The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

Recently there's been some discussion regarding the attitude some have toward these beings (overly friendly and casual compared to some persons' experiences and extant lore).

So. I'm curious. What experiences have folks had with them?

Personally my attitude is to run away very far and very fast and hope for the best. I'm a big fan of giving a token offering but backing it with iron (btw anyone ever figure out the 'cold' iron / iron thing?).

Sorry if this is rambling. I have a sleepy. Feel free to ask for clarification

 
I'm a little loath to talk about this except with people I know well, for fear of being seen as fluffy. And because I don't want to be shouted at for being wrong. Nor do I wish to get the attention of the Good Folk too much...

I have a lot of superstition around the daoine sidhe. I started making offerings to them about three years ago. (My great-grandmother in Co. Cork occasionally left milk out for the 'wee folk', apparently. I don't remember this, but my mother says she does.) I've had a mix of positive and negative experiences with them, especially in Ireland, but here in Britain too. Hence the propitiatory offerings. In Ireland once, I did a ritual among some standing stones - I asked permission, but didn't listen well enough for the answer. I was very aware, afterwards, that they weren't happy about it. It was terrifying.

The problem was that, about two years after I started making offerings, more interaction started to happen. Then what I interpreted as 'requests' started to be made, and I built my rock garden for them. I'm still working out whether they want to 'work' with me to any extent. The ones near my house in Nottingham were incredibly pleased when I responded to them, but in a sort of scary way... But I know one or two people who have been able to work with Good Folk in areas that they know.

I still find them terrifying, especially ones in areas that I don't know well. In particular, I try very hard not to talk about them, as that tends to get their attention. (I do not use iron, as I think that's seen as offensive - I'd rather make offerings to encourage them not to bother me.) But I think that careful work can be done with them - on their terms, not ours. It's not something I'm rushing into.

I think people who naively do "fairy magic" have lost the plot, personally - but each to their own. If they really can jump into it with both feet, maybe they've met some that aren't so dangerous. I think they're a class of beings and that they're not all the same, so it's possible. But I wouldn't take that approach myself. I like not pissing off powerful Otherwordly creatures.

Recently there's been some discussion regarding the attitude some have toward these beings (overly friendly and casual compared to some persons' experiences and extant lore).

So. I'm curious. What experiences have folks had with them?

I live in Asia, so while the template I have for understanding this otherworld and its inhabitants has been immensely useful to me... I more often see nopperabo than clurichaun. I still count yokai (for example--should I say halimaw or duende? That just sounds weird,) as "fay" in that I believe they work by the same mechanics, but I recognize that the yokai are not culturally under the umbrella of elves, land wights, or fay. And they would probably prefer to interact with someone familiar with, I dunno, Shinto or something (which I'm really not.)

If I were in Iceland or Ireland, then I would be very careful with my psychic antenna, because I've heard the stories. But generally I would default to: the fae--if these are fae--are just other people who look a little funny if you can see them at all. They've got all sorts of different and mysterious motives or way to communicate. Stranger danger applies, but they're not all-powerful or all-evil (or all-good) just because they aren't physically embodied. They're all individuals, except when maybe they might not be.

Recently there's been some discussion regarding the attitude some have toward these beings (overly friendly and casual compared to some persons' experiences and extant lore).

So. I'm curious. What experiences have folks had with them?

Personally my attitude is to run away very far and very fast and hope for the best. I'm a big fan of giving a token offering but backing it with iron (btw anyone ever figure out the 'cold' iron / iron thing?).

Sorry if this is rambling. I have a sleepy. Feel free to ask for clarification

I'mma second what you said, of giving credit and respect where respect and credit is due, but giving a wide berth and keeping some sot of ward or iron with me as a backup. That's how I've always been, which has led to some really odd accusations tossed my way from other pagans about how I'm not a "fairy friend". To that I give a judging look and often reply "Yes, that is true. It's hard to be friends with something who finds human morality to be a boring game and finds kidnapping and rape to be appropriate responses to imagined slights"

My most recent ex was one of those people. She always left them offerings, always treated them like her special magical friends. Yet when she'd miss an offering and all of a sudden a dead crow would literally fall at her feet she'd be like "I wonder what that means?" and I'm like ".....you do know that's the equivalent of a bullet in the mail with a message attached to it saying you're next if you don't pay up...right?".

Recently there's been some discussion regarding the attitude some have toward these beings (overly friendly and casual compared to some persons' experiences and extant lore).

So. I'm curious. What experiences have folks had with them?

Personally my attitude is to run away very far and very fast and hope for the best. I'm a big fan of giving a token offering but backing it with iron (btw anyone ever figure out the 'cold' iron / iron thing?).

Sorry if this is rambling. I have a sleepy. Feel free to ask for clarification

 
I am terrified by the Fae, for reasons I can't even put my finger on, Maybe something to do with having read Pratchetts Lords and Ladies at an impressionable age, but everything I've learnt about them since hasn't encouraged me to change the way I feel

I have a small amount of UPG.  

Even the friend/foe dichotomy runs the risk of being too neat a categorisation I think.  We're in the realms of orange & blue morality here.

I've had some success working with the wee folk.  But only if it fits their agenda.  Which I tend not to ask too many questions about, but sometimes seems to be simply that they're amused by me.

Cautiously, I get on alright with them.  But I'm not sure that's entirely positive.  Because there are certain rather dubious personality traits I have-  treating the world as if it exists entirely as a stage for me to play out on, a streak of vicious cruelty (especially with people I don't like), a tendency to decide I dislike people on an arbitrary and a trivial basis, an unwillingness to be bored.  And my limited experience suggests that working with the wee folk is likely to lead to those traits being accentuated and encouraged.  Not necessarily a good thing, for obvious reasons.

So, in some ways, the fact I've got on relatively well with them so far worries me and leads to me being reluctant to follow it up much more deeply.

 
Right?  It's not that they're "friend" or "foe"--leave alone that there's great diversity among them, it's hard to make generalizations, and even just on a sort of tribal level, before you get to individuals, you'll find a lot of different sorts of relationships to humans.  It's that they seem to operate on a set of morals/rules that's generally alien to ours, they can do things we can't, and they have no reason or obligation to be accountable to us.  That makes them unpredictable, by our standards, and "unpredictable" plus "power" plus "no accountability" makes for a dangerous combination, even when you have a positive personal relationship with an individual or community among them.  (And, of course, some of them, or some groups of them, have a history of being more/less alien by our standards, or more/less friendly to human interests and wellbeing.)  Add to that that by the standards of many of the Folk, as far as I can tell, we don't really count as real or as real people, and it just means interacting with the Folk is risky business.  Sometimes it's rewarding, and sometimes it's very dangerous, and sometimes it's fish banana crumble dumpling igneous sandbox.

I wonder, sometimes, if the way we see the Folk isn't so different from the way we're seen by the kinds of spirits that are summoned up by ceremonial magicians.  To them, we must be an unpredictable group of beings with a set of morals different to their own, that can penetrate their world and have power over them, that ask them weird questions, that sometimes interact with them benevolently and sometimes force them to do things they must consider terrible, and that are rarely accountable to them.  Add to that the occasional story of one of them breaking free and having a victory over the humans, and it must make for an interesting legendarium.

Recently there's been some discussion regarding the attitude some have toward these beings (overly friendly and casual compared to some persons' experiences and extant lore).

So. I'm curious. What experiences have folks had with them?

Personally my attitude is to run away very far and very fast and hope for the best. I'm a big fan of giving a token offering but backing it with iron (btw anyone ever figure out the 'cold' iron / iron thing?).

Sorry if this is rambling. I have a sleepy. Feel free to ask for clarification

I'd say that with me, they're neither friend nor foe.  I have the sense to be courteous enough to offer them something and be on my way if I happen to stumble upon an area where they're active.  That said, I don't go seeking them out either; as a matter of fact, I'd probably be more likely to avoid them simply because they are unpredictable.  

I do remember my first large public ritual that I attended about eleven years ago.  It was in one of our state parks, Land Between the Lakes, and was led by a local coven.  It was the day of the summer solstice and had been a gorgeous day.  As the sun set, everyone circled around a huge fire and the ritual began.  The coven leaders started invoking what seemed to be anybody and everybody: the Morrigan, Cernunnos, Hecate, Dionysus, Brighid, Lugh, their deceased Aunt Patricia from their mother's side, several animal spirits, and the Fae.  So, to say there was an uncomfortable mix of spirits and deities in the ritual space is an understatement.  I did notice that there was lightning in the distance when all of this started, and by the time we got to their fairy friends it had started raining...hard.  I decided that an open field in the middle of a thunderstorm wasn't the place to be and packed up and went home.  There was a rather large tornado in LBL that night.  I've seen people mix deities in ritual before and it was never that bad.  In my mind, that mix plus the fae energy made things extremely unstable.

I wonder, sometimes, if the way we see the Folk isn't so different from the way we're seen by the kinds of spirits that are summoned up by ceremonial magicians.  To them, we must be an unpredictable group of beings with a set of morals different to their own, that can penetrate their world and have power over them, that ask them weird questions, that sometimes interact with them benevolently and sometimes force them to do things they must consider terrible, and that are rarely accountable to them.  Add to that the occasional story of one of them breaking free and having a victory over the humans, and it must make for an interesting legendarium.

 I think is a reasonable assumption that if we cannot understand them then they cannot understand us. I think that would be true for any entity that is a alien to us. Power is a very funny thing. Someone might have power and control over something or someone some of the time but that can change very quickly and it is never truly perminent.