News from The Secret Commonwealth

 

In a book titled The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, Robert Kirk (1644-1692), a Gaelic scholar and Anglican vicar at Aberfoyle in Scotland,  describes a “secret way of correspondence” with the invisible world: a means of crossing between ordinary and nonordinary reality at will. Kirk subtitled his work “An Essay of the Nature and actions of the Subterranean and for the most part Invisible People, heretofore going by the names of Elves, Fauns and Fairies and the like.”

Subtle bodies The inhabitants of these realms are not disembodied. They have “light changeable bodies, like those called Astral, somewhat of the nature of a condensed cloud. They shape-shift and can make their “bodies of congealed air” appear and disappear at will.

Middle nature: The fairies are “of a middle nature betwixt man and Angel,” like the daimons of the ancient world. Kirk discusses rival opinions in his parish about whether the “good people” are spirits of the departed, clothed in their subtle bodies; “exuded forms of the man approaching death”; or “a numerous people by themselves.” He suggests that all these descriptions may be valid for different groups.

Doubles. Kirk reports that each of us has a double who is fully at home in the Otherworld. The old Scots Gaelic term for this double is coimimeadh (pronounced “coy-me-may”), which means “co-walker.” Kirk improvises a series of synonyms for the double, including: twin, companion, echo, “reflex-man,” and living picture. The double resembles the living person both before and after she or he dies. The double survives physical death, when the co-walker “goes at last to his own land.” When invited, the co-walker will make itself “known and familiar.” But most people are unaware that they have a double. Since it lives in a different element, it “neither can nor will easily converse” with the everyday waking mind.

As natural as fishing As a man of the Church, Kirk goes to great lengths to argue that there is nothing ungodly about “correspondence” with Otherworld beings, quoting reports of visionary experiences in the Bible. He also contends that it is as “natural” to encounter the inhabitants of the Otherworld as it is to go fishing; both involve moving into another element. Yeats brings this to poetic life in "The Song of Wandering Aengus", where a man fishing with a hazel rod catches a little silver trout that becomes a girl with apple-blossom in her hair.  

Kirk reassures us that we are dealing with “an invisible people, guardian over and careful of man,” whose “courteous endeavor” is to convince us of the reality of the spiritual world and of “a possible and harmless method of correspondence betwixt men and them, even in this life.” 

However, local legend has it that members of the Secret Commonwealth found the minister too mouthy about them and carried him away one summer evening when he was walking on a dun-shi, a fairy hill behind his house.  He was taken before his book was published. It remained for Sir Walter Scott to discover and publish it in 1815. The frontispiece is a watercolor drawing  hy Sir D.Y. Cameron depicting the Hill of the Faitries at Aberfoyle. Bailie Nicol Jarvie describes this hill and its legends in Rob Roy.

Kirk's successor as minister at Aberfoyle, the Rev. Dr. Grahame, in his Sketches of Picturesque Scenery, recounted that as Kirk was walking on the fairy hill, he sunk down in a swoon, which was taken for death. “After the ceremony of a seeming funeral,” Scott continued the story in Demonology and Witchcraft , “the form of the Rev. Robert Kirk appeared to a relation, and commanded him to go to Grahame of Duchray. ‘Say to Duchray, who is my cousin as well as your own, that I am not dead, but a captive in Fairyland; and only one chance remains for my liberation. When the posthumous child, of which my wife has been delivered since my disappearance, shall be brought to baptism, I will appear in the room, when, if Duchray shall throw over my head the knife or dirk which he holds in his hand, I may be restored to society; but if this is neglected, I am lost for ever." According to this story, Kirk did appear at the christening, and “was visibly seen;” but Duchray was so gobsmacked that he did not throw his dirk  and Kirk went away again.

Kirk lived in a world not yet "dispeopled of its dreams" as Andrew Lang wrote in his introduction to a 1893 edition of The Secret Commonwealth. Lang proceeded to discuss experiences of the co-walker:  "All things universally have their types, their reflex: a man’s type, or reflex, or ' co-walker' may be seen at a distance from or near him during his life—nay, may be seen after his death. The gifted man of second sight can tell the substantial figure from the airy counterpart."

Lang was especially interested in the kind of double that goes ahead of you for which the Norwegians use the term vardøger, who "was often seen of old to enter a House, by which the people knew that the Person of that Likeness was to visit them in a few days....It may have occurred to most of us to meet a person in the street whom we took for an acquaintance. It is not he, but we meet the real man a few paces farther on. Thus a distinguished officer, at home on leave, met a friend, as he tells me, in Piccadilly. The other passed without notice: the officer hesitated about following him, did not, and in some fifty yards met his man. There is probably no more in this than resemblance and coincidence, but this is the kind of thing which was worked by the Highlanders into their metaphysics."

Illustration: Robert Kirk Goes Away. RM+AI

Scottish Crossings to Fairyland

 

Robert Kirk, a seventeenth-century Anglican vicar at Aberfoyle in Scotland, wrote a remarkably detailed account of the Otherworld, its inhabitants, and their intercourse with living human beings. He wrote it by hand, as magical texts need to be written, with the greatest of  care, in 1691. Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth is not another collection of folklore and popular beliefs but a rigorous study, scientific by the standards of its day, that is clearly grounded in experience. Its main interest today is that it describes a “secret way of correspondence” with the invisible world: a means of crossing between ordinary and nonordinary reality at will.

Kirk subtitled his work “An Essay of the Nature and actions of the Subterranean and for the most part Invisible People, heretofore going by the names of Elves, Fauns and Fairies and the like.” By “subterranean,” he does not mean creatures living in dark, gloomy places in the bowels of the earth. Their realm is full of light, though it is not lit by any sun. They live in “cavities” and may pass wherever air may go. The earth is “full of cavities and cells,” and everywhere is inhabited; there is “no such thing as pure wilderness in the whole Universe.”

Though invisible to most humans, the inhabitants of these realms are not disembodied. They have “light changeable bodies, like those called Astral, somewhat of the nature of a condensed cloud.” They are best seen at twilight. They shape-shift and can make their “bodies of congealed air” appear and disappear at will.

The fairies are “of a middle nature betwixt man and Angel,” like the daimons of the ancient world. They are mortal, in the sense that they pass from their existing state, but they live far longer than a human life span. They are strongly connected to the earth and special places within the earth. They tend to show themselves in the costume of the country and speak its language. Kirk discusses rival opinions in his parish about whether the “good people” are spirits of the departed, clothed in their subtle bodies; “exuded forms of the man approaching death”; or “a numerous people by themselves.” He suggests that all these descriptions may be valid for different phenomena. Just beyond the borders of everyday perception is a vast and varied population.

Encounters with the fairies can be dangerous. They are known to abduct humans into their realm Those who enter the Otherworld willingly may have a hard time getting back. Some inhabitants of the invisible realm are hostile to humans, and some seek to feed on the energy of the living. However, the peoples of the Secret Commonwealth take a close interest in human affairs, and our lives are closely related to theirs. 

One of Kirk’s most intriguing observations is that each of us has a double who is fully at home in the Otherworld. The old Scots Gaelic term for this double is coimimeadh (pronounced “coy-me-may”), which means “co-walker.” Kirk improvises a series of synonyms for the double, including: twin, companion, echo, “reflex-man,” and living picture. The double resembles the living person both before and after she or he dies. The double survives physical death, when the co-walker “goes at last to his own land.” When invited, the co-walker will make itself “known and familiar.” But most people are unaware that they have a double. Since it lives in a different element, it “neither can nor will easily converse” with the everyday waking mind.

Your double may be seen by others. Kirk gives several examples: of someone’s double entering a house shortly before the person himself arrived; of sightings of the double of a person who had just died or was soon to die; of the perception of the subtle form of a lover or spouse standing close to the loved one; of a woman who observed her second self walking ahead of her as she left her home. Kirk also offers clues to the possible influence of the co-walker — even unrecognized and unperceived — in a person’s life. He cites the Scots belief that someone who eats great quantities of food without putting on weight is being joined in the gourmandise by a “joint eater” or geirt coimitheth. Maybe there is a tip here for a new weight-loss program!

Rereading The Secret Commonwealth, I asked for dream guidance to clarify exactly what Robert Kirk means by “co-walker.” In my dream, I acquired a suede coat identical to the coat I most often wear when flying around the world or traveling to my Active Dreaming workshops. In my dream, I carried both these garments, swapping them according to circumstances. The dream confirmed my suspicion that Kirk is writing about the dream double; unfortunately, he tells us little about dreaming, where the double is most easily perceived.

Kirk speculates that everything may have its double — a tantalizing hint of the existence of what I have called counterpart reality.

How can we know the truth about these things? Through the art and science of seeing. Robert Kirk describes the practice of the Scottish seer as he was able to understand and enter it. The seer is able to make spirits visible to himself and others. He is able to cross into the Otherworld and return at his choosing. Kirk includes a curious report of a seer who was seen to vanish, body and soul, from a certain spot and reappear an hour later some distance from the point of his crossing. 

The gift of seeing runs in certain families, but many of the most powerful seers receive their calling directly from the spirits. Their initiatory visions are often wild and shamanic; they gall into “fits and Raptures.” The gift of seeing brings the ability to look into subtler orders of reality and perceive things “that for their smallness or subtlety and secrecy are invisible to others” even though they are intermeshed with them. The seer is accompanied by an inner light that can be focused and directed, “a beam continually about him as that of the sun.” Kirk’s description of the taibhsear’s “beam” closely parallels Inuit accounts of the “shaman-light” of the angaqok.

Kirk provides an interesting account of a seer’s initiation. He winds a cord of human hair around his middle in the shape of a helix. He bends down and looks backward between his legs. The object of his gaze may be a funeral procession, moving over a border crossing. Or it may be a hole in a tree — like the hole left in a fir tree when a knot has gone.

Kirk describes how a seer can provide a layman with temporary access to the Sight. The apprentice places one foot on the seer’s foot, while the seer lays a hand on the apprentice’s head, so that the would-be seer is enclosed within the taibhsear’s body space as well as his energy field. as he looks over the seer’s right shoulder, the apprentice is suppose to see “a multitude” of beings rushing toward him through the air.

The gifts of seeing include the ability to fold time and space. Kirk cautions — as any good practitioner would — about the difficulty of interpreting and working with some of these sightings. He recounts the case of a woman with the Sight who foresaw a seaborne attack on her island in the Hebrides but was confused about whether the soldiers in the boat were hostile or friendly and even whether they were coming or going — with good reason, since they had stolen a barge from her island and were rowing toward it with their backs to the shore.

As a man of the Church, Kirk goes to great lengths to argue that there is nothing ungodly about “correspondence” with Otherworld beings, quoting reports of visionary experiences in the Bible. He also contends that it is as “natural” to encounter the inhabitants of the Otherworld as it is to go fishing; both involve moving into another element. He reassures us that we are dealing with “an invisible people, guardian over and careful of man,” whose “courteous endeavor” is to convince us of the reality of the spiritual world and of “a possible and harmless method of correspondence betwixt men and them, even in this life.”

According to local tradition, Robert Kirk paid for his knowledge. He was reputedly taken by the fairies in 1692 into a fairy knoll across a little valley from his church; villagers were still pointing out the site centuries later. Were the fairies annoyed with him for revealing their secrets? Or had they fallen in love with him? Maybe the tale was concocted by people who wanted to “spook” their neighbors into keeping away from personal exploration of the unseen. Some say the fairies took Kirk’s body and soul; some say only the soul. A related tradition says that he had a means of coming back from the Otherworld that depended on the actions of a cousin to whom he announced it in a dream. But the cousin lost his nerve when he saw the clergyman’s double appear in the church at a baptism. So Robert Kirk remained on the other side.

 

 

Text adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul,Imagination and Life Beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library

Art: A Fairy Ring’ by Walter Jenks Morgan (1847-1924)

 

Neither folk nor fairy

We did not have the term “near-death experience” (NDE) when I kept dying and coming back as a young boy. The first edition of Raymond Moody’s book Life after Life did not appear until 1975, twenty years after I left my body in St Andrew’s hospital in Melbourne and flew through the Moon Gate to live a life in another world while my body lay under the surgeon's knife.
     If the phenomenon now called NDE had been recognized earlier, it might have been easier for me to have been heard and understood by those around me. It would have been helpful to me to know that many others in Western society have reported profound experiences of leaving their bodies and that this is widely recognized as evidence that the soul can travel outside the body and that there is life after physical death.
    There is a statement in Life after Life that spoke to me deeply when I eventually got to read it: “Once the dying person reaches a certain depth in his experience, he does not want to come back, and he may even resist the return to the body.” This was certainly part of my story.
    Moody argues in Life after Life that “the similarity of so many of the accounts” is a reason for believing reports of NDEs.  But when I read the cases he assembled, and then hundreds of other reports from Near Deathers, I did not find many close “similarities” to what I experienced when I was nine, and seemed to live a whole life in another world. The stories that spoke to me were from ancient and indigenous cultures, from folklore, and from Eastern traditions.
    In Yeats’ song, I heard a voice that knew something of where I had been:

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand.

For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

      When I discovered George MacDonald’s tales of Highland seers and ghosts, I found a phrase that spoke very directly to my experience of trying to live in the ordinary world. In MacDonald’s wonderful little book The Portent: A Story of the Inner Vision of the Highlanders Commonly Called the Second Sight, the woman who nursed the narrator reveals details of his strange birth and his possible connection with a tragic drama played out in an earlier time. The nurse has the gift of second sight; she sees things happening at a distance, and moving between dimensions. She cautions Duncan that he will never be “either folk or fairy”. I did not remember quoting this phrase as a young boy. I doubt that it would have helped me communicate with those around me. But the notion that one may be “neither folk nor fairy” – but something of both” – helped me to explain things to myself.
     In MacDonald’s “faery romance,” Phantastes, the book C.S.Lewis said “baptized” his imagination, the room where the protagonist is sleeping turns into an enchanted forest overnight. Water spilling from a green basin becomes a little river. The floral patterns of the carpet become wildflowers and grasses along its bank. When he follows it into the woods, he is in Fairy Land. He is welcomed and fed by a friendly woman in a cottage of living trees, and knows she must be at least part human because she is awake during the day, when the fairies sleep. But she is something else as well. She must live close to fairies, and eat a little of their food, or else she will always be hungry.
      This became a pattern for me, since I went away. I found that the gates of the Otherworld opened from wherever I happened to be, and that I went hungry unless I stayed near its people and shared some of their food. I never had trouble staying awake in the night, or sleeping in the day.

- Excerpted from The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Art: Fairies by Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) 

The people beyond the garden gate

Though mostly skeptical of reported sightings of the Little People, I’ve had some personal encounters – wide awake and dreaming in the animate world of nature – that have quelled my inner naysayer. Here’s a brief account of one such episode, when I stepped through a garden gate in Gloucestershire, into the greenwood:

I walk by the redwood - a newcomer to this English landscape,　and a link to a place of my heart - above the cow pastures, and past an ancient sycamore that leans over a softly bubbling spring. I am drawn to a path that leads up to the kitchen garden on a rise behind the stone manor house. The far end of the garden is aglow with pink and peachy roses, rambling and climbing over trellises, forming a bower.
　　 Beyond the roses is a gate in the high, old brick wall that separates the garden from the woods beyond. In the arch is a weathered gray door, secured by a simple wooden latch. The woods are bottle green, dark as an inkpot above the top of the door. I open the gate and step through, onto a trail part covered by ground ivy.
　　As I walk the path, a breeze picks up, and soon the woods are alive with whispers. The stir is most active beneath and around me, where the wind does not reach. I have the vivid sense of small creatures running and hiding. I am amazed by the thought that they are trying to hide from me. I can't see them, not yet. But I sense them quite distinctly. They are Little Ones.
　　 There's no need to be afraid, I tell them. I'm not going to hurt you.
　　 For a moment, the woods seem very still.
　　 Then a small country voice says, from among the roots of a tree, We thought you were one of the Lords.
　　 Oh, I don't think so. Who are the Lords? Do you mean the Normans? Or the Courts of the Fairies?
　　 Sshhhh. We don't talk about Them.
　　 This leaves me quite uncertain about the identity of the Lords they fear.
　　 Wait, they tell me. We'll get the Centaur.
　　 It seems that this creature is the Big Man in the society of the Little Ones. I am tremendously excited by the prospect of meeting a centaur. When he gallops up, I am amazed. He is certainly a Big Man, in this company, with a massive torso, a curling black beard, two stumpy horns - and a phallus like a club. But he is about six inches in length, from his chin to his tail. And his body below the waist is that of a billy goat, not a horse, although he does indeed stand on four legs rather than two.
-----The Goat-man tries to act bold in front of the Little Ones, but is plainly terrified. From his perspective, I am a giant, and of entirely unknown intentions.
-----I can see the whole company more distinctly now. The Little Ones are the size of elm leaves. I have no wish to disturb their society, or make their centaur lose face. I bid them good day, and follow the track deeper into the woods.

-----It does not surprise me that when I stroke the smooth bark of a beech, the tree responds. I absorb a deep knowing from within the beech, and have the impression of a feminine figure whose eyes are leaf-green, without pupil or irises. She instructs me on natural remedies for various bodily complaints; when I check them out later, they work brilliantly.

This is an excerpt from the travel journal I kept while leading a five-day summer adventure in “Reclaiming the Ancient Dreamways” at Hawkwood College in Gloucestershire, at the invitation of Celtic scholar and shaman Caitlin Matthews.

Drawig: "Gate to the Little People" by RM

With the fairies

In the liminal state between sleep and awake, in the gray hour before dawn, I dress for a visit to Faerie. I give myself a splendid body, young and strong, the broad shoulders and narrow waist worthy of a Minoan bull dancer. I give myself a simple crown, a band of gold around the hairline with a glowing blue jewel suspended from it to hang over the third eye. I place a torque around the neck. I add a cape and kilt, and a wand, worn like a sword when not in use.
    Grand adventures unfold.
    When I go up to the lodge for breakfast, a woman from my workshop can't wait to tell me about something she saw in that pre-dawn hour."Robert! I saw you in a dream before dawn. You appeared in a small TV screen in the midst of my other dream. You were dressed as a fairy king, with a crown with a blue star and a wand."
     I guess the weave of dreaming between members of a community of dreamers glows brighter when you add a little fairy dust.
     This thought was confirmed in the first session of my workshop that morning. An older man new to my work returned from a group journey and reported to me, joyously, "I met a sylvan nymph! She led me on a path of adventure in Faerie realms."

Photo: Elven Oak in Kensington Gardens by RM

When a tree faery keeps your child soul safe

Prague

She came to my Shamanic Dreaming workshop because (she told us) she was seeking to find and follow the paths of her soul. She embarked on all our journeys with courage and high enthusiasm. What was quite unexpected, and life-transforming, was what happened when she accepted an invitation to visit the Magic Library.
     This is a real place in another order of reality, one I often call the Imaginal Realm. It is a realm of true imagination. Palaces and temples and schools and pleasure gardens are constructed here through creative interaction, and they may be visited by prepared and invited travelers over centuries or millennia of human time.
     In the Magic Library, access to any form of knowledge is possible. So is contact with master teachers in any field. In introductory workshops, I often invite participants to use their life memories to open the portal. Think of a favorite library or bookshop, museum or gallery where your imagination came alive in the presence of fresh images and ideas. Picture yourself at the threshold. When the drumming begins, step through the door. You'll find yourself in a deepening space. Its contents and possibilities go far beyond the memories you used to come here. Information may be stored here in many forms.
     The traveler I wish to celebrate picked a used bookstore that she loves, in her native city in another part of Central Europe. When she went inside the bookshop (as she told me) she found that a wall of books "peeled back", revealing a garden behind.
     She stepped out, with delight, into the garden, and then into the wood behind it. She paused at a certain tree because someone up in its branches was throwing sticks down at her. When she examined the sticks, she recognized Celtic designs that had been carved on them. Maybe they were Ogham sticks.
     She looked up, and saw a druid perched in the tree.
     She remembered one of the assignments I had suggested for this group journey. She told him, "I am looking for the story I am now living. Can you help me?"
    "Your story is about a Lost Girl," he responded. "When you were very young, a tree faery took part of your spirit because you world was not safe. Ever since then, the tree faery has kept that girl safe, inside a tree you know." The druid proceeded to identify the tree, and the park where it stands in her native city. She remembered the tree, and the park, very clearly from childhood.
    "You must go to that tree and retrieve your Lost Girl," the druid instructed.
     She promised she would do that, as soon as possible after she goes home. We discussed how, in Celtic folklore, people often sing to bring a soul back home, sometimes from a tree where it has been sheltered is is perching like a bird. She readily agreed she would sing for her Lost Girl, at the tree from her childhood, to entertain the faery and prove that she was ready to be a lively host for her child self. I am eager to hear the next installment.

For instructions on how to access the Magic Library, which I sometimes call the Secret Library or the Dream Library, please see Dreaming the Soul Back Home.

photo (c) Robert Moss

Remember 398.2 when a library beast says that fairies aren't real

"If you believe," he shouted to them, "clap your hands; don't let Tink die."
    Many clapped.
    Some didn't.
    A few beasts hissed.

- from Chapter 13: Do You Believe In Fairies? in Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie

For the category of "beasts that hissed", I nominate the library person who told the young daughter of a friend of mine, yesterday, "You won't find books about fairies in nonfiction because fairies aren't real."
    My friend described this beast as a "librarian". However, a true librarian I know can't believe that any real librarian could have made such a statement. Why? Because besides being mean-spirited it is just plain wrong.
    Any trained librarian ought to know that under the Dewey system, fairytales are to be found under call # 398.2, which is NONFICTION. You might be sitting at a librarian's desk, but if you don't know that, you are not a librarian.
     There are other things any good librarian would know, starting with the fact that there is a whole library of intriguing nonfiction books about fairytales (not forgetting that fairytales are themselves nonfiction!) In the English language, it starts with Robert Kirk's amazing Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, written by an Anglican minister in Scotland in 1691. The list extends through W.B.Yeats' commentaries in his anthology of Irish Fairytales and Folklore, W.B. Evans-Wentz's remarkable The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, replete with the narratives of the old ones from the Isle of Man to Brittany, through the investigations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the scholarship of Katharine Briggs, the archetypal inquiries of Marie-Louise von Franz, and the spirited mythic work of John and Caitlin Matthews.
     A good librarian would also know how fairytales have fired the imagination of tremendous creative writers. C.S.Lewis declared that George MacDonald was his "master" and that MacDonald's Phantastes: A Farie Romance "baptized" his imagination. The beloved Color Fairy Books collected by Scottish scholar and folklorist Andrew Lang have fueled the imaginations of thousands of writers as well as millions of children.
     My friend's daughter went home in tears after the hissing beast in her library told her that fairies aren't real. What to do? I suggested she should be sure to carry that Dewey call # with her as a charm next time she goes to that library. 398.2.

    We might all make a wish that any bright spirit who is available should help to rescue the child in that library person who has been locked up in some Land of Lost Girls and Boys, and let her back into her mind and heart and imagination.

    Oh, yes. And any time some hissing beast tells us that fairies aren't real, we must clap our hands immediately.