The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies

(to Parliament). With his first wife he had a son, Colin Kirk, Writer to the Signet; with his second wife, a son who became the minister of Dornoch. He died (if he indeed died, which is a matter of debate) in 1692, at the age of fifty-one. On his tomb was inscribed:

original: "Robertus Kirk, A.M. Linguae Hiberniae Lumen." Kirk was celebrated for translating the Psalms into Gaelic, which was then often referred to as the "Irish language."

In the time of Sir Walter Scott, the tomb was located at the edge of the Aberfoyle churchyard, but Mr. Kirk’s ashes are not there. His successor, the Reverend Doctor Grahame, informs us in his Sketches of Pictures of Scenery that while Mr. Kirk was walking on a dun-shi A Gaelic term for a fairy hill or mound., or fairy hill, in his neighborhood, he fainted and was taken for dead.

After the ceremony of a mock funeral, Scott writes (op. cit., p. 105), "the figure of the Reverend Robert Kirk appeared to a relative and commanded him to go to Grahame of Duchray.

'Tell Duchray, who is my cousin as well as yours, that I am not dead, but a captive in Fairyland, and that only one chance remains for my release. When the posthumous child, whom my wife has given birth to since my disappearance, is brought to be baptized, I will appear in the room. If Duchray throws over my head the knife or dagger he has in his hand, I may be restored to society; but if this is neglected, I am lost forever.'"

Faithful to his appointment, Mr. Kirk appeared at the christening and "was visibly seen," but Duchray was so astonished that he failed to throw his dagger over the apparition's head. Consequently, Mr. Kirk has still not been restored to society. This is highly regrettable, as he could now add much important material to his treatise. Neither history nor tradition has anything more to say about Mr. Robert Kirk, who seems to have been a well-born man of good family, a scholar, and, as his book demonstrates, an innocent and learned man.

2. THE SECRET COMMONWEALTH

The treatise, the history of which the reader now knows, is a small volume of a somewhat singular character. Written in 1691 by the Reverend Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle, it is a kind of metaphysics of the fairy world.

If he lived through the period of the Church's "Sufferings" Refers to the "Killing Times," a period of conflict between the Presbyterian Covenanters and the Scottish government., one might have expected the author to completely ignore Fairyland or to consider it merely a part of Satan's kingdom—a "burning issue" indeed, since some of the witches who suffered at the hands of the Presbyterians were simply tellers of folk tales about the state of the dead. The accusation against Alison Pearson was that she trafficked with the dead and obtained a medical recipe from a ghost to cure Archbishop Adamson of St. Andrews.

"The Bishop stayed in his castle in his cave, afflicted with a very foul disease, and often under the care of women suspected of witchcraft. One of these women confessed to him that she had learned medicine from a certain Mr. William Simpson, who appeared to her several times after his death and left her pregnant... She was executed in Edinburgh as a witch" (Diary of James Melville, p. 137, 1583).

The Archbishop, like other witches, supposedly had a "familiar" in the form of a hare, which once ran before him down the street. These were the beliefs of learned men like James Melville, the nephew and companion of Andrew Melville. Even in our author's time, Archbishop Sharp was accused of entertaining "the terrifying and black Devil" in his study at midnight, and of being "levitated" and dancing in the air. This last feat, worthy of a saint or a Neoplatonist like Plotinus, was considered a sin in the case of Archbishop Sharp, as can be read in Wodrow’s Analecta. Thus, the entire fairy world was commonly regarded as being as guilty as witchcraft. However, Mr. Kirk of Aberfoyle, living among Celtic people, treats Fairyland as a mere fact of nature—a world with its own laws, which he investigates without fear of the "Accuser of the Brethren" A biblical title for the Devil.. Therefore, we may consider him, even more than Wodrow, as one of the first students of folklore and psychic research in overlapping subjects, and he shows none of the usual persecutory disposition.