Communing With Nature: Fairies in English Ritual Magic and Occult Philosophy, 1400-1700

Abstract

This study examines extant British fairy summoning rituals written between 1400 and 1700, as well as the occult philosophy that increasingly informed them. These operations took the technology of medieval ritual magic (traditionally used to summon demons and more nebulous spirits) and redirected it to invoke the fairies of medieval romance and ballads. I argue that, contemporaneously, a new conceptualisation of fairies began to emerge among Renaissance magic theoreticians and practitioners. This occult philosophical fairy merged literary fairies with medieval magical theory, revived classical texts about daemons/various numina, and the wonderous beings of European popular tradition. Unlike popular depictions of fairies which closely associated them with Faerie (another land or realm which was their primary habitation), occult philosophical fairies were understood to ubiquitously fill this world. In this framework they were presented as morally ambiguous and intrinsically aligned with various elements and natural features.

I demonstrate that influence from these occult philosophical discussions about fairies is evident in some sixteenth-century English fairy summoning rituals, but that this became much more pronounced after the influx of German occult philosophy (particularly that attributed to Agrippa and Paracelsus) in English translations which were produced during the the mid-seventeenth century. Based upon the manuscript context of fairy summoning rituals, I argue that many of those interested in these spells were service magicians with a particular interest in ritual magic. Some of these magicians clearly had a utilitarian approach, being more interested in what a summoned fairy could do for them rather than in what it was. Others, however, increasingly drew from occult philosophical discourses and elaborated fairy summoning rituals with this material, emphasising their connection to the natural world and making it a source of power used when summoning them. I argue that this can be most helpfully understood as the development of a learned Christian animism at the cusp of modernity.