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  • The Binding of the Fairies: Four Spells
  • Frederika Bain (bio)

How and Why to Bind a Fairy

Sex has always been a dangerous business. In medieval and early modern England, sex with priests might lead to excommunication; sex with prostitutes to the French pox; sex with animals to deformed or half-human offspring, and perhaps the death of the human or animal partners; and sex with demons to the sealing of a demonic pact and thence to the loss of one’s soul. This introduction will discuss four early modern spells, found in Folger MS Xd 234, that show how a mage may bind to his will and command one or more fairies for sexual purposes; it is clear that this operation is considered to be fraught with its own dangers, perhaps the more fearsome for never being fully described. But it also appears to offer unique pleasures and benefits not obtainable from other forms of sexual congress. I explore how and why a mage might have considered sex with fairies first as a possible and then as a desirable thing, looking at texts and traditions relating to such spells for inter-nature coupling.

Xd 234 (ca. 1600)1 is a sheet of vellum on which are inscribed a series of interconnected spells to summon, supplicate, control, and copulate with “the seven Sisters of the fairies.”2 It is absent from the group of manuscript spells most often cited in the scholarship on the summoning of spirits, devils, and fairies,3 being mentioned only in Alan Nelson’s biography of the Earl of Oxford, Monstrous Adversary,4 in connection with Oxford’s being accused of necromancy, and in passing in David Rankine’s Book of Treasure Spirits.5 Nonetheless it is worth study for the insights it offers into the nature of magecraft, spirit summoning, and supernatural sex.

Are spirits, devils, and fairies—ethereal beings that may be summoned— thus conflatable? To some extent. It is well understood that the traditions out of which early modern fairy lore arises are complex:6 sexual binding or [End Page 323] forced sexual congress in particular, of or by fairies or demons, is referenced in romances,7 ballads, and witchcraft trials,8 as well as throughout medieval demonology. This last requires some discussion: because the spells of Xd 234 so resemble in form conjurations of demons, it will be well to begin with a brief overview of the traditional relationship between fairies and devils.9 Many early modern authors, including Reginald Scot10 and Lewes Lavater,11 conflate them or see fairies as emanations of the Devil. In his Daemonologie, James I argues that “the deuil illuded the senses of sundry simple creatures, in making them beleeue that they saw and harde such thinges” as “the Phairie,”12 while in fact they are merely demonic illusions. Emma Wilby points out that examiners of accused witches repeatedly seem to have heard “demon” or “devil” when the examinant said “fairy,” as in the confession of Elspeth Reoch, where the examiner writes that Reoch had met “the devell quhilk she callis the farie man.”13 Summonings and conjurings of fairies and of demons in manuscript spell books and in Scot’s Discouerie of Witchcraft often use near-identical language, evincing equal amounts of propitiation, fear, and fascination; calling on the same religious entities to lend their powers of coercion and protection to the endeavor;14 and requesting similar boons.

Another example of the imbrication of the traditions is the changing identity of the spirit Oberon/Oberion. In her discussion of possible prototypes for Prospero’s magic book in The Tempest, Barbara Mowat focuses on Folger Shakespeare Library MS Vb 26,15 a compendium of spells and charms from around 1577–83. It includes instructions for conjuring “Oberyon,” here illustrated as a jinn-like figure complete with turban and vaporous tail, and cataloged among such “Spirrittes” as Baal and Satan, though he is also referred to as king of the fairies.16 Oberon appears in his fairy form, along with his more recognizable name, both before Vb 26, in Huon of Burdeaux (translated 1534),17 and afterward in a number of sources, including A Midsummer Night...

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