These Mythical Creatures Might Be Living in Your Home Right Now

Do you lose things in your home? Do things go wrong in the night? If so, you may be at the behest of the small gods. Who are these? Well, they have many different names, some people may call them fairies, or pixies, or elves, and sometimes they could be giants and goblins and kobolds. This is what we are going to talk about today, who the small gods were and why they exist, and why they persist today. And so, if that interests you, then grab yourself a cup of tea, and welcome to Crecganford. The term small gods is a rather analytical one, there isn't a general name for these creatures, they are, in the academic world, resistant to definition. So they include little, but what you often perceive in terms of size, small magical beings, some people call them fairies, or elves, or pixies, some think they're goblins, they can even be giants. And why is this? Because giants aren't particularly small, although some giants are small, but some giants are huge. So are these small gods? Are these what people call fairies? Well fairies is just a name for people from fairyland, such as Americans come from America, Europeans come from Europe, and Africans come from Africa. Fairies come from fairyland, but they are in all shapes, sizes, colours, and all sorts. So giants, and the fae, and goblins, and elves, are all fairies, but they can also all be small gods. So what are these? Well, some people think they are leftover deities from long ago, long before people came with farming technology, long before cultures formed armies to take over nations and regions. Long before that, when we were hunters and gatherers, and when we were in touch with the land, we had beliefs about that land, and some people think they persisted. But I'm here to tell you that isn't quite the case. So what has happened? Well, before there were gods, humans relied on the land, and the land held certain properties. So rivers would give you water, and so were considered good. Caves would be dark and scary, considered bad. Certain parts of the woods where they opened up into a magical area, maybe a tunnel of trees, or an opening, they would be considered sacred places. And we felt in touch with those, the world was giving us something special because of those. And so what we find is that we created sacredness to do with the locality, the relationality of these places. So a good way to explain this is that gods such as Yahweh, or Zeus, or Jupiter, or Odin, these are cosmogonic gods, these are gods that created the universe and did big things, they are big gods with supreme power. The small gods aren't physically small, they are small in terms of the locale in which they operate. They operate in a region, in a grove, in a cave, a river, at a spring, in various locations. And as humans evolved, and society evolved, and landscapes evolved, these gods evolved too, and they sometimes evolved with the landscape, and they sometimes evolved in response to societal changes. So what we also need to know is that these gods are very much what I would call specialist and unique locally, in terms of their names and what they were. In terms of their actual type, they were known regionally. So for example, you could have a nymph of a spring, and there would be loads of nymphs of springs all across Europe, certainly in Roman times. But each nymph was very specific in what it did. The nymphs, say in Rome, maybe performed a different function to the nymphs in England. So we have this change as well, where the supreme god is the supreme god doing the same thing in most places, or generally the same thing as creating worlds, or looking after storms, or the land. These small gods were doing specific things in that locale, even though the type of small god they were was well known in the region. And what we find is that because of that there are multiples of these small gods, so there are multiple nymphs, and multiple elves, and multiple fae. But we only have one supreme god, and one earth god, and one storm god for a religion. So there is that change as well. But also that they are part of, well I talk about locality, but relationality as well, in terms of that the people related with the land to which the small gods were in, it was an important part of what they did, or how they lived. So how these gods developed was that they were associated with part of the landscape, and as the land changes, let's say farming comes along, you have farmland, and so the small god would be associated no longer with a specific feature of the landscape, but with the farm, let's say. And then with that they eventually became known to be even in the house, or the hearth of that place. And so you have the small gods deep within home, and occasionally they persisted if there wasn't a house or farm, they would stay in that landscape. And then what would happen, certainly in terms of European folklore, is that as the Romans come along, they see these various gods, and through Romano interpretatio, which is Romans used to use Roman words to explain things of different cultures, they would apply larger god names to these smaller gods. So perhaps a, let's say, a local god of a cave in England may be called Mars, because they thought it was a war god, a god of danger, potentially even death, maybe Hermes or something. So you find that Romans placed larger names to these, and these gods become therefore more relevant in the landscape, certainly where other cultures have come in and mixed, and so it takes these gods out of proportion. And then what you find is that, again, this happened across much of Western Europe, certainly in terms of England, which is why England is often mentioned, and Ireland in terms of fairies, a lot more than maybe other regions, is that as Christians come along, they see what the Romans have done, and they in effect, rather than synchronise, which is what Romans have done, like try to persist the belief but call it something different, the Christians replace it with something similar. So a grove is replaced with a church, and so we find that what was a sacred place that became probably more important, or sounded more important in Roman times, then gets replaced with a Christian place of worship. Not in all places, but in many places, and places that aren't, there still is a little persistence. But this doesn't explain how these creatures, these small gods, persist today, because many people think that Christianity didn't get everywhere in Europe, and those stories persisted from long ago, and that isn't true. Christianity really got everywhere in Europe, and certainly in England. And so we see that the persistence of these gods really disappears, and certainly when Christianity has come along, much of it disappears and is lost. So how do we know about this? Well, what happens is, post the Anglo-Saxon Christian revolution in England, so post Norman as well, after that, we start seeing people try to recreate some of the past, and they see these stories, and they recreate, in fact mediate, is probably a good word, on what was the past to try and create a relevant story today. And so we get this, what some people may consider a false narrative, that isn't really true. Things change all the time, the landscape changes, society changes, beliefs change. If you look at Christianity, there are thousands of denominations of Christianity across different parts of the world, and a Christian living in England today is very different to a Christian living in England say 1,500 years ago. Things change, so you can't consider a story about a small god to be false. A belief in the spirits or nature to be false, if it has been created today, that's just the way we do things. If it feels right to you, then it is right to you. And what we sometimes see is a misappropriation of these stories, thinking that they belong to a race or to an ethnic group, where that isn't true, because they change, they are very different. Your beliefs are your beliefs, and they will be different to someone who says they believe the same thing as you, because that person may have slightly different ideas. But these small gods, particularly, are living in the eye of the beholder. You are given a landscape where they live, but how they are is up to you, and what magic they have is up to you. And that is really the story of the small gods. So, in effect, what has happened in the grand scheme of life is that a sacred place has created this form of magic or an associated element of divinity lives there. This has then been attached to a strict piece of land owned by someone, maybe even going into the hearth or home. We see a lot of small gods like that associated with that. But where that hasn't happened, those gods persist. But as Christianity and the Romans have come along, they have changed the size of these gods, in effect, and changed the importance of where they were. And then we have tried to reconstruct those stories to create the small gods we see today. And then we've tried to apply them back into the landscape, saying they are our gods. But they are not, they are just small gods, explaining small parts of the landscape, perhaps reflecting how people thought of that landscape many years ago, but very often they are just reconstructions and a way of trying to piece various histories and folk tales and folklore as a whole together to make sense of the world. So, in short, small gods are those gods that are local and close to you, they are not small in size, and I wouldn't say they are small in power either, because to the individuals that believe in them, they can be very powerful indeed.