The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies

1 A much stranger case is told. Two young men photographed a stretch of a river. In the photograph, when it was developed, the corpse of a woman was seen floating in the stream. The water appeared to have been disturbed.

Nothing was found at the time, but two or three days later a girl drowned in that pool. As the reports of the Society for Psychical Research original: Sociedad Psíquica; an organization founded in 1882 to investigate paranormal phenomena sometimes say, "no confirmation has been obtained," but this is a pleasant example of reflection and clairvoyance captured by a camera.

According to the entire metaphysics of the system of "doubles"—which are parasites of humanity—there exists the superstition of nurses being stolen by the Fairies and of children being kidnapped while "changelings" term: changelings; in folklore, a fairy child left in place of a human child are left in their place. This latter belief explains the sudden decline and loss of health in a child; it is not the original child, but a fairy brat. To protect against this, bread is used (as a human food hateful to the Fairies; similarly, the Kanekas term: Kanekas; indigenous Melanesian inhabitants of New Caledonia carry a boiled breadfruit, or perhaps the Bible, or iron is placed in the birth-bed. "Iron scares the spirits," as the commentator original: escoliasta says regarding Odysseus's drawn sword in Hades original: Hades; the Greek underworld. The fairy bride in Wales likewise disappears upon being touched by iron.

This belief probably arose when iron was a new, rare, and mysterious metal. Mortal nurses in Fairyland are pleasantly illustrated by the ballad "I heard the lowing of a cow, A very, very pretty cow," found in C. Kirkpatrick Sharpe's book of ballads. 2 This is also published in Mrs. Graham Tomson's Border Ballads (Walter Scott). This part of the superstition is not easy to clarify. Kirk repeats the well-known accounts of the blindness of mortals who saw too clearly "by making use of their ointments" Refers to fairy ointment that allowed humans to see through fairy glamour.

Well-known examples appear in Gervase of Tilbury and are cited in Scott's note on Tamlane in Border Minstrelsy. As in Homer's fables about the dead, their speech is a kind of whistling like the cry of bats—another indication of the pre-Christian Hades. 3 "Their speech is a kind of whistling." That the voice of spirits is a kind of whistling, twittering, or chirping is a widespread and ancient belief. Homer's ghosts chirp like bats. In New Caledonia, an English settler found he could scare the natives away from a piece of land by whistling there at night. Mr. Samuel Wesley says: "I followed the noise through almost every room in the house, both day and night, with lights or without, and sat alone for some time; when I heard the noise, I spoke to it to tell me what it was, but I never heard an articulate voice, only once or twice two or three faint 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 "peculiar whistling" in some manifestations in Rio de Janeiro as "quite frequent" (Proc. S.P.R., 81 xix. 180). In this case children were the mediums; how did they come upon the idea of the traditional whistle? They have feasts and burials, and Pashley, in his Travels in Crete, tells the well-known Border story of a man who shot at a fairy bride and heard a voice crying: "You have killed the beautiful husband."

It is worth noting, of course, that the modern Greek superstition of the Nereids term: Nereids; in modern Greek folklore, these are often forest or water spirits similar to fairies, rather than just sea nymphs—who kidnap mortal girls to dance with them until they waste away—corresponds to some of our fairy legends. It can hardly be argued that the Nereids are a memory of prehistoric Finns. "The ancient Corybantic joy" original: La antigua alegría coribántica; referring to wild, rhythmic, and frenzied ritual dancing is a characteristic of the Nereids, as well as of the Sleagh Maith original: Sleagh Maith; Irish for "The Good People," a common euphemism for fairies. "The inconvenience of their succubi" term: succubi; female spirits or supernatural beings who seek sexual encounters with men—the fairy girls who make love to young men—is well known in the Breton ballad, Le Sieur Nan. The same superstition is common among the Kanekas of New Caledonia. My cousin, Mr. Atkinson, was visited by a young Kaneka man who returned two or three times to say goodbye to him with great emotion.

When Mr. Atkinson asked what was wrong, the boy said that he had just met, he believed, the girl of his heart in the forest. After a scene of flirting, she disappeared, and he knew that she was a fairy of the...