On-Demand · A History of Fairies: From Fearsome Gods to Friendly Guides with Cultural Historian Jason Lahman
Six session class via video streaming links
$120
Please note: Orders fulfilled weekly on Wednesdays
What is a fairy? A diminutive humanoid creature with insect wings, a shimmering gown, a magic wand, and the ability to bestow blessings, cast enchantments or fulfill wishes? This image is so wide-spread in modern cultures that, like unicorns, dragons and merfolk, the fairies have almost ceased to generate the kind of human responses that once upon a time included such emotions as primal terror, erotic ecstasy, trance-like euphoria, or total disorientation.
The fairy-folk of the past were not the small, friendly, or wish-fulfilling entities we know from our childhoods; they were often god-like, violent, shape-shifting and could command the fierce powers of the earth, the elements and the atmosphere. Unlucky humans could be ravished, maimed, killed, or carried away never to be seen again should they cross over into fairy territory, draw unnecessary attention to themselves, or show disrespect to these fantastical people. Fairy beings were connected to sacred sites, geographical anomalies, to dark magic and quite often to the dead. They could appear in any number of forms: shining lords and ladies parading on horseback, great dogs with luminous eyes, water-horses, seductive beauties, a green mist, dancing flames or even as someone’s deceased relatives.
Like human beings they ate, procreated, organized themselves into societies and hierarchies. They sometime even died; glimpses of fairy funeral processions were noted throughout the centuries. The fairy family is incredibly diverse and, as we will see, in every culture, such beings exist side-by-side with their human counterparts, in a parallel universe often experienced as an inverted or mirror version of the mortal world.
In this class, we will be trace the history of the development of the current concept of the fairy following a variety of clues and submerged streams of cultural belief. Although the core focus in this class will be on the fairy as cultural phenomenon in Western European cultures, we will travel across the globe to meet a wide array of astounding fairy cousins from every clime. We will make note of their shared characteristics as well as the different solutions that humans have invented to deal with their sometimes troublesome, sometimes beneficial presence.
We will see how the indigenous pagan belief systems of Old Europe were interwoven and often covered over by the Christianization process of the late-antique and early medieval periods as missionaries for the new religion began to spread throughout the West, building churches and co-opting sites long sacred to native deities. The old gods and nature spirits survived in folk belief and in the margins of religious art and architecture and were described in manifold ways by every-day people who continued to experience their presence in relation to local life-ways and ancestral landscapes. Healers and seers, cunning folk and those eventually labeled witches often held special knowledge of such powers. These shamanic, folk-wisdoms were later twisted by Christian authorities in the early modern period to serve the purpose of political scapegoating and state building.
Never-the-less, poets, playwrights and artists from the late Renaissance onwards celebrated the fairy-lore of their time and incorporated it into forms that would disseminate it for centuries to come on the stage, in print and in the visual and performing arts. And, in the 17th century, a serious anthropological study of the fairy realm and tradition began to take shape, blooming into a fairy revival across Western culture that culminated in the 19th century, an era when fairies as we now know them populated every facet of cultural life.
Over the course of six weeks of image rich lectures and in-class discussion, we will examine the relation of modern consciousness to this abundance of new fairy activity: occultism, the biological sciences, children’s literature, depth psychology, and the rise of mass media and cinema, all of which gave the fairy world renewed vitality, bringing them once again into human awareness, but also placing them in the closed perimeter of the human head, the skull-cave where modernity had confined the faculty of imagination. The fairy’s perceived nature as a marginal, dangerous, and even abject figure has often provided a name and metaphor for populations seen as liminal or labeled perverse- the queerness of the fairy in the modern mind will be looked at from a variety of angles.
The course concludes by examining the late 20th and early 21st century idea that fairies are not so much entities as deep bio-ethical relationships between human beings and nature, innate responses by homo sapiens to the metamorphic forces of the living world. This view suggests that the ongoing ecocides of the industrial centuries are directly related to our exile from earlier, earth-centered realities in which fairies played important roles.
Week 1: The Origins of Fairies and the Anthropology of Fairy Lore
What is a Fairy? Defining terms in a historical context.
Animism, rural life and spirit-imbued nature
Human relationships with invisible beings
A history of the historical work on Fairy beliefs
Pre-Christian Europe: The old gods, old spirits, and the old lifeways
Pagan mythologies and their transformation after Christianization.
Folk-memory and folklore as clues to earlier cultures in relation to Fairy beliefs
Week 2: The Fairy Cousins
The Fairy Cousins: Fairy-like beings across the world
The classical world and indigenous European spirits
Asia: China, Japan, Korea and Tibet
The Arab and Islamic traditions
The Pacific Islands
Indonesia
African cultures
The Americas
2. The Fairy Menagerie: Fairy beings in animal form
Week 3: The Genealogy, Geography & Typologies of Fairies Across Europe
The Secret Commonwealth: Fairy society and Fairy civilization
The Elemental Tradition: wood, water, air, fire, earth
Fairy folk and the domestic sphere
Underground Fairies: mining and the dead
Otherworld: the Good People and where they dwell
The fabulous and/or Fairy ancestor in noble and royal families
Week 4: The Fairies and Christianity
The Christianization of the Pagans
Survival of pagan deities and spirits in new forms
Fairies and the transformation of pagan practices
The Fairy tradition and Christian holy days
The Christian explanations of the Fairies
Witches, healers, cunning folk and the world of Fairy
The Fairie Queene: Elizabethan fairies and Gloriana’s court
The Fairy Godmother and the Cursing Fairy: potent hybrid archetypes
Week 5: The Victorian Fairies in Literature, Science and the Arts
Shakespeare’s Revival: A Midsummer Night’s Dream & The Tempest
German Romanticism: Dark fairies and national paganisms
Fairy Science: anthropologists, archeologists and folklorists
Fairies and the 19th century occult revival
Children’s literature and book illustration
The Genre of the Fairy Painting: sources and themes
Fairies on the Victorian stage
Week 6: The Thoroughly Modern Fairies in 20th Century Culture
Captured Fairy: techno-occultism and the photographing of Fairies
Guardian Fairy: Fairies as symbols of childhood
Queer Fairy: liminality, decadence, perversion, abjection
Pop Fairies: Disney and anti-Disney Fairies
Star Fairy: Fairies on film, key examples from world cinema
Green Fairy: ecology and environmentalism
Future Fairy: fairy possibilities and magical horizons
Jason Lahman is an artist and cultural historian specializing in the history of technology, science and the occult. He has taught a number of classes for Morbid Anatomy including A Cultural History of Robots, A History of Fairies and The Femme Fatale.
Six session class via video streaming links
$120
Please note: Orders fulfilled weekly on Wednesdays
What is a fairy? A diminutive humanoid creature with insect wings, a shimmering gown, a magic wand, and the ability to bestow blessings, cast enchantments or fulfill wishes? This image is so wide-spread in modern cultures that, like unicorns, dragons and merfolk, the fairies have almost ceased to generate the kind of human responses that once upon a time included such emotions as primal terror, erotic ecstasy, trance-like euphoria, or total disorientation.
The fairy-folk of the past were not the small, friendly, or wish-fulfilling entities we know from our childhoods; they were often god-like, violent, shape-shifting and could command the fierce powers of the earth, the elements and the atmosphere. Unlucky humans could be ravished, maimed, killed, or carried away never to be seen again should they cross over into fairy territory, draw unnecessary attention to themselves, or show disrespect to these fantastical people. Fairy beings were connected to sacred sites, geographical anomalies, to dark magic and quite often to the dead. They could appear in any number of forms: shining lords and ladies parading on horseback, great dogs with luminous eyes, water-horses, seductive beauties, a green mist, dancing flames or even as someone’s deceased relatives.
Like human beings they ate, procreated, organized themselves into societies and hierarchies. They sometime even died; glimpses of fairy funeral processions were noted throughout the centuries. The fairy family is incredibly diverse and, as we will see, in every culture, such beings exist side-by-side with their human counterparts, in a parallel universe often experienced as an inverted or mirror version of the mortal world.
In this class, we will be trace the history of the development of the current concept of the fairy following a variety of clues and submerged streams of cultural belief. Although the core focus in this class will be on the fairy as cultural phenomenon in Western European cultures, we will travel across the globe to meet a wide array of astounding fairy cousins from every clime. We will make note of their shared characteristics as well as the different solutions that humans have invented to deal with their sometimes troublesome, sometimes beneficial presence.
We will see how the indigenous pagan belief systems of Old Europe were interwoven and often covered over by the Christianization process of the late-antique and early medieval periods as missionaries for the new religion began to spread throughout the West, building churches and co-opting sites long sacred to native deities. The old gods and nature spirits survived in folk belief and in the margins of religious art and architecture and were described in manifold ways by every-day people who continued to experience their presence in relation to local life-ways and ancestral landscapes. Healers and seers, cunning folk and those eventually labeled witches often held special knowledge of such powers. These shamanic, folk-wisdoms were later twisted by Christian authorities in the early modern period to serve the purpose of political scapegoating and state building.
Never-the-less, poets, playwrights and artists from the late Renaissance onwards celebrated the fairy-lore of their time and incorporated it into forms that would disseminate it for centuries to come on the stage, in print and in the visual and performing arts. And, in the 17th century, a serious anthropological study of the fairy realm and tradition began to take shape, blooming into a fairy revival across Western culture that culminated in the 19th century, an era when fairies as we now know them populated every facet of cultural life.
Over the course of six weeks of image rich lectures and in-class discussion, we will examine the relation of modern consciousness to this abundance of new fairy activity: occultism, the biological sciences, children’s literature, depth psychology, and the rise of mass media and cinema, all of which gave the fairy world renewed vitality, bringing them once again into human awareness, but also placing them in the closed perimeter of the human head, the skull-cave where modernity had confined the faculty of imagination. The fairy’s perceived nature as a marginal, dangerous, and even abject figure has often provided a name and metaphor for populations seen as liminal or labeled perverse- the queerness of the fairy in the modern mind will be looked at from a variety of angles.
The course concludes by examining the late 20th and early 21st century idea that fairies are not so much entities as deep bio-ethical relationships between human beings and nature, innate responses by homo sapiens to the metamorphic forces of the living world. This view suggests that the ongoing ecocides of the industrial centuries are directly related to our exile from earlier, earth-centered realities in which fairies played important roles.
Week 1: The Origins of Fairies and the Anthropology of Fairy Lore
What is a Fairy? Defining terms in a historical context.
Animism, rural life and spirit-imbued nature
Human relationships with invisible beings
A history of the historical work on Fairy beliefs
Pre-Christian Europe: The old gods, old spirits, and the old lifeways
Pagan mythologies and their transformation after Christianization.
Folk-memory and folklore as clues to earlier cultures in relation to Fairy beliefs
Week 2: The Fairy Cousins
The Fairy Cousins: Fairy-like beings across the world
The classical world and indigenous European spirits
Asia: China, Japan, Korea and Tibet
The Arab and Islamic traditions
The Pacific Islands
Indonesia
African cultures
The Americas
2. The Fairy Menagerie: Fairy beings in animal form
Week 3: The Genealogy, Geography & Typologies of Fairies Across Europe
The Secret Commonwealth: Fairy society and Fairy civilization
The Elemental Tradition: wood, water, air, fire, earth
Fairy folk and the domestic sphere
Underground Fairies: mining and the dead
Otherworld: the Good People and where they dwell
The fabulous and/or Fairy ancestor in noble and royal families
Week 4: The Fairies and Christianity
The Christianization of the Pagans
Survival of pagan deities and spirits in new forms
Fairies and the transformation of pagan practices
The Fairy tradition and Christian holy days
The Christian explanations of the Fairies
Witches, healers, cunning folk and the world of Fairy
The Fairie Queene: Elizabethan fairies and Gloriana’s court
The Fairy Godmother and the Cursing Fairy: potent hybrid archetypes
Week 5: The Victorian Fairies in Literature, Science and the Arts
Shakespeare’s Revival: A Midsummer Night’s Dream & The Tempest
German Romanticism: Dark fairies and national paganisms
Fairy Science: anthropologists, archeologists and folklorists
Fairies and the 19th century occult revival
Children’s literature and book illustration
The Genre of the Fairy Painting: sources and themes
Fairies on the Victorian stage
Week 6: The Thoroughly Modern Fairies in 20th Century Culture
Captured Fairy: techno-occultism and the photographing of Fairies
Guardian Fairy: Fairies as symbols of childhood
Queer Fairy: liminality, decadence, perversion, abjection
Pop Fairies: Disney and anti-Disney Fairies
Star Fairy: Fairies on film, key examples from world cinema
Green Fairy: ecology and environmentalism
Future Fairy: fairy possibilities and magical horizons
Jason Lahman is an artist and cultural historian specializing in the history of technology, science and the occult. He has taught a number of classes for Morbid Anatomy including A Cultural History of Robots, A History of Fairies and The Femme Fatale.
Six session class via video streaming links
$120
Please note: Orders fulfilled weekly on Wednesdays
What is a fairy? A diminutive humanoid creature with insect wings, a shimmering gown, a magic wand, and the ability to bestow blessings, cast enchantments or fulfill wishes? This image is so wide-spread in modern cultures that, like unicorns, dragons and merfolk, the fairies have almost ceased to generate the kind of human responses that once upon a time included such emotions as primal terror, erotic ecstasy, trance-like euphoria, or total disorientation.
The fairy-folk of the past were not the small, friendly, or wish-fulfilling entities we know from our childhoods; they were often god-like, violent, shape-shifting and could command the fierce powers of the earth, the elements and the atmosphere. Unlucky humans could be ravished, maimed, killed, or carried away never to be seen again should they cross over into fairy territory, draw unnecessary attention to themselves, or show disrespect to these fantastical people. Fairy beings were connected to sacred sites, geographical anomalies, to dark magic and quite often to the dead. They could appear in any number of forms: shining lords and ladies parading on horseback, great dogs with luminous eyes, water-horses, seductive beauties, a green mist, dancing flames or even as someone’s deceased relatives.
Like human beings they ate, procreated, organized themselves into societies and hierarchies. They sometime even died; glimpses of fairy funeral processions were noted throughout the centuries. The fairy family is incredibly diverse and, as we will see, in every culture, such beings exist side-by-side with their human counterparts, in a parallel universe often experienced as an inverted or mirror version of the mortal world.
In this class, we will be trace the history of the development of the current concept of the fairy following a variety of clues and submerged streams of cultural belief. Although the core focus in this class will be on the fairy as cultural phenomenon in Western European cultures, we will travel across the globe to meet a wide array of astounding fairy cousins from every clime. We will make note of their shared characteristics as well as the different solutions that humans have invented to deal with their sometimes troublesome, sometimes beneficial presence.
We will see how the indigenous pagan belief systems of Old Europe were interwoven and often covered over by the Christianization process of the late-antique and early medieval periods as missionaries for the new religion began to spread throughout the West, building churches and co-opting sites long sacred to native deities. The old gods and nature spirits survived in folk belief and in the margins of religious art and architecture and were described in manifold ways by every-day people who continued to experience their presence in relation to local life-ways and ancestral landscapes. Healers and seers, cunning folk and those eventually labeled witches often held special knowledge of such powers. These shamanic, folk-wisdoms were later twisted by Christian authorities in the early modern period to serve the purpose of political scapegoating and state building.
Never-the-less, poets, playwrights and artists from the late Renaissance onwards celebrated the fairy-lore of their time and incorporated it into forms that would disseminate it for centuries to come on the stage, in print and in the visual and performing arts. And, in the 17th century, a serious anthropological study of the fairy realm and tradition began to take shape, blooming into a fairy revival across Western culture that culminated in the 19th century, an era when fairies as we now know them populated every facet of cultural life.
Over the course of six weeks of image rich lectures and in-class discussion, we will examine the relation of modern consciousness to this abundance of new fairy activity: occultism, the biological sciences, children’s literature, depth psychology, and the rise of mass media and cinema, all of which gave the fairy world renewed vitality, bringing them once again into human awareness, but also placing them in the closed perimeter of the human head, the skull-cave where modernity had confined the faculty of imagination. The fairy’s perceived nature as a marginal, dangerous, and even abject figure has often provided a name and metaphor for populations seen as liminal or labeled perverse- the queerness of the fairy in the modern mind will be looked at from a variety of angles.
The course concludes by examining the late 20th and early 21st century idea that fairies are not so much entities as deep bio-ethical relationships between human beings and nature, innate responses by homo sapiens to the metamorphic forces of the living world. This view suggests that the ongoing ecocides of the industrial centuries are directly related to our exile from earlier, earth-centered realities in which fairies played important roles.
Week 1: The Origins of Fairies and the Anthropology of Fairy Lore
What is a Fairy? Defining terms in a historical context.
Animism, rural life and spirit-imbued nature
Human relationships with invisible beings
A history of the historical work on Fairy beliefs
Pre-Christian Europe: The old gods, old spirits, and the old lifeways
Pagan mythologies and their transformation after Christianization.
Folk-memory and folklore as clues to earlier cultures in relation to Fairy beliefs
Week 2: The Fairy Cousins
The Fairy Cousins: Fairy-like beings across the world
The classical world and indigenous European spirits
Asia: China, Japan, Korea and Tibet
The Arab and Islamic traditions
The Pacific Islands
Indonesia
African cultures
The Americas
2. The Fairy Menagerie: Fairy beings in animal form
Week 3: The Genealogy, Geography & Typologies of Fairies Across Europe
The Secret Commonwealth: Fairy society and Fairy civilization
The Elemental Tradition: wood, water, air, fire, earth
Fairy folk and the domestic sphere
Underground Fairies: mining and the dead
Otherworld: the Good People and where they dwell
The fabulous and/or Fairy ancestor in noble and royal families
Week 4: The Fairies and Christianity
The Christianization of the Pagans
Survival of pagan deities and spirits in new forms
Fairies and the transformation of pagan practices
The Fairy tradition and Christian holy days
The Christian explanations of the Fairies
Witches, healers, cunning folk and the world of Fairy
The Fairie Queene: Elizabethan fairies and Gloriana’s court
The Fairy Godmother and the Cursing Fairy: potent hybrid archetypes
Week 5: The Victorian Fairies in Literature, Science and the Arts
Shakespeare’s Revival: A Midsummer Night’s Dream & The Tempest
German Romanticism: Dark fairies and national paganisms
Fairy Science: anthropologists, archeologists and folklorists
Fairies and the 19th century occult revival
Children’s literature and book illustration
The Genre of the Fairy Painting: sources and themes
Fairies on the Victorian stage
Week 6: The Thoroughly Modern Fairies in 20th Century Culture
Captured Fairy: techno-occultism and the photographing of Fairies
Guardian Fairy: Fairies as symbols of childhood
Queer Fairy: liminality, decadence, perversion, abjection
Pop Fairies: Disney and anti-Disney Fairies
Star Fairy: Fairies on film, key examples from world cinema
Green Fairy: ecology and environmentalism
Future Fairy: fairy possibilities and magical horizons
Jason Lahman is an artist and cultural historian specializing in the history of technology, science and the occult. He has taught a number of classes for Morbid Anatomy including A Cultural History of Robots, A History of Fairies and The Femme Fatale.