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.
In studying this belief, we are concerned directly with living Celtic
folk-traditions, and with past Celtic folk-traditions as recorded in
literature. And if fairies actually exist as invisible beings or
intelligences, and our investigations lead us to the tentative
hypothesis that they do, they are natural and not supernatural, for
nothing which exists can be supernatural; and, therefore, it is our duty
to examine the Celtic Fairy Races just as we examine any fact in the
visible realm wherein we now live, whether it be a fact of chemistry,
of physics, or of biology. However, as we proceed to make such an
examination, we shall have to remember constantly that there is a new
set of ideas to work with, entirely different from what we find in
natural sciences, and often no adequate vocabulary based on common human
experiences. An American who has travelled in Asia and an Englishman who
has travelled in Australia may meet in Paris and exchange travelling
experiences with mutual understanding, because both of them have
experienced travel; and they will have an adequate vocabulary to
describe each experience, because most men have also experienced travel.
But a saint who has known the spiritual condition called ecstasy cannot
explain ecstasy to a man who has never known it, and if he should try to
do so would discover at once that no modern language is suitable for the
purpose. His experience is rare and not universal, and men have
developed no complete vocabulary to describe experiences not common to
the majority of mankind, and this is especially true of psychical
experiences. It is the same in dealing with fairies, as these are
hypothetically conceived, for only a few men and women can assert that
they have seen fairies, and hence there is no adequate vocabulary to
describe fairies. Among the Ancients, who dealt so largely with
psychical sciences, there seems to have been a common language which
could be used to explain the invisible world and its inhabitants; but we
of this age have not yet developed such a language. 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. And to the
great majority of Europeans and Americans, mysticism is a most
convenient noun, applicable to anything which may seem reasonable yet
wholly untranslatable in terms of their own individual experience; and
mysticism usually means something quite the reverse of scientific
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