[539] Cf. Borlase, Dolmens of Ireland, iii. 854.
[540] Cf. Lefèvre, Rev. Trad. Pop., ix. 195-209.
[541] J. G. Campbell collected in Scotland two versions of a parallel episode, but concerning Loch Lurgan. In both versions the flight begins by Fionn’s foster-mother carrying Fionn, and in both, when she is tired, Fionn carries her and runs so fast that when the loch is reached only her shanks are left. These he throws out on the loch, and hence its name Loch Lurgan, ‘Lake of the Shanks.’ (The Fians, pp. 18-19).
[542] During the seventeenth century, the English government, acting through its Dublin representatives, ordered this original Cave or Purgatory to be demolished; and with the temporary suppression of the ceremonies which resulted and the consequent abandonment of the island, the Cave, which may have been filled up, has been lost.
[543] Thomas Wright, St. Patrick’s Purgatory (London, 1844), pp. 67-8.
[544] Wright, op. cit., p. 69.
[545] In the face of all the legends told of pilgrims who have been in Patrick’s Purgatory, it seems that either through religious frenzy like that produced in Protestant revivals, or else through some strange influence due to the cave itself after the preliminary disciplines, some of the pilgrims have had most unusual psychic experiences. Those who have experienced fasting and a rigorous life for a prescribed period affirm that there results a changed condition, physical, mental, and spiritual, so that it is very probable that the Christian pilgrims to the Purgatory, like the pagan pilgrims who ‘fasted on’ the Tuatha De Danann in New Grange, were in good condition to receive impressions of a psychical nature such as the Society for Psychical Research is beginning to believe are by no means rare to people susceptible to them. Neophytes seeking initiation among the ancients had to undergo even more rigorous preparations than these; for they were expected while entranced to leave their physical bodies and in reality enter the purgatorial state, as we shall presently have occasion to point out.
[546] Wright, St. Patrick’s Purgatory, pp. 62 ff.
[547] L. R. Farnell, Cults of the Greek States (Oxford, 1907), iii. 126-98, &c.
[548] Cf. Athenaeus, 614 A; Aristoph., Nubes, 508; and Harper’s Dict. Class. Lit. and Antiq., p. 1615.