Imagine you are standing in a field in rural
Ireland, the late 19th century, and you're not
alone out there. Who am I with? Standing right
next to you is this highly educated man of science,
maybe a physicist, someone who deeply understands
electromagnetism, thermodynamics, all the cutting
edge mechanics of the visible world at that time.
Got it. So a real strict rationalist. Exactly.
And you are both watching a woman hang her laundry
on a line. Okay, seems normal enough. Right,
but suddenly, without even a breath of wind,
the clothes just lift off the rope. Whoa. Yeah,
they don't just blow away, they actually levitate.
Like straight up? Deliberately up into the sky,
just hovering there against all the laws of gravity.
I can imagine the physicist is having an absolute
meltdown. Oh, completely. He's utterly baffled,
frantically trying to, I don't know, calculate
invisible wind currents or some kind of freak
magnetic anomaly. Naturally. Because his worldview
demands a physical explanation. Right. But then,
the local farmer who is standing on your other
side, he just nods. It's not surprised at all.
Completely unfazed. And he just says, ah, the
fairies are taking them. They'll bring them back.
That is amazing. And a few minutes later, the
clothes gently float back down and just drape
themselves right back over the line. You know,
it really is the ultimate collision of worlds
right there. It really is. You have this rigid,
newly minted scientific method crashing head
first into a belief system that is, well, literally
thousands of years old. Yeah. And the profound
question that comes out of that is, who actually
has the better vocabulary to explain what just
happened? Welcome to the Deep Dive. We've got
a massive stack of source material sitting right
here on the desk in front of us today. We really
do. And today, we are taking you, our listener,
completely off the edge of the physical map.
We're leaving the visible world behind. We are
looking at a foundational, honestly paradigm
-shifting text by an Oxford scholar named W .Y.
Evans -Wentz. It's titled, The Fairy Faith in
Celtic Countries. Yes. And I have to say, this
isn't just a book of folklore. Not at all. It's
a meticulously documented collection of historical
records, ethnographic field notes, interviews
with seers. And surprisingly, a whole lot of
very intense modern scientific parallels. Which
is the craziest part. But we need to establish
our ground rules right away, don't we? We really
do. Because when you hear the word fairy today,
your brain immediately defaults to a very specific
commercialized image. Oh, absolutely. I mean,
we think of Tinkerbell. Right. We think of animated
movies, little magical beings with wands granting
wishes to princesses. Or maybe the Tooth Fairy.
Exactly. It's entirely relegated to the realm
of children's bedtime stories. Which is a modern
tragedy, really. Because the original ancient
Celtic fairy faith is something entirely different.
It's completely alien to that modern Disney concept.
It is. And our mission today is not to recount
fairy tales. We are going to analyze this massive
body of evidence to see if the ancient Carchetic
belief system actually aligns with modern scientific
theories. Specifically theories of consciousness,
right? Right. Yes. theories of consciousness,
psychical research, and the worldwide concept
of animism. So we are essentially putting the
fairy realm under a microscope. Or honestly more
like a psychological MRI. I like that because
if you look closely at the notes Evans -Wentz
compiled, these ancient traditions aren't just
quaint superstitions. No, they appear to hold
a highly sophisticated pre -scientific understanding
of the human mind. And the survival of the soul.
Right. And the invisible forces of nature. They
might have been describing quantum mechanics,
non -local consciousness, and advanced psychology
centuries before we even had the sterile clinical
vocabulary to talk about those things. They were
trying to explain the unexplainable, the genuinely
anomalous phenomena of human existence. Exactly,
but they were doing it using the language and
the cultural symbols available to them at the
time. What is staggering to me as we go through
this material is how closely their ultimate conclusions
map onto the absolute cutting edge question.
that physicists and neurologists are asking right
now. It's eerie how well it aligns. Okay, let's
unpack this. Where should we start? Let's start
by completely dismantling the modern definition
of fairyland, because Evans -Wentz makes it very
clear that the ancient Celts were not talking
about a physical place. No, they were not. So
what actually was the fairy faith to them? Well,
to the Celts, the fairy faith is, at its core,
A Doctrine of Souls. A Doctrine of Souls, okay.
Right. Fairyland, which the Irish refer to as
Tir Na Nog, the Land of Youth, is not a geographical
location. So I can't just find it on a map? No.
You cannot sail a boat westward and eventually
hit its shores. You can't dig a hole deep enough
into a green hill to find a subterranean city.
Right. It is entirely a subjective, super normal
state of consciousness. So it's an inner state,
not an outer physical dimension. It is an inner
state, yes. But we have to be really careful
here not to equate inner with imaginary. That's
a huge distinction. It is. Because to the seers
who interacted with this state, it is as real,
if not realer, than the physical world. And the
beings that inhabit this state of consciousness,
they're called the side here, right? Pronounced
she, yes. Or the Tuatha de Danann. Okay, and
the Irish Seers, the people who claim to have
this second sight, they describe them in a very
specific, almost paradoxical way. They do. They
say these beings are like mortals. but they are
not mortals. What does that mean exactly? Well,
to our objective physical world, they are completely
invisible and immaterial. You can't touch them.
Right. But to the subjective world, to the realm
of pure consciousness, they are fully conscious,
living, intelligent entities. They really blur
the lines between psychology and physics, don't
they? They absolutely do. They are like this
invisible architecture holding up the world.
Now, obviously for the last hundred years or
so, anthropologists have tried very hard to explain
this away. Of course. That's what academia does.
Right. And when I first started reading through
the history of how academics tackled this, I
assumed what most people assume. Which is what?
That early humans just made up stories to explain
things they didn't understand. Like, I don't
know why lightning strikes, so there must be
a giant lightning spirit. Ah, yeah. You're describing
what scholars call the naturalistic theory. Okay.
It was the dominant academic explanation for
a long, long time. The idea is that primitive
people just personified nature. Because they
lacked science. Exactly. They didn't understand
why rivers flowed, or why the wind howled at
night, or why the seasons changed. So they just
invented nature spirits to fill in the gaps.
And to be fair to those anthropologists, the
environment absolutely does shape how the fairies
are described. Oh, completely. Evans -Wenz points
this out brilliantly in the text. He does. He
compares the descriptions of fairies in Ireland
to those in Scotland, and the contrast is wild.
It gets night and day. Like in the gentle green
rolling hills of Kwaitamara in Ireland, the good
people are described as beautiful, gentle, and
happy. They play music and dance in the moonlight.
Yeah, exactly. It's very pastoral. But have you
traveled to the Scottish Highlands? Oh, man.
It's a completely different vibe. It really is.
The landscape there is rugged. The locks are
deep and dark. The weather is just brutal and
unforgiving. And the fairies there reflect that
perfectly. They are terrifying. You have these
terrible water kelpies that drown trash. and
a much dreaded spirit host that moves violently
through the air at night, literally sweeping
people away. Right, so the naturalistic theory
successfully proves that the physical environment
colors the belief. It dictates the mood of the
fairies. Okay, that makes sense. But Evans -Wentz
demonstrates why this theory ultimately fails.
Why is that? Because it completely fails to explain
the actual origin of the belief. Oh, I see. It
doesn't explain why a person walking home at
night actually hallucinates or experiences a
vivid interaction with a conscious conversational
entity. Right. Personifying a thunderstorm doesn't
explain why a farmer has a three -hour conversation
with a glowing figure in his barn. Exactly. The
naturalistic theory only explains the clothes
the entity is wearing. So to speak. It doesn't
explain the entity itself. OK, so if they aren't
just metaphors for the weather, what about the
physical evidence? What physical evidence? Well,
I remember reading about archaeologists finding
these tiny ancient underground dwellings and
tiny flint arrowheads across the British Isles.
Ah, yes. Didn't some scholars argue that fairies
were just a folk memory of an actual historical
race of tiny humans? Like a prehistoric pygmy
race. Yeah. Like a race that got driven underground
when the taller, more aggressive Celts arrived.
Yes, that is the pygmy or ethnological theory.
It was heavily championed by a Victorian scholar
named David McRitchie. It's an incredibly seductive
theory, honestly, because it feels so grounded.
It gives you something physical to point to.
Right, we have tiny arrowheads, we have legends
of little people hiding in mounds. It seems like
a perfect match. It does seem perfect, until
you actually look at the text. Right, because
Evans -Wince just tears it apart. Completely
dismantles it. The pygmy theory falls apart the
moment you zoom out and look at the global evidence.
How so? Well, there are places in the world where
we know definitively through fossil records and
archaeology that no pygmy race ever existed.
Like certain reasons of North America, for instance.
And yet the indigenous people living in those
exact regions have identical deeply entrenched
beliefs in tiny magical nature spirits that live
in rocks and streams. Oh wow, so the physical
explanation doesn't hold up globally. Exactly.
You see the exact same beliefs among the Inuit
and the Sami people in the Arctic living in environments
that make the whole hidden cave -dweller historical
narrative physically impossible. Not to mention
the actual abilities of the fairies in the lore.
Right. If I'm remembering my history correctly,
being a short human who hides in a cave doesn't
automatically grant you the power to turn invisible.
Or fly through the air. Or read minds or paralyze
a cow with a single glance. A physical pygmy
simply cannot do those things. That is exactly
the point Evans -Wentz makes. The legends explicitly
describe a non -human, shape -shifting, ethereal
race. So the scholars were just cherry -picking.
Yes. They grabbed the small size detail because
it fit their physical evidence and completely
ignored the overwhelming descriptions of supernatural
power. Okay, so if they aren't metaphors for
nature and they definitely aren't physical pygmies,
were they just a distorted memory of the druids?
The druids. Yeah, I mean, the druids were these
powerful, mysterious priests who dealt in magic
and the unseen. Could the peasants have just
exaggerated their memories of them over the centuries?
You know, the druid theory is perhaps the easiest
one to dismiss. Really? Why? While the druids
were indeed powerful figures who performed rituals
and claimed to interact with the unseen, the
folklore is very, very careful to distinguish
between them. So the lore doesn't mix them up?
Not at all. The legends explicitly state that
the fairies are a distinct non -human race, often
considered older and far more ethereal than the
human priests. Oh, I see. The druids were the
practitioners who communicated with the unseen.
They were not the unseen beings themselves. Right.
Suggesting fairies are just remembered. Druids
is like suggesting a modern radio broadcaster
is actually the radio wave itself. That's a great
analogy. It completely confuses the medium with
the message. OK, that makes sense. So that leaves
us with the last major academic excuse. The mythological
theory. Right. This is the idea that fairies
are just the old grand pagan gods who got demoted
over time. Yes, as Christianity swept through
the Celtic lands. Right. The mighty gods of the
Tuatha de Danann were supposedly watered down
into little sprites hiding in the woods just
to survive the theological shift. And out of
all the conventional theories, This one actually
holds the most significant grain of historical
truth. Oh, it does. Yes. If you track the names,
many of the fairy queens and kings and later
Celtic lore are the exact same names as the old
pagan gods of pre -Christian Ireland. OK, so
there is a linguistic connection there. Definitely.
But Evans Wentz says it just kicks the can down
the road. How do you mean? Well, it's a linguistic
explanation, not a psychological one. If fairies
are just diminished gods, we still have to ask
the root question. Which is, why did human beings
believe in those gods in the first place? Exactly.
What was the original experiential spark? More
importantly, the mythological theory entirely
dismisses the lived experiences of the Percipients.
The people who are actually seeing them. Yes.
the people living in the 19th and 20th centuries
who were still claiming to interact with them
on the daily basis. Right, because when a peasant
wakes up in the middle of the night and sees
a luminous figure standing at the foot of their
bed, they aren't having an academic encounter
with a diminished mythological concept. Exactly.
They're having a direct, visceral, sometimes
absolutely terrifying psychological experience.
So all four of these academic theories, naturalistic,
pygmy, druid, and mythological, They only explain
the cultural clothing of the fairies. They explain
the shape of the container, but they completely
ignore the liquid inside it. Which brings Evans
-Wentz to the only theory that encompasses all
the data, both historical and modern. The psychological
theory. Yes. This theory posits that a real unseen
psychological germ or object exists in the world
waiting to be acted upon. Okay, unpack that for
me. What is a psychological germ? It means there
is a genuine external phenomenon happening in
human consciousness. A real psychical force.
Yeah. And the human mind then dresses that force
up in the imagery of nature. or ancient races
or old gods, just to make sense of it. Okay,
I have to push back here. Go for it. Because
I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of the
people actually experiencing this. Okay. If this
is entirely a state of mind, if it's all just
psychological... Why do people experience fairyland
as an external objective world? That's the million
dollar question. Like if I have a weird psychological
feeling I say I feel anxious or I had a strange
thought but these people don't say that. No they
don't. They say I saw a physical being standing
in my field or I heard music coming from that
specific hill over there. If it's an internal
state why is it violently thrust outward into
the physical space? That is the crux of this
entire investigation. And to understand it, we
have to completely expand our definition of what
constitutes reality. Because we're so used to
measuring things. We are so trained to believe
that if we can't measure it with a physical instrument,
it simply doesn't exist. You know, I found an
analogy while reading the text that really helped
me wrap my head around this. Oh, what was it?
Think of fairyland, like the dark matter of the
psychological universe. Oh, I like where this
is going. Right. In astrophysics, scientists
cannot see dark matter. They can't look through
a telescope and spot it. They can't capture it
in a jar. It literally doesn't interact with
light. But they know it's there. They know, mathematically,
that it is absolutely real. How? because they
can observe its massive gravitational pull on
the visible universe. They can see galaxies bending
and moving in ways that definitively prove a
massive invisible force is there. That is a phenomenal
way to conceptualize it. Right. In the same way
we can't see fairyland with our physical eyes,
a biologist can't like dissect a fairy on a table.
No. But if we look at human history, we can observe
the massive gravitational pull this unseen force
has on human culture. folklore and on the individual
minds of the people who experience it. It has
a profound weight to it. It exerts a force that
actively bends human behavior and perception.
It is a force acting upon human consciousness
from the outside. And if fairyland is indeed
this invisible dimension of consciousness, this
psychological dark matter, it leads us to a staggering
realization. Which is? If this was just an isolated
weird thing that happened in a few counties in
Ireland and Scotland, we could easily write it
off as local superstition. But it's not. No,
it's not. Which brings us to the global scale
of this phenomenon. Right. If this is a real
invisible dimension of consciousness, How did
human beings across the entire globe, separated
by oceans and thousands of years of history,
come up with the exact same framework to describe
it? The sheer universality of this is what makes
it impossible to ignore. It's everywhere. The
Celtic fairy faith is not an anomaly. It is just
one branch. of a massive worldwide tree of animism.
We should probably define animism for a second
because it's a word that gets thrown around a
lot in anthropology, but it's vital to understand
the worldview here. Animism isn't just believing
in ghosts. No. It's the core belief that the
entire universe is alive. Everything. Rocks,
rivers, trees, animals, the wind itself has a
living conscious soul inside it. Right. To an
animist, the universe isn't just a collection
of dead matter that accidentally bumps into itself.
It is a crowded, breathing, conscious ecosystem,
both visible and invisible. And when you look
at the world through that animistic lens, you
find the exact same entities everywhere. Evans
once draws evidence from completely disconnected
cultures. He does. Look at the Orunta people
of Central Australia, for example. They were
geographically isolated for millennia. And what
do they believe? They believe in what they call
the Alchiringa beings. Alchiringa? Yes. These
are ancestral, invisible spirits that inhabit
specific rocks, trees, and caves. They control
the natural elements, and they occasionally interact
with or even take human children. Wow. If you
translate the details, it is a one -to -one match
with the Celtic city. And it doesn't stop there.
In Asia, the Siamese have the Phi Spirits, legions
of minor deities living in forests and ethereal
spaces capable of good and bad, constantly interacting
with the physical world. And Native American
tribes across the continent have deeply ingrained
beliefs in the Unagamsuk, or similar entities.
Little spirits inhabiting rocks, streams, and
forests. Exactly. Even in ancient Greece, centuries
before the Celts were recording their myths,
the Greek peasants believed in nymphs and nereids.
They left offerings for them, they feared offending
them, and they claimed to see them in the woods
in the exact same way a 19th century Irish farmer
claimed to see a fairy. The whole world is tuning
in to the exact same frequency. But here's a
detail that always bothered me, and I was so
glad the text actually addressed it. What's that?
Why are they so often described as tiny? If they
are these powerful, god -like forces of consciousness,
the actual architects of nature, why are fairies,
globally, so often depicted as being three inches?
as tall or the size of a small child? The answer
to that lies in the mechanics of ancient neurology
and primitive psychology. OK, break that down
for me. Well, before we had modern science, before
we understood the brain stem or synapses, ancient
peoples tried to conceptualize human life. They
were trying to figure out how we work. Right.
They asked, what is the thing inside me that
animates this meat and bone? What is the soul?
And what did they come up with? Globally, the
most common way to conceptualize this invisible
animator was to imagine it as a miniature replica
of the person. Oh, like a mannequin or a homunculus.
Exactly. A tiny, ethereal version of you driving
the vehicle of your physical body. That's wild.
Sometimes it was described as being three inches
high. Sometimes it was envisioned as a tiny pygmy
with butterfly wings. Wait, really? Is that where
the classic fairy wings come from? Yes. Remarkably,
that is exactly where we get the enduring image
of fairy wings. I had no idea. Because fairies
were so often equated with the souls of the dead,
or with the animating spirits of nature, they
were envisioned in this exact same form, as tiny,
ethereal beings. So the smallness isn't meant
to be taken as a literal physical measurement.
No, it is a psychological symbol the soul. That
is fascinating. It's literally the visual language
of the soul manifesting as a tiny being. Yes.
But then the text goes into some really speculative
esoteric territory to explain how these beings
take shape, doesn't it? It does. It brings in
the alchemical and mystical theories of the Middle
Ages. Specifically thinkers like Paracelsus and
the Rosicrucians. Right. These Renaissance thinkers
took these ancient global animistic beliefs and
tried to systematize them scientifically. They
were trying to categorize the unseen. Exactly.
They categorized these unseen pygmy -like beings
as elementals. They believed that the invisible
universe was structured just like the visible
one governed by the four clouds. elements. So
they broke them down mathematically. You have
the gnomes, the elementals who inhabit and govern
the earth, the silphs, the elementals of the
air, the undines who govern water, and the salamanders
who inhabit fire. And Paracelsus made a crucial
argument about the biology, for lack of a better
word, of these elementals. What was his theory?
He argued they were not purely physical, like
a rock or a dog, but they were also not purely
spiritual, like God. So they were somewhere in
the middle. Yes, they existed in a liminal half
material state. They possessed elastic ethereal
bodies that could actually change shape. Oh wow.
And crucially Paracelsus stated that their shape
changed based on the mind of the person perceiving
them. Okay, here's where it gets really interesting.
Because that is the master key to this whole
thing. How so? Because that perfectly explains
the social psychology at play in the source material.
Ah, I see what you're saying. I was laughing
reading some of these accounts because whenever
people see fairies, the fairies always look and
act exactly like the people who believe in them.
They really do. Like the Irish fairies are seen
playing hurling, holding wakes, and listening
to bagpipes. Right. But the Breton fairies in
France spin wool and weave garments. They have
kings, queens and standing armies completely
mirroring the feudal systems of Europe. So if
an elemental has an elastic body that responds
to the mind, are we just projecting our own societal
structures onto this blank canvas of the invisible
world? We are just dressing them up in our own
cultural clothes. Are we? The text confirms your
suspicion entirely. Yes, there is massive, undeniable
cultural projection happening. So the bagpipes
aren't real. The social structures, the clothing,
the specific types of music, the fairies play.
That is all the cultural clothing woven by the
human imagination. OK, so it is just projection.
But, and this is a massive distinction, Evans
-Wentz insists we look past that clothing. What
do you mean? What's fascinating here is that
if you strip away the bagpipes, the hurling matches,
the tiny butterfly wings, and the feudal kingships,
you are not left with nothing. You are left with
the raw data. Exactly. You are left with an unexplained
interaction between a human mind and an external
invisible stimulus. So the cultural projection
is just how the brain desperately tries to translate
an encounter with something it fundamentally
cannot comprehend. Yes. The brain sees an invisible
force, panics, and overlays a familiar image,
like a tiny man playing a bagpipe, just to process
the data safely. So if we strip away all that
cultural clothing, we are left with a core set
of unexplained raw phenomena. The raw data. Right.
And this is where the deep dive gets really clinical.
Because how does modern science handle the raw
data that absolutely cannot be dismissed as mere
imagination or cultural projection? Well, in
any rigorous scientific experiment, When you
account for all known variables, when you strip
away the fraud, the delusion, the cultural bias,
and simple optical illusions, if there is something
left over, a stubborn piece of data that defies
explanation, you call it the X quantity. The
X quantity, the unexplained residuum. Exactly.
And in the fairy faith, this X quantity is incredibly
persistent, well documented, and frankly terrifying
to the scientific establishment. Because we're
talking about things like collective hallucinations,
right? Yeah. Where multiple people standing in
a field together see the exact same impossible
thing at the exact same time. Or the movement
of physical objects without any physical contact,
like the laundry you mentioned at the very beginning.
Right. We're talking about supernatural wrappings,
noises, and poltergeist activity. This is where
rural folklore violently collides with rigid,
psychical research. And Evans -Wentz doesn't
rely on local gossip for this, does he? Not at
all. He brings in the heavy hitters of science
to look at the X quantity. We're not talking
about fringe theorists here. No, we're talking
about pioneering foundational scientists of the
late 19th and early 20th centuries. Like Sir
William Crookes. Yes, a brilliant chemist and
physicist who discovered the element thallium.
And Sir Oliver Lodge, who was a pioneer in radio
and electromagnetic theory. Right. The French
astronomer, Camille Flammarion. the highly respected
anthropologist Andrew Lang. These were serious
men. Very serious. Men who applied rigorous skeptical
scientific methods to the unseen. Let's look
at some of the specific cases they investigated.
Because they read exactly like fairy tales, but
they are sworn documented evidence in courtrooms
and laboratories. Let's hear one. Take the events
at Sidville, France in the mid -19th century.
Oh, the Seidel phenomena is a classic case. What
exactly happened there? Well, In a parish house
surrounded by reputable witnesses, including
a magistrate, a priest, and local officials,
impossible things happened. Like what? There
were documented instances where heavy pillows
and coverlets floated away from a bed where children
were actively trying to sleep. Just floated away?
Yes. Furniture in the house moves violently across
the room without anyone touching it. There were
intelligent knocking sounds that would actually
respond to questions. And it's not just France.
There's the story from Ireland of a woman named
Mrs. Margaret Quinn, which is where I got the
intro to this deep dive. Ah, the laundry story.
Yeah. She was hanging her clothes on a line,
and suddenly the clothes lifted off the line
and floated away into the air. Right. And the
fascinating part isn't just the levitation, it's
the reaction of the crowd. How did they react?
Yeah. The people standing around didn't panic.
They didn't scream about demons or witches. They
just casually said, God bless the good people.
They will bring them back. Because it was just
a fact of life for them. Exactly. And sure enough,
the clothes slowly floated back down to the line.
Now, when a modern physicist investigates phenomena
like this, they use terms like telekinesis, or
they hypothesize the actions of discarnate intelligences.
They use very sterile language. But to the Celtic
peasant, This is just the seed at work. It's
the exact same phenomenon, the exact same X quantity
just viewed through two different linguistic
lenses. One uses sterile Greek and Latin roots.
The other uses ancient mythology. Precisely.
And then there's the concept of telepathy. Right.
The idea that a mind can communicate with another
mind across physical space without speaking.
I always like to think of telepathy like a biological
radio transmitter. That's a good way to look
at it. If the human brain acts as a transmitter.
capable of sending a telepathic stimulus or a
thought to another human brain, which these psychical
researchers were actively running experiments
on, could an entirely non -human invisible intelligence
broadcast on that exact same frequency? That
is the exact hypothesis proposed by researchers
like Sir Oliver Lodge. Really? Yes. His work
in early radio technology deeply informed his
view of the mind. How so? If we accept the premise
that human minds can interact invisibly across
space, emitting and receiving signals, there
is zero logical reason to assume that only human
minds exist in that invisible spectrum. Oh, wow.
If the radio waves are there, why assume we are
the only ones broadcasting? Exactly. But wait,
I have a question about this. How do we differentiate
between a normal, mundane hallucination like,
I ate something bad, I have a high fever, and
I suddenly see a pink elephant in my room, and
what the Celts call the second sight, or an ecstatic,
genuine vision of a fairy? That is a crucial
distinction, and the psychical researchers drew
a very hard line here. Where is the line? A normal
hallucination is entirely generated from within.
It is a visualized image pulled from your own
memory or subconscious due to a physiological
glitch. Like a fever dream. Yes. Your brain misfires,
maybe due to illness or exhaustion, and projects
an image outward. But the researchers argue that
a genuine vision, the second sight of a natural
seer, is not generated internally. It's not a
misfire. No. It is triggered by an outside force.
So it's the difference between my television
glitching and showing random static versus my
television suddenly picking up a crystal clear
broadcast from a hidden station I didn't even
know existed. Precisely. The genuine hallucination
of a phantom or a fairy is a telepathic or psychical
stimulus acting upon your nervous apparatus from
the outside. It is a real external force interacting
with human consciousness, forcing your brain
to process an image. Yes. The delusion and imposter
theory. The lazy academic idea that everyone
who has ever seen a fairy is either lying for
attention or clinically insane simply fails to
account for the sheer volume of collective verifiable
phenomena. It's intellectually dishonest to just
yell fraud at everything that breaks your scientific
model. It really is. To receive these broadcasts
from the unseen world, to tune your biological
radio to the fairy frequency, your mind usually
has to be in a highly receptive altered state.
You don't usually see a fairy while you're doing
your taxes or chopping wood in broad daylight.
No, you see them at twilight or in the moments
between waking and sleeping. Right. And this
leads us to the profound connection between fairyland
and the architecture of human consciousness itself.
Because the state of mind of the person experiencing
this is just as important as the phenomenon itself.
Absolutely. One of the most consistent details
in all fairy lore, and frankly one of the most
existentially terrifying, is the massive distortion
of time. The time dilation. Yes. You read these
stories of a mortal wandering into a fairy ring,
they hear beautiful music, they go inside, they
dance for what feels like maybe an hour or two.
And then? Then they walk back out, and a hundred
years have passed in the physical world. Everyone
they know is gone. Their friends are dead. Their
house is a ruin. They are a complete stranger
in the future. Or, conversely, they think they've
been taken away for years, enduring lifetimes
of labor in fairyland, and they wake up under
a bush and it's only been five minutes. And again,
Evans -Wentz points out that this time dilation
is not just a convenient fairy tale trope used
to create drama. No, it is a well -documented
psychological phenomena. He provides intense
scientific parallels from dream psychology to
show that The human mind naturally does this,
right? He does. The example that really blew
my mind was Thomas de Quincy. Ah, the famous
19th century author. Yes, the guy who wrote Confessions
of an English Opium Eater. He recorded having
these profound opium -induced dreams where he
literally lived out 60 entire years within a
single night's sleep. 60 years in one night.
He experienced the passage of every single day,
the aging process, the sprawling emotional weight
of an entire lifetime, all while his physical
body lay motionless in bed for eight hours. And
there are documented clinical cases beyond drug
use, too. Like what? He cites a man named Huna
who fell into a magnetic sleep. A magnetic sleep.
What's that? What modern medicine might call
a deep hypnotic coma or a cataleptic state. He
fell asleep in January and finally woke up in
May. Oh my goodness. And he genuinely believed
he had only lain down to rest the day before.
The intervening months simply did not exist for
him. Time just stopped. Or consider the famous
Cirrus of Prevorst, a German woman who spent
years in a deep trance state, experiencing massive
spans of time as a single continuous day. So
when a Celtic farmer claims they were taken by
the fairies into the hills, it aligns perfectly
with what clinical psychologists call trance
states, somnambulism or states and ecstasy. What
does that actually mean mechanically? It means
the consciousness is perceiving objects, experiencing
vivid events, and processing time completely
independently of the physical nerve apparatus.
So the physical brain and the ticking clock are
entirely bypassed. If we connect this to the
bigger philosophical picture, it suggests that
consciousness is not entirely bound by the physical
body. Or by linear ticking time. Right. In a
trance, the consciousness steps outside the normal
steady flow of physical time and enters the subjective
fluid time of the fairy realm. The fairy realm
is timeless because consciousness itself, when
freed from the physical brain, is timeless. Exactly.
But I have to push back here. Okay, what's bothering
you? We've been talking about this in very clinical,
almost peaceful, academic terms, dreams, trances,
time dilation. Right. But what about the dark
side of this? Because fairy folklore is incredibly
dark. It definitely is. What about the changelings?
How does this psychological framework explain
the very sinister, very prevalent belief that
fairies will steal a healthy human baby from
its crib or steal a healthy adult. Right. And
leave behind a withered, sick, evil little imp
in their place because that isn't just a dream.
No, it's a nightmare. That is a physical, horrific
reality where a mother looks at her child and
genuinely says, this is a monster. This is not
my baby. The changeling belief is undoubtedly
the darkest, most tragic and most complex part
of the fairy faith. How does Evans -Wentz handle
it? He tackles it head on with incredible empathy
and scientific rigor. First, he immediately dismisses
the old sociological theories. Which ones? The
idea that this is just a folk memory of ancient
rival tribes kidnapping children, or a memory
of ancient human sacrifice. Oh, I've heard those
theories. While those brutal things may have
happened historically, they don't explain the
psychological terror of the changeling. The belief
that the physical body is still there, but the
person inside is gone. Exactly. Instead, he connects
the changeling belief to a deeply scientific
cross -cultural phenomenon. Demon possession.
Wait, I need you to explain that because demon
possession doesn't sound like a scientific phenomenon
to me. I know, the term is loaded. But in the
realm of 19th and early 20th century psychology
and anthropology, it was a recognized category
of profound mental shift. Okay, give me an example.
Evans Wentz cites extensive practices from China,
where they kept detailed records of individuals
whose personalities suddenly, violently, and
permanently changed. And in modern psychology.
We have different terms for this today. We might
call it dissociative identity disorder. Ah, okay.
Or we might recognize it as a sudden severe pathological
illness like the catastrophic onset of childhood
schizophrenia. Or some kind of devastating form
of severe epilepsy or paralysis. Exactly. Oh,
I see. So a healthy, vibrant child suddenly develops
a severe neurological condition. Overnight. Overnight,
they stop speaking. They begin having violent
seizures. Their physical body wastes away due
to an undiagnosed illness. And their previously
sweet personality completely vanishes. Replaced
by screaming or catatonia? Right. And to a pre
-scientific mind, without access to an MRI or
a neurologist, the child they knew is literally
entirely gone. That is so heartbreaking. The
sudden onset of a severe disease is a traumatic
psychological event for the family. But because
the Celts view the entire world through the lens
of animism, they are forced to interpret this
neurological tragedy as a fairy abduction. The
logic of their worldview demands it. They believe
the healthy soul of the child has been pulled
out of the body and taken into the invisible
realm, abducted by the city. Yes. And because
of the economy of nature in their minds, if a
soul leaves a body, that body can't just be empty.
Nature abhors a vacuum. Right. Another entity
has to fill the void. So they believe a malicious,
ancient, sick fairy spirit has possessed the
vacant physical shell. Yes. The changeling is
an attempt to make sense of inexplicable medical
horror. It is a profound tragedy, but it reinforces
a central tenet of the Celtic belief system,
doesn't it? It does. The belief that the physical
body is merely a vessel. It is a temporary meat
suit, a conductor for consciousness. The body
is not the person. Which is the perfect bridge
to the final major concept of this deep dive.
Because if consciousness can temporarily leave
the body to enter this timeless realm of fairyland
during a trance, and if a soul can be swapped
out of a body during an illness, what happens
when the soul leaves permanently at death? This
brings us to the esoteric heart of the fairy
faith, the Celtic doctrine of rebirth or the
evolution of the soul. This is where the text
elevates from rural folklore into a grand, sweeping,
cosmological framework. It reads less like peasant
superstitions and more like speculative, theoretical
physics. It really does. It blew my mind when
I read it. Why is that? Because the expert tradition
among the Celts, the learned Seers, and the ancient
Druidic lines, they viewed the universe in exactly
the same way the ancient Greek philosophers like
Plato did. Ah, the phenomenal versus the numinal
world. Yes. They believed that the physical,
visible world, the phenomenal world, is merely
an effect. The cause of everything, the engine
running the universe, is an invisible, numinal
world. To use a classic analogy, the physical
world is just the shadow cast on the wall of
a cave. And the spiritual world, the invisible
realm, is the fire casting the shadow. The cause
is unseen, the effect is what we live in. And
to explain how the soul navigates this, Evans
-Wentz dives deeply into the Welsh bardas manuscripts.
The bardas? What are those exactly? These are
the preserved records of the ancient bardic and
druidic teachings. They describe the entire universe
as being structured into three distinct, massive
circles of existence. Let's break those down
because the mechanics here are fascinating. Let's
do it. The outermost circle, encompassing absolutely
everything, is Sagamp. This is the circle of
infinity. It is the realm of the absolute, the
uncreated. It is the realm of God alone. So no
human can go there. No human, no fairy, no created
soul can ever traverse it or even understand
it. It's the ultimate, untouchable source code
of the universe. Exactly. Then inside that infinite
circle, you have the second circle. The circle
of abrid. The circle of rebirth. Yes. This is
the realm we are in right now. The physical world.
It is the realm of physical existence, of matter,
of suffering, of learning, and of a constant
brutal cycle of life and death. The text specifically
notes an incredible phrase about Abrid. It says
that here, the dead are stronger than the living.
Because in Abrid, the physical life is fleeting
and weak, while the spiritual forces shaping
it are eternal and powerful. And in Abrid, the
soul is constantly returning, constantly reincarnating
into the physical world to gather experience.
Yes. And the soul doesn't just start out as a
human being. The bardic doctrine is incredibly
specific about this. Where does it start? It
states that the primordial soul begins its journey
in the lowest, most microscopic possible form.
What they called a water animal keel. Right.
A tiny organism at the bottom of the ocean. Wow.
And through countless lifetimes of struggle,
it slowly evolves upward, incarnating through
the plant kingdom, then the animal kingdom, until
it finally reaches humanity. So think about what
this means. It sounds exactly like Darwinian
evolution. It really does. But instead of just
the physical, biological body evolving through
natural selection and genetic mutation, it's
the invisible spiritual soul evolving through
conscious experience across millions of lifetimes.
It is spiritual Darwinism. It is an evolutionary
track for consciousness itself. And humanity
is the crucial... dangerous turning point in
this journey. Why dangerous? Because it is only
in the human state that the evolving soul finally
gains self -awareness and exercises free will.
It finally becomes morally responsible for its
actions. And if the human soul chooses well,
if it learns from the suffering of abrid, it
eventually graduates. It breaks the cycle of
reincarnation and enters the third and final
circle, Gwynvid. Gwynvid, the circle of liberty
and perfection. a realm of pure, unhindered consciousness
where suffering completely ceases. I love the
analogy the text uses for this evolutionary process.
Which one? It compares the migrating soul to
a silkworm. Oh, right. A silkworm weaves a cocoon
around itself, not randomly, but based on deeply
acquired, inherited instincts, right? Yeah. In
the exact same way, the indestructible soul monad,
the core spark of consciousness, weaves a new
physical body and a new ethereal body for its
next stage of evolution. Based entirely on the
instincts and experiences it gathered in its
past life. Exactly. This profound cosmic architecture
raises an incredibly important question for us
today. What's that? How does this ancient, mystical,
Celtic doctrine map onto the modern psychology
and physics we've been discussing. Is there any
modern equivalent to this? Evans Wentz points
directly to William James for that. One of the
brilliant founding fathers of modern psychology.
Yes. James proposed a concept to explain human
consciousness that sounds exactly like Celtic
mysticism. What did he call it? He called it
the mother sea or a universal reservoir of consciousness.
The mother sea. James suggested that our individual
isolated human minds are not separate self -contained
islands. We aren't just batteries in our own
little boxes. Right. Instead, we're all dipping
into the exact same massive, invisible ocean
of universal consciousness. I remember Joke used
a brilliant spatial metaphor for this. The fence
metaphor. He argued that the individual mind
is just a temporary fence built within this infinite
mother sea. And the fence exists to limit the
flood of universal consciousness, allowing us
to function in the physical world without being
overwhelmed. Because if we let it all in, our
brains would just break. Exactly. When the body
dies, the fence is simply removed and the droplet
of individual consciousness returns to the larger
sea. Yes. And in the context of the fairy faith,
this is the grand unifying theory. How so? It
means that fairies, the elementals, human souls,
the spirits of the dead, they are all just individual
units, different droplets of this universally
diffused soul stuff or mana. So they're all made
of the same material. Yes. Some droplets are
heavily fenced in embodied in dense physical
human forms. Like us. And some droplets have
lighter fences existing in the invisible, the
elastic, ethereal forms of the ceta. But fundamentally,
at their core, they are all the exact same substance.
Which means the entire Celtic doctrine of rebirth
and the existence of the fairy world is not just
a collection of random ghost stories. No, it
is a highly elaborate, internally consistent
philosophical framework designed to explain the
journey of consciousness through the cosmos.
The fairies are simply consciousness functioning
in a different state. vibrating on a different
frequency within the exact same universal ocean.
We have journeyed so far today. We really have.
We started standing in a field in Ireland, watching
a pile of laundry float in the air, listening
to stories of little people playing bagpopes.
And we have ended up at the very edges of modern
physics. speculative biology, the psychology
of trauma, and the ultimate evolutionary destiny
of the human soul. It is time to bring this massive
synthesis home for you, the listener. What we
have ultimately discovered is that the fairy
faith has been profoundly misunderstood by modern
society. Completely. It is not a collection of
groundless childish superstitions. It is a highly
complex, robust, pre -scientific framework. The
ancient Celts designed it to explain genuine
psychical phenomena, altered states of consciousness,
pathological illnesses, and the spiritual evolution
of humanity. They were observing real, anomalous
things in the world and building a grand functional
theory to explain them. But why should you care
about this today? I mean, you're probably not
worried about an invisible elemental stealing
your laundry and you aren't leaving saucers of
milk out to appease the side. Probably not. But
look at our modern world. In our current era
of constant relentless information overload,
of glowing screens, algorithms, and endless sterile
data, we suffer from a complete and devastating
loss of sympathetic contact with nature. We really
do. We look at the universe solely as a resource
to be extracted, as dead matter just bumping
in the void. Understanding the deep roots of
the fairy faith serves as a radical reminder.
It reminds us that the human mind has vast, untapped,
unmapped dimensions. It reminds us that there
is a profound mystery to consciousness that we
have not even begun to solve with all our technology.
It demands that we remain open, critical, and
curious about the X quantities in our own lives.
The moments of deep intuition, the strange synchronicities,
the dreams that feel too real to just be random
firing synapses. It asks us to humbly recognize
that the visible world we measure so carefully
might merely be the thinnest skin of reality.
And that beneath it lies a churning, infinite,
conscious universe. So, I want to leave you with
a final provocative thought to mull over on your
own as you go about your week. It builds on everything
we've synthesized today. Think about how modern
psychical research, quantum physics, and speculative
biology are currently using terms like telepathic
stimulus, subconscious visualization, non -local
consciousness, and the universal mother sea.
Very scientific terms. Are we, with all our advanced
university degrees, our particle accelerators,
and our laboratories, Simply inventing modern
clinical sterile jargon for the exact same invisible
forces that a Celtic peasant sitting by a peat
fire a thousand years ago intuitively understood
and called the Sid Hey. Are we just rebranding
the fairies? It is an incredibly humbling question
to consider. It really is. Thank you so much
for taking this immense deep dive into the source
material with us today. We hope it makes you
look at the visible world and the quiet invisible
spaces around you just a little bit differently
today. Remember, the map is not the territory.
And sometimes, the most important fundamental
forces in the universe won't show up on a scientific
instrument. Until next time, keep diving deep.