No faith is more ancient than the Old Faerie faith. The most distant of your people followed it, when mornings were still new. It wasn’t even a “faith” then…faith implies doubt, when the ancients knew full well that they in the world above, and we of the Sidhe below, were one people.
I say “one people” because that’s what we were, and that’s what we are. The “Human” and the “Faery” are two halves of the same whole. Has anyone ever told you what a “fetch” is? Are you acquainted with the notion that your whole being is in fact much more spread out and diverse than you have been taught to think?
Good. Because that is where the Faeries come in: We are the immortal “other-self” of mortal man. We are the Fetch-wives and husbands that you seek within yourselves. We dwell here, in the root-dimension of your world, deep within the hills and trees and rivers, emerging only at certain times and places…and those who can see us see us as an eldritch glow…for we are the concealed light of pure being, dwelling within. We too, derive awareness from the great serpent power, and we too, cycle through human lives and our own existence as faeries here, in the Meadows of Elfhame.
Time has no meaning for us here. I have walked the earth many thousands of years before humankind ever came forth, and I have seen the wasted earth devoid of any life….far in the future. And through all these times, I have followed the Faery rade through the worlds, riding between day and night, between land and sky, flying by a thousand different images of times and places. It is all the same to me.
To achieve union with your faery-self is to achieve totality of being…to be aware of both your world and our world at once…thus it is the true sight, the “two-sights” that allow one to know the hidden dimensions and qualities of things.
The ancients who came here before all, knew all of this…the mysterious ones who raised the great stones and who carved the cup and ring marks on the boulders and in the caves…they who held the snake and the moon in such sacred regard…they seem mysterious to you who scratch your heads and stare at the stone remains of their monuments, but I remember them, as you remember what you call “yesterday”. Their veneration of the Great Mother carried over into the new pagan faiths, and their belief in the numinous connection of life to life and man to nature also persisted. The cult of the Stag and the Snake was still prominent in the time when the Christians came, and secret though it is now, it will still be here when Christianity is gone…
We of the Sidhe represent the knowledge and wholeness that you seek, and that all people desire. Stories of us have become the stories of Gods. Your ancestors once worshipped us as such!
Our laughs and smiles are the laughs and smiles of beings that know the truth about life and eternity, and about what you call “death”. Such knowledge is like a running spring to thirsty men. Our beauty and our magic fills your minds with wonder, and re-kindles your forgotten child-like wonder at life; It is no surprise that most men who look upon us become ‘faery struck” and refuse to leave. When tides turn, they must go, for men are not of our world, and this almost always leads to madness and death for these lost souls. But worry not, Prentice…you can gain what it is you desire. We of the Faery folk, we dwell all around you, and in you…”
Look at the great stones, so lonely and numinous, standing like silent sentinels out on the turf. The ancients placed them according to forgotten leys of power, according to the blinking eyes of heaven, and the world of men and the world beyond meet where these stones stand. The spaces occupied by the dead, which are not true “spaces”, and the green fields of men are not different in the presence of the stones. On the four Hallowed nights, each of them becomes quite literally a Godstane, a bridge, between one place and the next, and the souls of the “dead” and the living can meet… although that description is from your limited perspective only. What is actually happening is that you are re-gaining your divided wholeness, coming into deeper awareness, when mystical events (such as the meeting of the inhabitants of both worlds) occur.
In one sense, the living are “dead”, and the “dead” are alive. No matter who or what you are, or where you are, you are a living, moving part of the land, and the land is itself a Goddess. The Great Stones and the Trees are places where perspective is regained and wholeness is achieved once again, in a blessed and mysterious communion with the forces in the netherworld, and the dead-lands. Death, Life, they are one phenomenon, with many angles of incidence, and many possible levels of experience.
Time means nothing, and the echoes of many ages and times flutter through here, like a constant wind. Wisdom is to be found by listening.
You begin to hear a voice from far away…it is a man’s voice, and it seems as though he is reciting a poem.
“Listen well to him…for he could hear us, in his life.” Thom says.
You strain to hear the man’s voice. He is saying:
“The host is riding from Knocknarea
And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare;
Caolte tossing his burning hair
And Niamh, calling Away, come away;
Empty your heart of its mortal dream.
The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,
Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,
Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are a-gleam,
Our arms are waving, our lips are apart;
And if any gaze on our rushing band,
We come between him and the deed of his hand,
We come between him and the hope of his heart.”