Doppleganger

In his tract called The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies written in 1691, Robert Kirk speaks of those who have the Second Sight which enables them to see the folk who live underground. He says that he has been told by some of these with the Second Sight that "they have seen a Doubleman, or the shape of some man in two places, perfectly resembling one another in all points". He also says that in spite of the two apparently being identical those with the Second Sight can easily tell which is the 'above ground' man and which is the 'subterranean man'. He affirms that "They call this reflex-man a 'Co-Walker', every way like the man as a twin brother and companion, haunting him as his shadow ...."

"This copy, echo, or living picture goes at last to his own herd. It accompanies the person so long and frequently for ends best known to itself, whether to guard him from the secret assaults of some of its own folks, or only as a sportful ape to counterfeit all his actions."

The doppleganger or other self is well known as a psychic phenomenon, but is interestingly here seen as a consequence of 'haunting' by the faerie folk.

Japanese Ship of Souls

They say the sea always roughens during the period of the Festival of the Dead in the seventh month of the old lunar calendar. After the Ships of Souls have been launched no one dares enter it: no boats can be hired : all the fishermen remain at home. For on that day the sea is a highway for the dead, who must pass back over its waters to their mysterious home, and therefore upon that day is it called Hotoke-umi - the Buddha Flood - the Tide of the Returning Ghosts. And ever upon the night of the sixteenth day, whether the sea be calm or tumultuous, all its surface shimmers with faint lights gliding out to the open, the dim fires of the dead; and there is heard a murmuring of voices, like the murmur of a city far off, the indistingshable speech of souls.

Lafcadio Hearn (1891)

Meilyr and the Lady

Meilyr was visiting the annual fair when his eye was caught by a young woman whose charms seemed to him incomparable. To his delight he managed to engage her in conversation and they spent some time together at the fair. He asked her if she would meet him again and she agreed. So they met at the trysting tree and walked together in the forest. Then lied down together on the soft moss on a flat rock above the flowing stream. There Meilyr took her in his arms. At first she warned him that no good would come of it, but he persisted so she allowed him to continue. As they lay together - fulfilled - on the moss she turned in his arms into an old crone of extreme ugliness with warts and hair sprouting from her nose. She left him then but said they might meet again in her own country.

For some time after this Meilyr lost his wits and wandered the land as a deranged vagrant. Eventually he recovered and resumed his former life. But although he seemed to others to be restored to what he had been, he found that he could see things that others could not see and he had the power too see events before they happened. And he saw his lover again, though not as he had seen her before, as she passed through the veil between the worlds and spoke to him so that he found, in repeating her words, that his speech was inspired. So he became a great poet, and a seer, and gained a reputation as a wise man, and a possessor of cunning arts.

All for the love of his lady.


Giraldus Cambrensis told a version of this tale in his twelfth century Journey Through Wales summarized HERE

Waters from the Source

So, searching for the source, Gwyn sought the spring from where waters welled up from the Otherworld, though it was said to be a perilous place with a veil of spell craft around it. It was because he knew certain words of power that he did not worry about that, and he spoke these words as he approached the place where the spring was reputed to be, though no spring could be seen. As he spoke the air about the place became like a clearing mist that shone diffusely as he drew near and he saw before him a bed of fine gravel from which water bubbled up out of the earth and out of this water a women taking shape before him.

In her hands she held a vessel of transparent crystal into which water flowed so he approached her to ask for a drink of the water, but as he spoke she began to dissolve once more back into the welling spring. He reached out for the vessel and tasted just a few drops of the water before she was gone and the well itself began to draw back the flow of water.

But it was enough, for great knowledge and wisdom had welled up within him with those few drops and he was overcome both with bitter grief and with great joy as he saw clearly how things were. He knew he must retreat from that place or be carried off for all time to the Otherworld as the place shifted its form once more. So he fled, but with him was a vision that never left him, though it was the cause of a trouble that he carried with him for all his days with his deep seeing into the weave of the world that others could not see and it took great strength to bear it.

In a Sunken Lane

There is nothing but the sense of something as you tread on the damp leaves of the sunken lane and know that the deep quietness contains a tune that calls to you from beyond the range of hearing , from deep in the twilight which contains a world that is there and not there, here and not here, everywhere and at a fine point of intersection between this world and another.

So you tread, tentatively, again and the tune calls you on ….

Where were you? Do you remember? Or only have the faintest trace of memory of another place, a perilous place, but one to which your heart would have you turn again. If only you could. But the tune is silent now. The intersection opening somewhere else, in some other lane.

And this lane, though still deeply mysterious, seems shallower than it did just then  … when?

Witch Road

To begin at the beginning it’s an ordinary lane
and the hedge alongside it a common hedgerow
bordering a field until the twined spindles
of its twisted branches bind the shifted light
around leaf and stem along another path through
the spaces between here and there, the shafts
that bend past thorn and bramble, turning
the glimpses caught in the eye’s corners away
into lines of sight, seer sight, lit by witch light
so each dark interstice of hedge is a step
through to another place, snickets running
deeper with each turn from one to another
into the lane that runs, no ordinary course,
just where the first lane runs but elsewhere
a half-step away from familiar things
spellbound now as the road slips through
and finds a way into Faery.

The Lonely God

"I want you," said Angus Og, "because the world has forgotten me. In all my nation there is no remembrance of me. I, wandering on the hills of my country, am lonely indeed. I am the desolate god forbidden to utter my happy laughter. I hide the silver of my speech and the gold of my merriment. I live in the holes of the rocks and the dark caves of the sea. I weep in the morning because I may not laugh, and in the evening I go abroad and am not happy. Where I have kissed a bird has flown; where I have trod a flower has sprung. But Thought has snared my birds in his nets and sold them in the market-places. Who will deliver me from Thought, from the base holiness of Intellect, the maker of chains and traps? Who will save me from the holy impurity of Emotion, whose daughters are Envy and Jealousy and Hatred, who plucks my flowers to ornament her lusts and my little leaves to shrivel on the breasts of infamy? Lo, I am sealed in the caves of nonentity until the head and the heart shall come together in fruitfulness, until Thought has wept for Love, and Emotion has purified herself to meet her lover. Tir-na-nog is the heart of a man and the head of a woman. Widely they are separated. Self-centred they stand, and between them the seas of space are flooding desolately. No voice can shout across those shores. No eye can bridge them, nor any desire bring them together until the blind god shall find them on the wavering stream--not as an arrow searches straightly from a bow, but gently, imperceptibly as a feather on the wind reaches the ground on a hundred starts; not with the compass and the chart, but by the breath of the Almighty which blows from all quarters without care and without ceasing. Night and day it urges from the outside to the inside. It gathers ever to the centre. From the far without to the deep within, trembling from the body to the soul until the head of a woman and the heart of a man are filled with the Divine Imagination. Hymen, Hymenaea! I sing to the ears that are stopped, the eyes that are sealed, and the minds that do not labour. Sweetly I sing on the hillside. The blind shall look within and not without; the deaf shall hearken to the murmur of their own veins, and be enchanted with the wisdom of sweetness; the thoughtless shall think without effort as the lightning flashes, that the hand of Innocence may reach to the stars, that the feet of Adoration may dance to the Father of Joy, and the laugh of Happiness be answered by the Voice of Benediction."
from The Crock of Gold by James Stephens