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For more than three centuries, The Secret Commonwealth has endured as the definitive textbook on fairies and their interaction with human beings. It was written by a protestant minister, Robert Kirk, who was surprisingly neutral in his treatment of the subject.
In the acclaimed writer Andrew Lang reprinted The Secret Commonwealth adding his own introduction which far surpassed the length of Kirk's original. The present edition includes both. In this edition, Kenneth Brennan has modernized Kirk's archaic language without detracting from its original charm. His extensive notes illuminate both texts with respect to advancements in our understanding of history over the past century. Cover art has been provided by Selina Fenich.
Welcome to the magical world of Faery! This book takes readers along on the journeys of the Reverend Robert Kirk, a seventeenth-century vicar of the parish of Aberfoyle, Scotland, into the heart of the faery world. Robert Kirk was a minister, Gaelic scholar and folklorist, best known for The Secret Commonwealth, a treatise on fairy folklore, witchcraft, ghosts, and second sight a type of extrasensory perception described as a phenomenon by the people of the Scottish Highlands.
This last feat, creditable to a saint or a Neo-Platonist like Plotinus, was reckoned for sin to Archbishop Sharp, as may be read in Wodrow's Analecta. Thus all Fairydom was commonly looked on as under the same guilt as witchcraft.
Yet Mr. Kirk of Aberfoyle, living among Celtic people, treats the land of faery as a mere fact in nature, a world with its own laws, which he investigates without fear of the Accuser of the Brethren.
We may thus regard him, even more than Wodrow, as an early student in folk-lore and in psychical research--topics which run into each other--and he shows nothing of the usual persecuting disposition. Nor, again, is Mr. Kirk like Glanvil and Henry More.
He does not, save in his title-page and in one brief passage, make superstitious creeds or psychical phenomena into arguments and proofs against modern Sadducees. Firm in his belief, he treats his matter in a scientific spirit, as if he were dealing with generally recognised physical phenomena. Our study of Mr. Kirk's little tractate must have a double aspect. It must be an essay partly on folk-lore, on popular beliefs, their relation to similar beliefs in other parts of the world, and the residuum of fact, preserved by tradition, which they may contain.
On the other hand, as mental phenomena are in question--such things as premonitions, hallucinations, abnormal or unusual experiences generally--a criticism of Mr. Kirk must verge on "Psychical Research. It "transfers" thoughts of no value, at a great expense of time and of serious hard work. But, as far as the writer has read the Society's Proceedings, it "takes no keep," as Malory says, of these affairs in their historical aspect.
Whatever hallucination, or illusion, or imposture, or the "subliminal self" can do today, has always been done among peoples in every degree of civilisation. If there be an element of fact in modern hypnotic experiments a matter on which I have really no opinion , it is plain that old magic and witchcraft are not mere illusions, or not commonplace illusions.
The subliminal self has his stroke in these affairs. Assuredly the Psychologists should have an historical department. The evidence which they would find is, of course, vitiated in many obvious ways, but the evidence contains much that coincides with that of modern times, and the coincidence can hardly be designed--that is to say, the old Highland seers had no design of abetting modern inquiry.
It may be, however, that their methods and ideas have been traditionally handed down to modern "sensitives" and "mediums. But first we glance at The Secret Commonwealth as folk-lorists.
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