Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality:
In his book The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis tries to depict the universe as it was seen through the eyes of a medieval person. He describes their view of the heavens, with its precise system of crystalline spheres towering like a great cathedral, vast but finite, into space. And he is just about to describe their view of Earth and its inhabitants who occupy the lower end of the Great Chain of Being, which stretches down from God and the angels, to man, animals, vegetables, and even stones, when he finds himself obliged to pause and consider an anomalous class of beings. They are not only strange to him, as a literary historian and Christian apologist, but they are also at odds with the cosmology he is outlining - a world even more precise and orderly than our own worldview. Following the Roman writer Martianus Capella, he calls these beings longaevi (presumably “long-lived ones”) - “dancing companies” of which “haunt woods, glades, and groves, and lakes, and springs and brooks; whose names are Pans, Fauns, … Satyrs, Silvans, Nymphs.” They are, of course, our daimons.
“In a sense,” says Lewis, “their unimportance is their importance. They are marginal fugitive creatures. They are perhaps the only creatures to whom the Model [i.e. the medieval cosmos] does not assign, as it were, an official status.” And this is as true of our own model of the cosmos as it was then. It is the nature of the daimons to be always unofficial, constituting a stumbling block to the orderly structures by which we envisage Creation. To his credit, Lewis does not disapprove of them. “Herein lies their imaginative value,” he says. “They introduce a welcome hint of wildness and uncertainty into the universe that is in danger of being a little too self-explanatory, too luminous.” Lewis’s private attempt to reconcile the daimons with a Christian cosmos took the form of his famous Narnia books for children of all ages.
… The process of demonization [i.e., the reduction of daimons to demons] took on new impetus with the Reformation. The Protestants were in no mood to accommodate the daimons; nor were their Catholic counterparts, the new breed of narrow counter-reformationists. Both sides quoted the early Christian Fathers, who had identified the pagan gods with devils, to support their own identification of fairies with demons. By 1584, Reginald Scot could complain loudly in his Discoverie of Witchcraft (vii, xv) that “our mothers' maids have so terrified us with … spirits, witches, urchins, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, … dwarfs, giants, nymphs, Incubus, Robin Good Fellow, … and other such bugs.” Here we see the fear and exasperation of a mind which has ceased to discriminate between daimons and is merely oppressed, lumping them all together in a demonic body. With the accession of James I to the throne in 1603, together with the rise of Puritanism, the demonization of fairies was all but complete in educated circles.
… What really did for the fairies, however, was their association with witches. … The history of witchcraft in Europe is extremely complex. (I will touch on the subject later on.) It’s enough to say here that, as the sixteenth century drew to a close, it became increasingly hag-ridden. Daimons, and fairies in particular, were implicated in the hysteria, phobia, and paranoia which surrounded witchcraft and the persecution of its alleged practitioners. This was also a period, of course, which saw the rise of empiricism which led eventually to the modern, essentially scientific, view of the world. On the face of it, this view could be seen as responsible for the ensuing decay of daimonic beliefs. But I am inclined to agree with C. S. Lewis when he says: “One might have expected the High Fairies to have been expelled by science; I think they were actually expelled by a darkening of superstition.”