There is a magical faery ball taking place at the Guildhall in Salisbury, near Stonehenge. The organisers say: Your hosts, Oberon and Titania, cordially invite you to enter our magic hall with your best finery and indulge in mischief, glamour, and magic in historic Salisbury, a few miles from sacred Stonehenge.

The ball is taking place on 20 June, 2008, Midsummer’s eve, from 7:00pm till 1am. We truly wish to make this an evening for our guests to remember: be whisked away by a horse and carriage to the marble steps of the Salisbury guildhall, where the Oreo String Quartet will be playing music for the season in the Foyer. Fine wines and casked ales are being provided by Shipseys for your enjoyment. DJ duo Sexbat and The Ingenue and DJ Andy Ravensable keep the trad-goth and industrial music going until the early hours. Photographer Dylan will take photos so you can have momentos of your special evening. Expect a surprise or two as well along the way, as this is a night when nothing is as it seems, and anything is possible!

What is the dresscode?

A. We hope people will stick with the Midsummer Night’s Dream theme, taking inspiration from the play or dress in something equally fae. We ask you also keep the “formal ball” idea in mind as well. In the past, our guests have come from alternative/dark artist backgrounds, so be prepared to see a fair bit of creativity! Masks are required - even the carriage livery and doorstaff is wearing them! - and you will not be admitted without a mask, though inexpensive masks will be provided if disaster strikes and you realise you left yours at home.

While there are various explanations of the origins of fairies and the nature of them and their lands, there is little explanation in any studies of where the modern conception of fairies has come from. None of the books suggest that fairies have wings like dragonflies or butterflies. The wee-folk of Celtic mythology are generally thought to be the size of small children or dwarfs, rather than the size of insects as they are thought of today.

They also tend to be suitably disproportionate, like chunky hobbits rather than the tiny but perfect adult fairies in modern storybooks. It is likely that these modern depictions of fairies sprang more from the minds of individual humans than any specific culture or mythology.

For almost as long as people have been seeing fairies, people have been writing about them. The countries of the world have a wide variety of myths and legends, but the “little people” crop up in a great many of them. Into more modern times, we have Spenser’s “The Fairie Queen”, and Shakespeare’s “A Midsummers Night’s Dream” in Elizabethan times, both of which did much to cement the modern conception of what a “fairy” is.

A wide variety of cultures believe in fairies similar to the Celtic version, and some cultures see fairies as the animistic spirits of nature. None of these fairies bear much resemblance to the modern fairies and if they had wings, it is a detail that is usually left out. Spencer’s fairies were like the Celtic version, Shakespeare’s were like a combination of tall elegant elves and the wee-folk, but it was not until the Victorian era that fairies were established as little winged beings.

Thomas Croker (1789-1854) in his collection of Irish Fairy Tales, described fairies as being “a few inches high, airy and almost transparent in body; so delicate in their form that a dew drop, when they chance to dance on it, trembles, indeed, but never breaks.”

One of the first of these “delicate” fairies to impinge on popular consciousness was probably Tinkerbell in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Around that time, there was also a large amount of sentimental art, creating cutesy portrayals of fairies and cherubs. There was also a large fuss made about the fairy photographs taken by two young girls in England at Cottingsley. These photographs sparked a world-wide debate that did much to “fix” the image of the small, winged, fairy in the public mind, and if you ask any group of people, there’ll no doubt be someone who remembers seeing the pictures at some time. The Victorians had a soft spot for the “cute”, and much of the modern conception of the little delicate, insect size fairy came from them.

Disney also has a part to play from the 1950s onward, pushing the sanitised Tinkerbell as a sort of happy go-lucky nature sprite, making fairies happy and unthreatening, reinforced even more by having Julia Roberts play her in the live action version.

From these images people have come to see fairies as happy, positive, creatures… a far cry from the baby-stealing wee folk of Celtic mythology from which they derived.

by Willie Meikle

Thank you to Willie Meikle for allowing us to post this article on our site

Willie is a Scottish author now living in Newfoundland. He has written eight novels and over 150 short stories, you can find Willie and his books at

http://www.williammeikle.com

Penny, from Crane’s Nest Creations, hosts a blog site in which she exhibits her Etsy bed-dolls, other art and talks about her beliefs, has hosted a superb piece about some of the fey traditions of Beltane which she has graciously granted us permission to reprint here for you. About herself, she says: Spirit guides me to create, I believe that art is the expression of the soul which has evolved to the point of reaching out to others with common interest in acceptance and there is a searching or attraction to those who are inspired to do the same.

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Half-nude, red-painted revelers at the Beltane Fire Festival reenact an ancient, annual Celtic ritual heralding the May 1 arrival of summer—”Beltane” being Celtic for “May.” Revived in the 1980s, the festival is part of an effort by modern Celts to celebrate the lost cultures of their ancestors, who dominated Europe some 2,000 years ago. [National Geo]

Beltane kicks off the merry month of May, and has a long history. This fire festival is celebrated on May 1 with bonfires, Maypoles, dancing, and lots of good old fashioned sexual energy. The Celts honored the fertility of the gods with gifts and offerings, sometimes including animal or human sacrifice. Cattle were driven through the smoke of the balefires, and blessed with health and fertility for the coming year. In Ireland, the fires of Tara were the first ones lit every year at Beltane, and all other fires were lit with a flame from Tara.

Today’s Pagans and Wiccans celebrate Beltane much like their ancestors did. A Beltane ritual usually involves lots of fertility symbols, including the obviously-phallic Maypole dance. The Maypole is a tall pole decorated with flowers and hanging ribbons, which are woven into intricate pattern by a group of dancers. Weaving in and out, the ribbons are eventually knotted together by the time the dancers reach the end.

In some Wiccan traditions, Beltane is a day in which the May Queen and the Queen of Winter battle one another for supremacy. In this rite, borrowed from practices on the Isle of Man, each queen has a band of supporters. On the morning of May 1, the two companies battle it out, ultimately trying to win victory for their queen. If the May Queen is captured by her enemies, she must be ransomed before her followers can get her back.

There are some who believe Beltane is a time for the faeries — the appearance of flowers around this time of year heralds the beginning of summer and shows us that the fae are hard at work. In early folklore, to enter the realm of faeries is a dangerous step — and yet the more helpful deeds of the fae should always be acknowledged and appreciated. If you believe in faeries, Beltane is a good time to leave out food and other treats for them in your garden or yard.

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As the sun set, the hilltops became alive with fire. The warm spring air filtered gently through the trees and caressed the lush green landscape as a blanket of night fell over the land. Happiness, hope and passion filled the night as the people danced and celebrated this sacred time, taking time to explore the forests, meadows and even each other. This night, known as Beltaine, has been celebrated in many cultures and in many different ways. Today, it remains as one of the two most important holidays to modern pagans, the other being Samhain.

Also known as May Day or May Eve, Beltaine falls on the first evening of May, or on the last evening of April, as people once considered that the beginning of a new day occurred at dusk. Beltaine, a fertility Sabbat, marks the last day of the planting season, once a very important time before the advent of modern conveniences and inconveniences. Beltaine also celebrates life and renewal and a time of hope; from this time, things started would tend toward their fruition. Continue Reading »

There was one time a woman named Colloo in Close-ny-Lheiy, near Glen Meay, and she had a child that had fallen sick in a strange way. Nothing seemed wrong with him yet crosser and crosser he grew, nying-nyanging night and day. The woman was in great distress. Charms had failed, and she didn’t know rightly what to do. It seems that, about a fortnight after birth, the child, as fine a child for his age as you would see in a day’s walk, was left asleep while the mother went to the well for water.

Now Herself forgot to put the tongs on the cradle, and, when she came back, the child was crying pitiful, and no quatin’ for him. And from that very hour the flesh seemed to melt off his bones, till he became as ugly and as wizened a child as you would see between the Point of Ayre and the Calf. He was that way, his whining howl filling the house, for four years, lying in the cradle without a motion on him to put his feet under him. Not a day’s res’ nor a night’s sleep was there at the woman these four years with him. She was fair scourged with him, until there came a fine day in the spring that Hom beg Bridson, the tailor, was in the house sewing. Hom is dead now, but there’s many alive as remember him. He was wise tremenjus, for he was going from house to house sewing, and gathering wisdom as he was going.Well, before that day the tailor was seeing lots of wickedness at the child. When the woman would be out feeding the pigs and sarvin’ the craythurs, he would be hoisting his head up out of the cradle and making faces at the tailor, winking, and slicking, and shaking his head, and saying

“What a lad I am!”

That day the woman wanted to go to the shop in Glen Meay to sell some eggs that she had, and says she to the tailor: “Hom man, keep your eye on the chile that the bogh [poor dear] won’t fall out of the cradle and hurt himself while I slip down to the shop.” Continue Reading »