This article was written for and published in 'The Cottingley Fairy Photographs: New Approaches to Fairies, Fakes, and Folklore'. After the book's publication it was released on academia.edu and shared for patrons only on my Patreon. I am now making it public on both my patreon and my blog. I encourage people who find this subject interesting to read the book which contains a variety of articles looking at the Cottingley hoax from different angles.
This text is my unedited original; the published versions contains some minor differences.
Theosophy and the Cottingley Fairies: the reshaping of fairy belief in the early 20th century
By Morgan Daimler
Introduction
The understanding of fairies in England that would have existed, particularly among children, in the early 20th century was shaped by a confluence of cultural factors which pervaded the late 19th and early 20th century and which reshaped the popular idea of fairies away from potentially malevolent, often human-sized beings and into twee butterfly winged sprites. This transformation was mainly influenced by Theosophy, Victorian popular ideas about fairies, and the early Edwardian romanticism of both childhood and the fairies which came to represent it. This reshaped belief, particularly popular among children, influenced not only the Cottingley photos but also their reception and the wider narrative around them which played into the expectations of the time.
Folkloric Fairies
The fairies that populate both folk belief and older literature are beings that can be helpful or dangerous, that enchant and terrify, that are intrinsically bound to humanity yet equally intrinsically foreign to humanity. They exist in different environments, across cultures, with a variety of personalities and habits, and in a wide range of forms[1]. The term itself, although falling out of favour, was for a long period used as a catchall word, an English term that was applied to both other languages in translation as well as used in a generic sense; more specific words are favoured today. The fairies of England are also beings who each generation claims as a relic of the past and yet persist in belief so that across 400 years they have always lingered into the new generation[2]. They are perpetually leaving and yet never gone, beings that persist in folk belief and in literature, and which show a remarkable adaptability in their persistence. Fairies in folklore are the fodder of other media, and have always been so, yet they have rarely faced greater changes than have been seen since the end of the Victorian era which re-envisioned them and changed them from terrors in the night which might be used to ensure children’s good behaviour into a child’s imaginary friend. Instead of warding the nursery with iron to keep them out, parents instead invited the fairies in as entertainment, filling bookshelves and picture frames with cavorting winged children. This tension between the folkloric fairies and those that would come to overtake popular culture is aptly illustrated in Kipling’s 1906 ‘Puck of Pook’s Hill’ where the eponymous Puck both avows that the fairies have all left England while also proclaiming, in the present tense, “Can you wonder that the People of the Hills don’t want to be confused with that painty-winged, wand-waving, sugar-and-shake-your-head set of imposters? Butterfly wings indeed!”[3].
Theosophical Fairies
Theosophy was a powerful influence on the way that popular culture in the early 20th century would understand fairies, moving away from the wider, cultural folkloric views and into a popular culture understanding that permeated the world of Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths during the period in which the Cottingley photographs were taken and published and has persisted through today. A spiritual movement that blended different contemporary occult ideas, Theosophy was begun in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky who freely borrowed ideas from various religions and spiritualities and merged them into her own personal theories. One aspect of this included fairies, who Blavatsky redefined to fit her wider ideas about the nature of reality.
The fairies of theosophy drew, to some small degree, from ideas laid out in the 15th century by an alchemist named Paracelsus who described elemental spirit which included a variety of beings usually considered fairies or falling under the wider umbrella of the concept[4],[5]. Fairies as actually understood in Theosophy though relied very little on precedent and instead leaned heavily into Blavatsky’s own theories of these beings, interchangeably referred to as nature spirits and elementals, which she described as less evolved souls seeking to eventually gain human incarnation and which were incapable of either true physical form or of higher intelligence[6]. This formed the basis of the wider Theosophical understanding of fairies, under any specific name, as both spirits of nature and as elemental forces which embody a particular natural element like earth or water, because all specific types of fairy beings are seen as cultural interpretations of a universal concept[7]. While Paracelsus’s elementals were or could be humanoid and capable of interacting with humans, even of reproducing with humans, Theosophy’s fairies or elementals were shaped by human perception, were intangible, and simplistic. They were, effectively, the embodiment of an aspect of nature which is seeking to evolve into human consciousness and form. They were also largely limited to their element, belonging to one of three elemental kingdoms that are seeking to evolve first into mineral then on into further more elaborate states until humanity is achieved[8].
This new spirituality was built on the bones of those that had come before, but unlike many other religions or occult traditions Theosophy attempted to anchor the fantastic within the rational. Theosophy envisioned itself as a merging of science and religion which sought to explain the supernatural within a wholly natural framework, to approach religion through science and science through religion[9]. This approach reflected wider ideas of the time, where folk belief was explained as a misunderstanding of natural phenomena rather than as genuine belief in something intangible. Changelings were rationalized away as children born with down syndrome, the fairy stroke that paralysed became the cerebral haemorrhage, and the fairies of Theosophy were explained as creatures of light and vibration which existed just beyond human perception.
Theosophy was popular with various prominent figures connected to the promotion of fairy beliefs of the time, most notably William Butler Yeats and George William Russell, both of whom promoted Irish fairy folklore to a wider audience, as well as WY Evans Wentz who sought explanations for who and what fairies were[10]. This reflected a contemporary union of occult spirituality and fairy belief that reflected a wider cynicism and yearning for simpler times coupled with a desire to believe[11]. Theosophist ideas moved fairies away from tangible reality and into the realm of imagination and mental perception, and the theories around elemental beings anchored them within the natural world, placing them within the realm of science. Those who followed Blavatsky in leading Theosophical thought further refined and delineated her ideas of these beings, describing both good and bad elemental spirits, and tying them firmly to fairies by using that term, as well as more specific ones such as kelpie or dryad, interchangeably with elementals[12]. Theosophy’s obsession with elementals impacted the wider cultural concept of fairies by changing them from the dangerous possessors of the forest into the protectors of the forest[13].
Victorian fairies
Victorian fairies in England were the result of various factors, including the previous literary adaptation of fairies coming out of earlier periods which miniaturized them, 19th century attempts to categorize fairies with science, and the effect of fiction and art which both infantilized fairies and placed them firmly within a romanticized notion of nature. This period is one of the most pivotal points in how popular culture would come to view fairies, with a surge in interest in romanticized folklore, nature, and entertainment. The fairies of folk belief became subjects of twee retellings and fairies more generally were rewritten and redefined away from dangerous and powerful beings and into the fodder of children's stories and art.
The earliest appearance of a tiny fairy can be found in Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, completed in 1597, in which he describes a fairy queen named Mab as ‘'In shape no bigger than an agate stone; On the forefinger of an alderman'[14]. Shakespeare also describes the connection between fairies and insects in this work where his miniscule Mab rides in a wagon built from insect parts including spiders’ legs and grasshoppers’ wings. In 1627 this imagery was furthered in Michael Drayton’s poem ‘Nymphidia’ which describes the fairies of the English fairy court as tiny beings who can fit in flowers, use parts of insects and bats to build with, and contests against bees. This reflected cultural fascination with the miniature and an ongoing disempowering of folkloric fairies in literature, best described by Diane Purkiss: ‘The Elizabethans and even more so the Jacobeans loved the miniature. In their hands, fairies shrank to tininess.’ and ‘Reducing the other to miniature scale reduces it to manageability too, making it laughable.’[15]. This miniaturization was combined with a Romanticism of nature filtered through the esoteric view of fairies as elemental spirits, as described by the 15th century alchemist Paracelsus, to produce the earth and air fairies which would gain popularity in literature and art. This in turn formed the groundwork of the later Victorian understanding of fairies as small nature spirits.
The Victorian fairy stories not only emphasized the smallness of these beings but also their overall powerlessness, limiting their abilities to the garden and plants or trees more generally. This theme of powerlessness or limited ability to affect humans, as with the wider theme of miniaturization, can also be traced back into earlier periods of English literature. Pope’s 1712 ‘Rape of the Lock’ includes small, relatively powerless fairies and William’s Blake subsequent 18th and 19th century works also describe small fairies. Moving into the Victorian era these diminished, safer fairies were taken out of adult literature and framed for an audience of children, reducing fairies not only into the realm of insects but also moralizing them into goodness and infantilizing them so that they became both innocent and childlike. As Carole Silver explains it: ‘As the elfin peoples became staples of children's literature, the perception grew that they themselves were childish....Some of the tales promoted a false set of conventions, one that made the fairies tiny and harmless - moral guides for children or charming little pets - and a tradition of sentimentalization and idealization developed.’[16]
JM Barrie’s 1904 play ‘Peter and Wendy’ and subsequent 1911 novel ‘Peter Pan and Wendy’ presents fairies that are in-line with these ideas: small, childlike, and with limited powers; Tinker Bell can aid Peter Pan in some ways but when she seeks to harm Wendy can only do so with the unwitting help of the Lost Boys. On stage in the play Tinker Bell was depicted as an indistinct ball of light who communicated through the sound of bells, existing largely through Peter Pan's perception and translation[17]. While slightly postdating the Cottingley fairy photos, Cicely Mary Barkers’s flower fairies nicely typify the culmination of these influences, with a range of art that depicted fairies as childlike figures clothed in the flowers or plants they were associated with. The tiny, glowing, nature-bound fairy may well be understood as the conglomeration of all of these influences into the 20th century. As Katherine Briggs aptly summarizes this overall rewriting of fairies as tiny and winged, ‘When [fairies] were given butterfly and dragonfly wings they were reduced to almost the status of insects, and in the sheltered days of the early twentieth century every care was taken to render them unalarming.’[18]
Post-Victorian Fairies
As the Edwardian era advanced from the Victorian and English culture wrestled with the trauma of the first world war fairies came to embody all that was innocent, symbolic of an idealized existence full of dance, art, and joy[19]. These fairies were depicted, as in the Cottingley photos or Cicely Mary Barker’s artwork, as tiny, pre-pubescent children with butterfly-like wings who might cause some small mischief but mostly passed their time cavorting in nature and celebrating life. This understanding, if not the imagery, combined both the Theosophical ideas of fairies as less evolved spirits with childlike morals and minds, as well as the Victorian ideas about fairies as the purview of children. The connection to nature and wild places had also become firm within the wider imagination echoing the romanticism for an idyllic past that pervaded a now industrialized culture.
Fairies of this new, modern type, can be found across an array of anecdotal accounts including those of Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths as well in both Marjorie Johnson’s mid-20th century ‘Seeing Fairies’ and The Fairy Investigation Soceity’s 21st century ‘Fairy Census’, demonstrating the indelible mark that these influences have had in sharp contrast to the view of fairies as human-sized and dangerous beings. The Cottingley fairy photographs and attached story played into various interests of the post World War 1 period and embraced a desire for a return to innocence and to an idealized English culture and offered an escape from the modern world and into whimsy[20]. Fairies during this period were creatures trapped between science and spirituality, between scepticism and belief, in a way that captured wider cultural themes of the time. Fairies were also beings who had been overtaken by their own, revamped, reputation so that their place in children’s stories and more widely as the purview of children meant that adults who believed in fairies were immediately seen as childish and unrealistic, with the esteemed folklorist Katherine Briggs noting that the Cottingley photographs were advocated for by ‘cranks and [those] into Theosophy’[21].
The Cottingley Hoax
The Cottingley fairy photos and the narrative that went with them emerged several years after the end of the Victorian era, in a milieu of mainstream fairy belief that had been established and popularized during that time. The tall, dangerous fairies of Celtic folklore had been largely changed into twee garden sprites that cavorted with children and spread whimsy, and it was these fairies who were captured in Elie Wright and Frances Griffiths’ stories and images in 1917. The first fairy that 10-year-old Frances Griffiths claimed to see was a tiny man clad in green hiding among willow leaves, and before the photographs were taken the two girls both swore to their parents that they had seen fairies in the beck, but both were dismissed by the adults who saw the fairies as a story to avoid punishment over repeated misbehaviour [22].
In 1920 Both of the girls’ mothers developed an interest in Theosophy and attended a lecture, ‘Fairy Life’ after which Mrs Wright told the speaker, Edward Garnder, about the girls’ photographs; this information was later passed on to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who became fascinated by the photos, believing them to be genuine[23]. Conan Doyle had a strong interest in both Theosophy and Spiritualism, believing that he had seen his mother’s apparition after she died, and was so confident in the veracity of the girls’ photographs that in the article he wrote for the Strand Magazine he intentionally left out the doubt raised by one of the experts who had examined the photos, only sharing that the expert did believe the photos were single exposures but not that they couldn’t say the photos weren’t faked[24]. The careful way that the photos were presented to the public intentionally led readers to a conclusion that supported belief, through the lens of the Theosophical and contemporary understanding of fairies.
The fairy images that were used to create the illusion in the photos came from illustrations in the 1914 Princess Mary’s Gift Book featuring both small wingless fairies as well as winged fairies; the wings notably edited by the girls from the original small dragonfly and folded insect wings into larger more dramatic butterfly wings. The images were typical of Edwardian popular fairies but would have been unrecognizable as fairies in older folklore[25] showing how these beliefs and beings had evolved into a new iteration that was unrecognizable in an older context.
Gardner and Conan Doyle both leaned into Wright and Griffiths youth, exaggerating it so that the reader would assume the two were younger than they actually were to play into ideas that children were connected to fairies because of their innocence[26]. Many questioned the veracity of the photos but many also believed in their truth because they fit into most of the contemporary preconceptions of who and what fairies were, and because the images were captured by children, a demographic believed to be closer to the nature of fairies and more likely to encounter them. That same factor also worked against the photographs as critics, including members of the Fairy Investigation Society, pointed out that the imagery fit with the aesthetic of Edwardian children’s books, from the fairies’ outfits to hairstyles, and that they were in stark contrast to depictions of fairies in Celtic and Norse folklore[27].
The controversy which surrounded the Cottingley photographs captured not only the continuing debate between believers and non-believers in the supernatural[28] but illustrated the ongoing attempt to scientifically classify and study fairies which had fascinated Victorian folklorists[29]. Wright and Griffiths photographs were touted as irrefutable evidence of fairy existence, while simultaneously supporting the contemporary popular ideas of who and what fairies were. Theosophy played a role in both shaping those views in the decades leading up to the events and in promoting the photos.
Conclusion
The Cottingley fairies became a legend in their own right and have persisted even after Wright and Griffiths admitted that the photos had been faked, perhaps because even now the story and images play into the imagination and the popular ideas of fairies which still remains a hundred years later. So strong has this influence been since the late 19th century that the image of the small winged child as fairy is now a cultural standard, found in art, fiction, and modern media including television and movies. Theosophy has left a permanent and perhaps indelible mark on fairy belief which combined with the Victorian era’s reshaping of fairies into the purview of children to create the twee winged beings of Wright and Griffiths’ photographs as well as innumerable others found across fiction and into modern anecdotal accounts of fairies.
References
Bihet, Francesca, Late-Victorian Folklore: Constructing the Science of Fairies, Revenant Journal 2021. Accessed February 20th 2024 from https://www.revenantjournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/009-Late-Victorian-Folklore.pdf
Blavatsky, Helena, 1893, Elementals. Accessed on February 25th 2024 https://www.theosophy.world/resource/elementals-hp-blavatsky
Briggs, Katherine, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature. Routledge, New York New York, 1967
Johnson, Marjorie. Seeing Fairies. Anomalist Books: San Antonio Texas, 2014
Kipling, Rudyard. Puck of Pook’s Hill. MacMillan; London. 1906
Kruse, J., (2019) "Ray of Light" Tinkerbell and Luminous Fairies', Accessed on February 23, 2024 https://britishfairies.wordpress.com/2019/01/06/ray-of-light-tinkerbell-and-luminous-fairies/
Paracelsus (nd) Tractatus IV Accessed on February 24, 2024 https://theomagica.com/blog/paracelsus-wisdom-on-the-ecosystem-of-spirits
Pazdziora, J. Patrick. ‘Cynical Mysticism’. Literature and Theology, vol 31 no 3, September 2017, pp 285-304 Published by: Oxford University Press. Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/48558022
Purkiss, Diane. At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies, Hobgoblins, and Other Troublesome Things. New York, New York; New York University Press, 2000
Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. 1980. Accessed February 22, 2024 from http://shakespeare.mit.edu/romeo_juliet/full.html
Silver, Carole. ‘On the Origins of Fairies: Victorians, Romantics, and Folk Belief’. Browning Institute Studies, Vol. 14, The Victorian Threshold (1986), pp. 141-156 https://www.jstor.org/stable/25057792
Silver, Carole. Strange & Secret Peoples: Fairies and the Victorian Consciousness, 1999
Smith, Paul. ‘The Cottingley Fairies: The End of a Legend’. In The Good People: New Fairylore Essays edited by Peter Narvaez. 371 – 405. Lexington, Kentucky, The University Press of Kentucky, 1991
Theosophy World, 2024. ‘Fairies’ Accessed February 24, 2024 https://www.theosophy.world/encyclopedia/fairies
Woodyard, Chris. ‘The Many Roads to Fairyland’, Ohio State University: Fairies and the Fantastic Conference, 2019
Young, Simon, (2023) Cottingley Fairy Interviews. Accessed on February 20, 2024 https://www.academia.edu/112469730/Cottingley_Interviews
[1] Katherine Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, 14
[2] Ibid, 3
[3] Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook’s Hill, 11
[4] Paracelsus (nd) Tractatus IV Accessed on February 24, 2024 https://theomagica.com/blog/paracelsus-wisdom-on-the-ecosystem-of-spirits
[5] Theosophy World, 2024. ‘Fairies’ Accessed February 24, 2024 https://www.theosophy.world/encyclopedia/fairies
[6] Helena Blavatsky, ‘Elementals’, 1893. Accessed February 25, 2024 https://www.theosophy.world/resource/elementals-hp-blavatsky
[7] Theosophy World, ‘Fairies’
[8] ibid
[9] Purkiss, Diane. At the Bottom of the Garden: A Dark History of Fairies, Hobgoblins, and Other Troublesome Things. 2000. 285
[10] Silver, Carole. Strange & Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness. 40
[11] Pazdziora, J. Patrick. ‘Cynical Mysticism’. Literature and Theology, 287
[12] Silver, 39
[13] Chris Woodyard, ‘The Many Roads to Fairyland’, Ohio State University: Fairies and the Fantastic Conference, 2019
[14] William Shakespeare, Romeo & Juliet
[15] Purkiss, 181 & 182
[16] Silver, 187
[17] John Kruse, 2019
[18] Briggs, The Fairies in Tradition and Literature, 249
[19] Purkiss, 287-288
[20] Pazdziora, 285-286
[21] Bihet, Francesca, Late-Victorian Folklore: Constructing the Science of Fairies, Revenant Journal 2021. 113-114
[22] Smith, Paul. ‘The Cottingley Fairies: The End of a Legend’. In The Good People: New Fairylore Essays edited by Peter Narvaez, 374
[23] Purkiss, 286
[24] ibid, 287
[25] Bihet, 113
[26] Ibid, 288
[27] Bihet, 112-113
[28] Smith, Paul. ‘The Cottingley Fairies: The End of a Legend’. In The Good People: New Fairylore Essays edited by Peter Narvaez, 372
[29] Silver, Carole. ‘On the Origins of Fairies: Victorians, Romantics, and Folk Belief’. Browning Institute Studies, Vol. 14, The Victorian Threshold, 142 - 143