Its been a while since I did an Ask Me Anything style blog and also a while since I wrote about my fiction so I thought that would be fun to do today. I’ve collected some questions from social media and am answering them here for everyone. Feel free to add additional questions in the comments if you’d like. Nicole: What’s your favorite fictional book that you have written?My answer: That’s…
Category Archives: By Land Sea and Sky
Theosophy’s Impact on the Pagan View of Fairies
Note: In this piece I’m going to be making some generalizations which may not apply to all neopagans but which do hold true for a majority that I have looked into. A main influence on the neopagan view of fairies, which is rarely acknowledged, is theosophy and more particularly the writings of Helena Blavatsky. Blavatsky herself is a controversial figure, accused of rampant plagiarism by her…
2022 Recap
This year has been a challenging one for me but I kept moving forward, and I wanted to offer a quick recap here for everyone.I had four articles published in magazines this year:
“Imagining Fairyland”, Pagan Dawn, Imbolc issue, 2022 no 222
“The White Elephant in the Room: Racism and Diversity in Fairy Belief”, Witches & Pagans Magazine, issue 39, 2022
“Fairy Queens and Witches”, Pagan Dawn,…
Pre-Christian Celtic Fairylore?
I recently shared a comic by Zach Weinersmith which featured a ‘traditional Celtic folklore fairy’ who, at one point, mentioned stealing a human soul for the fairies’ tithe to Hell. I shared it because the comic is funny but unsurprisingly – because social media is what it is – received some pushback from people over the idea of the tithe to Hell which they felt was problematically Christian in…
Top 10 Horror Movies
Since we’re into October I thought it would be fun to do a list of my top 10 favourite horror movies – feel free to add your own in the comments. Outside of a few close friends most people probably don’t know that I’m a big fan of the horror genre. I’ve watched horror since I was about 12, saw Halloween for the first time, and fell in love with the entire concept. Probably less surprisingly my…
Following the Pleaides
As some people are aware for the last four years I have been researching the Pleiades from a spiritual perspective and working to create a system of rituals connected to it. As we approach the four year anniversary of the experience in Iceland which led me onto this path I wanted to recap how things have gone so far. image of Pleiades by NASA, public domainI’ve talked about the approach I was…
Tolkien, Stereotypes, and Diversity
I’ve written here before about representation and racism in fairy media and later expanded that into a full length article which was published in Witches & Pagans magazine under the title ‘The (White) Elephant in the Room: Race & Identity in Fairy Lore’. In both of these pieces I emphasized the diverse descriptions of fairies, elves, and other Otherworldly beings that we find across folklore and…
Folklore in Legend
The 1985 movie Legend is often classified as a dark fantasy but it contains many themes from older folklore. So today lets look at some of the folklore we find in the film and how it is incorporated into the story. 1551 woodcutting of a unicorn https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_unicorn._Woodcut_after_C._Gessner._Wellcome_V0021193.jpgSpoilers ahead:For those unfamiliar the movie tells the…
Marriage and the Otherworld part 2
In my last piece I established that marriage was a common feature of stories involving fairies but today I’d like to look at some patterns we can note within that wider concept particularly of the Good Folk marrying humans. I think this can help us further explore the idea of marriage with the Othercrowd and may be useful both for those with an esoteric bent as well as those writing fiction who…
Marriage and the Otherworld
Recently the subject of fairies and marriage was brought up in a discussion, with someone suggesting that fairies would have no such concept as ‘marriage’ and that there were no accounts of marriage either of fairies or between fairies and humans. Since I’m not sure how pervasive that idea is I thought the best approach would be to address it here and discuss the layers of folklore involved -…