Our "Magonia" cycle continues with an analysis of the tales of kidnappings of human beings by the "fairy people", with particular attention to the phenomenon known as "changeling", the kidnappings of babies and nurses, the hypothesis of "Renewal of the feeric lineage" and, finally, a confrontation with the so-called "alien abductions".
di Marco Maculotti
cover: Remedios Varo, "Strange woman dropping a boy"
The belief in the existence of a "secret people", residing in one dimension other ma superimposed to the our, which is accessed by means of "portals" inside mountains, hills or ancient burial mounds, is widespread almost all over the world and especially in the northern part of the hemisphere (Europe and North America). Particularly rich in this regard is the Scottish folkloric tradition, which mentions such entities with the names of Sith or "Good People", and the Irish one, which names them Sidhe o gentry. In England they are known as Fairies, in France as Fairies and in Italy like Fairy (You do). In the European foklore there are multiple testimonies of men who, voluntarily or in spite of themselves, have been granted entry into the underground kingdom (fairy land) in which the "secret people" lives. Here we want to focus on a very specific type of "visits", that connected to the abduction of newborn children and human women to be used as nurses in the "underground kingdom".
Abductions of nurses and children
We begin our discussion by quoting a passage from the Scottish Reverend Robert Kirk in his seminal work The Secret Commonwealth (The secret Kingdom, and. it. Adelphi), written at the end of the seventeenth century. Among the "transgressions and criminal acts and sins" that the Undergrounds are accustomed to carry out - Kirk informs us -, there is that of "stealing nurses for their children, or that other type of rat which consists in taking away our children (it may be because they are heirs of some land in those invisible possessions) who never return"[Pp. 32-33]. Already from this quotation several mythical motifs can be extracted, the first of which, that of «Nurse of the fairy», is quite widespread globally: we find it throughout Europe and in many areas of Asia up to Japan, and even on the American coast overlooking the Pacific. Secondly, it can be noted that as early as the seventeenth century it was assumed that the children kidnapped from the Undergrounds were "heirs of some land in those invisible possessions"Or, in other words, fruit of those unions between the members of that mysterious people and human beings of which folklore speaks.
Considering this hypothesis, a sense can be seen in the need for such children to be raised with the help of human mothers: indeed, from what transpires from Scottish folk tales it would seem that without the help of human nurses such children could not survive in their world. The latter would therefore be beings hybrids, halfway between human corporeality and that intermediate-volatile state that characterizes i fairies in popular traditions.
And, however, it is said that the fairy people did not limit themselves to stealing children, but also provided for replace them with a changing ("Lasting image"). Graham Hancock writes [Shamans, p. 396]: "not only did magical creatures kidnap healthy and happy children, but they replaced them with not quite human beings", Which ethnographic and folkloric studies refer to as"thin and restless, ugly and misshapen, weak but extremely voracious, capricious and always dissatisfied».
These features of the changing they were also known from Slavic folklore: Here too the "surrogate children" are described as voracious and aggressive and furthermore it is said that they grew more slowly and began to walk and talk later than the norm. Again: it is said that they cried continuously, slept badly, appeared disproportionate in the limbs, laughed in a bizarre way and - even, according to some stories - someone claims that they could also develop horns. A traditional Gaelic song in particular recalls these beliefs: the narrating voice is that of a fairy who wishes to kidnap the child "complexion, plump and good»Of a human woman, to replace it with her own natural offspring [p. 396]:
« He is my clumsy baby,
withered, bald and dull,
weak and with few qualities. »
The Irish tradition relating to changing wants that "dwarf or deformed children are kept by fairies and then given in exchange for healthy children that they kidnap to renew their lineage» [p. 401], in the words of Professor AC Haddon. Thanks to the latter, we have the opportunity to introduce a central concept in this study, that of "renewal of the lineage" or blood, which we will return to later.
Scientific explanations
It is obligatory to specify that according to the majority of modern scholars such popular "rumors" are nothing more than superstitions caused by ignorance. They believe that, until the late nineteenth century, many diseases were as commonly as erroneously attributed to the enmity of fairies, such as stroke, which was believed to be caused by elves, to the point that even today the English term stroke is nothing more than the abbreviation for fairy stroke, or the "fairy shot", that "invisibly fell upon human or animal victims, turning them into a wooden statue that looked like the victim, but lifeless and with minimal functions»[Kafton-Minkel, Underground worlds, p. 51]. The phenomenon of changing it could therefore have been scientifically explained as polio, arthrosis and other incapacitating diseases.
Other academics have proposed the explanation that i changing they were actually children born autistic or deformed, mistreated by family members due to ignorance of "real medicine". Yet, reading the testimonies of past centuries (and even last), it would seem that, although probably many cases of apparent changing can be interpreted in this sense, nevertheless others are more difficult to decipher with the sole aid of experimental medicine. We are talking about those cases in which the (or, more often, la) witness claims to have received the "nocturnal visit" of some 'obscure' figures, who allegedly replaced a healthy child with a changing. Let us therefore try to analyze some of these experiences more concretely, as handed down by the sources at our disposal.
Testimonies from the XNUMXth to the XNUMXth century
Although today similar stories belong more to the field of children's fairy tales than to that of actual beliefs, nevertheless even in the last century the chronicles report exceptional facts that can be traced back to the research under consideration there. — not being able to explain only with "rational" or "scientific" explanations. One of these concerns a Norwegian milkmaid named Anne who had just given birth to a very healthy baby and one night saw her break into her room "a woman dressed in blackWith another child in her arms. During the anguished "encounter" Anne she could not move and only later did she discover that «her baby was gone, and in its place was an ugly gaunt, ugly, 'hunchbacked' brat. The replacement grew ... to an idiot who mooed like an ox. Anne never saw her baby again»[Hancock, p. 397].
An equally sinister story, which occurred on the Isle of Skye, was learned from WY Evans-Wentz in 1908 [ibid]:
“An elderly nurse fell asleep in front of a fireplace with a baby on her lap. The mother, who was in bed and staring at them dreamily, at a certain point saw with amazement three strange little women enter the house, who approached the sleeping baby, and just as the one who seemed to be the leader was about to remove him from the womb of the nurse, the last of the three exclaimed: "Oh, let's leave it with her, we've already taken so many!" "So be it" replied the oldest ... "
Similar tales were - as is easily imaginable — even more widespread in previous centuries. Hancock reports a case that took place in England in 1611, which is mentioned during a trial he saw as a defendant the alleged witch Susan Swapper [p. 394]:
“In Susan's day it was known that i fairy had a constant and extraordinary need to procure human children of all ages, but most of all, and surprisingly, babies. When the visitors appeared, Susan was pregnant and about to give birth and for this reason she was terrified that they might kidnap her; she resisted with all her strength when "the woman in the green slip said to her:" Sue her, get up and come with me, otherwise I'll drag you away. " "
Susan shook her husband trying to wake him from sleep, begging him to come to his aid, but he, not seeing at all the beings his wife claimed to be aware of, turned his back and went back to sleep. This case of the XXVII century, considered at the time the fruit of a "deal with the devil», He suggests to us at the same time how often the cases of" kidnappings "by fairies can be analyzed, in the perspective of the twenty-first century, on the one hand in correlation to phenomena cd. of "sleep paralysis" and on the other with the alleged «abduction alien " [cf. The phenomenon of sleep paralysis: folkloric interpretations and recent hypotheses]. We will return to this point in the conclusion of this essay.
Going back to the Middle Ages, in British folklore we come across more and more often tales of children kidnapped by supernatural creatures (for example by the Fairy Melusina, an aquatic divinity and of sources that has much in common with the fairies), you hate women brought to fairy land in the presence of the "Queen of the Fairies" to nurse the children of the underground or to witness their birth. However, it is interesting to note that the ethnological material does not conform in attributing to these "underground children" the title of actual children of fairies; it seems rather that [p. 395]:
“The nurses who had repeatedly gone to fairy land to bring the fairy-children to light, they confided that the mothers who had to attend were sometimes not fairies, but humans who "had been previously kidnapped and brought to Fairyland " »
From this it would follow that the children whom the kidnapped nurses have to attend in the "Land of the Fairies" are not children of gods fairies, or at least not entirely, being their human mothers. And with that we come to the question of "carnal" unions between fairies and humans and to the hypothesis, which we have already introduced, of the "renewal of the lineage", or of blood.
"Renew the lineage"
According to some Scottish beliefs, entities of the type of Sith they would not possess a soul (whatever is meant by this term), but they could "obtain" it by marrying or uniting "carnally" (although this term may appear here inadequate) with a human being: hence, the kidnappings and forced couplings to the detriment of human hosts, which equally according to folkloric tradition would serve to generate hybrid offspring. Beliefs of this kind are also widespread in various parts of the earth, for example in the Amazon or in the Far East (Japan, Indonesia, etc).
Although in the commentary by Mario M. Rossi (entitled The chaplain of the fairies), in appendix to the text of The Secret Commonwealth of Kirk in the Italian edition Adelphi, the author hypothesizes that i fairies are actually [p. 218] «nostalgic creatures who want the love of men, who kidnap babies just to reach a fuller, fuller life», as a rule, scholars are more likely to explain these alleged "kidnappings" differently: the Undergrounds would not abstractly aim at a "fuller life", but at a real organic state, if we can say so, "more full-bodied». In other words, the aim of these kidnappings and substitutions of people would be the become more concrete, strengthening his own lineage, so to speak, with a dose of "physicality"Human, thanks to mating andgenetic hybridization. Therefore, not the attainment of a "soul", but that of a "more full-bodied" physical state would be the purpose of fairies.
To support this thesis are the majority of specialists in European and above all British folk traditions, including the folklorist Peter Rojcewicz, according to whom [cit. in Hancock, p. 401]:
"[...] the most significant form of god dependence fairy from mortals clearly concerns their genetic evolution. Humans are indispensable because they are healthy. »
Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Irish poet WB Yeats ne The Celtic twilight wrote that the sidhe (fairies) had «need for human physical strength», And for this reason they often seduced and mated with the males of our species in order to carry out" hybrid "pregnancies, in the Secret Kingdom. Diane Purkiss also tells a legend according to which «i fairy… They need blood. They need new blood». Of the same opinion is Katherine Briggs, according to whom the fairies would aspire to «reinvigorate their decaying lineage with fresh blood and human vigor», going so far as to kidnap men, to take them to their kingdom and to offer them fairy food and drink, which would be recognized as having the power to magically retain such guests in the Underworld [Bord, Fate, p. 123].
Jean Markale in his book Wonders and secrets of the Middle Ages [p. 112] similarly notes: «Fairies need men, perhaps to regenerate their race threatened with sterility [...] We also know that they kidnap human children in order to make them exceptional beings, communicating their knowledge and magical powers to them.». Finally, we report Hartland's opinion, according to which [cit. in the Vallée, Passport to Magonia, p. 105]:
"The motive assigned to fairies in northern stories is that of preserving and improving their race, on the one hand by carrying off human children to be brought up among the elves and to become united with them, and on the other hand by obtaining the milk and fostering care of human mothers for their own offspring. "
These beliefs also find their echo in the work of Reverend Kirk, who states that [p. 19] "this food which they extract from us is brought to their homes by secret routes, as certain skilful women carry the essence of milk from their neighbor's cows to their cheese boiler by means of a long distance thread for magical art.". To this, the prelate adds that the members of the "secret people", with their "weapons", "they also pierce cows and other animals, which are usually said to be "hit by the elves": the purest substance of them, if they die, is taken from these Undergrounds to live, more precisely the aerial and ethereal parts, the most spiritual matter to prolong the life…" [p. 29] [cf. Fairies, witches and goddesses: "subtle nourishment" and "bone renewal"].
Some, giving credit to the hypotheses of John Keel and Jacques Vallée [cf. Who is hiding behind the mask? Visits from Elsewhere and the paraphysical hypothesis], connect these beliefs regarding the extraction of 'food' from humans and animals to the vampirism. A valid essay on this has been written by Giovanni Pellegrino. Others relate them to the hermetic teachings concerning those entities called "Elementary". In this regard, we quote Mario Krejis, who in Tshecundia, Ibis writes:
“Like all living beings Elementaries need nourishment, which they absorb from human or animal bodies, which help in a kind of optional mutualism in the struggle for existence. […] In a certain sense, the elementary ones could be assimilated to astral viruses, which multiply in living creatures by transfusing their genome and modifying their phenotypic expression in a way that suits their nature. They are therefore living thoughts, bearing determined qualities impressed upon them; embryonic souls belonging to a non-animal evolutionary line, but rather similar to the vegetable one. "
In this, meeting that perfectly character plane, ethereal, volatile e intermediate (o interdimensional) that folklore recognizes to fairies.
Changeling and lasting image
And now we come to the theme that gives the phenomenon its name: what exactly is the changing, a term that can be translated into Italian as «substitute image» or «lasting image»? Let us once again draw the threads of the speech from the aforementioned work by Reverend Kirk [pp. 20-21]:
"Women are still alive who say they were taken away when they were in childbirth to breastfeed fairies children while in their place a persistent and voracious figure of themselves was left, like their reflection in the mirror. That, as if it were an insatiable spirit in a body he had clothed himself with, at first pretended to devour the body which [instead] cunningly carried away, and then left the body as if it had expired and gone from here by natural and usual death. When the baby is weaned, she nurses her either dies, or is brought back to her home, or she is given the choice to stay there. "
We therefore ascertain that, as well as simultaneously with the abduction of a child a changing, that is to say an "enduring figure" of the kidnapped, when it was the woman who was "taken" to act as a nurse a fairy land, nevertheless it too was "replaced" by an equal "lasting image", which as in the case of changing of newborns initially appeared extremely voracious and then abandoned themselves, at a later stage, to progressive decay.
And yet "when the baby [who we suppose to be, as mentioned above, the son of the human nurse and a Dungeon, ed] is weaned", The woman kidnapped for this purpose, having fulfilled her function, can decide to be brought back" to her house ", that is in our world, or to remain in the Underworld. The third possibility (death) may perhaps be linked to the "decay" of the "persistent figure" left behind in our world in his stead?
A similar hypothesis could be explained by the globally widespread theories (especially in the shamanic field, but also in the oriental traditions and in the sacred science of ancient Egypt) on astral body or "double astral", as opposed to the physical body, which would act as a mere "container" of the first. It would follow that, in the cases analyzed here, it is the cd. "Double astral" of women used as nurses and children kidnapped to reach a fairy land, while their "physical vehicle" would remain in this world, emptied of pneuma which gives it life. This "astral double" would be what Kirk calls "the purest substance","the aerial parts and ethereal»,« The more witty matter», Of which i Fairies so to speak they "feed".
This conclusion, on the other hand, is perfectly in line with the vast list of ecstatic experiences coming from the most disparate cultures, from the shamanic ecstasy to that of the witches they reached "in spirit»The Sabbath, up to those of the benandanti and Christian mystics [cf. The Friulian benandanti and the ancient European fertility cults].
On the basis of these hypotheses, it could therefore be concluded that the abducted woman ran the risk of not being able to return in our world in those cases in which the "physical vehicle", deprived of the pneuma for as long as she had been a guest of the interdimensional realm di fairy land, had "degraded" irremediably: the reunion between the "astral body" and the physical body would then no longer have been possible and the unfortunate woman would have been condemned to remain forever stuck in other dimension referred to in folklore as the "Underworld" or fairy land. Folk tales, on the other hand, report countless mentions of people who, kidnapped by fairies, never returned - or who, alternatively, returned in our world after considerable periods of time, sometimes even a few centuries (Missing Time; cf. once again the phenomenon of abductions).
The folklore scholar Katherine Briggs interprets these beliefs by asserting that Fairy Land is a 'world of the dead': "those who enter are now dead and bring back an illusory body that crumbles as soon as it collides with reality» [Bord, Fate, p. 173]. In our opinion, more correctly, it could rather be assumed that those who enter the "fairy kingdom" (and remain there for a considerable period of time) once returned in our world are no longer able to reconnect the "astral body" to the "physical vehicle" which, now abandoned for too long, tends to "crumble" not because it is an "illusory body", but rather because the connection has failed for too long between pneuma (who was "visiting" a fairy land) and the physical body that constituted its "container" when it comes to our earthly dimension.
Kidnappings of the Fairies e abduction alien
We have already mentioned the correspondences between the abductions of newborns and nurses by the Fairies e abduction alien. In this concluding section we will make some additional remarks. In his book on the "little people", after having reported the famous case of abduction of Antonio Villas Boas, researcher Janet Bord notes the points of contact between the mythology of the "renewal of the lineage" and the modern hypotheses on abduction [Fairies, p. 122]:
“Some argue that the aliens aim to generate a partly human ancestry because their race would be weakening and therefore would require the introduction of new genes. Some women claim they were abducted and impregnated by aliens, who later returned to take their offspring away. "
Graham Hancock too highlights the connections between the two phenomena distant in time and space, especially with regard to "inability of the spirit-child to grow, unless it is nursed either by its own mother or by a wet nurse». During these 'experiences', the human parents of the 'hybrid offspring' would be asked to hold their own children (or the 'hybrid' offspring of others), to breastfeed them., to play with them or in any case to have physical contact with them. An account of a 'kidnapped' woman [p. 364] says that she was made to hug a young hybrid: "in the end the little girl seemed regenerated. He turned to Karen and telepathically communicated the word "thank you"". This testimony, and many others of the same tenor, seem fully in line with the hypothesis, previously analyzed by us, which relates the 'kidnapping' of newborns and human nurses by the "small people" to their need for " to reinvigorate the lineage "thanks to the" heat "and energy of the" kidnapped "human beings, and to this end led to the" other world ".
Judging by the evidence of alien abductions, Hancock writes [p. 362]:
"[...] many UFOs have recognizable specialized rooms on board where hybrid babies (and even older children) are introduced to their human fathers and mothers. In various reluctant reports, the abductees explain that they were clearly told by the aliens that, willy-nilly, they should have taken care of the hybrids, and that the children "need their mothers ... they must know they have mothers." […] John Mack has found a number of his patients with a poignant idea that they have produced hybrid offspring "out there". These suffered from the terrible sense of loss of those separated from their children, and were unable to meet them except on rare occasions when “periodically 'kidnapped' mothers and fathers are led to see their hybrid children and encouraged to hold and love them. "
These "incubation" rooms in which hybrid children would be raised could also be related to a theme of Siberian shamanism. According to the North and Central Asian tradition, in fact [Legends about Siberian shamans, p. 101]:
“[…] The souls of the lower shamans are raised by the lower demons in special cots where they are fed with a bottle; while the souls of the higher shamans come reared in special nests. »
Could it be the same type of phenomenon investigated from different perspectives and cultural substrates, distant in time and space? We could then define the "shamanic vein" as a third 'tradition' that is added to those analyzed here, namely the phenomenon of kidnappings fairies and that of abduction alien? We will try to analyze more deeply the correspondences between the three "strands" in the future, in the next essay of this cycle [cf. Access to the Other World in the shamanic tradition, folklore and "abduction"].
"What we have here is a complete theory of contact between our race and another race, nonhuman, different in physical nature, but biologically compatible with us. Angels, demons, fairies, creatures from heaven, hell, or Magonia: they inspire our strangest dreams, shape our destinies, steal our desires… But who are they? "
- Jacques Vallée, Passport to Magonia (p.129)
Bibliography:
- Janet Bord, You do. Chronicle of the royal encounters with the small people (Mondadori, Milan, 1999).
- Graham Hancock, Shamans. The masters of humanity (TEA, Milan, 2013).
- Walter Kafton-Minkel, Underground worlds. The Myth of the Hollow Earth (Mediterranee, Rome, 2012).
- Laura Knight-Jadczyk, Alien abduction, demonic possession, and the legend of the vampire, Cassioapea.org.
- Mario Krejis, Tshecundia, Ibis. The magic of the soul. Introduction to Hermeticism.
(Editions of the Swan, Peschiera del Garda, Verona, 1999). - Robert Kirk, The Secret Kingdom (Adelphi, Milan, 1993).
- Jean Markale, Wonders and secrets of the Middle Ages (Arktos, Rome, 2013).
- Mario M. Rossi, The chaplain of the fairies. Appendix a Robert Kirk, The Secret Kingdom (Adelphi, Milan, 1993).
- John Pellegrino, Vampirism in the light of Jacques Vallée's theories, CentroStudiLaRuna.
- Luciana Vagge Saccorotti (edited by), Legends about Siberian shamans (Arcana, Padua, 1999).
- Jacques Vallee, Passport to Magonia.
- William Butler Yeats, The Celtic twilight (SE, Milan, 2001).
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