Fairies

Claire Nahmad has spent her life trying to master the art of seeing and communicating with fairies. ‘I believe in fairies. These marvellous beings do exist, and I shall continue to remain insistent on that point. It is merely that we have lost the art of seeing and communicating with them’ 61

Nahmad’s book, has no academic references. However, she is described as ‘a herbalist and Wise woman who has spent her life learning the ancient arts and attuning herself to the life of the spirit.’62 It is these attunement skills and her version of ‘the art of seeing’ that I am interested in.

Unlike Nahmad, I am not asking you to embrace the spiritual. I am asking you to embrace the presence of physical matter. What interests me is that her advice on setting up a fairy encounter is in some ways similar to what I am asking you to do.

Firstly, like Merleau-Ponty, she refutes the supremacy of intellect over bodily experience. 63

Secondly, Nahmad claims that ‘materialist thinking has blotted out our ability to see and communicate with fairies...’64 This materialist thinking (which she attributes to the work of the demonic Ahriman, Lord of Darkness, in ancient Persian mythology) is not referring to a sensitivity to material qualities. It is referring to what Jane Bennett describes as ‘American materialism’ . In other words, commodification and hyper-consumption. Bennett similarly claims that ‘American materialism… conceals the vitality of matter.’65

Thirdly, both ask us to resist rationalist understanding of the mundane in order to lift the screen or veil that separates us from these experiences.

‘Demystification tends to screen from view the vitality of matter and to reduce political agency to human agency. Those are tendencies I resist.’ Jane Bennett.

66

Nahmad says that we need to encounter and overcome many different ‘skins of the ether before we can see fairies...’ She asserts that ‘these skins are the veil that humanity has woven to insulate itself from the fairies…and the immediacy of the invisible world.’67

We are likewise trying to dissolve boundaries and break through the insulation of mundane frameworks to reach a direct and sensual experience.

61 Claire Nahmad, Fairy Spells, Seeing and communicating with the fairies (London: Souvenir Press, 1998) p.9. 62 Ibid. Back cover. 63 “We know not through our intellect but through our experience”. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London & New York: Routledge & K Paul Humanities Press, 1974). 64 Nahmad, Fairy Spells, p.63. 65 Bennet, Vibrant Matter, p.5. 66 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, xv. 67 Nahmad, Fairy Spells, p.58.