Everyone—or almost everyone—agrees that there are no such things as fairies nowadays, and probably never were. They seem to belong to the class of mildly amusing, spooky things mentioned in urban fantasies for fun and in antireligious tracts to suggest that believing in God is just as silly. To wonder what fairies are, and what it would mean to “believe in them,” are questions lost in time—relevant if we wish to understand the poet W. B. Yeats, perhaps, but not to a “modern” sensibility. After years of such skepticism, though, it is perhaps time to entertain another view: that banishing the little people from our lives was only a prelude to dispensing with the notions of God and the soul of man. If we cannot believe in fairies, we cannot properly believe in anything at all.
Of course, our fictions and even our serious thinking about the terrestrial past or the astronomical present are full of things like fairies. Once upon a time there were many almost-human species whom our ancestors encountered with mingled fear and wonder. Nowadays we call them Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, and the like. Our immediate ancestors perhaps remembered them instead as elves, dwarves, giants, goblins, and even (maybe) mermen. According to folk memory, particularly in Europe, dwarves were cunning artificers, while elves liked dance and revelry. Of course, we may be wrong to think that we truly remembered those long-lost almost-humans: Perhaps instead they were only speculative imaginings to explain old bones and arrowheads, fossils and mysterious cave paintings—just as our own stories about Neanderthals are also, mostly, fantasies.
It is also very likely that there are species out there beyond the Sun as sapient as we are. What we imagine about them shows much more about ourselves than about biological possibility. How probable is it that we would recognize intelligence in some utterly alien form when it takes so much effort even to acknowledge that wolves or octopuses or bees have their own lives and thoughts?
Of one thing at least we can be confident: The other human species are no more, and there are probably no galactic visitors here, either. For now, there are only us, and the stories we tell are always of creatures who have long since gone away. Maybe they left England at the Reformation, as one of Rudyard Kipling’s stories suggests? But the same notion is to be found many centuries earlier, in Chaucer or even in Homer. Long ago, perhaps, there were gods as well as fairies walking secretively among us. Nowadays their very essence is to have always gone away, to have hidden themselves in the hills, or in an alongside universe, a fairyland or an imagined afterlife. Fairies obey other rules, and hint that the world is stranger than we think. Even the story of their having gone away is more significant than simply to explain that there aren’t any fairies nowadays, whether they tired of our company, or are straightforwardly deceased. Their very essence is that they aren’t here and now—and so must be somewhere else.
Unraveling the significance of the stories is easier if we distinguish the four layers of interpretation identified in medieval biblical hermeneutics: literal, moral, analogical, and anagogical. On the literal account, the stories simply represent our own and our ancestors’ best guesses about the other species with whom we shared the world (or may share the cosmos). The moral reading, rather, suggests what other axioms and attitudes might be possible to us, or to creatures only a little different from us: Is our enjoyment of the young, our respect for age or for authority, our sexual confusion or religious fervor rooted more in biology or old tradition? Are the “moral mysteries” species-specific (and so not strictly binding on all sapient or rational creatures)? Perhaps—many recent fantasies suggest—the fairies are bound more by honor than by empathy, in a hierarchical society (sociologically, a status society rather than a contract one, and moved by shame much more than guilt). Analogically, “fairy stories” encapsulate metaphysical truths or speculations: Perhaps that there is no necessary “logical” connection between cause and effect, or that the universe is not, after all, homogenous and subject everywhere to the very same natural laws. Maybe we should not ignore the role of intentional action in the state of things. Maybe, on the other hand, there is a question whether everything with an “outer” life also has an “inner” (fairies, after all, in some versions, have no “souls”). But the “anagogical” interpretation is perhaps most useful: Fairies represent forgotten human possibilities and strange philosophies that we might grow to understand, to transcend, or to embrace. What is it that we have dismissed in imagining or insisting on the fairies’ long, drawn-out departure? Are we certain that it wasn’t subterfuge, and that they may not linger still?