Lastly, I may mention that it is unlucky to say that you are very well: at any rate, I infer that it is regarded so, as you will never get a Manxman to say that he is feer vie, ‘very well.’ He usually admits that he is ‘middling’; and if by any chance he risks a stronger adjective, he hastens to qualify it by adding ‘now,’ or ‘just now,’ with an emphasis indicative of his anxiety not to say too much. His habits of speech point back to a time when the Manx mind was dominated by the fear of awaking malignant influences in the spirit world around him. This has had the effect of giving the Manx peasant’s character a tinge of reserve and suspicion, which makes it difficult to gain his confidence: his acquaintance has, therefore, to be cultivated for some time before you can say that you know the workings of his heart. The pagan belief in a Nemesis has doubtless passed away, but not without materially affecting the Manx idea of a personal devil. Ever since the first allusion made in my hearing by Manxmen to the devil, I have been more and more deeply impressed that for them the devil is a much more formidable being than Englishmen or Welshmen picture him. He is a graver and, if I may say so, a more respectable being, allowing no liberties to be taken with his name, so you had better not call him a devil, the evil one, or like names, for his proper designation is Noid ny Hanmey, ‘the Enemy of the Soul,’ and in ordinary Anglo-Manx conversation he is commonly called ‘the Enemy of Souls.’ I well remember getting one day into a conversation with an old soldier in the south of the island. He was, as I soon discovered, labouring under a sort of theological monomania, and his chief question was concerning the Welsh word for ‘the Enemy of Souls.’ I felt at once that I had to be careful, and that the reputation of my countrymen depended on how I answered. As I had no name anything like the one he used for the devil, I explained to him that the Welsh, though not a great nation, were great students of theology, and that they had by no means neglected the great branch of it known as satanology. In fact that study, as I went on to say, had left its impress on the Welsh language: on Sunday the ministers of all denominations, the deacons and elders, and all self-respecting congregations spoke of the devil trisyllabically as diafol, while on the other days of the week everybody called him more briefly and forcibly diawl, except bards concocting an awdl for an Eisteđfod, where the devil must always be called diafl, and excepting also sailors, farm servants, post-boys and colliers, together with country gentlemen learning Welsh to address their wouldn’t-be constituents—for all these the regulation form was jawl, with an English j. Thus one could, I pointed out to him, fix the social standing of a Welshman by the way he named ‘the Enemy of Souls,’ as well as appreciate the superiority of Welsh over Greek, seeing that Welsh, when it borrowed διάβολος from Greek, quadrupled it, while Greek remained sterile. He was so profoundly impressed that I never was able to bring his attention back to the small fry, spiritually speaking, of the Isle of Man, to wit, the fairies and the fenodyree, or even the witches and the charmers, except that he had some reserve of faith in witches, since the witch of Endor was in the Bible and had ascribed to her a ‘terr’ble’ great power of raising spirits: that, he thought, must be true. I pointed out to him that a fenodyree (see p. 288) was also mentioned in his Bible: this display of ready knowledge on my part made a deep impression on his mind.
The Manx are, as a rule, a sober people, and highly religious; as regards their tenets, they are mostly members of the Church of England or Wesleyan Methodists, or else both, which is by no means unusual. Religious phrases are not rare in their ordinary conversation; in fact, they struck me as being of more frequent occurrence than in Wales, even the Wales of my boyhood; and here and there this fondness for religious phraseology has left its traces on the native vocabulary. Take, for example, the word for ‘anybody, a person, or human being,’ which Cregeen writes py’agh or p’agh: he rightly regards it as the colloquial pronunciation of peccagh, ‘a sinner.’ So, when one knocks at a Manx door and calls out, Vel p’agh sthie? he literally asks, ‘Is there any sinner indoors?’ The question has, however, been explained to me, with unconscious irony, as properly meaning, ‘Is there any Christian indoors?’ and care is now taken in reading to pronounce the middle consonants of the word peccagh, ‘sinner,’ so as to distinguish it from the word for a Christian ‘anybody’: but the identity of origin is unmistakable.
Lastly, the fact that a curse is a species of prayer, to wit, a prayer for evil to follow, is well exemplified in Manx by the same words, gwee[14], plural gwecaghyn, meaning both kinds of prayer. Thus I found myself stumbling several times, in reading through the Psalms in Manx, from not bearing in mind the sinister meaning of these words; for example in Psalm xiv. 6, where we have Ta ’n beeal oc lane dy ghweeaghyn as dy herriuid, which I mechanically construed to mean ‘Their mouth is full of praying and bitterness,’ instead of ‘cursing and bitterness’; and so in other cases, such as Ps. x. 7, and cix. 27.
It occurred to me on various occasions to make inquiries as to the attitude of religious Manxmen towards witchcraft and the charmer’s vocation. Nobody, so far as I know, accuses them of favouring witchcraft in any way whatsoever; but as to the reality of witches and witchcraft they are not likely to have any doubts so long as they dwell on the Biblical account of the witch of Endor, as I have already mentioned in the case of the old Crimean soldier. Then as to charmers I have heard it distinctly stated that the most religious men are they who have most confidence in charmers and their charms; and a lay preacher whom I know has been mentioned to me as now and then doing a little charming in cases of danger or pressing need. On the whole, I think the charge against religious people of consulting charmers is somewhat exaggerated; but I believe that recourse to the charmer is more usual and more openly had than, for example, in Wales, where those who consult a dyn hyspys or ‘wise man’ have to do it secretly, and at the risk of being expelled by their co-religionists from the Seiet or ‘Society.’ There is somewhat in the atmosphere of Man to remind one rather of the Wales of a past generation—Wales as it was at the time when the Rev. Edmund Jones could write a Relation of Apparitions of Spirits in the County of Monmouth and the Principality of Wales, as a book ‘designed to confute and to prevent the infidelity of denying the being and apparition of spirits, which tends to irreligion and atheism’: see pp. 174, 195 above.
The Manx peasantry are perhaps the most independent and prosperous in the British Isles; but their position geographically and politically has been favourable to the continuance of ideas not quite up to the level of the latest papers on Darwinism and Evolution read at our Church Congresses in this country. This may be thought to be here wide of the mark; but, after giving, in the previous chapter, specimens of rather ancient superstitions as recently known in the island, it is but right that one should form an idea of the surroundings in which they have lingered into modern times. Perhaps nothing will better serve to bring this home to the reader’s mind than the fact, for which there is proof, that old people still living remember men and women clad in white sheets doing penance publicly in the churches of Man.
The following is the evidence which I was able to find, and I may state that I first heard in 1888 of the public penance from Mr. Joughin, who was an aged man and a native of Kirk Bride. He related how a girl named Mary Dick gave an impertinent answer to the clergyman when he was catechizing her class, and how she had to do penance for it at church. She took her revenge on the parson by singing, while attending in a white sheet, louder than everybody else in the congregation. This, unless I am mistaken, Mr. Joughin gave me to understand he had heard from his father. I mentioned the story to a clergyman, who was decidedly of opinion that no one alive now could remember anything about public penance. Not long after, however, I got into conversation with a shoemaker at Kirk Michael, named Dan Kelly, who was nearly completing his eighty-first year. He was a native of Ballaugh, and stated that he remembered many successive occupants of the episcopal see. A long time ago the official called the sumner had, out of spite he said, appointed him to serve as one of the four of the chapter jury. It was, he thought, when he was about twenty-five. During his term of office he saw four persons, of whom two were married men and two unmarried women, doing penance in the parish church of Ballaugh for having illegitimate children. They stood in the alley of the church, and the sumner had to throw white sheets over them; on the fourth Sunday of their penance they stood inside the chancel rails, but not to take the communion. The parson, whose name was Stowell or Stowall, made them thoroughly ashamed of themselves on the fourth Sunday, as one of the men afterwards admitted. Kelly mentioned the names of the women and of one of the men, and he indicated to me some of their descendants as well known in the neighbourhood. I cross-examined him all the more severely, as I had heard the other view of the remoteness of the date. But nothing could shake Kelly, who added that soon after the date of the above mentioned cases the civil functionary, known as the vicar-general, put an end to the chapter jury and to public penance: according to his reckoning the penance he spoke of must have taken place about 1832. Another old man, named Kewley, living now near Kirk Michael, but formerly in the parish of Lezayre, had a similar story. He thinks that he was born in the sixth year of the century, and when he was between eighteen and twenty he saw a man doing public penance, in Lezayre Church, I presume, but I have no decided note on that point. However that may be, he remembered that the penitent, when he had done his penance, had the audacity to throw the white sheet over the sumner, who, the penitent remarked, might now wear it himself, as he had had enough of it. Kewley would bring the date only down to about 1825.
Lastly, I was in the island again in 1891, and spent the first part of the month of April at Peel, where I had conversations with a retired captain who was then about seventy-eight. He is a native of the parish of Dalby, but he was only ‘a lump of a boy’ when the last couple of immorals were forced to do penance in white sheets at church. He gave me the guilty man’s name, and the name of his home in the parish, and both the captain and his daughter assured me that the man had only been dead six or seven years; that is, the penitent seems to have lived till about the year 1884. I may here mention that the parish of Dalby is the subject of many tales, which go to show that its people were more old-fashioned in their ways than those of the rest of the island. It appears to have been the last, also, to be reached by a cart road; and I was amused by a native’s description of the men at Methodist meetings in Dalby pulling the tappag, or forelock, at the name of Jesus, while the women ducked a curtsy in a dangerously abrupt fashion. He and his wife appeared to be quite used to it: the husband was an octogenarian named Quirc, who was born on the coast near the low-lying peninsula called the Niarbyl, that is to say ‘the Tail.’
To return to the public penance, it seems to us in this country to belong, so to say, to ancient history, and it transports us to a state of things which we find it hard to realize. The lapse of years has brought about profounder changes in our greater Isle of Britain than in the smaller Isle of Man, while we ourselves, helpless to escape the pervading influence of those profounder changes, become living instances of the comprehensive truth of the German poet’s words,
Omnia mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.