NOTES

[NOTES]

Note [1]. A woman from the North would probably be a faery woman or at any rate a "knowledgeable" woman, one who was "in the faeries" and certainly not necessarily at all a woman from Ulster. The North where the old Celtic other world was thought to lie is the quarter of spells and faeries. A visionary student, who was at the Dublin Art School when I was there, described to me a waking dream of the North Pole. There were luxuriant vegetation and overflowing life though still but ice to the physical eye. He added thereto his conviction that wherever physical life was abundant, the spiritual life was vague and thin, and of the converse truth.

Note [2]. St. Patrick prayed, in The Breastplate of St. Patrick, to be delivered from the spells of smiths and women.

[FOOTNOTES:]

[1] The Japanese Noh play Awoi no Uye has for its theme the exorcism of a ghost which is itself obsessed by an evil spirit. This evil spirit, drawn forth by the exorcism, is represented by a dancer wearing a "terrible mask with golden eyes."

[2] Besides the well-known books of Atsikof, Myers, Lodge, Flammarion, Flournoy, Maxwell, Albert De Rochas, Lombroso, Madame Bisson, Delanne, etc., I have made considerable use of the researches of D'Ochorowicz published during the last ten or twelve years in Annales des Science Psychiques and in the English Annals of Psychical Science, and of those of Professor Hyslop published during the last four years in the Journal and Transactions of the American Society for Psychical Research. I have myself been a somewhat active investigator.

[3] Henry More considered that "the animal spirits" were "the immediate instruments of the soul in all vital and animal functions" and quotes Harpocrates, who was contemporary with Plato, as saying, "that the mind of man is ... not nourished from meats and drinks from the belly but by a clear and luminous substance that redounds by separation from the blood." Ochorowicz thought that certain small oval lights were perhaps the root of personality itself.

[4] Herodotus has an equivalent tale. Periander, because the ghost of his wife complained that it was "cold and naked," got the women of Corinth together in their best clothes and had them stripped and their clothes burned.

[Transcriber's Notes:]