THE CELTIC DOCTRINE OF RE-BIRTH 358-96
Re-birth and Otherworld--As a Christian Doctrine--General
Historical Survey--According to the Barddas MSS.; according
to Ancient and Modern Authorities--Re-incarnation of the
Tuatha De Danann--King Mongan's Re-birth--Etain's Birth--
Dermot's Pre-existence--Tuan's Re-birth--Re-birth among
Brythons--Arthur as a Re-incarnate Hero--Non-Celtic
Parallels--Re-birth among Modern Celts: in Ireland; in
Scotland; in the Isle of Man; in Wales; in Cornwall; in
Brittany--Origin and Evolution of Celtic Re-birth Doctrine.
SECTION III
THE CULT OF GODS, SPIRITS, FAIRIES, AND THE DEAD
CHAPTER VIII
THE TESTIMONY OF ARCHAEOLOGY 397-426
Inadequacy of Pygmy Theory--According to the Theories
concerning Divine Images and Fetishes, Gods, Daemons, and
Ancestral Spirits haunt Megaliths--Megaliths are religious
and funereal, as shown chiefly by _Cenn Cruaich_,
Stonehenge, Guernsey menhirs, Monuments in Brittany, by the
Circular Fairy-Dance as an Ancient Initiatory Sun-Dance, by
Breton Earthworks, Archaeological Excavations generally, and
by present-day Worship at Indian Dolmens--New Grange and
Celtic Mysteries: Evidence of manuscripts; Evidence of
Tradition--The Aengus Cult--New Grange compared with Great
Pyramid: both have Astronomical Arrangement and same
Internal Plan--Why they open to the Sunrise--Initiations in
both--Great Pyramid as Model for Celtic Tumuli--Gavrinis and
New Grange as Spirit Temples.
CHAPTER IX
THE TESTIMONY OF PAGANISM 427-41
Edicts against Pagan Cults--Cult of Sacred Waters and its
Absorption by Christianity--Celtic Water Divinities--Druidic
Influence on Fairy-Faith--Cult of Sacred Trees--Cult of
Fairies, Spirits, and the Dead--Feasts of the Dead--
Conclusion.
CHAPTER X
THE TESTIMONY OF CHRISTIANITY 442-55
Lough Derg a Sacred Lake originally--Purgatorial Rites as
Christianized Survivals of Ancient Celtic Rites--Purgatory
as Fairyland--Purgatorial Rites parallel to Pagan Initiation
Ceremonies--The Death and Resurrection Rite--Breton Pardons
compared--Relation to Aengus Cult and Celtic Cave-Temples--
Origin of Purgatorial Doctrine pre-Christian--Celtic and
Roman Feasts of dead shaped Christian ones--Fundamental
Unity of Mythologies, Religions, and the Fairy-Faith.
SECTION IV
MODERN SCIENCE AND THE FAIRY-FAITH; AND CONCLUSIONS
CHAPTER XI
SCIENCE AND FAIRIES 456-91
Method of Examination: Exoteric and Esoteric aspects--The
X-quantity--Scientific attitudes toward the Animistic
Hypothesis: Materialistic Theory; Pathological Theory;
Delusion and Imposture Theory; Problems of Consciousness:
Dreams; Supernormal Lapse of Time--Psychical Research and
Fairies: Myers's researches--Present Position of Psychical
Research--Psychical Research and Anthropology in Relation to
the Fairy-Faith, according to a special contribution from
Mr. Andrew Lang--Final Testing of the X-quantity--Conclusion:
the Celtic Belief in Fairies and in Fairyland is scientific.
CHAPTER XII
THE CELTIC DOCTRINE OF RE-BIRTH AND OTHERWORLD
SCIENTIFICALLY EXAMINED 492-515
The Extension of the Terms Fairy and Fairyland--The Real
Man as an Invisible Force acting through a Body-Conductor--
A Psychical Organ essential for Memory--Pre-existence a
Scientific Necessity--The Vitalistic View of Evolution--Old
Theory of Heredity disproved--Embryology supports Re-birth
Doctrine--Psycho-physical Evolution--Memory of previous
Existences in Subconsciousness--Examples--Dream Psychology
furnishes clearest Illustrations--No Post-existence without
Pre-existence--Resurrection as Re-birth--The Circle of
Life--The Mystical Corollary--Conclusion: the Celtic
Doctrine of Re-birth and Otherworld is essentially
scientific.
INDEX 516-24
PREFACE
During the years 1907-9 this study first took shape, being then based
mainly on literary sources; and during the latter year it was
successfully presented to the Faculty of Letters of the University of
Rennes, Brittany, for the Degree of _Docteur-ès-Lettres_. Since then I
have re-investigated the whole problem of the Celtic belief in Fairies,
and have collected very much fresh material. Two years ago the scope of
my original research was limited to the four chief Celtic countries, but
now it includes all of the Celtic countries.
In the present study, which has profited greatly by criticisms of the
first passed by scholars in Britain and in France, the original literary
point of view is combined with the broader point of view of
anthropology. This study, the final and more comprehensive form of my
views about the 'Fairy-Faith', would never have been possible had I not
enjoyed during many months the kindly advice and constant encouragement
of Mr. R. R. Marett, Reader in Social Anthropology in the University of
Oxford, and Fellow of Exeter College.
During May 1910 the substance of this essay in its pan-Celtic form was
submitted to the Board of the Faculty of Natural Science of Oxford
University for the Research Degree of Bachelor of Science, which was
duly granted. But the present work contains considerable material not
contained in the essay presented to the Oxford examiners, the Right Hon.
Sir John Rhys and Mr. Andrew Lang; and, therefore, I alone assume
entire responsibility for all its possible shortcomings, and in
particular for some of its more speculative theories, which to some
minds may appear to be in conflict with orthodox views, whether of the
theologian or of the man of science. These theories, however venturesome
they may appear, are put forth in almost every case with the full
approval of some reliable, scholarly Celt; and as such they are chiefly
intended to make the exposition of the belief in fairies as completely
and as truly Celtic as possible, without much regard for non-Celtic
opinion, whether this be in harmony with Celtic opinion or not.
As the new manuscript of the 'Fairy-Faith' lies before me revised and
finished, I realize even more fully than I did two years ago with
respect to the original study, how little right I have to call it mine.
Those to whom the credit for it really belongs are my many kind friends
and helpers in Ireland, Scotland, Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall, and
Brittany, and many others who are not Celts, in the three great
nations--happily so intimately united now by unbreakable bonds of
goodwill and international brotherhood--Britain, France, and the United
States of America; for without the aid of all these Celtic and
non-Celtic friends the work could never have been accomplished. They
have given me their best and rarest thoughts as so many golden threads;
I have only furnished the mental loom, and woven these golden threads
together in my own way according to what I take to be the psychological
pattern of the Fairy-Faith.
I am under a special obligation to the following six distinguished
Celtic scholars who have contributed, for my second chapter, the six
introductions to the fairy-lore collected by me in their respective
countries:--Dr. Douglas Hyde (Ireland); Dr. Alexander Carmichael
(Scotland); Miss Sophia Morrison (Isle of Man); the Right Hon. Sir John
Rhys (Wales); Mr. Henry Jenner (Cornwall); Professor Anatole Le Braz
(Brittany).
I am also greatly indebted to the Rev. J. Estlin Carpenter, Principal of
Manchester College, for having aided me with the parts of this book
touching Christian theology; to Mr. R. I. Best, M.R.I.A., Assistant
Librarian, National Library, Dublin, for having aided me with the parts
devoted to Irish mythology and literature; and to Mr. William McDougall,
Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy in the University of Oxford, for a
similar service with respect to Section IV, entitled 'Science and
Fairies'. And to these and to all the other scholars whose names appear
in this preface, my heartiest thanks are due for the assistance which
they have so kindly rendered in reading different parts of the
_Fairy-Faith_ when in proof.
With the deep spirit of reverence which a student feels towards his
preceptors, I acknowledge a still greater debt to those among my friends
and helpers who have been my Celtic guides and teachers. Here in Oxford
University I have run up a long account with the Right Hon. Sir John
Rhys, the Professor of Celtic, who has introduced me to the study of
Modern Irish, and of Arthurian romance and mythology, and has guided me
both during the year 1907-8 and ever since in Celtic folk-lore
generally. To Mr. Andrew Lang, I am likewise a debtor, more especially
in view of the important suggestions which he has given me during the
past two years with respect to anthropology and to psychical research.
In my relation to the Faculty of Letters of the University of Rennes, I
shall always remember the friendly individual assistance offered to me
there during the year 1908-9 by Professor Joseph Loth, then Dean in that
University, but now of the College of France, in Paris, particularly
with respect to Brythonic mythology, philology, and archaeology; by
Professor Georges Dottin, particularly with respect to Gaelic matters;
and by Professor Anatole Le Braz, whose continual good wishes towards my
work have been a constant source of inspiration since our first meeting
during March 1908, especially in my investigation of _La Légende de la
Mort_, and of the related traditions and living folk-beliefs in
Brittany--Brittany with its haunted ground of Carnac, home of the
ancient Brythonic Mysteries.
W. Y. E. W.
JESUS COLLEGE, OXFORD.
_All Saints' Day_, 1911.
'There, neither turmoil nor silence....
'Though fair the sight of Erin's plains, hardly will they seem so after
you have known the Great Plain....
'A wonder of a land the land of which I speak; no youth there grows to
old age....
'We behold and are not beheld.'--The God Midir, in _Tochmarc Etaine_.
INTRODUCTION
'I have told what I have seen, what I have thought, and what I have
learned by inquiry.'--HERODOTUS.
I. THE RELIGIOUS NATURE OF THE FAIRY-FAITH
There is probably no other place in Celtic lands more congenial, or more
inspiring for the writing down of one's deeper intuitions about the
Fairy-Faith, than Carnac, under the shadow of the pagan tumulus and
mount of the sacred fire, now dedicated by triumphant Christianity to
the Archangel Michael. The very name of Carnac is significant;[1] and in
two continents, Africa and Europe--to follow the certain evidence of
archaeology alone[2]--there seem to have been no greater centres for
ancient religion than Karnak in Egypt and Carnac in Brittany. On the
banks of the Nile the Children of Isis and Osiris erected temples as
perfect as human art can make them; on the shores of the Morbihan the
mighty men who were, as it seems, the teachers of our own Celtic
forefathers, erected temples of unhewn stone. The wonderful temples in
Yucatan, the temple-caves of prehistoric India, Stonehenge in England,
the Parthenon, the Acropolis, St. Peter's at Rome, Westminster Abbey, or
Notre-Dame, and the Pyramids and temples of Egypt, equally with the
Alignements of Carnac, each in their own way record more or less
perfectly man's attempt to express materially what he feels spiritually.
Perfected art can beautify and make more attractive to the eye and mind,
but it cannot enhance in any degree the innate spiritual ideals which
men in all ages have held; and thus it is that we read amid the rough
stone menhirs and dolmens in Brittany, as amid the polished granite
monoliths and magnificent temples in Egypt, the same silent message from
the past to the present, from the dead to the living. This message, we
think, is fundamentally important in understanding the Celtic
Fairy-Faith; for in our opinion the belief in fairies has the same
origin as all religions and mythologies.
And there seems never to have been an uncivilized tribe, a race, or
nation of civilized men who have not had some form of belief in an
unseen world, peopled by unseen beings. In religions, mythologies, and
the Fairy-Faith, too, we behold the attempts which have been made by
different peoples in different ages to explain in terms of human
experience this unseen world, its inhabitants, its laws, and man's
relation to it. The Ancients called its inhabitants gods, genii,
daemons, and shades; Christianity knows them as angels, saints, demons,
and souls of the dead; to uncivilized tribes they are gods, demons, and
spirits of ancestors; and the Celts think of them as gods, and as
fairies of many kinds.
II. THE INTERPRETATION OF THE FAIRY-FAITH
By the Celtic Fairy-Faith we mean that specialized form of belief in a
spiritual realm inhabited by spiritual beings which has existed from
prehistoric times until now in Ireland, Scotland, Isle of Man, Wales,
Cornwall, Brittany, or other parts of the ancient empire of the Celts.
In studying this belief, we are concerned directly with living Celtic
folk-traditions, and with past Celtic folk-traditions as recorded in
literature. And if fairies actually exist as invisible beings or
intelligences, and our investigations lead us to the tentative
hypothesis that they do, they are natural and not supernatural, for
nothing which exists can be supernatural; and, therefore, it is our duty
to examine the Celtic Fairy Races just as we examine any fact in the
visible realm wherein we now live, whether it be a fact of chemistry,
of physics, or of biology. However, as we proceed to make such an
examination, we shall have to remember constantly that there is a new
set of ideas to work with, entirely different from what we find in
natural sciences, and often no adequate vocabulary based on common human
experiences. An American who has travelled in Asia and an Englishman who
has travelled in Australia may meet in Paris and exchange travelling
experiences with mutual understanding, because both of them have
experienced travel; and they will have an adequate vocabulary to
describe each experience, because most men have also experienced travel.
But a saint who has known the spiritual condition called ecstasy cannot
explain ecstasy to a man who has never known it, and if he should try to
do so would discover at once that no modern language is suitable for the
purpose. His experience is rare and not universal, and men have
developed no complete vocabulary to describe experiences not common to
the majority of mankind, and this is especially true of psychical
experiences. It is the same in dealing with fairies, as these are
hypothetically conceived, for only a few men and women can assert that
they have seen fairies, and hence there is no adequate vocabulary to
describe fairies. Among the Ancients, who dealt so largely with
psychical sciences, there seems to have been a common language which
could be used to explain the invisible world and its inhabitants; but we
of this age have not yet developed such a language. Consequently, men
who deny human immortality, as well as men with religious faith who have
not through personal psychical experiences transformed that faith into a
fact, nowadays when they happen to read what Plato, Iamblichus, or any
of the Neo-Platonists have written, or even what moderns have written in
attempting to explain psychic facts, call it all mysticism. And to the
great majority of Europeans and Americans, mysticism is a most
convenient noun, applicable to anything which may seem reasonable yet
wholly untranslatable in terms of their own individual experience; and
mysticism usually means something quite the reverse of scientific
simply because we have by usage unwisely limited the meaning of the word
_science_ to a knowledge of things material and visible, whereas it
really means a knowing or a knowledge of everything which exists. We
have tried to deal with the rare psychical experiences of Irish, Scotch,
Manx, Welsh, or Breton seers, and psychics generally, in the clearest
language possible; but if now and then we are charged with being
mystical, this is our defence.
III. THE METHOD OF STUDYING THE FAIRY-FAITH
In this study, which is first of all a folk-lore study, we pursue
principally an anthropo-psychological method of interpreting the Celtic
belief in fairies, though we do not hesitate now and then to call in the
aid of philology; and we make good use of the evidence offered by
mythologies, religions, metaphysics, and physical sciences. Folk-lore, a
century ago was considered beneath the serious consideration of
scholars; but there has come about a complete reversal of scholarly
opinion, for now it is seen that the beliefs of the people, their
legends, and their songs are the source of nearly all literatures, and
that their institutions and customs are the origin of those of modern
times. And, to-day, to the new science of folk-lore,--which, as Mr.
Andrew Lang says, must be taken to include psychical research or
psychical sciences,--archaeology, anthropology, and comparative
mythology and religion are indispensable. Thus folk-lore offers the
scientific means of studying man in the sense meant by the poet who
declared that the proper study of mankind is man.
IV. DIVISIONS OF THE STUDY
This study is divided into four sections or parts. The first one deals
with the living Fairy-Faith among the Celts themselves; the second, with
the recorded and ancient Fairy-Faith as we find it in Celtic literature
and mythology; the third, with the Fairy-Faith in its religious aspects;
and in the fourth section an attempt has been made to suggest how the
theories of our newest science, psychical research, explain the belief
in fairies.
I have set forth in the first section in detail and as clearly as
possible the testimony communicated to me by living Celts who either
believe in fairies, or else say that they have seen fairies; and
throughout other sections I have preferred to draw as much as possible
of the material from men and women rather than from books. Books too
often are written out of other books, and too seldom from the life of
man; and in a scientific study of the Fairy-Faith, such as we have
undertaken, the Celt himself is by far the best, in fact the only
authority. For us it is much less important to know what scholars think
of fairies than to know what the Celtic people think of fairies. This is
especially true in considering the Fairy-Faith as it exists now.
V. THE COLLECTING OF MATERIAL
In June, 1908, after a year's preparatory work in things Celtic under
the direction of the Oxford Professor of Celtic, Sir John Rhys, I
began to travel in Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and Brittany, and to
collect material there at first hand from the people who have shaped and
who still keep alive the Fairy-Faith; and during the year 1909-10 fresh
folk-lore expeditions were made into Brittany, Ireland, and Wales, and
then, finally, the study of the Fairy-Faith was made pan-Celtic by
similar expeditions throughout the Isle of Man, and into Cornwall. Many
of the most remote parts of these lands were visited; and often there
was no other plan to adopt, or any method better, or more natural, than
to walk day after day from one straw-thatched cottage to another, living
on the simple wholesome food of the peasants. Sometimes there was the
picturesque mountain-road to climb, sometimes the route lay through
marshy peat-lands, or across a rolling grass-covered country; and with
each change of landscape came some new thought and some new impression
of the Celtic life, or perhaps some new description of a fairy.
This immersion in the most striking natural and social environment of
the Celtic race, gave me an insight into the mind, the religion, the
mysticism, and the very heart of the Celt himself, such as no mere study
in libraries ever could do. I tried to see the world as he does; I
participated in his innermost thoughts about the great problem of life
and death, with which he of all peoples is most deeply concerned; and
thus he revealed to me the source of his highest ideals and
inspirations. I daily felt the deep and innate seriousness of his
ancestral nature; and, living as he lives, I tried in all ways to be
like him. I was particularly qualified for such an undertaking: partly
Celtic myself by blood and perhaps largely so by temperament, I found it
easy to sympathize with the Celt and with his environments. Further,
being by birth an American, I was in many places privileged to enter
where an Englishman, or a non-Celt of Europe would not be; and my
education under the free ideals of a new-world democracy always made it
possible for me to view economic, political, religious, and racial
questions in Celtic lands apart from the European point of view, and
without the European prejudices which are so numerous and so greatly to
be regretted. But without any doubt, during my sojourn, extending over
three years, among the Celts, these various environments shaped my
thoughts about fairies and Fairyland--as they ought to have done if
truth is ever to be reached by research.
These experiences of mine lead me to believe that the natural aspects of
Celtic countries, much more than those of most non-Celtic countries,
impress man and awaken in him some unfamiliar part of himself--call it
the Subconscious Self, the Subliminal Self, the Ego, or what you
will--which gives him an unusual power to know and to feel invisible, or
psychical, influences. What is there, for example, in London, or Paris,
or Berlin, or New York to awaken the intuitive power of man, that
subconsciousness deep-hidden in him, equal to the solitude of those
magical environments of Nature which the Celts enjoy and love?
In my travels, when the weather was too wild to venture out by day, or
when the more favourable hours of the night had arrived, with fires and
candles lit, or even during a road-side chat amid the day's journey,
there was gathered together little by little, from one country and
another, the mass of testimony which chapter ii contains. And with all
this my opinions began to take shape; for when I set out from Oxford in
June, I had no certain or clear ideas as to what fairies are, nor why
there should be belief in them. In less than a year afterwards I found
myself committed to the Psychological Theory, which I am herein setting
forth.
VI. THEORIES OF THE FAIRY-FAITH
We make continual reference throughout our study to this Psychological
Theory of the Nature and Origin of the Celtic Fairy-Faith, and it is one
of our purposes to demonstrate that this is the root theory which
includes or absorbs the four theories already advanced to account for
the belief in fairies. To guide the reader in his own conclusions, we
shall here briefly outline these four theories.
The first of them may be called the Naturalistic Theory, which is, that
in ancient and in modern times man's belief in gods, spirits, or fairies
has been the direct result of his attempts to explain or to rationalize
natural phenomena. Of this theory we accept as true that the belief in
fairies often anthropomorphically reflects the natural environment as
well as the social condition of the people who hold the belief. For
example, amid the beautiful low-lying green hills and gentle dells of
Connemara (Ireland), the 'good people' are just as beautiful, just as
gentle, and just as happy as their environment; while amid the
dark-rising mountains and in the mysterious cloud-shadowed lakes of the
Scotch Highlands there are fiercer kinds of fairies and terrible
water-kelpies, and in the Western Hebrides there is the much-dreaded
'spirit-host' moving through the air at night.
The Naturalistic Theory shows accurately enough that natural phenomena
and environment have given direction to the anthropomorphosing of gods,
spirits, or fairies, but after explaining this external aspect of the
Fairy-Faith it cannot logically go any further. Or if illogically it
does attempt to explain the belief in gods, spirits, or fairies as due
entirely to material causes, it becomes, in our opinion, like the
psychology of fifty years ago, obsolete; for now the new psychology or
psychical research has been forced to admit--if only as a working
hypothesis--the possibility of invisible intelligences or entities able
to influence man and nature. We seem even to be approaching a scientific
proof of the doctrines of such ancient philosophical scientists as
Pythagoras and Plato,--that all external nature, animated throughout and
controlled in its phenomena by daemons acting by the will of gods, is to
men nothing more than the visible effects of an unseen world of causes.
In the internal aspects of the Fairy-Faith the fundamental fact seems
clearly to be that there must have been in the minds of prehistoric men,
as there is now in the minds of modern men, a germ idea of a fairy for
environment to act upon and shape. Without an object to act upon,
environment can accomplish nothing. This is evident. The Naturalistic
Theory examines only the environment and its effects, and forgets
altogether the germ idea of a fairy to be acted upon; but the
Psychological Theory remembers and attempts to explain the germ idea of
a fairy and the effect of nature upon it.
The second theory may be called the Pygmy Theory, which Mr. David
MacRitchie, who is definitely committed to it, has so clearly set forth
in his well-known work, entitled _The Testimony of Tradition_. This
theory is that the whole fairy-belief has grown up out of a folk-memory
of an actual Pygmy race. This race is supposed to have been a very
early, prehistoric, probably Mongolian race, which inhabited the British
Islands and many parts of Continental Europe. When the Celtic nations
appeared, these pygmies were driven into mountain fastnesses and into
the most inaccessible places, where a few of them may have survived
until comparatively historical times.
Over against the champions of the Pygmy Theory may be set two of its
opponents, Dr. Bertram C. A. Windle and Mr. Andrew Lang.[3] Dr. Windle,
in his Introduction to Tyson's _Philological Essay concerning the
Pygmies of the Ancients_, makes these six most destructive criticisms or
points against the theory: (1) So far as our present knowledge teaches
us, there never was a really Pygmy race inhabiting the northern parts of
Scotland; (2) the mounds with which the tales of little people are
associated have not, in many cases, been habitations, but were natural
or sepulchral in their nature; (3) little people are not by any means
associated entirely with mounds; (4) the association of giants and
dwarfs in traditions confuses the theory; (5) there are fairies where no
pygmies ever were, as, for example, in North America; (6) even Eskimos
and Lapps have fairy beliefs, and could not have been the original
fairies of more modern fairy-lore. Altogether, as we think our study
will show, the evidence of the Fairy-Faith itself gives only a slender
and superficial support to the Pygmy Theory. We maintain that the
theory, so far as it is provable, and this is evidently not very far, is
only one strand, contributed by ethnology and social psychology, in the
complex fabric of the Fairy-Faith, and is, as such, woven round a
psychical central pattern--the fundamental pattern of the Fairy-Faith.
Therefore, from our point of view, the Pygmy Theory is altogether
inadequate, because it overlooks or misinterprets the most essential and
prominent elements in the belief which the Celtic peoples hold
concerning fairies and Fairyland.
The Druid Theory to account for fairies is less widespread. It is that
the folk-memory of the Druids and their magical practices is alone
responsible for the Fairy-Faith. The first suggestion of this theory
seems to have been made by the Rev. Dr. Cririe, in his _Scottish
Scenery_, published in 1803.[4] Three years later, the Rev. Dr. Graham
published an identical hypothesis in his _Sketches Descriptive of
Picturesque Scenery on the Southern Confines of Perthshire_. Mr.
MacRitchie suggests, with all reason, that the two writers probably had
discussed together the theory, and hence both put it forth. Alfred
Maury, in _Les Fées du Moyen-Age_, published in 1843 at Paris, appears
to have made liberal use of Patrick Graham's suggestions in propounding
his theory that the _fées_ or fairy women of the Middle Ages are due to
a folk-memory of Druidesses. Maury seems to have forgotten that
throughout pagan Britain and Ireland, both much more important for the
study of fairies than Celtic Europe during the Middle Ages, Druids
rather than Druidesses had the chief influence on the people, and that
yet, despite this fact, Irish and Welsh mythology is full of stories
about fairy women coming from the Otherworld; nor is there any proof, or
even good ground for argument, that the Irish fairy women are a
folk-memory of Druidesses, for if there ever were Druidesses in Ireland
they played a subordinate and very insignificant rôle. As in the case of
the Pygmy Theory, we maintain that the Druid Theory, also, is
inadequate. It discovers a real anthropomorphic influence at work on the
outward aspects of the Fairy-Faith, and illogically takes that to be the
origin of the Fairy-Faith.
The fourth theory, the Mythological Theory, is of very great importance.
It is that fairies are the diminished figures of the old pagan
divinities of the early Celts; and many modern authorities on Celtic
mythology and folk-lore hold it. To us the theory is acceptable so far
as it goes. But it is not adequate in itself nor is it the root theory,
because a belief in gods and goddesses must in turn be explained; and in
making this explanation we arrive at the Psychological Theory, which
this study--perhaps the first one of its kind--attempts to set forth.
VII. THE IMPORTANCE OF STUDYING THE FAIRY-FAITH
I have made a very careful personal investigation of the surviving
Celtic Fairy-Faith by living for many months with and among the people
who preserve it; I have compared fairy phenomena and the phenomena said
to be caused by gods, genii, daemons, or spirits of different kinds and
recorded in the writings of ancient, mediaeval, and modern metaphysical
philosophers, Christian and pagan saints, mystics, and seers, and now
more or less clearly substantiated by from thirty to forty years of
experimentation in psychical sciences by eminent scientists of our own
times, such as Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge in England, and
M. Camille Flammarion in France. As a result, I am convinced of the very
great value of a serious study of the Fairy-Faith. The Fairy-Faith as
the folk-religion of the Celts ought, like all religions, to be studied
sympathetically as well as scientifically. To those who take a
materialistic view of life, and consequently deny the existence of
spirits or invisible intelligences such as fairies are said to be, we
should say as my honoured American teacher in psychology, the late Dr.
William James, of Harvard, used to say in his lectures at Stanford
University, 'Materialism considered as a system of philosophy never tries
to explain the _Why_ of things.' But in our study of the Fairy-Faith we
shall attempt to deal with this _Why_ of things; and, then, perhaps the
value of studying fairies and Fairyland will be more apparent, even to
materialists.
The great majority of men in cities are apt to pride themselves on their
own exemption from 'superstition', and to smile pityingly at the poor
countrymen and countrywomen who believe in fairies. But when they do so
they forget that, with all their own admirable progress in material
invention, with all the far-reaching data of their acquired science,
with all the vast extent of their commercial and economic conquests,
they themselves have ceased to be natural. Wherever under modern
conditions great multitudes of men and women are herded together there
is bound to be an unhealthy psychical atmosphere never found in the
country--an atmosphere which inevitably tends to develop in the average
man who is not psychically strong enough to resist it, lower at the
expense of higher forces or qualities, and thus to inhibit any normal
attempts of the Subliminal Self (a well-accredited psychological entity)
to manifest itself in consciousness. In this connexion it is highly
significant to note that, as far as can be determined, almost all
professed materialists of the uncritical type, and even most of those
who are thinking and philosophizing sceptics about the existence of a
supersensuous realm or state of conscious being, are or have been
city-dwellers--usually so by birth and breeding. And even where we find
materialists of either type dwelling in the country, we generally find
them so completely under the hypnotic sway of city influences and mould
of thought in matters of education and culture, and in matters touching
religion, that they have lost all sympathetic and responsive contact
with Nature, because unconsciously they have thus permitted
conventionality and unnaturalness to insulate them from it. The Celtic
peasant, who may be their tenant or neighbour, is--if still uncorrupted
by them--in direct contrast unconventional and natural. He is normally
always responsive to psychical influences--as much so as an Australian
Arunta or an American Red Man, who also, like him, are fortunate enough
to have escaped being corrupted by what we egotistically, to distinguish
ourselves from them, call 'civilization'. If our Celtic peasant has
psychical experiences, or if he sees an apparition which he calls one of
the 'good people', that is to say a fairy, it is useless to try to
persuade him that he is under a delusion: unlike his
materialistically-minded lord, he would not attempt nor even desire to
make himself believe that what he has seen he has not seen. Not only has
he the will to believe, but he has the right to believe; because his
belief is not a matter of being educated and reasoning logically, nor a
matter of faith and theology--it is a fact of his own individual
experiences, as he will tell you. Such peasant seers have frequently
argued with me to the effect that 'One does not have to be educated in
order to see fairies'.
Unlike the natural mind of the uncorrupted Celt, Arunta, or American Red
Man, which is ever open to unusual psychical impressions, the mind of
the business man in our great cities tends to be obsessed with business
affairs both during his waking and during his dream states, the
politician's with politics similarly, the society-leader's with society;
and the unwholesome excitement felt by day in the city is apt to be
heightened at night through a satisfying of the feeling which it
morbidly creates for relaxation and change of stimuli. In the slums,
humanity is divorced from Nature under even worse conditions, and
becomes wholly decadent. But in slum and in palace alike there is
continually a feverish nerve-tension induced by unrest and worry; there
is impure and smoke-impregnated air, a lack of sunshine, a substitution
of artificial objects for natural objects, and in place of solitude the
eternal din of traffic. Instead of Nature, men in cities (and
paradoxically some conventionalized men in the country) have
'civilization'--and 'culture'.
Are city-dwellers like these, Nature's unnatural children, who grind out
their lives in an unceasing struggle for wealth and power, social
position, and even for bread, fit to judge Nature's natural children who
believe in fairies? Are they right in not believing in an invisible
world which they cannot conceive, which, if it exists, they--even though
they be scientists--are through environment and temperament alike
incapable of knowing? Or is the country-dwelling, the sometimes
'unpractical' and 'unsuccessful', the dreaming, and 'uncivilized'
peasant right? These questions ought to arouse in the minds of
anthropologists very serious reflection, world-wide in its scope.
At all events, and equally for the unbeliever and for the believer, the
study of the Fairy-Faith is of vast importance historically,
philosophically, religiously, and scientifically. In it lie the germs of
much of our European religions and philosophies, customs, and
institutions. And it is one of the chief keys to unlock the mysteries of
Celtic mythology. We believe that a greater age is coming soon, when all
the ancient mythologies will be carefully studied and interpreted, and
when the mythology of the Celts will be held in very high esteem. But
already an age has come when things purely Celtic have begun to be
studied; and the close observer can see the awakening genius of the
modern Celt manifesting itself in the realm of scholarship, of
literature, and even of art--throughout Continental Europe, especially
France and Germany, throughout Great Britain and Ireland, and throughout
the new Celtic world of America, as far west as San Francisco on the
great calm ocean of the future facing Japan and China. In truth the
Celtic empire is greater than it ever was before Caesar destroyed its
political unity; and its citizens have not forgotten the ancient faith
of their ancestors in a world invisible.
W. Y. E. W.
SECTION I
THE LIVING FAIRY-FAITH
CHAPTER I
ENVIRONMENT
'In the Beauty of the World lies the ultimate redemption of our
mortality. When we shall become at one with nature in a sense
profounder even than the poetic imaginings of most of us, we shall
understand what now we fail to discern.'--FIONA MACLEOD.
Psychical interpretation--The mysticism of Erin and Armorica--In
Ireland--In Scotland--In the Isle of Man--In Wales--In Cornwall--In
Brittany.
As a preliminary to our study it is important, as we shall see later, to
give some attention to the influences and purely natural environment
under which the Fairy-Faith has grown up. And in doing so it will be
apparent to what extent there is truth in the Naturalistic Theory;
though from the first our interpretation of Environment is fundamentally
psychical. In this first chapter, then, in so far as they can be
recorded, we shall record a few impressions, which will, in a way, serve
as introductory to the more definite and detailed consideration of the
Fairy-Faith itself.
Ireland and Brittany, the two extremes of the modern Celtic world, are
for us the most important points from which to take our initial
bearings. Both washed by the waters of the Ocean of Atlantis, the one an
island, the other a peninsula, they have best preserved their old racial
life in its simplicity and beauty, with its high ideals, its mystical
traditions, and its strong spirituality. And, curious though the
statement may appear to some, this preservation of older manners and
traditions does not seem to be due so much to geographical isolation as
to subtle forces so strange and mysterious that to know them they must
be felt; and their nature can only be suggested, for it cannot be
described. Over Erin and Armorica, as over Egypt, there hovers a halo
of romance, of strangeness, of mysticism real and positive; and, if we
mistake not the language of others, these phrases of ours but echo
opinions common to many Celts native of the two countries--they who have
the first right to testify; and not only are there poets and seers among
them, but men of the practical world as well, and men of high rank in
scholarship, in literature, in art, and even in science.
IN IRELAND
If anyone would know Ireland and test these influences--influences which
have been so fundamental in giving to the Fairy-Faith of the past
something more than mere beauty of romance and attractive form, and
something which even to-day, as in the heroic ages, is ever-living and
ever-present in the centres where men of the second-sight say that they
see fairies in that strange state of subjectivity which the peasant
calls Fairyland--let him stand on the Hill of Tara silently and alone at
sunset, in the noonday, in the mist of a dark day. Let him likewise
silently and alone follow the course of the Boyne. Let him enter the
silence of New Grange and of Dowth. Let him muse over the hieroglyphics
of Lough Crew. Let him feel the mystic beauty of Killarney, the
peacefulness of Glendalough, of Monasterboise, of Clonmacnois, and the
isolation of Aranmore. Let him dare to enter the rings of fairies, to
tempt the 'good folk' at their _raths_ and _forts_. Let him rest on the
ancient cairn above the mountain-palace of Finvara and look out across
the battlefields of Moytura. Let him wander amid the fairy dells of
gentle Connemara. Let him behold the Irish Sea from the Heights of
Howth, as Fionn Mac Cumhail used to do. Let him listen to the
ocean-winds amid Dun Aengus. Let him view the stronghold of Cuchulainn
and the Red Branch Knights. Let him linger beside that mysterious lake
which lies embosomed between two prehistoric cairns on the summit of
enchanted Slieve Gullion, where yet dwells invisible the mountain's
Guardian, a fairy woman. Let him then try to interpret the mysticism of
an ancient Irish myth, in order to understand why men have been told
that in the plain beneath this magic mountain of Ireland mighty warfare
was once waged on account of a Bull, by the hosts of Queen Meave against
those of Cuchulainn the hero of Ulster. Let him be lost in the mists on
the top of Ben Bulbin. Let him know the haunts of fairy kings and queens
in Roscommon. Let him follow in the footsteps of Patrick and Bridgit and
Columba. When there are dark days and stormy nights, let him sit beside
a blazing fire of fragrant peat in a peasant's straw-thatched cottage
listening to tales of Ireland's golden age--tales of gods, of heroes, of
ghosts, and of fairy-folk. If he will do these things, he will know
Ireland, and why its people believe in fairies.
As yet, little has been said concerning the effects of clouds, of
natural scenery, of weird and sudden transformations in earth and sky
and air, which play their part in shaping the complete Fairy-Faith of
the Irish; but what we are about to say concerning Scotland will suggest
the same things for Ireland, because the nature of the landscape and the
atmospheric changes are much the same in the two countries, both inland
and on their rock-bound and storm-swept shores.
IN SCOTLAND
In the moorlands between Trossachs and Aberfoyle, a region made famous
by Scott's _Rob Roy_, I have seen atmospheric changes so sudden and so
contrasted as to appear marvellous. What shifting of vapours and clouds,
what flashes of bright sun-gleams, then twilight at midday! Across the
landscape, shadows of black dense fog-banks rush like shadows of flocks
of great birds which darken all the earth. Palpitating fog-banks wrap
themselves around the mountain-tops and then come down like living
things to move across the valleys, sometimes only a few yards above the
traveller's head. And in that country live terrible water-kelpies. When
black clouds discharge their watery burden it is in wind-driven vertical
water-sheets through which the world appears as through an ice-filmed
window-pane. Perhaps in a single day there may be the bluest of heavens
and the clearest air, the densest clouds and the darkest shadows, the
calm of the morning and the wind of the tempest. At night in Aberfoyle
after such a day, I witnessed a clear sunset and a fair evening sky; in
the morning when I arose, the lowlands along the river were inundated
and a thousand cascades, large and small, were leaping down the
mountain-highlands, and rain was falling in heavy masses. Within an hour
afterwards, as I travelled on towards Stirling, the rain and wind
ceased, and there settled down over all the land cloud-masses so
inky-black that they seemed like the fancies of some horrible dream.
Then like massed armies they began to move to their mountain-strongholds,
and stood there; while from the east came perfect weather and a flood of
brilliant sunshine.
And in the Highlands from Stirling to Inverness what magic, what
changing colours and shadows there were on the age-worn treeless hills,
and in the valleys with their clear, pure streams receiving tribute from
unnumbered little rills and springs, some dropping water drop by drop as
though it were fairy-distilled; and everywhere the heather giving to the
mountain-landscape a hue of rich purplish-brown, and to the air an odour
of aromatic fragrance.
On to the north-west beyond Inverness there is the same kind of a
treeless highland country; and then after a few hours of travel one
looks out across the water from Kyle and beholds Skye, where Cuchulainn
is by some believed to have passed his young manhood learning feats of
arms from fairy women,--Skye, dark, mountainous, majestic, with its
waterfalls turning to white spray as they tumble from cliff to cliff
into the sound, from out the clouds that hide their mountain-summit
sources.
In the Outer Hebrides, as in the Aranmore Islands off West Ireland,
influences are at work on the Celtic imagination quite different from
those in Skye and its neighbouring islands. Mountainous billows which
have travelled from afar out of the mysterious watery waste find their
first impediment on the west of these isolated Hebridean isles, and they
fling themselves like mad things in full fury against the wild rocky
islets fringing the coast. White spray flashes in unearthly forms over
the highest cliff, and the unrestrained hurricane whirls it far inland.
Ocean's eternally murmuring sounds set up a responsive vibration in the
soul of the peasant, as he in solitude drives home his flocks amid the
weird gloaming at the end of a December day; and, later, when he sits
brooding in his humble cottage at night, in the fitful flickering of a
peat fire, he has a mystic consciousness that deep down in his being
there is a more divine music compared with which that of external nature
is but a symbol and an echo; and, as he stirs the glowing peat-embers,
phantoms from an irretrievable past seem to be sitting with him on the
edge of the half-circle of dying light. Maybe there are skin-clad
huntsmen of the sea and land, with spears and knives of bone and flint
and shaggy sleeping dogs, or fearless sea-rovers resting wearily on
shields of brilliant bronze, or maybe Celtic warriors fierce and bold;
and then he understands that his past and his present are one.
Commonly there is the thickest day-darkness when the driving storms come
in from the Atlantic, or when dense fog covers sea and land; and, again,
there are melancholy sea-winds moaning across from shore to shore,
bending the bushes of the purple heather. At other times there is a
sparkle of the brightest sunshine on the ocean waves, a fierceness
foreign to the more peaceful Highlands; and then again a dead silence
prevails at sunrise and at sunset if one be on the mountains, or, if on
the shore, no sound is heard save the rhythmical beat of the waves, and
now and then the hoarse cry of a sea-bird. All these contrasted
conditions may be seen in one day, or each may endure for a day; and the
dark days last nearly all the winter. And then it is, during the long
winter, that the crofters and fisher-folk congregate night after night
in a different neighbour's house to tell about fairies and ghosts, and
to repeat all those old legends so dear to the heart of the Celt.
Perhaps every one present has heard the same story or legend a hundred
times, yet it is always listened to and told as though it were the
latest bulletin of some great world-stirring event. Over those little
islands, so far away to the north, out on the edge of the world, in
winter-time darkness settles down at four o'clock or even earlier; and
the islanders hurry through with their dinner of fish and oat-bread so
as not to miss hearing the first story. When the company has gathered
from far and near, pipes are re-filled and lit and the peat is heaped
up, for the story-telling is not likely to end before midnight. 'The
house is roomy and clean, if homely, with its bright peat fire in the
middle of the floor. There are many present--men and women, boys and
girls. All the women are seated, and most of the men. Girls are crouched
between the knees of fathers or brothers or friends, while boys are
perched wherever--boy-like--they can climb. The houseman is twisting
twigs of heather into ropes to hold down thatch, a neighbour crofter is
twining quicken root into cords to tie cows, while another is plaiting
bent grass into baskets to hold meal. The housewife is spinning, a
daughter is carding, another daughter is teazing, while a third
daughter, supposed to be working, is away in the background conversing
in low whispers with the son of a neighbouring crofter. Neighbour wives
and neighbour daughters are knitting, sewing, or embroidering.'[5] Then
when the bad weather for fishing has been fully discussed by the men,
and the latest gossip by the women, and the foolish talk of the youths
and maidens in the corners is finished, the one who occupies the chair
of honour in the midst of the _ceilidh_[6] looks around to be sure that
everybody is comfortable and ready; and, as his first story begins, even
the babes by instinct cease their noise and crying, and young and old
bend forward eagerly to hear every word. It does not matter if some of
the boys and girls do topple over asleep, or even some of the older folk
as the hour gets late; the tales meet no interruption in their even,
unbroken flow. And here we have the most Celtic and the most natural
environments which the Fairy-Faith enjoys in Scotland.
There are still the Southern Highlands in the country around Oban, and
the islands near them; and of all these isles none is so picturesque in
history as the one Columba loved so well. Though Iona enjoys less of the
wildness of the Hebrides furthest west, it has their storm-winds and
fogs and dark days, and their strangeness of isolation. On it, as
Adamnan tells us, the holy man fought with black demons who came to
invade his monastery, and saw angelic hosts; and when the angels took
his soul at midnight in that little chapel by the sea-shore there was a
mystic light which illuminated all the altar like the brightest
sunshine. But nowadays, where the saint saw demons and angels the
Islanders see ghosts and 'good people', and when one of these islanders
is taken in death it is not by angels--it is by fairies.
IN THE ISLE OF MAN
In the midst of the Irish Sea, almost equidistant from Ireland,
Scotland, and Wales, and concentrating in itself the psychical and
magnetic influences from these three Celtic lands, and from Celto-Saxon
England too, lies the beautiful kingdom of the great Tuatha De Danann
god, Manannan Mac Lir, or, as his loyal Manx subjects prefer to call
him, Mannanan-Beg-Mac-y-Leir. In no other land of the Celt does Nature
show so many moods and contrasts, such perfect repose at one time and at
another time the mightiness of its unloosed powers, when the baffled sea
throws itself angrily against a high rock-bound coast, as wild and
almost as weather-worn as the western coasts of Ireland and the
Hebrides.
But it is Nature's calmer moods which have greater effect upon the Manx
people: on the summit of his ancient stronghold, South Barrule Mountain,
the god Manannan yet dwells invisible to mortal eyes, and whenever on a
warm day he throws off his magic mist-blanket with which he is wont to
cover the whole island, the golden gorse or purple heather blossoms
become musical with the hum of bees, and sway gently on breezes made
balmy by the tropical warmth of an ocean stream flowing from the far
distant Mexican shores of a New World. Then in many a moist and
sweet-smelling glen, pure and verdant, land-birds in rejoicing bands add
to the harmony of sound, as they gather on the newly-ploughed field or
dip themselves in the clear water of the tinkling brook; and from the
cliffs and rocky islets on the coast comes the echo of the multitudinous
chorus of sea-birds. At sunset, on such a day, as evening calmness
settles down, weird mountain shadows begin to move across the
dimly-lighted glens; and when darkness has fallen, there is a mystic
stillness, broken only by the ceaseless throbbing of the sea-waves, the
flow of brooks, and the voices of the night.
In the moorland solitudes, even by day, there sometimes broods a deeper
silence, which is yet more potent and full of meaning for the peasant,
as under its spell he beholds the peaceful vision, happy and sunlit, of
sea and land, of gentle mountains falling away in land-waves into
well-tilled plains and fertile valleys; and he comes to feel
instinctively the old Druidic Fires relit within his heart, and perhaps
unconsciously he worships there in Nature's Temple. The natural beauty
without awakens the divine beauty within, and for a second of time he,
out of his subconsciousness, is conscious that in Nature there are
beings and inaudible voices which have no existence for the flippant
pleasure-seeking crowds who come and go. To the multitude, his ancestral
beliefs are foolishness, his fairies but the creatures of a fervid
Celtic imagination which readily responds to unusual phenomena and
environments. They will not believe with him that all beauty and harmony
in the world are but symbolic, and that behind these stand unseen
sustaining forces and powers which are conscious and eternal; and though
by instinct they willingly personify Nature they do not know the secret
of why they do so: for them the outer is reality, the inner
non-existent.
From the Age of Stone to the civilized era of to-day, the Isle of Man
has been, in succession, the home of every known race and people who
have flourished in Western Europe; and though subject, in turn, to the
Irish Gael and to the Welsh Brython, to Northmen and to Danes, to Scots
and to English, and the scene of sweeping transformations in religion,
as pagan cults succeeded one another, to give way to the teaching of St.
Patrick and his disciples St. German and St. Maughold, and this finally
to the Protestant form of Christianity, the island alone of Celtic lands
has been strangely empowered to maintain in almost primitive purity its
ancient constitution and freedom, and though geographically at the very
centre of the United Kingdom, is not a part of it. The archaeologist may
still read in mysterious symbols of stone and earth, as they lie strewn
over the island's surface, the history of this age-long panoramic
procession of human evolution; while through these same symbols the Manx
seer reads a deeper meaning; and sometimes in the superhuman realm of
radiant light, to which since long ago they have oft come and oft
returned, he meets face to face the gods and heroes whose early tombs
stand solitary on the wind-swept mountain-top and moorland, or hidden
away in the embrace of wild flowers and verdure amid valleys; and in the
darker mid-world he sees innumerable ghosts of many of these races which
have perished.
IN WALES
Less can be said of Wales than of Ireland, or of Scotland as a whole. It
has, it is true, its own peculiar psychic atmosphere, different, no
doubt, because its people are Brythonic Celts rather than Gaelic Celts.
But Wales, with conditions more modernized than is the case in Ireland
or in the Western Hebrides of Scotland, does not now exhibit in a
vigorous or flourishing state those Celtic influences which, when they
were active, did so much to create the precious Romances of Arthur and
his Brotherhood, and to lay the foundations for the Welsh belief in the
_Tylwyth Teg_, a fairy race still surviving in a few favoured
localities.
Wales, like all Celtic countries, is a land of long sea-coasts, though
there seems to be, save in the mountains of the north, less of mist and
darkness and cloud effects than in Ireland and Scotland. In the south,
perhaps the most curious influences are to be felt at St. David's Head,
and in St. David's itself--once the goal for thousands of pilgrims from
many countries of mediaeval Europe, and, probably, in pagan times the
seat of an oracle. And a place of like character is the peninsula of
Gower, south of Swansea. Caerphilly Castle, where the Green Lady reigns
now amid its ruined acres, is a strange place; and so is the hill near
Carmarthen, where Merlin is asleep in a cave with the fairy-woman
Vivian. But in none of these places to-day is there a strong living
faith in fairies as there is, for example, in West Ireland. The one
region where I found a real Celtic atmosphere--and it is a region where
everybody speaks Welsh--is a mountainous country rarely visited by
travellers, save archaeologists, a few miles from Newport; and its
centre is the Pentre Evan Cromlech, the finest cromlech in Wales if not
in Britain. By this prehistoric monument and in the country round the
old Nevern Church, three miles away, there is an active belief in the
'fair-folk', in ghosts, in death-warnings, in death-candles and
phantom-funerals, and in witchcraft and black magic. Thence on to
Newcastle-Emlyn and its valley, where many of the Mabinogion stories
took form, or at least from where they drew rich material in the way of
folk-lore,[7] are environments purely Welsh and as yet little disturbed
by the commercial materialism of the age.
There remain now to be mentioned three other places in Wales to me very
impressive psychically. These are: ancient Harlech, so famous in
recorded Welsh fairy-romance--Harlech with its strange stone-circles,
and old castle from which the Snowdon Range is seen to loom majestically
and clear, and with its sun-kissed bay; Mount Snowdon, with its memories
of Arthur and Welsh heroes; and sacred Anglesey or Mona, strewn with
tumuli, and dolmens, and pillar-stones--Mona, where the Druids made
their last stand against the Roman eagles--and its little island called
Holyhead, facing Ireland.
However, when all is said, modern Wales is poorer in its fairy
atmosphere than modern Ireland or modern Brittany. Certainly there is a
good deal of this fairy atmosphere yet, though it has become less vital
than the similar fairy atmosphere in the great centres of Erin and
Armorica. But the purely social environment under which the Fairy-Faith
of Wales survives is a potent force which promises to preserve
underneath the surface of Welsh national life, where the commercialism
of the age has compelled it to retire in a state of temporary latency,
the ancestral idealism of the ancient Brythonic race. In Wales, as in
Lower Brittany and in parts of Ireland and the Hebrides, one may still
hear in common daily use a language which has been continuously spoken
since unknown centuries before the rise of the Roman empire. And the
strong hold which the Druidic _Eisteddfod_ (an annual national congress
of bards and literati) continues to have upon the Welsh people, in spite
of their commercialism, is, again, a sign that their hearts remain
uncorrupted, that when the more favourable hour strikes they will sweep
aside the deadening influences which now hold them in spiritual bondage,
and become, as they were in the past, true children of Arthur.
IN CORNWALL
Strikingly like Brittany in physical aspects, Southern and Western
Cornwall is a land of the sea, of rolling plains and moorlands rather
than of high hills and mountains, a land of golden-yellow furze-bloom,
where noisy crowds of black crows and white sea-gulls mingle together
over the freshly-turned or new-sown fields, and where in the spring-time
the call of the cuckoo is heard with the song of the skylark. Like the
Isle of Man, from the earliest ages Cornwall has been a meeting-place
and a battle-ground for contending races. The primitive dark Iberian
peoples gave way before Aryan-Celtic invaders, and these to Roman and
then to Germanic invaders.
Nature has been kind to the whole of Cornwall, but chiefly upon the
peninsula whose ancient capital is Penzance (which possibly means 'the
Holy Headland'), and upon the land immediately eastward and northward of
it, she has bestowed her rarest gifts. Holding this territory embosomed
in the pure waters of Ocean, and breathing over it the pure air of the
Atlantic in spring and in summer calm, when the warm vapours from the
Gulf Stream sweep over it freely, and make it a land of flowers and of
singing-birds, Nature preserves eternally its beauty and its sanctity.
There are there ruined British villages whose builders are long
forgotten, strange prehistoric circular sun-temples like fortresses
crowning the hill-tops, mysterious underground passage-ways, and crosses
probably pre-Christian. Everywhere are the records of the mighty past of
this thrice-holy Druid land of sunset. There are weird legends of the
lost kingdom of Fair Lyonesse, which seers sometimes see beneath the
clear salt waves, with all its ancient towns and flowery fields; legends
of Phoenicians and Oriental merchants who came for tin; legends of gods
and of giants, of pixies and of fairies, of King Arthur in his castle at
Tintagel, of angels and of saints, of witches and of wizards.
On _Dinsul_, 'Hill dedicated to the Sun,' pagan priests and priestesses
kept kindled the Eternal Fire, and daily watched eastward for the rising
of the God of Light and Life, to greet his coming with paeans of
thanksgiving and praise. Then after the sixth century the new religion
had come proclaiming a more mystic Light of the World in the Son of God,
and to the pious half-pagan monks who succeeded the Druids the Archangel
St. Michael appeared in vision on the Sacred Mount.[8] And before St.
Augustine came to Britain the Celts of Cornwall had already combined in
their own mystical way the spiritual message of primitive Christianity
with the pure nature-worship of their ancestors; and their land was
then, as it most likely had been in pagan days, a centre of pilgrimages
for their Celtic kinsmen from Ireland, from Wales, from England, and
from Brittany. When in later times new theological doctrines were
superimposed on this mysticism of Celtic Christianity, the Sacred Fires
were buried in ashes, and the Light and Beauty of the pagan world
obscured with sackcloth.
But there in that most southern and western corner of the Isle of
Britain, the Sacred Fires themselves still burn on the divine hill-tops,
though smothered in the hearts of its children. The Cornishman's vision
is no longer clear. He looks upon cromlech and dolmen, upon ancient
caves of initiation, and upon the graves of his prehistoric ancestors,
and vaguely feels, but does not know, why his land is so holy, is so
permeated by an indefinable magic; for he has lost his ancestral mystic
touch with the unseen--he is 'educated' and 'civilized'. The hand of the
conqueror has fallen more heavily upon the people of Cornwall than upon
any other Celtic people, and now for a time, but let us hope happily
only for this dark period of transition, they sleep--until Arthur comes
to break the spell and set them free.
IN BRITTANY
As was pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, Ireland and
Brittany are to be regarded as the two poles of the modern Celtic world,
but it is believed by Celtic mystics that they are much more than this,
that they are two of its psychic centres, with Tara and Carnac as two
respective points of focus from which the Celtic influence of each
country radiates.[9] With such a psychical point of view, it makes no
difference at all whether one scholar argues Carnac to be Celtic and
another pre-Celtic, for if pre-Celtic, as it most likely is, it has
certainly been bequeathed to the people who were and are Celtic, and its
influence has been an unbroken thing from times altogether beyond the
horizon of history. According to this theory (and in following it we
are merely trying to put on record unique material transmitted to us by
the most learned of contemporary Celtic mystics and seers) there seem to
be certain favoured places on the earth where its magnetic and even more
subtle forces are most powerful and most easily felt by persons
susceptible to such things; and Carnac appears to be one of the greatest
of such places in Europe, and for this reason, as has been thought, was
probably selected by its ancient priest-builders as the great centre for
religious practices, for the celebration of pagan mysteries, for tribal
assemblies, for astronomical observations, and very likely for
establishing schools in which to educate neophytes for the priesthood.
Tara, with its tributary Boyne valley, is a similar place in Ireland, so
selected and so used, as, in our study of the cult of fairies and the
cult of the dead, manuscript evidence will later indicate. And thus to
such psychical and magnetic, or, according perhaps to others, religious
or traditional influences as focus themselves at Tara and Carnac, though
in other parts of the two countries as well, may be due in a great, even
in an essential measure, the vigorous and ever-living Fairy-Faith of
Ireland, and the innate and ever-conscious belief of the Breton people
in the Legend of the Dead and in a world invisible. For fairies and
souls of the dead, though, strictly speaking, not confused, are believed
to be beings of the subjective world existing to-day, and influencing
mortals, as they have always existed and influenced them according to
ancient and modern traditions, and as they appear now in the eyes even
of science through the work of a few pioneer scientists in psychical
research. And it seems probable that subjective beings of this kind,
granting their existence, were made use of by the ancient Druids, and
even by Patrick when the old and new religions met to do battle on the
Hill of Tara. The control of Tara, as a psychical centre, meant the
psychical control of all Ireland. To-day on the Hill of Tara the statue
of St. Patrick dwarfs the Liath Stone beside it; at Carnac the Christian
Cross overshadows dolmens and menhirs.
A learned priest of the Roman Church told me, when I met him in Galway,
that in his opinion those places in Ireland where ancient sacrifices
were performed to pagan or Druid gods are still, unless they have been
regularly exorcized, under the control of demons (daemons). And what the
Druids were at Tara and throughout Erin and most probably at Carnac as
well, the priests were in Egypt, and the pythonesses in Greece. That is
to say, Druids, Egyptian priests, priestesses in charge of Greek
oracles, are said to have foretold the future, interpreted omens, worked
all miracles and wonders of magic by the aid of daemons, who were
regarded as an order of invisible beings, intermediary between gods and
men, and as sometimes including the shades from Hades.
I should say as before, if he who knowing Ireland, the Land of Faerie,
would know in the same manner Brittany, the Land of the Dead, let him
silently and alone walk many times--in sun, in wind, in storm, in thick
mist--through the long, broad avenues of stone of the Alignements at
Carnac. Let him watch from among them the course of the sun from east to
west. Let him stand on St. Michael's Mount on the day of the winter
solstice, or on the day of the summer solstice. Let him enter the
silence of its ancient underground chamber, so dark and so mysterious.
Let him sit for hours musing amid cromlechs and dolmens, and beside
menhirs, and at holy wells. Let him marvel at the mightiest of menhirs
now broken and prostrate at Locmariaquer, and then let him ponder over
the subterranean places near it. Let him try to read the symbolic
inscriptions on the rocks in Gavrinis. Let him stand on the Île de Sein
at sunrise and at sunset. Let him penetrate the solitudes of the Forest
of Brocéliande, and walk through the Val-Sans-Retour (Vale-Without-Return).
And then let him wander in footpaths with the Breton peasant through
fields where good dames sit on the sunny side of a bush or wall,
knitting stockings, where there are long hedges of furze, golden-yellow
with bloom--even in January--and listen to stories about _corrigans_,
and about the dead who mingle here with the living. Let him enter the
peasant's cottage when there is fog over the land and the sea-winds are
blowing across the shifting sand-dunes, and hear what he can tell him.
Let him, even as he enjoys the picturesque customs and dress of the
Breton folk and looks on at their joyous _ronde_ (perhaps the relic of a
long-forgotten sun-dance), observe the depth of their nature, their
almost ever-present sense of the seriousness of human life and effort,
their beautiful characters as their mystic land has shaped them without
the artificiality of books and schools, their dreaminess as they look
out across the ocean, their often perfect physique and fine profiles and
rosy cheeks, and yet withal their brooding innate melancholy. And let
him know that there is with them always an overshadowing consciousness
of an invisible world, not in some distant realm of space, but here and
now, blending itself with this world; its inhabitants, their dead
ancestors and friends, mingling with them daily, and awaiting the hour
when the _Ankou_ (a King of the Dead) shall call each to join their
invisible company.
SECTION I
THE LIVING FAIRY-FAITH
CHAPTER II
THE TAKING OF EVIDENCE
'During all these centuries the Celt has kept in his heart some
affinity with the mighty beings ruling in the Unseen, once so
evident to the heroic races who preceded him. His legends and faery
tales have connected his soul with the inner lives of air and water
and earth, and they in turn have kept his heart sweet with hidden
influence.'--A. E.
Method of presentation--The logical verdict--Trustworthiness of
legends--The Fairy-Faith held by the highly educated Celt as well
as by the Celtic peasant--The evidence is complete and
adequate--Its analysis--The Fairy-Tribes dealt with--Witnesses and
their testimony: from Ireland, with introduction by Dr. Douglas
Hyde; from Scotland, with introduction by Dr. Alexander Carmichael;
from the Isle of Man, with introduction by Miss Sophia Morrison;
from Wales, with introduction by the Right Hon. Sir John Rhys;
from Cornwall, with introduction by Mr. Henry Jenner; and from
Brittany, with introduction by Professor Anatole Le Braz.
I. GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Various possible plans have presented themselves for setting forth the
living Fairy-Faith as I have found it during my travels in the six
Celtic countries among the people who hold it. To take a bit here and a
bit there from a miscellaneous group of psychological experiences, fairy
legends and stories which are linked together almost inseparably in the
mind of the one who tells them, does not seem at all satisfactory, nor
even just, in trying to arrive at a correct result. Classification under
various headings, such, for example, as Fairy Abductions, Changelings,
or Appearances of Fairies, seems equally unsatisfactory; for as soon as
the details of folk-lore such as I am presenting are isolated from one
another--even though brought together in related groups--they must be
rudely torn out of their true and natural environment, and divorced from
the psychological atmosphere amidst which they were first presented by
the narrator. The same objection applies to any plan of dividing the
evidence into (1) that which is purely legendary; (2) that which is
second-hand or third-hand evidence from people who claim to have seen
fairies, or to have been in Fairyland or under fairy influences; and (3)
that which is first-hand evidence from actual percipients: these three
classes of evidence are so self-evident that every reader will be able
to distinguish each class for himself as it occurs, and a mechanical
classification by us is unnecessary. So no plan seems so good as the
plan I have adopted of permitting all witnesses to give their own
testimony in their own way and in its native setting, and then of
classifying and weighing such testimony according to the methods of
comparative religion and the anthropological sciences.
In most cases, as examination will show, the evidence is so clear that
little or no comment is necessary. Most of the evidence also points so
much in one direction that the only verdict which seems reasonable is
that the Fairy-Faith belongs to a doctrine of souls; that is to say,
that Fairyland is a state or condition, realm or place, very much like,
if not the same as, that wherein civilized and uncivilized men alike
place the souls of the dead, in company with other invisible beings such
as gods, daemons, and all sorts of good and bad spirits. Not only do
both educated and uneducated Celtic seers so conceive Fairyland, but
they go much further, and say that Fairyland actually exists as an
invisible world within which the visible world is immersed like an
island in an unexplored ocean, and that it is peopled by more species of
living beings than this world, because incomparably more vast and varied
in its possibilities.
We should be prepared in hearing the evidence to meet with some
contradictions and a good deal of confusion, for many of the people who
believe in such a strange world as we have just described, and who think
they sometimes have entered it or have seen some of its inhabitants,
have often had no training at all in schools or colleges. But when we
hear legendary tales which have never been recorded save in the minds
of unnumbered generations of men, we ought not on that account to
undervalue them; for often they are better authorities and more
trustworthy than many an ancient and carefully inscribed manuscript in
the British Museum; and they are probably far older than the oldest book
in the world. Let us, then, for a time, forget that there are such
things as libraries and universities, and betake ourselves to the Celtic
peasant for instruction, living close to nature as he lives, and
thinking the things which he thinks.
But the peasant will not be our only teacher, for we shall also hear
much of first importance from city folk of the highest intellectual
training. It has become, perhaps always has been in modern times, a
widespread opinion, even among some scholars, that the belief in fairies
is the property solely of simple, uneducated country-folk, and that
people who have had 'a touch of education and a little common sense
knocked into their heads', to use the ordinary language, 'wouldn't be
caught believing in such nonsense.' This same class of critics used to
make similar remarks about people who said there were ghosts, until the
truth of another 'stupid superstition' was discovered by psychical
research. So in this chapter we hope to correct this erroneous opinion
about the Fairy-Faith, an opinion chiefly entertained by scholars and
others who know not the first real fact about fairies, because they have
never lived amongst the people who believe in fairies, but derive all
their information from books and hearsay. In due order the proper sort
of witnesses will substantiate this position, but before coming to their
testimony we may now say that there are men and women in Dublin, in
other parts of Ireland, in Scotland, in the Isle of Man, and in
Brythonic lands too, whom all the world knows as educated leaders in
their respective fields of activity, who not only declare their belief
that fairies were, but that fairies are; and some of these men and women
say that they have the power to see fairies as real spiritual beings.
In the evidence about to be presented there has been no selecting in
favour of any one theory; it is presented as discovered. The only
liberty taken with some of the evidence has been to put it into better
grammatical form, and sometimes to recast an ambiguous statement when I,
as collector, had in my own mind no doubt as to its meaning.
Translations have been made as literal as possible; though sometimes it
has been found better to offer the meaning rather than what in English
would be an obscure colloquialism or idiomatic expression. The method
pursued in seeking the evidence has been to penetrate as deeply and in
as natural a way as possible the thoughts of the people who believe in
fairies and like beings, by living among them and observing their
customs and ways of thought, and recording what seemed relevant to the
subject under investigation--chance expressions, and legends told under
various ordinary conditions--rather than to collect long legends or
literary fairy-stories. For these last the reader is referred to the
many excellent works on Celtic folk-lore. We have sought to bring
together, as perhaps has not been done before, the philosophy of the
belief in fairies, rather than the mere fairy-lore itself, though the
two cannot be separated. In giving the evidence concerning fairies, we
sometimes give evidence which, though akin to it and thus worthy of
record, is not strictly fairy-lore. All that we have omitted from the
materials in the form first taken down are stories and accounts of
things not sufficiently related to the world of Faerie to be of value
here.
In no case has testimony been admitted from a person who was known to be
unreliable, nor even from a person who was thought to be unreliable.
Accordingly, the evidence we are to examine ought to be considered good
evidence so far as it goes; and since it represents almost all known
elements of the Fairy-Faith and contains almost all the essential
elements upon which the advocates of the Naturalistic Theory, of the
Pygmy Theory, of the Druid Theory, of the Mythological Theory, as well
as of our own Psychological Theory, must base their arguments, we
consider it very adequate evidence. Nearly every witness is a Celt who
has been made acquainted with the belief in fairies through direct
contact with people who believe in them, or through having heard
fairy-traditions among his own kindred, or through personal
psychological experiences. And it is exceedingly fortunate for us that
an unusually large proportion of these Celtic witnesses are actual
percipients and natural seers, because the eliminations from the
Fairy-Faith to be brought about in chapter iii by means of an
anthropological analysis of evidence will be so extensive that,
scientifically and strictly speaking, there will remain as a residual or
unknown quantity, upon which our final conclusion must depend, solely
the testimony of reliable seer-witnesses. That is to say, no method of
anthropological dissection of the evidence can force aside consideration
of the ultimate truth which may or may not reside in the testimony of
sane and thoroughly reliable seer-witnesses.
Old and young, educated and uneducated, peasant and city-bred, testify
to the actual existence of the Celtic Fairy-Faith; and the evidence from
Roman Catholics stands beside that from Protestants, the evidence of
priests supports that of scholars and scientists, peasant seers have
testified to the same kind of visions as highly educated seers; and what
poets have said agrees with what is told by business men, engineers, and
lawyers. But the best of witnesses, like ourselves, are only human, and
subject to the shortcomings of the ordinary man, and therefore no claim
can be made in any case to infallibility of evidence: all the world over
men interpret visions pragmatically and sociologically, or hold beliefs
in accord with their own personal experiences; and are for ever
unconsciously immersed in a sea of psychological influences which
sometimes may be explainable through the methods of sociological
inquiry, sometimes may be supernormal in origin and nature, and hence to
be explained most adequately, if at all, through psychical research. Our
study is a study of human nature itself, and, moreover, often of human
nature in its most subtle aspects, which are called psychical; and the
most difficult problem of all is for human nature to interpret and
understand its own ultimate essence and psychological instincts. Our
whole aim is to discover what reasonableness may or may not stand behind
a belief so vast, so ancient, so common (contrary to popular non-Celtic
opinion) to all classes of Celts, and so fundamental a shaping force in
European history, religion, and social institutions.
When we state our conviction that the Fairy-Faith is common to all
classes of Celts, we do not state that it is common to all Celts. The
materialization of the age has affected the Fairy-Faith as it has
affected all religious beliefs the world over. This has been pointed out
by Dr. Hyde, by Dr. Carmichael, and by Mr. Jenner in their respective
introductions for Ireland, Scotland, and Cornwall. Nevertheless, the
Fairy-Faith as the folk-religion of the Celtic peoples is still able to
count its adherents by hundreds of thousands. Even in many cases where
Christian theology has been partially or wholly discarded by educated
Celts, in the country or in the city, as being to them in too many
details out of harmony with accepted scientific truths, the belief in
fairies has been jealously retained, and will, so it would seem, be
retained in the future.
We are now prepared to hear about the _Daoine Maithe_, the 'Good
People', as the Irish call their _Sidhe_ race; about the 'People of
Peace', the 'Still-Folk' or the 'Silent Moving Folk', as the Scotch call
their _Sìth_ who live in green knolls and in the mountain fastnesses of
the Highlands; about various Manx fairies; about the _Tylwyth Teg_, the
'Fair-Family' or 'Fair-Folk', as the Welsh people call their fairies;
about Cornish Pixies; and about _Fées_ (fairies), _Corrigans_, and the
Phantoms of the Dead in Brittany. And along with these, for they are
very much akin, let us hear about ghosts--sometimes about ghosts who
discover hidden treasure, as in our story of the _Golden Image_--about
goblins, about various sorts of death-warnings generally coming from
apparitions of the dead, or from banshees, about death-candles and
phantom-funerals, about leprechauns, about hosts of the air, and all
kinds of elementals and spirits--in short, about all the orders of
beings who mingle together in that invisible realm called Fairyland.
II. IN IRELAND
Introduction by DOUGLAS HYDE, LL.D., D. Litt., M.R.I.A. (_An
Craoibhín Aoibhinn_), President of the Gaelic League; author of _A
Literary History of Ireland_, &c.
Whatever may be thought of the conclusions drawn by Mr. Wentz from his
explorations into the Irish spirit-world, there can be no doubt as to
the accuracy of the data from which he draws them. I have myself been
for nearly a quarter of a century collecting, off and on, the folk-lore
of Western Ireland, not indeed in the shape in which Mr. Wentz has
collected it, but rather with an eye (partly for linguistic and literary
purposes) to its songs, sayings, ballads, proverbs, and _sgéalta_, which
last are generally the equivalent of the German Märchen, but sometimes
have a touch of the saga nature about them. In making a collection of
these things I have naturally come across a very large amount of
folk-belief conversationally expressed, with regard to the 'good people'
and other supernatural manifestations, so that I can bear witness to the
fidelity with which Mr. Wentz has done his work on Irish soil, for to a
great number of the beliefs which he records I have myself heard
parallels, sometimes I have heard near variants of the stories,
sometimes the identical stories. So we may, I think, unhesitatingly
accept his subject-matter, whatever, as I said, be the conclusions we
may deduce from them.
The folk-tale (_sean-sgéal_) or Märchen, which I have spent so much time
in collecting, must not be confounded with the folk-belief which forms
the basis of Mr. Wentz's studies. The _sgéal_ or story is something much
more intricate, complicated, and thought-out than the belief. One can
quite easily distinguish between the two. One (the belief) is short,
conversational, chiefly relating to real people, and contains no great
sequence of incidents, while the other (the folk-tale) is long,
complicated, more or less conventional, and above all has its interest
grouped around a single central figure, that of the hero or heroine. I
may make this plainer by an example. Let us go into a cottage on the
mountain-side, as Mr. Wentz and I have done so often, and ask the old
man of the house if he ever heard of such things as fairies, and he will
tell you that 'there is fairies in it surely. Didn't his own father see
the "forth"[10] beyond full of them, and he passing by of a moonlight
night and a little piper among them, and he playing music that mortal
man never heard the like?' or he'll tell you that 'he himself wouldn't
say agin fairies for it's often he heard their music at the old bush
behind the house'. Ask what the fairies are like, and he will tell
you--well, pretty much what Mr. Wentz tells us. From this and the like
accounts we form our ideas of fairies and fairy music, of ghosts,
mermaids, _púcas_, and so on, but there is no sequence of incidents, no
hero, no heroine, no story.
Again, ask the old man if he knows e'er a _sean-sgéal_ (story or
Märchen), and he will ask you at once, 'Did you ever hear the Speckled
Bull; did you ever hear the Well at the end of the world; did you ever
hear the Tailor and the Three Beasts; did you ever hear the Hornless
Cow?' Ask him to relate one of these, and if you get him in the right
vein, which may be perhaps one time in ten, or if you induce the right
vein, which you may do perhaps nine times out of ten, you will find him
begin with a certain gravity and solemnity at the very beginning, thus,
'There was once, in old times and in old times it was, a king in
Ireland'; or perhaps 'a man who married a second wife'; or perhaps 'a
widow woman with only one son': and the tale proceeds to recount the
life and adventures of the heroes or heroines, whose biographies told in
Irish in a sort of stereotyped form may take from ten minutes to half an
hour to get through. Some stories would burn out a dip candle in the
telling, or even last the whole night. But these stories have little or
nothing to say to the questions raised in this book.
The problem we have to deal with is a startling one, as thus put before
us by Mr. Wentz. Are these beings of the spirit world real beings,
having a veritable existence of their own, in a world of their own, or
are they only the creation of the imagination of his informants, and
the tradition of bygone centuries? The newspaper, the 'National' School,
and the _Zeitgeist_ have answered to their own entire satisfaction that
these things are imagination pure and simple. Yet this off-hand
condemnation does not always carry with it a perfect conviction. We do
not doubt the existence of tree-martins or kingfishers, although nine
hundred and ninety-nine people out of every thousand pass their entire
lives without being vouchsafed a glimpse of them in their live state;
and may it not be the same with the creatures of the spirit world, may
not they also exist, though to only one in a thousand it be vouchsafed
to behold them? The spirit creatures cannot be stuffed and put into
museums, like rare animals and birds, whose existence we might doubt of
if we had not seen them there; yet they may exist just as such animals
and birds do, though we cannot see them. I, at least, have often been
tempted to think so. But the following considerations, partly drawn from
comparative folk-lore, have made me hesitate about definitely accepting
any theory.
In the first place, then, viewing the Irish spirit-world as a whole, we
find that it contains, even on Mr. Wentz's showing, quite a number of
different orders of beings, of varying shapes, appearances, size, and
functions. Are we to believe that all those beings equally exist, and,
on the principle that there can be no smoke without a fire, are we to
hold that there would be no popular conception of the banshee, the
leprechaun, or the _Maighdean-mhara_ (sea-maiden, mermaid), and
consequently no tales told about them, if such beings did not exist, and
from time to time allow themselves to be seen like the wood-martin and
the kingfisher? This question is, moreover, further complicated by the
belief in the appearance of things that are or appear to be inanimate
objects, not living beings, such as the deaf coach or the phantom ship
in full sail, the appearance of which Mr. Yeats has immortalized in one
of his earliest and finest poems.
Again, although the _bean-sidhe_ (banshee), leprechaun, _púca_, and the
like are the most commonly known and usually seen creatures of the
spirit world, yet great quantities of other appearances are believed to
have been also sporadically met with. I very well remember sitting one
night some four or five years ago in an hotel in Indianapolis, U.S.A.,
and talking to four Irishmen, one or two of them very wealthy, and all
prosperous citizens of the United States. The talk happened to turn upon
spirits--the only time during my entire American experiences in which
such a thing happened--and each man of the four had a story of his own
to tell, in which he was a convinced believer, of ghostly manifestations
seen by him in Ireland. Two of these manifestations were of beings that
would fall into no known category; a monstrous rabbit as big as an ass,
which plunged into the sea (rabbits can swim), and a white heifer which
ascended to heaven, were two of them. I myself, when a boy of ten or
eleven, was perfectly convinced that on a fine early dewy morning in
summer when people were still in bed, I saw a strange horse run round a
seven-acre field of ours and change into a woman, who ran even swifter
than the horse, and after a couple of courses round the field
disappeared into our haggard. I am sure, whatever I may believe to-day,
no earthly persuasion would, at the time, have convinced me that I did
not see this. Yet I never saw it again, and never heard of any one else
seeing the same.
My object in mentioning these things is to show that if we concede the
real objective existence of, let us say, the apparently
well-authenticated banshee (_Bean-sidhe_, 'woman-fairy'), where are we
to stop? for any number of beings, more or less well authenticated, come
crowding on her heels, so many indeed that they would point to a far
more extensive world of different shapes than is usually suspected, not
to speak of inanimate objects like the coach and the ship. Of course
there is nothing inherently impossible in all these shapes existing any
more than in one of them existing, but they all seem to me to rest upon
the same kind of testimony, stronger in the case of some, less strong in
the case of others, and it is as well to point out this clearly.
My own experience is that beliefs in the _Sidhe_ (pronounced Shee)
folk, and in other denizens of the invisible world is, in many places,
rapidly dying. In reading folk-lore collections like those of Mr. Wentz
and others, one is naturally inclined to exaggerate the extent and depth
of these traditions. They certainly still exist, and can be found if you
go to search for them; but they often exist almost as it were by
sufferance, only in spots, and are ceasing to be any longer a power.
Near my home in a western county (County Roscommon) rises gently a
slope, which, owing to the flatness of the surrounding regions, almost
becomes a hill, and is a conspicuous object for many miles upon every
side. The old people called it in Irish _Mullach na Sidhe_. This name is
now practically lost, and it is called Fairymount. So extinct have the
traditions of the _Sidhe_-folk, who lived within the hill, become, that
a high ecclesiastic recently driving by asked his driver was there an
Irish name for the hill, and what was it, and his driver did not know.
There took place a few years ago a much talked of bog-slide in the
neighbouring townland of Cloon-Sheever (_Sidhbhair_ or _Siabhra_), 'the
Meadow of the Fairies,' and many newspaper correspondents came to view
it. One of the natives told a sympathetic newspaper reporter, 'Sure we
always knew it was going to move, that's why the place is named
Cloon-Sheever, the bog was always in a "shiver"!' I have never been able
to hear of any legends attached to what must have at one time been held
to be the head-quarters of the _Sidhe_ for a score of miles round it.
Of all the beings in the Irish mythological world the _Sidhe_ are,
however, apparently the oldest and the most distinctive. Beside them in
literature and general renown all other beings sink into insignificance.
A belief in them formerly dominated the whole of Irish life. The _Sidhe_
or Tuatha De Danann were a people like ourselves who inhabited the
hills--not as a rule the highest and most salient eminences, but I think
more usually the pleasant undulating slopes or gentle hill-sides--and
who lived there a life of their own, marrying or giving in marriage,
banqueting or making war, and leading there just as real a life as is
our own. All Irish literature, particularly perhaps the 'Colloquy of
the Ancients' (_Agallamh na Senórach_) abounds with reference to them.
To inquire how the Irish originally came by their belief in these
beings, the _Sidhe_ or Tuatha De Danann, is to raise a question which
cannot be answered, any more than one can answer the question, Where did
the Romans obtain their belief in Bacchus and the fauns, or the Greeks
their own belief in the beings of Olympus?
But granting such belief to have been indigenous to the Irish, as it
certainly seems to have been, then the tall, handsome fairies of Ben
Bulbin and the Sligo district, about whom Mr. Wentz tells us so much
interesting matter, might be accounted for as being a continuation of
the tradition of the ancient Gaels, or _a piece of heredity inherent in
the folk-imagination_. I mean, in other words, that the tradition about
these handsome dwellers within the hill-sides having been handed down
for ages, and having been perhaps exceptionally well preserved in those
districts, people saw just what they had always been told existed, or,
if I may so put it, they saw what they expected to see.
Fin Bheara, the King of the Connacht Fairies in Cnoc Meadha (or
Castlehacket) in the County Galway, his Queen Nuala, and all the
beautiful forms seen by Mr. Wentz's seer-witness (pp. 60 ff.), all the
banshees and all the human figures, white women, and so forth, who are
seen in raths and moats and on hill-sides, are the direct descendants,
so to speak, of the Tuatha De Danann or the _Sidhe_. Of this, I think,
there can be no doubt whatever.
But then how are we to account for the little red-dressed men and women
and the leprechauns? Yet, are they any more wonderful than the pygmies
of classic tradition? Is not the Mermaid to be found in Greece, and is
not the Lorelei as Germanic as the Kelpy is Caledonian. If we grant that
all these are creatures of primitive folk-belief, then how they come to
be so ceases to be a Celtic problem, it becomes a world problem. But
granted, as I say, that they were all creatures of primitive
folk-belief, then their occasional appearances, or the belief in such,
may be accounted for in exactly the same way as I have suggested to be
possible in the case of the Ben Bulbin fairies.
As for the belief in ghosts or _revenants_ (in Irish _tais_ or
_taidhbhse_), it seems to me that this may possibly rest to some extent
upon a different footing altogether. Here we are not confronted by a
different order of beings of different shapes and attributes from our
own, but only with the appearances, amongst the living, of men who were
believed or known to be dead or far away from the scene of their
appearances. Even those who may be most sceptical about the _Sidhe_-folk
and the leprechauns are likely to be convinced (on the mere evidence)
that the existence of 'astral bodies' or 'doubles', or whatever we may
call them, and the appearances of people, especially in the hour of
their death, to other people who were perhaps hundreds of miles away at
the time, is amply proven. Yet whatever may have been the case
originally when man was young, I do not think that this had in later
times any more direct bearing upon the belief in the _Sidhe_, the
leprechauns, the mermaid, and similar beings than upon the belief in the
Greek Pantheon, the naiads, the dryads, or the fauns; all of which
beliefs, probably arising originally from an animistic source, must have
differentiated themselves at a very early period. Of course every real
apparition, every 'ghost' apparition, tends now, and must have tended at
all times, to strengthen every spirit belief. For do not ghost
apparitions belong, in a way, to the same realm as all the others we
have spoken of, that is, to a realm equally outside our normal
experience?
Another very interesting point, and one hitherto generally overlooked,
is this, that different parts of the Irish soil cherish different bodies
of supernatural beings. The North of Ireland believes in beings unknown
in the South, and North-East Leinster has spirits unknown to the West.
Some places seem to be almost given up to special beliefs. Any outsider,
for instance, who may have read that powerful and grisly book, _La
Légende de la Mort_, by M. Anatole Le Braz, in two large volumes, all
about the awful appearances of _Ankou_ (Death), who simply dominates the
folk-lore of Brittany, will probably be very much astonished to know
that, though I have been collecting Irish folk-lore all my life, I have
never met Death figuring as a personality in more than two or three
tales, and these mostly of a trivial or humorous description, though the
Deaf Coach (_Cóiste Bodhar_), the belief in which is pretty general,
does seem a kind of parallel to the creaking cart in which _Ankou_
rides.
I would suggest, then, that the restriction of certain forms of spirits,
if I may so call them, to certain localities, may be due to race
intermixture. I would imagine that where the people of a primitive tribe
settled down most strongly, they also most strongly preserved the memory
of those supernatural beings who were peculiarly their own. The
_Sidhe_-folk appear to be pre-eminently and distinctively Milesian, but
the _geancanach_ (name of some little spirit in Meath and portion of
Ulster) may have been believed in by a race entirely different from that
which believed in the _clúracaun_ (a Munster sprite). Some of these
beliefs may be Aryan, but many are probably pre-Celtic.
Is it not strange that while the names and exploits of the great
semi-mythological heroes of the various Saga cycles of Ireland,
Cuchulainn, Conor mac Nessa, Finn, Osgar, Oisin, and the rest, are at
present the inheritance of all Ireland, and are known in every part of
it, there should still be, as I have said, supernatural beings believed
in which are unknown outside of their own districts, and of which the
rest of Ireland has never heard? If the inhabitants of the limited
districts in which these are seen still think they see them, my
suggestion is that the earlier race handed down an account of the
primitive beings believed in by their own tribe, and later generations,
if they saw anything, saw just what they were told existed.
Whilst far from questioning the actual existence of certain spiritual
forms and apparitions, I venture to throw out these considerations for
what they may be worth, and I desire again to thank Mr. Wentz for all
the valuable data he has collected for throwing light upon so
interesting a question.
RATRA, FRENCHPARK,
COUNTY ROSCOMMON, IRELAND,
_September_ 1910.
THE FAIRY FOLK OF TARA
On the ancient Hill of Tara, from whose heights the High Kings once
ruled all Ireland, from where the sacred fires in pagan days announced
the annual resurrection of the sun, the Easter Tide, where the magic of
Patrick prevailed over the magic of the Druids, and where the hosts of
the Tuatha De Danann were wont to appear at the great Feast of _Samain_,
to-day the fairy-folk of modern times hold undisputed sovereignty. And
from no point better than Tara, which thus was once the magical and
political centre of the Sacred Island, could we begin our study of the
Irish Fairy-Faith. Though the Hill has lain unploughed and deserted
since the curses of Christian priests fell upon it, on the calm air of
summer evenings, at the twilight hour, wondrous music still sounds over
its slopes, and at night long, weird processions of silent spirits march
round its grass-grown _raths_ and _forts_.[11] It is only men who fear
the curse of the Christians; the fairy-folk regard it not.
The Rev. Father Peter Kenney, of Kilmessan, had directed me to John
Graham, an old man over seventy years of age, who has lived near Tara
most of his life; and after I had found John, and he had led me from
_rath_ to _rath_ and then right through the length of the site where
once stood the banquet hall of kings and heroes and Druids, as he
earnestly described the past glories of Tara to which these ancient
monuments bear silent testimony, we sat down in the thick sweet grass on
the Sacred Hill and began talking of the olden times in Ireland, and
then of the 'good people':--
_The 'Good People's' Music._--'As sure as you are sitting down I heard
the pipes there in that wood (pointing to a wood on the north-west
slope of the Hill, and west of the banquet hall). I heard the music
another time on a hot summer evening at the Rath of Ringlestown, in a
field where all the grass had been burned off; and I often heard it in
the wood of Tara. Whenever the _good people_ play, you hear their music
all through the field as plain as can be; and it is the grandest kind of
music. It may last half the night, but once day comes, it ends.'
_Who the 'Good People' are._--I now asked John what sort of a race the
'good people' are, and where they came from, and this is his
reply:--'People killed and murdered in war stay on earth till their time
is up, and they are among the _good people_. The souls on this earth are
as thick as the grass (running his walking-stick through a thick clump),
and you can't see them; and evil spirits are just as thick, too, and
people don't know it. Because there are so many spirits knocking (going)
about they must appear to some people. The old folk saw the _good
people_ here on the Hill a hundred times, and they'd always be talking
about them. The _good people_ can see everything, and you dare not
meddle with them. They live in _raths_, and their houses are in them.
The opinion always was that they are a race of spirits, for they can go
into different forms, and can appear big as well as little.'
EVIDENCE FROM KILMESSAN, NEAR TARA
John Boylin, born in County Meath about sixty years ago, will be our
witness from Kilmessan, a village about two miles from Tara; and he,
being one of the men of the vicinity best informed about its folk-lore,
is able to offer testimony of very great value:--
_The Fairy Tribes._--'There is said to be a whole tribe of little red
men living in Glen Odder, between Ringlestown and Tara; and on long
evenings in June they have been heard. There are other breeds or castes
of fairies; and it seems to me, when I recall our ancient traditions,
that some of these fairies are of the Fir Bolgs, some of the Tuatha De
Danann, and some of the Milesians. All of them have been seen
serenading round the western slope of Tara, dressed in ancient Irish
costumes. Unlike the little red men, these fairy races are warlike and
given to making invasions. Long processions of them have been seen going
round the King's Chair (an earthwork on which the Kings of Tara are said
to have been crowned); and they then would appear like soldiers of
ancient Ireland in review.'
_The Fairy Procession._--'We were told as children, that, as soon as
night fell, the fairies from Rath Ringlestown would form in a
procession, across Tara road, pass round certain bushes which have not
been disturbed for ages, and join the _gangkena_ (?) or host of
industrious folk, the red fairies. We were afraid, and our nurses always
brought us home before the advent of the fairy procession. One of the
passes used by this procession happened to be between two mud-wall
houses; and it is said that a man went out of one of these houses at the
wrong time, for when found he was dead: the fairies had _taken_ him
because he interfered with their procession.'[12]
_Death through Cutting Fairy-Bushes._--'A man named Caffney cut as fuel
to boil his pot of potatoes some of these undisturbed bushes round which
the fairies pass. When he put the wood under the pot, though it spat
fire, and fire-sparkles would come out of it, it would not burn. The man
pined away gradually. In six months after cutting the fairy-bushes, he
was dead. Just before he died, he told his experiences with the wood to
his brother, and his brother told me.'
_The Fairies are the Dead._--'According to the local belief, fairies are
the spirits of the departed. Tradition says that Hugh O'Neil in the
sixteenth century, after his march to the south, encamped his army on
the _Rath_ or _Fort_ of Ringlestown, to be assisted by the spirits of
the mighty dead who dwelt within this _rath_. And it is believed that
Gerald Fitzgerald has been seen coming out of the Hill of Mollyellen,
down in County Louth, leading his horse and dressed in the old Irish
costume, with breastplate, spear, and war outfit.'
_Fairy Possession._--'Rose Carroll was possessed by a fairy-spirit. It
is known that her father held communion with evil spirits, and it
appears that they often assisted him. The Carrolls' house was built at
the end of a fairy _fort_, and part of it was scooped out of this
_fort_. Rose grew so peculiar that her folks locked her up. After two
years she was able to shake off the fairy possession by being taken to
Father Robinson's sisters, and then to an old witch-woman in Drogheda.'
IN THE VALLEY OF THE BOYNE
In walking along the River Boyne, from Slane to Knowth and New Grange, I
stopped at the cottage of Owen Morgan, at Ross-na-Righ, or 'the Wood of
the Kings', though the ancient wood has long since disappeared; and as
we sat looking out over the sunlit beauty of Ireland's classic river,
and in full view of the first of the famous _moats_, this is what Owen
Morgan told me:--
_How the Shoemaker's Daughter became the Queen of Tara._--'In olden
times there lived a shoemaker and his wife up there near Moat Knowth,
and their first child was taken by the queen of the fairies who lived
inside the moat, and a little leprechaun left in its place. The same
exchange was made when the second child was born. At the birth of the
third child the fairy queen came again and ordered one of her three
servants to take the child; but the child could not be moved because of
a great beam of iron, too heavy to lift, which lay across the baby's
breast. The second servant and then the third failed like the first, and
the queen herself could not move the child. The mother being short of
pins had used a needle to fasten the child's clothes, and that was what
appeared to the fairies as a beam of iron, for there was virtue in steel
in those days.
'So the fairy queen decided to bestow gifts upon the child; and advised
each of the three servants to give, in turn, a different gift. The first
one said, "May she be the grandest lady in the world"; the second one
said, "May she be the greatest singer in the world"; and the third one
said, "May she be the best mantle-maker in the world." Then the fairy
queen said, "Your gifts are all very good, but I will give a gift of my
own better than any of them: the first time she happens to go out of the
house let her come back into it under the form of a rat." The mother
heard all that the fairy women said, and so she never permitted her
daughter to leave the house.
'When the girl reached the age of eighteen, it happened that the young
prince of Tara, in riding by on a hunt, heard her singing, and so
entranced was he with the music that he stopped to listen; and, the song
ended, he entered the house, and upon seeing the wonderful beauty of the
singer asked her to marry him. The mother said that could not be, and
taking the daughter out of the house for the first time brought her back
into it in an apron under the form of a rat, that the prince might
understand the refusal.
'This enchantment, however, did not change the prince's love for the
beautiful singer; and he explained how there was a day mentioned with
his father, the king, for all the great ladies of Ireland to assemble in
the Halls of Tara, and that the grandest lady and the greatest singer
and the best mantle-maker would be chosen as his wife. When he added
that each lady must come in a chariot, the rat spoke to him and said
that he must send to her home, on the day named, four piebald cats and a
pack of cards, and that she would make her appearance, provided that at
the time her chariot came to the Halls of Tara no one save the prince
should be allowed near it; and, she finally said to the prince, "Until
the day mentioned with your father, you must carry me as a rat in your
pocket."
'But before the great day arrived, the rat had made everything known to
one of the fairy women, and so when the four piebald cats and the pack
of cards reached the girl's home, the fairies at once turned the cats
into the four most splendid horses in the world, and the pack of cards
into the most wonderful chariot in the world; and, as the chariot was
setting out from the Moat for Tara, the fairy queen clapped her hands
and laughed, and the enchantment over the girl was broken, so that she
became, as before, the prettiest lady in the world, and she sitting in
the chariot.
'When the prince saw the wonderful chariot coming, he knew whose it was,
and went out alone to meet it; but he could not believe his eyes on
seeing the lady inside. And then she told him about the witches and
fairies, and explained everything.
'Hundreds of ladies had come to the Halls of Tara from all Ireland, and
every one as grand as could be. The contest began with the singing, and
ended with the mantle-making, and the young girl was the last to appear;
but to the amazement of all the company the king had to give in (admit)
that the strange woman was the grandest lady, the greatest singer, and
the best mantle-maker in Ireland; and when the old king died she became
the Queen of Tara.'
After this ancient legend, which Owen Morgan heard from the old folks
when he was a boy, he told me many anecdotes about the 'good people' of
the Boyne, who are little men usually dressed in red.
_The 'Good People' at New Grange._--Between Knowth and New Grange I met
Maggie Timmons carrying a pail of butter-milk to her calves; and when we
stopped on the road to talk, I asked her, in due time, if any of the
'good people' ever appeared in the region, or about New Grange, which we
could see in the field, and she replied, in reference to New Grange:--'I
am sure the neighbours used to see the _good people_ come out of it at
night and in the morning. The _good people_ inherited the _fort_.'
Then I asked her what the 'good people' are, and she said:--'When they
disappear they go like fog; they must be something like spirits, or how
could they disappear in that way? I knew of people,' she added, 'who
would milk in the fields about here and spill milk on the ground for the
_good people_; and pots of potatoes would be put out for the _good
people_ at night.' (See chap. viii for additional New Grange folk-lore.)
THE TESTIMONY OF AN IRISH PRIEST
We now pass directly to West Ireland, in many ways our most important
field, and where of all places in the Celtic world the Fairy-Faith is
vigorously alive; and it seems very fitting to offer the first
opportunity to testify in behalf of that district to a scholarly priest
of the Roman Church, for what he tells us is almost wholly the result of
his own memories and experiences as an Irish boy in Connemara,
supplemented in a valuable way by his wider and more mature knowledge of
the fairy-belief as he sees it now among his own parishioners:--
_Knock Ma Fairies._--'Knock Ma, which you see over there, is said to
contain excavated passages and a palace where the fairies live, and with
them the people they have _taken_. And from the inside of the hill there
is believed to be an entrance to an underground world. It is a common
opinion that after consumptives die they are there with the fairies in
good health. The wasted body is not taken into the hill, for it is
usually regarded as not the body of the deceased but rather as that of a
changeling, the general belief being that the real body and the soul are
carried off together, and those of an old person from Fairyland
substituted. The old person left soon declines and dies.'
_Safeguards against Fairies._--'It was proper when having finished
milking a cow to put one's thumb in the pail of milk, and with the wet
thumb to make the sign of the cross on the thigh of the cow on the side
milked, to be safe against fairies. And I have seen them when churning
put a live coal about an inch square under the churn, because it was an
old custom connected with fairies.'
_Milk and Butter for Fairies._--'Whatever milk falls on the ground in
milking a cow is taken by the fairies, for fairies need a little milk.
Also, after churning, the knife which is run through the butter in
drying it must not be scraped clean, for what sticks to it belongs to
the fairies. Out of three pounds of butter, for example, an ounce or two
would be left for the fairies. I have seen this several times.'
_Crossing a Stream, and Fairies._--'When out on a dark night, if pursued
by fairies or ghosts one is considered quite safe if one can get over
some stream. I remember coming home on a dark night with a boy companion
and hearing a noise, and then after we had run to a stream and crossed
it feeling quite safe.'
_Fairy Preserves._--'A heap of stones in a field should not be
disturbed, though needed for building--especially if they are part of an
ancient tumulus. The fairies are said to live inside the pile, and to
move the stones would be most unfortunate. If a house happens to be
built on a fairy preserve, or in a fairy track, the occupants will have
no luck. Everything will go wrong. Their animals will die, their
children fall sick, and no end of trouble will come on them. When the
house happens to have been built in a fairy track, the doors on the
front and back, or the windows if they are in the line of the track,
cannot be kept closed at night, for the fairies must march through. Near
Ballinrobe there is an old _fort_ which is still the preserve of the
fairies, and the land round it. The soil is very fine, and yet no one
would dare to till it. Some time ago in laying out a new road the
engineers determined to run it through the _fort_, but the people rose
almost in rebellion, and the course had to be changed. The farmers
wouldn't cut down a tree or bush growing on the hill or preserve for
anything.'
_Fairy Control over Crops._--'Fairies are believed to control crops and
their ripening. A field of turnips may promise well, and its owner will
count on so many tons to the acre, but if when the crop is gathered it
is found to be far short of the estimate, the explanation is that the
fairies have extracted so much substance from it. The same thing is the
case with corn.'
_November Eve and Fairies._--'On November Eve it is not right to gather
or eat blackberries or sloes, nor after that time as long as they last.
On November Eve the fairies pass over all such things and make them
unfit to eat. If one dares to eat them afterwards one will have serious
illness. We firmly believed this as boys, and I laugh now when I think
how we used to gorge ourselves with berries on the last day of October,
and then for weeks after pass by bushes full of the most luscious fruit,
and with mouths watering for it couldn't eat it.'
_Fairies as Flies._--'There is an old abbey on the river, in County
Mayo, and people say the fairies had a great battle near it, and that
the slaughter was tremendous. At the time, the fairies appeared as
swarms of flies coming from every direction to that spot. Some came from
Knock Ma, and some from South Ireland, the opinion being that fairies
can assume any form they like. The battle lasted a day and a night, and
when it was over one could have filled baskets with the dead flies which
floated down the river.'
_Those who Return from Faerie._--'Persons in a short trance-state of two
or three days' duration are said to be away with the fairies enjoying a
festival. The festival may be very material in its nature, or it may be
purely spiritual. Sometimes one may thus go to Faerie for an hour or
two; or one may remain there for seven, fourteen, or twenty-one years.
The mind of a person coming out of Fairyland is usually a blank as to
what has been seen and done there. Another idea is that the person knows
well enough all about Fairyland, but is prevented from communicating the
knowledge. A certain woman of whom I knew said she had forgotten all
about her experiences in Faerie, but a friend who heard her objected,
and said she did remember, and wouldn't tell. A man may remain awake at
night to watch one who has been to Fairyland to see if that one holds
communication with the fairies. Others say in such a case that the
fairies know you are on the alert, and will not be discovered.'
THE TESTIMONY OF A GALWAY PIPER
_Fairies=Sidheóga._--According to our next witness, Steven Ruan, a piper
of Galway, with whom I have often talked, there is one class of fairies
'who are nobody else than the spirits of men and women who once lived
on earth'; and the banshee is a dead friend, relative, or ancestor who
appears to give a warning. 'The fairies', he says, 'never care about old
folks. They only _take_ babies, and young men and young women. If a
young wife dies, she is said to have been _taken_ by _them_, and ever
afterwards to live in Fairyland. The same things are said about a young
man or a child who dies. Fairyland is a place of delights, where music,
and singing, and dancing, and feasting are continually enjoyed; and its
inhabitants are all about us, as numerous as the blades of grass.'
_A Fairy Dog._--In the course of another conversation, Steven pointed to
a rocky knoll in a field not far from his home, and said:--'I saw a dog
with a white ring around his neck by that hill there, and the oldest men
round Galway have seen him, too, for he has been here for one hundred
years or more. He is a dog of the _good people_, and only appears at
certain hours of the night.'
_An Old Piper in Fairyland._--And before we had done talking, the
subject of fairy-music came up, and the following little story coming
from one of the last of the old Irish pipers himself, about a brother
piper, is of more than ordinary value:--'There used to be an old piper
called Flannery who lived in Oranmore, County Galway. I imagine he was
one of the old generation. And one time the _good people_ took him to
Fairyland to learn his profession. He studied music with them for a long
time, and when he returned he was as great a piper as any in Ireland.
But he died young, for the _good people_ wanted him to play for them.'
THE TESTIMONY OF 'OLD PATSY' OF ARANMORE
Our next witness is an old man, familiarly called 'Old Patsy', who is a
native of the Island of Aranmore, off the coast from Galway, and he
lives on the island amid a little group of straw-thatched fishermen's
homes called Oak Quarter. As 'Old Patsy' stood beside a rude stone cross
near Oak Quarter, in one of those curious places on Aranmore, where each
passing funeral stops long enough to erect a little memorial pile of
stones on the smooth rocky surface of the roadside enclosure, he told me
many anecdotes about the mysteries of his native island.
_Aranmore Fairies._--Twenty years or so ago round the _Bedd_ of Dermot
and Grania, just above us on the hill, there were seen many fairies,
'crowds of them,' said 'Old Patsy', and a single deer. They began to
chase the deer, and followed it right over the island. At another time
similar little people chased a horse. 'The rocks were full of them, and
they were small fellows.'
_A Fairy Beating--in a Dream._--'In the South Island,' he continued, 'as
night was coming on, a man was giving his cow water at a well, and, as
he looked on the other side of a wall, he saw many strange people
playing hurley. When they noticed him looking at them, one came up and
struck the cow a hard blow, and turning on the man cut his face and body
very badly. The man might not have been so badly off, but he returned to
the well after the first encounter and got five times as bad a beating;
and when he reached home he couldn't speak at all, until the cock crew.
Then he told about his adventures, and slept a little. When he woke up
in the daylight he was none the worse for his beating, for the fairies
had rubbed something on his face.' Patsy says he knew the man, who if
still alive is now in America, where he went several years ago.
_Where Fairies Live._--When I asked Patsy where the fairies live, he
turned half around, and pointing in the direction of Dun Aengus, which
was in full view on the sharp sky-line of Aranmore, said that there, in
a large tumulus on the hill-side below it, they had one of their
favourite abodes. But, he added, 'The rocks are full of them, and they
are small fellows.' Just across the road from where we were standing, in
a spot near Oak Quarter, another place was pointed out where the fairies
are often seen dancing. The name of it is _Moneen an Damhsa_, 'the
Little Bog of the Dance.' Other sorts of fairies live in the sea; and
some of them who live on Aranmore (probably in conjunction with those in
the sea) go out over the water and cause storms and wind.
THE TESTIMONY OF A ROMAN CATHOLIC THEOLOGIAN
The following evidence, by the Rev. Father ----, came out during a
discussion concerning spirits and fairies as regarded by Roman Catholic
theology, which he and I enjoyed when we met as fellow travellers in
Galway Town:--
_Of Magic and Place-spirits._--'Magic, according to Catholic theology,
is nothing else than the solicitation of spiritual powers to help us. If
evil spirits are evoked by certain irrational practices it is unholy
magic, and this is altogether forbidden by our Church. All charms,
spells, divination, necromancy, or geomancy are unholy magic. Holy magic
is practised by carrying the Cross in Christ. Now evil magic has been
practised here in Ireland: butter has been _taken_ so that none came
from the churning; cows have been made to die of maladies; and fields
made unproductive. A cow was bought from an old woman in Connemara, and
no butter was ever had from the cow until exorcism with holy water was
performed. This is reported to me as a fact.' And in another relation
the Rev. Father ---- said what for us is highly significant:--'My
private opinion is that in certain places here in Ireland where pagan
sacrifices were practised, evil spirits through receiving homage gained
control, and still hold control, unless driven out by exorcisms.'
THE TESTIMONY OF THE TOWN CLERK OF TUAM
To the town clerk of Tuam, Mr. John Glynn, who since his boyhood has
taken a keen interest in the traditions of his native county, I am
indebted for the following valuable summary of the fairy creed in that
part of North Galway where Finvara rules:--
_Fairies of the Tuam Country._--'The whole of Knock Ma (_Cnoc
Meadha_[13]), which probably means Hill of the Plain, is said to be the
palace of Finvara, king of the Connaught fairies. There are a good many
legends about Finvara, but very few about Queen Meave in this region.'
_Famine of 1846-7 caused by Fairies._--'During 1846-7 the potato crop in
Ireland was a failure, and very much suffering resulted. At the time,
the country people in these parts attributed the famine to disturbed
conditions in the fairy world. Old Thady Steed once told me about the
conditions then prevailing, "Sure, we couldn't be any other way; and I
saw the _good people_ and hundreds besides me saw them fighting in the
sky over Knock Ma and on towards Galway." And I heard others say they
saw the fighting also.'
_Fairyland; and the Seeress._--'Fairies are said to be immortal, and the
fairy world is always described as an immaterial place, though I do not
think it is the same as the world of the dead. Sick persons, however,
are often said to be with the fairies, and when cured, to have come
back. A woman who died here about thirty years ago was commonly believed
to have been with the fairies during her seven years' sickness when she
was a maiden. She married after coming back, and had children; and she
was always able to see the _good people_ and to talk with them, for she
had the second-sight. And it is said that she used to travel with the
fairies at night. After her marriage she lived in Tuam, and though her
people were six or seven miles out from Tuam in the country, she could
always tell all that was taking place with them there, and she at her
own home at the time.'
_Fairies on May Day._--'On May Day the _good people_ can steal butter if
the chance is given them. If a person enters a house then, and churning
is going on, he must take a hand in it, or else there will be no butter.
And if fire is given away on May Day nothing will go right for the whole
year.'
_The Three Fairy Drops._--'Even yet certain things are due the fairies;
for example, two years ago, in the Court Room here in Tuam, a woman was
on trial for watering milk, and to the surprise of us all who were
conducting the proceedings, and, it can be added, to the great amusement
of the onlookers, she swore that she had only added "the three fairy
drops".'
_Food of Fairies._--'Food, after it has been put out at night for the
fairies, is not allowed to be eaten afterwards by man or beast, not even
by pigs. Such food is said to have no real substance left in it, and to
let anything eat it wouldn't be thought of. The underlying idea seems to
be that the fairies extract the spiritual essence from food offered to
them, leaving behind the grosser elements.'
_Fairy Warfare._--'When the fairy tribes under the various kings and
queens have a battle, one side manages to have a living man among them,
and he by knocking the fairies about turns the battle in case the side
he is on is losing. It is always usual for the Munster fairy king to
challenge Finvara, the Connaught fairy king.'
COUNTY SLIGO, AND THE TESTIMONY OF A PEASANT SEER[14]
The Ben Bulbin country in County Sligo is one of those rare places in
Ireland where fairies are thought to be visible, and our first witness
from there claims to be able to see the fairies or 'gentry' and to talk
with them. This mortal so favoured lives in the same townland where his
fathers have lived during four hundred years, directly beneath the
shadows of Ben Bulbin, on whose sides Dermot is said to have been killed
while hunting the wild-boar. And this famous old mountain, honeycombed
with curious grottoes ages ago when the sea beat against its
perpendicular flanks, is the very place where the 'gentry' have their
chief abode. Even on its broad level summit, for it is a high square
tableland like a mighty cube of rock set down upon the earth by some
antediluvian god, there are treacherous holes, wherein more than one
hunter may have been lost for ever, penetrating to unknown depths; and
by listening one can hear the tides from the ocean three or four miles
away surging in and out through ancient subterranean channels, connected
with these holes. In the neighbouring mountains there are long caverns
which no man has dared to penetrate to the end, and even dogs, it is
said, have been put in them never to emerge, or else to come out miles
away.
One day when the heavy white fog-banks hung over Ben Bulbin and its
neighbours, and there was a weird almost-twilight at midday over the
purple heather bog-lands at their base, and the rain was falling, I sat
with my friend before a comfortable fire of fragrant turf in his cottage
and heard about the 'gentry':--
_Encounters with the 'Gentry'._--'When I was a young man I often used to
go out in the mountains over there (pointing out of the window in their
direction) to fish for trout, or to hunt; and it was in January on a
cold, dry day while carrying my gun that I and a friend with me, as we
were walking around Ben Bulbin, saw one of the _gentry_ for the first
time. I knew who it was, for I had heard the _gentry_ described ever
since I could remember; and this one was dressed in blue with a
head-dress adorned with what seemed to be frills.[15] When he came up to
us, he said to me in a sweet and silvery voice, "The seldomer you come
to this mountain the better. A young lady here wants to take you away."
Then he told us not to fire off our guns, because the _gentry_ dislike
being disturbed by the noise. And he seemed to be like a soldier of the
_gentry_ on guard. As we were leaving the mountains, he told us not to
look back, and we didn't. Another time I was alone trout-fishing in
nearly the same region when I heard a voice say, "It is ---- barefooted
and fishing." Then there came a whistle like music and a noise like the
beating of a drum, and soon one of the _gentry_ came and talked with me
for half an hour. He said, "Your mother will die in eleven months, and
do not let her die unanointed." And she did die within eleven months. As
he was going away he warned me, "You must be in the house before sunset.
Do not delay! Do not delay! They can do nothing to you until I get back
in the castle." As I found out afterwards, he was going to _take_ me,
but hesitated because he did not want to leave my mother alone. After
these warnings I was always afraid to go to the mountains, but lately I
have been told I could go if I took a friend with me.'