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The problem was finally solved by diverting the road around the gnarled old tree. Men abe ane. 20 nn Leet bee a a a ne ne From the days of Moses burning bush to the modern appearances of angels and holy personages, these strange events seem to have concen- trated themselves around trees and shrubbery. A few years ago a sidhe, or fairy mound, was found by workmen building an airport in Ireland. They flatly refused to take a shovel or bulldozer to it. Like the skeog of Ballymagroartyscotch, the airport sidhe became the focal point of a controversy before the builders finally gave in and bypassed it. At least one man has died on a sidhe. His name was Robert Kirk, and he was the minister of the church at Aberfoyle, Ireland, back in the seventeenth century. After a lifetime of scholarly research, he decided that fairies were invisible creatures composed of ‘‘congealed air.”’ His body was found on a fairy mound and gave rise to the legend that the little people had carried off his soul. The brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, not only wrote scores of charming fairy stories, but they also studied the occult and wrote books about it. Some of their children’s tales were based on the lore they aaNnnsed Vane. ane banal. -2-e ee Wb len atnlee nenetnn Aba Lee collected. You undoubtedly remember the various stories about how secretive fairies are about their names. In Spence’s The Fairy Tradition in Britain we are told, ‘‘To mention the fairy name either individually or collectively was not permissible. This restriction is associated with the belief that to know the name of a being presupposes a certain measure of power over him.”’* In Scotland, the na fir chlis were ‘‘nimble men” who inhabited the sky. In Ireland and Wales, fairies with reddish skins were called fir darrig, and the legendary ancestors of the men who built Stonehenge were known as fir bolg, the ‘“‘men with bags,”’ who lingered in swamps and Laan bogs. Angels, elementals and ufonauts all play amusing games with their names, favoring minor variations on ancient languages. The late George Adamski, one of the first UFO contactees to receive publicity in the early 1950s, claimed that he had met an illustrious space person named Fir Kon; In most religions it is regarded as a grave offense to take the accepted name of God in vain, as in the Ten Commandments. Earlier cultures also demanded that the names of the gods be spoken aloud only with the greatest respect. This fear may have been based upon a certain awareness that invoking the name of a god could produce sudden supernatural manifestations. The Cosmic Jokers / 203