Bessie Dunlop, of Dairy, in Ayrshire, an associate of the witches, at some time about 1573 encountered “a fairy man”, one Thome Reid, who had been slain at the battle of Pinkie in 1547. At her trial she actually claimed to have seen this person walking in the High Street in Edinburgh, but, as fairies must not be addressed in public, she refrained from recognizing him. Says Andrew Lang, “there are excellent proofs that Fairyland was a kind of Hades, or home of the dead”. To Robert Kirk, the good pastor of Aberfoyle, the fairies were “an abstruse people”, the human doubles or astral bodies of the living. At the death of the man they represent, these “co-walkers” return “to their own herd”, that is to a separate existence in some appropriate limbo. He tells us that the folk on the Highland line in his day (circa 1660 – 90) believed that the souls of their predecessors dwelt in the fairy hills. “And for that end, say they, a Mote or Mount was dedicate beside every Churchyard, to receive the souls till their adjacent bodies arise, so became as a fairy hill.”(34) That is, there was a separate sepulchre or dwelling for the “fairy”, or human, soul. Reading this, we may understand how the orkney witch came to behold the fairies “rise from the kirkyard of Hildiswick”: Kirk, who, I have always believed, was a Rosicrucian, perhaps imposed upon his own local folk-lore something of the doctrine of spirits as he found it in Paracelsus and in the writings of Fludd and Vaughan.

In the Western Isles of Scotland the Sluagh, or fairy host, was regarded as composed of the souls of the dead flying through the air, and the feast of the dead at Halloween was likewise the festival of the fairies. The testimony of Lady Gregory and the late Mr. W. B. Yeats, as great a mystic as he was a poet, who jointly collected much Irish folk-lore, reveals that the majority of the people whom they examined believed that Fairyland was a region to which the souls of living folk might be spirited away while their bodies remained upon earth. “The dead,” wrote the great Jacob Grimm, “were known to the Norsemen as elves.”

The resemblance of the subterranean fairy world to the pre-Christian Hades helps to make plain the likeness of the whole fairy economy and background to those of the dead. Pluto and Proserpine, the Classical monarchs of the departed, were in early mediaeval times identified with the King and Queen of Faerie. In the early English poem of “Orfeo and Heurodys”, which localizes the story of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in England, Hades is called “Faerie”. But we must not confuse this idea with that of the Celtic insular otherworld, which was at first assuredly a Land of the Gods, and which later became confused with the conception of Fairyland. In the ancient ScotsEnglish romance of “Thomas of Erceldoune” (Thomas the Rhymer) the background is that of the mediaeval Hades, fused with that of the Celtic paradise, the apples on its fruit trees must not be eaten, and “the fiend of hell” comes once in seven years to claim a victim from among its inhabitants.

The germ of the primitive and prehistoric view of Faerie was indeed the idea of that subterranean mode of existence or “dead-aliveness” which early man conceived as going on in the mounds and tumuli in which he buried his dead. By poets and scholars it was confused with the Classical Hades, and later, by the churchmen who copied the old Irish sagas, with that of Purgatory.
And if I find difficulty in appropriately presenting in brief compass the evidence that the fairies are one and the same with the dead, what shall I say of that even greater body of proof which reveals their association with ancient places of sepulture, barrows, tumuli and stone circles? This part of the evidence has been almost entirely neglected in our country, although the pioneer labours of Mr. L. V. Grinsell in his Ancient Burial Mounds of England, and elsewhere, has done much to redeem the reproach. In France the work of MM. Saintyves, Le Rouzic and Professor Salomon Reinach has proved beyond question that standing stones in Brittany and other parts of that country are associated with fairies, who are thought of as inhabiting or “ensouling” them. That these fays represent the spirits of dead chieftains once worshipped ancestrally admits of no doubt.

But we must regard the fairies as the dead in an especial sense, for they were the spirits of the departed who awaited rebirth or reincarnation. Good evidence exists, and is multiplying, that savage people in a low condition of culture in Australia, Borneo and elsewhere believed that the spirits of the dead gather in communities in wild and deserted places, in hills, forests and lakes, and that when the period for their reincarnation comes round they take up a position of vantage in some isolated rock, tree or pond, from which it is thought they spring out upon a passing woman and enter the body of her yet unborn infant. Such spirits possess fairy-like traits an. habits and are regarded by savages precisely as the ancient peoples of Europe regarded fairies. (35) In Scotland, Ireland and Wales, numerous woods and copses, stones and rocks, lakes and lochs were formerly regarded either as the dwelling-places of the fairies or of the dead, and this reveals that such a belief as presently obtains among peoples of low culture today formerly flourished in Britain. Moreover, the idea associated with fairy changelings was certainly associated with that of reincarnation – the changeling, when unmasked, being invariably the spirit of an ancient man, or ancestor.

This theory not only accounts for the origin of fairy spirits, but it also explains and absorbs the remaining theories that fairies are either elementary spirits of nature or that they are a memory of vanished aboriginal races. Their residence in trees, stones and watercourses while awaiting reincarnation may make them appear as nature-spirits, but per se they are nothing of the kind. As Ridgeway says, all nature-spirits are regarded as having once been human beings. In early times the human dead were thought of as seeking an abode in desert places far from the dwellings of men. The theory that they were exclusively vanished races naturally also falls to the ground when we come to regard them as the ghosts of aboriginal folk of the Stone and Bronze Ages, which, in the first instance, they most certainly were, a tradition which appears to have survived throughout the ages.

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