Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, First Series

by Unknown

Albert de Rochas makes this notable comment:

"The same phenomenon would certainly have been produced had the patient been dead, and so one might by this means have a sort of evocation of a personality no longer of this world."

Note [15]. As late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Irish were accustomed to leave their houses on the plains and valleys in spring and live with their cattle on the uplands, returning to the valleys and plains in time to reap the harvest. Before tillage became general they may not have returned till the chill of autumn. From this perhaps came the faery flittings of May and November.

Note [16]. The pictures shown were drawings of spirits "A. E." made from his own visions. The yellow thing upon the head was, I suppose, some sort of crown. These countrywomen have seen so little gold that they do not describe anything as "of gold" or "like gold." They will say of yellow hair that it is "bright like silver."

Note [17]. The death-coach or more properly coiste-bodhar or "deaf-coach," so called from its rumbling sound. It is usually an omen of death.

Note [18]. The thing "yellow and slippery, not hair but like marble" is evidently a crown of gold. Are these spirits in dress of ancient authority the shepherds of the more recent dead?

Note [19]. I have read somewhere, but cannot remember where, that ragweed was once used to make some medicine for horses. This would account for its association with them in the half-fantasy, half-vision of the country seers. In the same way, the mushroom ring of the faeries is, it seems, a memory of some intoxicating liquor made of mushrooms, when intoxication was mysterious. The storyteller speaks of "those red flowers," showing how vague her sense of colour, or her knowledge of English, for ragweed is, of course, yellow.

Note [20]. "Bracket" is Irish for "speckled" and seems to me a description of the plaids and stripes of medieval Ireland.

Note [21]. Bodin in his De Magorum Dæmonomania speaks of salt as a spell against spirits because a "symbol of eternity."