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This is an age that masquerades as the age of rationality. The age of economic yardsticks, of 'pure' reason; an age when God is popularly supposed to be dead; an age when humanity seems set, in fact, on achieving an old dream and becoming God. Soon, we are told, we will have a 'Theory of Eveything', and then everything will be explained, understood. This rather touching bit of hubris, of course, is not new, despite assurances to the contrary. It's as old as the other view: the view that we live in a world of wonders, both within and without. The view that there have always, and will continue to be, 'more on heaven and earth than is dreamed of in your philosophy. ' The mythological imagination which is a counterpart, and a partner, to the scientific imagination; that reveals while it conceals. And that is a view that is still as strong as it ever was. It has changed direction; but then it always has. It is no static thing. For great myths are not personal invention; they are images that reside deep in the human spirit, made tangible in story; they are spiritual truths which we do not grasp only with reason, but with feeling, with intuition, with sensation. Myth is a truth which we express in every fibre of our beings; but it is also a truth that inhabits the world itself. In an age such as ours, the end of the age of Pure Science, the beginnings of something as yet undefined, what appear to be new myths have arisen.
But what appears to be new very often isn't. The power, the arbitrary nature of myth can blind us to the fact that it is infinitely flexible, infinitely re-inventing itself. Such is the case with three great myths: angels, fairies, aliens. Each of them expresses something complex and strange and terrifying; yet often also of a breathtaking simplicity, of a seemingly simple-minded literality, a simple joy. It is a cracking of the skin of the Otherworld, yet a deep look inside our own deepest recesses. And each is kin to the other. Over these three manifestations are strange images of a troubling similarity, even while there are differences. Each of them expresses a particular age, a particular world-view; but together, they show an extraordinary kinship of mind and spirit. And a constant renewal; for as the awe of each image faded, and what had once been mythological truth became pretty ornament, so a new terror, a new awe, took its place.
"And this was their appearance: they had the form of men, but each had four faces, and each had four wings. Their legs were straight, and their feet were like the sole of a calf's foot; and they sparkled like burnished bronze. . and the four had their faces thus: each had the face of a man in front, the face of a lion on the right side, an ox on the left side, and an eagle at the back. . and within them there was a burning, like torches moving to and fro. . " (Ezekiel 1, 5-15).
These are angels. These are Biblical angels; shapeshifters who can take on men's forms, or the forms of fiery wheels; messengers of God whose very names glorified him, for they always ended in "el", after Elohim, the sons of God--Raphael, Gabriel, Michael, Azrael. They are creatures of fire; merciless in their justice, utterly alien in their behaviour, though occasionally showing surprising humanity, as in the angels in Genesis 6 who come down to Earth and mate with human women. Although they are often seen in the Bible, they are regarded with some suspicion by orthodox Jews for they appear to be remnants of some ancient ploytheistic religion, perhaps that of the Babylonians. Within Judaism, the cult of angels was strongest in the Pharisees and Essenes, but the Sadducees, for example, considered them to be abominations. When we come to Christian belief, we find that Jesus himself referred to angels several times, but the stern Paul warned against such a cult(Colossians 2, 18). Islam makes faith in angels a key element. But the Qu'ran also insists that angels cannot be represented. It also makes a key distinction, by the way, between angels, which it says are made of purest gems; and jinn, or demons, which are made of fire. In all three religions, angels are believed to sometimes take up people--Ezekiel himself was one of them. They came from a strange dimension which is both part of, and outside, the world, and the people they took vanished into this dimension too.
Angels, with their capacity for carrying out God's punishment against the evil(see Sodom) or the oppressive(see Egypt) also expressed the anger of the righteous, the deep wish for justice in this life. In this way their inhumanity, their alien nature, was both good and bad--for it exprssed the immanence of God, the spirit of God which could be tied to no feeble notions of human right and wrong. But that was also an uncomfortable concept; for if God was One, and immanent, what were these creatures--demi-gods? Nature spirits? And if they were, what of monotheism(this of course is at the root of the opposition to the concept from orthodox Jews, and Protestants, later, too. )
In the Christian West, angels were adopted first in their original meaning, but later they were changed as the rather different ideas of both Western and Celtic Christianity adapted them to their own purposes. This also happened in medieval Judaism in Europe. Angelology became a respectable form of philosophical and theological exploration--a sure sign that their original awe was on the way out. The Kabbalists and occultists considered angels to be important nature and mystical spirits, and the Christian angelologists occupied themselves by devising all kinds of hierarchies for the different kinds of angels, such as cherubim, seraphim, offanim, hayyot, and others, mostly taken from Judaic lore, but further embroidered. A 'natural' history of angels was compiled--they could not eat, could not reproduce within themselves, but could mate with women; and they were also guardian spirits of natural things such as rain, storms, the dew, the frost--and also of people. Such notions filtered down from the angelologists to the people, and gradually, angels came to assume the forms we know today, the benign, beautiful guardians with all their teeth drawn, their claws trimmed back. And so we come to the magnificent Renaissance angels; truly human, but also more than human, something to aspire to, that would protect you, not some terrifying fiery Nemesis. The fiery wheels that had once been angels' symbols now became transmuted into softly glowing haloes. No longer could these beautiful creatures represent a terrifying other dimension, an alien judgment which we could not fully understand.
But their place had to be taken by something else. And in europe, this place was taken by fairies. In the process, some of the notions previously associated with angels transformed themselves, but it is extraordinary how many of them stayed very similar. Like angels, fairies were shapeshifters; they could look like tall, beautiful human beings or like insubtantial creatures of mist and fire; they exhibited strangely inhuman behaviour and came from an undefined other dimension, both part of, and outside our world. They often took up people with them; they were reputed to need to mate with women as they could not reproduce within themselves. Occasionally, a man could also be taken, and certainly children. Old documents exist which recount, factually, stories of the abductions of humans by fairies, stories which were certainly believed by many. Fairies were outside normal human concepts of 'good' and 'bad'; sometimes they rewarded goodness, sometimes they exhibited extreme maliciousness. They were not, like witches, (who, by the way, were seen as very much of this world, human beings who 'sold their souls')supposed to be actively evil; but they were 'mischievous', in the true, strong meaning of the word, which usually means destructive. They were said to have no souls. Always they followed their own agenda, their own destiny. One of their symbols was the circle, or
fairy ring. And they were closely associated with angels by many people; in fact, Christian apologists, made uneasy by the presence of such obviously non-Christian spirits, often tried to substitute angels for them. Unsuccessfully; for angels had lost that particular chilling kind of image, and were resisted by the imaginations of people except as those benign Christmas card beings.
The ancestry of fairies is also very old. They come, like angels, from a mixture of ideas and myth. On one side, they could trace their ancestry back to the Fates, the three Greek sisters who wove and controlled life. But on another side, they came from the Sidh, mythological figures who were seen as being pre-Celtic. The Sidh were supposed to live in the prehistoric long barrows and dolmens which crisscrossed Europe: the dimension they came from was the past, but the mythological, imaginal past. (The 'banshee' comes from Bean Sidh, or woman of the Sidh, who was supposed to wail when anyone was going to die). The Sidh were also associated, in one of those fluid, ambiguous flow of imaginal meaning, with the dead, and some of the Fairies' characteristics can sometimes remind you of the cold underworld realm of Hades--the fact, for instance, that you must not eat or drink anything while you were with the fairies, or you would never get back to your normal life recalling the story of Persephone. What the fairies certainly were note, at this stage of their history, were pretty little beings with dragonfly wings. They inspired terror, awe, and a certain longing. Yeats' poem The Stolen Child, which was inspired by the still very strong fairy beliefs of Ireland, shows this very clearly:
Come away, oh human child
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand
For the world's more full of weeping
Than you can understand.
The fairy world there as one of beauty and grace, but of an underlying, gloating kind of inhumanity:
. . He'll hear no more the lowing of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than he
can undetstand.
I have quoted at length from this poem because it seems to encapsulate many of the beautiful and chilling characteristics of fairies. They took people away and if they ever let them go again, they were often never the same again, the glamour still on them, the spell never quite broken so that they seemed touched in the head. Even now, we say 'away with the fairies'. There was something both attractive and repellent about Fairies in their heyday; something that caused Irish people, for instance, never to speak their name aloud but to call them 'the little people'. There was something in them that attracted them to humans, too, almost as if they had some yearning to share in our humanity. As angels were expressions of a fierce desert people who had to be constantly on guard against their enemies, so fairies were the expression of an agrarian people who were on the cusp of change between a highly religious to a more rationalising age. They were an expression of the gradual spread of humanist thought; but they were also still very much carrying their ancient baggage. As the centuries progressed, they started to lose some of that; started to lose, too, the ancient awe and terror they had held within themselves. When nineteenth century folklorists began their studies on fairies and fairy belief, it was again a sure sign that these beings were losing their power in the imagination of people. Only in fringe areas, such as Ireland, and deeply peasant corners of mainland Europe, retained fairy beliefs. In some places, there are still remnants of them. But certainly, the West in general began to lose faith in fairies in the nineteenth century; and their fate, ironically, was sealed when so-called 'fairy photographs' were taken, showing delicate, feminine little creatures with pretty insteps and gossamer wings. That is how we see them now; there is no-one who would claim to have been abducted by a fairy; it would simply not be taken seriously by anyone. And as to being abducted by an angel--that wouldn't even get past first base.
But abducted by an alien? That is an idea whose time have come. And that is where I come back to my beginning. This is an age of scientific rationality, right? We cannot 'believe' in angels or fairies any more--though interestingly enough, angels in their benign version are enjoying a certain succes d'estime among New Age people. Aliens--extra terrestrials--seem tailor-made for this purpose. They are certainly taken seriously, even by the scientific community in its cautious way. Millions of dollars are devoted to finding out if there is anyone 'out there': the extra dimension of the angels and the fairies has become that of unimaginable distances in space/time. Since the Second World war, there have been constant, persistent--even if often pooh-poohed, in an anxious sort of way--reports of UFOs and lately, alien abductions. All sorts of studies, not all of them respectable, but gaining more and more in this narrow virtue, are being written. And everyone seems to agree there is something in it, whatever that 'something' may be--actual extra-terrestrials, or hallucination, strange effects of the mind, or traumatising irruptions into dimensions beyond what we stubbornly try to categorise as reality. The latest book, an exhaustive look at the phenomenon, Encounters of the Fourth Kind, by journalist C. D. B. Bryan, includes innumberable interviews with people who speak of being abducted. Their stories seem real, distressing, terrifying; as real as those people who in the seventeenth century were abducted by fairies, who thousands of years ago were taken up by angels. They cannot be discounted; they are an expression of some metaphysical reality which we cannot fully grasp, some thing for which myth is the spoken form. And some of them seem truly inexplicable; totally outside that naive hubris of a Theory of Everything.
And once again, we see the similarities. What is the pre-eminent symbol of aliens and their presence? Why, UFOS, of course--glowing round things which inevitably bring us back to the fiery wheel and the fairy ring(which was often said to glow with a strange phosphorence). Aliens are commonly portrayed by abductees as inhuman, yet close to humns, with human like features. But they are shapeshifters, appearing in all kinds of guises--including, in one story, as a strange spiky ball. They appear, like fairies, to be curious of people, but at the same time without sympathy or real contact. In some stories, they withdraw the eggs from women's bodies to use in their own reproduction, as, often they appear unable to reproduce without the (forced) help of human beings. They are beyond human notions of good and evil--they simply ARE, with no apparent rhyme or reason, no apparent ethical base. They come from another dimension: that of space/time, which seems more 'scientific', more suited to the spirit of the age, than heaven or the past is. LIke fairies, like angels, they affect our notions of time--people talk of losing entire hours on board a spaceship, just as the fairies stole time from those they took, and the angels took humans out of the reach of time. They carry within them the same abritrary power as do angels and fairies: we simply do not know what they want, and the unknown nature of them is what terrifies us the most. Sometimes, they also carry messages of judgment for us and what we are doing on this planet. Because all of us are children of our age, we become more anxious in the face of the notion of aliens than of fairies or angels. Because aliens are the expression of a scientific age, an age that is post-industrial, an age that no longer believes wholeheartedly in progress and is in fact afraid of its relentless, spiralling confusion. We are not sure any more if we truly believe in the world of rationalism, in short; even the most hardened sceptic has moments of doubt as to that all-embracing Theory. Of course, we know that the field is open to all kinds of charlatans and hoaxers; but some abduction theories are, indeed, troubling, not the least because the tellers seem like such unremarkable, unimaginative people to whom something inexplicable has happened, and who stick to their stories through thick and thin. They often sound like they wish the whole thing had never happened to them; they speak of it ruining their lives. And there are always the sceptics, as in any age; imagine the horse-laugh of those who didn't believe Ezekiel, or the sneer behind 'away with the fairies'. And in this age, more than any other, we are aware of the tyranny of the sceptic. "Unscientific', 'irrational' are just as restricting, just as damming, as 'unChristian', and 'ungodly'.
So what? Are we supposed to believe not only in the existence of aliens, but also fairies, and angels? Are we to be eternally credulous, believing everything that comes along? That is what the New Age is, isn't it? A world both without religion and science; an abyss haunted with every ancient and modern monster, where the mind knows no barriers, and the spirit no guidance. But no; I feel, as the great Canadian novelist Robertson Davies says in 'Murther and Walking Spirits' that the Shakespearean spirit of credulity combined with scepticism is the most useful response. It is, I suppose, the artist's response: the knowledge that there are indeed, more things on heaven and earth that are dreamed of in any philosophy, any single system. The knowledge that myth expresses more truly the deepest spiritual truths than any careful expose, any rationally-argued proof. The gates between our deepest and highest levels are not always shut. In myth, in religion, in art, they are open, and through them mingle all kinds of things which can seem surprising and even terrifying. And for those who are not used to unlocking those gates, why they can sometimes open by themselves, scaring the wits out of the person experiencing it. For if the mind is not invited to feast on things unseen, if it is not allowed to find truth in myth, at all kinds of level, it will rebel, it will throw up those images anyway. Faith is a truth of the pysche, of the spirit: it is a thing which we ignore at our peril. Some of us are lucky enough to be legitimately in pursuit of us, whether theologically, or artistically: but those who can't, who won't, where does that leave them? In the days when angels were real, in the days when fairies were real, that was not such a pyschological impasse. But in a time when to translate such realities is seen as 'magical realism', the mind must still, nevertheless, fasten on something. There is, to my mind, something curiously impoverished about the stories of aliens and alien abductions; there is always surgery, something that appears rational, and always batteries of scientific instruments. That is surely because we are no longer 'allowed' to believe in the more ancient manifestations, so that we must tie our myths desperately to a semblance of rationality. It's 'possible' for us to really determine if there are extraterrestrials; but everyone knows Gargarin saw no angels when he was up there in space and we've walked into long barrows and seen no trace of fairies. Aliens are useful because although their existence appears possible, in reality, it is simply impossible to have total proof they exist. Because we cannot travel at beyond the speed of light, those planets which might or might not contain other conscious beings will stay as ignorant of us as we are of them. In the end, you need as much faith to believe in aliens as in angels or fairies.
But what do these strange kin have in common? What do they represent? What core do they touch in us? They are all alien; neither good nor evil, removed somehow, from us, yet strangely kin to us as well. They are symbolised by circles, they practise abductions, they are not of this world, unlike witches, for instance, but neither decisively are they out of it. They appear to be a minor, but powerful, symbol of immanence, of the strange speaking silence of the universe, of the Otherworld we feel all around us but only dimly glimpse, only fleetingly grasp. Yet they hold terrors for us; what lies beyond the borders of our human lives, our human, everyday thoughts and feelings may also be scary. We are not sure whether we truly want to enter with them, to understand, for then we would lose that very quality of humanity. And they are shapeshifters; constantly, they twist and turn and show themselves in all kinds of different lights, so that even as I write, I see them change again, transmuting, never still.
© Copyright Sophie Masson, 1996