| This woman, although discussing “red caps,” also appears credible as to the sincerity of her beliefs, but we cannot assume one way or the other that the people believed these stories, though some may have. When we arrive at writings as you will read in the following paragraph, it should be clear by now for the reader to see how mythology from the past is being woven into the time of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It becomes clear to me that Wentz himself is a Rosucrucian or Mason of sorts and helping to maintain the ongoing occultism of mushroom lore. Continuing with another quote by Wentz: “I have been told by more than one such seer that there on the hills and Greenlands (a great stretch of open country, treeless and grass-grown), and on the strand at Lower Rosses Point--called Wren Point by the country-folk--these beings can be seen and their wonderful music heard; and a well-known Irish artist has shown me many drawings, and paintings in oil, of these Sidhe people as he has often beheld them at those places and elsewhere in Ireland. They are described as a race of majestic appearance and marvellous beauty, in form human, yet in nature divine. The highest order of them seems to be a race of beings evolved to a superhuman plane of existence, such as the ancients called gods; and with this opinion, strange as it may seem in this age, all the educated Irish seers with whom I have been privileged to talk agree, though they go further, and say that these highest Sidhe races still inhabiting Ireland are the ever-young, immortal divine race known to the ancient men of Erin as the Tuatha de danann.” In the next quote, we have words which just do not seem like they would be written by a fairy tale book writer. The words give us clues into the mindset of Wentz: “Of all European lands I venture to say that Ireland is the most mystical, and, in the eyes of true Irishmen, as much the Magic Island of Gods and Initiates now as it was when the Sacred Fires flashed from its purple, heather-covered mountain-tops and mysterious round towers, and the Greater Mysteries drew to its hallowed shrines neophytes from the West as well as from the East, from India and Egypt as well as from Atlantis; and Erin's mystic-seeing sons still watch and wait for the relighting of the Fires and the restoration of the old Druidic Mysteries. Herein I but imperfectly echo the mystic message Ireland's seers gave me, a pilgrim to their Sacred Isle. And until this mystic message is interpreted, men cannot discover the secret of Gaelic myth and song in olden or in modern times, they cannot drink at the ever-flowing fountain of Gaelic genius, the perennial source of inspiration which lies behind the new revival of literature and art in Ireland, nor understand the seeming reality of the fairy races.” |
We have all the elements now in place to maintain a “fairy tale.” Ancient seers compared to modern folks who were talking about fairies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the comparison drawn to the Tuatha de danann, the immortality of their race, the mention of a Magic Island of the Gods, Sacred Fires and Atlantis, and to top it all off, some Druidic Mysteries thrown in for kicks. This should alone suffice to show that writers have been secretly engaged in maintaining a longtime tradition carried down through the Rosicrucian Enlightenment into modern times. Therefore, we must be suspect of everything that comes to us, vie “fairy tale books” including the one seeking to unveil some mystery such as this one Wentz has written, if we are seeking truth to these mysteries. Wentz’s next witness is a Protestant minister of Scotland who “is a native of Ross-shire, though he draws many of his stories from the Western Hebrides, where his calling has placed him. Because he speaks from personal knowledge of the living Fairy-Faith as it was in his boyhood as is now, and chiefly because he has had the rare privilege of conscious contact with the fairy world, his testimony is of the highest value.” … “An elder in my church knew a woman who was accustomed, in milking her cows, to offer libations to the fairies. The woman was later converted to Christ and gave up the practice, and as a result one of her cows was taken by the fairies. Then she revived the practice.” (115) I find it interesting that cows are being abducted by the fairies. What do the fairies want with cows we might ask ourselves? The next example is even more interesting because it wasn’t a cow they took, it was a person. Continuing, Wentz writes: “Our next witness from Barra is John Campbell, who is ninety-four years old, yet clear-headed.”… “'I have heard it said that the fairies live in knolls on a higher level than that of the ground in general, and that fairy songs are heard from the faces of high rocks. The fairies of the air (the fairy or spirit hosts) are different from those in the rocks. A man whom I've seen, Roderick MacNeil, was lifted by the hosts and left three miles from where he was taken up. The hosts went at about midnight. A man awake at midnight is in danger. Cows and horses are sometimes shot in place of men’.” (116) (115) Fairy Faith, p. 92 (116) ibid, p. 105 |