The Problem with Sea Apes May 24, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Actualite, Contemporary, Modern
***Dedicated to Andy the Mad Monk and Invisible***
Beach has, since the early days of this site, shown a persistent interest in mermaids. It would be outrageous then to pass by the important new documentary coming out (or has it already aired?) on Animal Planet. The following is borrowed from Wikipedia (courtesy of the inestimable Invisible).
Mermaids: The Body Found is a two hour Animal Planet… The fictional film tells the story of a scientific team’s investigative efforts to uncover the source behind mysterious underwater recordings and an unidentified marine body. Two former National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists tell their story on camera for the first time. After investigating mass strandings of whales, the team claimed to have recorded mysterious underwater noises coming from an unknown source. This sound resembled a sound previously recorded in 1997, called the ‘bloop’. They also claimed to have recovered 30% of the remains of an unknown creature from inside a great white shark which was said to possess attributes of the human body. They alleged that the marine creature had hands, not fins, and the hip structure of an upright animal. These findings, along with many others led the team to determine that this unknown animal was very closely related to humans, possibly a mermaid.
So a mockumentary has been created to entertain and to offer the latest theory on mermaids. And what is this theory? This time Beach borrows from part of a Fox News report (courtesy of Andy). Note how there is absolutely no mention here of the fictional content unless the word ‘compelling’ (as in ‘the punters don’t do simple facts’) is supposed to cover that!
In the two-hour CGI Special Mermaids: The Body Found, Animal Planet dives deep into the idea that mermaids may have been real, and, even better – related to humans! ‘It’s a very radical theory on human evolution, but we have approached an age-old myth and really chased its origins,’ Animal Planet honcho Charlie Foley told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column. ‘It has been compiled in a way that is very compelling, making us think that mermaids might not just be mythical creatures.’ The show unravels mysterious underwater sound recordings and presents a bone-chilling argument for the Aquatic Ape Theory, which suggests that during the transition from apes to hominid, some humans went through an aquatic stage. This stage is argued to have resulted in ‘aquatic ape-like’ creatures. ‘There are striking differences between us and other primates, yet [there are] many features we share with marine mammals, like the webbing between our fingers, which other primates don’t have, a layer of subcutaneous fat, and a loss of body hair,’ Foley explained. ‘We also have an instinctive ability to swim, and control over breath. Humans can hold breath up to 20 minutes, longer than any other terrestrial animal.’ Mermaids: The Body Found ponders the concept that coastal flooding millions of years ago turned some of our ancestors inland, while another group branched off into the deep water out of necessity and for food.
Beach has already highlighted sea apes. In fact, he dug up, to the best of his knowledge, the earliest reference to the concept that dates back to the eighteenth century. And this is where the problems begin… Readers might want to flag up problem concerning biology, which Beachcombing is, sadly, not qualified to do: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com However, Beachcombing would like to stick his oar into the epistemology of sea-bourne monkeys.
If you want to explain the unicorn then it makes sense to look for a now extinct creature. After all, people no longer see unicorns (with very few exceptions) and those sightings there are usually involve travelers far from home confronted by unusual but known animals. If there was a unicorn-like animal ten thousand years ago then it is possible that this animal got trapped in an early phase of human myth and that it was passed down to us from there.
However, the problem with explaining mermaids in this way is that sightings continue into the present. There are dozens of sightings, for example, from the Hebrides (Scotland) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beach can only see three ways forward in relation to the sea-ape theory.
(i) There is a small population of sea apes that survived (or survives) on and off the British coast and yet no body or photograph has ever turned up.
(ii) The mermaids that are seen cannot be explained as physical entities. Here you can give a psychological, a theosophist or a ‘pagan’ explanation, but sea apes are out.
(iii) By some bizarre mechanism presently beyond our understanding the sea ape, which has not lived on the Scottish coast for a thousand or ten thousand years, entered ‘collective memory’ and has reappeared in the imagination of locals: go to (ii) above but with sea apes ‘in’.
Beach just might be able to conceive, against all his better judgement, that in the wild backwoods of New Zealand or in the expanses of the Rocky Mountains there are giant flightless birds or unknown hominids. But if anyone finds a sea ape community on the coast of Scotland, he’ll eat a tonne of boiled sweets. He has never seen (pace Jungians) any proof for ancestral memory. And so he would plump for number (ii), as he would for fairies.
In fact, forget sea apes, mermaids seem to be sea fairies. And in many ways the sea ape theory is to mermaids what the late nineteenth century pygmy theory was to the fey.
People sometimes see things that are not physically present: whether they are truly external or not Beach will happily leave to the philosophers. What is absolutely terrifying about this is that if our perception can play these kinds of tricks on us (or ‘pull back the veils of creation’ if you prefer) can our senses be trusted under any circumstances? On just that subject, looking forward to the documentary…
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25 May 2012: Wade writes in ‘Your sea ape post instantly reminded me of the aquatic ape theory, first proposed by a German pathologist, Max Westenhofer, in 1942, then proposed again British marine biologist, Alister Hardy, in 1960. It has since been championed by Elaine Morgan, a Welsh writer (per Wikipedia). I saw a special on this years ago. It is a fascinating idea. My impression is that most anthropologists have either actively hated or completely ignored the theory as pseudo-science. Here are two links: Elaine Morgan’s and an anthropologist’s view that examines the controversial theory and yields the sceptical response. Thanks Wade!
The Leprechauns of Liverpool and the Bowling Green from Hell May 14, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary, Modern
Beachcombing has been spending some time in the last few days looking at the fairy lore of Irish immigrants: spurred on by his continuing failure to find the New York changeling case. Not surprisingly the city of Liverpool stuck out: Liverpool was flooded by Irish workers in the nineteenth century, particularly after the horrors of the famine, and Liverpudlian is, to this day, the one English ‘accent’ that shows signs of Irish influence. Beach has managed to track down a thin gruel of nineteenth-century fairy references from Liverpool, in a period where one fifth to one third of the city was of Irish decent. He would be extremely grateful for any help here: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com However, he also stumbled upon the curious story of the Liverpool Leprechauns.
Beach should start by saying that this story is somewhat outside his normal remit. It is very modern, it involves lots of screaming children, and, worst of all, UFOs (hats off to Magonia) make an unwelcome sweep over the Mersey… But it is also entertaining and, hey, rather the Summer of the Leprechauns than the Summer of Sam.
30 June 1964 children (number unspecified) saw ‘little men’ (numbers variable) in Jubilee Park near that vortex of northern necroticism, ‘the bowling green’. (If Beach ever writes a horror short story it will be called simply, ‘the Bowling Green’ and it will be illustrated by a man with bushy eyebrows drinking piss-weak ale.) Quite what the children saw has been much debated. ‘White hats’ on the little men were noted, as were their antics in throwing sods at each other. What is documented is that very rapidly the little men were interpreted (by the press?) as being leprechauns.
Leprechauns are, of course, an Irish solitary fairy known for shoe-making and vast wealth: Beach’s daughter recently shared with him the insight that the leprechaun might be rich because he sells lots of shoes. Legend claims that if you grab and hold a leprechaun you will be able to claim the fey’s treasure. So was ‘leprechaun’ just a reflex word picked up by a local journalist: leprechaun are always male, the connection might have been as simple as that? Or do we have here third of fourth generation Irish children living the stories told them by their grandparents? And in either case was this all hysteria? Beach’s belief system requires him to nod sagely here. But some modern Liverpudlians have memories. Make what you will of the following two.
I was one of the school children that saw those leprichauns I attended Brae Street School and we all saw them popping in and out of a window overlooking the school yard , there were about 4 of them all tiny dressed like a school book idea of a typical gnome and they sat swinging their legs on the window ledge getting in and out. What they were I don’t know I only know what they looked like. I’d love to know the truth!!!
I certainly [remember leprechauns], and I actually saw a few of them on Kensington Fields, close to the library, but my parents and other adults tried to convince me that I”d been seeing things. This would be one afternoon in early July 1964, around 4.30pm, and I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was 10 at the time and on my way to play football with my mates and saw these little (I”d say just a few inches tall) men dressed in red and black, standing in the grass, looking at me. I’m sure one of them had some type of hat on. I panicked and ran all the way home. My mum said there had been reports of leprechauns and little men on Jubilee Drive and Edge Lane the day before. That same evening crowds turned up on Jubilee Drive, and I remember a girl with a jam jar that she was going to put the leprechauns in!
Luckily, a history blog can leave the existential questions to one side and go like a hungry ferret after the hysteria. By the 1st word was spreading among the little folk (the children not the fairies) and swarms descended on Jubilee Park to see for themselves.
It was all too much for Irish parks constable James Nolan. ‘I don’t believe in leprechauns myself’, he said. He called in the city police. Police in cars and on motorcycles arrived. They cleared the hundreds of youngsters from the bowling greens — the reported playground of the wee folk — closed the gate, and stood guard. But beyond the bowling green gates the youngsters milled, tiny tots to 14-year-olds. They crammed the top of the covered reservoir for a better view of the bowling green. Tolerant bobbies wandered about trying to get the youngsters on the move. But the kids would not believe that there were no little green men. It was not until after 10pm that the park was cleared. How the story started was not known, but last night was the second night running of the leprechaun hunt. And how did those little brownies who help the Irish housewife with her chores come to arrive in Liverpool? Maybe they flew from old Ireland. A woman resident in Crosby last night reported seeing ‘strange objects glistening in the sky, whizzing over the river to the city from the Irish Sea’. 1 July 1964
The Crosby UFO and perhaps the ‘green’ men can be dismissed. They both sound like a journalist’s fugue. But by 10 July rumour had come to nearby Kirkby where children believed that there were fairies in the churchyard of St Chad’s there. It took ten days and the intervention of clergy and policemen to get the children out from among the graves. Beach wonders very vaguely if the ‘hunting’ element, children with jam jars and (by some accounts) air rifles (!) were responding to the idea of capturing the leprechaun and his treasure.
Beach should end by noting that rational explanations have been offered up, as they always are in these cases. There is the circus school that claims that the leprechaun scare began with a household of travelling midgets. There is the James Nolan school that claims that Nolan (the park constable) set up the rumour mill as a prank: evidence includes the testimony of a colleague. Then there is the diminutive gardener, Brian Jones, who may have set off the leprechaun fever and who claimed as much in a Liverpool newspaper in 1982. In any case, the Liverpool-Kirkby kerfuffle would make a great final chapter for a book of modern fairy.
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14 May 2012: Southern Man quotes direct from the great Janet Bord, The Traveller’s Guide to Fairy Sites on the Liverpool episode. ‘The city was an unlikely setting for a series of reported fairy sightings in the summer of 1964. Little green people, varying from 3 inches tall to garden gnome-sized, were being seen at night in the city’s parks and golf courses, as well as at people’s houses and flats. The excitement grew so intense when the reports were widely publicised, that on one occasion a crowd of people gathered near the bowling green in Edge Hill in August 1964 hoping to see fairies (or whatever they were) and had to be restrained by the police. Later the same year, a woman living in Wavertree claimed that three little men in green clothes had been sitting on her backyard wall, throwing stones at her dog, and other women saw them climbing a tree in Wavetree Park. These events demonstrate the difficulty the researches sometimes has of easily distinguishing between reports of fairies, aliens and other non-human beings…‘ Invisible coincidentally points to the report ‘Janet Bord’s Fairies, Real Encounters with Little People for the Wollaton little people sighting–also in a park-like setting, also by children. This was in 1979 and reminded me very much of the Liverpool case you cited, except it was kept much quieter so there was no crowd hysteria and there are no mention of jam jars.’ Thanks SM and Invisible!
23 May 2012: Larry writes ‘In 1989 when the USSR started being more open about themselves, some Moscow children reported seeing robot aliens in a nearby park. At the time the Western press ate this up because the Soviets usually never reported such things. If these little green men are aliens, I hope their taxpayers never find out that they came countless light years to Earth just to throw rocks at dogs and goof off in various parks. For what this is worth, there was an experiment done circa 1982 in a local radio station where someone pretended to report seeing a UFO. Nothing fancy, just a disk shaped light zipping across the night sky. In a matter of hours the station got over 300 calls from people who also swore they saw it. And the stories ramped up to where some were reporting seeing the ship land and aliens coming out to abduct them. Yes, separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to UFO reports has always been very difficult.’ Thanks Larry!
Geologist Galivants with Spirits and Fairies May 9, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern
John Beaumont (obit 1751) was a celebrated, to use an anachronistic word, geologist. He also experienced ‘the other side’ with a rush of spirits and ghosts that would have thrilled a wind-sock. One passage from his An Historical Physiological and Theological Treatise of Spirits, Apparitions, Witchcrafts, and Other Magical Practises are well known because they describe his first-hand Blake-style interaction with the spirit world. These passages were picked up by several nineteenth-century writers and they eventually found their way into Lewis Spence’s Occult Encylopedia. They give a sense of a man (however you explain his experiences) labouring under an immense mental weight.
I had two spirits, who constantly attended me, night and day, for above three months together, who called each other by their names; and several spirits would call at my chamber door, and ask whether such spirits lived there, and they would answer they did. As for the other spirits that attended me, I heard none of their names mentioned only I asked one spirit, which came for some nights together, and rung a little bell in my ear, what his name was, who answered Ariel [!]. The two spirits that constantly attended myself appeared both in women’s habit, they being of brown complexion, about three feet in stature; they had both black loose net-work gowns, tied with a black sash about the middle, and within the net-work appeared a gown of a golden colour, with somewhat of a light striking through it. Their heads were not dressed in top-knots, but they had white linen caps on, with lace on them about three fingers’ breadth, and over it they had a black loose net-work hood.
I would not, for the whole world, undergo what I have undergone, upon spirits coming twice to me; their first coming was most dreadful to me, the thing being then altogether new, and consequently most surprising, though at the first coming they did not appear to me but only called to me at my chamber-windows, rung bells, sung to me, and played on music, etc.; but the last coming also carried terror enough; for when they came, being only five in number, the two women before mentioned, and three men (though afterwards there came hundreds), they told me they would kill me if I told any person in the house of their being there, which put me in some consternation; and I made a servant sit up with me four nights in my chamber, before a fire, it being in the Christmas holidays, telling no person of their being there. One of these spirits, in women’s dress, lay down upon the bed by me every night; and told me, if I slept, the spirits would kill me, which kept me waking for three nights.
In the meantime, a near relation of mine went (though unknown to me) to a physician of my acquaintance, desiring him to prescribe me somewhat for sleeping, which he did, and a sleeping potion was brought me; but I set it by, being very desirous and inclined to sleep without it. The fourth night I could hardly forbear sleeping; but the spirit, lying on the bed by me, told me again, I should be killed if I slept; whereupon I rose and sat by the fireside, and in a while returned to my bed; and so I did a third time, but was still threatened as before; whereupon I grew impatient, and asked the spirits what they would have? Told them I had done the part of a Christian, in humbling myself to God and feared them not; and rose from my bed, took a cane, and knocked at the ceiling of my chamber, a near relation of mine then lying over me, who presently rose and came down to me about two o’clock in the morning, to whom I said, ‘You have seen me disturbed these four days past, and that I have not slept: the occasion of it was, that five spirits, which are not in the room with me, have threatened to kill me if I told any person of their being here, or if I slept; but I am not able to forbear sleeping longer, and acquaint you with it, and now stand in defiance of them’; and thus I exerted myself about them and notwithstanding their continued threats I slept very well the next night, and continued to do so, though they continued with me above three months, day and night.
Beach has not unfortunately been able to get his hands on the Treatise yet. However, he has been reading, with great interest, The Gleanings by the same author, where Beaumont is rather more contemplative about these etheral beings in a notable appendix entitled Notes Concerning Genii or Familiar Spirits. Here, indeed, Beaumont says things that would have got him burnt a hundred years and hung fifty years prior to publication.
And as I have averr’d my own Experience in this kind, I mud declare, that as often as those Genii have appear’d to me, it has always been with that swimming Motion through the Air, and not setting one Foot before the other, as usual with Men, when they pass from one place to another. I know many Persons laugh at all Apparitions; and it’s not for those I record these things, but for those to whom such Genii may appear ; who, as they will be much surprized at the first Sight of them, I know will be glad to find that others have had the like Experiences, and to be instructed in the manner of their Appearance, and in what they may portend. I shall farther here observe to you, that whenever such Genii have appeared to me, I have always look’d on my self to have been, for that time, in an extatick State of Mind; and conclude, that most: Persons, who see Apparitions, unseeen by others, present with them, are in such a state, tho’ many times unobserv’d by themselves, the various Dispositions of Men’s Minds not being to be understood without a good share of philosophical Learning, and much Application used. In this extatick state of Mind, Men are said to dream waking and the antient Poets call this a dreaming on Parnassus, in which Dream their Minds were opened, and they were led into Knowledges.
Beaumont goes on to speculate on some other facts of the spirit world including the question of whether or not second sight is transmitted to children when one parent in an ‘extatick’ state while ‘creating’ the child. He also wonders whether much of the familiars of witchcraft and the evidence of the witch trials cannot be explained by such phenomenon.
Beach is always curious about the relation between spirits and fairies in the popular imagination and he was interested to read in a short biographical sketch of Beaumont in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography that Beaumont (allegedly) married his wife on the instructions of a fairy. (‘Sloane claimed that fairies had instructed Beaumont to marry Dorothy, daughter of John Speccot, of Penheale, Egloskerry, Cornwall, who did indeed become his wife’.) However, he’s not yet tracked down a source for this. Can anyone help? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
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14 May 2012: With characteristic kindness Wade writes in with the source. ‘Here’ s Beaumont’s treatise: It must be the same person even though the date of death as 1731.’ No references to Beaumont’s wife unfortunately. Invisible speculates: ‘On John Beaumont’s fairy visitations, I wonder if it is possible that he was suffering from Charles Bonnet Syndrome, which is characterized by elaborate visual hallucinations. Some sufferers also report auditory hallucinations, although the music and bell sounds Beaumont reports sound more like tinnitus. So many fairy/spirit appearances; so little chance of matching them with modern medical diagnoses…. Then JK writes ‘I just read your latest article and found it fascinating. I also looked for the book and was rather surprised to find it (if real) on iTunes! Such books are usually buried in the Gutenberg Project or Archive.org. Such a panoply of subjective experiences would tend to make me suspect psychological issues. His self-described ‘ecstatic state of mind’ may have been symptoms of something akin to Bipolar Disorder; sleep disorder and visual/auditory hallucinations would go hand-in-hand. I’ve suspended judgement when it comes to apparently *supernatural* mischief and incidents. Over the years, my parents’ home has been scene to a range of incidents not easily explainable. These peculiar incidents have been experienced by friends, family and visitors despite occurring infrequently. I say this so as not to give the impression of knee-jerk scepticism when faced with the unknown. It’s simply the extent and variety of Beaumont’s experiences that causes me to doubt their objective spookiness (technical jargon). The amount of his experiences reminds me of Reverend Edmund Jones and the carnival of horrors he placed in Monmouth. What a character he must have been!’ More on EJ another day. For now thanks to Wade, JK and Invisible!!
Victorian Osiris Kills Father and Paints Fairies April 30, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern
Now that the happy days of summer are here Beach is running away, in his mind, with several projects. There are the bat boxes, visits to the animals’ secret garden in the woods (with elder daughter), an attempt (probably vain) to get a carpenter to put up some shelves and then, chief among Beach’s preoccupations, there is the fairy corridor. Essentially, Beach plans to plaster the upper floor of the Beachcombing mansion with various sketches, artifacts, cartoons, photographs and ceramics relating to the good folk: in part to give his children unquiet dreams, in part to amuse himself. Consequently even though term is not quite over Beach has been on the prowl, salivating over graphic novels, Edwardian art books and stills from the fake fairy archives. And, so far, the most interesting potential contributor to the corridor has been Richard Dadd (obit 1886) who Beach thought that he would celebrate today
Dadd was a high-flying nineteenth-century painter whose career can usefully be split into three phases. (I) The boring phase: when the young and insufferable Dadd painted a series of conventional works (still lifes etc). (II) The fame phase: when an intense Dadd, in his early twenties, began to paint pat fairies and had praise heaped on him. (III) Then, finally, there is the mad phase from his mid twenties onwards which Dadd spent painting two works of utterly unconventional fairies in a top security mental asylum. The two late pictures are ‘Contradiction: Oberon and Titania’ and the simply amazing ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke’.
How Dadd got from being a preppy Victorian fairy painter in the Royal Academy School to being a moon-barking inmate is a fascinating story in itself and Beach has half a suspicion that the fairies had something to do with it. On a trip to the Middle East in 1842 the still young Dadd began to show violent symptoms, so much so that his well-to-do travelling colleagues, including Sir Thomas Phillips, had the painter sent home early. Either in the Mediterranean or on the way back to his family in Kent Dadd convinced himself that he was the god Osiris (far more original than the staple of most nineteenth-century asylums, Napoleon). And he subsequently stabbed his father to death believing that bounder to be a devil. Dadd almost killed too a traveller on a train in France while trying to escape from arrest and was ultimately brought into the loving embrace of Britain’s surprisingly enlightened nineteenth-century Bedlam, Bethlem Royal Hospital.
It is always easy to identify the Osirises in our midst with hindsight: there is a worrying intensity in even mad Dadd’s early fairy pictures (see the one that heads this post), some scary nudes and over-red sunsets. But that intensity is as nothing compared to the hell that was to follow. Of course, Midsummer Night’s Dream was a staple of Victorian artists trying to fairy-up: as to a lesser extent was the Tempest. But no one painted Shakespeare like Dadd. If you look at the figures in this image (‘Contradiction’ above) you will see a worrying inability to communicate. No one is looking at anyone else, they seem all to be looking into space. Frequent comparisons with Bosch then are misplaced because Bosch’s infernos fit together like perfectly worked jigsaws. Yet, at the same time, Dadd’s characters are all clearly part of the same food chain with grand fairies and big fairies, and small fairies and beneath them tiny fairies and finally, we might imagine, microscopic fairies feeding on still smaller fairies and each other. It is an airless work, with no lush vegetation, only the kind of leaves that you would find in the drier parts of the Australian Bush. When Beach spent twenty minutes looking at it this evening he just wanted to throw open the window and let some air in. It took Dadd four years to paint.
The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke (that will almost certainly appear in the corridor) is more impressive and perhaps more frightening. An axe man (who could be Dadd) is about to split a hazelnut. And once more around him are a series of figures who are disconnected: their glances disconcertingly do not meet. But they are also clearly associated by their dress and their body language and the profusion of terrifying daisies everywhere. The connect-disconnect feeling is summed up for Beach by the fact that he is not sure which hazelnut the feller is about to crack. Is it the one directly at the man’s feet or the one about a yard away. Confusingly the pose the feller has taken up will not bring the axe to either: the visual experience is the same as that of staring at some of the early Renaissance works where perspective had still not been worked out and light seasickness results. This work, in any case, took Dadd nine years.
Not satisfied with just painting his nightmares Dadd wrote a poem about the Fairy Feller named Elimination of a Picture and its Subject which is about four thousand words long. A sample? ‘To your judgment I must bow Freely its exercise allow You perhaps to such are more inured. Your notions may be more endured But whether it be or be not so You can afford to let this go For nought as nothing it explains And nothing from nothing nothing gains.’ Paranoid schizophrenia probably works better in paint than in prose.
Beach is fascinated in fairy art at present, any off-the-beaten-track examples gratefully received: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
And here is mild Dadd, his knifing days behind him, painting Contradiction.
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30/April/2012: Invisible writes in: You undoubtedly have run across the fairy art of Charles Altamont Doyle (father of Arthur Conan Doyle). Also mad (he was an alcoholic, had seizures, and was periodically institutionalized) but his fairies are more whimsical and certainly less dire than Dadd’s whose work I cannot contemplate without feeling like I want to throw myself under a train. I can recommend The Doyle Diary: The Last Great Conan Doyle Mystery with a Holmesian Investigation into the Strange and Curious Case of Charles Altamont Doyle. There are very cheap used copies on bookfinder.com. More of a sketchbook than a diary–written/drawn while in a Scottish lunatic asylum. He seems to have been a loveable lunatic–the book is full of his witty appeals to his doctors, trying to prove he was not insane. Here are some pictures. Southern Man writes in with some suggestions for the corridor. The Cottingley Fairies (of course), engravings from nineteenth century books particularly Sykes, some of the early modern engravings of fairy hills, modern photographs with bits of luminous dust floating through the atmosphere, fairy sites on antique postcards, Neil Gaiman’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, particularly his version of Puck, Victorian stage girls dressed as fairies – preferably floating through the air. Thanks Invisible and SM!
5 May 2012: Fairy Avenger writes: Beach, liked very much this piece though you had not taken into account the latest scholarship, namely Patricia Allderidge’s excellent biography of Dadd in the Oxford DNB. I’ve copied out some of the relevant bits for you. I have some other fairy mistakes that you’ve made in your posts that I’ll include in the next months [!!]. Note, for example, that Dadd did not – contrary to earlier biographical sketches – believe that he was Osiris but that he was serving Osiris. ‘To those who knew him, Dadd’s character appeared to have changed. He had become watchful, suspicious, and unpredictable, concealing the fact that he was receiving messages and instructions from unknown sources (probably in the form of voices), but occasionally dropping hints that he was pursued by evil spirits, and was himself searching for the devil. Eventually he came to believe that the Egyptian god Osiris was the supreme being controlling all his actions, and the source of his ‘secret admonitions’. However, for much of the time Dadd still behaved normally… After a period of apparent recovery Dadd’s condition worsened again, and on 28 August 1843 he persuaded his father to accompany him to Cobham Park in Kent, near to his childhood home of Chatham, where he stabbed him to death with a knife bought specifically for the purpose. Dadd later explained that he had killed the devil in disguise, and seems to have retained this belief throughout his life, talking objectively about the murder as an event for which he held no personal responsibility. He made his way to France, but was arrested after trying to cut the throat of a stranger who was travelling with him in a carriage. Dadd was confined in a French asylum for ten months, and extradited in July 1844 to appear before the magistrates at Rochester. Though formally committed for trial, he was certified insane and was admitted on 22 August to the state criminal lunatic asylum attached to Bethlem Hospital at St George’s Fields in Southwark, south London. He was never to know freedom again. The ‘government wing’, where Dadd was first confined, had been built in 1816 to house patients sent by the courts and later through other legal channels. It was a prison-like block with heavily barred windows at the back of the main building, largely untouched by reforms which were taking place in the rest of the hospital. The internal environment was dark, cramped, and dismal, the outer world restricted to a bleak, high-walled exercise yard, and many of his companions were hardened criminals who had become insane while in prison. Dadd’s living conditions were much improved in 1857, when he and some of the ‘better class’ of criminal patients were moved to a specially converted ward in the main hospital, but far greater improvements occurred in 1864, when all the criminal patients were transferred from Bethlem to the new state asylum of Broadmoor in Berkshire… For some years Dadd was considered a dangerous patient, being unpredictable and sometimes violent, his conversation being rambling and incoherent when touching on the subject of his delusions. However, he soon began to work again in Bethlem, and effectively maintained his career as a painter for the rest of his life, though his pictures were rarely seen outside the asylums. A visitor in 1845 wrote of some recent drawings that they In Broadmoor Dadd’s talents found additional outlets, in painting scenery and a drop curtain for the theatre (now des.), as well as murals, furniture, and other decorative items, and in more ephemeral activities such as the production of comic cartoon figures at Christmas, and diagrams and illustrations for lectures and entertainments. Interviewed at the age of sixty, he appeared by this time to have accepted his fate, but still considered it unjust, feeling that society did not understand him. Dark and handsome in his youth, with expressive features, in later years he gave the impression of a scholarly recluse, with a snow-white beard and mild blue eyes gazing benignly from behind spectacles. Throughout the desolate circumstances of his later life he had clung to his identity as an artist, and although his personality was radically changed, insanity had not destroyed his intellect. He retained the delusion that he was subject to the will of Osiris, but after three decades in an asylum he still talked with intelligent interest about painting and the art world, read the Satires of Juvenal, and played the violin.’ Thanks FA!
Fairy Shysters April 26, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern
One part of Beach’s fairy fascination with Ireland has been the whole question of what might be called ‘fairy shysters’. Sharp swindlers who, in the nineteenth and twentieth century, went around taking innocent and usually vulnerable men and women for ‘a ride’. Beach has gathered some remarkable examples together, including three extraordinary instances of ‘fairy shysters’ posing as fairy kidnapped family members (another post another day). But for now what about a bit of fairy smoke and mirrors?
A young man died suddenly on May Eve while he was lying asleep under a hay-rick, and the parents and friends knew immediately that he had been carried off to the fairy palace in the great moat of Granard. So a renowned fairy man was sent for, who promised to have him back in nine days. Meanwhile [the fairy man] desired that food and drink of time best should be left daily for the young man at a certain place on the moat. This was done, and time food always disappeared, by which they knew time young man was living, and came out of the moat nightly for the provisions left for him by his people.
The fairy man gets off to a good start. The logic behind this act is, of course, that the young man will not have to eat fairy food: that would see him permanently imprisoned in fairy land, Persephone-style. Instead, the fairy man presumably got to eat to his heart’s content while the mourning parents looked on. The fairy man also needs to bring a young man back from the dead though: a harder task, but not, as we shall see, an impossible one.
Now on the ninth day a great crowd assembled to see time young man brought back from Fairyland. And in time stood the fairy doctor performing his incantations by means of fire and a powder which he threw into the flames that caused a dense grey smoke to arise. Then, taking off his hat, and holding a key in his hand, he called out three times in a loud voice, ‘Come forth, come forth, come forth!’ On which a shrouded figure slowly rose up in time midst of the smoke, and a voice was heard answering, ‘Leave me in peace; I am happy with my fairy bride, and my parents need not weep for me, for I shall bring them good luck, and guard them from evil evermore.’ Then the figure vanished and the smoke cleared, and the parents were content, for they believed the vision, and having loaded the fairy-man with presents, they sent him away home.
Let’s hope the fairy-man’s assistant who wore the shroud and who played his role so well also received some decent recompense. Beachcombing is fascinated in fairy shysters. If any one has come across any instances do please let him know: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com Beach should also note that this particular case appears in the work of an Irish folklorist. Other cases are beyond rumour and appear in legal proceedings. It goes without saying that some fairy men and fairy women were honest and quite beyond such shenanigans.
Pixie-led in the South-West April 16, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary, Modern
Beachcombing is back to the fairies. One subject that has intrigued him through this spring is the rare fairy-phenomenon of being ‘pixie-led’, one particularly associated with the south-west of England: hence the name as ‘the pixies’ are the fairies of Cornwall and Devon. To be pixie-led is to be led astray by the good folk while out on the moors or in the woods. Here to start is one eighteenth-century second-hand description:
‘Whitchurch Down (a favourite ride with me and my pony; for it sometimes is a hard matter to get him into any other road) is said to be very famous for the peril there incurred of being pixy-led: for there many an honest yeoman and stout farmer, especially if he should happen to take a cup too much, is very apt to lose his way; and whenever he does so he will declare, and offer to take his Bible oath upon it, ‘That as sure as ever he lives to tell it, whilst his head was running round like a mill-wheel, he heard with his own ears they bits of pisgies [alternative spelling] , a laughing and attacking their hands, all to see he led astray, and never able to find the right road, though he had travelled it scores of times’. And many good old folks relate the same thing, and how the pisgies delight to lead the aged a-wandering about after dark.
Note the sceptical tone here and the idea, one often found in the literature, that pixy-led is actually often whisky-led: though as one early twentieth-century commentator pointed out the experience is not typical of what the drunk actually goes through? Then what about this late nineteenth-century example from Devon? Here you get the chill of the real thing told by a sympathetic voice. It should be noted that turning your jacket or even a pocket inside out was reckoned a way to break the spell.
A few days ago a party of men were ripping bark in a wood about four miles from Torrington. In the evening, when it was time to pick up the tools, one of the men had occasion to separate himself from the party to fetch an iron which he had been using in another part of the wood. He avers, says a correspondent of a contemporary, that in stooping to pick up the tool a strange feeling came over him, and while totally unable to raise himself he heard peels of discordant laughter all around. It flashed across his mind that he was being play led, and though he had many times heard stories of people being in a similar state, his presence of mind forsook him, and he was unable to turn his coat inside out – a sure talisman against the spells of pixies. This was about half-past five in the afternoon. About seven o’clock his wife became uneasy at his non-appearance, and started off to look for him. Happening to meet one of the rippers she asked him whether he had seen her husband. ‘Yes’, replied the man ‘he left work when we did.’ This only added to the poor woman’s troubles, and when ten o’clock came and still no husband, she was greatly alarmed. When she arrived near the place where the man had been working she met her husband dripping wet. ‘Where have you been?’ said she. ‘I’ve been pixy led’ he replied and forthwith told his story. It appears according to his account, that the pixies held him under their spell for nearly five hours, and at the end of that time he was able to crawl away on his hands and knees, and scare knowing where he was creeping tumbled head over heels into a stream. Directly he rose he knew where he was, and made the best of his way homeward. ‘You girt, fule, why didden ‘ee turn your pocket inside out? Was all the comfort he received from his better half: ‘then you would have been able to come away at wance.’ The man firmly believed in pixies, and what strengthens his belief is the fact that a tailor named Short was ‘play led’ in the same wood some years ago, and remained under their magic spell until morning. Cavillers may say that the man was drunk, but is can be proved on the best authority that no intoxicating liquor was drunk that day by any of the party.
Any other examples of being pixy-led from British or other sources or, indeed, other traditions: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Icelandic Penis Collections, Gnome Sanctuaries and Other Unusual Museums April 3, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Actualite, Contemporary
Beachcombing was in his early teens on holiday in Cornwall when he went to the Gnome Museum. There was a very likeable hippy in her early forties (?) who ran the place and showed Beach and family around a couple of rooms and the garden where she had ‘seen’ the gnomes: there had been some form of mystic contact. She had also come up with a brilliant marketing trick. If you joined the gnome club you were given a small gnome and then every year you renewed your subscription you received a larger and larger gnome by post. Naturally, the young Beach went away with a little plaster cast figure and then lost the kind lady’s address.
In an alternative universe where everything proceeded according to God’s plan, there is a six-foot gnome of gold presently being run up the hill in a postal van. Perhaps in that parallel universe the Gnome museum has expanded to Ikea-like dimensions and displaced Truro.
In our pissy little version of time and space, meanwhile, the gnome museum has disappeared. Beach can find no proof that it ever existed. But some gentle musing this morning did get Beach thinking about other strange museums throughout the world and sent him running to his files. The vast majority, he should note, he has never been to: though he would love to visit Leila’s Hair Museum if anyone has some airmiles to spare.
Stalin World: Based in Lithuania this vast park specialises in statues of Soviet leaders and particularly Uncle Joe. There are also train carriages from ‘vintage’ trains: the trains that carried Lithuanians to the gulags or worse fates. And rather strangely – but this is Stalin World – there is a zoo as well. What animals are kept in the Stalin World zoo? Is petting allowed? Unfortunately, Beach cannot answer these questions because he was unable to find an internet page for Grutas Park where statues are kept: likely because of his lack of reach in the Baltic languages. The wikipedia page suggests that it is still open though.
Icelandic Phallic Museum: This is one where the blurb should be enough. ‘The Icelandic Phallological Museum is probably the only museum in the world to contain a collection of phallic specimens belonging to all the various types of mammal found in a single country… Phallology is an ancient science which, until recent years, has received very little attention in Iceland, except as a borderline field of study in other academic disciplines such as history, art, psychology, literature and other artistic fields like music and ballet.’ Ballet?!
Cheating Museum: A museum that went the way of the gnomes. In Rome in the 1990s university students opened a centre to celebrate different methods of exam cheating. Italy is a country, it must be remembered, where cheating at high schools and universities has been brought up to the level of an art form with no sense of moral fault attached. (Though God help you if you overcook the pasta.) Mrs B spent some time in a seminary as a theology student where, in the New Testament Greek exams, future priests would jostle to sit next to her and copy from her translation, while the teacher looked benevolently on.
Oradour-sur-Glane: This French town in Limousin was a site of a WW2 massacre and, in commemoration of the 642 people murdered there the town has been left frozen in time, recalling the events of 10 June 1944. Over several nightmare hours the men of the village were machine gunned in barns, the women and children burnt alive in the local church by German occupiers. Photographs show wrecked buildings and a car eternally parked in the village square. Went the Day Well with a snuff ending.
Leila’s Hair Museum: Leila appears to be a delightful person. ‘When Leila Cohoon tells people she owns a hair museum, they envision old curling irons, hair dyers, and other such tools. However, this is not the case. There are 159 wreaths and over 2,000 pieces of jewelry containing, or made of, human hair dating before 1900… According to Cohoon, ‘It could possibly be the only hair museum in the United States, maybe the world’.
HezBollah’s Museum: HezBollah decided to open their own museum in 2010 to celebrate (a remarkable) victory over Israel in their war in Lebanon. ‘A young boy ducks under a barricade to have his photo taken next to an Israeli tank. A father puts his baby daughter’s hand on the trigger of a piece of artillery. A Shiite sheikh, in full religious dress, strolls past a map of ‘Occupied Palestine’. Two women silently sob at the site where former Hezbollah leader Abbas al-Musawi, now dead, was said to have prayed.’ Essentially the whole site is dedicated to battle spoils and HezBollah paraphernalia. Not a place to wear your kippah.
Beach would be fascinated by any other strange museums (past and present) that are sent his way: particularly ones that have been missed by the internet: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com In the meantime he would like to offer some ‘internet museum’ sites put together by Invisible on that old obsession of his: fairies. The Fairy Museum (virtual), the Renaissance Faire Pictorial (mobile), the Leprechaun Museum, and the Japanese Fairy Museum. And here is one virtual museum that Beach found while looking for the gnomes: children should not visit unaccompanied… Thanks Invisible!!
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3 April 2012: JB writes in ‘Dear Beach, my guess is that you are befuddled with old age and that you are thinking of the Gnome Reserve in Devon (rather than in Cornwall). And I quote from their very entertaining website: For a completely unique 100% fun experience, simultaneously 100% ecologically interesting, with an extra 100% wonder and magic mixed in, visit The Gnome Reserve. Set amid truly rural countryside between Bideford and Bude just 7 miles from the Devon Cornwall border. the 4 acre Reserve comprises woodland, stream, 30 yard pond, meadow and garden – home to 1000+ gnomes and pixies, and about 250 labelled species of wild flowers, herbs, grasses and ferns. Gnome hats are loaned free of charge together with fishing rods, so you don’t embarrass the gnomes! Take your cameras and embarrass the family with some truly memorable photos for the family album! The children will love it because there is so much for them to discover from a woodpecker in a tree to a pixie flitting over clumps of comfrey. Recommended also for adults whose sophistication can have robbed them of a freshness of vision…The Gnome Reserve will rejuvenate you!’ Thanks JB. I’ll do some research, certainly some of these images seem familiar.
4 April 2012: Pam makes the same point: ‘Is the gnomereserve the place you’re searching for, Dr. B? They have a Gnome Museum there. I remember driving by it on my way to and from Tintagel. (The yard was *filled* with gnomic statuary.) I didn’t get a chance to visit the reserve as I was with two non-gnome/fairy fetishists and they weren’t interested. Since my friends had indulged my Arthur mania, including climbing up to Tintagel Castle, I thought I should leave well enough alone. I also have a vague memory of reading something in Fortean Times about a lady who had a museum and communed with gnomes (or fairies or pixies or…), but a search of their site yielded a big zero in that regard. Perhaps the gnomes have fogged my memory, or there’s some Big Conspiracy to suppress the Truth. It couldn’t be that I have a bad memory.’ The gnome reserve still hasn’t written back. Heidi Fury comes up with Marshsfreemuseum ‘It’s not terribly museumy, but maybe something there will catch your fancy.’ Lehmansterms writes (seconded by Dennis): It’s probably not among the oddest of all museums, but it contains some of the more bizarre items in what is a decidedly bizarre museum genre, the Mutter Museum at the University of Pennsylvania’s Philadelphia museum/campus has a few of the odder medical marvels Lehmansterms ever saw on public display – and in it’s heyday in the 60′s he saw and toured, more than once, the Army Medical Museum and Library in Washington D.C. At one time just across Independence Ave. from the Smithsonian’s venerable “castle”, it was moved to a far less visible location at the Walter Reed Medical Center (and, I believe, recently closed for good). The Mutter’s collection includes, among other items, the shared liver of Chang & Eng – Barnum’s original “Siamese Twins”, the “Soap Lady” – a saponified Colonial-era corpse unearthed in the 19th century, and an enormous collection of objects removed from the throats of choking victims rescued from the brink of death by the first revolutionary 19th century optical “endoscope”-type looker-grabber device. There are also a few skeletons of legitimate, non-hoax, physical bones (and not concrete castings or stone carvings) of actual human giants, to refer to a subject evidently of some interest to the good Dr. B. Photos on Google from the Mutter. A more informative, official website on the Mutter. The old Army Medical Museum - Lehmansterms also recalls what he found to be an extremely unusual exhibit in another of his original hometown, Philadelphia’s museums. Otherwise to be considered unusual only for the vast breadth and wealth of its collections (and for being the largest example of Classical Greek archtecture in the world, including Greece), this is the noted and notable Philadelphia Museum of Art. In the mid 90′s, while on a visit with his 3 daughters and a Swedish exchange student his ex was then hosting, we encountered in a back stairwell a large vitrine full of Victorian-era (lehmansterms believes he recalls) plaster casts of human genetalia. While the “plaster-casters” were a short-lived phenomenon recording the endowments of some of the more famous musicians of the early Psychedelic rock era - and, lehmansterms supposes, could be considered “Art” in an era in which handicrafters the like of Robert Mapplethorpe, et als, are considered to be artists - these were of a different time altogether, if not of dissimilar substance.’ Bennett has more on the phallic museum Thanks to Lehmansterms, Pam, Bennett and Heidi Fury!!!
7 April 2012: Ervy sends in this classic from Alberta: ‘Strange but true, Torrington is the home to the infamous Gopher Hole Museum. This attraction features stuffed gophers (Richardson ground squirrels) posed in a series of 47 anthropomorphic scenes, from a hair dresser to a preacher to an RCMP officer. Located north of Calgary, east of Olds on highway #27. Open daily from 10am to 5pm. Admission $2 for adults.’
Handlist of Adult Changelings March 30, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Modern
Beach’s hell is about to begin as today is the day that Mrs B runs away to Athens leaving him alone with his younger daughter FOR 48 HOURS. Beachcombing’s relations with tiny little Miss B are mainly restricted to playing peekaboo and putting her to bed. The next TWO DAYS then will be terrifying for both parties. While Beach is enjoying his last half hour of freedom he thought he would put together the outlines of a fairy handlist. Over the years Beach has stumbled (constantly) on references to changelings: i.e. children changed by the fairies for a fairy. However, he has also sometimes come across references to adult fairies, namely fairies that were changed in childhood and then survived into adulthood when they were politely shunned by their neighbours. Just to set things off here are a few from his very short list: he would love any additions, drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com For contributors rules are (i) the changeling should be real (no tenth-hand accounts about villages two hundred years ago) and (ii) the changeling has to be an adult: changeling children are everywhere and (iii) the change took place in childhood rather than in adulthood, no nursing mothers or Bridget Clearys.
This one is from a British newspaper in the 1880s: this describes an unusual variant on the changeling tradition.
I often called, on my way to school, at the house of a very little old woman (in fact I do not ever remember seeing a less woman) called Fanny Bradley, with the pretence of buying pens and pencils, but more from a desire to see this little woman; and I am sure that there are scores of the older part of the inhabitants of Rigton and Stainburn and the villages surrounding Almscliff Crag at the present day who can remember this little woman and her brother Tom, who was a very little man also. People said that when these two little folk were infants their mother took them with her to a field adjoining Almscliff Crag, where she had occasion to go to shear or reap some corn. At that day it was generally admitted by most people that a kind of little people of the fairy order, about 2ft. high and about the same proportion in body, and dressed in all kinds of flash and gaudy colours, and flying about with the quickness of lightning, inhabited the openings and crooks in the rocks. While this woman was busy at work these fairies came and stole her children. When she found that her children had gone she cried and was so much troubled that the fairies brought them back, and placed them where they found them. And they said that that was the reason Fanny and her brother were so little.
This is from Evans Wentz’s Fairy Faith and is rather upsetting. Sadly too the photo has not survived:
One of the most striking examples of a changeling exists at Plouharnel-Carnac, Brittany, where there is now living a dwarf Breton whom I have photographed and talked with, and who may possibly combine in himself both the abnormal psychical and the abnormal pathological conditions. He is no taller than a normal child ten years old, but being over thirty years old he is thick-set, though not deformed. All the peasants who know him call him ‘the Little Corrigan’, and his own mother declares that he is not the child she gave birth to. He once said to me with a kind of pathetic protest, ‘Did M. —- tell you that I am a demon?’
This is Evans Wentz again, also in Brittany:
M. Goulven Le Scour, at my request, wrote down in French the following account of actual changelings in Finistère:–’I remember very well that there was a woman of the village of Kergoff, in Plouneventer, who was called —-, the mother of a family. When she had her first child, a very strong and very pretty boy, she noticed one morning that he had been changed during the night; there was no longer the fine baby she had put to bed in the evening; there was, instead, an infant hideous to look at, greatly deformed, hunchbacked, and crooked, and of a black colour. The poor woman knew that a fée had entered the house during the night and had changed her child. This changed infant still lives, and to-day he is about seventy years old. He has all the possible vices; and he has tried many times to kill his mother. He is a veritable demon; he often predicts the future, and has a habit of running abroad during the night. They call him the ‘Little Corrigan’, and everybody flees from him. Being poor and infirm now, he has been obliged to beg, and people give him alms because they have great fear of him. His nick-name is Olier. ‘This woman had a second, then a third child, both of whom were seen by everybody to have been born with no infirmity; and, in turn, each of these two was stolen by a fée and replaced by a little hunchback. The second child was a most beautiful daughter. She was taken during the night and replaced by a little girl babe, so deformed that it resembled a ball. If her brother Olier was bad, she was even worse; she was the terror of the village, and they called her Anniac. The third child met the same luck, but was not so bad as the first and second. The poor mother, greatly worried at seeing what had happened, related her troubles to another woman. This woman said to her, ‘If you have another child, place with it in the cradle a little sprig of box-wood which has been blessed (by a priest), and the fée will no longer have the power of stealing your children.’ And when a fourth child was born to the unfortunate woman it was not stolen, for she placed in the cradle a sprig of box-wood which had been blessed on Palm Sunday (Dimanche des Rameaux). ‘The first three children I knew very well, and they were certainly hunchbacked: it is pretended in the country that the fées who come at night to make changelings always leave in exchange hunchbacked infants. It is equally pretended that a mother who has had her child so changed need do nothing more than leave the little hunchback out of doors crying during entire hours, and that the fée hearing it will come and put the true child in its place. Unfortunately, Yvonna —- did not know what she should have done in order to have her own children again.’
Here is a passage in Hartland’s Science of Fairy Tales describing a passage in Rhys (sorry we don’t have time to hunt down the original!).
Professor Rhys’ description of a reputed changeling, one Ellis Bach, of Nant Gwrtheyrn, in Carnarvonshire, is instructive as showing the kind of being accredited among the Welsh with fairy nature. The professor is repeating the account given to him of this poor creature, who died nearly half a century ago. He tells us: ‘His father was a farmer, whose children, both boys and girls, were like ordinary folks, excepting Ellis, who was deformed, his legs being so short that his body seemed only a few inches from the ground when he walked. His voice was also small and squeaky. However, he was very sharp, and could find his way among the rocks pretty well when he went in quest of his father’s sheep and goats, of which there used to be plenty there formerly. Everybody believed Ellis to have been a changeling, and one saying of his is well known in that part of the country. When strangers visited Nant Gwrtheyrn, a thing which did not frequently happen, and when his parents asked them to their table, and pressed them to eat, he would squeak out drily: ‘B’yta ‘nynna b’yta’r cwbwl’ that is to say’ Eating that means eating all.’ A changeling in Monmouthshire, described by an eye-witness at the beginning of the present century, was simply an idiot of a forbidding aspect, a dark, tawny complexion, and much addicted to screaming. [is this latter a child?]‘
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30/04/2012: Count Otto writes in.Concerning adult changelings – what exactly do you mean by this? Does the adult in question have to be actually done away with, or at least permanently removed, and replaced by a totally different person who may or may not look the same? If so, examples are probably very rare indeed. However, if the physical body remains the same, but the person inside is generally reckoned to be somebody else, does that count? And if so, does the transformation have to be absolute, or are there degrees of separation? Consider one of my favourite unashamed fraudsters of all time, Tuesday Lobsang Rampa. When it transpired that his physical body was in no way Tibetan, either genetically or in the sense of ever having been there, a convenient explanation was forthcoming whereby his soul was indeed that of a Tibetan lama, but his body was in every legally provable sense that of an Englishman who, thanks to a bizarre bird-watching accident, was now somebody else. Now, you may not believe that. Not many people do. Though you have to admire a man who with a perfectly straight face published the telepathically-dictated autobiography of his cat.However, a huge proportion of all the people who ever allegedly went to Fairyland were literally “not quite the same person” when they came back. And sometimes they didn’t come back for years. There is a very good case for suggesting that every fairy abductee was replaced by an actual fairy, and since fairies are generally reckoned to be highly intelligent, most of them more or less pulled it off, but they’re not perfect, so a few of them didn’t.Which ties in extraordinarily well with the modern alien abduction phenomenon. You’ve got your bog-standard abductees. Then you’ve got your star-children, who are in every biological sense human until the aliens whisk them away, and after that they suddenly announce that they aren’t human and somehow never were, and start displaying a combination of hitherto unadmitted artistic ability and rather vague psychic powers that would have come as no surprise at all to anyone who knew Thomas the Rhymer.And then you’ve got your “walk-ins” – biological humans who are suddenly somebody else because they have a totally alien consciousness. Effectively, 100% different people who happen to be identical in every way that you can actually prove. When you compare that with the medieval notions of possession and obsession (in its original sense of being demonically compelled to do things for no halfway logical reason), I think you’ll find that a very tangled can of worms has been opened.’ Thanks Count!!
Fairies and Vegetation March 16, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary, Modern
***Dedicated to Pater Beach***
Yes, sorry, Beach has not respected his only one-fairy-post a week rule. But this just proved too interesting to let go AND it was keeping him awake while Mrs B was gently snoring besides him.
First the facts. In many modern works fairies are portrayed as ‘nature spirits’ actively working for trees, flowers, gorse bushes or whatever else is green and tickles your fancy. Sometimes they are allies of nature, sometimes they are the personification of nature and sometimes things get all very Gaia and the two points mesh. For example, in an astute modern essay: ‘If fairies are some hidden aspect of natural processes, the personification of rotting or photo-synthesis in a parallel reality, then – yes, maybe I can believe in them.’
Modern instances of this let’s-all-vote-green tendency are countless though there are some particularly striking descriptions associated with the New Age commune at Findhorn in Scotland. For example, a nature spirit there explained to Robert Ogilvie Crombie ‘that he lived in the Garden, and that his work was to help the growth of trees. He went on to say that the Nature Spirits had lost interest in humans, since they have been made to feel that they are neither believed in nor wanted. He thought that men were foolish to think that they could do without the Nature spirits.’
It would be interesting to see if this concern over nature and humanity’s ‘broken relationship with the planet’ can also be traced in post-war UFO reports as environmental angst and anxiety grow in the 1950s and 1960s.
Beach has found many references to fairies as nature drones in theosophical works. For example, take this from Edward Gardner’s Fairies: A Book of Real Fairies (1945).
The life of the nature spirit, nearly the lowest or outermost of all, is active in woodland, meadow and garden, in fact with vegetation everywhere, for its function is to furnish the vital connecting link between the stimulating energy of the sun and the raw material of the form-to-be. The growth of a plant from a seed, which we regard as the ‘natural’ result of its being placed in a warm and moist soil, could not happen unless nature’s builders [i.e. the fairies] played their part.
Similar sentiments can be traced back through theosophical works to, at least, 1900, when they become rarer but when they are still kicking around. However, Beach has had enormous problems finding any traditional texts crediting fairies with this special relationship with vegetation. The closest – though this is really quite different – are Brownies who help around the house and the farm: until, of course, the ignorant farmer offers to buy them some clothes and they skedaddle.
The one text that did seem to anticipate this dates to 1870 and, at least claims, to be telling the story of an experience from some years (decades?) before: it has no trace of links with theosophy or proto-theosophy.
A Yorkshire man sees some fairies hoeing turnips and, though he is disbelieved, ‘… he stuck steadily to his story; and never went hoeing turnips again without a full conviction that, if he got up early enough, he should be sure to see the fairy farm-labourers. And when he never did see them, he still persisted – if the turnips were particularly green or well grown – that the little men, with their little hoes, must have been there in the night.’
Beach would be inclined to put all the nature spirit stuff down to zeitgeist and the changing way that humans process ‘fairies’ in their imagination. But this one Yorkshire text suggests that such a belief might date back to traditional modern or even early modern beliefs: anything earlier or similar? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
And while we are speaking fairies: a potential new fairy fake with thanks to Mike! ‘It’ looks suspiciously like the Virgin to Beach.
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16 March 2012: Invisible very kindly sends in fragments from a chapter of Katherine Briggs entitled ‘Forgotten Gods and Nature Spirits’. Beach is not particularly struck by any connection between these nature spirits and vegetation. They seem more the personification of certain forces in nature: particularly unpleasant and dangerous ones. However the Gwyllion and the goats come close to the idea of assistance in livestock terms and the final tale, dating from 1900 (?), might fit into the idea of a connection between a fairy and growth? ‘The nature spirits are the rarest of all the fairies in these islands and yet traces of them can be found in many places. The Calleach Bheur, the Blue Hag of the Highlands, appears to be the personified spirit of Winter. She herds the deer, and fights Spring with her staff, with which she freezes the ground. When at length Spring comes, she throws her staff under a holly tree under which green grass never grows. It is the Cally Berry in Ulster who is in perpetual conflict with Fionn and his followers. Black Annis of the Dane Hills of Leicestershire is a hag-like creature of the same kind. Her name is said to be derived from Anu or Danu, the Celtic goddess, mother of the Tuatha de Danu. In Wales, the Old Woman of the Mountain leads travellers astray. She is one of the Gwyllion, the hill fairies of Wales. They are friends of the goats, as the Cailleach Bheur is of the deer. Occasionally they come down from the mountain and enter human houses, where they must be hospitably entertained. A gentler and more benevolent mountain spirit is the Ghille Dubh of the Gairloch district. He was seen in the second half of the eighteenth century dressed in leaves and moss. He looked after lost children and led them home. In spite of his kindness five lairds of the Mackenzies set out to shoot him. Fortunately, they found no trace of him. A more excusable attempt was to poison the Each Uisge, who lived in Loch na Beiste in the Gairloch district by putting hot lime into the water. In this they did not seem to succeed as he was seen again in 1884…. In Germany there are spirits which guard the cornfields; the only trace of such a belief which I have found in Britain is in a tale told to me in 1959 by Jeannie Tobertson, the folk-singer who is one of the travelling people of Aberdeenshire. It was told her by her grandmother as a personal experience. Mrs Robertson’s grandmother, when she was a girl of fifteen, had, like the other girls of her family, a pony of her own. Hers was a little beauty, of whom she was very fond, and she looked after it very carefully. This particular year there was a poor harvest, and the farmers were unwilling to part with their grain, even for money. The girl was determined that her pony should not want, even if she had to steal for it. One night they camped near a fine field. Where the corn was standing in shocks, ready to be led. That night, after the rest of the camp was asleep, she stole out and went to the field. It was a bright moonlight night, as clear as day. She stooped to pick up a sheaf, and something moved beside her. She glanced aside, and saw a wee, wee woman, as big a year-old child. The little creature did not seem to notice her, but jumped on to one of the sheaves, and leapt from shock to shock. The girl drew back. Though her horse starved, she felt she could not steal from that field. Step by step she crept away, and still the little woman leapt from sheaf to sheaf. So they girl went back empty handed.’ Thanks Invisible!
29 March 2012: Pam adds ‘Also, I’ve been poking around (in a rather distracted manner, I admit) regarding the subject of nature spirits, as discussed in your blog of March 16. If Evan-Wentz is to be believed, the idea that fairies help in the growth of plants is a Neo-Platonic one and goes back to at least the 16th century (if I’m remembering correctly!). Which suggests to me that it was probably a belief amongst the scholarly occultists rather than something the local cunning man or woman might adhere to. (Then again, who knows?) (I believe there was also some reference to this Neo-Platonic idea in Paul Devereux’s Fairy Paths, but he may have gotten it from Evan-Wentz as well.) I’ve been meaning to copy out the passage(s) from Celtic Faith (& etc.) for a week and a half, but things are rather chaotic on my home front as well. I’ll try to get to it soonish. (Any excuse to comb through the fairy lore, et al., is welcome.)’ Thanks Pam!!
30/April/2012:
Pam writes back with the promised passage: I couldn’t find much in the Paul Devereux book, so my memory was faulty there, but here are the relevant passages from Evans Wentz. W. Y. Evans Wentz, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries: In the positive doctrines of mediaeval alchemists and mystics, e.g. Paracelsus and the Rosicrucians, as well as their modern followers, the ancient metaphysical ideas of Egypt, Greece, and Rome find a new expression; and these doctrines raise the final problem—if there are any scientific grounds for believing in such pygmy nature-spirits as these remarkable thinkers of the Middle Ages claim to have studied as being actually existing in nature…. These mediaeval metaphysicians, inheritors of pre-Platonic, Platonic, and neo-Platonic teachings, purposely obscured their doctrines under a covering of alchemical terms, so as to safeguard themselves against persecution, open discussion of occultism not being safe during the Middle Ages, as it was among the ancients and happily is now again in our own generation…. All these Elementals, who procreate after the manner of men, are said to have bodies of an elastic half-material essence, which is sufficiently ethereal not to be visible to the physical sight, and probably comparable to matter in the form of invisible gases. Mr. W. B. Yeats has given this explanation:—’Many poets, and all mystic and occult writers, in all ages and countries, have declared that behind the visible are chains on chains of conscious beings, who are not of heaven but of earth, who have no inherent form, but change according to their whim, or the mind that sees them. You cannot lift your hand without influencing and being influenced by hordes. The visible world is merely their skin….’ [From Yeats' Irish Fairy Tales and Folk-Tales] Wentz again three paragraphs on: And independently of the Celtic peoples there is available very much testimony of the most reliable character from modern disciples of the mediaeval occultists, e.g. the Rosicrucians, and the Theosophists, that there exist in nature invisible spiritual beings of pygmy stature and of various forms and characters, comparable in all respects to the little people of Celtic folk-lore. Yeats’s words do somewhat remind me of the famous opening of the Reverend Robert Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth,wherein he says these beings are said to be of a midle Nature betuixt Man and Angel, as were Dæmons thought to be of old; of intelligent fluidious Spirits, and light changable Bodies, (lyke those called Astral,) somewhat of the Nature of a condensed Cloud, and best seen in Twilight. Thes Bodies be so plyable thorough the Subtilty of the Spirits that agitate them, that they can make them appear or disappear att Pleasure. Some have Bodies or Vehicles so spungious, thin, and delecat, that they are fed by only sucking into some fine spirituous Liquors, that peirce lyke pure Air and Oyl…’ Thanks a million Pam!
Fairy Sighting on Skye, c. 1880 March 12, 2012
Posted by Beachcombing in : Contemporary, Modern
The family crisis continues here and so Beach offers a modest little post on a fairy sighting in Skye: perhaps Beachcombing’s favourite witness account of the ‘good folk’. This was written out in the early 1960s that puts the experience back c. 1880.
In the darkening of an Autumn evening over eighty years ago a little boy in the Isle of Skye was awaiting the return of his mother from a visit to an ailing neighbour. He and his elder sister had been left with their grandmother while their mother was on an errand of mercy. Another little boy had joined them, and all had played happily during the afternoon. Their own home was some distance from their grandmother’s – just too far for little ones unaccompanied. Presently there came to call on their grandmother an elderly woman from the village, one whom the children knew well and whom they liked. Probably by this time they were becoming a little tired and cross, and their old friend was trying to amuse them. Suddenly she said: ‘Come with me. I want to show you something.’ They all took hands and went out into the gloaming and down the path by the side of the burn. Then the old lady stopped, and said: ‘Look, do you see them?’ And there on the hillside, all dressed in green, were the fairies dancing in a ring round a fire. The children were simply enchanted by what they saw, and one can imagine their excitement and the wonderful story they would have to tell their mother on her return. Next morning they rushed out to look for the ashes of the fairy fire, but there was nothing to be seen.
So what is so special about this account? Well, it is perhaps not the account in itself, but what the account led to that makes Beachcombing’s hair stand on end. The little boy in this story was Ernest Edward Briggs, the father of perhaps the greatest post-war British folklorist Katherine Briggs. And as one biography of KB puts it ‘[her father] was an imaginative storyteller and devoted to Katherine and it was from this childhood influence that Katherine developed a strong interest in fairytales and folklore later in life.’ Certainly this story haunted the family and was told again and again.
KB, in fact, wrote:
[A]s children my brother and sisters and I were never tired of hearing this story. My aunt too, when she came to visit us, would corroberate [sic] the tale. And I have passed it on to mine, and shown them the green, grassy mound ‘where Papa saw the fairies’. Two years ago, and for the first time, I met the third child, now an old man, and he could recall as vividly and clearly as if it had been yesterday all the details of that wonderful evening.
This could in part be rationalised away as brother and sister retelling and retelling an experience and misunderstanding the presence of fairies on a Scottish island: the wealthy Briggs family had connections with Skye. But KB’s discussion of the tale with ‘the third child’ suggests someone outside the magic circle who had his own independent memories.
Perhaps KB is right, if we want to look for a ‘rational’ solution, to concentrate on the one adult present who was said to have second sight.
An interesting point in this narrative is the second-sighted woman who gave the children their glimpse of the fairies. It is noticeable that they were all hand in hand when they saw them, though her method was simpler than that of the wizards described by Kirk, who put their right hand on their pupil’s head and their right foot on his left and made him look over their right shoulder. The fairies were dressed in the usual manner in green and were dancing round a fairy knoll, but it was somewhat unusual for them to dance round a fire instead of being more mysteriously lit. Fires are as a rule only used by the iron-working fairies.
As always where ‘genuine’ fairies are concerned Beachcombing has not the slightest idea what to make of this. He has though since becoming part of the fraternity of fairy scholars become fascinated by the fairy-faith beliefs of those involved in fairy studies. Views on the reality of fairies seem to stretch from wicked disbelief to silly-headed credulity. What for example did Briggs really think about the existence of fairies? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
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14/Mar/2011: Fey writes: ‘The question of fairies, belief and fairy experts is a fascinating one. Let me give some examples. There are out and out believers: e.g. Signe Pike and Eddie Lenihan. They are not scholars and can get away with it. Janet Bord author of Fairies: Real Encounters with Little People is a serious type and I suspect that she believes. ‘My personal view is that traditional fairy lore had developed from various stimuli, namely belief in nature spirits, primitive races, pagan gods and the spirits of the dead. Personal sightings, on the other hand, could be the results of imagination, fabrication, or the externalisation of unconscious archetypes. If these were the only explanations, then none of the Little People seen were objectively real. Can this be true? I honestly do not know, and I am not going to pretend that I do, but if I were to allow myself a flight of fancy, I would speculate that some of the Little People might be real, and that they live in another world which exists parallel to ours.’ Katharine Briggs says in some place – can’t find it! – that the Cottingley Fairies don’t seem real to her because they look too much what Edwardian Fairies should look like. Does this not imply a certain patience that fairies can exist? Perhaps, perhaps not. Or what about this from Welsh scholar Robin Gwyndaf? ‘Once upon a time there was a boy who lived on a farm, high in the hills of north Wales. Occasionally when he was not needed to help with the housework or on the farm, or when he just felt like wandering over his ‘country estate’, he would leave the farm yard, walk along Cae Bach (the little field) until he came to Y Giat Goch (the red gate. Once through this he was right in the centre of a circular piece of land about ten yards in diameter . The grass there was always green – unusually green – and always fine and even, like velvet. There the young lad would sit for hours and dream his time away. Nowhere would he be happier than in that green circle of land near the red gate, because there the fairies would come and take him with them on a long journey, over the Foel Goch hill, Llangwm village nearby, and the Berwyn mountains, to a wonderful land of beauty and plenty, sweet music and dance. The author of this essay was that yong boy! I mention my childhood recollection not to emphasise the power of imagination, but to point out that the belief in the fairies persisted in Wales into the late forties and early fifties of this century.’ This surely implies belief in a scholar?’ Thanks Fey!
