Summoning Fairies

How I Got Here, Summoning Fairies

I looked into the folklore on seeing and summoning fairies for the intro to my TITAA newsletter issue, Fairies and Doom. But it was getting long, so I left out the deeper academic dives from 2 papers I found. Here you go!

Hogan’s “Communing with Nature”

First, the disseration by Samuel Hogan, Communing With Nature: Fairies in English Ritual Magic and Occult Philosophy, 1400-1700.

Rituals he covers include some to summon, others just to see them. Magical manuscripts that discuss fairy rituals/spells were owned and used by “cunning folk, necromancers, ritual magicians, and service magicians”. (Nb, I used NotebookLM to summarize a chapter and then edited a bit. I could do more…)

Fairy King Rituals

Oberion’s Plate: This ritual involves summoning Oberion using a plate made of lead or silver, and it has variations with and without prefatory incantations.
Call for Sibilia, Oberion, et alia into a Crystal: This ritual aims to summon Oberion, Sibilia, and other fairies into a crystal.
The Grand Ritual for Oberion: This ritual, while not explicitly naming Oberion as a fairy, is connected to texts that do, and emphasizes the danger of Oberion, advising precautions like washing with hyssop and taking a different route home.
Conventional Ritual for Oberion: This English ritual, similar to demon summoning, calls Oberion into a crystal or mirror to answer questions.
Conventional Invocation of Oberion into a Crystal: This ritual summons Oberion into a stone so he can show visions to a child scryer.
Oberion’s Physic Ritual: This ritual aims to summon Oberion into a crystal or basin of water, to teach the magician how to heal.
Ritual for Tobias, King of the Pigmies: This ritual exists in both longer, more idiosyncratic, and abridged, more conventional forms.

Fairy Queen Rituals

Call of Queen Micol: This is a brief invocation to Queen Micol that lacks a specific ritual context.
Ritual for Queen Bilgal, One of the Seven: This ritual summons the fairy Bilgal.

Table Rituals

The Thesaurus spirituum’s Table Ritual: This ritual involves setting up a ritual meal and invoking three fairies (Micol, Titan, and Burfax) to get a ring of invisibility, and has a prohibition against asking about the entity’s true nature.
The Agrippian Table Ritual: This is an elaboration of the Thesaurus spirituum’s Table Ritual, drawing from the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, emphasizing the summoned fairy’s connection to the natural environment and setting a table with green boughs.

Unnamed Fairy Rituals

The Skimmed Water Ointment: This ritual is about creating an ointment to see fairies by using the film on top of a bucket of water
Sylvan Square Ritual: This ritual summons three male entities, sometimes identified as fairies, in a wood using lapwing blood.

Sibyl & Envoy Rituals

Sibilia was, along with Micob and Oberion, one of the most frequently invoked fairy-related beings, with fourteen copies of six rituals to summon her preserved by the manuscripts included in this study. Sibilia was a prominent medieval fairy in medieval literature. Orginating as the Cumaean Sibyl turned leader of a worldly paradice under a mountain, this figue appears in Italian, French, and Spanish literature beginning in the fourteenth century and became most popular in the sixteenth.

Sibilia’s Candle, and Fire and Bath rituals: Well, a bunch. “Fire and Bath Ritual summons three apparently female entities to give the magician a ring of invisibility, after which he retires to his bed and receives the ring.”
Archangelic Envoy Ritual: An archangel acts as an envoy to bring Sibilia to the magician.
Elaborated Archangelic Envoy Ritual: This version involves a parchment crown and depicts Sibilia with a child.
The Condemned Envoy Ritual: This ritual is a case of diabolic magic, and was found in Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft.
The Dwarven Envoy Ritual: This ritual involves going to a church on Christmas Day and sprinkling honey.

Seven Sisters Rituals

Binding of the Seven Sisters: This ritual aims to bind the seven sisters, especially Lilia, into service, and often includes a sexual element. [See the next section for fairy sex.]
The Banishment of the Seven Sisters: This ritual aims to banish fairies from a place or ground, especially where treasure is hidden.

Ointment Rituals

Lapwing Ointment: This ritual uses the blood or grease of a lapwing to create an ointment for seeing spirits
The Sevenfold Ointment Ritual: This ritual uses various animal parts to create an ointment to see fairies, with a taboo against asking the fairy its name or nature.
The Fairy Thorn Ointment: This ritual uses “grass of a faery thorne”

Ritual Actions and Invocations

The Threefold Ritual: This ritual involves soaking a crystal or glass in the blood of a white hen.
Conjuration of Elaby Gathen: This is an invocation to summon the fairy Elaby Gathen.
Ashmole’s Invocation for Any Fairy: This is a general invocation to summon any fairy.

Locative Rituals

The Elder Ritual: This is an unusual ritual, possibly from oral tradition, that has a less structured approach to fairy summoning.
Januvian Rituals: This includes the Januvian Gnome Ritual which summons earth spirits and the Januvian Fairy Ritual which summons fairies and elves.

In Sum

The diss is fun and long… there’s a general proposal in here that over time, fairies transitioned towards being associated with nature and perhaps a form of animism, and less with being otherworldly entities. Finally, in terms of definitions, there was also a shift from visible fairies to including invisible entities. This matches with theosophists’ take on fairies as noted in the newsletter.

Bain and “The Binding of the Fairies”

In my newsletter post, I opened with this sarcastic note from The Guardian: ‘Fairy porn’: is this booming erotica genre an insult to Wales? Welp, this article is right on topic:

Frederika Bain’s The Binding of the Fairies, 4 Spells. This is a more specific examination of the 7 sisters & Lila summonings mentioned above. Her 4 spells, from a single 17th century manuscript, are specifically about summoning fairies for sex. As basically sex slaves, even. So, kind of content warning here, although I am not pasting in the worst of it.

This pronounced emphasis on sex is one reason the manuscript is of interest: there are no other spells, as such, that I am aware of that so concern themselves with sex with fairies, or in fact with any supernatural beings.

Generally fairies are more often the solicitors of sex from humans (stories like Tam Lin). And contrary to cases of men seeking fairy wives (Melusine, etc), these spells are about sex and then getting rid of the fairy afterward. So kind of a one-night stand invocation.

The spells are descriptively titled “Here followeth the way to make a band to bind the seven sisters of the fairies to thee, to your book, and to thy child or friend forever,” “Here followeth the way and manner how you shall call one of these virgins of fairies aforenamed at once unto thy bed whenever thou list and have her at pleasure,” “The manner of the band to bind her when she is appeared to thee,” and “Here followeth the manner of the license when you will have her to depart.” The mage requests in the course of them three things: treasure, knowledge, and sex. He both desires them and believes they are obtainable from fairies.

What’s especially odd to me is how much mention of God and other religious language appears in the spells… And the evident threats of a religious nature to try to enforce the binding and obedience. As if fairies would be subject to Christian laws? A few excerpts:

Spell 1

Samples:

I conjure you all,
sisters of fairies: + Lilia + Hestillia + Fata + Solla + Afria + Africa + Julia +
Venila,
+ by all the royal words aforesaid [and] rehearsed: I bind you + all to be
obedient to
me and to him and to all the words that be written in this book aforesaid.
I  constrain
and conjure you all this band to fulfill, upon pain of all pains and everlasting
condemnation, both in this world [and the world] to come.
Fiat, fiat, fiat +
+ away +
The peace of God betwixt thee and me. Go thy way unto thy place
predestinately of God until I shall call thee again by this aforesaid
band or invocation in the name of the Father and the Son and the
Holy Ghost, amen.

Spell 2

Read east and west, south and north:
Away to Risen < . . . . . . > In the hour of Jupiter and
lord of the ascendant, let them be called in as aforesaid. You
must call them before sun, and after sun mark a circle
of chalk or otherwise, one for her and then for yourself.
Here followeth the way and manner how you shall call one of
these virgins of fairies aforenamed at once unto thy bed when-
ever thou list and have her at pleasure:

Spell 3

Then when thou hast accomplished it and fulfilled thy will and desire
with her, then mayst reason with her of any manner of things that thou desirest,
and in all kind of question you list to demand of her, but in any wise I
advise thee to be well ware that you ask her not what she is, and
also I advise thee to be well ware that you never tell, during the time she
is bound in friendship to thee, what she doth for thee, to nobody nor by
any other means. Disclose it for no kind of occasion or betimes, how great
or whatsoever it be, and so doing and ordering thyself you shall be sure not
only to have her ready at your commandment, to come to lie with thee when-
soever it is thy will to have thy pleasure on her, but also you shall be sure
to have thy will fulfilled and done in all other things that you list to demand of her.

Amen.

Spell 4

Here followeth the manner of the license when you
will have her to depart:
O blessed virgin, I conjure thee by all the holy names of God most highest and
by the
virtue of the same words that thou camst hither before me. I conjure thee
and command thee to depart in peace for a time from me and to rest in the
place where
God hast ordained thee rest in, and be ready again to come unto me, at
any time whensoever I shall command thee, [blah blah blah]

So basically a prayer is a spell, and fairy rape is fine.

A Couple Other Books

There are a few more in the TITAA newsletter post, but also these:

Seeing Fairies: From the Lost Archives of the Fairy Investigation Society, Authentic Reports of Fairies in Modern Times, by Marjorie Johnston

The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies by Robert Kirk – supposedly written in 1692 (published in 1815).

The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries by Evans-Wentz – on Gutenberg books.

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