There are Fairies in the Bottom of Our Anger

“We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”

— Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841)

I’ve been reading a collection called Welsh Folk-Lore, assembled by the Rev. Elias Owen (1887, revisions 1896). I was especially intrigued by an autobiographical entry from the Rev. Dr. Edward Williams, a recollection from his youth in 1757. He and his companions, playing in a field, witnessed a troupe of swarthy, somehow inhuman, dwarf-like dancers, dressed in near-military red, one of whom chased and caught Williams, who managed to wriggle free. All raced home, then returned to the field with their families, but nothing was found of the possibly fairy dancers.

What’s captivating (and somewhat unnerving) about his tale is that it is rife with specific detail, that the man sounds in no way credulous, and that he makes no definite claims, outlandish or otherwise, as to who these figures might be; indeed he seems still mystified by them decades later as he puts down his recollections. Yet, as described, they fit well with other Celtic tales where the observer (almost always at at least one remove from the narrator) identities the entities as most definitely fairies.

What elements most likely influenced what he saw and how he interpreted his vision?

First of all, he was seven years old at the time of the meeting, so his memories had years in which to become clouded or otherwise amended.

At the time of his publication (1813), had he corroborated his memory with his friends and relatives? Not noted in Owen.

Were his family supportive of his and his friends’ descriptions of what happened? Again, not specifically noted, but their response at the time would suggest that they were.

What is clear, from the larger context of Owen’s collection, is that at least into the early 19th century the existence and prevalence of fairies was generally accepted in much of North Wales. (Owen himself is not a believer in the “good folk,” rather a collector of stories that he fears will vanish without publication.)

I don’t doubt that Williams and his friends saw something, that this something was both strange and frightening, leaving an indelible mark on his mind. And that, despite his later attempts to leave the dancers unidentified, in context, they would have been accepted as fairy folk.

(My guess? Misplaced Morris dancers who wished not to be identified – and who could blame them? as Stan and Garnet Rogers might suggest.)

Mackey’s book on popular delusions – which I haven’t read in many years – concentrates on wide-spread societal upheavals of mind, many of them economic bubbles that led to spectacular collapses, or religious manias like the Crusades. What I don’t recall his doing is tying these to the specifics of the cultures involved.

This, Owen’s work and Williams’ tale in particular, do. Though inhuman inhabitants have been accepted in a wide variety of cultures, the specifics of how they appear and how they behave are fairly singular to and consistent across the Celts: small of stature, more ancient and elemental than humans, fair, mirthful and generous (if given to tricks) yet mercurial in temperament, living at a faster time scale, normally invisible to humans, intensely secretive. This view remained mostly unchanged for many centuries, only going out of “fashion” with the Industrial Revolution.

Elsewhere, Renaissance Europe saw the St. Vitus Dance, a form of mass physical hysteria that enveloped whole communities (the Celtic fairies were said to entice humans to join them in their prolonged, manic dancing, so this hysteria is something of a role reversal). The Crusades, as Mackey notes, were another type of mass religious movement (with a far more brutal aspect, if you happened to be Jewish or Moslem).

But were such physical upheavals the same kind of culturally-contained phenomenon as encountering beings who, scientifically speaking, do not exist? I think so: both are society-wide expressions tied to a specific place and people that develop, blossom, become entrenched, then die out as the social assumptions supporting them dissolve.

The 20th and 21st centuries have been far from immune. In the 1950s, multitudes claimed to have seen, spoken to and traveled with space aliens. In that time of social constraint and prosperity, the inhabitants of UFOs were experienced as almost universally benign, set on taking us to a world without nuclear weapons and war, where all cares vaporize. But during the crime-splattered and tumultuous 1970s, these aliens in their comfy circular ships became malign, ramming probes into every human orifice (for some reason taking special sadistic pleasure in the nose).

But despite local differences – pre-human inhabitants vs. physical hysteria vs. extraterrestrial interference – there seems to be a universal link: a general need for humanity to embrace a communal experience that includes both hope and fear, with heavy emphasis on the latter. Today, we shiver over scary clowns, clandestine terrorists and terrestrial aliens behind every tree (though few of them dance in the fields). In other words, we have always not only believed in but actively sought out fake news.

What’s changed, with the spread of near-instantaneous communication, is the speed with which these tides of misapprehension sweep over us.

In the case of the UFOs, a radical change in perception of alien intention took place in America over less than a generation. More recently, the reaction to shifts in government – to altered power structure – involves the same principles but has spread across the globe. In the Arab Spring, disillusionment with the new order – the heralded replacement – took about six months. The initial government was seen as evil, was attacked through social media and was overthrown, a new coalition took power, and within those six months became the new enemy.

In the U.S., we have fingered fake news as one culprit in creating disillusionment. But it’s simply the local exhibition of a now almost universal phenomenon. The global culture has merged many formerly local bugaboos into a constantly simmering pot of apparent malignancy, attributed to the “other,” whoever the other of the moment may be. The process itself is nothing new, it’s just been subjected to a blinding increase in scope and speed.

So let us Americans sit tight. The revolt against the latest revolting development shouldn’t take more than 120 days. Possibly 90. The bubble will burst or, more likely, deflate like a pricked balloon.

But … then what?

by Derek Davis