The eighth chapter represents the central point of balance within the star, where all the qualities meet. This may seem complicated or confusing now, especially if you are unfamiliar with the directions and elements, but don’t worry—all will become clear as the book progresses.
Faery Craft septagram
by Tamara Newman
(www.tamaranewman.com)
Seven Months in Faery
There is a tradition within Faery lore that tells of people taken into Faery for periods of seven months or seven years. If you feel drawn to do so, you may choose to take a chapter a month and work through the exercises contained within and at the end of each chapter a number of times during that month. This will give you time to thoroughly explore each quality and pace yourself as you progress, enabling you to establish practices and routines that will enrich your relationship with the world and its hidden depths for the rest of your life. Faery Craft cannot be rushed. There are exercises contained within each chapter and also additional exercises and suggested activities at the end of each chapter in order to make it clear to follow.
I strongly suggest that you keep a notebook or journal in order to record your experiences and progress, including any interesting dreams you may have during this time. Faery experiences can be powerful, but they can also be subtle, and it will be easier to remember key moments, messages, and images if you keep a good record. Things that may seem insignificant or nonsensical at the time can gain meaning later on.
Take my hand as I lead you through the pages of this book. Let us adventure together, discovering our own unique gifts and strengths that we can bring to the world of Faery, working together with our Faery cousins to build bridges between our worlds so that we need no longer dwell in the damaging and painful illusion of disconnection.
“Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild,
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping
Than you can understand…”
W. B. Yeats, “The Stolen Child”
[contents]
chapter one
Knowledge
We begin our journey into Faery in the direction of east, the element of air, and the quality of knowledge. Within the Western Mystery tradition, which has been highly influential in most modern esoteric teachings, the element of air is associated with logic, law, and the mental realm. This led clearly to my choice of knowledge as being the quality to be associated with this direction and element.
In order to be able to better understand your experiences as you progress through the book, it is essential to have some background knowledge on the subject. This will mean that you are building on a strong foundation, enabling you to place any experiences into context and equipping you with the necessary tools of interpretation and discrimination. It also helps prevent making easy yet critical mistakes due to simply not knowing any better! If early time is spent in dedication to learning as much as possible about Faery lore and history, as well as the traditions of the land around you, then this knowledge has time to properly grow within you like a seed, as you nourish it with the spiritual work of the successive chapters.
In this chapter we will cover the origins and nature of Faery, the concept of hierarchy, the darker side of Faery, basic etiquette, Faery beasts, and important symbols that are connected with the Faery realm.
The Origins and Nature of Faery
“When the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies. And now when every new baby is born, its first laugh becomes a fairy. So there ought to be one fairy for every boy or girl.”
J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan and Wendy
Unlike the fairies of J. M. Barrie’s Neverland, we do not need to believe in Faery beings in order for them to exist, any more than we need to believe in the postman to receive our mail. But even those of us with close connections to the elusive Faery realm can find it difficult to explain exactly who they are, for their origins are as mysterious as their destiny, which is inextricably tied to our own.
As definitions and understandings grow and change over the years, the term Faery has come to cover a vast variety of beings. In many ways, the more you learn, the more confusing it becomes, as the lines between faeries, gods, angels, elementals, ghosts, and other spirits become very blurred, if indeed those lines exist at all in some cases. We can expand our understanding by looking at myth and folklore. It is then up to individuals to find, through their own experiential and intellectual exploration, their own insights, the grain of original truth that formed the pearl of myth.
Nature Spirits
“They were not the same as nature spirits, though they were allied to them. They were a race apart, with their own laws and rulers, their own ambitions and occupations, marriages, births and even, at long last, deaths.”
Christina Hole, English Folklore
As explained in the introduction, the term Faery has become, in recent years, an umbrella term for many different classes of beings,
