Book summary “The fairy-faith in Celtic countries”: summary

Introduction

You live in a materialist world that often reduces ancient folklore to childish superstition and idle peasant imagination. You miss the living reality of invisible dimensions because modern science rejects any experience it cannot measure in a laboratory.

The belief in fairies is not mere superstition, but an ancient, universal science of the unseen spiritual world supported by psychical research and comparative religion.

W. Y. Evans-Wentz investigates the living Fairy-Faith across Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall, and Brittany through direct field testimony, comparative mythology, archaeology, and psychical science. You will discover how folklore preserves ancient religious doctrines about the soul and the afterlife.

The book answers several key questions about this invisible reality:

• How do living peasants in Celtic lands perceive the unseen world?
• What links ancient megalithic monuments to the cult of the dead?
• Can modern psychical research explain fairy abductions and visions?
• How did Christianity absorb older pagan beliefs in spirits and nature divinities?

1. The Anthropo-Psychological Method and Theories

The living Fairy-Faith must be studied through direct field interviews and psychical research rather than obsolete materialist theories.

You must build any comprehensive study of belief on direct contributions from the Celtic folk, guided by noted scholars such as A.E. and William Butler Yeats. The research relies heavily on oral and written testimony from diverse social classes, ranging from peasants and scholars to poets and seers. Six regional introductions were specifically contributed by distinguished Celtic scholars for the collection of evidence.

Beginning in June 1908, the author walked from straw-thatched cottage to cottage across Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and Brittany to collect direct testimony. You discover that investigating the living Fairy-Faith requires an anthropo-psychological method that prioritizes folk-lore, direct field interviews, and psychical research over library books. Folklore must include psychical research, archaeology, and anthropology to properly study mankind.

The Religious Nature of the Fairy-Faith

Every civilization has possessed some form of belief in an unseen realm populated by invisible beings. The belief in fairies shares the same fundamental origin as all global religions, mythologies, and attempts to interpret an unseen spiritual world. The Celts conceptualize these inhabitants as gods and fairies, paralleling how ancients saw daemons and Christianity views angels and souls.

The author compares the pagan tumulus of Carnac in Brittany, dedicated to the Archangel Michael, and Karnak in Egypt as parallel centers of ancient religion and spiritual expression. Because psychical experiences like seeing fairies are not universal, modern languages have not developed words for them. Consequently, materialists mislabel anything untranslatable to physical existence as unscientific mysticism.

An American traveler and an Australian traveler can easily discuss travel because both share the experience, whereas a saint cannot easily explain ecstasy to someone who has never felt it.

Critique of Materialistic Theories

The Naturalistic Theory explains how physical environments shape the anthropomorphic traits of fairies, but it fails to account for the fundamental germ idea of a fairy. Environment influences local legends so that fairies reflect their surroundings, such as gentle fairies in green Irish dells versus fierce water-kelpies in stormy Scottish highlands. However, environment alone cannot create a belief without an underlying germ idea waiting to be acted upon.

The gentle green hills of Connemara produce gentle good people, whereas the dark-rising mountains and cloud-shadowed lakes of the Scottish Highlands produce fierce fairies and terrible water-kelpies.

The Pygmy Theory, which posits that fairies are folk-memories of a prehistoric race, is superficial and ignores essential psychical elements of the belief. Promoted by writers like David MacRitchie, the theory claims fairy lore derives from early races driven into mountain fastnesses. Critics like Dr. Bertram C. A. Windle and Andrew Lang counter that northern Scotland had no true pygmy race, mounds are often sepulchral rather than domestic, and fairies exist in regions where no pygmies ever lived.

North America features fairy beliefs despite the complete absence of a native pygmy race.

The Druid Theory of fairy origins is too narrow, while the Mythological Theory correctly views fairies as diminished ancient pagan divinities. The Druid Theory assumes fairies stem solely from folk-memories of Druids or Druidesses, which fails because Irish and Welsh myths prominently feature female entities from the Otherworld rather than historical Druidesses. The Mythological Theory is acceptable as far as it goes, but it requires the Psychological Theory to explain the origin of the underlying gods.

Irish and Welsh mythology are full of stories about fairy women coming from the Otherworld despite Druidesses playing an insignificant role.

Modern city life insulates people from nature and inhibits psychical perception, whereas country-dwelling peasants remain naturally responsive to invisible influences. Urban herding creates an unhealthy psychical atmosphere and constant nerve tension that suppresses the Subliminal Self. Uncorrupted peasants living in natural solitudes retain their intuitive faculties and rightfully trust their direct experiences of seeing fairies.

City-dwellers obsessed with business, politics, or social status lose touch with nature, whereas Celtic peasants living close to the soil readily experience psychical phenomena.

2. Living Testimony from Ireland

Dr. Douglas Hyde distinguishes short, conversational folk-beliefs about supernatural manifestations from long, intricate folk-tales centered around a hero. An old man on the mountain-side tells conversationally of seeing fairies near the fort, quite unlike telling the long tale of the Speckled Bull.

Irish peasants and seers retain direct conversational beliefs in the Sidhe, fairy music, and invisible forces inhabiting ancient raths.

The Fairy Folk of Tara

On the ancient Hill of Tara, modern fairy-folk hold undisputed sovereignty, featuring strange music and ghostly processions. John Graham, over seventy years old, heard the pipes in the wood and at the Rath of Ringlestown.

Local tradition holds that those who block fairy paths or use their bushes for fuel suffer retribution, such as wood refusing to burn and the offender pining away. A man named Caffney cut fairy-bushes as fuel, found that the wood would not burn despite sparking, and died within six months.

Evidence from Kilmessan

Traditional safeguards and offerings are practiced in Connemara and other Irish districts to protect dairy products and livestock from fairy influence. Belief dictates that fairies take a portion of milk or butter left behind during milking or churning.

You use specific protective gestures to guard dairy produce:

• Put one's thumb in the pail of milk after finishing milking.
• Use the wet thumb to make the sign of the cross on the thigh of the cow on the side milked.
• Place a live coal about an inch square under the churn when churning.
• Leave the knife used in drying butter unscraped so the remaining butter goes to the fairies.

A scholarly Roman Catholic priest from Connemara recalled seeing people place a live coal about an inch square under the churn and leaving an ounce or two of butter un-scraped from the knife for the fairies, out of a total amount of three pounds of butter.

3. Brythonic Divinities and Arthurian Romance

Arthurian legends and Welsh romances enshrine ancient Celtic divinities, fairy queens, and initiatory Otherworld journeys.

King Arthur originated as a great Celtic god and culture hero. You find that he was later confused and identified with a sixth-century historical chieftain. Arthur's father was Uthr Bendragon, a king of Hades. His sister is Morgan le Fay, an inhabitant of the Celtic Otherworld of Avalon.

Arthur as Fairy King

The name of Arthur's wife, Gwenhwyvar, translates to White Phantom or White Apparition. This links her directly to the fairy-folk and ghosts. Sir John Rhŷs demonstrated that the second part of her name is cognate with the Irish word for a fairy or ghost.

Green is the traditional colour worn by fairy-folk, symbolizing eternal youth, resurrection, and re-birth. When Queen Guenever goes maying, she warns her knights to be well-horsed and dressed in green. In the Myvyrian Archaiology, Arthur speaks with Gwenhwyvar while she is on a green steed and he is on a black one.

Lancelot grew up as the foster-son of a fairy woman on an island in the sea. According to Ulrich von Zatzikhoven's account analyzed by Gaston Paris, after his royal parents fled and his father died, an infant Lancelot was carried away by a fairy rising in a mist to her abode in the Land of Maidens. Lancelot was one year old when his parents were forced to flee.

The Literary Evolution of Romances

Starting from early historical mentions in Nennius around 800 AD, Arthurian traditions developed through Geoffrey's Historia Regum Britanniae into popular European literature. Geoffrey completed his Historia Regum Britanniae in 1136. Wace published Le Roman de Brut in 1155. Layamon wrote his Brut around 1200, following the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 after which fairy-romances began to exercise literary influence.

Layamon's Brut records distinct passages about elves enchanting the infant Arthur at birth to give him might, long life, and kingly virtues. In Old French romances called Romans d'Aventure and Romans Bretons, fairies appear as supernormal women who love mortal heroes. Morgain la Fée is represented as Arthur's cousin in Brun de la Montaigne.

In Chrétien de Troyes's romance Le Conte de la Charrette, Gwenhwyvar is abducted by Melwas. Her rescuer must cross the Water Bridge, which is a foot and a half wide, and the Sword Bridge, whose edge is two lances in length. These dangerous crossings mirror world mythology about crossing into the realm of the dead.

4. The Celtic Otherworld and Quests

The ancient Celtic Otherworld was not conceptualized as a distant celestial Christian heaven. You can understand it as a subjective realm situated either underground or far out in the Western Ocean.

The Celtic Otherworld is a subjective heaven-world accessed through magical talismans, sacred branches, and visionary trances.

Poets described this realm vaguely because it is subjective. It could be entered through caves or green hills where the defeated Tuatha De Danann retired to live as invisible beings and gods of the harvest. Scribes placed it in the midst of the Atlantic Ocean as a double of Atlantis, ruled by divine figures like Manannan Mac Lir.

Hy Brasil is said to appear like a phantom far out on the Atlantic. Intelligent witnesses reported it in the summer of 1908. It was also seen near Innishmurray once in seven years.

Irish manuscripts use multiple interchangeable names for the western Otherworld to designate it as the happy plain or land of the living. Ancient texts refer to this subjective realm through various poetic titles that emphasize youth, life, promise, and happiness. These names reflect the belief that the region accommodates gods, fairies, demons, and shades:

• Tir-na-nog
• Tir-Innambeo
• Tir Tairngire
• Tir N-aill
• Mag Mar
• Mag Mell

The Silver Branch and the Golden Bough

The Celtic Silver Branch and the classical Golden Bough served identical functions as magical passports and talismans for mortals entering the underworld. To visit the Otherworld before death, you required a passport given by the fairy queen. This talisman was usually a silver branch from a sacred apple-tree that produced soothing music and served as food.

Aeneas used the Golden Bough plucked near Avernus to convince Charon to ferry him across the Stygian lake into Pluto's realm.

Striking parallels between Celtic and classical underworld journeys suggest they are poetic descriptions of actual psychic experiences from ancient initiatory mysteries. By comparing the Rites of Proserpine and the Mysteries of Eleusis with Celtic legends, you find that all these mythological realms are different cultural expressions of the single great subjective heaven-world. Passing into these realms in a trance state and returning with full consciousness corresponds to ancient initiatory procedures.

Voyages and Quests

In the Voyage of Bran, the hero receives a white silver apple branch from a mysterious woman and sails to the Land of Women. Bran falls asleep to sweet music, awakens with a silver branch, and receives fifty quatrains from a fairy woman. He sails west, meets Manannan riding his chariot on the waves, visits the Island of Joy and the Land of Women, and eventually returns to Ireland under a taboo against touching the earth without holy water or protection.

When one of Bran's party leaps ashore in West Kerry and breaks the taboo, he instantly turns into a heap of ashes as if he had been dead for centuries.

Cormac travels to the Land of Promise guided by the god Manannan, receiving a magical silver branch and a truth-testing gold cup. A grey-headed warrior gives Cormac a musical silver branch, subsequently taking away Cormac's daughter, son, and wife as payment. Cormac follows them into a mist and discovers a wondrous bronze-and-silver realm containing the Fountain of Knowledge, whose five streams represent the five senses.

Manannan gives Cormac a gold cup that breaks into three pieces if three falsehoods are spoken under it.

Magical wands and symbolic branches used by gods, fairies, bards, and Druids served as instruments of control and authority across various cultures. Irish bards and Druids carried wands or branches of bronze, silver, or gold depending on their rank to command spirits, elementals, and human assemblies. This tradition parallels global religious and civil symbols such as Moses' rod, royal sceptres, episcopal croziers, and official maces.

Chief bard Sencha waved his peaceful branch during a bloody fray in Ulster, causing all the men to become silent and quiet.

The hero Cuchulainn is struck down by fairy women into a year-long malady and lured to the Otherworld before being cured by druidic magic. Fand and Liban transform into birds and are injured by Cuchulainn, who is subsequently whipped into a near-fatal illness by the fairy women. After his charioteer explores the Otherworld and reports its glories, Cuchulainn visits it for a month, but is eventually separated from Fand by his wife's jealousy, druidic potions, and Manannan's shaking mantle.

Cuchulainn lay sick at Emain-Macha for a full year without speaking to anyone until an unknown messenger arrived.

Ossian spends three hundred years in Fairyland with a fairy princess, but ages instantly upon returning to Ireland and touching the ground. Carried away across the ocean on a white horse, Ossian lives in the Otherworld for centuries before an overpowering homesickness drives him back to Ireland. His wife warns him three times never to touch level ground, but when he assists men in moving a marble slab, his girth breaks and he falls off, immediately turning into an aged, decrepit, and blind man.

Ossian helps a multitude of men move a heavy slab of marble, loses his balance on his horse, and falls to the ground.

Christian scribes progressively reinterpreted pagan Otherworld legends, converting the happy paradise into Christian heavens, purgatories, or hells. From the eighth century onward, Christian copyists fused pagan myths with Christian concepts, transforming the over-sea paradise into abodes of saints, monkesses, or fiery hells where souls are tormented. Saints like Brandan and Malo even embarked on physical ocean voyages to find the pagan heaven-world, and the Tuatha De Danann were rationalized into historical mortals.

Saint Malo embarked with his teacher Brandan in a boat to find the mysterious country, only to be turned back by waves until an angel explained that eternal peace is promised by Christianity.

5. The Doctrine of Re-Birth

The Celtic belief in re-birth is inseparably connected with the conception of the Otherworld, forming a dominant factor of the same religious system.

Alfred Nutt and other scholars noted that death is viewed as going to the Otherworld and birth as coming back to this world. Ancient nations such as Egyptians, Indians, Greeks, and Celts taught re-birth in their mysteries and philosophical systems.

According to the Barddas MSS.

According to the Welsh Barddas, soul evolution is structured around three circles of existence through which consciousness unfolds.

The three circles are Ceugant, Abred, and Gwynvyd. You can trace existence in Abred from the dead as you traverse it, while Gwynvyd brings absolute knowledge and freedom.

• Traverse every state of life for experience and judgment
• Remember every state and its incidents
• Be able to traverse every state as desired

Reincarnation of the Tuatha De Danann

Ancient Irish tradition holds that divine personages and members of the Tuatha De Danann can be reincarnated as mortals on the human plane. Heroes such as Cuchulainn and historical figures were regarded as avatars or reincarnations of early gods, with their pedigrees traceable to the Tuatha De Danann or Sidhe race.

Cuchulainn is explicitly noted as the avatar of the sun-deity Lugh lamhfada, who appeared to Cuchulainn's mother Dechtire and told her the child was a reincarnation of himself.

King Mongan of Ulster is recorded in historical tales as the reincarnation of the legendary hero Find, as verified by a visitor from the Otherworld. Cailte proved his identity and Mongan's past life by describing the exact location of the spear-head, stone pillar, and inscribed ogam near the river Larne.

6. The Testimony of Archaeology and Megaliths

The pygmy theory of fairies fails to explain why folk-memories regarding megalithic structures consistently operate in psychical channels globally. Major tumuli were religious and funereal from the beginning. Treating megaliths only as former human dwellings ignores the widespread and persistent folk belief that they are haunted by invisible beings, ghosts, and fairies.

Ancient megaliths and stone images were not mere idols, but were venerated as abodes or media for gods, daemons, and ancestral spirits.

The Peulvan at Noyal-Pontivy was said to go down to drink at rivers, and the King Stone at Rollright goes down the hill on Christmas Eve.

Ireland's chief idol, Cenn Cruaich, represents an ancient solar menhir surrounded by twelve pillar stones. St. Patrick attempted to place his crosier on Cenn Cruaich at Mag Slecht, causing the idol to bow westward and the twelve surrounding images to be swallowed by the earth. Traditional circular dances performed around megalithic monuments survive as memorials of ancient solar initiatory sun-dances.

Cult of Gods and Spirits

Chambered tumuli like New Grange served as spirit-temples for celebrating pagan mysteries and communicating with the dead rather than mere tombs. Neophytes performed fasts and vigils within the inner chambers to invoke ancestral spirits and receive divine counsel, paralleling the practice of incubation in ancient mysteries.

If you wish to follow ancient custom, you can perform these traditional steps:

• Travel to a sacred tumulus or grave of wizards.
• Sit down in the inner chamber or green of the brugh without company.
• Fast on the Tuatha De Danann for three days with their nights to invoke invisible beings and secure their prayer.

Aengus represents a Celtic solar deity whose cult was centered at cyclopean stone structures and tumuli. Aengus transported Diarmuid's body to Brugh-na-Boinne and breathed a soul into it so it could speak to him daily.

New Grange and the Great Pyramid Compared

The Great Pyramid of Egypt and New Grange share identical architectural, astronomical, and esoteric functions as places of initiation.

Caliph Al Mamoun in A.D. 820 entered the Great Pyramid and found neither mummy nor gold, only an empty stone chest without a lid. Both structures feature precise astronomical alignments toward solstitial sunrises, narrow passage-ways, and an empty stone coffer or basin without a burial inscription. Initiates underwent symbolic death and resurrection by resting in these vessels, mirroring the journey of the sun through Hades.

The sunrise symbolized life, resurrection, and re-birth. Ezekiel witnessed men standing with their backs to the temple of Jehovah and their faces toward the east worshipping the sun.

When you stand at prayer, you can turn to the east to admonish the mind to focus on the Lord. Gavrinis in Brittany served as the continental counterpart to New Grange, functioning as a primary spirit-temple for initiations. An examination of the inner chamber of Gavrinis revealed three stone cavities worn smooth by ages of handling and touching.

7. Paganism, Christianity, and the Cult of the Dead

Christian authorities sought to eradicate ancient pagan worship of fountains, trees, and stones, but ultimately absorbed these cults into the new religion.

Christianity absorbed ancient pagan cults of sacred waters, trees, and ancestor worship, transforming them into church rituals and purgatorial rites.

Edicts were issued by the second Council of Arles in 452, the Council of Tours in 567, Charlemagne, and King Canute to punish those who venerated trees, stones, and fountains. The Church placed images of saints or the Virgin Mary over sacred wells and trees. Country-folk unconsciously transferred their veneration to Christian figures.

Sailors at the fountain of Recourrance in Brittany cast bread onto the water to divine future weather. Lovers drop pins into wells to test the favour of water-spirits. In 1835, an unusual drought in Concoret prompted inhabitants to process to the fountain of Baranton for rain.

Druids held trees, particularly the oak and mistletoe, in high religious veneration. Pliny, Maximus Tyrius, and Strabo recorded that the Druids used oak leaves in all sacred rites. In Carmarthen, Wales, the decaying trunk of Merlin's Oak is preserved in cement. Local prophecy declared that if the tree falls, Carmarthen will fall with it.

St. Patrick's Purgatory

St. Patrick's Purgatory at Lough Derg preserves the remnants of pre-Christian Celtic initiatory mysteries. Legends link Lough Derg to battles with water-monsters and the final stronghold of Druids.

You can trace the rigorous preparatory ordeals of pilgrims directly to ancient pagan initiation ceremonies. If you undertake this pilgrimage, you follow precise rules:

• Go to the bishop of the diocese, declare voluntary intent, and request permission to make the pilgrimage
• Obtain a recommendatory letter to the prior of the island after the bishop's warnings
• Spend fifteen days in the church fasting and praying
• Receive mass, holy communion, and holy water sprinkling
• Walk in a procession with litanies to the entrance of the purgatory
• Enter the cave after receiving priest benediction and making the sign of the cross
• Remain locked in the cave until the next morning

8. Science, Psychical Research, and the X-Quantity

The folk-religion of the Celts contains an x-quantity or unexplained residuum of phenomena that cannot be resolved by standard anthropological sciences. While folk-imagination and social psychology explain the vast majority of animistic evidence, specific paranormal classes of phenomena demand examination by physiology and psychology.

The most reliable test of the fairy-faith requires examining the unexplained residuum through rigorous psychical research.

Unexplained phenomena include collective hallucinations, objects moving without contact, supernatural raps, telepathy, seership, dream states with supernormal knowledge, and spirit possession.

Problems of Consciousness

Advanced dream and trance states surpass ordinary sensory reactions and reveal a deeper subconscious stratum of the human Ego. Under narcotics, hypnosis, or deep sleep, you can experience extensive events within a few normal minutes or lose months of time while waking up with no sense of elapsed duration.

Professor Hilprecht dreamed of an ancient Assyrian priest who deciphered a broken cuneiform cylinder that Hilprecht could not read in waking life. Admiral Beaufort was unconscious for two minutes after falling into the water, yet his imagination traveled over every minute detail of his entire past life.

Psychical Research and Fairies

Psychical research provides scientific proof that human consciousness and personal energy survive the physical death of the body. F. W. H. Myers documented repeated apparitions indicating post-mortem knowledge, automatic writing announcing unknown deaths, and trance personalities taking over living bodies.

Eminent scientists confirm through rigorous testing that external non-human intelligences and independent psychic forces exist in nature. Sir William Crookes used mechanical tests with the medium Mr. Home to prove that physical objects moved without physical contact.

Elizabeth Morison and Frances Lamont saw past historical records dating from 1789 at le petit Trianon, mirroring how Celts witness ancient fairy processions on Tara Hill.

10 Key Ideas

1. The living Fairy-Faith must be studied through direct field interviews and psychical research rather than obsolete materialist theories.
2. The belief in fairies shares the same fundamental origin as all global religions, mythologies, and attempts to interpret an unseen spiritual world.
3. Arthurian legends and Welsh romances enshrine ancient Celtic divinities, fairy queens, and initiatory Otherworld journeys.
4. The Celtic Otherworld is a subjective heaven-world accessed through magical talismans, sacred branches, and visionary trances.
5. The Celtic belief in re-birth is inseparably connected with the conception of the Otherworld, forming a dominant factor of the same religious system.
6. According to the Welsh Barddas, soul evolution is structured around three circles of existence through which consciousness unfolds.
7. Ancient megaliths and stone images were not mere idols, but were venerated as abodes or media for gods, daemons, and ancestral spirits.
8. The Great Pyramid of Egypt and New Grange share identical architectural, astronomical, and esoteric functions as places of initiation.
9. Christianity absorbed ancient pagan cults of sacred waters, trees, and ancestor worship, transforming them into church rituals and purgatorial rites.
10. The most reliable test of the fairy-faith requires examining the unexplained residuum through rigorous psychical research.