The Celtic Fairies
Part 1
We live on an island. Who can tell when it's history began?
Often history and mythology are the same even though they are different.
Authors throughout the ages have drawn on our deepest mythology to bring magic to children’s and adults lives. But how much is mythology and how much is history? The line between these two genres is like the line between sanity and insanity.
This is the yin and the yang of our island.
In the words of Frank Church of the New York Sun Newspaper, 1897, in reply to a letter from an eight year old child, Virginia o’Hanlon, asking is Santa Claus real, after she had been told by her friends that he did not exist, he wrote :-
"Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the scepticism of a
sceptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is
not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or
children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his
intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence
capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and
devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and
joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary
as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance
to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight.
The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your
papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but
even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa
Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world
are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the
lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or
imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a
veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of
all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love,
romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory
beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world
there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now,
Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now,
he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood."
It is you, the reader, who must differentiate in your own mind what is real and what is unreal; remember for some reality is very different to others.
If your reality is good, is everything else bad; if your reality is bad is everything else good in comparison?
Stop for a while and imagine, imagine other lives, other peoples and look around you and see the people you live amongst. Tall people, short people, thin people, fat people, blue eyed people, brown eyed people, green eyed people, dark skinned people, yellow skinned people, pink skinned people. Why are we all so different and are we all the same?
Make your own mind up when you hear of our forefathers, when you hear of the Master Plan and the Endless Task that was put onto the shoulders of some of your earliest ancestors.
Read and evaluate for yourselves, love and hate with them, feel their fear and their joy and let the fairies of your island know that you really do believe and then perhaps you will see one.
You get nothing by not believing, new worlds open up for believers.
