Up the Airy Mountain
Illustration by Garth Williams 1951. While these brightly colored little fellows on the surface seem rather twee, as a child, I always found their eyes to look shifty and sly. They may not have been openly malicious, but neither were they friendly and open, either.
“Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen,
We daren’t go a-hunting
For fear of little men;
Wee folk, good folk,
Trooping alltogether,
Green jacket, red cap,
And white owl’s feather.”
For those who listen to our podcast, even after only six episodes, I could be known as the “fairy lady.”
It makes sense: many of my experiences have taken the form of interactions with what look and act like the Good Folk.
When I talk with other experiencers in the wider community, I often come into contact with those who have interacted with UFO entities, or with what was taken to be UFO entities, and I wondered for years why that hadn’t happened to me. There were plenty of instances of “bedroom invader” motifs in my experiences—whether they were dreams, hypnogogic or hypnopompic hallucinations, or visionary in origin. Plenty of entities traipsed around my psyche and bedroom in the deep of night on mysterious errands that seemed mostly to end in me developing night terrors and insomnia.
In only two instances did the creatures ever resemble some sort of “extraterrestrial-styled” entity such as a Gray.
(And that’s fine with me, I have a distinct and abiding mistrust of what are popularly called “The Grays.”)
But I did wonder why what I now call “The Other” came to me cloaked in the shape of the Fairy Faith, when I grew up in Appalachia in the 1960’s and 70’s. I had been reading books about UFOs since I was about 8 or 9., so, it made little sense to me why my own dealings with non-humans had been colored by beliefs that were seemingly 100 years out of date and from an ocean away from the hills of my home.
I got a clue, when I was 12 years old and read a library copy of Dr. Jacques Vallee’s book, Passport to Magonia. It was there, in the book that changed UFOlogy forever, that I found a poem that I had memorized organically by hearing it read to me over and over since I was preverbal—William Allingham’s “The Fairies.”
I remember being breathless when I found that poem quoted in Dr. Vallee’s book.
Breathless because that was -my- poem—one I could recite virtually from the time I could speak and it was a poem that I now realize has shaped my entire worldview in ways that I find difficult to explain.
I am certain that this poem, and Garth Williams,’ illustrations that went with it, in The Giant Golden Book of Elves and Fairies (Edited by Jane Werner) shaped my aesthetic understanding of art, literature, and folklore. (Recently, I figured out that my own drawing style has been strongly influenced by Garth Williams’ work in this book—the way I draw faces and eyes and paint hair is very strongly reminiscent of his art.)
It also colored and my interactions with non-human intelligences almost from the moment I was born.
Vallee’s thesis is also what caused me to stop, and blink—for he postulated in 1969 that the fairy folklore traditions of Europe described the same exact phenomenon as the emerging UFO folklore of the 20th century.
It was at that moment the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis began to slip from my fingers.
John Keel did it in the rest of the way when I read The Mothman Prophesies, and then Operation Trojan Horse the next year.
So, you must be thinking, “Wow, how daft do you have to be, woman? Of course, this is why you don’t see aliens! The Good Folk got to you first!”
Well, yes, and no.
What I didn’t think about until very recently was how strongly this one poem, in this one book, shaped my entire worldview, and it explicates the enormous power language has to shape human understanding and belief. It also speaks to the strength with which art can shape human thought on an individual as well as a societal and cultural level.
By the time I was nine or ten, I was a voracious reader of science fiction—much more so than fantasy. By the time I was twelve, I was INTO Star Trek. I lived, breathed and believed Star Trek. I was ready to head into space. I wanted to go. I wanted the aliens to land.
And yet…..in the back of my brain, the “wee folk, good folk, trooping altogether,” lurked and shaped my thoughts. Unbeknownst to me, and unbidden, “The Fairies” molded my psyche with images placed there from the time my eyes could focus on a page and recognize faces and shapes as representing…..something.
And then Brian Froud and Alan Lee’s Faeries book came out yet another year later.
I saw that book at my Aunt and Uncle’s house. She’d brought it home from the library and I spend our vacation with them reading it obsessively, staring hungrily at the pictures.
And it was all over.
I started reading fairy lore from folklorists like Katherine Briggs and Walter Evans-Wentz, and even as I worshipped at the altar of Spock (Ever look at his ears? I’m just sayin',—even Dr. McCoy teases him and calls him a hobgoblin) and continued to read UFO books, the die was cast. Yea, though I read every book by Vallee, Keel, Hyneck and Sanderson, and devoured every science fiction book in the library—it made no difference.
It was too late.
The Fairies had hijacked my brain, sure as the little men had stolen Bridget away “for seven years long.”
Yeah—that’s the thing about this poem.
Most of the stories and poems in “The Elves’ Book,” as we called it,” were of the light, sweet variety, though there was always a tiny edge of darkness and warning to them.
Allingham’s poem, however—there’s naught of sweetness to it, and very little light.
I reckon this is largely because he was writing at a time when “The Fairy Faith” was still very much a living tradition among the rural folk of his native Ireland. The narrator speaks of avoiding the mountains and glens for “fear of little men.,” and tells how they kidnapped a little girl named Bridget who they kept for seven years. When she came back, no one remembered her so, she died of a broken heart. They found her “sleeping,” and so they took her again, and placed her body in a lake where the keep it preserved until she should wake up.
That’s dark stuff for a little kid.
For all that Garth William’s illustrations are full-color, soft watercolor paintings, with lots of cuteness going around, his work for this poem has an edge to it. I always found the eyes of these colorfully dressed little fellows to be sly and somewhat forbidding. They smile, but not in a warm and inviting way. More in a beguiling, tricksy way. And of course, the dead little girl is right there, resting at the bottom of a lake on the right-hand page.
And yet, I knew it, word by word, and recited it at the drop of the hat. And found resonances in it in my reading years later.
The colors of the Flatwoods Monster, for example—red, green and white-- jumped out at my at first reading of the case. “Green jacket, red cap and white owl’s feather” rang out in my mind and I ticked a little box under,, “Vallee was right.” And decades later, when I read Mike Clelland’s The Messenger Owls, Synchronicity and the UFO Abductee, I was right there hearing, “and white owl’s feather,” in my memory.
So, there it is. This is likely why my “Other” stubbornly takes the shape of what we commonly call “Fairies,” and not “Aliens.”
I’m not complaining. I’d much rather have truck with the beings of light and shadow who look for all the world like goblins, elves, White Ladies and other beings of Fairy than those who feel the need to conduct amateur hour medical examinations . Poking and prodding humans stolen from their beds in the dead of night for some supposed “hybridization” program does not endear them to me.
(Yes, I am well aware of fairies kidnapping humans and using them for breeding purposes. I will say that in the accounts that have come down to us of such activities, it sounds like a lot more fun than the ham-handed rape-like experiences the Grays dole out.)
It’s kind of amazing, really, the power that rhythmic language can have to shape a pre-verbal mind. When combined with powerful visuals, the programming is exceedingly powerful, and can shape us in ways that are difficult to understand or parse out.
But digging deeply, seeking those sounds and images that have shaped our entire worldview is well worth the time and trouble.
Illustration 1951 Garth Williams. There, on the right side you can see the little dead girl, Bridget, laying in the lake, being watched over until she awakens again. That’s not creepy or anything right there. This is the original first edition copy my dad read to his little sister, and that was read to all of Gram’s grandchildren, including me. We called it “The Elves’ Book.”
