Essays on Using Fairy Tales to Understand Europe's Ancient Religions and Fairy Faiths
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Why Understanding Folk Religion is Necessary
The most important aspect of dealing with natural and magical beings is
building a good relationship. Rituals, prayers, sogns, offerings, etc
are all geared towards building this relationship. For thousands of
years the way people passed on knowledge of how to build these
relationships was through fairy tales and folk lore which are now known
as folk religion. Thus many fairy tales have their roots in
understanding human relationships with the magical world, though
interpreting these can be daunting, we have been left many clues to
help us do so. This site is focused towards many aspects of fairies and
fairy tales including understanding their religious elements. Below are
a few articles to help you do this.
In Search of Europe's Goddesses
Before the coming of the Indo-European's some believe that European's
worshipped a goddess. Long after Christianity Her religion survived
among the folk of Europe through their rituals and tales.
The Connection Between Humans, Fairies and Deities
Folklore and mythology tell us that Fairies, Humans and Deities are more closely related then many suspect.
Religious Elements in Fairy Tales
Learn to see and understand the religious elements within fairy tales.
Proto-Indo-European Religion
Learn about the first Indo-European's, the people who's religion became
the Celtic, Greek, Roman, Hindu, Persian, Slavic and Germanic faiths.
Understanding the Motivation of Fairies in Fairy Tales
Understand the purpose and motivation of the fairies.
Pagan Finnish Prayers to the Fairies and Gods
Prayers to the fairies of the forest remained an important part of Finnish folk religion for a long time.
Mari-El - Europe's Last Pagans
Called Europe's last pagans the people of Mari-El have never converted
to Christianity and still pray as a community in their sacred groves.
Links to Other Sites
Searching For Europe’s Goddess
Many have advanced the theory that before the coming of the
Indo-European peoples the majority of European peoples primarily
worshiped an ‘Earth Mother’ before the Indo-European
peoples entered Europe some five-thousand years ago. That the warlike
Indo-Europeans decimated her worshipers turning the people to the
warrior deities of Zeus, Odin and others. This isn’t the whole
story, however, for the Europe’s Goddesses didn’t truly
disappear, indeed long after most of the deities of the Indo-Europeans
had faded into obscurity people still worshipped goddesses. Those
attempted to discover Europe’s original faiths have just been
looking in the wrong places.
Its early spring, the ground is still touched by spots of melting snow
with little rivulets clear cold water running down between the budding
flowers and through fields which will soon be ready for planting. In
the distance a Christian church bell can be heard ringing as it has in
this village for over a thousand years. Even so a small group of young
girls still follows these rivulets of water towards the river to sing
and perform ceremonies in a beautiful cluster of trees which cling to
the side of a river as it runs through the countryside as they have
done since long before the coming of the Christian Church. Even here,
in the fertile heart of the bread basket of Russia it’s obvious
that water is the source of life, the source of fertility. The girls
tie scarves to trees beside the river, they perform circle dances and
sing and pray to the spirits of the water imploring them to dampen the
earth and to keep it damp until harvest time. The nature spirits known
to the Russians as Rusalky comply as they come out of the water and
dance through fields damping the ground for the year, bringing their
life giving water to what would otherwise be a lifeless earth.
Meanwhile the girls cast divinations or swear oaths of eternal
sisterhood, as they dance once more, free for the moment as the nature
spirits they worship. Even over a thousand years after the Slavic
nations had become Christian peasants still preyed to the water
goddesses for fertility.
At this same time in Christian France and Wales girls approached other
bodies of water, sacred wells with trees nearby to which they tied
pieces of cloth. They then threw offerings into the water in hopes that
the spirit of the wells can help them have children, grant them luck or
make their fields fertile. At this time to the north in Iceland a woman
could easily have been scolding her child for playing too loudly near
the goddesses who live in the rocks before she offers the spirits of
these rocks food in hopes that they will bring her luck. At the same
time in Ireland the remnants of a story are being told of the goddess
of a river who bore the Tuth De Dannon which the Irish believed to be
the fairies.
Throughout Europe despite the best efforts of the Christian Church to
stamp out the old religions and ideas people still made idols of
“corn mothers” to secure a good harvest, gave food to the
spirits in the rocks, and prayed to the rivers and wells for luck
centuries after their conversion. The goddess and the spirits of the
world survived not because people didn’t believe in the Christian
god but because while it was nice to believe that they would go to the
Christian heaven they still had to live, still had to survive with and
against the forces of nature just as they had for thousands of years.
So while the priests might change from worshiping Zeus, Jupiter and
Odin to Christ for the safety of their nation and the soldiers might
change their prayers for victory, such changes did not affect most
people. Most people would pray to the higher gods of course and hope to
get into heaven but then they would go home and spend the rest of the
week asking for more fertile fields. So it is that most people in a
society, the people who work the fields and live in the country will
follow the old religion for thousands of years after the nations
religion has supposedly changed.
Because it’s clear that much of Europe’s old faiths
survived the coming of Christianity it seems likely that these faiths
also survived the coming of the Indo-Europeans to a certain extent as
well. There are three very good reasons to presume that at least to
some extent the later faiths of Indo-European Europe would resemble at
least to some extent those of Neolithic Europe;
1-Surivivle of belief among the people
As already pointed out many of the faiths and beliefs remained to some
extent long after Europe became Christian, there were parts of Slavic
Europe that believed in their Vila until the 1960s. The people of
Greece still told stories of nymph like spirits until the last century
as well. Ancient beliefs and folk magic’s were attested to all
over Europe by researches in the 19th century; so even with the threat
of hell fire and inquisition, even with their pastors and the powerful
Church doing their best to stamp out such beliefs the belief in fairies
and ancient deities survived for thousands of years. Assuming then that
the Indo-Europeans could stamp out the beliefs of the Neolithic
Europeans with limited mobility and less organized efforts seems
laughable at best. Further it’s important to understand that the
Indo-Europeans had three classes, each with their own separate concerns
and each with their own separate beliefs. So while epics and sagas were
written about heroes and warrior deities this is not the whole story of
the ancient religion. The farmers and pastoral workers who integrated
with Europe’s preexisting populations had a separate set of
deities, many of which were likely borrowed from Europe’s
Neolithic population.
2- There is a common misconception that at some point about 5000 years
ago hoards of violent Indo-European horsemen pored into Europe bringing
with them the invention of war as they quickly decimated Europe’s
peaceful and defenseless peoples and cultures. In order to truly come
to an understanding of Neolithic European culture we must begin by
correcting this first mistake because while its true that the
Indo-European peoples did come to dominate Europe such that 95 percent
of Europe’s population in 1000 AD spoke a language descended from
the Indo-Europeans its unlikely that they completely decimated the
culture of the Neolithic Europeans. Rather if we examine the history of
Indo-Europeans encounters with other peoples we see that the
Indo-Europeans adopted deities from the peoples they encountered. For
example the Germanic peoples seem to have adopted Odin from the Uralic
peoples to the North. In Greece aspects of Zeus were adopted from the
near east as were Poseidon, Athena and Aphrodite. The Romans adopted so
much from the Etruscans that many Roman nobles claimed to be Etruscans
decades after they had conquered them in battle. The goddess like women
who weave fate which exist throughout Europe seem likely to have been
part of the pre-Indo-European belief system. In addition the Germanic
peoples spent hundreds of years after they had destroyed the Roman
Empire trying to be Roman. The Indo-European migration into Europe was
slow taking thousands of years, giving them plenty of time to meet and
slowly adapt to new cultures and regions, even if they always seem to
dominate them linguistically. Further most of the people of Europe only
have a limited number of what are believed to be Indo-European genetic
markers, showing that a large percentage or even a majority of the
population in some area’s were pre-Indo-Europeans.
3-Proximity to each other
There is this strange tendency to think of Neolithic Europe and the
Proto-Indo-European societies as developing in some form of isolation,
as being extremely separate from each other. Europe is not isolated,
however, rather it’s another part of the Eurasian landmass and
its largest mountain ranges would tend to isolate only small portions
of it. There are in fact direct entrances into Europe through the
Eurasian Steppes and the Anatolian Peninsula which offer very little
barrier between peoples as attested to by the number of raids made into
and out of Europe through these two points. It makes no sense given the
Indo-Europeans proximity to Europe to presume that they had a
drastically different set of beliefs. Their different lifestyle of
pastoralist vs agriculture fit their unique environments but it seems
likely that they swapped religious ideas for thousands of years that
they were neighbors with each other before the Indo-European Migration,
and it may even be that many of their ideas evolved from the same
source. The idea of a European goddess came from studying a people who
shared much of the same territory as the Proto-Indo-European peoples,
who traded with and likely intermarried with them for over a thousand
years.
So given that Indo-Europeans were so apt to borrow from other cultures
and that they had thousands of years of interaction with the peoples of
Europe we must presume that to the extent that goddess worship existed
in Neolithic Europe it must still exist, so where are they?
Their in the Water
Water fairies were among the most common and ultimately the most
important deities of many of the Indo-European farmers and pastoralists
and it seems likely that this importance was shared by the Neolithic
peoples. Briggs in fact held that water fairies were the most common of
all the fairy types the Celtic peoples believed in. Many of these well
spirits appear to have existed before the Indo-European invasion and so
were so important the belief in them survived from Neolithic Europe the
way until well after the post-Christian era. There can be;
“No doubt the Indo-Europeans had no monopoly in religious feeling
and observance of this (the worship of water) type; it may go back tens
of thousands of years. But it must have been part of their religion,
and its prevalence among their linguistic and cultural heirs must be
due at least in some degree to the power of Indo-European
tradition.” (M. L. West)
This makes sense because while the earth is omnipresent it is generally
unchanging with the exception of earthquakes. When water runs through a
desert however it is surrounded by fertile life; plants and animals
thrive. There are few dances for good earth; there are no dousing rods
or rituals to search for good earth, or very many prayers for the earth
to be good. Yes there is a desire for the fertility of the fields but
there are similar prayers asking for animals to be fertile. Further
fertility doesn’t always have to mean earth. More often people
pray for rain, people search for water; earth is everywhere but fresh
springs are special and rain is necessary for the earth to have any
value. So from Nymphs of Greece and Rome to the Nixes of Germany,
from the Rusalka of Russia to the Sacred wells of the Celts who are the
deities of healing and life, the ones revered by pastoralists and
farmers were most often deities of the water, not earth mothers.
It’s important to understand that many of the ideas deities, that
gods and goddesses of Pre-Christian Europe are nothing like the gods
and goddesses we think of today. Rather they tended to resemble
fairies, heroes or at their most powerful - giants. In the
“Golden Bough” Frazer writes that:
“by primitive peoples the supernatural agents are not regarded as
greatly, if at all, superior to man; for they may be frightened and
coerced by him into doing his will….. Nor does he draw any very
sharp distinction between a god and a powerful sorcerer. His gods are
often merely invisible magicians who behind the veil of nature work the
same sort of charms and incantations which the human magician
works…”
The book “The Religion of Ancient Rome” points out that the
Romans had no formed deity when they first entered Europe, rather they
worshipped spirits which later evolved into the deities of Rome. We see
this theme repeated over and over again, MacCaulloch believed that the
deities took the form that the peoples needed most such that fairies
evolved into more overarching gods and goddesses of fertility and that
fertility gods and goddesses evolved into deities of the arts and war
as these became more important.
I would continue these arguments to say that while many deities may
have been conceived fairly early, much of what was conceived was a
general sense of spirits, beings to be worshiped in the larger sense.
Nymphs were some of the most important deities of the Greek lower
classes and countryside, but also of their cities in general. As
previously mentioned these lower classes are the most likely to
continue their original culture, and to have had a separate religion
from the upper classes who were most likely representative of the
conquerors. This argument is supported by that fact that in many cases
nymphs were identified with indigenous populations and that they had
merged with Greek religion through the process of syncretism. True
nymph like creatures were said to live in everything, mountains, trees,
fields and more but they were nearly always associated with water, with
the most important ones very strongly associated with water. One of the
most important functions of the nymphs was to provide fresh water. As
part of this they also presided over human fertility, child birth and
care. They were healing deities who helped farmers and pastoralists to
increase their crops and herds. But nymph worship isn’t confined
to the Greeks. MacCullach in “Mythology of the World”
states that the Greek historian Procupius testified that the ancient
Slavs worshiped beings similar to the nymphs offering sacrifices to
them. And while the Rusalky and Vilas of Eastern Europe came to be
feared in modern times people often still preyed to them for fertility
and a good harvest. Further Macallach states that people tended to
acknowledge the importance of Vila’s to their history;
“The Vily are believed to have lived originally in close con-
tact and friendship with human beings. In the happy days of
yore, when the fields produced wheat and other sorts of cereals
without the help of man, when people lived In peace and contentedness and mutual goodwill, the fairies helped them to
garner their harvests, to mow their grass, to feed their cattle,
and to build their houses; they taught them how to plough,
to sow, to drain meadows, and even how to bury the dead.
But so soon as men had departed from their old virtues, when
the shepherds had thrown away their flutes and drums and
songs, and had taken whips into their hands and commenced
to crack them in their pastures, cursing and swearing, and
when, finally, the first reports of guns were heard, and nations
began to make war against each other, the Vila left the country
and went to foreign lands. That is why only very few chance
to see them dancing in the fields, or sitting upon a bare rock
or a deserted cliff^, weeping and singing melancholy songs.”
“At Whitsuntide they sit on trees, asking women for
a frock and girls for a shirt, whence women hang on the branches
strips of linen or little shreds torn from their dresses, this being
meant as a sacrifice to propitiate these water-nymphs.”
“In like manner the Slovenians believe that the fairies were
kind and well disposed toward human beings, telling them what
times were particularly suitable for ploughing, sowing, and har-
vesting. They themselves also took good care of the crops,
tearing out weeds and cockles; and In return for all this they
asked for some food, which they ate during the night. So long
as their anger was not aroused, they would appear every sum-
mer; but when mankind commenced to lead a sinful life, and
when whistling and shouting and cracking of whips began to
Increase In the fields, the Vily disappeared, never to return
until a better day has dawned. The belief that a Vila may
become a man's sister also points to the existence of close rela-
tions between them and human beings; and it is a popular con-
viction that not only every young lad and, indeed, every honest
man has a fairy for his sister who helps him in case of need, but
even some animals, such as stags, roes, and chamois, for whom
the Vily have a special liking, may possess such supernatural
kindred. The fairies will aid their brothers in danger, will bless
their property, and will bestow all sorts of presents upon them.
In numerous folk-tales Vily are married to young men. They
are dutiful wives and excellent housekeepers, but their hus-
bands must not remind them of their descent, or they will
disappear forever, though they still continue to keep secret
watch over the welfare of their children.”
Some have argued that the “moist earth” was the most
important deities to the ancient Slavs and that she was the most
important goddesses. Pointing out that people would even take a peace
of moist earth in their mouths when swearing an oath. But it’s
important to keep in mind that while the moist earth was important, any
earth wasn’t. People didn’t speak of the earth in general,
they didn’t accept dry earth for oaths and it was the Vila and
the Rusalky who made the earth moist. It was their actions that lead to
the earth being suitable for taking oaths and growing crops.
Julius Caesar when making plans to control and invade the Celts put in
his reports that they worshipped nymphs and as previously mentioned
Brigg’s stated that water fairies were the most common of all
fairies. Further their mother goddesses were of the water. Danu the
mother of the Tuatha De Dannan which became the Daoine Sidhe or fairies
of Ireland (Briggs) was associated with Rivers in the Indo-European
languages and mythologies. Among the the Gaulic people Dea Matrona was
their mother goddess and she was associated with the river Marne. In
later years sacred wells would retain so much importance for the Celts
that the Catholic Church would be forced to rededicate them to Saints
because they could not stop people from worshipping them. In “The
Religion of the Ancient Celts” MacCalloch states that the church
was not the first ones to rededicate the rivers and wells but that the
Celts had rededicated them after they came to dominate the preexisting
inhabitants of Western Europe.
The most wide spread female deities within Europe then are not deities
of the land but of the water. As importantly they are often fairy like
beings, and while it would be easy to argue that they were lessoned by
those who conquered to the role of fairies I would argue that the
relationship with fairies whose homes can be seen, who are believed to
live in features of the land nearby like neighbors members of the
village are much more intimate deities. The types of fertility and
healing deities that people tend to need to believe in, which is why
their cults lasted longer than those of any other deities in Europe.
Because of this it makes sense that rather than the nymph like beings
being made less by the Indo-European peoples the upper pantheon was
made more. After all one expects epic stories to be told of a few
characters who do more interesting things. So just as we now tell
stories of secret agents and football players even though doctors and
grocers might be more important and common we should expect that
ancient peoples would tell tales of war and seasonal gods even if they
prayed more often to gods and goddesses of the hearth, farm, and water.
Despite being only occasionally defined by name these water fairies
have a complex nature, one which symbolizes both the natural world and
the civilization of humanity. In this sense they can be said to be the
bridge between the humans who pray to them and the natural world on
whose lives these people depended.
Civilizing beings
To a certain extent the nymphs are civilizing beings they help herdsmen
increase their herds, helping people to build wealth and increase their
livelihoods. Further certain ones have been known to help grapes ripen,
farms to be fertile and more. This in turn helps to solidify them as
agricultural spirits. One could say that nymphs were the more rustic
the more original form of the domesticated Muses of Greek Mythology.
Much of the depiction of nymphs could in essence be said to be a form
of idealization of rural life through poems and plays by those who live
in the city. We see something similar occur to the fairies during the
Victorian era, when to a large extent fairies became a form of idolized
life, of youthfulness and a desire for immortality as well as a stereo
typical image of the country life. This relationship between the nymphs
and the rural poor is to be expected because as previously mentioned
these are the people who were likely the most influenced by the
indigenous populations of Europe. They are also often the slowest to
change religiously. Among the Slavic peoples it was held that;
The fairies are fond of singing and dancing; and enticing
young lads and shepherds or singers to dance with them, they
distribute happiness or misfortune among them…
The Rusalky live in woods, meadows, fields, and waters.
Generally appearing when the corn begins to ripen in the
fields, and concealed amidst it, ready to punish him who
wantonly plucks the ears, they dance and make merry,
adorned with the many-coloured blossoms of the poppy and
with their hair flying loose. (MacCulloch)
The Rusalkas have much to do with the harvest, sometimes making it
plenteous, and at other times ruining it by rain and wind. The peasants
in White-Russia say that the Rusalkas dwell amid the standing corn; and
in Little-Russia it is believed that on Whit-Sunday Eve they go out to
the corn-fields, and there, with joyous singing and clapping of hands,
they scamper through the rye or hang on to its stalks, and swing to and
fro, so that the corn undulates as if beneath a strong wind. (Ralston
1872)
It’s interesting to note that the cults to these nymph like
beings rarely worshiped them as individuals, rather nymph like beings
were worshiped in the plurality. After all a grove a trees can be
extensive so it would seem rare indeed to give each tree a name and a
personality. Much like ancestor worship many of the nymphs then
remained nameless; there was just the realization that they were the
mothers of life and fertility. Going beyond this general statement
however was the realization that humanity was born from the nymphs of
the ash trees in Greek mythology and from the ash trees themselves in
Germanic mythology (but from the god of the earth in Celtic).
Because of their status as the mothers of humanity the civilizing
powers of nymphs were also more important to the cities of Greece then
nearly any other beings as attested to by the fact that they were
placed on the coins the cities stamped. What we see then is that groups
of people and cities were intertwined with nymphs, nymphs who were the
mothers of the city as the deities would mate with the nymphs in order
to produce the founding heroes of each city making them in essence
truly the mother goddess of that city, with the people directly
descended from her. We see to a certain extent a similar idea in Celtic
lands where the River spirits were the mothers of a people. Because of
this the relationship which different peoples had with each other was
often describe in terms of the relationship and movements of nymphs.
People were said to learn many of the arts from nymphs or nymph like
beings such as the Muses. They were in essence a sort of Tutelary
spirit, which could encourage prosperity in cooperation with local
heroes. Further as the water the spirit of the water source which the
city uses they are the ones who keep the people alive and every day the
people must go out to gather water from them. In a way this makes
reverence to them much more routine then it would be for any other
deity.
In Slavic lands the vila went beyond the role of mother to also take the role of sister;
The belief that a Vila may
become a man's sister also points to the existence of close rela-
tions between them and human beings; and it is a popular conviction that not only every young lad and, indeed, every honest
man has a fairy for his sister who helps him in case of need, but
even some animals, such as stags, roes, and chamois, for whom
the Vily have a special liking, may possess such supernatural
kindred.
Perhaps one of the nymphs most important roles was in presiding over
and protecting marriage. In later Greece much of this definition
appears to have become more and more patriarchal, however even as this
occurred the nymphs themselves retained a certain amount of wildness,
of freedom as did the rusalka and the nixes of the rest of Europe.
Showing that although they were important symbols in marriage they
still retained some of their original spirit.
Given the archeology which helped formulate the idea of goddess based
worship in Europe the early nymph cults are of special interest not
just because of their apparent survivability but because of the way
statues were used in relation to their cults. Several Attic grave
reliefs show young girls playing with doll like objects. It has been
argued that these naked figures are not to be considered toys but as
votives dedicated by girls to insure fertility and sexual maturation.
The dedication of anatomically exaggerate votives in this sense could
have had a socializing function, teaching girls that the most important
parts of their bodies were their wombs and their breasts, that they
were bound to become mothers and that their identity was based in large
part on reproduction.
Boys in these reliefs on the other hand are shown playing with balls
and toys. Certainly Greece by this time was under the influence of
patriarchal society, but the only evidence we truly have for the
matriarchal society theory are the small figurines of women with
exaggerated reproductive parts or which appear as charms that were
found throughout Europe and the best record we have of cults which were
influenced by the Neolithic European beliefs are the nymph, rusalka and
the Celtic sacred wells to which such figures were often offerings.
Other statues of nymphs were nuptial dedications, given to the nymphs
on the occasion of the ritual bath before the marriage to insure
fertility. So while it seems likely that Greece and many other
societies within Europe became more patriarchal over time and so the
symbolism of the need women’s fertility became less an idea of
power so it also seems quite possible that the statues found throughout
Europe had multiple meanings, including as offerings for fertility
rather than as an indication of a general worship of fertility
goddesses.
What’s important to understand is that its seems likely that many
of the figures found throughout Europe resemble those later dedicated
to nymphs and so may themselves have been dedicated allowing us to
glimpse into the past religion of some of the Neolithic Europeans.
Some of the nymphs of mythology were considered to have come into being
before the deities with some of them even raising Zeus. And so we come
upon another important role which they played in helping to build
civilization, they raised heroes, deities and those who brought culture
to humanity. Similarly the various Slavic water fairies were said to
take and raise children;
feeding them with honey and instructing them in all kinds of knowledge.
This is significant not just because of the desirability of honey to
children but because the bee was the sacred animal and the messenger of
the nymphs and it was they who taught humans how to gather honey.
So to a certain extent nymphs were greater and more important than the
deities but although the race of nymphs were older then the gods
however they were not immortal. The trees whose spirits they are die,
wells dry up, the world changes and these changes represent the birth
and death of nymphs. This is an obvious part of being a true nature
deity, for nature isn’t stable and must always change and we
cannot forget that for all their civilizing qualities nymphs, rusalka,
and the others always remained nature spirits.
Wild and Untamed
Despite what can be seen as a civilizing nature the fairies of the
nymph types were ultimately wildness fairies, wild and untamed.
(Ralston, 1872) describes the rusalki by stating that;
They are generally represented under the form of beauteous maidens with
full and snow-white bosoms, and with long and slender limbs. Their feet
are small, their eyes are wild, their faces are fair to see, but their
complexion is pale, their expression anxious. Their hair is long and
thick and wavy, and green as is the grass (sometimes it is black, or
blond). Their dress is either a covering of green leaves, or a long
white shift, worn without a girdle. At times they emerge from the
waters of the lake or river in which they dwell, and sit upon its
banks, combing and plaiting their flowing locks, or they cling to a
mill-wheel; and turn round with it amid the splash of the stream. If
any one happens to approach, they fling themselves into the waters, and
there divert themselves, and try to allure him to join them. Whomsoever
they get hold of they tickle to death Witches alone can bathe with them
unhurt.
Phillppa Rapport, a more recent scholar describes them as:
In contrast to the bride, there is a female folk figure in East Slavic
lore whose hair is permanently loose and uncontrolled; she is the
rusalka.
She is pale, lithe, often beautiful female spirit who lives in the
water, forest and fields. She is known to swing on tree branches
waiting to entice unsuspecting male passersby whom she often attacks
and at times tickles to death.
Hair is light brown, blond, or green, loose hair, blazing eyes and
magnificent breasts…. Noted for her beautiful voice and
melodious laugh…. If her hair ever dries out she will perish.
She goes on to state that they ride wildly through pastors on horses,
dance freely in meadows. In essence they are symbolic of the freedom
and happiness so often denied to women in later Europe. Their wild hair
is extremely which is significant to their character and this is
symbolic in the Slavic lands as hair is symbolic of sexual status.
In the wedding ritual the bride is “sold” to her new
husband and his family, and must leave her home and village. As part of
the ritual, she “sell her braid to her new husband, and is valued
for the thickness of her braid. I will argue that this act is symbolic
of the women’s giving over her sexual potency and autonomy to her
husband…
Because the various Slavic fairies have no braids they can be said to
be free from any obligation and they cannot be sold or given over to
anyone. Without the knots of a braid they are not tied down to anything
as the fairies of the nymph type tend to be.
Of course the tying down associated to marriage was not always so strict;
Philippa Rapport maintains that the wedding rituals of the tenth
through the fifteenth century show diminishing domestic and social
status of women with the increasing influence of the church.
Vila and rusalka in the Slavic lands are to a certain extent a folk
memory of freer times. However, they go beyond this by being able to
shirk nearly all reasonability, when a fairy of a nymph type bares
their children they give it over to humans to be raised as they have no
family ties. Yet despite the fact that they don’t raise their own
children they do in fact raise the children of other people. They raise
those who will become leaders and heroes, the fairies of the nymph type
have every advantage then for they still raise children as many people
want too but they do not have to raise children who are disobedient or
difficult, only those who will grow up to do great things. Their
children are Zeus and Dyonisis thus their civilizing power comes from
their wild freedom and their freedom comes from their civilizing power.
This contrasting nature is important to the fairies of the nymph types.
In Greece the religious places associated with nymphs were natural
places, often in caves. So the heroes and the civilizers of society
lived and were raised in caves while at the same time caves were the
birth place of monsters and the dangerous nature. In Slavic lands it
was said that;
they run about the meadows, or they frolic among the high-standing corn and,
rocking upon it, make it wave to and fro. Whole bevies of
them live on lonely spots along the streams, or in deep places
and under rapids. Sitting in the depths of brooks and rivers,
they entangle the fishermen's nets; by breaking the dikes they
flood the adjoining fields and wreck the bridges; and they may
also cause fatal storms, dangerous rains, and heavy hail.
Rising to the surface of the stream on clear summer nights,
they bathe, sprinkling the water around them and frolicking in
the waves; they like to sit on the mill-wheel, splashing each
other, and then they dive deep, crying, "Kuku." In late spring
especially they come out of the water, and run about the
neighbouring woods and thickets, clapping their hands and
turning somersaults upon the grass, while their laughter re-
sounds far and wide in the forests. In the evening they like
to rock upon slender branches, enticing unwary wanderers;
and if they succeed in leading any one astray, they tickle him
to death, or draw him down into the depths of the stream.
The Rusalky are extremely fond of music and singing; and
their fine voices lure swimmers to deep places, where they
drown. The water-nymphs also divert themselves by dancing
in the pale moonlight, and they inveigle shepherds to play with
them, the places where they dance being marked by circles
in which the grass is particularly luxuriant and green. Fond of
spinning, they hang their yam on trees; and after washing
the linen which they weave, they spread it on the banks to
dry. If a man treads on such linen, he becomes weak and lame.
(Ralston)
Larson states that;
The word numph, paradoxically can refer to the Greek Maiden as a virgin
bride and her divine counterpart in the chorus of Artemis, or it can
refer to a local fertility deity, often manifestly unchaste, who
presides over the spring and woodland..... Nymphs combine the forbidden
allure of virgin Artimus with the lust of the sexually aware Aphrodite;
yet a social deities believed to inhabit not Olympus but caves, trees,
and springs they are much more accessible.... The nymph is also
idolized myth poetic version of the village girl at the peak of her
sexual desirability.... She has supernatural power and assumed
superiority over the male so that her desires are central to the
narratives of their stories..... Unlike the chorus of Artemis, which
attempts to preserve sexual purity, the nymphs in general are likely to
engage in sexual sport with Hermes, the silens, or even a bemused
shepherd.
Fairies of the nymph type then represent both the a certain amount of
wishfulness for women and the sexual fantasies of men. For nymphs
unlike the girls of ancient Europe are free, boys who dare to harm
their linins, or insult them are punished. She is superior to males and
yet is desirable to them. She is never rejected, never has to truly
worry what others will think of her. She is also never going to be tied
down. For boys she represents both the fantasy of the shy girl and the
aggressive willing girl. The fairies of the nymph type allow them to
imagine having a dominant mate while continuing to think of their
future or current brides as submissive.
This internal dualism as previously mentioned is important to
naturalistic worship, because nature itself is clearly internally
dualistic, as mentioned in Grimm’s Fairies
So while later religions and societies would place the duel nature of
creative and destructive of fertility and desolation in separate beings
it was common for people who worshiped nature to think of them as being
in the same being. So when people later thought of the fairies as evil
or dangerous it may not be a complete change in their nature but rather
a shift in focus.
As part of this dualism we also see that they were both feared for
their deisire to snatch away both males and females and that they would
give comfort to those who’s loved ones had been snatched away.
This is because death by natural forces was thought to be a selection
by the gods, a means by which they took people to live among them. In
both accounts of Hylos (Herkuleses assistant who was taken by the
nymphs) they are said to have taken him, not drowned him. In one he
becomes their husband in the other they hold him in their laps like a
weeping child while they comfort him. In either case however he is now
free from mortal concerns. In essence one can imagine that he will find
a form a bliss in their free heaven.
In the Rome an epitaph states that a five year old girl was carried of by the naides to be a their playmate.
In many later mythologies its stated that fairies will try to get girls
to join them or that fairies of the nymph type are the souls of girls
who drowned before marraige or unbaptized. What’s likely is that
these myths are a remnant of a form of heaven in which some girls could
get to live out their fantasy of being free, of dancing wildly,
punishing those who wronged them, while at the same time bringing life
to their village and people. For men this too represents a form of
heaven where they are allowed to be blissfully passive.
Humans Fairies and Deities
What are Fairies?
Originally the root word of fairy meant to bring fate… to decide
death. It was once believed throughout Europe that fairies were the
ones who determined the fate of everyone including the deities
themselves. Fate at this time wasn’t the abstract concept it has
become related to some distant force, fate was the what the fairies
created. People’s lives were and to some extent still are
completely under the control of natural forces. . Thus it is these
natural forces including the wind, the trees, rocks, shadows, and even
emotions which lives and souls of their own that controlled
everyone’s fate. The belief that all things have souls was once
shared by nearly all people. This view also gave rise to the mystery of
what the souls that inhabited everything were. In Europe these souls
were later personified as the fairies.
We are perhaps best served in our understanding of fairies by looking
to the Japanese for their understanding of the nature of Kami, which
are things that inspire reverence and awe. In the same manner, fairies
are the wondrous trees in nature, the tall mountains, and the calm
majestic rivers. This view is apparent in people’s original
belief that the gods needed no temple - they lived directly within that
which inspired awe.
The word “temple” itself means wood, implying that the
deities lived within groves of trees, on mountain tops and within
sacred wells. (Jacob Grimm, 1835) Early Romans also worshipped deities
associated with specific localities and even household objects which
they needed to survive, such as cupboards and hearths. (Bailey, 1907)
Fairies are not simply those creatures that inspire awe and reverence,
just as the Kami was worshipped in Japan, so too were the fairies
worshipped by the peoples of ancient Europe. Just as the Kami and Yokai
of Japan were often feared so too in Europe did the fairies plant the
seeds of fear and cause sorrow. So in myth, fairies are both the
monster and the object of reverence, the illness in the cattle, the
things in the dark that cause our flesh to constrict into Goosebumps
and make our hearts race.
The ancient Romans would drive diseases away by performing rituals that
would show the power of civilization over nature in order to make the
nature fairies afraid to come near them as they believed that nature
fairies were the cause of illness. Among the Celts it was considered
dangerous to harm certain plants because they were inhabited by
fairies. In one myth, a man named Caffney cut some of the plants that
housed fairies in order to cook his dinner. But the wood would not
burn, and soon he pined away until he died. (Wentz, 1911)
Briggs speaks of another fairy, the Lamia, which hid herself in despair
and became a monster, jealous of the good fortune of human mothers.
This jealousy, coupled with a desire to hold children, moved her to
steal children away (Perkiss, 2007). In a Greek fairy tale a young man
is enamored by some beautiful fairies causing his mother to warn,
“Beware, my son! The maidens may be fairies. Evil may come.
Beware!" (Gianakoulis, 1930) Such warnings show how horrified people
were of fairies because of the things which they might do.
Fairies, then, are our hopes and our fears; our dreams and our
nightmares. On the one hand, they give the world life, while on the
other hand they bring destruction. There is nothing felt and nothing
that happens that is not caused by a fairy. In myth, certain fairies
were known as fates, a word that came to mean
“unavoidable”. However, events caused by fates are
unavoidable only because fairies deliberately make it so.
Again Purkiss points out that fairies represent the women’s
domain in that they are both distant from the action of most stories
and yet ultimately they are the ones driving it. It is not a
coincidence that fairies weave and spin. In Europe, it was believed
that there was magic in spinning and weaving. That “fate”
could be altered through the act of spinning and weaving. Having an
understanding of this provides us with some useful information for
telling the fairies’ story. To effectively tell the
fairies’ story, we need to understand why they would do such
things, why they make the world the way they do, and why they get so
heavily involved in the lives of humans.
What are Humans?
To answer the question of what fairies are, it is perhaps best to begin
by coming to an understanding of what humans are. Our knowledge of
fairies springs from our encounters with them as well as the stories we
tell about them, therefore, to properly understand fairies, we must
become familiar with our relationship with them.
Humans are unique among the European mortal realm because there are
clear creation stories that explain where our race came from. These
creation stories tend to agree with each other, at least in part. In
Greek mythology, humans are the children of the nymphs of the ash trees
who, in turn were born from the blood of the grandfather of the deities
and so are older than the gods themselves. Indeed one of these ash
trees raised the deity Zeus so it could be argued that perhaps the
first humans and Zeus were adopted brothers. In Germanic and
Scandinavian mythology, humans were created from the ash trees directly
by the deity Odin. The Celts have a slightly different take on the
origin of humans;
“In Celtic belief men were not so much created by gods as
descended from them. (For) All the Gauls assert that they are descended
from Dispater, and this, they say, has been handed down to them by the
Druids. Dispater was a Celtic underworld god of fertility, and the
statement probably
presupposes a myth, like that found among many primitive peoples,
telling how men once lived underground and thence came to the surface
of the earth. But it also points to their descent from the god of the
underworld. Thither the dead returned to him who was ancestor of the
living as well as lord of the dead” (MacCulloch, 2005)
Ultimately then, we have to conclude that humans are not a separate
species from nature, but that like the fairies and deities we are a
direct descendant of these things. In one of the most famous stories of
humans encountering fairies, two fairy children - a girl and a boy who
were green in color - were taken in by Sir Richard de Caine at Wikes.
Scared and saddened at finding himself in the human world, the boy
eventually died. However over time, the girl became human; though she
remained “rather loose and wanton in her conduct.”
(Keightley, 1870) What this shows us is that fairies can become human
simply by living among us. One could say than that we are actually a
stage of the fairies’ life cycle. In over half of Europe’s
myths, humans came from trees whose souls are those of the fairies and
deities while the rest of European myths claim that humans are
descendants of a deity of the underworld. This is significant because
Celtic belief holds that many fairies live within and come from the
underworld as well.
Despite this relationship however, it is also clear that humans are
distinctly different from fairies. As Jacob Grimm points out, humans
physically lie somewhere between the realms of fairies and giants. So
while fairies hold power and sway over us, they stand in awe before us.
(Grimm, 1835) It is relatively common in mythology for humans to
capture leprechauns in order to steal their treasure, or to threaten
the lives of tree fairies to force them to provide us with fertile
fields. Furthermore, some reports also say that fairies abduct humans
to strengthen their sickly line (Briggs, 1967). This shows that not
only are humans physically stronger than fairies, but also we are close
enough to bear children with them. Fairies themselves are not afraid of
losing their powers by bringing human blood into their line. This close
relationship between humans and fairies will come clearer in the
Chapter “Humans Become Fairies” of this book.
Some interesting questions arise from these stories regarding fairies
and humans. Firstly, if we are so close to fairies why is the world of
fairies such a mystery to us? Why are humans mortal while fairies are
immortal? Why do we lack the fundamental knowledge of nature that
fairies have?
The truth of the matter is that only most humans lack magic and
immortality; there have however been many humans throughout myth and
folklore who have found immortality and magic through druidism,
witchcraft, wizardry, and the arts of the cunning folk. Even by simply
visiting the realm of fairies humans have actually found their place
among them. Despite this, however, most humans lack such powers,
leaving us to wonder why this is so?
There are a few possible answers to these questions. First, we must
recall that the deities were not the first beings. They joined together
to kill the first being; and just as the deities killed the first
being, so too perhaps could humans displace the deities. So allowing us
to understand all the secrets of nature the way other fairies do could
be dangerous.
Indeed, Zeus forbade teaching humans the secrets of fire and many other
arts out of fear of what humans would do with this knowledge. Fairies,
too, desire to keep secrets from humans. For in the same manner that
they will capture us to be their spouses, so too will we capture them
out of greed for their treasure or to fulfill our own lustful desires.
Indeed there was a dwarf
who told humans directly that they were mortal and weak due in part to
their “faithlessness” (Grimm, 1935). What we see then is
that humans are believed by fairies to be their treacherous
descendants, so it is possible that the secrets of magic have been
concealed from us simply to keep us from being even more dangerous.
Secondly Germanic and Scandinavian myths also tell us that Odin will
eventually need the souls of dead humans to help him in his final
battle to prevent all things from being destroyed. So it is perhaps
necessary for humans to be mortal so that we can join his army. This
could also be his reason for creating us.
Briggs points out that one aspect of fairies is that they can never
mature or be the hero, while humans on the other hand can mature and
grow physically strong. (Briggs, 1967) Saving the world from Armageddon
requires something other than capricious or playful beings. Instead, it
requires creatures that are not afraid to die, beings who seek out the
warrior’s life and are always striving for more – these are
qualities of humans that immortal and magic-bearing beings would have
difficulty obtaining.
Odin is not the only one in mythology who needed humans. In the Welsh
story of Prince Powell the fairy king seeks out Powell in order to get
his aid in slaying a monster that the fairies cannot kill. (Griffis,
1921) Water dragons would seek out humans as far away as Japan in order
to help them battle with unclean beings that they could not fight
themselves. Humans, then, are perhaps made to be a mortal form of fairy
which is ignorant of magic due to the fairies and deities need for a
human hero’s to help protect them.
Another possible reason why fairies keep humans ignorant is because
deities and fairies enjoy sacrifices such as bread, clothes, gold, or
even the living beings that are offered to them. Such sacrifices denote
humans’ respect for the deities and fairies. In the myths and
stories, fairies respond to these acts despite the fact that they seem
to serve little purpose for them. This is obviously the case in stories
such as “The Three Little Men in the Wood” where the
fairies give a girl great gifts such as an unlimited supply of gold in
return for providing them with a small crust of bread. (Grimm and
Grimm, 1812) It seems odd that such respect should be the only reason
that such rituals are observed, or that the fairies and deities seek
these rituals while getting nothing from them. To understand this
better, we need to examine the nature of historical beliefs about magic.
At its most basic level, magic is a sympathetic human action, a ritual
combined with a thought which causes a desired outcome (Fraizer, 1890).
This gives credence to odd rituals such as burning an effigy of someone
in order to cause them to suffer, weaving a knot to bind someone, or
painting an animal so that we are later in a better position to kill
that animal. When we offer something to a fairy, it could then be taken
as a sympathetic action directed positively for the fairy. In other
words, sacrifices essentially provide the fairy with blessings.
Moreover, through these myths, we find that our sacrifices lend the
fairies strength. If we understood everything that they did, then we
would not have needed them anymore so they would not have received
strength in the form of sacrifices from us. As we’ll see further
in the “What are Deities” and “Fairies are ancient
Gods” sections of this book, fairies can become deities or lose
their divinity based on human worship.
Finally its possible that immortality is limited. Most all myths and
fairy tales state that the deities and fairies are immortal because of
magical foods which they eat. In Greek mythology the fruit which made
the deities immortal was guarded by giants, in Indian and Celtic
mythology it was guarded by fairies. In Germanic mythology the deities
were unable to get this food for some time and so began to grow old
until Loki managed to get some of this food. Because immortality
comes from a fruit it may be that it’s a limited resource which
means not everyone can be immortal.
Regardless of the reasons, however, what is ultimately clear is that in
most Indo-European, Ularic and Tengeri myths, humans are simply another
stage of life. Not just in the evolution of fairies but also within the
life cycle of fairies themselves. This is also seen in India where
reincarnation is a major theme, implying that mortals can become
immortal beings and immortal beings can die to become mortals. It is
also clear in Central Asia where humans share souls with fairies; human
souls can become the spirits of the mountains or the trees and then
later be reborn within a human again. Even in Europe, where things have
grown murky it is still obvious from some folk tales that fairies are
essentially souls and humans are houses for these souls.
What is the Soul?
To begin understanding the ancient European conception of the soul, you
must forget everything you think you know about it. Our modern
conception does not help in our goal of becoming aware of the
mythological nature of fairies and our relationship to them. Moreover,
the modern European beliefs about the soul do not explain some of the
important traditions that have been carried over from ancient belief
systems.
People in ancient Europe, as they often times do now, believed that the
soul was separate from the body. Indeed at one time people thought that
souls inhabited objects as well as living things.
“The ancient Egyptians…conceived the Ka or personality as
a thing separable from the person or body, and hence ‘the statue
of a human being represented and embodied a human Ka’. Likewise a
statue of a god was the dwelling-place of a divine Ka, attracted to it
by certain mystical formulae at the time of dedication.” (Wentz,
1911)
When someone dies we erect a marker to them, a marker which is then
placed in a beautiful location and on which we place flowers and other
offerings. That this marker is a remnant of a shrine to the dead person
is clear, for we speak to them at it which is in essence a form of
prayer to their soul. What’s more, we feel reverence around it as
we would in a religious setting. So again it is clear that this is a
shrine for the dead. What isn’t clear, given most peoples current
beliefs regarding the soul, is why this shrine must be at the
person’s body. The answer to this question is surprising as it is
plainly obvious – people once believed that the soul remained
with the body after death. In Russia, they have funeral songs in:
“which the grave itself is spoken of as the home of the departed
spirit. “Dark and joyless is our prison-house," is the reply
constantly made by ghosts when questioned about their habitation.
"Stone and earth lie heavy on our hearts, our eyes are fast closed, our
hands and feet are frozen by the cold." Especially during the winters
do the dead suffer; when the spring returns the peasants say, "Our
fathers enjoy repose," and in Little-Russia they add, "God grant that
the earth may lie light on you.” (Ralston, 1872)
From this song, we can see that the Russians believed that the soul
remained within the body. Similarly, as we will see further in the
“Humans Are the Dead” section of this book that in Celtic,
Germanic, Mongolian, Japanese, and nearly every other Indo-European,
Tengeri and Asian Mythology humans souls were also thought to grow into
flowers, trees, and rivers - things that we previously and will further
explain to be fairies. Yet at the same time, side by side with these
beliefs, are Celtic and Russian myths that tell of souls taking the
form of a winged animal.
In Brittany, souls are frequently thought to be in butterfly form,
“but that upon leaving the body it is often believed to take the
form of a fly and sometimes that of a raven…" (Ralston 1872).
The butterfly also seems to have been universally accepted by the
Slavonians as an emblem of the soul. Similarly, one of the names in the
Government of Yaroslaw is dushichka, a caressing diminutive of dusha,
the soul. In Kherson culture, it is believed that if the usual alms are
not distributed at a funeral, the dead man's soul will reveal itself to
his relatives in the form of a moth flying about the flame of a candle.
Then, the day after receiving such a warning visit, the family would
call together the poor and distribute food to them. Meanwhile, Bohemian
culture holds that if the first butterfly a man sees in the spring is a
white one, he is destined to die within the year. The Servians, on the
other hand, believe that the soul of a witch often leaves her body
while she is asleep and flies abroad in the shape of a butterfly.
“The belief in the bird-soul was well known in the Highlands. To
illustrate: A farmer was coming home from Inverness to Buntait when at
a weird part of the way his mare got uncontrollable and ran up with him
to where there was a waterfall (eas). Whereupon he swooned and fell
off. On recovering he found his way home and was amazed at finding his
mare tied in the stable, not knowing how it happened, for nobody
confessed to having tied her. Soon after he hurt himself in moving a
heavy box of oats at the farm of Shewglie; a plough or two broke
thereafter at the spring-work, always a bad omen. Getting more unwell,
he said to his wife the night before his death: "What a beautiful bird
I heard singing by my bedside to-night." "I well believe it," she
replied. To which he answered: "It was my ghost; I cannot live
long.” (Ralston, 1872)
There were also a number of other animal forms which human souls could take.
“it was generally believed among the Northern nations that the
soul escaped from the body in the shape of a mouse, which crept out of
a corpse’s mouth and ran away, and it was also said to trance.
While the soul was absent, no effort or remedy could recall the patient
to life; but as soon as it had come back animation returned.”
(Guerber, 1909)
It is also clear that along with these ideas, it was believed that
humans changed into some other form after death. What we see from
examining European mythology surrounding death is that the same people
believed that two or even three things happened to a human soul when we
died.
Why did the ancient Europeans hold so many beliefs? Is it simply
because they were confused by what happens after death? Is it because
people were not certain which one of a myriad of choices to believe in
so they picked all possible outcomes? Of course, any of these options
is possible. Certainly the modern tradition of laying flowers on the
grave has persisted even though almost no one truly believes that this
does any real good for the dead. So it is also quite possible that the
beliefs in Europe changed slowly over time, thus making it appear that
they believed that two or at times three very different things could
happen to a person's soul.
There is, however, an alternative option, that people believed many
things happened to a person when they died. That they at one time
believed that people had more than one soul just like the people of the
Steppes in Central Asia, the Ainu, the Japanese, the Finns as well as
the forbearers of the Hungarians and North East Europeans did. These
peoples do have some disagreement as to the number of souls a human can
have, but they nearly all believed that when people die some of their
souls reside in nature and become trees or mountains, while others are
reincarnated or travel to the afterlife for a time in the form of a
winged creature such as a butterfly or a bird. (Ried, 2002)
Jacob Grimm points out that Germanic people spoke of the soul as a
feminine object, while they spoke of life -integrally related to breath
- as masculine. (Grimm, 1835) Clearly, then, there was a distinction of
some form between the two, which in turn, supports the idea that at one
time the people in Europe to one extent or another believed in more
than one soul. The fundamental belief in multiple souls is significant
because it shows us not only how some fairies that reside in nature can
be connected with ancient humans, but it also explains how an
individual fairy can seemingly have many personalities and forms at one
time.
We see the same belief repeated in Japan where people thought that the
Kami had multiple souls, and therefore multiple natures or
personalities. According to them, any given Kami has four souls and
three natures. Namely; Aramitama, Nigimitama, and Sakimitama - any one
of these natures can become dominant thus completely changing the way
the Kami acts, what they desire, and what goals they will have.
The Aramitama is violent and generally destructive. However, it is
important to keep in mind that destructiveness is not always
harmful. After all, it was violence and destructiveness that
saved Japan from the genocide of the Mongols and protected people from
other dangers.
The second type, Nigimitama, is the gentle nature which Kami uses to
make the crops grow and the water pure. However, Kami in this state do
not go out of their way to do good. They simply keep the natural order
of things so that there is enough for humans and animals to survive.
The final nature, Sakimitama, is one in which Kami brings extra luck,
creates wealth for humans, and performs other similar helpful actions.
While it is dangerous to compare one distant faith to another I use the
Japanese as an example only because I believe that just as in the
concepts behind the Kami we see separate natures in fairies of European
mythology. For the same fairy that causes people's crops to
grow is the one that children are told to avoid. (Frazer, 1922) In the
sacred groves, the fairies that people prayed to for wealth and luck
would not hesitate to kill those who disturbed them. (Tactis)
Hermes in Greek mythology was both the god who protected merchants from
thieves and the one who helped thieves rob the merchants. He gave
humans secrets to keep them safe, yet snatched children away, dragging
them into a dark world from which there was no return. It is clear from
these stories that the fairies and deities in European myths had
multiple natures, and that their motivations and thoughts changed with
their mood. Indeed, fairies and deities can be said to feel things with
more intensity than most humans can and so they need to struggle for
control much more fiercely.
Unlike much of the modern perception of the world, in which the duality
between destruction and creation exists in separate beings, fairies
exhibit this duality inside themselves. An internalized duality makes
sense given that fairies were natural phenomena which are, in
themselves, dualistic in a way that is neither good nor evil. After
all, if fairies helped humans hunt for food, they must also help wolves
source their food, which can include humans as there is no moral
difference in the wolf's mind between a deer and a human. In addition,
we as humans have every right to kill the wolf to defend ourselves, our
own food, and those we love. Why is this comparison significant?
Because this is the way of fairies – in fact, the way of all
feral creatures - and this is a critical insight into what they think
and do.
Indeed, when examining fairies, it becomes obvious that humans are not
always their closest companions. Fairies often love trees and animals
more because these are their friends. When a human chops down a tree
they are in fact killing a fairy, which can be the child, mother, or
lover of another fairy. To fairies, humans can be the wolves that
destroy what they love or the rats that bring disease. In this sense,
fairies have every right to return pestilence onto humanity to protect
themselves just as we have the right to defend ourselves from predators
and illnesses.
What are Deities?
Just as humans exist somewhere between fairies and giants, so do
fairies lie between mortals and deities in their ability to perform
magic. Deities appear to exist physically alongside the giants as
massive, awe-inspiring beings. For example, Loki is so large that he
caused earthquakes when he was struggling beneath the ground. At the
same time, it’s obvious that deities are able to change their
size whenever it suits their interests - often choosing to enter human
houses in disguise and Odin is believed to have become the leader of
the fairies' wild hunt through the forest in a human form.
The differences between the ancient gods and fairies may be less than
many suspect, just as it is with humans and fairies. On one hand, many
of the fairies are descendants from deities or created by them. On the
other, some fairies seem to come from the same place that deities are
from and are even older than the deities themselves. For instance Zeus,
the leader of the deities in Greek mythology, was raised by a nymph who
kept him hidden from his father. Further Odin would often turn to
spirits of the earth for advice and knowledge.
Examining the evolution of European beliefs about deities makes the
definitive line between the worlds of fairies and deities even harder
to see. Initially, Europeans had no real pantheon or concept of deity
as it is now understood. Rome’s first deities were the spirits of
rocks, trees, and animals in other words before they worshiped gods
Romans worshiped fairies (Bailey, 1907).
Among the Celts, most gods were local gods rather than all-powerful
deities. They were the gods of the rivers, mountains, trees, war, and
more, making it hard to make a clear distinction between them and other
spirits which might exist.
J. A. MacCulloch (1911) believed that the divinities were the most
important spirits which only later came to be deified as deities.
Oftentimes, these deities included among their ranks the spirits of the
great humans who had died. This shows a connection not only between
fairies and deities, but humans and deities as well.
These examples suggest that the only separation between deities and the
other spirits (fairies) is simply that humans hold more respect for the
deities.
Looking back to the roots of European beliefs, we see that within Near
and Central Asia there also appears to be little conception of deities.
(tengerism.org) Even among the Greeks deities often act as fairies. At
one time, for example, Hermes took the bogyman's place in coming down
the chimney to scare naughty children thus cementing himself as a
fairy. (Purkiss, 2007)
Perhaps then, fairies are deities who have not been conceived as such
by humans. In other words, deities are hierarchically higher then
fairies because of how humans regard them. Moreover, as we will see in
the chapter “Fairies are Forgotten Gods”, deities can lose
their godhood and turn back into fairies. This deification process can
go beyond the fairy stage and down to the realm of humans such that
humans can become the deities that people worship. Nothing makes this
clearer than the evolution of the wild hunt which was, at one time, led
by Odin who had become a fairy. However;
“in the middle ages, when the belief in the old heathen deities
was partly forgotten, the leader of the Wild Hunt was no longer Odin,
but Charlemagne, Frederick Barbarossa, King Arthur, or some
Sabbath-breaker, like the Squire of Rodenstein or Hans von Hackelberg,
who, in punishment for his sins, was condemned to hunt for ever through
the realms of air.” (Guerber, 1909)
What we see then is that while there are clear mythological lines
between humans, fairies, and deities, it holds more in common with the
line between children and adults then between one species and another.
Fairy Tales and Religion
Folktales are the ultimate expression of a culture, remaining relevant
for each new generation which hears them. A mother tells their child a
story in the evening, a person tells their friend one as they sit in a
bar, or a traveler tells a village a story. The people hearing the
story then decide if the story is relevant enough and good enough to
get passed on. If there are parts that they don’t like these can
be easily removed, if they feel something would make the story better
it can easily be added. The person they then tell the story to has the
same option and on and on it goes. However, even as the story changes
to remain culturally relevant it also retains elements from the past,
elements which can be dissected and puzzled together with other sources
to discover beliefs which have been in part forgotten.
Fairy tales are important to understanding religion because people once
believed the tales to be true to some extent. We see this not only in
Russia where story tellers believed that even elements such as taking
animals were the way things once were simply “the way things were
back then” (Haney, 1999) but also in places such as Japan and the
Celtic lands where belief in Kami and fairies have persisted into the
modern era. Even where such belief persists however it does change, it
is subject to evolving cultural ideas.
Of course at first glance it would appear that fairies, spirits,
deities aren’t present within fairy tales at all. Indeed it has
been argued that what defines fairy tales is a lack of religious
elements when compared to mythology. I would argue however that there
are two important things to understand about fairy tales. Firstly,
fairy tales are about the day to day life of people’s interaction
with the world and the supernatural figures which inhabit it. Myths of
the world’s creation, of deities fighting dragons, of the great
heroic powers clashing with each other are entertaining and important
to warriors and priests but not really to the daily life of the
majority of the population. Thus mythology offers only a limited look
at the religion of a people. The rest of a peoples belief system was
rarely recorded as it was considered base and silly by the upper castes
which did the writing. This means that the only record of the beliefs
of the majority of a people are contained in fairy tales and a few folk
rituals as the upper castes had different needs and beliefs then the
lower casts. This is true not only in Europe where kings and nobles
became Christian while pagan rites and beliefs remained common among
the lower castes but also in Asia where Buddhism, modern Shintoism,
Confucianism, Hinduism, etc were used as tools by the upper castes to
force compliance of the peoples they had conquered. Yet these religions
did not get rid of the religious beliefs of the lower castes and or
indigenous peoples completely, for their beliefs are still hidden
within fairy tales and folk knowledge. There are then two basic eras
within the history of nearly all folktales, the time before a people
were conquered or the upper caste converted to a new religion and the
time after these events occurred.
Pre-Upper Caste Religious Change.
Pre-Christian, Muslim, Confucianism, Buddhism, etc.
It’s certainly true that even before the coming of Buddhism,
Christianity, Islam, Shintoism, most Eurasian societies still had clear
caste systems. However before the coming of forced religious laws the
lower castes tended to be left to their own devises more then they
would be in these later eras of forced belief. Of course for many
people this change occurred multiple times which makes it ever more
difficult to sort through the many ideas contained in fairy tales.
In general however fairies during this period of time were magical
beings which existed in a somewhat vulnerable state of being but which
at the same time could and did manipulate and control the fate of
humanity. Because of their close connection with human’s fairy
like beings were in many ways more important to people then the deities
they might believe in. Observers of the Mari-El for example were
surprised that they tended to focus their religious activities on
pleasing the keremet, a form of nature spirit which could also be
considered an ancestor spirit or the pieces of the soul of a deceased
deity which was broken apart, rather then spending their time trying to
please the deities which they believed tended to be distant beings. The
Greeks often times made their first offering to the nymphs, the Romans
first deities appear to have been more like fairies then deities.
Fairies were so important to the Celts and Nordic people that while
they allowed the Christians to burn down their temples would not let
them hurt the sacred trees.
There are a few key things to understand during this stage;
1-Fairies tend to be dualistic in nature being both creative and
destructive. In some cases people even begin to worship fairy type
beings simply to pacify their destructive nature. We certainly see this
in Japan where a hero began battling serpent like kami which were
killing people in his village. He then negotiated a truce with the kami
in which people would make offerings to them in return for peace.
2-People’s worship of fairies is both out of respect and fear.
Further to a large extent such worship can often be equated to
bargaining in which they offer food, gold, etc in return for favors. In
many rituals people offer the fairy/kami like spirit a percentage of
their harvest if it is good. In other tales people threaten fairy like
beings telling them that they’ll do them harm in return for
treasures.
3-Fairies are not necessarily more powerful then humans. There are
tales where people threatened to cut down the tree a fairy lived in,
where a boy in Japan saves the daughter of a kami from some bullies,
where a man catches a fairy and forces him to be his wife.
4-Fairy beliefs tend to be related to people and societies needs. On a
number of pacific islands it was said that spirits would curse those
who went into the groves at night which helped people avoid malaria.
Dangerous places such as rivers all over the world are said to be
haunted which keeps children away and more. The belief in fairies can
also be comforting, allowing the parents of a drowned child to believe
that their child’s spirit went to play with the nymphs forever or
providing people a way to try to make things better no matter how hard
life gets.
Post-Upper Caste Belief System
At some point in most societies histories the upper caste develops or
converts to a new religion which is what happened with the Shintoism of
Japan, the Christianity of Europe, Buddhism, Confuciusism, Islam, etc.
Even after peoples ‘conversion’ to such religions, much of
their traditional beliefs remain in tact and many fairy tales remain to
tell of the old ways. There are some changes however, one of which is a
focus on the negative aspects of fairy like beings. So although some
stories often do remain about fairy like beings helping humans these
tend to be rare. Further the happiness which fairies offer, their
kingdoms, food, gold, etc are often believed to be an illusion. Fairies
are believed to be miserable in many ways in order to prevent people
from wanting to be a fairy when they die like they might have in the
before this period. Of course in the case of Buddhism this picture is a
little different as many of the fairy like creatures are said to have
converted to or to be in some way related to Buddhism, and thus are
trying to achieve the same afterlife that humans are.
In this post-period, fairies become a story element rather then as a
religious being, or where the religious elements remain they either
become an opposition to the new religion and exist to reinforce the new
religions superiority over the previous belief system, or they are
adopted into the new belief system as Saints, Buddhist figures, etc.
This is the environment in which most of the fairy tales we hear today
were told. Thus we must examine fairy tales with the realization that
while there were always demonic creatures some of the beings within
fairies were made to be more evil then the original belief system meant
for them to be. Secondly, the roll of fairies was often subverted and
reduced. A good example of this comes from the fact that Wild Huntsmen
from fairy tales likely has his roots in the Germanic myths about Odin.
The Fairies and Magical Rituals of Fairy Tales
At one time in parts of Russia and Eastern Europe people would take
deformed children, those which were not considered whole and could not
walk, and wrap them in dough and then placed in a slightly warm oven.
This didn’t hurt them as the oven wasn’t hot, it was
believed that the hearth spirit would then help heal them, that just as
dough rises the child would rise up as well. The parallel between this
ritual and the tale of the Gingerbread Man should be obvious. Knowing
the origins of the Gingerbread Man story is interesting, yet it
doesn’t necessarily help us understand anything we didn’t
know on learning about the ritual. At the same time it does give us a
better grasp of how stories were altered so that we can begin to review
other stories, so that we can begin to understand deeper meanings.
Further it gives us insight into the fear of the people involved in the
ancient religion. The parents of the Gingerbread Man released him into
the world by giving him new life and new speed, but the sudden freedom
and his likely relationship with the fairy world caused him to run away
from all work while seeking out and trusting the dangerous fox.
We see another ritual performance in the story of the “Fool and
the Birch Tree” the younger foolish brother in this fairy tale is
leading his cow through the woods when he hears the wind blowing
through a birch trees leaves and he thinks that the Birch is making an
offer to him for the cow. Although it’s not mentioned in the
fairy tale two things are worth mentioning at this point. First is that
the Slavic people at one time sacrificed cattle and other animals to
trees in return for wealth and second is that the sound wind through
the trees was commonly believed to be the trees speaking, although only
certain people could only understand what the tree was saying. What we
have in this tale then is that a person who in the post-Christian era
is considered foolish hears a tree speak to him in order to make an
offer for the cow.
So the fool ties the cow to the tree and leaves later after the wolves
and animals of the forest, the creatures which the forest spirits
watched over and cared for in Russian mythology, came and ate the cow.
Some time after this a thief hides some gold in the tree for safe
keeping. The fool of course finds this gold and becomes rich. One could
argue of course that he simply got lucky, its important to keep in mind
however that fairies were believed to not only be able to see the
future but to be able to manipulate it also. This story then shows us
that just as the Christian god is now believed to work by manipulating
events in the world, fairies were also believed to do the same. Luck,
both good and bad, in ancient belief systems is not random; rather
it’s the result of magical intervention. This story further shows
us that of the forest eating a sacrifice, such as the cow, may have
been considered part of the sacrifices purpose, after all when the
wolves ate the cow in the story the boy who ‘sacrificed’
the cow was rewarded. In other words an understanding of ritual allows
one to gain a better understanding of fairy tales which in turn allow
one to gain a better understanding of the ritual and the being the
ritual is being performed for.
This understanding of the fairy beings is of the utmost importance
because almost all rituals were made in the distant past and so were
created to deal with the concerns of the distant past. In order to deal
with modern concerns one must figure out how to approach fairies now.
The tale of “Briar Rose” or “Sleeping Beauty”
begins with a magical ritual, but unlike the other two tales
we’ve discussed we get to see not only the results but the
personality of the fairy like creature which performs the first feat of
magic shine through. Its interesting to note that in “Sleeping
Beauty” the fairy which starts the story, manipulates the
characters and drives the action is the one most ignored by those
studying or rewriting the story. In both the French and the German
versions of this tale the story begins with a water fairy in the form
of a frog or in the form of a well spirit granting the King and Queen a
child.
In “Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” the version collected by
Perrault, the king and queen take a much more active role in seeking
help from the water fairy with the opening lines; “They went to
all the waters in the world; vows, pilgrimages, all ways were
tried.”
What we see in the king and queen’s search is that despite the
fact that the kingdom in which they lived had 13 fairies (or 7 in
Perrault’s version) the king and queen chose to seek help in
having a child or ultimately received it from the spirit of the water,
not from the fairies they would later invite to give the child
blessings. Water fairies have a unique ability to see the future so
this spirit of the wells would have foreseen much of the epic tale that
was about to unfold because of its action of helping the king and queen
to have a child. Certainly, the story that resulted has been with us
for hundreds of years and is now one of the most popular stories in the
world.
The well fairy can be said to be the stories author, after all everyone
else in the story was just doing what was natural to them. Being
forgetful, being spiteful or any other actions taken by characters in
the story just happened. Only the well fairy at the beginning of the
tale had a real choice. This tells us about the importance of water
spirits among ancient peoples. It also tells us however that fairies
may at times do what they do in order to create art by using humans as
the medium. Further it also shows that their schemes to lead people to
happiness can take a long time. If one is to presume that the Princess
lived happily ever after, as we surely must (the fairies made it so
after all) then we must also understand that the person she lived
happily ever after with was born decades after she was. Thus even the
fairy cursing Briar Rose to sleep led in the end to the fulfillment of
her happiness.
Such grand manipulation is common place in fairy tales and isn’t
limited to water fairies. Similar manipulation occurs in the tale of
“Puss and Boots.” Of all the tales of fairies collected by
the brothers Grimm, none shows such a close relationship between a
human and a fairy-like creature as “Puss in Boots” does. It
is clear from the story that Puss is no ordinary cat, although Briggs
does assert that cats were a form of fairy in their own right having a
fairy court and their own set of magical powers. Still, it is rare for
a cat to be so closely involved with human affairs. According to Jacob
Grimm, Puss shares many of the features that a household fairy would
have. He asks for boots, a symbol of his status as a fairy creature.
Grimm asserts that it is often such boots that separate ordinary beings
from fairies. What’s interesting in this as it relates to the
story, however, is that these are not special boots. They were not
given to Puss by some fairy princess or ancient god. Instead, they were
given to him by a poor boy. So if it is as Grimm asserts that these
boots are, in fact, boots that provide Puss with his status and with
power, we must conclude that humans can in fact give gifts to fairies
which in turn become powerful because of the act of offering.
In return for the gift of the boots, and because of the love he held
for the father of the poor boy in this story, Puss develops a complex
plot to make “his master” wealthy. Puss plans and works
towards putting his master in good favor with the king over the course
of months. This is not just an effort to make his master wealthy, for
he could have tricked and killed the ogre at any point in order to
provide his master with treasure. Puss is working to have his master
marry the princess knowing the two would like each other. Puss then is
more than simply a bystander; he is a true weaver of fate.
Such attempts at manipulating human fate can go wrong. Though perhaps
this occurs not because of a mistake made by the fairy, but because of
their sympathy for a human which distracts them from their mission as
occurred in “Rumpelstiltskin.” As with many tales of fairy
encounters the story of “Rumpelstiltskin” begins not only
with a problem during a time when the main character (a millers
daughter in this case) is forced into a time of in-between. In this
particular fairy tale this occurs when her father lies and ends up
having her taken by a greedy king who imprisons and threatens to kill
her if she doesn’t turn straw into gold. Clearly this situation
puts her in a space between for she is not yet a fiancé, yet she
is no longer free in that regard. She is trapped in a prison but an
‘honored’ guest.’ She is between being a member of
her father’s house, the executioner, and the king’s
household. It is at this moment when she is trapped; pulled by so many
worlds that the fairy appears. Fairies after all a creatures which
exist in the betwixt and between worlds, seeking out those who
don’t yet have a place in the world.
In many ways Rumpelstiltskin is the most confusing and intriguing part
of this story. For this particular “männlein,”
as the German text designates, Rumpelstiltskin, despite outward
appearances, is neither clear in his goal nor his motivation. On the
cusp of it, it would seem that he wants the girl’s first-born
baby. However, most fairies in stories don’t ask for the child
they want, instead they simply take it. Rumpelstiltskin, however,
despite being clearly able to sneak into a prison, being able to weave
magic powerful enough to turn straw into gold doesn’t just take
the child as he obviously could. Instead he tries to get the girl to
accept giving the baby to him. What’s more, even after he comes
to collect the child, he decides to give her another chance to escape
her agreement with him.
Such actions put him in line with the wizard characters of European
folklore such as Malagigi or Germanic/French mythology or Merlin of
British tales. Rumpelstiltskin seems very likely then to be a wizard
character, after all he isn’t simply trying to get a baby,
he’s trying to take a future king. By his own words, this
baby is more precious to him than all the treasures in the world.
What’s more the child which Rumpelstiltskin wants is going to be
the child of a tyrant, the type of King who would lock a young girl in
a tower and threaten to execute her if she fails to make him wealthy.
Clearly removing this child from his father wouldn’t be a bad
thing. Yet Rumpelstiltskin fails to do so because he gives the girl a
chance to get out of their bargain, he feels sorry for her. It is one
thing after all to take a child from an evil king, but it’s
entirely more difficult to take one from its sobbing mother. This
likely proves to be an impossible task for a männlein which
typically help princesses and girls find children and happiness.
The challenge with most fairy tales is that they begin with the fairy
not only as a side character but as one which is fully developed. There
is very little back story provided for them. This is what makes the
tale “The Spindle, the Shuttle, and the Needle” so special,
it begins at the actual beginning. In this tale a young girl uses the
aforementioned objects to spin and weave her fate, to find her own
husband.
Jacob Grimm’s “Teutonic Mythology” notes,
“Women gain their power, their heroic respect at this time from
the magic that comes from the spindle.” In “The Golden
Bough” it’s stated that “Women become very nearly or
perhaps in some ways more than gods from the power over fate that they
have, a power which comes from spinning.”
The fates which come to spin the fate of a child, which create and kill
heroes which drive the action of everything are often depicted as no
more then old women with certain powers. This of course is different
from our modern perception of fairies and the spinners of fate and
perhaps this is ultimately the reason its so hard to identify the
fairies in fairy tales. In modern times most people look for the
strange and the magical, for whimsy sprites and distant deities. What
fairy tales teach us is that magic is much more accessible, that the
wise and the powerful are not only accessible, but that they are often
right there in front of us, or more importantly that we can become the
spinners of fate on our own.
Origins of Europe’s Fairy Faiths
Proto-Indo-Europeans
In the primal wilderness of the Neolithic Eurasian steppes which
stretched out for thousands of miles, a wilderness in which humans were
still be hunted by wolves and bears, were born the seeds of all but
four of Europe’s modern languages. Their descendent languages
include Celtic, German, English, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian,
Greek, Lithuanian, Serbian, as well as a number of Middle Eastern and
Indian languages. It was here buffeted by the cold winds and always on
the look out for wild animals which at any moment could take either
their lives or the lives of the animals on which they depended for
their food – that the Proto-Indo-Europeans began to flourish. The
success of the Proto-Indo-Europeans likely comes in large part because
of new ways they found to utilize animals; they began to ride horses
for the first time and use oxen to pull newly invented wagons in order
help them better herd cattle and sheep with the help of domesticated
dogs.
When night came and the wind would grow frigid these people would
gather around the fires to cook, eat, and protect themselves from the
cold as well as the darkness of the unknown that lay beyond their camp
as the howls of the wolves and the growls of the bears surrounded them.
The fires glow would only help so much for a fire does not banish the
darkness form site it only pushes it away creating a wall outside of
which creatures might prowl. In their imagination and in reality they
must have seen enemies from other clans and wild animals prowling in
the darkness. Worse still were the ‘others,’ the
predecessors of the giants and trolls, of the fairies which snatched
children away from the arms of their loving families, as well as the
forbearers of the demons that would haunt the dreams and fears of later
Europe. The night then wasn’t just darkness, for darkness is
fear, it’s the unknown the place where evil things can lurk. It
was here surrounded by darkness huddled together around a fire and
hearth eating cheese, butter, and meat that the embers of
Europe’s later fairy tales and religions grew as people
contemplated the nature of the soul and the spirits around them.
Eventually the voice of a priest would rise in a poetic song to tell
tales of the heroic deeds of their people in hopes of instilling these
heroic values in their children, or simply to entertain each other with
amusing tales of the strange things their deities and heroes did. The
night was the time of these poets and singers the time of the priestly
caste. For it was at night that people had to feel secure in the
heroics of the deities and the power of the singer to keep evil away
with his charms and songs.
Deities of the Proto-Indo-Europeans
The Deities of Indo-European mythology most largely resembled mortals,
for although they were powerful and knowledgeable they could still be
wounded in battle and grow old. In order to stave off their old age
they would eat sacred food which give them their immortality. In one
Norse myth the deities weren’t able to obtain this food for some
time and so grew old and feeble until Loki was able to get the food for
them.
The idea the gods gain their immortality from a sacred food is one of
the best attested ideas in later Indo-European myths. This food was
known as Ambrosia among the Greeks and Soma in India. The De’
Dannan of Ireland stayed young thanks to sacred barriers on an island
in a loch which was guarded by a dragon. In Norse mythology golden
apples held by the goddess Idoun were held to give the gods their
power. In all cases this food was difficult to collect. In order to
obtain it one of the deities often times had to transform into a bird
to carry it out of the realm where it was held. The fact that deities
could grow old doesn’t mean that the Indo-Europeans thought they
weren’t incredibly powerful because they were as attested by the
fact that they would grow from baby to adult nearly instantly in order
to begin doing amazing feats that no normal human could. Indra was said
to be born asking who he could do battle with and within a year after
Zeus’s birth he was strong enough to defeat the titans. There are
many legends of the gods feats of strength and their prowess to prove
they are much more then a mortal human. Still it is a common feature of
Indo-European mythology that the deities are understandable in that
they have the same concerns and desires which mortals have.
This is perhaps because the job of the deities of Indo-European
mythology was to inspire courage, through their own acts to combat
evil. The deities of the Indo-Europeans showed the importance of
courage by being vulnerable After all someone cannot learn how to live
and fight from someone who cannot fear, who cannot die, and who has no
mortal concerns.
MacCulloch and Bailey believed that the original deities were closer to
the realm of fairy and that they evolved into the deities we would know
later. I would argue however that this situation is fluid, that because
there are so many beings which could be considered sacred religion as
well as its deities and fairies reflect peoples desires and fears so
that they can help fill roles in society. So as humans need to take
courage in an all knowing god this is what they believed in but when
they needed hero’s to lead by example this is what they tell
tales of.
The conception of the numen (is) formless and indefinite, it is not
surprising that in the genuine Roman religion there should have been no
anthropomorphic representations of the divinity at all. 'For 170
years,' Varro tells us, taking his date from the traditional foundation
of the city in 754 B.C., 'the Romans worshipped their gods without
images,'
By primitive peoples the supernatural agents are not regarded as
greatly, if at all, superior to man; for they may be frightened and
coerced by him into doing his will. At this stage of thought the world
is viewed as a great democracy; all beings in it, whether natural or
supernatural, are supposed to stand on a footing of tolerable equality.
The notion of a man-god, or of a human being endowed with divine or
supernatural powers, belongs essentially to that earlier period of
religious history in which gods and men are still viewed as beings of
much the same order, and before they are divided by the impassable gulf
which, to later thought, opens out between them. Strange, therefore, as
may seem to us the idea of a god incarnate in human form, it has
nothing very startling for early man, who sees in a man-god or a
god-man only a higher degree of the same supernatural powers which he
arrogates in perfect good faith to himself. Nor does he draw any very
sharp distinction between a god and a powerful sorcerer. His gods are
often merely invisible magicians who behind the veil of nature work the
same sort of charms and incantations which the human magician works in
a visible and bodily form among his fellows. And as the gods are
commonly believed to exhibit themselves in the likeness of men to their
worshippers, it is easy for the magician, with his supposed miraculous
powers, to acquire the reputation of being an incarnate deity.
Tribes of the the Gods
In both Scandinavian mythology and Vedic mythology there were two
tribes of the gods who went to war with each other. In the Vedic
texts these are the Asura and the Devas while among the Norse these
tribes are the Æsir and the Vanir. Although the name of the
Æsir and the Asura do likely have the same root one should be
careful when trying to draw parallels between them. There are two
reasons for this; first Thor the god of the Storms is an Æsir in
Norse myth while his counter part Indra is the King of the Devas in the
Rigveda, further the lord of the Æsir, Odin, has no counter part
in India as he is partially inspired by Ugric-Finno mythology. Second
the Devas become dominant in Hindu mythology while the Æsir
become dominant in Norse mythology.
The challenge to understanding or comparing either tribe is that there
appears to be some borrowing of deities from other cultures within each
and the roles of the individual tribes names do not appear to be as
important as what the story represents..
What’s important to understand is that this meeting of two tribes
of gods could have come out of the Proto-Indo-European meeting with
another people their early history, before they split and traveled to
India and Europe. Certainly this isn’t a given and given the fact
that there appears to be so many borrows, changed sides and changed
roles it might be impossible to sort out which god belonged to which
side or which people originally.
More likely however is that since there are few to no details of this
war only of the truce that the war itself is just an artifice used to
explain why the warrior and priestly class deities are above the
working class deities.
The Storm God
The storms rolls in bringing with it life giving rain but also winds
and floods which destroy homes and sweep away loved ones. So it is that
storms are the most confusing of natural phenomenon - needed, even
desired - yet at the same time, feared. Nearly everyone has experienced
fear as a storm rolls in, the sense of dread as the sky turns dark and
the winds howl outside like demons along with the flash of lightening
followed by a boom. But to the Indo-Europeans this boom, this lighting
was the weapon of an ally, brought to defeat the evil, to defeat the
monsters which they feared. Of all the deities of the Indo-European
peoples the most commonly attested is the lord of thunder and the
storm. He is the warrior who banished the darkness and destroys evil
with his thunder bolts.
This god of thunder of the storm was the chief deity Zeus in Greek
legend, the Chief Deity Indra of the Rigveda in Indian mythology, as
well as Perun the most likely chief deity of the Slavic peoples. The
thunder god was also one of the most important deities in Celtic,
Scandinavian, Hittite and Germanic folklore.
He is the only deity I know so commonly attested to as being of primary
importance in all Indo-European faiths which we still have a record of.
That he is so commonly attested to can be taken one of two ways, the
first is that he was the lead deity of the Proto-Indo-European peoples.
Certainly he appears to be a good candidate for this and it seems very
likely that he was extremely important. On the other hand we should
expect that the deity best attested to would be a defender of the
people against strange demons for all nearly Indo-Europeans migrated to
strange lands. The people who wrote the Veda in India, the
Indo-Europeans who traveled west into Europe were thousand of miles
from home, for what ever reason they had traveled across the world into
the unknown where only the sky and the storms remained the same. The
peaceful sky however could not protect them, it could not defeat the
demons they feared, only the storm could do that. Only the axe, arrows,
or hammer of the gods could strike down the giants and dragons of the
new land in which they found themselves. So while one can presume that
the Indo-European’s thunder god is yet a sign that they were war
like, (which they likely were to some extent) one can also take it as a
sign that they were afraid, that they needed a guardian in the sky.
Certainly when one considers what his original role likely was this
idea makes some sense. Consider after all why it is that the thunder is
considered to be the weapon of good? Most people who sit in the
darkness with the storm raging around them would not consider this to
be so, but remember that religion has its roots in function. When a
weeping fearful child climbs into bed with their parents as the storm
rages around them and asks what the thunder is what are the parents to
say? What story do they tell their baby to comfort them? It seems
unlikely that the story of the Proto-Indo-European parents would have
told their child would have been one of demons haunting the world, for
there were enough of those in the darkness and the storm. What was
needed was a sign of something trying to defeat the fears of the child
and so they would tell their child of how the oak tree which they had
made offerings to, the spirit of the oak tree which supplies some of
the food was out in the storm fighting the demons, fighting the
darkness which the child feared. In this way the child would know that
the thunder was his friend and so would be comforted.
So while the god of the oak trees and the thunder may be a god of war,
making a warrior one of the most important gods to the Indo-European
peoples this may only be because a warrior is sometimes what is needed
to give comfort not just to those going into battle but also to those
who are weak and afraid.
List of Proto-Indo-European Deities
The challenges that exist in understanding the original culture of the
peoples would eventually come to dominate European culture are many not
only because they have fractured into many cultures but because they
were likely formed from multiple tribes with multiple leaders and
different shamans or priests long before they began their Journey into
Europe and India. However there are a number of similarities between
Indo-European cultures and a number of linguistic clues which can help
us to better understand the general culture of this group of peoples.
The Proto-Indo-Europeans where a pastoral culture, one of the first if
not the first to have started breeding horses and wagons (so heavy that
they were likely pulled by oxen as horses were still too small to do
this) which gave them a level of mobility not enjoyed by nearly any
other culture of the time. Such mobility offers many advantages to a
society which needs to hunt and herds animals for much of its food.
However it can also offer some level of disadvantage as well as horses
make it far easier for one tribe to make quick raids on another in
order to loot food and women. This in turn can force these societies to
become more war like and it is under this catalyst that the
Proto-European society developed. This war like nature can be seen in
their development of a clear warrior cast whose role was perhaps to
raid for cattle from their enemies and recover cattle taken in raids.
To aid them in their raids many of their deities including Dyēus
‘the sky father’ who was perhaps one of their most
important deities became warlike and could be asked to aid them in
their battles, He would later evolve into Zeus, Jupiter, Tyr and other
deities of the European pantheons.
The Sky
The sky is always looming over head, it is always watching, The sun may
rise and fall, it may move from one place to the other so that it
cannot see you, but the sky, the vast sky covers everything. In this
role *Dyēus Ph2ter ‘Sky Father’ watched over oaths, made
certain that the earth was functioning as it should so one can see then
how then how the ‘Sky Father’ came to be one of the most
important deities of some of the Indo-European pantheons, important
enough that some have claimed that he was the lead deity. It is
difficult to determine who was the lead deity of the
Proto-Indo-Europeans, however, certainly Zeus and Jupiter were the lead
deities of the Roman and Greek pantheon but they were not only the
‘Sky Father’ they were also the lighting deity. The
‘Sky Father’ does not hold so much importance among the
Slavic, Indian, Norse, or Germanic peoples. Nor does he appear to be
extremely important to the Celts. The sky father does hold great
importance too many of the peoples of the steppes and so is very well
attested to but for whatever reason this importance either faded or was
never fully present for nearly all the Indo-European peoples. He
remained important among the Indo-Iranians as Mitra and Varuna and
certain aspects of his nature appear to be present in Odin the head
gods of the German, but much of Odin’s nature seems to be
borrowed from a preexisting shamanistic people (likely the Finno-Ugric
peoples). So with the exception of the Persians the Sky Father never
seems to lead without being merged with another deity.
Earth Mother
Just as the sky is always above the earth is always below, but while
one views the sky with awe, as a mystery to be unraveled, a something
which is always watching the earth isn’t as mysteries. It
doesn’t bring the rain, and unlike lighting when the earth
rumbles as an earthquake its always viewed as negative. And while I
know of no cases of Indo-European myth where Gaia is blamed for earth
quakes it still doesn’t change the fact that the earth for the
most part remains silent. So the Earth mother is not well attested to
in most Indo-European societies.
Indeed there are very few goddesses we can name that came from
Proto-Indo-European mythology, the most famous goddesses from Greek
Mythologies are borrowed from Near Asia and so are not a part of the
original Proto-Indo-European Pantheon, there are very few goddesses
attested to in Vedic Mythology or in Europe which don’t have
obvious root elsewhere. Those that exist represent natural or abstract
elements such as rivers, the dawn, happiness, or are married to a male
deity. The most important female deities appear to have been Mother
Earth, the Mistress of Horses, and the Dawn.
Dawn and Spring
In the darkness and on cold night’s humans all share one thing in
common we are waiting for the dawn. It should be no surprise then that
as far as I can tell the dawn is the best attested to of all the
goddesses of Proto-Indo-European origin. The dawn after all is a
dramatic event and it may be that only such dramatic events survived
the test of time, in story after story. Just as the dawn is beautiful
so to is the goddess who represents her. In the Rigveda she smiles
beautifully and displays her bodily charms. Among the Greeks the dawn
Eos was thought to fall in love with many men and to carry them away as
many of ther mythological characters did.
Among the Anglo-Saxons the dawn was Eostre from whose name we get the
word Easter for she was a goddess of the spring as well as the dawn.
The spring adds to her importance for as the goddess of spring she not
only ends winter but brings the food back to the world. Thus while Gaia
can be thought of as important but passive, the dawn and spring can be
said to take an active role in helping humanity.
Heroic Gods
The Proto-Indo-European rituals to their war gods seemed to be of
special importance as they would sacrifice great horses (surely one of
their most valuable positions) to them in a festival that involved the
drinking of *Medhu (the root word for mead and many other sweet honeyed
foods and drinks from India to Ireland). They would punish those who
failed at war by the sword or the fire or sacrifice humans using the
sword and fire to aid in victory.
One of the most important tales of nearly all Indo-Europeans from the
Hittites and Vedic to the Norse and the Greeks involved a heroic figure
who would loose his cattle to a giant and often times three headed
serpent and then would seek the aid of the war god to get them back.
Another important tale is that of the heroic last stand, of warriors
fighting a battle that they are destined to die in for glory and to
insure the survival of even a few humans. This story would eventually
evolve into Ragnarok when spirits of the dead hero’s and the gods
would battle a great evil in order to avoid the complete destruction of
humanity, knowing full well that they would die in this battle. Such
stories would have been important to the warrior cast as part of their
role as guardians, for there would likely have been many times when a
group of them from one clan or another would have had to face
unbeatable odds while allowing the other casts to escape.
Food Giving Caste
It’s important to understand however that while the
Proto-Indo-Europeans had a warrior cast with a deity, rituals and tales
of their own the whole society was not necessarily obsessed with war.
The Proto-Indo-Europeans like other Indo-Europeans societies after them
was a triple society with two castes other then the warrior; the
priestly caste and the caste of herders/farmers. Thus the vast majority
of spirits, elements and deities appear to have been related to
fertility and the land. Indeed for the Indo-Euorpeans who entered
Europe the land and the wilderness were perhaps the most important
thing. Oak trees were held to be sacred and the word for temple comes
from their word for wood, for sacred grove. The Proto-Indo-European too
lived in an area with at least some forestation and would bring their
cattle and sheep to the elms to forage, they would use the ash trees to
make their spears, the birch to make cloth, and the willow tree to
weave baskets. They would plough their fields and use sickles to aid
them in harvesting cereals. Their food came from farming and
pastoralist activities so the bulk of their people were engaged in
these activities. Fertility was of key importance and most of the
festivals of Europe and India involve fertility not war. They would
sacrifice he-goats and or occasionally people by drowning them to
assure the fertility of their animals and the land.
Hearth Mother
The Greeks equated Tabiti the lead deity of the Scythian raiders to
their goddess Hestia the goddess of the hearth, home and family. If we
are to believe the Greeks this would mean that the Scythians were the
only Indo-European people we know of whose head deity was a goddess.
However, even among the Greeks Hestia was so important that the first
sacrifice families made was offered to her. Vesta was the goddess of
the hearth and fire in Roman mythology and offerings were made to her
for protection. The hearth goddess may also exist in Cletic mythology
in forms such as Belisama the goddess of fire and crafts. In Vedic
mythology however the closest thing to hearth deities are male. This
does not mean that the Hearth Goddess wasn’t one of the most
important figures in the Proto-Indo-European religion. After all the
names of deities are passed down in stories, in epics and sagas and
sadly mothers while important figures they were not the primary figures
of most sagas. The same problem likely exists with regards to our
understanding of the fertility goddesses as well, who became goddesses
of the field or were personified within trees. It’s interesting
to note however that long after the other gods and goddesses had come
to be considered demons by Christianized Europe the deities of the
field and family were still worshiped.
War Stories
The reason war stories were of such importance may be due in large part
to the fact that they are interesting. Just as many of the movies from
now are related to heroic fighters even though combat itself
doesn’t necessarily define our society so to could their society
have been much more peaceful then their tales would seem to indicate.
Ultimately the Proto-Indo-Europeans worshiped the elements and what to
them were heroic figures. Their sacrifice to rivers and fire along with
the importance of these elements to the Indo-Iranians, the Vedic, and
early Europeans indicates that they believed in the importance of the
spirits of these elements. Trees too as mentioned previously were
likely believed to have important spirits who could aid them in their
time of need as did the sun and the moon. In addition to the elements
they worshipped what to them were heroic figures. Deities with very
clear flaws that involved womanizing, a horrible temper, and a
propensity to throw nearly childish temper tantrums. It would seem that
like later Europeans they believed fairly early that immortal beings
may never completely mature in the way one would expect a human too.
But such ‘faults’ were likely considered to be more amusing
then actual faults as we see from the dualism of many of their decedent
cultures the worst flaws were weakness, guile and trickery much like
what would be displayed by Loki in Norse mythology. It was okay then
for their deities and the fairies to act lecherous and lusty so long as
they weren’t weak or deceitful.
It was clear that they believed that they could please and manipulate
the elements of the earth and the deities through their priestly caste
which would sacrifice cattle in order to gain the favor of their gods
with the word for hundred cattle meaning a special sacrifice. It was in
this third priestly caste that we see an expectation of wisdom and
knowledge, the final most important trait of a good person in a society
that valued productivity, strength and knowledge especially in men.
The Indo-Europeans after all are for the most part all patriarchal
societies with the Proto-Indo-European word *Wedh is from the grooms
point of view and it means ‘to lead home.’ This means that
the males born from their marriages would grow up and remain in their
fathers village which in turn meant that they would grow up to compete
with their fathers brothers for position and that their courage and
strength were important to their father and their uncles survival in
the future. This meant that these relatives would take on the role of
being stern disciplinarians. While the uncles from the mothers family
would live more distantly and so could act as advisors and friends.
Because of this the maternal family appears to have been closer
emotionally to a child even though they lived some distance away.
Daylight and Fairy Tales
After the storm and or the night when daylight came again at last the
Proto-Indo-Europeans would return to their work in the fields to
harvest plants and cereals or to the Steppes to herd their animals and
hunt for food. Later Indo-European peoples would have clearly defined
work for men and women, with the later sometimes staying at home or
cultivating cereals as the men went out to hunt and herd. It is
impossible to say if the Proto-Indo-Europeans had a similar system but
it is likely that they did divide work into various castes as nearly
all later Indo-Europeans groups would.
The men and women would continue their stories here under the sky which
seemed to go on for ever, the sky which they watched carefully for
signs of storms as they both passed the time and built upon their
values. These stories were likely different from the tales of the night
before, for while poetic sagas and epics of heroes are an important
part of Indo-European mythology so too are folk tales, tales of the
clumsy and weak, the ordinary surviving and thriving in a harsh world
as well as amusing tales of animals doing strange and silly things.
They needed these stories too not only for the distraction but also for
the courage and humor they could take from them for like all ancient
peoples they faced what seemed an infinite number of dangers After all
for most people heroic deeds mean little, for most of us are altogether
ordinary. We dream of heroism but relate to the weak Jacks of folk
tales.
In order to help those of them who were ordinary with their ordinary
tasks they had the fairies, the spirits of the land. For like later
peoples of the steppes and their decedents they too very likely had a
fairy faith of sorts, a belief in spirits and souls of the land and sky
that could harm or help them. It is these people of the Steppes, the
Proto-Indo-Europeans who would come to define the fairy faiths of
Europe as they moved into Europe to bring with them what would become
the Slavic, Greek, Roman, Germanic, and Celtic languages while
replacing the original languages and many of the original ideas of the
Native Europeans. So while the Proto-Indo-Europeans weren’t the
first peoples of Europe they became by far its most significant.
A second society - of fairies
Fairy societies are present among every Indo-European people I’ve
been able to find folk tales from. From the fairy tales of the
Hindu-Kush, India and Persia within Asia and the Celts, Greeks, Romans,
Slavic and Germanic peoples of Europe we see the presence of a second
society of magical humans who live in a parallel world, humans who we
now call fairies. These fairies have a supernatural control over nature
- the wild animals are their herd animals and friends so they protect
them. People always had to be very careful to respect these fairies for
they would haunt buildings or people that were in their paths and at
times they would curse and kill those who disrespected their claims on
wild animals and plants.
The parallel world in which these fairies lived was all around the
Indo-European peoples, hidden by secret doorways into mountains, rocks,
cliffs and trees or at the bottom of special lakes and rivers. Tales of
deities and fairy like creatures opening windows in cliff faces or
doors in the sides of mountains are common, as are stories of people in
Europe seeing the fairies living within hills or the craggy rocks.
It seems likely then that the Proto-Indo-Europeans believed that they
traveled among fairies which lived within the rocks, mountains, trees
and lakes which surrounded them as they herded their animals through
the wilderness or went hunting. It’s also likely that the
Proto-Indo-Europeans acted to both pacify and keep these fairies at bay
while also making offerings to them for luck and healing. Among later
Germanic peoples the warriors, priests and poets would worship the gods
who could grant them victory and magic, but what do peasants need
victory for? For peasants there are the gods, but there are also the
fairies which make the plants grow, the fairies which help the animals
be fertile and which give or withhold permission to hunt in the wild.
These are who the farmers and herders, need to bargain with. So
long after Europe was Christianized the peasants would still pray
to these fairies, they would still make offerings to pear trees and
sacred wells, still bargain with the spirits of the hills and rocks.
Nature fairies are fickle. The apsara of India who lived in the
forests, lakes, rivers, trees and mountains loved to sing and dance
could be dangerous when doing so. Their beauty hid a certain amount of
malicious glee and they would often leave humans mentally deranged.
The Nymphs of Greece and the fairies of the Celts too would dance
through the forests, playing and laughing with childlike glee as if
never able to truly grow up and they too could leave those they
encountered insane. But perhaps the most fickle of all are the rusalky
of the Slavic peoples who are known to tickle humans to death.
The male counterparts to the nymphs and the apsara were equally as
playful, equally as musical. But they weren’t all play however
for among the people of India the part horse or part bird gandharva
were said to guard Soma, the food that made the gods immortal.
The satyrs of Greek mythology too were originally depicted as having
horse tails but through encounters with the Latin peoples whose Faunas
was part goat the satyrs also became part goat. By the time fairy tales
and myths were collected in Europe nearly every European society had a
forest spirit with goat legs. The Leszi of the Slavic peoples were the
ultimate bachelors just as the satyrs of Greece were; causing and
getting into trouble from too much drink, chasing female humans and
fairies around the forests and generally acting rowdy. The outlier in
all this are the Glaistig of the Scottish Celts, who are beautiful
females with the lower half of a goat. Still despite their gender their
role appears to have been similar as nature spirits which herd cattle
and love song and dance but which are dangerous for they unlike the
others drink human blood.
Water Dragons
Giant serpents lurked in the waters of Indo-European myths, serpents
who’s mythological decedents are the dragons of nearly every
people in Eurasia. For the Indian Naga is descended from these
creatures and the Chinese and Japanese dragons were adapted from these.
Further nearly every European people believed in water dragons as well.
The first water dragons do not seem to have had any good qualities,
more likely this was a later addition. The ancient serpents of
Proto-Indo-European myth very likely were believed to block the flow of
water, to poison and pollute wells. They were the monster that the
storm god battled. Perhaps the most famous battles in Indo-European
myths are between heroes and serpents. Zeus battled the many headed
dragon typhoon, while Indra of Vedic mythology battled Vrtra.
Herculeas, Beowulf, they all had to battle some form of serpent.
The Fates
The Moirae of Greece, the Norns of the Norse, and the Parcae of Rome
were three women who acted to spin the fate of man and at times even
the gods, determining how they should live as well as when they should
die. These givers of fate are common throughout European Mythology and
fairy tales and have promoted some to call them the triple goddesses;
there were not three of them in every myth however. The Irish for
example appear to have believed in seven daughters of the sea who
fashioned the threads of life. The Lithuanians also attested to their
being seven dieves valditojes (ruling deities) The Laimas of the
Latvians appear either in ones or threes depending upon the myth.
Regardless of their number however what’s important is their
function for this is what lets us know that they all have the same
origin. The fates are always female and they are the ones who determine
a child’s fate after they are born through the spinning of
thread. Because of how widespread they are through Europe some have
speculated that they were present in Europe before the Indo-European
invasion. Given that they are so pervasive in Europe and that they are
not really present so far as I know in the east such speculation seems
reasonable. It is possible of course that the Indo-Europeans lost their
belief in them as they traveled east. Still presuming that they are of
European origin there are three possibilities as to why they are so
prevalent throughout the convenient.
1-They were prevalent throughout most of Europe before the
Indo-European invasion. This is certainly possible though if this is
the case it seems unlikely that figures like them would have been the
focus of every religion given likely number of cultures and religious
systems that would have been present in Europe. So while fate may have
been the primary deity of a few lands, chances are they were secondary
figures as we see in later mythology.
2-They were passed in popular stories from country to country after the
Indo-Europeans came. Again this seems possible and certainly the story
and basic idea seem to be catchy enough to have passed on.
3-The Indo-Europeans encountered the fate goddesses early on their way
into the Europe which means that they may have been a product of the
Cutcuteni-Trypillian people. Certainly the idea of using a female as a
charm to bring luck, if this is indeed what the Cutcuteni-Trypillian
female figurines were would seem to fit the idea of a female that
controls the future.
The ‘fates’ were never seen as purely benevolent, after all
they deal death, illness and ill luck just as they deal good luck and
often times one of them acts petty and jealous. In the Edda the
youngest of there number cursed a child to death because she accidently
hurt herself, in Sleeping Beauty one of them cursed a baby to die on
her sixteenth birthday because she felt over looked. Its certainly
possible that this is a result of their being lessoned by the
conquering Indo-Europeans but I would point out that fate itself seems
fickle and at times cruel. It would be surprising then for people to
believe that the one dealing fate was saintly and perfect.
I realize that giving three possible answers to what the origins of the
fates does not explain who or what they are, however this is the
challenge with trying to track what might be pre-Indo-European
mythology, with no records left we are only left with possibilities but
no real answers.
The fairy shawl
The Greeks, Japanese, Celts and more all have tales of fairies which
use scarves, shawls or some other item of clothing to turn into fairies
and animals which allows them to ender the hidden realm. When these
fairies are female its common for their to be tales of a man stealing
their item of clothing as they bath in order to force them into a
marriage arrangement which always ends badly in Europe though can end
positively in Asian societies.
It was also common in both places for people to believe that there were
secret herbs, chants, or potions which gave the fairies their powers
and while it seems likely that such stories could have been developed
independently of each other because as people thought about the nature
of the separate society and pondered how they gained their powers the
idea of magical herbs or items likely could easily have been developed.
The question then is how early would this idea have been struck upon?
Certainly it seems probably given the importance of the priest class in
Indo-European societies that the idea of some magical system was
present in the Proto-Indo-European society. This in turn makes it
possible that at least some fairies were believed to be fairies thanks
to some magical item which they had.
Migration into Europe
At some point in pre-history the Indo-European languages and culture
began to expand such that they eventually became the dominant culture
of Europe. Yet how this occurred has been the subject of much
controversy because while there are some signs of cultural changes at
the end of the Neolithic period there are no real signs of a massive
military invasion in Northern or Eastern Europe which would indicate a
massive invasion. Further the collapse of the societies within Europe
and the construction of walls that did occur can be arguably attributed
to the environmental changes which occurred at the time.
Around 3200 BC the world began to change as a baby ice age caused
temperatures to drop and the climate to become dryer. The growing
season for foods would have become shorter and the crops would have
grown less in the cooler dryer climate or withered all together from
lack of rain which would leave many people starving. The Neolithic
populations after all had been built to sustain larger and larger
populations on less and less land and so the sudden environmental shift
could have destroyed their society. This along with the opportunity to
do battle presented by horses and ox-carts could have lead to war or at
the very least theft by neighboring or even distant villages desperate
for food.
The Indo-Europeans like everyone else would have faced shortages as
they had to bring their animals over a wider area to find food.
Analysis shows that pollens form cereal crops throughout Europe began
to drop which meant that the Indo-Europeans own crops likely started to
fail. The need for more room as well as the danger presented by
starving predators and other clans who would have likely sought to
steal food to provide a buffer against their own failing crops and
dying animals would have pushed the Indo-Europeans to begin to migrate,
much as the drop in temperature forced the Germans to migrate into Rome
over 3000 years later. There is a key difference between the Germanic
migration and the Indo-European migration however for the Germanic
peoples were facing against the Romans, a well organized military
people while the Indo-Europeans were entering post Neolithic Europe
which although capable of amazing levels of organization was still not
so well organized or structured as Rome.
The question then is where did the Indo-Europeans come from?
The Kurgan hypothesis states that they came from the Pontic steppes and
this The problem of course is that there isn’t an overwhelming
amount of evidence to support any hypothesis, still the Kurgan
Hypothesis does seem to have the most reasonable amount of support so
I’ll use this as a jumping point to try to understand the
expansion of the Indo-European peoples and how this could have affected
the mythology and folklore of Europe.
According to the Kurgan Hypothesis the Yamna culture, known from the
way they buried their dead and their other cultural artifacts most
likely represents the Proto-Indo-European society. As you can see from
the map other then two seas to the south they have few barriers
surrounding them so they its likely that they were influenced by and
influenced their neighbors greatly. Indeed the Proto-Uralic people
which bordered them to the North have a number of loan words in their
language from the Proto-Indo-Europeans. To the East lies more people of
the steppes possibly the later Altaic peoples but this is uncertain, to
the south are the peoples of the Caucuses and to the West lies the
Cucuteni-Trypillian Culture. There is evidence not only of extensive
trade between the Proto-Indo-Europeans but that for thousands of years
they shared some of the same territory.
The Cucuteni-Trypillian Culture had massive cities for their time with
some as large as those of the Fertile Crescent. The Yamna and the
Cutcuteni-Trypillian cultures began to live side by side around 4500
BC. It’s important to remember that at this time there likely
weren’t borders in the sense that we have to day so communities
of peoples from different cultures would have traveled side by side.
Over time the successors to the Yamna seem to have became more
dominate, however while the Cutcuteni-Trypillian built walls there are
no real signs of a major conflict and their culture didn’t fade
away until 2,750 BC. This means that they and the Proto-Indo-Europeans
lived side by side for 1,750 years. Hardly what one would expect if the
Yamna were a purely warrior culture bent on conquest and the
Cutcuteni-Trypillian were purely peaceful.
The extensive amount of time that the two cultures had in contact with
each other is likely to have influenced the later Indo-European
cultures greatly. Indeed similar contact such as the ones between the
Romans and the Germans for example ended with the Germanic people
adopting Roman Christianity. The Romans before this adopted a number of
Etruscan religious and cultural ideas and for centuries after they
defeated the Etruscans some Roman nobles still proudly proclaimed that
they were related to Etruscans. The Greeks adopted many elements from
their neighbors to the near east and the chief deity of the Norse and
Germanic peoples adopted many elements from the Uralic people. Yet all
of these people fought a number of wars with and occasionally
eliminated the societies of the peoples they emulated all together. So
while it’s impossible to say of how much of the
Cutcuteni-Trypillian culture the Proto-Indo-Europeans would have
adopted given that they left no written records to indicate what they
believed the written history that we can surmise or read of the
Indo-Europeans in Europe seems to indicate that they adopted a lot of
cultural elements from their neighbors.
It is fairly common to presume that the Cutcuteni-Trypillian were
matriarchal and that they worshiped a female goddess. However its
also been argued that the figurines which they left were more in line
with magical charms then sacred idols. In addition peoples of Northern
Indo-European decent such as the Germanic and possibly the Slavic
peoples would believe that it was wrong to try to trap their deities
and nature spirits in wood or stone form. In other words the later
cultures of Northern Europe were against the construction of idols
which means that any art found could simply have been art. It’s
impossible then to know what the Cutcuteni-Trypillian believed with
certainty just as its impossible to know the exact relationship that
these two peoples had. Given their proximity to each other it’s
even possible that they spoke a similar language although their
isn’t any archeological evidence to support this.
Still regardless of their relationship at some point something changed
and the Cutcuteni-Trypillian culture disappeared while the
Indo-European peoples expanded to take over Europe, Iran, India, etc.
Its hard to say how much influence the Fertile Crescent hand on the
Cucuteni-Trypillian culture. This map shows some genetic influence on
the region where they came from but there are still many questions it
leaves open. Is the migration north recent or does it actually
represent a past movement, were there more people from the Fertile
Crescent in Northern Europe before the Indo-Europeans took it over?
Also how much influence is necessary to change a culture? We see for
example that there is very little genetic replacement by the
Indo-Europeans within Ireland and other parts of Europe but these
people still speak an Indo-European language and have elements within
their mythology that would indicate a lot of influence. Genetic
replacement isn’t absolutely necessary then to indicate a
linguistic or religious change.
Although some people have imagined the Indo-European migration into as
a sudden mass movement of horse riding invaders much like the later
Turkic or Mongolian expansions this doesn’t appear to be the
case. From the map of their presumed expansion its easy to see that
from the time they hypnotically moved through Europe at less then one
mile per year. I repeat that this hardly seems like a military invasion
against a peaceful people
This is not to say that there wasn’t military invasion, rather
its to say that it seems more likely that there were a series of wars
conducted at different times by different peoples against the
Pre-Indo-European peoples who had knew how to and were able to defend
themselves to one extent or another.
There are some clear signs of wars and raids between the Neolithic
peoples before the Indo-Europeans showed up in which they appear to
have taken women and other wealth from each others villages.
The Native Europeans were farmers and hunter gatherers who were
decimated by the mini-ice age which ruined their crops and the wild
game that they hunted. Further they did not have horses to help them
track their wild game or aid them in raids on other villages or to
escape from raiders. Nor did they have wagons to help them move when
they needed to search for food. Finally they did not have as much
experience with animal husbandry so they were less able to utilize
goats and cattle which would have been more likely to survive the
shortages then the cereal crops which they grew. Archeological evidence
points to a collapse of many of their societies as they began to work
desperately to survive the mini-ice age. It was into this collapsing
and starving society that the Indo-Europeans first came.
Just as the Indo-European societies were split into three castes so too was the invasion likely to have involved three parts.
1-Fertility, Farming and Economic Invasion
During the first part of the invasion the Indo-Europeans had a clear
advantage thanks to their pastoral life style because while the Native
Europeans would have faced serious food shortages the Indo-Europeans
would have been able to settle between the existing villages while
bringing their animals through the ancient forests, meadows and plains
to eat tree leaves and grasses which humans couldn’t easily
cultivate for food, allowing them to continue to eat the meat, butter
and cheese of their animals. Further on horse back they could travel
father to search for wild grains, vegetables, acorns and game.
In this sense much of what probably occurred was an economic invasion,
in which the Indo-Europeans entering Europe could entice the women of
the Neolithic inhabitants to marry them. Further as food grew scarce
they also may have begun to hire the Neolithic European men to work for
them. In order to survive then many of the people of Europe would have
chosen to learn the language of and join the Indo-Europeans, slowly
depleting their already dwindling numbers.
Being a male dominated society the women who married into the
Indo-European families would go to live with them in their villages and
so would learn their language and their culture. And while having
better incomes would also mean that Indo-Europeans females would be
less likely to marry into the Europeans hypothetical egalitarian
society when this did occur it is likely that the European male would
choose to live in the Indo-European society because of the greater
wealth available to him within it.
Certainly there may have been occasions when an Indo-European man was
lured away by European woman however, it is much less likely for a man
from a pastoral society with a warrior class to choose to live with a
sedentary society. Indeed Europe’s nymph mythology in which a man
is lured into living with the fairies in their realm may refer to this.
As Perkiss points out in her book “Fairies and Fairy Stories
– A History” when a knight or Greek warrior goes to live
with a nymph or fairy their heroism is taken from them and this is
considered to be a fate worse then death. In other words for an
Indo-European male to have chosen to give up their heroism to marry
someone would have been so horrible that warning tales were built
against this idea.
Further starvation likely drove many Europeans to attempt to steal the
cattle and sheep of the far wealthier Indo-Europeans who in turn would
have followed the example of one of their most important myths in
stopping at nothing to take revenge. What we see then is that as to
European societies collapsed they began to live in caves and isolated
islands, perhaps stealing from the Indo-Europeans rather then
confronting them directly. Perhaps many Europeans who refused or were
unable to become a part of the incoming Indo-European societies must
have appeared, dehumanized by the Indo-Europeans the stories of them
must have been very much like the tales of weak and desperate fairies
of later years hiding in the mountains, secretly stealing from the
Indo-Europeans, or working for occasional scraps of food.
2-Cultural Invasion
In Indo-European cultures bard and mistral figures can earn huge
amounts of wealth, the Celts and Vedic cultures would pay them in herds
of horses and cattle. As the Indo-Europeans began to prove ever more
successful their epics and sagas as well as their religion may have
seemed all the more enticing to some of the peoples with which they had
contact. This in turn could have caused them lure some of the most
intelligent and capable peoples of Europe’s societies to begin to
imitate them.
3-Military Invasion
The early Romans and Etruscans lived next to each other for hundreds of
years having various periods of peace and war in which Rome slowly
conquered Etruscan land bit by bit. In legend Rome also raided the
Sabine in order to obtain more women to help them populate their young
city. Such raids for women were probably not uncommon among the
Indo-Europeans and over time would certainly have resulted in their
ability to greatly enhance their population as well as more serious
conflicts between them and other peoples.
Like the Romans the Indo-Europeans likely often moved into a new area
or expanded their borders so that they were suddenly in contact with a
new group of peoples who they traded and went to war with over the
course of generations. As they warred the existence of their warrior
class would have allowed them to excel over many of their competitors
and their growing numbers would have allowed them eventually overwhelm
Europe’s other inhabitants.
If the Indo-Europeans had aggressively invaded Europe all the way to
the coast one would expect to see clusters of their population centers
where they wiped out the local populations. Instead we see that as we
get to the coast of France, Denmark, Sweden, and England the appearance
of the genetic marker associated with their males drops to 10% or
below.
What likely happened was that one generation only went a little ways
into Europe, intermarried with the existing population and then their
children who now only accounted for a smaller percentage of their
genetic population pushed further into Europe.
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