Fairies, term that one frequently encounters in old texts and in ancient traditions; it signifies a type of genie or imaginary deity who inhabited the earth and was distinguished by numerous actions and magical abilities, sometimes good and sometimes evil.

Fairies were a particular sort of deity without any relation to the ancient Greek and Roman gods, except when associated with the larvae of Roman myths. See Lemures. However, some rightly claim that one should not place them at the same rank as gods at all. Instead, they assume that fairies were a type of contiguous creature who were neither gods nor angels, neither humans nor demons.

Fairies are of Eastern origin. Their history and religion being filled with stories of fairies and dragons, it seems Persians and Arabs are their inventors. Persians call them peri and Arabs call them djinn. They have a particular region that they assume to be inhabited by fairies called Gimnistan, which we call the Fairy Kingdom. The Faerie Queene, the English poet Spencer’s masterpiece, is an epic poem whose characters and their traits are drawn from fairy tales.

In his work Mascurat, Naudé traces the origin of fairy tales to the mythic tradition of the ancient Fates and suggests that they both served as deputies and interpreters of the gods’ will for man. However, he later intends “fairies” to mean a type of sorceress that became famous for predicting the future through some type of communication with genies. The religious beliefs of the ancients, he observes, were not much more frightening than our own, and their hell and Furies had nothing comparable to our demons. According to him, instead of our sorcerers and magicians—who do nothing but evil and who are engaged in the most vile and base activities—the ancients believed in a less wicked type of goddess that Latin authors called albas dominas. Rarely doing evil, they are more inclined to useful and favorable acts. One example is the nymph Egeria, who undoubtedly inspired representations of the last fairy queens Morgana, Alcina, Ariosto’s Manto, Spencer’s Gloriana and others found in English and French texts. According to Hyginus, some of them presided over the births of young princes and knights in order to announce their destiny as was previously done by the Fates. ch. clxxi and clxxiv.

Despite what Naudé says, the ancients were not lacking in sorcerers as wicked as ours are assumed to be (think Horace’s Canidia, ode V. satire i.5). Fairies come neither from the Fates nor from ancient sorceresses, but rather from nymphs like Egeria. See Nymphs, Fates, etc.

The fairies of our modern fiction are imaginary beings that the authors of these types of works employed to carry out marvelous and absurd actions, just as poets in the past used pagan divinities to intervene in epics, tragedies, and sometimes comedies. With their assistance, one can safely express any insane or strange idea. See Marvelous.