Sídhe — Fairy Demigods

In Celtic mythology, Celtic tradition calls the higher Fairies the Sídhe (Shí). Foremost among them are the High Fairies of the Blessed Court — Din Shi.

The Din Shi, like other Heroic Fairies, spend their time in aristocratic pastimes — they dance, make music, hunt, and ride. Moreover, they are constantly at war with one another and with humans. Scarcely had they healed their battle wounds when the Fairies set out again to hunt.

According to tradition, the Din Shi were once gods (the Tuatha Dé Danann), then warriors who never knew defeat, and finally transformed into the High Fairies.

We have spoken many times of the notion that a people degenerates as it moves away from its source — Jotuns become Trolls, Alvs become Fairies.

The Din Shi live like medieval knights, spending their days at feasts and in battle.

These Fairies can change shape at will — sometimes they are as tall as, or taller than, an adult human; at other times they appear as children.

Benevolent Din Shi hunt deer with their white, red-eared hounds; malevolent ones hunt humans and gather human souls. They speed through the sky with a sound like migrating birds calling; their horses’ eyes blaze with fire.

If the Sídhe are left unmolested, they will pay no attention to humans. Yet a single touch can drive a person mad; the Sídhe’s arrows, tipped with venom, kill outright.

The Sídhe are a people of mages, sages, and poets, consummate in art and magic, but their power is less from bookish learning and scientific curiosity of humans than from a deep understanding of the world’s structure — a special kinship with it. It is said they are so endowed from birth that they need not seek knowledge.

The Sídhe, like all Fairies without exception, have an unearthly, nonhuman beauty, though it is often marred by some deformity. For example, women called Elle are painted beauties, yet the backs of their skulls are hollow. The Scottish Glaistigs wear long garments to conceal goat hooves. The Shetland Hromushki are lame. Some have only one nostril or one eye, others have no nose at all; some show fangs, others have webbed hands and feet; some have breasts so long they must be thrown over their shoulders.

Dance and music are central to Fairy narratives. Welsh Fairies are most often seen dancing. They attempt to lure mortals into their circle; if a person cannot stand firm, he may vanish from his friends for a long time. Thus the Fairies drew Edmund William Rees into their circle; he returned home only at the year’s end, his face hollow. He remembered little and kept repeating that he had been dancing. That is usually how these tales go. People either cannot or dare not speak of their experience. In most such stories, the hero dies the instant he is freed from Fairy power. Sometimes he simply crumbles to dust — suddenly and dramatically.

Fairies have their own notions of honor, which they observe strictly. They severely punish those humans who do not respect these rules. Above all, they enforce secrecy, for they keep secrets, and they punish harshly those who try to spy on them. People who boast of their feats before the Fairies often fall ill, bear elfin marks upon their bodies, or are struck with paralysis. And those who try to steal Fairy treasures risk their lives.

It is likely these beliefs that prevented the Din Shi from living peacefully alongside humans. In ancient times the Sídhe readily consorted with people, and many mortal heroes had lovers among the Shi, while mortal women went to live in the Enchanted Land (and later — in the Hills).

One of the most mysterious themes of Irish mythology is the love of the women of the Sídhe for mortal men, whom the enchantresses lead away to the Shi. Not even druids could resist the charms of these maidens; thus a king, the father of Condla, asked a druid to protect his son from the spells of a female form calling him to the Plain of Bliss. But the druid could do nothing, and the young heir departed from this world forever.

In our time the ways of mortals and the Sídhe have diverged widely, yet the ancient bond is not entirely lost: many old families of the British Isles count the Sídhe among their ancestors, and many of these families continue to be patronized by the Shi to this day — by ancient ties of blood.

Although the Sídhe are known as brave and skillful warriors, there is little evidence of their wars or duels with humans — they prefer to settle matters with the sons of Mil by means other than the force of arms. Perhaps this is due to a special geis-ban common to the Fairy folk, or perhaps the tales are right and the cold iron of human weapons is intolerable to the Sídhe.

Sometimes it is said that this aversion is tied to the use of iron tools to plough fields and cut forests — that is, to human participation in the symbolic slaying of nature. Consequently, iron would naturally inspire revulsion in the Fairies. In one legend a man who decided to slip into the kingdom of the Shi propped the secret door open with an iron rod so that it would not slam shut behind him forever. That is how that crafty fellow managed to escape a most unhappy fate.

We have already mentioned that Celtic legends say that after people spread across the land, the Fairies did not wish to share the visible world with them and withdrew into the “Hills,” which came to be called “Sídh,” “Shi” (Irish Sídhe, the world). They needed to find a new dwelling, and their king, the great god Dagda, decided to allocate each member of the Tuatha Dé Danann who remained in Ireland a sidh. These sidhs were mounds, or artificial hills, each with a special gate leading into an underground realm of endless delight and unseen luxury, which corresponded to the primitive imaginings of the ancient Celts. We have a description of one such sidh that Dagda took for himself and which his own son Aengus seized by trickery.

From that time each fairy is called Fer-Sídhe, “man of the hill,” or — Bin-Sídhe, ‘woman of the hill’ (the banshee of popular tradition).

These hills are also called “nows” and are divided into two parts — an outer one (“Shi”, “Sidh”) and an inner one (“Bru” or “tulmen”). The Shi is a cave, and the Bru is a hall whose roof rests on columns. Several Fairy families typically live together in the Bru, while tulmens are inhabited by solitary Fairies. Sometimes one can see the entrance to a bru. This most often happens on the eve of a festival — say, on Lammas-tide (7 August). But on All Hallows’ tide (11 November) it is best not to approach the hills at all: on the night of 11 November the Fairies travel between the hills along their roads and paths, spread like a web. One can also see the entrance to a Bru at other times; to do so, on a full moon one must circle the hill nine times — no more and no less. Then one will see what happens within. By the way, on hills known to house fairies one should not build dwellings, churches, or castles, for the Fairies may move such structures to another place. Some maintain that in this guise people perceive the palaces of the Shi, while others say the hills are merely gates, a kind of antechamber to the true country of the Shi (the Enchanted Land).

In Ireland one constantly encounters places consecrated to the Sídhe. Place names testify to the great antiquity of these traditions. Their favorite haunts are hills and knolls. On those same knolls once stood settlements or palisaded forts of the ancient Irish, and they are often taken for the homes of the enchanted folk. But the Fairies are by no means bound to all these raths, duns, and lisses and often choose for themselves rocky heights, stony hollows, or deserted groves. They are seen there when they go out to attend to the affairs of their settlement. Fairies often travel from place to place along their own paths, invisible to human eyes, but woe to anyone who erects a building on their path and prevents them from moving freely as they please.

In British folklore, one often encounters the motif of the “marvelous funerals” — the funerals of the Fairies. Yet tales and traditions repeatedly insist that Fairies do not die, at least not of old age (they can only be slain or mortally wounded).

When they die — or rather perish in the world of men — Fairies return to the Enchanted Land, where they continue to live as if nothing had happened (there is no record of anyone ever dying in the Enchanted Land — on the contrary, it is everywhere said that death is barred there). Still, sometimes they grow so weary of life that they begin to long for a death that would free them from the burdens of existence. And to die, a Fairy must acquire an immortal soul like a human’s… Few would want to witness more of these “marvelous funerals”…