KIRK’S
SECRET COMMONWEALTH.
The bibliography of the following little tract is extremely obscure. The title-page of the edition of 1815, which we reproduce, gives the date as 1691. Sir Walter Scott says in his Demonology and Witchcraft (1830, p. 163, note), “It was printed with the author’s name in 1691, and reprinted, in 1815, for Longman & Co.” But was there really a printed edition of 1691? Scott says that he never met with an example. Research in our great libraries has discovered none, and there is none save that of 1815 at Abbotsford. The reprint, of one hundred copies, was made, as it states, from no printed text, but from “a manuscript copy preserved in the Advocates’ Library.” On page 45 of the edition of 1815, at the end of the comments on Lord Tarbott’s Letters, there is a “Note by the Transcriber”—that is, the person who wrote out the manuscript in the Advocates’ Library: “See the rest in a little manuscript belonging to Coline Kirk.” Now Coline or Colin Kirk, Writer to the Signet, was the son of the Rev. Mr. Kirk, author of the tract. If the son had his father’s book only in manuscript, it seems very probable that it was not printed in 1691; that the title-page is only the title-page of a manuscript. Till some printed text of 1691 is discovered, we may doubt, then, whether the hundred copies published in 1815, and now somewhat rare, be not the original printed edition. The editor has a copy of 1815, but it is the only one which he has met with for sale.
The Rev. Robert Kirk, the author of The Secret Commonwealth, was a student of theology at St. Andrews: his Master’s degree, however, he took at Edinburgh. He was (and this is notable) the youngest and seventh son of Mr. James Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle, the place familiar to all readers of Rob Roy. As a seventh son, he was, no doubt, specially gifted, and in The Secret Commonwealth he lays some stress on the mystic privileges of such birth. There may be “some secret virtue in the womb of the parent, which increaseth until the seventh son be borne, and decreaseth by the same degree afterwards.” It would not surprise us if Mr. Kirk, no less than the Rev. Robert Blair of St. Andrews (1650-60), could heal scrofula by the touch, like royal persons—Charles III. in Italy, for example. As is well known to all, the House of Brunswick has no such powers. However this may have been, Mr. Kirk was probably drawn, by his seventh sonship, to a more careful study of psychical phenomena than most of his brethren bestowed. Little is known of his life. He was minister originally of Balquidder, whence, in 1685, he was transferred to Aberfoyle. This was no Covenanting district, and there is no bigotry in Mr. Kirk’s dissertation. He was employed on an “Irish” translation of the Bible, and he published a Psalter in Gaelic (1684). He married, first, Isobel, daughter of Sir Colin Campbell of Mochester, who died in 1680, and, secondly, the daughter of Campbell of Fordy: this lady survived him. From his connection with Campbells, we may misdoubt him for a Whig. By his first wife he had a son, Colin Kirk, W.S.; by his second wife, a son who was minister of Dornoch. He died (if he did die, which is disputed) in 1692, aged about fifty-one; his tomb was inscribed—
ROBERTUS KIRK, A.M.
Linguæ Hiberniæ Lumen.
The tomb, in Scott’s time, was to be seen in the east end of the churchyard of Aberfoyle; but the ashes of Mr. Kirk are not there. His successor, the Rev. Dr. Grahame, in his Sketches of Picturesque Scenery, informs us that, as Mr. Kirk was walking on a dun-shi, or fairy-hill, in his neighbourhood, he sunk down in a swoon, which was taken for death. “After the ceremony of a seeming funeral,” writes Scott (op. cit., p. 105), “the form of the Rev. Robert Kirk appeared to a relation, and commanded him to go to Grahame of Duchray. ‘Say to Duchray, who is my cousin as well as your own, that I am not dead, but a captive in Fairyland; and only one chance remains for my liberation. When the posthumous child, of which my wife has been delivered since my disappearance, shall be brought to baptism, I will appear in the room, when, if Duchray shall throw over my head the knife or dirk which he holds in his hand, I may be restored to society; but if this is neglected, I am lost for ever.’” True to his tryst, Mr. Kirk did appear at the christening, and “was visibly seen;” but Duchray was so astonished that he did not throw his dirk over the head of the appearance, and to society Mr. Kirk has not yet been restored. This is extremely to be regretted, as he could now add matter of much importance to his treatise. Neither history nor tradition has more to tell about Mr. Robert Kirk, who seems to have been a man of good family, a student, and, as his book shows, an innocent and learned person.
The tract, of which the reader now knows the history, is a little volume of somewhat singular character. Written in 1691 by the Rev. Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle, it is a kind of metaphysic of the Fairy world. Having lived through the period of the sufferings of the Kirk, the author might have been expected either to neglect Fairyland altogether, or to regard it as a mere appanage of Satan’s kingdom—a “burning question” indeed, for some of the witches who suffered at Presbyterian hands were merely narrators of popular tales about the state of the dead. That she trafficked with the dead, and from a ghost won a medical recipe for the cure of Archbishop Adamson of St. Andrews, was the charge against Alison Pearson. “The Bischope keipit his castle lyk a tod in his holl, seik of a disease of grait fetiditie, and oftymes under the cure of women suspected of witchcraft, namlie, wha confessit hir to haiff learnit medecin of ane callit Mr. Wilyeam Simsone, that apeired divers tymes to hir efter his dead, and gaiff hir a buik.... She was execut in Edinbruche for a witch” (James Melville’s Diary, p. 137, 1583). The Archbishop, like other witches, had a familiar in the form of a hare, which once ran before him down the street. These were the beliefs of men of learning like James, the nephew and companion of Andrew Melville. Even in our author’s own time, Archbishop Sharp was accused of entertaining “the muckle black Deil” in his study at midnight, and of being “levitated” and dancing in the air. This last feat, creditable to a saint or a Neo-Platonist like Plotinus, was reckoned for sin to Archbishop Sharp, as may be read in Wodrow’s Analecta. Thus all Fairydom was commonly looked on as under the same guilt as witchcraft. Yet Mr. Kirk of Aberfoyle, living among Celtic people, treats the land of faery as a mere fact in nature, a world with its own laws, which he investigates without fear of the Accuser of the Brethren. We may thus regard him, even more than Wodrow, as an early student in folk-lore and in psychical research—topics which run into each other—and he shows nothing of the usual persecuting disposition. Nor, again, is Mr. Kirk like Glanvil and Henry More. He does not, save in his title-page and in one brief passage, make superstitious creeds or psychical phenomena into arguments and proofs against modern Sadducees. Firm in his belief, he treats his matter in a scientific spirit, as if he were dealing with generally recognised physical phenomena.
Our study of Mr. Kirk’s little tractate must have a double aspect. It must be an essay partly on folk-lore, on popular beliefs, their relation to similar beliefs in other parts of the world, and the residuum of fact, preserved by tradition, which they may contain. On the other hand, as mental phenomena are in question—such things as premonitions, hallucinations, abnormal or unusual experiences generally—a criticism of Mr. Kirk must verge on “Psychical Research.” The Society organised for that difficult subject certainly takes a vast deal of trouble about all manner of odd reports and strange visions. It “transfers” thoughts of no value, at a great expense of time and of serious hard work. But, as far as the writer has read the Society’s Proceedings, it “takes no keep,” as Malory says, of these affairs in their historical aspect. Whatever hallucination, or illusion, or imposture, or the “subliminal self” can do to-day, has always been done among peoples in every degree of civilisation. An historical study of the topic, as contained in trials for witchcraft, in the reports of travellers and missionaries, in the works of the seventeenth-century Platonists, More, Glanvill, Sinclair, and others, and in the rare tracts such as The Devil in Glen Luce and The Just Devil of Woodstock, not to mention Lavater, Wierus, Thyræus, Reginald Scott, and so on, is as necessary to the psychologist as to the folk-lorist.[1] If there be an element of fact in modern hypnotic experiments (a matter on which I have really no opinion), it is plain that old magic and witchcraft are not mere illusions, or not commonplace illusions. The subliminal self has his stroke in these affairs. Assuredly the Psychologists should have an historical department. The evidence which they would find is, of course, vitiated in many obvious ways, but the evidence contains much that coincides with that of modern times, and the coincidence can hardly be designed—that is to say, the old Highland seers had no design of abetting modern inquiry. It may be, however, that their methods and ideas have been traditionally handed down to modern “sensitives” and “mediums.” At all events, here is an historical chapter, if it be but a chapter in “The History of Human Error.” These wide and multifarious topics can only be touched on lightly in this essay; the author will be content if he directs the attention of students with more leisure and a better library of diablerie to the matter. But first we glance at The Secret Commonwealth as folk-lorists.
Mr. Kirk’s first chapter, “Of the Subterranean Inhabitants,” naturally suggests the recent speculations of Mr. MacRitchie. The gist of Mr. MacRitchie’s Testimony of Tradition is that there once was a race of earth-dwellers in this island; that their artificial caves still exist; that this people survive in popular memory as “the legendary Feens,” and as the Pechts of popular tales, in which they are regarded as dwarfs. “The Pechs were unco wee bodies, but terrible strang.” Here, then, it might be thought that we have the origin of Fairy beliefs. There really was, on this showing, a dwarf race, who actually did live in the “fairy-hills,” or howes, now commonly looked on as sepulchral monuments.
There is much in Mr. MacRitchie’s theory which does not commend itself to me. The modern legends of Pechts as builders of Glasgow Cathedral, for example, do not appear to prove such a late survival of a race known as Picts, but are on a level with the old Greek belief that the Cyclopes built Mycenæ (Testimony of Tradition, p. 72). Granting, for the sake of discussion, that there were still Picts or Pechs in Galloway when Glasgow Cathedral was built (in the twelfth century), these wild Galloway men, scourges of the English Border, were the very last people to be employed as masons. The truth is that the recent Scotch have entirely forgotten the ages of mediæval art. Accustomed to the ill-built barns of a robbed and stinted Kirk, they looked on the Cathedral as no work of ordinary human beings. It was a creation of the Pechts, as Mycenæ and Tiryns of the mighty walls were creations of the Cyclopes. By another coincidence, the well-known story of the last Pecht, who refuses to divulge the secret of the heather ale, is told in the Volsunga Saga, and in the Nibelungenlied, of the Last Niflung. Again, the breaking of a bar of iron, which he takes for a human arm, by the last Pecht is a tale current of the Drakos in modern Greece (see Chambers’s Popular Traditions of Scotland for the last Pecht). I cannot believe that the historical Picts were a set of half-naked, dwarfish savages, hairy men living underground. These are the topics of Sir Arthur Wardour and Monkbarns. Mr. W. F. Skene may be said to have put the historic Picts in their proper place as the ancestors of the Highlanders. The Pecht of legend answers to the Drakos and the Cyclopes: the beliefs about his habits may have been suggested by the tumuli, still more by the brochs: it seems less probable that they represent an historical memory. As to the Irish “Feens,” the topic can only be discussed by Celtic scholars. But it does not follow, because the leader of the Feens seemed a dwarf among giants, that therefore his people were a dwarfish race.[2] The story proves no more than Gulliver’s Travels.
Once more, we often read in the Sagas of a hero like Grettir, who opens a howe, has a conflict with a “barrow-wight,” as Mr. Morris calls the “howe-dweller,” and wins gold and weapons. But the dweller in the howe is often merely the able-bodied ghost of the Norseman, a known and named character, who is buried there; he is not a Pecht. Thus, as it seems to me, the Scotch and Celts possessed a theory of a legendary people, as did the Greeks. Whether any actual traditions of an earlier, perhaps a Finnish race, was at the bottom of the legend, is an obscure question. But, having such a belief, the Scotch easily discovered homes for the fancied people in the sepulchral howes: they “combined their information.” The Fairies, again, are composite creatures. As they came to births and christenings, and as Norse wise-wives (as in the Saga of Eric the Red) prophesied at festivals, Mr. MacRitchie combines his own information. The Wise-wife is a Finn woman, and Finn and Fairy amalgamate. But the Egyptians, as in the Tale of Two Brothers (Maspero, Contes Egyptiens), had their Hathors, who came and prophesied at births; the Greeks had their Mœræ, as in the story of Meleager and the burning brand. The Hathors and Mœræ play, in ancient Egypt and in ancient Greece, the part of Fairies at the christening, but surely they were not Finnish women! In short, though a memory of some old race may have mingled in the composite Fairy belief, this is at most but an element in the whole, and the part played by ancestral spirits, naturally earth-dwellers, is probably more important. Bishop Callaway has pointed out, in the preface to his Zulu Tales, that what the Highlanders say of the Fairies the Zulus say of “the Ancestors.” In many ways, as when persons carried off to Fairyland meet relations or friends lately deceased, who warn them, as Persephone and Steenie Steenson were warned, to eat no food in this place, Fairyland is clearly a memory of the pre-Christian Hades. There are other elements in the complex mass of Fairy tradition, but Chaucer knew “the Fairy Queen Proserpina,” as Campion calls her, and it is plain that in very fact “the dread Persephone,” the “Queen over death and the dead,” had dwindled into the lady who borrows Tamlane in the ballad. Indeed Kirk mentions but does not approve of this explanation, “that those subterranean people are departed souls.” Now, as was said, the dead are dwellers under earth. The worshippers of Chthonian Demeter (Achaia) beat the earth with wands; so does the Zulu sorcerer when he appeals to the Ancestors. And a Macdonald in Moidart, being pressed for his rent, beat the earth, and cried aloud to his dead chief, “Simon, hear me; you were always good to me.”[3]
Thus, to my mind at least, the Subterranean Inhabitants of Mr. Kirk’s book are not so much a traditional recollection of a real dwarfish race living underground (a hypothesis of Sir Walter Scott’s), as a lingering memory of the Chthonian beings, “the Ancestors.” A good case in point is that of Bessie Dunlop, of Dalry, in Ayrshire, tried on 8th November 1576 for witchcraft. She dealt in medicine and white magic, and obtained her prescriptions from Thomas Reid, slain at Pinkie fight (1547), who often appeared to her, and tried to lead her off to Fairyland. She, like Alison Pearson, was “convict and burnt” (Scott’s Demonology, p. 146, and Pitcairn’s Criminal Trials). Both ladies knew the Fairy Queen, and Alison Pearson beheld Maitland of Lethington, and Buccleugh, in Fairyland, as is recounted in a rhymed satire on Archbishop Adamson (Dalzell’s Scottish Poems, p. 321). These are excellent proofs that Fairyland was a kind of Hades, or home of the dead.
Mr. Kirk, who speaks of the Sleagh Maith as confidently as if he were discussing the habits of some remote race which he has visited, credits them, as the Greek gods were credited, with the power of nourishing themselves on some fine essential part of human sacrifice, of human food, “some fine spirituous Liquors, that peirce like pure Air and Oil, on the poyson or substance of Corns and Liquors.” Others, more gross, steal the actual grain, “as do Crowes and Mice.” They are heard hammering in the howes: as Brownies they enter houses and cleanse the hearths. They are the Domovoys, as the Russians call them. John Major, in his exposition of St. Matthew (1518, fol. xlviii.), gives perhaps the oldest account of Brownies, in a believing temper. Major styles them Fauni or brobne. They thrash as much grain in one night as twenty men could do. They throw stones about among people sitting by the fire. Whether they can predict future events is doubtful (see Mr. Constable in Major’s Greater Britain, p. xxx. Edinburgh, 1892). To us they seem not much remote from the Roman Lares—spirits of the household, of the hearth. In all these creatures Mr. Kirk recognises “an abstruse People,” who were before our more substantial race, whose furrows are still to be seen on the hill-tops. They never were, to his mind, plain palpable folk; they are only visible, in their quarterly flittings, to men of the second sight. That gift of vision includes not only power to see distant or future events, but the viewless forms of air. To shun the flittings, men visit church on the first Sunday of the quarter: then they will be hallowed against elf-shots, “these Arrows that fly in the dark.” As is well known, superstition explained the Neolithic arrow-heads as Fairy weapons; it does not follow that a tradition of a Neolithic people suggested the belief in Fairies. But we cannot deny absolutely that some such memory of an earlier race, a shy and fugitive people who used weapons of stone, may conceivably play its part in the Fairy legend.
Thence Mr. Kirk glides into that singular theory of savage metaphysics which somewhat resembles the Platonic doctrine of Ideas. All things, in Red Indian belief, have somewhere their ideal counterpart or “Father.” Thus a donkey, when first seen, was regarded as “the Father” or archetype “of Rabbits.” Now the second-sighted behold the “Double-man,” “Doppel-ganger,” “Astral Body,” “Wraith,” or what you will, of a living person, and that is merely his counterpart in the abstruse world. The industry of the Psychical Society has collected much material—evidence, whatever its value, for the existence of the Double-man. We may call it a hallucination, which does not greatly increase our knowledge. From personal experience, and the experience of friends, I am constrained to believe that we may think we see a person who is not really present to the view—who may be in the next room, or downstairs, or a hundred miles off. This experience has occurred to the sane, the unimaginative, the healthy, the free from superstition, and in circumstances by no means mystic—for example, when the person supposed to be seen was not dying, nor distressed, nor in any but the most normal condition. Indeed, the cases when there was nothing abnormal in the state of the person seen are far more numerous, in my personal knowledge, than those in which the person seen was dying, or dead, or excited. The reverse appears to be the rule in the experience of the Psychical Society. “The actual proportion of coincidental to non-coincidental cases, after all deduction for possible sources of error, was in fact such that the probability against the supposition of chance coincidence became enormous, on the assumption of ordinary accuracy on the part of informants” (Professor Sidgwick, Proc. S.P.R., vol. viii. p. 607). Some 17,000 answers were collected. We must apparently accept these facts as not very abnormal nor very unusual, and doubtless as capable of some subjective explanation. But when such things occurred among imaginative and uneducated Highlanders, they became foundations and proofs of the doctrine of second sight—proofs, too, of the primitive metaphysical doctrine of counterparts and correspondances. “They avouch that every Element and different state of Being have Animals resembling these of another Element.” By persons not knowing this, “the Roman invention of guardian Angels particularly assigned” has been promulgated. The guardian Angel of the Roman superstition is merely the Double or Co-walker—the type (in the viewless world) of the man in the apparent world. Thus are wraiths and ghosts explained by our Presbyterian psychologist and his Highland flock. All things universally have their types, their reflex: a man’s type, or reflex, or “co-walker” may be seen at a distance from or near him during his life—nay, may be seen after his death. The gifted man of second sight can tell the substantial figure from the airy counterpart. Sometimes the reflex anticipates the action of the reality: “was often seen of old to enter a House, by which the people knew that the Person of that Likeness was to visit them in a few days.” It may have occurred to most of us to meet a person in the street whom we took for an acquaintance. It is not he, but we meet the real man a few paces farther on. Thus a distinguished officer, at home on leave, met a friend, as he tells me, in Piccadilly. The other passed without notice: the officer hesitated about following him, did not, and in some fifty yards met his man. There is probably no more in this than resemblance and coincidence, but this is the kind of thing which was worked by the Highlanders into their metaphysics.[4]
The end of the Co-walker is obscure. “This Copy, Echo, or living Picture goes att last to his own Herd.” Thus Ghosts are short-lived, and, according to M. d’Assier on the Manners of Posthumous Man (L’Homme Posthume), seldom survive for more than a century. By an airy being of this kind the Highlanders explained the false or morbid appetite. A “joint-eater” inhabited the patient; “he feeds two when he eats.” As a rule, the Fairies get their food as witches do—take “the Pith and Milk from their Neighbours’ Cows unto their own chiese-hold, throw a Hair-tedder, at a great distance, by Airt Magic, only drawing a spigot fastened in a Post, which will bring Milk as farr as a Bull will be heard to roar.” This is illustrated in the drinking scene in Faust. This kind of charge is familiar in trials for witchcraft.
In accordance with the whole metaphysics of the system of doubles, which are parasites on humanity, is the superstition of nurses stolen by Fairies, and of children kidnapped while changelings are left in their place. The latter accounts for sudden decline and loss of health by a child; he is not the original child, but a Fairy brat. To guard against this, bread (as human food hateful to Fairies—so the Kanekas carry a boiled yam about at night), or the Bible, or iron is placed in the bed of childbirth. “Iron scares spirits,” as the scholiast says of the drawn sword of Odysseus in Hades. The Fairy bride, in Wales, vanishes on being touched with iron. This belief probably came in when iron was a new, rare, and mysterious metal. The mortal nurses in Fairyland are pleasantly illustrated by the ballad
in C. Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s Ballad Book.[5] This part of the superstition is not easy to elucidate. Kirk repeats the well-known tales of the blinding of the mortal who saw too clearly “by making use of their Oyntments.” Well-known examples occur in Gervase of Tilbury, and are cited in Scott’s note on Tamlane in the Border Minstrelsy. As Homer fables of the dead, their speech is a kind of whistling like the cry of bats—another indication of the pre-Christian Hades.[6] They have feasts and burials; and Pashley, in his Travels in Crete, tells the well-known Border story of a man who fired on a Fairy bridal, and heard a voice cry, “Ye have slain the bonny bridegroom.” It is, of course, to be noted that the modern Greek superstition of the Nereids, who carry off mortal girls to dance with them till they pine away, answers to some of our Fairy legends, while it will hardly be maintained that the Nereids are a memory of pre-historic Finns. “Antic corybantic jollity” is a note of Nereids, as well as of the Sleagh Maith. “The Inconvenience of their succubi,” the Fairy girls who make love to young men, is well known in the Breton ballad, Le Sieur Nan. The same superstition is current among the Kanekas of New Caledonia. My cousin, Mr. Atkinson, was visited by a young Kaneka, who twice or thrice returned to take leave of him with much emotion. When Mr. Atkinson asked what was the matter, the lad said that he had just met, as he thought, the girl of his heart in the forest. After a scene of dalliance she vanished, and he knew that she was a forest Fairy, and that he must die in three days, which he did. This is the “inconvenience of their succubi,” regretted by Mr. Kirk. Thus it appears that the mass of these opinions is not local, nor Celtic merely, but of world-wide diffusion. Thus Sir Walter Scott observes of the Afghans and Highlanders, “Their superstitions are the same, or nearly so. The Gholée Beabacan (demons of the desert) resemble the Boddach of the Highlanders, ‘who walked the heath at midnight and at noon’” (Quarterly Review, xiv. 289). Again, Mr. Kirk says that “Were-wolves and Witches’ true Bodies are (by the union of the spirit of Nature that runs thorow all, echoing and doubling the Blow towards another) wounded at home, when the astrial or assumed Bodies are stricken elsewhere.” Thus, if a witch-hare is shot, the witch’s real body is hurt in the same part; and Lafitau, in North America, found that when a Huron shot a witch-bird, the real magician was stricken in the same place. The theory that the Fairies appear as “a little rough Dog” is illustrated by the Welsh Dogs of Hell. Blackwood’s Magazine for 1818 contains many examples of these Hell-dogs, which are often invested in a sheet of fire, as Rink says is the case among the Eskimo. Take a modern instance. “Mr. F. A. Paley and friend, walking home at night on a lonely road, see a large black dog rise from it, slowly walk to the side, and disappear. They search in vain. Mr. Paley hears subsequently that this mysterious dog is the terror of the neighbourhood, but no such real dog is known.” Date, summer 1837 (Journ. of S.P.R., Feb. 1893, p. 31).
The dwellings of these airy shadows of mankind are, naturally, “Fairie Hills.” There is such a hill, the Fairy Hill at Aberfoyle, where Mr. Kirk resided: Baillie Nicol Jarvie describes its legends in an admirable passage in Rob Roy. Mr. MacRitchie says, “How much of this ‘howe’ is artificial, or whether any of it is, remains to be discovered.” It is much larger than most artificial tumuli. According to Mr. Kirk, the Highlanders “superstitiously believe the souls of their Predecessors to dwell” in the fairy-hills. “And for that end, say they, a Mote or Mount was dedicate beside every Churchyard, to receive the souls till their adjacent bodies arise, and so become as a Fairy hill.” Here the Highland philosophers have conspicuously put the cart before the horse. The tumuli are much older than the churches, which were no doubt built beside them because the place had a sacred character. Two very good examples may be seen at Dalry, on the Ken, in Galloway, and at Parton, on Loch Ken. The grassy howes are large and symmetrical, and the modern Presbyterian churches occupy old sites; at Parton there are ruins of the ancient Catholic church. Round the tumulus at Dalry, according to the local form of the Märchen of Hesione, a great dragon used to coil in triple folds, before it was killed by the blacksmith. Nobody, perhaps, can regard these tumuli, and many like them, as anything but sepulchral. On the road between Balantrae, in Ayrshire, and Stranraer, there is a beautiful tumulus above the sea, which at once recalls the barrow above the main that Elpenor in the Odyssey, asked Odysseus to build for him, “the memorial of a luckless man.” In the Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius, the ghost of a hero who fell at Troy appears to the adventurers on a tumulus like this of the Ayrshire coast. In speaking of these barrows Mr. Kirk tells how, during a famine about 1676, two women had a vision of a treasure hid in a fairy-hill. This they excavated, and discovered some coins “of good money.” The great gold corslet of the British Museum is said to have been found in Wales, where tradition spoke of a ghost in golden armour which haunted a hillock. The hillock was excavated, and the golden corslet, like the Shakespearian bricks, is “alive to testify” to the truth of the story.
The Fairy belief, we have said, is a composite thing. On the materials given by tradition, such as the memory, perhaps, of a pre-historic race, and by old religion, as in the thoughts about the pre-Christian Hades, poetry and fancy have been at work. Consumption, lingering disease, unexplained disappearances, sudden deaths, have been accounted for by the agency of the Fairies, or People of Peace. If the superstition included no more than this, we might regard it as a natural result of imagination, dealing with facts quite natural in the ordinary course of things. But there are elements in the belief which cannot be so easily dismissed. We must ask whether the abnormal phenomena which have been so frequently discussed, fought over, forgotten, and revived, do not enter into the general mass of folk-lore. They appear most notably in the two branches of Browniedom—of “Pixies,” as they say in Devonshire, who haunt the house, and in the alleged examples of the second sight. The former topic is the more obscure, if not the more curious. Let us examine the occurrences, then, which may have begotten the belief in Brownies, and in house-haunting Pixies or Fairies. These appearances may be alleged, on one hand, to be actual facts in Nature, the workings of some yet unexplained forces; or they may merely be the consequences of some very old traditional method of imposture, vulgar in itself, but still historical. That form of imposture, again, may be wrought either by conscious agents, or unconsciously and automatically by persons under the influence of somnambulism; or, finally, the phenomena may in various cases be due to any one of these three agencies, all of which may possibly be veræ causæ, as conscious imposture and trickery is certainly one vera causa.
In Mr. Kirk’s book we meet “the invisible Wights which haunt Houses, ... throw great Stones, Pieces of Earth and Wood at the Inhabitants,” but “hurt them not at all.” As we have said, Major (1518) calls these wights “Fauni or Brobne”—that is, Brownies—and says that they thrash as much grain in one night as twenty men could do, and throw stones about. The legend of their working was common in Scotland, and a correspondent says that in Devonshire the belief in Pixies who set the house in order exists among the grand-parents of the present generation. But the sportive is more common than the kindly aspect of Brownies. Through history we constantly find them causing objects to move without visible contact, and “acting in sport, like Buffoons and Drolls.” In his Letters on Demonology (p. 377) Scott gives instances where the buffoon or droll was detected, and confessed that the rattlings of plates and movements of objects were caused by an apparatus of threads or horse-hair. He also quotes the famous doings of “The Just Devil of Woodstock” in 1649, which so perplexed and discomfited the Cromwellian Commissioners. He accounts for those annoyances by the confessions of Joe Collins of Oxford, “Funny Joe,” which he quotes from Hone’s Every-Day Book, while Hone quotes from the British Magazine of 1747. But the writer in the British Magazine gives no references or authorities for the authenticity of Funny Joe’s confessions, nor even for the existence of Joseph. Scott could not find his original in the pamphlets of the British Museum, and some of the statements attributed to Joe do not tally with the official account, and other contemporary documents collected in Sir Walter’s Woodstock. Joe pretends, for example, to have been secretary to the Commission under the name of Giles Sharpe; but in the other accounts the secretary is named Browne. A Royalist Brownie or Polter-geist lies under shrewd suspicion, but Joe’s own existence is unproved, and his alleged evidence is of no value. However, no sane person can dream of doubting that many a Brownie has been as much in flesh and blood as the Brownie of Bodsbeck in Hogg’s story.
There remain the less easily explicable tales of strange and humorous disturbances, accompanied by loud sounds, rappings, the moving of objects without visible contact, and so forth.[7] Perhaps we may best examine these by taking modern instances, collected by the Psychical Society, in the first place, and then comparing them with cases recorded at distant times and in remote places. Some curious common features will be observed, and the evidence has at least the value of undesigned coincidence. Glanvil, Telfair (minister of Rerrick), the Wesleys, Dr. Adam Clarke, Increase Mather, were not modern students of psychical research. The modern Psychical Researchers, we fear, are not students of old legendary lore, which they dismiss on evidence not first-hand nor scientifically valid. Thus they do not seem to be aware that they are describing, almost in identical terms, phenomena identical with those noted by Telfair, Mather, Lavater, and the rest, and by those ancients attributed to devils. The modern recorders are not consciously copying from old accounts; the coincidences therefore have their value, as proving that certain phenomena have occurred and recurred. Now those phenomena may be due to conscious or to hysterical imposture, but they have been frequent and common enough to keep alive, and probably to originate, a part of the Fairy belief—that part which is concerned with Brownies and house-haunting Pixies, or Domovoys. These, again, correspond to the tricky beings described by Mr. Leland in his Etruscan Remains as survivals of old Roman and Etruscan popular religions, while we find similar occurrences in the Empire of the Incas not long after the Spanish conquest of Peru.[8]
Beginning, then, with what is nearest to us in time, we take Mr. F. W. H. Myers’s essays “On the Alleged Movement of Objects without Contact, occurring not in the Presence of a Paid Medium.”[9] The alleged phenomena are, of course, as common as blackberries in the presence of paid mediums, but are to the last degree untrustworthy. Even when there is no paid medium present, the mere contagious excitement which is said to be developed at séances makes all that is thought to occur there a story to be taken with plenty of salt.[10] One of Mr. Myers’s examples was the result of séances, but it had features of great importance for the argument. It will be found in Proc. S. P. R., vol. xix. p. 189, July 1891. The performers are Mr. C., Mrs. C., and Mr. H. Mr. C. and Mrs. C. are spoken of as good witnesses, known to Mr. Myers and Professor Barrett. Mr. H.’s health has suffered so much that he cannot be examined, and Mr. H. is the person who interests us here, for reasons which will be given later. All three were “unbelievers” in these matters. On the second evening “lights floated about the room,” which was lit, apparently, by a full moon. “F.” (who is also “H.”) felt cold hands touching, and “hands” recur in the old pre-scientific accounts. The three mages were holding hands tightly at the time. Now Mr. H. had hitherto been in excellent health, but after his chair was dragged from under him, and he was “thrown down on the ground,” he went into “a trance.” His watch and ring (on the finger of a hand held by Mrs. C.) were carried to a remote part of the room. H. leaves the circle and sits at the window. Another figure walks through the room. H. returns, is “thrown down,” his coat is dragged off, and his boots are discovered on a distant sofa. He asks for “something from home,” goes into a trance, a photograph locked up by him at home is found on the table. His wife, in town, “being quite ignorant of our having had séances, told us that, at that very hour, a fearful crash occurred in his bedroom. The photograph vanished, and returned last night, when H. was in a trance.” He is “thrown down” again. He has “alternate fits of unconsciousness and raving delirium.” The home of Mr. and Mrs. C. (not the house where they sat) is vexed by “figures,” noises, knockings; “we were sprinkled with water in the night,” haunted by sounds of drums and horns, and so forth. Before a “manifestation,” “we all felt a sudden chill, like either a wave of intensely cold air passing, or a rapid decrease of temperature.”[11]
This is a disgusting story if Mr. H.’s health was ruined by his presence at the performances. The point, however, is that he did behave in epileptic fashion while these events were in progress. It is natural to suppose that, in his “trances,” he may have been capable, unconsciously, of feats physically and morally impossible to him in his normal condition. This explanation would not cover all the alleged occurrences, but would account for many of them.
We now take an ancient instance, similar disturbances at Newberry, in New England, in 1679, similarly accompanied by the presence of an epileptic patient.[12] The house of William Morse was “strangely disquieted by a dæmon.” The inmates were Morse, his wife, and their grandson, a boy whose age is not given. The trouble began on December 3, with a sound of heavy objects falling on the roof. On December 8, large stones and bricks “were thrown in at the west end of the house ... the bedstead was lifted up from the floor, and the bed-staff flung out of the window, and a cat was hurled at the wife. A long staff danced up and down in the chimney. The man’s wife put the staff in the fire, but she could not hold it there, inasmuch as it would forcibly fly out; yet after much ado, with joynt strength, they made it to burn.... A chair flew about, and at last lighted on the table, where victuals stood ready to eat, and was likely to spoil all, only by a nimble catching they saved some of their meat.... A chest was removed from place to place, no hand touching it. Two keys would fly about, making a loud noise by knocking against each other.... As they lay in bed with their little boy between them, a great stone from the floor of the loft was thrown upon the man’s stomach, and he turning it down upon the floor, it was once more thrown upon him.” On January 23, 1680, “his ink-horn was taken away from him while he was writing” (he was keeping a diary of these events), “and when by all his seeking he could not find it, at last he saw it drop out of the air, down by the fire.... February 2, while he and his boy were eating of cheese, the pieces which he cut were wrested from them.... But as for the boy, he was a great sufferer in these afflictions, for on the 18th of December he, sitting by his grandfather, was hurried into great motions. The man made him stand between his legs, but the chair danced up and down, and was like to have cast both man and boy into the fire, and the child was tossed about in such a manner as that they feared his brains would have been beaten out.”
All these contortions of the boy were apparently what M. Charcot calls clownisms.[13] When taken to a doctor’s house the boy “was free of disturbances,” which returned with his return home. He barked like a dog, clucked like a hen, talked nonsense about “Powel,” who pinched and bullied him. While he was in bed with the old people, “a pot with its contents was thrown upon them.” They were clutched by hands, like Mr. and Mrs. C. Once a voice was heard singing, “Revenge, revenge is sweet.” Finally a mate of a ship came, declared that the grandmother was not rightly suspected as a witch, and offered, if he were left alone with the boy, to cure him. “The mate came next day betimes, and the boy was with him till night; since which time his house, Morse saith, has not been molested with evil spirits.” Probably the mate used a rope’s end: the boy was more speedily cured than Mr. H.
The phenomena are those of droll or buffooning wights, as Mr. Kirk says, and no man can doubt that the boy was at the bottom of the whole affair. But whether he was capable, when well and conscious, of such diversions, is another question. Children like him produced the famous witch-mania in New England.
We have here, undeniably, a well-recorded case, analogous to that of Mr. H. In a modern case of bell-ringing, heavy thumps, and movement of objects, the agent was “a young girl who had never been out to service before,” and who passed the night in a state of wildly agitated somnambulism, repeating the whole of the Service for the day.[14] Mather gives several other examples, in which motives for trickery are manifest, while we hear nothing of an epileptic or hysterical patient.
In the majority of instances, ancient or modern, children are the agents. Thus we have “Physical Phenomena obtained in a Family Circle,” that of Mr. and Mrs. Davis, with their children, at Rio Janeiro.[15] The time was 1888. Curiosity had been caused by “the notorious Henry Slade.” There were “touches and grasps of hands.” A table “ran after me” (Professor Alexander) “and attempted to hem me in,” when only C., a little girl, was in the room. “As far as I could see, she did not even touch the table.” The chair of Amy (aged thirteen months) was moved about, like that of Master Morse two hundred years earlier. A table jumped into the laps of the public. There were raps and thumps, which “seemed to shake the whole building.” Lights floated about. A slate, covered with flour, was placed on C.’s lap; her hands lay on the table. Marks of fingers came on the flour, and, in answer to request, the mark of “a naked baby foot.” The children present were wearing laced boots, and we are not told that little Amy was under the table. Bluish lights and the phantasm of a dog were seen.
All this answers to an ancient example—the disturbances in Mr. Wesley’s house at Epworth, December 1715 to January 1716.[16] The house was a new one, rebuilt in 1709. We have Mr. Samuel Wesley’s Journal, with many contemporary letters from members of the family, and later reminiscences. There were many lively girls in the house, and two servants—a maid and a man, recently engaged. The disturbances began with groanings; then came knockings, which flitted about the house. Mr. Wesley heard nothing till December 21. The knocks replied to those made by the family, but they never could imitate the sounds. Mrs. Wesley and Emily saw an object “like a badger” run from under a bed and vanish. The mastiff was much alarmed by the sounds. Mr. Wesley was “thrice pushed by invisible power.” The bogie was a Jacobite, as was Mrs. Wesley: Mr. Wesley was for King George. The knocks were violent when that usurper was prayed for. They did not try praying for King James. Robin, the servant, saw a hand-mill work violently. “Naught vexed me but that it was empty. I thought, had it but been full of malt, he might have ground his heart out for me.” But this was a jocose, not an industrious devil. Robin called it “old Jeffries,” after a gentleman lately dead; the family called it “Jeffrey,” unless one name is a mere misspelling. It “seemed to sweep after” Nancy Wesley, when she swept the chambers. “She thought he might have done it for her, and saved her the trouble.” Mrs. Wesley concealed the matter from her husband, “lest he should fancy it was against his own death” (Letter of January 12, 1716-17). This belief in noises foretelling death is very common; compare Scott’s nocturnal disturbances at Abbotsford when Bullock, his agent in building it, was dying in London. The racket occurred on April 28 and 29, 1818, and Scott examined the scene “with Beardie’s broadsword under my arm.”[17] Bullock died in Tenterden Street, in London, whether on April 28 or 29 is not easily to be ascertained. “The noise resembled half a dozen men putting up boards and furniture, and nothing can be more certain than that there was nobody on the premises at the time.”[18] The noises used to follow Hetty Wesley, and thump under her feet, as under those of C. in Professor Alexander’s narrative. Mr. Wesley’s plate “danced before him on the table a pretty while, without anybody’s stirring the table.”[19] The disturbances quieted down in January, but recurred on March 31. Similar phenomena had occurred “long before” in the family.[20] “The sound very often seemed in the air, in the middle of a room, nor could they ever make any such themselves by any contrivance.”[21] On February 16, 1740, twenty-three years later, Emily writes to Jack about “that wonderful thing called by us Jeffrey.... That something calls on me against any extraordinary new affliction.”
Priestley styles this affair “the best-authenticated that is anywhere extant.” He supposes it to have been “a trick of the servants, for mere amusement.” The modus operandi is difficult to explain. We hear nothing of bad health or hysterics in the household.[22] For our purpose it is enough that a few incidents of this kind, however produced, might originate and keep alive the belief in Brownies, and