Yeats’s study of fairy had occupied him steadily for fifteen years from 1887 to 1902. He continued to study in connection with spiritualism until 1915. Yeats’s own collection of Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry had been published in 1888, Irish Fairy Tales in 1892 and The Celtic Twilight in 1893 before he met Lady Gregory. Any theory about nature of the fairy-faith shared with her came from Yeats, and he claims originality. In writing The Celtic Twilight(1902) his study of fairy was deepened by his collecting trips with Lady Gregory. The result of Yeats’s collaboration with lady Gregory was not to appear until 1920 when she published her two volume edition of Visions and Beliefs in West of Ireland, “Collected and arranged by Lady Gregory: with two essays and notes by W. B. Yeats.” Yeats’s essays(both dated 1914) were “Swedenborg, Mediums and Desolate Places” and “Witches and Wizards in Irish Folk-lore.” Like all the Irish antiquarians, Yeats also commonly referred to the fairies as “the people of Raths,” “the Danaan nations,” “The Tribes of the Goddess Danu,” In Fairy and Folk Tales he explains the Galic terms. The Irish word for fairy is sheehogue[sidheog], a diminutive of “shee” in banshee. Fairies are deenee shee[daoine shee](fairy people) In Irish tradition anyone may be taken by the sidhe, but there is, in fact a hierarchy of those who are most desirable. Yeats follows this tradition in one of his first poems about the sidhe, “The Stolen Child.” As Yeats understood the Irish tradition, the sidhe can do nothing the help of mortals and it is for this reason that they must always seek out humans. When the sidhe takes someone that person is said to be “away.” As a spiritualist would interpret this, it means that the soul has left the body and is travelling with the fairies. Often when appears ill or asleep or “lies in a dead faint upon the ground” it is because that the person is “away.” The Sidhe, according to Yeats’s countrymen, never takes anyone or anything without leaving some changeling in its place. In The Only Jealousy of Emer―Yeats’s most successful and moving dramatization and use of a changeling― Emer guesses that Cuchulain is “away.” When people are taken to live with the sidhe, they take on supernatural powers and work and live just as the Shape Changers that they are amongst. The chief distinction to be made between the shide and the dead is that the dead returns to the earth as ghosts of their former selves, whereas the sidhes are the everlasting ones. The idea that the fairy faith is in reality a doctrine of souls was lent supported by the fact that the country people say that almost all who are dead are taken by the sidhes. As the place where souls temporarily reside, the middle land of the sidhe is the Bardo of the Tibetans, the summerland of the Spiritualists, and ethereal world of theosophy and magic. Yeats saw his studies of spiritualism as a continuation of his studies of fairy, both of them as leading to the beginning of his philosophy. His study of fairy led him to the formulation of two theories that makes his system possible―that of Anima Mundi and that of the “airy body” or “vehicle” of the soul. A Vision is the result of his study about the fairy.

• 서혜숙(건국대) | Hye Sook Suh