The Life Cycles of Wee Folk

Wee Folk have families, raise young, and grow old, just as human beings do. Since their nature is primarily etheric, rather than biological, their life cycles are profoundly different in many ways from those of human beings and the animals we usually encounter. (There are some exceptional cases, as some sprites can manifest themselves physically, and these will be dealt with below.) For the life cycle to be completely understood, the whole life of the being, from conception to death, has to be reviewed.

Puck, Joshua Reynolds, 1789, Public Domain

Unfortunately, it is not at all easy to get information on reproduction and death of Wee Folk. I have provided a short page discussing the problems involved. The information I have from most Wee Folk appears to be intentionally misleading. I have information from Devas that appears to be correct, but it is rather limited. I also have been able to make my own observations, though I do not always understand what I am observing. Clearly, the reader has to be warned that the information I am providing here is only tentative. I will try, through this page, to point out those things about which I have anything less than full confidence.

Wee folk, possibly of all tribes, are divided into male and female roles, just as humans and most animals we normally have in our lives. Clearly, these roles are different from what they are in biological entities, as there are no cells carrying genetically coded molecules involved. I suppose the easiest way to think of male and female in Wee Folk is the Chinese concept of Yin and Yang. The male and female roles are different, it is just not a physical biological difference. It occurs to me that there may be distinctions of sex among Wee Folk that humans do not have or do not perceive in themselves.

Most tribes of Wee Folk are exogamous, which means that they customarily choose mates from other tribes. For example, a Crafts Sprite, such as a Kobold, would be likely to choose a Brownie or a Pooka as a mate, but much less likely to choose another Kobold.

A few tribes of Wee Folk are usually endogamous, meaning that they usually choose mates from within their own tribes. For example, among Fairies, both the male and female partners are usually of the same tribe. They may come from very different parts of the world, speak different languages, and regard each other as quite foreign. But they are nonetheless of the same tribe.

Regional sprites, such as Brownies, Pixies, and Leprechauns, usually regard each other as of the same tribe, for the purpose of choosing a mate, though they do not for other purposes. Since they are usually exogamous, Pixies would not usually look among Leprechauns for mates, though a Pixie might take a Pooka or a Selkie.

Another complication for all this is that some Wee Folk are Shape Shifters, who can take physical form. These folk can take mates from among those whose physical bodies are like their own. Thus, Selkies, who can manifest themselves as either seals or humans, take physical mates from either species. A Selkie could, alternatively, take an etherial partner, such as a Brownie. The child of a human and a Shape Shifter is quite completely human, though sometimes with abilities some people might call a bit odd; this might be genetic, but could simply be from rearing by a parent who is a Shape Shifter.

When two Wee Folk fall in love, just as humans do, they tend to be together quite a lot. The urge to mate comes when they discover, possibly subliminally, that there is what they call a “seed,” nearby, that is sufficiently well suited to their natures.

The seed is the etheric remnant core of a sprite who has undergone what they call “shedding,” which we might call death. It might be analogous to a human soul. It has some intangible, rather distant connections to memories of the past of the sprite with whom it was formerly associated. It may also have connections to that sprite’s feelings and passions. What it does not have is the energy it needs to be active.

When the lovers find the seed, whether they consciously realize they have found it or not, they become passionately agitated and go into a sort of dance they call “rolling.” To me, this is much more like whirling or spinning than rolling, as it looks like a powerful little whirlwind. The face of one of the Wee Folk in it is occasionally recognizable in it as it whirls, with an expression of what appears to be intoxicated joy.

Rolling releases quite a lot of energy the Wee Folk have saved up over time. As the process continues, the seed whose presence triggered the event is drawn into the whirlwind, where it is exposed to the energy it needs to begin acting on of its own, in a process the Wee Folk call “anchoring.” And so, it is established as a child of the pair of Wee Folk who are its parents.

The seed that triggers the rolling event is typically suitable to be of the same tribe as its mother. The mothers nurture them, teaching them what they need to learn to obtain the energy they need to maintain their etherial lives. Exogamous Mothers also teach their young the customs of their own tribes, which is a function exogamous fathers cannot perform well. I am sorry to say I do not know much about how the children of endogamous unions are raised, because those groups that are endogamous tend not to talk about it much.

Later on, when a child is sufficiently grown, he might want to travel about. This is especially true of Elves and, of course, Sailing Sprites. Elvish fathers, however, very often take their children with them as they travel, and there are groups of sprites who have sayings, warning their daughters against taking an Elf as a mate unless they are prepared to see their children leave them to go on the road.

Rolling enables other offspring, aside from those the Wee Folk regard as their own children. The other offspring are merely incidental to their mating, typically Primitive Sprites, who are usually merely empowered to live, but are really too primitive to interact with the Wee Folk who enabled their lives. Such sprites can also be brought to active life by other energetic actions, and are capable of living without rearing through childhood, which is why they are not regarded as children by those who enable them.

Once in a while, a seed is brought to new life that was not the one who triggered the rolling action, but is highly enough advanced to require parenting. In such a case, the parents have to make special arrangements to see that the child is reared in a suitable manner. The child can be reared by the mother, to a large degree, but an associate of a tribe compatible with the child is brought in to teach the customs of that tribe, rather as a nanny helps raise a human child. Some groups of Wee Folk are not at all put off by such a parenting duty. In some cases the child is given to a female of a compatible tribe for adoption, and there is normally no stigma or regret associated with this act.

As Wee Folk grow to adulthood and age, they accumulate a large number of connections to memories and concerns that they maintain. They regard this as very important to their existence, and probably would not have it any other way. It is almost as though they regard themselves as an accumulation of memories opinions and passions, with the underlying seeds that form their cores being just things to which their real beings are attached. This might explain the term “anchoring” as describing conception. Of course, the memories they have are also connected to each other, as well as the core.

Wee Folk do not have diseases quite the way human beings do, but they do have problems of health. They can suffer disorders associated with environments that have been polluted by any of a number of things, including pollutants that destroy plants or sicken the animals around them. The reason for this is that they are dependent on flows of energy for their nourishment, and when the environment from which they get nourishment is polluted, the energy flowing through it becomes abnormal. A sick environment has sick Wee Folk living in it. If they are aware of the source of their problems, however, they can move away from their homes and try to find new ones.

They can suffer from anxiety or depression because the people around them are selfish, vengeful, angry, or just carelessly throw bad thoughts around. They might or might not be aware of the sources of their problems. An unhelpful reaction that might arise from lack of awareness is to act in ways that are anti-social or anti-human. Of course, human beings can suffer from the same things.

The length of life of Wee Folk depends very much on their personal natures and the circumstances with which they live. The very primitive folk may shed their associations with the death of the insect or simple plant they inhabit dies. Generally, the more sophisticated Wee Folk will live long lives, compared to those of human beings, and in the cases of some, their lives can last for centuries or millennia. An accident can shorten a person’s life; for example some Wee Folk will shed because they are living in a tree that is cut down. Evil thoughts and bad energy can shorten a person’s lifetime quite a lot.

As Wee Folk age, they do not become infirm or less able to do things, the way many human beings do. Instead, the aging process causes them to accumulate more and more connections to memories and passions. This causes them to grow in wisdom and ability. It also increases their social stature. There is a price for this, however, which is that maintaining such memories requires a certain amount of energy. So, aging Wee Folk eventually get to the point where, with each new associated memory, their use of energy becomes more inefficient.

With the passing of time, the amount of energy Wee Folk can derive from their surroundings is insufficient to maintain the numbers of connections they have among the memories and between the memories and their core seed. When that happens, the old memories start to fall away, and this process goes on with increasing rapidity, because the memories are connected to each other. The process is what they call “shedding,” but is something we might associate with the idea of death. Once it starts, it does not usually last long, and when it is over, all that is left is some dissipating packages of memories, which do not last long independently, and the seed, which awaits a new pair of Wee Folk to roll and bring it back to active life.