The second aim of the author is to record a few of the most important curious customs and traditions of the people in the past. This is done both for the amusement and the information of the coming generation. However, it is well to remember that this is not a complete list. The author left behind him sufficient materials for others to follow on the trail which he is the first to "blaze" in those parts.
Writers and tourists visiting West Kerry and reading this book, might be inclined to go away under the impression that the people of Corkaguiny are exceptionally superstitious and peculiar, as compared with those of other portions of the United Kingdom and the world. If we will but calmly examine the records and customs of the world, we will at the first glance see that even in our darkest hour we were far in advance of many of them in that respect. About the Thirteenth or Fourteenth Century, superstitions began to creep in amongst Christians. They increased in many forms immediately. In Ireland slight traces of the old Pagan superstitions lingered amongst the people, but between 1580 and 1736 in England, no less than thirty thousand persons were publicly hanged for being witches, and most of the poor innocent creatures were burned at the stake. The most learned judges of the English courts declared from their benches that witchcraft existed, and that persons in one league with the devil could raise storms, destroy life and property, by no further act than taking off their stockings and steeping them in soap and water. They even went so far as to force their victims to believe and confess that they were witches. Only that England was so much engaged in hounding to death the Catholic priests, Heaven knows how many more would have fallen.
In 1716 it appears one Mrs. Hicks and her little daughter were hanged for selling their souls to the devil, and their accusers charged them with raising a storm by soaking stockings in a lather of soap.
Scotland was buried in superstition. Calvin and Luther, both the great heads of the Protestant Reformation, believed in witchcraft, and the King of Scotland, when he ascended the throne of England, by tongue, pen and fire, advocated the rack for the witches.
I believe Italy, Spain and France, three Catholic countries, were the first to reject witchcraft. Germany, although at first very slow to believe in witchcraft, burned them by the thousands, and that in a most barbarous manner. The Puritan fathers of New England had the hangman's rope pretty busy in Boston Common with the witches of Salem, Massachusetts, and the Quakers of other parts of the State. If a man did not believe in witches, he was classed worse than a heretic.
Public execution of witches in England was stopped by law, I believe about the year 1736. During all that time Ireland was trampled under the heels of superstitions. Anglo-Norman lords were a party to the laws which caused so much innocent blood to flow as divine perfume from 1600 to 1736, in cases of witchcraft and "Papists," both in England and her colonies. Naturally, their castles in Ireland had the foul air of superstition and adoration about them. In Ireland they suppressed education, and tried to make themselves the only lords which the people had to serve and adore on earth or in heaven. They abused their powers, and the Irish people at last refused to have those false Gods, and now they are almost driven out of the country.
Irishmen were not ever very much inclined to marry their daughters to those degenerated "false gods," bearing a British or foreign title. They usually left such honors to the ladies of other countries, many of the latter unfortunate vain-minded creatures afterwards returning to their native lands bringing, in addition to a costly bought title, a decree of divorce. It ought to be remembered that even today, notwithstanding England's proud boast of democracy, it is probably the worst country in the world for rank, title and blue-blood lords—one class looking down with contempt on the other. In the House of Lords you have dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, bishops and barons. They cannot understand that "all men were created equal," only when they want the common people to fight their battles.
Notwithstanding the isolated and backward state of Ireland under alien rule, yet as far as the author can ascertain the Irish people never demanded a single life to be sacrificed in cases of witchcraft, and if any individual fell, it was at the command of the foreigner and to satisfy his craving for blood and sacrifice. Ireland appears to be much cleaner from superstition than her neighbors in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of the Christian era.
The writer is not finding fault with the people of those countries which honestly believed in the existence of witches, but he is protesting against those who leave the very dens of superstition and come to Ireland to magnify trifles, at the same time pretending that they have none of their own. Every country has had people some of whom are more or less superstitious. It is not even confined to any one religion. In many houses in America for good luck you will find the horseshoe nailed inside over the door. There are locomotive engineers in the New England States who will not very willingly take out a train engine bearing the number "thirteen." Persons traveling with me refused to sleep in the next vacant room to me in Seattle, Washington, because the number of it was "thirteen." Among the first who followed the trail of the "forty-niners" to California, were persons who would not start on any part of their journey on a Friday, and through superstition carried the feet of rabbits with them in their pockets.