Some Encounters with Fae

My very first direct encounter with the Fae was twelve years ago. I could not find my entry in my journal, so we’ll make do with saying, it was around 2014 or maybe 2015.

I was still living in Sedona. The house I was living at had a back deck locking over into the valley. I had gotten to smoking tobacco in a pipe, and liked reading out there.

One evening, I was reading Ted Andrew’s Intercession of Spirit. He was talking about his many encounters he had. I was reading about how, in one of the encounters, the smell of tobacco seeped into the air. It reminded him of his grandfather’s pipe smoking. An older, fatherly gnome appeared, nodding along to whatever he was doing.[1]

It suddenly struck me, sitting there with my own pipe, reading this book … why haven’t I encountered the fae?

So I spoke out loud and made a Statement of Intent, that I would like to meet some of the fae. The world arrested for a moment, and then it passed. I kept reading and more or less forgot about it.

That night, sleeping next to my wife, she woke me up complaining to me that I should stop poking her. I said I was not. She sleepily responded, “well, someone is poking me.” Back then, my senses were not as well developed, but it was enough in Sedona to look.

And there it was, I sensed a kind of hole in reality in the shape of a humanoid figure. It did not feel like they were separate from reality, or that this was an overlay, but more that the spacetime matrix there warped into a humanoid shape, and they were partially in the plane of reality that I sense and partially in some other. Yet they did not feel alien at all.

I closed my eyes and saw more clearly: a small, child-like entity, maybe a little smaller than the size of my hand, with a leaf. Poking at my wife.

I told the being, my wife is off limits. (“Awww…”) but I can play with them if they want. A whole group of them showed up to play.

I can feel them engaging my imaginal space. As an adult, the imaginal space feels private and disconnected from the world. I think most poeople “visualize” and fail to get anything substantial, or even affect the world because they are visualizing within the imaginal space. Yet, these beings showed up there and started playing.

They would use my imaginal space as a kind of shared space to imagine things and scenrios. They played like little kids. Kids somehow share their imaginal space and play like that together. They made me the big bad wolf chasing them around, and then we went into the interior of Thunder Mountain and the spirit (or perhaps, land god) living there. It was a bit like Space Mountain with a lot of slides for running around.

The spirit of Thunder Mountain invited me to climb to its summit, and two fae queens (at least that was how it felt) in the area reached out with an invitation.

I told these munchkins that they are welcomed at the house, though there are some ground rules. They were more than welcomed to read anything in my library (some of them did, even popped up some pretend-glasses to read).

I learned a few things in tbis encounter. The fae were not so far away, and these I had encountered had a child-like quality. I had some other encounters that were more indirect, in dream spaces that I wasn’t sure what happened – particularly with what seem like water sprites that appeared as washer-women. Those helped me during Ayahuasca, and visited me when I lived in Seattle before Sedona. Yet these muchkinds were so present, I had taken them to be the normal.

The second memorable encounter happened during the COVID lockdown era. I had paid attention to Permaculture. I had seen references to it throughout my adult life. One day, I finally looked it up and discovered that Permaculture Design filled a huge hole, and provided some profound and important solutions.

My wife and I got a fig tree and a palo verde. We planted the fig in the back yard and the palo verde in the front. As I got deeper into permaculture design, I started having aspirations for cultivating a perennial food forest. I was looking at putting two more trees in the back – maybe a guava, or something tropical that needs to be shaded more.

Sometime in the middle of that, I was approached by a fae telling me that, since I intend to plant two more trees, they want to move in as soon as I did. I agreed to it.

… and proceeded to procastinate about it.

Sometime in Jan of this year, 2026, I got yelled at by a fae.

I had been reading a fantasy fiction in which the main character has magical relationship with the fae. In that book, within that culture, they were called the First Born. The main character had bought a merchant district, and many of the First Born moved in, to care for each house.. They in turn, would assess the character of humans wishing to dwell with them. If their character were found wanting, they would chase them out. The remaining residents in turn started dusting off old traditions, making daily offerings. The main character narrating the story commented that this started the age-old symbiotic relationship of human and First Born.

That part of the fiction resonated with the things I had been exploring. I had just had my world turned upside down finding out that in China, martial arts were not just combat systems, they were part of a system and network of rituals. The reaction to the Boxer Rebellion lead to systematically dismantling this.

So of course, in that gap, the fae came to yell at me because I had not yet planted the trees and they really really wanted to move in. It did not really register at the time, but the one who yelled at me did not seem as young as the ones I had met in Sedona. There was still that childlikeness, but looking back, they had a more mature energy signature, and were bigger.

He was telling me that they just needed any two trees, to plant them soon. There were some other fae that wanted to move into the interior of the house. They had been waiting for the trees to be planted as well, but did not want to wait any longer. I invited them to inhabit the house.

I can tell, the ones that moved into the house started to take inventory of the things in here. When I was packing things so my wife and kids for an SCA camping event, they were able to tell me if something was just lost and not on the property. When I had to drive back home from the camping event to pick something up and bring it back, some of them hitched a ride in the car to come out.

The ganja session that night had them started to talk and play, but also some conversation. I asked them why do they need trees? They used it to teleport and travel. (“Where do you think the Druids learned it from?”) That turned into something I had never considered before: rotation.

In the psychic navigation system, I talked about moving along the x,y,z, t, and S axes. The S-axis in particular, is important, otherwise, it is very difficult to navigate to energy channels, subtle bodies, or personal domains.

However, those have all been about moving linearly along the length of each of those axis.

The fae knows how to rotate around any of those axis, and that is the basis for many of their siddhis. (I will be writing up and incorporating rotation into the psychic navigation system).

When they rotate on any of the ordinary spatial axes (x,y,z), they can seem to phase out of the plane of existance – but they did not actually move that far off of it. This is how they can sneak around, seem like they are a part of this reality while being able to step aside. This is also how they circle sunwise and widdershins around a tree. (And of course I asked them about the connection to baguazhang).

Rotating about the time axis does some interesting things: slow down or speed up the subject experience of time flows. That relates to the stories of getting into fairy mounds and then coming back out with time have moved on faster. (I am looking forward to being able to consciously trigger this as a siddhi during sword fights).

One of the most fascinating application of this is the rotation for a personal Domain.

For example, there are culture clashes where people seem to be talking past each other, but those are actually two different narratives that are rotated out of phase from each other, but around 90º,

Some of the stubborn energy things that need healing were because I wasn’t properly rotated.

And then there were things in the Domain that were not static. They dynamically rotate, or span across in a spiral (similar to the complex plane where something rotates about a straight line).

This followed on very quickly with karma ripening with someone who is half-fae. I don’t know how that exactly works, but there it is. Resolving that karma came and went quickly, and was very personally intense, took several sessions facilitated by Ganja.

It threw me off because, I had it stuck in my mind that the fae were childlike, and they were not like the Sidhe or Tuatha Dé Danann. (I was told that the Tuatha Dé Danann were not actually fae so much as beings that inhabited the Otherworld because they knew how to rotate).

I found out that, these fae don’t see themselves as lesser and greater, but younger and older. I don’t know if that is universally true, but it seems to track that way. These older fae were not their oldest. The elder fae were significantly more older and more powerful.

They showed me three of their siddhis: Glamour, Charm, and Enchantment. (I was able to derive Gaes from Charm). All three of these are developed from the ability to rotate, and these older fae are more skilled and dangerous with it. I can see why the old tales included caution about dealing with the fae. The bit about speaking truths and oaths are likely related to the Gaes siddhi, but I had not explored that with them.

Glamour is very similar to a Mantle in that it is worn as a kind of energy garment. There is a rotation that happens to allow it to appear to be something else while hiding what is beneath.

Charm is similar to the charismatic projection siddhi from having a personal Domain. I had been working on asserting my personal domain more in the past month. Charm, however, does not feel aggressive or pushy because … well, it feels charming. It is like that because instead of projecting out something in the personal Domain in a linear direction (leading to clashes), it is rotated and can slide right through. (It is not lost on me that this is very similar to martial arts, particularly internal martial arts).

As useful as Glamour and Charm are, Enchantment is in my opinion the most significant.

By “enchantment” I do not mean the popular idea of it that comes from D&D or fantasy tropes. THere, we are talking about mechnistically imbuing characteristics into an inanimate object. While Enchantment can do that, the mechnistic imbuing misses the significance.

Enchantment is more like the magic of the character, Irene Belserion from the anime, Fairy Tail, the mother of one of the main characters, Erza Scarlet. Enchantment is a Domain effect where inanimate objects comes to life and magic.[2]

One of the definitions of Modernity is the mass Disenchantment, with some critics arguing that we never went from those kinds of superstitions. Certainly there are people who celebrate Disenchanment and the rise of Reason and Progress in our world.

But this talk with the older fae reveals a different hypothesis. The fae will work with metals. Iron itself is not toxic to the Fae, but rather, because Iron is a receiver of Mars, and Mars is poisoned[3], that poisoned Mars energy is toxic to the Fae. During the Industrial Revolution when the iron horse (the train and train tracks) were dug up and crisscrossed the world, introduced a lot of worked iron and steel into the world. The elder fae had retreated from this phase of the world, taking with them, Enchantment also withdrew. That left us with a world that is much less magical, even if there are people who retain the belief in magic. This all tracks between the 1850s to 1900s.

It is also entirely possible that bullets are hard to stop with magic, not because magic is invalid and were never effective in the first place, but because bullets carried the poison of Mars, and many magic falls apart in face of it. There are outliers of some practitioners with siddhis to bend steel and heal by shooting people with a pistol.

If you are a person who wants to bring magic back in the world, I think a good place to start is to create that space within the home to welcome the fae, and live together with them.

See Also

• Denizens: Fae

Footnotes

1. They like the smell of tobacco more than ganja

2. I suspect (but have not verified) that Enchantment may have something to do with the Veil of Life. One of my friends asked if there is some connection between consecration and enchantment. I am thinking consecration has more to do with the Veil of Spirit.

3. I have had encounters with the planetary consciousness of Mars. There is a poison. The planetary consciousness knows about it and has been working on a cure.