Philosophy May Not Neglect the Fairies: A Role for Imaginal Beings in a Reenchanted World

Philosophy May Not Neglect the Fairies

A Role for Imaginal Beings in a Reenchanted World

"Philosophy may not neglect the multifariousness of the world
—the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross."

- Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

Editorial Note

The reflections in this essay are my own. They were prompted in part by Dr. Francis Young, author of Fairies: A History, especially as heard in his interview with Michelle Franklin in the podcast linked below. The piece was organized with the assistance of ChatGPT, which contributed to portions of the phrasing. The key terms - living lures for feeling, panentheistic sensibilities, etc. - are my own.

For citation purposes, please reference the Open Horizons website and list the essay as curated by Jay McDaniel.

Fairies as Living Lures for Feeling

"Before the rise of the 'small winged fairy' in the 19th century, the category of fairies included a vast range of supernatural human-like creatures, from the elves of Scandinavia and the aos sí of Ireland to the vilas of the Balkans and the fadas of Iberia."

So writes Dr. Francis Young in Fairies: A History (Polity Books, 2026). Young is a historian of religion, folklorist, and tutor Oxford University's Department for Continuing Education. You can hear him interviewed at the bottom of this page, My aim is to follow Whitehead's advice and offer a Whitehead-influenced philosophy of fairies, understood as supernatural human-like creatures such as elves, the Aos Si, and the Vilas.

Elves

In Germanic and Norse traditions of Northern Europe—especially Scandinavia, Iceland, and the Germanic-speaking regions of medieval Europe—elves appear as powerful and radiant beings associated with forests, burial mounds, ancestral memory, and the thresholds between life and death. At times they shrink into nimble, mischievous sprites; at other times they re-emerge as tall, luminous, and long-lived figures marked by insight and restraint, as in modern fantasy. Across these variations, elves function as imaginative disclosures of a world more alive, more articulate, and more responsive than everyday perception allows—a world in which northern landscapes are watchful, memory is thick with presence, and beauty carries moral weight.

The Aos Sí

The Aos Sí, the “people of the mounds,” belong to Ireland and the wider Gaelic world, where they inhabit the imagination as neighbors of another order of reality, dwelling just beneath or alongside the familiar landscape. They are not merely believed in; they are felt—as presences that thicken the land with memory, danger, generosity, and consequence. Emerging from stories of the Tuatha Dé Danann retreating into the sídhe, the Aos Sí function as living lures for attentiveness to place: Irish hills, mounds, ringforts, and ancient sites become charged with invitation and warning. In imaginative experience, they disclose an Otherworld that is neither heaven nor afterlife, but a parallel way of inhabiting the same earth. They shape how time is felt, how gifts are given, and how boundaries are honored, reminding those who sense their presence that the land itself remembers and responds.

Vilas (Vily)

Vilas arise in Balkan and South Slavic folklore, especially in the traditions of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Bulgaria. They are figures through which forests, mountains, winds, and waters acquire voice and agency. Often appearing as radiant women with flowing hair, they are not passive objects of fascination but forces of attraction and consequence, drawing humans into relationships that heal, punish, or transform. Their powers of shapeshifting, weather-making, and healing are less about supernatural spectacle than about making felt the volatility and responsiveness of the natural world itself. As living lures for feeling, vilas awaken awe, desire, and caution, reminding the imagination that intimacy with nature—especially in wild, mountainous landscapes—is never neutral: it demands respect, vulnerability, and restraint.

Belief, Experience, and Ontological Possibility

It is one thing to believe in fairies and another to interact with them in an experiential way. When directly experienced by those who interact with them, fairies and other often-called “supernatural” entities may be understood in more than one, nonexclusive way.

They may be understood, first, as actual entities—or societies of actual entities—existing in parallel or overlapping regions of the space–time continuum, regions contiguous with but not reducible to ordinary three-dimensional space. On this reading, encounters with fairies are encounters with realities that are genuinely there, though ordinarily inaccessible or only intermittently disclosed.

Alternatively, they may be understood as living lures for feeling: objects of imaginative experience that inhabit liminal, imaginal spaces and function as catalysts of perception, valuation, and response. As such, they are not necessarily mere fictions or projections, but can be understood as objective contents of experience that shape how the world is felt and interpreted. They may turn out to be hallucinations with no corresponding actuality—but they do not feel that way. They function as living lures for feeling.

These two interpretations need not be mutually exclusive. As living lures for feeling, fairies may themselves disclose or mediate awareness of actualities in parallel regions of the cosmos. Imagination, in this sense, is not a barrier to reality but a mode of access—one of the ways reality proposes itself to experience when it cannot, or will not, present itself directly.

A Contemporary Resurgence

I recently asked Google whether there is a resurgence of belief in fairies today. The response was striking. Yes, it said, there is evidence of a widespread and sustained renewal of interest and belief—shaped by environmental concern, alternative spiritualities, modern Paganism, and digital-age aesthetics such as fairycore. What was once often dismissed as children’s fantasy or superstition is, for many people, becoming a way of reconnecting with nature and recovering a sense of wonder in an intensely technological world.

At roughly the same time, I found myself rereading a book by an open and relational theologian who was promoting what he called the death of supernaturalism as a positive theological achievement—a way of affirming God, creativity, and openness without recourse to anything “supernatural.” The fervency of his rejection caught my attention. It made me wonder what he, and others like him, might make of this renewed openness to fairies and fairy-like realities.

Three Epistemic Postures

Consider, then, three kinds of people—understood not as psychological types, but as epistemic postures, ways of standing in relation to the world.

The Enchanted Realists believe in fairies and other kinds of supernatural or more-than-human beings, and regard such belief as compatible with seriousness, depth, and an honest engagement with reality.

The Open Agnostics are unsure whether fairies exist, but remain open to the possibility, suspending judgment while honoring experience, testimony, and mystery. They recognize that fairies, at the very least, function as objects of experience—living lures for imaginative feeling—even if not agents in their own right.

The Anti-Supernatural Rationalists adamantly disbelieve in fairies, regarding both belief in them—and even openness to the possibility that they might exist—as irrational, and as something that risks one’s standing as serious, credible, and intellectually responsible.

Disbelief, Respectability, and the Policing of Nature

Some among the Anti-Supernatural Rationalists understand themselves as scientifically informed naturalists. They oppose what they call supernaturalism and assume that fairies, if they exist at all, would necessarily fall into that category. They may even be shaped by process or open-and-relational theology, affirming an all-loving God who does not know the future in advance and an open-ended universe suffused with creativity and sentience—while emphasizing, sometimes quite strongly, that they are emphatically not supernaturalists.

As they see things, nature cannot possibly include fairy-like entities—beings that appear and disappear in rapid succession, evade stable location, and resist ordinary observation—except, ironically, in the case of quantum events in the depths of atoms. Process philosophers themselves often note that such events are not three-dimensional, elude classical localization, and can even be understood as subjects of experience, albeit not conscious ones. Outside this narrow exception, fairy-like possibilities are ruled out in advance.

Here disbelief functions less as a conclusion than as a boundary. It insists that physicality must be measurable by the natural sciences, and that whatever cannot be instrumentally detected, quantified, or experimentally isolated must therefore be unreal. Disbelief also serves a social function: it helps preserve a reputation for being rational, serious, and intellectually respectable—especially in academic or scientific settings where openness to enchantment risks being read as naïveté. What results is not simply skepticism about fairies, but a deeper narrowing of what is allowed to count as nature.

What is excluded, then, is not only fairies, but entire regions of experience: forms of presence that flicker, withdraw, and return; realities that are felt before they are measured; ways the world makes itself known without submitting to capture. The fervency of disbelief signals that something more than empirical caution is at stake. It marks an anxiety about reenchantment itself—about a world that may be more crowded, more elusive, and more alive than even an open-ended cosmology is prepared to acknowledge.

Reenchantment, Panexperientialism, and Humility

Belief in fairies—or at least openness to such belief—can be understood as a step toward rediscovering, and reentering, a reenchanted world. It runs parallel to what philosophers sometimes call panexperientialist sensibilities: the intuition that something like feeling or responsiveness is present throughout the fabric of reality, and not confined to human or animal consciousness alone. Within this outlook, the universe is no longer imagined as inert matter punctuated by occasional pockets of experience, but as a world already alive in many registers, most of them subtle and easily overlooked.

Such openness also reshapes how space and time themselves are imagined. Creation need not be conceived as monodimensional or exhaustively describable from a single vantage point, but as layered and multidimensional—comprised of overlapping modes of presence that may intersect with ordinary experience without being reducible to it. What follows is not credulity, but humility: a readiness to dwell attentively within a world that may include entities, agencies, and patterns of existence that resist easy classification.

Openness to fairies also parallels a broader willingness to take seriously other liminal domains of inquiry, such as parapsychology and psychedelic research. In each case, the issue is not uncritical acceptance, but a refusal to dismiss experiences simply because they do not fit comfortably within inherited explanatory frameworks. What these domains share is an insistence that reality sometimes makes itself known obliquely—through altered states, anomalous experiences, or fleeting encounters that do not submit easily to repetition or control.

Supernatural, Scientism, and an Organic Science

At this point, a word deserves careful attention: supernatural. The term does not have a single, fixed meaning. As Ludwig Wittgenstein reminds us, words take their meanings from their use within particular forms of life. For many people today, to affirm the supernatural is not to reject science, but to affirm mystery or nonhuman agency—and to resist scientism: the claim that the methods of the natural sciences exhaust what can count as real.

In this light, openness to fairies and other supernatural entities can be understood as an ethical and ecological posture. It softens the habits of domination that accompany a purely instrumental view of nature and encourages attentiveness rather than mastery, reverence rather than control. In such a world, fairies need not be proven in order to matter. It may be enough that they remind us—again and again—that reality is not finished, not fully mapped, and not finally under our control.

Such openness is not anti-scientific—particularly not anti-science understood in its broadest sense as disciplined inquiry into the natural world. What it resists is a strictly mechanistic conception of science that assumes reality is nothing more than inert matter in motion. In this spirit, it remains open to what might be called an organic science: a science that recognizes creativity and prehensive connection throughout the cosmos; that understands the universe as unfolding within a space–time continuum more than three-dimensional; and that acknowledges that science itself—however organic or self-critical—does not have a monopoly on knowing.

Speculative Possibilities: Quantum Fairies and Galactic Fairies

Openness to fairies need not be confined to folklore, landscape, or human-scale imagination. It may also include a willingness to recognize that something fairy-like—that is, elusive, event-like, relational, and intermittently disclosed—may be present at radically different scales of the universe itself.

At the smallest scales of reality, quantum events already challenge ordinary intuitions about locality, continuity, and persistence. They appear and disappear, resist stable spatial location, and behave less like enduring objects than momentary acts. Process philosophers have long emphasized that such events can be understood as actual occasions—brief subjects of experience, not conscious, but nonetheless responsive and internally related to their environments. In this light, one might speak—carefully and metaphorically—of quantum fairies: not literal sprites hidden in atoms, but fairy-like realities whose fleeting, playful, and indeterminate character unsettles mechanistic pictures of matter and invites a more imaginative, relational understanding of the microcosm.

At the opposite extreme, one might also speculate about galactic fairies. Large-scale cosmic structures—galaxies, nebulae, stellar nurseries—exhibit patterns of emergence, self-organization, and rhythmic becoming that exceed simple aggregation. They unfold over vast stretches of time, yet display coherence, creativity, and responsiveness to their cosmic environments. To describe something fairy-like at this scale is not to anthropomorphize the cosmos, but to acknowledge that lures for feeling operate not only in forests and mounds, but also in spiral arms and cosmic clouds—inviting awe, humility, and a sense of participation in a universe whose life vastly exceeds the human.

Such speculations are not offered as empirical claims demanding proof, but as imaginative extensions of a reenchanted worldview. They suggest that fairies, understood as living lures for feeling, may name a mode of responsiveness that appears wherever reality is dynamic, relational, and creative—whether in the depths of atoms, the sweep of galaxies, or the threshold places of the Earth itself. What matters, finally, is not whether one endorses the language, but whether one allows the universe to remain surprising, playful, and alive at every scale.

Imaginal Beings

I close with a further word about the ontological status of fairies. I think of them as imaginal beings—not imaginary beings, as if they were merely fictive or fabricated by the mind, but imaginal beings in the sense that they are discovered and experienced in and through the imagination.

Here the imagination is not merely generative; it is also receptive. It does not only project; it receives. It does not only invent; it discovers. The imagination, in this view, is a mode of perception—one that apprehends patterns of possibility, intensities of presence, and lures for feeling that are not reducible to sensory data alone.

To call fairies imaginal beings is therefore to suggest that they exist within a domain of experience that is neither purely subjective nor straightforwardly empirical. They are encountered in the interplay between receptivity and creativity, between what is given and what is shaped. They may or may not correspond to actual entities in parallel regions of reality; I leave that question open. What I affirm is that the imaginal itself belongs to the real.

If we grant that propositions, possibilities, and values are real features of the world—if we grant that reality includes more than what can be weighed and measured—then imaginal beings are not intrusions into the natural order. They are part of the way the world proposes itself to experience. They are among the ways reality invites response.
To speak of fairies as imaginal beings is thus not to retreat into fantasy. It is to acknowledge that reality includes dimensions that disclose themselves through imagination, and that the imagination itself may be one of the organs through which the universe becomes aware of its own depth.

The History of Fairies with Dr. Francis Young

"Many people think they know what fairies are, what a fairy looks like, and how a fairy is expected to behave. Francis Young's new history of fairies demonstrates that the truth about belief in fairies is far stranger than clichéd images of tiny figures with wings and wands.

Before the rise of the 'small winged fairy' in the 19th century, the category of fairies included a vast range of supernatural human-like creatures, from the elves of Scandinavia and the aos sí of Ireland to the vilas of the Balkans and the fadas of Iberia. Young traces the ancient origins of belief in such creatures and how it adapted to the rise of Christianity and then flourished in medieval Europe, before being transformed - but not destroyed - by the upheavals of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and even European colonial expansion, which made fairies a global phenomenon. He concludes this uniquely wide-ranging history by reflecting on the surprising ways in which fairy belief endures in our apparently disenchanted contemporary world.

No one who reads this brilliant tour through the enchanted pathways of fairyland will ever look at the winged creatures of contemporary popular culture - or the woods at the end of their garden - in the same way again."

Twilight of the Godlings: Dr. Francis Young

"Throughout the recorded history of Britain, belief in earthbound spirits presiding over nature, the home and human destiny has been a feature of successive cultures. From the localised deities of Britannia to the Anglo-Saxons' elves and the fairies of late medieval England, Britain's godlings have populated a shadowy, secretive realm of ritual and belief running parallel to authorised religion. Twilight of the Godlings delves deep into the elusive history of these supernatural beings, tracing their evolution from the pre-Roman Iron Age to the end of the Middle Ages. Arguing that accreted cultural assumptions must be cast aside in order to understand the godlings – including the cherished idea that these folkloric creatures are the decayed remnants of pagan gods and goddesses – this bold, revisionist book traces Britain's 'small gods' to a popular religiosity influenced by classical learning. It offers an exciting new way of grasping the island's most mysterious mythical inhabitants."