I've long been curious about the beings among us too small, fast or otherwise elusive to qualify as "real." It has often bothered me, as a scientific secularist, that I have never been able to dismiss my sense that such creatures indeed exist, somewhere just out of reach of our consciousness.
Recently, exploring a collection of ancient English folktales, I happened upon an extensive list of supernatural beings that have come down to us through the centuries:
...boggles,bloddy-bones,ignis fatui,brownies, bugbears,shelycoats, scrags, breaknecks, fantasms, boggy-boes, dobbies, hobthrusts, fetches, kelpies, warlocks, mock-beggars, mum-pokers, urchins, satyrs, pans, fauns, and on and on, ten times as many names as these.
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What else, other than these tiny creatures, can explain the odd twists of fate that define all of our lives?
BTW, the above list, though abridged, forms the basis of several literary classics, including Tolkien's "Hobbit" and the superstar "Harry Potter" series. The authors of these blockbusters simply tapped into our ancient British superstitions to create their fictional worlds.
But as any Scotsman can tell you, verily, there are spirits among us, just outside of our perception, that our language has long tried to document.
All we have are mysterious shadows and unanswered questions. But somewhere deep in our collective soul, we know that magic exists, and that angels watch over us as we fall, urging us to rise again, and tell our stories in a more hopeful vein, one that just might inspire yet another generation to find its magical voice...
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1 comment:
I recommend, should you be interested in investigating more about this cultural phenomena, you read Graham Hancock's new book Supernatural, or some of Jacque Valle's much older work from the 60 and 70s on UFOs.
Hancock cites some interesting work done on volunteers with the hallucinogenic compound DMT, the active ingredient of the substance used by south american indians to have shamanistic experiences and encounters with spirit beings and guides.
When injected with this substance, many of the participants in the study reported encounters with little beings which were remarkably similar to those found in alien abduction stories, and also remarkably similar to the little creatures encountered by people in previous centuries, who believed they were meeting with elves and fairies.
DMT occurs naturally in the brain, and Hancock speculates that some people have a natural tendency towards their brains producing it in sufficient amounts to produce these experiences spontaneously.
It might go a long way to explaining how a certain percentage of people report being abducted by aliens, or communicated with beings who are not human. Interestingly, the participants in the DMT study also had abduction experiences, but clearly were not physically going anyway, as they never left the beds of the hospital where the study was carried out.
But scientific studies aside, I can certainly can appreciate your musing on the feelings of magic and mystery being a deep curiosity and intrinsic part of ourselves.
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