Grimoire for the Apprentice Wizard

distant as the stars,” says Faerie Shaman Victor

Anderson (1915-2002).

Faerie is a twilight realm, lit only by the bright

stars, candles, fireflies, and the auras of all living things

(which are very visible there). Neither the Sun nor the

Moon shines in Faerie, yet everything is illuminated.

The inhabitants of Faerie (faeries, or the fay) dwell in

fine halls and chambers beneath the ground,

underwater, or high up in great trees. They also have

exquisite crystal castles and aerie courts high in the

mountains and deep in the forest glades. The only real

city in Faerie is called Tyr na Nog.

However, in all of these places, a glamour of

seeming magnificence is but an illusory veneer. For

Faerie shares the same natural features and landscapes

as our world, but without the artificial works of

humankind. For instance, the Faerie Isle of Avalon

corresponds to Glastonbury in the mundane world. In

fact, Faerie can best be understood as a kind of “parallel

dimension” to ours, connected by the aforementioned

gateways, which appear the same from both sides.

Faerie is governed by rigid rules and formulae,

and anyone entering this enchanted realm would be

wise to learn them. The most important rule—which

also applies to the Underworld—is never eat or drink

anything in Faerie that you haven’t brought with

you! The fae are repelled by iron—especially if it is

magnetized—so don’t even think of entering Faerie

carrying that metal! By the same token, keeping a

lodestone in your mojo bag will protect you against

unwilling abduction. And should you find yourself in

Faerie and wish to leave, all you need do is take your

shirt off, turn it inside out, and put it back on again—

thus rendering yourself invisible to the Fae. Also turn

your pockets inside out. But whatever else you do in

Faerie—you must take care to be extremely courteous

to the fae at all times! They are easily insulted, and

their offense can be terrible!

Lesson 4. The Three Worlds

There is a saying that “Common sense is what tells us

the world is flat.” For most of human history, the vast

majority of people believed this to be the case, and old

maps depict the Earth not as a globe, but a disc.

Medieval Christian maps showed Jerusalem, the “Holy

City,” at the center of the pancake, which

encompassed the entire world known to the

cartographers (“map-makers”) of the time.

Above the world-disc, the vaulted arch of the

Heavens formed an inverted bowl that could also be

clearly seen and mapped, and so “the World Above”

became the logical abode of the gods and angels. And

the presence of caves, mines, wells, geysers, and

volcanoes similarly indicated the existence of a hidden

“World Below.” It made equal sense to assign that

dark realm deep beneath the Earth to the dead and

populate it as well with monsters and demons—ruled

over by gods of the “Underworld.”

And so our mortal world, sandwiched between

these supernatural realms like a hamburger in a bun,

was naturally thought of as “Middle Earth,” or

Midgard, as the Vikings called it. Indeed, the Norse

developed this concept into a rather elegant structure,

portraying an ancient cosmology of multiple worlds

that still informs the basis of many religions, including

Christianity.

Yggdrasil

The Norse envisioned a complex system of nine

worlds altogether, of which the main three are Asgard

(above), Hel (below), and, of course, Midgard in the

middle. These are arranged in various ways depending

on which version you read. The current general favorite

is to lay them out in a way similar to the Qabalistic

Tree of Life, except that our world is in the middle

Medieval world map by Beatus of Liebana, 776 CE

W
S

N E

Midgard, held in

the branches

of the world-

tree, Yggdrasil

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Corrected pages 3rd printing.2.p65 52 6/10/2004, 4:03 PM