The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies

The research of Mr. Charcot, Mr. Richet, and other psychologists does not help us much at present regarding the matter of true second sight original: "segunda visión verídica"; the ability to perceive distant or future events. This is not a case of a "suggested" hallucination given to a hypnotized subject, but rather an impression produced by a remote person or event upon a subject who has not been hypnotized at all. For example, Dr. Adam Clarke, in his Life (vol. ii, p. 16), tells us of Mr. Tracy Clarke, who, while on the Isle of Man with his son, dreamed that he had visited his wife in Liverpool. He told his son that Mrs. Clarke looked very well, but that, contrary to her habit, she was sleeping in the best bedroom. On the day Mr. Clarke said this, Mrs. Clarke remained silent and sat on the sofa.

Mrs. Clarke, who was indeed sleeping in the best bedroom, told the small child lying in her room that she had heard his father ride up to the house on horseback, put his horse in the stable, open the door, come up the stairs, and walk around her bed, though she could not see him. This is a case, at least, of "second hearing" and has no hypnotic explanation.

We conclude with the sincere spirit of Dr. Johnson regarding the Poltergeist original: "Polter-Geist"; a noisy spirit or ghost and second sight: willing to be convinced, but far from conviction. As for the belief in fairies, we conceive of it as a complex matter. Tradition, with its memory of ancient inhabitants of the earth, is not entirely absent from it. However, it owes more to a survival of the pre-Christian Hades and a belief in local spirits: the Vuis Nature spirits or ghosts in Melanesian mythology of Melanesia, the Nereids Sea nymphs of ancient Greece, the fairies of antiquity and modern Greece, the Lares Guardian deities of the household of Rome, and the fateful Moirae The Fates of Greek mythology and Hathors Egyptian deities associated with fate and motherhood—old imaginings of a world that has not yet been "depopulated of its dreams." 2

2 The "earth-houses" of Scotland and the islands, which seem to have been inhabited at an early period, can rarely be called hills or mounds. Being built for the purpose of concealment, they are usually almost at the same level as the surrounding ground. Fairy hills, on the other hand, are higher and much more noticeable, and were probably sepulchral Related to tombs or burial. This, at least, is the impression left on me by MacRitchie's book, The Underground Life (Privately printed. Edinburgh, 1892).