We Are All Fairies to Each Other

What Ancient Stories Teach Us About Online Life

Hello, friends! We interrupt our scheduled programming because… it’s my party, and I just might be the kind of person who grabs the mic at the end of the night and starts talking about all of the amazing thoughts I had while we were making merry. Sorry not sorry.

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I recently came across this mind-blowing essay, The Internet as the Astral Plane. The Internet as Fairyland by Katherine Dee at default.blog, and to say that I can't shake it is an understatement. It has haunted me so relentlessly over the past few weeks, that I had to interrupt writing my fiction in order to grapple with it. (I understand she is writing a book about it, in which case, put me on the pre-order list...)

You see, I'm certain that Dee has hit on not only a powerful metaphor, but a fundamental spiritual truth about the internet in general. Her basic premise is that in our quote-unquote disenchanted world, the internet functions exactly as fairyland does. We go forth on a journey to a place that is not our real world, we meet uncanny strangers, some of whom will help us on our journeys and others who appear beautiful but in actuality, wish evil upon us. And sometimes we get lost.

What strikes me most profoundly about Dee's analysis is how it illuminates something I've been wrestling with in my own work about the enchanted cosmos—the recognition that stories hold the key to navigating these otherworldly spaces correctly. If the internet truly is fairyland, then we need to approach it with the same wisdom our ancestors brought to their encounters with the Good Neighbors. The stories will teach us if we will only listen.

The Glamour That Binds Us

"The Internet, too, offered enchantment. Presence without proximity. Transformation without consequence. Pleasure without limit. But enchantment, eventually, turns to disenchantment. Not all at once. You start to realize the world around you is not quite human. It is more than not quite human. It is monstrous. You were never meant to stay there. And yet, you do."

This passage captures something I've observed in my own digital wanderings and in the experiences of so many people I know. The internet promises us the classic fairy bargain: power without responsibility, connection without vulnerability, knowledge without wisdom. But like all fairy gifts, these promises come with a terrible price—the gradual erosion of our ability to dwell contentedly in the physical world.

What's particularly insidious is how this digital fairyland reveals ourselves to ourselves more than it describes reality. The things we find most compelling online—the arguments that pull us in, the communities that capture our attention, the outrage that inflames us—these become mirrors reflecting our own spiritual vulnerabilities. Take, for instance, the so-called "gender wars" that dominate so much online discourse. What we're witnessing isn't rational debate about complex social realities, but rather individuals universalizing their own struggles, encountering the bad fairies who are most inclined to trick them into the water like a pooka.

The internet amplifies our tendency to mistake our personal experience for universal truth, something Lisa and I spoke about in one of our latest podcasts. Someone who struggles with gender identity becomes convinced that traditional gender roles are universally oppressive. Someone who finds healing through embracing traditional roles becomes convinced that any deviation is dangerous delusion. Both are being led astray by the same fairy magic—the glamour that makes our own experience seem like the only real experience.

The Curse of Presence Without Proximity

"Each new medium has disoriented us by warping time, collapsing distance, and ultimately, untethering the self from the body. Still, observers like Sacasas are right: the Internet is different. Previous technologies created liminal spaces we only vaguely intuited. They were a bridge to the electronic elsewhere. The Internet was the electronic elsewhere. It was a parallel world, complete with its own geography, culture, and rules. We've never just 'used' the Internet. We went online; we surfed the web; we traversed cyberspace."

One of my favorite memes describes the act of reading as “staring at marked slices of dead tree and hallucinating vividly for hours on end.” It’s funny, but it hits dangerously close to home. When we are surfing the web, we are pushing this phenomenon further, and our pattern-making brains are creating whole constructs to hold the disparate pieces of information we consume together into a single unifying narrative. There’s a weird classic floating out there called Hypnotherapy by Dave Elman, and one of the skills he teaches in the book is how to easily induce a hypnotic state for the purpose of self-hypnosis and, ostensibly, self-improvement. Unfortunately, we’ve learned how to hypnotize ourselves without realizing it, placing us at the terrible mercy of the denizens of fairyland.

These kind of hypnosis and hallucination, apophenia and epiphany on steroids, flourish in liminal space like native residents.

"The Internet provided an opportunity not only for imaginative play but for personal transformation, a liminal space between fantasy and reality, something betwixt and between. Just as the printing press brought individuality through literacy and the novel helped create the modern sense of self, the Internet fractured this self by enabling multiple simultaneous identities."

This is where Dee's insight becomes practically urgent. We don't just "use" the internet any more than medieval peasants or storybook characters "used" the fairy ring. We enter it, and in entering, we risk losing ourselves. We develop multiple personas, customized for each place we choose to interact, for each particular interest we dive into.

The problem is that transformation without grounding in physical reality, without the accountability of real embodied community, tends to be transformation into something less than human rather than more. We become changelings—neither fully present in the digital realm nor capable of dwelling peacefully in the physical world.

And here is what I find most troubling: we are all fairies to each other online. Any kind of internet presence becomes a persona which other people project onto and react to. We are all illusion masters with each other, providing the illusion of relationship where there is none. Even those of us who try to be authentic online—who share our real names, our real struggles, our actual thoughts—we cannot escape the fact that we are presenting a curated version of ourselves, a kind of digital doppelgänger that looks like us but lacks the fullness of our embodied humanity. We can be our best selves, but we are still fairies— and we cannot control when we manifest as will-o’-the-wisps or red caps.

These fairy personas? They are not icons, not in the Christian sense— they simply can’t be, because they are disincarnate, fragmented pieces of real, complex human selves. At best, they can point the way, teach us to open our hearts enough to see past illusion, perhaps even to use the power of enchantment wisely when we must wield it. But they are not icons.

The Temptation of the Akashic Records

"According to these mystical traditions, skilled astral travelers could briefly experience their wildest dreams, but this journey wasn't without risk. C.W. Leadbeater warned that visions in the astral space could be 'notoriously unreliable,' sometimes even 'grotesque caricatures of life.' Interpreting the Akashic records demanded its own sort of 'media literacy,' and the presence of astral doppelgängers introduced new complications, since these doubles didn't necessarily behave like their real-world counterparts."

This is perhaps the most practically useful insight from Dee's essay. The internet, like the astral plane, contains everything—all human knowledge, all human folly, all human longing and deception. It is indeed a kind of Akashic records, and one that requires tremendous spiritual discernment to navigate safely. The visions we encounter here are notoriously unreliable, often grotesque caricatures of life.

Think of how online political discourse reduces complex human beings to cartoon villains or heroes. Think of how dating apps reduce the mystery of human attraction to a series of swipes. Think of how social media reduces the richness of human experience to a stream of performative highlights. These are the grotesque caricatures that Leadbeater warned about. These are the shapechanging fairies, leading us ever closer to the cliff’s edge.

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of this digital fairyland is how it severs what mystics called the "silver cord":

"Most significantly, astral travelers needed to maintain a 'silver cord' connecting their consciousness to their physical bodies. A severed cord meant permanent separation—a soul death more profound than physical harm. The Otherworld is beguiling. Glamorous, in the old sense of the word: an illusion so complete you cannot see through it. Time moves strangely there. Food doesn't nourish. Names have power. Most who visit Fairyland never come back. Those who do come back are irrevocably changed."

When we lose our connection to physical reality, to embodied community, to the rhythms of the natural world, we risk a kind of soul death. This, in turn, reminds me of the characters of Jon and Nicholas Darrow from Susan Howatch’s Starbridge books, 20^th century Christian mystics with quasi- (or not-so-quasi) psychic aptitudes. Both men, father and son, recognized the importance of being rooted in an appropriate spiritual container for people with a certain psychospiritual bent, such as is provided by a strongly liturgical church with a developed prayer rule. This is an essential way to anchor into embodied reality before venturing into the hollow hills.

Without a tether, however, we become what Dee so poignantly describes:

"The soul, like the body, adapts to its environment and after too long online, the rhythms of the physical world feel foreign. I've come back from somewhere but not fully. But my soul does know how to live here; how to live in my body."

Ironically, discourse about embodiment subverts itself. In this realm, we are all ghosts remembering past lives. We can tell each other to touch grass all day long—but we cannot touch grass with each other, because we are not together, on the same patch of earth. I can show you pictures of my garden, but you cannot smell my roses, taste my summer squash, run your fingers over the petals of my blue delphiniums. Talking about embodiment, about cultivating real, living lifestyles, makes us feel like we are doing something about our beguilement. It is a lie. Our own brains trick us, thinking that because we have thought about the embodied life, we have lived it. Fairyland’s deceptions are so dangerous.

The Path Back: Christ in the Underworld

So how do we navigate this fairy realm without losing ourselves? How do we maintain that silver cord while still benefiting from what the internet has to offer?

The answer, I believe, lies in framing our daily digital wanderings as part of a larger quest through cyberspace. Such a journey requires the right bones to enflesh it-- not just any old choose-your-adventure narrative to scaffold it, but powerful stories that show us guides who have themselves successfully navigated the underworld and returned. We need the stories that teach us how to enter the otherworld with purpose and return with wisdom. We must recall Orpheus, Cúchulainn, Dante, Rip Van Winkle, Lazarus who never laughed again. We must know our myths and our folktales, and not just the ones from our own cultures. In another grand twist, the internet allows us to search out tales from all over the world, allows us to tell each other stories with our own voices. We have only to choose our maps and our compass well.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t plug one of my favorite series here. In A.A. Attanasio's The Perilous Order of Camelot, he presents a cosmos where, simply, everything ever believed is true. All of the gods, all of the fairies, all of the realms exist simultaneously on planes of energetic being that incorporates even our modern quantum mythology. Including "the nailed god," Jesus Christ, who through the faith of King Arthor enters into and begins to redeem this fictional cosmos. Arthor carries his faith with him into the actual underworld, his embodied, complicated faith, clings to Christ in the face of despair and illusion, and emerges the once and future King, a human being both real and transfigured.

This is the kind of story that provides the key to how we, especially as Christians, especially as story-telling Christians, especially as Orthodox, can navigate the Otherworld, the Astral Plane of the internet, and not only survive, but manifest actual, real relationships.

It’s essential to have an end in mind when we enter the digital realm. We cannot simply wander in like curious tourists. We must go with a purpose, armed with spiritual discipline, and always with the intention of returning. Like Arthor in the underworld, we must carry our faith with us and cling to Christ in the face of every digital temptation and illusion— including, especially, those illusions cloaked in bells and incense, in the vestments of the Church, in the unintentional fairies of our real-life brothers and sisters in Christ.

The Possibility of Real Connection

But here's the paradox that Dee herself acknowledges: real connections can emerge from this digital fairyland. In another of her essays, she writes about internet relationships, and though the article particularly examines their transitory and deceptive nature, Dee also notes that "only the internet, where you got to know people backward, soul-first, could have brought us to this closeness."

I grew up reading Elfquest by Wendy and Richard Pini, and was fascinated by the “sending” of the elves, who were able to realize intimate telepathy because of their fully integrated, transparent personalities. Do we all hunger for such clarity in communication? I know I do. In our embodied lives, we often find it difficult to locate real people who share more than one of our interests, who are willing to talk about it and also maybe even be nice about it. It can be so jarring, even doubly isolating, when we accidentally cross-pollinate our interests, when we mention homeschooling in the knitting circle, mysticism at the barbecue, ornithology at church. There is a real dearth of relationship in the embodied world, and the skills necessary to fix this have been hidden or even lost by so many. Finding friends, it turns out, can be a real quest one can undertake in fairyland— but this quest is more perilous than it seems, and requires more self-honesty than many of us can bear, except in small doses. How can we see past the fairies to the icons that live behind them?

I have made real friends on the internet. But those friendships had to be tested against reality in order to evolve. Both parties had to see the human behind the fairy, had to be willing to admit to our own illusions. We had to be able to recognize the subtle ways projection muscled into the interactive field of our relating, and then be strong enough to push through it. Significantly, the most enduring friendships I've formed online have been with practicing Orthodox Christians—people who, like myself, had Christ as the mediator between us, the reconciling principle, the space between the I-Thou. But I won’t pretend that religious faith is any kind of charm against bewitchment when the evidence of our own eyes shows that it is just as frequently a means of entrapment.

I believe that the internet, like every otherworld, can be redeemed and even transfigured. But redemption requires what the mystics always knew: we need sophisticated spiritual armor, we need the clear intentions of a pure heart, and we need a way back home.

Living Between Two Worlds

What does this mean practically? It means we commit to approaching the internet with the same wisdom our ancestors brought to their encounters with the otherworld. We will venture forth online, but we will quest with purpose, not just for time-murder and idle browsing. We will set clear boundaries—temporal, emotional, and spiritual. We remember that the personas we encounter online are not the full reality of the people behind them, not icons in the truest sense. We acknowledge that we, too, regardless of intention, become personas, and try our hardest to dispel our own glamour.

Most importantly, we cultivate what Dee calls our "silver cord"—our connection to embodied life, to physical place, to flesh-and-blood community. We need to remember that The Otherworld is beguiling: “Glamorous, in the old sense of the word: an illusion so complete you cannot see through it. Time moves strangely there. Food doesn't nourish. Names have power. Most who visit Fairyland never come back. Those who do come back are irrevocably changed.”

But perhaps being changed is not always a curse. Perhaps, like Arthor returning from the underworld, we can be changed for the better—made wiser, more compassionate, more capable of serving our communities in the physical world.

The internet as fairyland is not a space to be avoided entirely, but neither is it a space to be entered carelessly. It is a realm that demands wisdom, discernment, and above all, the kind of spiritual preparation that only comes from deep grounding in story, in community, and in the eternal love that transcends all digital glamour.

The key is remembering that we are not meant to stay there. We are meant to return, transformed but not transfixed, carrying whatever wisdom we've gained back to the world of flesh and blood and bread and wine—the world where Christ has already harrowed the underworld and continues to make all things new.

May you be blessed,

Laura

P.S.— What do you think? Are your online experiences like getting lost in the woods? Does this way of looking at cyberspace change how you might choose to interact with it? Drop me a line in the comments…

If you want to think more about this metaphor, check out my series on Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”!