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
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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
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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 The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927) has become an influential classic. The Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies, Donald Sewell Lopez Jr. (born 1952), recently analyzed the history and influence of that book in ‘Western’ culture in The Tibetan Book of the Dead: A Biography (2011) and Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West (1999), by specially focusing on Evans-Wentz’s cultural and Theosophical background. Yet, next to his now famous influence on raising the awareness of Tibetan Buddhism in America, Evans-Wentz was similarly interested in the ‘naturalistic religion’ of Native Americans whom he investigated for his last book Cuchama and Sacred Mountains (1981), as well as the pre- Christian Celtic fairy faith, to which he dedicated four years of research for his dissertation.
Despite the array of interest and thinking that Evans-Wentz developed throughout his works, a coherent analysis of it still remains a desideratum. Crucial information on his life and work can be found in the book Pilgrim of the Clear Light (1982) by his biographer Ken Winkler. Other research has focused on Evans-Wentz’s relation to the famous psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung (1875 - 1961)12 , and to the scholar of the Cornish language Henry Jenner (1848- 1934) 13 . Evans-Wentz’s early research is addressed in the context of Theosophy by Mark Williams in Ireland’s Immortals (2016), and by Carole Silver in Strange and Secret People (1999). In addition to these, this study will attempt to provide new insights into Evans- Wentz’s early work, and will hopefully contribute to the awareness that the scholarly and Theosophical pursuit into fairy phenomena is much broader and more complex than the media-spectacle about the photograph by two young girls in Cottingley would lead us to assume.
2. Research Question and Methodology
The main argument of The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries can skeletally be summarized as follows: A) Celtic people have experiences with fairies. B) These experiences are principally the same as those investigated, and found genuine, by the Society of Psychical Research. From that, Evans-Wentz reaches several conclusions, the most important of which is: C)
11 See especially: Leadbeater, The Hidden Side of Things, 130 - 169. 12 McGuire, William, ‘Jung, Evans-Wentz and various other gurus’, in: Journal of Analytical Psychology ; 2003 Vol. 48 N.4, 433-445. 13 Phillips, Carl, ‘A ‘mystic message to the world’ Henry Jenner, W. Y. Evans-Wentz and the fairy-faith in ‘Celtic’ Cornwall’, in : Cornish Studies , Volume 19, Number 1, 2011, 123-139. 5 fairies are real, and people can enter fairyland temporarily in an altered state of consciousness and for an indeterminate time after death.
Since the main theoretical sources of Evans-Wentz’s argument have never been discussed, the perception of Evans-Wentz’s early work is often distorted. In the secondary literature, TFFCC seems to puzzle its readers with three ‘oddities’: Firstly, Evans-Wentz’s attempt to prove the reality of fairies and fairyland, which led reviewers to judge his work as a ‘rather fanciful performance’. 14 Secondly, that he later only wrote about Tibetan Buddhism and never looked back to Ireland, and his early work. And finally: his ‘naiveté’ or blindness towards the contemporary political situation. 15
These ‘oddities’ lead to my following research question: what is the main theoretical source for TFFCC that led Evans-Wentz to conclude that fairies, and fairyland, exist? Having examined the material, my hypothesis is: the main theoretical source behind Evans-Wentz’s argument is Theosophy, and refers especially to: Alfred Percy Sinnett’s (1840-1921) Esoteric Buddhism (1883), Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s (1831-1891) Isis Unveiled (1877) and The Secret Doctrine (1888), as well as George William Russell’s (1867-1935) ‘Celtic’ interpretation of these works, which was especially influenced by James Morgan Pryse’s (1859-1942) Apocalypse Unsealed (1910). Being aware of these sources will contribute to understanding Walter Evans-Wentz’s early work and thinking, and highlight its direct relation to research within the Celtic Revival and the Theosophical Movement. Moreover, it will become clear that there is no break, but a transition between TFFCC and his second book The Tibetan Book of the Dead . This transition takes the form of developing Theosophical thought concerning experiences within the realm of the afterlife, which Evans-Wentz perceived as being at the core of every religion. Finally, it will demonstrate that instead of political blindness, Evans-Wentz framed his work within a call for Universal Brotherhood built on shared underlying divine faculties in human nature.
My curiosity was initially aroused by The Tibetan Book of the Dead – A Biography by Donald Lopez Jr. and Evans-Wentz’s biography Pilgrim of the Clear Light by Ken Winkler; both highlighting the general importance of Theosophy for Evans-Wentz’s investigation especially in The Tibetan Book of the Dead . My most important influence for approaching Theosophical theory was the Theosophist Geoffrey Avery Barborka (1897-1982), and his The Divine Plan (1961), an erudite study of Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine .
This thesis contains three analytical parts: The first part provides a necessary historical background to TFFCC and to Evans-Wentz until his time in Oxford. I will place special emphasis on his connection to Theosophy, and the main theoretical influences that he encountered at Oxford; namely the comparative-mythological approach of Sir John Rhys (1840-1915) in order to reconstruct the Celtic fairy faith and the cultural evolutionary approach in the elaboration of Andrew Lang (1844-1912) in order to prove the genuine core of folklore. After an analysis of Evans-Wentz’s book in its historical context, I will attempt to define its underlying sources in the second analytical part. Because of the high relevance of
14 Robinson, ‘The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries by W. Y. Evans Wentz review’, 813. 15 Williams, Ireland’s Immortals , 414, 416, 423. 6
George Russell whose testimony Evans-Wentz’s used with the pseudonym the ‘Irish Mystic’, I will especially focus on him, as well as on Evans-Wentz’s connection with William Butler Yeats (1865-1939).
Following that, I will discuss the identity of the core concepts in Evans-Wentz’s conclusion with Theosophical theory. It will become apparent that the lower fairies reflect the Theosophical debate on elementals, especially in their ability to cause Spiritualist phenomena; Druidic ‘magic’ reflects Theosophical theory on ‘magic’, and elaborates on the relationship of the Druids as Aryan wisdom keepers of sunken Atlantis. Closely connected to that, Russell’s vision can be identified as training to read the Astral Light, and to unite with his higher principles as elaborated by his teacher James Pryse. The subjective fairyland reflects Theosophical debate on the realm of the recently departed: Kama Loca / Devachan. Finally, higher fairies reflect the Theosophical theory of the human progress of becoming angelic Dhyan Chohan, and the reincarnating Christ and Buddha the Theosophical Avatara. While attempting to prove the Celtic fairy faith, Evans-Wentz presents Theosophical theory in a Celtic light. With this theory as the background, he continues to develop his Theosophical theory in his second published book The Tibetan Book of the Dead .
The basic method to answer my research question is a close reading of the primary text. The repeated, thorough, and critical reading follows a process that Ingvild Sælid Gilhus describes as a variety of the hermeneutical circle. As she writes, hermeneutics consists of a reading that moves back and forth between parts and the whole of the text, its structure and meaning, the horizon between the reader and the text, and between the text and its context. 16 During that process, the a priori knowledge of the researcher is continually modified, adding more layers of interpretation in a continuous exchange between the reader and the source material. 17 Before adding interpretation due to a comparison of the primary literature with its cultural context, and from secondary literature, my analysis will focus on explaining the primary source as much as possible: concentrating on the information given by the text itself. In order to interpret Evans-Wentz’s evidence and argument, I will look especially for references, scattered information, and comments in footnotes that reflect Evans-Wentz’s interpretive framework to investigate the fairy faith.
An important tool is using printed and digitalized versions of Evans-Wentz’s books. The digital versions allow quick and complete searches of single phrases to investigate their frequency and development of contexts. For example, Evans-Wentz uses specific phrases to refer to the same person, among them ‘most educated Celt’, ‘Irish Seer’, ‘Irish Mystic’ etc. Tracing these single phrases help to reconstruct a related, scattered theory and its influence, and helps to identify the various codes Evans-Wentz uses, in this case, for George Russell. Having thus been able to identify a basic theoretical framework, this framework will be compared accumulatively with related cultural material. 18 The Theosophical sources will be specified, most importantly by using unpublished parts of Evans-Wentz’s handwritten Notes for an Autobiography (1921) held by the Stanford library, and a comparison between TFFCC
16 Gilhus, ‘Hermeneutics’, 276. 17 Ibid., 278. 18 Ibid., 278. 7 and Theosophical primary literature that, according to those notes, Evans-Wentz had certainly read.
My method in researching Evans-Wentz’s TFFCC is grounded in Wouter Hanegraaff’s historical approach for ‘rejecting the rejection of rejected knowledge’ in the study of ‘Western Esotericism’. This approach builds upon Hanegraaff’s Esotericism and the Academy (2012) wherein he analyses ‘how intellectuals from the 15 th century to the present have been constructing a tradition or domain that we would nowadays recognize as ‘Western Esotericism’. 19 According to Hanegraaff, the referential corpus of what came to be understood as ‘Western Esotericism’ is grounded in a Christian historiographical narrative on ‘ancient wisdom’ in the Renaissance. 20 This narrative emerged historically from Christian apologetics legitimizing their conviction against claims to be only a novel invention, and from ‘Platonic Orientalism’, a shared assumption that divine wisdom originated from the Orient and their Persian magi . A crucial conviction was that ancient sages like Zoroaster or Moses received the timeless wisdom due to divine inspiration, which was perceived as standing either at the beginning of a declined transmission, or at the core of a continuing tradition. 21 ‘Overwhelmingly’ due to polemical Protestant ‘anti-apologeticism’, this ancient wisdom narrative was turned into its opposite in order to cleanse Christianity from its ‘pagan’ influences, for example, as being inspired by demons.
A crucial figure in this polemic was Jacob Thomasius (1622-1684) who sharply differentiated pure Christian philosophy from its ‘pagan error’. He stated that Pagans reject the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo , which implies the clear differentiation between creator and creation, in favor of the eternity of the world . This ‘error’ made not only the world co-eternal with God, but also implied the possibility that experiential knowledge due human’s divine nature through ecstatic states of mind were possible. 22 This anti-polemicist agenda against Paganism was continued by Enlightenment thinkers; by handing over the authority to decide about the validity of philosophy to rational judgment. In an attempt at eclectic thinking, the now conceptualized ‘Other’ of Protestant polemics became ridiculed and declassified as a product of human stupidity and irrational ‘superstition’. 23 The contrasted surging scientific framework of science and natural philosophy has famously become known, since Max Weber (1864-1920), as a ‘process’ of the ‘disenchantment of World’ by stating that:
(…) if one only wished to, one could always find out; (…) there are no mysterious incalculable powers that play into it, but rather (…) one can have power over all things by means of calculation.24
19 Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy , 376 20 Ibid., 73. 21 Ibid., 10f, 15f. 22 Ibid., 86, 105. 23 Ibid., 136, 221. 24 Weber, Max, Wissenschaft als Beruf 1917/1919, Politik als Beruf 1919 , Studienausgabe der Max Weber- Gesamtausgabe Band 1/17; Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Wolfgang Schluchter, (eds.) J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck): Tübingen 1994, p, 9 in: Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy , 253. 8
In this attempt, a ‘waste-basket’ category of rejected knowledge was created. Though, instead of being a mere collection of rejected ideas, this category was required as a means of contrast in order to construct ‘modern’ identity against the appeal of the authority of ‘ancient wisdom’:
(…) by being conceptualized as ‘the Other of science and rationality’, it functions as the dark canvas of presumed backwardness, ignorance of irrationality that modernity needs in order to paint the outlines of its own identity in shining colors of light and truth. In short: modern identities imply the occult. 25
As an academic discipline that studies ‘Western Esotericism’ historically, Hanegraaff advocates an ‘agenda’ of non-eclective historiography against the Enlightenment eclecticism and the (mostly negative) mnemohistorical narratives resulting from it. Instead of selecting according to the modern narrative what to be taken seriously, the established canon of modern intellectual and academic culture should be questioned in order to recognize the greater complexity and richness of our common heritage. Even though ‘Western Esotericism’ is an imagined historiographical construct, according to Hanegraaff, it refers to tendencies that fall within the parameters first defined by Thomasius in what he saw as Paganism. ‘Fundamentals’ of ‘Western Esotericism’ could thus be found in the two elements of ‘cosmotheism’ (that the world is co-eternal), and ‘gnosis’ (that direct experiential knowledge is attainable through ‘ecstatic’ states of mind). By exploring the ‘blank spaces on our mental maps’ non-eclectic historiography in the study of Western Esotericism thus especially takes serious these discredited voices as ‘possible ways of looking at the nature of reality and the pursue of knowledge’. 26
The attempt of studying ‘religion’ or ‘Western Esotericism’ historically has to be specified in demarcation to the approach ‘religionism’; not only because it is a major approach in the study of ‘Western Esotericism’ 27 , but also as a demarcation to Evans-Wentz’s own research. According to Hanegraaff, religionism originates historically from the Lutheran Gottfried Arnold (1666-1714), who argues that only a historian who had experienced ‘inner illumination’ would be able to write an adequate history of Christianity, and recognizes ‘the
25 Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy , 254. Among the responses to Hanegraaff’s analysis of the category ‘Western Esotericism’ I want to highlight Egil Asprem’s response in The Problem of Disenchantment (2014). Asprem perceives the emergence of ‘Western Esotericism’ in terms of a multiple reactions to ‘problems’ in line with the philosophical approach ‘Problemgeschichte’. Reconsidering Hanegraaff’s analysis, the ‘problem’ of Paganism in Christian discourse was followed by the discourse of a ‘problem’ of disenchantment. This reconceptualization opens the investigation in the study of ‘Western Esotericism’ to the multiplicity of divergent struggles answering this problem without describing them with ‘totalizing implications’. As Asprem clarifies, the problem-historical view extends Hanegraaff’s analysis ‘beyond the focus on rejection and stigmatization by an establishment and into other areas of culture’, by looking also at spokespersons that ‘solve similar problems in analogous ways as encountered in the esoteric field’ without being considered ‘marginalized’, ‘rejected’, or ‘othered’. Asprem The Problem of Disenchantment , 545f, 548. For Kocku von Stuckrad’s alternative discursive approach on ‘esotericism’ as claims to higher knowledge in the European history of religion see especially: Stuckrad, Locations of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe , Brill, Leiden 2010. 26 Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy , 371f, 377f. 27 The religionist approach to ‘Western Esotericism’ is historically connected to scholars presenting at Eranos, the summer conferences organized by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn (1881-1962), held in Ascona at the Lage Maggiore between 1933 and 1988. For a discussion see: Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy , 277ff, and Hakl, Hans Thomas, Eranos, Nabel der Welt, Glied der Goldenen Kette , Frietsch Verlag: 2015. 9 truth’. Scholars working with a religionism-approach move the center of attention ‘from ideas to nonverbal experiences’. While presented as a historical research, it strongly minimizes the relevance of historical influences and historical criticism, in favor of the conviction ‘that the true referent of religion does not lie in the domain of human culture and society but only in a direct, unmediated personal experience of the divine’. 28 As Hanegraaff continues, religionism as the scholarly project of ‘exploring historical sources of what is eternal and universal’ has come to be used as the methodological counterpart of social-scientific ‘reductionism’ in the study of religion. Their controversy not only concerns the question whether to contain religion as a category sui generis, but also the treatment of how to investigate the ‘reality of experiences’.29 In contrast to reductionism and religionism, this thesis follows Hanegraaff’s empirical ‘third approach’ to the study of Western Esotericism. As he stated in reference to his article ‘Empirical Method in the Study of Esotericism’ (1995), by referring to historical sources, the existence of divine realities is simply beyond the possibility of empirical verification or falsification. Independent of personal convictions, historical research should limit itself to what can be verified empirically; the scholar ‘can describe, analyze, interpret, or even seek to explain what people believe, but cannot affirm that they are either right or wrong’. Limiting the scholarly enterprise to the empirically possible necessarily leaves theological question about the reality of ‘meta-empirical’ dimension open, resulting in a ‘methodological agnosticism’ towards judgments about the truth of experiences. 30
3. The Historical Context of TFFCC
In his book Ireland’s Immortals (2016), Mark Williams gives an overview of contemporary scholarly debate on the history of how Irish people venerated, invented and re-invented a pantheon of native Irish gods. After almost 300 years in which earlier material became almost completely forgotten, at the beginning of the 20 th century, there was a sudden interest in the
28 Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy , 125, 127, 311. 29 Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy , 127, 311, Kripal, Authors of the Impossible , 18 For example, Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) accused ‘historicists’ of simply brushing real experiences aside as soon as they violate their own materialist and positivist agenda. In an elaboration of him, Kripal concludes that ‘any ordinary history of religions that relies exclusively on textual-critical, social-scientific, or political analyses (from Foucauldian constructionism and postcolonial theory to philology and materialist cognitive science) is woefully inadequate to the task of understanding and interpreting the paranormal (…)’. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible 18, 22. An example for interpreting experiences comparably to Evans-Wentz and George Russell in the study of Western Esotericism can be given by Marco Pasi’s article ‘Esoteric Experiences and Critical Ethnocentrism’ (2014). Pasi focuses especially on the dimension of the rejection of altered states of consciousness in the history of ‘Western Esotericism’. Pasi states that these ‘esoteric experiences’ typically include episodes of dissociation, and of standing in contact with higher entities, resulting in innovative and ‘transgressive discourses’. Pasi analyses these experiences with the two concepts ‘alienated agency’ and ‘creative dissociation’. Perceived in the framework of ‘critical ethnocentrism’, the rejection of these ‘esoteric experience’ could then be validated as the ‘deeper epistemological level’ of constructing a particular model of the self and reality consistent with the requirements of a rationalized Western modernity. Against the claim of destructing an earlier model of epistemology or of abdicating Western culture, the exploration of esoteric experiences should be done in the modest intent of a possible expansion of that earlier model. Pasi, ‘Esoteric Experiences and Critical Ethnocentrism’, 137, 139ff. 30 Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy , 357. 10
Irish divinities in art, academia and ‘spiritual speculation’.31 As he writes, it was the creativity of two particular artists between 1885 and 1905 - George Russell, and William Butler Yeats - which was responsible for shaping how the Irish gods were reimagined in modernity. Williams accentuates three background movements that lead to their impact: The Romantic Movement; the Celtic Revival and its academic offshoot ‘Celtology’; and the ‘late Victorian groundswell of interest in the occult’.32 All three movements have to be seen as deeply intertwined. With the direct influence of Butler Yeats and Russell, these movements also form the context and theoretical background in which Evans-Wentz’s work should be placed. In the following, I will discuss the biographical and Theosophical influences, as well as the movements and theories most important for Evans-Wentz’s work. The discussion of the Theosophical Society will introduce the main protagonists whose work will be discussed in chapter 5. This background will then be used to understand and describe the Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries in the context of its time.
3a) Romantic Forerunners
Carole Silver, in her book Strange and Secret Peoples (1999), sees English Romanticism as the root of Victorian fairy fascination. As she writes, famous Romantic poets and novelists such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), Robert Southey (1774-1843) and John Keats (1795-1821) started a quest into the fairy-realm to discover an alternative world, in nostalgia of a fading British past, and in order to compete with the fairy collections of France or Germany. Besides the literary treatment of fairies, Silver especially highlights two currents that built the groundwork for the later Victorians. Firstly: paintings, especially by William Blake (1757-1827) and Johann Heinrich Füssli (1741-1825), and secondly: scholars who collected and analyzed primary sources in the form of fairy legends, and traditions, and thus provided the material for later Victorian folklorists.33
William Blake, an important influence on Russell and Butler Yeats, has to be especially emphasized because he publically stood for his conviction that fairies exist. 34 As it was for Russell and Evans-Wentz, a primary factor in William Blake’s work is direct visionary experience. Sheila Spector highlights that Blake incorporates his direct visions into his theology and paintings, by arguing that a primordial revelation was, and could still be received, by the different nations. This is possible through the ‘Poetic Genius’; an imaginative faculty of the soul which connects humans directly to the truth without interferences of the intellect. 35 An influential figure in the development of folklorist scholarship and the collection of fairy lore was Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) and the antiquarian Thomas Crofton Croker (1798-1854). In works such as Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft (1830), Scott maintained the existence of fairies as a possibility, by contributing to Croker’s three volume Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825).36 The last volume included the translations of the Brothers Grimm essay ‘On the Nature of the Elves’. Therein, ‘the belief in
31 Williams, Ireland’s Immortals , 274, 278. 32 Ibid., 279, 292. 33 Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples , 10, 18, 28. 34 Ibid. , 25. 35 Spector, ‘Blake, William’, 174. 36 Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples, 11. 11 spirits and fairies’ is explained as a consistent whole, which ‘prevailed over all Europe before the introduction of Christianity’; - a central thesis which resonates until the works of Evans- Wentz. 37
3b) The Theosophical Society
Modern Theosophy is identified with the name for teachings derived primarily from the writings of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891). Madame Blavatsky, along with the veteran of American Civil War, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907), established the Theosophical Society in New York.38 Believing that the Otherworld was scientifically verifiable, and in search of ancient wisdom 39 , Blavatsky gathered about 17 people interested in Spiritualism in her apartment on the evening of 7 September 1875.40 Joscelyn Godwin writes in The Theosophical Enlightenment (1994) that Blavatsky herself was perceived by some practitioners concerned with Spiritualism as a ‘marvelous subject’. Yet, disillusioned by the general fallacy and passivity of mediums, she started to demonstrate her active superiority and capability of producing the typical phenomena of Spiritualism herself . A central claim of her critique was that beings appearing in séances were indeed not the dead proper, but various creatures, for example elementals and shells. The former were creatures evolving in the four Kingdoms of nature, the later, ‘psychic detritus left behind by human beings’. 41 After a lecture by the military officer George Henry Felt (1831-1906) on his book project ‘concerned with The Kabbalah of the Egyptians ’, Felt claimed that he could reproduce the ancient knowledge and cause the elementals to appear due to chemical processes.42 Enthusiastic about the implications of this claim, Blavatsky and Olcott founded the Theosophical Society as a group for studying the ‘unseen universe and the powers therein’. In 1876, the Society started to conduct psychic experiments in secret. Their collected theoretical insights, elaborated through the ancient wisdom Blavatsky claimed to have received from two Tibetan teachers - the Mahatmas - were first published 1877 in Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled.43
In 1879, Olcott and Blavatsky moved the headquarters of the Theosophical Society to India, where they became close friends with Alfred Percy Sinnett (1840-1921). 44 Sinnett claimed to be in contact with the Mahatmas himself, leading to his highly influential publication Esoteric
37 Croker , Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland Part III , 54, 140. 38 Santucci, ‘Theosophical Society’, 1114. 39 According to one of Blavatsky’s letter on 9 February 1875 and her article “A Few Questions to ‘HIRAF” (1975) her engagement was in search for perfect knowledge of the ‘Oriental Cabala’ handed down through oral transmission. According to Hanegraaff’s article ‘Western Esotericism and the Orient in the First Theosophical Society’, Blavatsky referred to a standard 19 th century concept of a universal non-Jewish Kabbalah which, according to available authors, originated in Chaldea or the religion of Zoroaster. Blavatsky thus reflects one origin of the 15 th century ‘ancient wisdom narrative’ that Hanegraaff coined ‘Platonic Orientalism’. Hanegraaff, ‘Western Esotericism and the Orient in the First Theosophical Society’, 7. 40 Hanegraaff, ‘Western Esotericism and the Orient in the First Theosophical Society’, 5. 41 Godwin, Theosophical Enlightenment , 279, 281f. 42 Hanegraaff, ‘Western Esotericism and the Orient in the First Theosophical Society’, 8. 43 Santucci, ‘Theosophical Society’, 1115. 44 For further information on the history of the Theosophical Society in India, see: Mukhopadhyay, “A Short History of the Theosophical Movement in Colonial Bengal”, (2016), https://www.academia.edu/31943518/A_Short_History_of_the_Theosophical_Movement_in_Colonial_Bengal , last accessed 16.07.2018. 12
Buddhism (1883) . After Sinnett arrived in England to promote his book in 1884, the London Lodge split into two sections. One focused on Oriental Theosophy, following Blavatsky’s claim that her understanding of Buddhism and ‘Hinduism’ was the closest to the ancient truth, and one under the leadership of Anna Kingsford (1846-1888) to study the Western alternative under the newly founded Hermetic Society. 45
Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism was the first book by a Theosophist in which the reincarnation doctrine was laid out relatively fully. 46 In 1884, it was sent to the poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) and was a major inspiration for his early interest in Spiritualism, Theosophy, and psychic phenomena.47 Immediately after he had read it, Butler Yeats gave that book to his friend Charles Johnston (1867-1931), who was so fascinated that he left Ireland to study Theosophy in London, and after his return started the Dublin Hermetic Society in 1886. 48
In Henry Summerfield’s biography of George Russell That Myriad-Minded Man (1975), we discover that Russell also had his ‘spiritual awakening’ in the form of ‘waking dreams’ during that time in 1884. Russell experienced that an age-old yet unknown ‘greater self’ of him tried to enter his consciousness to reveal Russell’s true being and purpose. Nature sometimes became translucent, and he would often find himself rapt in the presence of beings akin to his ‘greater self’.49 In his The Candle of Vision (1918), George Russell meditates on the visions that he has had in order to find the deeper truths in them, in relation to various ‘sacred texts’. 50 George Russell summarized how in his youth he was musing over the suitable title for a series of paintings, depicting the evolutionary history of humans, when suddenly, a creature whispered in his ear to call them ‘the birth of Aeon’. This name evoked a vision that Aeon, one of the highest and earliest emanations, revolted against heaven, descended into chaos, and mirrored itself into it, in order to weave a mansion for his spirit. Aeon thus became the Creator-god of our world. As Russell continues, the next day he went into a library, he approached an open dictionary of religion, and on the open page he found an entry explaining that Gnostics designate Aeon to the first created beings. 51 Russell saw this as a sign and chose Aeon as a pseudonym. According to Dr. Deidre Kelly, Russell’s handwriting was so illegible, that his copywriter could only identify the first two letters of it. AE henceforth remained Russell’s official pseudonym, because, as he later wrote to Butler Yeats, he hoped to ‘escape from personal notoriety’, and to have a more pleasant life. 52 In Summerfield’s account, he only gave these experiences a framework after 1885 when he started his intellectual studies
45 Santucci, ‘Theosophical Society’, 1116, 1118. 46 Chajes, ‘Reincarnation in H. P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine’, 73. 47 Lennon, Irish Orientalism , 225, Kuch, Yeats and AE , 8. 48 Goodrick-Clarke, ‘Hermeticism and Hermetic Societies’, 555. In the study of Western Esotericism, the category ‘Hermeticism’ is contested, because it is historical burdened, vaguely defined, and confusing by comprising the belief in the ancient wisdom narrative from the Orient with the Renaissance fascination of alchemy, or astrology. For a discussion, see: Hanegraaff, ‘Hermes Trismegistus and Hermetism’, in: Marci Sgarbi (ed.), Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy Springer International Publishing AG, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02848-4_180-1, (last accessed: 17.07.2018) 49 Summerfield, That Myriad-Minded Man, 12. 50 Russell, The Candle of Vision , viii. 51 Ibid., 72f. 52 Kelly, ‘Natural magic: the paintings of AE Russell’, 4, in reference to: AE (1921), letter to Yeats, in: Some passages from the letters of AE to W.B. Yeats (Dublin, 1936), 51. (N.L.I.,Pádraig Ó’Broin Collection, LO8233). 13 and interest in the Celtic tradition at that time. Due to his friendship with Charles Johnston, his search slowly evolved into a commitment to Theosophy.53 While Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled first remained unaffordable for him, it was Mohini Mohun Chatterjee 54 (1858-1936), and his Man: Fragments of Forgotten History (1885) 55 that flamed Russell’s interest. Because of Butler Yeats, Russell also came in contact with Esoteric Buddhism, yet, according to Summerfield, he saw it as ‘only partly authentic’.56
After Richard Hodgson (1855-1905) of the Society of Psychical Research declared Blavatsky’s teaching as mere fiction and accused her of being a Russian spy, Blavatsky left India for England in 1885. There she published her compendium The Secret Doctrine (1888), and soon afterwards established the ‘Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society’ for focusing also on practical instruction. 57 In 1887, Butler Yeats too moved to London, where he became Blavatsky’s personal student in her Esoteric Section. Having more interest in the applied Sciences he joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn 58 on 7 March 1890, after
53 Summerfield, That Myriad-Minded Man, 13f, 16. 54 According to the Mukhopadhyay, the lawyer Chatterjee was one of the most controversial figures in the early history of the Theosophical Society. He joined the Society in Bengal in 1882, and served in the position of a high disciple, or ‘chela’, of the Mahatma Koot Hoomi. In 1883, Olcott put him in charge of the Theosophical Sunday School in Calcutta, and he accompanied Olcott and Blavatsky to Europe as their private secretary. Chatterjee thereby became influential in the foundation of the Dublin Lodge of the Theosophical Society, and for the ‘Oriental’ turn in at least Butler Yeats’s writings, most visibly in his poem entitled ‘Mohini Chatterjee’. Following ‘a scandal’, Chatterjee left the Theosophical Society in 1887, resuming to his earlier profession as a lawyer. Mukhopadhyay, ‘The Occult and the Orient’, 28f. 55 In this book, Chatterjee describes, like Sinnett, the fall of men into matter, the evolution of various human subraces while focusing on Aryan and Atlanteans, the upward reincarnation from elementals towards Dhyan Chohan (whom he equals with deva), as well as the subjective human afterlife states Devachan and Kama Loca. As will become apparent in chapter 5, these concepts are crucial for understanding Evans-Wentz’s esoteric fairy faith. In contrast to Sinnett, Chatterjee more closely highlights relations between humans and elementals, stating, for example, that earlier humans did not procreate but had the kabbalistic ability to ‘develop elemental beings into man’. Interesting for a comparison with Russell’s paintings of humanlike elementals, Chatterjee sees among those elementals that will evolve into humans Asuras, whom he describes as ‘elementals having human form’. Chatterjee definitely influenced Russell’s writing, but it is at that point not clear whether he also directly influenced Evans-Wentz. Despite his high relevance, the trajectory of Chatterjee’s writing has so far not been discussed in the study of Western Esotericism. Further information on the influence of Chatterjee into the writing of Sinnett, Russell, and Butler Yeats, will be provided by Mukhopadhyay in: ‘Mohini: A Case Study of a Transnational Spiritual Space in the History of the Theosophical Society’, (forthcoming). Chatterjee, Man: fragments of Forgotten History , 59, 133. 56 Summerfield, That Myriand-Minded Man – A.E, 24. 57 Santucci, ‘Theosophical Society’, 1118. 58 The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded by William Wynn Westcott (1848-1925) and Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers as a ‘practical’ oriented initiatory order in 1888, and is still existent in various modifications. It became one of the most influential organizations in the history of modern occultism. As Robert A. Gilbert argues, its origin is closely connected with the cessation of the Hermetic Society following the death of Anna Kingsford in 1887. Its rituals where composed by the masonic autodidact Kenneth Mackenzie (1833-1886), and transformed after his death by Westcott, insisting that its content stems from the German Fräulein Anna Sprengel, a fictional character who was presumably directly inspired by Kingsford. By 1890, the Golden Dawn had around 80 members the majority of whom came from the professional class or the literary and artistic avant garde . Butler Yeats was originally tutored by Mathers, but progressively distanced himself from this authoritative character. In Butler Yeats’s writing, the influence of the Golden Dawn is most visible in his Rosa Alchemica (1896). While Gorski argues that Butler Yeats associated its character Michael Robartes on his ambiguous attitude towards Mathers, Peter Kuch argues in his book Yates and AE that Robartes was rather based on a critique of George Russell. Gilbert, ‘Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’, 544ff. Gorski, ‘Yeats, William Butler’, 1179f. Kuch, Yeats and AE , 112f. For The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn see also: Gilbert, 14 he met its co-founder MacGregor Mathers (1854-1918) while Butler Yeats was working in the British Library. 59 In 1890, Russell too finally joined Johnston’s Dublin Lodge after he visited Blavatsky during a trip to London in 1889.60 Also in 1890, the activist Annie Besant (1847- 1933) joined the London Theosophical Society, soon rising to become the key disciple under Blavatsky. Yet, following Blavatsky’s death in 1891, Besant also became a central figure in one of the Society’s major internal conflicts. In 1895, Besant accused the leader of the American section William Quan Judge (1851-1896) of forging the letters of the Mahatmas. Her resolution during the Society’s convention in Adyar finally led the American Section to split off. While the majority of the British Society supported Besant, the Irish delegates sided with Judge, calling themselves the Theosophical Society of Europe, with Russell as vice- president. 61 During the same time, in 1895, Russell also met the American Theosophist James Morgan Pryse 62 (1859-1942) when he moved temporarily to Dublin to run Blavatsky’s press. Pryse soon held a ‘mesmeric power’ over Russell. Both collaborated on the production of the Irish Theosophist and in publishing Russell’s visionary paintings. As Summerfield clarifies, their relationship was that between a master and a pupil, and Russell would even address him in the 1930s as his guru. 63
After Judge’s death, he was succeeded by Katharine Tingley (1847-1929) in 1896, which lead to Russell’s break with the American Section two years later. Leading the (second) Dublin Lodge in 1900 and lecturing on Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine , Russell immersed himself increasingly in eastern spirituality. In 1904, he finally joined the Adyar Theosophical Society, which was led by Annie Besant and her associate Charles Webster Leadbeater. Yet, Besant’s and Leadbeater’s writings, later known as Neo-Theosophy, disassociated themselves from Blavatsky’s earlier teaching, and steered the Indian Society in Adyar onto a new course. After 1909, their central mission was to prepare the young Jiddu Krishnamurti (1896-1986) to become the vessel for the new world teacher. Dismayed by this development, Russell also left the Indian Society, again re-founding the Dublin Hermetic Society, where he was teaching The Secret Doctrine until he left for London in 1933. 64
3c) Biography and Theosophy of Evans-Wentz until Oxford (1909)
Walter Evans-Wentz was born February 2, 1878, in Trenton, New Jersey. His father Christopher Wentz (1836 – 1921) was a German immigrant and real estate developer, married to the American Mary Evans Cook. According to Evans-Wentz, her ancestors originated from Wales and England, and possibly even Ireland in pre-historic days. 65 His biographer Ken Winkler suggests that it was the childhood tales told to him by his mother, which caused his
The Golden Dawn Companion: A Guide to the History, Structure and Workings of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn . Wellingborough: Aquarian Press: 1986. 59 Kuch, Yeats and AE , 39, 57. 60 Goodrick-Clarke , ‘Hermeticism and Hermetic Societies’, 556, Kuch , Yeats and AE , 56. 61 Goodrick-Clarke, ‘Hermeticism and Hermetic Societies’, 556, and Santucci, ‘Theosophical Society”’, 1120. 62 A study on Pryse is missing; a small description on his work in the London Lodge and influence on Russell can be found in Kuch, Yeats and AE , 107-110, Summerfield That Myriad-Minded Man , 61f, and Eglinton, AE , 31f. Kuch sparsely describes him as a ‘shabby, unimpressive man with a strong Southern accent’. 63 Summerfield, That Myriad-Minded Man , 61. 64 Goodrick-Clarke, ‘Hermeticism and Hermetic Societies’, 557. and Santucci, ‘Theosophical Society’, 1121. 65 Evans-Wentz, Notes for an Autobiography , 6, and Winkler, Pilgrim of the Clear Light , 18f, 34. 15 later interest in fairytales leading to him writing TFFCC. 66 Having been a member of the Trenton Baptist Church, his father soon became a Spiritualist. As Winkler writes, after his death, many pamphlets were found in his library, dealing with ‘spiritual and psychical research, and practices’, which fascinated Walter more than his early Bible reading. 67 According to Winkler, Evans-Wentz might also have come into contact with Theosophical writings through his father’s library. Evans-Wentz’s unpublished Notes for an Autobiography (1920) - now in the Stanford library - give interesting further insights into these early influences. He writes:
In those days and until I entered college, my chief intellectual delight was in the study of the Neo-Platonic philosophers, chiefly Iamblichus (…). All of the chief theosophical writers of the present age, such as Blavatsky, Sinnett, Judge, and the works published by the Hermetics of England, and any book about the ancient mysterias became familiar to me. Any book purporting to deal with occultism or symbolism was sure to get a reading (?) from me. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism and the Occult World and especially a little treatise of aphorisms by M.C. called Light on the Path were of fundamental influence. 68
Evans-Wentz’s mention of Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism as a fundamental influence deserves great attention, not only because it was the same book that led to the creation of the Dublin Hermeticists, but also because it created most concepts underlying TFFCC . Turning back to his unpublished notes, Evans-Wentz’s Theosophical influence and critique on Christendom are also apparent when writing about his early stance towards religion:
I grew up untouched, and, as I often thank, unsullied spiritually by the Church. Which has come to be called Christian more because of constitutional(?) creeds attributed to Christian sources, than because of the teachings of the One initiated as the Christos, Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary. I grew up as free as a pagan as any of whom St. Paul preached in Athens, (…?) pagan. I regarded myself as a faithful follower, not of Jesus, the Christ alone, but of the Buddha, the Prophet, and of all the Great teachers. As I have held myself to no one country or race, so have I not allied myself formally with any of the world religions. I have embraced all of them. 69
According to Winkler, by the age of twelve, Evans-Wentz was already convinced that he had lived before. By seventeen, this conviction was superseded by direct experience in terms of ecstatic visions while residing in nature. Winkler explains that during this time, Evans-Wentz was a recluse. In contrast to his siblings, he always remained a bachelor, living ‘the life of his
66 A further suggestion for Evans-Wentz early fascination might be found in Evans-Wentz’s Cachuma and Sacred Mountains. In that book, Evans-Wentz remembers that he had a nurse who was medium. As he portrays, he often saw his nurse going into trance and described ’what to her were the disembodied spirits of Red Men, who, when incarnate, had formerly dwelt there’. Evans-Wentz, Cachuma and Sacred Mountains , 139f. 67 Winkler, Pilgrim of the Clear Light , 26. 68 Evans-Wentz, Notes for an Autobiography , 17f. 69 Ibid., 15f. 16 own’. 70 As he writes in his Notebook he felt a special relationship between the vitality of his body and the vitality of the sun. Independently of how he felt:
(…) the magnetism from the earth under me and the magnetism from the sun above me filled my body with such freshness that I would return home calm and happy and well. One evening, when (…?) returning home just at sunset hour I had experienced the first ecstatic like vision of my present life, and vividly do I remember it now. I had been alone all day in the upper Delaware in the midst of wild daisies and butterflies in one of my secret retreats communing with nature. As I walked home slowly I fell to singing a song of ecstatic rapture composed as I sang it. The sun was calm and warm, the sky clear. As the stars shone one by one, I stopped and lifted my gaze on the twinkling lights on a village called Morrisville across the Delaware in Pennsylvania. As I did so, there came flashing into my mind with such authority that I never thought of doubting it, a mind-picture of things past and to come. No details were definite. There was only the unfathomable conviction that I was a wanderer in this world from some far-off, unfathomable and indescribable yet real Realm; that all the things I looked upon were but illusory shadows; that the being that I then knew to be was eternal. And there came to be a vague knowledge of things to be. I knew from that night that my life was to be that of a world-pilgrim, wandering from country to country, over seas, across continents and mountains, through deserts to the end of the earth, seeking seeking for I knew not what. 71
This experience carries important similarities to that of Russell. Evans-Wentz’s conviction of the veracity of seers in trance-states, which becomes crucial for his later argument in TFFCC, can thus also be traced to him having comparable experiences . This shift is also reflected in the introductory statement in TFFCC concerning own experience as the difference between religious faith and knowledge:
Consequently, men who deny human immortality, as well as men with religious faith who have not through personal psychical experiences transformed that faith into a fact, nowadays when they happen to read what Plato, Iamblichus, or any of the Neo- Platonists have written, or even what moderns have written in attempting to explain psychic facts, call it all mysticism. 72
In 1900, Evans-Wentz shortly joined his father’s business dealing with mortgages and land transfers. Though, as Winkler writes, not only did he come to California to help his father, but because his father lived close to the new headquarter of the American Section of the Theosophical Society in Point Loma, led by Katharine Tingley.73 As the center out of which a new society should develop, Tingley focused on self-improvement and child-education, not only by teaching Theosophical classics such as Blavatsky and Sinnett, but also the wisdom
70 Winkler, Pilgrim of the Clear Light , 26, 32. 71 Evans-Wentz, Notes for an Autobiography , 22f. 72 Evans-Wentz , TFFCC , xxv. 73 Winkler , Pilgrim of the clear Light , 36. 17 and positive influence on health inherent in the ‘minutiae of the natural world’.74 While Russell led the (second) Dublin Lodge, lecturing on Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine , Evans- Wentz became a member of the American Society in 1901. According to Lopez, he received a diploma from the Raja-Yoga 75 School and Theosophical University in 1903, and it was even Tingley who encouraged Wentz to start studying Literature at Stanford.76 There, he met William Butler Yeats during his America tour in 1903, lecturing on the Irish fairy faith he famously gathered from the receding rural villages between 1888 and 1893, and published as The Celtic Twilight (1902).77 Besides a fascination for folklore through Butler Yeats, Evans- Wentz found a ‘spiritual mentor’ in William James (1842 – 1910). He attended James’s lecture on the Varieties of Religious Experience , when James was visiting Professor in Stanford in 1906, and was particularly affected by his focus on religious experience. 78 According to Winkler, his decision to study at Jesus College Oxford was driven by the wish to study under Sir John Rhys, the first Professor of Celtic at Oxford, of whom he heard, presumably, through Butler Yeats. Having graduated from Stanford, Evans-Wentz moved to Europe in order to continue his studies in folklore, yet, as Winkler writes, his time at Oxford is ‘remarkably unclear’, leaving no mention of classes taken or even books he read. 79
3d) The Celtic Revival
In the Edwardian Age, Ireland – drawing on its Celtic past - became a focal point for Northwest European countries in the process of cultural and national reinvention.80 Colm Toibin, in his lecture The Irish Literary Renaissance (2014), elucidated that this Irish cultural revival started after the downfall of Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-1891) trying to bring Home Rule to Ireland. In 1890, after this political disillusion, young artists sympathized with the nationalistic vision of Ireland’s cultural organizations, such as the ‘Gaelic League’ (founded 1893) and ‘Young Ireland’ (founded in 1830s), by feeling especially responsible to restore an ‘essential nobility’ of the Irish people, and to find new ways for a political revolution. 81 A central influence in this context is Standish James O'Grady’s (1846 –1928) three volume work History of Ireland (1878-1881). According to Williams, O’Grady attempted to produce an Irish national mythology, by refurbishing mediaeval Irish legacy in a dialectic between didactic history and imaginative mythology. 82 O’Grady presented Ireland as sacred ground, equal to Greek antiquity, and by presenting the Tuatha de Danann 83 as central divinities, who
74 Ashcraft, Dawn of the New Cycle , 50, 53, 70. 75 Ashcraft describes Raya Yoga as an ‘ever changing set of methods (…) based on moral self-control and other traits of character development’. The consequence of Raya Yoga was the internalized sense of moral excellence resulting from the doctrine of reincarnation, appreciation for beauty, and compassion for all beings. Ashcraft, Dawn of the New Cycle , 86. 76 Lopez, The Tibetan Book of the Dead - a Biography, 21, and Winkler, Pilgrim of the Clear Light . 42. 77 Lopez, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, A Biography, 21, and Winkler, Pilgrim of the Clear Light . 36. 78 Lopez, The Tibetan Book of the dead - A Biography , 21, and Winkler, Pilgrim of the Clear Light , 42. 79 Winkler, Pilgrim of the Clear Light , 44. 80 Summerfield, That Myriad-Minded Man, 104. 81 Toibin, “The Irish Literary Renaissance”, 16:20 - 18:40, and Castle, Modernism and the Celtic Revival , 4f. 82 Williams , Ireland’s Immortals , 303 83 The Tuatha De Danann or ‘People of the Goddess Danann’ are the heroic, or ‘supernormal’ people who according to the Book of Invasions (1075) lived in Ireland before the arrival of the Gaels. The Tuatha de Danann are in part influenced by pre-Christian deities and in part inventions by medieval Christian writers. After their retreat, they were associated with the ever-young inhabitants of the Sid, the pre-Celtic subterranean grave 18 were consecrated all over Indo-Europe by a different name. 84 By delving into their own past, ancient Irish language and ancient Irish writings were rediscovered. Sparked by the sense of political idealism, an attempt was made to reconnect and to ‘refine’ that past by creating a separate, contemporary Irish culture in the light of ancient glory; for example in the rediscovery of the great Irish warrior Cú Chulainn in Lady Augusta Gregory’s (1852-1932) translation Cuhulainn of Muirthemne (1902).85 In that context, Irish folklore, presented in Butler Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight (1902 ) began to matter as a particular ancient Irish tradition.86 Carl Phillips points out in his article on the correspondence between Evans-Wentz and Henry Jenner, that, for Revivalists what it meant to be Celtic was in no way homogenous: it was rather a struggle between various versions of the Celtic, in a process of negotiating what was acceptable. 87 He sees Jenner in his contribution to TFFCC , wrestling to contain the Celtic in a position of Celtic Christianity, while facing contradictory Pagan elements in Cornwell’s Celtic past. 88 Not only must Butler Yeats’s and Russell’s work be seen in light of the Celtic Revival, so too must TFFCC . Evans-Wentz highlights Ireland as the ancient European sacerdotal center thus:
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 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 (…). 89
As in the case of Butler Yeats, Evans-Wentz’s proof of the fairy faith as something genuine can be understood as a re-evaluation of the Irish past; and, by citing Russell and Butler Yeats as leading authorities in that field, in a similar way as it was imagined by them.90 Nevertheless, on the first page of TFFCC , Evans-Wentz highlights that Ireland and Brittany, ‘the two extremes of the modern Celtic world’, are both the most important places from which he collected evidence. Both countries had preserved the old ‘racial life’ that he clothes in simplicity, beauty, high ideals, mysticism and spirituality. 91 Instead of taking sides with the Irish, Evans-Wentz’s work should rather be seen as conciliatory, setting his repeated pledge
hills, accessing the Irish Otherworld from which they can come forth to ‘help and hinder mortals’. They were reinvented during the Celtic Revival as cosmic beings. Williams, Ireland’s Immortals , 30, 90, 272, 512. For a description of the Sid, see Borsje, ‘Monotheistic to a Certain Extent’, 58. 84 Williams , Ireland’s Immortals , 300ff. 85 Toibin, “The Irish Literary Renaissance”, 20:00 – 22:40, and Williams, Ireland’s Immortals , 406, 507, 513. 86 Toibin: “The Irish Literary Renaissance”, 25:00 – 26:00. As Kuch elucidates, Butler Yeats’s term ‘Twilight’ is referring to the borderland between the ‘physical and the metaphysical’, or the mingled area between ‘heaven and earth’. More than collecting accounts, Butler Yeats incorporated in the book’s first edition visions of himself following a technique he had learned by McGregor Mathers: ‘Regina, Regina Pigmeorum, Veni’, and ‘The Eaters of Precious Stone’. Kuch, Yeats and AE , 61, 79f. 87 Phillips, ‘A ‘mystic message to the world’, 135f. 88 Phillips argues that TFFCC can be seen as representing a conflict between contradictory versions of the modern, one defined by Celtic Christianity and state-sponsored education, and ‘the other defined by nature religion and Celtic Christianity, the early human sciences, and spiritualism and psychical research.’ The second point can here be expanded to Theosophy to be the important source behind Evans-Wentz’s argument and conclusion. Phillips, ‘A ‘mystic message to the world’’, 128. 89 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 59. 90 Castle , Modernism and the Celtic Revival , 12. 91 Evans-Wentz , TFFCC , 1. 19 for Brotherhood directly against the ‘absurdity’ of proving a racial difference between the Gaels and the Brythons.92
3e) Evans-Wentz and Oxford-Scholarship
Juliette Wood, in her article ‘Folk Narrative Research in Wales’ (2005), examines the romantic and nationalistic motivated research into folklore at the end of the 19 th century that was transformed into an academic discipline through the Folklore Society (founded 1878). As she writes, in the Society there was a major theoretical controversy between two schools of research: one the hand, the cultural evolution approach which was defended by the important folklorist and later president of the Society of Psychical Research, Andrew Lang (1844-1912), and on the other hand, the comparative mythological approach in whose legacy Sir John Rhys stood.
To continue contextualizing TFFCC it is helpful to look at these important Oxford scholars and the theories with which Evans-Wentz was directly in contact.93 As he writes, he investigated the literary sources on the fairy faith in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Rennes between 1907 and 1909, and expanded this early work with anthropological fieldwork when he arrived in Oxford in 1909. With the social anthropologist Robert Marett (1866- 1943), John Rhys directed Evans-Wentz’s study; Evans-Wentz even discloses that without Marett’s advice, the book would not have existed. 94 It was finally examined by John Rhys and Andrew Lang in 1909. As Kathleen Raine records in her foreword to TFFCC , many of Evans- Wentz ideas derived especially from these ‘seniors’, turning TFFCC into a ‘summary of the leading ideas of the best authorities at the time at which it was written.’ 95
Evans-Wentz followed in the footsteps of early Celtology that tried, through language and mythology, to trace the Irish deities to their Indian origins, in an attempt to reconstruct the ancient Celtic religion. The comparative-mythological approach emerged in the 1850s due to the linguistic work of Max Müller, building upon the discovery that the European language family is connected to Sanskrit. 96 Max Müller’s outline of the comparative approach is presented in the four published lectures entitled Introduction to the Science of Religion (1870/1882). Following Victorian scholarship on religion, Max Müller explains religion as a typical human faculty that enables us to sense ‘the Infinite’. 97 As Max Müller explains, in earliest antiquity there was a feeling of incompleteness, and a longing in the heart of humans for a guide and a ‘father in heaven’. The sky was the only graspable ‘unchangeable and infinite being’ to express that idea, and thus was chosen in absence of anything better. The first step in the history of religion, for Max Müller, was an expression of a pure and exalted idea, after which a step of degeneration followed. As Max Müller explains, in a process of misunderstanding, the original worship associated with the infinite being only referred to as sky, became associated with the sky itself. In a third step, the ‘polyonomy’ in speaking
92 Ibid., 396. 93 Wood, “Folk Narrative Research in Wales at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century”, 326, 330f. 94 Evans-Wentz, TTFFCC . xi., Wood, “Folk Narrative Research in Wales at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century”, 325, 328, 336. 95 Raine, “Foreword”, xiv. 96 Williams , Ireland’s Immortals , 293. 97 Müller , Introduction to the Science of Religion , 13. 20 differently of one sky would break apart into a polytheism representing the different aspects of it; and the original cult and prayer became translated into legends and mythologies about these aspects, forgetting its origin altogether. 98 For Max Müller, this faculty, together with the lineage of expression through language, determines a group of humans to identify themselves as one ‘ethnos’, or ‘a people’. One of three great lineages for Max Müller in the history of the world is the Aryan. By investigating their mythology linguistically and comparatively, their ‘real conviction’ beneath progressive misunderstandings could be recovered. 99 In his Hibbert Lecture, entitled Lectures on the origin and growth of religion as illustrated by Celtic heathendom (1886), Rhys builds upon the comparative approach of Max Müller. In a philological comparison between the pantheon of the Gauls and the pantheon of the Greek, Rhys traces the wanderings of an underlying ‘Aryan’ mythology. 100 In his Studies in the Arthurian Legends (1891) Rhys expresses Max Müller’s ‘solar myth theory’ even more clearly in the figures of the Arthurian legend.101 As Williams observes, O’Grady’s emphasis of the de Danann as central Irish gods is a result of this work of comparison with Indian deities; and so is Evans-Wentz’s TFFCC . As Rhys did in his lecture on Celtic heathendom, Evans-Wentz reconstructs a lost and essentialist Pan-Celtic culture. 102 By treating Arthur and Lug, (the pivotal warrior and ruler of medieval Irish saga) thereby as ‘solar’ deities, he carried forward, through Rhys, also Max Müller’s solar myth theory.103
Yet, more than reconstructing the Celtic fairy faith, Evans-Wentz attempts to prove its reality, for which he builds upon the competing cultural evolutionary approach established by Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917). Tylor adapted it from the biological evolutionary approach of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) presented in Origin of Species (1859). In correspondence to the development of a biological organism, Tylor attempts to reconstruct culture as a progression from savagery to civilization. Myth and folklore were seen as ‘survivals’ of these earlier stages that could give insights into the evolution of human thought. 104 A core concept for Tylor, and subsequently for Lang, Marett and Evans-Wentz, is the concept of Animism. Tylor presents this concept in chapter XI of his Primitive Culture (1871). He proposes that earlier research misrepresented ‘lower races’ as having no religion at all, while ignoring their belief in supernatural beings. 105 As a rudimentary definition for the study of religion, he proposes building upon this ‘deeper motive’ in his famous formula: ‘It seems best to fall back at once on this essential source, and simply to claim, as a minimum definition of Religion, the belief in Spiritual Beings.’106 The name Animism was given as an alternative to the name
98 Ibid., 198f, 207f. 99 Ibid., 49, 54, 63, 86. For example, by tracing the myth of the splitting of Zeus‘s head to the dawn from a bright sky. 100 Rhys, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion , 6f, 610f. 101 Rhys, Studies in the Arthurian Legends , 14, 17f. Arthur is the prime example in this theory. Arthur was fatally injured by the traitor Mordred in the Battle of Camlann. As a representative of the sun, Arthur was conquered by a representation of darkness. Instead of being killed - unlikely for the sun -, he was said to be ‘born away’ in Avalon to return again when his strength was restored. 102 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 396, Williams, Ireland’s Immortals , 410. 103 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 308, 322. 104 Wood, “Folk Narrative Research in Wales at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century”, 331, and Waardenburg, Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion , 229. 105 Tylor, Primitive Culture , 313f, 316. 106 Ibid., 316. 21
Spiritualism, which was already in use. Tylor’s Animism has ‘two great dogmas’: first, the belief in ‘souls of individual creatures, capable of continued existence after death’; and second, the belief in spirits that affect or control the material world, ‘upward to the rank of powerful deities’.107 Tylor also suggests that the doctrine of a ‘ghost-soul animating man’ built upon experiences in dreams and vision, and could biologically explained as ‘evidence of their senses’. 108
Andrew Lang develops his theory of religion in The Making of Religion (1909). With Tylor, he sees religions developing in an evolutionary scheme from simple to complex. The most ancient state of religion can again be found among the most ‘backward races’. Though, in contrast to Spiritual Beings as the origin of religion, he values their distinctly positive ‘High Gods’ as idealizations of their virtuous and creative character. 109 Crucial for the development of religion, and particular for Evans-Wentz’s psychological approach to investigating fairies, is the next evolutionary step: a necessary degeneration. With Tylor, he argues that humans have ‘supernormal’ experiences, yet in contrast to Tylor, Lang sees these experiences as genuine .110 Experiences such as thought-transference, clairvoyance, or telepathy are caused by unknown, yet clearly existing, human faculties. 111 Misunderstanding the real cause of these experiences, the ‘savage’ constructs the idea of independent and intelligent souls, and spirits.112 Experiences like these are thus the true origins of Tylor’s Animism. 113 An anthropologist should therefore be aware that under the layer of ‘savage’ folklore, real supernormal experience lies hidden. Instead of rejecting the possibility of these experiences a priori , the scholar should in contrast ask: ‘are any of the stories true?’ 114 A pioneering step in Lang’s theory is the assumption that there is no principal difference between the psychical abilities and supernormal experience of European and ‘backward races’.115 Paranormal phenomena should therefore be studied in a variety of locations - in the case of moving objects, for example Poltergeist phenomena - and preferably ‘in the field of experience’ itself.116
A different evaluation of Tylor is depicted in Marett’s The Threshold of Religion (1909). The influence of that book in Evans-Wentz’s work will not only become apparent in his use of ‘magic’, but in the reconstruction of a Druidic religion in a position between individual experience and social expression. Seeing Animism as an insufficient explanation for the
107 Ibid., 318. 108 Ibid., 317f, 330. 109 Lang, The Making of Religion , 201, 279. 110 Ibid., 68. Lang defines ‚supernormal experience‘ by writing: ‘By ' supernormal ' experiences I here mean such as the acquisition by a human mind of knowledge which could not be obtained by it through the recognized channels of sensation.’ 111 Ibid., 5f. 112 Ibid., 168ff. 113 Ibid., 50, 53. 59. The origin of Animism, as the belief in souls, stands in contrast to Tylor’s assumption that the idea of souls or spirits was deduced from dreams. By introducing the primal form of religion as the belief in High Gods which are not perceived as spirits , or ghosts , Lang sees the animistic theory as rejected. Ibid., 10, 56f. 207f. 114 Ibid., 73, 80, 352ff. 115 Ibid., 8, 49, 61, 66. 116 Ibid., 65, 120, 168. 22 origin of religion, Marett goes a step back by stating a specific kind of human feeling as the origin of it. For Marett, the communion of man with his environment sometimes evokes feelings of awe and the uncanny, which attributes a specific power to the origin of that feeling. 117 This attributed power as the emotional result of an experience with something mysterious, supernormal, or incalculable, is called ‘mana’ in its positive aspect, and ‘taboo’ in its negative aspect by Marett.118 Specific plants or animals, for example, where first experienced as uncanny, and because of that extraordinary status, attributed in veneration with mana. The perception of being animated by spirits might develop from that in a later step. The attribution of mana thus becomes crucial for creating circumstances wherein an inter- subjective exchange of will can take place, which Marett deems as a crucial explanation for the effectiveness of ‘magic’. With Lang, he argues that the psychology of humans under ‘rudest’ conditions is in so far the same, that the generalization of their experiences as the origin of religion is possible. Yet, these experiences have to be investigated, not on the level of the individual alone, but as communicated and in an exchange of ideas and sentiments of the society this individual stands in.119 It is this combination, which Marett formulates as a definition of the Comparative study of Religion:
Comparative Religion is a branch of empirical science which aims at describing in formulae of the highest generality attainable the historical tendencies of the human mind considered in its religious aspect. 120
4. The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries
4a) Analysis of the Book
Evans-Wentz defines the Celtic fairy faith in his ‘Introduction’ in the following way:
By the Celtic Fairy-Faith we mean that specialized form of belief in a spiritual realm inhabited by spiritual beings which has existed from prehistoric times until now in Ireland, Scotland, Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, or other parts of the ancient empire of the Celts. 121
His investigation is structured into four Sections. In his first Section, Evans-Wentz presents (intentionally unstructured) the ‘Living Fairy Faith’ in the form of short interviews that he gathered on the Celtic Islands. As Lang and Butler Yeats did, Evans-Wentz investigates folklore with an open mind, looking for genuine first-hand experience. Closely with Marett, he also argues that the ability of peasant Celts to use their subtle human psychic faculties are still more ‘uncorrupted’.122 Building upon his earlier work at the University of Rennes, Section II analyses Irish medieval literature as the ‘Recorded Fairy Faith’. As Williams rightly noticed, this Section is not meant as a historicist analysis of medieval records as
117 Marett, The Threshold of Religion , 11, 109. 118 Ibid., Xxvii, 79. 119 Ibid., Xxxviif, 21f, 26, 70f, 102, 144. 120 Ibid., 144. 121 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , xvi. 122 Ibid., xxxiv, 18, 22. 23 distinct cultural products, but tries to find the deeper essence that unites the ‘Living’ and ‘Recorded Fairy Faith’.123 In order to reconstruct this faith, he especially places emphasis on a description of the Otherworld and the doctrine of rebirth. This approach is continued in Section III where he goes historically a step further by also including the archaeological sources.
In order to understand how Evans-Wentz’s attempts to find the essential reality of the Celtic fairy faith, one has thus to be aware of his two crucial dimensions of analysis: the ‘esoteric’ and the ‘exoteric’ fairy faith. 124 The ‘esoteric fairy faith’ stems from direct experience with the invisible world by mystics and seers, and originates from the ‘highest educated and scientific Celts of ancient times’: the Druids. The ‘esoteric fairy faith’ is thus ‘pure’ and preserved in an unbroken oral tradition until Evans-Wentz’s time.125 In contrast to that, he explains that the ‘popular’ or ‘exoteric’ fairy faith is not based on experience preserved by an elite class, but rather based on hearsay, coming ‘directly from the masses of the Celtic people’. As he writes, this exoteric belief in fairies is principally ‘degenerated’, unlearned, influenced by various Non-Celtic religions and thought, and became ‘superadded’ by Christianity. 126 For Evans-Wentz, the importance of testimonies of mystics and seers for providing provable information of the invisible realm and its inhabitants is thereby so decisive that he focused almost exclusively on them for his conclusion, and rejects almost all the other evidence he had gathered before. In chapter II, he illustrates this process for ordering his collected material by writing:
And it is exceedingly fortunate for us that an unusually large proportion of these Celtic witnesses are actual percipients and natural seers, because the eliminations from the Fairy-Faith to be brought about in chapter iii by means of an anthropological analysis of evidence will be so extensive that, scientifically and strictly speaking, there will remain as a residual or unknown quantity, upon which our final conclusion must depend, solely the testimony of reliable seer-witnesses .127 [emphasis mine]
123 Williams, Ireland’s Immortals , 410. 124 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC 256. 125 Ibid., 458. 126 Ibid., 244, 457f, 485. In order to clarify Evans-Wentz’s difference between the ‘esoteric’ and the ‘exoteric’, the terms might be compared with Robert Ellwood’s (born 1933) metaphor of an ‘outward’ and ‘inward’ look on nature that he uses in order to explain Theosophy. Comparable to the exoteric fairy faith, Ellwood explains the ‘outward look’ as dependent on observing surfaces; it does not have access to what nature ‘really is’; as if someone tried to understand a person only by looking at the movement of his or her body. The ‘within look’ (or esoteric fairy faith) in contrast is explained as seeing the fundamental reality of nature, as if someone has access to the character or consciousness of a person. In a further comparison with a metaphor by Blavatsky, Evans-Wentz’s esoteric faith could be described as understanding that the ‘Universe is worked and guided, from within outwards.’ For Evans-Wentz, modern people lost the experience with the invisible world completely; and thus misunderstand the language used to describe these experiences as ‘mystical’, meaning: ‘anything which may seem reasonable yet wholly untranslatable in terms of their own individual experience’. In addition to the decline from ‘esoteric’ and ‘exoteric’, a further step of losing insights through experiences, for Evans-Wentz, is modernity. Bringing back the esoteric fairy faith scientifically can also be understood as ‘countering’ the misunderstanding of modernity, and translating experiences with the inner reality of nature into a ‘modern’, scientific language. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine I :317, Ellwood, Theosophy , 29f. Evans.- Wentz, TFFCC , xvii. 127 Ibid., 21. 24
According to their direct experience with the invisible world, its inhabitants can be delineated in a tripartite way: subhuman, human, and superhuman. The subhuman orders are explained as elementals, nature spirits, or daemons. In the human order, Evans-Wentz includes the souls of the dead; and in the order ‘of the superhuman’ beings, those that are in character as the gods of ‘the Hindoos’, or the ‘highest of the Tuatha the Danann’. 128
In Section IV, Evans-Wentz attempts to put these reliable remnants on its ‘logical foundation’. 129 Therein, chapter XI is meant to prove the underlying existence of fairyland, and the lower species of its inhabitants by uniting theories from psychic researches with a person to whom he refers as the ‘Irish Mystic’. 130 Chapter XII is meant to prove the existence of the higher species, among them human souls. 131 By comparing the remaining experiences of his investigation with the findings of the Society of Psychical Research, Evans-Wentz in principal proves the ‘two great dogmas’ of Tylor’s Animism with a method proposed by Lang 132 : The ‘supernormal’ experiences at the core of the Celtic fairy faith turn out to be caused by different orders of spirits and the dead.133 Following his evaluation that the fairy faith is part of a world-wide Animism, Evans-Wentz’s scope becomes visible. Not only does he attempt to prove the Celtic fairy faith, but also the existence of a universal spiritual realm of which the fairies and fairyland are only one social, Celtic expression.134 For example, he writes:
From a rationalist point of view anthropologists would be inclined to regard the bulk of this widespread belief in spiritual beings as being purely mythical, but for us to do so and stop there would lead to no satisfactory solution: the origin of myth itself needs to be explained, and one of the chief objects of our study throughout the remainder of this book is to make an attempt at such an explanation, especially of Celtic myth. (…) But if we look still deeper, we discover as background to the myths and the social psychology a profound animism. This animism appears in its own environment in the shading away of the different fairy-like beings into spirits and ghosts of the departed. 135
128 Ibid., 492. 129 Ibid., 515. 130 Ibid., 457. 131 Ibid., 493. 132 An example of Lang’s application of his theory in direct relation to fairy-lore can be found in Lang’s introduction to Robert Kirk’s The Secret Commonwealth of Elves Fauns & Fairies (1893 / 1691). Evans-Wentz follows Lang’s method very closely by Lang explaining ‘strange tales’ containing raps and the moving of objects without visible contact. Lang then also describes cases collected by the Society of Psychical Research, and compares them with records of ‘distant times and in remote places’. Having demonstrated their common character, Lang is assured that specific phenomena ‘have occurred and recurred’, and presumably originate the part of the fairy belief concerned with the ‘house-haunting Pixies’. As Guiness highlights, Evans-Wentz was aware of Lang’s text as early as in his time as a student in California, and brought it as a gift to Butler Yeats when he met him in Ireland. Guiness, “Visions and beliefs in the west of Ireland”, 41. Lang, “Introduction”, 25f. For the relation to Butler Yeats, see chapter 4f) and footnote 177. 133 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 490, 493. 134 Ibid., 226f, 233. 135 Ibid., 281f. 25
While Evans-Wentz attempts to prove the reality of fairies with ‘psychic-theory’, the popular expressions of the fairy faith are described as alleged experiences of the spirit realm seen through Celtic goggles .
In this regard, it is important to notice how Evans-Wentz unified comparable academic theories with theories of his collected evidence, to construe a coherent framework for explaining the esoteric fairy faith, and to present a theory on the origin of religion. As Raine saliently states, TFFCC
[I]s a young man’s book in which we can see the author’s first attempts to find an ordering principle to account for the many convergent themes of a field of knowledge hitherto excluded from academic consideration. 136
For example, Evans-Wentz concludes in Section III that the mythology and religion of all people can be traced to the knowledge of, or belief in the spiritual realm and its inhabitants. The contact with that realm and their spirits by means of Celtic initiation rites later became superseded by Christianity, yet survived in legends, and the belief in the subsequent Catholic Purgatory. 137 Closely connected to these initiation rites, for Evans-Wentz is the usage of ‘magic’. According to him, the right to perform ‘magic’ in antiquity was held by an initiated class who with the ancient priests of Egypt maintained their power by seeing spirits, taking them under control in order to foretell the future, or produce natural phenomena. 138 In Evans- Wentz’s discussion on ‘magic’, he refers directly to Marett , yet declares ‘mana’ as a real power from a ‘supernormal plane’, which he equates with the ‘soul-stuff’ of James, taken from his essay ‘The Confidences of a ‘Psychical Researcher’ (1909). 139 When Evans-Wentz declared that spirits and fairies are actually made out of that universal substance, he won two authorities to vouch for the reality of his understanding of ‘magic’, which draws from the same realm out of which all religion originated.140
As will be shown in part 5, Evans-Wentz’s framework for the ‘esoteric fairy faith’ is most heavily indebted to Theosophy, a system using concepts not unlike those of James or Lang to explain psychic phenomena. Aware of the usage of Theosophy as explanatory model by witnesses of the ‘Living Fairy Faith’, Evans-Wentz argues that the ‘Oriental’ Theosophy occupies common ground with Celtic Druidism. Since mysticism is everywhere the same, these systems would naturally coalesce. 141 Having said this, it is possible to alter an important sentence of Williams on the usage of Theosophy in TFFCC . In his debate on Evans-Wentz, Williams writes:
136 Raine, „Foreword“, xiv. 137 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 448, 455. 138 Ibid., 265. 139 Ibid., 254, and James, “The Confidences of a Psychical Researcher”, 373f. In this essay, James tries to find answers to the phenomena of people gaining supernormal knowledge. On the one hand, he suggests a ‘mother-sea’ of consciousness that surrounds and connects our normal individual consciousness. This mother- sea acts as a bank wherein the ‘earth’s memories’ are stored, and can be drawn upon if both kinds of consciousness conflate. On the other hand, supernormal knowledge could be gained by other kinds of consciousness, derived from an ominous environment of un-personalised ‘soul-stuff’, which can temporarily take possession of a medium. 140 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 254, 265. 141 Ibid., 458. 26
By uncritically recording Russell’s words as part of the ‘living Fairy-Faith’, Evans- Wentz was allowing the theosophically inflected vision of a single remarkable individual to guide his interpretation of an entire tranche of Irish and Scottish folklore. 142
The seeming passivity of Evans-Wentz in following a Theosophical model created by someone else can be altered by arguing that Evans-Wentz actively chose to do so, since its offered content was within the range of broader Victorian scholarship, and mutually confirmed his own convictions for explaining and presenting the fairy faith. In a letter to Jenner dated 20 November 1911, which was in part published in Phillips’ article, Evans- Wentz described the intention of his book in the following way:
It is my earnest hope, (…) that you will feel as you examine it that I have not been unfaithful to the great trust reposed in me by the Celtic peoples. The book is their mystic message to the world. I have been for them not much more than a scribe and an advocate. 143
Despite Evans-Wentz’s self-identification as a mere mouthpiece, in TFFCC the Celts become a mouthpiece for Evans-Wentz, not only for his belief in Theosophical doctrine, but in light of them, a mouthpiece for a Universal Brotherhood. The book closes accordingly not only by declaring to have freed the fairy faith from the assumption of being a mere absurdity, but by emphatically presenting the esoteric Celtic doctrine of the progressive deification of humanity.144
4b) The Argument of Section IV
Evans-Wentz’s arguments to prove the reality of the fairy faith are described below in order to find their most influential sources. It will become apparent that the arguments are only coherent when implicit (Theosophical) concepts are taken into account; these are traced to their Theosophical sources in chapter 5. It will also become apparent that in his argument Evans-Wentz differentiates between a specific ‘Irish Mystic’, and a plurality of mystics and seers, or ‘most learned contemporary Celts’. The ‘Irish Mystic’, who is most influential as a proof for lower being and fairyland, 145 will be identified with George Russell in 4c). Evans- Wentz’s implicit theories for the Celtic Otherworld and higher beings will be discussed in a comparison between him and the teachings of Russell in TFFCC in 4d). By doing this, Russell will again appear among the plurality of mystics that provide the teaching for the proof of higher beings. Finally, a student colleague of Evans-Wentz, and William Butler Yeats, will be identified amongst the remaining mystics and educated Celts 4e).
142 Williams, Ireland’s Immortals , 414. 143 Phillips, “A ‘mystic message to the world’, 133. 144 Ibid., 514f. 145 Ibid., 59ff. 27
Before going into more detail of the Celtic doctrines, counting the appearances of the protagonists in Section IV will further demonstrate the dominance of the ‘Irish Mystic’ for Evans-Wentz’s conclusion.146
Frederic Myers: 15 147 , William James: 15 148 , (the) Mystic: 14 149 , Andrew Lang: 10 150 , Seer: 10 151 , Sigmund Freud: 9 152 , William Crookes: 7 (his medium Homes: +7) 153 , Oliver Lodge: 5154 .
The Subtle Body Theory
To better understand the proof for the lower and higher order of fairies, I will start with the theory of the human condition, given to Evans-Wentz by ‘mystical Celts’. 155 Central to Evans-Wentz’s argument is the doctrine of subtler bodies that was given to him by the Celtic mystics and seers. According to this doctrine, a human being is composed of a soul-monad 156 , a personality, and a body consisting of visible and invisible parts of matter. 157 As Evans- Wentz writes, the goal of evolution is the realization of divinity. The consciousness of a human is just a momentary state in a process wherein a transcendental consciousness (the soul-monad / or ‘subconsciousness’) realizes itself in the world of the senses. 158 While people might think of themselves as being their real self, the normal consciousness is a reflection of this other consciousness, just as moonlight is in reality a reflection of the sun.159
Throughout the completely evolved man of the far distant future, the deep and broad river [of consciousness] will have overflowed all its banks (…). The ordinary
146 Not counted are occurrences below five, names in headings, book-titles in footnotes, and different usages such as ‘language’, etc. The transition from the proof of lower beings and fairyland towards higher beings and human souls happens on p. 492, which reflects the end of the occurrence of most psychical researchers besides Freud and James. 147 Myers: 465,465, 465, 466, 468, 472, 472, 472, 473, 473, 474, 474, 485, 485, 490. 148 James: 463, 463, 473, 479, 479, 479, 489, 491, 503, 505, 505, 505, 505, 506, 506, 513. 149 Mystic: 457 (learned -s), 471 (Irish), 480 (Irish), 485 (Irish), 492 (Celtic), 497 (Celtic -s), 503 (Celtic -s), 503 (Celtic), 503 (Celtic), 504 (the most learned of contemporary Celts, chiefly -s), 505 (-´s view), 505 (modern Celtic -s), 505 (unlike these -s), 514 (educated and mystical Celts). 150 Lang: 463, 474, 474, 474, 475, 475, 476, 477, 477, 477, 484. 151 Additional occurrences wherein a seer is spoken about without double mentioning such as: ‘mystics and seers’: 476 (a Celtic), 476 (that), 477 (many) 479 (educated Celtic -s ), 485 (-s can always see them), 486 (Irish - witness), 486, (the natural), 486 (the – but not the non-), 486 (reacts abnormally) 487 (became normal to the), 487 (wholly sane and reliable), 490 (unbroken succession of) 152 Freud: 464, 466, 467, 467, 502 502. 153 Crookes: 473, 477, 481, 482, 482 , 483, 489. Homes: 482, 482, 483, 483, 483, 483, 484. 154 Lodge: 456, 473, 478, 478, 489 155 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC, 493. 156 The soul-monad is equalized with various concepts: Ego, individuality (504, 506), Transcendental Self (506), Myer’s subliminal Self (465), James’ subconscious self, B-region (506, 514), subconscious mind (507), and object of the subconsciousness (508, 515). 157 Ibid., 504f. 158 Ibid., 489, 504, 512. 159 Ibid., 504. 28
consciousness of man will then have been transmuted into the subconsciousness, of which it had always been a pale reflection.160
The divine/sub consciousness is vastly advanced in its ‘psychical powers’; and conversely the abilities of the normal consciousness are comparatively embryonic.161 Yet, the gap between the normal consciousness and the divine/sub consciousness can be bridged, and unconscious abilities can be developed, and perceived consciously. Intuition, for example, is explained as a momentary connection between the brain and the soul monad. 162 A further example of this relation is dreams. In normal consciousness a human is unlikely to remember what happened 10 years ago. Yet, during a dream-like state (also hypnosis, in trance through an ‘influx of latent power’), supernormal knowledge and abilities became apparent, such as perceiving objects or remembering experiences in a past life.163 The Buddha, who could remember all his former existences thus represents the completion of an evolutionary process of unfolding latent psychic powers. It is furthermore this sub/divine consciousness that is immortal and reincarnates, while the other human parts progressively disintegrate after death. After the physical body has died, the human survives in its ‘ghost body’, consisting of invisible parts of matter. Then the soul-monad departs from the personal consciousness, which thus disintegrates into its psychical constituents. Finally, in order to proceed with the evolution of consciousness, the soul-monad, which has recorded the experiences of its former lives, constitutes new suitable grosser bodies in which it incarnates again, like a silkworm weaves its cocoon. 164
Proof for ‘discarnated’ Human Souls
The proof for ‘discarnated’ human souls depends on an elaboration of a ‘vitalistic view of evolution’ in combination with the ‘Celtic Esoteric Doctrine’.165 Evans-Wentz evaluates this principle with the ‘law of the conservation’ and ‘indestructibility’ of matter, and a comparison between a dead and a living person. Life should be seen as an independent form of consciousness that has the power to animate and unite matter. If consciousness is thus indestructible, like every power, it also has to exist after death.166 According to embryology, the human underwent an evolutionary progress from its lowest to its highest form. Yet, the common theories like the ‘transmission of acquired characteristics’ could not explain why there are geniuses, and a broad variety of distinct evolved personalities. Evans-Wentz concludes that there must be an independent evolution of the psychical body (the personality/soul) which progresses towards acquiring ‘newer’ and ‘higher’ instincts. If the acquired evolution of personality is an independent progress that needs as long as the evolution as physical body, it has to be able to remember former experiences and transmit
160 Ibid., 498. 161 Ibid., 509. 162 Ibid., 506. 163 Ibid., 459, 468, 507, 509. 164 Ibid., 503, 509. 165 Ibid., 498. 166 Ibid., 494f, 496. 29 them to its next physical existence. The Celtic doctrine of a soul-monad that evolves into the human world by combining itself with different bodies is given as a scientific possibility. 167
Proof for Lower Species
The proof for lower species starts with data given by psychic researchers on apparitions and supernormal abilities such as telepathy. Evans-Wentz demonstrates that specific phenomena could also be produced by invisible beings, and not only by the dead. The existence of these beings is demonstrated by combining the theories on visions by the ‘Irish Mystic’, and Frederic Myers (1843-1901). The main researchers referred to besides Myers are William Crookes (1832-1919), Oliver Lodge (1851-1940), Camille Flammarion (1842-1925), as well as a brief discussion of Lang, and James. After analyzing their work, Evans-Wentz concludes that all of their inexplicable phenomena such as noises or movements of tables could also be caused by different beings other than the dead, for example elementals.168
The crucial shift from a discussion of phenomena to a judgment of noumena derives from the ‘Irish Mystic’. According to Evans-Wentz, Myers explains that the telepathic force of a dying person can stimulate the nervous apparatus of a different person. The telepathic force causes the system to project a part of its consciousness: the person sees this apparition as a mixture between the outside force and the inside impression. According to the ‘Irish Mystic’, visions can also be caused by the memory of nature, and by veridical beings. A seer does not react to the stimulus of these beings with the projection of inner pictures as normal people do. Instead, he uses ‘ecstatic’ or ‘second vision’, whereby the seer enters into the same ‘plane of consciousness’ as the being itself. A normal person thus sees an apparition altered through memory, whereas a seer has access to the real beings. 169
The existence of beings thus depends on believing the ‘Irish Mystic’ that the experience of trance-visions can also be caused by the beings themselves. It also explains that some see an apparition, while others can see the species behind it, since ‘forth-dimensional’ beings, cannot be seen in the ‘third-dimensional’ plane. 170
Proof for Fairyland
As Evans-Wentz writes, seer-witnesses and mystics can enter fairyland in a trance state. Even more importantly for Evans-Wentz, fairyland can be entered after death and is inhabited by fairies, according to the ‘Irish Mystic’. 171 To prove the first thesis, Evans-Wentz builds upon Myers ‘Subliminal self’ and Sigmund Freund’s theory of the subconscious. Following them, Evans-Wentz reasons that humans can take part in parallel states of consciousness, wherein people gain access to supernormal abilities. The ‘supernormal’ abilities of altered perception in dream-states could be equated, for example, with Celts who visited fairies or the dead. Moreover, Evans-Wentz compares the condition of people having modifications of time perception in cases such as the Seeress of Prevorst, Friederike Hauffe (1801-1829), with the
167 Ibid., 497f, 500f. 168 Ibid., 478f, 480f. 169 Ibid., 485f. 170 Ibid., 487. 171 Ibid., 471 in reference to 65. 30 condition intrinsic to Celts who perceive modifications of time when entering fairyland. In conclusion, fairyland is explained as a different state of consciousness, and the higher abilities of the ‘subconscious’ accessed via trance- or dreams.172
Yet, the earlier statements of invisible beings go further than the explanation that fairyland is a parallel consciousness, by explaining that invisible beings exist on their own - ‘fourth- dimensional’ - plane. In order for the dead to be at the same place which is accessible to fairies, fairyland not only refers to a state but also to the place(s) which are entered when in this state. This major step - from a state of consciousness to an existing independent place that is entered after death and shared with non-human beings - is not explained. As will be shown, that argument implies a form of non-exclusive Otherworld that is subjective and objective at the same time. For the reader, the proof of this specific kind of Otherworld depends on believing the ‘Irish Mystic’.
Proof for Higher Species
The proof for higher species is relatively weak compared to its importance. On page 514, Evans-Wentz speaks of a ‘logical corollary’ to the rebirth doctrine: a belief that was given to him by ‘educated and mystical Celts’. According to that belief, in former eons there were human races that evolved out of the human ‘plane’ into the ‘divine plane of conscious existence’. These earlier human divine beings are now gods, and incarnate into the human world in order to educate humans to achieve divinity and the ‘higher kingdom’; among them we have Jesus, Buddha, and Zoroaster. 173 It is not further explained why there should be a ‘divine plane’ and former humans, or what the relation between higher fairies and humans are; this proof depends solely on believing the Celtic ‘belief’.
4c) Identification of George Russell with the ‘Irish Mystic’
In this chapter, the ‘Irish Mystic’ will be identified with George William Russell 174 by drawing a comparison with his The Candle of Vision (1918), some of his paintings, as well as the essay a ‘Visionary’ in Butler Yeats’s The Celtic Twilight . I will continue by discussing the similarity and difference of his theory with Evans-Wentz’ as written in TFFCC . In providing evidence of fairies in Ireland, Evans-Wentz published the dialogue ‘An Irish Mystic’s Testimony’ (p. 59-69), which provides ‘very rare and very important evidence’.175
Before the ‘Irish Mystic’ describes his visions, the mystic divides the Sidhe-race into two classes of beings: the lower, shining beings of the mid-world 176 , and the higher, opalescent beings, the great chiefs of Tuatha de Danann, which belong to the heaven-world. While he
172 Ibid., 468f. 173 Ibid., 514. 174 As was found, this identity was indeed revealed by Evans-Wentz in his last book Cuchama and sacred Mountains , 165; written 30 years after Russell’s death. Evans-Wentz states: “The late George William Russell (1867 – 1935), the well-known Irish poet-seer, often referred to as A.E. described to the author the resplendent appearances of great devas which he had seen in the mountains and elsewhere in Ireland, the Sacred Isle, and of which he painted likewise. (…) A.E.’s [testimony] is given under “An Irish Mystic’s Testimony,” on page 59 to 65 (…).” 175 Ibid., 59. 176 Ibid., 62. 31 was lying in the dunes of County Sligo, (which is in the West of Ireland ), the mystic describes a sighting of the shining and opalescent beings in the following way:
I had been listening to music in the air, and to what seemed to be the sound of bells, and was trying to understand these aerial clashings in which wind seemed to break upon wind in an ever-changing musical silvery sound. Then the space before me grew luminous, and I began to see one beautiful being after another. (…) there was at first a dazzle of light, and then I saw that this came from the heart of a tall figure with a body apparently shaped out of half-transparent or opalescent air, and throughout the body ran a radiant, electrical fire, to which the heart seemed the centre. Around the head of this being and through its waving luminous hair, which was blown all about the body like living strands of gold, there appeared flaming wing-like auras. From the being itself light seemed to stream outwards in every direction; and the effect left on me after the vision was one of extraordinary lightness, joyousness, or ecstasy. 177
In his book The Candle of Vision , Russell similarly writes:
Once I lay on the sand dunes by the western sea. The air seemed filled with melody. The motion of the wind made a continuous musical vibration. Now and then the silvery sound of bells broke on my ear. I saw nothing for a time. Then there was an intensity of light before my eyes like the flashing of sunlight through a crystal. It widened like the opening of a gate and I saw the light was streaming from the heart of a glowing figure. Its body was pervaded with light as if sunfire rather than blood ran through its limbs. Light streams flowed from it. It moved over me along the winds, carrying a harp, and there was a circling of golden hair that swept across the strings. Birds flew about it, and over the brows was a fiery plumage as of wings of outspread flame. On the face was an ecstasy of beauty and immortal youth. There were others, a lordly folk, and they passed by on the wind as if they knew me not or the earth I lived on. When I came back to myself my own world seemed grey and devoid of light though the summer sun was hot upon the sands. 178
177 Ibid., 61. Williams identifies this being in his book Ireland’s Immortals as Aengus, a primordial emanation, which by falling into materiality forgot its divinity, thereby changing in its nature from eternal joy to love, and from love to earthly desire. Between 1897 and 1902, Russell worked intensely to visualize this being with Butler Yeats, in order to establish contacts with Ireland’s genuine deities for their dawning return, and in order to work on Butler Yeats’s plan to establish the secret mystical order ‘The Castle of Heroes’. For Butler Yeats, Aengus embodied the creative energy of euphoria, presiding over the intersection between sex, ‘magic’, and poetry. A case study of Aengus can be found in Williams, Ireland’s Immortals 346-360. The appearance of a dark messenger of Aengus eventually influenced via William Sharp (1855 – 1905) the creation of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. For a connection between Russell and Lovecraft see Williams Ireland’s Immortals 384-389, and Joshi, A Subtler Magick: The Writings and Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft (1982), 97f. For creating the rituals of his intended order, Butler Yeats collaborated with MgGregor Mathers. For the relation between Mathers, Russell, and Butler Yeats in the creation of ‘The Castle of Heroes’, see: Kuch, Yeats and AE , 119-125. 178 Russell, The Candle of Visions , 34. A second sighting that the ‘Irish Mystic’ describes in TFFCC is a ‘water- being’ that Evans-Wentz called an ‘elemental king’ (65). A second sighting, called the ‘elemental king’ by George Russell, is described in The Candle of Vision, 166 . The sightings are almost completely identical; here left out because of space reasons. 32
In The Celtic Twilight , Butler Yeats published small essays on beliefs of the Irish peasantry. 179 In his essay ‘A Visionary’, an anonymous ‘mystic’, poet, painter, and wanderer in nature, appears who reflects the thoughts of Russell so far discussed. 180 Similar to Russell’s letter to Butler Yeats, that mystic wants to remain anonymous, ‘for he wished to be always unknown, obscure, impersonal. The first vision of the mystic in The Celtic Twilight is of a woman in a door, which mirrors the theories of Myers and of the mystic in the Proof of the existence of minor fairies. Butler Yeats asks whether this vision could be caused by a thought by a living person that appeared ‘to us in that symbolic form?’ Whereupon the mystic answers that he would have felt the thought of a living person in his living body. The apparition must therefore be a spirit; a dead person or something that had never lived. 181 Butler Yeats later describes the mystic’s painting as anatomically incorrect, yet as expressing deep beauty of feeling:
The faeries in whom he believes have given him many subjects, notably Thomas of Ercildoune sitting motionless in the twilight while a young and beautiful creature leans softly out of the shadow and whispers in his ear. He had delighted above all in strong effects of colour: spirits who have upon their heads instead of hair the feathers of peacocks; a phantom reaching from a swirl of flame towards a star ; a spirit passing with a globe of iridescent crystal—symbol of the soul—half shut within his hand.182
When discussing the paintings of Russell, Kelly writes that they were very popular at the time of TFFCC , yet controversial, after he had his first exhibition in 1904. 183 He normally painted them at his favorite destinations, Sligo and Donegal – the places where he had also reported his sightings in TFFCC . One of his main categories, his ‘dream/mystical images’, were based on his visions, yet, his paintings were not given a title. 184 In ‘An Irish Mystic’s Testimony’, a ‘wood being’ is described in the following way:
The wood beings I have seen most often are of a shining silvery colour with a tinge of blue or pale violet, and with dark purple-coloured hair.185
Kelly describes the picture ‘Spirit of the Wood’ likewise to visualize Russell’s experience with the shining ones :
179 Yeats, The Celtic Twilight , 1. 180 Ibid., 13. 181 Ibid., 12, 16. This could also explain the anonymity of the ‘Irish Mystic’ in TFFCC . Butler Yeats added that he asked this question in that way because he “was well instructed in the ways of the visionaries and in the fashion of their speech”. Butler Yeats demonstrates awareness of Myers’ belief that apparitions could be caused by telepathy, and appear in a ‘symbolic form’. It may be the case that the unification of Myers and Russell’s theories was so neatly done in Evans-Wentz’s proof, because Russell was already aware of them. 182 Yeats , The Celtic Twilight , 19. 183 Kelly, ‘Natural magic: the paintings of AE Russell’, 5. 184 Ibid., 6f. 185 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 64. 33
186
Two other pictures may demonstrate the thematic connection in Butler Yeats, Russell, and Evans-Wentz: 1) the typical ‘peacock’-like feathers around the head, 2) the ‘phantom’ reaching towards the stars, and the 3) inspiration by a ‘creature’ which in TFFCC is used in order to prove the existence of fairies:
187
4d) The Position of George Russell in Comparison with Evans-Wentz
The importance of Russell for TFFCC is already evident in the dedication, where Evans- Wentz writes that Russell had guided him in his study of Irish mysticism, and that his loyalty had influenced much of what he had written. In order to spot Russell’s theory as presented by Evans-Wentz in TFFCC, I will collect those occurrences in the book that are connected either with the pseudonym the ‘Irish Mystic’, ‘Irish seer’, and those that are thematically clearly related to him. These occurrences are then compared with scattered comments by Evans- Wentz, whereby Evans-Wentz’s implicit theories underlying his ‘scientific proof’ will become apparent.
186 Fig.2 Russell, Spirit of the Wood , Oil on canvas, 41 x 53cm, TCD Sullivan/Solomons Collection 196916 The Art Collections, Trinity College Dublin. Russell did not give his pictures a title, and their year is mostly unclear. The titles are those given by the exhibitors. 187 Fig. 3 & 4 Russell, Mystical landscapes with figures Oil on canvas, 40.6 x 53.4 cm. (16 x 21''.), Salford, City Art Gallery. Russell’s typical depiction of nature spirits with peacock feathers would find an echo by following Theosophists. For example Hodson, in his book Fairies at work and Play (1925), describes a visions with a ‘forest deva’ in Geneva in 1924, by highlighting: ‘[o]ver his head is a very bright band of brilliant colours, and these, combined with the fringes, produce the appearance of an American Indian with head-feathers and fringed clothing.’ Hence, he reasons that the ‘dyed head-feathers of the Indians are copied from these auras of nature-spirits which they resemble”. Hodson, Fairies at Work and Play , 106. 34
Beings
As already discussed, the beings are divided into lower, shining beings, and higher opalescent beings. Important information for our later discussion is that Evans-Wentz and Russell identify the shining beings as the elementals of the medieval mystics, and are further divided into wood beings and water being. The opalescent are taller than humans, while the shining have a similar size or smaller. Both are also more beautiful than men. The shining beings are not individualized, they are collective, calm in thought, and seem to have their existence in a higher being. The opalescent beings are in contrast greater in individuality and closer in spiritual unity. Both beings grow old, die, and pass into new bodies, though some breathe forth beings out of themselves. There are further male, female and indistinct sexes, as well as a clear social hierarchy.
Evans-Wentz approves Russell’s experiences with lower beings, yet elaborates on Russell’s testimony by equating the higher Sidhe with a future state of humans:188 As an introduction to the ‘Living Fairy Faith’, Evans-Wentz quotes ‘A.E.’ by saying that mighty beings rule in the ‘Unseen’, which ‘once was evident’. 189 As an introduction to the Celtic doctrine of rebirth in chapter VI, Evans-Wentz quotes ‘A.E.’ by saying that ‘comrades come back from Tir-na-nog for the uplifting of their race’. 190 For the ‘Irish Mystic’, the highest of the Tuatha de Dannan live in the heaven-world, which is part of Tir-na-nog, or the Celtic Otherworld.191 He ‘cannot say whether they incarnate as humans’. Yet, the higher beings pass into new bodies just as men do, 192 and they breathe forth beings out of themselves. He also sees correspondences between the opalescent beings and ancient Irish gods such as Manannan. 193
In the chapter on the Celtic reincarnation, Evans-Wentz develops the theory that ‘divine personages, national heroes who are members of the Tuatha da Danann or Sidhe race’ can reincarnate out of the Otherworld. 194 An important example is Arthur, who exists apart from the human ‘plane’ and reincarnates as a sun-divinity to teach science and arts. 195 A different example is Manannan Mac Lir 196 , god of the Tuatha De Danann in the Celtic Otherworld, who was, according to Evans-Wentz, perhaps the ' double ' of an ancient Atlantean king.197 His son Morgan incarnated to become Ulster’s high king, and was educated by Manannan to realize his divine nature and mission. 198 In that chapter, he also states to have discussed the
188 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 62, 64f. 189 Ibid., 17. 190 Ibid., 358. 191 Ibid., 60, 62. 192 Ibid., 64. 193 Ibid., 62. 194 Ibid., 368. 195 Ibid., 310, 321, 379. 196 Manannan Mac Lir is the Irish sea god, first appearing in The Voyage of Bran (c. 700). There, he is sparsely described as a man in a chariot riding over the ocean, revealing Christ-like attitudes. For Manannan see: Williams, Ireland’s Immortals . 56f, and MacQuarrie, The Biography of the Irish god of the Sea from Imram Brain (ca. 700) to Finnegans Wake (1939): The Wave of Mannannan (Lewiston, 2004) 197 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 7, 333. 198 Ibid., 373. 35
‘re-birth doctrine‘ in context of incarnating fairies with ‘well-educated’ Celts, and a ‘very prominent Irishmen’. 199
Evans-Wentz suggests that the highest Sidhe are a race evolved into a superhuman plane of existence. 200 They are described as in nature divine but in form human. On page 285, he writes that reliable seers in Ireland with greater psychical experience (probably the ‘Irish Mystic’ again) describe the likeness between humans and Sidhe. 201 On page 286, Evans- Wentz highlights the Tuatha the Danann as ‘gods and no-gods’, while Rhys sees this as an ancient formula similar to the Sanskrit deva and adeva. 202 On page 307, Evans-Wentz concludes that the Tuatha de Danann are divine beings that direct human warfare, and natural phenomena. 203 In chapter XII, Evans-Wentz describes the highest Sidhe of the Tuatha de Daann as superhuman, and the same in character as the gods of the Greeks and Hindus. 204 On page 509, Wentz highlights the historical Buddha as the completion of evolution, and on page 514, he refers to Buddha as a god who incarnated from a ‘divine and invisible world’ into the human plane to teach humans about reaching divinity. 205 He highlights that gods are beings who once were men, and emphasizes the need that exists in nature to work for the evolutionary laws. He also confirms that men will likely evolve into gods, a belief which is shared by educated contemporary Celts and mystics. 206
Concluding these thoughts, Evans-Wentz develops during the book a theory that the higher beings are at least in character the same, but probably even identical with the future state of humans (namely deified gods), and able like them to reincarnate in order to guide humanity and nature.207 Following his theory of beings that evolved into the superhuman, gods in reverse, were like man. This theory is inspired by quotes from Russell and not contradictory to the collected evidences he gave as the ‘Irish Mystic’, which makes it also possible that Russell is still among the plurality of Celts, ‘mystics and seers’ that are a source for Evans- Wentz’s proof of higher beings and future human races. Further evidence can be given in 4e) by tracing this theory to William Butler Yeats, and in chapter 5 by tracing it to Theosophy, especially Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism .
The Otherworld
The ‘Irish Mystic’ differentiates between an outer and an inner world. The outer world is seen with the physical eyes, in contrast to beings that are now in their own world. The ‘Irish Mystic’ furthermore differentiates between three great worlds that humans can see while in the body: The earth-world, the mid-world where the lower shining beings reside, and the
199 Ibid., 383, 385. 200 Ibid., 59. 201 Ibid., 285. 202 Ibid., 286. 203 Ibid., 307. 204 Ibid., 492. 205 Ibid., 509, 514. 206 Ibid., 514f. 207 A further argument is that Evans-Wentz attempts to prove the higher orders of fairies (among them human souls) and their relations towards each other in his last chapter. Yet, he only speaks about human monads and the godlike future humans. Since human souls are discussed extensively, the proof for the (superhuman) higher fairies is either completely left out, or is identical with the (superhuman) future of mankind. Ibid., 493ff. 36 heaven world, wherein the opalescent Sidhe reside. This invisible world is beautiful, harmonious, and a radiant archetype of our world. The world where the Sidhe reside is also called Tir-na-nog by the ancient Irish. People can enter the world of the Sidhe in trance, and after death when one sees the Sidhe frequently and broods on them. Yet, Tir-na-nog is only one of many ‘Otherworlds’. Some worlds are more horrible. The realm of the dead is thus part of the invisible world, but not necessarily identical with the distinct heaven-world, wherein independent beings reside. 208
Evans-Wentz refers to his underlying understanding of the Otherworld in his description of Ireland. There, he speaks of men of the second-sight who see fairies in a state of subjectivity, which is called fairyland by peasants. 209 He also writes that the Celtic Otherworld is like the ‘hidden realm of subjectivity lying just beyond the horizon of mortal existence”, and can only be seen through visions of the Irish seer. 210 This realm is not exclusive, but inhabited by various beings, where all disembodied spirits alike find their ‘appropriate abode’.211 He clarifies that the beautiful and peaceful Tir Innambeo ruled by Manannan, and the heroic quests that take place in Hades depict two kinds of legends of the same Otherworld.212 He confirms this equation in a footnote by stating: ‘Hades or the 'invisible realm of subjectivity which, too, is Fairyland’. 213 The variety of Scandinavian depictions of the Otherworld is explained by various Aryan people ‘looking at that one great invisible realm (…) which forms the Heavenworld of every religion’.214 Under Christian influence, this former sphere became divided and changed into Heaven and Hell. 215
As can be seen, underlying Evans-Wentz’s scientific conclusion that fairyland exists as a state and place is the implicit understanding of a subjective realm that humans enter after death. This subjective realm, however, consists of already existing abodes, inhabited appropriately by beings. For Evans-Wentz, the dead seem to reside in the rather positive ‘Heavenworld’, while according to the Russell only some dead enter the heaven-world. In both cases, there is an emphasis of the realm of the dead with the world of the higher Sidhe, and not with the mid- world of the lower Sidhe. This concurrence is seemingly approved in Evans-Wentz’s letter to Jenner, 16 March 1911, published by Carl Phillips. Henry Jenner and Evans-Wentz discuss therein, among other things, the similarities between the realm of the dead and that of the elementals. According to Evans-Wentz, Jenner reasons that the dead are one order of beings, and the elementals another one in a different ‘plane’ Evans-Wentz judges this conclusion to be ‘very logical’ and in ‘complete harmony with folk beliefs’216 . Jenner would later publish this difference as a ‘plane of the dead, similar to but not necessarily identical with that of the elementals’.217
208 Ibid., 60, 62, 65. 209 Ibid., 2. 210 Ibid., 334. 211 Ibid., 335. 212 Ibid., 353. 213 Ibid., 296. 214 Ibid., 338. 215 Ibid., 353. 216 Phillips, Carl, ‘A ‘mystic message to the world’, 131. 217 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 169. 37
Processes of visions
Russell differentiates between three processes of visions. The first are visions from the memory of nature.218 Evans-Wentz elaborates that these records correspond within mental pictures in us and are caused by a psychic element in the earth’s atmosphere. Everyone may have access to it, yet only the seers can do it whenever they want to. 219 In the second process, the mystic ‘throws’ himself into the mood of seeing the inner world. This state is facilitated by sacred places and their ‘naturally charged’ psychical forces or ‘magical power’. 220 To support this point, Evans-Wentz cites the ‘unique material’ from the ‘most learned’ of Celtic mystics and seers on page 14. Here, he explains that at certain places the earth’s magnetism and subtler forces are so powerful, that susceptible persons can feel it more easily. 221 In a footnote on page 33, Evans-Wentz describes the ‘Irish Mystic’ with whom he ‘often discussed the Fairy-Faith in detail’.222 As he says, the earth magnetism is circulating through so called ‘fairy-paths’. In the third process, visions ‘force’ themselves upon him. 223 Later, he explains that a being may project a stimulus upon the mystic. In both cases, the seer is in an ecstatic mode, which is explained as his consciousness temporarily functioning in the world of the being. 224 This theory is thus fully in accord with Evans-Wentz.
4e) Further Influences: William Butler Yeats
The question remains: who are the other mystics and seers that reflect given (Theosophical) doctrine of the ‘esoteric fairy faith’, and caused Evans-Wentz to speak in the plural? Apart from Russell, close resemblance within the evidence of the ‘Living Fairy-Faith’ has the ‘Testimony from a County Kerry Seer’, given by an Irishman of County Kerry, which Evans- Wentz describes as a fellow student of Evans-Wentz in Oxford. 225
We pass into the spirit realm at death and come back into the human world at birth; and we continue to reincarnate until we have overcome all earthly desires and mortal appetites. Then the higher life is open to our consciousness and we cease to be human; we become divine beings. 226
Besides this study colleague it is possible to propose a further influence on the ‘esoteric fairy faith’: William Butler Yeats. Directly after the evidence of Russell, Evans-Wentz quotes Butler Yeats emphasizing that the ‘Fairy-Kingdom’ certainly exists. 227 At a different place in TFFCC , he states that he discusses re-birth with a ‘very prominent Irishmen now living in Ireland’ with whom he was ‘privileged’ to discuss.228 In his last book Cuchama and Sacred
218 Ibid., 60. 219 Ibid., 485. 220 Ibid., 61. 221 Ibid., 14. 222 Ibid., 33. 223 Ibid., 61. 224 Ibid., 486f. 225 Ibid., 83. 226 Other possibilities are the unrecorded testimonies that are said to confirm the ‘Irish Mystic’, which come from a member of the Royal Irish Academy and the wife of a ‘well-known’ Irish historian. Ibid., 66. 227 Ibid., 66. 228 Ibid., 385. 38
Mountains (1981), Evans-Wentz repeats that Butler Yeats was convinced that fairy beings inhabit ‘magnetized psychically-charged places’, and even states the he took Evans-Wentz to these places in County Sligo. 229 Foster, in his biography of Butler Yeats, confirms meetings between Evans-Wentz and Butler Yeats around 1908 in preparation for TFFCC , and at a time that Butler Yeats had a special interest in occultism and Spiritualism. 230 Evidence of this interest is a letter Butler Yeats sent to his father in 1911, writing that he wants to show ‘that what we call Fairy Belief is exactly the same thing as English and American spiritism except that Fairy Belief is very much more charming.’231 In that letter, Butler Yeats is referring to a book about experiences and tales in Ireland that Lady Gregory was starting to prepare in cooperation with him in 1911: Visions and beliefs in the west of Ireland (1920). In her article, ’Visions and beliefs in the west of Ireland’ (1998) Guinness highlights the strong dependency between this book and TFFCC . In contrast to Foster’s argument that Butler Yeats can be read throughout the book of Evans-Wentz, she highlights a mutual exchange. According to her, not only was Evans-Wentz shown around Ireland for several weeks by Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory, they also introduced him to ‘their most gifted visionaries and story-tellers’. 232 It is not unlikely that Evans-Wentz met Russell through them, since he was a close friend of Butler Yeats.233 When looking at the book it can be seen that Butler Yeats interpreted Lady Gregory’s stories in lengthy comments. Very interesting is Note 5, wherein he compares a sighting with ‘visions as seen by a fellow-student of mine at the Dublin Art School’- Russell again.
Apart from Russell, Butler Yeats compares the sighting using two further sources. The first is Annie Besant and her book Ancient Wisdom (1897) . Butler Yeats would use Besant as a typical example of Theosophy, and in arguing about changes in the form of fairies which could be brought about by thought. 234 Butler Yeats’s second source is Emanuel Swedenborg 235 (1688-1772). The use of Swedenborg in understanding fairies becomes clearer when looking at Butler Yeats’s article Swedenborg, Mediums and the Desolate Places (1914), which concludes the book Visions and beliefs . There, Butler Yeats recalls how the collected stories on fairies encompassed in a coherent ‘ancient system of belief’ which bears many analogies with Spiritism. 236 One day, he opened The Spiritual Diary (1758) of Swedenborg, wherein he found all of the puzzle pieces he was looking for to find their identity. Some of
229 Evans-Wentz, Cuchama and Sacred Mountains , 165. 230 Foster, W. B. Yeats, A Life Vol 1, 389, 525. 231 Yeats, ‘Letter to John Butler Yeats’, 9 May 1911, cited in: Foster , W. B. Yeats, A Life, Vol. 1 , 439. 232 Guiness, ‘Visions and beliefs in the west of Ireland’, 38, 41. 233 Ibid., 41, Raine, ‘Foreword’, xiiif. In exchange for the contacts Evans-Wentz had given Robert Kirk’s and Andrew Lang’s The Secret Commonwealth (1893) to Butler Yeats, wherein Lang proposes his psychical theory. Raine suggests, it was Evans-Wentz who brought Butler Yeats in contact with the ideas of Lang. Guiness on the other hand suggests that Evans-Wentz ‘bolstered’ Butler Yeats’s ‘wish to interpret folk-lore via the séance room’ and even encouraged the publication of Visions and Beliefs, in fear that its material might be published elsewhere. While all of these protagonists influenced each other, it seems to me impossible to argue which of them caused the work of the other. It is more likely that all of them, including Lang, where working simultaneously on the same project, demonstrating the broad fascination of the conflation between science, folklore, and occultism at the times of the Celtic Revival. 234 Lady Gregory, Visions and beliefs in the west of Ireland , 273, 275. 235 For Swedenborg, see: Hanegraaff, Swedenborg, Oetinger, Kant , Swedenborg Foundation, West Chester: 2007, and Stengel, Aufklärung bis zum Himmel , Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen: 2011. 236 Yeats, ‘Swedenborg, Mediums and the Desolate Places’, 1. 39
Swedenborg’s basic assumptions discussed by Butler Yeats have high resemblances with Evans-Wentz’s underlying assumptions discussed above, as the subjective otherworld and the deification of humans into higher beings. Butler Yeats summarizes Swedenborg by arguing that ‘all angels were once men’, and all men will become angels after death. After their death, the departed develop towards their ‘springtime of their life’ and then progress in beauty and sensual enjoyment. 237 First, however, the dead do not realize their situation and repeat their habits; which could be seen by the spirits who still exist in the fairy hills. 238 Heaven and Hell are indeed subjective expressions of the nature and thought of the departed, which surround them like scenes and places. Also the dead are not alone, but share each other’s life and communicate with the living. 239
Butler Yeats’s use of a Theosophical work and Swedenborg to interpret the fairy faith is not far apart, since Theosophical theory builds also on the work of Swedenborg. An example can be given with Isis Unveiled, wherein Blavatsky identified Swedenborg as a natural seer who was following the philosophy of mystical writers without being himself an adept, and failed therefore in part in his correct interpretations .240 Without denying the possible influence by Swedenborg either through Butler Yeats, or directly maybe through his father’s library, Evans-Wentz’s theory closely resembles the elaboration of Swedenborg’s doctrine through Theosophical writers, as will be shown in the next chapter.
It becomes apparent that the mystics and contemporary Celts to whom Evans-Wentz refers to in his book are likeminded people that Evans-Wentz personally knew: study colleagues and friends, most importantly George Russell and William Butler Yeats. It also becomes apparent that they influenced each other in their interpretation; and that Evans-Wentz developed his own understanding of the fairy faith in dialogue with them. Yet, besides their influences, Russell is the prime material for Evans-Wentz to proving and explaining the existence of fairies and fairyland.
Preliminary Conclusion
It became obvious that the proof for fairies depends thoroughly on believing the experience and theory of George Russell of seeing fairies in their own nature and world due to induced trance; affirming Williams’s witty description of Russell as Evans-Wentz’s ‘spiritual crush’. 241 Yet, it also becomes apparent that Evans-Wentz’s argument for proving fairyland only becomes conclusive when implicit concepts are taken into account; concepts that were developed at least in dialogue with William Butler Yeats and George Russell. The existence of fairyland as a state and place becomes coherent only with the implicit understanding of a subjective otherworld. This subjective otherworld is nevertheless not totally individualistic, but shared with specific beings, and at appropriate, objective places. Following Russell, these
237 Ibid., 2, 5. 238 Ibid., 3. 239 Ibid. 5. 240 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled Vol. I, 306. 241 Williams, Ireland’s Immortals , 413. 40 beings are strictly classified in orders, which also underlie Evans-Wentz’s implicit theory of a mutual intersection and a close evolutionary entanglement between higher beings and human souls. The lower beings remain as the principal cause for apparitions and psychic phenomena, which is implicitly stated by dealing with the proof for souls only in the later chapter. The reason for the (exoteric) belief in fairies would thus indeed be elementals, or lower parts of the soul, which are only perceived as apparitions due to unskilled observers.
5. The Theosophical background of TFFCC
In this chapter, I will elaborate on the following thesis: TFFCC , and especially its scientific conclusion, profoundly reflects Theosophical theory mostly on the basis of Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism, Blavatsky Isis Unveiled, The Secret Doctrine, and Russell’s Celtic interpretation of them. Concerning the lower fairies, the esoteric fairy faith reflects the Theosophical debate on elementals that appear in séances and dwell in the same realm of the recently departed: Kama Loca. This purgatory realm is the subjective pre-state of the positive dwelling of the immortal Monad until reincarnation: Devachan. This reveals fairyland as the Theosophical afterlife state Kama Loca / Devachan. Elementals are at the core of Druidic practice, which reflects Theosophical theory on ‘magic’ drawn from Blavatsky Isis Unveiled , and elaborates on the relationship of the Druids as the Aryan wisdom keepers of sunken Atlantis. Christ and Buddha can be identified as Avatara of deified entities who help current humans in their development towards becoming angelic Dhyan Chohan. While attempting to prove the Celtic fairy faith, Evans-Wentz presents Theosophical theory in a Celtic light. With this theory as the background, he continues his pursued into the esoteric core of religion in his second book The Tibetan Book of the Dead .
5a) Russell’s Theosophical Influence, the Higher Self
In tracing Russell’s influences, I follow Williams that it is important to differentiate between two steps in the depiction of the mythology by Russell. The first phase lasts until 1902 and demonstrates a distinct idealized Irish mythology that Russell restored by using Theosophical elements, visible for example in The Legends of Ancient Eire (1885). Therein, the origin myth of the Irish ‘race’ is based on the medieval Book of Invasion (1075) and the Tuatha de Danann are rather deified magicians without being in themselves deities. This time was historically determined by Russell’s strong belief in the coming of an Irish Mahatma at the end of the 1890s, bringing back the original belief.242 As Ashcraft clarifies, Blavatsky prophesied that the Kali Yuga, the most immoral and materialist cycle, would come to an end, initiating a turn upwards of human development towards higher intuitive spiritualism. 243 Progressively, Russell accepted Oriental Theosophy and the Indo-European origins of Irish literature, using rather kabbalistic and ‘hindu’ mythology as a model to rediscover the de Danann as
242 Williams, Ireland’s Immortals , 342f 243 Ashcraft, Dawn of the New Cycle , 44. 41 reflections of cosmic principles. This later step can be found in Russell’s 1902 published piece The Children of Lir , and in his Irish cosmology described in The Candle of Vision .244
As can be found in Summerfield, Russell’s belief in the Theosophical creation was based on his own experiences, and framed by The Apocalypse Unsealed from his Theosophical teacher Pryse, and Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine.245 Though Summerfield’s description almost exclusively builds on the work of Pryse, especially in p. 9ff . Russell’s basic understanding of creation is summarized in Summerfield in the following way: The unmanifested God is the One. Out of him emanated the Logos, which is the Divine Mind, and the Archaeus, which is the World Soul. The World Soul manifests as the Astral Light 246 , the sensitive ethereal substance which serves visionaries as the world chronic, and finally as matter, which Russell also calls the Mighty Mother. The First Logos multiplies into seven hierarchies of beings of divine power, which Pryse calls the Logoi, and which build collectively the Second Logos. According to Summerfield, the true self for Russell is one of these Logoi - or Aeons - who fell into existence and became the immortal soul of humans.247 The reverse of this fall brings back the former glory to the higher self . Pryse accordingly writes that ‘[t]he origin of man is in the Deity, and his true self or individuality is a Logos, a manifested God’. 248 Pryse thus speaks from man as a unity of three variations of the same Logos, with the earthly human as the third and lowest incarnation of it:
The First Logos, the enthroned God, who is the source of life and its ultimate goal, is never incarnated; the Second Logos is the incarnating Self; and the man as he is on earth is the Third Logos, who, if he conquers and achieves the second birth, becomes the son of the God.249
Over several incarnations, the higher self creates out of lower material earthly humans as an outer body, and refines and transmutes thus human until it is redeemed and higher and lower bodies unite. 250 The Biblical Johannes and Jesus are, for example, one unity: Johannes the earthly human and Jesus is his ‘noetic self’.251 The divine higher self ‘overshadows’ the earthly human in its development and is ‘directly related’ to his faculties in several ways. For example, the higher-self stores in its Kronos-aspect all experiences during the several incarnations in its higher memory. 252 The reward for unifying with the higher self for the earthly Ego is, among other things, the attainment of ‘Eternal Memory’ of all its earlier, supernal existence.253
244 Williams, Ireland’s Immortals , 312ff. 245 Summerfield, That Myriad-Minded Man, 45, 61, and footnote 19 & 20 on p. 299f. 246 Summerfield calls the lower substance Akasha. For clarity, I will stick to Blavatsky’s differentiation seeing Akasha as the higher, unmanifested substance, or ‘Primordial Aether’, and Astral Light its lower manifestation. As she writes: ‘The astral light stands in the same relation to Akasa and Anima Mundi, as Satan stands to the Deity’. The Secret Doctrine I , 197. See the explanation in Barborka, The Divine Plan , 30f. 247 Ibid. (Summerfield) 62f. 248 Pryse , The Apocalypse Unsealed , 9. 249 Ibid., 210. 250 Ibid., 133. 251 Ibid., 80. 252 Ibid., 95, 112, 138, 145, 174. 253 Ibid., 96f. 42
In Summerfield, after 1893 the name Russell would denote for him only his superficial personal self, while AE denoted ‘the Logos incarnated in human form, his immortal self, passing from body to body with its sheath of accumulated desires and experiences.’254 In variation to Summerfield, I argue that Russell’s framework for the higher self can rather be found in Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled , than in The Secret Doctrine . This differentiation is important since the higher soul in The Secret Doctrine is undeveloped, while Russell and Evans-Wentz ground their theory in an already perfected and alternative consciousness.
In Isis Unveiled Chapter IX, we read that Adam Kadmon, the Logoi, AEons, or Demiurgos, were the first emanation out of the One. They created a perfect being, Adam. All of these Logoi wanted to endow man with immortal spirit, rebelling against primordial wisdom.255 The created man was thus composed out of subliminal astral elements and the divine breath (the spirit). This rebellion failed, and man, together with some of the Logoi, fell into matter in order to evolve cyclically out of it to reach former glory. The fallen man is composed in its highest form out of the divine spirit (Monad), or inner-self, an immortal and distinct entity, also called individuality. On a higher sphere, this individuality is watched by its two parent spirits, the Augoeides which stem from the World-soul, and with those the individuality desires to unite. On the lower sphere, this individuality stands in contrast to the earthly personality, temporarily ‘Mr. Smith or Brown’.256
As Julie Chajes points out in her article ‘Reincarnation in H. P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine’ (2017), there are important differences between Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine , among the most important is the idea of reincarnation. In her summary of that theory in the The Secret Doctrine , Blavatsky saw
the spirit as intrinsically immortal, and maintained it was normal for it to incarnate repeatedly, each time attaching itself to a different mortal soul and body, thereby living many lives on Earth. 257
In contrast, Isis Unveiled teaches a doctrine of Metempsychose. We find this teaching also in chapter IX: the earthly human should attempt to overcome his personality to unite the Monad with the Augoeides by means of specific practices. If this is done, the human is illuminated and inspired: after death the ‘freed Adam’ ascends to loftier spheres. 258
The man who has conquered matter sufficiently to relieve the direct light from his shining Augoeides, feels truth intuitionally; he could not err in his judgment, notwithstanding all the sophisms suggested by cold reason, for he is illuminated.
254 Summerfield, That Myriad-Minded Man , 31. This quote from Summerfield is probably taken from Pryse, Apocalypse Unsealed, 13. 255 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled vol. 1 . 297f, 300. 256 Ibid., 303, 316, 319. 257 Chajes, ‘Reincarnation in H. P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine’, 66. 258 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled Vol.1 , 303, 306. Despite Chajes’ argument, the later reincarnation theory can also already be found in Blavatsky’s A few Questions to “Hiraf” (1875). 43
Hence, prophecy, vaticination, and the so-called Divine inspiration are simply the effects of this illumination from above by our own immortal spirit. 259
In an article by Russell in the Irish Theosophist (September 15, 1894), Russell writes about the doctrine of reincarnation, and the higher soul and development of higher faculties as taught in Isis Unveiled :
(…) we find every day growing stronger that sense of immortality, of absolute union with the universal soul, which at first merely manifested itself in strange feelings and emotions; we find the clues to the control of our physical and mental faculties, and are not surprised to discover the ten−thousand− fold increase in value these faculties then bear; (…) until finally we come, after many incarnations, after suffering, after despair sometimes, to a knowledge which transcends all human knowledge (…). 260
In the variation of Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine , the highest principle Atman is in essence identical with the uncreated One, also termed: ‘breath of the absolute’, ‘(…) the emanating spark from the uncreated Ray’261 ; or simply: Monad.
It is the only immortal and eternal principle in us, being an indivisible part of the integral whole — the Universal Spirit, from which it emanates, and into which it is absorbed at the end of the cycle. 262
This Monad is described as on a ‘pilgrimage’ through the various kingdoms of being, wherein it progressively unleashes its essence. 263 As will later be explained in more detail, the seven beings that emerged out of the Logos (the Dhyan-Buddhas) emanate or create 264 those Monads that are destined to become men in one of the evolutionary cycles. Compounded with the higher principle Buddhi which has yet to be evolved (discriminating principle) and the currently evolving Manas (Mind principle), the Monad constitutes the immortal self of a human.265 On its pilgrimage, the Monad is clothed in several bodies. These separate bodies have to evolve first and stand in direct connection to higher beings from whom they originate 266 . A part of Stanza V in The Secret Doctrine II illustrates the organic interaction between the Monad and various beings:
The breath (human Monad) needed a form; the Fathers gave it. The breath needed a gross body; the Earth moulded it. The breath needed the Spirit of Life; the Solar Lhas breathed it into its form. The breath needed a mirror of its body (astral shadow); “We gave it our own,” said the Dhyanis. The breath needed a vehicle of desires (Kama Rupa); “It has it,” said the Drainer of Waters (Suchi, the fire of passion and animal instinct). The breath needs a mind to embrace the Universe (…). 267
259 Ibid., 306. 260 M.R.J., AE in the Irish Theosophist , 81. 261 Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine I , 571f. 262 Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine I , 16, and Barborka, The Divine Plan , 10. 263 Barborka, The Divine Plan , 18. 264 Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine I, 572 265 Barborka, The Divine Plan , 179, Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine Volume 5, 471. 266 Barborka, The Divine Plan, 185f, 120, 295. 267 Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine II , 105. 44
The lower quaternary is constituted, for example, out of the ‘gross body’ and the animal soul (Kama Rupa / desire body), and builds the mortal part of a human which has already evolved. This Monad is clothed temporarily in various lower bodies. In Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism , these various bodies are listed in the following way:
1. Spirit - Atma. 2. Spiritual Soul - Buddhi. 3. Human Soul - Manas.
4. Animal Soul - Kama Rupa. 5. Astral Body Linga - Sharira. 6. Vitality Prana, or Jlva.
7. The Body - Rupa. 268
As in Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, humans are already a compound of all these bodies, while the higher ‘Spiritual Soul – Buddhi’ is in the present stage only latent as a potential faculty, for example, for clairvoyance. 269
We can thus conclude several points . In variation to Summerfield’s analysis, Russell’s framework for AE is closer to his teacher Pryse’s in Apocalypse Unsealed and to Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled than to The Secret Doctrine , or Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism. The immortal Logoi of Pryse, and Aeon of Russell can be linked to the world soul and immortal Augeoeides in Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled, which later become the undeveloped higher body buddhi in Secret Doctrine. Yet, this soul should not be confused with the highest self (the ‘light of the Logos’ in Pryse 270 ) – the Monad.271 Blavatsky emphasizes that a human is an evolving Monad that ‘has, moreover, his own divine Spirit or personal God.’272 When this discussion is compared with Evans-Wentz’s theory of the reincarnating soul-monad, we see important commonalities. Evans-Wentz has clear references to Theosophical discussions on the Monad in combination with a pre-existing higher soul as discussed, especially in Apocalypse Unsealed and Isis Unveiled . In Evans-Wentz, the personality of a human is a pale reflection of an already existing, unknown, higher consciousness – the individuality. 273 This higher consciousness appears to the personality as its subconsciousness. 274 In future development, the lower personality will be transmuted into the ‘higher’ consciousness. 275 If the latent
268 Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism, 65. 269 Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism , 70, 180, 198. 270 Pryse, The Apocalypse Unsealed , 10 271 See also Eglinton, A Memoir of AE , 166. 272 Barborka, The Divine Plan , 456 in reference to Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine Volume V , 351 273 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 504. 274 Ibid., 508. 275 Ibid., 498. An important origin of Evans-Wentz’s theory is Frederic Myers (1843 –1901). Myers proposes an evolution of consciousness whereby a human’s personality gains control over an already ‘subliminal’ existing faculty, capable of supernormal activity. Myers defines the ‘subliminal’ in the following way: ‘Subliminal.—Of thoughts, feelings, etc., lying beneath the ordinary threshold (limen) of consciousness, as opposed to 45 powers of this higher soul are brought into consciousness, its higher memory can be attained; as in the case of the Buddha. 276 This doctrine is combined with the reincarnation thesis as it was introduced in Esoteric Buddhism . This can especially be seen in the individuality, which creates its pale reflection anew in every incarnation.277 As will become more obvious, there are several clear references by Russell and Evans-Wentz that are in line with the doctrine of Blavatsky, especially in Isis Unveiled , which underlines Russell as a source for TFFCC . We can thus draw a scheme underlying Evans-Wentz’s main Theosophical sources for TFFCC , which will be a reference for further discussions. The Celtic influences are excluded:
It can be added, that the scientific proof for the existence of fairies in TFFCC consists at its core of Evans-Wentz trying, like George Russell himself, to come to terms with Russell’s unusual experiences
.
supraliminal, lying above the threshold.’ According to Jeffrey Kripal, Myers’ subliminal self is like a basement that could suddenly open into a ‘vast psychical sea’, and is close to William James’s understanding of a ‘continuum of cosmic consciousness’ the individual self can plunge into. Similar to the theory of Evans-Wentz, Myers sees the subliminal self as acting in three degrees: in inspiration within dreams or ‘psychosis’; in telepathic communication; and within complete influence within trance, possession and ecstasy. Comparable to Lang, Myers proposes that earlier evidence of folklore and Spiritualism should be tested for its authenticity as a basis for future inquiries into postmortem survival; and similar to Blavatsky, Myers explains the theoretical closeness to Swedenborg by arguing that Swedenborg was an early precursor of his work. As in the case of Evans-Wentz’s theory of ‘magic’, his theory of consciousness can be traced to him finding mutual confirmation between various sources, and especially in the closeness between James, Lang and Myers which found in Blavatsky and Russell a unifying whole. Myers influence on Evans-Wentz is still apparent in The Tibetan Book of the Dead , for example by Evans-Wentz writing about the ‘ecstatic state of non-ego, of subliminal consciousness’ at the moment of dying, and about the ‘supernormal faculties of the bardo-body’ gained after death. Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead , 31, 97. Kripal , Authors of the Impossible , 62ff. Kripal , Esalen , 406ff. Myers , Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death: Volume 1 , xxi. For the legacy of Myers for the ‘Human Potential Movement’ see especially: Kripal, Esalen, America and the Religion of No Religion , University of Chicago Press 2007. 276 Ibid., 509. 277 Ibid., 503f. 46
5b) The Lower Species: Kingdoms of Beings, Elementals
In chapter 3b) we discussed how the Theosophical Society emerged after the military officer Felt claimed to be able to make the elementals appear due to chemical processes. According to an analysis by Hanegraaff, there is a ‘crucial but neglected background-tradition’ to the occultist fascination to summon elementals. 278 Based on a newspaper article from 10 November 1895, Felt conducted the materialization by means of a ‘combustion of aromatic gum and herbs’. 279 While the idea that elementals are inhabited by the four kingdoms of earth originates from Paracelsus’ treatise Liber de nymphis, sylphis, pygmaeis et salamandris (1566), the specific attempt to evoke them became popularized though Henri Montfaucon de Villars’s (1635 –1673) novel Comte de Gabalis (1670). The novel announces satirically that the occult philosophy is ultimately about becoming the master of nature, having power over the elements, to converse with the supreme intelligence, or command demons. 280 As claimed by the Count of Gabalis in that novel, by partaking a specific ‘alchemical elixir’, Gabali’s pupil would be able to see the elementals; which became interpreted in Edward Bulwer- Lytton’s (1803 – 1873) important novel Zanoni (1842) as an ecstatic ‘hallucinogenic’ substance which unfurls its effects by inhalation. 281 In his article ‘The First Psychonaut?’ (2016), Hanegraaff further elaborates on the connection between the emergence of occultism, visions of spirits or elementals, and experiments with (‘hallucinogenic’) suffumigations. Louis-Alphonse Cahagnet (1809 -1885) hereby emerged as a key figure. In his autobiographical Sanctuaire du spiritualisme (1850), he describes how the protagonist induces visions of spirits after inhaling incenses influenced most likely from a recipe of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa’s (1486 –1535) De occulta philosophia I , (1533) p. 43. 282 Hanegraaff could thus draw a red line of evocation of spirits and elementals in relation to altered states of consciousness from Paracelus and Agrippa, and in conjugation with Comte de Gabalis , Zanoni , and Cahagnet, to the research of Felt and subsequent Theosophical researchers.
In this chapter, I will argue that the representation of the Sidhe underlies the primal differentiation of the Kingdom of Beings in Theosophical theories. It is thereby possible to continue Hanegraaff’s lineage of Theosophical inquirers to George Russell and William Butler Yeats, and ultimately to Evans-Wentz, reaching even into his later works, such as Tibetan Book of the Dead . Evans-Wentz consciously follows Russell in bringing his visions in harmony with Paracelsus 283 , Celtic culture and Theosophy. Paracelsus’ elementals will
278 Hanegraaff, ‘Western Esotericism and the Orient in the First Theosophical Society’, 12. 279 Ibid., 11 280 Hanegraaff Esotericism and the Academy , 222f. Comte de Gabalis was also important in spreading the idea of intermarriage with elementals in occultist circles, visible, for example, by the direct reference to that book in Blavatsky’s article ‘Thoughts on the Elementals’ (1890). An affirmation due to Celtic fairy lore where intermarriage with fairies is a repeated motif might be suggested, also due to Blavatsky’s reference of elementals as fairies in the same article. 281 Hanegraaff, ‘Western Esotericism and the Orient in the First Theosophical Society’, 13. 282 Hanegraaff, ‘The First Psychonaut?’, 112. 283 In ‘An Irish Mystic’s Testimony’, it is Evans-Wentz who asks Russell whether the lower Sidhe resemble what ‘medieval mystics called elementals’; which Russell affirms. That Evans-Wentz was aware of Paracelsus can be seen on p. 369 in TFFCC , wherein he claims that the rebirth doctrine ‘continued to live’ in Europe through alchemists and mystical philosophers, and was preserved by Orders such as the ‘Rosicrucians’. Paracelsus, 47 ultimately appear again, after a long transition and transformation, as the Tibetan ‘wrathful deities’.
I want to start by giving several definitions. A crucial concept is that of a plane. In Blavatsky’s Theosophical Glossary (1918/1892) she defines:
Plane. From the Latin planus (level, flat) an extension of space or of something in it, whether physical or metaphysical, e.g., a "plane of consciousness". As used in Occultism, the term denotes the range or extent of some state of consciousness, or of the perceptive power of a particular set of senses, or the action of a particular force, or the state of matter corresponding to any of the above. 284
A plane is a subtler state of matter, and the corresponding state of senses or consciousness, which already hints towards Evans-Wentz underlying principle of the invisible world. According to The Secret Doctrine , the cosmos consists of seven great planes. At the top are three unmanifested planes, followed by four denser planes. The densest plane- the seventh counted from above-, is our material world. A graphic by Blavatsky demonstrates this in the following way; no notice has to be taken on the globes left and right:
285
All of these planes are divided into seven sub-planes. Our seventh, material plane, is subdivided by Blavatsky in the following way, corresponding the several subtle bodies:
together with Agrippa, Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled and Secret Doctrine , and Kingsford’s Hermetic Works (1885) are mentioned by Evans-Wentz as an example of a contemporary ‘renaissance of the ancient doctrine’ through various ‘philosophical or religious societies’. Russell might have come to the same conclusion independently, and directly through Chatterjee, who wrote in his Man: Fragments of Forgotten History : ‘These elemental beings, or nature-spirits as they are sometimes called, are the same as the mysterious creatures mentioned by the Rosicrucians under various names’. While the directions of influence remain unclear, this again demonstrates that Evans-Wentz did not necessarily have to follow Russell; both could have re-affirmed each other through the reading of similar (Theosophical) sources. Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 369, Chatterjee, Man: Fragments of Forgotten History , 39. 284 Blavatsky, The Theosophical Glossary , 237. 285 Fig. 5. Illustration without title , in: Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine I , 200. 48
286
In her Theosophical Glossary , Blavatsky also defines Elementals in the following way:
Elementals . Spirits of the Elements. The creatures evolved in the four Kingdoms or Elements—earth, air, fire, and water. They are called by the Kabbalists, Gnomes (of the earth). Sylphs (of the air). Salamanders (of the fire), and Undines (of the water). Except a few of the higher kinds, and their rulers, they are rather forces of nature than ethereal men and women. These forces, as the servile agents of the Occultists, may produce various effects; but if employed by "Elementaries" (q.v.)—in which case they enslave the mediums—they will deceive the credulous. All the lower invisible beings generated on the 5th, 6th, and 7th planes of our terrestrial atmosphere, are called Elementals: Peris, Devs, Djins, Sylvans, Satyrs, Fauns, Elves, Dwarfs, Trolls, Kobolds, Brownies, Nixies, Goblins, Pinkies, Banshees, Moss People, White Ladies, Spooks, Fairies, etc., etc., etc. 287
The homes of the elementals are the closer terrestrial sub-planes. These elementals comprise fairies, and were likewise defined by Evans-Wentz and George Russell as the lower order of the Sidhe. In Isis Unveiled , she groups elementals as the most developed of the three lowest classes of beings. The lowest are the elementaries, or larvae. 288 As she also explains in her Glossary , these most miserly ‘depraved’ humans have lost their divine higher properties, and float in Kama Loca - a crucial concept that will be discuss below - until their disintegration. 289 The second group consists of abstract forms, models or ideas of things and human before they are born in the physical world. Dying in the invisible world, they unite with the divine breath while becoming a human embryo. The third group, the elementals or nature spirits, are the agents of nature that live in ether. Compared to her later teaching, there is however a certain important difference in character between these elementals. In Isis Unveiled , this third group
286 Fig. 6 . Illustration without title , in: Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine Volume V , 525. 287 Blavatsky, The Theosophical Glossary , 103. 288 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled Volume 1 , 310. 289 Blavatsky, The Theosophical Glossary , 112. 49 never becomes human.290 In The Secret Doctrine Blavatsky writes the important passage that all spirits either were or will be men:
In sober truth, as just shown, every “Spirit” so-called is either a disembodied or a future man. As from the highest Archangel (Dhyan Chohan) down to the last conscious “Builder” (the inferior class of Spiritual Entities), all such are men, having lived æons ago, in other Manvantaras, on this or other Spheres; so the inferior, semiintelligent and non-intelligent Elementals — are all future men. 291
Emphasis should be put on the term Dhyan Chohan. Geoffrey Barborka, the Theosophy student who made an in-depth study of The Secret Doctrine , defines them as a generic term for all angelic beings in the higher planes. As he explains ‘dhyan’ stems from the Sanskrit root ‘dhyai’, to meditate, and ‘chohan’ of Sanskrit: ‘lord’, thus: Lords of the Meditation. 292 These higher classes are discussed in Isis Unveiled in reference to Proclus:
The highest among them were the twelve uper-ouranioi, or supercelestial gods, having whole legions of subordinate demons at their command. They are followed next in rank and power by the egkosmioi, the intercosmic gods, each of these presiding over a great number of demons, to whom they impart their power and change it from one to another at will. These are evidently the personified forces of nature in their mutual correlation, the latter being represented by the third class or the "elementals" we have just described. 293
In The Secret Doctrine , Blavatsky writes similarly about the Dhyani, that ‘the whole Kosmos is guided, controlled, and animated’ by them.294 Barborka summarizes further that their highest goal is to unfold and fulfill the cosmic plan, and to supervise that process by guiding lesser Beings in manifesting the phenomenal world. As in Russell’s description of the organization of the higher Sidhe, the organization of the Dhyan Chohan is rather that of an army that is built up in several hierarchies.295 The following example from The Secret Doctrine expresses Barborka’s definition:
This hierarchy of spiritual Beings, through which the Universal Mind comes into action, is like an army - a “Host,” truly - by means of which the fighting power of a nation manifests itself, and which is composed of army corps, divisions, brigades, regiments, and so forth, each with its separate individuality or life, and its limited freedom of action and limited responsibilities; each contained in a larger individuality, to which its own interests are subservient, and each containing lesser individualities in itself. 296
290 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled Vol. 1 , 310f 291 Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine I, 277- In Isis Unveiled , Blavatsky refers to fairies as elemental spirits, adding that they never become men. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled Vol 1 , Xxix. 292 Barborka, The Divine Plan , 59. 293 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled Vol. 1 , 312. 294 Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine l, 274. 295 Barborka, The Divine Plan , 60, 61. 296 Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine I , 38. 50
And similar to Russell’s Sidhe, Blavatsky writes in The Secret Doctrine that these beings, elementals and Dhyan Chohan, are not individuals in a human sense, but units whose purity and ‘less accentuated individuality’ increases the closer they reach to the ‘One Divine’. 297 The hierarchies of the lesser beings on the one side, and the higher hierarchies of the Dhyan Chohan on the other side, comprise with minerals, animals and humans the different kingdoms of beings. Humans comprise a middle position between elementals and celestial beings. Among these Kingdoms there is an upward evolution by means of reincarnation. Similarly, as the lower ranks develop upwards, there is a hierarchy of compassionate higher beings that help these lower beings and guide – which will be discussed closer in the chapter on Avataras.298 In Barborka, the hierarchy of beings is depicted in the following way:
1. Class I of the Dhyani-Chohanic Kingdom 2. Class II of the Dhyani-Chohanic Kingdom 3. Class III of the Dhyani-Chohanic Kingdom 4. The Human Kingdom 5. The Animal Kingdom 6. The Plant Kingdom 7. The Mineral Kingdom 8. Class I of the Elemental Kingdom 9. Class II of the Elemental Kingdom 10. Class III of the Elemental Kingdom 299
When compared with the threefold world of the Sidhe depicted in an ‘Irish Mystic’s Testimony’, the Earth-world corresponds to the terrestrial kingdom of humans, animals, plants, and animals. The opalescent beings of the heaven-world correspond to the higher celestial beings in the Dhyani-Chohanic Kingdom I, II, III. Finally, the mid-world of the lower Sidhe / elementals corresponds to the Elemental Kingdom I, II, III. The detail that Kingdom I contains the lowest of human souls points towards the next argument that the mid- world is that greater plane that the elementals and the dead share.
5c) Fairyland: the After-Death States Kama Loca and Devachan
I will argue that Theosophical concepts of the afterlife, Kama Loca and Devachan, reconciles Evans-Wentz’s underlying assumptions of fairyland as a ‘hidden realm of subjectivity’ beyond mortal existence which is both the dwelling place for fairies and the departed.300
In The Legends of Ancient Eire , Russell writes:
Tir-na-noge, the land of Niam, is that region the soul lives in when its grosser energies and desires have been subdued, dominated and brought under the control of light;
297 Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine I , 274. 298 Barborka, The Divine Plan , 68. 299 Ibid., 59. 300 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 334. 51
where the Ray of Beauty kindles and illuminates every form which the imagination conceives, and where every form tends to its archetype. (…)In a sense it corresponds with the Tibetan Devachan.301
Russell’s ‘Tir-na-noge’ is compared here with the Tibetan Devachan 302 , yet before reaching it, its grosser particles have to be subdued. In The Legends of Ancient Eire , Russell calls this region ‘mirror of heaven’ and ‘astral light’, a dreadful sphere and ‘House of Learning’, wherein illusions arise, corresponding to human centers. 303
As Sinnett elaborates in Esoteric Buddhism , when a human dies, he abandons his first three bodies, namely the physical body, its vitality and its subtler counterpart, or astral body.304 The higher principles prepare to pass through stages into higher planes. The first plane a human finds itelf in, after departing from the material world is Kama Loca, also called the Astral Plane.305 In Barborka, we read that Kama Loca literally means World of Desire, from the Sanskrit root ‘kam’, to desire. 306 As Sinnett continues , in Kama Loca the human undergoes a purgatory process. There, the ‘material tastes, emotions, and proclivities’ of the kama-rupa exhaust themselves so that the three higher bodies finally lose their lower ‘earthly’ affinities and thus connection to the material world. 307 Building from the same theory, Leadbeater writes in The Astral Plane that purification of the ‘lower desires’ happens by means of a loss of grosser particles, whereupon the human loses gravity and rises to higher strata until the mind-principle is free enough to unite with the higher Triad. Both authors also agree that this purgatory state is perceptible to the senses of many clairvoyants and identical with the dwelling place of the elementals.308 Sinnett writes: ‘Kama loca may be permanently inhabited by astral beings, by elementals, but can only be an antechamber to some other state for human beings.’309 Blavatsky defines Kama Loca in an elaboration of Sinnett, saying:
The semi-material plane, to us subjective and invisible, where the disembodied "personalities", the astral forms, called Kamarupa remain, until they fade out from it by the complete exhaustion of the effects of the mental impulses that created these
301 Russell, The Legend of Ancient Eire , 95. 302 The term Devachan was introduced in the English speaking world by Emil Schlagintweit’s Buddhism in Tibet (1863). Schlagintweit defines Devachan as the pleasurable place Sukhāvatī of the celestial Amitābha Buddha in Mahayana Buddhism wherein humans enjoy the good deeds of their life. In contrast to theosophical Devachan, humans are freed from the bond of reincarnation, yet able to assume human form to descend to earth. Schlagintweit, Buddhism in Tibet , 100f. 303 Russell, The Legend of Ancient Eire , 94f. On the mural paintings at Ely Place, Russell even depicted the cycle of the soul in an arrangement between elemental spirits a being of the heaven-world In The Candle of Vision , he also confirms that heaven-world is a real region yet should be conceived as a plane, that exists in earth like the soul in body. Summerfield, That Myriad-Minded Man , 66f in reference to Russell’s discussion of Plato’s Phaedo , 111b, in Russell, The Candle of Vision, 32. 304 Sinnett differentiates this third body of a human from the conscious sending forth of all human bodies minus the physical one, in the praxis called Astral Projection. Sinnett’s Astral body cannot, in contrast, be sent away to be used as a vehicle for the other, higher bodies. Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism , 69. 305 Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism , 122. 306 Barborka, The Divine Plan , 393. 307 Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism , 314 308 Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism , 122, and Leadbeater, The Astral Plane, 27. 309 Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism , 167. 52
eidolons of human and animal passions and desires. (See "Kamarupa".) It is the Hades of the ancient Greeks and the Amenti of the Egyptians, the land of Silent Shadows; a division of the first group of the Trailokya. (See "Kamadhatu".)310
Blavatsky’s reference to the Greek Hades also points to the several shades and dwellings in Kama Loca, depending on the individual way of death or lived mode of life. 311 In Sinnett, the darkest abode of subjective misery in Kama Loca, a Luciferian dwelling place for the ‘aristocrat of sin’, is Avichi 312 ; a concept that corresponds to the later elementaries in Blavatsky.
In John Eglinton’s biography of Russell, A Memoire of AE , he published a letter from Russell to Weekes , written in December 1932. Therein he writes:
One part of me shall go back to earth, another part to the illusion of Heaven, another part to its own being- what you think of as Deity- another part perhaps to faery or elemental spheres, for we have all forms of beings in ourselves. 313
Summerfield, in an elaboration on the same letter, shows that Russell himself had visions of the horrors of Kama Loca 314 ‘not by any folly of spiritualism but by the alert concentrated psyche rising out of the cell of the brain’. In this letter, Kama Loca is identified with one of the levels of the mid-world.315 This not only explains the non-exclusivity of Evans-Wentz’s invisible Otherworld, it also explains the additional negative worlds that Russell saw, and reconciles it with the underlying assumption by Evans-Wentz that Hades is a part of fairyland.
Evans-Wentz’s description of Tir-na-nog as a positive and ‘subjective world’ 316 becomes more clear in the discussion of Theosophical Devachan/fairyland a state wherein imagination becomes real. In The Secret Doctrine , it can be found that when a human closes his period in Kama Loca, he enters the gestation phase. Barborka explains the Gestation as a second death, wherein the mind-principle unites with its highest properties. 317 These highest properties are explained as the compound Atma-Buddhi. Having been thus combined, the triad Atma- Buddhi-Manas prevails until its rebirth on the material plane in the paradisiacal state of bliss Devachan, erected by its own consciousness. 318 A picturesque description of this subjective Devachan can in The Ocean of Theosophy (1893) by William Judge. He explains Devachan as
310 Blavatsky, The Theosophical Glossary , 159. 311 Barborka, The Divine Plan , 397. 312 Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism , 142. 313 Englinton, A Memoir of AE , 170. 314 Besides Esoteric Buddhism , Russell must have been aware of the concepts of Kama Loca and Devachan at least since his reading of Chatterjee. In his Man: Fragments of Forgotten History, Chatterjee underlines the connection between the realm of the dead and Karma Loca by rejecting any claim that it is a secluded place. For example: ‘The intermediate state between Devachan and earth-life is Kama Loca, which it is hardly necessary to point out, is not a locality.’ Similarly, Chatterjee describes the creation of elementaries in that realm stemming from humans having earthly desires. Chatterjee, Man: Fragments of Forgotten History , 117f, 121. 315 Summerfiel, That Myriad-Minded Man , 66. 316 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 335. 317 Barborka, The Divine Plan , 404. 318 Ibid., 400. 53 a state of rest wherein the best and highest parts of a human which could not bloom, now can blossom.319
It simply now has gotten the opportunity to make its own world for itself unhampered by the clogs of physical life. Its state may be compared to that of the poet or artist who, rapt in ecstasy of composition or arrangement of color, cares not for and knows not of either time or objects of the world. 320
In Sinnett’s terms, Devachan is the subjective world of ‘harvest’, wherein the moral and spiritual activities find their effects, and dreams and hopes find fruition, which appear to the departed even more real than reality of this world. Kama Loca and Devachan thus reflect lower and higher faculties of humans, which take form in a subjective post death state/place. 321 Corresponding to these faculties are specific beings. Besant’s Ancient Wisdom fits the delineation of Evans-Wentz hereby by situating Devachan on the upper plane of Kama Loca as a ‘specially guarded part’ of the mental plane. 322 Here, human souls reside on the same plane as the numberless intelligences, described with ‘great power, and most splendid in appearance’. These beings are described as ‘Shining Ones who guide the processes of natural order, overlooking the hosts of lower entities’, and yield submission to their overlords, which Besant equals to Archangels and Buddhist Rupa Devas – thus in principle the Dhyan Chohan.323
5d) Fairies and the After-Death States in The Tibetan Book of the Dead
I will further demonstrate the similarity of these implicit ideas behind fairyland in Evans- Wentz’s other book The Tibetan book of the Dead . It will become apparent that the ideas that underlie both books are the same as those that have been shown to underlie the Theosophical ones.
Evans-Wentz’s largest publication after TFFCC , The Tibetan Book of the Dead consists of seven texts. Four of them are prayers, and three are instruction texts for Tibetan funeral rites; two of these manuals that addressed to advanced tantric practitioners. 324 These texts are part of a cycle of 15-20 texts called The Great Liberation by Hearing in the Intermediate States (Bar-do thos-grol chen-mo ). The Great Liberation by Hearing is a composition from a chapter of a large cycle of ‘treasure texts’ (gter ma) which were found by Karmalingpa (1403–1478) in the 15 th century, called the Peaceful and Wrathful Deities: A Profound Sacred Teaching, [entitled] Natural Liberation through [Recognition of] Enlightened Intention 325 (Zab-chos zhi-khro dgongs-pa rang-grol ). 326 According to tradition, these texts were hidden
319 Judge, The Ocean of Theosophy , 129. 320 Ibid., 125. 321 Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism , 128, 132, 135. 322 Besant, The Ancient Wisdom , 137. 323 Ibid., 114. 324 Lopez, ‘Tibet, America, and the Book of the Dead’, 37:20. 325 Also: The Profound Doctrine of Wisdom's Natural Freedom [in Encountering] the Peaceful and Wrathful Deities. 326 The description of the events happening in the bar do is part of chapter ten, The Treasury of Words and Meanings (tshig don mdzod ), in Karmalingpa’s Peaceful and Wrathful Deities. The chapter provides practical instructions for preparation and anticipation of one’s own death, a description to reverse the dying process, 54 in the eighth century by Padmasambhava, the legendary founder of the Nyingma school, when Tibet first became influenced by Buddhism (late 7 th century). 327 The Liberation upon hearing was first standardized by Rikzin Nyama Drakpa (1647-1710) in the early 18 th century. A later block print edition that consisted of 17 texts was purchased in 1919, among other books, in Gyantse by the British political officer Major W.L. Campbell, who was stationed in Sikkim.328 When Campbell returned to Sikkim, he handed these books over to Evans-Wentz, who was stationed in this region. For his later publication in 1927, Evans-Wentz used a portion of these texts, in comparison with three other editions 329 among them an unknown manuscript of the possession of his translator Kazi Dawa Samdup 330 (1868-1922).
The Great Liberation of Hearing in the intermediary state represents an adaptation of ancient Tibetan funeral rites to Indio-Buddhist concepts. In the leading ancient Tibetan tradition, the living lost their life power ( bLa ) after death, and by entering the world of the dead became mischievous and antagonistic towards the living. The predominant function of the funeral rites was to control the aggressive powers of the ancestral spirits ( mtshun ), and to safeguard their passage in their state of vulnerability. 331 In Buddhist adaptation, the world of the dead was seen as intermediary state ( bar do ) wherein the departed wanders a maxim of 49 days between dying and rebirth. This intermediary state offers specific opportunities for extinction from the ongoing cycle of rebirth. The Great Liberation of Hearing provides assistance in this process from a lama, who directly addresses the dying, instructs, and reminds him of his earlier teachings. At the moment of death, reality dawns in its purest, subtlest, and non-conceptual form. The trained tantric Yogi learns to enter ‘reality-itself’ ( chos-nyid ), realizes the truth (de- bzhin-nyid ), perceives emptiness, and attains enlightenment. To the untrained who cannot utilize this moment, 100 peaceful and wrathful deities progressively appear. These deities, however, should be seen as nothing other than the inner reality of the dying person projected ‘as in a dream’. The lama instructs the departed not to fear the deities but to realize their subjectivity and interdependency, in order to attain Buddhahood. 332 If the departed does not and final instructions when the death process has set it. For a discussion of that chapter see: David Germano (2007) ‘Dying, Death, and Other Opportunities’ in: Lopez (ed.) Religions of Tibet in Practice , 458-493. 327 Buswell and Lopez, ‘Evans-Wentz, Walter Y.’, 503, and Dorje, ‘A Brief Literary History of the Tibetan Book of the Dead’, 38. The translator and scholar especially for the Tibetan Nyingma school, Gyurme Dorje (b. 1950) traces the iconography of the Peaceful and Wrathful Deities back to an influential text included in the Collected Corpus of the Nyingma School , the Guhyagarbha Tantra , which was compiled by King Indrabhūti in north-west India in the sixth century. 328 Cuevas, The Hidden History of the Tibetan Book of the Dead , 207. 329 The other came from the Dutch Mari Albert Johan van Manen (1877 – 1943), and from the possession of a Zhamarpa lama from Darjeeling. Cuevas, The Hidden History of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, 207. 330 Kazi Dawa Samdup was a respected English-Tibetan translator and headmaster of the Bhutia Boy’s school in Gangtok. Samdup agreed to provide translations for Evans-Wentz, and over the course of the next two months he met with him each morning before his school day. The translations that Samdup made for Evans-Wentz would eventually appear in three books: The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927), Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines (1935), and The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation (1954). Cuevas, The Hidden History of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, 3, and Lopez, ‘Foreword’, E. 331 Cuevas, The Hidden History of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, 31. 332 Cuevas (2003), The Hidden History of the Tibetan Book of the Dead , 27, 192. Germano (2007) ‘Dying, Death, and Other Opportunities’, 459f. For a closer analysis of the appearances in this cycle see: Lauf, Ingo (1989) Secret Doctrines of the Tibetan Books of the Dead Shambhala: Boston. For a detailed history and origins of the Tibetan Book of the Dead see: Bryan Cuevas J. (2003), The Hidden History of the Tibetan Book of the Dead , (2003), Oxford University Press: Oxford & New York. 55 discern reality and flees its projected terror, it enters the next cycle of the endless chain of rebirth samsara.
In his introduction, explanations and footnotes, Evans-Wentz interprets The Great Liberation of Hearing in his own terms. Close resemblance to his theory in TFFCC can be found in chapter VIII: ‘The Psychology of the Bardo Vision’. The statement of TFFCC that religion originated from real contact with the spiritual realm was so important for Evans-Wentz that he repeats it there in a direct reference. There, he announces that the Tibetan bardo-realm and the Celtic fairyland both point towards the same, real, inhabited realm with which initiatory rites are connected.333
Evans-Wentz argues that after death the deceased becomes aware of his new supernormal faculties. 334 The ‘bardo-plane’ that he enters appears totally subjective as in a dream, visualizing the positive and negative impulses and desires of the departed divine and animal nature. 335 Depending on the respective belief, the visions will be either Christian or Buddhist: ‘Rationally considered, each person's after-death experiences, as the Bardo Thödol teaching implies, are entirely dependent upon his or her own mental content.’336 Evans-Wentz sees in this an explanation of why Christian seers in trance states either have visions of God on a throne, or of visions in hell. 337
The statement that bardo-realm is in essence the same as the Celtic fairyland, is supported by its relation to beings. Related to the higher or divine impulses are divine beings, which appear as Peaceful Deities. Among them is Vairochana, the ‘Originator of all phenomena’, and Amitabha, ‘Infinite Compassion and Love Divine the Christos’.338 Similarly, related to the lower impulses and passions are lower beings which appear as the Wrathful Deities. Among these minor deities Evans-Wentz counts spirits or dakinis, which he equated with ‘fairies’.339
333 Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead , 37. 334 Ibid., 31. 335 Ibid., 33f. 336 Ibid., 34. 337 Ibid., 34. 338 Ibid., 32. A comparison might be drawn with Blavatsky’s The Mystery of Buddha , wherein she writes: But it must be remembered that the higher ethereal principles [in mortal men] are not, like the lower, more material ones, visible sometimes to man (as astral bodies), and they have to be regarded in the light of separate or independent Powers or Gods, rather than as material objects. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine Volume 5 , 394. 339 Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead , 32. The equation dakini / fairy is further elaborated in a footnote, explaining that these ‘fairy-like goddesses possess peculiar occult powers for good or for evil’. Ibid., 127. Similarly, dakinis are described in the Theosophical Glossary as ‘evil elementals’. Blavatsky, The Theosopical Glossary , 87. While Evans-Wentz focuses in TFFCC on the ability of the higher Sidhe to reincarnate, or create Avataras in order to uplift humanity it should be said that The Secret Doctrine also mentions the ability of dakinis to incarnate and to marry men. Evans-Wentz TFFCC , 368. So Blavatskys write in The Secret Doctrine II , 285 on the Atlanteans that they (…) took unto themselves wives who were entirely human and fair to look at, but in whom lower, more material, though sidereal, beings had incarnated. These beings in female forms (Lilith is the prototype of these in the Jewish traditions) are called in the esoteric accounts “Khado” (Dâkini, in Sanskrit). Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine II , 284f. 56
A further example is given in a footnote on p. 160 of his book, where he comments on the ability to see devas in a state of meditation / dhyana.
Ordinarily it is only when clairvoyant vision is induced by dhyana, or exists naturally in certain specially gifted clairvoyants, and directed to the deva-world, that the devas are seen; sometimes, however, the devas appear unexpectedly. The Tri-Pilata, like the canonical literature of Northern Buddhism, is replete with visions and unexpected visitations of devas, as Christian and Moslem sacred literature is replete with lore concerning angels. 340
In this footnote, he seemingly reflects on the various ways of having visions echoing George Russell’s testimony to ‘throw myself into the mood of seeing’, or having visions ‘forced themselves upon me’.341 Finally, he compares devas with angels, which brings him close to Besant in The Ancient Wisdom , and Russell and his interpretation of the Sidhe in TFFCC . Blavatsky in her ‘Thoughts on the Elementals’, correspondingly states that ‘[t]here are high Devas and lower ones, higher Elementals and those far below man and even animals. But all these have been or will be men’. 342 In her Theosophical Glossary she defines a deva in emphasis on higher beings:
Deva (Sk.). A god, a "resplendent" deity. Deva-Deus, from the root div "to shine". A Deva is a celestial being—whether good, bad, or indifferent. Devas inhabit "the three worlds", which are the three planes above us. There are 33 groups or 330 millions of them. 343
Finally, even though it is rather subtle, Evans-Wentz gives a further example of post-human beings / fairies while discussing the history of The Tibetan Book of the Dead in his chapter XIV. Evans-Wentz highlights that Rigzin Karma Ling-pa found the hidden treasure of Padma Sambhava. Both characters are immediately linked more closely, by describing Ringzin as an ‘emanation or incarnation’ of Sambhava, described as the founder of Lamaism. 344 This idea of an Avatar that incarnates to guide humankind was apparent in TFFCC in the discussion of the Buddha as a posthuman being, as well as in the discussion of the abilities of highest fairies such as Manannan Mac Lir 345 . In a footnote, Evans-Wentz explains the word ‘Rig-hdsin’ as a Tibetan translation of the Sanskrit term Vidya-Dhara, meaning either a learned person, or ‘a class of supernatural beings like certain orders of fairies’.346
Evans-Wentz’s commentary in The Tibetan Book of the Dead thus still reflects the ‘esoteric fairy faith’ in TFFCC in terms of a subjective after-death state which is especially connected with higher and lower beings that can be seen by clairvoyants in trance states. Matching Theosophical theory of afterlife states, lower beings correspond with lower human faculties,
340 Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, 160. 341 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 61. 342 Blavatsky, ‘Thoughts on the Elementals’ 343 Blavatsky, The Theosophical Glossary , 91 As Barborka confirms, the term deva is used by Blavatsky rather loosely and sometimes in regard to the lower Elemental Kingdom. Barborka, The Divine Plan , 135. 344 Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead , 74. 345 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC, 373, 385, 514. 346 Evans-Wentz, The Tibetan Book of the Dead , 73. 57 while the higher faculties correspond to higher beings such as Amithaba/Christ, and who bear the ability to incarnate in order to guide humanity. This example demonstrates that between both works there is no break, but a transition in the form of a Theosophical doctrine of the afterlife state, which Evans-Wentz saw as universal. Mirroring the thesis that the esoteric doctrine in all religion is identical 347 , he ‘rediscovered’ the (Theosophical) teaching of mere ‘natural differentiation’ as either Celtic or Tibetan. 348
5e) Elementals, Psychic Phenomena and ‘Magic’ in Blavatsky and TFFCC
As stated, crucial factors in Theosophy and TFFCC are the entanglements between departed humans in Kama Loca (the mid-world), elementals (the lower Sidhe), clairvoyant visions, and phenomena in séances. I will further argue that TFFCC directly reflects the arguments of Theosophy on the origin of supernormal phenomena. In part 3b), we also discussed Godwin’s analysis that for Blavatsky, Spiritualists did not communicate with the dead, but with elementals and shells. The argument that is presented by Blavatsky is slightly different from Godwin’s analysis.349 In her article ‘Thoughts on the Elementals’ (1890), wherein Blavatsky further links elementals to fairies, she highlights in a revealing quote.
In those whom the millions of Spiritualists call the "Spirits of the Dead," and in whom the Roman Church sees the devils of the Host of Satan--we see neither. We call them, Dhyan Chohans, Devas, Pitris, Elementals high and low--and know them as the "Gods" of the Gentiles, imperfect at times, never wholly. 350
In Isis Unveiled , Blavatsky also confirmed that all types of beings can appear ‘chameleon- like’ as manifestations on Spiritual circles: planetary spirits, the actual dead, nature spirits, but most commonly the depraved soulless humans, the elementaries. By refuting Spiritualist claims, the existence of nature spirits becomes as a necessity. 351 By the manipulation of ether,
347 Sinnett, The Occult World , 109 348 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 396. Lopez, in his The Tibetan book of the Dead - A Biography argues: Evans-Wentz’s classic is not so much Tibetan as it is American, a product of American Spiritualism. Indeed, it might be counted among its classic texts. (…) The Tibetan Book of the Dead is a remarkable case of what can happen when American Spiritualism goes abroad. Keeping in mind the variety of Evans-Wentz’s academic sources, and the broader European fascination with occultism, a description of The Tibetan Book of the Dead as a classical book of Spiritualism seems to be too narrow. Evans-Wentz does not describe himself as a Spiritualist and devalues Spiritualism in favor of Theosophy. For example, on page 139f in Cuchama and Sacred Mountains Evans-Wentz consequently writes of Theosophy as ‘reformed spiritism’, and even as ‘higher Spiritualism’. Considering how Evans-Wentz developed earlier Theosophical doctrine in The Tibetan Book of the Dead , I propose to speak of that book, if a comparison is necessary, as a classic text of Theosophy. In this context, the importance of Tibet as a place for Theosophical ascended masters should also be noted, as well as Evans-Wentz’s emphasis that The Tibetan Book of the Dead was revealed by an avatara of Sambhava, the originator of Lamaism. Seen in that Theosophical context, Sambhava can be counted among the spiritual teachers and conservators of ancient wisdom; and that Evans- Wentz’s publication is even meant to be interpreted as a fateful event. Evans-Wentz, Cuchuma and sacred Mountains , 139f. Lopez, The Tibetan book of the Dead - A Biography , 15. 349 The statement of Godwin’s argument can be found in Blavatsky ‘A few questions to Hiraf’ (1875). Here, Blavatsky argues that phenomena of Spiritualism are not caused by the dead proper. The ‘elementaries’ in this text still stand somewhere between the elementals in Kingdom I, II, and III of her later writing. Blavatsky, ‘A Few Questions to ‘Hiraf’’, 8. 350 Blavatsky, ‘Thoughts on the Elementals’. 351 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled Vol. 1 , 325. 58 nature spirits are said to be able produce physical effects. One of their most effective tricks is also contained in the argument of Russell, which became part of Evans-Wentz most serious proof for the existence of fairies:
They [the elementals of class III] not only exist and can all live in ether, but can handle and direct it for the production of physical effects, (…) More than this ; they can so condense it [ether] as to make to themselves tangible bodies, which by their Protean powers they can cause to assume such likeness as they choose, by taking as their models the portraits they find stamped in the memory of the persons present. It is not necessary that the sitter should be thinking at the moment of the one represented. His image may have faded many years before. The mind receives indelible impression even from chance acquaintance or persons encountered but once. 352
And just as these nature spirits can disguise themselves as humans through the memory or impressions of a person, inner clairvoyant visions can perfectly recognize these beings. Similarly, elementals can disguise themselves as animals. The trick of disguise, which from Blavatsky’s perspective is even worse, can be played by elementaries, the evil spirits that pretend to be good. This scientific indifference should be strictly avoided and lead to future study in the field of psychology.353
Blavatsky’s opinion of the nature of spiritualist phenomena was copied and elaborated by other Theosophical writers. Even though Russell opposed Leadbeater 354 , he shared his hostility to Spiritualism by arguing that the only manifestation possible was a shell speaking through the medium.355 This concept of the shell can be found when looking at Leadbeater’s book The Astral Plane .356 This Astral Plane is inhabited by two groups of beings: human and non-human beings. The largest group of human beings is the dead in their purgatory state. After all their ‘animal desires’ have been purified, the desire-body kama-rupa, empty of all consciousness, is left behind as a shell to slowly disintegrate. 357 The same concept can also be found in Evans-Wentz’s argument of the subtle bodies in TFFCC .358 Among the non-humans within the Astral Plane, Leadbeater emphasizes elementals. As in Blavatsky, these elementals are classified into different groups. The semi-intelligent beings of Class II are without shape, and react and adapt sensitively towards thoughts. Manipulated, these beings can produce specific phenomena in the séance-room such as bell-ringing or stone-throwing. 359 And similar to Blavatsky, Leadbeater also attributes to the natural entities of Class III a large portion of spiritualistic phenomena, such as answering questions, producing raps, reading of thoughts, or even materializations. As he suggests, whenever silly tricks are played at séances, it probably
352 Ibid., 311. 353 Ibid., 311, 326, 333. 354 Summerfield, That Myriad-Minded Man, 134. 355 Ibid., 41. 356 Leadbeater, The Astral Plane , 8 Leadbeater refers to the Astral Plane as the general seventh plane; the invisible world including its sub-planes. 357 Ibid., 27f, 32. 358 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 503. 359 Leadbeater , The Astral Plane , 52f. 59 comes from them. 360 Sinnett in this regard agrees that occult phenomena can rarely be only attributed to one class of beings. In contrast:
It is by command over the elementals that some of the greatest physical feats of adeptship are accomplished; and it is by the spontaneous playful acts of the elementals that the greatest physical phenomena of the séance room are brought about.361
As stated in 4b) Evans-Wentz’s proof of lower fairies is constructed in a similar way, by arguing that all the phenomena that occur in séances can also be produced by nature spirits. Yet, more than producing the same argument as Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled , Evans-Wentz also uses the same psychical researchers and cites the same books as Blavatsky did in her work, making it possible that Evans-Wentz’s direct reference was Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled . In this regard, ‘The Final Testing of the ‘X-quantity’ (480ff) by Evans-Wentz is of special interest. Taking his Celtic seer witnesses aside, two important psychical researchers that are mentioned for his argument are Crookes and Flammarion. Flammarion’s argument (echoed by Leadbeater) is that most psychic phenomena are childish in nature and rather the work of fairies than deceased adults. He is cited in his Mysterious Psychic Forces (1907) arguing that psychic spirits are not necessarily the dead but elementals or spectres. 362 Flammarion was also a Theosophist who was held in high regard by Blavatsky and Sinnett, and is cited in several of their works. In Isis Unveiled , Flammarion, as in Evans-Wentz’s chapter, is mentioned alongside Crookes to disprove the Spiritualist argument.363 Flammarion and Crookes again appear on page 195f within the same argument to dispute whether the ‘dead are the sole agents in the production of all the phenomena.’ 364 This time, Evans-Wentz and Blavatsky use the same book by Crookes, Notes of an Inquiry into Phenomena called Spiritual.365 In a different context, Flammarion also appears in Esoteric Buddhism on the phenomena of a dying planet. 366
Druidic Magic
In part 4a) we discussed how Evans-Wentz refurbished Marett and James to argue that ‘magic’ is real and can be brought about due to manipulation of ‘soul-stuff’ out of which fairies are made. 367 A Theosophical equivalent to James’s soul-stuff or Marett’s mana is ether, which was mentioned in context of the quote above from Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled . Leadbeater in The Astral Plane , and Judge in Echoes of the Orient similarly define ether as the substance wherein ‘Sylphs, Salamanders, Gnomes, Undines, Elementals’, as well as remnants of the dead are floating. 368 As ‘soul of the world’, this substance envelopes the Earth and each of its molecules. 369 I want furthermore to argue that Evans-Wentz’s theory of
360 Ibid., 85f. 361 Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism , 158. 362 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 480ff (especially 481). 363 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled Vol.1 , 54f. 364 Ibid., 196. 365 Ibid., 195, and Evans-Wentz , TFFCC , 482 366 Sinnett. Esoteric Buddhism , 251. 367 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC, 265, 255. 368 Judge, Echoes of the Orient , 45. 369 Ibid., 46. 60
‘magic’ reflects the Theosophical theory of harnessing ether by controlling nature spirits, in order to install Druids as elite keepers of Theosophical wisdom.
Malcolm Chapman writes in The Celts, the Construction of a Myth (1992), that in the 19 th, century the linguistic discovery of the Indo-European language-family, which included various Celtic branches, was brought about in the context of an idea of race, and nation building. If a language moved, it was taken by ‘flesh-and-blood people’, carrying their culture with them. 370 Gauri Viswanathan elaborates in her Outside the Fold (1998), that this discourse of ‘aryanized’ Celts was welcomed especially by Irish and Indian Theosophists. The Celts where perceived as a race that were a spiritually supreme towards which the Anglo-Saxons strove, and thus gave the Theosophists a brahmanical cast. 371 In other words, it gave to them a national type of keepers of the lineage of esoteric knowledge: the Druids.
In The Occult World , Sinnett wrote that in all religions, secret castes controlled natural phenomena in association with preter-human beings. 372 In Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled , she adds that ‘true’ religions build upon knowledge of the ‘occult powers’ in nature. Blavatsky argues that man, in practicing physical and moral purity, reaches control over his spirit. The resulting increase of ‘vital power’ enabled man to attain control over the elementary spirits below him. This magical practice could thereby be compared with the Western wisdom of the Druids in Great Britain. In their ‘silent crypts’, they practiced spiritual and physical science, and thought the secrets of the universe, such as the immortality of the soul. 373
The similarities in Evans-Wentz’s explanation of what ‘magic’ really meant in antiquity is thereby so close to Isis Unveiled that they almost appear as direct copies.
TFFCC Isis Unveiled ‘Magic was the supreme science because ‘Magic was considered a divine science it raised its adepts out of the ordinary which led to a participation in the levels of humanity to a close relationship attributes of Divinity itself.’375 with the gods and creative powers.’374
Similarly, Evans-Wentz writes that Druids, together with the ancient priests of Egypt, maintained their power by seeing fairies, taking them under control in order to foretell the future, perform exorcism, or produce natural phenomena. 376
Man, being of the god-race and thus superior to these lower, servile entities, could, like the gods, control them if adept in the magical sciences; for ancient Magic, about which so much has been written and about which so little has been understood by most people in ancient, mediaeval, and modern times, is according to the wisest ancients
370 Chapman, The Celts , 17f. 371 Viswanathan, Outside the Fold , 191. 372 Sinnett, The Occult World, 107, 105, 113. 373 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled , 18, 27. 374 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 257. 375 Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled , 25. 376 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 265. 61
nothing more than the controlling of daemons, shades, and all sorts of secondary spirits or elementals by men specially trained for that purpose. 377
Furthermore, Evans-Wentz reasons in TFFCC that Atlantis might be the origin of the Celtic belief in the Otherworld and rebirth, shared in a pan-Aryan culture. 378 In The Secret Doctrine II , Blavatsky likewise points out that ‘(…) the Druids (…) were the descendants of the last Atlanteans’ 379 , and adds that the sacerdotal places of the Druids were even built by them. 380 The esoteric doctrine of the Druids was so universal that it could be found among the ‘Aryan Hindus’, the Greeks, the ‘Latins’, and others. Four pages later, she hints that the ‘Druids believed in the rebirth of man’. While repeating that the Aryans inherited their doctrine from the Atlanteans, she again highlights the Aryan origin of the Celts. 381
5f) Memory of the Earth: Russell’s Training and Reading of the Astral Light
Russell had already had visions as a young man, yet, they also have to be seen as the result of special training, related to specific theories and concepts common in Theosophy. TFFCC reflects his training in gaining spiritual insights, especially by reading the Astral Light.
In his later poem The Feast of Age (1913), Russell underlines a druidic gathering as a sacred rite, wherein attendants rise ‘homewards’ to the ‘innumerable All’. 382 To achieve comparable results himself, Russell had, in 1893, already started with concentration exercises and meditation to gain control over his flickering visions. 383 From 1895, Russell undertook practical training through his teacher Pryse. According to Summerfield and Kuch, Pryse gave Russell instructions in ‘psychometry’, which trained Russell to hold shapes in his imagination, until he felt hidden spiritual centers open, and he encountered dazzling visions of ancient figures and landscapes evoked from the ‘Memory of the Earth’.384 Towards the end of 1895, Pryse and Russell used this technique to investigate the historical background of Irish legends; their mutual results were published in the Irish Theosophist under the pseudonyms AE and Aretas under the title ‘The Enchantment of Cuchullain’ (15 November 1895 – 15 March 15 1896). 385
As hinted by Kuch and Summerfield, we can draw attention to the fact that Russell’s theory in TFFCC of reflections of the memory of nature that Evans-Wentz used to explain specific
377 Ibid., 256. 378 Ibid., 396. 379 Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine II , 343. 380 Ibid., 756. 381 Ibid., 760. 382 Russell, ‘The Feast of Age’, and Summerfield, That Myriad-Minded Man , 117. 383 Summerfield, That Myriad-Minded Man , 45. 384 Ibid., 47, 69. 385 Kuch, Yeats and AE , 107f. Russell retells how the hero of the Ulster cycle Cuchullain is enfeebled by Fand, an immortal being of the Tuatha de Dannan, who fell in love with Cuchullain, thereby alienating herself from her husband Manannan Mac Lir. The account is introduced by a small poem highlighting the emergence of this hero during the practice with Pryse, saying: ‘While our vision, backward cast / Ranged the everliving past (…)’. Russell and Pryse, `The Enchantment of Cuchullain`, 32-35. Kuch argues that the content for ‘The Enchantment of Cuchullain’ was taken in fact from Eugene O'Curry’s (1796-1862), On the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish , (1873), a copy of which was found in Russell’s library. Cp. Kuch, Yeats and AE , 108. 62 sightings of ghosts and fairies 386 , builds upon Pryse’s training of reading the Astral Light. The Astral Light in the explanation of Judge and Barborka, is an aspect of ether discussed above, and the lowest manifestation of the primordial, undifferentiated divine substance Akasha. 387 Very like a ‘sensitive photographic plate’, this substance takes a picture of every moment and holds it into it. In this regard, the Astral Light serves as a cosmos store house of all past events, colors, sounds and things: a seer can always gaze upon them. The Astral Light is also the substance a thought takes physical form in when it is shaped in the brain, and therefore allows abilities like thought-transference or apparitions.388
As Summerfield highlights, Russell and Pryse also experimented with thought-transference, and with reading the chakras. After making some progress, Russell increasingly attempted to annihilate his personality in order to identify with the inmost self, and to let the inspiration from that self, radiate unhindered through him.389 For clarification of these practices, it is advisable to have a further look at the theory of his guru Pryse. For Pryse and Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled , training in higher abilities is ultimately connected with the mission of man to unite the lower principles with its higher principles. Pryse elaborates that the higher soul is not really a body, but an archetypical form. The refinement of the human lower principles creates the immortal solar body wherein the unification between the principles can be attempted. To achieve this unification, specific practices have to be trained. Within the higher soul rests the ‘light of the Logos’. Pryse calls this force the serpent-formed Kundalini when this light is aroused, or ‘electrified’. If this happens, the Kundalini force weaves from the universal soul the immortal solar body – here also called Augoeides. 390 In order to arouse this force for its highest work, it has to be charged by moving through specific nerve centers that are correlated with the forces of the specific subtle bodies; the seven chakras. Yet before this can be done, the adept has to master and purify these centers. Emotions and thoughts, for example, have to be brought to perfect peace. Also, a single thought or idea has to be able to be held undeviatingly in the mind. With mastery, the neophyte can arouse the ‘paraklete’, the force connected to the seventh chakra, and enters into ‘the state of manteia, the sacred trance of seership’. 391 When the parakletos is fully awaked, the light of the Logos transforms the brain to become a ‘self-born spiritual man’. 392
Between 1896 and 1897, Russell tried to convince Butler Yeats in several letters to collaborate in a project of mutual friends to ‘bring back the mysticism of the ancient Celts to
386 Evans-Wentz , TFFCC , 485f. Experiences with passive and active use of the earth’s memory are later elaborated by Russell in his The Candle of Visions , in the hope that this ‘tablet’ might, with future training, lead to a revolution in knowledge. Russell, The Candle of Vision , 64. 387 Barborka, The Divine Plan , 30. 388 Judge , Echoes of the Orient , 45ff. 389 Summerfield, That Myriad-Minded Man , 40, 45ff, 51. 390 Pryse, The Apocalypse Unsealed , 9, 11f. 391 Ibid., 15, 21f, 199. 392 In Pryse, the physical place of the nervous center causing these insights is the pineal gland. This theory goes back to Blavatsky’s third eye, as elaborated in The Secret Doctrine . Humans, in their earlier evolutionary state in the third root race had a physical third eye, which gave them abilities such as clairaudience or clairvoyance – the sixth sense. This ability got lost and became the pineal gland; Inner sight could thus only be achieved through training or by ‘natural born magicians’. Pryse, The Apocalypse Unsealed 16, 61, Barborka, The Divine Plan , 306ff, 309. 63 the attention of the Irish people’ through the publication of several essays. 393 Even though Butler Yeats rejected to contacting the Irish gods for a popular revival of Celtic mysticism, both collaborated in visionary work between 1897 and 1902 in the context of Butler Yeats’s work to construct a Celtic-Catholic initiatory order. Some results were, albeit slightly veiled, published in The Celtic Twilight , under the heading ‘The Queen and the Fool’.394 When Evans-Wentz started to work with George Russell’s visions for TFFCC , the theory and content that he depicted as typical Irish mysticism was already intensely shaped through training in Theosophical work, not only through Russell’s own practice, and in collaboration with Butler Yeats, but especially by the practices of reading the Astral Light informed by and published together with his guru Pryse.
5g) The Higher Species: Dhyan Chohan, Avatara
Here, I want to discuss the background to assumptions Evans-Wentz made about the important relation between former, contemporary, and future humans. Evans-Wentz writes in his last disclosure that ‘in past aeons there have been human races like the present human race who in past aeons of time have evolved completely out of the human plane of conscious existence. Hence the gods are beings which once were man, and the actual race of men will in time become gods’.395 Closely related to this will be the question of the status of Evans- Wentz’s Tuatha de Dannan,
The evolution of humans according to Sinnett takes place in an upward progression in several rounds and on several planets of our solar system. These planets are numbered from A to G, whereas the earth is referred to as Globe D. The monads of the different kingdoms wander from one planet to the next. The mineral kingdom, for example, first evolved on Globe A, and when their distinct process was completed, their life impulse wandered off to create a mineral kingdom on Globe B. Simultaneously, with the conclusion of minerals on Globe A, the vegetal kingdom started to evolve on Globe A. When this second period was completed, minerals started to evolve on Globe C, plants on Globe B, and animals on Globe A. Following this simplified explanation, the moment the human kingdom entered Globe D, there were already three human kingdoms on other planets. 396 The cyclical period of a Monad to ascend through one of the Classes of Beings is called a Manvantara. Every Manvantara consists of seven progressive minor rounds. This also means that in order for the human kingdom to evolve, there has to be a progression of seven kinds of humans. One kind of the seven stages of humanity is called a root-race. Every root-race is again divided into 7 sub-races. On the Globe D -the earth- humans have entered the fifth-root race. 397 As mentioned earlier, Blavatsky believes that the perfected humans of earlier planets have become Dhyan Chohans;
393 Kuch, Yeats and AE , 109. 394 Kuch, Yeats and AE , 109, 116. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight , 91, and Williams, Ireland’s Immortals , 357. The scene starts with: ‘I knew a man who was trying to bring before his mind's eye an image of Aengus’. Since Evans-Wentz knew The Celtic Twilight , he might have been familiar with contents of Russell’s visions as early as in 1902. 395 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 514. 396 Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism , 28, 90f. 397 Barborka, The Divine Plan , 263f. 64 which Sinnett treats as synonymous with the Buddhas. 398 Blavatsky confirmed this theory in The Secret Doctrine several times, also by writing that every entity must win for itself the right to become divine. 399 In Sinnett, once the last perfected Dhyan Chohan passes into Nirvana, a major Manvantara is completed, and the solar system enters the sleeping state pralaya.400
In the first part, the different relations between the Monads and the first beings were discussed. The perfected forerunners not only guide and instruct, but emanate the Monads and provide their various bodies. Two essential types of the Dhyan Chohan can be isolated in The Secret Doctrine : The Lunar Pitris, and the Solar Pitris. The Lunar Pitris were those ascended humans who ascended on the Moon. In order for the ascending Monads of the animal kingdom to evolve as physical humans on earth, the Lunar Pitris ‘projected out’ their ‘shadows’ (chhayas) and gave humans their first, ‘astral’ form. 401 In the quote of The Secret Doctrine , chosen by Barborka
The Pitris shoot out from their ethereal bodies, still more ethereal and shadowy similitudes of themselves, or what we should now call “doubles,” or “astral forms,” in their own likeness.* This furnishes the Monad with its first dwelling, and blind matter with a model around and upon which to build henceforth. 402
The first root-race was thus a shadowy copy projected out of their lunar progenitors. In the following root-races man concretized and divided into sexes. In the third root-race a different kind of earlier ascended humans awakened the mind-principle in earthly humans: the Manasaputras or Solar Pitris.403 The Secret Doctrine speaks of these beings as ‘divine Rebels’ and ‘higher Angels’ 404 who have ‘robbed’ the sacred fire of mind by ascension in their past incarnations. In elaboration of the fall of Lucifer and Prometheus in Isis Unveiled , they demonstrate a moment of compassion when ascended beings provided the mind-principle so that humans could become self-conscious. 405
While the evolution of all beings from subhuman into divine beings is anchored in Sinnett’s Theosophy, its relation to the Tuatha de Danann in TFFCC is more complex. One reason for this complexity is Russell’s shifting assumptions: from a Celitc towards a more ‘Oriental’ Theosophy. A further complexity is that Evans-Wentz’s differentiates between the Tuatha de Danann, and the highest of the Tuatha de Danann. In part 5b) we analyzed the characteristics of Dhyan Chohan in comparison with the Tuatha de Danann. In part 4c) we saw it that for Evans-Wentz the highest of the de Danann evolved to a superhuman state; a point on which
398 Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism , 254. 399 Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine I, 106. 400 Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism , 247, and Barborka, The Divine Plan , 119. 401 Barborka, The Divine Plan, 119f. 402 Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine I , 248, in: Barborka, The Divine Plan , 120. 403 Barborka, The Divine Plan , 271, 295. 404 Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine II , 80, 103. 405 Ibid., 103, 296f. 65 all ‘educated seers’ would agree. 406 In Chapter Xii Evans-Wentz attempts to explain the relation between the higher beings and human souls 407 while implying that the proof of their existence was implicitly also given when having proven the true core of the fairy-phenomena. By Evans-Wentz claiming direct evolutionary relations between humans and gods, and by writing that ‘the highest’ of de Danann are ‘the same in character as the gods of the Greeks and Hindoo (…)’ 408 , the difference between highest beings and future humans almost disappears, because both will become, or have already become, specific kinds of deified Dhyan Chohan.
Russell’s earlier narrative can be found in The Legends of Ancient Eire . There, he describes a downgrading procession from an age of the Gods to an age of heroes ending in our present age of Iron. Ireland, as he writes, was a sacred Island inhabited by Atlanteans, - the giant fourth root-race in The Secret Doctrine . These Atlanteans were conquered by the Tuatha de Danann:
they were men who had made themselves Gods by magical or Druidical power. They were preeminently magi become immortal by strength of will and knowledge. Superhuman in power and beauty, they raised themselves above nature; they played with the elements; they moved with ease in the air.409 [emphasis mine]
This narrative of the de Danann as a deification of an earlier race fits Evans-Wentz’s explanation of them as particular Irish beings having evolved into a superhuman state, still occupying Irish space. Yet, emphasis should be placed on Russell’s statement in ‘An Irish Mystic’s Testament’, where he explains that the legendary de Danann are only pointing towards divine beings. As he writes, he no longer attributes ‘to any one of them [opalescent beings] personal identity with particular beings of legend’. Instead, Russell believes ‘that they correspond in a general way’ to the ancient Irish gods. 410 Evans-Wentz’s description of a relation between the highest Thuatha de Danann and future states of humans can be read in a very similar way. Greek gods, ‘Hindoo’ deva, or the highest the Celtic Tuatha de Danann are all different cultural perceptions of ascended divine beings, depicting a state or similar state towards which human evolution is also striving. These human’s future states/beings are either seen from the perspective of a Celt, or a ‘Hindoo’, or an ancient Greek. Evans-Wentz’s explanation thus remains close to Sinnett’s and Blavatsky’s general ascension of all beings from ordinary to divine, of which the human is an intermediary state, and should not to be read as: fairies are the dead, or humans become higher fairies.
A missing part in that analysis is Evans-Wentz’s assumption that among the ‘divine beings (…) who once were man` are Buddha and Jesus, and that they reincarnate in order to guide
406 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 59. 407 Ibid., 493. 408 Ibid. , 492. Evans-Wentz changes an important detail in Russell’s earlier description in “The Legends of Ancient Eire”, wherein Russell wrote that the Tuatha ‘differ (…) from the Gods of ancient Greece and India’ by making themselves into Gods. Russell, ‘Legends of Ancient Eire’, 94. 409 Russell, ‘Legends of Ancient Eire’, 94. 410 Evans-Wentz, TFFCC , 62. 66 humanity towards becoming divine like them.411 A closely related concept of Blavatsky’s is Avatara, which she defines in her Theosophical Glossary as ‘[d]ivine incarnation. The descent of a god or some exalted being, who has progressed beyond the necessity of Rebirths, into the body of a simple mortal.’412 In the formulation of Sinnett, an Avatara incarnates to share ethical and esoteric doctrine. 413 However, it seems to be necessary to differentiate between two Theosophical systems of Avatara: the descent of a Logos, or a divine being that never was human, and the descent of a being that has become divine. We find the first version, for example, in Judge’s Ocean of Theosophy . In Judge, an Avatara appears at the beginning of every cycle, or to every of the seven root-races. Yet these large cycles of Avataras, includes smaller cycles, with minor Avataras appearing thus to the sub-races. Among the greater Avataras, Judge counts Krishna, Zoroaster, and Buddha. Jesus, on the other hand is only part of a small cycle, since his theories are in principle the same as Buddha’s. 414 Yet, among these small Avataras, he also includes
(…) mixed characters who have had great influence on nations, such as King Arthur, Pharaoh, Moses, Charlemagne reincarnated as Napoleon Bonaparte, Clovis of France reborn as Emperor Frederic III of Germany, and Washington the first President of the United States of America where the root for the new race is being formed. 415
A different concept can be found in Esoteric Buddhism . In his chapter on Buddha he writes that a ‘Dhyan Chohan, (…) who are Buddha in all his or their developments’416 , incarnates to all of the seven root-races. Behind the earlier Buddhas and Gautama, the collective principle of higher wisdom of perfected Dyhan Chohan dwell, which Sinnett identifies as Avaloketiswara. 417 In other words, before the highest principle in Sinnett incarnates, it has to evolve first. This relation is given in the hierarchy: humans become Dhyan Buddhas, Dyhan Buddhas become Avaloketiswara, Avaloketiswara incarnate as Buddha. 418 A high adept can choose by will a suitable reincarnation. 419 In the same process, this higher principle elects a suitable human, and educates and initiates him or her, to find a suitable vessel. 420 In the Mystery of the Buddha Blavatsky elaborates on this process of teaching a suitable vessel by describing the exalted teacher Samkarâchârya as a merging between a ‘divine ex-personality’ of the ‘astral’ Gautama with an ‘impersonal Individuality’. 421 With regard to Jesus she writes ‘(…) the students of Esoteric Philosophy see in the Nazarene Sage a Bodhisattva with the spirit of Buddha Himself in Him’. 422 She builds upon the following understanding of Bodhisattva:
411 Ibid., 514. 412 Blavatsky, The Theosophical Glossary , 42. 413 Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism , 214. 414 Judge, The Ocean of Theosophy , 134f. 415 Ibid., (Judge) 135. 416 Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism , 216. 417 Ibid., 214, 216. 418 Ibid., 216f. 419 Ibid., 210. 420 Ibid., 212. 421 Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine Volume V , 389. 422 Ibid., 396. 67
The Dhyâni-Buddha, when the world needs a human Buddha, “creates” through the power of Dhyâna (meditation, omnipotent devotion), a mind-born son—a Bodhisattva—whose mission it is after the physical death of his human, or Mânushya- Buddha, to continue his work on earth till the appearance of the subsequent Buddha. 423
Evans-Wentz’s description of Jesus and Buddha as incarnating future humans in TFFCC matches mostly with the concept of Avatara in Esoteric Buddhism , while the identity of national heroes as smaller Avataras can also be found in Judge.424 Also, with Evans-Wentz’s later explanation of Christ as Amithaba in The Tibetan Book of the Dead , it seems that Evans- Wentz saw Jesus on one level with Buddha. While this may show the influence of Blavatsky, we find a similar understanding by Russell, who writes:
(…) those who read do not know that (…) Christos is the Magician of the Beautiful and is not only the Architect of the God-world but is that in us which sees beauty, creates beauty, and is verily wisdom in us and is our deepest self(…).” 425
Following the earlier argument, Jesus, for Evans-Wentz is an ascended divine being reincarnated into human form and only perceived as ‘Jesus’ due to a specific cultural perception. While distinct from other divine beings in his level of ascension, character, and mission as a teacher, the being is not distinctly Christian, but just as much Buddhist as he is Celtic, and can thus mentioned as a being among the highest Sidhe. 426
423 Ibid., 391. 424 Summerfield, That Myriad-Minded Man, 158, 224, 271. Summerfield refers to an article in the Irish Statesman on 12. September 1925. Therein, Russell counts historical persons like Napoleon, Caesar and Lawrence of Arabia among the Avatars. Summerfield identifies this as an influence of Sinnett on Russell, despite Russell’s negative judgment of Sinnett. 425 Russell, The Candle of Vision 172f . 426 The contextualization of Christian figures as culturally differently perceived divine beings continues in Cuchama and Sacred Mountains . In a footnote on p. 40, Evans-Wentz described Moses and Elias as shining beings , whose appearance could be compared to the appearance of the Shining beings on High places of the ‘red Man.` An even more striking example is p. 134f wherein Evans-Wentz compares the origin of the Book of Mormon with Spiritualism, and the Koran. As he writes, to Joseph Smith was revealed the hiding place of gold tablets by two personages he recognized as Jesus Christ and God the Father due to having ‘been mentally conditioned by Christian teachings’. As he continues, had the same personages be seen by the Red Man, they would have included them among their Shining Beings, such as Hindus and Buddhist would have included them among the Devas. Evans-Wentz continues by demonstrating the extra-ordinary quality of this place, stating that Spiritualism only emerged 10 miles away from Joseph Smith’ experience. Lopez, in The Tibetan Book of the Dead actually uses Evans-Wentz’s argument and comparison between Spiritualism and The Book of Mormon , in order to contextualize Evans-Wentz book within Spiritualism. For a critique on Lopez’ interpretation, see footnote: 347. Evans-Wentz, Chuchama and Sacred Mountains , 40, 134f. 68
6. Conclusion One year before his death in 1965, Evans-Wentz finished his last book Cuchama and sacred mountains (1981). Like William James in his ‘The Confidences of a Psychical Researcher’, Evans-Wentz looks back in his book at his psychical research, and writes:
If there were no Otherworld, or no extra-terrestrial state of consciousness, then, indeed, there would be for man no after-death existence; and all the teachings of the Great Sages and Seers throughout the ages would be invalid. But the writer, after more than fifty years of research in the historic faiths of mankind and in matters yogic and psychic throughout both the Orient and the Occident, here places on record his own conviction that there is an Otherworld and Otherworld beings. 427
When he was young, Evans-Wentz remembers, he ‘was something of a pilgrim’428 ; now, after having studied Tibetan Buddhism, and finally the ‘Red Man’ in America, his ‘Reflection’ elucidates that the main concepts found in his early intellectual pilgrimage in Celtic countries would remain essentially the same throughout his work. Central for Native American religion, as in the TFFCC , Evans-Wentz sees the emphasis on personal experience and not on belief: on insights through ‘self-realization’ instead of mere scripture. 429 And as in TFFCC , in order to study Native American religion, Evans-Wentz sees ‘the most culturally valuable approach to right knowing’ in psychical research, while seeing anthropology, ethnology, and archaeology as merely subsidiary. 430
Striking in the context of his earlier research are descriptions of Native initiation, wherein the youths learns the doctrine of reincarnation. They also learn about harnessing the ‘occult forces’ inherent in all of nature, which Evans-Wentz explains by using Marett’s theory of mana. Yet even more striking, Evans-Wentz explains the intimate relations between Native Americans and invisible beings by directly repeating the evidence collected from George Russell and Butler Yeats in TFFCC, thereby making any argument untenable that Evans- Wentz never looked back to Ireland.431 Underlying his research into Celtic, Egypt, Tibetan, and Native American beliefs, remains the same quest: finding answers whether there is ancient truth, for which invisible beings could be a potent indicator. Instead of perceiving TFFCC as an early work without connection to his later scholarship, his publications in Tibetan Buddhism should rather be seen as one episode within a continuing global quest of finding evidence for higher reality which started with TFFCC and ended with Cuchama and Sacred Mountains .
427 Evans-Wentz, Cuchama and sacred Mountains , 82. 428 Ibid., xii. 429 Ibid., 160. 430 Ibid., 153. 431 Ibid., 121, 152, 161, 164ff In Cuchama and sacred Mountains , Evans-Wentz describes TFFCC as devoted to the ‘problem of the existence of orders normally invisible’, by expanding earlier comparisons between Fairies and Devas to the Shining Beings of the ‘Red Men’. Yet, not only Russell’s higher Sidhe appear again and become identified as the same beings as the Native’s guardians of sacred places appearing in their initiations. Also the ‘Little People, as Irish seers who have similar psychic experiences also call them’, appear in a vision of the chief of the Asarokees. 69
The first part of this research into Evans-Wentz’s early work started with the central question of the main theoretical sources of TFFCC , and three oddities found in the secondary literature: his presumed a-political attitude; his attempt to prove the reality of fairies; and the assertion that he never looked back to Ireland. The first realization was that Evans-Wentz’s study is part of a broader cultural and academic phenomenon: that of seriously studying unusual phenomena related to different realms of consciousness and reality, and of folklore. Not as a remnant of naïve belief, but as possible remembrances of real experiences. The most important academic influences on Evans-Wentz were scholars involved in his study at Oxford, most visibly the theory and method of Andrew Lang. Evans-Wentz saw the academic theories of Andrew Lang, William James, Frederic Myers and others, as mutually confirming his primary sources, and he unified all of them into a unique higher framework underlying his study.
By analyzing the main argument in TFFCC , it became clear that his scientific argument has several logical breaks, and is not comprehensible without taking implied concepts into account. These concepts were either only briefly mentioned by Evans-Wentz and scattered through several footnotes and personal comments, or developed at least in conversation with the ‘Irish Mystic’ and his testimony. One of these concepts refers to the afterlife. For Evans- Wentz, the afterlife is an individual state that corresponds to an individual objective place, and is accessible by seers in trance. Related to these places and states are beings, which are strictly separated in higher and lower orders. The other concept is the evolutionary relation between humans and higher beings. By tracing these concepts to their sources, the centrality of the ‘Irish Mystic’ for Evans-Wentz’s conclusion could be underlined.
The ‘Irish Mystic’ could then be identified with George Russell. Besides Russell, Evans- Wentz’s framework was influenced by an unknown study colleague, and influenced by the conversation he had with William Butler Yeats. It could thus be concluded that Evans- Wentz’s main theoretical evidence of the ‘esoteric fairy faith’ was taken either from colleagues or likeminded people he already knew. Central visions, stated as typically Irish by Evans-Wentz, could even be contextualized in Russell and Butler Yeats’s shared work, while being respectively influenced by theories and practices of The Theosophical Society and the Order of the Golden Dawn. It could hence be illuminated that during his little known about time at Oxford, Evans-Wentz was more deeply connected to Theosophical circles than he gave account of in his study.
The central thesis regarding the main theoretical sources of TFFCC is that Evans-Wentz’s study underlies a unique framework for proving the reality of fairies and fairyland that was influenced directly and indirectly by Theosophy. A valuable hint exposing the centrality of Blavatsky, and especially of Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism , was found in the unpublished passages of Evans-Wentz’s Notes of an Autobiography . Further comparisons with Theosophical literature highlighted the importance of Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled , which Evans- Wentz sometimes copied almost directly. By analyzing the influences from Russell, it became obvious that he relied not only on Blavatsky, but also on the instructions of his teacher James Pryse. Furthermore, it became obvious that Russell’s influences on Blavatsky shifted from an earlier stage focusing on Celtic influences and Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled , to a later Oriental
70 stage focusing on The Secret Doctrine . With reference also to Evans-Wentz’s later work, we can conclude that instead of passively following Russell and letting his whole research be interpreted in Theosophical terms, Evans-Wentz’s should rather be seen as having actively chosen to do so, since Russell’s experience and theory resembled, confirmed, and explained his own experiences and convictions.
In the second part of this thesis, the theoretical doctrines of the ‘esoteric fairy faith’, and Evans-Wentz’s personal underlying concepts were traced to Theosophical sources. One of Evans-Wentz’s crucial doctrines is the evolution of consciousness, which over time becomes absorbed into the unconsciousness; a storehouse not only for supernormal abilities, but the actual core of a human, which survives after death and incarnates as an individual soul for further development. In addition to the influences of Myers, Jung and James, Evans-Wentz’s theory was placed in the context of the Theosophical pilgrimage of the Monad, and the higher soul, as discussed by Pryse and in Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled .
Closely related to the evolution of consciousness is the human’s afterlife. It could be found out that Evans-Wentz’s descriptions are highly related to Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism . Sinnett describes the subjective world of desire, Kama Loca, as a different plane of matter and consciousness that interpenetrates reality. In addition to Kama Loca wherein lower desires are purified in a process that can resemble an individual hell, the state/place Devachan expresses the bliss of enjoying positive higher aspect of a human’s soul. Matching these theories is Evans-Wentz’s description of the fading of the temporal lower soul and the co-existence with invisible beings. These beings can, furthermore, be brought into harmony with the Kingdom of Beings as described by Blavatsky and Sinnett. Evans-Wentz and Russell identified lower beings as elementals, which made it possible to further demonstrate the continuity and importance of investigating nature spirits in the history of Theosophy. The higher beings and their evolutionary relation with humans were traced to the Theosophical concept of the Dhyan Chohan. With reference to Theosophical cosmogony and evolutionary links between all beings through the pilgrim of their Monad, it became possible to further explain Evans- Wentz’s doctrine of the relations between humans, of gods, and earlier eons. Crucial in that argument was the insight that for Evans-Wentz descriptions, gods like ‘Zeus’ or ‘Lug’ are only cultural perceptions of the same universal divine beings.
In order to demonstrate that Evans-Wentz’s later work is not a break with, but a continuation of his earlier research, his crucial concepts of beings and afterlife were compared with his most well-known book The Tibetan book of the Dead . It could be shown that underlying both books are the same principles, which Evans-Wentz saw as universal to all genuine religions. Evans-Wentz’s argument on phenomena in séances was also found to relate to the Theosophical argument on the prime role that invisible non-human beings have in these phenomena. Crucial in this connection was the concept of ‘magic’, which Evans-Wentz developed with reference to Marett and James, and could be expanded to the Theosophical theory of ether, by harnessing the substance lower beings are made of. Closely linked to this is practice of reading the Astral Light, which underlies concepts brought forth by Russell that gained high importance for Evans-Wentz’s argument. Moreover, Evans-Wentz’s depiction of Aryan Druids as wisdom keepers of sunken Atlantis can be seen in light of Blavatsky and her
71 book The Secret Doctrine . The second part closed by discussing reincarnating higher beings that educate humans towards becoming divine, which was traced to the theory of Avatara.
Evans-Wentz describes various intimate relations between humans and beings, up to the point that humans are fairies, by sharing not only the same evolution, but also the same substances out of which they are made. Evans-Wentz thereby expresses the positive conviction that humans were, are, and will become godlike. The conviction that all humans are part of divinity due to their very own nature lets Evans-Wentz overcome racial and nationalistic thinking. While not debating the political situation of his time in length, overcoming racist differences between ‘Ireland and Brittany’ is nevertheless addressed in Evans-Wentz’s emphasis of the brotherhood of humanity. Underlying his study remains the hope that the truth, preserved in pre-Christian religion, can be restored, and serve to heal a spiritually blind and materialistic time before the dawning of ‘a new age’.432
432 The reflection that humanity will enter the Aquarian Age which will return ancient wisdom was explicitly formulated in Cuchama and Sacred Mountain , 180f. For Evans-Wentz, humans are at the moment in a transitional time, while the ‘new age’ would start at the year 2,160 AD. 72
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Illustrations
Fig. 1. “Frances and the Fairies.”, 1917, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. Taken from: Smith, “The Cottingley Fairies: The End of a Legend”, 377.
Fig. 2. Russell, George, ‘Spirit of the Wood’, Oil on canvas, 41 x 53cm, TCD Sullivan/Solomons Collection 196916, The Art Collections, Trinity College Dublin.
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Fig. 3 & 4. Russell, George ‘Mystical landscapes with figures’ Oil on canvas, 40.6 x 53.4 cm. (16 x 21''.), Salford, City Art Gallery, 1954. All pictures by Russell are originally given without title, and without a year.
Fig. 5. Illustration without title , taken from: Blavatsky, Helena, The Secret Doctrine I, Cosmogenesis, Unabridged Verbatim Edition , Theosophical University Press, Pasadena, California 2014 (first version: The Theosophical Publishing Company, London 1888), 200.
Fig. 6. Illustration without title , taken from: Blavatsky, Helena, The Secret Doctrine Volume 5, The Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar 1938, (first version 1897), 525.
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