{LIVE REMOTE ONLINE OFFERING} GOOD NEIGHBOURS: FAIRIES IN ENGLISH MAGIC

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ZOOM CLASSES OPERATE THE SAME AS IN PERSON CLASSES. WE DO NOT RECORD CLASSES TO PROTECT THE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OF OUR TEACHERS.

PLEASE NOTE: This class is not an in-person class. This class is being offered as a LIVE ONLINE-ONLY OFFERING. The zoom link will be attached to your receipt. Please check your junk folder in your email if you do not receive a receipt. If you have not received one please email learn@ritualcravt.com. Please register ahead of time to ensure that you make it to the online session on time! (Class times are in MDT time zone)

Class fees are non transferable, please note that we stick to the student agreements clicked on during registration. Please ensure you are able to attend the scheduled class time.

Registration will close one hour prior to class starting.

Between the slippery slope to Hell and the stairway to St Peter’s pearly gates, there lies a middle road winding to Elphame, the Land of Faerie. Sharing the gang pacts of hellish devils and the feasting halls under barrows of the ancient dead, the Fair Folk seem at once like-yet-also-utterly-unlike other spirits. Ancient, yet vivacious. Terrestrial, yet otherworldly.

Between their shifting dream-logics and internal court politics, the Good Neighbours appear in a variety of works of early modern of magic: from appealing to a Queen of the Pygmies to bring visions, favour, and/or fortune; to formally summoning the Seven Sisters, Sybillia, or Oberon themselves using the grimoiric tools and techniques of spirit conjuration; to bribing them to reveal hidden buried treasures from their mounds.

Moreover, there are a dizzying variety of formulae, techniques, and customs to not so much “work with” as simply handle or even (if possible) actively avoid the Fair Folk: eye-salves to see their disturbances, offerings to propitiate them, protocols to ensure your children are not stolen, waters to wash the worst of their influences from your life. So-called ‘fairy tales’ are not all accurate, and most practitioners who spend time with the fae speak of nightmarish torture far more frequently than pastoral gossamer wings…

In this class, contemporary cunning-man and historian of magic Dr Alexander Cummins will take us through detailed study of several operations of early modern magic concerning the Fair Folk, sourced from popular grimoires and sorcerous chapbooks, treatises of occult philosophy, the working-books of cunning-folk, historic collections of lore and custom, and accounts by early modern theologians, heresiographers and demonologists. In so doing, we will examine where the human meets the inhuman in these phantasmagorical glades and winter nights, and consider the manners by which we may honour the natural world and ourselves be good neighbours; while holding firm the boundaries that keep our loved ones safe.