Note 11 — II SEERS AND HEALERS II

Note 11. The seers and healers in this section differ but little from clairvoyants and spirit mediums of the towns, and explain their powers in much the same way. Indeed one of Lady Gregory's story-tellers will have it that America is more full than Ireland of faeries, and describes the mediums there to prove it. It is often through some virtue in these country seers and healers that the faeries or spirits are able to affect men and women and natural objects. Mrs. Sheridan says that a child could not have been taken if she had not been looking on, and one hears again and again that even when the faeries fight among themselves or play at hurley, there must be a man upon either side. We are all in a sense mediums, if the village seer speaks truth, for through any unsanctified emotion, love, affection, admiration, the spirits may attain power over a child or horse or whatever is before our eyes, and perhaps, as the controls of mediums will sometimes say, they can only see the world through our eyes. Albert de Rochas, borrowing a theory from the seventeenth century, has suggested with the general assent of spiritists that the fluidic or sidereal body of the medium, the mould upon which the physical body is, it may be, built up, is more detachable than in persons who are not mediums, and that the spirits make themselves visible by transforming it into their own shape or into what shape they please and attain by its means a power over physical objects. (See L'Extériorisation de la Motricité.) Instead of the expensive crystal of the Bond Street clairvoyant, Biddy Early gazed into her bottle, but that is almost the whole difference. If the dreams and visions of Connacht have more richness and beauty than those of Camberwell, it is that Connacht, having no doubts as to our survival of death, is not always looking for but one sort of evidence, and so can let things happen as they will. The brother or sister or the like who comes to the knowledgeable man or woman after death is but the "guide" that has been so common in England and America, since the Rochester rappings, and a country form of Plutarch's "dæmon." At other moments, however, "seer" or "healer" resembles a witch or wizard rather than a modern medium.