The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies

"Proserpina," as Campion calls her, and it is evident that, in reality, "the terrible Persephone," the "Queen of death and the dead," had been reduced to the lady who borrows Tamlane in the ballad. In fact, Kirk mentions, but does not approve of, this explanation: "that those subterranean people are the souls of the departed." Now, as has been said, the dead are inhabitants beneath the earth. The worshippers of Demeter Chthonian original: "Deméter Chthonian"; referring to the aspect of the Greek goddess Demeter associated with the underworld (Achaea) strike the earth with rods; the Zulu sorcerer does the same when he appeals to the Ancestors.

And a Macdonald in Moidart, when pressed to return his rent, struck the earth and cried aloud to his dead chief: "Simon, hear me, you were always good to me." 2

2 In Father Macdonald's book on Moidart.

4. FAIRYLAND AND HADES

Thus, at least in my opinion, the subterranean inhabitants of Kirk's book are not so much a traditional memory of a real dwarf race that lived underground (a hypothesis of Sir Walter Scott), but rather a persistent memory of the Chthonic beings, "the Ancestors." A good example is that of Bessie Dunlop, of Dalry, in Ayrshire, tried on November 8, 1576, for witchcraft. She dealt in medicines and white magic, and obtained her recipes from Thomas Reid—who died in the battle of Pinkie (1547)—who appeared to her often and tried to take her to Fairyland. She, like Alison Pearson, was "convicted and burned" (Scott's Demonology, p. 146, and Pitcairn's Criminal Trials).

Both ladies met the Queen of the Fairies, and Alison Pearson saw Maitland of Lethington and Buccleugh in Fairyland, as related in a rhymed satire on Archbishop Adamson (Scottish Poems by Dalzell, p. 321). These are excellent proofs that Fairyland was a kind of Hades, or the home of the dead.

Mr. Kirk, who speaks of the Sleagh Maith Gaelic: "The Good People" or fairies with as much confidence as if he were discussing the habits of some remote race he has visited, attributes to them—as was attributed to the Greek gods—the power to nourish themselves on some essential part of human sacrifices and human food: "some fine spirituous liquors, which penetrate like pure air and oil, into the pith or substance of the grains and liquors." Others, more coarse, steal the grain itself, "as crows and mice do." They are heard hammering in the sheds; like brownies, they enter houses and clean the hearths.

They are the Domovoys Russian: protective house spirits in folklore, as the Russians call them. John Major, in his exposition of St. Matthew (1518, fol. xviii), gives perhaps the oldest account of brownies with a believing temperament. Major calls them fauni Latin: fauns or brobne likely a variant of "brownie". They grind as much grain in one night as twenty men could do. They throw stones among the people sitting by the fire. It is doubtful whether they can predict future events (see Mr. Constable in Major's Greater Britain, p. xxx. Edinburgh, 1892). To us, they do not seem very far removed from the Roman lares Latin: guardian spirits of the household, spirits of the hearth. In all these creatures, Mr. Kirk recognizes "an abstruse people" who existed before our more substantial race, whose furrows can still be seen on the tops of the hills. They were never, in his understanding, simple and palpable people; they are only visible, in their fleeting quarterly journeys, to men of second sight the supposed supernatural ability to see future events or invisible entities.

That gift of vision includes not only the power to see distant or future events, but also the invisible forms of the air. To avoid these flutterings, men visit the church on the first Sunday of the quarter: then—