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First, I have to clarify what exactly I mean by the term "faery," which is used in several different ways. Although "faery" most properly applies to the courts of the people of the Sidhe, in these articles I will be using the term generally to apply to all nonhuman civilizations and their lands. I understand that this will strike many as less than optimal, but unfortunately no other servicable term comes to mind. The nearest suitable term would be Otherkin, but that is normally applied to those of "faery" who take on human incarnation.
I personally find that a lot of Victorian-style imperialism sneaks into the modern attitudes about faery, likely because so much of modern faery lore (and ceremonial magick as well) originates from that period. Even such valuable authors as R.J. Stewart are apt to say things implying that, for example, the faery have no real feelings, certainly not love, or that faery lacks the mental and spiritual complexity that humanity has, and therefore the faery folk are quite willing to put themselves at a human's disposal in order to stand next to humanity's fire, as it were. These strike me as the sorts of things proper Englishmen might have written about "savage" human races a century ago, and they strike me as no more true now than they would have been then. There are, of course, differences between the many "faery" races and humanity, but there does not need to be a set heirarchy placing one race above another--in fact it seems to me quite inappropriate; there is also a question of how many of these differences would actually turn out to be cultural if a serious study was undertaken.
One goal of the Iseum of the Green World is to enter into a relationship with Faery that is not humanocentric. We do not assume that fairies, elves, angels, demons, devas, or what have you, exist to be the guides or servants of human magicians. They have their own lives and their own agendas, and although we can establish friendships, romances, apprenticeships, and so on, as we would with a human, we have no innate right to expect another sentient being to be at our beck and call. Mutual respect and trust, once established, will take us much deeper into Faery than a smug sense of entitlement.
Another distinction that will be made here is between Faery and nature spirits. Of course in the popularized view, which stems from the Theosophical movement, there is no distinction here. There is a single heirarchy of beings, ranging from devas (the name applied to the small pixies of popular imagination) to fairies to angels, governing all natural processes. I must confess a personal prejudice here, because the concept of an enormous bureaucracy being needed to keep the natural world moving, a bureaucracy that by its description would have to include more beings than actually exist in the natural world itself, seems to me a woefully inefficient way of doing things. My other personal problem is that since I originally learned the term "deva" in its Hindu context, where it has much more in common with the more regal energy of the Sidhe courts, I have never been able to bring myself to use the term to mean pixies.
My theory is that this odd setup comes from a logical fallacy that, coming as it does from the nineteenth-century mindset, would have been easy to make. The fallacy itself happens this way: you start with a premise. At some point, evidence arises that directly contradicts the premise. However, instead of reevaluating the premise, you layer another premise on top of it that explains away the discrepancy. If you keep this up for long enough, you can end up with quite a precarious house of cards. In this case, the original premise would be that only humans have souls. This obviously was the generally held belief at the time, and in fact is still fairly popular now. But then, various seers detected spirits at work in the natural world--lingering around plants to help them grow, for example. These to the Theosophist could not have been the souls of plants, because the initial premise clearly stated that plants did not have souls. So they must be some other external being, which then (Theosophists being marginally Christian) had to be put into relationship with the angels in some way, and so a bureaucracy was born.
I am personally unable to work with this theory, so for the work here I have replaced it with an altered premise: plants do have souls. Everything that has a physical being has a soul. There is also a sort of Collective Soul for a species, for a distinct area, for an ecosystem, and so on. There is more fluidity between the individual and collective souls than sentient beings generally perceive to be true of themselves. These are what we would term "nature spirits," and by communicating with them we can bring ourselves into greater harmony with the environment around us. (These, by the way, do not exist to serve us either.)
In other words, I'm an animist. ;)