The Fairy Doctor: Biddy Early, the Blue Bottle and the Shaman in the Parish

The story is told in several ways, but this is the one most often heard. A young man was crossing the fields of east Clare on a summer evening when he came on a crowd of small people with hurleys, ready for a match and one player short. They asked him to make up their side. He played, and played well, and his side won, and when the game was over they gave him a blue glass bottle and told him to take it to his mother. “What will I tell her?” he asked. “Tell her nothing,” they said. “She will know.” His mother was Biddy Early, and for the rest of her life, when someone came to her door with a sick child or a failing cow or a question that could not be answered, she looked into the bottle, and in the mist that gathered there she saw what to do.

Who the Fairy Doctor Was

When the learned orders of Gaelic Ireland lost their patrons in the seventeenth century, the work of the seer and the healer did not disappear. It went down the social scale into the parish, into the hands of men and women who held no office and could often not read. In Irish they were the bean feasa and the fear feasa, the woman and man of knowledge; in English, wise women and fairy doctors. They cured the sick, found lost things, diagnosed the fairy stroke and the elf-shot, told whether a missing person was dead or “taken,” and, when someone had been taken, went into the Otherworld or dealt with its people to bring them back.

Yeats, collecting in Sligo in the 1880s, wrote that “the most celebrated fairy doctors are sometimes people the fairies loved and carried away, and kept with them for seven years,” and that those the fairies love, even if they are not carried off, may “grow silent and strange, and take to lonely wanderings in the ‘gentle’ places. Such will, in after-times, be great poets or musicians, or fairy doctors.” The pattern is unmistakable to anyone who has read the ethnography of shamanism: the call through a strange sickness or absence, the long apprenticeship to spirits, the return with a gift that sets one apart.

Biddy Early

Bridget Early, born around 1798 near Feakle in Co. Clare and dead in 1874, is the best documented of them all, largely because Lady Gregory went looking for the people who remembered her early in the twentieth century and wrote down what they said in Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland. As a child, it was said, she spoke of the fairies as other children speak of their playmates. She learned the herbs of the district and, the story goes, the fairies taught her what lay behind the herbs. She married four times. She was denounced from the altar more than once, and the priests who came to rebuke her went away again, while their parishioners kept coming to her door.

She took no money for her cures. That was the rule for anyone who held a gift from the Otherworld, and it still is for many who have the cure in Ireland today. But she accepted gifts, and was clear about which ones she preferred, and a bottle of whiskey was rarely refused. The country people forgave her that easily. When she died she asked that the blue bottle be thrown into Kilbarron Lake near her house, and it was, by some accounts by the priest himself. It has never been recovered, though people have looked.

Corby Ingold, writing on shamanism in the Celtic world, sets out what makes her life read like a shaman’s. She was marked out young by an unusual closeness to a hidden people. They taught her healing, which she combined with lore inherited in her family. Her gift set her apart and cost her, in the church’s hostility and in the reputation of being “fey.” She was given a power object by her allies, which strengthened her sight and told her, when the mist did not come, that a case was beyond her. And at the end the object went back into the water, the old Celtic door to the Otherworld, from which it came.

They Were Still There

It is easy to imagine the fairy doctors as a nineteenth-century curiosity. They were not. In the Highlands of Sutherland in the 1950s, the writer Rowena Farre described her neighbours Mr and Mrs Fraser, healers who were especially gifted with animals, in her bestselling Seal Morning; Mr Fraser knew three hundred and seventy-six stories and, she wrote, accepted the fairies and the power of spells “in the same way as others accept the power of electricity.” Some readers have doubted how much of Farre’s book is literally true, but its picture of an inherited healing lore passed from mother to son and father to daughter fits what the folklorists found elsewhere. Ingold himself remembers people with the sight and the gift of healing in Connemara and Clare in the 1970s, and the traditional musician who told an American friend, “Well, I don’t believe in them… but they’re there.”

In 1999 the storyteller Eddie Lenihan campaigned to save a whitethorn at Latoon in Co. Clare that stood in the path of a new road, warning that it was a meeting place of the Munster fairies. The road was moved. Many in Ireland laughed, and many more quietly agreed that it was as well to be careful.

The Other Side of the Faith

We would not be honest if we told this story only in its gentle form. In March 1895, in Co. Tipperary, a young woman called Bridget Cleary was burned to death in her own kitchen by her husband, who had become convinced, with the help of relatives and a local herb doctor, that she was a changeling and that the fire would drive the fairy out and bring his wife back. Angela Bourke’s The Burning of Bridget Cleary tells the story with great care. The fairy faith was a language for illness, for anger, for the inexplicable and the unbearable, and like any such language it could be used to justify cruelty. The fairy doctor was a figure of power in a small community, and power can be misused.

This is part of why we insist on consent, on supervision and on never treating spiritual work as a substitute for medicine. The wise woman at her best and the herb doctor at Bridget Cleary’s bedside came out of the same world. The difference lay in the character of the practitioner and the care of the community around them. It still does. Our page on healing work today says more.

What the Fairy Doctors Teach

• The work is relationship. Biddy Early did not command the fairies. She was on terms with them, and her power was theirs, lent.
• The work is local. The fairy doctor knew the forts and the bushes and the wells of one district intimately, and the people of it.
• The work is for others. No one went to Biddy Early to have a beautiful experience. They went because a child was sick.
• The gift is not for sale. Take what is given freely; do not trade on what was given to you.
• Know when you cannot help. When the mist did not rise in the bottle, she sent the person away. That is wisdom, not failure.
• Give it back. At the end, the bottle went into the lake.

A Practice: Keeping a Seeing Vessel

Scrying in water is found the world over, and Biddy Early’s bottle is the best-known Irish example. This is a modern practice built on that pattern. It is not a reconstruction of anything she did.

1. Choose the vessel. A plain glass bottle, a dark bowl, a small dish. Something you will use for nothing else.
2. Dedicate it at the water. Take it to a well, lake or stream near you. Fill it there. Say who you are and ask the place whether you may use its water to see. Leave something that will not harm the water.
3. Ask only for others, or for the right reason. Before each use, state the question and whom it serves. Never use it to spy, to gain, or to harm.
4. Look softly. In low light, gaze into the water without effort, as you would into a fire, for five or ten minutes. Let images, words and feelings rise and pass.
5. Accept the empty bowl. If nothing comes, say so. Do not invent an answer.
6. Record and return. Write what came. Pour the water back on the earth with thanks.
7. When you are done with it, for good, give the vessel back to the water it was filled from.

Biddy Early has been dead for a century and a half, and people in Clare still tell her stories. Whatever the bottle was, the people of Clare trusted her because she used what she was given for them, and gave it back at the end. That is the whole of the fairy doctor’s art, and most of ours.