204 APPARITIONS them their friends or people, which is equivalent to the term, abakubo, given to the ancestral spirits. In the funeral procession of the good people are recognised the forms of those who have just died, as Umkatshana, in the Zulu tale, saw his relations among the ancestral spirits. So also in the Highland tales. A boy who had been carried away by the fairies, on his return home speaks of them as our folks/ which is equivalent to abakicetu. applied to the ancestral spirits. The fairies are also called ancestors. The Red Book of Clanranald is said not to have been dug up, but found on the moss, says Mr Camp bell in the Tales of the West Highlands ; it seemed as if the ancestors sent it. " All these coincidences cease to be strange if we suppose that the Celtic people retain as subordinate and childish traditions the primitive beliefs which make the religion of the Kaffir. Brownies. It would be easy to trace the belief in brownies (lubber spirits, who tend the house) to the lar, or hearth spirit of the ancients. The domovoy, or Russian brownie, " lives behind the stove;, but he, or the spirits of the dead ancestors whom he represents, were held to be in even more direct relations with the fire on the hearth. In some districts tradition expressly refers to the spirits of the dead the functions which are generally attributed to the domovoy; and they are supposed to keep careful watch over the house of a descendant who honours them and provides them with due offerings. In some families a portion of the supper is always set aside for the domovoy ; for if lie is neglected lie waxes ivroth, and knocks tlie tables and benches about at night." This is the account of Mr Ralston, which tallies with the Scotch stories of brownies, as with those of the Lithuanian kanlca, the Finnish paara, the French lutin, and the humble Northumbrian loyie, who " flitted " with the farmer when he removed his furniture. All these are lares ; and the ghastly supersti tion of the vampire, still prevalent in Greece as once in Scotland, may be traced to the unsatisfied ingna, or male volent spectre of the Australian savage, the tii of Poly nesia, the upir of Russian folk-lore. Second We now come to almost the most universally credited sight. class of apparitions namely, the subjective visions, coin ciding with real facts and events occurring at a distance, beheld by persons possessing the Celtic taishitaraugh, or gift of second-sight. The second-sight is described by a believer as "a singular faculty of seeing an otherwise invisible object, without any previous means used by the person that beholds it for that end." The name of second- sight is the Scotch one under which the reputed pheno mena excited the curiosity of Dr Johnson, and " made him wish to have some instances of that faculty well authenti cated." In Scott s opinion, "if force of evidence could authorise us to believe facts inconsistent with the general laws of nature, enough might be produced in favour of the existence of the second-sight." All history, all tradition, abounds in instances. A well-known anecdote tells how St Ambrose fell into a comatose state while celebrating the mass at Milan, and on his recovery declared that he had been present at St Martin s funeral at Tours, where, indeed, reports from Tours afterwards declared that he had been seen. A similar experience of Swedenborg s (who described at Gottenburg a fire which was actually raging at Stockholm) is reported by Kant. The wide distribution of the belief is shown by the fact that Mr Mason Browne s exploring party on the Coppermine River was met by Indians, sent by their medicine man, who predicted the coining of the party, just as a seer in the Hebrides described even the livery of Dr Johnson s servant before his arrival. In a remote age and country we find Njal, the hero of the Njal s saga, credited with forspan, or the gift of beholding such shadowy apparitions of future events a power carefully distinguished from ordinary clear-sighted wisdom. Returning to savage life, a com plete account of the morbid nature and of the initiation of a diviner is given from the mouths of Kaffir converts in Dr Calla way s Religion of the Amazidu. A peculiar organisation, a habit of haunting the desert, and of fasting, combine to produce the inyanga, or second- sighted man ; what Reichenbach calls der sensitiv Hensch, and franker Zulus " a soft-headed one." This part of the subject may be concluded with a quotation from the Odyssey, showing the similarity of these prophetic and warning apparitions in the islands of western Greece and of western Scotland. Theoclymenus speaks to the doomed wooers at their latest feast "Ah, wretched men, what ails you 1 Your knees, and faces, and heads are swathed in night, and a wailing sound has arisen, and all cheeks are wet with tears, and the walls and the fair spaces of the ceiling do drip with blood, and the porch is full of ghosts, and the court is filled with shadows the shadows of men bound hellwards and the sun has perished out of heaven, and an evil mist has overspread the world." Compare Martin in his Description of the Western Isles "When a shroud is perceived about one, it is a prognostick of death. The time is judged according to the height of it about the person ; for if it is seen about the middle, death is not to be expected for the space of a year ; and as it is frequently seen to ascend higher towards the head, death is concluded to be at hand within a few days or hours, as daily experience confirms." These modern and ancient instances scarcely serve to increase " the force of evidence " that Scott speaks of, but rather to prove that the superstition is a fragment of the most primitive specu lations on the facts of trance and coma. The apparitions which play a part in all the records of Appari- trials for witchcraft admit of some explanation, though tious in scarcely an adequate one, in known laws of human nature. Wltclicr8 It is easy enough to understand how in primitive times the diviner who beheld spirits was also believed to be able to command them to do his bidding and to injure his enemies. The belief persisted under the civilisation of ancient Rome, and Apuleius tells a very impressive story of how the apparition of "a woman of hideous aspect, marked by guilt and extreme sorrow, whose haggard face was sallow as boxwood," was evoked by a witch to slay her foe. No instance of the survival of savage supersti tions is stranger than the fact that men like Henry More and Glanvil, Bodin, the great French publicist, Sir Thomas Browne, and Wesley, could still maintain that disease and death might be caused by such malevolent apparitions. We can only say in their defence that the amount of con current evidence and confession, corresponding as it did with the prohibition of witchcraft in the Bible, constrained them to share the cruel superstition of their age. Nor is it impossible to assign causes, besides the inadequate one of conscious imposture, for the confessions of the unhappy creatures accused of witchcraft. First we must try to conceive how entirely and implicitly the faith of the middle ages accepted the existence of an omnipresent army of evil spirits. The world was the battlefield of devils and angels, and there was a constant tendency in men s minds to Manichseanism, to crediting the devil with frequent victories. Perhaps no single work enables the modern reader so vividly to imagine this state of terror, this agony of patients who believed that they were in conflict with visible powers of evil, as the autobiography of Guibert de Nogent, the con temporary historian of the first crusade. He has left, in the character of his mother, a most gracious picture of womanly piety, and yet this excellent lady supposed her self to be the nightly prey of Satan, whom she saw in
tangible form ! Then we must remember that the church