Beware the Fool of June

Midsummer, Litha, the Summer Solstice: the solar climax of the Wheel of the Year and long associated with the Fae world. Today we keep the season bright and joyful. 

But under all that light, the month carries a warning. June belongs to the most powerful and evil Fae of them all. He answers to several names. The Amadán na Bruidhne, also written Briona, the Fool of the Fort. The Amadán Dubh, the Black Fool. Whatever you call him, he is most active in June, and some accounts tie him to the solstice itself.

The folklorist Lady Augusta Gregory gathered the stories told of this most malignant of all the Fae.

He comes as a young man or a young woman, as a jester, or as the most hideous of beasts. Most describe him misshapen, with an odd lumbering gait. Sometimes he arrives as a crowd of himself, a dozen copies closing in around a single traveler.  

For reasons no one records, he must change his form every two days, unless an encounter has already changed it for him. He keeps to the edges. Dusk, the rim of a wood, the margin of a field. Anywhere that is, like his season, betwixt and between.

The shape he takes is the one most likely to seize his victim's attention. He is not alone in this. A witness in Gregory's accounts describes the Fae as fluid and shifting, changing with the presence, even the mood, of whoever is watching them. They are the truest state of between, like a quantum superposition.

The Underworld's relationship with quantum mechanics is an idea planted years ago, when I first read these accounts, for my own Last Battle of Moytura series. As a former physics major, the parallel was hard to unsee. In the books, the Fae and their Underworld stay fluid and malleable while our world holds solid, continuous, and stable.

Down at the smallest scale, things like electrons and light don't sit still in any fixed state. A single particle exists as a blur of possible places and conditions, and stays that way until something measures it. Only then does it settle. Think of a tossed coin: while it spins it is neither heads nor tails, and stays neither until it lands and you look. The Amadán is every shape at once until he meets someone, or until his two days run out. Then he resolves into the jester, the monster, or the maiden. And it is what we bring to the encounter that 'chooses' the shape of our doom.

And doom it is, because the Amadán is malevolent beyond redemption. You cannot reason with him. He wants nothing you own, so there is nothing to bargain for. He is raw entropy wearing a shape, as impersonal as a hurricane or an erupting volcano, and as ruinous to anyone who stumbles into him in the June dusk.

The touch of the Amadán is deadly. For anyone he strikes there is no cure.

A County Clare Man:

They, the other sort of people, might be passing you close and they might touch you; but any one that gets the touch of the Amadán-na-Briona is done for. And it's true enough that it's in the month of June he's most likely to give the touch. I knew one that got it, and told me about it himself.

His stroke leaves its mark in one of two ways. Sometimes the body wastes in the days after, as though every drop of vitality had been drawn out of it. Just as often it is the mind that goes, and the victim is left witless, much like the Amadán himself. Gregory records the case of one young boy.

But about three years after that he was cutting bushes in a wood, and he saw the Amadán coming at him. He had a big vessel in his arms, and it shining, so that the boy could see nothing else, but he put it behind his back then, and came running; and he said he looked wide and wild, like the side of a hill. And the boy ran, and the Amadán threw the vessel after him, and it broke with a great noise, and whatever came out of it, his head was gone then and there. He lived for a while after and used to be telling us many things, but his wits were gone.

There is little to be done against the Black Fool. The old wards get mentioned, iron carried in a pocket and the rest, but avoidance is the only counsel anyone really trusts. Should he catch at the edge of your sight, keep your eyes ahead and do not turn. Never, whatever happens, let him lay a hand on you, for that is the moment he takes your mind, or your vitality. One charm is set apart for him alone, and you say it aloud: "Lord be between me and harm."

The Amadán surely predates Christianity in Ireland, yet the prayer earns its place all the same. An encounter with the Fae opens on glamour, a kind of soporific rapport that binds victim to captor. To call on a high and ordered authority is to break that spell, to pull the mind back to its own center long enough to run.

That is about as detailed as the old accounts of the Fool himself get. I came back to him by accident, while building the lesser antagonists for my next book, The Fae Uprising, and I'll admit he unsettled even me. It's the raw power of him, joined to the fact that nothing in him can be reasoned with. He is going to be a wonderful villain to write.

His timing puzzled me, too. There is something strange, to a modern mind, about so much aimless wickedness arriving at the very peak of the light. But remember, the peak is also a turning. From the solstice on, the dark gains a little ground each day, the long shadow thrown by summer's own growth.

To see why he rises just as the sun peaks, you have to look at how the two worlds are bound together, the Underworld and ours, each needing something from the other. Most sources give that something a name. Foyson.

It's the vital essence of a thing, its spirit or its strength. Leave an offering out for the Fae overnight and it will sit there in the morning looking untouched, except that the life of it is gone. They have taken the foyson and left you the husk, a worthless likeness. Vitality is everything to the Fae. Without it, their whole world starves.

Their hunger for it peaks at midsummer, exactly when our world is most full. Their seasons run opposite to ours, so June finds them at their most desperate.

They need the foyson most in the very weeks we have the most abundant resources.  They cross into our world more frequently to seek it.

So it makes a grim kind of sense to send the one creature whose power outstrips even the Queen's. And the illness his stroke leaves behind looks just like a person drained of their essence. When he feeds on the mind, the wits go. When he feeds on the body, it wastes. Either way, the victim is left looking like something the foyson has already been taken from.

Having met him again on the page, I can't stop seeing him off it. The fairy-stroke was the old name for the catastrophes that still fall on us without warning. A stroke that leaves a body paralyzed or a mind in pieces. A first psychotic break, arriving from nowhere. We have better names for these things now, and real understanding of them.

And still the names do not quite reach the wound. When ruin comes to the body or the mind, the tidy biology of it never fully answers the sense that something has been breached, that we have been struck at by a wicked and senseless thing we never saw coming. The Black Fool gives that feeling a shape to hold.

What makes him terrible is the absence of any mind behind the power. He is force without motive, and in that he keeps company with a good many of the systems we live inside now. A single layoff that cascades, by degrees, into a person sleeping outdoors. An illness whose treatment empties a household's finances. Vast social machineries with no one at the wheel, grinding through lives almost absentmindedly.

So go carefully this June, and keep clear of the Black Fool in all his shapes. But spare a little pity, too, for the Fae shivering through their winter on the far side of ours. Leave something out for them. Let them take the foyson, and ease their long way through the dark.

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Further Reading:

Lady Augusta Gregory, Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, with two essays and notes by W. B. Yeats (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1920). The Amadán accounts quoted here are from the chapter "The Fool of the Forth" in the Second Series.

W. Y. Evans-Wentz, The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries (London: Oxford University Press, 1911).

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I write urban fantasy books that continue Celtic myth where the Fae are not your boyfriends, and they certainly don't grant wishes (with our a horrific price). They're the alien, strange apex predators they were in the old stories.

Find out what they're doing on a suburban island near Portland Oregon in the free series prequel.