After my recent post, I decided to look into the context of the Lewis quote on the longaevi from The Discarded Image. What follows is a summary, not intended to be thorough and, as usual, aimed at unapologetically pillaging ideas for my own use.
To begin with, here is Lewis describing some fundamentals of the medieval model, into which he will later situate the longaevi:
In the Mundas which God built of that raw material [the four contraries of hot, cold, moist, and dry] we find them only in combination. They combine to form the four elements. The union of hot and dry becomes fire; that of hot and moist, air; of cold and moist, water; of cold and dry, earth. (In the human body they combine with a different result, as we shall see later.) There is also a Fifth Element or Quintessence, the aether; but that is found only above the Moon and we mortals have no experience of it.
In the sublunary world—Nature in the strict sense—the four elements have all sorted themselves out into their ‘kindly stedes.’ Earth, the heaviest, has gathered itself together at the centre. On it lies the lighter water; above that, the still lighter air. Fire, the lightest of all, whenever it was free, has flown up to the circumference of Nature and forms a sphere just below the orbit of the Moon.
Lewis says the longlivers (let’s dispense with the Latin) are ambiguously understood to belong between air and Earth.
In a sense, if I may risk the oxymoron, their unimportance is their importance. They are marginal, fugitive creatures. They are perhaps the only creatures to whom the Model does not assign, as it were, an official status. Herein lies their imaginative value. They soften the classic severity of the huge design. They intrude a welcome hint of wildness and uncertainty into a universe that is in danger of being a little too self-explanatory, too luminous.
The longlivers, as the name implies, have longer lives than humans but are not immortal. They are “innocent” and have “bodies of elemental purity.”
Lewis then proceeds to place these uncategorizable beings into three categories, based on three extracts from Milton that illustrate three possible understandings of “fairies”:
- Swart Faery. Horrors. Enemies of God. Elves, ettins, giants, nymphs. “Fayre fiendes that cause my hayres to stand upright.” This dark view of fairies, Lewis says, “gained ground, I think, in the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth century—an unusually hag-ridden period.”
- Small creatures, though their degree of smallness is always vague. They seem to range (even within the same story!) from insect sized to the size of a short human. More importantly, though, these fairies are intent on dancing and mirth, having almost nothing to do with humans. These fairies are more afraid of humans than humans are of them.
- High fairies. Unlike in the second understanding, these fairies often seek out humans—sometimes for amorous purposes. These are human-sized, beautiful, and possessing material splendor. They can also be elusive when they want to be. I’m reminded of Tolkien’s elves here.
Lewis then goes on to outline four theories about the nature of longlivers:
- A third rational species distinct from angels and men. Long-lived but mortal. Sometimes associated with the four classical elements, i.e., elementals (undines, sylphs, gnomes, salamanders).
- Demoted (not fallen) angels. They did not follow Lucifer in rebellion but were sympathetic to him. They were banished to the lower, airy regions to await final judgment.
- A special class of the dead. There is some inconsistency here. Some of the dead are found to be consorting with fairies. Some became fairies. Some never died but were whisked off to Fairyland. If I may insert my own theorizing here: the connection with the dead makes sense when you consider the long association of the burial of the dead with the fruitfulness of the land. The land is fed and in turns feeds.
- Fallen angels, i.e., devils. “This becomes almost the official view after the accession of James I. … This view, which is closely connected with the later Renaissance phobia about witches, goes far to explain the degradation of the Fairies from their medieval vitality into the kickshaws of Drayton or William Browne. A churchyard or a brimstone smell came to hang about any treatment of them that was not obviously playful. … One might have expected the High Fairies to have been expelled by science; I think they were actually expelled by a darkening of superstition.” Obviously, fairies as demons is the most dreadfully boring option of all.
I bring this up because it is a valuable wrestling with the phenomena in Christian and classical lands. I don’t have any interest in the royal court as a metaphor for the sacred; it was valuable in its time but I prefer an ecological model like animism. Nevertheless, these are good thoughts to think with.
I also want to linger on Lewis’ comment that it was superstition, not science, that expelled the fairies. The witch craze was a pseudo-science claiming to reveal and stamp out a scourge of goatish Sabbats. They had tests! Court trials! Books published on the latest findings! Yet in the end, it was all aircraft grade superstition. Sixteenth century conspiracy theory. Human fear, not facts, killed the fairies.
Likewise, we children of the Enlightenment, full of our own fanciful ideas, assume the mass of humanity throughout history is obviously wrong about the elder folk. We write off everyone, everywhere as naive or unscientific or demonically deceived and then wonder why we feel lonely and the world disenchanted.
“They intrude a welcome hint of wildness,” says Lewis—and this is what we need. Our worldviews are entirely too tame. No matter how loudly various blowhards defend “the truth,” it’s dogs fighting over scraps.
You want a more enchanted cosmos? It’s not hard. Find a place where the water bubbles up from the underworld and listen with the trees as they lean in.
