As for the belief in ghosts or _revenants_ (in Irish _tais_ or
_taidhbhse_), it seems to me that this may possibly rest to some extent
upon a different footing altogether. Here we are not confronted by a
different order of beings of different shapes and attributes from our
own, but only with the appearances, amongst the living, of men who were
believed or known to be dead or far away from the scene of their
appearances. Even those who may be most sceptical about the _Sidhe_-folk
and the leprechauns are likely to be convinced (on the mere evidence)
that the existence of 'astral bodies' or 'doubles', or whatever we may
call them, and the appearances of people, especially in the hour of
their death, to other people who were perhaps hundreds of miles away at
the time, is amply proven. Yet whatever may have been the case
originally when man was young, I do not think that this had in later
times any more direct bearing upon the belief in the _Sidhe_, the
leprechauns, the mermaid, and similar beings than upon the belief in the
Greek Pantheon, the naiads, the dryads, or the fauns; all of which
beliefs, probably arising originally from an animistic source, must have
differentiated themselves at a very early period. Of course every real
apparition, every 'ghost' apparition, tends now, and must have tended at
all times, to strengthen every spirit belief. For do not ghost
apparitions belong, in a way, to the same realm as all the others we
have spoken of, that is, to a realm equally outside our normal
experience?
Another very interesting point, and one hitherto generally overlooked,
is this, that different parts of the Irish soil cherish different bodies
of supernatural beings. The North of Ireland believes in beings unknown
in the South, and North-East Leinster has spirits unknown to the West.
Some places seem to be almost given up to special beliefs. Any outsider,
for instance, who may have read that powerful and grisly book, _La
Légende de la Mort_, by M. Anatole Le Braz, in two large volumes, all
about the awful appearances of _Ankou_ (Death), who simply dominates the
folk-lore of Brittany, will probably be very much astonished to know
that, though I have been collecting Irish folk-lore all my life, I have
never met Death figuring as a personality in more than two or three
tales, and these mostly of a trivial or humorous description, though the
Deaf Coach (_Cóiste Bodhar_), the belief in which is pretty general,
does seem a kind of parallel to the creaking cart in which _Ankou_
rides.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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