Fairies of New England: The Little People of the Hills and Forests

In 1890, Mrs. W. Wallace Brown, wife of a government agent assigned to the Passamaquoddy tribe, published a story she’d been told by a local tribe member, in which a Wabanaki chief goes on an extraordinary spiritual journey.

Based on Brown’s closeness to the Passamaquoddy of Eastern Maine, it’s likely the storyteller was a member of that tribe, although they could also have been a Penobscot (unfortunately, Brown doesn’t identify the storyteller or offer any information about them except that they were Wabanaki).

The story, which purports to explain how the Passamaquoddy learned to play ball games, is perhaps most interesting for its description of the chief’s journey from Eastern Maine to the Land of the Northern Lights, a place I can only describe as a kind of fairyland.

Note: I offer this interpretation of a Wabanaki story as a personal reflection. It isn’t intended to represent a Wabanaki reading of the story, and I’d be keen to hear contemporary Wabanaki perspectives.

The path of the Milky Way

How does one reach fairyland from Eastern Maine? One travels north and follows the path of the Milky Way, of course.

As the story relates, the Passamaquoddy chief heads north toward Canada, looking for his son, who keeps disappearing. He eventually comes to a place where he can neither see nor hear. He loses “all knowledge,” and experiences “nothing.” What happens to the chief in this place of “nothing” remains unsaid, for nothing can be said about nothing. We later find out he’s traveled the path of the Milky Way.

When the chief’s eyes open, he finds he’s arrived in a “queer country,” bathed in a nebulous light, with no sun, moon, or stars. The people who live there speak an unknown tongue and play a game of ball that causes the lights in the sky to change. They wear lights upon their head and rainbow-colored belts at their waist. Eventually, the chief meets an old man from his own country who tells him the name of this strange place: Wa-ba-ba-nal, the Land of the Northern Lights.

What does it mean to travel north and follow the path of the Milky Way?

If the chief’s journey is spiritual in nature, we can perhaps draw one conclusion from the story’s portrayal of this journey: spirituality requires two things, human effort and divine transport. This is reflected in the fact that the journey has a knowable portion, during which the chief is in control of his actions (heading north), and an unknowable portion, during which he no longer exerts control (the path of the Milky Way). The former, it seems, refers to spiritual techniques, while the latter points to cosmic transport.

The story’s cosmology

I’m interested in the story’s cosmology because it creates a clear distinction between earthly and spiritual experience and has much to say about the relationship between the two.

First, the story envisions a universe divided between a terrestrial and celestial realm. The terrestrial, for the Wabanaki, is called Dawnland and encompasses the land we now call Maine, as well as Nova Scotia in Canada, while the celestial is located in the northern sky. A great gulf, unknowable except through the spirit, separates these realms. It can only be traversed via the path of the Milky Way.

The story designates the two realms as the Upper and the Lower Country, the Upper being associated with the Northern Lights and its fairylike inhabitants, the Lower being the land of the Wabanaki. From the perspective of someone existing within the Lower Country, the Upper Country is associated with the North, the sky, and the Northern Lights.

What is the Land of the Northern Lights?

The Land of the Northern Lights is clearly a spiritual realm, but it’s also visible (occasionally) from Maine. The aurora borealis represents a terrestrial window onto this celestial realm, allowing the Wabanaki to see the world of spirit in the form of intangible light.

Seeing, however, is not the same thing as visiting, and while the former may be a spiritual act, the latter represents a type of spiritual culmination.

Before one follows the path of the Milky Way, the Lights of the Upper Country are signposts pointing toward the North, toward the celestial path’s entrance. Although beautiful, the lights do more than invite the Wabanaki to gaze. They call them to enter the Land of the Northern Lights. And one can only do this by giving up knowledge of the senses and starting out on a spiritual path.

Who are the inhabitants of Wa-ba-ba-nal?

Those who inhabit the Northern Lights are most certainly spirits. I’d call them fairies, but the word has too many European associations. In their actions, they seem to mirror the Wabanaki, for they play the same game of ball and live in wigwams.

The ball game is significant because it originates in the Upper Country. The Wabanaki inhabitants of the Lower Country only learn the game when they journey between the worlds. This suggests that Wabanaki activities may derive from the doctrine of celestial spirits. While the terrestrial and celestial countries complement each other, the latter apparently shapes the former.

The story identifies the Northern Lights as the effect of celestial spirits moving. If these spirits teach the Wabanaki how to exist in the lower world, the act of looking up at the Lights, feeling them guide one’s terrestrial movements, is a spiritual act. Although this looking doesn’t require the individual to enter the Land of the Northern Lights, it’s a powerful reminder that the passage is possible.

Why is the North a spiritual direction?

The story depicts the North as a direction associated with spirituality. I couldn’t help wondering why this might be. In European traditions, the East is usually considered to be the direction of the spirit, because the Sun rises there. In the Catholic mass, one looks toward the East, ad orientem, toward God. The North, on the other hand, is considered to be a direction of darkness, cold, and death.

One reason the North might be seen as a spiritual direction is that—in one story at least—Glooskap, a divine figure central to Wabanaki folklore, received the breath of life in the far north of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. It may be that he came down from the North to mingle with the Wabanaki and teach them his spiritual ways. Other stories say he came from a sky land, which clearly echoes the notion of the Land of the Northern Lights.

A more concrete explanation is that the Northern Lights, from the perspective of Maine, appear in the northern sky. The Wabanaki are called the people of the first light because they live in the East, in Dawnland, near the rising sun. Hence, the East appears to be associated with the Wabanaki way of life, whereas the Northern Lights, a phenomenon far rarer than the dawn, came to be associated with the more rarefied world of the spirit.

Read about more New England fairies in my book New England Fairies: A History of the Little People of the Hills and Forests.

Cover photo by Dreerwin, license CC BY-SA 4.0 International.