Mr. Andrew Lang, who has done a special service to science by showing that psychical research is inseparably related to anthropology, has favoured us with a statement of his own position toward this relationship and has made it directly applicable to the Fairy-Faith. In a general way, but not in some important details (as indicated in our annotations) we agree with Mr. Lang’s position, which he states as follows:—
Mr. Evans Wentz has asked me to define my position towards psychical research in relation to anthropology. I have done so in my book, The Making of Religion. The alleged abnormal or supernormal occurrences which psychical research examines are, for the most part, ‘universally human,’ and, whether they happen or do not happen, whether they are the results of malobservation, or of fraud, or are merely mythical, as human they cannot be wisely neglected by anthropology.
The fairy-folk, under many names, in many tongues, are everywhere objects of human belief, in Central Australia, in New Zealand, in the isles of the Pacific, as in the British Isles, Lowland or Highland, Celtic in the main, or English in the main, I conceive the various beings, fairies, brownies, Iruntarinia, Djinns, or what you will, to be purely mythical. I am incapable of believing that they are actual entities, who carry off men and women; steal and hide objects (especially as the Iruntarinia do); love or hate, persecute or kiss human beings; practise music, vocal and instrumental; and in short ‘play the pliskies’ with which they are universally credited by the identical workings of the human fancy. They tend to shade away, on one side, into the denizens of the House of Hades—phantasms of the dead. The belief in such phantasms may be partially based on experience, whether hallucinatory or otherwise and inexplicably produced.[591]
As far as psychical research studies report of these phantasms it approaches the realm of ‘the Fairy Queen Proserpine’. As far as such research examines the historical or contemporary stories of the Poltergeist, it touches on fairies: because the Irish, for example, attribute to the agency of fairies the modern Poltergeist phenomena, whether these, in each case, be fraudulent or, up to now, be unexplained.
There are not more than two or three alleged visions of the traditional fairies in the annals of psychical research; and I have met with but few sane and educated persons who profess to have seen phantoms at all resembling the traditional fairy; while phantasms supposed to be of the dead, the dying, and the absent are frequently reported. On the whole, psychical research has very little concern with the fairy-belief in its typical forms, and if the researcher did find modern cases of fairy visions alleged by sane and educated percipients, he would be apt to explain them by suggestion acting on the subconscious self.[592]
1 Marloes Road, London, W.
September 26, 1910.
Concerning phantasms of the dead into which, as above pointed out, the fairy-folk tend to shade away, Mr. Lang has elsewhere said:—‘On the whole, if the evidence is worth anything, there are real objective ghosts, and there are also telepathic hallucinations: so that the scientific attitude is to believe in both, if in either.’[593] And he shows that while anthropologists have explained all animistic beliefs as the results of primitive men’s philosophizing ‘on life, death, sleep, dreams, trances, shadows, the phenomena of epilepsy, and the illusions of starvation’, ‘normal phenomena, psychological and psychical, might suggest most of the animistic beliefs.’[593] In The Making of Religion, Mr. Lang has expanded this anthropological argument so as to make it even more fully embrace psychical research.
If we apply the brilliant results of Mr. Lang’s investigations to our own, it is apparent that the background of the Fairy-Faith, like that of all religions, is animistic, as we have argued in [chapter iii]; that it must have grown up in ancient times into its traditional form out of a pre-Celtic followed by a pre-Christian Celtic religion; these latter due, in turn, to actual psychical experiences, such as hallucinations, visions of different sorts, clairvoyance, ‘mediumship’, and magical knowledge on the part of Druid priests and, probably, to some extent, on the part of the common people as well; and, finally, that the living Fairy-Faith depends not so much upon ancient traditions, oral and recorded, as upon recent and contemporary psychical experiences, vouched for by many ‘seers’ and other percipients among our witnesses, and now placed on record by us in [chapter ii] and elsewhere throughout this study.
The Present Position of Psychical Research
Sir William Crookes, the well-known English authority in physical science, was almost the first scientist to become seriously interested in psychics, and in Part III of Notes of an Enquiry into the Phenomena called Spiritual, during the Years 1870-1873 (London), boldly affirms:—‘It will be seen that the facts are of the most astounding character, and seem utterly irreconcilable with all known theories of modern science. Having satisfied myself of their truth, it would be moral cowardice to withhold my testimony because my previous publications were ridiculed by critics and others.’ And this conclusion reached forty years ago has not been reversed, but has been confirmed by one after another of learned scientists on both sides of the Atlantic.