When the Reverend Robert Kirk died on a fairy mound in 1692, his parishioners believed the corpse in his coffin was not him. The real Kirk, they said, had been taken by the fairies for revealing their secrets. The man buried was a stock, a soulless replica made of wood and wicker. The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies (written 1691) is the only 17th-century fairy account that treats the Good Neighbors as a coherent, organized society with its own politics, economics, and morality. Where other writers saw demons, delusions, or literary devices, Kirk reported a parallel commonwealth.
What Exactly Is The Secret Commonwealth?
The Secret Commonwealth is a manuscript treatise on fairies, apparitions, and second sight written in 1691 by Rev. Robert Kirk, a minister of the Scottish Episcopal Church in Aberfoyle. It describes the “subterranean” or “invisible” people as a real, organized race living alongside humans but invisible to most. Kirk did not write a folklore collection or a demonology. He wrote an ethnography of a hidden society, complete with its government, economy, reproduction, warfare, and moral code. The book circulated in manuscript until Sir Walter Scott published it in 1815, 124 years after Kirk’s death.
Where the Book Comes From: Kirk’s Life and Death
Robert Kirk was born in 1644 in Aberfoyle, a parish in the Scottish Highlands. He studied theology at St. Andrews and Edinburgh, served as a minister, and translated the Bible into Scottish Gaelic. The Highlands in the 1690s were a world saturated with fairy belief. Every hill had a name. Every marsh had a story. Every family had a story of a relative taken or visited.
Kirk began collecting accounts from people who claimed second sight, the ability to see the invisible world. He interviewed seers, known in Gaelic as taibhsearan (singular taibhsear, pronounced TIE-sher). These were not fringe figures. In Highland society, second sight was respected, feared, and treated as a real inherited gift. Kirk documented their testimony with the same seriousness a natural historian would bring to describing a newly discovered species.
He completed the manuscript in 1691. The following year, in May 1692, Kirk died suddenly at age 48. He was found on a fairy hill called the Dun near his manse. Local tradition held that the fairies took him for betraying their secrets. When his coffin was opened years later, it was said to contain only a stone.
That history matters. Kirk was not a credulous peasant. He was a university-educated clergyman who spoke the language of his informants, lived among them, and believed what they told him. His book is a document from inside a living tradition, not a collector’s cabinet of curiosities.
What Kirk’s Fairies Actually Were
Kirk described the “subterraneans” as intelligent, mobile, and organized. They live underground in invisible cities. They speak Gaelic. They have their own kings, laws, wars, marriages, and funerals. They reproduce through a hybrid process: fairy women bear children who are then exchanged for human infants, the classic changeling exchange. They are neither angels nor demons. They occupy a “middle state” between humans and pure spirits.
Key details from the text:
- Their weapons are stone-tipped arrows, which they use to shoot cattle and humans, causing illness
- They are nocturnal and avoid sunlight
- They have their own livestock (fairy cattle are said to be small and dark)
- They require human midwives for childbirth, and treat them well if paid properly
- They tithe one-tenth of their population to the Devil every seven years, which drives their abduction of humans
- They can be seen by anyone born with second sight, a gift Kirk treats as biological and inherited
The fairy society Kirk describes is not a fantasy. It is a mirror of 17th-century Highland Scotland, rendered in invisible ink. Their kings, their weapons, their cattle, their dealings with humans all map onto the clannish, cattle-raiding, semi-feudal world Kirk lived in.
How Other 17th-Century Writers Handled Fairies
Kirk’s near-contemporaries wrote about fairies and spirits from positions far outside the tradition. Four comparisons make the difference clear.
Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). Scot was a skeptic. His book aimed to prove that witchcraft was a delusion and that those accused were innocent. Fairies appear in his work as evidence of human gullibility. He lists fairy beliefs alongside other “old wives’ tales” and dismisses them as tricks of melancholy. Scot’s fairies are not real. They are symptoms of a disordered mind. Kirk’s fairies are real, and his book takes them seriously.
Richard Bovet, Pandaemonium, or the Devil’s Clergy (1684). Bovet wrote a demonology. He classified fairies as a species of demon, lower-ranking devils who tempt and delude humans. His framework is theological. Fairies are either fallen angels or the offspring of fallen angels. Bovet cites cases from his own time but filters every story through a Christian demonological lens. Kirk shares none of this. His fairies are not evil. They are morally ambiguous, capable of kindness and cruelty, and they operate under their own laws, not Satan’s.
Joseph Glanvill, Saducismus Triumphatus (1681, posthumously expanded 1689). Glanvill was a philosopher and clergyman who argued for the reality of witches and spirits against the rising tide of materialism. His book collects affidavits and sworn testimonies from people who claimed contact with spirits. Glanvill’s method is legal and adversarial. He treats each story as evidence in a court case against atheism. Kirk’s method is ethnographic. He does not argue. He describes.
John Aubrey, Miscellanies (1696). Aubrey was a collector of antiquities and folklore. His Miscellanies includes a section on fairies and apparitions that reads like a cabinet of curious specimens. He records what he heard without endorsing or denying. But Aubrey never lived inside the tradition. He was a gentleman scholar collecting stories from servants, tenants, and country people. Kirk was the minister of a parish where fairy belief was the default. He spoke Gaelic. He interviewed seers directly. His book breathes from the inside.
What Kirk Did That No One Else Did
Kirk’s book broke three conventions that no other 17th-century fairy account matched.
First, he gave fairies a politics. The subterraneans have a government. They have a legal system. They have property disputes. No other 17th-century writer describes fairy society in this detail because no other writer thought fairies had a society. They were either demons, delusions, or decorative figures.
Second, he treated second sight as a faculty, not a curse. Other writers described second sight as a melancholy disorder, or a demonic gift, or a curiosity. Kirk described it as a natural sense, like hearing or smell, that a minority of people possess. He cataloged its inheritance patterns, its triggers, and its limitations. He treated it as a biological fact.
Third, he refused the demonological frame. This is the most radical choice in the book. Kirk was a clergyman. He could have classified fairies as demons and been done with it. He did not. He created a third category, the “middle state,” between human and angel, material and spiritual. This was not orthodox theology. It was a creative theological response to what his informants told him, and it cost the book any chance of being printed in its own century.
Common Misconceptions about Kirk’s Fairies
They are not the same as Victorian fairies. The gauzy, winged creatures of 19th-century art and children’s books have nothing to do with Kirk’s subterraneans. Kirk’s fairies are human-sized, dressed in Highland clothing, and armed with stone arrows. They do not have wings. They do not grant wishes. They steal cattle and children.
Kirk was not a superstitious simpleton. He was a learned man who read widely in theology, philosophy, and natural history. His manuscript cites classical authors, Church fathers, and contemporary scientific writers. He wrote within the framework of educated belief in his time, not outside it.
The book is not a work of imagination. Kirk did not invent his fairies. He reported what his informants told him with fidelity. Whether the fairies are real or not, the book documents a living system of belief that existed in the Scottish Highlands in the late 17th century. It is an ethnographic record of the first rank.
Why the Comparison Matters
The difference between Kirk and his contemporaries is the difference between description from inside and description from outside. Scot, Bovet, Glanvill, and Aubrey all wrote about fairies from positions of distance. Scot was a skeptic writing to disprove. Bovet was a theologian writing to classify. Glanvill was an apologist writing to defend. Aubrey was an antiquarian writing to preserve.
Kirk was a participant-observer. He lived in a place where second sight was real to everyone he knew. He interviewed people face to face in their own language. He believed them. His book is the only 17th-century account that treats fairies as a society rather than a symptom, a demon, or a curiosity.
That is why The Secret Commonwealth still matters. It is not the most famous fairy book of its century. It is the one that gets the least wrong.
FAQ
Did Kirk really get taken by fairies? Local tradition says yes. His sudden death on a fairy mound and the later discovery of an empty coffin (or a stone inside it) were interpreted as fairy abduction. We treat it as folklore. The tradition itself is evidence of how seriously his community took the book.
What does “second sight” mean in Kirk’s system? It is the inherited ability to see the invisible fairy world. Kirk treats it as a natural sense, not a supernatural curse, and describes it running in families. He calls it taibhsearachd in Gaelic.
Is The Secret Commonwealth hard to read? The original 1691 manuscript survives, but the language is dense. The 1815 edition by Sir Walter Scott is more accessible. Modern annotated editions exist. We recommend the 2014 edition from New York Review Books for readers who want the full text with context.
Did Kirk’s fairies influence modern fairy beliefs? Indirectly, yes. The book was obscure until the 20th century, but it became a key text for folklorists and later for writers in the esoteric tradition. W. B. Yeats knew it. John Buchan cited it. It remains a primary source for anyone studying Scottish fairy belief.
The Secret Commonwealth sits alone in its century. No other writer attempted what Kirk attempted: a systematic, respectful, and detailed account of the fairy people as a living society. For readers who want to understand what the Highland fairies actually were, before the Victorian sentimentalists got hold of them, there is no better place to start.
For deeper exploration, see our guide to fairy traditions in Scottish and Irish folk magic, our glossary entry on second sight, and the full faeries vertical hub for more comparisons between historical accounts.