DeDanaan

Filed by Aine MacDermot

The Celtic Spirit World
by Lewis Spence
from ‘The Magic Arts in Celtic Britain’
(chapter VII)

As might be expected of a strain in whom the mystical preponderates, the Celt believed himself to be surrounded by numbers of viewless beings of varied type and character, some beneficent, others the reverse. His ideas concerning these naturally differed considerably throughout the centuries and according to local circumstances, but it has often been remarked that the Celtic attitude towards the phantom world is distinguished by a certain gruesome relish and appreciation seldom to be met with in other races. As a Scotsman I have frequently had occasion to note this extraordinary predilection for the gloomy and the weirdly repulsive. The primitive nature of many of our ghost-forms is self-evident. Our ballad literature is replete with instances in which the dividing line between dead and living is imperfectly conceived. In such cases the ghost is usually a body rather than a spirit, thus resembling the vampire of the Balkans and other areas. The lover returns to his mistress at midnight, in the same form as he assumed before death, yet bearing all the signs of mortality.

To the Celts, as to many other primitive folk, the inhabitants of the supernatural world were regarded as one in essence, merely varying forms of spiritual life. They did not distinguish very clearly between spirits of men, animals or birds. To them, indeed, spirit appears to have been of human origin alone, and might for a season attach itself to a body and then leave it - to take up residence in a tree, a rock or a watercourse. As the centuries passed this crude original notion was greatly modified, but almost to the day before yesterday we find instances of its acceptance. The writer’s maternal grandmother, who would have been regarded in educated circles as a woman of culture, assured him on her death at the age of eighty that she would return in the shape of a bird and would peck at his window. Her mother was gifted with the second sight, and the occult experiences of both were of so continuous and complicated, a nature as to be accepted by the remainder of the family - hard-bitten shipbuilders, naval surgeons and the managers of large industrial concerns - as the common coinage of everyday occurrence. Nor are such cases rare in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, as thousands are aware.

This sentiment of fellowship with the supernatural, the sense of living on the edge of it, or in constant communion with it, has naturally conferred upon the Celtic ghost qualities not usually discovered in the larvae of other races. He (or she) is horrible, frequently repulsive, yet it is understood that so he should be. If he were not it would indeed be quite out of keeping. It is expected of him that he should be as ghastly as possible, as if otherwise, his reputation would rapidly deteriorate. For something happens to the Celtic person after death; he assumes by enchantment a certain property of untouchableness, of separateness from the terrestrial sphere which renders it risky in the extreme to have dealings with him. This particular condition is expressly conveyed by many passages in the ancient Irish sagas. Even a journey to the home of the gods will bring about such a state of things in the case of a living man. We are told, for example, in The Book of Leinster, that when Loegaire, son of the King of Connaught, returned from the home of the gods, he was advised by his hosts that he and his comrades should not dismount from their horses when they reached earthly soil. (1) To do so would have brought about their instant transformation to dust. The dwarf ruler who entertained the British King Herla in the Otherworld issued a similar warning to his guest and his followers, but in some cases it went unheeded, so that the neglectful crumbled into dust when they dismounted in their own country. (2) This species of enchantment is alluded to by Malory in speaking of King Arthur. Some men, he remarks, aver that the king is not dead but still survives. “I will not say that it shall bee so,” adds Sir Thomas, “but rather I will say that heere in this world hee changed his life. (3)

This belief undoubtedly arises from the primitive idea that death was an unnatural contingency, a calamity caused by the spells or malevolent magical devices of supernatural beings, ancestral spirits, or wizards. Once the Celt crosses the borderline which separates the living from the dead his general nature undergoes an entire alteration, he assumes the magical character and abilities of the inhabitants of the Land of the Dead. He is the creature of another element. He is surrounded by a set of taboos which bear no relationship to existence in the earth-life.

All this differentiates the Celtic idea of death very markedly from that as understood by other races. When mortals of other than Celtic stock return from the Land of the Gods or the Land of the Dead they usually do so as heroes, bearing with them gifts of usefulness to humanity, framing new legal codes, bringing knowledge to men. But the Celtic visitor to the Land of the Dead lingers on earth miserably for a space, until, with the echoes of the divine place where he has sojourned ringing in his ears, he once more seeks its peace and is not again seen in the haunts of men.

That the spirit of man could function as a “ghost” even while he was still alive appears to have been a doctrine acceptable to the Cells, and this associates it in a measure with the belief in the vampire. The Celtic belief in a species of “doppel-ganger”, or astral counterpart, is revealed in the writings of the mystical Robert Kirk, the minister of Aberfoyle, towards the end of the seventeenth century (a secret Rosicrucian, if I mistake not), for he speaks of a “Reflex man, a Co-walker, every way like the Man, as a Twin-brother and companion, haunting him as his shadow, as is oft seen and known among Men (resembling the Originall), both before and after the Originall is dead”.(4) This appears to be much the same is the Irish “fetch”, whose name seems to me to be a corruption of the Irish Gaelic taidhbhse (pron. “taish”), meaning “ghost”. Should one see the fetch of a person in the morning, the incident has no doomful significance. To see the double at night implies the death of the person seen. Mrs. B-, the wife of a doctor in an Irish town, beheld the fetch of her husband standing near the window while he slept by her side. Later, the doctor confessed that he himself had seen the apparition. On the following night Dr. B- rose from his sleep, calling for help, but shortly expired. (5)

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