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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75485 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+  TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
+
+  This book was published in 1893 and is a careful reproduction of a
+  book printed in 1815 from a manuscript of 1691 by Rev. Robert Kirk.
+  An Introduction and Notes have been added by Andrew Lang for the
+  1893 publication.
+
+  In this etext:
+  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
+  Bold text is denoted by =equal signs=.
+
+  Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the Lang footnotes
+  have been placed at the end of the book in front of the two Catalog
+  pages.
+
+  Except for a very few changes noted at the end of the book, all
+  misspellings in the text, and inconsistent or archaic usage, have
+  been left unchanged.
+
+
+
+
+          THE SECRET COMMONWEALTH OF ELVES FAUNS & FAIRIES
+
+               [Illustration: BIBLIOTHEQUE DE CARABAS]
+
+
+
+
+                       Bibliothèque de Carabas
+
+                              VOL. VIII
+
+
+
+
+       _Five hundred and fifty copies of this Edition have been
+            printed, five hundred of which are for sale._
+
+
+                       [_All rights reserved._]
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: (Kilted shepherd looking at an apparition)]
+
+
+
+
+                      The Secret Commonwealth of
+
+                       Elves, Fauns, & Fairies
+
+            A Study in Folk-Lore & Psychical Research. The
+                Text by Robert Kirk, M.A., Minister of
+                  Aberfoyle, A.D. 1691. The Comment
+                         by Andrew Lang, M.A.
+                              A.D. 1893
+
+
+               [Illustration: (small decorative icon)]
+
+
+              _LONDON. M.D.CCCXCIII. PUBLISHED BY DAVID
+                         NUTT, IN THE STRAND_
+
+
+
+
+                             Dedication.
+
+                                 TO
+
+                       ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.
+
+
+      O Louis! you that like them maist,
+      Ye’re far frae kelpie, wraith, and ghaist,
+      And fairy dames, no unco chaste,
+            And haunted cell.
+      Among a heathen clan ye’re placed,
+            That kens na hell!
+
+      Ye hae nae heather, peat, nor birks,
+      Nae troot in a’ your burnies lurks,
+      There are nae bonny U.P. kirks,
+            An awfu’ place!
+      Nane kens the Covenant o’ Works
+            Frae that of Grace!
+
+      But whiles, maybe, to them ye’ll read
+      Blads o’ the Covenanting creed,
+      And whiles their pagan wames ye’ll feed
+            On halesome parritch;
+      And syne ye’ll gar them learn a screed
+            O’ the Shorter Carritch.
+
+      Yet thae uncovenanted shavers
+      Hae rowth, ye say, o’ clash and clavers
+      O’ gods and etins—auld wives’ havers,
+            But their delight;
+      The voice o’ him that tells them quavers
+            Just wi’ fair fright.
+
+      And ye might tell, ayont the faem,
+      Thae Hieland clashes o’ oor hame.
+      To speak the truth, I tak’ na shame
+            To half believe them;
+      And, stamped wi’ TUSITALA’s name,
+            They’ll a’ receive them.
+
+      And folk to come, ayont the sea,
+      May hear the yowl of the Banshie,
+      And frae the water-kelpie flee,
+            Ere a’ things cease,
+      And island bairns may stolen be
+            By the Folk o’ Peace.
+
+      Faith, they might steal _me_, wi’ ma will,
+      And, ken’d I ony Fairy hill,
+      I’d lay me down there, snod and still,
+            Their land to win,
+      For, man, I’ve maistly had my fill
+            O’ this world’s din.
+
+
+
+
+                         The Fairy Minister.
+
+                             IN MEMORY OF
+                        THE REV. ROBERT KIRK,
+             _WHO WENT TO HIS OWN HERD_, AND ENTERED INTO
+                   THE LAND OF THE PEOPLE OF PEACE,
+                     IN THE YEAR OF GRACE SIXTEEN
+                       HUNDRED AND NINETY-TWO,
+                            AND OF HIS AGE
+                              FIFTY-TWO.
+
+
+      People of Peace! A peaceful man,
+        Well worthy of your love was he,
+      Who, while the roaring Garry ran
+        Red with the life-blood of Dundee,
+      While coats were turning, crowns were falling,
+        Wandered along his valley still,
+      And heard your mystic voices calling
+        From fairy knowe and haunted hill.
+      He heard, he saw, he knew too well
+        The secrets of your fairy clan;
+      You stole him from the haunted dell,
+        Who never more was seen of man.
+      Now far from heaven, and safe from hell,
+        Unknown of earth, he wanders free.
+      Would that he might return and tell
+        Of his mysterious company!
+      For we have tired the Folk of Peace;
+        No more they tax our corn and oil;
+      Their dances on the moorland cease,
+        The Brownie stints his wonted toil.
+      No more shall any shepherd meet
+        The ladies of the fairy clan,
+      Nor are their deathly kisses sweet
+        On lips of any earthly man.
+      And half I envy him who now,
+        Clothed in her Court’s enchanted green,
+      By moonlit loch or mountain’s brow
+        Is Chaplain to the Fairy Queen.
+                                         A. L.
+
+
+
+
+KIRK’S
+
+SECRET COMMONWEALTH.
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+I. THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK AND AUTHOR.
+
+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.
+
+
+II. THE SECRET COMMONWEALTH.
+
+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.
+
+
+III. “THE SUBTERRANEAN INHABITANTS.”
+
+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]
+
+
+IV. FAIRYLAND AND HADES.
+
+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
+
+      “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.
+
+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
+
+              “That shrewd and knavish sprite
+      Called Robin Goodfellow,”
+
+who
+
+      “Frights the maidens of the villagery,
+      Skims milk, and sometimes labours in the quern.”
+
+By a curious coincidence, we can show a case in which phenomena of
+the kind usually reported as occurring at _séances_, and in examples
+like that of William Morse, were actually accepted as manifestations
+of the _Sleagh Maith_, or Fairies. In his account of the disturbances
+in the Wesley family, Dr. Clarke, the author, averred that he had
+himself witnessed similar events. It thus became necessary to consult
+his _Life_ (London, 1833). “In the history of my own life,” says
+Dr. Clarke, “I have related this matter in sufficient detail.”[23]
+Unluckily, in his _Life_ (pp. 76, 77) he gives scarce any details.
+Previous to sudden deaths in a family called Church, the phenomena of
+falling plates, heavy tread, and other noises occurred. Mr. Clarke
+“sat up one whole night in the kitchen, and most distinctly heard
+the above noises.” He was a born mystic, and even in childhood a
+reader of Cornelius Agrippa, and, later, of the alchemists. But he
+records the instance of a woman, who solemnly declared to Mrs. Clarke
+that a number of the _gentle people_ (_Sleagh Maith_) “occasionally
+frequented her house; that they often conversed with her, one of
+them putting its hands on her eyes during the time, which hands she
+represented, from the sensation she had, to be about the size of
+those of a child of four or five years of age.” The family were “worn
+down” with these visits, and from the mention of touches of hands it
+is pretty plain that we have to do with the kind of sprite who paws
+people at _séances_. But these sprites are recognised (the scene is
+the North of Ireland) as “gentle people,” Folk of Peace. The amusing
+thing is, that Mr. Clarke, while he believes in Mr. Wesley’s Jeffrey,
+and in the supernatural origin of a noise in a kitchen, laughs at
+similar phenomena when assigned to Fairies. It is a mere difference
+of terminology.
+
+Another old example may be given. It is Alexander Telfair’s “True
+Relation” of disturbances at Ringcroft, in the parish of Rerrick.[24]
+The story is attested by the signatures of Ewart, minister of Kells,
+in Galloway; Monteith, minister of Borg; Murdoch, minister of
+Crosmichael, on Loch Ken; Spalding, minister at Parton, also by Loch
+Ken; Falconer, minister at Keltown; Mr. M‘Lellan of Colline, Lennox
+of Milhouse, and a number of farmers. These were all neighbours,
+and all attested what they saw and heard. Robert Chambers says,
+“There never, perhaps, was any mystic history better attested. Few
+narrations of the kind have included occurrences and appearances
+which it was more difficult to reconcile with the theory of trick or
+imposture.” Mr. Telfair himself had been chaplain, in 1687, to Sir
+Thomas Kirkpatrick of Closeburn. He was then an Episcopalian.
+
+Andrew Mackie was a stone-mason at Rerrick. On March 7 (1695?), and
+for long after, stones began to fly about in his house by night and
+day. “The stones which hit any person had not half their natural
+weight.” Mackie complained to Telfair, his minister, who entered
+the house and prayed: nothing odd occurred. As he stood outside, he
+“saw two little stones drop down on the croft;” then he was asked
+to return, and was pelted inside the cottage. This was March 11.
+For a week there was no more trouble, then the disturbances began
+again. Mr. Telfair was sent for, and was pelted, beaten with a staff,
+and heard loud knockings. “That night, as I was at prayer, leaning
+on a bedside, I felt something lifting up my arm. I, casting my
+eyes thither, perceived a little white hand and arm from the elbow
+down, but presently it evanished.” “There was never anything seen
+except that hand I saw,” and an apparition of a boy in grey clothes.
+Sometimes the stoning went on in the open air.[25] There were plenty
+of touchings, grippings, and scratchings. “The door-bar” (a long,
+heavy piece of squared wood) “would go thorow the house as if a
+person were carrying it in their hand, yet nothing seen doing it.”
+Here we compare, in _Proc. S. P. R._, February 1892, the story of a
+carpenter’s shop at Swanland, in Yorkshire, where pieces of wood were
+“levitated” into abnormal flight. No imposture was discovered, nor
+was the presence of any one person necessary.
+
+The ministers of Kells and Crosmichael were pelted with stones of
+eight pounds weight. On April 6, fire-balls floated through the
+cottage. When five ministers were present, “it made all the house
+shake, brake a hole through the thatch, and poured in great stones.”
+“It handled the legs of some as with a man’s hand;” it hoisted Mr.
+Telfair, Lennox of Millhouse, and others off the ground! A sieve
+flew through the house; Mackie caught it; a force gripped it, and
+pulled the interior part out of the rim. A day of humiliation was
+solemnly kept in the parish, which only excited the emulation
+of the disturbing agent; “it continued in a most fearful manner
+without intermission.” Voices were heard, which talked nonsense of a
+semi-scriptural kind; finally the thing died out early in May. By
+the way, on April 28, “it pulled down the end of the house, all the
+stone-work thereof.”
+
+This is a very odd case, as no suspicion is thrown on the children.
+The attestations of several witnesses are given, not only at the
+close, but for almost every separate incident. The vision of the
+white hand is agreeable.
+
+_The Devil of Glen Luce_, in Galloway, was published by Sinclair in
+his _Hydrostaticks_, of all places, in 1672, and again in _Satan’s
+Invisible World_, and by Glanvil in _Sadducismus Triumphatus_. In
+this affair a boy called Thomas, a son of the unlucky householder,
+was clearly the agent. The phenomena were stone-throwing, beating
+with sticks, levitation of a plate, and a great deal of voices,
+probably uttered by the aforesaid Thomas. The Synod ordered a day of
+humiliation (1655-56).
+
+The affair of the Drummer of Tedworth (1661) is, or ought to be, too
+well known for quotation. The troubles began after Mr. Mompesson
+seized the drum of a vagrant musician. In the presence of a
+clergyman, chairs walked about the room of themselves, “a bed-staff
+was thrown at the minister, but so favourably that a lock of wool
+could not have fallen more softly.” The children, as usual, were
+especially haunted. A jingling of money was common, as it also was
+at Epworth. Lights wandered about the house, “blue and glimmering.”
+The noise was persistent in the woodwork of the children’s beds,
+while their hands were outside. The knocks answered knocks made by
+visitors. There were divers other marvels. The Drummer was suspected,
+but, consciously or not, the children were probably the agents. They
+seem to have been in their usual health.[26] In Galashiels (date not
+given), loud knocks on the floor accompanied a hystero-epileptic
+girl wherever she sat. In bed, “her body was so lifted up that many
+strong men were not able to keep it down.” The minister, who could
+make nothing of her, was Mr. Wilkie; the girl was Margaret Wilson
+(Sinclair, p. 200).
+
+This little parcel of strange stories may suffice to show that part
+of the Fairy belief is based on such incidents as still occur, or are
+reported to occur, just in the old fashion. It is for psychologists
+and physicians to ascertain how far, if at all, the incidents are
+produced by hysterical, or epileptic, or somnambulistic patients.
+Common forthright trickery is usually detected in paid mediums. But
+the trickery simulates real events, or continues an old traditional
+form of imposture. The moral that parents should not allow their
+children to be present at _séances_ hardly needs enforcing. Some of
+them may escape unharmed, but frightful injuries may be inflicted on
+health and on character.[27]
+
+
+VI. SECOND SIGHT AND “TELEPATHY.”
+
+We have already hinted that events of an ordinary kind—illusions,
+cases of mistaken identity, or hallucination—are probably the
+ground-work in part of the Highland belief in second sight. Of
+course, if a certain proportion of hallucinations were or could be
+taken for “veridical,” attention would be given to these alone: the
+others would be neglected. The Psychical Society has collected and
+examined hundreds of these cases in modern life.
+
+The Society may find out, experimentally, whether second sight can
+be acquired in the manner described by Mr. Kirk—whether by the
+hair tether, or by merely putting the foot under that of a seer.
+Thus contact is used in thought reading, as, in second sight, the
+seer by contact communicates his hallucination. Second sight itself
+is now called telepathy, which, however, does not essentially
+advance our knowledge of the subject. It is either very common, or
+people who choose to claim the possession of it are very common.
+In our society it is mere matter for idle tales; in the Highlands
+the second sight was a belief and a system. Mr. Pepys and Dr.
+Johnson investigated the matter, and Dr. Johnson came away open to
+conviction, but unconvinced. The Psychical Society is now examining
+second sight in the Highlands. It is interesting to learn that the
+Presbyterian seers justified their visions out of the Bible, which
+also justified the burning of these gifted men on occasion. Mr.
+Kirk is tolerant enough to ascribe their visions to a “bounty of
+Providence.” This may have passed, north of the Highland line, but in
+Fife and the south the seers would speedily have been accommodated
+with a stake and tar-barrel. The writings of Wodrow and Mr. Robert
+Blair of St. Andrews (1650-60) prove that if a savoury preacher
+wrought marvels, he was inspired, but if an amateur did the very same
+things,—prophesied, healed diseases, and so forth,—he, or she, was
+likely to be haled before the Presbytery, and possibly dragged to
+the stake. In the Highlands these invidious distinctions were less
+forcibly drawn. Mr. Kirk treats the whole question in his curiously
+cold scientific way. If these things occur, they are in the realm of
+Nature, and are results of causes which may be variously conjectured.
+They may be providential, or a sport of evolution, derived from “a
+complexionall Quality of the first acquirer,” which often becomes
+hereditary in his lineage.
+
+Lord Tarbott’s letter to an inquirer, Robert Boyle, is added by Mr.
+Kirk to his little treatise, with his own annotations. His belief
+that the Fairy sights could only be seen while the eyes are kept
+steady without twinkling, is attested by a well-known anecdote. On
+the afternoon of Culloden, a little girl, staying with Lord Lovat at
+Gortuleg, was reading in a window-seat. Chancing to look out, she
+saw a company of headlong riders hastening to the castle. Believing
+them to be the _Sleagh Maith_, she tried hard to keep her eyes from
+twinkling, that she might not lose the vision. But these, alas! were
+no Fairies, they were Prince Charles and his men flying from the
+victorious English. The tale proves that the belief long survived the
+day of the minister of Aberfoyle. Lord Tarbott mentions, also, the
+vision of the shroud on the breast of a man about to die, which seems
+to be alluded to in the prophecy of Theoclymenus in the _Odyssey_.
+Lord Tarbott’s tales are of the familiar kind, there are dozens
+of such in _Theophilus Insulanus_. Mr. Kirk’s notes are chiefly
+remarkable for his citation of Walter Grahame’s “evil eye,” which
+killed what he praised,—a world-wide superstition, too common to need
+supporting by foreign and classical examples.
+
+Unluckily, at this point Mr. Kirk abandons what we may call his
+scientific attitude. He has accounted for his “supernatural” affairs
+as not supernatural at all, but phenomena in Nature, and subject,
+like other phenomena, to laws. But now it occurs to him to explain
+the conduct of his _Sleagh Maith_ as the result of missionary zeal on
+their part: “they endeavour to convince us of a Deity;” though, on
+the face of his argument, a Co-walker no more proves a Deity than
+does an ordinary “walker.” He may have been reading “the learned
+Dr. Mor” (More the Platonist), and may have altered his ideas. His
+account of a girl who learned, or rather composed, a long poem by
+aid of “our nimble and courteous spirits,” affords an early example
+of what is called “an inspirational medium.” It is unlucky that Mr.
+Kirk did not publish this work, of which he had a copy. The ordinary
+“spiritual” poetry may be written, as Dr. Johnson said of _Ossian_,
+“by any one who would abandon his mind to it.” When Mr. Kirk
+maintains that Neolithic arrow-heads could not have been executed “by
+all the Airt of man,” he relapses from his usual odd common-sense. He
+also believes in men who are magically shot-proof, like Claverhouse,
+who had to be shot by a silver bullet; like Archbishop Sharp, on
+whom his pious assassins erroneously held that their bullets took
+no effect; and like certain soldiers mentioned by Dugald Dalgetty
+of Drumthwacket. This absurd belief was very generally held by
+the Covenanters. Where his local superstitions and those of his
+generation are not concerned, Mr. Kirk recovers his clearness of
+intellect. In Purgatory he finds only the pre-Christian Hades, “our
+Secret Republick,” with an ecclesiastical colouring—“additional
+Fictions of Monks’ doting and crazied Heads.” Mr. Kirk did not
+perceive the danger involved in his own argument. If a Highland
+second-sighted man answers to a Hebrew prophet in his visions and
+trances, a Hebrew prophet is in danger of being no more considered
+than a Highland second-sighted man. However, it is to Mr. Kirk’s
+praise that he shows no persecuting disposition as far as witches are
+concerned (though he has seen them pricked), and that he argues very
+fairly from his premisses, and within his limits.[28] He recognises
+the unity of spiritual phenomena and of popular beliefs, whether it
+springs from a common well-head of delusion in our nature, or whether
+it really has a source in the observation of peculiar and rather rare
+phenomena.
+
+To the Edinburgh edition of 1815 (probably the only one) the editor
+added the work of Theophilus Insulanus on Second Sight. This is
+not rare nor expensive, and we do not reproduce it. One case of
+“telepathy” may be quoted from Theophilus.
+
+“Donald Beaton, residenter in Hammir, related that, in his passage
+from Glasgow to the Isle of Sky, he stopped at Tippermory, a known
+harbour in the Isle of Mull.” Here some one gave him a loin of
+venison. Donald, whose wife’s mother was a seer, to try her powers,
+wished that piece of venison in her hands. “The same night the seer,
+who lived with her daughter, his wife, apprehended she saw him enter
+the house with a shapeless lump in his hands—she knew not what, but
+it resembled flesh, which gave herself and her daughter great joy, as
+they had despaired of him by his long absence.” This is “telepathy,”
+if telepathy there be.
+
+Another picturesque tale shows how, on the night before the Rout
+of Moy, Patrick M‘Caskill met the famed M‘Rimmon (_sic_), M‘Leod’s
+piper, in the town of Inverness, and saw him contract into the
+size of a boy of five or six, and expand again into his athletic
+proportions. M‘Rimmon was killed in the Rout of Moy—an attempt
+to surprise and seize Prince Charles. Before leaving Skye he had
+prophesied—
+
+      “M‘Leod shall come back,
+      But M‘Rimmon shall never.”
+
+The editor is acquainted with a splendid case of second sight in
+Kensington. The seer was an accomplished English gentleman, and
+mentioned his vision at the moment to a witness who remembers and
+corroborates the statement. Thus the Hebrides and Highlands have no
+monopoly of second sight.
+
+The researches of M. Charcot, M. Richet, and other psychologists do
+not at present help us much in the matter of veridical second sight.
+It is not a hallucination “suggested” to a hypnotised subject, but
+an impression produced by a remote person or event on a subject who
+has not been hypnotised at all. For example, Dr. Adam Clarke, in his
+_Life_ (vol. ii. p. 16) tells us of Mr. Tracy Clarke, who, being in
+the Isle of Man with his son, dreamed that he had visited his wife in
+Liverpool. He told his son that Mrs. Clarke was looking very well,
+but, contrary to her habit, was sleeping in the best bedroom. On the
+day when Mr. Clarke said this, Mrs. Clarke, who had been sleeping in
+her best bedroom, told the little son who lay in her room that she
+had heard his father ride up to the house, stable his horse, open
+the door, come upstairs, and walk round her bed, but that she could
+not see him. This is a case at least of second hearing, and has no
+hypnotic explanation.
+
+We end in the candid spirit of Dr. Johnson, as far as the
+Polter-Geist and second sight are concerned—willing to be convinced,
+but far indeed from conviction. As to the Fairy belief, we conceive
+it to be a complex matter, from which tradition, with its memory of
+earth-dwellers, is not wholly absent, while more is due to a survival
+of the pre-Christian Hades, and to the belief in local spirits—the
+Vuis of Melanesia, the Nereids of ancient and modern Greece, the
+Lares of Rome, the fateful Mœræ and Hathors—old imaginings of a world
+not yet “dispeopled of its dreams.”[29]
+
+[Illustration: Puss-in-Boots smells a rat.]
+
+
+
+
+                              AN ESSAY
+
+                                 OF
+
+  The Nature and Actions of the Subterranean (and, for the most
+  Part,) Invisible People, heretofoir going under the name of
+  ELVES, FAUNES, and FAIRIES, or the lyke, among the Low-Country
+  Scots, as they are described by those who have the SECOND SIGHT;
+  and now, to occasion further Inquiry, collected and compared,
+  by a Circumspect Inquirer residing among the Scottish-Irish in
+  Scotland.
+
+
+
+
+                        Secret Commonwealth,
+
+                                 OR,
+
+            A Treatise displayeing the Chiefe Curiosities
+               as they are in Use among diverse of the
+                   People of Scotland to this Day;
+                        SINGULARITIES for the
+                        most Part peculiar to
+                             that Nation.
+
+         A Subject not heretofore discoursed of by any of our
+              Writters; and yet ventured on in an Essay
+                 to suppress the impudent and growing
+                     Atheisme of this Age, and to
+                     satisfie the desire of some
+                           choice Freinds.
+
+
+  _Then a Spirit passed before my Face, the Hair of my Flesh stood
+  up; it stood still, but I could not discerne the Forme thereof;
+  ane Image was before mine Eyes._—Job, 4. 15, 16.
+
+  _This is a_ REBELLIOUS PEOPLE, _which say to the Siers, sie not;
+  and to the Prophets, prophesie not unto us right Things, bot
+  speak unto us smoothe Things._—Isaiah, 30. 9, 10.
+
+  _And the Man whose Eyes were open hath said._—Numbers, 24. 15.
+
+  _For now we sie thorough a Glass darkly, but then Face to
+  Face._—1 Corinth. 13. 12.
+
+  _It doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we shall be lyke
+  God, and sie him as he is._—1 John, 3. 2.
+
+  Μη γιγαντες μαιωδησονται ὑποκατωδεν ὑδατος και των γειτονων
+  αυτον;—Job, 26. 5 (Septuag.).
+
+
+By MR ROBERT KIRK, Minister at Aberfoill.
+
+1691.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+OF THE SUBTERRANEAN INHABITANTS.
+
+
+These _Siths_, or FAIRIES, they call _Sleagh Maith_, or the Good
+People, it would seem, to prevent the Dint of their ill Attempts,
+(for the Irish use to bless all they fear Harme of;) and are said to
+be of a midle Nature betuixt Man and Angel, as were Dæmons thought
+to be of old; of intelligent studious Spirits, and light changable
+Bodies, (lyke those called Astral,) somewhat of the Nature of a
+condensed Cloud, and best seen in Twilight. Thes Bodies be so plyable
+thorough the Subtilty of the Spirits that agitate them, that they
+can make them appear or disappear att Pleasure. Some have Bodies or
+Vehicles so spungious, thin, and defecat, that they are fed by only
+sucking into some fine spirituous Liquors, that peirce lyke pure
+Air and Oyl: others feid more gross on the Foyson or substance of
+Corns and Liquors, or Corne it selfe that grows on the Surface of
+the Earth, which these Fairies steall away, partly invisible, partly
+preying on the Grain, as do Crowes and Mice; wherefore in this same
+Age, they are some times heard to bake Bread, strike Hammers, and
+do such lyke Services within the little Hillocks they most haunt:
+some whereof of old, before the Gospell dispelled Paganism, and in
+some barbarous Places as yet, enter Houses after all are at rest,
+and set the Kitchens in order, cleansing all the Vessels. Such Drags
+goe under the name of Brownies. When we have plenty, they have
+Scarcity at their Homes; and on the contrarie (for they are empowred
+to catch as much Prey everywhere as they please,) there Robberies
+notwithstanding oft tymes occassion great Rickes of Corne not to
+bleed so weill, (as they call it,) or prove so copious by verie farr
+as wes expected by the Owner.
+
+THERE Bodies of congealled Air are some tymes caried aloft, other
+whiles grovell in different Schapes, and enter into any Cranie or
+Clift of the Earth where Air enters, to their ordinary Dwellings;
+the Earth being full of Cavities and Cells, and there being no Place
+nor Creature but is supposed to have other Animals (greater or
+lesser) living in or upon it as Inhabitants; and no such thing as a
+pure Wilderness in the whole Universe.
+
+2. WE then (the more terrestriall kind have now so numerously planted
+all Countreys,) do labour for that abstruse People, as weill as for
+ourselves. Albeit, when severall Countreys were unhabitated by us,
+these had their easy Tillage above Ground, as we now. The Print of
+those Furrous do yet remaine to be seen on the Shoulders of very high
+Hills, which was done when the champayn Ground was Wood and Forrest.
+
+THEY remove to other Lodgings at the Beginning of each Quarter of
+the Year, so traversing till Doomsday, being imputent and [impotent
+of?] staying in one Place, and finding some Ease by so purning
+[Journeying] and changing Habitations. Their chamælion-lyke Bodies
+swim in the Air near the Earth with Bag and Bagadge; and at such
+revolution of Time, SEERS, or Men of the SECOND SIGHT, (Fæmales
+being seldome so qualified) have very terrifying Encounters with
+them, even on High Ways; who therefoir uswally shune to travell
+abroad at these four Seasons of the Year, and thereby have made it
+a Custome to this Day among the Scottish-Irish to keep Church duely
+evry first Sunday of the Quarter to sene or hallow themselves, their
+Corns and Cattell, from the Shots and Stealth of these wandring
+Tribes; and many of these superstitious People will not be seen in
+Church againe till the nixt Quarter begin, as if no Duty were to be
+learned or done by them, but all the Use of Worship and Sermons were
+to save them from these Arrows that fly in the Dark.[30]
+
+THEY are distributed in Tribes and Orders, and have Children, Nurses,
+Mariages, Deaths, and Burialls, in appearance, even as we, (unless
+they so do for a Mock-show, or to prognosticate some such Things
+among us.)
+
+3. THEY are clearly seen by these Men of the SECOND SIGHT to eat
+at Funeralls [and] Banquets; hence many of the Scottish-Irish will
+not teast Meat at these Meittings, lest they have Communion with,
+or be poysoned by, them. So are they seen to carrie the Beer or
+Coffin with the Corps among the midle-earth Men to the Grave. Some
+Men of that exalted Sight (whither by Art or Nature) have told me
+they have seen at these Meittings a Doubleman, or the Shape of some
+Man in two places; that is, a superterranean and a subterranean
+Inhabitant, perfectly resembling one another in all Points, whom
+he notwithstanding could easily distinguish one from another, by
+some secret Tockens and Operations, and so go speak to the Man his
+Neighbour and Familiar, passing by the Apparition or Resemblance of
+him. They avouch that every Element and different State of Being
+have Animals resembling these of another Element; as there be Fishes
+sometimes at Sea resembling Monks of late Order in all their Hoods
+and Dresses; so as the Roman invention of good and bad Dæmons, and
+guardian Angells particularly assigned, is called by them an ignorant
+Mistake, sprung only from this Originall. They call this Reflex-man a
+Co-walker, every way like the Man, as a Twin-brother and Companion,
+haunting him as his shadow, as is oft seen and known among Men
+(resembling the Originall,) both before and after the Originall is
+dead; and wes also often seen of old to enter a Hous, by which the
+People knew that the Person of that Liknes wes to Visite them within
+a few days. This Copy, Echo, or living Picture, goes att last to his
+own Herd. It accompanied that Person so long and frequently for Ends
+best known to it selfe, whither to guard him from the secret Assaults
+of some of its own Folks, or only as ane sportfull Ape to counterfeit
+all his Actions. However, the Stories of old WITCHES prove beyond
+contradiction, that all Sorts of People, Spirits which assume light
+aery Bodies, or crazed Bodies co-acted by forrein Spirits, seem to
+have some Pleasure, (at least to asswage from Pain or Melancholy,)
+by frisking and capering like Satyrs, or whistling and screeching
+(like unlukie Birds) in their unhallowed Synagogues and Sabboths.
+If invited and earnestly required, these Companions make themselves
+knowne and familiar to Men; other wise, being in a different State
+and Element, they nather can nor will easily converse with them. They
+avouch that a Heluo, or Great-eater, hath a voracious Elve to be his
+attender, called a Joint-eater or Just-halver, feeding on the Pith or
+Quintessence of what the Man eats; and that therefoir he continues
+Lean like a Hawke or Heron, notwith standing his devouring Appetite:
+yet it would seem that they convey that substance elsewhere, for
+these Subterraneans eat but little in their Dwellings; there Food
+being exactly clean, and served up by Pleasant Children, lyke
+inchanted Puppets. What Food they extract from us is conveyed to
+their Homes by secret Paths, as sume skilfull Women do the Pith and
+Milk from their Neighbours Cows into their own Chiese-hold thorow
+a Hair-tedder, at a great Distance, by Airt Magic, or by drawing a
+spickot fastened to a Post, which will bring milk as farr of as a
+Bull will be heard to roar.[31] The Chiese made of the remaineing
+Milk of a Cow thus strain’d will swim in Water like a Cork. The
+Method they take to recover their Milk is a bitter chyding of the
+suspected Inchanters, charging them by a counter Charme to give them
+back their own, in God, or their Master’s Name. But a little of the
+Mother’s Dung stroakit on the Calves Mouth before it suck any, does
+prevent this theft.
+
+4. THEIR Houses are called large and fair, and (unless att some
+odd occasions) unperceaveable by vulgar eyes, like Rachland, and
+other inchanted Islands, having fir Lights, continual Lamps, and
+Fires, often seen without Fuel to sustain them. Women are yet alive
+who tell they were taken away when in Child-bed to nurse Fairie
+Children, a lingering voracious Image of their (them?) being left
+in their place, (like their Reflexion in a Mirrour,) which (as if
+it were some insatiable Spirit in ane assumed Bodie) made first
+semblance to devour the Meats that it cunningly carried by, and
+then left the Carcase as if it expired and departed thence by a
+naturall and common Death. The Child, and Fire, with Food and other
+Necessaries, are set before the Nurse how soon she enters; but she
+nather perceaves any Passage out, nor sees what those People doe
+in other Rooms of the Lodging. When the Child is wained, the Nurse
+dies, or is conveyed back, or gets it to her choice to stay there.
+But if any Superterraneans be so subtile, as to practice Slights for
+procuring a Privacy to any of their Misteries, (such as making use
+of their Oyntments, which as Gyges’s Ring makes them invisible, or
+nimble, or casts them in a Trance, or alters their Shape, or makes
+Things appear at a vast Distance, &c.) they smite them without Paine,
+as with a Puff of Wind, and bereave them of both the naturall and
+acquired Sights in the twinkling of ane Eye, (both these Sights,
+where once they come, being in the same Organ and inseparable,) or
+they strick them Dumb. The Tramontains to this Day put Bread, the
+Bible, or a piece of Iron, in Womens Beds when travelling, to save
+them from being thus stollen; and they commonly report, that all
+uncouth, unknown Wights are terrifyed by nothing earthly so much as
+by cold Iron. They delyver the Reason to be that Hell lying betwixt
+the chill Tempests, and the Fire Brands of scalding Metals, and Iron
+of the North, (hence the Loadstone causes a tendency to that Point,)
+by ane Antipathy thereto, these odious far-scenting Creatures shrug
+and fright at all that comes thence relating to so abhorred a Place,
+whence their Torment is eather begun, or feared to come hereafter.
+
+5. THEIR Apparell and Speech is like that of the People and Countrey
+under which they live: so are they seen to wear Plaids and variegated
+Garments in the Highlands of Scotland, and Suanochs therefore in
+Ireland. They speak but litle, and that by way of whistling, clear,
+not rough. The verie Divels conjured in any Countrey, do answer in
+the Language of the Place; yet sometimes the Subterraneans speak
+more distinctly than at other times. Ther Women are said to Spine
+very fine, to Dy, to Tossue, and Embroyder: but whither it is as
+manuall Operation of substantiall refined Stuffs, with apt and solid
+Instruments, or only curious Cob-webs, impalpable Rainbows, and a
+fantastic Imitation of the Actions of more terrestricall Mortalls,
+since it transcended all the Senses of the Seere to discerne
+whither, I leave to conjecture as I found it.
+
+6. THERE Men travell much abroad, either presaging or aping the
+dismall and tragicall Actions of some amongst us; and have also many
+disastorous Doings of their own, as Convocations, Fighting, Gashes,
+Wounds, and Burialls, both in the Earth and Air. They live much
+longer than wee; yet die at last, or [at] least vanish from that
+State. ’Tis ane of their Tenets, that nothing perisheth, but (as the
+Sun and Year) every Thing goes in a Circle, lesser or greater, and
+is renewed and refreshed in its Revolutions; as ’tis another, that
+every Bodie in the Creation moves, (which is a sort of Life;) and
+that nothing moves, but [h]as another Animal moving on it; and so on,
+to the utmost minutest Corpuscle that’s capable to be a Receptacle of
+Life.
+
+7. THEY are said to have aristocraticall Rulers and Laws, but no
+discernible Religion, Love, or Devotion towards God, the blessed
+Maker of all: they disappear whenever they hear his Name invocked,
+or the Name of JESUS, (at which all do bow willinglie, or by
+constraint, that dwell above or beneath within the Earth, Philip.
+2. 10;) nor can they act ought at that Time after hearing of that
+sacred Name. The TABHAISVER, or Seer, that corresponds with this
+kind of Familiars, can bring them with a Spel to appear to himselfe
+or others when he pleases, as readily as Endor Witch to those of her
+Kind. He tells, they are ever readiest to go on hurtfull Errands,
+but seldome will be the Messengers of great Good to Men. He is not
+terrified with their Sight when he calls them, but seeing them in a
+surpryze (as often he does) frights him extreamly. And glaid would
+he be quite of such, for the hideous Spectacles seen among them;
+as the torturing of some Wight, earnest ghostly stairing Looks,
+Skirmishes, and the like. They do not all the Harme which appearingly
+they have Power to do; nor are they perceaved to be in great Pain,
+save that they are usewally silent and sullen. They are said to have
+many pleasant toyish Books; but the operation of these Peices only
+appears in some Paroxisms of antic corybantic Jolity, as if ravisht
+and prompted by a new Spirit entering into them at that Instant,
+lighter and mirrier than their own. Other Books they have of involved
+abstruse Sense, much like the Rosurcian [Rosycrucian] Style. They
+have nothing of the Bible, save collected Parcells for Charms and
+counter Charms; not to defend themselves withall, but to operate on
+other Animals, for they are a People invulnerable by our Weapons;
+and albeit 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 assumed
+Bodies are stricken elsewhere; as the Strings of a Second Harp, tune
+to ane unison, Sounds, though only ane be struck; yet these People
+have not a second, or so gross a Bodie at all, to be so pierced; but
+as Air, which when divyded units againe; or if they feel Pain by
+a Blow, they are better Physicians than wee, and quickly cure it.
+They are not subject to sore Sicknesses, but dwindle and decay at a
+certain Period, all about ane Age. Some say their continual Sadness
+is because of their pendulous State, (like those Men, Luc. 13. 2.
+6.) as uncertain what at the last Revolution will become of them,
+when they are lock’t up into ane unchangeable Condition; and if they
+have any frolic Fitts of Mirth, ’tis as the constrained grinning of a
+Mort-head, or rather as acted on a Stage, and moved by another, ther
+[than?] cordially comeing of themselves. But other Men of the Second
+Sight, being illiterate, and unwary in their Observations, learn
+from those; one averring those subterranean People to be departed
+Souls, attending awhile in this inferior State, and clothed with
+Bodies procured throwgh their Almsdeeds in this Lyfe; fluid, active,
+ætheriall Vehicles to hold them, that they may not scatter, or
+wander, and be lost in the Totum, or their first Nothing; but if any
+were so impious as to have given no Alms, they say when the Souls of
+such do depairt, they sleep in an unactive State till they resume the
+terrestriall Bodies again: others, that what the Low-countrey Scotts
+calls a Wreath, and the Irish TAIBHSHE[32] or Death’s Messenger,
+(appearing sometimes as a little rough Dog, and if crossed and
+conjured in Time, will be pacified by the Death of any other
+Creature instead of the sick Man,) is only exuvious Fumes of the Man
+approaching Death, exhal’d and congeal’d into a various Likness,[33]
+(as Ships and Armies are sometimes shapt in the Air,) and called
+astral Bodies, agitated as Wild-fire with Wind, and are neather Souls
+or counterfeiting Spirits; yet not a few avouch (as is said,) that
+surelie these are a numerous People by them selves, having their
+own Polities. Which Diversities of Judgments may occasion severall
+Inconsonancies in this Rehearsall, after the narrowest Scrutiny made
+about it.
+
+8. THEIR Weapons are most what solid earthly Bodies, nothing of
+Iron, but much of Stone, like to yellow soft Flint Spa, shaped like
+a barbed Arrow-head, but flung like a Dairt, with great Force. These
+Armes (cut by Airt and Tools it seems beyond humane) have something
+of the Nature of Thunderbolt subtilty, and mortally wounding the
+vital Parts without breaking the Skin; of which Wounds I have
+observed in Beasts, and felt them with my Hands. They are not as
+infallible Benjamites, hitting at a Hair’s-breadth; nor are they
+wholly unvanquishable, at least in Appearance.
+
+THE MEN of that SECOND SIGHT do not discover strange Things when
+asked, but at Fits and Raptures, as if inspyred with some Genius at
+that Instant, which before did lurk in or about them. Thus I have
+frequently spoke to one of them, who in his Transport told he cut
+the Bodie of one of those People in two with his Iron Weapon, and so
+escaped this Onset, yet he saw nothing left behind of that appearing
+divyded; at other Times he out wrested [wrestled?] some of them. His
+Neibours often perceaved this Man to disappear at a certane Place,
+and about one Hour after to become visible, and discover him selfe
+near a Bow-shot from the first Place. It was in that Place where he
+became invisible, said he, that the Subterraneans did encounter and
+combate with him. Those who are unseened or unsanctified (called Fey)
+are said to be pierced or wounded with those People’s Weapons, which
+makes them do somewhat verie unlike their former Practice, causing
+a sudden Alteration, yet the Cause thereof unperceavable at present;
+nor have they Power (either they cannot make use of their natural
+Powers, or ask’t not the heavenly Aid,) to escape the Blow impendent.
+A Man of the Second Sight perceaved a Person standing by him (sound
+to others view) wholly gored in Blood, and he (amazed-like) bid him
+instantly flee. The whole Man laught at his Airt and Warning, since
+there was no appearance of Danger. He had scarce contracted his Lips
+from Laughter, when unexpectedly his Enemy leapt in at his Side,
+and stab’d him with their Weapons. They also pierce Cows or other
+Animals, usewally said to be Elf-shot, whose purest Substance (if
+they die) these Subterraneans take to live on, viz. the aereal and
+ætherial Parts, the most spirituous Matter for prolonging of Life,
+such as Aquavitæ (moderately taken) is among Liquors, leaving the
+terrestrial behind. The Cure of such Hurts is, only for a Man to find
+out the Hole with his Finger; as if the Spirits flowing from a Man’s
+warme Hand were Antidote sufficient against their poyson’d Dairts.
+
+9. AS Birds and Beasts, whose Bodies are much used to the Change of
+the frie and open Air, forsee Storms; so those invisible People are
+more sagacious to understand by the Books of Nature Things to come,
+than wee, who are pestered with the grosser Dregs of all elementary
+Mixtures, and have our purer Spirits choaked by them. The Deer scents
+out a Man and Powder (tho a late Invention) at a great Distance; a
+hungry Hunter, Bread; and the Raven, a Carrion: Ther Brains, being
+long clarified by the high and subtil Air, will observe a very
+small Change in a Trice. Thus a Man of the Second Sight, perceaving
+the Operations of these forecasting invisible People among us,
+(indulged thorow a stupendious Providence to give Warnings of some
+remarkable Events, either in the Air, Earth, or Waters,) told he saw
+a Winding-shroud creeping on a walking healthful Persons Legs till it
+come to the Knee; and afterwards it came up to the Midle, then to the
+Shoulders, and at last over the Head, which was visible to no other
+Persone. And by observing the Spaces of Time betwixt the severall
+Stages, he easily guessed how long the Man was to live who wore the
+Shroud; for when it approached his Head, he told that such a Person
+was ripe for the Grave.
+
+10. THERE be many Places called Fairie-hills, which the Mountain
+People think impious and dangerous to peel or discover, by taking
+Earth or Wood from them; superstitiously beleiving the Souls of their
+Predicessors to dwell there.[34] And for that End (say they) a Mote
+or Mount was dedicate beside every Church-yard, to receive the Souls
+till their adjacent Bodies arise, and so become as a Fairie-hill;
+they useing Bodies of Air when called Abroad. They also affirme those
+Creatures that move invisibly in a House, and cast hug great Stones,
+but do no much Hurt, because counter-wrought by some more courteous
+and charitable Spirits that are everywhere ready to defend Men, (Dan.
+10. 13.) to be Souls that have not attained their Rest, thorough a
+vehement Desire of revealling a Murther or notable Injurie done or
+receaved, or a Treasure that was forgot in their Liftyme on Earth,
+which when disclos’d to a Conjurer alone, the Ghost quite removes.
+
+IN the nixt Country to that of my former Residence, about the Year
+1676, when there was some Scarcity of Graine, a marvelous Illapse and
+Vision strongly struck the Imagination of two Women in one Night,
+living at a good Distance from one another, about a Treasure hid
+in a Hill, called SITHBHRUAICH, or Fayrie-hill. The Appearance of
+a Treasure was first represented to the Fancy, and then an audible
+Voyce named the Place where it was to their awaking Senses. Whereupon
+both arose, and meitting accidentallie at the Place, discovered their
+Designe; and joyntly digging, found a Vessell as large as a Scottish
+Peck, full of small Pieces of good Money, of ancient Coyn; which
+halving betuixt them, they sold in Dish-fulls for Dish-fulls of Meall
+to the Countrey People. Very many of undoubted Credit saw, and had
+of the Coyn to this Day. But whither it was a good or bad Angell,
+one of the subterranean People, or the restless Soul of him who hid
+it, that discovered it, and to what End it was done, I leave to the
+Examination of others.
+
+11. THESE Subterraneans have Controversies, Doubts, Disputs, Feuds,
+and Siding of Parties; there being some Ignorance in all Creatures,
+and the vastest created Intelligences not compassing all Things.
+As to Vice and Sin, whatever their own Laws be, sure, according to
+ours, and Equity, natural, civil, and reveal’d, they transgress and
+commit Acts of Injustice, and Sin, by what is above said, as to
+their stealling of Nurses to their Children, and that other sort
+of Plaginism in catching our Children away, (may seem to heir some
+Estate in those invisible Dominions,) which never returne. For the
+Inconvenience of their Succubi, who tryst with Men, it is abominable;
+but for Swearing and Intemperance, they are not observed so subject
+to those Irregularities, as to Envy, Spite, Hypocracie, Lieing, and
+Dissimulation.
+
+12. AS our Religion oblidges us not to make a peremptory and curious
+Search into these Obstrusenesses, so that the Histories of all Ages
+give as many plain Examples of extraordinary Occurrances as make
+a modest Inquiry not contemptable. How much is written of Pigme’s,
+Fairies, Nymphs, Syrens, Apparitions, which tho not the tenth Part
+true, yet could not spring of nothing! Even English Authors relate
+(of) Barry Island, in Glamorganshire, that laying your Ear into
+a Clift of the Rocks, blowing of Bellows, stricking of Hammers,
+clashing of Armour, fyling of Iron, will be heard distinctly ever
+since Merlin inchaunted those subterranean Wights to a solid manuall
+forging of Arm’s to Aurelius Ambrosius and his Brittans, till he
+returned; which Merlin being killed in a Battell, and not coming to
+loose the Knot, these active Vulcans are there ty’d to a perpetuall
+Labour. But to dip no deeper into this Well, I will nixt give some
+Account how the Seer my Informer comes to have this secret Way of
+Correspondence beyond other Mortalls.
+
+THERE be odd Solemnities at investing a Man with the Priviledges
+of the whole Mistery of this Second Sight. He must run a Tedder
+of Hair (which bound a Corps to the Bier) in a Helix [?] about
+his Midle, from End to End; then bow his Head downwards, as did
+Elijah, 1 Kings, 18, 42. and look back thorough his Legs untill he
+sie a Funerall advance till the People cross two Marches; or look
+thus back thorough a Hole where was a Knot of Fir. But if the Wind
+change Points while the Hair Tedder is ty’d about him, he is in
+Peril of his Lyfe. The usewall Method for a curious Person to get a
+transient Sight of this otherwise invisible Crew of Subterraneans,
+(if impotently and over rashly sought,) is to put his [left Foot
+under the Wizard’s right] Foot, and the Seer’s Hand is put on the
+Inquirer’s Head, who is to look over the Wizard’s right Shoulder,
+(which hes ane ill Appearance, as if by this Ceremony ane implicit
+Surrender were made of all betwixt the Wizard’s Foot and his Hand,
+ere the Person can be admitted a privado to the Airt;) then will he
+see a Multitude of Wight’s, like furious hardie Men, flocking to him
+haistily from all Quarters, as thick as Atoms in the Air; which are
+no Nonentities or Phantasms, Creatures proceiding from ane affrighted
+Apprehensione, confused or crazed Sense, but Realities, appearing to
+a stable Man in his awaking Sense, and enduring a rationall Tryall of
+their Being. Thes thorow Fear strick him breathless and speechless.
+The Wizard, defending the Lawfullness of his Skill, forbids such
+Horror, and comforts his Novice by telling of Zacharias, as being
+struck speechless at seeing Apparitions, Luke, 1. 20. Then he further
+maintains his Airt, by vouching Elisha to have had the same, and
+disclos’d it thus unto his Servant in 2 Kings, 6. 17. when he blinded
+the Syrians; and Peter in Act, 5. 9. forseing the Death of Saphira,
+by perceaving as it were her Winding-sheet about her before hand;
+and Paul, in 2nd Corinth. 12. 4. who got such a Vision and Sight as
+should not, nor could be told. Elisha also in his Chamber saw Gehazi
+his Servant, at a great Distance, taking a reward from Naaman, 2d
+Kings, 5. 26. Hence were the Prophets frequently called SEERS, or
+Men of a 2d or more exhalted Sight than others. He acts for his
+Purpose also Math. 4. 8. where the Devil undertakes to give even
+Jesus a Sight of all Nations, and the finest Things in the World,
+at one Glance, tho in their naturall Situations and Stations at a
+vast Distance from other. And ’tis said expresly he did let sie them;
+not in a Map it seems, nor by a phantastick magicall jugling of the
+Sight, which he could not impose upon so discovering a Person. It
+would appear then to have been a Sight of real solid Substances, and
+Things of worth, which he intended as a Bait for his Purpose. Whence
+it might seem, (compairing this Relation of Math. 4. 8. with the
+former,) that the extraordinary or Second Sight can be given by the
+Ministery of bad as weill as good Spirits to those that will embrace
+it. And the Instance of Balaam and the Pytheniss make it nothing the
+less probable. Thus also the Seer trains his Scholler, by telling of
+the Gradations of Nature, ordered by a wise Provydence; that as the
+Sight of Bats and Owls transcend that of Shrews and Moles, so the
+visive Faculties of Men are clearer than those of Owls; as Eagles,
+Lynxs, and Cats are brighter than Mens. And again, that Men of the
+Second Sight (being designed to give warnings against secret Engyns)
+surpass the ordinary Vision of other Men, which is a native Habit in
+some, descended from their Ancestors, and acquired as ane artificiall
+Improvement of their natural Sight in others; resembling in their own
+Kynd the usuall artificiall Helps of optic Glasses, (as Prospectives,
+Telescopes, and Microscopes,) without which ascititious Aids those
+Men here treated of do perceive Things that, for their Smallness, or
+Subtility, and Secrecy, are invisible to others, tho dayly conversant
+with them; they having such a Beam continuallie about them as that
+of the Sun, which when it shines clear only, lets common Eyes see
+the Atomes, in the Air, that without those Rayes they could not
+discern; for some have this Second Sight transmitted from Father to
+Sone thorow the whole Family, without their own Consent or others
+teaching, proceeding only from a Bounty of Providence it seems, or
+by Compact, or by a complexionall Quality of the first Acquirer. As
+it may seem alike strange (yet nothing vicious) in such as Master
+Great-rake,[35] the Irish Stroaker, Seventh-sons, and others that
+cure the King’s Evill, and chase away Deseases and Pains, with only
+stroaking of the affected Pairt; which (if it be not the Reliques
+of miraculous Operations, or some secret Virtue in the Womb, of the
+Parent, which increaseth until Seventh-sons be borne, and decreaseth
+by the same Degrees afterwards,) proceids only from the sanitive
+Balsome of their healthfull Constitutions; Virtue going out from them
+by spirituous Effluxes unto the Patient, and their vigorous healthy
+Spirits affecting the sick as usewally the unhealthy Fumes of the
+sick infect the sound and whole.
+
+13. THE Minor Sort of Seers prognosticat many future Events, only
+for a Month’s Space, from the Shoulder-bone of a Sheep on which a
+Knife never came, (for as before is said, and the Nazarits of old
+had something of it) Iron hinders all the Opperations of those that
+travell in the Intrigues of these hidden Dominions. By looking into
+the Bone, they will tell if Whoredom be committed in the Owner’s
+House; what Money the Master of the Sheep had; if any will die out
+of that House for that Moneth; and if any Cattell there will take a
+Trake, as if Planet-struck. Then will they prescribe a Preservative
+and Prevention.
+
+14. A WOMAN (it seems ane Exception from the generall Rule,)
+singularlie wise in these Matters of Foirsight, living in Colasnach,
+ane Isle of the Hebrides, (in the Time of the Marquess of Montrose
+his Wars with the States in Scotland,) being notorious among many;
+and so examined by some that violently seazed that Isle, if she saw
+them coming or not? She said, she saw them coming many Hours before
+they came in View of the Isle. But earnestly looking, she some times
+took them for Enemyes, sometime for Friends; and morover they look’t
+as if they went from the Isle, not as Men approaching it, which made
+her not put the Inhabitants on their Guard. The Matter was, that the
+Barge wherein the Enemie sailed, was a little befoir taken from the
+Inhabitants of that same Isle, and the Men had their Backs towards
+the Isle, when they were plying the oares towards it. Thus this old
+Scout and Delphian Oracle was at least deceived, and did deceave.
+Being asked who gave her such Sights and Warnings, she said, that
+as soon as she set three Crosses of Straw upon the Palm of her Hand,
+a great ugly Beast sprang out of the Earth neer her, and flew in the
+Air. If what she enquired had Success according to her Wish, the
+Beast would descend calmly, and lick up the Crosses. If it would not
+succeid, the Beast would furiously thrust her and the Crosses over on
+the Ground, and so vanish to his Place.
+
+15. AMONG other Instances of undoubted Verity, proving in these the
+Being of such aerial People, or Species of Creatures not vulgarly
+known, I add the subsequent Relations, some whereof I have from my
+Acquaintance with the Actors and Patients, and the Rest from the
+Eye-witnesses to the Matter of Fact. The first whereof shall be of
+the Woman taken out of her Child-bed, and having a lingring Image
+of her substituted Bodie in her Roome, which Resemblance decay’d,
+dy’d, and was bur’d. But the Person stollen returning to her Husband
+after two Years Space, he being convinced by many undenyable Tokens
+that she was his former Wyfe, admitted her Home, and had diverse
+Children by her. Among other Reports she gave her Husband, this was
+one: That she perceived litle what they did in the spacious House
+she lodg’d in, untill she anointed one of her Eyes with a certain
+Unction that was by her; which they perceaving to have acqainted
+her with their Actions, they fain’d her blind of that Eye with a
+Puff of their Breath. She found the Place full of Light, without any
+Fountain or Lamp from whence it did spring. This Person lived in the
+Countrey nixt to that of my last Residence, and might furnish Matter
+of Dispute amongst Casuists, whither if her Husband had been mary’d
+in the Interim of her two Years Absence, he was oblidged to divorse
+from the second Spouse at the Return of the first. There is ane Airt,
+appearingly without Superstition, for recovering of such as are
+stolen, but think it superfluous to insert it.
+
+I SAW a Woman of fourtie Years of Age, and examined her (having
+another Clergie Man in my Companie) about a Report that past of her
+long fasting [_her Name is not intyre_.][36] It was told by them of
+the House, as well as her selfe, that she tooke verie little or no
+Food for severall Years past; that she tarried in the Fields over
+Night, saw and conversed with a People she knew not, having wandered
+in seeking of her Sheep, and sleep’t upon a Hillock, and finding her
+self transported to another Place before Day. The Woman had a Child
+since that Time, and is still prettie melanchollyous and silent,
+hardly ever seen to laugh. Her natural Heat and radical Moisture seem
+to be equally balanced, lyke ane unextinguished Lamp, and going in a
+Circle, not unlike to the faint Lyfe of Bees, and some Sort of Birds,
+that sleep all the Winter over, and revive in the Spring.
+
+IT is usuall in all magicall Airts to have the Candidates
+prepossessit with a Believe of their Tutor’s Skill, and Ability to
+perform their Feats, and act their jugling Pranks and Legerdemain;
+but a Person called Stewart, possessed with a prejudice at that was
+spoken of the 2d Sight, and living near to my House, was soe put
+to it by a Seer, before many Witnesses, that he lost his Speech and
+Power of his Legs, and breathing excessively, as if expyring, because
+of the many fearfull Wights that appeared to him. The Companie were
+forced to carrie him into the House.
+
+IT is notoriously known what in Killin, within Perthshire, fell
+tragically out with a Yeoman that liv’d hard by, who coming into a
+Companie within ane Ale-house, where a Seer sat at Table, that at
+the Sight of the Intrant Neighbour, the Seer starting, rose to go
+out of the Hous; and being asked the Reason of his hast, told that
+the intrant Man should die within two Days; at which News the named
+Intrant stabb’d the Seer, and was himself executed two Days after for
+the Fact.
+
+A MINISTER, verie intelligent, but misbelieving all such Sights as
+were not ordinar, chanceing to be in a narrow Lane with a Seer, who
+perceaving a Wight of a known Visage furioslie to encounter them,
+the Seer desired the Minister to turn out of the Way; who scorning
+his Reason, and holding him selfe in the Path with them, when the
+Seer was going hastily out of the Way, they were both violently cast
+a side to a good Distance, and the Fall made them lame for all their
+Lyfe. A little after the Minister was carried Home, one came to tol
+the Bell for the Death of the Man whose Representation met them in
+the narrow Path some Halfe ane Hour before.
+
+ANOTHER Example is: A Seer in Kintyre, in Scotland, sitting at Table
+with diverse others, suddenly did cast his Head aside. The Companie
+asking him why he did it, he answered, that such a Friend of his, by
+Name, then in Ireland, threatened immediately to cast a Dish-full of
+Butter in his Face. The Men wrote down the Day and Hour, and sent to
+the Gentleman to know the Truth; which Deed the Gentleman declared he
+did at that verie Time, for he knew that his Friend was a Seer, and
+would make sport with it. The Men that were present, and examined the
+Matter exactly, told me this Story; and with all, that a Seer would
+with all his Opticks perceive no other Object so readily as this, at
+such a Distance.
+
+
+
+
+                          A SUCCINT ACCOMPT
+                                  OF
+                     MY LORD TARBOTT’S RELATIONS,
+                          IN A LETTER TO THE
+                  HONOURABLE ROBERT BOYLE, ESQUIRE,
+                                OF THE
+                      PREDICTIONS MADE BY SEERS,
+               Whereof himself was Ear and Eye-witness.
+
+  [I thought fit to adjoyne [it] hereunto, that I might not
+  be thought singular in this Disquisition; that the Mater of
+  Fact might be undenyably made out; and that I might, with all
+  Submission, give Annotations, with Animadversions, on his
+  supposed Causes of that Phenomenon, with my Reasons of Dissent
+  from his Judgement.]
+
+
+SIR,
+
+I HEARD very much, but beleived very little, of the Second Sight;
+yet its being assumed by severall of great Veracity, I was induced
+to make Inquirie after it in the Year 1652, being then confin’d to
+abide in the North of Scotland by the English Usurpers. The more
+generall Accounts of it were, that many Highlanders, yet far more
+Islanders, were qualified with this Second Sight; that Men, Women,
+and Children, indistinctly, were subject to it, and Children, where
+Parents were not. Some times People came to age, who had it not when
+young, nor could any tell by what Means produced. It is a Trouble to
+most of them who are subject to it, and they would be rid of it any
+Rate if they could. The Sight is of no long Duration, only continuing
+so long as they can keep their Eyes steady without twinkling. The
+hardy therefore fix their look, that they may see the longer; but
+the timorous see only Glances, their Eyes always twinkles at the
+first Sight of the Object. That which generally is seen by them, are
+the Species of living Creatures, and of inanimate Things, which was
+in Motion, such as Ships, and Habits upon Persons. They, never sie
+the Species of any Person who is already dead. What they foirsie
+fails not to exist in the Mode, and in that Place where it appears
+to them. They cannot well know what Space of Time shall interveen
+between the Apparition and the real Existance: But some of the
+hardiest and longest Experience have some Rules for Conjectures; as,
+if they sie a Man with a shrowding Sheet in the Apparition, they will
+conjecture at the Nearness or Remoteness of his Death by the more
+or less of his Bodie that is covered by it. They will ordinarily
+sie their absent Friends, tho at a great Distance, some tymes no
+less than from America to Scotland, sitting, standing, or walking
+in some certain Place; and then they conclude with a Assurance that
+they will sie them so and there. If a Man be in love with a Woman,
+they will ordinarily sie the Species of that Man standing by her,
+and so likewise if a Woman be in love; and they conjecture at their
+Enjoyments (of each other) by the Species touching (of) the Person,
+or appearing at a Distance from her (if they enjoy not one another.)
+If they sie the Species of any Person who is sick to die, they sie
+them covered over with the shrowding Sheet.
+
+THESE Generalls I had verified to me by such of them as did sie,
+and were esteemed honest and sober by all the Neighbourhood; for I
+inquired after such for my Information. And because there were more
+of these Seers in the Isles of Lewis, Harris, and Uist, than in any
+other Place, I did entreat Sir James M‘Donald (who is now dead) Sir
+Normand M‘Loud, and Mr. Daniel Morison, a verie honest Person, (who
+are still alive,) to make Inquirie in this uncouth Sight, and to
+acquaint me therewith; which they did, and all found ane Agriement in
+these Generalls, and informed me of many Instances confirming what
+they said. But though Men of Discretion and Honour, being but at
+2d Hand, I will choose rather to put myself than my Friends on the
+Hazard of being laughed at for incredible Relations.
+
+I WAS once travelling in the Highlands, and a good Number of Servants
+with me, as is usuall there; and one of them going a little before
+me, entering into a House where I was to stay all Night, and going
+haistily to the Door, he suddenly stept back with a Screech, and did
+fall by a Stone, which hit his Foot. I asked what the Matter was, for
+he seemed to be very much frighted. He told me very seriously that I
+should not lodge in that House, because shortly a dead Coffin would
+be carried out of it, for many were carrying of it when he was heard
+cry. I neglecting his Words, and staying there, he said to other of
+his Servants, he was sorry for it, and that surely what he saw would
+shortly come to pass. Tho no sick Person was then there, yet the
+Landlord, a healthy Highlander, died of ane appoplectick Fit before I
+left the House.
+
+In the year 1653, Alexander Monro (afterward Lieut. Coll. to the
+Earl of Dunbarton’s Regiment,) and I were walking in a Place called
+Ullabill, in Lochbroom, on a little Plain, at the Foot of a rugged
+Hill. There was a Servant working with a Spade in the Walk before
+us; his Back was to us, and his Face to the Hill. Before we came
+to him, he let the Spade fall, and looked toward the Hill. He took
+Notice of us as wee passed neer by him, which made me look at him;
+and perceiving him to stair a little strangely, I conjectured him to
+be a Seer. I called at him, at which he started and smiled. What are
+you doing? said I. He answered, I have seen a very strange Thing; ane
+Army of Englishmen, leeding of Horses, coming doun that Hill; and a
+Number of them are come down to the Plain, and eating the Barley,
+which is growing in the Field neer to the Hill. This was on the 4th
+May, (for I notted the Day,) and it was four or fyve Days before the
+Barley was sown in the Field he spoke of. Alexander Monro asked him
+how he knew they were Englishmen? He said, because they were leeding
+of Horses, and had on Hats and Bootts, which he knew no Scot Man
+would have there. We took little Notice of the whole Storie, as other
+than a foolish Vision; but wished that ane English Partie were there,
+we being then at Warr with them, and the Place almost unaccessable
+for Horsemen. But in the Beginning of August therafter, the Earle of
+Midleton (then Lieut. for the King in the Highlands) having occasion
+to march a Party of his toward the South Highlands, he sent his Foot
+thorow a Place called Inverlawell; and the Fore-partie which was
+first down the Hill, did fall off eating the Barley which was on the
+litle Plain under it. And Monro calling to mynd what the Seer told
+us, in May preceiding, he wrote of it, and sent ane Express to me to
+Lochslin, in Ross, (where I then was) with it.
+
+I HAD Occasion once to be in Companie where a Young Lady was, (excuse
+my not naming of Persons,) and I was told there was a notable Seer
+in the Companie. I called him to speak with me, as I did ordinarly
+when I found any of them; and after he had answered me to several
+Questions, I asked if he knew any Person to be in love with that
+Lady. He said he did, but he knew not the Person; for during the two
+Dayes he had been in her Company, he perceaved one standing neer her,
+and his Head leaning on her Shoulder; which he said did fore-tell
+that the Man should marrie her, and die before her, according to his
+Observation. This was in the Year 1655. I desired him to describe the
+Person, which he did; so that I could conjecture, by the Description,
+of such a one, who was of that Ladyes Acquaintance, tho there were
+no thought of their Marriage till two Years thereafter. And having
+Occasion, in the Year 1657, to find this Seer, who was ane Islander,
+in Company with the other Person whom I conjectured to have been
+described by him, I called him aside, and asked if that was the
+Person he saw beside the Lady near two Years then past. He said it
+was he indeed, for he had seen that Lady just then standing by him
+Hand in Hand. This was some few Months before their Marriage, and
+that Man is since dead, and the Lady still alive.
+
+I SHALL trouble you but with one more, which I thought most
+remarkable of any that occurred to me. In January 1652, the above
+mentioned Lieut. Coll. Alex. Monro and I happened to be in the House
+of one Wm. M‘Cleud of Ferrinlea, in the County of Ross. He, the
+Landlord, and I were sitting in three Chairs neir the Fire, and in
+the Corner of the great Chimney there were two Islanders, who were
+that verie Night come to the Hous, and were related to the Landlord.
+While the one of them was talking with Monro, I perceaved the other
+to look oddly toward me. From this Look, and his being ane Islander,
+I conjectured him a Seer, and asked him, at what he stair’d? He
+answered, by desiring me to rise from that Chair, for it was ane
+unluckie one. I asked him why. He answered, because there was a dead
+Man in the Chair nixt to me. Well, said I, if it be in the nixt
+Chair, I may keep mine own. But what is the Likness of the Man? He
+said he was a tall Man, with a long Grey Coat, booted, and one of
+his Legs hanging over the Arme of the Chair, and his head hanging
+dead to the other Side, and his Arme backward, as if it were brocken.
+There were some English Troops then quartered near that Place, and
+there being at that Time a great Frost after a Thaw, the Country was
+covered all over with Yce. Four or Fyve of the English ryding by
+this House some two Hours after the Vision, while we were sitting by
+the Fire, we heard a great Noise, which prov’d to be those Troopers,
+with the Help of other Servants, carrying in one of their Number, who
+had got a very mischeivous Fall, and had his Arme broke; and falling
+frequently in swooning Fits, they brought him into the Hall, and set
+him in the verie Chair, and in the verie Posture that the Seer had
+prophesied. But the Man did not die, though he recovered with great
+Difficulty.
+
+AMONG the Accounts given me by Sir Normand M‘clud, there was one
+worth of special Notice, which was thus. There [was] a Gentleman in
+the Isle of Harris, who was always seen by the Seers with ane Arrow
+in his Thigh. Such in the Isle who thought those prognostications
+infalliable, did not doubt but he would be shot in the Thigh before
+he died. Sir Normand told me that he heard it the Subject of their
+Discourse for many Years. At last he died without any such Accident.
+Sir Normand was at his Buriall, at St Clement’s Church in the Harris.
+At the same Time, the Corps of another Gentleman was brought to be
+buried in the same verie Church. The Friends on either Side came to
+debate who should first enter the Church, and in a Trice from Words
+they came to Blows. One of the Number (who was arm’d with Bow and
+Arrows) let one fly among them. (Now everie Familie in that Isle have
+their Buriall-place in the Church in Stone Chests, and the Bodies
+are carried in open Biers to the Buriall-place.) Sir Normand having
+appeased the Tumult, one of the Arrows was found shot in the dead
+Man’s Thigh. To this Sir Normand was a Witness.
+
+IN the Account which Mr Daniel Morison, Parson in the Lewis, gave
+me, there was one, tho it be hetergeneous from the subject, yet it
+may [be] worth your Notice. It was of a young Woman in his Parish,
+who was mightily frightned by seeing her own Image still before her,
+alwayes when she came to the open Air; the Back of the Image being
+alwayes to her, so that it was not a reflection as in a Mirrour, but
+the Species of such a Body as her own, and in a very like Habit,
+which appeared to herself continually before her. The Parson keept
+her a long whyle with him, but had no Remedy of her Evill, which
+troubled her exceidingly. I was told afterwards, that when she was
+four or fyve Years elder she saw it not.
+
+THESE are Matters of Fact, which I assure yow they are truely
+related. But these, and all others that occurred to me, by
+Information or otherwise, could never lead me into a remote
+Conjecture of the Cause of so extraordinary a Phænomenon. Whither it
+be a Quality in the Eyes of some People into these Pairts, concurring
+with a Quality in the Air also; whither such Species be every where,
+tho not seen by the Want of Eyes so qualified, or from whatever other
+Cause, I must leave to the Inquiry of clearer Judgements than mine.
+But a Hint may be taken from this image which appeared still to this
+Woman abovementioned, and from another mentioned by Aristotle, in
+the 4th of his Metaphysicks (if I remember right, for it is long
+since I read it;) as also from the common Opinion that young Infants
+(unsullied with many Objects) do sie Appearitions, which were not
+seen by those of elder Years; as like wise from this, that severalls
+did sie the Second Sight when in the Highlands or Isles, yet when
+transported to live in other Countreys, especially in America, they
+quite lose this Qualitie, as was told me by a Gentleman who knew some
+of them in Barbadoes, who did see no Vision there, altho he knew them
+to be Seers when they lived in the Isles of Scotland.
+
+                      Thus far my Lord Tarbett.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+MY LORD, after narrow Inquisition, hath delivered many true and
+remarkable observes on this Subject; yet to encourage a further
+Scrutiny, I crave leave to say,
+
+THAT 1. But a few Women are endued with this Sight in respect of Men,
+and their Predictions not so certane.
+
+2. This Sight is not criminal, since a Man can come by it unawares,
+and without his Consent; but it is certaine he sie more fatall and
+fearfull Things than he do gladsome.
+
+3. THE Seers avouch, that severalls who go to the _Siths_, (or
+People at Rest, and, in respect of us, in Peace,) before the natural
+Period of their Lyfe expyre, do frequently appear to them.
+
+4. A VEHEMENT Desyre to attain this Airt is very helpfull to the
+Inquyrer; and the Species of ane Absent Friend, which appears to the
+Seers, as clearly as if he had sent his lively Picture to present it
+selfe before him, is no phantastick Shaddow of a sick Apprehension,
+but a reality, and a Messinger, coming for unknown Reasons, not from
+the originall Similitude of it selfe, but from a more swift and
+pragmantick People, which recreat them selves in offering secret
+Intelligence to Men, tho generally they are unacquainted with that
+Kind of Correspondence, as if they had lived in a different element
+from them.
+
+5. THO my Collections were written long before I saw My Lord of
+Tarbett’s, yet I am glad that his descriptions and mine correspond
+so nearly. The Maid my Lord mentions, who saw her Image still before
+her, suteth with the CO-WALKER named in my Account; which tho some,
+at first Thought, might conjecture to be by the Refraction of a Cloud
+or Mist, as in the Parelij, (the whole Air and every Drop of Water
+being a Mirrour to returne the Species of Things, were our visive
+Faculty sharpe enough to apprehend them,) or a naturall Reflexion,
+from the same Reasons that an Echo can be redoubled by Airt; yet it
+were more fasable to impute this Second Sight to a Quality infused
+into the Eye by ane Unction: for Witchies have a sleepie Oyntment,
+that, when applyed, troubles their Fantasies, advancing it to have
+unusuall Figures and Shapes represented to it, as if it were a Fit
+of Fanaticism, Hypocondriack Melancholly, or Possession of some
+insinuating Spirit, raising the Soul beyond its common Strain, if the
+palpable Instances and Realities seen, and innocently objected to the
+Senses did not disprove it, make the Matter a palpable Verity, and no
+Deception; yet since this Sight can be bestowed without Oyntment, or
+dangerous Compact, the Qualification is not of so bad an Originall.
+Therefore,
+
+6. BY my Lord’s good Leave, I presume to say, that this Sight can
+be no Quality of the Air nor of the Eyes; becaus, 1. such as live in
+the same Air, and sie all other Things as farr off and as clearly,
+yet have not the SECOND SIGHT. 2. A SEER can give another Person
+this Sight transiently, by putting his Hand and Foot in the Posture
+he requires of him. 3. The unsullied Eyes of Infants can naturally
+perceave no new unaccustomed Objects, but what appear to other Men,
+unless exalted and clarified some Way, as Ballaam’s Ass for a Time;
+tho in a Witches Eye the Beholder cannot sie his own Image reflected,
+as in the Eyes of other People; so that Defect of Objects, as well
+as Diversities of the Subject, may appear differently on severall
+Tempers and Ages. 4. Tho also some are of so venemous a Constitution,
+by being radicated in Envy and Malice, that they pierce and kill
+(like a Cockatrice) whatever Creature they first set their Eye on
+in the Morning; so was it with Walter Grahame, some Time living in
+the Paroch wherein now I am, who killed his own Cow after commending
+its Fatness, and shot a Hair with his Eyes, having praised its
+swiftness, (such was the Infection of ane evill Eye;) albeit this was
+unusuall, yet he saw no Object but what was obvious to other Men as
+well as to himselfe. 5. If the being transported to live in another
+Countrey did obscure the Second Sight, nather the Parson nor the Maid
+needed be much troubled for her Reflex-selfe; a little Peregrination,
+and going from her wonted Home, would have salved her Fear. Wherefore,
+
+7. SINCE the Things seen by the Seers are real Entities, the Presages
+and Predictions found true, but a few endued with this Sight, and
+those not of bad Lyves, or addicted to Malifices, the true Solution
+of the Phænomenon seems rather to be, the courteous Endeavours of
+our fellow Creatures in the Invisible World to convince us, (in
+Opposition to Sadduce’s, Socinians, and Atheists,) of a Deity; of
+Spirits; of a possible and harmless Method of Correspondence betwixt
+Men and them, even in this Lyfe; of their Operation for our Caution
+and Warning; of the Orders and Degrees of Angells, whereof one
+Order, with Bodies of Air condensed and curiously shap’t, may be
+nixt to Man, superior to him in Understanding, yet unconfirmed; and
+of their Region, Habitation, and Influences on Man, greater than
+that of Starrs on inanimat Bodies; a Knowledge (be-like) reserved
+for these last atheistick Ages, wherein the Profanity of Mens Lives
+hath debauched and blinded their Understanding, as to MOSES, JESUS,
+and the Prophets, (unless they get Convictions from Things formerly
+known,) as from the Regions of the Dead: nor doth the ceasing of
+the Visions, upon the Seers Transmigration into forrein Kingdoms,
+make his Lordship’s Conjecture of the Quality of the Air and Eye a
+white the more probable; but, on the Contrary, it confirms greatly
+my Account of ane Invisible People, guardian over and care-full of
+Men, who have their different Offices and Abilities in distinct
+Counterey’s, as appears in Dan. 10. 13. viz. about Israels, Grecia’s,
+and Persia’s assistant Princes, whereof who so prevaileth giveth
+Dominion and Ascendant to his Pupills and Vassalls over the opposite
+Armies and Countreys; so that every Countrey and Kingdom having
+their topical Spirits, or Powers assisting and governing them,
+the SCOTTISH SEER banished to America, being a Stranger there, as
+well to the invisible as to the visible Inhabitants, and wanting
+a Fimiliarity of his former Correspondents, he could not have the
+Favour and Warnings, by the severall Visions and Predictions which
+were wont to be granted him by these Acquantances and Fayourites in
+his own Countrey. For if what he wont to sie were Realities, (as I
+have made appear,) ’twere too great ane Honour for Scotland to have
+such seldom-seen Watchers and predominant Powers over it alone,
+acting in it so expressly, and all other Nations wholly destitute of
+the lyke; tho, without all peradventure, all other People wanted the
+right Key of their Cabinet, and the exact Method of Correspondence
+with them, except the sagacious active Scots, as many of them have
+retained it of a long Time, and by Surpryses and Raptures do often
+foirtell what in Kyndness is really represented to them at severall
+Occasions. To which Purpose the learned lynx-ey’d Mr. Baxter, on Rev.
+12. 7. writting of the Fight betwixt Michaell and the Dragon, gives a
+verie pertinent Note, viz. That he knows not but ere any great Action
+(especiall tragicall) is don on Earth, that first the Battell and
+Victory is acted and atchieved in the Air betwixt the good and evill
+Spirits: Thus he. It seems these were the mens Guardians; and the
+lyke Battells are oft tymes perceav’d in a Loaft in the Nycht-time;
+the Event of which myght easily be represented by some one of the
+Number to a Correspondent on Earth, as frequently the Report of
+great Actions have been more swiftly caried to other Countreys than
+all the Airt of us Mortals could possibly dispatch it. St. Austine,
+on Mark, 9. 4. giveth no small Intimation of this Truth, averring
+that Elias appeared with Jesus on the Mount in his proper Bodie, but
+Moses in ane aereall Bodie, assumed like the Angels who appeared, and
+had Ability to eat with Abraham, tho no Necessity on the Account of
+their Bodies. As lyke wise the late Doctrine of the Pre-existence
+of Souls, living into aereall Vehicles, gives a singular Hint of
+the Possibility of the Thing, if not a direct Prooff of the whole
+Assertion; which yet moreover may be illuminated by diverse other
+Instances of the lyke Nature, and as wonderfull, besides what is
+above said. As,
+
+8. THE invisible Wights which haunt Houses seem rather to be some
+of our subterranean Inhabitants, (which appear often to Men of the
+Second Sight,) than evill Spirits or Devills; because, tho they
+throw great Stones, Pieces of Earth and Wood, at the Inhabitants,
+they hurt them not at all, as if they acted not malitiously, like
+Devills at all, but in Sport, lyke Buffoons and Drolls. All Ages have
+affoorded some obscure Testimonies of it, as Pythagoras his Doctrine
+of Transmigration; Socrates’s Dæmon that gave him [Warning] of future
+Dangers; Platoe’s classing them into various vehiculated Specieses
+of Spirits; Dionisius Areopagita’s marshalling nyne Orders of
+Spirits, superiour and subordinate; the Poets their borrowing of the
+Philosophers, and adding their own Fancies of Fountain, River, and
+Sea Nymphs, Wood, Hill, and Montain Inhabitants, and that every Place
+and Thing, in Cities and Countreys, had speciall invisible regular
+Gods and Governours. Cardan speaks of his Father his seeing the
+Species of his Friend, in a moon-shyn Night, riding fiercely by his
+Window on a white Horse, the verie Night his Friend dy’d at a Vast
+Distance from him; by which he understood that some Alteration would
+suddenly ensue. Cornelius Aggrippa, and the learned Dr. Mor, have
+severall Passages tending that Way. The Noctambulo’s themselves would
+appear to have some forrein joquing Spirit possessing and supporting
+them, when they walk on deep Waters and Topes of Houses without
+Danger, when asleep and in the dark; for it was no way probable that
+their Apprehension, and strong Imagination setting the Animal Spirits
+a work to move the Body, could preserve it from sinking in the
+Deepth, or falling down head-long, when asleep, any more than when
+awake, the Body being then as ponderous as before; and it is hard
+to attribute it to a Spirit flatelie evill and Enemy to Man, because
+the Noctambulo returns to his own Place safe. And the most furious
+Tribe of the Dæmons are not permitted by Providence to attacke Men so
+frequently either by Night or by Day: For in our Highlands, as there
+may be many fair Ladies of this aereal Order, which do often tryst
+with lascivious young Men, in the quality of Succubi, or lightsome
+Paramours and Strumpets, called _Leannain Sith_, or familiar
+Spirits (in Dewter. 18. 11.); so do many of our Hyghlanders, as if
+a strangling by the Night MARE, pressed with a fearfull Dream, or
+rather possessed by one of our aereall Neighbours, rise up fierce in
+the Night, and apprehending the neerest Weapons, do push and thrust
+at all Persons in the same Room with them, sometymes wounding their
+own Comerades to dead. The lyke whereof fell sadly out within a few
+Miles of me at the writting hereof. I add but one Instance more, of
+a very young Maid, who lived neir to my last Residence, that in one
+Night learned a large Peice of Poesy, by the frequent Repetition
+of it, from one of our nimble and courteous Spirits, whereof a Part
+was pious, the rest superstitious, (for I have a Copy of it,) and no
+other Person was ever heard to repeat it before, nor was the Maid
+capable to compose it of herself.
+
+9. He demonstrated and made evident to Sense this extraordinary
+Vision of our Tramontain Seers, and what is seen by them, by what is
+said above, many haveing seen this same Spectres and Apparitions at
+once, haveing their visive Faculties entire; for _non est disputandum
+de gustu_. Itt now remaines to shew that it is not unsutable to
+Reason nor the Holy Scriptures.
+
+FIRST, That it is not repugnant to Reason, doeth appear from this,
+that it is no less strange for Immortal Sparks and Souls to come
+and be immersed into gross terrestrial elementary Bodies, and be
+so propagated, so nourished, so fed, soe cloathed as they are,
+and breathe in such ane Air and World prepared for them, then for
+Hollanders or Hollow-cavern Inhabitants to live and traffick among
+us, in another State of Being, without our Knowledge. For Raymond de
+Subinde, in his 3d Booke, Chap. 12. argues quaintly, that all Sorts
+of Living Creatures have a happie rational Politie of there own, with
+great Contentment; which Government and mutual Converse of theirs
+they all pride and pluim themselves, because it is as unknown to Man,
+as Man is to them. Much more, that the Sone of the HIGHEST SPIRIT
+should assume a Bodie like ours, convinces all the World that no
+other Thing that is possible needs be much wondered at.
+
+2. The Manucodiata, or Bird of Paradise, living in the highest
+Region of the Air; common Birds in the second Region; Flies and
+Insects in the lowest; Men and Beasts on the Earth’s Surface;
+Worms, Otters, Badgers, in Waters; lyke wise Hell is inhabited at
+the Centre, and Heaven in the Circumference: can we then think
+the middle Cavities of the Earth emptie? I have seen in Weems, (a
+Place in the Countie of Fyfe, in Scotland,) divers Caves cut out
+as vast Temples under Ground; the lyke is a Countie of England;
+in Malta is a Cave, wherein Stons of a curious Cut are thrown in
+great Numbers every Day; so I have had barbed Arrow-heads of yellow
+Flint, that could not be cut so small and neat, of so brittle a
+Substance, by all the Airt of Man. It would seem therefoir that
+these mention’d Works were done by certaine Spirits of pure Organs,
+and not by Devills, whose continual Torments could not allow them
+so much Leasure. Besides these, I have found fyve Curiosities in
+Scotland, not much observ’d to be elsewhere. 1. The Brounies, who
+in some Families are Drudges, clean the Houses and Dishes after all
+go to Bed, taking with him his Portion of Food and removing befor
+Day-break. 2. The Mason Word, which tho some make a Misterie of it,
+I will not conceal a little of what I know. It is lyke a Rabbinical
+Tradition, in way of Comment on Jachin and Boaz, the two Pillars
+erected in Solomon’s Temple, (1 Kings, 7. 21.) with ane Addition
+of some secret Signe delyvered from Hand to Hand, by which they
+know and become familiar one with another. 3. This Second Sight,
+so largely treated of before. 4. Charmes, and curing by them very
+many Diseases, sometimes by transferring the Sicknes to another.
+5. A being Proof of Lead, Iron, and Silver, or a Brieve making Men
+invulnerable. Divers of our Scottish Commanders and Souldiers have
+been seen with blue Markes only, after they were shot with leaden
+Balls; which seems to be an Italian Trick, for they seem to be a
+People too currious and magically inclyned, Finally Iris-men, our
+Northern-Scotish, and our Athole Men are so much addicted to and
+delighted with Harps and Musick, as if, like King Saul, they were
+possessed with a forrein Spirit, only with this Difference, that
+Musick did put Saul’s Pley-fellow a sleep, but roused and awaked
+our Men, vanquishing their own Spirits at Pleasure, as if they were
+impotent of its Powers, and unable to command it; for wee have seen
+some poor Beggers of them, chattering their Teeth for Cold, that how
+soon they saw the Fire, and heard the Harp, leapt thorow the House
+like Goats and Satyrs. As there paralell Stories in all Countries and
+Ages reported of these our obscure People, (which are no Dotages,)
+so is it no more of Necessitie to us fully to know their Beings and
+Manner of Life, then to understand distinctly the Politie of the nyne
+Orders of Angels; or with what Oyl the Lamp of the Sun is maintained
+so long and regularlie; or why the Moon is called a great Luminary
+in Scripture, while it only appears to be so; or if the Moon be
+truly inhabited, because Telescopes discover Seas and Mountains in
+it, as well as flaming Furnishes in the Sun; or why the Discovery of
+America was look’t on as a Fairie Tale, and the Reporters hooted at
+as Inventors of ridiculous Utopias, or the first probable Asserters
+punished as Inventures of new Gods and Worlds; or why in England the
+King cures the Struma by stroaking, and the Seventh Son in Scotland;
+whither his temperat Complexion conveys a Balsome, and sucks out
+the corrupting Principles by a frequent warme sanative Contact, or
+whither the Parents of the Seventh Child put furth a more eminent
+Virtue to his Production than to all the Rest, as being the certain
+Meridian and hight to which their Vigour ascends, and from that furth
+have a graduall declyning into a feebleness of the Bodie and its
+Production. And then, 1. Why is not the 7th Son infected himselfe
+by that Contagion he extracts from another? 2. How can continual
+stroaking with a cold Hand have foe strong a natural Operation, as
+to exhale all the Infections warming corroding Vapours. 3. Why may
+not a 7th Daughter have the same Vertue? So that it appears, albeit,
+a happie natural Constitution concurre, yet something in it above
+Nature. Therefore every Age hath left some secret for its Discoverie;
+who knows but this Entercourse betwixt the two Kinds of rationall
+Inhabitants of the same Earth may be not only beleived shortly,
+but as friely entertain’d, and as well known, as now the Airt of
+Navigation, Printing, Limning, riding on Saddles with Stirrups,
+and the Discoveries of Microscopes, which were sometimes a great a
+Wonder, and as hard to be beleived.
+
+10. THO I will not be so curious nor so peremptorie as he who will
+prove the Posibility of the Philosopher’s Stone from Scripture,
+Job, 28. 1. 2. Job, 22. 24. 25.; or the Pluralitie of Worlds, from
+John, 14. 2. and Hebrews ij. 3.; nor the Circulation of Blood from
+Eccles. 12. and 6.; nor the Tanismanical Airt, from the Blind and
+Lame mentioned in 2d of Samuel, 5. 6. yet I humblie propose these
+Passages which may give some Light to our Subject at least, and show
+that this Polity and Rank of People is not a Thing impossible, nor
+the modest and innocent Scrutiny of them impertinent or unsafe. The
+Legion or Brigad of Spirits (mentioned Mark, 5. 10.) besought our
+Saviour not to send them away out of the Countrey; which shows they
+were DÆMONES LOCI, Topical Spirits, and peculiar Superintendents and
+Supervisors assign’d to that Province. And the Power over the Nations
+granted (Rev. 2. 26.) to the Conquerors of Vice and Infidelitie,
+Sound somewhat to that Purpose. Tobit had a Dæmon attending Marriage,
+Chap. 6. Verse, 15; and in Matth. 4. and 5. ane evill Spirit came in
+a Visible Shape to tempt our Saviour, who himselfe denyed not the
+sensible appearing of Ghosts to our Sight, but said, their Bodies
+were not composed of Flesh and Bones, as ours, Luke, 24. 39. And in
+Philip. 2. 10. our verie Subterraneans are expressly said to bow to
+the Name of JESUS. Elisha, not intellectually only, but sensibly, saw
+Gehazi when out of the Reach of ane ordinary View. It wants not good
+Evidents that there are more managed by God’s Spirits, good, evill,
+and intermediate Spirits, among Men in this World, then we are aware
+of; the good Spirits ingesting fair and heroick Apprehensions and
+Images of Vertue and the divyne Life, thereby animating us to act for
+a higher Happines, according to our Improvement; and relinquishing
+us as strangely upon our Neglect, or our embraceing the deceatfull
+syrene-like Pictures and Representations of Pleasures and Gain,
+presented to our Imaginations by evill and sportfull Angells, to
+allure to ane unthinking, ungenerous, and sensual Lyfe; non of them
+having power to compell us to any Misdemeanour without our flat
+Consent. Moreover, this Life of ours being called a Warfair, and
+God’s saying that at last there will be no Peace to the Wicked, our
+bussie and silent Companions also being called _Siths_, or _People
+at Rest and Quiet_, in respect of us; and withall many Ghosts
+appearing to Men that want this _Second Sight_, in the very Shapes,
+and speaking the same Language, they did when incorporate and alive
+with us; a Matter that is of ane old imprescriptible Tradition, (_our
+Highlanders_ making still a Distinction betwixt _Sluagh Saoghalta_
+and _Sluagh Sith_, averring that the Souls goe to the _Sith_ when
+dislodged;) many real Treasures and Murders being discovered by Souls
+that pass from among our selves, or by the Kindness of these our
+airie Neighbours, non of which Spirits can be altogither inorganical.
+No less than the Conseits about Purgatory, or a State of Rescue; the
+_Limbus Patrum et Infantum_, Inventions, [which] tho misapplyed, yet
+are not Chimæras, and altogither groundless. For _ab origine_, it is
+nothing but blansh and faint Discoveries of this SECRET REPUBLICK
+of ours here treated on, and additional Fictions of Monks doting
+and crazied Heads, our Creed saying that our Saviour descended εἰς
+ᾅδου, to the invisible Place and People. And many Divines supposing
+that the Deity appear’d in a visible Shape seen by Adam in the Cooll
+of the Day, and speaking to him with ane audible voice. And Jesus,
+probably by the Ministery of invisible Attendants, conveying more
+meat of the same Kind to the fyve Thowsand that wes fed by him with
+a very few Loaves and Fishes, (for a new Creation it was not.) The
+Zijmjiim and Ochim, in Isa. 13. 21. 22. Thes Satyres, and doolfull
+unknown Creatures of Islands and Deserts, seem to have a plain
+Prospect that Way. Finally, the eternal Happiness enjoyed in the 3d
+Heavens, being more mysterious than most of Men take it to be. It is
+not a sense whollie adduced to Scripture to say, that this SIGHT, and
+the due Objects of it, hath some Vestige in holy Write, but rather
+’tis modestly deduced from it.
+
+11. It only now remains to ansear the obvious Objections against the
+Reality and Lawfullness of this Speculation.
+
+QUESTION 1. How do you salve the Second Sight from Compact and
+Witchcraft?
+
+ANSWER. Tho this Correspondence with the Intermediate Unconfirm’d
+People (betwixt Man and Angell) be not ordinary to all of us who are
+Superterraneans, yet this SIGHT falling some Persons by Accident, and
+its being connatural to others from their Birth, the Derivation of it
+cannot always be wicked. A too great Curiositie, indeed, to acquyre
+any unnecessary Airt, may be blameworthy; but diverse of the SECRET
+COMMONWEALTH may, by Permission, discover themselves as innocently to
+us, who are in another State, as some of us Men do to Fishes, which
+are in another Element, when we plunge and dive into the Bottom of
+the Seas, their native Region; and in Process of Time we may come to
+converse as familiarly with these nimble and agile Clans (but with
+greater Pleasure and Profit,) as we do now with the Chino’s Antipodes.
+
+QUESTION 2. Are they subject to Vice, Lusts? Passion, and Injustice,
+as we who live on the Surface of the Earth?
+
+ANSWER. The Seers tell us that these wandering Aereal People have
+not such an Impetus and fatall Tendency to any Vice as Men, as not
+being drenched into so gross and dregy Bodies as we, but yet are
+in ane imperfect State, and some of them making better Essays for
+heroick Actions than others; having the same Measures of Vertue
+and Vice as wee, and still expecting advancement to a higher and
+more splendid State of Lyfe. One of them is stronger than many
+Men, yet do not incline to hurt Mankind, except by Commission for
+a gross Misdemeanour, as the destroying Angell of Ægypt, and the
+Assyrians, Exod. 12. 29. 2 Kings, 10. 35. They haunt most where is
+most Barbaritie; and therefoir our ignorant Ancestors, to prevent the
+Insults of that strange People, used as rude and course a Remedie;
+such as Exorcisms, Donations, and Vows: But how soon ever the true
+Piety prevailed in any Place, it did not put the Inhabitants beyond
+the Reach and Awthoritie of these subtile inferiour Co-inhabitants
+and Colleagues of ours: The FATHER OF ALL SPIRITS, and the Person
+himselfe, having the only Command of his Soul and Actions, a
+concurrance they may have to what is virtuously done; for upon
+committing of a foul Deed, one will find a Demure upon his Soul, as
+if his cheerfull Collegue had deserted him.
+
+QUESTION 3. Do these airie Tribes procreate? If so, how are they
+nourished, and at what period of Time do they die?
+
+ANSWER. Supposing all Spirits to be created at once in the Beginning,
+Souls to pre-exist and to circle about into several States of
+Probationship; to make them either totally unexcusable, or perfectly
+happie against the last Day, solves all the Difficulties. But in
+very Deed, and speaking suteable to the Nature of Things, there is
+no more Absurditie for a Spirit to inform ane Infant in Bodie of
+Airs, than a Bodie composed of dull and drusie Earth; the best of
+Spirits have alwayes delyghted more to appear into aereal, than
+into terrestrial Bodyes. They feed most what on Quintessences, and
+aetheriall Essences. The Pith and Spirits only of Women’s Milk feed
+their Children, being artificially conveyed, (as Air and Oyl sink
+into our Bodies,) to make them vigorous and fresh. And this shorter
+Way of conveying a pure Aliment, (without the usuall Digestions,)
+by transfusing it, and transpyring thorow the Pores into the Veins,
+Arteries, and Vessells that supplie the Bodie, is nothing more
+absurd, than ane Infant’s being fed by the Navel before it is borne,
+or than a Plant, which groweth by attracting a livelie Juice from the
+Earth thorow many small Roots and Tendons, whose courser Pairts be
+adapted and made connatural to the Whole, doth quickly coalesce by
+the ambient Cold; and so are condens’d and bak’d up into a confirm’d
+Wood in the one, and solid Bodie of the Flesh and Bone in the other.
+A Notion which, if intertained and approv’d, may shew that the late
+Invention of soaking and transfusing (not Blood, but) athereal
+virtuall Spirits, may be usefull both for Nourishment and Health,
+whereof is a Vestige in the damnable Practise of evill Angells, their
+sucking of Blood and Spirits out of Witches Bodys (till they drew
+them into a deform’d and dry Leanness,) to feid their own Vehicles
+withall, leaving what we call the Witches Mark behind; a Spot that I
+have seen, as a small Mole, horny, and brown-coloured; throw which
+Mark, when a large Brass Pin was thrust (both in Buttock, Nose, and
+Rooff of the Mouth,) till it bowed and become crooked, the Witches,
+both Men and Women, nather felt a Pain, nor did bleed, nor knew the
+precise Time when this was adoing to them, (there Eyes only being
+covered.) Now the Air being a Body as well as Earth, no Reason can be
+given why there may not be Particles of more vivific Spirit form’d
+of it for Procreation, then is possible to be of Earth, which takes
+more Time and Pains to rarify and ripen it, ere it can come to have
+a prolific Virtue. And if our Aping Darlings did not thus procreate,
+there whole Number would be exhausted after a considerable Space of
+Time. For tho they are of more refyned Bodies and Intellectualls than
+wee, and of far less heavy and corruptive Humours, (which cause a
+Dissolution,) yet many of their Lives being dissonant to right Reason
+and their own Laws, and their Vehicles not being wholly frie of Lust
+and Passion, especially of the more spirituall and hautie Sins they
+pass (after a long healthy Lyfe) into one Orb and Receptacle fitted
+for their Degree, till they come under the general Cognizance of the
+last Day.
+
+QUESTION 4. Doth the acquiring of this Second Sight make any Change
+on the Acquirers Body, Mind, or Actions?
+
+ANSWER. All uncouth SIGHTS enfeebles the SEER. Daniel, tho familiar
+with divyne Visions, yet fell frequently doun without Strength,
+when dazzled with a Power which had the Ascendant of, and passed
+on him beyond his Comprehension, Chap. 10. 8. 17. So our SEER is
+put in a Rapture, Transport, and sort of Death, as divested of his
+Body and all its Senses, when he is first made participant of this
+curious Peice of Knowledge: But it maketh no Wramp or Strain in the
+Understanding of any; only to the Fancy’s of clownish or illiterate
+Men, it creates some Affrightments and Disturbances, because of the
+Strongness of the Showes, and their Unacquaintedness with them. And
+as for their Lyfe, the Persons endued with this Rarity are, for
+the most Part, candid, honest, and sociable People. If any of them
+be subject to Immoralities, this obstruse Skill is not to be blamed
+for it; for unless themselves be the Tempters, the Colonies of the
+Invisible Plantations, with which they intercommune, do provoke them
+by no Villainy or Malifice, nather at their first Acquaintance nor
+after a long Familiarity.
+
+QUESTION 5. Doth not Sathan interpose in such Cases by many subtile
+unthought Insinuations, as to him who let the Fly, or Familiar, go
+out of the Box, and yet found the Fly of his own putting in, as
+serviceable as the other would have been?
+
+ANSWER. The Goodness of the Lyfe, and Designs of the ancient Prophets
+and Seers, was one of the best Prooffs of their Mission.[37]
+
+
+
+
+NOTE.
+
+
+In trying to collect evidence as to the Rerrick “evil spirit” from
+Kirk-Session Records, I have been most kindly assisted by the Rev.
+Mr. M‘Conachie, Minister of Rerrick. Mr. M‘Conachie finds that only
+two parishes in the Stewartry, Kells and Girthon, have records
+containing the years 1695, 1696. The records of Rerrick do not go so
+far back. We are therefore left to the pamphlet of 1696, by Telfair,
+which is an unusually business-like statement, the names of attesting
+witnesses being added in the marginal notes. For phenomena singularly
+similar to those of Rerrick, _Obeah_, by Mr. H. J. Bell, may be
+consulted. (_Obeah_, Sampson Low & Co., London, 1889, p. 93.)
+
+
+
+
+NOTES.
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+_Note_ (_a_), p. xvi.—“The Psychical Society.”
+
+  The Psychical Society, as far as the writer is aware has not
+  examined officially the old accounts of the phenomena which it
+  investigates at present. The Catalogue of the Society’s Library,
+  however, proves that it does not lack the materials.
+
+
+_Note_ (_b_), p. xxx.—“Their speech is a kind of whistling.”
+
+  That the voice of spirits is a kind of whistling, twittering,
+  or chirping, is a very widely diffused and ancient belief. The
+  ghosts in Homer twitter like bats; in New Caledonia an English
+  settler found that he could scare the natives from a piece of
+  ground by whistling there at night. Mr. Samuel Wesley says, “I
+  followed the noise into almost every room in the house, both by
+  day and by night, with lights and without, and have sat alone for
+  some time, and, when I heard the noise, spoke to it to tell me
+  what it was, but never heard any articulate voice, and only once
+  or twice two or three feeble squeaks, a little louder than the
+  chirping of a bird, and not like the noise of rats, which I have
+  often heard” (_Memoirs of the Wesley Family_, p. 164). Professor
+  Alexander mentions the “pecular whistling sound” at some
+  manifestations in Rio Janeiro as “rather frequent” (_Proc. S. P.
+  R._, xix. 180). Here children were the mediums; how did they get
+  the idea of the traditional whistle? See also the following note.
+
+
+_Note_ (_c_), p. xl.—“Not long after the Spanish conquest of Peru.”
+
+  The phenomena alluded to here are said to have occurred in
+  1549. The evidence is a mere report by Cieza de Leon, who does
+  not pretend to have been an eye-witness. But, as Mr. Clements
+  Markham, Cieza’s editor, remarks, the phenomena are analogous to
+  those of spiritualism. At the very least, we find a belief in
+  this kind of manifestation at a remote date, and in an outlandish
+  place. Cieza says:[38]
+
+  “When the Adelantado Belalcazar was governor of the province of
+  Popyan, and when Gomez Hernandez was his lieutenant in the town
+  of Auzerma, there was a chief in a village called Pirsa, almost
+  four leagues from the town, whose brother, a good-looking youth
+  named Tamaraqunga, inspired by God, wished to go to the town of
+  the Christians to receive baptism. But the devils did not wish
+  that he should attain his desire, fearing to lose what seemed
+  secure, so they frightened this Tamaraqunga in such sort that
+  he was unable to do anything. God permitting it, the devils
+  stationed themselves in a place where the chief alone could see
+  them, in the shape of birds called _auras_. Finding himself so
+  persecuted by the devils, he sent in great haste to a Christian
+  living near, who came at once, and hearing what he wanted, signed
+  him with the sign of the cross. But the devils then frightened
+  him more than ever, appearing in hideous forms, which only were
+  visible to him. _The Christian only saw stones falling from the
+  air and heard whistling._ A brother of one Juan Pacheco, citizen
+  of the same town, then holding office in the place of Gomez
+  Hernandez, who had gone to Caramanta, came from Auzerma with
+  another man to visit the Indian chief. They say that Tamaraqunga
+  was much frightened and ill-treated by the devils, who carried
+  him through the air from one place to another in presence of the
+  Christians, he complaining and the devils whistling and shouting.
+  Sometimes when the chief was sitting with a glass of liquor
+  before him, the Christians saw the glass raised up in the air and
+  put down empty, and a short time afterwards the wine was again
+  poured into the cup from the air.” Compare what Ibn Batuta, the
+  old Arab traveller, saw at the court of the King of Delhi. The
+  matter is discussed in Colonel Yule’s _Marco Polo_.
+
+  This may suffice as a specimen of the manifestations. They
+  continued while the chief was on his way to church; he was lifted
+  into the air, and the Christians had to hold him down. In church
+  the ghostly whistling was heard, and stones fell around, while
+  the chief said that he saw devils standing upside down, and
+  himself was thrown into that unusual posture. The combination of
+  convulsive movements with the other phenomena is that which we
+  have already remarked in the cases of “Mr. H.” and the grandson
+  of William Morse. Cieza de Leon says that the chief was not
+  troubled after his baptism. The illusions of the newly-converted,
+  so like those of the early Christian hermits, are described by
+  Callaway in his _Zulu Tales_.
+
+
+_Note_ (_d_), p. l.
+
+  Priestley’s explanation of the Epworth disturbances is imposture
+  by the servants, by way of a practical joke. Coleridge, on the
+  other hand, says that “all these stories, and I could produce
+  fifty cases at least equally well authenticated, and, as far
+  as the veracity of the narrators, and the single fact of their
+  having seen and heard such and such sights or sounds, above all
+  rational scepticism, are as much like one another as the symptoms
+  of the same disease in different patients.”
+
+  It is a pity that Coleridge did not produce his fifty
+  well-authenticated examples. The similarity of the narratives
+  everywhere, all the world over, is exactly what makes them
+  interesting. Coleridge goes on: “This indeed I take to be the
+  true and only solution—a contagious nervous disease, the acme,
+  or intensest form of which is catalepsy” (Southey’s _Wesley_,
+  vol. i. p. 14, Coleridge’s note). If there be such a contagious
+  nervous disease, it is a very remarkable malady, and well worth
+  examining. The Wesleys were not alarmed; they bantered the
+  spirit; they wished they could set him to work; and beyond the
+  trembling of the children when Jeffrey was knocking during their
+  sleep, there is no sign of morbid conditions. A neighbouring
+  clergyman, who was asked to pass a night in the house, saw and
+  heard just what the others heard and saw.[39] The hypothesis of a
+  contagious nervous disease, in which every witness exhibits the
+  same symptoms of illusion in all parts of the world, is a theory
+  which needs a good deal of verification. Where material traces
+  of the disturbances remain, it is absurd to speak of contagious
+  hallucinations. We must fall back on the hypothesis of trickery,
+  or must say with Southey, “Such things may be preternatural,
+  yet not miraculous; they may not be in the ordinary course of
+  nature, yet imply no alteration of its laws.” Any theory is more
+  plausible than the idea that Mr. Wesley and Mr. Hoole were in a
+  state bordering on catalepsy. Believers in hypnotism may think
+  it possible that this, that, and the other persons, if they
+  submitted themselves to hypnotic influences, might have the same
+  hallucinations suggested to them. But there is no evidence, in
+  the Epworth case nor in the Rerrick case, of any such matter.
+  “So far as we yet know, sensory hallucination of several
+  persons together, _who are not in a hypnotic state_, is a rare
+  phenomenon, and therefore not a probable explanation” (_Proc. S.
+  P. R._, iv. 62). There is some evidence that epileptic patients
+  suffer from the same illusions—for example, the presence of a
+  woman in a red cloak; and in _delirium tremens_ the “horrors” are
+  usually similar. But that all the persons who enter a given house
+  should be impressed by the same material illusions, as of chairs
+  and tables, and even beds (like Nancy Wesley’s) flying about, is
+  a theory more incredible than the hypothesis either of trickery
+  or of abnormal occurrences. When the disturbances always cease on
+  the arrival of a competent witness, then it is not hard to say
+  which theory we ought to choose. For imposture see next note.
+
+
+_Note_ (_e_), p. lvii.—“Children at _séances_.”
+
+  The phenomena discussed are most frequently connected with
+  children, who may be regarded either as mediums or impostors,
+  conscious or unconscious. In _Proc. S. P. R._, iv. 25-42,
+  Professor Barrett gives the case of a little girl whom he
+  knew. She had raps wherever she went, even when alone with the
+  Professor, who made her stand with her hands against the wall,
+  at the greatest stretch of her arms, “with the muscles of the
+  legs and arms all in tension.” “A brisk pattering of raps”
+  followed Professor Barrett’s request. But he also mentions
+  a boy “of juvenile piety,” who “for twelve months deceived
+  his father, a distinguished surgeon, and all his family, by
+  pretended spiritualistic manifestations, which appeared at first
+  sight inexplicable, until the cunning trickery of the lad was
+  discovered.” The only difference between these cases is that an
+  “outsider” discovered trickery in one instance and not in the
+  other. This is a very ticklish kind of certainty, and it is plain
+  that children can do a great deal in the way of mere imposture.
+  The state of any young Wesley who might have been caught out
+  is unenviable. Verily Mr. Wesley would not have spared for his
+  crying.
+
+
+_Note_ (_f_), p. lxii.—“The pricking of witches.”
+
+  It is pretty certain that some of there unlucky old women were
+  pricked “in anæsthetic areas.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+_Note_ (_a_), p. 8.—“These Arrows that fly in the Dark.”
+
+  The arrows are the ancient flint arrow-heads, which Mr. Kirk
+  later asserts to be too delicate for human artificers. On this
+  matter Isabel Gowdie, the witch, confessed, “As for Elf arrows,
+  the Divell sharpes them with his ain hand, and deliveris them to
+  Elf boys, wha whyttlis and dightis them with a sharp thing lyk a
+  paking needle; bot whan I was in Elfland, I saw them whyttling
+  and dighting them.” Isabel described the manner in which witches
+  use this artillery: “We spang them from the naillis of our
+  thoombs,” and with these she and her friends shot and slew many
+  men and women. The confessions of Isabel Gowdie are in the third
+  volume of Pitcairn’s _Scottish Criminal Trials_. They contain
+  little or nothing of the “psychical;” all is mere folk-lore,
+  fairy tales, and charms derived from the old Catholic liturgy.
+  The poor woman, having begun to fable, fabled with manifest
+  enjoyment and considerable power. It seems from her account that
+  each “Covin,” or assembly of witches, had a maiden in it, and
+  “without our maiden we could do no great thing.” On the other
+  hand, an extraordinary case of an epileptic boy, who was hurled
+  about, and beheld distant occurrences in trance, may be read in
+  Chambers’s _Domestic Annals of Scotland_, iii. 449. Candles used
+  to go out when this boy, a third son of Lord Torpichen, was in
+  the room. The date (1720) and the place (Mid-Lothian) prevented
+  any one from being burned for bewitching him. A fast was
+  proclaimed. The boy recovered, and did good service in the navy.
+  He is said to have been “levitated” frequently.
+
+
+_Note_ (_b_), p. 11.—“Milk thorow a hair-tedder.”
+
+  Isabel Gowdie confessed to stealing milk from the cow by magic.
+  “We plait the rope the wrong way, in the Devil’s name, and we
+  draw the tether between the cow’s hind feet, and out betwixt her
+  forward feet, in the Devil’s name, and thereby take with us the
+  cow’s milk.”
+
+  Mr. Kirk, it will be observed, does not connect the Fairy kingdom
+  with that of Satan, as some of his contemporaries were inclined
+  to do.
+
+
+  _Note_ (_c_), p. 19.—“The Wreath (wraith) ... is only exuvious
+  fumes of the Man, ... exhaled and congealed into a various
+  likeness.”
+
+  What is this theory of “Men illiterate and unwary in their
+  Observations,” but Von Hartmann’s doctrine of “the nerve force
+  which issues from the body of the medium, and then proceeds
+  to set up fresh centres of force in all neighbouring objects
+  ... while it still remains under the control of the medium’s
+  unconscious will”? See Mr. Walter Leaf on Hartmann’s _Der
+  Geisterhypothese des Spiritismus_, _Proc. S. P. R._, xix. 293.
+  It is amusing to find a learned German coinciding in scientific
+  theory with “ignorant and unwary” Highland seers. Both regard the
+  phantasms as manifestations of “nerve-force,” “exuvious fumes,”
+  and as “neither souls nor counterfeiting spirits.”
+
+
+_Note_ (_d_), p. 23.—“Fairy hills.”
+
+  The hypothesis that the Fairy belief may be a tradition of an
+  ancient race dwelling in subterranean homes, is older than Mr.
+  McRitchie or Sir Walter Scott. In his _Scottish Scenery_ (1803),
+  Dr. Cririe suggests that the germ of the Fairy myth is the
+  existence of dispossessed aboriginals dwelling in subterranean
+  houses, in some places called Picts’ houses, covered with
+  artificial mounds. The lights seen near the mounds are lights
+  actually carried by the mound-dwellers. Dr. Cririe works out
+  in some detail “this marvellously absurd supposition,” as the
+  _Quarterly Review_ calls it (vol. lix., p. 280).
+
+
+_Note_ (_e_), p. 30.—“Master Great-rake, the Irish Stroaker.”
+
+  Glanvill, in _Essays on Several Important Subjects_ (1675),
+  prints a letter from an Irish Bishop on Greatrex, the “stroker.”
+  He cured diseases “by a sanative contagion.” According to
+  the Bishop, Greatrex had an impression that he could do
+  “faith-healing,” and found that he could, but whether by virtue
+  of some special power or by “the people’s fancy,” he knew not.
+  He frequently failed, and his patients had relapses. See his own
+  _Account of Strange Cures: in a Letter to Robert Boyle_. London,
+  1666.
+
+
+
+
+POSTSCRIPT.
+
+
+It has been said that no trace can be found of a printed _Secret
+Commonwealth_ before 1815. The present editor is inclined to believe
+that in 1699 the work was still in manuscript. In a letter of Lord
+Reay’s to Mr. Samuel Pepys (Oct. 24, 1699), he says, “I have got a
+manuscript since I last came to Scotland, whose author, though a
+parson, after giving a very full account of the Second Sight, defends
+there being no sin in it.... With the first opportunity I shall send
+you a copy of his books.” This description answers very well to Mr.
+Kirk’s treatise, and to no other contemporary work with which I
+am acquainted, unless it be _A Discourse of the Second Sight_, by
+the Rev. Mr. John Frazer, minister of Tiree and Coll. There were,
+doubtless, other parsons busy with these topics; and the minister of
+Rerrick informs me that several MSS. by Mr. Telfair, author of the
+tract already quoted, were only dispersed about 1877. Examples of
+these clerical psychical researchers may be found in C. K. Sharpe’s
+prefatory notice to Law’s _Memorials_ (Edinburgh, 1818). Such an
+one is the Rev. Robert Knox, who writes from Cavers to the Rev. Mr.
+Wyllie on the case of Sir George Maxwell of Pollock. He dare not
+attribute the mediumship of Janet Douglas “positively to an evil
+cause.... _It is our ignorance of any natural agent_ that makes us
+impute the effects to evil spirits” (_Memorials_, p. lxxv). Moreover,
+Lord Reay writes as if his “parson” were still alive in 1699,
+whereas Mr. Kirk “went to his own herd” in 1692. “I am promised the
+acquaintance of this man, of which I am very covetous.” Lord Reay was
+at Durness, and may not have heard of the mishap which carried the
+minister of Aberfoyle into Fairyland. It may be added that Dr. Hickes
+writes to Mr. Pepys about neolithic arrow heads as “a subject of near
+alliance to that of the Second Sight, and of witchcraft, which is
+akin to them both.” He also speaks of “a very tragical, but authentic
+story told me by the Duke of Lauderdale, which happened in the family
+of Sir John Dalrymple, Laird of Stair, and then Lord President. His
+Grace had no sooner told it me, but my Lord President coming into
+the room, he desired my Lord to tell it himself, which, altering his
+countenance, he did with a very melancholick air; but it is so long
+since that I dare not trust my memory with relating the particulars
+of it” (June 19, 1700).
+
+Dr. Hickes calls the first Lord Stair “John,” Scott calls him
+“James.” There can be no doubt that Dr. Hickes refers to the woful
+tale of the bride of Lammermoor, who died on September 12, 1669.
+Law, in his _Memorials_, says she “was harled through the house”—by
+spirits, he means. This “harling” or tossing about of a patient,
+probably epileptic, we have noticed in many of the old stories,
+as in the modern instance of “Mr. H.” Now, in his Introduction to
+the _Bride of Lammermoor_, Scott gives all the authorities at his
+command: Law, Symson’s _Elegie_, and Hamilton of Whitelaw’s _Satire_,
+which avers that Satan seized the bride and “threw the bridegroom
+from the nuptial bed.” Sir Walter was unacquainted with Dr. Hickes’
+hint, which actually produces the bride’s own father as evidence
+for a story which was plainly regarded as supernatural. It is most
+unlucky that Dr. Hickes distrusted his memory. However, it is
+something to feel assured that “a memorable story” was accepted at
+the time by the family of the bride, and was known to Lauderdale.[40]
+Lauderdale himself, by the way, was a psychical researcher, and
+accommodated Richard Baxter with some accounts of haunted houses,
+published in his _World of Spirits_. One story of a haunted house,
+where a spectral hand appeared, he gives on the authority of “the
+Rev. James Sharp,” afterwards the famous Archbishop. Lauderdale
+inspected the famed Loudun nuns, and saw only “wanton wenches singing
+baudy songs in French.” His letter to Mr. Baxter is dated March 12,
+1659. His best haunted house is of the Epworth type.
+
+
+                _Printed by_ BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
+                        _Edinburgh and London_
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] Note (_a_), p. 81.
+
+[2] _The Testimony of Tradition_, p. 75.
+
+[3] In Father Macdonald’s book on Moidart.
+
+[4] A much odder case is reported. Two young men photographed a
+reach of a river. In the photograph, when printed, was visible the
+dead body of a woman floating on the stream. The water was dragged.
+Nothing was found; but two or three days later a girl drowned herself
+in the pool! As the Reports of the Psychical Society sometimes say,
+“no confirmation has been obtained;” but this is a pleasing instance
+of the Reflex, and of second sight in a photographic camera.
+
+[5] It is also published in Mrs. Graham Tomson’s _Border Ballads_
+(Walter Scott).
+
+[6] Note (_b_), p. 81.
+
+[7] Many instances may be read of in a little anonymous work,
+_Obeah_. The scene is Hayti.
+
+[8] Note (_c_), p. 82.
+
+[9] _Proc. S. P. R._, July 1891, February 1892.
+
+[10] As far as the author has watched _séances_ personally, they have
+ended in nothing but “giggling and making giggle.”
+
+[11] Some _séances_ were held at —— College, Oxford, about 1875. The
+performers were all athletic undergraduates. The breath of chill air
+was always felt “before anything happened,” and, when the out-college
+men had gone, the owner of the rooms, in his bed-chamber, was
+disturbed by the racket which continued in the sitting-room. But I
+know not if he had sported his oak!
+
+[12] _An Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providences_, by
+Increase Mather. Boston, 1684; London, Reeves & Turner, 1890, pp.
+101-111.
+
+[13] _Diseases of the Nervous System_, iii. 249. London, 1890.
+
+[14] _Proc. S. P. R._, xix. 160-173.
+
+[15] _Op. cit._, pp. 173-189.
+
+[16] _Memoirs of the Wesley Family_, by Adam Clarke, LL.D., F.A.S.
+London, 1823, pp. 161-200.
+
+[17] Letter to Terry, April 30. Lockhart, v. 309.
+
+[18] Scott to Terry, May 16.
+
+[19] Susannah Wesley to Samuel Wesley, March 27, 1717.
+
+[20] _Op. cit._, p. 193.
+
+[21] _Op. cit._, p. 194.
+
+[22] Note (_d_), p. 83.
+
+[23] _Memoirs of the Wesley Family_, p. 198.
+
+[24] Edinburgh: Mossman, 1696. There is a London reprint, of which I
+have a copy. The pamphlet is republished in Mr. Stevenson’s edition
+of Sinclair’s _Satan’s Invisible World Discovered_, 1685-1871,
+Appendix, p. xix.
+
+[25] Compare similar phenomena in _Obeah_, and in Peruvian example,
+note (_c_), p. 82.
+
+[26] Glanvil’s version is given in Sinclair’s _Satan’s Invisible
+World_.
+
+[27] Note (_e_), p. 85.
+
+[28] Note (_f_), p. 86.
+
+[29] The “earth-houses” in Scotland and the isles, which seem to
+have been inhabited at an early period, can seldom be called hills
+or mounds; being built for purposes of concealment, they are usually
+almost on a level with the surrounding land. The _Fairy hills_, on
+the other hand, are higher and much more notable, and were probably
+sepulchral. This, at least, is the impression left on me by Mr.
+MacRitchie’s book, _The Underground Life_. (Privately printed.
+Edinburgh, 1892.)
+
+[30] Note (_a_), p. 86.
+
+[31] Note (_b_), p. 87.
+
+[32] The _Death-candle_ is called DRUIG.
+
+[33] Note (_c_), p. 87.
+
+[34] Note (_d_), p. 88.
+
+[35] Note (_e_), p. 88.
+
+[36] Thus in the Manuscript, which is only a Transcript of Mr. Kirk’s
+Original. Perhaps M‘Intyre?
+
+[37] The original Transcriber has added: “See the Rest in a little
+Manuscript belonging to Coline Kirk,” probably the author’s son of
+that name.—A.L.
+
+[38] _The Travels of Pedro de Cieza de Leon_, ch. cxviii.
+
+[39] Mr. Hoole’s account, _Memoirs of the Wesleys_, p. 91.
+
+[40] The letters to Pepys are quoted from his Correspondence,
+published as Vol. X. of his _Diary_ (New York, 1885).
+
+
+
+
+                      Bibliothèque de Carabas.
+
+         _Crown 8vo Volumes, Printed on Hand-made Paper, with
+                Wide Margins and Uncut Edges, done up
+                    in Japanese Vellum Wrappers._
+
+                     The Prices are net for cash.
+
+               _THESE VOLUMES WILL NEVER BE REPRINTED._
+
+
+  =I. CUPID AND PSYCHE=: The Most Pleasant and Delectable Tale of
+  the Marriage of Cupid and Psyche. Done into English by WILLIAM
+  ADLINGTON, of University College in Oxford. With a Discourse on
+  the Fable by ANDREW LANG, late of Merton College, in Oxford.
+  Frontispiece by W. B. RICHMOND, and Verses by the EDITOR, MAY
+  KENDALL, J. W. MACKAIL, F. LOCKER-LAMPSON, and W. H. POLLOCK.
+  (lxxxvi. 66 pp.) 1887. _Out of print._
+
+  =II. EUTERPE=: The Second Book of the Famous History of
+  Herodotus. Englished by B. R. 1584. Edited by ANDREW LANG,
+  with Introductory Essays on the Religion and the good Faith of
+  Herodotus. Frontispiece by A. W. TOMSON; and Verses by the EDITOR
+  and GRAHAM R. TOMSON. (xlviii. 174 pp.) 1888. _Out of print._
+
+  =III. THE FABLES OF BIDPAI; or, The Morall Philosophie of Doni=:
+  Drawne out of the auncient writers, a work first compiled in
+  the Indian tongue. Englished out of Italian by THOMAS NORTH,
+  Brother to the Right Honourable Sir ROGER NORTH, Knight, Lord
+  NORTH of Kyrtheling, 1570. Now again edited and induced by
+  JOSEPH JACOBS, together with a Chronologico-Biographical Chart
+  of the translations and adaptations of the Sanskrit Original,
+  and an Analytical Concordance of the Stories. With a full-page
+  Illustration by EDWARD BURNE JONES, A.R.A., Frontispiece from
+  a 16th century MS. of the Anvari Suhaili, and facsimiles of
+  Woodcuts in the Italian Doni of 1532. (lxxxii. 264 pp.) 1888.
+  _Nearly out of print._ The few remaining copies, 12_s._
+
+  =IV.-V. THE FABLES OF ÆSOP=, as first printed by W. CAXTON
+  in 1484. Now again edited and induced by J. JACOBS. With
+  Introductory Verses by Mr. ANDREW LANG. 2 Vols. (280 pp., 320
+  pp.) 1890. £1, 1_s._
+
+  “Ces deux volumes de la ‘Bibliothèque de Carabas’ (Bidpai et
+  Æsop) constituent l’examen le plus complet et le plus savant qui
+  ait été fait depuis Benfey de cette grande question de l’origine
+  et de la migration des fables, et la critique de l’auteur s’y
+  montre partout aussi sage que bien informée.”—M. A. BARTH, in
+  _Mélusine_.
+
+  “The degree and quality of the editor’s learning are not to
+  be doubted; it is varied, profound, and without a spice of
+  pedantry.”—_Scots Observer._
+
+  =VI. THE ATTIS OF CAIUS VALERIUS CATULLUS.= Translated into
+  English Verse, with Dissertations on the Myth of Attis, on the
+  Origin of Tree-Worship, and on the Galliambic Metre. By GRANT
+  ALLEN, B.A., formerly Postmaster of Merton College, Oxford. (xvi.
+  154 pp.) 1892. 7_s._ 6_d._
+
+  “The paramount interest of this book lies in its two
+  disquisitions upon the meaning of the Attis myth and upon the
+  meaning of tree-worship.”—_Speaker._
+
+  “As a contribution to folk-lore it is of real value and interest,
+  and to a considerable extent new in the line it takes.”—_Literary
+  World._
+
+  “This theory, in which ‘the ghost plays ... the same part that
+  guano and phosphates play to-day,’ when stated thus baldly sounds
+  strange, but when read in the author’s own vivacious narrative,
+  along with the excellent illustrations which he brings forward,
+  it is singularly attractive.”—_Bookman._
+
+  “Highly interesting, and at this time will probably fall in with
+  prevailing opinions.”—ROBINSON ELLIS in _The Academy_.
+
+  “Whether readers adopt Mr. Allen’s conclusions or net, all
+  must agree that he has propounded a most interesting theory,
+  and stated it in a manner forcible and stimulating to
+  thought.”—_Nation._
+
+  =VII. PLUTARCH’S ROMANE QUESTIONS.= Translated, A.D. 1603, by
+  PHILEMON HOLLAND. Now again Edited by FRANK BYRON JEVONS, M. A.,
+  Classical Tutor to the University of Durham. With Dissertations
+  on Italian Cults, Myths, Taboos, Man Worship, Aryan Marriage,
+  Sympathetic Magic, and the Eating of Beans. (cxxviii. 170 pp.)
+  1892. 10_s._
+
+  “Mr. Jevons’s essay is learned and interesting, and in some cases
+  he has probably found out the reason of behaviour which the
+  Romans could not account for themselves.”—_Daily News_, Jan. 10,
+  1893.
+
+  “All antiquaries and folk-lorists will thank him for enabling
+  them to peruse in a convenient form that part of Plutarch’s
+  ‘Moralia’ which bears upon their science.”—_Daily Chronicle_,
+  Jan. 6, 1893.
+
+  “An admirable essay on Roman religion and on the characteristics
+  of Aryan religion.”—_Glasgow Herald_, Jan. 5, 1893.
+
+  “Holland’s quaintness and homely vigour make his translations
+  delightful reading. A most valuable and interesting introduction
+  is supplied by a sound scholar and shrewd thinker, Mr. F. B.
+  Jevons.”—_Athenæum_, Jan. 7, 1893.
+
+  “Holland’s translation, a delightful piece of Elizabethan
+  English, as Mr. Jevons says, provides a seemly garb for
+  Plutarch’s ancient reasonings. Mr. Jevons’s own contribution
+  to the volume is, as a help towards a true interpretation, of
+  scarcely less value than the translation itself.”—_Scotsman_,
+  Dec. 26, 1892.
+
+  “Mr. Jevons’s introduction is at once learned and
+  readable.”—_Times_, Dec. 22, 1892.
+
+  “The editor has supplied an excellent commentary upon some of
+  the most striking parts in a series of dissertations on Italian
+  cults, myths, taboos, man-worship, Aryan marriage, sympathetic
+  magic, and the eating of beans. The mere titles of these essays
+  show the curiosity and interest of the problems dealt with in the
+  text.”—_Manchester Guardian_, Jan. 10, 1893.
+
+
+
+
+  TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
+
+  Except for the changes below, all spelling in the text has been
+  left unchanged.
+
+  Main text (probable printer’s errors):
+  Pg 1: ‘heretofioir going’ replaced by ‘heretofoir going’.
+        (befoir, therefoir and foirtell all appear in the text)
+  Pg 7: ‘by ws’ replaced by ‘by us’.
+  Pg 18: ‘unaictve State’ replaced by ‘unactive State’.
+  Pg 67: ‘bewixt the two’ replaced by ‘betwixt the two’.
+
+  Lang’s Notes and Footnotes:
+  Pg 86: ‘distingnished surgeon’ replaced by ‘distinguished surgeon’.
+
+  Publisher’s Catalog:
+  “de l’ateur” replaced by “de l’auteur”.
+  “Plutarch’s ‘Moralio’” replaced by “Plutarch’s ‘Moralia’”.
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 75485 ***