto-Religion.”
- 161.
Robbins, “Crypto-Religion,” 412.
- 162.
Barker, “Christianity,” 165; Cannell, “Introduction,” 12.
- 163.
Robbins, “Crypto-Religion,” 412–414; cf. “Continuity Thinking,” 6.
- 164.
Frankfurter, “Amente Demons,” 97.
- 165.
Mills, “Bad Christians,” 211.
- 166.
Henningsen, “Witches’ Flying.”
- 167.
Henderson and Cowan, Scottish Fairy Belief, 213. See also Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples; and Gunnell’s and Valk’s chapters, this volume.
- 168.
Lecouteux, Witches, Werewolves, and Fairies.
- 169.
Spenser, Shepheardes Calendar, 31; cf. Peter Heylyn, Cosmographie, 1.113.
- 170.
Jolly, “Medieval Magic,” 15; cf. Ostling, Devil and the Host, 183–192. Robbins makes the same argument from an anthropological perspective in many places, perhaps most fully in his “Continuity Thinking.”
- 171.
Stewart, “Syncretism and Its Synonyms”; Styers, Making Magic; Sahlins, “Western Illusion”; Keane, Christian Moderns.
- 172.
Robbins, “Ambivalent and Resistant Christians,” 77.
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Acknowledgments
This Introduction has benefitted from comments received during the workshopping of two early versions at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (University of Queensland) and the Early Modern Circle (University of Melbourne). Daniel Midena, Laurel Zwissler, Ronald Hutton, and Serena Love all read and critiqued early drafts; I should also like to thank Andrea Rizzi, Brenda Carr, Charles Stewart, David Frankfurter, and Joel Robbins for their encouragement or critique at crucial junctures. Special thanks to Michigan singer-songwriter Nathan K. for permitting me to use lyrics to his song “Ghosts” as an epigraph to this chapter. Apologies to Sam Roberts, Terry Pratchett, David Byrne, and Skrillex. All inadequacies are, of course, my own.
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Ostling, M. (2018). Introduction: Where’ve All the Good People Gone?. In: Ostling, M. (eds) Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits. Palgrave Historical Studies in Witchcraft and Magic. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58520-2_1
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