CHAPTER XVIII.

SCOTTISH SUPERSTITIONS: HALLOWEEN.

THE imaginative element in the character of the Celtic race naturally

predisposes them to the reception and retention of fanciful ideas in connection
with our relations to the unseen. Keenly sensible of the existence of supernatural
influences, they are morbidly curious as to the mode in which they act upon
humanity, and ever desirous to propitiate or guard against them. There is
something in the presence of the sea and the mountains which fosters a habit of
reverie; and the mind, awed and perplexed by the vastness of the forces of
Nature, is led to give them an actual and definite embodiment, and to associate
them directly with the incidents of our mortal life. Granted the existence of
invisible creatures, there is no reason why man, who looks upon the universe as
a circle of which he is the centre, should not suppose them to be interested in all
that interests himself; and when this is once admitted, it follows as an inevitable
result, that he will endeavour to make them the agents of his inclination or his
will, unless he fears them as powers whose anger must be reverently deprecated.
It will be found that most of the popular superstitions to which we refer are
based upon these motives; that most of them originate in the desire to bribe and
cajole Fortune, or to command and defeat it. Others will be found to have had
their rise, as we have hinted, in the feelings of awe and wonder awakened by the
mystery or the grandeur of Nature. The wail of waters against a rocky coast has
suggested the cries of the ocean maiden who seeks to lure the mariner to his
destruction; the wreathing mists floating in fantastic shapes across the mountain
valleys, has peopled their depths with a world of spirits or friendly or inimical to
mortals. The imagination, which has been quickened by Nature, proceeds in turn
to breathe into Nature a new life.

To some of the superstitions which haunt the glens, and peaks, and torrents of
the Scottish Highlands, the poet Collins has alluded in one of his most beautiful
odes. He speaks of the North as fancy’s land, where still, it is said, the fairy