It’s often wondered: Are Faery Queens just demoted goddesses? Many books say that faery kings and Queens are simply demoted pagan gods and goddesses – that once upon a time they would have been important, but now since new and “better” gods have come into town, these old gods have lost their influence and are relegated to being a faery king or queen instead.
Nowhere near as good as a real god – just stuck in some fantasy fairy limbo.
But here’s the thing.
I don’t think they were demoted – I think they were always faery.
Let’s think of faery as some kind of shifty combo between nature spirits, consciousness of the land, and a particular life energy signature. Faery is always deeply connected with nature and often with the raw truths of life – death, birth, sex, fertility and desire – plus the deeper more mystical parts of life, including shapeshifting, magic and wisdom.
So if you are a god that is intertwined with the land, who governs sex or death or magic or transformation or desire… it makes sense that you are also a faery god too.
And almost all British deities have links with faery. All of them are deeply connected with the earth and either are known as fae or have lived in fairyland or married a faery or SOMETHING.
That’s because the sacred realm of the Celtic lands literally is faerieland.
It’s our Mount Olympus, our Satyaloka, our Midgard. In the Celtic myths of the British isles, the gods and spirits and faeries all come from the the Celtic otherworld, otherwise known as Annan or Avalon. This place is the source of all sacred wisdom and connection with the divine and the home of faeries, gods, spirits, the dead and all sorts.
To connect with the divine in Celtic myth we don’t ascend out of nature – we go DEEPER into nature.
Like every indigenous spirituality on this earth, the Celts believed in spirits of the earth and spirits of place – all directly connected to the land.
In fact, their concept of Goddess WAS the land – the powerful sovereignty goddess who
Why then do modern folk think faeries are so lame and childish?
It’s been a targeted campaign over two thousand years to wipe out the native belief in spirits and a plethora of gods, goddesses and beings and replace it with the One True God… who himself comes from the harsh desert landscapes and warring tribes of the middle east.
Faeries and spirits were demonised by the one true church and the god who would hold no idols before him. Belief in anything good or powerful that was not god was impossible, and the faeries became the emissaries of the DEVIL – the personification of all evil who the almighty God just doesn’t seem to be able to eradicate from the world despite being all powerful ?.
How do you cut off something’s power?
You shame it. Make it bad and evil, and then shame it by making it silly and laughable.
Only children, idiots and people in the past (who definitely are not as smart as us, right?) believe in faeries…
…. ignoring the fact that so many modern south east and east asian religions hold the earth and nature spirits as sacred in their spiritual practice, giving offerings to the spirits regularly.
Faeries lost their power and became romanticised here in the UK – no more the spirits of the ferocious mountain gorges or entities of lust and life power, they became tiny little flower spirits, sweet and harmless and empty of power or purpose.
It was an intentional effort to cut us off from connection with our land.
So these gods and goddesses were never demoted to faery; they were always faery as faery is the energy of the Celtic otherworld.
These ancient gods and goddesses hold raw, feral, powerful energies of life.
When I think of the most famous and beloved faerie kings and queens – Morgana, Guinevere, Aine, Mab etc. – it’s not just that they were once goddesses living in a separate more fancy, elevated and celestial sphere and then got downgraded to faery and got covered with twigs and roses and mud.
They were ALWAYS fae. They were always brimming with the magic of the Celtic otherworld, with the energy of the land. They were goddesses of sex and death, fertility and sovereignty and the summer sun – and what could be more faery than that?
Remember, in the British Isles, Celtic myth had it that the earth was the source of the sacred – the goddess was the land herself, so of course the gods and goddesses would be intimately connected with the land and the spirits of place.
Faery was ALWAYS important.
Faery is an energy signature.
Faery is feral and dirty, dealing with the realities of life – of death, birth, sex, illusion and desire. It’s complicated and shape shifty and ecstatic and painful. Faery is heady and intoxicating, flirty and sexy, raw and real. It’s the sensual feeling of mud beneath your toes and the scratch of a roses’ thorns. Ecstasy and laughter and giddy excitement.
It holds a very particular energy signature…
… and it holds all the expressions of communion with the divine that would be utterly inappropriate in a stoic British church, all the expressions that a mind-focused, punishing and sin-obsessed god and clergy just wouldn’t understand.
A faery god or goddess holds a powerful connection to the earth, and the god of the Church wanted us to get as far away from the earth as possible.
As the concept of what a god actually WAS became more disembodied and untouchable and more out there in the clouds and less connected to the actual physical realm, the ancient gods who were fae – who were about death and life and longing and earth and fertility – became less important and were forgotten.
But the ancient faery gods are still here.
Deep in the undercurrents of the land, the energy of the ancient gods still lives.
Like Gwyn Ap Nudd, the faery king of Glastonbury Tor, an ancient underworld god bridging the realms of death and life.
Like Morgan le Fay, the Arthurian sorceress and psychopomp who moves between the worlds, from fairyland to Britain to the land of the dead and back again.
Like Aine, the bright goddess of the sun in Ireland who is now named as a faery Queen.
Like Maeve, thought by many to be the root of Shakespeare’s intoxicating Queen Mab*, who was originally a warrior queen of Connaught who could sleep with 100 men a night.
Some faery gods and goddesses are so forgotten we have barely a name left to remember them by…
… and many have no names at all.
But they are still there, these distinctively British Celtic gods and goddesses. They are the sacred spirits of the earth, the fierce shakti fire of the mountains and valleys, the undying lineage of the sacred in our little island that is so steeped in the memories of the otherworld.
So, are Faery Queens just demoted goddesses?
No – they were never demoted to faery, because they always were faery – it’s only that their holy divine origins and status as gods were forgotten for centuries.
How wonderful that we get to remember them now.
*I mean, this is what people say. I am not convinced that there is a link between Mab and Maeve, but I think that the name Queen Mab became a catch-all for the delightful faery queen in poetry and literature over the last 500 years so I will let it slide.
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