Believers, sceptics, and charlatans: evidential rhetoric, the fairies, and fairy healers in Irish oral narrative and belief

Folklore, April, 2005 by Timothy Corrigan Correll

Abstract

This article examines storytelling events as contexts in which propositions about the fairies and folk healers associated with them were appraised and contested. It considers the evidential rhetoric employed in narratives that argued for and against the existence of fairies and the powers of wise folk who trafficked with them. Particular attention is given to narratives of negative evidence including stories that depicted individuals who believed they have had supernatural experiences as deluded, either by their own imaginations or through the chicanery of others. As will be seen throughout, traditions of belief and traditions of disbelief were competing discourses that came into collision, interpenetrating and modifying each other in a dialectical relationship that informed individuals as they negotiated their own attitudes about the fairies and fairy healers.

Introduction

In nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Ireland, magico-medical beliefs about the fairies and folk healers said to derive power from them were increasingly condemned on both rationalist and religious grounds. From the seventeenth century onward, the leaders of the Catholic Church followed Tridentine directives that sought to impose uniformity in religious standards and practices. This included the enactment of synodal statutes aimed at routing magical and quasi-religious customs, including superstitious curing and beliefs (Connolly 1982, 111; Rogan 1987, 33 and 60-1; Forrestal 1998, 124-5). Anti-Catholic legislation carried out by the Protestant ascendancy, however, decimated the church infrastructure, insuring that the full implementation of the Counter-Reformation mission was protracted (Conolly 1982, 60; Forrestal 1998, 45-6).

With the legalisation and state subsidisation that occurred after the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, the organisational strength of the Catholic Church grew rapidly (Corish 1985, 151-91). The restructuring of society that occurred following the Great Famine of 1845-9 accelerated what has been referred to as the "devotional revolution" (Larkin 1976). The ratio of priests to people tripled, as did attendance at Mass in some areas (Miller 1975, 83). Improvements in communication led to a tightening of clerical discipline and a more systematic censure of behaviour deemed inappropriate by the Church. Official doctrine was disseminated and monitored through sermon, pastoral visitation, confession, confraternities, book societies, schools, and hospitals (Larkin 1976, 68 and 77; Connolly 1982, 70; Corish 1985, 193-6; Inglis 1987, 143; Rogan 1987, 132ff; Correll 2003, 217-26).

The condemnation of "vulgar superstitions" was part of a programme of catechesis. Irish catechisms often included injunctions against superstition and healing in their exegesis of the First Commandment. An English/Irish version of The Christian Doctrine printed in 1862, for example, condemned lucht pisreog, which it glossed as "enchanters" or individuals who possessed fios sigheog or "knowledge of fairies" and prohibited paying "any attention to witchcraft, to charms, to dreams, or to any words or signs for a purpose to attain which they have no efficacy or virtue from nature, or God, or the Church" (Anonymous 1862, 69).

In this period, the religious attack on superstition increasingly converged with the advance of a rationalist worldview. As B. N. Hedderman, a nurse who worked in the west of Ireland, remarked concerning the "rank superstition" of her patients and friends: "science and the church had denounced that teaching" (1917, 89). Improved communications, mass literacy, and other factors resulted in new outlooks and aspirations among the expanding middle classes who sought to prove themselves "as civil and morally respectable as other modern Europeans" (Hynes 1978, 141; Connolly 1985, 52-6; Inglis 1987, 7; O Giollain 1991; Connolly 1999, 24). Proponents of modern enlightenment espoused empiricism and reason, while denigrating popular belief as "backward" or "ignorant." Members of the medical establishment disparaged fairy beliefs as dangerous impediments to scientific treatment (Hedderman 1917, 80, 81-3, 85 and 87-9; Gregory 1920, vol. 1, 128 and vol. 2, 61; Mac Philib 1991, 121-2; Welch 1993, 164-5), and civil authorities sometimes enacted legal sanctions against wise folk (Murphy 1995, 281; Bourke 1999, 18-19). Throughout the nineteenth century, the popular press reported cases of injury or death resulting from "fairy quackery" (Connolly 1982, 100-1 and 298; Murphy 1995, 281; Bourke 1999, 33). Fairy legend was thus "dragged into the public view and ranged with the oral, primitive and 'dark' against the literate and enlightened" (Bourke 1998, 89).

Many of the priests, doctors, and other representatives of progress and middle-class values who functioned as intermediaries between local rural life and the larger world decried traditional beliefs as "silly" and/or "sinful" (O Giollain 1991; Correll 2003, chap. 5 and 6). However, incredulity concerning fairy beliefs should not be seen simply as an outside imposition of the "enlightened" bourgeoisie. For in communities where siscealta or fairy stories were traditionally performed, the debate over truth and falsehood was often at the centre of discourses concerning the fairies. Scepticism in fairy beliefs was manifest in a range of social behaviour. While some individuals vehemently asserted the truth of fairies, and presented numerous stories as evidence of their existence, others doubted or even actively opposed such suggestions and referred to beliefs generically as "old pishogues," or "old superstitions" (Irish Folklore Collection [IFC] 1487: 323, Leitrim), [1] and the narration of fairy stories as "telling lies."