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- Convenors:
-
Fionnan Mac Gabhann
(University College Cork)
Emily Bianchi (Ohio State University)
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- Chairs:
-
Fionnan Mac Gabhann
(University College Cork)
Emily Bianchi (Ohio State University)
Short Abstract
The papers in this panel question the idea that the supernatural is necessarily beyond the natural or ordinary. Case studies from Ireland, Poland, and the U.S. explore the numinous and otherworldly aspects of reality, and how people relate to demons, spirits, fairies, and the afterlife.
Long Abstract
Folklorists and anthropologists have long critiqued the cross-cultural application of “the supernatural,” arguing that it is rooted in scientific naturalism and presupposes binary distinctions between natural and unnatural, ordinary and extraordinary. More recently, in light of what has been described as an ontological turn in anthropology, scholars have renewed their focus on the persistent nature-culture divide in ethnographic theory and writing.
Through diverse case studies from Ireland, Poland, and the United States, the papers in this panel explore the numinous, transcendent, and otherworldly as experienced by others, aiming to move beyond the category of “the supernatural” toward alternate conceptions of reality. Panelists examine other-than-human beings that infuse interlocutors’ lives with meaning, influence behavior and attitudes, and serve as resources for reflection and commentary. These studies highlight the varied ways people relate to entities such as demons, spirits, fairies, and the dead, and document the forms of interaction and relationship that emerge from these encounters.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Sunday 14 June, 2026, -Paper short abstract
Memorates about experiences with spirits of the dead are common among death care workers in Ireland such as undertakers and embalmers. Such narratives reveal a range of belief, disbelief, and hedged positions on the existence of spirits, an afterlife, and the supernatural or numinous in general.
Paper long abstract
In Ireland today those engaged in after death care—particularly undertakers, embalmers, clergy and civil celebrants—are in regular contact with the deceased and the bereaved as they facilitate funerals and last rites. Memorates about spirits of the dead making themselves known or communicating with the living are common in the occupational lore of death workers. Such narratives reveal a range of belief, disbelief, and hedged positions on the existence of spirits, an afterlife, and the supernatural in general. For those with the strongest belief—often based in experience—perhaps better terms for the supernatural would include the “numinous,” "transcendent,” or "supranormal" because for them the so-called supernatural is not above or beyond the natural but simply another facet, however mysterious, of reality.
Paper short abstract
The Shakers, a US monastic community, tell stories about their interactions with ancestors. I consider the types of interactions remembered and retold and instances so unremarkable that they do not bear repeating, complicating the distinctions between natural and supernatural, PEN and memorate.
Paper long abstract
“They are all around,” Brother Arnold Hadd says of the Shaker ancestors. “They want you to know they’re there.” The Sabbathday Lake Shakers are a Protestant monastic sect in New Gloucester, Maine. Shakerism is “faith as practiced,” learned through experience and refined through the struggle to overcome self in community. It is not only the living who aid Shakers in their attempts to become more Christ-like: ancestors leave signs to encourage, bless, and admonish contemporary Shakers.
Some interactions with ancestors are remembered, retold, and made sharable. These anecdotes might be divided into two categories: guidance and reassurances, and signs of death.
But interactions with ancestors rarely become narratives circulated beyond the moment. Intimate knowledge of Shakers past, achieved through the passed down stories told about their character traits and idiosyncrasies, allows living Shakers to interpret signs left by ancestors. Shakers connect strings of occurrences to discern who is communicating what message. At issue for Shakers is not the believability of a supernatural experience, characteristic of memorate or legend, but the meaning making of a natural one. It is this difference that may account for the relative lack of memorates circulated in the Shaker community.
The lack of reality testing in Shaker memorates as well as in stories about religious experiences told within a person’s worldview suggests that traits folklorists have identified as foundational to the genre may indeed be products of modern rationalism. For some groups, there may be less of a distinction between personal experience narrative and memorate.
Paper short abstract
This paper will address and engage with the panel’s wider themes by analyzing the relationship between the numinous and natural worlds in a corpus of fairy legends and memorates recorded from Sorcha Mhic Grianna (1875-1964), a female storyteller from northwest Donegal, in the late 1930s.
Paper long abstract
The permeability of the boundary between the human world and the otherworld is a defining feature of legends about the fairies (síscéalta) in Irish narrative tradition. In these stories, the fairy world encroaches on the “real” world and, by inflicting varying degrees of chaos and disorder, threatens the survival and stability of the human community, whose niche and livelihood are portrayed as being ‘ever under siege’ (Rieti 1991, 3). As noted by Barbara Rieti in the context of Newfoundland oral tradition, ‘fairy narratives reflect the struggles and hard-won survival of culture and human creation, and the tenuous imposition of order on the wilderness’ (1991, 3).
This paper will contextualize and analyze a corpus of fairy legends and memorates which were recorded from a female storyteller from northwest Donegal in the late 1930s. Sorcha Mhic Grianna (1875-1964) is best known today as a storyteller who specialized in the narration of long and elaborate international folktales and hero tales. As will be discussed, however, fairy legends and memorates form an important and as of yet unexamined part of Mhic Grianna’s narrative repertoire. In this corpus of stories, traditional fairy legend motifs and story types are blended with compelling accounts of transformative encounters with the otherworld which were experienced by the storyteller and close members of her family and community. By examining the relationship between the numinous and natural worlds in Mhic Grianna’s fairy narratives, this paper will address the panel’s broader critique of binary distinctions between natural and unnatural, ordinary and extraordinary.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyses the unique demonology of an Irish priest, Eddie Bheairte Ó Confhaola. Composed from an admixture of sources and in response to present needs, this demonology offers both a spiritual diagnosis and a remedy for a range of contemporary social ills.
Paper long abstract
Eddie Bheairtle Ó Confhaola is a priest, healer, and seanchaí (vernacular historian) from the west of Ireland, widely regarded for his repertoire of seanchas (oral tradition) and for his gift of healing through verbal charms. While most of Eddie Bheairtle's beliefs and expressive culture are well-attested in Irish folklore, he has developed a striking demonology with no obvious precedent in native tradition which outlines the hand of seventeen distinct devils at work in various social ills. This demonology seems to have arisen in response to the present needs of Eddie Bheairtle's parishioners and to contemporary threats against God's wider community. The remedies and proscribed actions for countering these malign forces offers a path toward salvation and a window into Eddie Bheairtle's worldview.
We might be tempted to think of Eddie's devils as "supernatural characters", but this would presuppose a concept of the natural which his worldview does not contain. Drawing especially on the work of Irving Hallowell, I argue that Eddie Bheairtle's demonology is best understood as a personalistic theory of causation, grounded in a conception of "persons" that includes both human and other-than-human beings and envisions a gradation of power among them.
Paper short abstract
Polish demonology constitutes an alternative ontology in which non-human beings are woven into everyday life. The existence of demons shapes rituals, work and morality, mediating between nature, culture and the Other – undermining the category of the “supernatural”.
Paper long abstract
Polish folk demonology has long been described in terms of ‘beliefs in supernatural beings.’ Such an approach, rooted in a naturalist conception of science, flattens the perspective of tradition-bearers themselves. In the rural folklore, demons did not function as entities from another world but as integral elements of the everyday experience, an important factor shaping agricultural practices, protective rituals, social relations and ways of interpreting illnesses or misfortunes.
This paper examines Polish demonological narratives from the 19th and early 20th centuries, approaching them as forms of knowledge about the world and its order. The analysis focuses on the ways in which these narratives organise experience – for example, by explaining the boundaries between day and night, domestic and wild space, community and the Other. Demonological beings can be read as mediators of everyday life: they comment on work, gender and morality, while also serving as tools for interpreting what escapes human control.
In line with the critique of the category of the ‘supernatural’, I propose reading Polish folk demonology as a system of alternative ontology, in which non-human beings are not ‘beyond nature’ but rather extend what is human and natural. Such a perspective allows us to interpret relationships with demons not as traces of irrationality but as a resource for reflection on the world, its boundaries and rules.