The survival of fairy faith in folklore

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Edge Guerrero
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Re: The survival of fairy faith in folklore

Postby Edge Guerrero » Tue Jul 03, 2018 5:13 pm

- Theres nothing wrong with being a fairy, brother!
The Hulkster can garantee you, brother. Theres some pretty tough fairys flying around on this world, brother!



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Postby Luigi » Wed Jul 04, 2018 9:38 am

I was looking into the topic of the witch trials being the churches attack on legitimate survivals of paganism as discussed in the early links I posted and came to an interesting topic: what was the role of witchcraft in the East Orthodox realm? The general concensus is that it was nowhere near as bad as the Western witch craze. The evidence is discussed in detail in this JSTOR article:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1856344?ne ... b_contents

To summarize, witchcraft trials in the East typically only happened after a great disaster such as a famine or a plague. Typically 5-10 people got either burned to death or exiled. Around the same time the West got really paranoid about it in the 1600s, so did Russian rulers and decreed harsh punishment for it. It didnt really happen much until the 1700s though. We only have records from one large Moscow archive that survived, but according to it 99 people were tried. The verdict usually doesnt survive in the damaged manuscript or just wasnt recorded, but among the verdicts that survived about 2/3 people were found innocent, and of those found guilty about 1/3 of them were only exiled and not executed. When Catherine the Great came to power she changed the law so witchcraft was a less serious crime, deserving punishments fit for crimes like fraud, and the executions and exiles ended. The author attributes the smaller scale and lower severity to the fact that because Christianity and Paganism coexisted among Slavs longer than it did in the West, they had a world view that preserved the idea of the natural world as a sacred force to be venerated and meant that a lot of Slavs actually were practicing witchcraft. The historical documents note multiple times the irony that the accusers of witches were often known to have used the services of the witch in the past. Also because of the power of the natural world idea, apparently the river trial was used way more than the west and people had a solid chance of surviving it(they tie up your hands and feet and throw you in a river. If you float its from witch powers, if you sink they rescue you. This would actually just happen if you exhaled the air in your lungs). As a source for his assertion about the Slavic dual worldview he cites this book: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php? ... 0674333604

Also an interesting note for those who read my crusade thread, the Russian authorities in the 1600s actually make specific mention of Lithuania's amazingly persistent customs: The forbid any Russian from buying Lithuanian herbs, as they are used to do magic in Lithuania.
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Postby Masato » Wed Jul 04, 2018 2:52 pm

^ great stuff man

What's messed up is when you cross the line from thinking this was all fuss over superstitious nonsense VS thinking maybe some actual skills were known and certain real powers may have existed that were snuffed out.

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Postby Luigi » Wed Jul 04, 2018 9:49 pm

Masato wrote:^ great stuff man

What's messed up is when you cross the line from thinking this was all fuss over superstitious nonsense VS thinking maybe some actual skills were known and certain real powers may have existed that were snuffed out.

I dont think the witch trials were able to snuff them out. I think it lasted until the Soviet Union's religious supression and generally the nihilism of modernity. A similar situation to the English cunning folk.
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Postby Luigi » Sat Jul 07, 2018 8:09 am

For anyone who watched the docs, remember when they said once you start thinking about the fairies you can see them? Well yesterday the fairies managed to circumvent my agnosticism and hardline skepticism. Not long ago I decided I wanted a video game to play on my phone and so about a week ago I downloaded Dragon Quest 5. The Dragon Quest series was big in Japan but never became mainstream in the West. Its basically the sequel to some obscure old games from the 80s I emulated 5 or so years ago. 2 days ago I finished the last of my immediately available resources on the fairy faith, then yesterday while playing DQ5 I went to a tavern/inn in the town I was staying at and noticed a faintly visible young woman sitting at the bar. She was surprised when I spoke to her, saying other couldnt see or hear her. She explained she was a fairy who had come from Fairyland, and she wanted me to return there with her to meet the fairy queen. At this point I was expecting a nearby animal to reveal itself to be Isobel Gowdie and changelings to jump out from behind the bar and tear the tavern apart.

Now I know what you're thinking, I picked that game because the fairy research put the fantasy setting on my mind and a ton of games have fairies and similar stuff. Well actually I play fantasy themed games all the time and have since I was a kid. I cant think of a single one where there are so many parallels to this very specific set of recurring themes in my research. Still, it could all just be a series of coincidences. But maybe my wyrd was woven long ago, and this is all part of a path the progenitors are leading me though. If you can hear me, Im ready to come home.
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Postby Edge Guerrero » Sat Jul 07, 2018 8:14 pm

Luigi wrote:For anyone who watched the docs, remember when they said once you start thinking about the fairies you can see them? Well yesterday the fairies managed to circumvent my agnosticism and hardline skepticism. Not long ago I decided I wanted a video game to play on my phone and so about a week ago I downloaded Dragon Quest 5. The Dragon Quest series was big in Japan but never became mainstream in the West. Its basically the sequel to some obscure old games from the 80s I emulated 5 or so years ago. 2 days ago I finished the last of my immediately available resources on the fairy faith, then yesterday while playing DQ5 I went to a tavern/inn in the town I was staying at and noticed a faintly visible young woman sitting at the bar. She was surprised when I spoke to her, saying other couldnt see or hear her. She explained she was a fairy who had come from Fairyland, and she wanted me to return there with her to meet the fairy queen. At this point I was expecting a nearby animal to reveal itself to be Isobel Gowdie and changelings to jump out from behind the bar and tear the tavern apart.

Now I know what you're thinking, I picked that game because the fairy research put the fantasy setting on my mind and a ton of games have fairies and similar stuff. Well actually I play fantasy themed games all the time and have since I was a kid. I cant think of a single one where there are so many parallels to this very specific set of recurring themes in my research. Still, it could all just be a series of coincidences. But maybe my wyrd was woven long ago, and this is all part of a path the progenitors are leading me though. If you can hear me, Im ready to come home.


- I played on PS 2. But never knew the name till last year when for some reason i stumped on the trailer of that game.


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Don't be selfish, preserve this world for the next generations.

I'll never long for what might have been
Regret won't waste my life again
I won't look back I'll fight to remain

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Postby Masato » Mon Jul 09, 2018 12:06 am

Luigi wrote:For anyone who watched the docs, remember when they said once you start thinking about the fairies you can see them? Well yesterday the fairies managed to circumvent my agnosticism and hardline skepticism. Not long ago I decided I wanted a video game to play on my phone and so about a week ago I downloaded Dragon Quest 5. The Dragon Quest series was big in Japan but never became mainstream in the West. Its basically the sequel to some obscure old games from the 80s I emulated 5 or so years ago. 2 days ago I finished the last of my immediately available resources on the fairy faith, then yesterday while playing DQ5 I went to a tavern/inn in the town I was staying at and noticed a faintly visible young woman sitting at the bar. She was surprised when I spoke to her, saying other couldnt see or hear her. She explained she was a fairy who had come from Fairyland, and she wanted me to return there with her to meet the fairy queen. At this point I was expecting a nearby animal to reveal itself to be Isobel Gowdie and changelings to jump out from behind the bar and tear the tavern apart.

Now I know what you're thinking, I picked that game because the fairy research put the fantasy setting on my mind and a ton of games have fairies and similar stuff. Well actually I play fantasy themed games all the time and have since I was a kid. I cant think of a single one where there are so many parallels to this very specific set of recurring themes in my research. Still, it could all just be a series of coincidences. But maybe my wyrd was woven long ago, and this is all part of a path the progenitors are leading me though. If you can hear me, Im ready to come home.


This is very interesting. I am not a big believer in too many coincidences, I tend to listen when I see things connecting or themes repeating.

You should chat with our man SR Brant... he has some interesting theories about a possible middle-ground between things being just our imagination and things being 'real', like one fuels & creates the other, etc. Looked at in this way, I can see how if for example some first nations tribe or whatever really really believes in certain metaphysical things, they will surely start to 'see' it, translate their realities from this perspective, interpret experiences in this way, etc. Therefore they have undoubtedly witnessed so-and-so working their magic, it is undeniable to them. Is it all superstitious/not real/in their imaginations? Possibly. But for THEM its real, so there is something happening, no? To what degree do our thoughts and imaginings influence or even create reality?

SRBrant can explain better then me, I may even be misunderstanding his theories.

In any case, if we consider that something like this may be true, then a theoretical destruction/erasure of pagan magic and fairies etc would not only rob the people of this stuff, but it would also rob whatever metaphysical stuff that exists from their contact to our world as well. Like destroying all the bridges that connects the physical from the metaphysical

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Postby Luigi » Thu Jul 26, 2018 3:48 am

A digitized scan of an entire book from 1895 which discusses such matters. I found info on it around pages 215-225 while reading about neolithic stone circles but Im sure there is more in there:

https://books.google.ca/books?id=a7AsAQ ... edir_esc=y

The author discusses the sidhe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aos_S%C3%AD

Apparently in some Gaelic tales the fairies are seen as later versions of the Tuatha De Dannan(a powerful clan of gods/mythic heroes from Irish mythology).
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Postby Luigi » Sun Jul 29, 2018 8:59 pm

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Postby Luigi » Thu Aug 16, 2018 6:25 am

Another early modern attestation, this time receiving the patronage of Queen Elizabeth I:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Faerie_Queene
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