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By Olivia Havlin: 04/23/2018
“For many pious Christians, as for the inquisition of Joan of Arc, this was a distinction without a difference. Fairies were demons, plain and simple.” – Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (Green 1)
In Medieval tales of King Arthur, Morgan le Fay (Morgan the Fairy), who was said to be the half-sister of Arthur, was considered a goddess, a demon, a witch, and a fairy. “She is a complex figure woven from many ancient threads and is variously represented as a dangerous sorceress who enchants men with her magic and her beauty; a woman famous for her wisdom, esoteric knowledge, and abilities as a healer; a fairy; or a goddess, who can bless or curse, or confer sovereignty, as she pleases” (Young Ch. 5). She behaves in a way that is consistent with the belief that fairies can be helpful and benevolent, or they can be mischievous and malevolent. She encompasses all the ways in which we think about fairies, except perhaps one, and that is the fallen angel theory, in which the angels who were shunned from heaven by god become either good (guardian angels), evil (demons), or somewhere in between (fairies). Along with the fallen angel theory, a fairy can be a former pagan deity, a shape-changing witch, or even a demon. In this essay, I flesh out some of these ideas in order to have a better understanding of how fairies became associated with demons.
In ancient civilizations, people believed in many deities reigning over them from above. They also believed in earth dwelling beings, such as nymphs, dryads, and hamadryads, who were female spirits of the natural world – minor goddesses of the forests, rivers, springs, meadows, mountains, and seas. They were the crafters of nature’s wild beauty, from the growing of trees, flowers, and shrubs, to the nurture of wild animals and birds, and the formation of grottos, springs, brooks, and wetlands (Theoi.com). Over time, these minor gods became fairies, or nature spirits as Christianity took hold of Europe and people no longer believed in many gods.
It is difficult to say exactly what constitutes as a ‘fairy,’ because the umbrella term ‘fairy’ could mean something different to everyone and can be almost anything: a dainty, winged being that flits around flowers; a tall, regal elf; a grotesque swamp-like creature; a malevolent mischief-maker; or anything in between. They can shapeshift into different creatures and animals, and they can render themselves invisible. They have the ability to be in two different worlds, and many of them are attracted to humans. Disney and Hollywood have convinced everyone that fairies are benevolent wish-granters or even environmental champions, but in folklore, most fairies are terrifying. They tend to prefer baby-stealing to wish granting, and milk spoiling to gift leaving. “Elves and their ilk are often metaphors, allegories, indices for credulity or exoticism or evil or the wild; but they are sometimes for some people, real beings with whom real people understand themselves to interact” (Ostling 5). Fairies, or the “Good People,” from European folklore are usually depicted as capricious at best, and downright evil at worst.
This is where demons come in. At one time, fairies were a natural part of life; they were common everyday beings that people lived with. However, around the fourteenth century, this changed when the Church began changing its mind about witchcraft. Before the fourteenth century, “secular law was concerned with preventing the harmful applications of witchcraft, but gradually, under the influence of the Church, the very practice of it was banned, because it was a form of paganism, like the worship of trees and sacred springs, and other surviving pagan customs” (Shahar Ch. 8). This shows that the worship of the nature gods that once inhabited trees or rivers was now illegal and considered pagan and linked to witchcraft. “But on the whole, the Church took a more lenient view of the practitioners of witchcraft than did the secular law, perhaps because it wished to win over the recently converted population without applying too much pressure, or because it accepted the position of some of the Church fathers concerning the unreality of witchcraft.” To add to that, “before the thirteenth century there were clergymen who believed in the reality of witchcraft” (Shahar Ch. 8). So witchcraft became illegal more as a push from secular peoples and not by the Church – at least at first.
Until the fourteenth century, there was not a great number of court cases involving witchcraft. However, from then on, there was a growth of ideas of the Devil. Gradually, the attitude of the Church toward people who engaged in sorcery began to change. It began to view witches as the Devil’s accomplices, and they switched to believing in witchcraft, but what they did not believe, was that those who claimed to have practiced witchcraft had any powers. Rather they believed it was all the work of the Devil.
In Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft, he illustrates the Church’s opinion, “In these matters they doo but dreame, and doo not those things indeed, which they confesse through their distemperature, growing of their melancholike humor: and therefore (saith he) these things, which they report of themselves, are but meere illusions” (Scot 34). Scot believed that witchcraft could not possibly be real because there was no “mention made of these kinds of witches in the Bible” (Scot 9). He even went so far as to say that fearmongers had given witches too much credit, explaining, “For alas! What an unapt instrument is a toothles, old, impotent, and unweldie woman to flie in the aier? Truelie, the divell little needs such instruments to bring his purposes to passe” (Scot 10). In other words, women were too unwieldy and incompetent to do the Devil’s bidding, in Scot’s and the Church’s opinion. So, in general, “If witchcraft was unreal, that means that the acts themselves were unreal” (Shahar Ch. 8).
Eventually, though, this view changed, as well, with the publication of books like the Malleus Maleficarum, or the Hammer of Witches. Written by James Sprenger and Henry Kramer, the Malleus remained in use for hundreds of years, and with every new publication released, the accusations grew. It had indisputable influence on the witch trials in England and on the continent. It, and others like it, had been used as a judicial case-book for the detection and persecution of witches, specifying rules and procedures by which suspected witches were tortured and put to death. Thousands of people, primarily women, were killed as a result of the methods described in this book, for reasons as minor as a strange birthmark, widowhood, mental illness, cultivation of medicinal herbs, or for financial gain by the accuser. The Malleus serves as a warning about what happens when intolerance and ignorance take over a society.
Now witches were believed to have made pacts with the Devil and summoning demons in order to gain power. But were they summoning demons or fairies? According to the Discoverie, an example of a summoning was to call upon the Greek Oracle Sibylla, whom they called a fairie; “And I will sweare to thee an oth, by the perill of my soule, that if thou wilt come to me, and appeare to me this night, and shew me true visions in this christall stone, and fetch me the fairie Sibylla, that I may talke with hir vislblle, and she may come before me, as the conjuration leadeth to fulfill my will & desire effectuallie” (Scot 335). According to the Malleus, when referring to succubi and incubi, Sprenger and Kramer believed them to be fauns or satyrs saying, “the Devil which the common people call an Incubus, the Romans called a fig Faun,” and further, “by Satyrs here Devils are meant; as the gloss says, Satyrs are wild shaggy creatures of the woods, which are a certain kind of Devils called Incubi” (Malleus Ch. III). However, Reginald Scott, who wrote Scottish Fairy Beliefs: A History, describes the ‘father of the fairies’ as “shaped like a satyr and fed upon the air, having wife and children to the number of twelve thousand, which were the brood of the northern fairies inhabiting Southerland” (Henderson 23). As fear of witches increased, fairies quickly became so enmeshed with witchcraft that it is often difficult to distinguish them from Satan’s unholy regiments (Henderson 106).
By the time of the Reformation, the ability to distinguish a fairy from a demon had become much more difficult. Demons are spiritual, noncorporeal beings, but they have been depicted in religious iconography as hybrid creatures with horrifying characteristics or as caricatures of idols of an opposing religion. In the early Church, for example, there was a belief that pagan idols were demons (Britannica.com). In his book Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits: Small Gods on the Margins of Christendom, Michael Ostling compares nature spirits or fairies with what he refers to as small gods. His aim is to “identify small gods and to listen to those voices tending to venerate, negotiate with, or appease the small gods as to those who demonize them – confining them to hell, marginalizing them in the past or the countryside, or denying their real existence altogether.” Furthermore, he goes on to say, “Although devil never really meant small god, Christian thinkers have characteristically re-labeled small gods as devils” (Ostling 5). He also hopes to “recover the indigenous fairy from underneath its devil mask,” seeking to separate fairy from demon (Ostling 5).
Richard Firth Green, in his book Elf Queens and Holy Friars, claims, “it would not be an exaggeration to say that for much of the Middle Ages the word ‘incubus,’ meant simply ‘fairy.’” (Green 79). Moreover, he goes on to say that this is “clear evidence that as late as the fifteenth century the word ‘incubus’ might still have been imagined as a fancy word for ‘fairy’” (Green 79). He goes on to describe a story from a fifteenth-century German chronicle that describes an incubus who calls himself King Goldemar who “played a musical instrument, drank wine, and frequently dismayed the religious by exposing their hidden vices.” Green asserts this ‘Incubus’ is “clearly a fairy – a fairy king in fact” (Green 81). He adds that the best way to respond to the difficulty in deciphering a fairy from a demon is to read the stories that contain words like, “incubus-demon” as though the demon were simply a fairy (Green 81).
During the Middle Ages in Christian Europe, the acknowledgment of fairies or of pagan gods was akin to heresy. “The religious impetus subjected the fairies to a process of demonization, with frightening consequences for the people who resisted these reinterpretations and steadfastly held on to their beliefs” (Henderson & Cowan 2). Furthermore, it was “often difficult to understand how fairy belief survived… into the modern era” because the worship of fairies was suppressed and those who were caught worshipping them were persecuted. (Henderson & Cowan 2). As described in the Malleus, the belief in fairies was subject to extinction, for according to Sprenger and Kramer, “apart from humans and angels there are no other reasoning creatures. Hence, they can only be demons” (Sprenger & Kramer472). “The Church in those days viewed witchcraft as a form of idolatry, because like idolatry witchcraft had recourse to demons. Thus, it was necessary, in the process of evangelizing Europe, to uproot witchcraft together with all other pagan vestiges.” Further, “This view of sorcery as an alliance with the Devil may have developed from the clerical understanding of ‘ritual magic’. Or it may have stemmed from the attribution of heretics of magical dealings with the Devil” (Shulamith Ch. 8).
“In essence, the fairies came to be presented as agents of the Devil and all those who had traffic with them as co-conspirators in his grand plan to wreak havoc on good and godly citizens” (Henderson 106). The act of calling upon a demon was considered a sin, even if it appeared evident that the witch did not worship the Devil. But why was there all this hatred toward supposed witches and a demonization of fairies? The answer may be as simple as women.
Chrisitan monks and priests considered anything concerning women to be unlucky, dirty, or evil. During the late Middle Ages, the magical aspects of femininity became increasingly associated with witchcraft. Feminine symbols became feared and were assigned negative values, and there was a particular distaste for women in power. The frequent association of women with magic and the supernatural suggests suspicions about women and a fear of their power, which contributed to negative assessments of womankind in general and the imposition of limitations on their rights and privileges. Some of the conflicts surrounding the proper position of women are brought out in the Arthurian stories, which often depicted attempts to undercut women’s power or to put limits on it.
For Sir Thomas Malory, Morgan represents a traitorous force within Arthurian society. She opposes and sabotages the political and social structure of her brother’s realm through her beauty, sexuality, magical powers, and occult knowledge. Malory’s text transforms Arthur, the legendary pagan king, into a righteous Christian king, while demonizing his semi-divine half-sister, which in turn shows how fairies, or former pagan deities, were transformed by Christianity into malicious, evil demons. Women were feared and were thought to be bad, therefore they were witches and were associated with the Devil. But the Devil was also an incubus, which was also a fairy. In the end, the important question was not “Do you believe in fairies?” because everyone did. The question was whether you considered the good neighbors to be manifestations of divine providence or the legions of hell.
Works Cited
Angel and Demon | Religion | 2018. Britannica.com, https://www.britannica.com/topic/angel-religion (accessed April 16, 2018).
Atsma, Aaron J. Theoi Project. Theoi.com. Nymphai. Accessed April 16, 2018. http://www.theoi.com/Nymphe/Nymphai.html
Cowan, Edward J., and Lizanne Henderson. 2001. Scottish Fairy Beliefs. Accessed February 5, 2017. https://books.google.com/books?id=IokHsI7y008C&pg=PA6&lpg=PA6&dq=Mingling+of+Fairy+and+Witch+Beliefs+in+16th+%26+17th+Century+Scotland&source=bl&ots=LI5pP3ND0r&sig=E6c3GIImBWHydsa6Yu0SliKTOPo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjOlZLpi5DZAhXwRt8KHROrBm0Q6AEIUzAK#v=onep.
Green, Richard Firth. 2016. Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Books.
Keightly, Thomas. 1892. The Fairy Mythology. Douglas L. Alley. Accessed February 5, 2017. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41006/41006-h/41006-h.htm.
King, James I. 1597. Sacred Texts: Daemonologie. Accessed February 5, 2017. http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/kjd/kjd00.htm.
Ostling, Michael. 2017. Fairies, Demons, and Nature Spirits: ‘Small Gods’ at the Margins of Christendom. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Scot, Reginald. 1584. A Discoverie of Witches. London: Cambrige.
Shahar, Shulamith. 2003. The Fourth Estate : A History of Women in the Middle Ages. Chapter 8: Witches and the heretical movements. London: Routledge, 2003. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost), EBSCOhost (accessed April 16, 2018). http://web.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.umw.edu/ehost/ebookviewer/ebook/bmxlYmtfXzEwMjcwM19fQU41?sid=218fd743-cfd8-4c72-ae1d-a665878ee2aa@sessionmgr4007&vid=0&format=EK&lpid=ch8&rid=0
Spreger, James, and Henry Kramer. 1487. Malleus Mleficarum. Edited by Montague Somers. Accessed February 5, 2017. http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/mm/.
Young, Serenity. 2018. Oxford Scholarship: Women Who Fly: Goddesses, Witches, Mystics, and other Airborne Females. November. Accessed April 12, 2018. http://www.oxfordscholarship.com.ezproxy.umw.edu/view/10.1093/oso/9780195307887.001.0001/oso-9780195307887-chapter-6.
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