Faery Healing

In ethnic magical traditions, worldwide, healing is undertaken not by humans alone, but by spirit beings working with a human mediator. The Faery tradition of Europe, and, through emigration, the USA, is no different. Indeed, a huge proportion of grass roots folk healing was, at one time, an essential aspect of the faery tradition. In this article I will outline some of the background of this healing tradition in folklore and historic use, and describe how such arts might be used today. After all, there is no point to any magical or spiritual art if it is simply a curious hangover from the past: and if it can work today, we should work with it. Anything less would be irresponsible at this time of world crises. The plural is intentional; we live in a time of multiple interlaced international crises. No one can retire to the hills now. Folkloric Faery Healing There are many significant accounts of healing within the faery tradition, which is to say, actual healing techniques that were, and still are, associated with faery beings that co-operate with the human healer, seer, or seeress. This is a very significant tradition, for much of the folk healing of the European races (i.e. from the Mediterranean and Atlantic seaboards northwards) was explicitly associated with faery beings. Similar folkloric magic is found in African traditions, and in those of the native tribes and nations of the Americas. Thus we should think of faery healing as something that has a strong ethnic presence in America…though this is seldom voiced. At this point, you can relax, for this article is not going to turn into one of those endlessly repeated items that categorizes faery names or types and lists what they do: you can find those lists in many sources, ranging from tedious copyist stuff, to excellent reference material (such as the books by Katherine Briggs1 ). What concerns us here is not ethnic origins, regional names, practices or beliefs as such, but what was actually done, and how they did it. Let’s look at some examples: 1: Scottish healers (in the 17th and 18th century) were frequently reported as being able to withdraw musket balls or bullets from wounds, at a distance. Typically, though not always, the healer would spit the bullet out into a bowl of water. The wound healed, the Scotsman lived to fight another day. Hooray! Scottish officers were rumored to be immune to small-arms fire, because of special spells laid around them by the Scottish faery seers or seeresses. Sometimes this immunity ran in certain families. Back in the late 1980’s I discussed this tradition with an American tribal elder: he told me that he had protective powers woven around him when he was drafted into the military, and nothing touched him while he was in Vietnam. We were both modern men, with cars and computers, talking seriously to one another. I told him the historical account of my grandfather, who, in the 1914-18 war walked through a storm of machine-gun fire from a German emplacement, unscathed. We were talking about identical traditions shared across different races. Protective spirits and healing spirits are often one and the same in folkloric magic. 2: An English healer in South Devon hit the newspaper headlines in the early 1900’s because she was able to close up wounds at a distance, by reciting a special prayer or charm over a cloth. In those days there were many agricultural wounds from working with blades. The country people believed, not without good reason, that if they went to a doctor or a hospital they would be likely to die. Similar healing arts for splinters, fragments, wounds, were known in many countries, among the farming and fishing communities where such wounds were commonplace. 3: Irish Scottish Welsh and Breton healers were able to draw out tubercular matter from the body of sick people (TB was endemic in Ireland and Scotland for generations. Both of my grandmothers, Scots and Welsh, died of it in the early 20th century). This method, drawing out lung clots and putrid matter, is similar to that of the much publicized, much maligned Philipino “psychic surgeons”. 4: European faery healers generally were able to close up the open skulls of infants, reduce or draw off fevers, close up wounds, remove poisons or foreign items from the eyes, such as splinters and straw fragments, and conduct a range of other simple but effective healings. Some healers specialized, and could only do certain specific things: healing animals, closing wounds, stopping fevers, and so forth. Others worked in more general widespread manner, especially those who had a team of faery allies to work with. More of this shortly! These are just a small number of examples, and we do not have space in this article to go into further detail. The connection between these, and many other forms of unusual healing, was the co-operation of the faery beings. Healers may have one or more faery allies that work with them, and often use some traditional items, such as stones or cloths, and sometimes charms or prayers, handed down to them by a mentor and/or family member. They may or may not have been herbal healers who dispensed medicines or remedies…despite our modern romantic ideas about village healers; the faery healers were often limited to simple but powerful tasks. They were not the comprehensive wise women or warlocks of contemporary fiction. But how does it work? The faery beings are spirit beings, associated with the vitality of the land or sea. They are not bound by time and space, as humans seem to be. Seers and seeresses can perceive things at a distance through the “eyes” or consciousness of a faery being. Healing is often done the same way: the faery co-walker, cousins, or ally, removes the broken blade from the flesh, and the human healer, perhaps in the same room, or even some miles away, places it in water that has been blessed. The wound closes up, sometimes healing visibly before witnesses. In less dramatic, but no less significant healings, the combined subtle forces of human and faery beings are directed through the healer’s hands, to purify or energize someone, a human, an animal, even a tree or a place. It is at this level that we can find potential for modern use, and I have been working on this for some years in my own explorations and practices, and I teach some of the resulting methods to small groups in the USA. What is the value for today? I think that the most effective path for faery healing today, and one that is nothing more nor less than a duty for us humans, is some healing and transformation of the lands and oceans that we have polluted. To be frank with you, dear readers, I am tired of hearing humanocentric needs for “healing”: every New Age enthusiast and her dog can do “healing” of some sort or other, and we all seem to want “healing”. Is some of it just self-indulgence on our part…or am I being cynical? Recently I read a delightful article by a British journalist who had tried healings, therapy, self-development, and so forth for some years. One day, she wrote, “I suddenly woke up and asked myself; when am I finished, done, cooked, and fully self-developed integrated and healed?” As a result of this inner question, she stopped her quest for receiving healing and self-development, and began to live her life to the full. Things started to change for her, to improve. Working with the faery races, we can, as responsible humans, go far beyond giving attention to human ills, be they real or imaginary. Not that I am saying we must ignore human ills, but that we should go to the source of that which creates our collective malaise: the destruction and pollution of the living world. If you are serious about working with faery spirit beings, this is where the tasks are. These are tasks that were unknown to our healer ancestors. I will rephrase that, and repeat it in another way: faery healing is different today to the way it was understood only a century ago. We can take the many techniques and work with them in new and appropriate ways, such as those I have described in my book, but we have to apply them to new problems, new situations. Faery healing faded out of our lives because of changes in the way people lived, as we came into the urbanized modernist culture, with its emphasis on machines and aggressive combative drug therapy. But that same culture has proven short lived, and is even now in its frantic death throes. We return, I propose, to some of the spiritual traditions of our ancestors, (and faery healing is a major one of these), as we begin to find ways to heal and rebirth our relationship with the planet. Not by repeating whatever our ancestors did in folkloric practices, but by taking the foundation of their traditional healing arts, and recreating them afresh for our present time and needs. Faery healing is about working consciously with faery spirit allies in specific healing arts: there are many faery beings who are skilled in such arts, and few humans left who know how to work with them. I see our new wave of faery healing not as yet another kind of alternative therapy to make a buck, but as a compassionate acceptance of responsibility, and a willingness to help redeem and transform that which is sick and ailing in our world. My faery allies, cousins, and co-walkers agree with me on this, and work with me towards such ends. 1. Briggs, Katherine An Encyclopedia of Fairies (many editions, various publishers).