It’s Halloween again, originally a Celtic new year festival, the Samhain.  Of the four major pagan festivals in Ireland, the Celts were most uneasy about this one–the Night of the Dead when, it was said, you or your kin were most likely to go mad. 

The mad, as the Irish still say, were “away with the fairies,” and after sunset on Oct. 31 is when the fairies flew.  Samhain (pronounced “sow-when”) thus became the most bewitched evening of the Celtic calendar, the night when the veil dividing this world from the next was thought to be at its thinnest. 

Through this veil, they claimed, fairy spirits would come to embody young adults and turn them into changelings.  What else could explain the rapid onset of schizophrenia, known in those days as lunacy? 

Newspaper accounts throughout the 19th century are strewn with stories of suspected changelings being killed, usually by drowning, by parents trying to break the spell of madness. 

Such cases may shock readers today, but they were dealt with leniently by the courts whose magistrates accepted superstition as a mitigating factor. 

The Fairies Were Framed

The mad are no longer murdered as changelings, of course, but if you ever get to spend a Halloween in the Emerald Isle, then you’ll hear campfire stories of phantom fairy ghosts returning for a mad haunt. 

Fires made from bones of slaughtered cattle–piled high on flames of burning peat–still light every other hill in Ireland, starting at Tara, as pleas to the otherworld to keep the bad fairies away. 

Wearing costumes, a practice that dates from the belief that disguises can hide us from the visiting dead, led to the original “mischief night” with children begging door-to-door for food and drink. 

In the pale moonlight, they still might swipe a gate off its hinges.  Dressed as silly space aliens and superheroes, they’re still seen only by jack-o-lantern pumpkins perched in windows to welcome the benevolent spirits back on the re-imported night of the living dead. 

At one time the curse of the Druid Fallon would get your people 17 generations of madness.  Modern day Druids, such as they are, no longer lay curses.  While mystic vision still hangs thick in the Irish air, more reasonable explanations vie for consideration, such as the continual famines that starved our family out, finally, in 1847, along with a million other Irish. 

Hint: In-vitro starvation is proven to more than double rates of insanity in offspring, so it’s a good bet that centuries of famine mutated our gene bank into a rickety makeshift lean to. 

Yet once upon a time, the very fungus that ran down the potato stalks, destroying crops overnight in 1845, was blamed on fairies too.  Some Irish farmers swore they saw legions of fairies waging war in the skies above blighted fields. 

From bad health to failed crops, fairies were to blame for so many things that it raises the obvious question: were these fairies framed? 

Sure they were, but that doesn’t mean that modern science has been any better at describing the change.  The opaque explanations of psychiatry might even do less to illuminate the experience of psychosis. 

The Shaman Disease

I can’t imagine what it’s like to hear voices.  I can only assume it’s as startling as hearing a group of unseen intruders talking in your own home.  What could be spookier? 

Some psychiatrists call schizophrenia “the shaman disease,” because in tribal cultures the symptoms were likely to give you an elevated social status as shaman. 

I won’t go that far, but I do dwell at times on the metaphysically uncertain nature of these voices that appear like enchanting sorcerers.  You almost can’t help it, given the religious nature of the delusions that feature so prominently. 

My sister Chelle swore she was the wife of Christ.  Since then she’s been with the film star Warren Beatty and the broadcaster Brian Williams, among other dashing celebs, so her divinations haven’t exactly been on the money. 

Still, whatever it was that took Chelle and our second sister Austine away—be it psychosis or a band of Irish fairies–it does seem like a portal to other dimensions.