Many of the second-sighted men about him would have nothing of this doctrine and still believed, it seems, the old Celtic theory of the rebirth of the soul, a Manichæan and gnostic doctrine, for being "unwary in their observations" they believed what the "abstruse people" themselves declared "one averring those subterranean people to be departed souls attending awhile in this inferior state and clothed with bodies procured through their alms deeds in this life; fluid, active ethereal vehicles to hold them that they may not scatter or wander or be lost in the totum or the first nothing; but if any were so impious as to have given no alms they say when the souls of such do depart, they sleep in an uncertain state till they resume the terrestrial body." These bodies, come at by the giving of alms, suggest to one that body of Christ which, as Boehme taught, alone enables the shade to escape from _turba magna_ the great wrath and dream-like transformation into the shape of beasts. One remembers also the celestial body of the seventeenth century Platonists. The power attributed to almsgiving calls to mind those tales of clothes given to the poor in some ghost's name thereby enabling the ghost to be decked out in their double. Lady Gregory has found the idea of rebirth in Aran, but in what seems the Cabalistic form not the Celtic; and it occurs again and again in the Gaelic romances. Cuchulain was the rebirth of Lug; and Mongan who was killed by Arthur of Britain was the rebirth of Finn Mac Cool. Here and there through the seventeenth century Platonists, Kirk's contemporaries, one finds some story that might have been in Lady Gregory's book. Glanvill in the second part of his _Sadducismus Triumphatus_ published in 1674 has an Irish tale where the dead and the faeries are associated as in Galway today. "A gentleman in Ireland near to the Earl of Orrery's seat sending his butler one afternoon to buy cards; as he passed a field, he, to his wonder, espied a company of people sitting round a table, with a deal of good cheer before them in the midst of a field. And he going up towards them, they all arose and saluted him, and desired him to sit down with them." But one of them said these words in his ear: "Do nothing this company invites you to." "He therefore refused to sit down at the table, and immediately the table and all that belonged to it were gone; and the company are now dancing and playing upon musical instruments, and the butler being desired to join himself to them; but he refusing this also, they fall all to work, and he not being to be prevailed with to accompany them in working, any more than in feasting and dancing, they all disappeared, and the butler is now alone." For some days attempts are made to carry away the butler. During one of these he is levitated in the presence of the Earl of Orrery and certain of his guests. Then the man who warned him to do nothing he was bid, came to his bedside. "'I have been dead,' said the spectre or ghost, 'seven years and you know that I lived a loose life. And ever since have been hurried up and down in a restless condition with the company you saw and shall be till the Day of Judgment.'"