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Esoteric Fairy Faith’ University of Amsterdam ‘Esoteric Fairy Faith’ The Theosophical Background of Walter Y. Evans-Wentz’s The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries Student: Friedemann Rimbach-Sator Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Wouter Hanegraaff Second Examiner: Dr. Marco Pasi Research Master Religious Studies Master Thesis July 2018 1 General Outline 1. Introduction .................................................................................................................. 3 2. Research Question and Methodology ........................................................................... 5 3. The Historical Context of TFFCC ............................................................................. 10 3a) Romantic Forerunners ................................................................................... 11 3b) The Theosophical Society ............................................................................. 12 3c) Biography and Theosophy of Evans-Wentz until Oxford (1909) ................. 15 3d) The Celtic Revival ......................................................................................... 18 3e) Evans-Wentz and Oxford-Scholarship ........................................................... 20 4. The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries ............................................................................ 23 4a) Analysis of the Book ....................................................................................... 23 4b) The Argument of Section IV ........................................................................... 27 4c) Identification of George Russell as the ‘Irish Mystic’ ................................... 31 4d) The position of George Russell in Comparison with Evans-Wentz .............. 34 4e) Further Influence: William Butler Yeats ......................................................... 38 Preliminary Conclusion .................................................................................................. 40 5. The Theosophical background to TFFCC .................................................................. 41 5a) Russell’s Theosophical Background, the Higher Self ..................................... 41 5b) The Lower Species: Kingdoms of Beings, Elementals ................................... 47 5c) Fairyland: the After-Death States Kama Loca and Devachan ........................ 51 5d) Fairies and the After-Death States in The Tibetan Book of the Dead ............. 54 5e) Elementals, Psychic Phenomena and ‘Magic’ in Blavatsky and TFFCC ...... 58 5f) Memory of the Earth: Russell’s Training and Reading of the Astral Light .... 62 5g) The Higher Species: Dhyan Chohan, Avatara ................................................ 64 6. Conclusion .................................................................................................................. 69 7. Bibliography and Illustrations ................................................................................... 73 2 1. Introduction And when one counts seriously the ever-increasing millions of the Spiritualists, Occultists, and Mystics in Europe and America, one may well refuse to lament with Carrington over the "Departure of the Fairies." They are gone, says the poet: . .They are flown, Beautiful fictions of our fathers, wove In Superstition's web when Time was young, And fondly loved and cherished--they are flown, Before the Wand of Science! . We maintain that they have done nothing of the kind; (…) Blavatsky, in: ‘Thoughts on the Elementals’ James LeFevour, an active member of the Theosophical Society 1 in America, reflects in one of his articles how strongly the interest ‘in fairies and astral nature spirits is interwoven with Theosophical history’. 2 Any research into the recent history of that interweaving will presumably quickly stumble over its most notorious event: the 66 years of fierce debate between believers and disbelievers following a photograph taken in 1917 by two young girls in Cottingley, England. In reaction to being scolded by their parents to repeatedly spending their free time in a glen, Frances Griffiths (1907-1986) and Elsie Wright (1901-1988), then aged 9 and 16, explained to Frances’ father that they kept going back in order ‘to see the fairies’. 3 Having convinced Elsie’s father to lend them his new quarter-plate box camera, the girls subsequently proved their case by returning home with a photograph showing Frances looking into the camera, surrounded by a group of dancing fairies. This photograph would become famous as the ‘Cottingley Fairies’. As Paul Smith portrays in his article ‘The Cottingley Fairies: the End of a Legend’ (1991), this event would have been forgotten, if their mothers had not chosen to attend a meeting on ‘fairy life’ at the Bradford Theosophical Society in 1919. As a result of this meeting, the photograph came to the attention of the president of the Blavatsky Lodge of the Theosophical Society in London, Edward Gardner (1869-1969), who held a particular interest in spirit photography and research into the existence of fairies. 4 Gardner, at first skeptical about its authenticity, conducted his own research by contacting experts on photography and by interviewing the girls in 1920. As he concluded, the photograph was real; and the girls ‘good simple clairvoyants’, capable of having insight into the ‘subtler physical region’.5 However, the big media attention first started in 1920, when Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) joined Gardner’s research. Like Gardner, the famous writer 1 A description of the early history of Theosophy, and its connection with the most important protagonists of this study is given in part: 3b. 2 LeFevour, ‘Clairvoyance and the Fairy Realm’, 141. 3 Smith, ‘The Cottingley Fairies: The End of a Legend’, 374. 4 Ibid., 375, 379. 5 Gardner, Fairies: A book of Real Fairies , Theosophical Publishing House, London 1945, p.15-17, in Smith, ‘The Cottingley Fairies: The End of a Legend’, 386. 3 and inventor of the Sherlock Holmes series was convinced in the existence in fairies, and was particularly interested in Spiritualism 6, and spirit photography. After having become aware of the ‘Cottingley Fairies’ through Gardner’s public lectures, Doyle published the story of his involvement and gradual conviction of this case in his book The Coming of the Fairies (1922); including a 15-page essay by Gardner entitled: ‘Theosophic View of Fairies’. 7 As late as 1982, and after decades of argument between self-proclaimed debunkers and vindicators, Elsie and Frances admitted in an interview with the social scientist Joe Cooper that the story was a hoax 8 that had spun out of control: initially intended as revenge for the unfair treatment by their parents. At that point, Doyle was already heavily ridiculed, and his reputation as a serious person damaged due to his involvement in that affair. 9 10 The Cottingley photograph might well be one reason that research into the colorful historical entanglements between ‘astral nature spirits’ and Theosophy has remained a subject rather left untouched in academia and by Theosophists. Besides Gardner, one of the other well-known names in the Theosophical Society in this context is Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854- 1934), who, in his The Hidden Side of Things (1913), provides lengthy descriptions of 6 In 1848, the rapping in a farmhouse in Hydesville recorded by the sisters Margaret Fox (1833-1893) and Kate Fox (1837-1892) developed into a nationwide religious movement built upon the conviction that deceased persons stand in contact with the physical realm. As Ashcraft writes, the American willingness to believe in spirits was influenced by Transcendentalism, as well as the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), and the popularity of Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer (1734-1815). This new religious movement not only provided direct experience to communicate with the dead, or deceased relatives through entranced mediums, it also provided meaning in the American antebellum period, gave a space for engaging in alternative political ideas such as the women’s rights movement, and reconciled the scientific paradigm with the desire for transcendence. See: Ashcraft, Dawn of the New Cycle , 18f. For Spiritualism, see also: Oppenheim, Janet The Other World , Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1985, and Moore, Laurence, In Search of White Crows , Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York 1977. 7 Smith, ‘The Cottingley Fairies: The End of a Legend’, 382f, 392. 8 According to an interview by Geoffrey Crawley, the editor of the British Journal of Photography, Frances still insisted that their last taken photograph ‘Fairies and their Sun-bath’ was actually true. See: ibid., 399. 9 LeFevour, ‘Clairvoyance and the Fairy Realm’, 144. 10 Fig 1. ‘Frances and the Fairies.’ Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. Taken from: Smith, ‘The Cottingley Fairies: The End of a Legend’, 377. 4 function, locality, and evolution of nature spirits.11 A similarly influential person in recent history is the British Theosophist Geoffrey Hodson (1886-1983), who published his visions - including an investigation of the glen in Cottingley - under the title Fairies at Work and Play (1925). In this thesis, the work of a man whose name is not normally discussed in the context of an entanglement between Theosophy and ‘nature spirits’ will be the main focus: Walter Evans- Wentz (1878-1965), and his The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries (1911, henceforth: TFFCC ). Evans-Wentz, born in Trenton, New Jersey is especially remembered as an anthropologist of Tibetan Buddhism. His annotated translation
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