of people carried through the air often for considerable distances.
It is not my business to weigh the evidence at this moment, for I am
concerned only with similarity of belief. The medium, Mrs. Guppy,
somewhere in the "sixties" was believed to have been carried from
Hampstead, a pen in one hand and an account book in the other, and
dropped on to the middle of a table in South Conduit Street. Lord
Dunraven was one of a number of witnesses who testified to having
seen the medium Hume float out of one window of the upper room, where
they were sitting, and in at another window. I read the other day in
a spiritistic paper, of two boys carried through the air in Italy and
dropped in front of a bishop who immediately handed them over to the
police. And of course the folk-lore of all countries and the legends
of the saints are full of such tales.
NOTE 7. The offering to the Sidhe is generally made at Hallowe'en,
the old beginning of winter, and upon that night I was told when a
boy the offering was still made in the slums of Dublin.
NOTE 8. Father Sinistrari speaks of a like commerce between beasts
and spirits. "Et non solum hoc evenit cum mulieribus, sed etiam cum
equabus, cum quibus commicetur; quæ si libenter coitum admittunt, ab eo
curantur optime, ac ipsarum jubæ varie artificiosis et inextricabilibus
nodis texuntur; si autem illum adversentur, eas male tractat, percutit,
macras reddit, et tandem necat, ut quotidiana constat experienta."
NOTE 9. Houses built upon faery paths are thought to be unlucky.
Often the thatch will be blown away, or their inhabitants die or
suffer misfortune.
NOTE 10. The number of quotations I can find to prove the
universality of the thought that the dead and other spirits change
their shape as they please is but lessened by the fewness of the
books that are near my hand in the country where I am writing. John
Heydon, "a servant of God and secretary of nature," writing in 1662
in _The Rosie Cross Uncovered_ which is the last book of his _Holy
Guide_ says that a man may become one of the heroes: "A hero," he
writes, "is a dæmon, or good genius, and a genius a partaker of
divine things and a companion of the holy company of unbodied souls
and immortal angels who live according to their vehicles a versatile
life, turning themselves proteus-like into any shape."
And Mrs. Besant, a typical writer of the modern Theosophical School,
insists upon these changes of form, especially among those spirits that
are most free from the terrestrial body and explains it by saying that,
"astral matter takes form under every impulse of thought." Swedenborg
I have already quoted in my long essay, but to prove that the
shape-changer is a part of general literature--I have but Wordsworth
and Milton under my hand. When the white doe of Rylstone shows itself
at the church door according to its Sunday custom, one has one tale to
tell, another another, but an Oxford student will have it that it is
the faery that loved a certain "shepherd-lord."
"'Twas said that she all shapes could wear."
And Milton writes like any Platonist of his time:
"For Spirits, when they please,
Can either sex assume, or both; so soft
And uncompounded is their essence pure,
Not ty'd or manacled with joint or limb,
Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones,
Like cumbrous flesh; but, in what shape they choose,
Dilated or condensed, bright or obscure,
Can execute their aery purposes,
And works of love or enmity fulfil."
NOTE 11. The seers and healers in this section differ but little
from clairvoyants and spirit mediums of the towns, and explain
their powers in much the same way. Indeed one of Lady Gregory's
story-tellers will have it that America is more full than Ireland
of faeries, and describes the mediums there to prove it. It is
often through some virtue in these country seers and healers that
the faeries or spirits are able to affect men and women and natural
objects. Mrs. Sheridan says that a child could not have been taken
if she had not been looking on, and one hears again and again that
even when the faeries fight among themselves or play at hurley,
there must be a man upon either side. We are all in a sense mediums,
if the village seer speaks truth, for through any unsanctified
emotion, love, affection, admiration, the spirits may attain power
over a child or horse or whatever is before our eyes, and perhaps,
as the controls of mediums will sometimes say, they can only see
the world through our eyes. Albert de Rochas, borrowing a theory
from the seventeenth century, has suggested with the general assent
of spiritists that the fluidic or sidereal body of the medium, the
mould upon which the physical body is, it may be, built up, is more
detachable than in persons who are not mediums, and that the spirits
make themselves visible by transforming it into their own shape or
into what shape they please and attain by its means a power over
physical objects. (See _L'Extériorisation de la Motricité_.) Instead
of the expensive crystal of the Bond Street clairvoyant, Biddy Early
gazed into her bottle, but that is almost the whole difference. If
the dreams and visions of Connacht have more richness and beauty
than those of Camberwell, it is that Connacht, having no doubts as
to our survival of death, is not always looking for but one sort of
evidence, and so can let things happen as they will. The brother
or sister or the like who comes to the knowledgeable man or woman
after death is but the "guide" that has been so common in England
and America, since the Rochester rappings, and a country form of
Plutarch's "dæmon." At other moments, however, "seer" or "healer"
resembles a witch or wizard rather than a modern medium.
* * * * *
In one thing, however, they always resemble the medium and not the
witch. They seem to have no dealings with the devil. The Irish Trials
for witchcraft of the English and continental type took place among
the English settlers. I have never come across a case of a "compact"
nor has Lady Gregory, nor have I read of one.
NOTE 12. It is almost unthinkable to Lady Gregory and myself, who
know Mrs. Sheridan, that she can ever have seen a drawbridge in
a picture or heard one spoken of. Nor does this instance stand
alone. I have had in my own family what seemed the accurate calling
up of an unknown past but failing a link of difficult evidence
still unfound, coincidence, though exceedingly unlikely, is still
a possible explanation. I have come upon a number of other cases
which are, though no one case is decisive, a powerful argument taken
altogether. In _The Adventure_ (MacMillan), an elaborate vision
of this kind is recorded in detail and, accepting the record as
accurate, the verification is complete. Two ladies found themselves
in the garden of the Petit Trianon in the midst of what seemed to
be the court of Marie Antoinette, in just the same sudden way in
which some countryman finds himself among ladies and gentlemen
dressed in what seem the clothes of a long passed time. The record
purports to have been made in November and December 1901, whereas the
vision occurred in August. This lapse of time does not seem to me
to destroy the value of the evidence, if the record was made before
its corroboration by long and difficult research.[2] Accepting the
good faith of the narrators, both well-known women and of established
character, its evidence for some more obscure cause than unconscious
memory can only be weakened by the discovery in some book or magazine
accessible to the visionaries before their visit to the Trianon,
of historical information on such minute points as the dress Marie
Antoinette wore in a particular month, and the position of ornamental
buildings and rock work not now in existence. There is a great mass
of similar evidence in Denton's _Soul of Things_ though its value is
weakened by his not sufficiently allowing for thought transference
from his own mind to that of his sensitives.
A "theosophist" or "occultist" of almost any modern school explains
such visions by saying they are "pictures in the astral light" and that
all objects and events leave their images in the astral light as upon
a photographic plate, and that we must distinguish between spirits and
these unintelligent pictures. I was once at Madame Blavatsky's when she
tried to explain predestination, our freedom and God's full knowledge
of the use that we should make of it. All things past and to come were
present to the mind of God and yet all things were free. She soon
saw that she had carried us out of our depth and said to one of her
followers with a mischievous, mocking voice: "You with your impudence
and your spectacles will be sitting there in the Akasa to all eternity"
and then in a more meditative voice, "No, not to all eternity for a
day will come when even the Akasa will pass away and there will be
nothing but God, chaos, that which every man is seeking in his heart."
Akasa, she was accustomed to explain as some Indian word for the astral
light. Perhaps that theory of the astral pictures came always from the
despair of some visionary to find understanding for a more metaphysical
theory. It is, however, ancient. To Cornelius Agrippa it is the air
that reflects, but the air is something more than what the word means
for us. "It is a vital spirit passing through all beings giving life
and substance to all things ... it immediately receives into itself
the influences of all celestial bodies, and then communicates them
to the other elements as also to all mixed bodies. Also it receives
into itself as if it were a divine looking-glass the species of all
things, as well natural as artificial," it enters into men and animals
"through their pores" and "makes an impression upon them as well when
they sleep as when they awake and affords matter to divers strange
dreams and divinations.... Hence it is that a man passing by a place
where a man was slain and the carcase newly laid is moved by fear and
dread; because the air in that place being full of the dread species
of man-slaughter does being breathed in, move and trouble the spirit
of the man with a like species ... whence it is that many philosophers
were of the opinion that the air is the cause of dreams." Henry More
is more precise and philosophical and believes that this air which he
calls _Spiritus Mundi_ contains all forms, so that the parents when a
child is begotten, or a witch when the double is projected as a hare,
but as it were, call upon the _Spiritus Mundi_ for the form they need.
The name "Astral Light" was given to this air or spirit by the Abbé
Constant who wrote under the pseudonym of Élephas Lévi and like Madame
Blavatsky, claimed to be the voice of an ancient magical society. In
his _Dogma et Rituel de la Haute Magie_ published in the fifties, he
described in vague, eloquent words, influenced perhaps by the recent
discovery of the daguerreotype these pictures which we continually
confuse with the still animate shades. A more clear exposition of a
perhaps always incomprehensible idea is that of Swedenborg who says
that when we die, we live over again the events that lie in all their
minute detail in our memory, and this is the explanation of the authors
of _The Adventure_ who believe, as it seems, that they were entangled
in the memory of Marie Antoinette. I have met students who claimed to
have had knowledge of Lévi's sources and who believed that when at last
a spirit has been, as it were, pulled out of its coil, other spirits
may use its memory, not only of events but of words and of thoughts.
Did Cornelius Agrippa identify soul with memory when, after quoting
Ovid to prove that the flesh cleaves to earth, the ghost hovers over
the grave, the soul sinks to Oxos, and the spirit rises to the stars,
he explains that if the soul has done well it rejoices with the almost
faultless spirit, but if it has done ill, the spirit judges it and
leaves it for the devil's prey and "the sad soul wanders about hell
without a spirit and like an image?" Remembering these writings and
sayings, I find new meaning in that description of death taken down by
Lady Gregory in some cottage: "The shadow goes wandering and the soul
is tired and the body is taking a rest."
I was once talking with Professor James of experiences like to those
in _The Adventure_ and said that I found it easiest to understand
them by believing in a memory of nature distinguished from individual
memory, though including and enclosing it. He would, however, have
none of my explanation and preferred to think the past, present, and
future were only modes of our perception and that all three were in
the divine mind, present at once. It was Madame Blavatsky's thought,
and Shelley's in the _Sensitive Plant_:
"That garden sweet, that lady fair,
And all sweet shapes and odours there,
In truth have never passed away;
'Tis we, 'tis ours, are changed, not they.
"For love, and beauty, and delight,
There is no death nor change; their light
Exceeds our organs, which endure
No light, being themselves obscure."
NOTE 13. The ancient Irish had quadrilateral houses built of logs,
and round houses of clay and wattles. O'Sullivan, in his introduction
to O'Curry's _Manners and Customs_, writes: "The houses built in
_Duns_ and in _stone caiseal_, and those surrounded by mounds of
earth, were, probably in all cases round houses." A _Bo Aires_,
or farmer with ten cows was supposed to have a house at least
twenty-seven feet wide but the houses of better off men must have
made one room of considerable size, a whole household sleeping on
beds, sometimes with low partitions between, raying out from the
wall like spokes of a wheel. Petrie thought the great quadrilateral
banqueting hall of Tara was once ninety feet wide.
NOTE 14. In _The Roman Ritual_, there is an exorcism for evil spirits
and a ceremony for the succour of the sick (_cura infirmorum_). And
in the beginning of the chapter containing this ceremony (Caput
IV., verse 12), it is stated that images of Christ, the Virgin, and
of saints especially in veneration of the sick man, may cure him
if brought into the room. In the ceremony of exorcism, the priest
is directed to make numerous signs of the cross over the possessed
person (_sic. rubric: Tres cruces sequentes fiant in pectore
dæmoniaci_). The spirit is commanded to be gone in the name of the
Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. The ceremony with psalms
covers twenty-six pages of my copy. The exorcism is described as
a driving out of the "most unclean spirit" of every phantasm and
every legion. It commands the "most evil dragon, in the name of the
immaculate lamb who walked upon the asp and the basilisk and cast
down the lion and the dragon" to "go down out of this man."
In the ceremony for the sick, the priest places his hand on the head
of the sick man and says:
"Let them place their hands on the sick and they shall be well
[_Super ægros manus imponent, et bene habebunt_]. May Christ Son of
Mary, Saviour of the world and Lord, by the merits and intercession
of his holy apostles Peter and Paul and of all the saints be clement
and propitious to you."
The ceremony is ten pages and contains various psalms and selections
from the Gospels.
Round these two ceremonies have gathered in the minds of the country
people, at least, many traditional ideas. When any one is cured, there
is a victim, some other human being or some animal will die. If one
remembers that diseases were very commonly considered to be the work
of demons, one sees how the story of the Gadarene swine would support
the tradition. I know not into what subtlety the dreaming mind may not
carry the thought, for some few months ago in France, an excommunicated
miracle-working priest said in my hearing: "There is always a victim;
so-and-so was the victim for France," naming a holy Italian nun who had
just died. "And so-and-so," naming a living holy woman, "is the victim
for my own village." Various medieval saints, and even certain witches,
cured sick persons by taking the disease upon themselves.
Christian Scientists and Mental Healers are often afraid of
themselves acquiring the disease which they drive out of their
patient; they sometimes speak of the effort that it costs them to
shake it off. I was told a story the other day, which I have proved
not to be true, but which is evidence of the belief. A woman said to
me some such words as these: "My friend so-and-so, who is a Mental
Healer, was staying in the country. She saw a woman there with a
strange look. She asked what was wrong, and found that this woman was
expecting a periodical fit of madness. She offered to undertake her
cure, and brought her to her own house. The patient became violent,
but my friend was able by faith and prayer to soothe her till she
fell asleep. My friend went downstairs exhausted, and lay upon the
sofa. Presently she saw strange shadows coming into the room and
knew they had come from the patient upstairs, and these shadows,
taking the form of swine, threw themselves upon her and only after a
long struggle could she throw them off." The swine and their attack
were all moonshine, but the healer, whom I found and questioned, did
believe that she saw shadows leaving the patient.
The transference of disease was a generally recognized part
of medieval and ancient medicine; and Albert de Rochas gives
considerable space to it in his _L'Extériorisation de la
Sensibilité_, Paris, 1909. He quotes from a seventeenth-century
writer, Abbé de Vellemort, many examples from medical and scientific
writers of that time who believed themselves to have transferred
diseases from their patients to animals and to trees and to various
substances, "Mumia" as they called them, which absorb _des esprits
qui résident dans le sang_ and then describes various experiments
made in 1885 by Dr. Babinski "Chef de Clinique de M. Charcot" in
transferring now by magnets, now by suggestion various forms of
nervous disease from one patient to another. Where these diseases
were produced in the first instance by suggestion, the patient
from whom the disease was transferred, was freed from it, but
where the disease was natural and the cause of the patient being
at the hospital, there was no cure although in one case there was
improvement. Albert de Rochas then quotes as follows from a lecture
given by Dr. Luys to La Société de Biologie in 1894.
"M. D'Arsonval has, according to a communication from an English
physician, given an account at the last meeting of the Société de
Biologie, of the persistent action in a magnetized iron bar of the
magnetic fluid, which to a certain extent, kept a memory of its
former state.
"My researches of the same kind have given me proofs some time since
of analogous phenomena with the help of magnetized crowns placed on
the head of a subject in an hypnotic state.
"In this case, it is a question not only of storing vibrations of
magnetic nature, but of really living nature, of real cerebral
vibrations through the coating of the brain, stored in a magnetic
crown, in which they remain for a greater or less length of time.
"To arrive at this phenomenon, instead of using an unresponsive
physical instrument, I use a reacting living being--an hypnotized
subject, who has thus become sensitive to living magnetic vibrations. I
am presenting to the Society the magnetized crown, like several other
models which I have already shown. It is adapted to the head by means
of a system of straps, encircles it and leaves the frontal region free.
"It also forms a bent magnet with a positive and a negative pole.
This crown was put, more than a year ago, on the head of a woman
suffering from melancholia with ideas of persecution, agitation, and
a tendency to suicide, etc. The application of the crown lead to the
patient's getting slowly better after five or six séances; and at
the end of ten days I thought I could send her back to the hospital
without any danger. At the end of a fortnight, the crown having been
isolated, the idea came to me quite empirically of placing it on the
head of the 'subject' now before you.
"He is a male, hypnotizable, _hystérique_, given to frequent fits
of lethargy. What was my surprise to see this subject, put into the
somnambulistic state, complaining in exactly the same terms as those
the cured patient had used a fortnight before.
"_He_ first of all took on the sex of the patient; _he_ spoke in the
feminine gender; _he_ complained of violent headache; _he_ said he was
going mad, that his neighbours came into his room to do him harm. In a
word, the hypnotic subject had, thanks to the magnetized crown, taken
on the cerebral state of the melancholic patient. The magnetized crown
had been powerful enough to draw off the morbid cerebral influx of the
patient (who got well), which had persisted, like a memory, in the
intimate (or innermost) texture of the magnetic strip of metal.
"This is a phenomenon we have produced many times, for several years;
not only with the subject now present, but with others.
"This communication is, amongst physiological phenomena, on a line
with M. D'Arsonval's on the persistence of certain anterior states
in inorganic bodies; it will no doubt cause much astonishment and
scepticism amongst those who are not accustomed to hypnologic research.
"Doubts will be cast on the sincerity of the subject, on his tendency
to produce wonders, to being carried away, and also on what may
perhaps seem too easy an acquiescence on the part of the operator.
"To all these objections I will only answer: that this phenomenon
of the transmission of the psychical states of a subject by means
of a magnetized crown which keeps given impressions is quite in the
order of the phenomena formerly communicated by M. D'Arsonval. And,
further, the first time I made this experiment, it was done without
my knowing, in an entirely empirical way. The impregnated crown was
put on the head of the hypnotic subject about a fortnight after it
had been put on the patient's head. There has therefore necessarily
been a first operation, of which I did not foreknow the results;
for we did not know any more than the hypnotized subject, what was
going to happen, and the subject reacted, _motu proprio_, without any
excitant other than the magnetic crown.
"So one can assert, without trying to draw any other conclusions,
that certain vibratory states of the brain, and probably of the
nervous system, are capable of storing themselves in a magnetized
bent strip of metal, as the magnetic fluid is stored in the soft bar
of iron, and of leaving persistent traces; still further, that one
can only destroy this persistent magnetic property by fire. The crown
has to be red-hot before it ceases to act, as M. D'Arsonval found to
be the case with the iron bar."
Albert de Rochas makes this notable comment:
"The same phenomenon would certainly have been produced had the
patient been dead, and so one might by this means have a sort of
evocation of a personality no longer of this world."
NOTE 15. As late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Irish
were accustomed to leave their houses on the plains and valleys in
spring and live with their cattle on the uplands, returning to the
valleys and plains in time to reap the harvest. Before tillage became
general they may not have returned till the chill of autumn. From
this perhaps came the faery flittings of May and November.
NOTE 16. The pictures shown were drawings of spirits "A. E." made
from his own visions. The yellow thing upon the head was, I suppose,
some sort of crown. These countrywomen have seen so little gold that
they do not describe anything as "of gold" or "like gold." They will
say of yellow hair that it is "bright like silver."
NOTE 17. The death-coach or more properly _coiste-bodhar_ or
"deaf-coach," so called from its rumbling sound. It is usually an
omen of death.
NOTE 18. The thing "yellow and slippery, not hair but like marble"
is evidently a crown of gold. Are these spirits in dress of ancient
authority the shepherds of the more recent dead?
NOTE 19. I have read somewhere, but cannot remember where, that
ragweed was once used to make some medicine for horses. This
would account for its association with them in the half-fantasy,
half-vision of the country seers. In the same way, the mushroom ring
of the faeries is, it seems, a memory of some intoxicating liquor
made of mushrooms, when intoxication was mysterious. The storyteller
speaks of "those red flowers," showing how vague her sense of colour,
or her knowledge of English, for ragweed is, of course, yellow.
NOTE 20. "Bracket" is Irish for "speckled" and seems to me a
description of the plaids and stripes of medieval Ireland.
NOTE 21. Bodin in his _De Magorum Dæmonomania_ speaks of salt as a
spell against spirits because a "symbol of eternity."