Thankyou for the fairy lore, Endymion. It's remarkably
poetic, with all this imagery of dew and sunlight and
moutains -- we have nothing comparable in folk
traditons here, only in self-conscious educated
Victorian verses and paintings of 'flower fairies' and
the like (based remotely on Shakespeare's Midsummer
Night's Dream), which we folklorists sneer at! Maybe
they had got hold of something genuine after all.
Jacqueline
--- Endymion <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "jacqueline simpson"
> <[log in to unmask]>
>
>
> > I don't know enough about High
> > Ceremonial Magic to know if any of its medieval or
> > Tudor practitioners invoked Zeus or Aphrodite or
> > Osiris etc, but at the 'folk' level I see no
> obvious
> > traces of any memory of Celtic, Germanic, or Roman
> > gods.
>
> I can not lay any claims as to the traces of ancient
> Slavic Gods in the
> Cunning-Folk practices but the presence of beings
> from "lower" mythology is
> evidently present, namely the fairies.
>
> > You mention fairies. How do the Slavs fit fairies
> into
> > their cosmological and religious world-view? Here
> in
> > the West there are two widespread legends which
> seek
> > to link them into the Bible schema: (a) they are
> the
> > 'Hidden Children of Eve', or (b) they were
> 'neutral'
> > angels who refused to take sides in the war
> between
> > Satan and Michael. [I can recount these legends,
> if
> > anyone wants them.]
>
> There are legend of fairies as "Hidden Children of
> Eve" over here as well
> but, frankly, I doubt it was a widespread belief.
> Tihomir R. Djordjevic in
> his excellent and exhaustive study "Vestica i vila u
> nasem narodnom
> verovanju i predanju" ("Witches and fairies in our
> folk beliefs and
> legends") from 1953, devotes only a page or two to
> these kinds of legends,
> while other motifs are prevelant. Namely, that
> fairies are more connected to
> the spirits of the ancestors (because of etymology
> of their name in
> Serbian - vila) and spirits of nature. To quote a
> stanza from a Serbian epic
> song:
>
> "A mene vilu od gore, /And I, a fairy of the
> mountain high,
> Mene je gora rodila, /I was born from the mountain,
> U zelen listak povila, /Swaddled in a green leaf.
> Jutrenja rosa padala, /Morning dew was falling,
> Mene je vilu dojila, /And, I, a fairy, was suckled.
> Od gore vjetric puvao, /The wind soft from the
> mountains,
> Mene je vilu sikao, /And, I, a fairy, was rocked.
> To su mi bile dadije." /These were my mothers.
>
> It is also believed that they are born not like the
> beasts of the field, but
> like fruits or flowers; that they become pregnant in
> the spring by the sun
> and dew and give birth in caves during the winter.
> In Montenegro people
> believe that fairies are born of the dew on a
> distant mountain that is as
> high as the moon and they believe that fairies are
> raised on a tree that has
> golden leaves and a silver trunk. Elsewhere it is
> believed that fairies are
> born during sun showers. It is also believed that
> fairies are born of a
> plant which, early in the morning, has excreted its
> own liquid on its leaves
> that sparkles along with the dew.
>
> > There is some material in witch-trials, especially
> > Scottish, suggesting that some of our healers too
> > 'learned from fairies', but since the trial
> evidence
> > is always slanted in the direction of
> > 'fairies=demons', we can't safely work out how the
> > accused woman herself thought of them.
>
> That is rather unfortunate. Luckily, we still have
> some Cunning-Folk left to
> research and question.
>
> Andrija
>
___________________________________________________________
How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday
snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com
