The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies opens as both a scholarly inquiry and an enchanted memorial, honoring the Rev. Robert Kirk while questioning the book's publication history and the possibility that the surviving 1815 text is the earliest true edition. Kirk emerges as a Highland minister, scholar, and seventh son whose life, work on Bible translation and Gaelic psalmody, marriages, children, and mysterious death have all been absorbed into the fairy legends he recorded. ...

The tract, of which the reader now knows the history, is a little volume of somewhat singular character. Written in 1691 by the Rev. Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle, it is a kind of metaphysic of the Fairy world. Having lived through the period of the sufferings of the Kirk, the author might have been expected either to neglect Fairyland altogether, or to regard it as a mere appanage of Satan’s kingdom—a “burning question” indeed, for some of the witches who suffered at Presbyterian han...

THE bibliography of the following little tract is extremely obscure. The title-page of the edition of 1815, which we reproduce, gives the date as 1691. Sir Walter Scott says in his Demonology and Witchcraft, (1830, p. 163, note), "It was printed with the author's name in 1691, and reprinted, in 1815, for Longman & Co." But was there really a printed edition of 1691? Scott says that he never met with an example. Research in our great libraries has discovered ...

A classic, enchanting document of Scottish folklore about fairies, elves, and other supernatural creatures.Late in the seventeenth century, Robert Kirk, an Episcopalian minister in the Scottish Highlands, set out to collect his parishioners’ many striking stories about elves, fairies, fauns, doppelgängers, wraiths, and other beings of, in Kirk’s words, “a middle nature betwixt man and angel.” For Kirk these stories constituted strong evidence for the reality of a s...

The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairiesby Robert Kirk and Andrew LangThis monograph, originally written in 1691, is a classic of Scottish fairy folklore.These Subterraneans have Controverfies, Doubts, Difputes, Feuds, and Siding of Parties... As to Vice and Sin, whatever their own Laws be... they tranfgrefs and commit Acts of Injuftice... -from Chapter 11 As a study of 17th-century folklore, this mysterious and remarkable text is fascinating. As a documen...

"Kirk is a magnificent dish to set before any student of either folk-lore or folk-psychology."—Times Literary SupplementIn the late seventeenth century, a Scottish minister went looking for supernatural creatures of "a middle nature betwixt man and angel." Robert Kirk roamed the Highlands, talking to his parishioners and other country folk about their encounters with fairies, wraiths, elves, doppelgangers, and other agents of the spirit world. Magic was a part of everyday l...

“The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies” is the famous and mysterious treatise on fairy folklore, witchcraft, second sight, and ghosts by Gaelic scholar and minister, Robert Kirk. Written before he died in 1692, the work was not published until 1815 after many legends had grown around Kirk’s death, which imagined that he was secreted away by the fairies themselves for revealing their secrets. Most famous during his own lifetime for publishing one of the first translations of ...

Our thoughts about the world are clearly influenced by such things as point of view, temperament, past experience and culture. However, some thinkers go much further and argue that everything that exists depends on us, arguing that 'even reality is relative'. Can we accept such a claim in the face of events such as floods and other natural disasters or events seemingly beyond our control? 'Realists' argue that reality is independent of out thinking. 'Relativists' disagree, arguing that wha...

One of the most sought after and enigmatic texts about Celtic fairies. Written by a Scottish clergyman, Robert Kirk, in 1691, and not committed to print until the early 19th century, The Secret Commonwealth is an unusually sympathetic account of the denizens of fairyland, and a complex of still mysterious extrasensory phenomena including poltergeists, clairvoyance and doppelgangers.Magic was a part of everyday life for Kirk and his fellow Highlanders, and this remarkable book offer...

Could robots be genuinely intelligent? Could they be conscious? Could there be zombies? Prompted by these questions Robert Kirk introduces the main problems of consciousness and sets out a new approach to solving them.He starts by discussing behaviourism, Turing's test of intelligence and Searle's famous Chinese Room argument, and goes on to examine dualism – the idea that consciousness requires something beyond the physical – together with its opposite, physicalism. Probing the id...

A great deal of work in philosophy today is concerned with some aspect of the complex tangle of problems and puzzles roughly labelled the mind-body problem. This book is an introduction to it. It is a readable, lucid and accessible guide that provides readers with authoritative exposition, and a solid and reliable framework which can be built on as needed. The first chapter briefly introduces the subject and moves on to discuss mechanism - the idea that minds are machines - focusing on Sea...

This book begins by providing a simplified version of the computational quantum chemistry sufficient to calculate the wavefunctions that are the basic input of NG-QTAIM. Enough basic (scalar) QTAIM theory is provided to understand the later chapters. In addition, our developments of scalar QTAIM are presented and activities at various levels of difficulty are provided for the readership to facilitate understanding.The topological origins of Quantum Theory of Atoms in Molecules (QTA...