Betwixt! Exploring Faerie mythology and history.
Updated: Sep 24
Reflecting on my first solo exhibition:
I completed my first solo show in November of 2025 and true to my nature I went ALL OUT, there were 30 pieces, most of which I created that year and for the opening, an experimental music performance featuring two absolutely amazing local musicians. I wasn't expecting much to sell, but it almost sold out!
I'm so immensely grateful to everyone who came and made it what it was. I think the biggest take away for me was the feeling of connection, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised - as humans we're used to congregating to make and share art, it feels like an act that's encoded into our DNA. But as an artist, alone in my studio, it's easy to think: Will people like this? Does this actually resonate? Am I tapping into the collective conscience or am I just rambling to myself while thousand-mile-staring out the window?
So obviously I was over the moon when I could see people connecting with the artwork, like chicken dance, squealing over the moon. - I am terrible at keeping my cool and wanted to melt into a puddle on the floor. It felt like everything I'm trying to use my art for: Connection, ancestral remembering, creative curiosity and most of all that intense appreciation for the natural world.
Which brings me to the theme, which is one I've though a lot about and one of the reasons the exhibition was such a success. Everyone loves Faeries!
Faeries, why faeries?
Behind the exhibition was a lot of pondering and researching, so I want to record some of my thoughts on faeries as a blog post.
I chose the theme of faeries because they are the perfect motif for a changing world. Faeries represent change itself, they are neither energy nor form but rather the connection between them. Within mythology they appear on the threshold of transition, at dawn and dusk, betwixt and between, where a baby is born, where a person dies, where the garden turns into the forest. They represent the hyper natural - ephemeral, beautiful and dangerous.
And where are humans now if not on a precipice? We're lonely and disconnected, hooked up to screens, chained to meaningless jobs, we have more disposable income than almost any other country yet are crushed by the feeling that our needs are not being met. We're desperate for a deeper sense of wonder and wholeness.
A sense of richness in the world that we've lost - A sense that the jungles are as thick and vast as the oceans, that the plains are full of dancing grasses, that the mountains disappear into the heavens.
We desperately want to believe that we belong to this place.
A place as intricate as a butterfly, as spiralling as a snake, woven like a braid of hair, as dark as volcanic soil, glistening like a shelf of icicles, as painful as the spiders bite as rich as a handful of pearlescent seashells, as uncertain as the wind.
That perhaps this place is alive with spirits as old as the world itself?
Primarily Faeries connect us to three things:
Ourselves
Our humanity, history and future
Our childhood
And each transition on our life's path
Nature
And that we are nature
"From A Midsummer Nights Dream to A Court Of Thorns and Roses, Faeries in pop culture have become an undeniable force of nature, showing how mythology resurfaces again and again like an irrepressible garden weed. The Faerie archetype is necessary and touches many of the edgier, uncharted places in the human psyche."
-Excerpt from my Faeries Zine 2025.
I was the kind of child that wore a fairy dress for six months straight without taking it off. Seriously, I was obsessed and my mum had to wash it while I was asleep.
In primary school I got to play Titania in A Midsummer Nights Dream, the parents adorned the stage with flowers and vines and it was a sight so beautiful it is burned into my memory forever. I even had a song written for me by a close friend when I was about five, it's called 'maya fairy'.
You can listen to it here:
My favourite thing about my love for faeries and ultimately wanting to be one is that it's not unique at all, faeries are a special part of so many childhoods.
Remembering how I felt when I walking through the bush, crouching down to peer at an unsuspecting patch of leaf litter and discovering a tiny world of beetles and ants beneath towering shoots of grass, fallen leaves like shade cloths, vast above their heads. I knew innately in my little body that when I was in nature, I was alive and contentedly connected to an energy my adult self can't fully articulate.
Children understand Faeries because they understand liminal time, quantum possibilities and the force of life itself, a wholeness many of us spend the rest of our lives trying desperately to grasp. The elderly it's said, also have an affinity with faeries and are once again close to the veil of life and death, present in a kind of wonder and accepting of the mystery.
When I was eight I was given Brian Froud's book: Good faeries/Bad faeries. I loved it with my whole heart, these were beings I had met before. Faeries connected me to something ancient which I could not get enough of. Fiction like the Hobbit and the Dark Crystal just made sense to me, they bore all the touchstones of mythologies known to my ancestors and art like this twangs a string of recognition so deep we're not sure where the sound is coming from. But the truth is, whatever your stories, whoever your ancestors, you are on average just eight generations away from someone who lived in a mythology that was alive - which they believed in, with every fibre of their being.
You are made entirely of stories.
My favourite thing about my inquiry into faeries is how they chronicle the human relationship to the natural world, through time.
Many people may not realise that the faeries we imagine today: small cute and winged, like tinker bell or the tooth faerie come directly from the Victorian period. This was a revival in a way but also a relegation, it cemented the idea that faeries were for children.
The industrial revolution changed our relationship to the natural world in a huge way. It lessens the death-grip nature has on us, we move away from total dependance to a perceived independence and it marks a running leap towards the out-sourcing that fuels our lifestyles today.
From a philosophical view I don’t see this as a positive shift, but the truth is it made this relationship between humanity and the natural world more positive, just like the faeries we know and love today, it becomes innocent, endearing and whimsical, -more about management than survival.
It’s worth mentioning that belief in faeries does signify a closeness to nature and childhood, which in a way, pushes back against the machinery and efficiency of the industrial revolution. I also want to be clear that before this faeries were still very much associated with children, just not exclusively and in a more nuanced sense.
So if the faeries mark our relationship to the natural world, if they've been tamed and domesticated... Who were the faeries before this? The dark faeries who were never all good. This is were you’ll find a whole bunch of click bait youtube videos titled 'The shocking and horrible history of faeries' and so on, and it is pretty shocking. Changeling myths for one, make my blood run cold. But what you can’t fit into a youtube video is the complexity of this relationship and the plethora of beings who live... Just beyond the veil.
Who are the faeries? From pagan deities to malicious kidnappers to The Little People. Faeries are EVERYWHERE, let's meet a few.
Irish Faeries
We’re winding back the clock now to the late middle ages. Ireland is a convenient place to do this, as belief in faeries runs thick and deep through the Irish culture.
Christian monasteries sprout from seeds sown by Roman Britain and we start to get stories in writing. Understandably it's hard to detangle these from the ideology of the time and before this huge shift these stories would have been kept as oral folklore, perhaps by poets or bards whose job it was to remember this crucial information as part of a larger animist cosmology.
Written down by candlelight in the monastery, these documents are heavily filtered not only by religion and mythology but by power itself, with rich families commissioning genealogies and histories which validated their right to rule over a certain patch of farm land. These were often created in exchange for land or resources which the monks desperately needed and being a purely oral culture the elite knew the value of commissioning these scripts. Along with the genealogies, there were also a great number of mythologies written around this time and even a few glossaries.
However christianity and faeries are terrible housemates, these new religious ideas cannot shake the rich faerie beliefs of Ireland and they become fallen angels, too good for hell and too bad for heaven. They’re used as a scapegoat, blamed for almost anything and altogether demonised. Although we do get accounts of people crediting the faeries with miracles, we can only say for sure that faeries were a wild card - whether they would bless or blight you really wasn't something you wanted to stick around and find out.
They make the hair on the back of peoples neck stand up, they whisper into every liminal space. Don't get caught on at the crossroads on Samhain, don't cut down a faerie tree and whatever you do, don't step into a faerie ring.
You can peel back the layers of Irish mythology like bark, Christian, Roman, Norman, Viking, Pagan, Tribal... Faeries are alive through it all. These stories range from divine to Hollywood level horror and I can't help but wonder if some of the stories from the middle ages reflect the relationship these people had with the natural world, the expectations of religion and the threat of war. Things could and frequently did go wrong, it was undeniably: dangerous. They were at the hands of nature and the mystery of all her elements, like a wind that rips the thatch off the rafters or hail that shreds a whole field of seedlings.
These religious communities were out to survive and if anything went wrong, it was blamed on the faeries, a way of avoiding shame and judgement. Faeries could: steal your child; sour your milk; smother your fireplace; stop your chickens from laying eggs; and turn you mad, to mention a few.
Changelings
One of the worst things a Faerie could do is take your child. Replacing it with a sick Faerie child or sometimes an elderly faerie of their own, a cunning scheme devised to provide the Faerie with extra care. But it's an imposter, a Changeling. It’s easy to see from a current perspective how this was used as an explanation for children with intellectual disabilities or chronic illness. Unfortunately although some ‘faerie changelings’ were treated with care as a way of keeping their real children in Faerie Land safe, most children believed to be changelings endured horrible abuse at the hands of their communities and families. In an effort to get rid of the ‘Faerie child’ and return the human child, children were burned, abandoned and even drowned.
People were truly afraid of their children being taken and a plethora of strange superstitions were enacted to prevent it, such as keeping iron tongs near the infant, tucking salt into the infants clothing or laying a bible in it's cot while it sleeps.
"Often a baby might become ill, or take on a strange appearance, or a person might be left unable to move their limbs, 'fairy-struck' as they called it, and the local people would begin to suspect fairy work."
"If a family felt unable to care for a child, particularly one who they felt would be no use to them in the future - due to an undiagnosed condition or a deformity - it was easier for them to lose a child believing that they had been taken by a gang of fairies, than it was to believe they were going to let their child die.
The fact that changeling tales so often mention their ravenous appetites suggests the parents of these unfortunate children saw them as a threat to their families' continued existence, and that allowing them to die might be the only way to save everyone else. The changeling stories just helped them down the horribly inevitable path."
-Excerpt from The Irish Post.
This has to be understood through a very real lens. It should not be sanitised as distant history or myth but rather a current conversation about how we might better protect vulnerable people from abuse and othering that is still very much happening today.
While this violence and horror shows a kind of 'survival of the fittest', we also have plenty of historical evidence of human communities looking after those with different abilities and enacting real care and compassion.
'The Good People' is a fabulous book by Hannah Kent: Although heartbreaking, it's beautifully written and highly immersive, taking you back to the time of changelings within a thoughtfully reconstructed historical fiction.
Pagan Faeries and Immigration in Ancient Ireland
Pagan Ireland is still alive in it's mythology and archeology but like a lot of oral cultures, we have lost some elements and as a result it's definitely a puzzle to piece together.
Pagan Faeries to me, tell stories of land stewardship, immigration and war. What's more, they might have been actual tribes of people.
They're epic mythological figures, so vastly different to the Tinker Bell we imagine today. Think luminous beings, with large eyes and elven features, spangled in ornate jewellery, beneath billowing cloaks. Although they don't have wings, there are a few mentions of them flying or floating through the air.
Meet the Tuatha Dé Danann: The ancient faerie race of Ireland, they craft magic from the very fibres of the world. They're healers, craftspeople, prophets, hunters and even gods and goddesses. - Although they're not the only group to have supernatural powers at this time... Their community includes the likes of: the Dagda; the Morrigan; Manannán mac Lir, Lugh, Dian Cecht, Goibniu, Nuada Airgetlam, Aengus Og, Ogma, and Brigid, to name a few mythological figures - who we might be familiar with.
Tuath Dé Danann is translated: "people of the goddess Danu" or sometimes "Tribe of the gods" and although their story is from an ancient time, the Tuath Dé Danann are not dead and gone, far from it. They are waiting in the hills; Enchanted faerie mounds called sídhe where they made their home after agreeing to leave the 'above ground world' to the Milesians, a group who invaded Ireland sometime after the Tuath Dé Danann. Some say this happened in a great battle, others say it was a peaceful agreement since the Tuath Dé Danann, using prophecy, could forsee their people losing against the Milesian in warfare. Either way, they sought refuge underground, dancing and feasting in huge candle-lit caverns beneath the earth.
How they came to Ireland is similarly fascinating. They're said to literally appear in a puff of smoke (or clouds.) I've read every theory from alien landings to a migrating tribe who decided to settle and burn their boats, walking onto this new land in a cloud of smoke. One thing is for sure, they come with extensive skills and magical crafts.
"As detailed in the Lebor Gabála Érenn (the Book of the Taking of Ireland, commonly known as the Book of Invasions), the Tuatha Dé Danann are the fifth race of beings to invade Ireland, arriving after the Fir Bolg (or “bag men”) who come from Greece and before the Milesians (or sons of Míl) who come from Spain."
-Excerpt from Irish Myths .com
I believe the Tuath Dé Danann were real people. Whether they wielded supernatural powers or not, well, that is up to you. They no doubt had an intricate understanding of the world - so at the very least they represent the movement of technologies between countries in prehistory.
What could we give our ancient ancestors credit for if we weren't afraid of damaging the myth that our modern society is the most technically evolved?
They bear as a reminder that history is a mixed bag, immigration always was and always will be a human trait. Often these countries who we like to associate with and claim heritage from, are not simply pure motherlands where we evolved our cultures in isolation but rather melting pots of art, mythology and customs cross-pollinated by prehistoric travel.
As I mentioned above the Tuatha Dé Danann are not dead history, they're still alive - dancing and singing, living beneath the soil, simply waiting for us to wander unsuspectingly into a faerie fort.
The Yunwi Tsunsdi and Nunnehi, Cherokee Faeries
The Native American peoples have their own myths that are often compared to faerie myths, I'll try my best here not to collate different tribe's stories while also being sensitive to the fact that many of their mythologies have been trampled by colonisation, so it's hard to know whats been lost.
Yunwi Tsundi, more or less translates to 'people, little' in the Cherokee language and is our first clue as to who these characters are. They're said to live in the forests or sometimes underground and be extremely shy, in fact they can make themselves invisible at will. Most stories warn not to go looking for them and if you happen to encounter them it's wise to give them a gift of food, like acorns or berries. They love music so many stories simply mention hearing them singing and drumming far off in the mountains.
As the name suggests, they're very short and are often described as having long hair that reaches almost to the ground and being very beautiful. They're mostly benevolent and love children often helping them when they are lost, whoever they're quick to punish humans who wrong or harm them and I wonder if there are lessons about ecological respect woven in there too. Their affinity with children I find similarly fascinating and reminds me of European faeries.
I've seen a few mentions of three distinct clans of Yunwi Tsundi, the Rock People, the Laurel People and the Dogwood People. Although I worry this is a white washed simplification, it's still a fascinating part of their story. Each clan has a slightly different personality and as their names suggest reside in different areas. The rock people live in the mountains and plains, they're said to be harsh and unkind towards humans on account of their space being invaded, they even steal children occasionally. The Laurel People live in the forested areas and are humorous and fun-loving, they like to play pranks on people but are mostly harmless. The Dogwood people also live in the forested areas and are kind but stricter than the Laurel people, they reward and punish humans depending on how they're treated.
Nunnehi roughly translates to 'people who live anywhere' and are similar to (almost interchangeable with) the Yunwi Tsundi, they are said to be travellers and warriors. There are many epic stories of spirit warriors within Cherokee cosmology, both little people and tall willowy people who appear to help in times of crisis and war, fighting alongside the humans to help them survive.
The trouble with comparison is that I have an intrinsically European point of view, in this chapter you'll notice I refer to Yunwi Tsundi and Nunnehi as people and faeries, the truth is they are neither, we don't have a word in english that would do them justice. 'Spirit' makes them sound like they're not real and most other names are European comparisons to faeries. What's more, this is only a fraction of the Cherokee cosmology and the Cherokee are just one of 575 Native American tribes who are all unique and have their own stories, customs and beliefs.
Native American cosmologies are often described as animist, which simply means everything is alive. I love to think about these stories as part of a larger animist world full of animals and plants but also spirits, ancestors and inter dimensional beings all strongly connected to the land and geography.
The Pygmy Theory
The Pygmy theory addresses this connection between our human and mythological ancestors. After all faerie stories appear almost everywhere in the world, how could their similarities be a sheer coincidence? When reading some faerie stories, just like the Tuatha Dé Danann or the Yunwi Tsunsdi it does occur to me that these could be descriptions of an ancient group of humans or humanoid ancestors and I'm not the first to have this thought. The the Pygmy Theory has been around since the late 19th century and perhaps even earlier. It's congruent with the idea that an ancient race of pygmies populated certain areas before us homo sapiens arrived on the scene and invaded their homes, essentially out competing with them.
This theory offers the explanation that faerie stories are simply a shared memory of a diminutive ancestor who lived in harmony with the land, stood to only a few feet tall and was terrified of iron. They have an affinity with children and often help those who are lost or play tricks on an unsuspecting passer-by. Like all faeries they're highly individual their personalities range from cave dwelling cannibals to helpful forest nymphs.
The ideas drawn together in the Pygmy Theory is that an early race of humans would be scared of iron as living in the 'rock age' it would be a completely alien material to them. The discovery of homo floresiensis (believed to be an early hominin.) in Indonesia fanned the fire of the Pygmy Theory as it confirmed that we have more overlap with our pygmy cousins than we previously thought. There were after all about 300,000 years where Homo sapiens lived alongside an estimated eight now-extinct species of human. And fossilised remains indicate an even higher number of early human species once populated Earth before our species came along, a staggering 21 documented species with more being discovered in recent times.
My take away from the Pigmy Theory is just how strongly faeries relate to who we are as a species and where we came from. To date the theory is considered a myth and does have some academic holes, but I'm including it here as I find it totally fascinating. For context I want to also touch on some of the places it lets us down:
The main academic critique is that there's simply not enough evidence, archeology is usually needed to back theories like this up. But it contains an even more pressing and relevant problem, not to do with pygmy faeries but rather pygmy ancestors and the recognition of First Nations Australians. Believe it or not, yes, the Pygmy Theory extends to this country and has been weaponised to challenge Aboriginal sovereignty by claiming a distinct, earlier race inhabited the continent. At present the claim of Australian pygmies is false and even if their were an earlier race discovered, using this to minimise the reality of the english colonisation is abhorrent. Clearly there's more to dig into here - regarding white views on sovereignty and human rights, but that's for another post.
This issue is also relevant in my work with ancestral connection for us white people. It asks us how do we hold our unique connection with our own ancestors on stolen, ravaged land? After all, we are all descended from first peoples. As European and English people we seemed to lose an integral connection to our own cultures and homeland through the act of destroying another, or perhaps we'd already lost the connection. Either way that is secondary as First Nations Australians are literally putting their culture back together in real time and healing from fresh, bloody, bodily trauma.
This is the importance of context, of becoming a good ancestor and stepping into accountability for our own ancestors who enacted violence and genocide.
To conclude, Faeries primarily live in four places:
Our Ancestors
As we've just mentioned there are faerie stories where the lines between prehistory and myth blur, revealing surprising aspects to our shared humanity. Who were we and why were faerie stories so important?
Our psyche
The psychology of faeries is fascinating and can connect us to many hidden aspects of ourselves as well as a kind of 'collective psyche'. There are more psychological archetypes related to faeries than you can shake a stick at, just think of: The 'other', our inner child, the liminal, the faerie lover or muse, our relationship with nature, to mention a few...
Our relationship to nature
Faeries tell us about our place in nature, of our role and the choices we take in how we interact with the world. Many faerie stories reflect an animistic world view, they remind us we are nature and give us clear guidelines on stewarding and protecting the natural world. Truly ancient skills for a modern dilemma!
The other side
Faeries teach us about energy beyond matter and have a unique affinity with both our perceived reality and the hidden realms parallel to it. They urge us to look past our physical assumptions, to believe in the impossible, the expossible and the hyperpossible.
So, do you believe in faeries?
Thanks so much for reading! That was a long one and we touched on a lot of themes. Please leave a comment in the comment box down below or sign up to my email newsletter, I would love to hear from you.
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