Thus, to my mind at least, the _Subterranean Inhabitants_ of Mr.
Kirk’s book are not so much a traditional recollection of a real
dwarfish race living underground (a hypothesis of Sir Walter
Scott’s), as a lingering memory of the Chthonian beings, “the
Ancestors.” A good case in point is that of Bessie Dunlop, of Dalry,
in Ayrshire, tried on 8th November 1576 for witchcraft. She dealt in
medicine and white magic, and obtained her prescriptions from Thomas
Reid, slain at Pinkie fight (1547), who often appeared to her, and
tried to lead her off to Fairyland. She, like Alison Pearson, was
“convict and burnt” (Scott’s _Demonology_, p. 146, and Pitcairn’s
_Criminal Trials_). Both ladies knew the Fairy Queen, and Alison
Pearson beheld Maitland of Lethington, and Buccleugh, in Fairyland,
as is recounted in a rhymed satire on Archbishop Adamson (Dalzell’s
_Scottish Poems_, p. 321). These are excellent proofs that Fairyland
was a kind of Hades, or home of the dead.
Mr. Kirk, who speaks of the _Sleagh Maith_ as confidently as if he
were discussing the habits of some remote race which he has visited,
credits them, as the Greek gods were credited, with the power of
nourishing themselves on some fine essential part of human sacrifice,
of human food, “some fine spirituous Liquors, that peirce like pure
Air and Oil, on the poyson or substance of Corns and Liquors.”
Others, more gross, steal the actual grain, “as do Crowes and Mice.”
They are heard hammering in the howes: as Brownies they enter houses
and cleanse the hearths. They are the Domovoys, as the Russians
call them. John Major, in his exposition of St. Matthew (1518,
fol. xlviii.), gives perhaps the oldest account of Brownies, in a
believing temper. Major styles them Fauni or _brobne_. They thrash
as much grain in one night as twenty men could do. They throw stones
about among people sitting by the fire. Whether they can predict
future events is doubtful (see Mr. Constable in Major’s _Greater
Britain_, p. xxx. Edinburgh, 1892). To us they seem not much remote
from the Roman Lares—spirits of the household, of the hearth. In
all these creatures Mr. Kirk recognises “an abstruse People,” who
were before our more substantial race, whose furrows are still to be
seen on the hill-tops. They never were, to his mind, plain palpable
folk; they are only visible, in their quarterly flittings, to men
of the second sight. That gift of vision includes not only power to
see distant or future events, but the viewless forms of air. To shun
the flittings, men visit church on the first Sunday of the quarter:
then they will be hallowed against elf-shots, “these Arrows that fly
in the dark.” As is well known, superstition explained the Neolithic
arrow-heads as Fairy weapons; it does not follow that a tradition of
a Neolithic people suggested the belief in Fairies. But we cannot
deny absolutely that some such memory of an earlier race, a shy and
fugitive people who used weapons of stone, may conceivably play its
part in the Fairy legend.
Thence Mr. Kirk glides into that singular theory of savage
metaphysics which somewhat resembles the Platonic doctrine of
Ideas. All things, in Red Indian belief, have somewhere their ideal
counterpart or “Father.” Thus a donkey, when first seen, was regarded
as “the Father” or archetype “of Rabbits.” Now the second-sighted
behold the “Double-man,” “Doppel-ganger,” “Astral Body,” “Wraith,” or
what you will, of a living person, and that is merely his counterpart
in the abstruse world. The industry of the Psychical Society has
collected much material—evidence, whatever its value, for the
existence of the Double-man. We may call it a hallucination, which
does not greatly increase our knowledge. From personal experience,
and the experience of friends, I am constrained to believe that we
may think we see a person who is not really present to the view—who
may be in the next room, or downstairs, or a hundred miles off.
This experience has occurred to the sane, the unimaginative, the
healthy, the free from superstition, and in circumstances by no
means mystic—for example, when the person supposed to be seen was
not dying, nor distressed, nor in any but the most normal condition.
Indeed, the cases when there was nothing abnormal in the state of the
person seen are far more numerous, in my personal knowledge, than
those in which the person seen was dying, or dead, or excited. The
reverse appears to be the rule in the experience of the Psychical
Society. “The actual proportion of coincidental to non-coincidental
cases, after all deduction for possible sources of error, was in
fact such that the probability against the supposition of chance
coincidence became enormous, on the assumption of ordinary accuracy
on the part of informants” (Professor Sidgwick, _Proc. S.P.R._, vol.
viii. p. 607). Some 17,000 answers were collected. We must apparently
accept these facts as not very abnormal nor very unusual, and
doubtless as capable of some subjective explanation. But when such
things occurred among imaginative and uneducated Highlanders, they
became foundations and proofs of the doctrine of second sight—proofs,
too, of the primitive metaphysical doctrine of counterparts and
_correspondances_. “They avouch that every Element and different
state of Being have Animals resembling these of another Element.” By
persons not knowing this, “the Roman invention of guardian Angels
particularly assigned” has been promulgated. The guardian Angel of
the Roman superstition is merely the Double or Co-walker—the type
(in the viewless world) of the man in the apparent world. Thus are
wraiths and ghosts explained by our Presbyterian psychologist and
his Highland flock. All things universally have their types, their
reflex: a man’s type, or reflex, or “co-walker” may be seen at a
distance from or near him during his life—nay, may be seen after
his death. The gifted man of second sight can tell the substantial
figure from the airy counterpart. Sometimes the reflex anticipates
the action of the reality: “was often seen of old to enter a House,
by which the people knew that the Person of that Likeness was to
visit them in a few days.” It may have occurred to most of us to
meet a person in the street whom we took for an acquaintance. It
is not he, but we meet the real man a few paces farther on. Thus a
distinguished officer, at home on leave, met a friend, as he tells
me, in Piccadilly. The other passed without notice: the officer
hesitated about following him, did not, and in some fifty yards met
his man. There is probably no more in this than resemblance and
coincidence, but this is the kind of thing which was worked by the
Highlanders into their metaphysics.[4]
The end of the Co-walker is obscure. “This Copy, Echo, or living
Picture goes att last to his own Herd.” Thus Ghosts are short-lived,
and, according to M. d’Assier on the Manners of Posthumous Man
(_L’Homme Posthume_), seldom survive for more than a century. By
an airy being of this kind the Highlanders explained the false or
morbid appetite. A “joint-eater” inhabited the patient; “he feeds
two when he eats.” As a rule, the Fairies get their food as witches
do—take “the Pith and Milk from their Neighbours’ Cows unto their own
chiese-hold, throw a Hair-tedder, at a great distance, by Airt Magic,
only drawing a spigot fastened in a Post, which will bring Milk as
farr as a Bull will be heard to roar.” This is illustrated in the
drinking scene in _Faust_. This kind of charge is familiar in trials
for witchcraft.
In accordance with the whole metaphysics of the system of doubles,
which are parasites on humanity, is the superstition of nurses stolen
by Fairies, and of children kidnapped while changelings are left
in their place. The latter accounts for sudden decline and loss of
health by a child; he is not the original child, but a Fairy brat. To
guard against this, bread (as human food hateful to Fairies—so the
Kanekas carry a boiled yam about at night), or the Bible, or iron
is placed in the bed of childbirth. “Iron scares spirits,” as the
scholiast says of the drawn sword of Odysseus in Hades. The Fairy
bride, in Wales, vanishes on being touched with iron. This belief
probably came in when iron was a new, rare, and mysterious metal. The
mortal nurses in Fairyland are pleasantly illustrated by the ballad
“I heard a cow lowe,
A bonny, bonny cow lowe,”
in C. Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s _Ballad Book_.[5] This part of the
superstition is not easy to elucidate. Kirk repeats the well-known
tales of the blinding of the mortal who saw too clearly “by making
use of their Oyntments.” Well-known examples occur in Gervase
of Tilbury, and are cited in Scott’s note on _Tamlane_ in the
_Border Minstrelsy_. As Homer fables of the dead, their speech is
a kind of whistling like the cry of bats—another indication of the
pre-Christian Hades.[6] They have feasts and burials; and Pashley,
in his _Travels in Crete_, tells the well-known Border story of
a man who fired on a Fairy bridal, and heard a voice cry, “Ye
have slain the bonny bridegroom.” It is, of course, to be noted
that the modern Greek superstition of the Nereids, who carry off
mortal girls to dance with them till they pine away, answers to
some of our Fairy legends, while it will hardly be maintained that
the Nereids are a memory of pre-historic Finns. “Antic corybantic
jollity” is a note of Nereids, as well as of the _Sleagh Maith_. “The
Inconvenience of their _succubi_,” the Fairy girls who make love to
young men, is well known in the Breton ballad, _Le Sieur Nan_. The
same superstition is current among the Kanekas of New Caledonia. My
cousin, Mr. Atkinson, was visited by a young Kaneka, who twice or
thrice returned to take leave of him with much emotion. When Mr.
Atkinson asked what was the matter, the lad said that he had just
met, as he thought, the girl of his heart in the forest. After a
scene of dalliance she vanished, and he knew that she was a forest
Fairy, and that he must die in three days, which he did. This is
the “inconvenience of their succubi,” regretted by Mr. Kirk. Thus
it appears that the mass of these opinions is not local, nor Celtic
merely, but of world-wide diffusion. Thus Sir Walter Scott observes
of the Afghans and Highlanders, “Their superstitions are the same, or
nearly so. The _Gholée Beabacan_ (demons of the desert) resemble the
_Boddach_ of the Highlanders, ‘who walked the heath at midnight and
at noon’” (_Quarterly Review_, xiv. 289). Again, Mr. Kirk says that
“Were-wolves and Witches’ true Bodies are (by the union of the spirit
of Nature that runs thorow all, echoing and doubling the Blow towards
another) wounded at home, when the astrial or assumed Bodies are
stricken elsewhere.” Thus, if a witch-hare is shot, the witch’s real
body is hurt in the same part; and Lafitau, in North America, found
that when a Huron shot a witch-bird, the real magician was stricken
in the same place. The theory that the Fairies appear as “a little
rough Dog” is illustrated by the Welsh Dogs of Hell. _Blackwood’s
Magazine_ for 1818 contains many examples of these Hell-dogs, which
are often invested in a sheet of fire, as Rink says is the case among
the Eskimo. Take a modern instance. “Mr. F. A. Paley and friend,
walking home at night on a lonely road, see a large black dog rise
from it, slowly walk to the side, and disappear. They search in vain.
Mr. Paley hears subsequently that this mysterious dog is the terror
of the neighbourhood, but no such real dog is known.” Date, summer
1837 (_Journ. of S.P.R._, Feb. 1893, p. 31).
The dwellings of these airy shadows of mankind are, naturally,
“Fairie Hills.” There is such a hill, the Fairy Hill at Aberfoyle,
where Mr. Kirk resided: Baillie Nicol Jarvie describes its legends
in an admirable passage in _Rob Roy_. Mr. MacRitchie says, “How much
of this ‘howe’ is artificial, or whether any of it is, remains to be
discovered.” It is much larger than most artificial tumuli. According
to Mr. Kirk, the Highlanders “superstitiously believe the souls of
their Predecessors to dwell” in the fairy-hills. “And for that end,
say they, a Mote or Mount was dedicate beside every Churchyard, to
receive the souls till their adjacent bodies arise, and so become
as a Fairy hill.” Here the Highland philosophers have conspicuously
put the cart before the horse. The tumuli are much older than the
churches, which were no doubt built beside them because the place had
a sacred character. Two very good examples may be seen at Dalry, on
the Ken, in Galloway, and at Parton, on Loch Ken. The grassy howes
are large and symmetrical, and the modern Presbyterian churches
occupy old sites; at Parton there are ruins of the ancient Catholic
church. Round the tumulus at Dalry, according to the local form of
the _Märchen_ of Hesione, a great dragon used to coil in triple
folds, before it was killed by the blacksmith. Nobody, perhaps, can
regard these tumuli, and many like them, as anything but sepulchral.
On the road between Balantrae, in Ayrshire, and Stranraer, there is
a beautiful tumulus above the sea, which at once recalls the barrow
above the main that Elpenor in the _Odyssey_, asked Odysseus to build
for him, “the memorial of a luckless man.” In the _Argonautica_ of
Apollonius Rhodius, the ghost of a hero who fell at Troy appears to
the adventurers on a tumulus like this of the Ayrshire coast. In
speaking of these barrows Mr. Kirk tells how, during a famine about
1676, two women had a vision of a treasure hid in a fairy-hill.
This they excavated, and discovered some coins “of good money.”
The great gold corslet of the British Museum is said to have been
found in Wales, where tradition spoke of a ghost in golden armour
which haunted a hillock. The hillock was excavated, and the golden
corslet, like the Shakespearian bricks, is “alive to testify” to the
truth of the story.