the NEW BOTTRELL diaries: What Religion did Fairies Follow?

25 Feb 2012

What Religion did Fairies Follow?

Posted by Beachcombing

Beach’s endless reading in the literature of fairies has led him to a couple of unusual passages. He honestly doesn’t know that to make of them. In truth, they frighten him.

The first is from a south-western fairy tale where a man is reunited with his ‘dead’ fiancé who is actually trapped in fairy land. While there she explains the lifestyle, beliefs and manners of the fairy folk.

‘For you must remember they are not of our religion,’ said she, in answer to his surprised look, ‘but star-worshippers. They don’t always live together like Christians and turtle-doves; considering their long existence such constancy would be tiresome for them, anyhow the small tribe seem to think so. And the old withered ‘kiskeys’ of men that one can almost see through, like puffs of smoke, are vainer than the young ones. May the Powers deliver them from their weakly frames! And indeed they often long for the time when they will be altogether dissolved in air, and so end their wearisome state of existence without an object or hope.’

This rather ghastly half life is bad enough, but what Beachcombing finds most intriguing is the reference to ‘star-worshipping’. What on earth does this mean in this context? Is it an erudite nineteenth-century reference to astrology? Or is it, if we want to be almost absurdly ambitious, a memory of Neolithic religion in Cornwall in the 1800s? There has long, of course, been the idea that the fairies are the memory of an earlier civilisation.

Beach would plump for astrology and sleep well the night after. But every so often other sources have curious details about fairy religion that are rather more difficult to explain away. This is Robert Kirk on the fairies in his Secret Commonwealth, written in 1691 describing fairy beliefs.

They live much longer than we yet die at last, or least vanish from that state. For ‘tis one of their tenets that nothing perisheth, but (as the sun and year) everything goes in a circle, lesser or greater, and is renewed and refreshed in its revolutions, as ‘tis another that every body in the creation moves (which is a sort of life), and that nothing moves, but has another animal moving on it, and so on, to the utmost minutest corpuscule that’s capable to be a receptacle of life.

We have here a slightly intellectualised version of village Hinduism. But what the hell is it doing in late seventeenth-century Scotland? There are two explanations that jump to Beachcombing’s mind.

First, a wild one: the ancients compared druidic belief to Pythagoras. Is it possible that this transmigration of souls comes from authentic druidic customs that have somehow survived to be represented as fairy beliefs? There was long the idea that fairy belief stemmed from druidic belief.

Second, a contorted version of the same. Is it possible that knowing that transmigration was connected with the druids the seventeenth century had connected these beliefs with the fairies as an act of antiquarianism?

For the record, Beach suspects that both explanations are wrong. And this paragraph remains like a great beached whale flapping its tail and daring us to explain it.

So what is going on here? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

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22/1/2012: Phil P writes in to say ‘One other possibility comes to mind. The Rom as presumed to have originally come from India. (Romany is related closely to Sanskrit) Is it possible that they brought a bit of Hindu cosmology to Scotland? I don’t know how far back their presence in the isles goes.’ Thanks Phil!

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william bottrell 1816-81

William Bottrell was born at Raftra (or Raughtra) in St. Levan, within a couple of miles or so of the Land’s End, on the 7th of March 1816. He was the son of William Vingoe Bottrell and Margaret, daughter of William and Margaret (née Andrew) Bosence, of Sancreed. The latter couple were married at St. Levan, 27 Sept. 1788, and Margaret, their daughter, was baptised at St. Buryan, on the15 June 1792. William Vingoe Bottrell was also born at Raftra in 1790, and baptised at Sennen. He was the son of Richard Bottrell, of St. Levan, and Mary Vingoe, who were married at Sennen, 2 Aug.1788. Williams father was a Yeoman Farmer of some means, so the first few years of William’s life were spent on the family farm at Raftra. It was in these surroundings that he heard his first stories while sitting by the fire in the kitchen with his Grandparents, Mary and Richard Bottrell. His Grandma told him how as a young girl her own mother had died, and how she had been sent to live with an aunt and uncle at Alverton in Penzance and had befriended Edward Pellew (Admiral Lord Exmouth) as a young boy. Bottrell later went on to tell this story in volume three of his Folktales.

Grandma Mary had a great influence on young William. She would take him for walks over the fields and cliffs around the Lands End telling him stories that had been handed down from generation to generation of Vingoe’s for hundreds of years. Stories that later became the basis of the three volumes. William was an only child so his parents were able to give him what was for those times a good education. This more formal education was started at Penzance Grammar School under William Purchase, who was the English master there, and under Nicholas Bice Julyan until 1831, when he was sent to Bodmin School, then under the headmastership of Leonard James Boor. William gained a love for the classics and mathematics, which stayed with him for the rest of his life. He left Bodmin School in 1837 and little is known of his life between 1837 and 1851 other than like so many of his fellow Cornishmen and women he travelled the world. About 1837 he visited France and went on to invest heavily in land in the Basque area of Spain. Later in his life he used to speak of his love for his Spanish garden with its herbs, fruit and flowers. He also collected local Basque folk tales but this idyllic life came to an end when his land was confiscated and given to the Catholic Church and Bottrell returned to Cornwall a ruined man.

Within months he was on the move again, this time to Canada where he had obtained a position as English Teacher in a College in Quebec (1847–1851). He became unsettled with academic life and left for the forests of the interior where he worked for a short time as an overseer for a timber company, returning to Penzance, in 1852 where he lived at No. 4, Clare Street. At some stage he married and took his wife to live in Australia where she unfortunately died. This was a black time in his life, which he refused to discuss with anyone, but would dismiss it with the words “I lost my love and my money so came home.”

On his return from Australia he lived the life of a recluse at Hawke’s Point Lelant. A friend of his later wrote: “Here he lived in a hovel and cultivated a little moorland, He had a black cat called ‘Spriggans’ plus a cow and pony. These animals would all follow him down the almost perpendicular cliff, over a goats path, to the spring which was their water supply and no accidents happened to either.” His friend went on to tell how Bottrell became a friend of the tinners who worked in near-by mines. They would do a days work underground then think nothing of spending a couple of hours helping Bottrell clear ground in order that he could create a garden. It was from these men that Bottrell learned more of the ancient tales of west Cornwall. As they sat by the fire in the cottage which he had made his home, one of the number would tell a tale whilst William drew a sketch of the man. Bottrell always acknowledged the debt he owed to these men, he said of them “they have intelligence, mother-wit and memories and I am able to garner from the ample harvest.”

Only a few years later and most of the stories which make up the volumes of not only Bottrell’s own work but also a large part of the two volumes produced by Robert Hunt would have been lost. Much of his work was utilised by Hunt in his two-volume Popular Romances of the West of England, first printed in 1865, of which upward of 50 “drolls” were communicated to him by Bottrell, a help which is not as handsomely acknowledged as it deserved. The then editor of the “Cornish Telegraph” suggested to Bottrell that he should write and publish the stories himself.

William Bottrell’s first appearance in print was in the columns of The Cornish Telegraph of 1867, where he gave an account of “The Penzance of our Grandfathers.” Many articles of his appeared subsequently in this paper and in One and All, a particularly interesting periodical, and in 1873 he contributed to the Reliquary. Of all these various articles the best were gathered together and published in the three volumes. Life began to improve for William and he moved into St Ives. Before the completion of his last volume, however, he suffered a stroke and was paralysed. After six weeks of suffering he died at 10am on the 27 August, 1881 at Dove St., St. Ives and was buried in the churchyard he loved the most, St. Levan amongst his ancestors.

William Bottrell had become:

“A sun-dial pillar left alone,
On which no dial meets the eye;
A black mill-wheel with grass o’ergrown,
That hears no water trickle by:
Dark, palsied mass of severed rock,
Deaf, blind and sear to sun and rain;
A shatter’d gravestone’s time worn block
That only shows an honoured name.”

Anon.