and confirmed by Celtic and non-Celtic percipients, when considered in
relation to its non-Celtic sources and then at once contrasted with
ancient and modern Celtic beliefs of the same character which constitute
it--to be seen in the above Gaelic and Brythonic manuscript and other
evidence, and in Cædmon's theory that angels are small beings--plunges
us into the very complex and extremely difficult problem how far fairies
as pygmy spirits may be purely Celtic, and how far they may reflect
beliefs not Celtic. The problem, however, is far too complicated to be
discussed here; and one may briefly say that there seems to have been a
time in the evolution of animism when the ancient Celts of Britain, of
Ireland, and of Continental Europe too, held, in common with the ancient
Greeks, Romans, and Teutons, an original Aryan doctrine. This doctrine,
after these four stocks separated in possession of it, began to evolve
its four specialized aspects which we now can study; and in the Irish
Universities of the early Christian centuries, when Ireland was the
centre of European learning, the classical and Celtic aspects of it met
for the first time since their prehistoric divorcement. There, as is
clearly seen later among the mediaeval alchemists and occultists, a new
influence--from Christian theology--was superadded to the ancient
animistic beliefs of Europe as they had evolved up to that time.
_Conclusion_
The ethnological argument, after allowing for all its shortcomings,
suggests that small-statured races like Lapps and Eskimos (though not
necessarily true pygmy races, of whose existence in Europe there is no
proof available) did once inhabit lands where there are Celts, and that
a Celtic folk-memory of these could conceivably have originated a belief
in certain kinds of fairies, and thus have been a shaping influence in
the animistic traditions about other fairies. The animistic argument
shows that pygmies described in Celtic literature and in Celtic and
non-Celtic mythologies are nearly always to be thought of as non-human
spirits; and that there is now and was in past ages a world-wide belief
that the human soul is in stature a pygmy. The philosophical argument of
alchemists and mystics, in a way, draws to itself the animistic
argument, and sets up the hypothesis that the smallness of elves and
fairies is due to their own nature, because they actually exist as
invisible tribes of non-human beings of pygmy size and form.
THE CHANGELING BELIEF
The smallness of fairies, which has just been considered, and the belief
in changelings are the two most prominent characteristics of the
Fairy-Faith, according to our evidence in chapter ii; and we are now to
consider the second. The prevalent and apparently the only important
theories which are current to explain this belief in changelings may be
designated as the Kidnap Theory and the Human-Sacrifice Theory. These we
shall proceed to estimate, after which there will be introduced newer
and seemingly more adequate theories.
_Kidnap Theory_
Some writers have argued that the changeling belief merely reflects a
time when the aboriginal pre-Celtic peoples held in subjection by the
Celts, and forced to live in mountain caverns and in secret retreats
underground, occasionally kidnapped the children of their conquerors,
and that such kidnapped children sometimes escaped and told to their
Celtic kinsmen highly romantic tales about having been in an underground
fairy-world with fairies. Frequently this argument has taken a slightly
different form: that instead of unfriendly pre-Celtic peoples it was
magic-working Druids who--either through their own choice or else,
having been driven to bay by the spread of Christianity, through force
of circumstances--dwelt in secret in chambered mounds or souterrains, or
in dense forests, and then stole young people for recruits, sometimes
permitting them, years afterwards, when too old to be of further use, to
return home under an inviolable vow of secrecy.[150] And Mr. David
MacRitchie in supporting his own Pygmy Theory has made interesting
modern elaborations of these two slightly different theories concerning
changelings.[151]
As already pointed out, there are definite ethnological elements blended
in the other parts of the complex Fairy-Faith; and so in this part of
it, the changeling belief, there are conceivably more of such elements
which lend some support to the Kidnap Theory. In itself, however, as we
hope to show conclusively, the Theory, failing to grasp the essential
and underlying character of this belief, does not adequately explain it.
_Human-Sacrifice Theory_
Alfred Nutt advanced a theory, which anticipated one part of our own,
that 'the changeling story is found to be connected with the antique
conception of life and sacrifice'. And he wrote:--'It is at least
possible that the sickly and ailing would be rejected when the time came
for each family to supply its quota of victims, and this might easily
translate itself in the folk-memory into the statement that the fairies
had carried off the healthy' (alone acceptable as sacrifice) 'and left
in exchange the sickly.'[152] Though our evidence will not permit us to
accept the theory (why it will not will be clear as we proceed) that
some such sacrificial customs among the ancient Celts entirely account
for the changeling story, yet we consider it highly probable that the
theory helps to explain particular aspects of the complex tradition, and
that the underlying philosophy of sacrifice extended in an animistic
way, as we shall try to extend it, probably offers more complete
explanation.
Thus, the Mexicans believed that the souls of all sacrificed children
went to live with the god Tlaloc in his heaven-world.[153] Among the
Greeks, a sacrificed victim appears to have been sent as a messenger,
bearing a message repeated to him before death to some god.[154] On the
funeral pile of Patroclus were laid Trojan captives, together with
horses and hounds, a practice corresponding to that of American Red Men;
the idea being that the sacrificed Trojans and the horses and hounds as
well, were thus sent to serve the slain warriors in the otherworld.
Among ourselves in Europe and in America it is not uncommon to read in
the daily newspaper about a suicide as resulting from the belief that
death alone can bring union with a deceased sweetheart or loved one.
These examples, and very many parallel ones to be found the world over,
seem to furnish the key to the theory of sacrifice: namely, that by
extinguishing life in this world it is transmitted to the world of the
gods, spirits, and the dead.
Both Sir John Rhys and D'Arbois de Jubainville have shown that the
Irish were wont to sacrifice the first-born of children and of
flocks.[155] O'Curry points out a clear case of human sacrifice at an
ancient Irish funeral[156]:--'Fiachra then brought fifty hostages with
him from Munster'; and, when he died, 'the hostages which he brought
from the south were buried alive around the _Fert_ (burial mound) of
Fiachra.' More commonly the ancient Celts seem to have made sacrifices
to appease place-spirits before the erection of a new building, by
sending to them through death the soul of a youth (see p. 436).
It is in such animistic beliefs as these, which underlie sacrifice, that
we find a partial solution of the problem of changeling belief. But the
sacrifice theory is also inadequate; for, though changelings may in some
cases in ancient times have conceivably been the sickly children
discarded by priests as unfit for sending to the gods or fairies, how
can we explain actual changelings to be met with to-day in all Celtic
lands? Some other hypothesis is evidently necessary.
_Soul-Wandering Theory_
Comparative study shows that non-Celtic changeling beliefs parallel to
those of the Celts exist almost everywhere, that they centre round the
primitive idea that the human soul can be abstracted from the body by
disembodied spirits and by magicians, and that they do not depend upon
the sacrifice theory, though animistically closely related to it. For
example, according to the Lepers' Islanders, ghosts steal men--as
fairies do--'to add them to their company; and if a man has left
children when he died, one of whom sickens afterwards, it is said that
the dead father takes it.'[157] In Banks Island, Polynesia, the ghost of
a woman who has died in childbirth is greatly dreaded: as long as her
child is on earth she cannot proceed to Panoi, the otherworld; and the
relatives take her child to another house, 'because they know that the
mother will come back to take its soul.'[158] When a Motlav child
sneezes, the mother will cry, 'Let him come back into the world! let him
remain.' Under similar circumstances in Mota, the cry is, 'Live; roll
back to us!' 'The notion is that a ghost is drawing a child's soul
away.' If the child falls ill the attempt has succeeded, and a wizard
throws himself into a trance and goes to the ghost-world to bring the
child's soul back.[159] In the islands of Kei and Kisar a belief
prevails that the spirits of the dead can take to themselves the souls
of the living who go near the graves.[160] Sometimes a Polynesian mother
insists on being buried with her dead child; or a surviving wife with
her dead husband, so that there will be no separation.[161] These last
practices help to illustrate the Celtic theory behind the belief that
fairies can abduct adults.
Throughout Melanesia sickness is generally attributed to the soul's
absence from the body, and this state of disembodiment is believed to be
due to some ghost's or spirit's interference,[162] just as among Celts
sickness is often thought to be due to fairies having taken the soul to
Fairyland. An old Irish piper who came up to Lady Gregory's home at
Coole Park told us that a certain relative of his, a woman, had lain in
a semi-conscious state of illness for months, and that when she
recovered full consciousness she declared she had been with the 'good
people'.
Folk-beliefs like all the above, which more adequately explain the
changeling idea than the Human-Sacrifice Theory, are world-wide, being
at once Celtic and non-Celtic.[163]
_Demon-Possession Theory_
There has been among many peoples, primitive and civilized, a
complementary belief to the one that evil spirits or ghosts may steal a
soul and so cause in the vacated body illness if the abduction is
temporary, and death if it is permanent: namely, a belief that demons,
who sometimes may be souls of the dead, can possess a human body while
the soul is out of it during sleep, or else can expel the soul and
occupy its place.[164] When complete possession of this character takes
place there is--as in 'mediumship'--a change of personality, and the
manner, thoughts, actions, language, and the whole nature of the
possessed person are radically changed. Sometimes a foreign tongue, of
which the subject is ignorant, is fluently spoken. When the possession
is an evil one, as Dr. Nevius has observed in China, where the phenomena
are common, the change of character is in the direction of immorality,
frequently in strong contrast with the character of the subject under
normal conditions, and is often accompanied by paroxysms and contortions
of the body, as I have often been solemnly assured by Celts is the case
in a changeling. (See M. Le Scour's account on page 198, of three
changelings that he saw in one family in Finistère; and compare what is
said about fairy changelings in Ireland, Scotland, Isle of Man, Wales,
and Cornwall.)
A conception like that among the Chinese, of how an evil spirit may
dispossess the soul inhabiting a child's or adult's body, seems to be
the basis and original conception behind the fairy-changeling belief in
all Celtic and other countries. When a child has been changed by
fairies, and an old fairy left in its place, the child has been,
according to this theory, dispossessed of its body by an evil fairy,
which a Chinaman calls a demon, while the leaving behind of the old
fairy accounts for the changed personality and changed facial expression
of the demon-possessed infant. The Chinese demon enters into and takes
complete possession of the child's body while the child's soul is out of
it during sleep--and all fairies make changelings when a babe is asleep
in its cradle at night, or during the day when it is left alone for a
short time. The Chinese child-soul is then unable to return into its
body until some kind of magical ceremony or exorcism expels the
possessing demon; and through precisely similar methods, often aided by
Christian priests, Celts cure changelings made by fairies, pixies, and
_corrigans_. In the following account, therefore, apparently lies the
root explanation of the puzzling beliefs concerning fairy changelings so
commonly met with in the Celtic Fairy-Faith:--'To avert the calamity of
nursing a demon, dried banana-skin is burnt to ashes, which are then
mixed with water. Into this the mother dips her finger and paints a
cross upon the sleeping babe's forehead. In a short time the demon soul
returns--for the soul wanders from the body during sleep and is
free--but, failing to recognize the body thus disguised, flies off. The
true soul, which has been waiting for an opportunity, now approaches the
dormant body, and, if the mark has been washed off in time, takes
possession of it; but if not, it, like the demon, failing to recognize
the body, departs, and the child dies in its sleep.'[165]
In relation to this Demon-Possession Theory, the writer has had the
opportunity of observing carefully some living changelings among the
Celts, and is convinced that in many such cases there is an undoubted
belief expressed by the parents and friends that fairy-possession has
taken place. This belief often translates itself naturally into the
folk-theory that the body of the child has also been changed, when
examination proves only a change of personality as recognized by
psychologists; or, in a distinct type of changelings, those who exhibit
great precocity in childhood combined with an old and wizened
countenance, there is neither a changed personality nor
demon-possession, but simply some abnormal physical or mental condition,
in the nature of cretinism, atrophy, marasmus, or arrested development.
One of the most striking examples of a changeling exists at
Plouharnel-Carnac, Brittany, where there is now living a dwarf Breton
whom I have photographed and talked with, and who may possibly combine
in himself both the abnormal psychical and the abnormal pathological
conditions. He is no taller than a normal child ten years old, but being
over thirty years old he is thick-set, though not deformed. All the
peasants who know him call him 'the Little _Corrigan_', and his own
mother declares that he is not the child she gave birth to. He once said
to me with a kind of pathetic protest, 'Did M. ---- tell you that I am a
demon?'
_Conclusion_
The Kidnap Theory, resting entirely upon the ethnological and social or
psychological elements which we have elsewhere pointed out as existing
in the superficial aspects of the essentially animistic Fairy-Faith as a
whole, is accordingly limited in its explanation of this specialized
part of the Fairy-Faith, the changeling belief, to these same elements
which may exist in the changeling belief. And, on the showing of
anthropology, the other theories undoubtedly offer a more adequate
explanation.
By means of sacrifice, according to its underlying philosophy, man is
able to transmit souls from this world to the world where dwell the gods
and fairy-folk both good and evil. Thus, had Abraham sacrificed Isaac,
the soul of Isaac would have been taken to heaven by Jehovah as fairies
take souls to Fairyland through death. But the difference is that in
human sacrifice men do voluntarily and for specific religious ends what
various kinds of fairies or spirits would do without human intervention
and often maliciously, as our review of ancient and modern theories of
sacrifice has shown. Gods and fairies are spiritual beings; hence only
the spiritual part of man can be delivered over to them.
Melanesians and other peoples whose changeling beliefs have now been
examined, regard all illness and death as the result of spirit
interference; while Celts regard strange maladies in children and in
adults as the result of fairy interference. And to no Celt is death in
early life a natural thing: if it comes to a child or to a beautiful
youth in any way whatsoever, the fairies have taken what they coveted.
In all mythologies gods have always enjoyed the companionship of
beautiful maidens, and goddesses the love of heroic youths; and they
have often taken them to their world as the Tuatha De Danann took the
great heroes of the ancient Celts to the Otherworld or Avalon, and as
they still in the character of modern fairies abduct brides and young
mothers, and bridegrooms or other attractive young men whom they wish to
have with them in Fairyland (see our chapters iv-vi).
Where sacrifice or death has not brought about such complete transfer or
abduction of the soul to the fairy world, there is only a temporary
absence from human society; and, meanwhile, the vacated body is under a
fairy spell and lies ill, or unconscious if there is a trance state. If
the body is an infant's, a fairy may possess it, as in the Chinese
theory of demon-possession. In such cases the Celts often think that the
living body is that of another child once _taken_ but since grown too
old for Fairyland; though the rational explanation frequently is purely
pathological. Looked at philosophically, a fairy exchange of this kind
is fair and evenly balanced, and there has been no true robbery. And in
this aspect of the changeling creed--an aspect of it purely
Celtic--there seems to be still another influence apart from human
sacrifice, soul-abductions, demon or fairy-possession, and disease;
namely, a greatly corrupted folk-memory of an ancient re-birth doctrine:
the living are taken to the dead or the fairies and then sent back
again, after the manner of Socrates' argument that the living come from
the dead and the dead from the living (cf. our chapter vii). In all such
exchanges, the economy of Nature demands that the balance between the
two worlds be maintained: hence there arose the theories of human
sacrifice, of soul abduction, of demon or fairy-possession; and in all
these collectively is to be found the complete psychological explanation
of the fairy-changeling and fairy-abduction beliefs among ancient and
modern Celts as these show themselves in the Fairy-Faith. All remaining
classes of changelings, which fall outside the scope of this clearly
defined psychological theory, are to be explained pathologically.
MAGIC AND WITCHCRAFT
The evidence from each Celtic country shows very clearly that magic and
witchcraft are inseparably blended in the Fairy-Faith, and that human
beings, i. e. 'charmers,' _dynion hysbys_, and other magicians, and
sorceresses, are often enabled through the aid of fairies to perform the
same magical acts as fairies; or, again, like Christian priests who use
exorcisms, they are able, acting independently, to counteract fairy
power, thereby preventing changelings or curing them, saving churnings,
healing man or beast of 'fairy-strokes', and, in short, nullifying all
undesirable influences emanating from the fairy world. A correct
interpretation of these magical elements so prominent in the Fairy-Faith
is of fundamental importance, because if made it will set us on one of
the main psychical highways which traverse the vast territory of our
anthropological inquiry. Let us, then, undertake such an interpretation,
first setting up, as we must, some sort of working hypothesis as to what
magic is, witchcraft being assumed to be a part of magic.
_Theories of Modern Anthropologists_
We may define magic, as understood by ancients and moderns, civilized or
non-civilized, apart from conjuring, which is mere jugglery and
deception of the senses, as the art of controlling for particular ends
various kinds of invisible forces, often, and, as we hold, generally
thought of as intelligent spirits. This is somewhat opposed to Mr.
Marett's point of view, which emphasizes 'pre-animistic influences',
i. e. 'powers to which the animistic form is very vaguely attributed if
at all.' And, in dealing with the anthropological aspects of
spell-casting in magical operations, Mr. Marett conceives such a magical
act to be in relation to the magician 'generically, a projection of
imperative will, and specifically one that moves on a supernormal
plane', and the victim's position towards this invisible projected force
to be 'a position compatible with _rapport_'.[166] He also thinks it
probable that the essence of the magician's supernormal power lies in
what Melanesians call _mana_.[166] In our opinion _mana_ may be equated
with what William James, writing of his attitude toward psychical
phenomena, called a universally diffused 'soul-stuff' leaking through,
so to speak, and expressing itself in the human individual.[167] On this
view, Mr. Marett's theory would amount to saying that magicians are able
to produce magical effects because they are able to control this
'soul-stuff'; and our evidence would regard all spirits and fairies as
portions of such universally diffused _mana_, 'soul-stuff', or, as
Fechner might call it, the 'Soul of the World'. Moreover, in essence,
such an idea of magic coincides, when carefully examined, with what
ancient thinkers like Plato, Iamblichus, the Neo-Platonists generally,
and mediaeval magicians like Paracelsus and Eliphas Levi, called magic;
and agrees with ancient Celtic magic--judging from what Roman historians
have recorded concerning it, and from Celtic manuscripts themselves.
Other modern anthropologists have set up far less satisfactory
definitions of magic. According to Dr. Frazer, for example, magic
assumes, as natural science does, that 'one event follows another
necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any spiritual or
personal agency'.[168] Such a theory is not supported by the facts of
anthropology; and does not even apply to those specialized and often
superficial kinds of magic classed under it by Dr. Frazer as
'sympathetic and imitative magic', i. e. that through which like produces
like, or part produces whole. To our mind, sympathetic and imitative
magic (to leave out of account many fallacious and irrational
ritualistic practices, which Dr. Frazer includes under these loose
terms), _when genuine_, in their varied aspects are directly dependent
upon hypnotic states, upon telepathy, mind-reading, mental suggestion,
association of ideas, and similar processes; in short, are due to the
operation of mind on mind and will on will, and, moreover, are
recognized by primitive races to have this fundamental character. Or,
according to the Fairy-Faith, they are caused by a fairy or disembodied
spirit acting upon an embodied one, a man or woman; and not, as Dr.
Frazer holds, through 'mistaken applications of one or other of two
great fundamental laws of thought, namely, the association of ideas by
similarity and the association of ideas by contiguity in space or
time'.[169]
The mechanical causation theory of magic, as thus set forth in _The
Golden Bough_, does not imply _mana_ or will-power, as Mr. Marett's more
adequate theory does in part: Dr. Frazer wishes us to regard animistic
religious practices as distinct from magic.[170] Nevertheless, in direct
opposition to Dr. Frazer's view, the weight of the evidence from the
past and from the present, which we are about to offer, is decidedly
favourable to our regarding magic and religion as complementary to one
another and, for all ordinary purposes of the anthropologist, as in
principle the same. The testimony touching magicians in all ages, Celtic
magic and witchcraft as well, besides that resulting from modern
psychical research, tends to establish an almost exclusively animistic
hypothesis to account for fairy magical phenomena and like phenomena
among human beings; and with these phenomena we are solely concerned.
_Among the Ancients_[171]
Among the more cultured Greeks and Romans--and the same can be said of
most great nations of antiquity--it was an unquestioned belief that
innumerable gods, placed in hierarchies, form part of an unbroken
spiritual chain at the lowest end of which stands man, and at the
highest the incomprehensible Supreme Deity. These gods, having their
abodes throughout the Universe, act as the agents of the Unknown God,
directing the operation of His cosmic laws and animating every star and
planet. Inferior to these gods, and to man also, the ancients believed
there to be innumerable hosts of invisible beings, called by them
daemons, who, acting as the servants of the gods, control, and thus in a
secondary sense create, all the minor phenomena of inanimate and animate
nature, such as tempests, atmospheric disturbances generally, the
failure of crops or their abundance, maladies and their cure, good and
evil passions in men, wars and peace, and all the blessings and curses
which affect the purely human life.
Man, being of the god-race and thus superior to these lower, servile
entities, could, like the gods, control them if adept in the magical
sciences; for ancient Magic, about which so much has been written and
about which so little has been understood by most people in ancient,
mediaeval, and modern times, is according to the wisest ancients nothing
more than the controlling of daemons, shades, and all sorts of secondary
spirits or elementals by men specially trained for that purpose.
Sufficient records are extant to make it evident that the fundamental
training of Egyptian, Indian, Assyrian, Greek, Roman, and Druid priests
was in the magical or occult sciences. Pliny, in his _Natural History_,
says:--'And to-day Britain practises the art [of magic] with religious
awe and with so many ceremonies that it might seem to have made the art
known to the Persians.'[172] Herein, then, is direct evidence that the
Celtic Fairy-Faith, considered in its true psychic nature, has been
immediately shaped by the ancient Celtic religion; and, as our witness
from the Isle of Skye so clearly set forth, that it originated among a
cultured class of the Celts more than among the peasants. And, in
accordance with this evidence, Professor Georges Dottin, who has made a
special study of the historical records concerning Druidism,
writes:--'The Druids of Ireland appear to us above all as magicians and
prophets. They foretell the future, they interpret the secret will of
the _fées_ (fairies), they cast lots.'[173] Thus, in spite of the
popular and Christian reshaping which the belief in fairies has had to
endure, its origin is easily enough discerned even in its modern form,
covered over though this is with accretions foreign to its primal
character.
Magic was the supreme science because it raised its adepts out of the
ordinary levels of humanity to a close relationship with the gods and
creative powers. Nor was it a science to be had for the asking, 'for
many were the wand-bearers and few the chosen.' Roman writers tell us
that neophytes for the druidic priesthood often spent twenty years in
severe study and training before being deemed fit to be called Druids.
We need not, however, in this study enter into an exposition of the
ordeals and trials of candidates seeking magical training, or else
initiation into the Mysteries. There were always two schools to which
they could apply, directly opposed in their government and policy--the
school of white magic and the school of black magic; the former being a
school in which magical powers were used in religious rites and always
for good ends, the latter a school in which all magical powers were used
for wholly selfish and evil ends. In both schools the preliminary
training was the same; that is to say, the first thing taught to the
neophyte was self-control. When he proved himself absolutely his own
master, when his teachers were certain that he could not be dominated by
another will or by any outside or psychic influence, then for the first
time he was permitted to exercise his own iron will in controlling
daemons, ghosts, and all the elemental hosts of the air--either as a
white magician or as a black magician.[174]
The magical sciences taught (an idea which still holds its ground, as
one can discover in modern India) that by formulas of invocation, by
chants, by magic sounds, by music, these invisible beings can be made to
obey the will of the magician even as they obey the will of the gods.
The calling up of the dead and talking with them is called necromancy;
the foretelling through spiritual agency and otherwise of coming events
or things hidden, like the outcome of a battle, is called divination;
the employment of charms against children so as to prevent their growing
is known as fascination; to cause any ill fortune or death to fall upon
another person by magic is sorcery; to excite the sexual passions of man
or woman, magical mixtures called philtres are used. Almost all these
definitions apply to the practices of black magic. But the great schools
known as the Mysteries were of white magic, in so far as they practised
the art; and such men as Pythagoras, Plato, and Aeschylus, who are
supposed to have been initiated into them, always held them in the
highest reverence, though prohibited from directly communicating
anything of their esoteric teachings concerning the origin and destiny
of man, the nature of the gods, and the constitution of the universe and
its laws.
In Plato's _Banquet_ the power or function of the daemonic element in
nature is explained. Socrates asks of the prophetess Diotima what is the
power of the daemonic element (personified as Love for the purposes of
the argument), and she replies:--'He interprets between gods and men,
conveying and taking across to the gods the prayers and sacrifices of
men, and to men the commands and replies of the gods; he is the mediator
who spans the chasm which divides them, and therefore in him all is
bound together, and through him the arts of the prophets and priests,
their sacrifices and mysteries and charms, and all prophecy and
incantation find their way. For God mingles not with man; but through
the daemonic element (or Love) all the intercourse and converse of God
with man, whether awake or asleep, is carried on. The wisdom which
understands this is spiritual.'[175]
_Among the Ancient Celts_
If we turn now directly to Celtic magic in ancient times, we discover
that the testimony of Pliny is curiously confirmed by Celtic
manuscripts, chiefly Irish ones, and that then, as now, witchcraft and
fairy powers over men and women are indistinguishable in their general
character. Thus, in the _Echtra Condla_, 'the Adventures of Connla,' the
fairy woman says of Druidism and magic:--'Druidism is not loved, little
has it progressed to honour on the Great Strand. When his law shall come
it will scatter the charms of Druids _from journeying on the lips of
black, lying demons_'--so characterized by the Christian
transcribers.[176] In _How Fionn Found his Missing Men_, an ancient tale
preserved by oral tradition until recorded by Campbell, it is said that
'Fionn then went out with Bran (his fairy dog). There were millions of
people (apparitions) out before him, called up by some sleight of
hand'.[177] In the _Leabhar na h-Uidre_, or 'Book of the Dun Cow' (p. 43
a), compiled from older manuscripts about A. D. 1100, there is a clear
example of Irish fetishism based on belief in the power of demons:--'...
for their swords used to turn against them (the Ulstermen) when they made
a false trophy. Reasonable [was] this; for demons used to speak to them
from their arms, so that hence their arms were safeguards.'[178]
Shape-shifting quite after the fairy fashion is very frequently met
with in old Celtic literature. Thus, in the Rennes _Dinnshenchas_ there
is this passage showing that spirits or fairies were regarded as
necessary for the employment of magic:--'Folks were envious of them
(Faifne the poet and his sister Aige): so they loosed elves at them who
transformed Aige into a fawn' (the form assumed by the fairy mother of
Oisin, see p. 299 n.), 'and sent her on a circuit all round Ireland, and
the fians of Meilge son of Cobthach, king of Ireland, killed her.'[179]
A fact which ought to be noted in this connexion is that kings or great
heroes, rather than ordinary men and women, are very commonly described
as being able to shift their own shape, or that of other people; e. g.
'Mongan took on himself the shape of Tibraide, and gave Mac an Daimh the
shape of the cleric, with a large tonsure on his head.'[180] And when
this fact is coupled with another, namely the ancient belief that such
kings and great heroes were incarnations and reincarnations of the
Tuatha De Danann, who form the supreme fairy hierarchy, we realize that,
having such an origin, they were simply exercising in human bodies
powers which their divine race exercise over men from the fairy world
(see our chapter iv).
In Brythonic literature and mythology, magic and witchcraft with the
same animistic character play as great or even a greater rôle than in
Gaelic literature and mythology. This is especially true with respect to
the Arthurian Legend, and to the _Mabinogion_, some of which tales are
regarded by scholars as versions of Irish ones. Sir John Rhys and
Professor J. Loth, who have been the chief translators of the
_Mabinogion_, consider their chief literary machinery to be magic (see
our chapter v).
So far it ought to be clear that Celtic magic contains much animism in
its composition, and that these few illustrations of it, selected from
numerous illustrations in the ancient Fairy-Faith, confirm Pliny's
independent testimony that in his age the Britons seemed capable of
instructing even the Persians themselves in the magical arts.
_European and American Witchcraft_
In a general way, the history of witchcraft in Europe and in the
American colonies is supplementary to what has already been said, seeing
that it is an offshoot of mediaeval magic, which in turn is an offshoot
of ancient magic. Witchcraft in the West, in probably a majority of
cases, is a mere fabric of absurd superstitions and practices--as it is
shown to be by the evidence brought out in so many of the horrible legal
and ecclesiastical processes conducted against helpless and eccentric
old people, and other men and women, including the young, often for the
sake of private revenge, and generally on no better foundation than
hearsay and false accusations. In the remaining instances it undoubtedly
arose, as ancient witchcraft (black magic) seems to have arisen, through
the infiltration of occult knowledge into uneducated and often
criminally inclined minds, so that what had formerly been secretly
guarded among the learned, and generally used for legitimate ends,
degenerated in the hands of the unfit into black magic. In our own age,
a parallel development, which adequately illustrates our subject of
inquiry, has taken place in the United States: fragments of magical lore
bequeathed by Mesmer and his immediate predecessors, the alchemists,
were practically and honestly applied to the practice of magnetic
healing and healing through mental suggestion by a small group of
practitioners in Massachusetts, and then with much ingenuity and real
genius were applied by Mary Baker Eddy to the interpretation of
miraculous healing by Jesus Christ. Hence arose a new religion called
Christian Science. But this religious movement did not stop at mental
healing: according to published reports, during the years 1908-9 the
leader of the New York First Church of Christ, Scientist, was deposed,
and, with certain of her close associates, was charged with having
projected daily against the late Mrs. Eddy's adjutant a current of
'malicious animal magnetism' from New York to Boston, in order to bring
about his death. The process is said to have been for the deposed
leader and her friends to sit together in a darkened room with their
eyes closed. 'Then one of them would say: "You all know Mr. ----. You
all know that his place is in the darkness whence he came. If his place
is six feet under ground, that is where he should be." Then all present
would concentrate their minds on the one thought--Mr. ---- and six feet
under ground.' And this practice is supposed to have been kept up for
days. Mrs. ----, who gives this testimony, is a friend of the victim,
and she asserts that these evil thought-waves slowly but surely began
his effacement, and that had the black magicians down in New York not
been discovered in time, Mr. ---- could not have withstood the
forces.[181] Perhaps so enlightened a country as the United States may
in time see history repeat itself, and add a new chapter to witchcraft;
for the true witches were not the kind who are popularly supposed to
ride on broomsticks and to keep a house full of black cats, and the
sooner this is recognized the better.
According to this aspect of Christian Science, 'malicious animal
magnetism' (or black magic), an embodied spirit, i. e. a man or woman,
possesses and can employ the same magical powers as a disembodied
spirit--or, as the Celts would say, the same magical powers as a
fairy--casting spells, and producing disease and death in the victim.
And this view coincides with ordinary witchcraft theories; for witches
have been variously defined as embodied spirits who have ability to act
in conjunction with disembodied spirits through the employment of
various occult forces, e. g. forces comparable to Mesmer's odic forces,
to the Melanesian _mana_, or to the 'soul-stuff' postulated by William
James, or, as Celts think, to forces focused in fairies themselves. So,
also, according to Mr. Marett's view, there is a state of _rapport_
between the victim and the magician or witch; and where such a state of
_rapport_ exists there is some _mana_-like force passing between the two
poles of the magical circuit, whether it be only unconscious mental or
electrical force emanating from the operator, or an extraneous force
brought under control and concentrated in some such conscious unit as we
designate by the term 'spirit', 'devil', or 'fairy'.
In conformity with this psychical or animistic view of witchcraft, in
the Capital Code of Connecticut (A. D. 1642) a witch is defined as one
who 'hath or consorteth with a familiar spirit'.[182] European codes, as
illustrated by the sixth chapter of Lord Coke's _Third Institute_, have
parallels to this definition:--'A witch is a person which hath
conference with the devil; to consult with him to do some act.'[182] And
upon these theories, not upon the broomstick and black-cat conception,
were based the trials for witchcraft during the seventeenth century.
The Bible, then so frequently the last court of appeal in such matters,
was found to sustain such theories about witches in the classical
example of the Witch of Endor and Saul; and the idea of witchcraft in
Europe and America came to be based--as it probably always had been in
pagan times--on the theory that living persons could control or be
controlled by disembodied spirits for evil ends. Hence all black
magicians, and what are now known as 'spirit mediums', were made liable
by law to the death penalty.[183]
In mediaeval Europe the great difficulty always was, as is shown in the
trials of Jeanne d'Arc, to decide whether the invisible agent in magical
processes, such as was imputed to the accused, was an angel or a demon.
If an angel, then the accused was a saint, and might become a candidate
for canonization; but if a demon, the accused was a witch, and liable to
a death-sentence. The wisest old doctors of the University of Paris, who
sat in judgement (or were consulted) in one of Jeanne's trials, could
not fully decide this knotty problem, nor, apparently, the learned
churchmen who also tried her; but evidently they all agreed that it was
better to waive the question. And, finally, an innocent peasant girl who
had heard Divine Voices, and who had thereby miraculously saved her king
and her country, was burned at the stake, under the joint direction of
English civil and ecclesiastical authorities, and, if not technically,
at least practically, with the full approval of the corresponding French
authorities, at Rouen, France, May 30, A. D. 1431.[184] In April, A. D.
1909, almost five centuries afterwards, it has been decided with tardy
justice that Jeanne's Voices were those of angels and not of demons, and
she has been made a saint.
How the case of Jeanne d'Arc bears directly upon the Fairy-Faith is
self-evident: One of the first questions asked by Jeanne's inquisitors
was 'if she had any knowledge of those who went to the Sabbath with the
fairies? or if she had not assisted at the assemblies held at the
fountain of the fairies, near Domremy, around which dance malignant
spirits?' And another question exactly as recorded was this:--'_Interroguée
s'elle croiet point au devant de aujourduy, que les fées feussent maulvais
esperis: respond qu'elle n'en sçavoit rien._'[185]
_Conclusion_
Finally, we may say that what medicine-men are to American Indians, to
Polynesians, Australians, Africans, Eskimos, and many other contemporary
races, or what the mightier magicians of modern India are to their
people, the 'fairy-doctors' and 'charmers' of Ireland, Scotland, and Man
are to the Gaels, and the '_Dynion Hysbys_' or 'Wise Men' of Wales, the
witches of Cornwall, and the seers, sorceresses, and exorcists of
Brittany are to the Brythons. These Gaelic and Brythonic magicians and
witches, and 'fairy mediums', almost invariably claim to derive their
power from their ability to see and to communicate with fairies,
spirits, and the dead; and they generally say that they are enabled
through such spiritual agencies to reveal the past, to foretell the
future, to locate lost property, to cast spells upon human beings and
upon animals, to remove such spells, to cure fairy strokes and
changelings, to perform exorcisms, and to bring people back from
Fairyland.
We arrive at the following conclusion:--If, as eminent psychical
researchers now postulate (and as many of them believe), there are
active and intelligent disembodied beings able to act psychically upon
embodied men in much the same way that embodied men are known ordinarily
to act psychically upon one another, then there is every logical and
common-sense reason for extending this psychical hypothesis so as to
include the ancient, mediaeval, and modern theory of magic and
witchcraft, namely, that what embodied men and women can do in magical
ways, as for example in hypnotism, disembodied men and women can do.
Further, if fairies, in accord with reliable testimony from educated and
critical percipients, hypothetically exist (whatever their nature may
be), they may be possessed of magical powers of the same sort, and so
can cast spells upon or possess living human beings as Celts believe and
assert. And this hypothesis coincides in most essentials with the one we
used as a basis for this discussion, that, in accordance with the
Melanesian doctrine of control of ghosts and spirits with their inherent
_mana_, magical acts are possible.[186] This in turn applied to the
Celts amounts to a hypothetical confirmation of the ancient druidical
doctrine that through control of fairies or demons (daemons) Druids or
magicians could control the weather and natural phenomena connected with
vegetable and animal processes, could cast spells, could divine the
future, could execute all magical acts.
EXORCISMS
According to the testimony of anthropology, exorcism as a religious
practice has always flourished wherever animistic beliefs have furnished
it with the necessary environment; and not only has exorcism been a
fundamental part of religious practices in past ages, but it is so at
the present day. Among Christians, Celtic and non-Celtic, among
followers of all the great historical religions, and especially among
East Indians, Chinese, American Red Men, Polynesians, and most Africans,
the expelling of demons from men and women, from animals, from inanimate
objects, and from places, is sanctioned by well-established rituals.
Exorcism as applied to the human race is thus defined in the
_Dictionnaire de Théologie_ (Roman Catholic) by L'Abbé
Bergier:--'_Exorcism_--conjuration, prayer to God, and command given to
the demon to depart from the body of persons possessed.' The same
authority thus logically defends its practice by the Church:--'Far from
condemning the opinion of the Jews, who attributed to the demon certain
maladies, that divine Master confirmed it.'[187] And whenever exorcism
of this character has been or is now generally practised, the
professional exorcist appears as a personage just as necessary to
society as the modern doctor, since nearly all diseases were and to some
extent are still, both among Christians and non-Christians, very often
thought to be the result of demon-possession.
When we come to the dawn of the Christian period in Ireland and in
Scotland, we see Patrick and Columba, the first and greatest of the
Gaelic missionaries, very extensively practising exorcism; and there is
every reason to believe (though the data available on this point are
somewhat unsatisfactory) that their wide practice of exorcism was quite
as much a Christian adaptation of pre-Christian Celtic exorcism, such as
the Druids practised, as it was a continuation of New Testament
tradition. We may now present certain of the data which tend to verify
this supposition, and by means of them we shall be led to realize how
fundamentally such an animistic practice as exorcism must have shaped
the Fairy-Faith of the Celts, both before and after the coming of
Christianity.
'Once upon a time,' so the tale runs about Patrick, 'his foster-mother
went to milk the cow. He also went with her to drink a draught of new
milk. Then the cow goes mad in the byre and killed five other kine: a
demon, namely, entered her. There was great sadness on his
foster-mother, and she told him to bring the kine back to life. Then he
brought the kine to life, so that they were whole, and he cured the mad
one. So God's name and Patrick's were magnified thereby.'[188] On
another occasion, when demons came to Ireland in the form of black
birds, quite after the manner of the Irish belief that fairies assume
the form of crows (see pp. 302-5), the Celtic ire of Patrick was so
aroused in trying to exorcize them out of the country that he threw his
bell at them with such violence that it was cracked, and then he
wept:--'Now at the end of those forty days and forty nights' [of
Patrick's long fast on the summit of Cruachan Aigle or Croagh Patrick,
Ireland's Holy Mountain] 'the mountain was filled with black birds, so
that he knew not heaven or earth. He sang maledictive psalms at them.
They left him not because of this. Then his anger grew against them. He
strikes his bell at them, so that the men of Ireland heard its voice,
and he flung it at them, so that a gap broke out of it, and that [bell]
is "Brigit's Gapling". Then Patrick weeps till his face and his chasuble
in front of him were wet. No demon came to the land of Erin after that
till the end of seven years and seven months and seven days and seven
nights. Then the angel went to console Patrick and cleansed the
chasuble, and brought white birds round the Rick, and they used to sing
sweet melodies for him.'[188] In Adamnan's _Life of S. Columba_ it is
said that 'according to custom', which in all probability was
established in pagan times by the Druids and then maintained by their
Christian descendants, it was usual to exorcize even a milk vessel
before milking, and the milk in it afterwards.[189] Thus Adamnan tells
us that one day a youth, Columban by name, when he had finished milking,
went to the door of St. Columba's cell carrying the pail full of new
milk that, _according to custom_, the saint might exorcize it. When the
holy man had made the sign of the cross in the air, the air 'was greatly
agitated, and the bar of the lid, driven through its two holes, was shot
away to some distance; the lid fell to the ground, and most of the milk
was spilled on the soil.' Then the saint chided the youth,
saying:--'Thou hast done carelessly in thy work to-day; for thou hast
not cast out the demon that was lurking in the bottom of the empty pail,
by tracing on it, before pouring in the milk, the sign of the Lord's
cross; and now not enduring, thou seest, the virtue of the sign, he has
quickly fled away in terror, while at the same time the whole of the
vessel has been violently shaken, and the milk spilled. Bring then the
pail nearer to me, that I may bless it.' When the half-empty pail was
blessed, in the same moment it was refilled with milk. At another time,
the saint, to destroy the practice of sorcery, commanded Silnan, a
peasant sorcerer, to draw a vessel full of milk from a bull; and by his
diabolical art Silnan drew the milk. Then Columba took it and
said:--'Now it shall be proved that this, which is supposed to be true
milk, is not so, but is blood deprived of its colour by the fraud of
demons to deceive men; and straightway the milky colour was turned into
its own proper quality, that is, into blood.' And it is added that 'The
bull also, which for the space of one hour was at death's door, wasting
and worn by a horrible emaciation, in being sprinkled with water blessed
by the Saint, was cured with wonderful rapidity.'[190]
And to-day, as in the times of Patrick and Columba, exorcism is
practised in Ireland and in the Western Hebrides of Scotland by the
clergy of the Roman Church against fairies, demons, or evil spirits,
when a person is possessed by them--that is to say, 'fairy-struck,' or
when they have entered into some house or place; and on the Scotch
mainland individual Protestants have been known to practise it. A
haunted house at Balechan, Perthshire, in which certain members of the
Psychical Research Society had taken up summer quarters to
'investigate', was exorcized by the late Archbishop of Edinburgh,
assisted by a priest from the Outer Isles.[191]
Among the nine orders of the Irish ecclesiastical organization of
Patrick's time, one was composed of exorcists.[192] The official
ceremony for the ordination of an exorcist in the Latin Church was
established by the Fourth Council of Carthage, and is indicated in
nearly all the ancient rituals. It consists in the bishop giving to the
candidate the book of exorcisms and saying as he does so:--'Receive and
understand this book, and have the power of laying hands upon demoniacs,
whether they be baptized, or whether they be catechumens.'[193] By a
decree of the Church Council of Orange, making men possessed of a demon
ineligible to enter the priesthood, it would seem that the number of
demoniacs must have been very great.[193] As to the efficacy of
exorcisms, the church Fathers during the first four centuries, when the
Platonic philosophy was most influential in Christianity, are
agreed.[193]
In estimating the shaping influences, designated by us as fundamental,
which undoubtedly were exerted upon the Fairy-Faith through the practice
of exorcism, it is necessary to realize that this animistic practice
holds a very important position in the Christian religion which for
centuries the Celtic peoples have professed. One of the two chief
sacraments of Christianity, that of Baptism, is preceded by a definitely
recognized exorcism, as shown in the Roman Ritual, where we can best
study it. In the Exhortation preceding the rite the infant is called a
slave of the demon, and by baptism is to be set free. The salt which is
placed in the mouth of the infant by the priest during the ceremony has
first been exorcized by special rites. Then there follows before the
entrance to the baptismal font a regular exorcism pronounced over the
child: the priest taking some of his own saliva on the thumb of his
right hand, touches the child's ears and nostrils, and commands the
demon to depart out of the child. After this part of the ceremony is
finished, the priest makes on the child's forehead a sign of the cross
with holy oil. Finally, in due order, comes the actual baptism.[194] And
even after baptismal rites have expelled all possessing demons,
precautions are necessary against a repossession: St. Augustine has said
that exorcisms of precaution ought to be performed over every Christian
daily; and it appears that faithful Roman Catholics who each day employ
holy water in making the sign of the cross, and all Protestants who pray
'lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil', are employing
such exorcisms:[195] St. Gregory of Nazianzus writes, 'Arm yourself with
the sign of the cross which the demons fear, and before which they take
their flight'[196]; and by the same sign, said St. Athanasius, 'All the
illusions of the demon are dissipated and all his snares
destroyed.'[197] An eminent Catholic theologian asserts that saints who,
since the time of Jesus Christ, have been endowed with the power of
working miracles, have always made use of the sign of the cross in
driving out demons, in curing maladies, and in raising the dead. In the
_Instruction sur le Rituel_,[198] it is said that water which has been
blessed is particularly designed to be used against demons; in the
_Apostolic Constitutions_, formulated near the end of the fourth
century, holy water is designated as a means of purification from sin
and of putting the demon to flight.[199] And nowadays when the priest
passes through his congregation casting over them holy water, it is as
an exorcism of precaution; or when as in France each mourner at a grave
casts holy water over the corpse, it is undoubtedly--whether done
consciously as such or not--to protect the soul of the deceased from
demons who are held to have as great power over the dead as over the
living. Other forms of exorcism, too, are employed. For example, in the
_Lebar Brecc_, it is said of the Holy Scripture that 'By it the snares
of devils and vices are expelled from every faithful one in the
Church'.[200] And from all this direct testimony it seems to be clear
that many of the chief practices of Christians are exorcisms, so that,
like the religion of Zoroaster, the religion founded by Jesus has come
to rest, at least in part, upon the basic recognition of an eternal
warfare between good and bad spirits for the control of Man.
The curing of diseases through Christian exorcism is by no means rare
now, and it was common a few centuries ago. Thus in the eighteenth
century, beginning with 1752 and till his death, Gassner, a Roman priest
of Closterle, diocese of Coire, Switzerland, devoted his life to curing
people of possessions, declaring that one third of all maladies are so
caused, and fixed his head-quarters at Elwangen, and later at Ratisbon.
His fame spread over many countries of Europe, and he is said to have
made ten thousand cures solely by exorcism.[201] And not only are human
ills overcome by exorcism, but also the maladies of beasts: at Carnac,
on September 13, there continues to be celebrated an annual fête in
honour of St. Cornely, the patron saint of the country and the saint who
(as his name seems to suggest) presides over domestic _horned_ animals;
and if there is a cow, or even a sheep suffering from some ailment which
will not yield to medicine, its owner leads it to the church door
beneath the saint's statue, and the priest blesses it, and, as he does
so, casts over it the exorcizing holy water. The Church Ritual
designates two forms of Benediction for such animals, one form for those
who are ordinarily diseased, and another for those suffering from some
contagious malady. In each ceremony there comes first the sprinkling of
the animal with holy water as it stands before the priest at the church
door; and then there follows in Latin a direct invocation to God to
bless the animal, 'to extinguish in it all diabolical powers,' to defend
its life, and to restore it to health.[202]
In 1868, according to Dr. Evans, an old cow-house in North Wales was
torn down, and in its walls was found a tin box containing an exorcist's
formula. The box and its enclosed manuscript had been hidden there some
years previously to ward off all evil spirits and witchcraft, for
evidently the cattle had been dying of some strange malady which no
doctors could cure. Because of its unique nature, and as an illustration
of what Welsh exorcisms must have been like, we quote the contents of
the manuscripts both as to spelling and punctuation as checked by Sir
John Rhys with the original, except the undecipherable symbols which
come after the archangels' names:--
'[C] Lignum sanctae crusis defendat me a malis presentibus
preateritus & futuris; interioribus & exterioribus [C] [C]
Daniel Evans [C] [C] Omnes spiritus laudet Dominum: Mosen
habent & prophetas. Exergat Deus & disipenture inimiciessus
[C] · [C] O Lord Jesus Christ I beseech thee to preserve
me Daniel Evans; and all that I possess from the power
of all evil men, women; spirits, or wizards, or hardness of
heart, and this I will trust thou will do by the same power
as thou didst cause the blind to see the lame to walk and
they that were possesed with unclean spirits to be in their
own minds Amen Amen [C] [C] [C] [C] pater pater pater Noster
Noster Noster aia aia aia Jesus [C] Christus [C] Messyas [C]
Emmanuel [C] Soter [C] Sabaoth [C] Elohim [C] on [C] Adonay
[C] Tetragrammaton [C] Ag : : [C] Panthon [C] ... reaton
[C] Agios [C] Jasper [C] Melchor [C] Balthasar Amen [C][C][C]
[*][J][*][V][*][M][T][S][T][J][T][Mo].[O][*][J][*][Mo][C][C] And by
the power of our Lord Jesus Christ and His Hevenly Angels
being our Redeemer and Saviour from
Gabriel [_symbols_] all witchcraft and from assaults of the
Michail [_symbols_] Devil Amen [C] O Lord Jesus Christ
I beseech thee to preserve me and all that I possess from
the power of all evil men; women; spirits; or wizards
past, present, or to come inward and outward Amen [C] [C].'[203]
From India Mr. W. Crooke reports similar exorcisms and charms to cure
and to protect cattle.[204] Thus there is employed in Northern India the
_Ajaypâl jantra_, i. e. 'the charm of the Invincible Protector,' one of
Vishnu's titles, in his character as the earth-god Bhûmiya--in Scotland
it would be the charm of the Invincible Fairy who presides over the
flocks and to whom libations are poured--in order to exorcize diseased
cattle or else to prevent cattle from becoming diseased. This _Ajaypâl
jantra_ is a rope of twisted straw, in which chips of wood are inserted.
'In the centre of the rope is suspended an earthen platter, inside which
an incantation is inscribed with charcoal, and beside it is hung a bag
containing seven kinds of grain.' The rope is stretched between two
poles at the entrance of a village, and under it the cattle pass to and
fro from pasture. The following is the incantation found on one of the
earthen saucers:--'O Lord of the Earth on which this cattle-pen stands,
protect the cattle from death and disease! I know of none, save thee,
who can deliver them.' In the Morbihan, Lower Brittany, we seem to see
the same folk-custom, somewhat changed to be sure; for on St. John's
Day, the christianized pagan sun-festival in honour of the summer
solstice, in which fairies and spirits play so prominent a part in all
Celtic countries, just outside a country village a great fire is lit in
the centre of the main road and covered over with green branches, in
order to produce plenty of smoke, and then on either side of this fire
and through the exorcizing smoke are made to pass all the domestic
animals in the district as a protection against disease and evil
spirits, to secure their fruitful increase, and, in the case of cows,
abundant milk supply. Mr. Milne, while making excavations in the Carnac
country, discovered the image of a small bronze cow, now in the Carnac
Museum, and this would seem to indicate that before Christian times
there was in the Morbihan a cult of cattle, preserved even until now,
no doubt, in the Christian fête of St. Cornely, just as in St. Cornely's
Fountain there is preserved a pagan holy well.
It ought now to be clear that both pre-Christian and Christian exorcisms
among Celts have shaped the Fairy-Faith in a very fundamental manner.
And anthropologically the whole subject of exorcism falls in line with
the Psychological Theory of the nature and origin of the belief in
fairies in Celtic countries.
TABOOS
We find that taboos, or prohibitions of a religious and social
character, are as common in the living Fairy-Faith as exorcisms. The
chief one is the taboo against naming the fairies, which inevitably
results in the use of euphemisms, such as 'good people', 'gentry',
'people of peace', _Tylwyth Teg_ ('Fair Folk'), or _bonnes dames_ ('good
ladies'). A like sort of taboo, with its accompanying use of euphemisms,
existed among the Ancients, e. g. among the Egyptians and Babylonians,
and early Celts as well, in a highly developed form; and it exists now
among the native peoples of Australia, Polynesia, Central Africa,
America, in Indian systems of Yoga, among modern Greeks, and, in fact,
almost everywhere where there are vestiges of a primitive culture.[205]
And almost always such a taboo is bound up with animistic and magical
elements, which seem to form its background, just as it is in our own
evidence.
To discuss name taboo in all its aspects would lead us more deeply into
magic and comparative folk-lore than we have yet gone, and such
discussion is unnecessary here. We may therefore briefly state that the
root of the matter would seem to be that the name and the dread power
named are so closely associated in the very concrete thought of the
primitive culture that the one virtually is the other: just as one
inevitably calls up the other for the modern thinker, so it is that, in
the world of objective fact, for the primitive philosopher the one is
equivalent to the other. The primitive man, in short, has projected his
subjective associations into reality. As regards euphemisms, the process
of development possibly is that first you employ any substitute name,
and that secondly you go on to employ such a substitute name as will at
the same time be conciliatory. In the latter case, a certain
anthropomorphosing of the power behind the taboo would seem to be
involved.[206]
Next in prominence comes the food taboo; and to this, also, there are
non-Celtic parallels all the world over, now and in ancient times. We
may take notice of three very striking modern parallels:--A woman
visited her dead brother in Panoi, the Polynesian Otherworld, and 'he
cautioned her to eat nothing there, and she returned'.[207] A Red Man,
Ahak-tah, after an apparent death of two days' duration, revived, and
declared that he had been to a beautiful land of tall trees and
singing-birds, where he met the spirits of his forefathers and uncle.
While there, he felt hunger, and seeing in a bark dish some wild rice,
wished to eat of it, but his uncle would allow him none. In telling
about this psychical adventure, Ahak-tah said:--'Had I eaten of the food
of spirits, I never should have returned to earth.'[208] Also a New
Zealand woman visited the Otherworld in a trance, and her dead father
whom she met there ordered her to eat no food in that land, so that she
could return to this world to take care of her child.[209]
All such parallels, like their equivalents in Celtic belief, seem to
rest on this psychological and physiological conception in the
folk-mind. Human food is what keeps life going in a human body; fairy
food is what keeps life going in a fairy body; and since what a man eats
makes him what he is physically, so eating the food of Fairyland or of
the land of the dead will make the eater partake of the bodily nature
of the beings it nourishes. Hence when a man or woman has once entered
into such relation or communion with the Otherworld of the dead, or of
fairies, by eating their food, his or her physical body[210] by a subtle
transformation adjusts itself to the new kind of nourishment, and
becomes spiritual like a spirit's or fairy's body, so that the eater
cannot re-enter the world of the living. A study of food taboos confirms
this conclusion.[211]
A third prominent taboo, the iron taboo, has been explained by exponents
of the Pygmy Theory as pointing to a prehistoric race in Celtic lands
who did not know iron familiarly, and hence venerated it so that in time
it came to be religiously regarded as very efficacious against spirits
and fairies. Undoubtedly there may be much reason in this explanation,
which gives some ethnological support to the Pygmy Theory. Apparently,
however, it is only a partial explanation of iron taboo in general,
because, in many cases, iron in ancient religious rites certainly had
magical properties attributed to it, which to us are quite unexplainable
from this ethnological point of view;[212] and in Melanesia and in
Africa, where iron is venerated now, the same explanation through
ethnology seems far-fetched. But at present there seem to be no
available data to explain adequately this iron taboo, though we have
strong reasons for thinking that the philosophy underlying it is based
on mystical conceptions of virtues attributed--reasonably or
unreasonably--to various metals and precious stones, and that a careful
examination of alchemical sciences would probably arrive at an
explanation wholly psychological.
Besides many other miscellaneous taboos noticeable in the evidence,
there is a place taboo which is prominent. Thus, if an Irishman cuts a
thorn tree growing on a spot sacred to the fairies, or if he violates a
fairy preserve of any sort, such as a fairy path, or by accident
interferes with a fairy procession, illness and possibly death will come
to his cattle or even to himself. In the same way, in Melanesia,
violations of sacred spots bring like penalties: 'A man planted in the
bush near Olevuga some coco-nut and almond trees, and not long after
died,' the place being a spirit preserve;[213] and a man in the Lepers'
Island lost his senses, because, as the natives believed, he had
unwittingly trodden on ground sacred to Tagaro, and 'the ghost of the
man who lately sacrificed there was angry with him'.[213] In this case
the wizards were called in and cured the man by exorcisms,[213] as
Irishmen, or their cows, are cured by the exorcisms of 'fairy-doctors'
when 'fairy-struck' for some similar violation. The animistic background
of place taboos in the Fairy-Faith is in these cases apparent.
_Among Ancient Celts_
In the evidence soon to be examined from the recorded Fairy-Faith, we
shall find taboos of various kinds often more prominent than in the
living Fairy-Faith.[214] So essential are they to the character of much
of the literary and mythological matter with which we shall have to deal
in the following chapters, that at this point some suggestions ought to
be made concerning their correct anthropological interpretation.
Almost every ancient Irish taboo is connected with a king or with a
great hero like Cuchulainn; and, in Ireland especially, all such kings
and heroes were considered of divine origin, and as direct incarnations,
or reincarnations of the Tuatha De Danann, the true Fairies, originally
inhabitants of the Otherworld. (See our chapter vii.) As Dr. Frazer
points out to have been the case among non-Celts, with whom the same
theory of incarnated divinities has prevailed, royal taboos are to
isolate the king from all sources of danger, especially from all magic
and witchcraft, and they act in many cases 'so to say, as electrical
insulators' to preserve him or heroes who are equally divine.[215]
The early Celts recognized an intimate relationship between man and
nature: unperceived by man, unseen forces--not dissimilar to what
Melanesians call _Mana_--(looked on as animate and intelligent and
frequently individual entities) guided every act of human life. It was
the special duty of Druids to act as intermediaries between the world of
men and the world of the Tuatha De Danann; and, as old Irish literature
indicates clearly, it was through the exercise of powers of divination
on the part of Druids that these declared what was taboo or what was
unfavourable, and also what it was favourable for the divine king or
hero to perform. As long as man kept himself in harmony with this unseen
fairy-world in the background of nature, all was well; but as soon as a
taboo was broken, disharmony in the relationship--which was focused in a
king or hero--was set up; and when, as in the case of Cuchulainn, many
taboos were violated, death was inevitable and not even the Tuatha De
Danann could intercede.
Breaking of a royal or hero taboo not only affects the violator, but his
subjects or followers as well: in some cases the king seems to suffer
vicariously for his people. Almost every great Gaelic hero--a god or
Great Fairy Being incarnate--is overshadowed with an impending fate,
which only the strictest observance of taboo can avoid.[216]
Irish taboo, and inferentially all Celtic taboo, dates back to an
unknown pagan antiquity. It is imposed at or before birth, or again
during life, usually at some critical period, and when broken brings
disaster and death to the breaker. Its whole background appears to rest
on a supernatural relationship between divine men and the Otherworld of
the Tuatha De Danann; and it is very certain that this ancient
relationship survives in the living Fairy-Faith as one between ordinary
men and the fairy-world. Therefore, almost all taboos surviving among
Celts ought to be interpreted psychologically or even psychically, and
not as ordinary social regulations.
FOOD-SACRIFICE
Food-sacrifice plays a very important rôle in the modern Fairy-Faith,
being still practised, as our evidence shows, in each one of the Celtic
countries. Without any doubt it is a survival from pagan times, when, as
we shall observe later (in chapter iv. 291, and elsewhere), propitiatory
offerings were regularly made to the Tuatha De Danann as gods of the
earth, and, apparently, to other orders of spiritual beings. The
anthropological significance of such food-sacrifice is unmistakable.
With the same propitiatory ends in view as modern Celts now have in
offering food to fairies, ancient peoples, e. g. the Greeks and Romans,
maintained a state ritual of sacrifices to the gods, genii, daemons, and
to the dead. And such sacrifices, so essential a part of most ancient
religions, were based on the belief, as stated by Porphyry in his
_Treatise Concerning Abstinence_, that all the various orders of gods,
genii or daemons, enjoy as nourishment the odour of burnt offerings. And
like the Fairy-Folk, the daemons of the air live not on the gross
substance of food, but on its finer invisible essences, conveyed to them
most easily on the altar-fire.[217] Socrates, Plato, Xenophon, and other
leading Greeks, as well as the Romans of a like metaphysical school,
unite in declaring the fundamental importance to the welfare of the
State of regular sacrifices to the gods and to the daemons who control
all natural phenomena, since they caused, if not neglected, abundant
harvests and national prosperity. For unto the gods is due by right a
part of all things which they give to man for his happiness.
The relation which the worship of ancestors held to that of the gods
above, who are the Olympian Gods, the great Gods, and to the Gods below,
who are the Gods of the Dead, and also to the daemons, and heroes or
divine ancestors, is thus set forth by Plato in his _Laws_:--'In the
first place, we affirm that next after the Olympian Gods, and the Gods
of the State, honour should be given to the Gods below.... Next to these
Gods, a wise man will do service to the daemons or spirits, and then to
the heroes, and after them will follow the sacred places of private and
ancestral Gods, having their ritual according to law. Next comes the
honour of living parents.'[218]
It is evident from this direct testimony that the same sort of
philosophy underlies food-sacrifice among the Celts and other peoples as
we discovered underlying human-sacrifice, in our study of the Changeling
Belief; and that the Tuatha De Danann in their true mythological nature,
and fairies, their modern counterpart, correspond in all essentials to
Greek and Roman gods, genii, and daemons, and are often confused with
the dead.
THE CELTIC LEGEND OF THE DEAD
The animistic character of the Celtic Legend of the Dead is apparent;
and the striking likenesses constantly appearing in our evidence between
the ordinary apparitional fairies and the ghosts of the dead show that
there is often no essential and sometimes no distinguishable difference
between these two orders of beings, nor between the world of the dead
and fairyland. We reserve for our chapter on _Science and Fairies_ the
scientific consideration of the psychology of this relationship, and of
the probability that fairies as souls of the dead and as ghosts of the
dead actually exist and influence the living.
GENERAL CONCLUSION
The chief anthropological problems connected with the modern
Fairy-Faith, as our evidence presents it, have now been examined, at
sufficient length, we trust, to explain their essential significance;
and problems, to some extent parallel, connected with the ancient
Fairy-Faith have likewise been examined. There remain, however, very
many minor anthropological problems not yet touched upon; but several of
the most important of these, e. g. various cults of gods, spirits,
fairies, and the dead, and folk-festivals thereto related (see Section
III); the circular fairy-dance (see pp. 405-6); or the fairy world as
the Otherworld (see chap. vi), or as Purgatory (see chap. x), will
receive consideration in following chapters, and so will certain very
definite psychological problems connected with dreams, and trance-like
states, with supernormal lapse of time, and with seership. We may now
sum up the results so far attained.
Whether we examine the Fairy-Faith as a whole or whether we examine
specialized parts of it like those relating to the smallness of fairies,
to changelings, to witchcraft and magic, to exorcisms, to taboos, and to
food-sacrifice, in all cases comparative folk-lore shows that the
beliefs composing it find their parallels the world over, and that
fairy-like beings are objects of belief now not only in Celtic
countries, but in Central Australia, throughout Polynesia, in Africa,
among American Red Men, in Asia generally, in Southern, Western, and
Northern Europe, and, in fact, wherever civilized and primitive men hold
religious beliefs. From a rationalist point of view anthropologists
would be inclined to regard the bulk of this widespread belief in
spiritual beings as being purely mythical, but for us to do so and stop
there would lead to no satisfactory solution: the origin of myth itself
needs to be explained, and one of the chief objects of our study
throughout the remainder of this book is to make an attempt at such an
explanation, especially of Celtic myth.
Again, if we examine all fairy-like beings from a certain superficial
point of view, or even from the mythological point of view, it is easy
to discern that they are universally credited with precisely the same
characters, attributes, actions, or powers as the particular peoples
possess who have faith in them; and then the further fact emerges that
this anthropomorphosing is due directly to the more immediate social
environment: we see merely an anthropomorphically coloured picture of
the whole of an age-long social evolution of the tribe, race, or nation
who have fostered the particular aspect of this one world-wide
folk-religion. But if we look still deeper, we discover as background to
the myths and the social psychology a profound animism. This animism
appears in its own environment in the shading away of the different
fairy-like beings into spirits and ghosts of the departed. Going deeper
yet, we find that such animistic beliefs as concern themselves
exclusively with the realm of the dead are in many cases apparently so
well founded on definite provable psychical experiences on the part of
living men and women that the aid of science itself must be called in to
explain them, and this will be done in our chapter entitled _Science and
Fairies_.
So far it ought to be clear that already our evidence points to a very
respectable residue in the experiences of percipients, which cannot be
explained away--as can the larger mass of the evidence--as due to
ethnological, anthropomorphic, naturalistic, or sociological influences
on the Celtic mind; and for the present this must be designated as the
_x_ or unknown quantity in the Fairy-Faith. In chapter xi this _x_
quantity, augmented by whatever else is to be elicited from further
evidence, will be specifically discussed.
These points of view derived from our anthropological examination of the
chief parts of the evidence presented by the living Fairy-Faith will be
kept constantly before us as we proceed further; and what has been
demonstrated anthropologically in this chapter will serve to interpret
what is to follow until chapter xi is reached. With this tentative
position we pass to Section II of this study, and shall there begin to
examine, as we have just done with their modern Fairy-Faith, the ancient
Fairy-Faith of the Celts.
SECTION II
THE RECORDED FAIRY-FAITH
CHAPTER IV
THE PEOPLE OF THE GODDESS DANA (_TUATHA DÉ DANANN_) OR THE _SIDHE_
(PRONOUNCED _SHEE_)[219]
'So firm was the hold which the ethnic gods of Ireland had taken
upon the imagination and spiritual sensibilities of our ancestors
that even the monks and christianized bards never thought of
denying them. They doubtless forbade the people to worship them,
but to root out the belief in their existence was so impossible
that they could not even dispossess their own minds of the
conviction that the gods were real supernatural beings.'--STANDISH
O'GRADY.
The Goddess Dana and the modern cult of St. Brigit--The Tuatha De
Danann or _Sidhe_ conquered by the Sons of Mil--But Irish seers
still see the _Sidhe_--Old Irish MSS. faithfully represent the
Tuatha De Danann--The _Sidhe_ as a spirit race--_Sidhe_
palaces--The 'Taking' of mortals--Hill visions of _Sidhe_
women--_Sidhe_ minstrels and musicians--Social organization and
warfare among the _Sidhe_--The _Sidhe_ war-goddesses, the
_Badb_--The _Sidhe_ at the Battle of Clontarf, A. D.
1014--Conclusion.
The People of the Goddess Dana, or, according to D'Arbois de
Jubainville, the People of the god whose mother was called Dana,[220]
are the Tuatha De Danann of the ancient mythology of Ireland. The
Goddess Dana, called in the genitive Danand, in middle Irish times was
named Brigit.[220] And this goddess Brigit of the pagan Celts has been
supplanted by the Christian St. Brigit[220]; and, in exactly the same
way as the pagan cult once bestowed on the spirits in wells and
fountains has been transferred to Christian saints, to whom the wells
and fountains have been re-dedicated, so to St. Brigit as a national
saint has been transferred the pagan cult rendered to her predecessor.
Thus even yet, as in the case of the minor divinities of their sacred
fountains, the Irish people through their veneration for the good St.
Brigit, render homage to the divine mother of the People who bear her
name Dana,--who are the ever-living invisible Fairy-People of modern
Ireland. For when the Sons of Mil, the ancestors of the Irish people,
came to Ireland they found the Tuatha De Danann in full possession of
the country. The Tuatha De Danann then retired before the invaders,
without, however, giving up their sacred Island. Assuming invisibility,
with the power of at any time reappearing in a human-like form before
the children of the Sons of Mil, the People of the Goddess Dana became
and are the Fairy-Folk, the _Sidhe_ of Irish mythology and romance.[221]
Therefore it is that to-day Ireland contains two races,--a race visible
which we call Celts, and a race invisible which we call Fairies. Between
these two races there is constant intercourse even now; for Irish seers
say that they can behold the majestic, beautiful _Sidhe_, and according
to them the _Sidhe_ are a race quite distinct from our own, just as
living and possibly more powerful. These _Sidhe_ (who are the 'gentry'
of the Ben Bulbin country and have kindred elsewhere in Ireland,
Scotland, and probably in most other countries as well, such as the
invisible races of the Yosemite Valley) have been described more or less
accurately by our peasant seer-witnesses from County Sligo and from
North and East Ireland. But there are other and probably more reliable
seers in Ireland, men of greater education and greater psychical
experience, who know and describe the _Sidhe_ races as they really are,
and who even sketch their likenesses. And to such seer Celts as these,
Death is a passport to the world of the _Sidhe_, a world where there is
eternal youth and never-ending joy, as we shall learn when we study it
as the Celtic Otherworld.
The recorded mythology and literature of ancient Ireland have, very
faithfully for the most part, preserved to us clear pictures of the
Tuatha De Danann; so that disregarding some Christian influence in the
texts of certain manuscripts, much rationalization, and a good deal of
poetical colouring and romantic imagination in the pictures, we can
easily describe the People of the Goddess Dana as they appeared in pagan
days, when they were more frequently seen by mortals than now. Perhaps
the Irish folk of the olden times were even more clairvoyant and
spiritual-minded than the Irish folk of to-day. So by drawing upon these
written records let us try to understand what sort of beings the _Sidhe_
were and are.
NATURE OF THE _SIDHE_
In the _Book of Leinster_[222] the poem of _Eochaid_ records that the
Tuatha De Danann, the conquerors of the Fir-Bolgs, were hosts of
_siabra_; and _siabra_ is an Old Irish word meaning fairies, sprites, or
ghosts. The word fairies is appropriate if restricted to mean fairies
like the modern 'gentry'; but the word _ghosts_ is inappropriate,
because our evidence shows that the only relation the _Sidhe_ or real
Fairies hold to ghosts is a superficial one, the _Sidhe_ and ghosts
being alike only in respect to invisibility. In the two chief Irish
MSS., the _Book of the Dun Cow_ and the _Book of Leinster_, the Tuatha
De Danann are described as 'gods and not-gods'; and Sir John Rhys
considers this an ancient formula comparable with the Sanskrit _deva_
and _adeva_, but not with 'poets (_dée_) and husbandmen (_an dée_)' as
the author of _Cóir Anmann_ learnedly guessed.[223] It is also said, in
the _Book of the Dun Cow_, that wise men do not know the origin of the
Tuatha De Danann, but that 'it seems likely to them that they came from
heaven, on account of their intelligence and for the excellence of their
knowledge'.[224] The hold of the Tuatha De Danann on the Irish mind and
spirit was so strong that even Christian transcribers of texts could not
deny their existence as a non-human race of intelligent beings
inhabiting Ireland, even though they frequently misrepresented them by
placing them on the level of evil demons,[225] as the ending of the
story of the _Sick-Bed of Cuchulainn_ illustrates:--'So that this was a
vision to Cuchulainn of being stricken by the people of the _Sid_: for
the demoniac power was great before the faith; and such was its
greatness that the demons used to fight bodily against mortals, and they
used to show them delights and secrets of how they would be in
immortality. It was thus they used to be believed in. So it is to such
phantoms the ignorant apply the names of _Side_ and _Aes Side_.'[226] A
passage in the _Silva Gadelica_ (ii. 202-3) not only tends to confirm
this last statement, but it also shows that the Irish people made a
clear distinction between the god-race and our own:--In _The Colloquy
with the Ancients_, as St. Patrick and Caeilte are talking with one
another, 'a lone woman robed in mantle of green, a smock of soft silk
being next her skin, and on her forehead a glittering plate of yellow
gold,' came to them; and when Patrick asked from whence she came, she
replied: 'Out of _uaimh Chruachna_, or "the cave of Cruachan".' Caeilte
then asked: 'Woman, my soul, who art thou?' 'I am _Scothniamh_ or
"Flower-lustre", daughter of the Daghda's son Bodhb derg.' Caeilte
proceeded: 'And what started thee hither?' 'To require of thee my
marriage-gift, because once upon a time thou promisedst me such.' And as
they parleyed Patrick broke in with: 'It is a wonder to us how we see
you two: the girl young and invested with all comeliness; but thou
Caeilte, a withered ancient, bent in the back and dingily grown grey.'
'Which is no wonder at all,' said Caeilte, 'for no people of one
generation or of one time are we: _she is of the Tuatha Dé Danann, who
are unfading and whose duration is perennial; I am of the sons of
Milesius, that are perishable and fade away_.' The exact distinction is
between Caeilte, a withered old ancient--in most ways to be regarded as
a ghost called up that Patrick may question him about the past history
of Ireland--and a fairy-woman who is one of the _Sidhe_ or Tuatha De
Danann.[227]
In two of the more ancient Irish texts, the _Echtra Nerai_[228] or
'Expedition of Nera', a preliminary tale in the introduction to the
_Táin bó Cuailnge_ or 'Theft of the Cattle of Cuailnge'; and a passage
from the _Togail Bruidne dâ Derga_, or 'Destruction of Da Derga's
Hostel',[229] there seems no reasonable doubt whatever about the Tuatha
De Danann or _Sidhe_ being a race like what we call spirits. The first
text describes how Ailill and Medb in their palace of Cruachan
celebrated the feast of _Samain_ (November Eve, a feast of the dead even
in pre-Christian times). Two culprits had been executed on the day
before, and their bodies, according to the ancient Irish custom, were
left hanging from a tree until the night of _Samain_ should have passed;
for on that night it was dangerous to touch the bodies of the dead while
demons and the people of the _Sidhe_ were at large throughout all
Ireland, and mortals found near dead bodies at such a time were in great
danger of being _taken_ by these spirit hosts of the Tuatha De Danann.
And so on this very night, when thick darkness had settled down, Ailill
desired to test the courage of his warriors, and offered his own
gold-hilted sword to any young man who would go out and tie a coil of
twisted twigs around the leg of one of the bodies suspended from the
tree. After many had made the attempt and failed, because unable to
brave the legions of demons and fairies, Nera alone succeeded; but his
success cost him dear, for he finally fell under the power both of the
dead man, round whose legs he had tied the coil, and of an elfin host:
with the dead man's body on his back, Nera was obliged to go to a
strange house that the thirst of the dead man might be assuaged therein;
and the dead man in drinking scattered 'the last sip from his lips at
the faces of the people that were in the house, so that they all died'.
Nera carried back the body; and on returning to Cruachan he saw the
fairy hosts going into the cave, 'for the fairy-mounds of Erinn are
always opened about Halloween.' Nera followed after them until he came
to their king in a palace of the Tuatha De Danann, seemingly in the
cavern or elsewhere underground; where he remained and was married to
one of the fairy women. She it was who revealed to Nera the secret
hiding-place, in a mysterious well, of the king's golden crown, and then
betrayed her whole people by reporting to Nera the plan they had for
attacking Ailill's court on the Halloween to come. Moreover, Nera was
permitted by his fairy wife to depart from the _síd_; and he in taking
leave of her asked: 'How will it be believed of me that I have gone into
the _síd_?' 'Take fruits of summer with thee,' said the woman. 'Then he
took wild garlic with him and primrose and golden fern.' And on the
following November Eve when the _síd_ of Cruachan was again open, 'the
men of Connaught and the black hosts of exile' under Ailill and Medb
plundered it, taking away from it the crown of Briun out of the well.
But 'Nera was left with his people in the _síd_, and has not come out
until now, nor will he come till Doom.'
All of this matter is definitely enough in line with the living
Fairy-Faith: there is the same belief expressed as now about November
Eve being the time of all times when ghosts, demons, spirits, and
fairies are free, and when fairies _take_ mortals and marry them to
fairy women; also the beliefs that fairies are living in secret places
in hills, in caverns, or under ground--palaces full of treasure and open
only on November Eve. In so far as the real fairies, the _Sidhe_, are
concerned, they appear as the rulers of the Feast of the Dead or
_Samain_, as the controllers of all spirits who are then at large; and,
allowing for some poetical imagination and much social psychology and
anthropomorphism, elements as common in this as in most literary
descriptions concerning the Tuatha De Danann, they are faithfully enough
presented.
The second text describes how King Conaire, in riding along a road
toward Tara, saw in front of him three strange horsemen, three men of
the _Sidhe_:--'Three red frocks had they, and three red mantles: three
red steeds they bestrode, and three red heads of hair were on them. Red
were they all, both body and hair and raiment, both steeds and men.'
'Who is it that fares before us?' asked Conaire. 'It was a taboo of mine
for those Three to go before me--the three Reds to the house of Red. Who
will follow them and tell them to come towards me in my track?' 'I will
follow them,' says Lé fri flaith, Conaire's son. 'He goes after them,
lashing his horse, and overtook them not. There was the length of a
spearcast between them: but they did not gain upon him and he did not
gain upon them.' All attempts to come up with the red horsemen failed.
But at last, before they disappeared, one of the Three said to the
king's son riding so furiously behind them, 'Lo, my son, great the news.
Weary are the steeds we ride. We ride the steeds of Donn Tetscorach (?)
from the elfmounds. Though we are alive we are dead. Great are the
signs: destruction of life: sating of ravens: feeding of crows, strife
of slaughter: wetting of sword-edge, shields with broken bosses in hours
after sundown. Lo, my son!' Then they disappear. When Conaire and his
followers heard the message, fear fell upon them, and the king said:
'All my taboos have seized me to-night, since those Three [Reds] [are
the] banished folks (?).' In this passage we behold three horsemen of the
_Sidhe_ banished from their elfmound because guilty of falsehood.
Visible for a time, they precede the king and so violate one of his
taboos; and then delivering their fearful prophecy they vanish. These
three of the Tuatha De Danann, majestic and powerful and weird in their
mystic red, are like the warriors of the 'gentry' seen by contemporary
seers in West Ireland. Though dead, that is in an invisible world like
the dead, yet they are living. It seems that in all three of the textual
examples already cited, the scribe has emphasized a different element in
the unique nature of the Tuatha De Danann. In the _Colloquy_ it is their
eternal youth and beauty, in the _Echtra Nerai_ it is their supremacy
over ghosts and demons on _Samain_ and their power to steal mortals away
at such a time, and in this last their respect for honesty. And in each
case their portrayal corresponds to that of the 'gentry' and _Sidhe_ by
modern Irishmen; so that the old Fairy-Faith and the new combine to
prove the People of the God whose mother was Dana to have been and to be
a race of beings who are like mortals, but not mortals, who to the
objective world are as though dead, yet to the subjective world are
fully living and conscious.
O'Curry says:--'The term (_sídh_, pron. _shee_), as far as we know it,
is always applied in old writings to the palaces, courts, halls, or
residences of those beings which in ancient Gaedhelic mythology held the
place which ghosts, phantoms, and fairies hold in the superstitions of
the present day.'[230] In modern Irish tradition, 'the People of the
_Sidhe_,' or simply the _Sidhe_, refer to the beings themselves rather
than to their places of habitation. Partly perhaps on account of this
popular opinion that the _Sidhe_ are a subterranean race, they are
sometimes described as gods of the earth or _dei terreni_, as in the
_Book of Armagh_; and since it was believed that they, like the modern
fairies, control the ripening of crops and the milk-giving of cows, the
ancient Irish rendered to them regular worship and sacrifice, just as
the Irish of to-day do by setting out food at night for the fairy-folk
to eat.
Thus after their conquest, these _Sidhe_ or Tuatha De Danann in
retaliation, and perhaps to show their power as agricultural gods,
destroyed the wheat and milk of their conquerors, the Sons of Mil, as
fairies to-day can do; and the Sons of Mil were constrained to make a
treaty with their supreme king, Dagda, who, in _Cóir Anmann_ (§ 150), is
himself called an earth-god. Then when the treaty was made the Sons of
Mil were once more able to gather wheat in their fields and to drink the
milk of their cows;[231] and we can suppose that ever since that time
their descendants, who are the people of Ireland, remembering that
treaty, have continued to reverence the People of the Goddess Dana by
pouring libations of milk to them and by making them offerings of the
fruits of the earth.
THE PALACES OF THE _SIDHE_
The marvellous palaces to which the Tuatha De Danann retired when
conquered by the race of Mil were hidden in the depths of the earth, in
hills, or under ridges more or less elevated.[232] At the time of their
conquest, Dagda their high king made a distribution of all such palaces
in his kingdom. He gave one _síd_ to Lug, son of Ethne, another to Ogme;
and for himself retained two--one called _Brug na Boinne_, or Castle of
the Boyne, because it was situated on or near the River Boyne near Tara,
and the other called _Síd_ or _Brug Maic ind Oc_, which means Enchanted
Palace or Castle of the Son of the Young. And this Mac ind Oc was
Dagda's own son by the queen Boann, according to some accounts, so that
as the name (Son of the Young) signifies, Dagda and Boann, both
immortals, both Tuatha De Danann, were necessarily always young, never
knowing the touch of disease, or decay, or old age. Not until
Christianity gained its psychic triumph at Tara, through the magic of
Patrick prevailing against the magic of the Druids--who seem to have
stood at that time as mediators between the People of the Goddess Dana
and the pagan Irish--did the Tuatha De Danann lose their immortal
youthfulness in the eyes of mortals and become subject to death. In the
most ancient manuscripts of Ireland the pre-Christian doctrine of the
immortality of the divine race 'persisted intact and without
restraint';[233] but in the _Senchus na relec_ or 'History of the
Cemeteries', from the _Leabhar na h-Uidhre_, and in the _Lebar gabala_
or 'Book of the Conquests', from the _Book of Leinster_, it was
completely changed by the Christian scribes.[233]
When Dagda thus distributed the underground palaces, Mac ind Oc, or as
he was otherwise called Oengus, was absent and hence forgotten. So when
he returned, naturally he complained to his father, and the _Brug na
Boinne_, the king's own residence, was ceded to him for a night and a
day, but Oengus maintained that it was for ever. This palace was a most
marvellous one: it contained three trees which always bore fruit, a
vessel full of excellent drink, and two pigs--one alive and the other
nicely cooked ready to eat at any time; and in this palace no one ever
died.[234] In the _Colloquy_, Caeilte tells of a mountain containing a
fairy palace which no man save Finn and six companions, Caeilte being
one of these, ever entered. The Fenians, while hunting, were led thither
by a fairy woman who had changed her shape to that of a fawn in order to
allure them; and the night being wild and snowy they were glad to take
shelter therein. Beautiful damsels and their lovers were the inhabitants
of the palace; in it there was music and abundance of food and drink;
and on its floor stood a chair of crystal.[235] In another fairy palace,
the enchanted cave of Keshcorran, Conaran, son of Imidel, a chief of the
Tuatha De Danann, had sway; 'and so soon as he perceived that the
hounds' cry now sounded deviously, he bade his three daughters (that
were full of sorcery) to go and take vengeance on Finn for his
hunting'[236]--just as nowadays the 'good people' take vengeance on one
of our race if a fairy domain is violated. Frequently the fairy palace
is under a lake, as in the christianized story of the _Disappearance of
Caenchomrac_:--Once when 'the cleric chanted his psalms, he saw [come]
towards him a tall man that emerged out of the loch: from the bottom of
the water that is to say.' This tall man informed the cleric that he
came from an under-water monastery, and explained 'that there should be
subaqueous inhabiting by men is with God no harder than that they should
dwell in any other place'.[237] In all these ancient literary accounts
of the _Sidhe_-palaces we easily recognize the same sort of palaces as
those described to-day by Gaelic peasants as the habitations of the
'gentry', or 'good people', or 'people of peace.' Such habitations are
in mountain caverns like those of Ben Bulbin or Knock Ma, or in fairy
hills or knolls like the Fairy-Hill at Aberfoyle on which Robert Kirk is
believed to have been _taken_, or beneath lakes. This brings us directly
to the way in which the _Sidhe_ or Tuatha De Danann of the olden times
_took_ fine-looking young men and maidens.
HOW THE _SIDHE_ 'TOOK' MORTALS
Perhaps one of the earliest and most famous literary accounts of such a
_taking_ is that concerning Aedh, son of Eochaid Lethderg son of the
King of Leinster, who is represented as contemporary with Patrick.[238]
While Aedh was enjoying a game of hurley with his boy companions near
the _sídh_ of Liamhain Softsmock, two of the _sídh_-women, who loved the
young prince, very suddenly appeared, and as suddenly took him away with
them into a fairy palace and kept him there three years. It happened,
however, that he escaped at the end of that time, and, knowing the
magical powers of Patrick, went to where the holy man was, and thus
explained himself:--'Against the youths my opponents I (i. e. my side)
took seven goals; but at the last one that I took, here come up to me
two women clad in green mantles: two daughters of _Bodhb derg mac an
Daghda_, and their names _Slad_ and _Mumain_. Either of them took me by
a hand, and they led me off to a garish _brugh_; whereby for now three
years my people mourn after me, the _sídh_-folk caring for me ever
since, and until last night I got a chance opening to escape from the
_brugh_, when to the number of fifty lads we emerged out of the _sídh_
and forth upon the green. Then it was that I considered the magnitude of
that strait in which they of the _sídh_ had had me, and away from the
_brugh_ I came running to seek thee, holy Patrick.' 'That,' said the
saint, 'shall be to thee a safeguard, so that neither their power nor
their dominion shall any more prevail against thee.' And so when Patrick
had thus made Aedh proof against the power of the fairy-folk, he kept
him with him under the disguise of a travelling minstrel until, arriving
in Leinster, he restored him to his father the king and to his
inheritance: Aedh enters the palace in his minstrel disguise; and in the
presence of the royal assembly Patrick commands him: 'Doff now once for
all thy dark capacious hood, and well mayest thou wear thy father's
spear!' When the lad removed his hood, and none there but recognized
him, great was the surprise. He seemed like one come back from the
dead, for long had his heirless father and people mourned for him. 'By
our word,' exclaimed the assembly in their joyous excitement, 'it is a
good cleric's gift!' And the king said: 'Holy Patrick, seeing that till
this day thou hast nourished him and nurtured, let not the Tuatha De
Danann's power any more prevail against the lad.' And Patrick answered:
'That death which the King of Heaven and Earth hath ordained is the one
that he will have.' This ancient legend shows clearly that the Tuatha De
Danann, or _Sidhe_, in the time when the scribe wrote the _Colloquy_
were thought of in the same way as now, as able to _take_ beautiful
mortals whom they loved, and able to confer upon them fairy immortality
which prevented 'that death which the King of Heaven and Earth hath
ordained'.
Mortals, did they will it, could live in the world of the _Sidhe_ for
ever, and we shall see this more fully in our study of the Otherworld.
But here it will be interesting to learn that, unlike Aedh, whom some
perhaps would call a foolish youth, Laeghaire, also a prince, for he was
the son of the king of Connaught, entered a _dún_ of the _Sidhe_, taking
fifty other warriors with him; and he and his followers found life in
Fairyland so pleasant that they all decided to enjoy it eternally.
Accordingly, when they had been there a year, they planned to return to
Connaught in order to bid the king and his people a final farewell. They
announced their plan, and Fiachna of the _Sidhe_ told them how to
accomplish it safely:--'If ye would come back take with you horses, but
by no means dismount from off them'; 'So it was done: they went their
way and came upon a general assembly in which Connaught, as at the year
expired, mourned for the aforesaid warrior-band, whom now all at once
they perceived above them (i. e. on higher ground). Connaught sprang to
meet them, but Laeghaire cried: "Approach us not [to touch us]: 'tis to
bid you farewell that we are here!" "Leave me not!" Crimthann, his
father, said: "Connaught's royal power be thine; their silver and their
gold, their horses with their bridles, and their noble women be at thy
discretion, only leave me not!" But Laeghaire turned from them and so
entered again into the _sídh_, where with Fiachna he exercises joint
kingly rule; nor is he as yet come out of it.'[239]
HILL VISIONS OF _SIDHE_ WOMEN
There are many recorded traditions which represent certain hills as
mystical places whereon men are favoured with visions of fairy women.
Thus, one day King Muirchertach came forth to hunt on the border of the
Brugh (near Stackallan Bridge, County Meath), and his companions left
him alone on his hunting-mound. 'He had not been there long when he saw
a solitary damsel beautifully formed, fair-haired, bright-skinned, with
a green mantle about her sitting near him on the turfen mound; and it
seemed to him that of womankind he had never beheld her equal in beauty
and refinement.'[240] In the Mabinogion of _Pwyll, Prince of Dyvet_,
which seems to be only a Brythonic treatment of an original Gaelic tale,
Pwyll seating himself on a mound where any mortal sitting might see a
prodigy, saw a fairy woman ride past on a white horse, and she clad in a
garment of shining gold. Though he tried to have his servitor on the
swiftest horse capture her, 'There was some magic about the lady that
kept her always the same distance ahead, though she appeared to be
riding slowly.' When on the second day Pwyll returned to the mound the
fairy woman came riding by as before, and the servitor again gave
unsuccessful chase. Pwyll saw her in the same manner on the third day.
He thereupon gave chase himself, and when he exclaimed to her, 'For the
sake of the man whom you love, wait for me!' she stopped; and by mutual
arrangement the two agreed to meet and to marry at the end of a
year.[241]
THE MINSTRELS OR MUSICIANS OF THE _SIDHE_
Not only did the fairy-folk of more ancient times enjoy wonderful
palaces full of beauty and riches, and a life of eternal youth, but they
also had, even as now, minstrelsy and rare music--music to which that of
our own world could not be compared at all; for even Patrick himself
said that it would equal the very music of heaven if it were not for 'a
twang of the fairy spell that infests it'.[242] And this is how it was
that Patrick heard the fairy music:--As he was travelling through
Ireland he once sat down on a grassy knoll, as he often did in the good
old Irish way, with Ulidia's king and nobles and Caeilte also: 'Nor were
they long there before they saw draw near them a _scológ_ or
"non-warrior" that wore a fair green mantle having in it a fibula of
silver; a shirt of yellow silk next his skin, over and outside that
again a tunic of soft satin, and with a _timpán_ (a sort of harp) of the
best slung on his back. "Whence comest thou, _scológ_?" asked the king.
"Out of the _sídh_ of the Daghda's son Bodhb Derg, out of Ireland's
southern part." "What moved thee out of the south, and who art thou
thyself?" "I am Cascorach, son of Cainchinn that is _ollave_ to the
Tuatha De Danann, and am myself the makings of an _ollave_ (i. e. an
aspirant to the grade). What started me was the design to acquire
knowledge, and information, and lore for recital, and the Fianna's
mighty deeds of valour, from Caeilte son of Ronan." Then he took his
_timpán_ and made for them music and minstrelsy, so that he sent them
slumbering off to sleep.' And Cascorach's music was pleasing to Patrick,
who said of it: 'Good indeed it were, but for a twang of the fairy spell
that infests it; barring which nothing could more nearly than it
resemble Heaven's harmony.'[243] And that very night which followed the
day on which the _ollave_ to the Tuatha De Danann came to them was the
Eve of _Samain_. There was also another of these fairy _timpán_-players
called 'the wondrous elfin man', 'Aillén mac Midhna of the Tuatha De
Danann, that out of _sídh_ Finnachaidh to the northward used to come to
Tara: the manner of his coming being with a musical _timpán_ in his
hand, the which whenever any heard he would at once sleep. Then, all
being lulled thus, out of his mouth Aillén would emit a blast of fire.
It was on the solemn _Samain_-Day (November Day) he came in every year,
played his _timpán_, and to the fairy music that he made all hands would
fall asleep. With his breath he used to blow up the flame and so, during
a three-and-twenty years' spell, yearly burnt up Tara with all her
gear.' And it is said that Finn, finally overcoming the magic of Aillén,
slew him.[243]
Perhaps in the first musician, Cascorach, though he is described as the
son of a Tuatha De Danann minstrel, we behold a mortal like one of the
many Irish pipers and musicians who used to go, or even go yet, to the
fairy-folk to be educated in the musical profession, and then come back
as the most marvellous players that ever were in Ireland; though if
Cascorach were once a mortal it seems that he has been quite transformed
in bodily nature so as to be really one of the Tuatha De Danann himself.
But Aillén mac Midhna is undoubtedly one of the mighty 'gentry' who
could--as we heard from County Sligo--destroy half the human race if
they wished. Aillén visits Tara, the old psychic centre both for
Ireland's high-kings and its Druids. He comes as it were against the
conquerors of his race, who in their neglectfulness no longer render due
worship and sacrifice on the Feast of _Samain_ to the Tuatha De Danann,
the gods of the dead, at that time supreme; and then it is that he works
his magic against the royal palaces of the kings and Druids on the
ancient Hill. And to overcome the magic of Aillén and slay him, that is,
make it impossible for him to repeat his annual visits to Tara, it
required the might of the great hero Finn, who himself was related to
the same _Sidhe_ race, for by a woman of the Tuatha De Danann he had his
famous son Ossian (Oisin).[244]
In _Gilla dé_, who is Manannan mac Lir, the greatest magician of the
Tuatha De Danann, disguised as a being who can disappear in the
twinkling of an eye whenever he wishes, and reappear unexpectedly as a
'kern that wore garb of yellow stripes', we meet with another fairy
musician. And to him O'Donnell says:--'By Heaven's grace again, since
first I heard the fame of them that within the hills and under the earth
beneath us make the fairy music, ... music sweeter than thy strains I
have never heard; thou art in sooth a most melodious rogue!'[245] And
again it is said of him:--'Then the _gilla decair_ taking a harp played
music so sweet ... and the king after a momentary glance at his own
musicians never knew which way he went from him.'[246]
SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND WARFARE AMONG THE _SIDHE_
So far, we have seen only the happy side of the life of the
_Sidhe_-folk--their palaces and pleasures and music; but there was a
more human (or anthropomorphic) side to their nature in which they wage
war on one another, and have their matrimonial troubles even as we
moderns. And we turn now to examine this other side of their life, to
behold the _Sidhe_ as a warlike race; and as we do so let us remember
that the 'gentry' in the Ben Bulbin country and in all Ireland, and the
people of Finvara in Knock Ma, and also the invisible races of
California, are likewise described as given to war and mighty feats of
arms.
The invisible Irish races have always had a very distinct social
organization, so distinct in fact that Ireland can be divided according
to its fairy kings and fairy queens and their territories even now;[247]
and no doubt we see in this how the ancient Irish anthropomorphically
projected into an animistic belief their own social conditions and
racial characteristics. And this social organization and territorial
division ought to be understood before we discuss the social troubles
and consequent wars of the _Sidhe_-folk. For example in Munster Bodb was
king and his enchanted palace was called the _Síd_ of the Men of
Femen;[248] and we already know about the over-king Dagda and his Boyne
palace near Tara. In more modern times, especially in popular
fairy-traditions, Eevil or Eevinn (_Aoibhill_ or _Aoibhinn_) of the
_Craig Liath_ or Grey Rock is a queen of the Munster fairies;[249] and
Finvara is king of the Connaught fairies (see p. 42). There are also the
Irish fairy-queens Cleeona (_Cliodhna_, or in an earlier form _Clidna_
[cf. p. 356]) and Aine (see p. 79 above).
We are now prepared to see the Tuatha De Danann in their domestic
troubles and wars; and the following story is as interesting as any, for
in it Dagda himself is the chief actor. Once when his own son Oengus
fell sick of a love malady, King Dagda, who ruled all the _Sidhe_-folk
in Ireland, joined forces with Ailill and Medb in order to compel Ethal
Anbual to deliver up his beautiful daughter Caer whom Oengus loved. When
Ethal Anbual's palace had been stormed and Ethal Anbual reduced to
submission, he declared he had no power over his daughter Caer, for on
the first of November each year, he said, she changed to a swan, or from
a swan to a maiden again. 'The first of November next,' he added, 'my
daughter will be under the form of a swan, near the Loch bel Draccon.
Marvellous birds will be seen there: my daughter will be surrounded by a
hundred and fifty other swans.' When the November Day arrived, Oengus
went to the lake, and, seeing the swans and recognizing Caer, plunged
into the water and instantly became a swan with her. While under the
form of swans, Oengus and Caer went together to the Boyne palace of the
king Dagda, his father, and remained there; and their singing was so
sweet that all who heard it slept three days and three nights.[250] In
this story, new elements in the nature of the _Sidhe_ appear, though
like modern ones: the _Sidhe_ are able to assume other forms than their
own, are subject to enchantments like mortals; and when under the form
of swans are in some perhaps superficial aspects like the swan-maidens
in stories which are world-wide, and their swan-song has the same
sweetness and magical effect as in other countries.[251]
In the Rennes _Dinnshenchas_ there is a tale about a war among the 'men
of the Elfmounds' over 'two lovable maidens who dwelt in the elfmound',
and when they delivered the battle 'they all shaped themselves into the
shapes of deer'.[252] Midir's sons under Donn mac Midir, in rebellion
against the Daghda's son Bodh Derg, fled away to an obscure _sídh_,
where in yearly battle they met the hosts of the other Tuatha De Danann
under Bodh Derg; and it was into this _sídh_ or fairy palace on the very
eve before the annual contest that Finn and his six companions were
enticed by the fairy woman in the form of a fawn, to secure their
aid.[253] And in another tale, Laeghaire, son of the king of Connaught,
with fifty warriors, plunged into a lake to the fairy world beneath it,
in order to assist the fairy man, who came thence to them, to recover
his wife stolen by a rival.[253]
THE _SIDHE_ AS WAR-GODDESSES OR THE _BADB_
It is in the form of birds that certain of the Tuatha De Danann appear
as war-goddesses and directors of battle,[254]--and we learn from one of
our witnesses (p. 46) that the 'gentry' or modern _Sidhe_-folk take
sides even now in a great war, like that between Japan and Russia. It is
in their relation to the hero Cuchulainn that one can best study the
People of the Goddess Dana in their rôle as controllers of human war. In
the greatest of the Irish epics, the _Taín Bó Cuailnge_, where
Cuchulainn is under their influence, these war-goddesses are called
_Badb_[255] (or _Bodb_) which here seems to be a collective term for
_Neman_, _Macha_, and _Morrigu_ (or _Morrigan_)[256]--each of whom
exercises a particular supernatural power. _Neman_ appears as the
confounder of armies, so that friendly bands, bereft of their senses by
her, slaughter one another; _Macha_ is a fury that riots and revels
among the slain; while _Morrigu_, the greatest of the three, by her
presence infuses superhuman valour into Cuchulainn, nerves him for the
cast, and guides the course of his unerring spear. And the Tuatha De
Danann in infusing this valour into the great hero show themselves--as
we already know them to be on _Samain_ Eve--the rulers of all sorts of
demons of the air and awful spirits:--In the _Book of Leinster_ (fol.
57, B 2) it is recorded that 'the satyrs, and sprites, and maniacs of
the valleys, and demons of the air, shouted about him, for the Tuatha De
Danann were wont to impart their valour to him, in order that he might
be more feared, more dreaded, more terrible, in every battle and
battle-field, in every combat and conflict, into which he went.'
The Battles of Moytura seem in most ways to be nothing more than the
traditional record of a long warfare to determine the future spiritual
control of Ireland, carried on between two diametrically opposed orders
of invisible beings, the Tuatha De Danann representing the gods of light
and good and the Fomorians representing the gods of darkness and evil.
It is said that after the second of these battles 'The _Morrigu_,
daughter of Ernmas (the Irish war-goddess), proceeded to proclaim that
battle and the mighty victory which had taken place, to the royal
heights of Ireland and to its fairy host and its chief waters and its
river-mouths'.[257] For good had prevailed over evil, and it was settled
that all Ireland should for ever afterwards be a sacred country ruled
over by the People of the Goddess Dana and the Sons of Mil jointly. So
that here we see the Tuatha De Danann with their war-goddess fighting
their own battles in which human beings play no part.
It is interesting to observe that this Irish war-goddess, the _bodb_ or
_badb_, considered of old to be one of the Tuatha De Danann, has
survived to our own day in the fairy-lore of the chief Celtic countries.
In Ireland the survival is best seen in the popular and still almost
general belief among the peasantry that the fairies often exercise their
magical powers under the form of royston-crows; and for this reason
these birds are always greatly dreaded and avoided. The resting of one
of them on a peasant's cottage may signify many things, but often it
means the death of one of the family or some great misfortune, the bird
in such a case playing the part of a _bean-sidhe_ (banshee). And this
folk-belief finds its echo in the recorded tales of Wales, Scotland, and
Brittany. In the _Mabinogi_, 'Dream of Rhonabwy,' Owain, prince of
Rheged and a contemporary of Arthur, has a wonderful crow which always
secures him victory in battle by the aid of three hundred other crows
under its leadership. In Campbell's _Popular Tales of the West
Highlands_ the fairies very often exercise their power in the form of
the common hoody crow; and in Brittany there is a folk-tale entitled
'_Les Compagnons_'[258] in which the chief actor is a fairy under the
form of a magpie who lives in a royal forest just outside Rennes.[259]
W. M. Hennessy has shown that the word _bodb_ or _badb_, aspirated
_bodhbh_ or _badhbh_ (pronounced _bov_ or _bav_), originally signified
rage, fury, or violence, and ultimately implied a witch, fairy, or
goddess; and that as the memory of this Irish goddess of war survives in
folk-lore, her emblem is the well-known scald-crow, or royston-crow.[260]
By referring to Peter O'Connell's _Irish Dictionary_ we are able to
confirm this popular belief which identifies the battle-fairies with the
royston-crow, and to discover that there is a definite relationship or
even identification between the _Badb_ and the _Bean-sidhe_ or banshee, as
there is in modern Irish folk-lore between the royston-crow and the fairy
who announces a death. _Badb-catha_ is made to equal 'Fionog, a
royston-crow, a squall crow'; _Badb_ is defined as a '_bean-sidhe_, a
female fairy, phantom, or spectre, supposed to be attached to certain
families, and to appear sometimes in the form of squall-crows, or
royston-crows'; and the _Badb_ in the three-fold aspect is thus explained:
'_Macha_, i. e. a royston-crow; _Morrighain_, i. e. the great fairy;
_Neamhan_, i. e. _Badb catha nó feannóg; a badb catha_, or royston-crow.'
Similar explanations are given by other glossarists, and thus the evidence
of etymological scholarship as well as that of folk-lore support the
Psychological Theory.
THE _SIDHE_ IN THE BATTLE OF CLONTARF, A. D. 1014
The People of the Goddess Dana played an important part in human warfare
even so late as the Battle of Clontarf, fought near Dublin, April 23,
1014; and at that time fairy women and phantom-hosts were to the Irish
unquestionable existences, as real as ordinary men and women. It is
recorded in the manuscript story of the battle, of which numerous copies
exist, that the fairy woman Aoibheall[261] came to Dunlang O'Hartigan
before the battle and begged him not to fight, promising him life and
happiness for two hundred years if he would put off fighting for a
single day; but the patriotic Irishman expressed his decision to fight
for Ireland, and then the fairy woman foretold how he and his friend
Murrough, and Brian and Conaing and all the nobles of Erin and even his
own son Turlough, were fated to fall in the conflict.
On the eve of the battle, Dunlang comes to his friend Murrough directly
from the fairy woman; and Murrough upon seeing him reproaches him for
his absence in these words:--'Great must be the love and attachment of
some woman for thee which has induced thee to abandon me.' 'Alas O
King,' answered Dunlang, 'the delight which I have abandoned for thee is
greater, if thou didst but know it, namely, life without death, without
cold, without thirst, without hunger, without decay, beyond any delight
of the delights of the earth to me, until the judgement, and heaven
after the judgement; and if I had not pledged my word to thee I would
not have come here; and, moreover, it is fated for me to die on the day
that thou shalt die.' When Murrough has heard this terrible message, the
prophecy of his own death in the battle, despondency seizes him; and
then it is that he declares that he for Ireland like Dunlang for honour
has also sacrificed the opportunity of entering and living in that
wonderful Land of Eternal Youth:--'Often was I offered in hills, and in
fairy mansions, this world (the fairy world) and these gifts, but I
never abandoned for one night my country nor mine inheritance for
them.'[262]
And thus is described the meeting of the two armies at Clontarf, and the
demons of the air and the phantoms, and all the hosts of the invisible
world who were assembled to scatter confusion and to revel in the
bloodshed, and how above them in supremacy rose the _Badb_:--'It will be
one of the wonders of the day of judgement to relate the description of
this tremendous onset. There arose a wild, impetuous, precipitate, mad,
inexorable, furious, dark, lacerating, merciless, combative, contentious
_badb_, which was shrieking and fluttering over their heads. And there
arose also the satyrs, and sprites, and the maniacs of the valleys, and
the witches, and goblins, and owls, and destroying demons of the air and
firmament, and the demoniac phantom host; and they were inciting and
sustaining valour and battle with them.'[263] It is said of Murrough
(_Murchadh_) as he entered the thick of the fight and prepared to assail
the foreign invaders, the Danes, when they had repulsed the Dal-Cais,
that 'he was seized with a boiling terrible anger, an excessive
elevation and greatness of spirit and mind. A bird of valour and
championship rose in him, and fluttered over his head and on his
breath'.[264]
CONCLUSION
The recorded or manuscript Fairy-Faith of the Gaels corresponds in all
essentials with the living Gaelic Fairy-Faith: the Tuatha De Danann or
_Sidhe_, the 'Gentry', the 'Good People', and the 'People of Peace' are
described as a race of invisible divine beings eternally young and
unfading. They inhabit fairy palaces, enjoy rare feasts and love-making,
and have their own music and minstrelsy. They are essentially majestic
in their nature; they wage war in their own invisible realm against
other of its inhabitants like the ancient Fomorians; they frequently
direct human warfare or nerve the arm of a great hero like Cuchulainn;
and demons of the air, spirit hosts, and awful unseen creatures obey
them. Mythologically they are gods of light and good, able to control
natural phenomena so as to make harvests come forth abundantly or not at
all. But they are not such mythological beings as we read about in
scholarly dissertations on mythology, dissertations so learned in their
curious and unreasonable and often unintelligible hypotheses about the
workings of the mind among primitive men. The way in which social
psychology has deeply affected all such animistic beliefs was pointed
out above in chapter iii. In chapter xi, entitled _Science and Fairies_,
our position with respect to the essential nature of the fairy races
will be made clear.
SECTION II
THE RECORDED FAIRY-FAITH
CHAPTER V
BRYTHONIC DIVINITIES AND THE BRYTHONIC FAIRY-FAITH[265]
'On the one hand we have the man Arthur, whose position we have
tried to define, and on the other a greater Arthur, a more colossal
figure, of which we have, so to speak, but a _torso_ rescued from
the wreck of the Celtic pantheon.'--The Right Hon. Sir JOHN
RHYS.
The god Arthur and the hero Arthur--Sevenfold evidence to show
Arthur as an incarnate fairy king--Lancelot the foster-son of a
fairy woman--Galahad the offspring of Lancelot and the fairy woman
Elayne--Arthur as a fairy king in _Kulhwch and Olwen_--Gwynn ab
Nudd--Arthur like Dagda, and like Osiris--Brythonic fairy-romances:
their evolution and antiquity--Arthur in Nennius, Geoffrey, Wace,
and in Layamon--Cambrensis' Otherworld tale--Norman-French writers
of twelfth and thirteenth centuries--_Romans d'Aventure_ and
_Romans Bretons_--Origins of the 'Matter of Britain'--Fairy-romance
episodes in Welsh literature--Brythonic origins.
ARTHUR AND ARTHURIAN MYTHOLOGY
As we have just considered the Gaelic Divinities in their character as
the Fairy-Folk of popular Gaelic tradition, so now we proceed to
consider the Brythonic Divinities in the same way, beginning with the
greatest of them all, Arthur. Even a superficial acquaintance with the
Arthurian Legend shows how impossible it is to place upon it any one
interpretation to the exclusion of other interpretations, for in one
aspect Arthur is a Brythonic divinity and in another a sixth-century
Brythonic chieftain. But the explanation of this double aspect seems
easy enough when we regard the historical Arthur as a great hero, who,
exactly as in so many parallel cases of national hero-worship,
came--within a comparatively short time--to be enshrined in the
imagination of the patriotic Brythons with all the attributes anciently
belonging to a great Celtic god called Arthur.[266] The hero and the god
were first confused, and then identified,[267] and hence arose that
wonderful body of romance which we call Arthurian, and which has become
the glory of English literature.
Arthur in the character of a culture hero,[268] with god-like powers to
instruct mortals in wisdom, and, also, as a being in some way related to
the sun--as a sun-god perhaps--can well be considered the human-divine
institutor of the mystic brotherhood known as the Round Table. We ought,
probably, to consider Arthur, like Cuchulainn, as a god incarnate in a
human body for the purpose of educating the race of men; and thus, while
living as a man, related definitely and, apparently, consciously to the
invisible gods or fairy-folk. Among the Aztecs and Peruvians in the New
World, there was a widespread belief that great heroes who had once been
men have now their celestial abode in the sun, and from time to time
reincarnate to become teachers of their less developed brethren of our
own race; and a belief of the same character existed among the Egyptians
and other peoples of the Old World, including the Celts. It will be
further shown, in our study of the Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth, that
anciently among the Gaels and Brythons such heroes as Cuchulainn and
Arthur were also considered reincarnate sun-divinities. As a being
related to the sun, as a sun-god, Arthur is like Osiris, the Great
Being, who with his brotherhood of great heroes and god-companions
enters daily the underworld or Hades to battle against the demons and
forces of evil,[269] even as the Tuatha De Danann battled against the
Fomors. And the most important things in the traditions of the great
Brythonic hero connect him directly with this strange world of
subjectivity. First of all, his own father, Uthr Bendragon,[270] was a
king of Hades, so that Arthur himself, being his child, is a direct
descendant of this Otherworld. Second, the Arthurian Legend traces the
origin of the Round Table back to Arthur's father, Hades being 'the
realm whence all culture was fabled to have been derived'.[271] Third,
the name of Arthur's wife, Gwenhwyvar, resolves itself into White
Phantom or White Apparition, in harmony with Arthur's line of descent
from the region of phantoms and apparitions and fairy-folk.
Thus:--_Gwenhwyvar_ or _Gwenhwyfar_ equals _Gwen_ or _Gwenn_, a
Brythonic word meaning white, and _hwyvar_, a word not found in the
Brythonic dialects, but undoubtedly cognate with the Irish word
_siabhradh_, a fairy, equal to _siabhra_, _siabrae_, _siabur_, a fairy,
or ghost, the Welsh and the Irish word going back to the form
_*seibaro_.[272] Hence the name of Arthur's wife means the _white ghost_
or _white phantom_, quite in keeping with the nature of the Tuatha De
Danann and that of the fairy-folk of Wales or _Tylwyth Teg_--the 'Fair
Family'.
Fourth, as a link in the chain of evidence connecting Arthur with the
invisible world where the Fairy-People live, his own sister is called
_Morgan le Fay_ in the romances,[273] and is thus definitely one of the
fairy women who, according to tradition, are inhabitants of the Celtic
Otherworld sometimes known as Avalon. Fifth, in the Welsh Triads,[274]
Llacheu, the son of Arthur and Gwenhwyvar, is credited with clairvoyant
vision, like the fairy-folk, so that he understands the secret nature of
all solid and material things; and 'the story of his death as given in
the second part of the Welsh version of the Grail, makes him hardly
human at all.'[275] Sixth, the name of Melwas, the abductor of Arthur's
wife, is shown by Sir John Rhys to mean a prince-youth or a princely
youth, and the same authority considers it probable that, as such,
Melwas or Maelwas was a being endowed with eternal youth,--even as
Midir, the King of the Tuatha De Danann, who though a thousand years old
appeared handsome and youthful. So it seems that the abduction of
Gwenhwyfar was really a fairy abduction, such as we read about in the
domestic troubles of the Irish fairy-folk, on a level with the abduction
of Etain by her Otherworld husband Midir.[276] And in keeping with this
superhuman character of the abductor of the White Phantom or Fairy,
Chrétien de Troyes, in his metrical romance _Le Conte de la Charrette_,
describes the realm of which Melwas was lord as a place whence no
traveller returns.[277] As further proof that the realm of Melwas was
meant by Chrétien to be the subjective world, where the god-like Tuatha
De Danann, the _Tylwyth Teg_, and the shades of the dead equally exist,
it is said that access to it was by two narrow bridges; 'one called _li
Ponz Evages_ or the Water Bridge, because it was a narrow passage a foot
and a half wide and as much in height, with water above and below it as
well as on both sides'; the other _li Ponz de l'Espée_ or the Sword
Bridge, because it consisted of the edge of a sword two lances in
length.[278] The first bridge, considered less perilous than the other,
was chosen by Gauvain (Gwalchmei), when with Lancelot he was seeking to
rescue Gwenhwyfar; but he failed to cross it. Lancelot with great
trouble crossed the second. In many mythologies and in world-wide
folk-tales there is a narrow bridge or bridges leading to the realm of
the dead. Even Mohammed in the _Koran_ declares it necessary to cross a
bridge as thin as a hair, if one would enter Paradise. And in living
folk-lore in Celtic countries, as we found among the Irish peasantry,
the crossing of a bridge or stream of water when pursued by fairies or
phantoms is a guarantee of protection. There is always the mystic water
between the realm of the living and the realm of subjectivity.[279] In
ancient Egypt there was always the last voyage begun on the sacred Nile;
and in all classical literature Pluto's realm is entered by crossing a
dark, deep river,--the river of forgetfulness between physical
consciousness and spiritual consciousness. Burns has expressed this
belief in its popular form in his _Tam O'Shanter_. And in our Arthurian
parallel there is a clear enough relation between the beings inhabiting
the invisible realm and the Brythonic heroes and gods. How striking,
too, as Gaston Paris has pointed out, is the similarity between Melwas'
capturing Gwenhwyvar as she was in the woods a-maying, and the rape of
Proserpine by Pluto, the god of Hades, while she was collecting flowers
in the fields.[280]
A curious matter in connexion with this episode of Gwenhwyvar's
abduction should claim our attention. Malory relates[281] that when
Queen Guenever advised her knights of the Table Round that on the morrow
(May Day, when fairies have special powers) she would go on maying, she
warned them all to be well-horsed and _dressed in green_. This was the
colour that nearly all the fairy-folk of Britain and Ireland wear. It
symbolizes, as many ancient mystical writings declare, eternal youth,
and resurrection or re-birth, as in nature during the springtime, when
all vegetation after its death-sleep of winter springs into new
life.[282] In the _Myvyrian Archaiology_,[283] Arthur when he has
reached the realm of Melwas speaks with Gwenhwyvar,[284] he being on a
black horse and she on a green one:--'Green is my steed of the tint of
the leaves.' Arthur's black horse--black perhaps signifying the dead to
whose realm he has gone--being proof against all water, may have been,
therefore, proof against the inhabitants of the world of shades and
against fairies:--
Black is my steed and brave beneath me,
No water will make him fear,
And no man will make him swerve.
The fairy colour, in different works and among different authors
differing both in time and country, continues to attach itself to the
abduction episode. Thus, in the fourteenth century the poet D. ab Gwilym
alludes to Melwas himself as having a cloak of green:--'The sleep of
Melwas beneath (or in) the green cloak.' Sir John Rhys, who makes
this translation, observes that another reading still of _y glas glog_
resolves it into a green bower to which Melwas took Gwenhwyvar.[285] In
any case, the reference is significant, and goes far, in combination
with the other references, to represent the White Phantom or Fairy and
her lover Melwas as beings of a race like the Irish _Sidhe_ or People of
the Goddess Dana. And though by no means exhausting all examples tending
to prove this point, we pass on to the seventh and most important of our
links in the sequence of evidence, the carrying of Arthur to Avalon in a
fairy ship by fairy women.
From the first, Arthur was under superhuman guidance and protection.
Merlin the magician, born of a spirit or daemon, claimed Arthur before
birth and became his teacher afterwards. From the mysterious Lady of the
Lake, Arthur received his magic sword _Excalibur_,[286] and to her
returned it, through Sir Bedivere. During all his time on earth the
'lady of the lake that was always friendly to King Arthur'[287] watched
over him; and once when she saw him in great danger, like the Irish
_Morrigu_ who presided over the career of Cuchulainn, she sought to save
him, and with the help of Sir Tristram succeeded.[287] The passing of
Arthur to Avalon or Faerie seems to be a return to his own native realm
of subjectivity. His own sister was with him in the ship, for she was of
the invisible country too.[288] And another of his companions on his
voyage from the visible to the invisible was his life-guardian Nimue,
the lady of the lake. Merlin could not be of the company, for he was
already in Faerie with the Fay Vivian. Behold the passing of Arthur as
Malory describes it:--'... thus was he led away in a ship wherein were
three queens; that one was King Arthur's sister, Queen Morgan le Fay;
the other was the Queen of Northgalis; the third was the Queen of the
Waste Lands. Also there was Nimue, the chief lady of the lake, that had
wedded Pelleas the good knight; and this lady had done much for King
Arthur, for she would never suffer Sir Pelleas to be in no place where
he should be in danger of his life.'[289] Concerning the great Arthur's
return from Avalon we shall speak in the chapter dealing with Re-birth.
And we pass now from Arthur and his Brotherhood of gods and fairy-folk
to Lancelot and his son Galahad--the two chief knights in the Arthurian
Romance.
According to one of the earliest accounts we have of Lancelot, the
German poem by Ulrich von Zatzikhoven, as analysed by Gaston Paris, he
was the son of King Pant and Queen Clarine of Genewis.[290] In
consequence of the hatred of their subjects the royal pair were forced
to flee when Lancelot was only a year old. During the flight, the king,
mortally wounded, died; and just as the queen was about to be taken
captive, a fairy rising in a cloud of mist carried away the infant
Lancelot from where his parents had placed him under a tree. The fairy
took him to her abode on an island in the midst of the sea, from whence
she derived her title of Lady of the Lake, and he, as her adopted son,
the name of _Lancelot du Lac_; and her island-world was called the Land
of Maidens. Having lived in that world of Faerie so long, it was only
natural that Lancelot should have grown up more like one of its
fair-folk than like a mortal. No doubt it was on account of his
half-supernatural nature that he fell in love with the White Phantom,
Gwenhwyvar, the wife of the king who had power to enter Hades and return
again to the land of the living. Who better than Lancelot could have
rescued Arthur's queen? No one else in the court was so well fitted for
the task. And it was he who was able to cross one of the magic bridges
into the realm of Melwas, the Otherworld, while Gauvain (in the English
form, Gawayne) failed.