Taught online via Zoom
Sundays, April 30, May 7, 14, 21, 28, and June 4
2 pm - 4 pm ET
$150 Patreon Members / $175 General Admission

PLEASE NOTE: All classes will also be recorded and archived for students who cannot make that time

What is a fairy? A diminutive humanoid creature with insect wings, a shimmering gown, a magic wand, and the ability to bestow blessings, cast enchantments or fulfill wishes? This image is so wide-spread in modern cultures that, like unicorns, dragons and merfolk, the fairies have almost ceased to generate the kind of human responses that once upon a time included such emotions as primal terror, erotic ecstasy, trance-like euphoria, or total disorientation.

The fairy-folk of the past were not the small, friendly, or wish-fulfilling entities we know from our childhoods; they were often god-like, violent, shape-shifting and could command the fierce powers of the earth, the elements and the atmosphere. Unlucky humans could be ravished, maimed, killed, or carried away never to be seen again should they cross over into fairy territory, draw unnecessary attention to themselves, or show disrespect to these fantastical people. Fairy beings were connected to sacred sites, geographical anomalies, to dark magic and quite often to the dead. They could appear in any number of forms: shining lords and ladies parading on horseback, great dogs with luminous eyes, water-horses, seductive beauties, a green mist, dancing flames or even as someone’s deceased relatives.

Like human beings they ate, procreated, organized themselves into societies and hierarchies. They sometime even died; glimpses of fairy funeral processions were noted throughout the centuries. The fairy family is incredibly diverse and, as we will see, in every culture, such beings exist side-by-side with their human counterparts, in a parallel universe often experienced as an inverted or mirror version of the mortal world.

In this class, we will be trace the history of the development of the current concept of the fairy following a variety of clues and submerged streams of cultural belief. Although the core focus in this class will be on the fairy as cultural phenomenon in Western European cultures, we will travel across the globe to meet a wide array of astounding fairy cousins from every clime. We will make note of their shared characteristics as well as the different solutions that humans have invented to deal with their sometimes troublesome, sometimes beneficial presence.

We will see how the indigenous pagan belief systems of Old Europe were interwoven and often covered over by the Christianization process of the late-antique and early medieval periods as missionaries for the new religion began to spread throughout the West, building churches and co-opting sites long sacred to native deities. The old gods and nature spirits survived in folk belief and in the margins of religious art and architecture and were described in manifold ways by every-day people who continued to experience their presence in relation to local life-ways and ancestral landscapes. Healers and seers, cunning folk and those eventually labeled witches often held special knowledge of such powers. These shamanic, folk-wisdoms were later twisted by Christian authorities in the early modern period to serve the purpose of political scapegoating and state building.

Never-the-less, poets, playwrights and artists from the late Renaissance onwards celebrated the fairy-lore of their time and incorporated it into forms that would disseminate it for centuries to come on the stage, in print and in the visual and performing arts. And, in the 17^th century, a serious anthropological study of the fairy realm and tradition began to take shape, blooming into a fairy revival across Western culture that culminated in the 19^th century, an era when fairies as we now know them populated every facet of cultural life.

Over the course of six weeks of image rich lectures and in-class discussion, we will examine the relation of modern consciousness to this abundance of new fairy activity: occultism, the biological sciences, children’s literature, depth psychology, and the rise of mass media and cinema, all of which gave the fairy world renewed vitality, bringing them once again into human awareness, but also placing them in the closed perimeter of the human head, the skull-cave where modernity had confined the faculty of imagination. The fairy’s perceived nature as a marginal, dangerous, and even abject figure has often provided a name and metaphor for populations seen as liminal or labeled perverse- the queerness of the fairy in the modern mind will be looked at from a variety of angles.

The course concludes by examining the late 20^th and early 21^st century idea that fairies are not so much entities as deep bio-ethical relationships between human beings and nature, innate responses by homo sapiens to the metamorphic forces of the living world. This view suggests that the ongoing ecocides of the industrial centuries are directly related to our exile from earlier, earth-centered realities in which fairies played important roles.

Each week the instructor will provide primary and secondary source documents for students as well as links to a wide variety of sources in many media. Discussion, questioning and sharing will be encouraged.

Week 1: The Origins of Fairies and the Anthropology of Fairy Lore

1. What is a Fairy? Defining terms in a historical context.

2. Animism, rural life and spirit-imbued nature

3. Human relationships with invisible beings

4. A history of the historical work on Fairy beliefs

5. Pre-Christian Europe: The old gods, old spirits, and the old lifeways

6. Pagan mythologies and their transformation after Christianization.

7. Folk-memory and folklore as clues to earlier cultures in relation to Fairy beliefs

Week 2: The Fairy Cousins

1. The Fairy Cousins: Fairy-like beings across the world

2. The classical world and indigenous European spirits

3. Asia: China, Japan, Korea and Tibet

4. The Arab and Islamic traditions

5. The Pacific Islands

6. Indonesia

7. African cultures

8. The Americas

9. 2. The Fairy Menagerie: Fairy beings in animal form

Week 3: The Genealogy, Geography & Typologies of Fairies Across Europe

1. The Secret Commonwealth: Fairy society and Fairy civilization

2. The Elemental Tradition: wood, water, air, fire, earth

3. Fairy folk and the domestic sphere

4. Underground Fairies: mining and the dead

5. Otherworld: the Good People and where they dwell

6. The fabulous and/or Fairy ancestor in noble and royal families

Week 4: The Fairies and Christianity

1. The Christianization of the Pagans

2. Survival of pagan deities and spirits in new forms

3. Fairies and the transformation of pagan practices

4. The Fairy tradition and Christian holy days

5. The Christian explanations of the Fairies

6. Witches, healers, cunning folk and the world of Fairy

7. The Fairie Queene: Elizabethan fairies and Gloriana’s court

8. The Fairy Godmother and the Cursing Fairy: potent hybrid archetypes

Week 5: The Victorian Fairies in Literature, Science and the Arts

1. Shakespeare’s Revival: A Midsummer Night’s Dream & The Tempest

2. German Romanticism: Dark fairies and national paganisms

3. Fairy Science: anthropologists, archeologists and folklorists

4. Fairies and the 19^th century occult revival

5. Children’s literature and book illustration

6. The Genre of the Fairy Painting: sources and themes

7. Fairies on the Victorian stage

Week 6: The Thoroughly Modern Fairies in 20^th Century Culture

1. Captured Fairy: techno-occultism and the photographing of Fairies

2. Guardian Fairy: Fairies as symbols of childhood

3. Queer Fairy: liminality, decadence, perversion, abjection

4. Pop Fairies: Disney and anti-Disney Fairies

5. Star Fairy: Fairies on film, key examples from world cinema

6. Green Fairy: ecology and environmentalism

7. Future Fairy: fairy possibilities and magical horizons

Jason Lahman is an American visual artist, sculptor, poet and cultural historian. He studied illustration at Parsons School of Design and art history at the New School in New York City. He holds an MA in modern European history with an emphasis in the history of science and technology from San Francisco State University where he taught in the humanities department. He completed his PhD coursework in the history of science at the University of California at Davis and has lectured widely on the topic of technology and visual culture, with a special emphasis on early cinema and automata. He is currently based in Portugal where he maintains a full-time studio art practice.