The Old Blood:
A Faerie Tale Liturgy

Introduction:
Magical Art, Transformation, and Childlike Ease

I coined the term Faerie Tale Liturgy to describe the following:
* Some of my stories, rituals, liturgies, expressions of my worldview, or other material, if read, are a transformative Shamanic experience.
* The transformation doesn’t require struggling to understand the piece’s meaning. It requires an attempt to be childlike. Trying to let go of mental busyness and simply read—like a child reading a fairytale—allows meaning and magic to emerge.

Fairytales often have heroes. Heroes face challenges, which are not always pleasant. 1

Are you drawn to tales about the Faerie Queen? Sense magic in your veins? Think you might be part Faerie? Feel you’re meant to create positive changes? The following Faerie tale might be part of your story.

Long ago, they tried to erase us, we who are of the Old Blood.

The blood of our attackers is coarse, lacking nuance. They befoul the earth and want no race here except their own.

Their blood is coarse, like unrefined iron, the veins of which traverse the earth’s dark caves and weave structures that hold the planet together. Their blood often lacks nuance, but it has a might that can shape future galaxies. Instead of celebrating these powers and ours, they desecrate the earth and want no race here except their own, that they might be purveyors of all the earth’s gifts.

We … are … not … their … race.

We are not their race. 2

… I must rephrase that: We bred with them from the very first. Genes intertwined.

However, even now, most humans are predominantly one race or the other.

Eventually, those with the less subtle blood discovered they could not risk exterminating everyone who had immensely magical DNA. Without us, their bloodline will die, because it is weak, lacking breath. 3

We with subtle blood trace our lineage to ancestors from the stars. Our veins run with possibilities. We live between the cracks of reality.

We serve the Faerie Queen and King, each of us a Holy Grail, a consecrated vessel holding all that is sacred and good, holding even the earth, holding all of existence. Our very beings are the source of—and template for—the health for all of existence. Our very beings are the origin of all safety. We hold that which must be passed down to the next generation. 4

We were the bloodline of royalty carefully nurtured for centuries.

We will not be kept as cattle any longer by coarse beings, will not be breeding stock enslaved to invigorate their bloodline.

Once we mated with them by choice. We see their beauty and sacredness. We do not want to exterminate them. Our coupling with them was once held sacred, creating wholeness for all beings and the earth. Then they engineered society that our mating be with our submission, oppression. No.

I do not outline their cruel perpetrations to imply that we should switch roles with them, stifling them as much as they have stifled us. I write to reveal their too often denied cruelty.

They believe that escaping oppression requires becoming the oppressor. We can teach them otherwise. We do not want to rule them. We see their beauty and sacredness.

We need to be neither below nor above them. We need to be alongside them. Then all beings and the earth can be whole because that can be accomplished only by both races standing together.

They have strengths we do not. Theirs combine with ours to make all things whole. Perhaps the unsubtle ones descended from different Deities than the Gods who are our ancestors. All Gods are worthy of worship.

The unsubtle ones serve knowledge we do not have, serve paths we cannot walk. It is as vital for us to protect their knowledge as it is for them to protect ours. It is as vital for us to protect their paths as it is for them to protect ours.

Their sorrows teach them lessons that our sorrows do not teach us. It is as vital for us to learn their lessons as it is for them to learn ours.

Only with their help can the Holy Grail continue now and for future generations.

I focus here more on our strengths and lives than on theirs not to imply that ours are superior, but because

1) Theirs are well known—the culture at large mirrors them.

2) It is vital to point out strengths and lives that society has hidden so well.

I focus on our wondrousness here not to imply that we are better or more worthy than they are, but because

1) Their wondrousness is already applauded far and wide.

2) It is vital to point out the wondrousness that society has hidden so well.

We claim our destiny. They can go about their business—as long as it is their business. It is not their business to hurt ours—we want them to do what they need for themselves, we want them to claim their destiny.

We claim our destiny.
We claim our destiny.

We claim our destiny:

We celebrate the stardust from which we and all of creation were made.

We honor our ancestors from the stars.

We emerge into fullness, for possibilities run in our veins.

We live between the cracks of reality.

We serve the Faerie King and Queen, each of us a Holy Grail, a consecrated vessel holding all that is sacred and good, holding even the earth, holding all of existence. Our very beings are the template for—and source of—the health for all of existence. Our very beings are the origin of all safety. We hold that which must be passed down to the next generation.

We are a Holy Grail that must be passed down to the next generation.

We are the bloodline of royalty.

We honor both those like us and unlike us because all beings are beautiful, sacred, and important. All beings are worthy of worship.

We live free to mate with whom we want or not at all. We understand that what is between our legs should serve only with glory.

We play free. We play free. We play free.

Footnotes about the Holy Grail, Magical Art,
Successful Transformation, and ICE

A terrifying event occurred when I was preparing to post this blog. The event was nevertheless helpful in its synchronicity. You can read about it in one of the footnotes. The footnotes that proceed it provide context.

1) I can’t know for sure when I wrote this liturgy. I think it was before 2009, perhaps well before. My estimate is based on the innumerable times over the years that I looked at the piece, debating whether to publish it, then left it for a year before looking at it again. Then reading it to a friend who said, “Publish it,” then forsaking it until a year later, when I’d read it to a student whom I thought it might help, on and on.

2) I do not tend to view life as innately polarized. I believe polarization is one of many ways life manifests.

Polarization is often a falsehood some people construct and then play out. This piece was an attempt to portray a situation like that. But my writing itself was polarizing. For example, I portrayed everyone as more polarized than they are, as if everyone is just one thing or the other, or certain traits are exclusive to one group. I did the latter when I represented only one type of individual as a Holy Grail, when everyone is a Holy Grail in their own way and in a way that is vital to the health of everything now and in the future.

One reason I refrained from publishing the piece was that I doubted it could help remedy a situation if it was feeding the problem! We cannot go to new places using the old routes.

However, I cannot write a way around the problem, except for this footnote. When trying to uncover the hidden polarization that permeates every second of modern society, the best I could do was to paint with broad strokes. They bypassed vital nuances, even some of the very details I wanted to highlight.

… Hm, perhaps some of my wording was shaded with anger. I won’t correct that. I do not know if I should or shouldn’t.

In any case, now I believe sharing my vision is vital, despite its flaws. I have not encountered anything else like this written or spoken. It needs to be published.

And now I release its inaccurate views. This will allow me to do more work to remedy the situation that the piece describes. I invite you to do the same. So mote it be!

… Holy sh* t, ten minutes ago, people were screaming “ICE go home” outside my window! At first, I thought it was a neighborhood reaction to an abduction. Terrifying. But it was a protest march that passed by. Still, America is terrifying.

One reason that I thought ICE was abducting a neighbor is that “ICE go home” doesn’t sound like a protest chant. It seems like something neighbors coming to the rescue would shout.

I didn’t join the protest because I’m a 76-year-old disabled person. I’d be a liability. But I first heard shouting when I was formatting this piece to publish it here. The shouting affirmed: It is time to publish this, even if it makes me look biased, ignorant, or whatever. I care more about serving Gaia and all Her children than I do about how I appear. I will risk people thinking poorly of me, in case this essay will help someone. I am done debating forever.

Trying to imagine new ways of living is hard. Voicing faulty ideas leads to better ones. Silence until I only have perfect ideas is an excuse for inaction. No perfect ideas exist. I must take action to implement the best ideas I know.

An hour and a half later: The protesters are marching by again, returning from where they went. I can see them better now. I had suspected they were high schoolers. Yes, the protesters are high schoolers and middle schoolers, and I am crying. They are just children, most of them look about twelve to fourteen years old. Fighting for their freedom. I am crying because they are brave, because children shouldn’t have to do this, and because children always have to do this.

When they came by the first time, the ferocity of their voices was one reason I thought they were not demonstrators but neighbors trying to stop abductions. Their screams of “ICE, go home” had been filled with rage. These kids know what’s going on.

Last night, I was able to listen to Bruce Springsteen’s song about Minneapolis’s response to ICE, right after Bruce released the piece. I felt it calling me to continue sharing my Shamanic art—for example, the above liturgy. It’s easy, in times like these, to get discouraged and think that my art is useless. Quite the opposite, which is why oppressors hate artists.

The mystical—the Fey-touched, the otherworldly—is equally important and equally threatens systemic oppression. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake because (among other things) she visited with Faeries. A Fey-touched life threatens oppressive structures.

3) Do you think karma is fulfilled and enlightenment reached when a person is no longer predominantly one race or the other but is fully both?

4) Decades ago I had a vision that I have since taught repeatedly in oral tradition: There is no Holy Grail, except the one inside each of us; the Arthurian legend of quests for the Grail is a patriarchal lie to distract us from questing within for an immensity of power; the lie also serves to make women ignorant of their special powers. The liturgy’s paragraph for which this is a footnote implies a lot of my vision of the Holy Grail. Yet there’s far more to the teaching. It can be conveyed only in oral tradition and its experiential lessons.

Francesca De Grandis is the bestselling author of Be a Goddess!. Now she publishes less to focus on oral tradition: Long-distance Faerie Shamanism classes, psychic readings, and other services. Fifty years as a full-time community Shaman inform her work. Francesca is a mystic whose Goddess spirituality combines otherworldly travel, practical magic, and down-to-earth wisdom. De Grandis developed Shamanic theories, rituals, and worldviews that have been a seminal influence on modern Paganism. Her home is ecstatic paradox.

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