Three Wards

In the last installment of this series, I followed the blood. I traced it from Bathory's bathtub through Roman gladiatorial arenas, through Aztec temples and Maasai cattle herds and the Christian Eucharist, through parabiosis laboratories at Stanford where old mice grew young again on borrowed plasma, and I ended up standing in front of three words that I have been circling for most of my life without fully understanding why they kept appearing together.

Iron. Salt. Sunlight.

I named them at the close of that piece because the blood demanded it. Every ward tradition I have ever studied, every protective practice documented across European folklore for keeping nonhuman peoples at a distance, eventually reduces to those three substances. I left the reader with the observation that all three connect to blood systems in the body, and I promised to explain what I meant. I have been building toward this piece since the first entry in the series, because I think the three wards are the key to everything the foyson concept implies, and I think the reason they work tells us more about the nature of nonhuman peoples than any encounter report or folklore collection ever could.

An Iron Door

Robert Kirk, writing in 1691, documented the Highland practice of placing a piece of iron in the bed of a woman who had just given birth, alongside bread and a Bible, to prevent the infant from being stolen by the Good Neighbours. Katharine Briggs, in her Dictionary of Fairies, confirmed that iron in any shape- a knife, a horseshoe, a pin, a pair of tongs, the bolt of a door- was effective as a ward, and that this belief was consistent across every Celtic-language culture she studied. Morgan Daimler, whose work on faerie protective traditions I return to often, notes that roughly eighty percent of faerie types documented in the folklore are averse to iron, with the remaining twenty percent being those whose nature already places them near the metal- mine faeries, forge spirits, certain house spirits, and the aos sidhe connected to smithing. In Welsh tradition, an iron knife was so powerful a deterrent that friendly faeries visiting a household expected all knives to be hidden from sight, and a traveler attacked on the road by the Othercrowd needed only to draw a blade for them to vanish entirely. William Sikes documented this in British Goblins in 1880, and the specificity of the practice- hide the knives from friends, draw them against enemies- suggests a culture that understood iron's effect on nonhuman peoples with extraordinary precision.

Iron's protective reputation extends well beyond the Celtic world. In Germanic and Norse practice, an iron nail hammered into a doorpost served the same function as the Highland horseshoe. Kveldulf Gundarsson, in Elves, Wights, and Trolls, documents the Scandinavian tradition of iron as a barrier against alfar and vaettir, the elves and spirits of the Norse cosmos. In Sicily, a pinch of salt placed on a horse's back protected it from faerie molestation, and iron implements were kept near the stall door as secondary insurance. Across Britain, iron cemetery fences were understood to serve a dual purpose: containing the spirits of the dead and preventing faeries from entering consecrated ground. Pliny the Elder, in the first century, recommended driving iron coffin nails into a doorjamb to repel malicious spirits, and the practice has been documented in some form across every European tradition I have been able to find, as well as in West African ritual practice, where metal objects are invoked for spirit protection and binding.

Across every tradition I have studied, the folklore arrives at the same conclusion: iron repels nonhuman peoples. What none of these traditions explain is why.

I think the biochemistry does.

Iron sits at the center of heme, the molecule that makes blood red. Heme is a porphyrin ring- four pyrrole subunits arranged in a circle- with a single iron ion locked at its core, and this structure is the prosthetic group of hemoglobin, the protein that carries oxygen from the lungs to every cell in the body. Every hemoglobin molecule contains four heme groups, and each heme group contains one iron atom, and each iron atom binds and releases one molecule of oxygen. Without heme, there is no oxygen transport. Without iron, there is no heme.

Every vertebrate on earth depends on iron sitting at the center of a porphyrin ring inside a protein inside a red blood cell for blood-borne oxygen delivery. Roughly seventy percent of the iron in a body is in its hemoglobin. Another six percent operates as a component of enzymes involved in respiration, energy metabolism, and the synthesis of collagen and neurotransmitters. Iron is the element around which the blood organizes itself.

If foyson is carried in the blood, and I believe the evidence across this entire series supports that conclusion, then iron is not simply present in the system that carries foyson. Iron is the structural center of it, the keystone molecule of the foyson delivery system itself.

A Line Of Salt

Salt is the second ward, and its folklore is at least as widespread as iron's, though the traditions take a different shape.

Katharine Briggs argued that salt is disliked by the Good Neighbours because it is a universal symbol of preservation, eternity, and goodwill, and that in alchemy it represents the earthly body, opposing it to the faeries' astral forms. The British Fairies blog, whose scholarship on these traditions I trust and return to often, traces the practice to Graeco-Roman culture, where salt was placed on the lips of neonates to ward off evil spirits, a custom later adopted by the Christian church in the baptismal rite of giving salt to a child. In the Celtic tradition, salt scattered across a threshold or along windowsills was the primary method of keeping faeries, demons, and spirits out of a house, and if food had to be carried to farm hands in the fields, sprinkling it with salt kept the faeries from extracting the nourishment from it unseen. Hold that detail, because it connects directly to the foyson concept: salting the food did not make it unappealing to the faeries in the way a bitter herb might make it unpalatable. Salting the food protected its nourishment. The salt guarded the foyson.

The tradition crosses every ocean. In Japan, salt is thrown into the sumo ring before a match to drive off malevolent spirits, and the misogi ceremony at the start of the new year uses salt to wash away dead energy from the body. In Tibetan Buddhism, salt pushes away negative forces. In Hawaii and Samoa, sea salt placed in the four corners of a house and poured across the door threshold prevents spirits from crossing into the home. In upper Egypt, women threw salt on burning coals carried in earthen vessels before a caravan set out, reciting blessings to render inert the machinations of evil spirits. In the Swiss canton of Bern, a person carrying rock salt in each vest pocket alongside fresh bread and a psalm-book was considered fortified against all kinds of spiritual enemies.

In Bavaria, a mother licked her child's forehead to taste for the salt that indicated bewitchment. In Ireland, a charm against faerie-stroke involved placing three equal portions of salt in three parallel rows on a table, encircling them with the arm, and reciting the Lord's Prayer three times over each row. In the Province of Quebec, French Canadians scattered salt about stable doors to prevent lutins from tormenting the horses. In Aboriginal Australia, the Ngayurnangalku spirits of Kumpupintil- Lake Disappointment, a vast salt flat in the northwest- were so feared that the surrounding tribes prohibited entry to the area, a taboo that persists to this day and extends even to flying over the lake.

Every continent, every century, the same conclusion: salt repels the unseen.

Again, the folklore does not tell us why. I think the science does, and I think it tells us something specific enough to test.

Lining the inner surface of every blood vessel in the body is a structure called the endothelial glycocalyx, a mesh of negatively charged biopolymers approximately 400 nanometers thick, invisible to the naked eye, and performing a function that Hans Oberleithner and his team at the University of Munster have spent over a decade characterizing with atomic force microscopy. The glycocalyx acts as a sodium buffer. It binds sodium ions to its negatively charged proteoglycans, holding them in an electrostatic net on the surface of the vessel wall, preventing them from penetrating the endothelial cells underneath. A healthy glycocalyx has a high sodium storage capacity and maintains sufficient surface negativity to create a repulsive force between the blood vessel wall and the red blood cells moving through it, a security zone that keeps the two surfaces from making unfavorable contact. Oberleithner's 2011 study, published in Pflugers Archiv, demonstrated that sodium overload caused the glycocalyx to shrink by approximately fifty percent and stiffen by roughly one hundred and thirty percent, with a sixty-eight percent reduction in heparan sulphate residues. The glycocalyx collapsed, the sodium barrier failed, and the endothelial cells transformed from a sodium-releasing state to a sodium-absorbing state, and the vessel wall lost its protective boundary.

Salt, at the cellular level, is a boundary substance. The glycocalyx uses it to maintain the integrity of the barrier between what flows through the blood and what the vessel wall absorbs. When the glycocalyx is intact, it holds sodium in place and keeps the boundary secure. When it is damaged, sodium floods through, the barrier collapses, and the cells underneath are exposed.

I think the folklore is describing the same mechanism from the outside. Salt at the threshold. Salt on the windowsill. Salt sprinkled on the food to keep the foyson from being taken. The ward is a boundary, and the substance that maintains boundaries in the blood is sodium.

The Bright Side

Sunlight is the third ward, and it is the most brutal of the three.

Iron repels. Salt creates a boundary. Sunlight destroys.

Kirk described the Good Neighbours as having "light changeable Bodies, somewhat of the Nature of a condensed Cloud, and best seen in Twilight." Evans-Wentz, collecting testimony for The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries in 1911, recorded informant after informant confirming that encounters occurred at dusk, at dawn, after dark, and in moonlight. In Irish tradition, the faerie hills rose on their pillars and blazed with light on certain nights of the year- Lammas, Samhain, the feasts of Gwynn ap Nudd- and these were the nights when the doors between worlds opened widest, always after dark, always when the sun was below the horizon. Roger Ekirch, in his cultural history At Day's Close, devoted his opening chapter to the terrors of the night, documenting how for earlier generations the hours after sunset carried anxieties about proximity to the devil, the spirits of the dead, and faeries, and how dawn was experienced as a loosening of the night's grip on the visible world, a lifting. For many nonhuman peoples in the Celtic traditions, sunlight suppresses manifestation, dims the contact, makes the passage between their world and ours more difficult to hold open.

For others, sunlight does far worse.

In Scandinavian folklore, trolls exposed to daylight did not simply retreat. They burst, or they turned to stone. Britannica records this flatly: "Hostile to men, trolls lived in castles and haunted the surrounding districts after dark. If exposed to sunlight they burst or turned to stone." This is one of the oldest and most persistent troll traditions in Norse culture, predating Tolkien by centuries, and the petrification was permanent. A troll caught above ground at dawn was not inconvenienced. It was killed, its body transformed into the rock formations that still dot the Norwegian landscape, and the folklore treated these formations as evidence, proof that the sun had done its work. The Orkney trows, smaller cousins of the mainland trolls, were trapped above ground if caught at sunrise, unable to return to their dwellings until the sun set again, imprisoned in the light.

The Norse dwarves, the svartálfar or black elves, carried the same vulnerability. In the Alvíssmál, one of the poems of the Poetic Edda, Thor tricks the dwarf Alvíss into staying above ground through the night by asking him question after question about the names of the world, and when the first light of dawn touches him, Alvíss turns to stone. Thor knew exactly what he was doing. He used the sun as a weapon. The Ynglinga saga describes another dwarf as dagskjarr- sun-shy- in a context that implies the fear is mortal, not preferential. The svartálfar dwell in Svartálfheimr, deep underground and far from the sun, and the folklore is explicit about why: daylight petrifies them.

I can confirm the suppressive end of this spectrum from my own fieldwork and from the decade of activity in my home that Tems and I have documented together. Darkness and storms are vital to manifestation in virtually every case I have worked, and even in our own house, where the activity has been consistent and mostly positive for over ten years, it remains rare for anything to happen in plain daylight. Summer is like afternoon- the presence may well be there, the expression is muted. Equinoxes, solstices, deep autumn, winter, and early spring are all dramatically more active, as though the thinning of the light and the shortening of the day create conditions under which the unseen can press closer to the surface of things. Sunlight operates on a spectrum of severity against nonhuman peoples, from suppression at one end to annihilation at the other, and I think the type of being determines where on that spectrum the damage falls.

I suspect this is because sunlight acts on the same biochemical system that iron and salt act on, and that system is heme.

Porphyria is a group of disorders caused by defects in the enzymes of the heme biosynthetic pathway, the eight-step process by which the body assembles protoporphyrin IX and inserts an iron atom into its center to create heme. When one of those enzymes is deficient or dysfunctional, porphyrin intermediates accumulate in the blood, the bone marrow, and the tissues, and these accumulated porphyrins are photosensitive. When ultraviolet light strikes them- specifically the UV-A spectrum present in sunlight- they absorb that energy and generate reactive oxygen species that damage the surrounding tissue. The damage is not discomfort. In erythropoietic protoporphyria, the most common porphyria in children, protoporphyrin IX accumulates because the final enzyme in the pathway, ferrochelatase, cannot insert iron into the porphyrin ring efficiently enough, and the result is immediate, painful photosensitivity upon sun exposure, sometimes within minutes. In severe cases, organs shut down. Blood vessels rupture. The body, unable to complete the heme it needs, is attacked by the very sunlight that most organisms depend on for life.

All three wards converge at this point in the chemistry. Heme's final synthetic step is the insertion of iron into the porphyrin ring. Porphyria occurs when that process is disrupted, when the porphyrins accumulate without being completed into heme, and the accumulated porphyrins react to sunlight.

Sunlight, in the biochemistry, is the energy that activates incomplete heme. At low exposure, the activation is irritating. At high or sustained exposure, it is lethal.

I think the folklore is documenting exactly this range. Kirk's Good Neighbours, seen best in twilight, are at the suppressive end of the spectrum- sunlight makes them harder to perceive, dims their presence, closes the window between worlds. The trolls and the svartálfar are at the destructive end- sunlight does not dim them, it petrifies them, ruptures them, ends them. The spectrum of sunlight's effect on nonhuman peoples in the folklore mirrors the spectrum of UV damage on porphyrin-loaded tissue in the biochemistry, from mild photosensitivity to organ failure to death, and I think the parallel is too precise to be coincidental. The ward is a description of a biochemical vulnerability expressed in the language available to the people who observed it, and some of them observed annihilation.

Now then.

I carry all three.

I have the rarest type of porphyria, documented since I was a toddler. My variant does not produce blisters- my skin turns pink, the vessels in my eyes can rupture, and the organs inside me begin to shut down. Sunlight is the only trigger. Not wine, not coffee, not chocolate, not any of the dietary triggers that activate the more common forms of the condition. Only sunlight, only UV, only the specific wavelengths that activate photosensitive porphyrins in the blood. This has been present for as long as anyone in my family can remember, and it was identified early enough that my childhood was shaped around it, structured by avoidance of the one thing most children take for granted.

I have chronic anemia. Despite years of supplementation, my body does not hold iron the way most bodies do. The iron goes in and the levels remain stubbornly, persistently low, as though something in my system either cannot retain it or is releasing it faster than I can replace it. Iron, the center of heme, the element around which hemoglobin organizes itself, does not stay in my blood at the concentrations it should.

I have acute salt sensitivity. My body responds to sodium with a speed and intensity that most people do not experience, swelling, blood pressure changes, fluid shifts that are measurable within hours of a salty meal. The glycocalyx, the sodium buffer that maintains the boundary integrity of blood vessel walls, appears to function differently in my system than it does in most.

I am naming these conditions because they are documented, because they have been present since early childhood, and because the pattern they form is, I think, worth keeping close. Three conditions, all present in the same body, all present since the earliest years of life, and all three map precisely onto the three substances that European folklore has identified, across centuries and continents, as the primary wards against nonhuman peoples. Iron, salt, and sunlight. Heme, glycocalyx, and porphyrin photosensitivity. The ward, the boundary, and the activation energy.

I am not claiming that my conditions prove anything about the nature of nonhuman peoples or the mechanism of foyson. I am noting that the convergence exists, that it is specific enough to be interesting, and that I am not the only person I have encountered in this work whose body carries difficulty with one or more of these three systems. The folklore says that certain bodies are more permeable to the unseen than others. The folklore says that the wards exist because some people need them. I think the biochemistry suggests a reason why, and I think my body is one data point in a much larger pattern that has been recorded in the traditions of every culture that has lived alongside nonhuman peoples and paid attention to what kept them at arm's length.

Interestingly, I stumbled onto something in summer of 2024 that changed my daily life. I was researching dihydroberberine as a potential treatment for my MODY diabetes, a genetic form of diabetes that affects the way the liver processes energy, and I noticed that the compound acts on the same hepatic pathways that are divergent in porphyria patients compared to the general population. Dihydroberberine opens cells to energy and nutrition, and the liver pathways it targets overlap with the pathways involved in heme synthesis and porphyrin processing in ways I had not expected.

I tested my hypothesis slowly and carefully, over months, increasing my sunlight exposure in small increments and monitoring for the symptoms that had defined my entire life. After roughly three months of supplementation, I was able to spend about an hour in direct sun with no pain, no illness, no organ involvement, no danger. Today I can spend several hours outdoors in conditions that would have hospitalized me as a child. The treatment works for both the porphyria and the MODY diabetes, because the underlying metabolic pathways overlap.

I think the dihydroberberine finding reinforces the foyson argument. If the three wards act on heme-related systems, and if a compound that supports those systems can reduce the ward's effect on my body- can allow me to tolerate sunlight, the very substance that the folklore says disrupts nonhuman manifestation- then the connection between the wards and the heme pathway is specific enough to be pharmacologically measurable. A supplement targeting those pathways altered one ward's impact on one body, and I can document the timeline. That is a testable observation, and I think it is the closest thing to a controlled experiment that my own biology has ever offered this investigation.

Now if only I can find something that will allow me to enjoy some of those organic sea salt and vinegar chips Artemaeus is always drooling over..

The Circle Closes Here.

This series began with foyson, and foyson is where it closes, because I think these six entries draw a single circle that starts and ends with the same question: what are they feeding on, and why can't they get enough of it?

The Bio-Well scans and the voltmeter in my living room confirmed what my nervous system had been reporting since early childhood- my body pulls energy inward, my field draws rather than radiates, and the permeability that makes me sensitive to nonhuman peoples may be written into the same biochemistry that makes me sensitive to iron, to salt, and to the sun. The foyson concept gave that experience a name, and the biochemistry gave the name a mechanism: biogenic amines as the measurable decay of essence, CLA and K2 as the measurable richness of it, the cow as the single animal that delivers the broadest, most stable, most abundant foyson across all three product categories, and the blood as the fluid through which all of it circulates in its most concentrated form. The cattle mutilations target the densest foyson in the animal- the blood-rich organs, the reproductive tissues, the tongue and eyes and lymph nodes- and they leave behind a body that no scavenger will touch, because what the scavenger would feed on is already gone. The three wards protect what remains, and they protect it at the blood level: iron at the center of heme, sodium at the surface of the glycocalyx, sunlight activating the porphyrin intermediates that I suspect nonhuman peoples depend on for manifestation in the physical world.

Grace, the stolen woman in the Selena Moor testimony, told William Bottrell in the 1870s that the faerie children "wern't so strongly made as they used to be, for want of more beef and good malt liquor." She was describing a foyson crisis, a weakening of the nonhuman population tied directly to the quality and availability of mortal food. Beef, the meat whose foyson persists longest after slaughter. Malt liquor, a fermented product of grain rich in B vitamins and bioavailable minerals. Grace did not have a laboratory or a spectrometer, and the faeries who told her why their children were failing did not cite the Journal of Dairy Science. They named what they needed, and what they named aligns with everything the biochemistry has since confirmed.

Cow dairy enriches human breast milk with the same CLA isomer within forty-eight hours of consumption. Cow meat delivers the only package of creatine, carnitine, and taurine available in any single protein source. Cow butter, from a pasture-fed animal eating green grass in sunlight, carries a concentration of bioactive compounds that nothing else on a doorstep can match. The cow feeds the mother, the mother feeds the faerie child, and without the cow, the chain weakens at both ends. Foyson degrades as food ages, as biogenic amines accumulate, as cooking converts heme iron to non-heme and destroys the enzymes. Fresh food carries the most essence. The freshness is the foyson, measurable in the absence of histamine and tyramine and cadaverine, in the preservation of CLA and K2 and B12, in the bioavailability that diminishes with every hour between harvest and table. The faerie preference for fresh dairy, fresh cream, fresh butter left at the threshold is a description of optimal feeding conditions, recorded in the vocabulary of the hearth.

I think the three wards are the oldest technology available to those who live alongside the unseen. I think they work because they protect the system through which foyson moves: the blood, the barrier, and the light. I think every culture that figured this out encoded it into their protective traditions, and I think the biochemistry, when you lay it over the folklore, confirms what the grandmothers always knew.

Iron at the threshold. Salt on the windowsill. Come home before dark.

The series closes here, but the research- and disclosure to you, dear reader- do not.

Stay on the bright side, sunshine 😉

Tillie