Faeries

Faeries
Also called	the Fey; the Good Neighbours and a hundred other placating names, none of them descriptive
Class	Other — among those that came before man
Dwells	the deep woods, and other ground man has not taken
Feeds on	the living things of their domain, guiltily; and on man, without guilt
Approach	the trick, or the bargain; rarely possession
Earliest account	European, oral, and old enough that the placating names outlived the accounts
Claimed by	the Golden Dawn and a long tail of others have claimed terms; none has produced them
Consensus among us Real, territorial, and the only Others we know of with a functioning moral order. That order excludes man completely, and we think we know why. inherited contested

Those that came before man. Creatures of Nature. Faeries are denizens of the wild, spawned by the life of fauna and flora. They do not distinguish themselves from the rest of the creatures of nature although they are the only ones capable of accessing the Dark. Faeries are able to communicate with all those of nature and feel at home among them. inherited

Faeries, or Fey, have always been agonised by their need to sustain themselves through consuming others. Their culture revolves around self flagellation and forgiveness asked of their surroundings. However this sentiment does not exist towards humans. In the past Fey have feasted on humans regularly and in some cultures have terrorised humans so much that they became local deities that received human sacrifices. inherited

The exception in their ethics

The inherited passage above contains the most important sentence anyone has written about the fey and passes over it in half a line. They have a moral order, it is elaborate and sincerely held, and man is the single exception to it. contested

This is not indifference. Indifference would be simpler and would not require the machinery. They ask forgiveness of a deer. They flagellate over a felled tree. They maintain, by every inherited account, a rigorous and exhausting ethics of consumption toward every living thing in their domain — and none of it extends to a human being, ever, in any account we hold. inherited

Read against the replacement grievance this stops being a puzzle. Their moral community is the natural world: the thing they had, and still partly have. Man is not a member of it. Man is the category that took the position and is therefore outside the order entirely — not an evil to be resisted but a thing that does not qualify for consideration, in the way a stone does not. A fey asking a deer's pardon and then playing with a man for a season is not being inconsistent. It is applying its ethics correctly, by its own lights, and we are simply not in scope. contested

They do not want your body

This is the distinction that matters and the one that gets seekers killed, because the djinn bargain is better known and the two are assumed to work alike. They do not. ⚠ warning

A djinn takes the flesh in order to walk in the world, because it has no ground of its own. The fey never lost their ground. They hold the deep woods and whatever else man has not taken, and having a place already, they have no use for a body to be in the world with. contested

What they want is a plaything, and they want it in their own domain. The direction of the whole transaction is reversed: the djinn comes out, the fey take you in. Possession is rare in the accounts and appears to be regarded as crude. The characteristic outcome is a person removed — walked into the woods and kept there, bent to their entertainment on their ground, for as long as the interest lasts. inherited

The methods are the trick and the bargain, and both are common:

The trick

Made to whoever will accept it, structured so that a reasonable person accepts. Accounts stress that the terms are never technically false. The fey are described as fastidious about this in a way that reads as pride rather than restraint.

The bargain

Genuine, negotiated, and honoured. As with the djinn, the deal is not the trap. The trap is what a person is willing to agree to, and it is worth noticing that they bother negotiating at all — a thing that could simply take would not need your yes. contested

The duration is the part nobody warns about. There is no account in our possession of a fey tiring quickly. ⚠ warning

Competing accounts

unsigned— inherited, a formula repeated in many places with no origin inherited

The names are all flattery. Good Neighbours, Fair Folk, the Gentry. Every people that lived beside them arrived independently at the practice of never calling them what they are, which tells you what the relationship was.

Against it: True of the naming and inferred about everything else. A people may flatter what it fears without the fear being warranted.

Flagrent— wiki correspondence firsthand

I do not think they are cruel. I have thought about this for a long time and I keep arriving at the same place, which is that a cat is not cruel either. Cruelty needs the other thing to count. That is what is frightening about them and it is not the same as being frightened of a monster.

Against it: A sympathetic reading from someone who reports no encounter, only a long consideration of the accounts.

How this entry was assembled

Drawn from: The existing entry, inherited from an unnamed hand. European oral material at many removes, mostly through collections assembled by people who thought they were preserving stories.

Compiled by: Gershon.

Known weaknesses: Nearly everything here descends from folklore collected in the nineteenth century by antiquarians with a project, and that filter is not removable. The ethics-exception reading is ours and rests on one inherited sentence. We have no firsthand account of a fey encounter at all — the account above is a reading, not a report.

Wanted: A firsthand account from anyone. Any account of a fey extending its moral order to a human being, which would break this entry and which we would rather have than be right.

See also

The fastidiousness about exact terms described above is followed up under City of London, which suggests the instrument may be older than the institutions now running on it.