This is an interview I did with
Simon Young which appeared in the Fairy
Investigation Society Newsletter 2, New Series, Jul 2015.
SY: Caroline, first of all thanks so
much for talking to us. Could you start by telling us something about what you
are studying and how you got there?
CT: I did a PhD at the University of Melbourne, Australia,
on what can be generally termed ‘nature worship’ in Late Bronze Age or ‘Minoan’
Crete. It involved looking at images and sites in Crete and Greece and at
comparative material from Cyprus, the Levant and Egypt. I focused on miniature
images engraved upon gold rings and stone seals dating to the Cretan
Neopalatial Period (ca.1750–1430 BCE) that depict human figures interacting
with the landscape through religious activity focused upon trees, stones and
mountains, as seen in Figure 1, as well as the actual sites where such activity
may have occurred.
Figure 1. Minoan style gold ring from Mycenae, Greece.
I came to this topic through a lifelong interest in
religion – specifically ancient religion – and art. I have a background in art
and craft and worked as a medieval style tapestry weaver at the Australian Tapestry Workshop for fourteen years, before
going back to university in 2004 and starting my PhD in 2009. I also have a
background in nature religion, having been involved in Contemporary Paganism since
1985, before which I was a rather disinterested Catholic. In the case of Minoan
religion I am interested in what appears to be a communicative relationship
between humans and the landscape, expressed through ritual, which suggests that
the Minoans perceived the landscape as animate.
Many images on the gold rings feature full-sized human
figures apparently communicating with tiny hovering human figures that seem to
emerge from the sky or in the vicinity of trees and rocks, as can be seen in
Figures 2, 3 and 4. In Minoan archaeology these have traditionally been
interpreted as ‘envisioned epiphany’ scenes, meaning that they are thought to
depict a vision of a deity or spirit that the human figure in the image is experiencing.
Figure 2. Drawing of the bezel of a Minoan gold ring
(Ashmolean Museum).
Figure 3. Drawing of the bezel of a gold ring from
Elateia, Greece.
Figure 4. Drawing of the bezel of a Bronze ring from
Khania, Crete.
SY: Now many people reading this will be
saying what has this to do with fairies? Well, I’m presenting here Figure 5
from a recent article of yours. Can you explain what the image we are looking
at shows and why it might be argued that this is a particularly early depiction
of a fairy?
Figure 5. Drawing of the bezel of a gold ring from
Isopata, Crete.
CT: As you can see in Figure 5, a tiny female figure
hovers in the upper right of the image while four larger human figures appear
to be in an ecstatic state, possibly dancing. Other objects hover in the sky as
well, such as an eye, a snake, and a possible shooting star or bean pod (we
don’t really know what it is, some think it might be a sprig of wheat) and
perhaps a small container, but it is the tiny human figure that I’m suggesting
is akin to what we might term a fairy. I’m not the first one to suggest this;
Lucy Goodison proposed the same thing in her book Holy Trees and Other Ecological Surprises (Just Press, 2010).
In examples where hovering human figures seem to
emerge from trees, as in Figure 6, I tend to think that what we might be
looking at are what were termed in ancient Greece ‘Tree Nymphs’, which were
long-lived – but not necessarily immortal – numina of trees. There are other
types of nymphs as well, but generally they tend to live in natural places such
as in forests and on mountains rather than cities. Although Crete is part of
the Greek Islands today, the ancient Minoans were not Greek, but I think that
such figures emerging from trees express the same idea as the Greek nymph.
Figure 6. Drawing of a clay sealing from Haghia
Triada, Crete.
Not all Minoan examples are associated with trees;
some appear in conjunction with architectural structures such as buildings,
stone altars or boats, as can be seen in Figures 7 and 8.
Figure 7. Drawing of a clay sealing from Zakros.
Figure 8. Drawing of the bezel of a gold ring from
Amnissos, Crete.
SY: So these would be boat or building
spirits?
CT: Well, in Figure 7 the hovering figure seems to emerge
from what might be either a building rendered in small scale or an altar
structure that has what are termed in Minoan archaeology ‘Horns of
Consecration’(stylized bull’s horns and/or possibly the Egyptian sign for the
horizon consisting of two stylized mountain peaks with a valley in between
them) on top of it. Whether it is a building or an altar, the Horns of
Consecration suggest that it is a sacred structure, so this hovering figure is
probably indicating some sort of numen of the structure. There is also a small
altar on the right with a plant on top of it which a full-sized male figure is
leaning over. In Figure 8 the hovering figure, while above a boat, actually
emerges from a tree or branch that is also hovering above the boat, so I think
this is some sort of numen of the wood that the boat is made from. Boats were
considered to be alive in the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean, as evidenced
by texts from the Levantine city of Ugarit (on the Syrian coast opposite
Cyprus) that speak of a boat being ‘killed’ by a storm. Maritime archaeologist,
Sara A. Rich, has suggested that Levantine cedar wood ship masts were
considered to be manifestations of the tree goddess, Asherah. It may have been
the case in Crete as well that the animate tree continued being inhabited by
its numen after it was turned into a boat.
Whatever the location of the tiny hovering figures in
the Minoan images, I think they represent a communicative relationship between
a human being and a spirit of the environment. In Greek literature, only heroes
and heroines (think Achilles or Helen in the Iliad) saw supernatural beings in anthropomorphic form, often
because they were half-divine themselves or especially favoured by the gods.
Other people had to settle for seeing such beings in their natural forms for
example, the god Zeus as a thunder storm or Athena as a shooting star. This
might be what we are looking at in Figure 9.
In the examples on the Minoan rings the human figures
who see the tiny hovering figures may be claiming to have a more intimate
relationship with the animate environment ‒ which manifests to them in
anthropomorphic form ‒ than those who see shooting stars, birds, insects, or
symbols, as seen in Figure 9. A spirit that takes a human form is easier for an
actual human being to relate to and may suggest a particular type of skill or
special quality of the human that gives them the ability to see the
supernatural being in human form. Of course ‘supernatural’ isn’t really the
right word here, as this is not occurring outside of or beyond nature. I should
say ‘numen’, meaning the spirit or divine power presiding over a thing or
place.
Figure 9. Drawing of the bezel of a gold ring from
Vapheio, Greece.
In these particular examples, being on gold rings
owned by elite Minoan administrators and perhaps rulers, it is these types of
people who are claiming to have an intimate relationship with the animate world
around them and who may also have had priestly roles within their society. This
does not preclude the regular people of ancient Crete also having a
relationship with the numina of the environment, and they probably did, but the
artwork that depicts these images was commissioned by and belonged to the palatial
elites.
SY: You rightly point out that there is
a lot of uncertainty here. This is, after all, a civilization with no usable
written records: that is we can’t yet read their writing. The images are open
to many different interpretations. But if we accept that there are ‘spirits’ of
some kind here what kind of spirits are they likely to be? Some talk of spirits
of the dead, others nature spirits? Are these, thinking of arguments about
fairies in Britain and Ireland, perhaps the same thing in the end?
CT: That’s right, the scripts of Minoan Crete (Cretan
Hieroglyphic and Linear A) are not translated so in deciphering Minoan religion
we have to rely on images and archaeological sites, as well making comparative
analogies with other societies. Yes, the Minoan examples may have been both
spirits of the human dead and animate aspects of the natural world at the same
time. We don’t really know what the Minoans thought about where the dead went
when they left their human bodies, but in some cultures ritual offerings are
given to the dead for a certain amount of time, or the remains of the dead are
treated in a particular way for a specific period, until it is deemed that they
have moved from the realm of the human dead (which could be earthbound or in an
otherworld) to the realm of the ancestors.
The ancestors may not be so much in an ‘other’ place,
as in another state of being, and may return to, or manifest in, familiar
earthly locales. In some cultures ancestors are associated with the chthonic,
earthly gods, or with the celestial deities and the stars. Sometimes more elite
ancestors have a more comfortable afterlife while regular people have a
correspondingly ordinary afterlife. The Minoan hovering figures could certainly
be ancestors and of course, as you say, British and Irish fairies are
associated with the dead. I still think, however, that they emerge from within
the real world rather than come from some remote unknowable place outside the
world.
SY: So if we can just back up for a
minute: Let’s take this argument on trust for a moment and call these being
‘fairies’. Is this perhaps the oldest depiction of a fairy in the world?
CT: Well, it depends on what you think a fairy is. In
British and Irish fairy lore and in Scottish Witch Trial confessions, fairies
are not really always small, some are human sized but are recognised as fairies
by their clothes – either green or very old fashioned – again crossing over
with ghosts of the dead (old clothes) and spirits of nature (green clothes). If
fairies are actually signs of communication between human beings and their
environment, which I think they are, then they can be classified as a category
of deity – if you think that deities are anthropomorphized aspects of the
natural and cultural world, which I do. In that case, these Minoan images would
not be the oldest images of fairies, as they only date to the Late Bronze Age,
which really isn’t that old.
SY: I’ve spent quite a lot of the
afternoon looking at these images and it strikes me that many of the ‘fairies’
we are seeing are ‘winged’: what is it with ‘fairies’ (and other spirits) and
wings?
CT: Well, actually, what you’re looking at is traditionally
interpreted in Minoan archaeology as their hair which is rendered as a series
of dots (Figures 2, 3, 4, 5). It is thought that the rows of upwards curving
dots behind the tiny figures is their hair being blown upwards as they descend
from the air. Some scholars have suggested than rather than hovering, the
figures are just really far away and that is why they appear so small. Their
billowing hair, along with their pointed feet suggest that they are not
standing on the ground however but are floating, rather than being located in
the distance of the image. But, the hair could be interpreted as wings – some
of them don’t have any noticeable hair at all though (Figures 6, 7, 8).You can
also see dots in the sky in Figure 10. These have been interpreted as either
the horizon or as bees heading for a beehive situated in the far left of the
image.
As for fairies and wings, I’m not sure how old the
image of the winged fairy is. Certainly the cute butterfly-like fairy is a
Victorian construct, but I’m not sure about other periods. The fairies that the
Scottish witches dealt with were human sized and not winged as far as I know.
Different cultures will have different looking fairies, but I suspect the wings
are related to their ability to fly as well as their non-human, rather
insect-like natures – they don’t usually have bird’s wings, do they? Although
many ancient deities certainly took on the forms of birds and some of the
Minoan rings depict birds swooping down toward human figures in some sort of
swoon, as can be seen in Figure 10.
Figure 10. Drawing of the bezel of a gold ring from
Kalyvia, Crete.
SY: Let’s leave these fascinating images
behind for a moment. We know that in other parts of the world and throughout
history shamans, witches and magicians had spirit assistants, which they
sometimes called fairies. Is this relationship between a man and woman of power
and a, let’s call it, ‘familiar’, pretty much universal in human societies?
CT: I suspect so, but not for everyone. Some people are
simply not the slightest bit interested in dealing with the hidden or ‘occult’
realms. And sometimes the person who does deal with what we may call for
convenience the Otherworld is accepted and revered by their society and has a
high status, and other times they are disapproved of, shunned and even
persecuted. In the Minoan examples elites were showing that they had a special
communicative relationship with the animate landscape, so in this society it
must have had a positive – even prestigious – value. In other cultures, especially
when not part of official religion, interaction with spirits can have a very
low, even criminal, status as we see in the European Witch trials.
SY: If an Isobel Gowdie, the Scottish
witch condemned for trafficking with fairies in 1662, was to come back today
and meet our modern fairy shamans and fairy seers would she feel kinship? Is
there continuity between the men and woman of power who see fairies in 2015 and
those who were the brokers between the spirit world and this world three or
four hundred years ago?
CT: I think that
people from the past such as Isobel Gowdie who believed in and had converse
with fairies – by whatever name they called them, elves, brownies, piskies,
lords and ladies –would find common ground with people who do this today. There
may be cultural differences, the fairies may have different names or look
different, the reasons why people converse with them today may be different to
those in say, mid-seventeenth century Scotland when Isobel Gowdie was around,
but the general idea is the same. I think fairies are a way to speak to nature.
I know that sounds rather naive and romantic in this post-industrial world, but
I don’t mean it in an escapist way, but rather as an actual method by which one
can intuit information about our world. Does that mean that I think fairies are
metaphors? No, but I don’t think they – or gods for that matter – really have
human forms. I think that is a disguise they wear so they don’t confuse or even
frighten us by their real forms. I think we find it easier to relate to them
when they are in anthropomorphic form. If fairies are a way by which human
beings can relate to the world around them, attempt to gain access to knowledge
that may otherwise be unobtainable, bring good fortune upon ourselves, and
avert illness and bad luck, then I do think that we have continuity with
historical figures who interacted with fairies. But, I don’t think that in 2015
we can unlearn the advances in science of the last three hundred and fifty-plus
years that separate us from a fairy witch such as Isobel Gowdie, which might
make some of us more self-conscious and less spontaneous in our adventures into
the realm of fairy.
SY: Caroline, Thanks so much!
