Creideamh Sí, or Irish fairy faith

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

Due to the Irish diaspora and humanity’s love of drink, St. Patrick’s Day is celebrated worldwide with green-themed decorations and pints of Guinness. Since most modern traditions ignore the fact that this is a Christian feast day and instead highlight leprechauns and four-leaf clovers, let’s just ignore Patrick and his snakes and take a closer look at the Irish Creideamh Sí, or “fairy faith.”

As quoted in The Irish Fairy Book by Alfred Perceval Graves, Folklorist Alfred Nutt called Irish fairy lore “as fair and bounteous a harvest of myth and romance as ever flourished among any race.” Like many folk beliefs, fairy lore was originally an oral tradition and wasn’t written down until Christian monks began to catalog the culture. 

As such, according to the Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend by Miranda J. Green, only scraps of text survive from years prior to the 11th century. The texts probably draw from materials as early as the sixth century and present an image of pre-Christian culture, though likely dampened by the faith of the primarily 12th-century monks who cataloged it.

An imagining of a clurichaun from T. C. Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions. Courtesy photo.

When poet William Butler Yeats began his study of the fairy faith, Irish folklore maintained two primary theories for the origins of fairies. As recorded in the Irish Fairy Book, the first Christian creation myth held that fairies were “angels outcast from heaven for their unworthiness, yet not evil enough for hell.” The competing and likely older belief is that fairies are the descendants of the Tuatha Dé Danann, or “the people of the goddess Danu.” 

It’s unclear whether the Tuatha Dé Danann and their offspring were regarded as actual gods or simply supernatural beings. Many Christian writers documenting the beliefs portrayed them as superhuman — like Samson or Noah in the Bible — but that could have been censorship on their part to avoid talking about non-Christian gods.

In the latter theory, the Milesians — mythologized ancestors of the ancient Celts — forced the Tuatha Dé Danann underground, where their children became the Aos Sí or Aes Sídhe, or the “folk of the fairy mounds.”

“Fairy mounds,” or tumuli, are prehistoric gravesites, like the Newgrange Passage Tomb, which pepper Ireland and were likely once used as religious centers and burial places. Newgrange is one of the oldest man-made constructions on Earth — older than the pyramids and Stonehenge — and is made from more than 200,000 tons of loose stones, many of which are decorated with intricate carvings. The structure also has rudimentary windows that align with astronomical events, such as the sunrise on the winter solstice.

The Creideamh Sí manifests itself in practical ways in everyday life. Believers will still leave out offerings to appease the fairies, which, according to legend, can grant wealth and artistic inspiration or steal children and cause disease, among other powers. Traditional offerings include milk, baked goods and fruit.

Even people who don’t particularly believe in fairies will still avoid their sacred spaces just to be safe, which usually means steering clear of tumuli, mushroom rings, certain trees and ancient settlements called ringforts. Notably, a whitethorn tree called the Latoon fairy bush reportedly held up construction of the M18 Motorway in County Clare, Ireland, for around 10 years. 

Irish folklorist and storyteller Eddie Lenihan led the campaign to save the tree after hearing testimony from locals that it was a site of supernatural significance. After international backlash, the Clare County Council diverted the motorway around the tree.

The most famous Irish Aos Sí is, of course, the leprechaun, though they aren’t significant in Irish mythology. The earliest known mention stems from the 8th century Saga of Fergus mac Léti, now held at University College Dublin, which depicts three leprechauns attempting to drown the king of Ulster. The figures only became popular in the 19th century with the writings of Yeats and other members of the revivalist literary movement.

Perhaps the second most famous are the bean sídhe, anglicized as “banshee,” meaning “women of the fairy mounds.” According to Encyclopedia Britannica, these professional mourners appeared to signal deaths in families of pure Irish descent. Anyone who heard the banshee wail or keen — a form of public lamentation — would know that one of their loved ones was marked for death.

Yeats classified the banshee and the leprechaun as “solitary fairies,” as opposed to the “trooping fairies” often depicted in works like Sir Orfeo and William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which travel in cohorts or armies. 

Other solitary fairies include the fear dearg, red-clothed men with penchants for stealing babies; the alp-luachra, who sits in people’s stomachs and eats half of their food; the féar gortach, a harbinger of famine; and the leannán sídhe, beautiful women who take human artists as lovers and inspire them while drastically shortening their lives.

Given how Americans celebrate St. Patrick’s Day — with a whiskey in one hand and a beer in the other — the holiday’s mythological spokesperson should be the clurichaun, not the leprechaun. In the book Dead-watchers, and Other Folk-lore Tales of Westmeath, Patrick Bardan describes the clurichaun as “a sprite that rides on a boughalaun [ragwort flower] and makes himself merry in gentlemen’s cellars.” 

These essentially drunk leprechauns haunt breweries, bars, wine cellars and anywhere else they can sneak a free drink. Most stories involve wealthy landowners fleeing clurichauns in failed attempts to save their liquor, only to discover that, no matter where they move, the clurichaun will follow them.

So, this St. Patrick’s Day, avoid the cliché Lucky Charms costume and embody some proper Irish folklore by wailing in public or stealing booze from the rich. It’s more accurate and shows off your knowledge of traditional Irish culture.