Part 2

Thence Mr. Kirk glides into that singular theory of savage metaphysics which somewhat resembles the Platonic doctrine of Ideas. All things, in Red Indian belief, have somewhere their ideal counterpart or “Father.” Thus a donkey, when first seen, was regarded as “the Father” or archetype “of Rabbits.” Now the second-sighted behold the “Double-man,” “Doppel-ganger,” “Astral Body,” “Wraith,” or what you will, of a living person, and that is merely his counterpart in the abstruse world. The industry of the Psychical Society has collected much material—evidence, whatever its value, for the existence of the Double-man. We may call it a hallucination, which does not greatly increase our knowledge. From personal experience, and the experience of friends, I am constrained to believe that we may think we see a person who is not really present to the view—who may be in the next room, or downstairs, or a hundred miles off. This experience has occurred to the sane, the unimaginative, the healthy, the free from superstition, and in circumstances by no means mystic—for example, when the person supposed to be seen was not dying, nor distressed, nor in any but the most normal condition. Indeed, the cases when there was nothing abnormal in the state of the person seen are far more numerous, in my personal knowledge, than those in which the person seen was dying, or dead, or excited. The reverse appears to be the rule in the experience of the Psychical Society. “The actual proportion of coincidental to non-coincidental cases, after all deduction for possible sources of error, was in fact such that the probability against the supposition of chance coincidence became enormous, on the assumption of ordinary accuracy on the part of informants” (Professor Sidgwick, _Proc. S.P.R._, vol. viii. p. 607). Some 17,000 answers were collected. We must apparently accept these facts as not very abnormal nor very unusual, and doubtless as capable of some subjective explanation. But when such things occurred among imaginative and uneducated Highlanders, they became foundations and proofs of the doctrine of second sight—proofs, too, of the primitive metaphysical doctrine of counterparts and _correspondances_. “They avouch that every Element and different state of Being have Animals resembling these of another Element.” By persons not knowing this, “the Roman invention of guardian Angels particularly assigned” has been promulgated. The guardian Angel of the Roman superstition is merely the Double or Co-walker—the type (in the viewless world) of the man in the apparent world. Thus are wraiths and ghosts explained by our Presbyterian psychologist and his Highland flock. All things universally have their types, their reflex: a man’s type, or reflex, or “co-walker” may be seen at a distance from or near him during his life—nay, may be seen after his death. The gifted man of second sight can tell the substantial figure from the airy counterpart. Sometimes the reflex anticipates the action of the reality: “was often seen of old to enter a House, by which the people knew that the Person of that Likeness was to visit them in a few days.” It may have occurred to most of us to meet a person in the street whom we took for an acquaintance. It is not he, but we meet the real man a few paces farther on. Thus a distinguished officer, at home on leave, met a friend, as he tells me, in Piccadilly. The other passed without notice: the officer hesitated about following him, did not, and in some fifty yards met his man. There is probably no more in this than resemblance and coincidence, but this is the kind of thing which was worked by the Highlanders into their metaphysics.[4]

The end of the Co-walker is obscure. “This Copy, Echo, or living Picture goes att last to his own Herd.” Thus Ghosts are short-lived, and, according to M. d’Assier on the Manners of Posthumous Man (_L’Homme Posthume_), seldom survive for more than a century. By an airy being of this kind the Highlanders explained the false or morbid appetite. A “joint-eater” inhabited the patient; “he feeds two when he eats.” As a rule, the Fairies get their food as witches do—take “the Pith and Milk from their Neighbours’ Cows unto their own chiese-hold, throw a Hair-tedder, at a great distance, by Airt Magic, only drawing a spigot fastened in a Post, which will bring Milk as farr as a Bull will be heard to roar.” This is illustrated in the drinking scene in _Faust_. This kind of charge is familiar in trials for witchcraft.

In accordance with the whole metaphysics of the system of doubles, which are parasites on humanity, is the superstition of nurses stolen by Fairies, and of children kidnapped while changelings are left in their place. The latter accounts for sudden decline and loss of health by a child; he is not the original child, but a Fairy brat. To guard against this, bread (as human food hateful to Fairies—so the Kanekas carry a boiled yam about at night), or the Bible, or iron is placed in the bed of childbirth. “Iron scares spirits,” as the scholiast says of the drawn sword of Odysseus in Hades. The Fairy bride, in Wales, vanishes on being touched with iron. This belief probably came in when iron was a new, rare, and mysterious metal. The mortal nurses in Fairyland are pleasantly illustrated by the ballad

“I heard a cow lowe, A bonny, bonny cow lowe,”

in C. Kirkpatrick Sharpe’s _Ballad Book_.[5] This part of the superstition is not easy to elucidate. Kirk repeats the well-known tales of the blinding of the mortal who saw too clearly “by making use of their Oyntments.” Well-known examples occur in Gervase of Tilbury, and are cited in Scott’s note on _Tamlane_ in the _Border Minstrelsy_. As Homer fables of the dead, their speech is a kind of whistling like the cry of bats—another indication of the pre-Christian Hades.[6] They have feasts and burials; and Pashley, in his _Travels in Crete_, tells the well-known Border story of a man who fired on a Fairy bridal, and heard a voice cry, “Ye have slain the bonny bridegroom.” It is, of course, to be noted that the modern Greek superstition of the Nereids, who carry off mortal girls to dance with them till they pine away, answers to some of our Fairy legends, while it will hardly be maintained that the Nereids are a memory of pre-historic Finns. “Antic corybantic jollity” is a note of Nereids, as well as of the _Sleagh Maith_. “The Inconvenience of their _succubi_,” the Fairy girls who make love to young men, is well known in the Breton ballad, _Le Sieur Nan_. The same superstition is current among the Kanekas of New Caledonia. My cousin, Mr. Atkinson, was visited by a young Kaneka, who twice or thrice returned to take leave of him with much emotion. When Mr. Atkinson asked what was the matter, the lad said that he had just met, as he thought, the girl of his heart in the forest. After a scene of dalliance she vanished, and he knew that she was a forest Fairy, and that he must die in three days, which he did. This is the “inconvenience of their succubi,” regretted by Mr. Kirk. Thus it appears that the mass of these opinions is not local, nor Celtic merely, but of world-wide diffusion. Thus Sir Walter Scott observes of the Afghans and Highlanders, “Their superstitions are the same, or nearly so. The _Gholée Beabacan_ (demons of the desert) resemble the _Boddach_ of the Highlanders, ‘who walked the heath at midnight and at noon’” (_Quarterly Review_, xiv. 289). Again, Mr. Kirk says that “Were-wolves and Witches’ true Bodies are (by the union of the spirit of Nature that runs thorow all, echoing and doubling the Blow towards another) wounded at home, when the astrial or assumed Bodies are stricken elsewhere.” Thus, if a witch-hare is shot, the witch’s real body is hurt in the same part; and Lafitau, in North America, found that when a Huron shot a witch-bird, the real magician was stricken in the same place. The theory that the Fairies appear as “a little rough Dog” is illustrated by the Welsh Dogs of Hell. _Blackwood’s Magazine_ for 1818 contains many examples of these Hell-dogs, which are often invested in a sheet of fire, as Rink says is the case among the Eskimo. Take a modern instance. “Mr. F. A. Paley and friend, walking home at night on a lonely road, see a large black dog rise from it, slowly walk to the side, and disappear. They search in vain. Mr. Paley hears subsequently that this mysterious dog is the terror of the neighbourhood, but no such real dog is known.” Date, summer 1837 (_Journ. of S.P.R._, Feb. 1893, p. 31).

The dwellings of these airy shadows of mankind are, naturally, “Fairie Hills.” There is such a hill, the Fairy Hill at Aberfoyle, where Mr. Kirk resided: Baillie Nicol Jarvie describes its legends in an admirable passage in _Rob Roy_. Mr. MacRitchie says, “How much of this ‘howe’ is artificial, or whether any of it is, remains to be discovered.” It is much larger than most artificial tumuli. According to Mr. Kirk, the Highlanders “superstitiously believe the souls of their Predecessors to dwell” in the fairy-hills. “And for that end, say they, a Mote or Mount was dedicate beside every Churchyard, to receive the souls till their adjacent bodies arise, and so become as a Fairy hill.” Here the Highland philosophers have conspicuously put the cart before the horse. The tumuli are much older than the churches, which were no doubt built beside them because the place had a sacred character. Two very good examples may be seen at Dalry, on the Ken, in Galloway, and at Parton, on Loch Ken. The grassy howes are large and symmetrical, and the modern Presbyterian churches occupy old sites; at Parton there are ruins of the ancient Catholic church. Round the tumulus at Dalry, according to the local form of the _Märchen_ of Hesione, a great dragon used to coil in triple folds, before it was killed by the blacksmith. Nobody, perhaps, can regard these tumuli, and many like them, as anything but sepulchral. On the road between Balantrae, in Ayrshire, and Stranraer, there is a beautiful tumulus above the sea, which at once recalls the barrow above the main that Elpenor in the _Odyssey_, asked Odysseus to build for him, “the memorial of a luckless man.” In the _Argonautica_ of Apollonius Rhodius, the ghost of a hero who fell at Troy appears to the adventurers on a tumulus like this of the Ayrshire coast. In speaking of these barrows Mr. Kirk tells how, during a famine about 1676, two women had a vision of a treasure hid in a fairy-hill. This they excavated, and discovered some coins “of good money.” The great gold corslet of the British Museum is said to have been found in Wales, where tradition spoke of a ghost in golden armour which haunted a hillock. The hillock was excavated, and the golden corslet, like the Shakespearian bricks, is “alive to testify” to the truth of the story.

V. FAIRIES AND PSYCHICAL RESEARCH.

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.