Faery Craft: Weaving Connections with the Enchanted Realm (31 page)

This weaves through my work, coupled with steady self-observation, meditation, and the idea that God Herself is present in all things, and we therefore have a responsibility to co-create the universe with the gods, nature, and the totality of divine flow. We can come into full possession of our own divine selves, living in harmony with all the realms, and taking our rightful place in the unfolding of the cosmos.

You seem to put a good deal of emphasis on empowerment and
self-awareness. How does that expand into awareness of Faery?

I once asked Victor Anderson what the Fey wanted from me, and he replied: “For you to become more yourself. For you to become more human.” That hit me strongly! For me to live in greater harmony with all the realms means I have to live in greater harmony within myself! That, to me, is what the tools and practices of magick are for: to become fully ourselves so we can actually be of help to other beings.

Our work is not about running off into other realms but about bringing ourselves and our own realms into the greatest health and balance possible so that we can better share space with all the realms.

How would you describe your relationship with Faery?

My relationship is that of the poet to the muse, the warrior to the fire of courage, and the human soul to nature. Faery connects me to the light in the land and the possibility of beauty. It also is helpful to me in that it affords an opportunity for my sceptical brain to hold space with my imagination and with energetic and emotional experiences. It is good to doubt the reality of the unseen realms and simultaneously stretch my mind to include rationally inexplicable happenings. Making space for dissonance keeps us strong and flexible. I have experiences of Faery and can also hold that these perceptions feel irrational. I’m okay with that.

T. Thorn Coyle

Why is working with the seven directions important?

The seven sacred directions help to orient us in space and time. We have a center at our core and a circumference that extends 360 degrees around us. If I can maintain awareness of the horizon all around me, as well as above and below, I can remain centered in my life and my work, and remain in relationship with everything I interact with. The seven directions remind me that my whole life is about this relationship. I don’t just focus on what is in front of me but interact with all spaces around me, including what is just beyond the edge of my perception. Working with the seven sacred directions also serves as a link to magick workers of old, who studied the seven visible planets or intoned the seven vowels or walked through the seven gates or called upon the seven angels. It connects us to our magickal legacy and opens us to what is yet to come. The seven directions also help me remember that there is more to the world than my eyes and ears perceive. There is possibility all around me in every moment.

What change would you like to bring into the world?

I would like for connection to become deeply important. I would like for each human to practice internal alignment so that our relationship to the world can come into greater alignment, so that our relationship with all the worlds can come into greater alignment. We can be strong, autonomous, compassionate, and free, living in right relationship, bringing our systems of imbalance toward integration. I would like for more and more people to want this change and actively work toward its fulfilment. I’ll keep starting with myself.

For further information, visit www.thorncoyle.com.

The Resurgence of Faery Inspiration

“It is Credibly Asserted, that in ancient times that many of those aforesaid Gnomes, Fairies Elves & other terrestrial wandering spirits, have been seen & heard amongst Men, but now it is said & believed that they are not so frequent.”

The seventeenth-century Sloane MS 3825

It seems that every generation for the last several hundred years has commented on the dwindling relationship between humans and faeries, and yet most of the traditions, groups, and paths we have looked at in this chapter were either born or have grown immensely in popularity over the last half century! While all are expressed in diverse ways, what all these paths have in common is the theme of uncovering and embracing our true selves in order to be more fully in the world. When we can truly know and be ourselves, we can find what it is we are here to do. We can then use these gifts to build a bridge to the realm of Faery, just as the following inspirational artists, musicians, writers, entertainers, and craftspeople are doing through their work. May their words inspire you to find your soul’s true expression and bring potential to full bloom!

The Artists

There are many incredible artists working within the Faery community today, each with their own distinctive style and approach, yet all drawing their inspiration from the same source: the realm of Faery. I was lucky enough to be able to interview a few of the most influential and inspirational figures in the world of Faery art today, and here I share with you a glimpse into the lives of the people behind the beautiful art.

Brian and Wendy Froud

Brian and Wendy Froud are loved and respected around the world, bringing joy and inspiration to many through their many years of sharing their visions of Faery with the world. Brian is a fine artist and illustrator perhaps best known for his work as a conceptual artist in the 1980s hit movies
Labyrinth
and
The Dark Crystal
, as well as many beautiful published works, including
Faeries
(with Alan Lee),
Good Fairies/Bad Faeries, The Faeries Oracle (
with Jessica Macbeth), and most recently
How To See Fairies
(with John Matthews).

Wendy is a doll artist, sculptor, and puppet-maker extraordinaire, with many published works to her name, including
The Winter Child
and
The Faeries of Spring Cottage,
as well as a recent collaboration with Brian on the
Heart of Faery Oracle
. Not only has Wendy worked alongside Brian on
Labyrinth
and
The Dark Crystal,
but she was one of the original team of sculptors who created Yoda for
The Empire Strikes Back
! I visited Brian and Wendy in their beautiful hobbitlike home in rural Devon, UK, to gain some insight into their creative process and relationship with Faery.

Brian Froud, “Woodwoman”

I’m not going to bother asking if you believe in faeries, because we know you do…

B: People assume I’m just illustrating something, and I say no, I’m
expressing
something. There’s a big difference. Now we’ve just got this book out with John Matthews called
How To See Faeries
, there’s no way around it. Right now people are saying, “Ah, these people really do believe in faeries and are telling us about it,” and that, I think, has been a breakthrough in getting people to understand we do believe.

How did your awareness of the Faery realm first enter your life?

W: For me, it came really from my mother and my mother’s family. She’s always believed, and she just taught me to believe from an early age. It was just the most natural thing, and it wasn’t a cute little game we played or anything, it was just that they were there, and we could leave things for them, and we could feel them. We couldn’t see them particularly, but we could always feel them, so I just grew up thinking it was the most natural thing in the world.

B: I don’t know, because in Faery time it doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. However, there were a couple of events that were reminders. One was when I was at art school and I was about to give up painting, because I felt that was not the right thing and not expressive of what I wanted to do, and I was going to do graphic design. As I was waiting in the college library for my interview I came across a book by Arthur Rackham, and in it were these wonderful drawings of trees with faces in, and that was the revelation. I thought, “That’s how I felt as a child.” I was always exploring woods, climbing trees, crawling underneath bushes, and there was something about the faces that informed you there was spirit in nature, and that got me into exploring Faery tales and more and more exploring the reality behind Faery tales and faeries themselves.

The next thing was when I moved to Dartmoor and I experienced nature—rocks and trees and roots and earth—and I realised that I didn’t want to be a normal landscape painter, I wanted to paint the landscape that was the inner landscape. I wanted to know what it looked like on the inside, and once I felt that, then I started to paint trolls and faeries.

I discovered faeries really by making it up, by trying to imagine what it was…but it was always about feeling. So I brought all my skills as an artist to bear on trying to get the form and shape of what I was painting to feel like something that was elusive and invisible. Then I did various pictures, paintings, bits of books, and then the book, the
Faeries
book. Alan Lee and myself just tumbled into it, just went for it. We did research, we were both enthusiastic about English, Irish, and Scottish folklore, and we just worked from the descriptions that people had given over the years and drew it.

I think because we did it with passion and insight, we were getting it right, and people really responded to it. But it was only really years later when I embarked upon another book, called
Good Faeries/Bad Faeries
, which was more about my inner worldview of faeries, more about how I was feeling about them, and it was more of a spiritual thing, and again I did it really through intuition. It’s really only when that was finished and I was on tour with the book and signing the book, I started to spontaneously experience faeries on the streets of America!

W: That’s the book you have to write, that’s the book I want you to write someday! It is amazing, the story.

B: It is a rare thing for me to have those spontaneous Faery experiences, but they are real.

So really you are translating a feeling into a visual interpretation, which creates that same feeling in the viewer, creating a bridge in that way?

W: Very much so, they are a bridge to the otherworld, or a doorway, a gateway. Very often with our work, people will look at it and they will have a very emotional response when they experience it. It’s something about “coming home.” It’s something about going to a place that they forgot they knew so well. That’s wonderful.

How well do think you’ve portrayed you feelings or your vision of the otherworld—how close do you think you’ve got?

W: I don’t think it’s anything like what they really are, only how they appear. Sometimes I think they do look like that, but usually they are energy. It’s impossible, I think, especially in three dimensions, it’s impossible to capture it because so much of it is the energy, and you can’t really sculpt that.

Wendy Froud, “Autumn”

B: Well, I think I’ve got nowhere near! After all these years I haven’t got anywhere near, but I keep trying. People want to believe what I’m showing them is real, and they go, “Oh, that’s how they look, isn’t it?” and I say, “Well, actually, no. It’s how they
feel
.” You’ve got to bring people to some place where they can understand and feel it, and also that is a genuine opening, a genuine gateway to the reality—not only to the wider reality but to that specific or particular personality.