Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland, Second Series

This is the raw material of myth, collected from the lips of peasants and healers in the remote West of Ireland at the turn of the twentieth century. Lady Gregory spent over two decades gathering these accounts from a world where the dead still walked, where wise women knew the secret names of herbs that could cure or curse, and where every fog-shrouded crossroads hummed with invisible presences. Here are the banshees that wailed before a death, the spirits that haunted the houses of the unquiet dead, the charms and cures passed down through generations of folk healers who understood that illness often had causes no doctor could name. The prose is deceptively simple, almost naïve in its directness, but it conceals something startling: a complete cosmology in which the visible world was merely one layer of reality, and the otherworld pressed constantly against it. This is the folklore that directly fueled the Irish Literary Revival, the raw ore from which Yeats forged his greatest poetry and plays. For readers who have ever felt that modern life has flattened the world, these accounts offer a glimpse into a time when belief was still luminous and unapologetic, when an old woman in a cottage might know things that scholars could not imagine.