for but few English wizards came before the court, the only society
for psychical research in those days. The translation, however, of
Cornelius Agrippa's _De Occulta Philosophia_ in the seventeenth
century, with the addition of a spurious fourth book full of
conjurations, seems to have filled England and Ireland with whole
or half wizards. In 1703, the Reverend Arthur Bedford of Bristol
who is quoted by Sibley in his big book on astrology wrote to the
Bishop of Gloucester telling how a certain Thomas Perks had been to
consult him. Thomas Perks lived with his father, a gunsmith, and
devoted his leisure to mathematics, astronomy, and the discovery of
perpetual motion. One day he asked the clergyman if it was wrong to
commune with spirits, and said that he himself held that "there was
an innocent society with them which a man might use, if he made no
compacts with them, did no harm by their means, and were not curious
in prying into hidden things, and he himself had discoursed with
them and heard them sing to his great satisfaction." He then told
how it was his custom to go to a crossway with lantern and candle
consecrated for the purpose, according to the directions in a book
he had, and having also consecrated chalk for making a circle. The
spirits appeared to him "in the likeness of little maidens about a
foot and a half high ... they spoke with a very shrill voice like an
ancient woman" and when he begged them to sing, "they went to some
distance behind a bush from whence he could hear a perfect concert
of such exquisite music as he never before heard; and in the upper
part he heard something very harsh and shrill like a reed but as it
was managed did give a particular grace to the rest." The Reverend
Arthur Bedford refused an introduction to the spirits for himself
and a friend and warned him very solemnly. Having some doubt of his
sanity, he set him a difficult mathematical problem, but finding that
he worked it easily, concluded him sane. A quarter of a year later,
the young man came again, but showed by his face and his eyes that he
was very ill and lamented that he had not followed the clergyman's
advice for his conjurations would bring him to his death. He had
decided to get a familiar and had read in his magical book what he
should do. He was to make a book of virgin parchment, consecrate it,
and bring it to the cross-road, and having called up his spirits,
ask the first of them for its name and write that name on the first
page of the book and then question another and write that name on
the second page and so on till he had enough familiars. He had got
the first name easily enough and it was in Hebrew, but after that
they came in fearful shapes, lions and bears and the like, or hurled
at him balls of fire. He had to stay there among those terrifying
visions till the dawn broke and would not be the better of it till
he died. I have read in some eighteenth-century book whose name I
cannot recall of two men who made a magic circle and who invoked the
spirits of the moon and saw them trampling about the circle as great
bulls, or rolling about it as flocks of wool. One of Lady Gregory's
story-tellers considered a flock of wool one of the worst shapes that
a spirit could take.
There must have been many like experimenters in Ireland. An Irish
alchemist called Butler was supposed to have made successful
transmutations in London early in the eighteenth century, and in the
_Life of Dr. Adam Clarke_, published in 1833, are several letters
from a Dublin maker of stained glass describing a transmutation and a
conjuration into a tumbler of water of large lizards. The alchemist
was an unknown man who had called to see him and claimed to do all by
the help of the devil "who was the friend of all ingenious gentlemen."
W. B. Y.
1914.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] I have modernized the old lowland Scotch in these quotations from
_Pitcairn's Criminal Trials_.
NOTES
NOTES
NOTE 1. THE FAERY PEOPLE. The first detailed account of the Faery
People of the Gaelic race was made by the Reverend Robert Kirk in
1691. His book which remained in manuscript till it was discovered
by Sir Walter Scott in 1815 was called _The Secret Commonwealth_,
an essay "of the nature of the subterranean (and for the most part
invisible people) heretofore going under the names of elves, fays,
and faeries." Kirk was a Gaelic scholar, a translator into Gaelic of
the Psalms. He is described upon his tomb as _Lignæ hibernæ lumen_,
for in his day little distinction was made between the Irish and the
Scottish-Irish among whom he lived and whose words he has recorded.
He died a year after he had finished his manuscript or, as the people
of his parish say, was taken by the faeries. The Reverend William
Taylor, the present incumbent of Abberfoyle, Kirk's old living,
told Mr. Wentz that it was generally believed at the time of Kirk's
death, that the faeries had carried him off because he had looked too
deeply into their secrets. He seems to have fainted while walking
upon a faery knoll, a little way from his own door, and to have died
immediately. Mr. Wentz found one old Gaelic speaker who believed that
his spirit had been taken, but others who said there was nothing in
the grave but a coffin full of stones, for body and soul had been
taken. Mr. Lang prints a tradition that Kirk appeared to his cousin
Graham of Ducray and could have been saved if the cousin had dared to
throw a knife over the apparition's head.
Kirk describes "the subterranean people" or "the abstruse people,"
as he sometimes calls them, much as they are described today in
Galway or in Mayo. He is clear that they are not demons and like
Father Sinistrari, a Catholic theologian of Padua, quotes the
Scriptures in support of this opinion. The "abstruse people" are
not indeed, without sin though midway between men and angels, but
being in no way "drenched into so gross and dredgy bodies as we, are
especially given to the more spiritual and haughty sins." "Whatever
their own laws, be sure according to ours and equity natural civil
and revealed" they do wrong by "their stealing of nurses to their
children and that other sort of Plaginism in catching our children
away (may seem to heir some estate in those invisible dominions)
which never return. For the inconvenience of their succubi who tryst
with men it is abominable, but for swearing and intemperance they
are not observed so subject to this irregularity as to envy, spite,
hypocrisy, lying, and simulation." Some have thought the spirit
controls of our best mediums no better. "They are not subject to
sore sickness, but dwindle and decay at a certain period all about
ane age" and "they pass after a long healthy life into one orb and
receptacle fitted to their degree till they come under the general
cognism at the last day." They are the "Sleagh Math or the good
people" being called so by the "Irish" ... "to prevent the dint of
their ill-attempts" and being "of a middle nature betwixt man and
angel" have "intelligent, studious spirits, and light changeable
bodies (like those called astral) somewhat of the nature of a
condensed cloud and best seen in twilight. Their bodies are so
pliable through the subtlety of the spirits that agitate them that
they can make them appear or disappear at pleasure. Some have bodies
or vehicles so spongeous, thin, and desiccate, that they are fed
by only sucking into some fine spirituous liquors that pierce like
pure air and oil; others feed more gross on the foisone or substance
of corns and liquors or corn itself that grows upon the surface of
the earth which these faeries steal away, partly invisible, partly
preying on the grain as do crows and mice." Lady Gregory has a story
of the crying of new dropped lambs of faery in November and some
evidence that there is a reversal of the seasons, our winter being
their summer, and some such belief was known to Kirk for "when we
have plenty they have scarcity at their homes; and on the contrary
(for they are empowered to catch as much prey everywhere as they
please)." "Their bodies of congealed air are sometimes carried aloft,
other whiles grovel in different shapes and enter into any cranny or
cleft of the earth where air enters to their ordinary dwellings, the
earth being full of cavities and cells and there being no place nor
creature but is supposed to have other animals greater or lesser,
living in or upon it as inhabitants, and no such thing as a pure
wilderness in the whole universe" and we must always "labour for that
abstruse people as well as for ourselves." Unless Kirk is in error,
as seems probable, they are unlike the Irish faeries who shift but
twice a year in May and in November, when the ancient Irish perhaps
shifted from their winter houses to summer pastures or home again,
for they have formed the custom to "remove to other lodgings at the
beginning of each quarter of the year, so traversing till doomsday
some being impudent [impotent?] of staying in one place and finding
some ease by so purning [turning] and changing habitations," and at
these times they are much seen when "their chameleon-like bodies swim
in the air near the earth with bag and baggage." He is evidently
puzzled how to place them among the orders and admits that it is
uncertain "what at the last revolution will become of them when they
are locked up into ane unchangeable condition." He even believes that
they are so beset with anxiety upon this subject that have they "any
frolic fits of mirth 'tis as the confirmed grinning of a mort head."
Many of the second-sighted men about him would have nothing of this
doctrine and still believed, it seems, the old Celtic theory of the
rebirth of the soul, a Manichæan and gnostic doctrine, for being
"unwary in their observations" they believed what the "abstruse
people" themselves declared "one averring those subterranean people
to be departed souls attending awhile in this inferior state and
clothed with bodies procured through their alms deeds in this life;
fluid, active ethereal vehicles to hold them that they may not
scatter or wander or be lost in the totum or the first nothing; but
if any were so impious as to have given no alms they say when the
souls of such do depart, they sleep in an uncertain state till they
resume the terrestrial body." These bodies, come at by the giving of
alms, suggest to one that body of Christ which, as Boehme taught,
alone enables the shade to escape from _turba magna_ the great wrath
and dream-like transformation into the shape of beasts. One remembers
also the celestial body of the seventeenth century Platonists.
The power attributed to almsgiving calls to mind those tales of
clothes given to the poor in some ghost's name thereby enabling the
ghost to be decked out in their double. Lady Gregory has found the
idea of rebirth in Aran, but in what seems the Cabalistic form not
the Celtic; and it occurs again and again in the Gaelic romances.
Cuchulain was the rebirth of Lug; and Mongan who was killed by
Arthur of Britain was the rebirth of Finn Mac Cool. Here and there
through the seventeenth century Platonists, Kirk's contemporaries,
one finds some story that might have been in Lady Gregory's book.
Glanvill in the second part of his _Sadducismus Triumphatus_
published in 1674 has an Irish tale where the dead and the faeries
are associated as in Galway today. "A gentleman in Ireland near to
the Earl of Orrery's seat sending his butler one afternoon to buy
cards; as he passed a field, he, to his wonder, espied a company
of people sitting round a table, with a deal of good cheer before
them in the midst of a field. And he going up towards them, they all
arose and saluted him, and desired him to sit down with them." But
one of them said these words in his ear: "Do nothing this company
invites you to." "He therefore refused to sit down at the table, and
immediately the table and all that belonged to it were gone; and the
company are now dancing and playing upon musical instruments, and the
butler being desired to join himself to them; but he refusing this
also, they fall all to work, and he not being to be prevailed with
to accompany them in working, any more than in feasting and dancing,
they all disappeared, and the butler is now alone." For some days
attempts are made to carry away the butler. During one of these he is
levitated in the presence of the Earl of Orrery and certain of his
guests. Then the man who warned him to do nothing he was bid, came to
his bedside. "'I have been dead,' said the spectre or ghost, 'seven
years and you know that I lived a loose life. And ever since have
been hurried up and down in a restless condition with the company you
saw and shall be till the Day of Judgment.'"
Throughout the Middle Ages, there must have been many discussions
upon those questions that divided Kirk's Highlanders. Were these
beings but the shades of men? Were they a separate race? Were they
spirits of evil? Above all, perhaps, were they capable of salvation?
Father Sinistrari in _De Dæmonialitate et Incubis, et Succubis_,
reprinted in Paris with an English translation in 1879, tells a
story which must have been familiar through the Irish Middle Ages,
and the seed of many discussions. The Abbot Anthony went once upon
a journey to visit St. Paul, the first hermit. After travelling for
some days into the desert, he met a centaur of whom he asked his
road and the centaur, muttering barbarous and unintelligible words,
pointed to the road with his outstretched hand and galloped away
and hid himself in a wood. St. Anthony went some way further and
presently went into a valley and met there a little man with goat's
feet and horns upon his forehead. St. Anthony stood still and made
the sign of the cross being afraid of some devil's trick. But the
sign of the cross did not alarm the little man who went nearer and
offered some dates very respectfully as it seemed to make peace. When
the old Saint asked him who he was, he said: "I am a mortal, one of
those inhabitants of the desert called fauns, satyrs, and incubi,
by the Gentiles. I have come as an ambassador from my people. I ask
you to pray for us to our common God who came as we know for the
salvation of the world and who is praised throughout the world." We
are not told whether St. Anthony prayed but merely that he thought of
the glory of Christ and thereafter of Christ's enemies and turning
towards Alexandria said: "Woe upon you harlots worshipping animals as
God." This tale so artfully arranged as it seems to set the pious by
the ears may have been the original of a tale one hears in Ireland
today. I heard or read that tale somewhere before I was twenty,
for it is the subject of one of my first poems. But the priest in
the Irish tale, as I remember it, tells the little man that there
is no salvation for such as he and it ends with the wailing of the
faery host. Sometimes too, one reads in Irish stories of hoof-footed
creatures, and it may well be that the Irish theologians who read
of St. Anthony in Sinistrari's authority, St. Hieronymus, thought
centaur and homunculus were of like sort with the shades haunting
their own raths and barrows. Father Sinistrari draws the moral
that those inhabitants of the desert called "fauns and satyrs and
incubi by the Gentiles" had souls that could be shrived, but Irish
theologians in a country full of poems very upsetting to youth about
the women of the Sidhe who could pass, it may be even monastic walls,
may have turned the doubtful tale the other way. Sometimes we are
told following the traditions of the eleventh-century poems that the
Sidhe are "the ancient inhabitants of the country" but more often
still they are fallen angels who, because they were too bad for
heaven and not bad enough for hell, have been sent into the sea and
into the waste places. More probably still the question was never
settled, sometimes Christ was represented as throwing them into hell
till someone said he would empty the whole paradise, and thereupon
his hand slackened and some fell in this place and some in that
other, as though providence itself were undecided. Father Sinistrari
is conscious of weighty opponents but believes that Scripture is
upon his side. He quotes St. John, Chapter x., verse 16: "And other
sheep I have which are not of this fold; them also I must bring
and they shall hear my voice and there shall be one fold and one
shepherd." He argues that the commentators are wrong who say that
the fold is the synagogue and the other sheep the Gentiles, because
the true church has been from the beginning of the world, and has
had nothing to do with Jewish observances, for its revelations were
made to the first man and Jews and Gentiles have belonged to it.
If the Gentiles were not also of Christ's fold, he would not have
sent them prodigies to announce his birth, the star of the Magi, the
silencing of their oracle, a miraculous spring of oil at Rome, the
falling down of the images of Egyptian gods and so on. The other fold
should therefore, he thinks, refer to those "rational animals" who
sent their ambassador to St. Anthony and who were to hear Christ's
voice "either directly through Himself or through His apostles."
He argues that they are a race superior to the human and must not
be confused with angels and devils who are pure spirits being in a
final state of salvation or of judgment. He has written his book as a
guide to confessors who have frequently, it seems, to protect men and
women, often nuns or monks, who are plagued by spirits or tempted by
spirit lovers, and to apportion penalties to those who have fallen.
It is a great sin should they confuse their lovers with devils, for
then they "sin through intention," but otherwise it is a venal sin,
and seeing that incubi and succubi by reason of their "rational and
immortal" spirits are the equal of man and by reason of their bodies
being "more noble because more subtle," "more dignified than man,"
a commerce that does not "degrade but rather dignify our nature"
(_et hoc homo jungens se incubo non vilificat, immo dignificat suam
naturam_). The incubus, (or succuba) however, does, he holds, commit
a very great sin considering that we belong to an inferior species.
It is difficult to drive them away, for unlike devils they are no
more subject to exorcism than we are ourselves, but just as we cannot
breathe in the higher peaks of the Alps because of the thinness of
the air, so they cannot come near to us if we make certain conditions
of the air. They are of different kinds but always one or other of
the four elements predominates, and those who are predominantly
fiery cannot come if we make the air damp, and those that are watery
cannot come if we use hot fumigations and so on. You can generally
judge the kind by remembering that a man attracts spirits according
to his own temperament, the sanguine, the spirits of fire, and the
lymphatic, those of watery nature, and those of a mixed nature, mixed
spirits; but it is easy to make mistakes. He tells of the case that
came into his own experience. He was asked to drive a spirit away
that was troubling a young monk and advised hot fumigations because
it was by their means "a very erudite theologian" drove away a spirit
who made passionate love in the form of "a very handsome young man
to a certain young nun" after holy candles burning all night and
"a crowd of relics and many exorcisms" had proved of but as little
value as her own vows and fasts. A vessel made of "glass-like earth"
containing "cubeb seed, roots of both aristolochies, great and small
cardamon, ginger, long pepper, caryophylias, cinnamon, cloves, mace,
nutmeg, calamite, storax, benzoin, aloes wood root, one ounce of
triasandates and three pounds of half brandy and water," was set upon
hot ashes to make it fume, and the door and window of the cell were
closed. The young friar, a deacon of the great Carthusian priory of
Padua, was further advised to carry about with him perfumes of musk,
amber, chive, peruvian bark, and the like, and to smoke tobacco and
drink brandy perfumed with musk. All was to no purpose for the spirit
appeared to him in many forms such as "a skeleton, a pig, an ass,
an angel, a bird" or "in the figure of one or other of the friars."
These appearances seem to have had no object except that like the
Irish faeries the spirit was pleased to make game of somebody.
Presently it came in the likeness of the abbot and heard the young
deacon's confession and recited with him the psalms _Exsurgat Deus_
and _Qui habitat_ and the Gospel according to St. John, and bent its
knee at the words _Verbum caro factum est_, and then after sprinkling
with holy water and blessing bed and cell and commanding the spirit
to come there no more, it vanished. Presently in the likeness of the
young friar, it called at the vicar's room and asked for some tobacco
and brandy perfumed with musk of which it was, it said, extremely
fond, and having received them "disappeared in the twinkling of an
eye." Sinistrari, however, having decided that the demon must be
igneous or "at the very least aërial, since he delighted in hot
substances" and since the monk's temperament seemed "choleric and
sanguine," advised the vicar to direct his penitent to strew about
the cell and hang by the window and door bundles of "water-lily,
liverwort, spurge, mandrake, house-leek, plantain," and henbane and
other herbs of a damp nature which drove the spirit away though it
came once to the cell door to speak of Sinistrari all the evil it
could. He has other like stories; one to show the uselessness of mere
sacred places and objects, describes a woman followed to the steps of
the Cathedral altar and there stripped by invisible hands.
One remembers a passage in PLUTARCH: "But to believe the gods have
carnal knowledge, and do delight in the outward beauty of creatures,
that seemeth to carry a very hard belief. Yet the wise Egyptians
think it probable enough and likely, that the spirit of the gods hath
given original of generation to women, and does beget fruits of their
bodies; howbeit they hold that a man can have no corporal company
with any divine nature."
One hears today in Galway, stories of love adventures between
countrywomen or countrymen and the People of Faery--there are several
in this book and these adventures have been always a principal theme
to Gaelic poets. A goddess came to Cuchulain upon the battlefield, but
sometimes it is the mortal who must go to them. "Oh beautiful woman,
will you come with me to the wonderful country that is mine? It is
pleasant to be looking at the people there: beautiful people without
any blemish; their hair is of the colour of the flag flower, their
fair body is as white as snow, the colour of the foxglove is on every
cheek. The young never grow old there, the fields and the flowers are
as pleasant to be looking at as the blackbird's eggs; warm and sweet
streams of mead and wine flow through that country; there is no care
and no sorrow upon any person; we see others, but we ourselves are not
seen." Did Dame Kettler, a great lady of Kilkenny who was accused of
witchcraft early in the fifteenth century, find such a lover when she
offered up the combs of cocks and the bronzed tail feathers of nine
peacocks; or had she indeed, as her enemies affirmed at the trial, been
enamoured with "one of the meaner sort of hell"?
NOTE 2. This light occurs again and again in modern spiritism as
in old legends. It shows in some form in almost every dark séance.
Grettir the Strong saw it over buried treasure. It surrounded the
head of Hereward the Wake in childhood, and in the middle of the
nineteenth century, Baron Reichenbach called it "odic light" and
published much evidence taken down from his "sensitives" who saw
it about crystals, magnets, and one another, and over new-made
graves. Holman Hunt represents in his _Flight into Egypt_ the souls
of the Innocents encircled by creeping and clinging fire. When this
fire encircles a good spirit it is generally described as white and
brilliant, but about the evil as lurid and smoky.
NOTE 3. When I was a boy, there was a countryman in a Sligo madhouse
who was sane in all ways except that he saw, in pools and rivers,
beings who called and beckoned. I have myself known a landscape
painter who after painting a certain stagnant pool was nightly
afflicted by a dream of strange shapes, bidding him to drown himself
there. The obsession was so strong that he could not throw it off
during his waking hours, and for some days struggled with the
temptation. I was with him at the time and had noticed his growing
gloom and had questioned him about it.
NOTE 4. Bran, in the _Voyage of Bran_ when sailing, meets Manannan the
sea-god. "And Manannan spoke to him in a song, and it is what he said:
"It is what Bran thinks, he is going in his curragh over the
wonderful, beautiful, clear sea; but to me, from far off in my
chariot, it is a flowery plain he is riding on.
"What is a clear sea to the good boat Bran is in, is a happy plain
with many flowers to me in my two-wheeled chariot.
"It is what Bran sees, many waves beating across the clear sea; it is
what I myself see, red flowers without any fault.
"The sea-horses are bright in summer-time, as far as Bran's eyes can
reach; there is a wood of beautiful acorns under the head of your
little boat.
"A wood with blossom and with fruit, that has the smell of wine; a
wood without fault, without withering, with leaves of the colour of
gold." (_Gods and Fighting Men_, by Lady Gregory.)
NOTE 5. Swedenborg describes these colours and I have a note of
similar visions as seen by a fellow-student of mine at the Dublin Art
School. Mrs. Besant in her _Ancient Wisdom_ and other writers of the
Modern Theosophical School describe them and moralize about them.