FROM THE ARCHIVES:The British Association for the Advancement of Science heard several lectures in 1932 including one by an elderly clergyman, Canon J. A. Mac Culloch, who argued that fairies were real and had been a race of people at some time in the distant past.
His paper, entitled Were Fairies an Actual Race of Men?, prompted this editorial in which The Irish Times hedged its bets on the possibility that they did indeed exist. –
THE BRITISH Association’s debate on fairies may be read this morning with a wild surmise, but our masters the philosophers can blame no one save themselves. The scepticism of our time is not a natural growth.
We have ceased to believe in fairies, or ceased to own our belief, only because science has told us so often that they do not exist, has warned us with such gravity that foolish tales of gnomes and elves must have the worst effect upon the minds of our children. Yesterday’s debate is the first hint of a recantation.
The old schoolman in Mr. Yeats’s play had reason to repent his materialistic teaching when the angel warned him of death within the hour unless a pupil could be found who believed in the things of the spirit. When science, led by the Church, argues the possibility of a race of fairies, will it find a believer before the hour-glass runs out?
Canon Mac Culloch’s paper reviewed the case for the fairies with a wealth of detail and he will find many eager to support his view that fairy lore may be a survival from an early race of supernatural beings.
Indeed, the tradition must be as old as man himself. It is true that our Germanic gnomes, swan-maidens and goblins may be of a later stock, but the nymphs and satyrs who were dispossessed by them carry the belief back nearer to the roots of the world.
The British Association received these conjectures with caution, but the fact that they should have been discussed at all must fill with pride those unrepentant beings who never have ceased to believe in “the good people”.
Aged men on Irish hillsides who produce tiny worn shoes, evidently the product of no terrestrial last, are now in a position to patronise the philosophers – a liberty which, in fact, they are seldom slow to take. Within the past few days we have seen, at least, a partial rehabilitation of astrology.
Horoscopes have been cast which foretold the future with an accuracy denied even to the weather prophet, armed with all his modern apparatus.
The old dream of transmutation of metals has come true, and it is admitted that the alchemists were right after all.
At some future meeting, doubtless, the psychology of the lubber-fiend [a large hairy man with a tail in English folklore] will be discussed and pure magic will return to its old place.
So philosophy will escape the charge that it dreams of fewer things than there are in heaven and earth, and man will grow in wisdom as to stoops to consider the old knowledge that he had dismissed with contumely.
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