Fairies and Demons
I left her at the garden gateway,
my jewel, my fairy lover,
eyes like stars, lips like berries,
voice like a gentle harp.
I left her in the cattle-meadow,
my brown-haired fairy lover,
eyes like stars, cheeks like roses.
When I kissed her, I tasted pears.
--Irish song to the Leanan Sidhe, the fairy lover
The Irish believe that spirits inhabit the land around us - spirits who sometimes fall in love with human beings and lure them away from ordinary life.
I don't deny the Irish their beliefs. I'll say that from the onset. Nor do I deny the existance of the Sidhe, or nature spirits - the spirits from which the sanitized idea of the 'fairy' came from. That's the thing about many of the pagan ideas though - invading faiths came in and sanitized (or demonised, in some cases a bit of both) the old. In a lot of cases that still happens between one faith and another... but that's a digression and an argument for another time and place, (and as I type this up, Facebook seems to be the place for a raging debate between radical Islamist rhetoric and Christian edicts).
Anyway - the old spirits of the land, and their infatuation with human kind and luring them away... um... yeah-no. Yes, I'm aware there are many traditional folk songs about just such a thing - Thomas the Rhymer being one of them... and even many folk stories about such things occurring... but I can't help but feel that these are a case of the new wanting to make the old seem bad, so... lets first of all demonise the spritual-sexual connection inherent in nature based faiths, and second of all relegate their symbols and icons to something that is somehow... less.
Consider the dryad for example - the spirit of a tree. The energy and living essence of one of the life giving 'children' of the gods. Most consider dryads to be beautiful women who come out of the spirit of the tree to seduce mortal men and keep them for eternity. If such were true... what about all the 'tree hugging hippies' (no that's not meant as a derogatory term at all, it's why it's in quotation marks). Have they all been seduced and captivated by such beautiful creatures, or are they simply feeling the spirit and energies of the trees themselves. That nature spirit that dwells within them?