The Little People
Some Folkloric Musings
Folklore is one of my favorite fields of inquiry, and I even consider myself something of an amateur folklorist—although I’m quite certain the eminent antiquarians of yesteryear would think little enough of my contributions.
But the point is this: consonant with my Traditionalist leanings, I often discern in folklore a kind of relict or remnant of the true discoveries, or wisdom, of traditional sciences. Actually, there’s a case to be made for folklore itself being reckoned among the traditional sciences, like astrology and alchemy; it is, in its own way, every bit as precise and exacting as the modern “empirical” sciences.
Take, for instance, the tales of “the Little People.” Now, these beings are classified under many different names by many different cultures: the fairies, the Daoine Sìth, brownies, spriggans, Bruni, Nimerigar, Ninnimbe, clurichauns, and countless others too numerous to recount here. Mostly, these creatures are dismissed as the folkloric residues and superstitions of primitive peoples and mindsets; the leveling and puerile popular culture of our aberrant modern civilization delights in transforming them into cute and clever sprites, tricksy beings that are playful and never frightening, and entirely domesticated for the consumption of small children and child-like adults.
All of this, of course, could not be further from the truth. I recommend the horror tales of Arthur Machen for those who are interested in a more natural and realistic depiction of the Little People of Celtic mythology. The great Welsh writer had a rare knack for evoking the sense of dread that these beings elicited in the rustic folk of the British Isles; for starters, you can read “The Novel of the Black Seal,” a story that appears in Machen’s episodic The Three Impostors.1 It’s the quintessential Machen treatment of the Welsh fairy folk; thereafter, you can graduate to such lesser classics as “The Shining Pyramid,” “The Red Hand,” “Out of the Earth,” and my especial favorite, “Change.” Even his peerless masterpiece, “The White People,” incorporates elements of this theme.
In keeping with his late Victorian bona fides, Machen interprets the myths of the Little People through a pseudo-scientific lens. In his tales, the fairy legendry of the British Isles is euhemeristic; they disguise a hidden episode of ethnographic history, in which the present inhabitants of the Isles—the Celts and Anglo-Saxons—subjugated and drove underground a prehistoric race of autochthones who have since evolved into the “fey folk” of Celtic lore, the furtive and sinister Little People who still harass and sometimes murder their conquerors.
The notion wasn’t original to Machen—the Scottish antiquarian and intrepid folklorist David MacRitchie explored a similar concept in Testimony of Tradition,2 as well as a later pamphlet entitled Fians, Fairies and Picts.3 The idea was that folkloric tradition simply preserved the memory of a small-statured, aboriginal race—“Turanians” in the case of Machen, or Lapps or Finns in MacRitchie’s telling—which was driven to a secretive, underground existence, and eventual extinction, by the implacable Aryan invaders of more recent millennia.
I confess, it’s a fascinating theory, and I’ve always had a special fondness for these ideas. Naturally, though, a wiser consideration of the facts in the case exposes the theory for what it really is: an altogether too “pat,” too materialistic and evolutionistic hypothesis that bears all the hallmarks of muddled, scientistic Victorian thought.
From a Traditionalist perspective, the theory is untenable. As I explained in an earlier essay, the true explanation for these beings is that they represent the manifestations of inferior subtle forces (rarely, perhaps, superior forces), which an incrementally materializing humanity—subject to “involution” rather than “evolution”—has gradually lost the ability to perceive.
Or, if the Little People do in truth represent living, physical beings such as we know, they may really represent the survivals of some ancient race, as the “euhemerists” suppose—but they are far more likely to be survivals of a formerly advanced race, one that belonged to a previous cycle, and has since degenerated to its present, dilapidated state. Eschewing the simplistic, linear fairy tale of evolutionism, Traditionalists have long supposed that so-called “primitive races” are nothing of the sort, and are instead the dying tag-ends of once-great civilizations from earlier periods in our cycle or even anterior cycles altogether.4
I guess I’ve found some possible confirmation of this view in a curious document I have in my possession. It’s an unpublished, secret history of the world commissioned by the College of Seth; its dissemination was limited to members of that institution, though I managed to get my hands on a copy in exchange for a favor performed. But I see no harm in quoting a passage or two from the book in this Substack post, especially since it’s unlikely to be read by any members of the College, or really anyone else for that matter.
Anyhow, this history—which, it must be said, is a wild read—begins with a chapter on some of the strange races that inhabited the “Antediluvian World,” and among them are creatures which the author calls the “Derroes,” or οἱ Δήρροι:
“The Derroes are but the degenerate tag-ends of an already degenerate race; they are the stunted, dwarfed relics of the Rmoahal race, forced to dwell in miserable and bestial conditions beneath the earth after the final, all-consuming irruption of those savage Atlantean hordes their ancestors delighted in tormenting and sacrificing to the Black Sun. Scarcely more than three feet high, these wizened and brutish subterranean dwellers have become synonymous with horror and the blind malice of unknown things in the myth and folklore of every human race. The Derroes have many names, and I do but recount a few—kobolds, des gobelins, plant annwn, Προῦνοι, Ninnimbe, Reba-Ruek, trows, brownies, gnutons, κόβαλοι, spriggans, fairies.
“The Derroes, being a fugitive and persecuted race, driven beneath the earth and bent and crippled and malformed by their unhealthy environs, but with their intellectual powers little weakened, have very naturally nursed a terrible hatred for their erstwhile persecutors—they hate humanity, and delight in wreaking cruel and terrifying punishment upon the distant descendants of their enemies. The ancient, unexpurgated folklore of the ‘Little People’—unleavened by the maudlin need of some to transform these beings into versifying sprites and mild children’s correctives—preserves intact the ancestral fear of these creatures, which were wont to steal out at night, to abduct children and wayward women, and replace their own foul offspring in the cribs and beds of the kidnapped. For those who really know how to read history, the folklore of mankind abounds with the horrors of the Little People—countless stories of how the Derroes commit unanswered murders in lonely places, and inflict cruel tortures upon waylaid men and women. The beloved fairy tales of ‘Yallery Brown,’ ‘Childe Rowland,’ and ‘Rumpelstiltksin’ preserve dim recollections of their atrocious crimes in much-garbled and heavily diluted form.”5
I should mention that the “Rmoahals”—alluded to in this passage as the progenitors of the Derroes—also appear in Theosophical lore, where they are one of the sub-races of the Fourth, or Atlantean, Root-Race; the College seems to regard them with especial dread, although the Theosophists do not, perhaps further indicating the influence of the Counter-Initiation upon this organization.
But it’s interesting that the passage also mentions the “Prounoi” (οἱ Προῦνοι), which are better known in the Latin tongue as Bruni, and were said by certain late Latin historians to be a race of homunciones atroces that apparently dwelt in the Scottish Highlands, just beyond the Roman frontier. Incidentally, some folklorists and linguists think that this word is the original of the Scottish Gaelic brùnaidh or brownie, one of the most famous “species” of Little People.
In any case, it is without doubt of these “demons,” the so-called Bruni, that the seventeenth-century Jesuit scientist Caspar Schott wrote in the Physica Curiosa:
“…quorundam opinio fuit, non daemones illos esse, sed homunciones quosdam, medium inter bruta & homines, sub humana tamen forma, animantium genus constituentes, qui praedictis aliisque occultis locis latitent, sed tamen hominum aspectibus se quandoque offerant.”6
Which, roughly translated, reads: “…it is the opinion of some that they are not demons, but rather a form of ‘manlings,’ halfway between brutes and men, but nevertheless with a human form, and constituting a species of living things which hide in the aforesaid and other hidden places, and sometimes show themselves to the sight of men.” You’re unlikely to find a more succinct description of the Bruni or Prounoi, but whether they and the other species of Little People still exist in our relentlessly involutionary and materialized world is beyond my capacity to say—though I will confirm, for what it’s worth, that those members of the College of Seth with whom I have spoken about the subject seem to believe that they in fact do.
One final note about the Bruni. I found a curious reference to them once in an ancient manuscript that belonged to the collection of a wealthy East Coast bibliophile; I had the privilege, years ago, of indexing this man’s extensive library. The manuscript was of medieval provenance, and it contained among other things a breviary by Gildas the Wise entitled, I believe, Historia de Gentibus Brittonum (or something to that effect), which is—so far as I know—unique.
Anyhow, it was quite dull, like all such late Roman breviaries; but it did recount one interesting episode, which was supposed to have taken place during the emperor Septimius Severus’ brutal campaign in northern Scotland in the early third century. As the story went, a group of Roman soldiers became lost in the “Hebrides”—probably the Isle of Skye—and came across a dark loch upon whose shore was a great black tower.
The tower was ancient and decrepit, and of a forbidding and sinister construction that even the pagan Romans shunned, but it was shelter of a kind, so the soldiers stopped there for the night. When they awoke, they were missing two of their number, with something like crude manikins left in their place. So the Roman commander decided to lay a trap the next night to revenge his comrades, whom he suspected the Picts of abducting.
Instead, the following night disclosed something even more surprising: a tall, beautiful woman of an unearthly pale complexion appeared in the tower, apparently seeking to bewitch and abscond with some of the soldiers. Gildas called her a domina candida, a “white lady;” the pious monk seemed to regard her as a supernatural being, and traduced her as entirely loathsome and a satellite of the Devil. In any case, the story went that the Roman commander seized this lovely creature, thinking her some kind of Pictish princess and hoping to take her back to the emperor as a prize. At that very moment, however, an abominable horde of “gibbering manlings,” homunciones garrientes, poured out of the earth beneath the tower, and beset the Romans.
These were the Bruni, horrible creatures, and they were leagued in some mysterious fashion with the domina candida who had been made prisoner; she was indeed a sort of princess, but not of the Picts. The story ends with the Roman commander surrendering himself to the “white lady” and her horde of Bruni in exchange for the escape and free passage of his men through their land. Presumably, the commander descended into the “underworld” with this “Queen of Elfland”—one of the earliest instances I’ve ever heard of this common fairy trope—though his fate is unrecorded, and Gildas’ story concludes with assorted moral lessons to be drawn about the various snares and wiles employed by the Devil to entrap men.
It’s a strange story, and rather similar to another one from those parts—the story of Thomas the Rhymer, or Thomas of Ercildoune. I’ve come across this connection between a “white lady” and the Bruni or Little People many times, and I’ll probably go into greater detail in a future post; there’s certainly a great deal of material to mine.
In the meantime, if you’re in the British Isles—for Heaven’s sake, stay away from the barrows, knowes, hypogea, tumuli, henges, and other remnants of anterior cycles. These properly belong to the Little People, and nothing good can come of messing with them.
Arthur Machen, The Three Impostors: or The Transmutations (London: John Lane, 1895).
David MacRitchie, Testimony of Tradition (London: Keegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1890).
David MacRitchie, Fians, Fairies and Picts (London: Keegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1893).
Cf., for instance, “On the Hyperborean Tradition,” by Arvo, in Introduction to Magic: The Path of Initiatic Wisdom (Vol. II).
Diomedes Palaeologus, The Slaves of the Black Sun: A Secret History of the World (London: Sethian Publishing House, 1989), pp. 20-1.
Caspar Schott, Physica Curiosa (Würtzburg: Johann Andreas Endter & Wolfgang, 1662), vol. I, pg. 196.