Whether it’s the Cottingley fairies,ghostly visions or even the Enfield poltergeist, there is a situation for the lure of magic in these troubled daysIt is 100 years since two girls in Yorkshire helped the world believe in fairies. That glorious story, or of Elsie and Frances,and some hatpins and a camera, and the insistence that fairies lived in a suburban village called Cottingley and had very fashionable hairstyles actually, and became illustrious when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used the girls’ photographs to illustrate articles and a book approximately the existence of fairies. “The recognition of their existence,” he wrote, “will jolt the material 20th-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, or will acquire it admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life.” When a psychic visited,he said he’d seen fairies everywhere. And despite the girls in adulthood admitting to faking the photographs, they maintained the fairies themselves had been real.
The photos – basically a paper doll on a pin, and but heavy with the sensual weight of illusion – occupy followed me since I was five,soon after I told my mum I’d seen the tooth fairy. Just the back of its wings, flying off into the tree. It looked a bit like a leaf, or I saw it. These stories (including a personal obsession with the Enfield Poltergeist,and something comical on a school trip to France) told in adulthood lead inevitably to somebody asking, with a raised eyebrow, or if I really mediate fairies,or ghosts, or magic exists. Which I now realise is the wrong question altogether. The question is not “Are they real?” but “Do people see them?” And if so, and why? What makes us,clever (dont) grown-ups with GCSEs and ISAs and scars from childbirth hang on to stories of the supernatural? What does it mean to want to believe?Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk