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Friends,
Since 2019, I’ve lived in Ireland. It’s a country being pulled away from Catholic traditionalism and towards humanistic tech neoliberalism. But the spiritual Celtic landscape has never gone away, either. Here, the supernatural, paranormal, mystical, and occult still hold their strange and potent sway. But where they were once “contained” by religion or traditional belief structures, now they don’t reside in the same place in Irish experience or psyche. Where does magic “go” when it’s displaced? So here’s my series on the spiritual realm of Ireland, which will be looking at Ireland’s spiritual landscape specifically, and how that gives us a picture of the spirit and modernity in general. The first in the series was AEWCH 186 with Dr. Andrew Sneddon on Irish witchcraft and belief.
But let’s be honest, when we think of magic in Ireland, the first place our mind goes is faeries. So I asked anthropologist Dennis Gaffin to join me. Dennis is a researcher and author of several books, including In Place: Spatial and Social Order in a Faeroe Islands Community, and his recent novel on theosophy, The Divinity Inquiry. But it’s his work Running with the Fairies: Towards a Transpersonal Anthropology of Religion that we focus on the most.
I’m so excited to share this episode with you, friends.
SHOW NOTES
WHAT BOOK YOU SHOULD READ?
With so few books of anthropological scholarship on fairies in Ireland – ones that don’t merely dismiss the phenomena out of hand – Dennis’s book is a standout. So your best bet is to go way back to anthropologist Walter Evans-Wentz’s kind of sort of classic book, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. Evans-Wentz’s big book is a favorite of academics, lay scholars, and para researchers because of its rigor, and shows up in the strangest places.
WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO?
A great episode, I think, that pulls apart belief and disbelief, magic and where it hides in plain sight, is AEWCH 141 with religious scholar Jason Josephson-Storm. (BTW, I really, really love that episode!)
WHAT SHOULD YOU LOOK INTO FURTHER?
Here are three articles on fairies and fairy faith in Ireland to send you down this path. First, when a Teachta Dála (or TD, a member of Irish government) blamed fairies on poor road conditions. Second, a massive road project ro-routed to preserve a fairy bush. Third, a statue of a fairy banned from public display because it was considered offensive.
MORE ON DENNIS
To be honest, info on Dennis is pretty hard to find! But here’s a good long review of Running with the Fairies . And here’s an issue of The Irish Theosophist featuring some writings on fairies. I didn’t know about the publication (from the 19th century) until I read Dennis’s work.
Until next time, friends!
CH
Conner Habib 