Dear Richard Dawkins. I understand that you prefer your nice walled English garden just the way it is, without scary primeval stories of primitive superstition. But how, dear renowned biologist, champion of rationality, can I convince you? There are indeed fairies, and that they are as real as your nose, your beard, and your wife – maybe even more so.

Are are you really so sure you have gone over all the empirical evidence, or is this just an opinion, a subjective prejudice? Would you have to catch a fairy, cage it, put it under a microscope, maybe kill it, dissect it, embalm it, get the proof you are looking for? Are you really so skeptical, so rational, if you can’t admit the possibility of all kind of unseen beings, forces, parallel intelligences, beyond your puny rationalism, beyond your stunted imagination? You might rationalise, but you are entirely unreasonably, entirely confined to that little English garden. There is more under heaven and earth than is dreamt of there…

If religion is a brain disease, the surely your popular ‘science’ is also. In any case it is a left hemisphere tyranny; the part the brain that reduces things to parts, that make a caricature out of reality, which maps, which narrows, which reduces. But you have forgotten the other hemisphere, the one that connects you to the living world. Too bad you are looking at a fraction of reality — too bad you have lost the depth, the mytho-poetics, the human story… which has always been informed by the mysteries. Haven’t you made a cult out of science and atheism, haven’t you made an army of vehement reductionists.

Yes, there are fairies and all kinds of invisible being. Even you, without knowing it, are dependent on such spirits of nature, to be Richard Dawkins, cousin to Darth Vader, missionary of the dark lord of materialism, supreme arch-minister of propaganda, guardian of the selfish gene, purveyor of the crazy ape machine model of humanity and assassinator of fairies.

Take off the death mask and see the distorted face, the one pinched into a black box. The irony is that you are really actually killing the spirit of pure science, by making it a monotheistic religion. In truth the sciences, philosophy and poetics are traditionally seamlessly part of an alchemic experiment and conversation with nature, they do not belong in separate departments and sub-departments and none has any authority over the other, nor do they have claims to the absolute. And yet you have made the humble sciences into a God to you, the one and only way to access to the truth. But that isn’t science at all — that is dogma, that is Faust. That is the ancient cult of materialism.

The kind of fairies I am talking about are not Disney cartoons. They are not those little humanoid shaped beings in the garden, with little green hats. Fairies are something else something else entirely. They can’t conform or be formed by the human mind, they slip and slide between neural pathways. They brighten and derange, they irritate and destabilise, they are always giving us little gifts and curses. And they are everywhere, wherever these is a glow, wherever things are alive.

I am quite certain there are fairies on the left bank of Paris, for instance. There are swarms of them in fact, dense and bright, mischievous and playful, hiding in stones and under bridges. Often they are sad, and you can feel them weeping in the stone. In the spring time they are manically gay, and if you close your eyes you can hear their strange music.

One of the original meanings of Fae is ‘enchanted’. Enchanted beings. Or if you like ‘enchanted being’. They may seem to be separate from us in fact they exist within the same field of consciousness. They are dense and luminous, but they are prior to flesh and bone. The come to life when you turn off all the subconscious gossip, when you are deeply present enough to feel the pulse of life. Pulse is another words for fairy — they are the deep pulse within life, a sparkling luminous sort of apparition. They appear not to your eyes, but to your second or third sense, your deeper mechanics. The inhabit people sometimes you can see them swarming in peoples eyes like a sudden pleasurable madness. There are many in the body and outside the body, billions in the blood stream.

A world without fairies, is not a world. It is something else. It is a nightmare of the selfish gene, an ape gone mad and itching itself. It is a shopping centre in the middle of the dessert, an entirely artificial soulless lake. If there were no fairies in the water, it wouldn’t be water, if there were no fairies in the air, there would be no air — just a steel wall, a negation.

Yes, the death penalty is the punishment for killing fairies. The only just one.

How do you kill fairies? By living your life in the boring rounds of your own sterile individuality. By the constant levelling, by the dull talk. By not recognising the luminous web that surrounds us. By drowning out the sound of the fairies with your toxic noise. By the constant complaint, by the constant negation, the death rattle of the negative gossip. By selling the virgin forests for a gallon of oil, for building another apartment complex.

Some ecologists also kill fairies. They also try to ‘manage’ or ‘ego-engineer’ the earth. They see a tree or a animal as a resource, they see nature as a grid system, they see things as mere ‘things’. Things are not mere things. They are something all together more mysterious. There are a billion beings living in and through and because of a single being, a single grasshopper. Every being is your mother, it is said, and every being is the mother of your mother too.

And there are also fairies — numberless fairies, dancing in your hair, making your eyes bright, making the world a world. To repeat. Without fairies, a the world is not a world.