Oddcast episode

July 30, 2025

Samuel Gillis Hogan on Fairies in English Ritual Magic and Occult Philosophy, 1400-1700

[Sorry for the glitches in the recording; the internet-faeries were especially mischievous that day. We should have left them a saucer of pixellated milk or something]

In this episode we speak with Samuel Gillis Hogan, a man who has worked on an archive of fascinating texts from western Europe in the early-modern period dealing with non-human intelligences that are neither angels nor demons. These are fairies. Turns out, fairies can be summoned, conversed with, married, and a bunch of other things you might not expect. This one is a look down a fascinating corridor of magic, philosophy, and theology that I, for one, didn’t even know existed.

Among topics discussed are:

• The body of texts which Sam worked on for his PhD research, and the number of faerie-related spells found therein (mostly summoning-spells, but other types as well),
• The unanswerable question ‘What is a fairie?’,
• Some of the things a fairie could do for you once summoned (including bringing you a ring of invisibility, granting knowledge of various sorts, becoming a ‘familiar’ spirit to assist with further magical operations, and more),
• The realm of fairie considered as an otherworld,
• The etymology of the word ‘faerie’ from French, probably then going back to the Latin fata,
• A few discursus, one on an elaborate fairie-summoning ointment-recipe, and one on the Green Children of Woolpit (see now Clark 2024, cited in the Works Cited below),
• Discussion of the theories of ‘elementals’ propounded by Paracelsus and Agrippa, and of how these ‘this-worldly’, empirical faeries came to influence the conjuration-tradition once their occult-philosophic understanding entered the wider English discourse in the sixteenth century, and
• Gillis Hogan’s finding that the confluence of occult philosophy and fairie-summoning magical tradition gave rise to a learned Christian animism in the early-modern period.

Interview Bio:

Dr. Samuel Gillis Hogan is an intellectual and cultural historian broadly interested in the history of magic, especially in the premodern world. He completed his PhD in history at the University of Exeter, England, under the supervision of Professors Catherine Rider and Jonathan Barry. He wrote his dissertation on fairies in late medieval and early modern summoning rituals and occult philosophy. He is currently adapting his PhD into a monograph and a reference book with the goal of publication. He intends his next project to further explore the intersections between environmental history and the history of magic.

Works Cited in this Episode:

Gillis Hogan”s 2023 thesis Communing With Nature: Fairies in English Ritual Magic and Occult Philosophy, 1400-1700.

Primary (roughly in order of appearance):

Lucan on the Keltic Otherworld: Pharsalia 1.457.

On eschatological UFO encounters, see Joshua Cutchin. Ecology of Souls: A New Mythology of Death & the Paranormal. Horse and Barrell Press, 2022, Cap. 10 for an overview.

Gerald of Wales. The Journey Through Wales and The Description of Wales. Edited by Betty Radice. Translated by Lewis Thorpe. London: Penguin, 1978.

Le Huon de Bordeaux en prose du XVème siècle. Edited by Michel J. Raby. New York, NY: Lang, 1998.

Sir Orfeo. Edited by A.J. Bliss. Oxford University Press: London, 1954.

Paracelsus on the four types of elementals and marriages with them: See Henry E. Sigerist, ed. Liber de Nymphis, Sylphis, Pygmaeis et Salamandris et de Caeteris Spiritibus Theophrasti Hohenheimensis. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1996.

Agrippa on the four types of elementals: Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy was first published in 1533 at Köln; English translation 1651, ascribed to one J.F.

Liber Razielis: Book 6 of the Latin text has been edited in Vol. 1 of Rebiger, Bill, Peter Schäfer, Evelyn Burkhardt, Gottfried Reeg, Henrik Wels, and Dorothea M. Salzer. Sefer ha-Razim I und II: das Buch der Geheimnisse I und II. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009.

Secondary:

John Clark. The Green Children of Woolpit: Chronicles, Fairies and Facts in Medieval England. Exeter New Approaches to Legend, Folklore and Popular Belief. University of Exeter Press, Exeter, 2024.

Susanna Clarke. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Bloomsbury, New York, NY, 2004.

Samuel P. Gillis Hogan. Communing With Nature: Fairies in English Ritual Magic and Occult Philosophy, 1400-1700. PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 2023.

Richard Firth Green. Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2016.

Daniel Harms. “Of Fairies”: An Excerpt from a Seventeenth-Century Magical Manuscript. Folklore, 129(2):192–98, 2018a.

Daniel Harms. Hell and Fairy: The Differentiation of Fairies and Demons Within British Ritual Magic of the Early Modern Period. In Richard Raiswell Michelle D. Brock and David R. Winter, editors, Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2018b.

Frank Klaassen. The Transformations of Magic: Illicit Learned Magic in the Later Middle Ages and Renaissance. Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA, 2013.

Jacques Vallée. Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. H. Regnery, Chicago, IL, 1969.

Recommended Reading:

SHWEP Episode Recommended Reading

Themes

Addressative Magic, Animism, Apuleius, Christianity, Demonology, Elementals, Faeries, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Knowledge Magic, Liber Razielis, Magic, Otherworlds, Paracelsus, UFOlogy