Children, Folklore and the Supernatural January 7, 2018
Author: Beach Combing | in : Contemporary, Modern , trackback
Children, we are told, have supernatural encounters more easily than adults. On several levels this would make sense. But forgetting, for a moment, about whether this is true or false, where does the idea come from? There is a very strong notion among spiritualists and theosophists in the later 19C that kids had greater potential to see fairies and the dead. This apparently had to do with their innocence. Beach can’t recall the exact mumbo jumbo terms used to describe their capacity but it included ‘fluids’. Often puberty was given as a reason that children stop seeing things: this was wheeled out for Cottingley, for example. But does the idea that children are more likely to encounter, say, a ghost exist prior to this?
What Beach is struck by is the fact that there is nothing known to him in the folklore of the Anglo-Saxon countries that would suggest that infants were believed to have a greater capacity to see the impossible: fairy sightings involve children, as they involve adults. There is, on the other hand, the very strong idea that animals can see impossible things and that the movements of cats, dogs and horses were watched with a certain attention. Going wider there are traditions about using the very young in acts of crystal scrying and the like: here there are important parallels from around the world. The idea that children can be what might be loosely called a medium. So where does this notion about children and the supernatural come from? Is it just a late 19C invention or does it have deeper roots: drbeachcombing AT gmail DOT com. Again this is not a question about whether children really do see the supernatural more or not.
Bruce T, 29 Jan 2018: ‘No doubt a Spiritualist bastardization of the findings of nascent field of psychology in the late 19th cen. which was obsessed with looking at childhood trauma and forgotten experiences as the causes for adult problems. Merely psychic types throwing a little of the new terminology on that same old crap they’d been spewing to see if stuck, would be my best guess. It’s no different than modern psychics that try to justify their loopy ideas by combining them with a tiny iota of knowledge of quantum mechanics. Oddly, they still use the “Children as open door to the Great Beyond” bit. Let’s see if little Tommy can bring back Elvis the next time he’s over there. I suspect watching animals goes much further back. You can learn a lot from an animal that can see and smell better than you. Say there’s tiger behind that big rock ahead, Rover isn’t going to want go anywhere near it. If you’ve got a lick of sense you’ll follow the dog. A flock of birds flushes in the woods a few hundred feet away? Something is coming and as you don’t know if it’s friend or foe, it might be a good time to find a hiding place and check it out. You can tell short term weather by animal behavior, and many people swear animals beat it before earthquakes. It’s nothing supernatural, it’s an animal’s reaction to their surroundings by using their natural senses.’
