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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
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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
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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 Society1 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
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and inventor of the Sherlock Holmes series was convinced in the existence in fairies, and was particularly interested in Spiritualism6, 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 hoax8 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
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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.
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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.
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LeFevour, ‘Clairvoyance and the Fairy Realm’, 144.
10 Fig 1. ‘Frances and the Fairies.’ Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. Taken from: Smith, ‘The Cottingley
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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)
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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’
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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 theTheosophist 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.
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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.
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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 15th 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.
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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.
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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 20th century, there was a sudden interest in the
28 Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy, 125, 127, 311.
29Hanegraaff, 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.
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Irish divinities in art, academia and ‘spiritual speculation’.31 As he writes, it was the creativity of two particular artistsbetween 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.
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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 wisdom39, 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 19th 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 15th 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.
13
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 visionthat 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
14
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 Chatterjee54 (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 Dawn58 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,
15
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 Blavatskyduring 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 Pryse62 (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.
16
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.
17
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 ofseers 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.
18
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-Yoga75 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 villagesbetween 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 Danann83 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
19
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.
20
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 19th 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 Rennesbetween 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.
