So What Are Fairies?

"Would you mind making a tea for us? I am after all not just your host, but also your future husband..."

"No risk the police ...?"

"No risk whatsoever, they can go on for hours and hours or even days and never suspect the house and garden is where it is."

When Susan came along with the tea kettle, she asked: "so, if we are in a fairy mound, what are exactly fairies?"

"Now that is a good question. My friend Tollers has an idea they were an older humanity, but immortal, and one whose first parents never fell."

"But if fairies are living on," she said while pouring the tea into the cups, "that would mean they would not need Christ, then?"

"No, it is a dogma that if there were ever pre-adamite men - mind you there is nothing that dogmatically says there were - but IF there were, there are none of them left now. Pope Pius stated it clearly in 1950."

"In that case we cannot be fairies, can we?"

"Not pure ones, no."

"But would'nt the latest limit for such a thing be when Christ came? And aren't fairies sighted mostly after Christ came, I mean in England and Scotland and so?"

"In Ireland the latest limit would be when St Patrick came. But by then the fairy mounds had become something demonic there ... St Patrick baptised a few who were thus released from the devil's might. Like the children of Mananan MacLir who had been turned into swans or like the bard Ossian, or more correctly Oisín*"

"So, why were there anyway pre-adamites around so long after Christ came, if there ever were such?"

"I didn't exactly say the fairies were pre-adamites, only that this is one interpretation by my friend Tollers."

"Tollers sounds like a nick-name, what's he really called?"

"I think you met him together with Roy Campbell and Jack Lewis in the bar in Oxford a few years ago."

"That would be Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien ..."

"And his friends call him Tollers now and then."

"But are there other theories?"

"Some have guessed demons. A Catholic Bishop after the Reformation pretty much denied it, since they disappeared at the Reformation. 'Their songs were all Hail Mary's' he wrote."

"And demons having no bodies, they might appear, but hardly beget, so that would hardly explain us having 'fairy blood' - or Mrs Lefay having such either."

"Angels and demons are - according to one Church Father, I think St John of Damascus, but we can look it up later - and he mentioned angels only, but it would go for demons too, since they are fallen angels, 'incorporeal as compared with us, but corporeal as compared with God' - so it is not impossible they could have engendered. It seems it was a great sin for them to do so, at least if Ethiopians are right in accepting their text of Henoch, but they could, with same reservation."

"Would that be the Nephelim, who are their children?"

"In such a case, the Nephelim were begotten that way."

"But weren't they giants?"

"Those referred to in Genesis seem to have been so, yes."

"Any other possibilities?"

"If you ask Owen Barfield, who is a Theosophist, you might get some Blavatsky like or some Cacey like stuff about Atlantis and Lemuria and Mu and about men from outer space ... if you and your sister are right about Geocentrism being true, we can at least rule that out."

"Hey, have you been reading my sister's essay on Ramandu and Galileo or something?"

"I have. And do not ask how I came over it, I won't tell you until you are my wife."

Susan got a bit flushed in the face about that: "But you did ask me to make the tea although I am not the hostess yet?"

"Had to taste your tea before I married you, hadn't I?"

*He pronunced it "uh-SHEEN"