When the bullfighter Rafael el Gallo was introduced to Ortega y Gasset and told that he was a philosopher, he left a phrase for posterity: There’s people for everything. This expression has become a true aphorism that we could well apply today to the subject of this article, as we are about to delve into an eccentric society founded in 1927 that, surprisingly, remained active until recently: the Fairy Investigation Society, an organization dedicated to the study of fairies. Indeed, there’s people for everything, and Walt Disney was one of its members.

But we shouldn’t be too surprised—or at least, not entirely. The gradual advancements in the invention of photography, and later cinematography, coincided with a new nineteenth-century trend that revived old beliefs, riding on the wave of the Romantic movement that stylistically dominated the first half of the 19th century.

As a reaction against the cold rationalism of Neoclassicism, this movement championed the exact opposite: individual exaltation, liberalism, exoticism, a certain melancholy, and passionate outbursts. Literature and visual arts were thus filled with nationalist epics, suicides over impossible loves, ghosts, nocturnal storms, and so on. Let us remember Gericault, Delacroix, Friedrich, Espronceda, the Duke of Rivas, Lord Byron, Beethoven…

Fairy Society
Nightmare at night (Johann Heinrich Füssli). Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

Along these lines, there was a shift away from classical mythology, which was too closely tied to the previous era, in favor of other mythologies. This shift revived the old desire to communicate with the deceased, a longing that dated back to Antiquity and persisted in later periods. The Enlightenment stifled it somewhat, but it reemerged forcefully in the mid-19th century through Allan Kardec, the pseudonym of French spiritualist Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail, author of the seminal work The Book of Spirits and founder of the Revue Spirite.

From the mid-19th century onwards, spiritualist societies proliferated, organizing gatherings to contact the beyond through mediums and study phenomena that, at the time, still seemed to have a place in the scientific field. It’s worth noting that Alfred Russell Wallace, one of the pioneers of evolutionary theory, showed an interest in the subject, as did the astronomer Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner. There were also notable enthusiasts like Victor Hugo or Charles Dickens. Both in Europe and the US, mediums became famous, such as the renowned theosophist Madame Blavatsky, Chico Xavier, the Fox sisters, Florence Cook… The door was open, and through it entered all kinds of fantastic beings.

And as mentioned earlier, there was an unprecedented interest in national folklore, coinciding with the emergence of new independent or unified nations. Celtic, Scandinavian, and Germanic mythologies are prime examples, as they gained recognition and experienced a surge during this period. Alongside them, a fantastical creature found its place and rose to prominence: the fairy.

Fairy Society
Helena Blavatsky in 1888. Credit: Charlotte Wegner / Wikimedia Commons

Ironically, fairies were actually rooted in Greek nymphs and sylphs (that is, the mythology that Romanticism sought to move away from), but their synthesis with traditions from other European regions gave rise to these ethereal, feminine beings of strange beauty, often depicted with wings and magical powers. These powers were generally used for good but occasionally caused illnesses.

If research societies became commonplace, led by the famous Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, followed by a string of names seemingly plucked from a Harry Potter book (The Ordo Templi Orientis, The Society of Inner Light, Order of the Keltic Cross, Ancient Order of the Phoenix, The Fellowship of Isis, Ancient Celtic Church), then it was only a matter of time before fairies had one of their own.

That said, it took some time, as it wasn’t until 1927, following the boom sparked by the Cottingley Fairies case a decade earlier. Some might be familiar with it, if only because of the movie Photographing Fairies, whose title perfectly encapsulates what the episode was about: two young English cousins, Elsie Wright, sixteen, and Frances Griffiths, ten, published five photos they had taken of themselves surrounded by tiny fairies. Incredibly, many considered them authentic, including the writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

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The first Cottingley photograph, showing Frances surrounded by fairies. Credit: Elsie Wright / Wikimedia Commons

The creator of Sherlock Holmes not only fell for it but immersed himself fully in the world of esotericism, somewhat betraying the spirit—no pun intended—of the detective. In his defense, it should be noted that he was grief-stricken by the recent death of his son in World War I and desperately wished to contact him in the afterlife.

It wasn’t until 1981 that Frances and Elsie admitted the images were staged and that the entire episode was a prank that got out of hand (though Frances insisted that, despite everything, she had seen fairies). The strangest part is that during all this time, a society dedicated to the study of fairies existed, known as The Society for the Investigation of Fairies or, in short, the Fairy Investigation Society.

Its founders were Sir Quintin Craufurd and Bernard Sleigh. The former was a Royal Navy captain who conducted experiments to contact the beyond using wireless telegraphy, which had just been introduced to ships. He soon gained popularity in spiritualist circles, experimenting with other communication systems—such as automatic writing and psychic photography—and even claimed that the elves living in the Thames marshes on London’s outskirts directed him to the locations of sunken ship treasures. Sleigh, on the other hand, was a multidisciplinary artist who had made fairies his favorite subject, authoring An Ancient Mappe of Fairyland, Newly Discovered and Set Forth, a map of the realm of these beings.

In 1927, Sleigh compiled a dozen children’s stories he had written and published them in a volume titled The Gates of Horn. Despite receiving positive reviews, it was a failure because publishers marketed it for children when it was actually intended for adults, following the style of the Scottish writer George MacDonald. Interestingly, one of the stories reflected the idea of a society dedicated to studying fairies, and he later decided to take it a step further by creating a real one.

Fairy Society
A central part of An Ancient Mappe of Fairyland by Bernard Sleigh. Credit: British Fairies

As can be seen, the subject was a passion for him, and the Fairy Investigation Society was oriented toward exploring it, not just from a cultural perspective but also a “scientific” one, attempting to document fairy sightings and prove their authenticity.

To this end, the society organized meetings, collected testimonies, gave lectures, and more. The spiritualist movement, still lingering from the Victorian era, along with the Cottingley case, helped it be taken more seriously than it perhaps deserved during the 1930s.

However, World War II was relentless and not only forced the suspension of all activity but also destroyed most of the documentation collected, courtesy of the Luftwaffe. Craufurd revived it in 1949 with the help of Marjorie T. Johnson, who was appointed secretary of the society and tasked with writing the newsletters in the 1950s, as well as publishing Seeing Fairies, an anthology of fairy sightings recorded by the Fairy Investigation Society. This included her own experiences, as she claimed to see them occasionally, along with other similar beings such as angels.

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Portrait of a fairy (Sophie Gengembre Anderson). Credit: Public domain / Wikimedia Commons

This sustained the interest in the Fairy Investigation Society, which exceeded one hundred members in the following decade. And don’t think they were all uneducated; among them were travel writer and photographer Alasdair Alpin MacGregor, sinologist historian Victor Purcell (professor at the University of Cambridge), Indian painter and occultist poet Ithell Colquhoun (one of the pioneers of surrealism in England), Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding (head of the RAF during World War II), Hispanist Walter Starkie, and novelist and poet Naomi Mitchison (one of the great figures of Scottish literature), for instance.

That said, the most renowned member was far more famous: Walt Disney, who was part of the group at least between 1956 and 1957, though he likely had contact with it earlier. In 1947, Disney had visited Ireland to research local folklore since, at that time, he was producing fantasy-themed short films (later compiled in The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad). His interest in fairy tales, which he frequently adapted for the screen, was well known.

But times were changing. The rapid scientific advancements after World War II, marked by the atomic age and the start of the space race, began to undermine spiritualism and its esoteric variants. It didn’t disappear—on the contrary, countless publications persisted, and television expanded its reach—but it was exiled from the academic world and confined to the realm of eccentricity.

An article in the Sunday Pictorial ridiculed Marjorie T. Johnson to such an extent that she retired, and her successor, Leslie Shepard, was unable to revitalize the society.

Consequently, the Fairy Investigation Society closed in 1990. However, fourteen years later, it was resurrected—quite fittingly—this time with anonymous membership and without the previous requirement of believing in fairies to join. Yes, times had indeed changed.

This article was first published on our Spanish Edition on September 25, 2019: La sociedad inglesa que se dedicaba al estudio de las hadas, de la que Walt Disney fue miembro

SOURCES

Francesca Bihet, Sprites, spiritualists and sleuths: the intersecting ownership of transcendent proofs in the Cottingley Fairy Fraud

James Randi Educational Foundation, The Case of the Cottingley Fairies. Examine the evidence

Richard Sugg, Fairies. A dangerous history

Allan Kardec, The spirits’ book

Fairy Investigation Society

Wikipedia, Fairy Investigation Society

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