The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries

Mr. Evans Wentz has asked me to define my position towards psychical research in relation to anthropology. I have done so in my book, The Making of Religion. The alleged abnormal or supernormal occurrences which psychical research examines are, for the most part, ‘universally human,’ and, whether they happen or do not happen, whether they are the results of malobservation, or of fraud, or are merely mythical, as human they cannot be wisely neglected by anthropology.

The fairy-folk, under many names, in many tongues, are everywhere objects of human belief, in Central Australia, in New Zealand, in the isles of the Pacific, as in the British Isles, Lowland or Highland, Celtic in the main, or English in the main, I conceive the various beings, fairies, brownies, Iruntarinia, Djinns, or what you will, to be purely mythical. I am incapable of believing that they are actual entities, who carry off men and women; steal and hide objects (especially as the Iruntarinia do); love or hate, persecute or kiss human beings; practise music, vocal and instrumental; and in short ‘play the pliskies’ with which they are universally credited by the identical workings of the human fancy. They tend to shade away, on one side, into the denizens of the House of Hades—phantasms of the dead. The belief in such phantasms may be partially based on experience, whether hallucinatory or otherwise and inexplicably produced.[591]

As far as psychical research studies report of these phantasms it approaches the realm of ‘the Fairy Queen Proserpine’. As far as such research examines the historical or contemporary stories of the Poltergeist, it touches on fairies: because the Irish, for example, attribute to the agency of fairies the modern Poltergeist phenomena, whether these, in each case, be fraudulent or, up to now, be unexplained.

There are not more than two or three alleged visions of the traditional fairies in the annals of psychical research; and I have met with but few sane and educated persons who profess to have seen phantoms at all resembling the traditional fairy; while phantasms supposed to be of the dead, the dying, and the absent are frequently reported. On the whole, psychical research has very little concern with the fairy-belief in its typical forms, and if the researcher did find modern cases of fairy visions alleged by sane and educated percipients, he would be apt to explain them by suggestion acting on the subconscious self.[592]

Concerning phantasms of the dead into which, as above pointed out, the fairy-folk tend to shade away, Mr. Lang has elsewhere said:—‘On the whole, if the evidence is worth anything, there are real objective ghosts, and there are also telepathic hallucinations: so that the scientific attitude is to believe in both, if in either.’[593] And he shows that while anthropologists have explained all animistic beliefs as the results of primitive men’s philosophizing ‘on life, death, sleep, dreams, trances, shadows, the phenomena of epilepsy, and the illusions of starvation’, ‘normal phenomena, psychological and psychical, might suggest most of the animistic beliefs.’[593] In The Making of Religion, Mr. Lang has expanded this anthropological argument so as to make it even more fully embrace psychical research.

If we apply the brilliant results of Mr. Lang’s investigations to our own, it is apparent that the background of the Fairy-Faith, like that of all religions, is animistic, as we have argued in chapter iii; that it must have grown up in ancient times into its traditional form out of a pre-Celtic followed by a pre-Christian Celtic religion; these latter due, in turn, to actual psychical experiences, such as hallucinations, visions of different sorts, clairvoyance, ‘mediumship’, and magical knowledge on the part of Druid priests and, probably, to some extent, on the part of the common people as well; and, finally, that the living Fairy-Faith depends not so much upon ancient traditions, oral and recorded, as upon recent and contemporary psychical experiences, vouched for by many ‘seers’ and other percipients among our witnesses, and now placed on record by us in chapter ii and elsewhere throughout this study.

Sir William Crookes, the well-known English authority in physical science, was almost the first scientist to become seriously interested in psychics, and in Part III of Notes of an Enquiry into the Phenomena called Spiritual, during the Years 1870-1873 (London), boldly affirms:—‘It will be seen that the facts are of the most astounding character, and seem utterly irreconcilable with all known theories of modern science. Having satisfied myself of their truth, it would be moral cowardice to withhold my testimony because my previous publications were ridiculed by critics and others.’ And this conclusion reached forty years ago has not been reversed, but has been confirmed by one after another of learned scientists on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 1908, Sir Oliver Lodge, Principal of the University of Birmingham, and at present one of the best known of scientists concerned with the study of spiritual phenomena, stated his position thus:—‘On the whole, I am of those who, though they would like to see further and still stronger and more continued proofs, are of opinion that a good case has been made out, and that as the best working hypothesis at the present time it is legitimate to grant that lucid moments of intercourse with deceased persons may in the best cases supervene.... The boundary between the two states—the known and the unknown—is still substantial, but it is wearing thin in places; and like excavators engaged in boring a tunnel from opposite ends, amid the roar of water and other noises, we are beginning to hear now and again the strokes of the pickaxes of our comrades on the other side.’[594] In 1909, Sir Oliver Lodge published The Survival of Man, in which, after a careful exposition, covering over three hundred pages, of the definite results of much scientific experimentation by the best scientists of Europe and America, in such psychical phenomena as Telepathy or Thought Transference, Telepathy and Clairvoyance, Automatism and Lucidity, the following tentative conclusion is reached:—‘The first thing we learn, perhaps the only thing we clearly learn in the first instance, is continuity.

There is no such sudden break in the conditions of existence as may have been anticipated; and no break at all in the continuous and conscious identity of genuine character and personality.’[594] And his personal conviction is that ‘Intelligent co-operation between other than embodied human minds than our own ... has become possible’.[595]

William James, who was one of the chief psychical researchers in the United States, published his conclusions in October 1909; and of psychical phenomena he wrote:—‘As to there being such real natural types of phenomena ignored by orthodox science, I am not baffled at all, for I am fully convinced of it.’ Of ‘mediumship’, he postulated the very interesting theory of a universally diffused ‘soul-stuff’, which elsewhere (p. 254) we have referred to as the scientific equivalent to the Polynesian Mana: ‘My own dramatic sense tends instinctively to picture the situation as an interaction between slumbering faculties in the automatist’s mind and a cosmic environment of other consciousness of some sort which is able to work upon them. If there were in the universe a lot of diffuse soul-stuff, unable of itself to get into consistent personal form, or to take permanent possession of an organism, yet always craving to do so, it might get its head into the air, parasitically, so to speak, by profiting by weak spots in the armour of human minds, and slipping in and stirring up there the sleeping tendencies to personate.’ Expanding this theory into a ‘pan-psychic’ view of the universe and assuming a ‘mother-sea’ of consciousness, a bank upon which we all draw, James asked these questions about it, which educated Celtic seers ask themselves about the Sidhe or Fairy-World and its also collective consciousness or life: ‘What is its own structure? What is its inner topography?... What are the conditions of individuation or insulation in this mother-sea?

To what tracts, to what active systems functioning separately in it, do personalities correspond? Are individual “spirits” constituted there? How numerous, and of how many hierarchic orders may these then be? How permanent? How transient? And how confluent with one another may they become?’[596] We should ask the reader to compare this scientific attitude with the almost identical attitude taken up with respect to the Sidhe Races and the constitution of their world and life by the Irish mystic and seer (pp. 60 ff.).

M. Camille Flammarion, the well-known French astronomer, is another of the pioneer psychical researchers; and in his psychic studies, entitled, as translated in an English edition, The Unknown, recently announced these definite conclusions:—‘(1) The soul exists as a real entity independent of the body. (2) It is endowed with faculties still unknown to science. (3) It is able to act at a distance, without the intervention of the senses.’ And in his Mysterious Psychic Forces (Boston, 1907, pp. 452-3), he says:—‘The conclusions of the present work concord with those of the former (The Unknown).... I may sum up the whole matter with the single statement that there exists in nature, in myriad activity, a psychic element the essential nature of which is still hidden from us.’

This chapter can now be brought to its logical conclusion by directly applying the results so far attained to our still vigorous x-quantity or residuum gathered out of the Fairy-Faith. We have, although hurriedly, blazed a rough pathway through the necessary parts of the jungle of scientific theories, and have arrived at a very considerable clearing made by the pioneers, the psychical researchers. We seem, in fact, to have arrived at a point in our long investigations where we can postulate scientifically, on the showing of the data of psychical research, the existence of such invisible intelligences as gods, genii, daemons, all kinds of true fairies, and disembodied men. It is not necessary to produce here, in addition to what already has been set forth, the very voluminous detailed evidence of psychical research as to the existence of such intelligences. The general statement may be made that there are hundreds of carefully proven cases of phenomena or apparitions precisely like many of those which the Celtic peoples attribute to fairies.[597]

Various explanations or theories are offered by our men of science as to what these invisible intelligences are, for none of our scientists would say that the dead alone are responsible, even in a majority of cases, for the observed phenomena and apparitions, but rather such beings as we call daemons, fairies, and elementals. M. Camille Flammarion says:—‘The greater part of the phenomena observed—noises, movement of tables, confusions, disturbances, raps, replies to questions asked—are really childish, puerile, vulgar, often ridiculous, and rather resemble the pranks of mischievous boys than serious bona-fide actions. It is impossible not to notice this. Why should the souls of the dead amuse themselves in this way? The supposition seems almost absurd.’[598] There could be no better description of the pranks which house-haunting fairies like brownies and Robin Goodfellows and elementals enjoy than this; and to suppose that the dead perform such mischievous and playful acts is, in truth, absurd. M. Flammarion also says:—‘Two inescapable hypotheses present themselves. Either it is we who produce these phenomena’ (and this is not reasonable) ‘or it is spirits. But mark this well: these spirits are not necessarily the souls of the dead; for other kinds of spiritual beings may exist, and space may be full of them without our ever knowing anything about it, except under unusual circumstances. Do we not find in the different ancient literatures, demons, angels, gnomes, goblins, sprites, spectres, elementals, &c.? Perhaps these legends are not without some foundation in fact.’[598]

On ‘the phenomena of percussive and allied sound’—such as fairies and the dead are said to produce—Sir William Crookes made this report:—‘The intelligence governing the phenomena is sometimes manifestly below that of the medium. It is frequently in direct opposition to the wishes of the medium.... The intelligence is sometimes of such a character as to lead to the belief that it does not emanate from any person present.’[599] In the case of the ‘medium’ Mr. Home, Sir William Crookes used mechanical tests and proved to his own satisfaction that physical objects moved without Mr. Home or any other person being in contact with them,[600] in the way that fairies are believed to move objects. These phenomena parallel remarkable ancient and modern examples of the same nature: e. g. in the affair at Cideville, France, brought before a magistrate, there is sworn evidence by reputable witnesses that pillows and coverlets floated away from a bed in which two children were asleep, and that furniture in the house moved without contact.[601] Mrs. Margaret Quinn, originally of Mullingar, but now of Howth, gave this remarkable testimony:—‘When I was a little girl, I lived with my mother in West Meath, near Mullingar. A fort was at the back of our house, and mother used to hear music playing round our house all night, and she has seen them (the good people). It often happened there at home that we would have clothes out on the line and they would float off like a balloon at a time when there would not be a bit of wind and in daylight.

My mother would come out and say, “God bless them (the good people). They will bring them back.” And then the clothes would slowly come floating back to the line.’ And in our chapter ii there is other testimony concerning objects moved without contact with human beings, either through the agency of fairies or of the dead. After due investigation of such and various other phenomena, Sir William Crookes, among other theories to explain them, gives this theory:—‘The actions of a separate order of beings, living on this earth, but invisible and immaterial to us. Able, however, occasionally to manifest their presence. Known in almost all countries and ages as demons (not necessarily bad), gnomes, fairies, kobolds, elves, goblins, Puck, &c.’[602] Here we seem to have what ought to be, by this stage of our study, proof of the Psychological Theory of the nature and origin of the Fairy-Faith.

Let us now draw a few of the direct parallels thus suggested. Consider first how a fairy is said to appear, how it is described, and how it vanishes, and then compare the facts stated in the following case of a phantom reported by Sir William Crookes[603]:—‘In the dusk of the evening’ (just the time when fairies are most easily seen) ‘during a séance with Mr. Home at my house, the curtains of a window about eight feet from Mr. Home were seen to move. A dark, shadowy, semi-transparent form, like that of a man, was then seen by all present standing near the window, waving the curtain with his hand. As we looked, the form faded away and the curtain ceased to move.’ The following—Mr. Home as in the former case being the ‘medium’—is a still more striking instance:—‘A phantom form came from a corner of the room, took an accordion in its hand, and then glided about the room playing the instrument. The form was visible to all present for many minutes, Mr. Home also being seen at the same time. On its coming rather close to a lady who was sitting apart from the rest of the company, she gave a slight cry, upon which it vanished.’ Compare the following types of observed phenomena by the same authority with what our Welsh witness from the Pentre Evan country said about death-candles (p. 155):—‘I have seen a luminous cloud floating upwards to a picture.’ Or, ‘I have more than once had a solid self-luminous body placed in my hand by a hand which did not belong to any person in the room.

In the light I have seen a luminous cloud hover over a heliotrope on a side-table, break a sprig off, and carry the sprig to a lady; and on some occasions I have seen a similar luminous cloud visibly condense to the form of a hand and carry small objects about.’ Similar lights, parallel to the death lights or death tokens observed by Celtic percipients in Wales and in Brittany, and to what in Ireland are called the ‘lights’ of the ‘good people’ or ‘gentry’—all of which phenomena are traceable to no material causes as yet discovered—are reported by Iamblichus and others of his school.[604] And such lights are among phenomena best attested by modern psychical researchers. Supernormally produced music, said to have been produced by daemons, which is parallel to that called by several of our own percipients ‘fairy’ music, was also known to the Neo-Platonists;[604] and in the scientific investigations to which Mr. Home was subjected, musical sounds were heard which could not be attributed to any known agency. In haunted houses, as psychical research discovers, the rustling of dresses, movements of objects, and sounds, often occur spontaneously without and with the occurrence of apparitions;[604] and these phenomena are parallel to certain ones which we have had cited by Celtic percipients as due to fairies. Mr. Lang, too, has set forth clearly the probability of real ‘haunts’ or spirits possessing particular places—just as fairies are said to possess particular localities or buildings in Celtic lands.

The Report on the Census of Hallucination by Professor Sidgwick’s Committee has furnished data sufficiently good to convince many scientists that phantoms (comparable in a way with Irish banshees and the Breton Ankou) do appear to the living directly before a death as though announcing it.[605] According to other equally reliable data, sometimes a phantasmal voice—like certain ‘fairy’ voices—has given news of a death.[606] Myers and others have studied and recorded many cases of the dead appearing, as the Celtic dead appear when they have been taken to Fairyland.[606]

In Phantasms of the Living, by Gurney, Myers, and Podmore, the explanation of apparitions which are coincident with a death as being generated by a telepathic influence exerted upon the percipient by the dying friend, suggests the most rational interpretation of certain parallel kinds of apparitions, of the dead or of fairies, who, as in these last examples, appear dressed in garments. It is that all such apparitional appearances, coincident with a death or not, are equally due to a telepathic force exerted by an agency independent of the percipient. This outside force acts as a stimulus upon the nervous apparatus of the person to whom it is thus transmitted, and causes him to project out of some part of his own consciousness (which part may have passed over into the subconsciousness) a visualized image already impressed there. The image has natural affinity or correspondence with the outside stimulus which arouses it.

Such an hypothesis curiously agrees in part with the one put forth by our seer-witness, the Irish mystic (p. 60 ff.). He would probably agree as to the visualization process in most types of ordinary apparitions. In addition, he holds that Nature herself has a memory: there is some indefinable psychic element in the earth’s atmosphere upon which all human and physical actions or phenomena are photographed or impressed. These records in Nature’s mind correspond to mental impressions in us. Under certain inexplicable conditions, normal persons who are not seers may observe Nature’s mental records like pictures cast upon a screen—often like moving pictures. Seers can always see them if they wish; and uncritical seers frequently mistake these phantom records or pictures existing on the psychical envelope of the planet for actual events now occurring, and for actual beings—fairies of various kinds and the dead. A recent book entitled An Adventure, by Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont (pseudonyms), adequately illustrates what we mean by such phantom pictures. During the year 1901 these two cultured ladies saw at le petit Trianon of Marie Antoinette records in the mind of Nature of past historical events dating from about 1789. Of this there seems not to be the slightest doubt. The fairy boat-race on Lough Gur, as described by Count John de Salis (p. 80), and the procession seen on Tara Hill of fairies ‘like soldiers of ancient Ireland in review’ (p. 33), probably illustrate the same kind of phenomena (cf. pp. 55-7, 68, 74, 123, 126, &c.).

But in visions by natural seers, following again the theory of our Irish seer-witness, there is present not only an outside force (as seems to be the case when ordinary apparitions are seen) but also a veridical being with a form and life of its own in a world of its own. Such a real entity is as distinct from a picture in the memory of Nature as a living person is distinct from the mental picture which his friend holds and projects as a visualized image when responding to a telepathic stimulus sent by him. The natural seer, not being obliged to see with his normal sense of vision, need not use the normal method (namely, visualization) of responding to the outside telepathic stimulus, and so does not see the ordinary apparitional ghost or fairy. He exercises ‘second-sight’ or ecstatic vision, and while so doing is in the same plane of consciousness and under the same conditions of perception as the intelligence which projects upon him the stimulus inducing automatically such ‘second-sight’ or ecstatic vision. Therefore, if the intelligence has a form and nature of its own, the seer and not the non-seer will perceive them in their own world while his consciousness is temporarily functioning there and out of the normal plane of mental action. In other words, in the normal plane the non-seer reacts normally upon the same stimulus upon which the seer reacts abnormally. The former percipient sees a non-real apparition, a visualized image out of his own experience; the latter claims to see a real being.

It is mathematically possible to conceive fourth-dimensional beings, and if they exist it would be impossible in a third-dimensional plane to see them as they really are. Hence the ordinary apparition is non-real as a form, whereas the beings, which wholly sane and reliable seers claim to see when exercising seership of the highest kind, may be as real to themselves and to the seers as human beings are to us here in this third-dimensional world when we exercise normal vision.

Concerning actual demon-possession, which among spiritualists and psychical researchers would be called spirit phenomena through ‘mediums’, and which, as we have elsewhere pointed out (pp. 249 ff.), offers the most rational explanation for the changeling belief and related Celtic beliefs about fairies, Dr. J. L. Nevius, in his Demon Possession, offers very important scientific data relating to China. Dr. F. F. Ellinwood, who like that authority studied strange psychical phenomena in the interior districts of the Shantung Province (China) for many years, says in an introductory note to that work:—‘Antecedently to any knowledge of the New Testament’ (so full of cases of demon-possession) ‘the people of North China believed fully in the possession of the minds and bodies of men by evil spirits.... It has always been understood that the personality of the evil spirit usurped, or for the time being supplanted, that of the unwilling victim, and acted through his organs and faculties. Physical suffering and sometimes violent paroxysms attended the presence and active influence of the spirit.’ In the face of so many cases of such phenomena observed in China by the same authorities, Dr. Ellinwood adds, as Dr. Nevius’s conclusion, that ‘no theory has been advanced which so well accords with the facts as the simple and unquestioning conclusion so universally held by the Christians of Shantung, viz. that evil spirits do in many instances possess or control the mind and will of human beings’.

Hypnotism shows how one strong and magnetic human will can control the mind and will of its subject; the scientific results attained by the Society for Psychical Research in its study of spiritualism show a disembodied will or intelligence controlling and using the body of a living human being; and Dr. Nevius writes:—‘Now may not demon-possession be only a different, a more advanced form of hypnotism?’ Criminal records of Europe and America show many examples of condemned criminals who confessed in all sincerity that some invisible or outside influence led them against their better judgement to commit crime; and very often in such examples the past lives of the condemned are so good as to set up a strong probability in favour of their belief in possession. And altogether in accord with the evidence of modern mediumship, as well as that of mediumship among the ancients, Dr. Nevius says of Chinese demon-possession:—‘When normal consciousness is restored after one of these attacks, the subject is entirely ignorant of everything which has passed during that state. The most striking characteristic of those cases is that the subject evidences another personality, and the normal personality for the time being is partially or wholly dormant. The new personality presents traits of character utterly different from those which really belong to the subject in his normal state, and this change of character is, with rare exceptions, in the direction of moral obliquity and impurity.

Many persons while “demon-possessed” give evidence of knowledge which cannot be accounted for in ordinary ways.... They sometimes converse in foreign languages of which in their normal states they are entirely ignorant. There are often heard, in connexion with “demon possessions”, rappings and noises in places where no physical cause for them can be found; and tables, chairs, crockery, and the like are moved about without, so far as can be discerned, any application of physical force, exactly as we are told is the case among spiritualists.’[607]

(2) Authorities do not agree in their opinions as to the pathological and psychological processes with which we are directly concerned; they are quite uncertain how to explain the human brain in all its more subtle functions, or the sympathetic nervous system and nervous states generally, in relation especially to human consciousness under various abnormal but not diseased conditions of the organism; and they do not propose any conclusions as final, but only as very weakly tentative, though some of these are in favour of a psycho-physical view of man in which there is a close approach to the present more advanced position of psychical research.

(3) Psychical research has furnished proof sufficient to convince such first-class scientists as Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, William James, M. Camille Flammarion, and others, that states of consciousness exist in nature outside of, though probably connected with, the consciousness of incarnate human beings, and that these intelligences can produce effects on matter and on the psychical constitution of man; and some of these scientists consider certain of such intelligences to be discarnate men and women.

(4) Scientific proof has been adduced that there are genuine hallucinations—like those relating to fairies—of human-like forms, seen by single percipients, or collectively; and such collective hallucinations are incapable of being explained away, which is equally true of apparitions seen by a single percipient to move physical objects.

(6) In the accepted theory of telepathy we have support for assuming that, like hypnosis, it is a psychical process, and can be carried on either by two embodied spirits or human beings, or by a disembodied spirit and one still incarnate. Myers’s theories, including that of the Subliminal Self, embody all the preceding ones and agree in details with them.

(7) The results taken together harmonize with those attained in our study of psychical phenomena attributed by the Celtic peoples to fairies; and, if they be accepted, older psychological and pathological theories must be thoroughly revised in many cases, or else cast aside as worthless. Finally, since we have demonstrated that the background of the Fairy-Faith, and hence the residuum or x-quantity of it, is like the background of all religious and mystical beliefs, being animistic, and like them has grown up in ancient times out of definite psychical phenomena identical in character with those now studied by science, and is kept alive by an unbroken succession of ‘seers’ and percipients, we have a clear right to set up under scientific authority these tentative conclusions: