Painting by Brian Froud

I’ve been looking into old faery lore lately. Not the sanitised Victorian version of miniature winged beauties, but at the old tales of strange encounters, customs that go back beyond memory, time lost in the faery realm and the darker aspects of the hidden folk. I watched a documentary and, amongst a few other ideas, one in particular got me thinking. The suggestion was that if faeries do not have a concrete and objective reality of their own in our world, but do exist for us in the realms of imagination, perhaps imagination itself is a state of being we do not fully understand, bridging the gap between our usual vision of reality and unreality in a way that has a validity of its own. As a concept, and after years of working with magical systems, that works for me.

In esoteric terms, the realm of imagination is a realm of causation…the place where abstract ideas take on the substance of proto-reality, one step removed from concrete materialisation. You could consider a can opener. A need arises for some method of opening a can, need fuels that abstract thought, but that won’t get the beans on the toast. Imagination is what creates the design for the tool that will. You see it as a reality, a working gadget, in your own mind, long before it becomes a prototype or opens a can. You could call imagination the matrix of reality and that would not be very far away from some of the recent postulations of scientific thought.

I couldn’t help thinking about the Disney version of Pinocchio and how much he wanted to be a real boy. The wooden puppet and his externalised ‘conscience’ sought the help of a faery and it was she who would eventually be the catalyst for his transformation from wood to flesh. Only the catalyst, not the cause… the puppet’s own actions make him real. I was wondering how closely that applies to people. Many of us are Ugly Ducklings, Cinderellas or Sleeping Beauties for much of our lives.

Ugly Ducklings feel sidelined, shunned by the ‘in’ crowd, left out in the cold because we are not ‘like them’. It is untrue… but it may as well be, because that is what we feel and we become self-fulfilling prophecies of our own isolation. We may withdraw…or we may become the victim of our own desire to please and to ‘fit’… unless, by some leap of inner vision, we can finally see ourselves for the Swans we have always been.

The Cinderellas are not so different. We are not good enough… we are lesser, unworthy in our own eyes and will do anything to feel ‘good enough’. It takes a catalyst, the ‘fairy godmother’ or a critical loss perhaps, to reveal our true being. Sometimes it just needs someone to see beyond our dark imaginings and hold up the magic mirror of their own being in which we can see, like Snow White, that we are ‘fairest of them all’. And always were.

Continue reading at The Silent Eye