A Historical Basis For The Elven Mythos?
It is a commonly-held tenet that for every legend, there exists a grain of truth. For every civilization on this planet, there is a tale of "those who have come before." It is my belief that there is evidence enough to prove that such a race, or races have existed, and may indeed still be with us in one form or another in the present time.
---Me, back in the summer of 2006.
3/17/09: It's been about four years since I wrote the article "The Enduring Legacy Of The Elves", which was supposed to be a manifesto of all that I had learned and believed about the subject. A lot has happened to me since then. Certain events in my life have caused me to re-evaluate a lot of what I've believed. I just let this site and the material on it sit unchanged and un-updated for a very long time, even after the site move, because in truth I was unsure of what to do with it. After a while, it just felt to me that I was clinging to a lot of beliefs from my teens that I'd desperately wanted to be true, but that ended up seeming more dubious the longer I looked.
I decided to take a step back in the summer of 2006, and I re-worked a lot of my old material during that time. However, much of it was still in lockstep with the de Vere/Gardner angle, at a time when I was having serious doubts about the claims that were being made by both camps. I moved the site to its current host in late 2007 to get away from the banner ads and link ads that were plaguing my former hosting service, and revised things a little bit more.
So here we are in 2009, and I'm taking a step back again. And after sixteen years, I'm amazed that I've managed to hang onto it all for this long.
To recap everything in the former article: I've been fascinated with the legends of Elves and the "Fair Folk" for as long as I can remember, and I'd always wondered if there was a historical basis for these legends. In 1993 when I was sixteen, a friend and classmate of mine claimed to be experiencing memories of having been a Princess of an "Elven" people. These elves were not the willowy waifs of modern fantasy pop-culture, but in her words "resembled the old Scottish nobility." She was even writing a book based on these experiences, which at times seemed to be "past-life" memories, and at times seemed to be happening concurrently with her life as she was experiencing it in the present day.
Keep in mind, we were teenagers, and we were very much in the height of the "Mad Bastard" phase that a lot of young Practitioners seem to go through. We formed a loose coven with some of our like-minded friends, and began exploring concepts and belief systems like Remote Viewing and Astral Projection, Hermeticism, Chaos Magick and Modern Ceremonial Magick. My friend, now our ringleader, claimed that she'd spotted a math teacher at our school who was a Freemason (he always wore the ring) and that the Freemasons were secretly sworn to protect the Elvish Royalty.
If any of this sounds familiar, it may be because of a little book called The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, which was in turn influenced by an earlier book titled Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. Keep in mind that this was going on fully ten years before the release of the former book, but ten years after the release of the latter one.
My friend worked in a library after school, and it's perfectly possible that she could have had access to either Holy Blood, Holy Grail or the articles of one Laurence Gardner, which were appearing in a new-age publication called NEXUS at the time. However, she claimed that all of these experiences were examples of either instinctive knowledge or divinely-revealed mysticism. But after I learned through my own studies that many of my own private childhood mythologies had contained what could only be described as blatant Mithraic symbolism, I began to wonder if perhaps her "personal mythologies" as well could have all resulted from something embedded in her subconscious mind; or if we were just pulling symbols from the collective unconscious at random, like names from a hat.
Eventually our "High-School Coven" fizzled and fell apart due to warring egos and internal drama, as these things are sometimes wont to do. I found myself at a loss - wondering if it had all been a fantasy, or if there was any historical truth at all to what she'd been telling us. I kept looking for answers; though for a long time my search was limited to a stumbling, instinctive hunt for information, limited to intuitive flashes and "what felt right," based on what I had retained of my friend's descriptions.
In the summer of 1999, I stumbled onto Laurence Gardner's NEXUS articles on a website, while looking for information on the ancient Egyptian Bennu Bird. Bam. All of a sudden, I'd found exactly what I'd been searching for over a period of six years, and completely by accident. Within was a near-perfect description of my onetime-schoolfriend's "Elven Royalty,"
"What did these early God-kings look like? Well, they are now thoroughly identifiable from their preserved remains, which have been excavated at various sites from as far afield as Transylvania and Tibet. With their light-brown to red hair and pale eyes, the leather-clad men stood at least 6ft 6ins and upwards, while even the women were over 6ft tall. Undoubtedly these forebears of the Gaelic and Celtic High-kings were among the most awesome warriors of all history."
After studying Laurence Gardner's "Starfire" articles in NEXUS Magazine, I immediately began my search anew. I began to read anything and everything I could find on the subject, beginning with the collected works of Zecharia Sitchin. Space Aliens aside, I had already done enough independent research on the subject of ancient Sumer to be able to spot flaws in Mr. Sitchin's work. To be fair, the legends that he drew his theories from are often contradictory in and of themselves, since the details of any particular legend will vary depending on the place (city-state) in ancient Mesopotamia where they originated from. But as I continued to read Mr. Sitchin's works, I was put off by his tendency to "cherry pick" and "mix and match" some of the details of different myths together until they came to resemble something that would support his theories.
I eventually found http://www.dragoncourt.org, and the writings of Nicholas de Vere (who claims to have taught Laurence Gardner everything he knows.) What transpired next is a subject for another time and another article, but de Vere's writings also served to back up some of the intuitive feelings that I'd had on the topic of the Grail Bloodlines in general. I'd also read most of Laurence Gardner's books by the time.
What I learned was that both de Vere and Gardner claim that the "Elves" that eventually made their way into the legends of early Celtic and Teutonic peoples peoples (and from there into the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and modern fantasy fiction) had their roots in the ancient Scythian and Mitanni civilizations that once dwelled upon the steppes of the Caucasus and within the Asia Minor regions. I'd already had an interest in the Scythians since I'd first read about them as a young child in a book on ancient history owned by my grandfather, and even back then something had just seemed to "click" about them. Now, I felt I knew why.
It's certainly possible that the legends of the Elves could have sprung from tall tales spun around an ancient people who once existed; this was quite common in the ancient world, before literacy was widespread. The memory of a particular people's ancestors or traditional enemies would be preserved in their oral histories, which would grow with each retelling until the subjects of these stories were either regarded as godlike entities with awesome supernatural powers, or reviled as demonic monsters. For example, the Aesir, Vanir, and the Jotunn may have actually existed as human tribes at one time, only to be mythologized by the later Nordic peoples as superhumans and giants. Ditto with the Celtic tales of the Tuatha de Dannan, Fir Bolg, and Fomori.
But de Vere and Gardner claim that the "Royal Scyths" actually were party to vast metaphysical knowledge and paranormal abilities inherited from their progenitors - the Priest-Kings ("En") of the Anunnaki, who were deified by the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians in their mythological systems, and who are said to parallel the Anakim and Nephilim of ancient Hebrew lore. Nicholas de Vere in particular claims that these Elven peoples existed slightly "in sync" with a higher dimensional plane than our own, which might have inspired tales of the "Otherworld" of Celtic folklore. These peoples are also sometimes referred to as "Draconic," because the Dragon is said to be one of their oldest and most enduring symbols.
But is there an actual historical basis for the existence of such a divinely-gifted and metaphysically powerful people? Is it all simply a case of exaggerated tall tales that were woven about an ancient civilization? Or has it all been a series of hoaxes hatched by individuals who wish to use this mythos to attract followers in a bid for personal power and material gain? This is what I've been attempting to find out for myself over the past sixteen years. I am still very much of two minds about de Vere and Gardner, and this will probably show in my articles about them on this site.