Subject: Fwd: Rev. Robert Kirk's "Secret Commonwealth"

Or why fairies and aliens hate the metal iron

The "Fairy Hill" at Aberfoyle,
 Scotland, where Rev. Kirk
 was said to be held eternal
 captive of the fairies.

Rev. Robert Kirk's "Secret Commonwealth"

 by Paul B. Thompson
 Nebula Editor
pscp...@aol.com

 It has long been the habit of scholars to study the obscure, the
strange, and the unusual. Aside from the intrinsic interest of such
subjects, the fringes of human experience offer the widest scope for
unexpectedly enlarging our collective knowledge. Many common scientific
subjects were once "fringe:" electricity, meteors and radioactivity
were all once beyond the pale of standard knowledge. No scholar worth
his salt would pass up an opportunity to write their name into history
as a discoverer.

 Robert Kirk was such a scholar. Born in 1644, Kirk came from a long
line of educated men. His grandfather, John Kirk, was a notary and
scrivener in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father, Reverend James Kirk, was
appointed minister to the parish of Aberfoyle, in Perthshire, in 1639.
He had a large family, of whom Robert Kirk was his seventh son. Among
the Celts, this was a propitious place to be born -- seventh sons were
commonly believed to have second sight. Kirk never made a reputation as
a seer, but he was exceptionally gifted intellectually. He studied at
Edinburgh University and at St. Andrews, receiving his master's degree
at 17. Ordained as a minister, Kirk served at various parishes for the
next twenty years. He married in 1678.

 Kirk was also a linguist. He translated the psalms into Gaelic verse,
and translated other religious works into the Scots Highland dialect.
His facility with Gaelic led him to be named editor of a new Irish
edition of the bible. In June 1685 he was appointed to his father's old
parish of Aberfoyle, and served there until his early death in 1692.
Aberfoyle was, in the words of Sir Walter Scott, "[a] beautiful and
wild region, comprehending so many lakes, rocks, sequestered valleys,
and dim copsewoods, and not even yet quite abandoned by the fairies,
who have resolutely maintained secure footing in a region so well
suited to their residence."

 His linguistic expertise would have been enough to insure Robert Kirk
a footnote in the cultural history of the British Isles, but his real
fame (and interest to readers of ParaScope) lies in his study of fairy
lore. He collected tales of fairy encounters by his countrymen and
analyzed them in a monograph entitled "The Secret Common-Wealth."

 In Kirk's time, fairies were not seen as tiny, gauzy-winged creatures
of children's storybooks. Far from it -- fairies were thought of as
strange, powerful creatures, a paraphysical race of beings living among
mankind. It was common for some of the clergy to denounce fairy folk as
demons, or at least servants of Satan. Kirk wasn't so sure. He decided
that they were a separate race "betwixt Man and Angel." Lacking
scientific language to describe fairy attributes, Kirk resorted to
poetic descriptions. Fairies were made on "congealed Air" or "condensed
cloud." This ethereal composition was crucial to their ability to
vanish at will, fly, or penetrate any enclosed space, no matter how
tiny. Being so nebulous, fairies imbibed only the most refined of
"spirituous liquors" (Scotland being a good location for such), and
Kirk noted that although they had prodigious appetites, fairies never
grew fat because they only used the quintessence of food and drink.
Humans sometimes stumbled upon fairy banquets hidden away in the hills,
but mortals should never partake of fairy food; one taste, and the
luckless human was forever a captive of the Subterranean race. An
especially odd detail Kirk gives is that the fairies had a special
class of servant at their revels, whom he describes as "Pleasant
Children" or enchanted puppets, which sounds like the fairies were
tended by mechanical dolls...

 Fairy affairs curiously mirrored the situation of their human
neighbors. When men experienced a good harvest, things were poorly in
the fairy realm, and vice-versa. Fairies lived in tribes and "orders"
(medieval social classes), had factions, fought wars among themselves
-- sometimes in the sky, to the astonishment of mortal witnesses -- and
by custom had to move their homes at the beginning of each quarter of
the year. These migrations were sometimes seen by psychically gifted
Scots, and led to them being called "the crew that never rest."

 Fairy fashion echoed that of the country in which they lived. In
Scotland, they wore plaid kilts, and in Ireland dressed like the Irish.
Fairy women were the finest spinners and weavers in the world, making
cloth as fine as cobwebs, which seems only fitting for a race made of
congealed air. They had no religion, but would flee when humans invoked
God or Jesus. Kirk repeats the common belief that fairies fear and hate
iron, and offers an unusual reason why: Hell, it seems, is a place so
hot and terrible molten iron flows like water all over the place. Being
highly sensitive creatures, the fairies cannot bear even the smell of
cold iron, as it reminds them of the fate that awaits them once they
die... eternity in Hell.

 Fairy relations with humans are always strange and often tragic. Time
passes differently among the fairies. What seems like a few days or
weeks in Elfland can be decades in the mortal world. Kirk's informants
told him of vast underground halls, lit by perpetual lamps, where
hundreds of fairies feasted and roistered down the ages.

 There were also more sinister aspects to human/fairy interactions.
Most people have heard of changelings, where a human baby is taken away
from its parents and a defective fairy child left in its place. But the
Subterraneans did not balk at taking adults away too. They particularly
liked women who'd just given birth. They were kidnapped to serve as wet
nurses to fairy babies. Interestingly, the fairies would leave exact
doubles of their captives behind. Kirk discusses these doppelgangers,
who he calls "co-walkers," in some detail. Like changeling infants,
co-walkers tend to weaken, become incoherent, and eventually die.
They're not human or fairy, but a sort of biological robot created by
fairy magic to distract mortals away from the truth about the abduction
of their loved ones. UFO lore is full of co-walker types. Many of the
classic "men in black" episodes feature clumsy, muddle-mouthed visitors
who don't quite seem in sync with the mundane world. MIBs, like
co-walkers, perform some task, then depart -- though they don't usually
die in front of puzzled witnesses.

 Kirk gives this account of one woman's abduction (I have modernized
his spelling):

 "Among other instances of undoubted verity, proving in these the being
of such aerial people, or species of creatures not vulgarly known, I
add the subsequent relations, some whereof I have from my acquaintance
with the actors and patients and the rest from the eyewitnesses to the
matter of fact. The first whereof shall be of the woman taken out of
her child-bed, and having a lingering image of her substituted body in
her room, which resemblance decayed, died, and was buried. But the
person stolen returning to her husband after two years space, he being
convinced by many undeniable tokens that she was his former wife,
admitted her home and had diverse children by her. Among other reports
she gave her husband, this was one: that she perceived little what they
[the fairies] did in the spacious house she lodged in, until she
anointed one of her eyes with a certain unction that was by her; which
they perceiving to have acquainted her with their actions, they fained
her blind of that eye with a puff of their breath. She found the place
full of light, without any fountain or lamp from whence it did spring."

 Kirk goes on to say the returned woman was undoubtedly the same one
everyone thought had died, and that her husband, having remarried since
her "death," was obliged to divorce his second wife to remarry his
first.

 The scholarly minister's interest in the Good People (as fairies were
euphemistically called) proved unhealthy. Kirk's monograph was finished
in 1691. A short time later, after the minister returned from London to
Aberfoyle, he went for an evening stroll in his nightshirt. Kirk's
perambulations took him past a fairy mound near his home. While passing
by the mound (or walking over it, according to some accounts), the 47
year-old scholar collapsed. He was found and brought home, but died
soon after and was buried in the kirkyard of his own church. Kirk's
death on or near a fairy mound must have made his parishioners shudder,
but an even weirder postscript would be added to the case.

 One of Kirk's relatives was awakened in the night by the apparition of
the dead minister. Kirk gave him a message for his cousin, one Graham
of Duchray. I am not dead, Kirk's specter declared. The Good People had
carried him off. He had one chance to escape their clutches: when
Kirk's posthumous child was christened (his wife being pregnant when he
died), Kirk's apparition would appear at the ceremony. Graham of
Duchray was to throw an iron-bladed knife over the head of the
minister's specter. Iron was a powerful counter to fairy magic, and
Kirk would be released from their power by this act. (One wonders what
would become of his corpse, buried securely in the Aberfoyle
cemetery... but some folk in Aberfoyle claimed that Kirk's body was
abducted, not just his soul. His coffin, it was said, was buried with
nothing in it but stones.)

 The child was born, and duly christened. While the family dined
afterward, Kirk appeared before them. Unfortunately, his cousin Graham
was so thunderstruck by this vision he failed to throw his knife as
directed. Kirk's spirit faded away, never to be seen again. Well into
the twentieth century people in Aberfoyle maintained that Robert Kirk
was not really dead, but lived as an eternal captive in fairyland.

 This kind of fairy lore echoes again and again through UFO literature.
Strange time effects, odd, diminutive "people" with pointed features
seen to occupy UFOs, traditional fairy gambits of borrowing mundane
object from witnesses -- and witnesses not being able to borrow
"extraterrestrial" artifacts back -- all are common facets of UFO close
encounters. Sometimes the fairy connection is so obvious as to be
startling -- as in the 1967 Long Island case where a contactee was
given a seemingly ordinary metal disc to wear so that "they" would
recognize her.

 Who are "they?" asked the contactee.

 "They are the very good people," she was told. (See John Keel, The
Mothman Prophecies, chapter 15).

 If there is a strong link between fairy lore and UFO encounters, what
does it mean? The crassly obvious view is that extraterrestrials have
been visiting us for centuries, and in the past they were mistaken for
elves and fairies. This is a naive concept; more probable is the notion
that modern encounters with strange beings are interpreted as contact
with outer space folk whereas three hundred years ago such a meeting
would have been seen as a visitation by the Good People.

 It seems as though the phenomenon changes very little, but our
perception of it changes a great deal. Our understanding of it all
would be greatly enhanced if we could strip away the trappings of
folklore, religion, and pseudo-science that continued to obscure the
core facts. And if at some future date we can recognize these
experiences unburdened by medieval superstitions or cheesy
science-fiction concepts of "aliens," then perhaps we'll know our
visitors for who they truly are. Maybe then they'll cease to trouble
us, and cease to be "the crew that never rest."

 © Copyright 1997 ParaScope, Inc.

Guess of Coast to Coast Nov. 16th 2004

 Author  Dr. Bruce Goldberg ... Goldberg... shared some tips on how to
ward off alien abductions, such as with the "greys." The herbs
pennyroyal and St. John's wort are repellent to the beings, as is the
metal iron.