Month: July 2025

Who the Devil? Parallels between faeries and demons

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I’ve discussed the ‘Denham List’ of faeries in a couple of previous posts. Here, I want to focus on an aspect I’ve previously paid little attention to, which is the inclusion amongst the faery names of multiple terms denoting the devil or demons. Denham specifically mentioned “demons” and “fiends” alongside his catalogue of faery types but also “Tom-tumblers” and other compounds including ‘Tom,’ ‘Hodge’ and Dick (as in ‘Dick a Tuesday’ and, for that matter, in the exclamation ‘What the Dickens’) which are often ‘nick-names’ for the devil and lesser imps. The inclusion of demons in a list of faeries implies an equivalence between the two and, in fact, there is considerable cross-over between what we might more clearly separate now into ‘demonic’ and ‘faery.’ It’s this I want to pursue a little more here.

The confusion, or combination, of the fae and the satanic is a long-standing feature of western culture. Another example helpfully illustrated by the Denham text arises from the mention of “pans [and] fauns.” Pan (in the singular and as a special name) is the Greek goat god of upland pastures; with his entourage of satyrs and fauns, with their horns, hooves and furry caprine legs, they were imported into Britain from ancient mythology by several routes. Unhelpfully, parallels were drawn between Pan and Puck and his relatives- giving a more ‘respectable’ and, perhaps, ‘learned’ gloss to native supernaturals. As a result, images of horned Pan could be used to represent Puck and other faeries. In parallel with this process, the image of Pan was convenient to the church as a way of representing the devil, and as a result (as may be imagined) iconographic overlap generated further confusion as to identity. If Puck looked like Pan- and Pan looked like Satan- did this mean that Puck was really the devil? This muddling of identities was (as I’ve said before) compounded by the fact that the Catholic church couldn’t readily accommodate faeries and goblins into scripture. Faced with a dichotomy of ‘angels‘ or ‘demons,’ the predictable inclination was to class faeries as evil, although- in day to day terms- Catholic doctrine tended to be rather more flexible and to tolerate a popular belief in faeries as rather vaguely defined but not wholly malign nature spirits. With the Reformation and the Protestant emphasis upon the primacy of the holy text, the matter of classification became a lot more strict. If faeries weren’t mentioned in the Bible- which they weren’t- they had to be devils. This had the effect of further blurring or complicating the definitions.

The subsequent witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries certainly made no distinction between faery and demon, setting up Satan as ruler of Faery in a manner that had simply never been seen before and which caused profound confusion between two quite separate bodies of belief. The result of these combined processes was to create a grey area in which popular folklore often mixed up demonic and faery traits. It is surprising to find how much was shared between mighty Satan and ordinary faeries. I will list a few examples here of these commoon features.

Firstly, there is the power of names, for “naming the Devil summons him,” just as knowing a faery’s name gives a mortal power over that being. Because of the name’s power, alternatives were sought, such as references to ‘Old Nick’ and ‘Old Harry’- comparable to ‘the Good Folk’ and the Tylwyth Teg. Another way of raising the Devil was to run in circles around a particular spot. At Great Kimble, in Buckinghamshire, stands the ancient earthwork called Cymbeline’s Castle or Mount; circle this seven times and you will generate unwelcome company- just as may circling certain barrows or fairy rings may call forth the Little Folk (as with the rings at Alnwick, Northumberland and Brington in Northamptonshire, for instance).

The Devil could travel in a whirlwind– and carry off people the same way- just as could faeries. He could take the shape of a huge black dog– a form of faery beast widely known across Britain. The Devil was prone to preventing the construction of buildings that annoyed him, whether by their mere location- such as Barn Hall, at Tolleshunt Knights in Essex- or because a church was being built- as at March in Cambridgeshire. In either case, he objected so much that he destroyed the completed work nightly, until the hint was taken or the counter-measures were employed. The faeries have often interfered with the building of churches in the exactly same manner.

A very common feature of British folk tales is the notion that the Evil One, rather like many faeries, could be quite easy to trick or to fool. At Kentchurch in Herefordshire, the story is told of Jack, who outwitted the Devil in a bargain whereby they each agreed to take the above and below ground parts of the crops sown in a field in alternate years. Jack then sowed corn the first year and turnips the next; when the Devil duly got his agreed share, he had wheat roots in the first year and then turnip leaves in the second. A Northamptonshire boggart or bogie was tricked in just the same manner. At the Devil’s Dyke in Sussex, Satan’s plan was to dig a channel through the Downs and so let in the sea to flood the land with all its churches. He was only half-done when a cock crowed- alerting him to the approach of daylight. Being unable to abide this (just like faeries) he broke off his work- not knowing that a woman had tricked him by simply waking up her cockerel and getting it to crow before dawn. At the Wrekin Hill in Shropshire, the Devil- who was on his way to dam the river Severn and flood Bewdley town- met a cobbler carrying a bag of old shoes. He asked the man how far Bewdley was, and the canny cobbler claimed that he had worn out his sack full of shoes walking from there. Very easily discouraged, the Devil immediately gave up his plan. An extremely similar story is told in Wiltshire, when the Devil planned to bury the town of Devizes with a giant shovelful of earth. To amplify his lack of omniscience, he got lost on the way and asked a man he met on the road for directions. Recognising his interlocutor and- like the Shropshire cobbler- thinking fast, the traveller said, “I set off from Marlborough to Devizes, but it’s so far that my hair was black when I started and now it’s grey!” This made the Devil give up and he dumped the earth right where he stood, forming Cley Hill near Warminster- which is about 17 miles from Devizes. A related account involves setting the Devil impossible tasks which he can never complete, a stratagem which has been employed to defeat a range of supernaturals, including hobs and faeries; tasks such as making ropes of sand or emptying a pool with a holed walnut shell are common.

As I’ve said before, the notion that we can outwit the faeries is a reassuring one- even though they are not, like the Devil, perpetually plotting our temptation and downfall. Nevertheless, if it’s possible to escape the active enmity of Satan, just as you can avoid the almost casual and disinterested harm many faeries inflict, we can understand why such stories spread. More generally, we may speculate as to why the overlap of characteristics exists and whether- in fact- established traits of the native faeries may perhaps have been extended to the devil and his imps.

I wonder if, to a considerable extent, it was a matter of (almost literally) “better the devil you know.” The ascription to the Devil many of the familiar powers and characteristics associated with faeries may have made him seem less threatening and less of a profound eschatological peril. Church teachings imbued him with enormous power, but (in parallel with conventional religious remedies such as faith and prayer) there was surely comfort to be derived from the idea that his powers were flawed and limited and that he could be tricked and defeated- especially, arguably, when that was something available to the ordinary person, without the need for the ‘professional’ intervention of a priest. Likening the devil to faeries brought him down to a more manageable scale, perhaps. If you coped everyday with the Good Folk taking your milk and playing tricks on you, it may have encouraged the hope and confidence that you could similarly deal with the devil.

As I suggested a little earlier, this mixing of powers and predilections can flow both ways. Under religious influence, the notion of antagonism towards church buildings (and aversion to Christian symbolism) appears to have been transferred from demons to faeries. That this process of assimilation may not have been fully completed might be suggested by the fact that, when in stories faeries object to the ringing of church bells, it’s said to be because of the racket they cause, not because of their association with religious services. None of this, I’d argue, was inherent in the nature of the native British faery, but arose from the process of accommodation of the supernaturals to church doctrine.

Overall, though, comparisons between devils and faeries tended to diminish and, to a degree, humanise the former. By making them more like us, we became more of a match for them.

The Nature of Human-Faery Children

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Statue of a selkie by David Powell at Culzean Castle, Ayrshire

I was recently contacted by a reader of the blog, asking my opinion on the nature (and powers) of the children of a faery and a human parent. I had to admit that I couldn’t really the answer the query because, in British folklore, although plenty of mixed race human/faery babies and infants are mentioned, we seldom hear much about them beyond the fact of their births.

The major exception to this, I think, is with mermaids, where intermarriage/ rape is quite common and there are more accounts of what happens to the children later on. This is because a regular feature of these stories is the return of the mermaid mother to the sea and the impact of that upon the family left behind. There are a few instances where the children follow their mothers and, from these, I think we can generalise to say that they typically have the traits of both worlds: they are human children to look at, but can communicate with their mermaid/ selkie relatives and, if necessary, join them in their home under the ocean without fear of drowning. We know, for example, that the children of the mermaid of Zennor were able to live with her beneath the sea, making clear that their human genes didn’t override their mermaid ones- in so far as breathing under water seems to have been concerned, anyway. We might instructively contrast this to the account of the Welsh merman Jinny and his human wife; they are said to have lived in a “box” under the sea (perhaps somewhere she could breathe air) and to daily visit land, once again, we may suppose, for her benefit.

The Orkney story of Johnny Croy describes how he obtained a mermaid wife by snatching her precious golden comb. To win it back, she struck a bargain with him- that she would live with him on his farm for seven years and that he would then go with her to visit her family in ‘Finfolkaheem’ (the land of the fin-folk under the sea). During the first part of their marriage on land, they had seven children. When the time came to go under the waves, Johnny’s mother employed a desperate and brutal strategy to prevent the mermaid taking all of her children with her: the old woman branded a cross her youngest grandchild’s buttock with red-hot iron. The result was that the baby stayed on land with the grandmother, whilst the rest of the family disappeared forever beneath the sea. Evidently, the children (and Johnny for that matter) were able to live under water; however, the use of a Christian symbol, so potent a charm against faeries, was also effective against supernaturals more generally and barred the baby from entering Finfolkaheem- or ‘Faery’ as we might express it. This narrative suggests that, more generally, the kinds of items and actions that protect against faery malice will also have some sort of impact upon their offspring- even when they are part-human. These include such items as iron, rowan, stale urine, red ribbons, pages or words from the Bible and blessings.

There are occasional hybrids reported- part human/ part seal- and these are largely regarded as disabled within the human world: they are typically covered in hair, are unable to speak, and have limbs that are part-flipper. However, across the west of Scotland, there are traditions of local families with selkie ancestry who still spend part of their time in human form and part of the time as seals. In the traditional Orkney story of the Selkie of Sule Skerry, a man appears to a single parent mother who is lamenting that she does not know who the father of her child may be. He reveals that he is the father, and that he is a selkie. He gives her a purse of gold to ‘purchase’ the boy and compensate her for carrying the child, the pains of labour and her grief over his loss, and then takes the boy away to live with him on the remote rocky outcrop called Sule Skerry. Once again, it’s clear that the boy must be very readily able to adapt to selkie life, implying that he shares most of the selkie-characteristics that will permit him to survive at sea (as well, perhaps, as indicating that selkies and humans are not that far apart genetically, as the simple fact of his conception must, in any case, show).

Extrapolating, I’d suggest that human/ faery offspring are likely to share the key fae traits of their parents: aversion to man-made metal objects and the paraphernalia of the Christian faith, as mentioned, but in addition they may be unable to cross flowing water, they may be unable to lie and they may have a particular love of dairy products. They might well be expected to have some magical powers- the ability to shapeshift (although this is arguably inherent to the selkie’s very nature), to fly, to become invisible and to have certain healing skills using herbs and water from south-flowing streams and springs.

Statue by Hans Pauli Olsen of a kópakonan or ‘seal wife’ at Mikladalur on Kalsoy, Faroes

Never Doubt the Pixies…

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The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould

During some time away in Cornwall and Devon, I came across a few records of the work of the vicar and writer Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924). Born at Lewtrenchard in north Devon, he eventually became both the parson of the parish and the squire of the manor there. Over and above his church duties, he was a prolific author, with over 1200 pubications to his name. Amongst other interests, he was a novelist, collected folksongs, engaged in archaeology on Dartmoor, and wrote about the legends and beliefs of Cornwall and Devon.

This last fascination, of course, it what attracted my attention. For example, in his Book of Dartmoor (1900), Baring-Gould recorded that at Pixy Holt near Dartmeet, there was a cave where the local little people lived. “It is the correct thing to leave a pin or some other small trifle in acknowledgment when visiting,” he added. Readers may be delighted to discover that this connection survives and that they may look wround the garden and shop of Pixieland at Dartmeet- “home of the garden gnome.” I confess that I’ve never been in all the times I’ve been to Dartmoor (even with my daughter when she was little); a dereliction of my professional duty, I suppose you’ll say…

The River Dart, at Pixies Holt (by Sam Freeman)

Other local experts on the pixies included the journalist and author Ruth St Leger-Gordon, of Sticklepath village, and her husband Douglas, also a writer. I have read Ruth’s very useful Witchcraft and Folklore of Dartmoor (1972) and benefitted from her research. Douglas wrote a Portrait of Dartmoor (1963), in which he observed that the Rev Baring-Gould had declared the pixies to be “out of date nearly a century before his time” and that they had “retired into a world of fantasy eighty years before his day.” If we take “his day” to be the date of Baring-Gould’s birth, this would push the pixies back into the mid-eighteenth century (since which, allegedly, nothing more has been heard of them). As I’ve observed before, it is a very common trait for people to treat faeries as something familiar to their grandparents, but long gone from the ‘modern’ world (in other words, their present). It’s a way of distancing yourself from ‘old wive’s tales’- especially when talking to a researcher who might seem rather superior and supercilious. Your simple, uneducated grandpa and grandma believed in these things and told you about them when you were little, but you yourself are much too grown-up and sophisticated to believe in that sort of nonsense now. Faery belief perpetually seems to be fading away- and yet it never does die out.

Now, Ruth St Leger-Gordon’s book incorporates much more recent testimony of the continued presence of the Dartmoor pixies right up to the time she wrote, contradicting Garing-Gould’s opnions, but the reverend man himself learned a lesson about so lightly and impertinently dismissing the little folk, as Douglas described:

One winter evening, the vicar was at his desk, waiting and listening out for his wife and daughters to return from tea with neighbours. He heard the expected sound of carriage wheels on the drive and hurried to the door to greet them. No-one was there- but he then heard “a ghastly gibbering laugh” above his head.

This was a typical pixie trick, both misleading him and punishing him for his want of belief. Again, I have described in another post how the faeries dislike a lack of belief on our part; it is an affront to them, for obvious reasons. What’s more, it seems that the pixies are especially prone to such chastisements. In the Dartmoor story of Nanny Norrish, her scepticism was answered one night when she met the pixies piled up before her in a pyramid and all chattering loudly. Despite receiving a nasty fright, Nanny appears to have got off lightly, for one folklore writer averred that the pixies’ “malevolence will know no end” towards one who’s spoken ill of them. Famously, they will mislead (pixie lead) individuals, using illusions of sound as well as sight to lure them into trouble.

Hopefully Baring-Gould learned his lesson, but I know for sure that there are plenty of readers who will attest to the ongoing tendency of the faery folk to trick and chastise us, not only when we’ve vexed them but- on occasion- just because they feel like it…