A Window Into the Celtic Otherworld

The National, the newspaper that bills itself "The Newspaper that Supports an Independent Scotland",recently fearured an article by Professor Alan Riach. Dr. Riach, a Professor of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University, has written an article that surveys over the centuries Scottish lieterary works that have focused on the Celtic Otherworld. 

Among them are " The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies" by Robert Kirk (c1641-92), "Survivals of Belief Among the Celts" (1911) by George Henderson (1866-1912), who collected material from the Outer Hebrides, particularly South Uist and the "The Magic Arts in Celtic Britain" (1946) by the poet Lewis Spence.

Of particular interest to Professor Riach is a work by John Gregorson Campbell (1834-91), who was a Gaelic-speaker from Appin, a minister of Tiree, and one of the major folklorists of the 19th century: "The material he collected c1850-74 was published in two volumes, Superstitions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland (1900) and Witchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands (1902). The dating suggests that some of his informants were born in the 18th century and some stories seem to predate the Jacobite rising of 1745, drawing from an earlier, more traditional Gaelic society."

Professor Riach raises a common theme which is the corruption of Celtic belief caused by the arrival of Roman Catholicism: ' The Catholic tradition in Scotland reports that the fairies are supposed to belong to the angelic order of beings who remained neutral in the revolt of the Angels. They had to undergo a trial on earth after their leader Lucifer had been expelled from Heaven and fallen into Hell. When God commanded the angels to cease fighting, those who fell to earth became fairies, those who remained in the sky became the northern lights, those who fell on rocks became echoes, those who fell in the sea became seals. Yeats and Lady Gregory were informed that there were two kinds of fairies, the Tuatha Dé Danann, or the Peoples of the Goddess Danu, who were good, and the Fir Bolg, or Men of Bags, “more wicked and more spiteful”: these are “the two races of the Sidhe”.

Speaking of Robert Kirk, who wrote in the 17th century, Riach describes the tension between Christianity and the Celtic cultural beliefs which at the time dominated the the Gaelic speaking lands: "Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle – I said we’d come back to him – author of The Secret Commonwealth of Elves and Fairies, was described as a “walker between two worlds” and Black confirms the justice of this appellation, “but not in the sense in which it was intended. The two worlds Kirk walked between were the Gaelic-speaking world of the parish of Aberfoyle in Perthshire, where he preached, and the Scots- and English-speaking worlds of his parents and background in Edinburgh. As a churchman, he was more than familiar with Latin but it is his immersion and integration into the Gaelic world which validates the description. Black notes: “This is a truly ‘secret commonwealth’ with a discernible organisational principle, and indeed the traditions of the Church upon which the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory is based were themselves substantially inherited from eschatologies of this kind, including those of the Celts and the Greeks.”

For anyone interested in ancient Celtic belief and the concept of the "The Otherworld" this article is a solid jumping off point. 

Read the full article here: https://www.thenational.scot/news/18255854.witchcraft-fairies-folklore-journey-gaelic-otherworld/