Observations placeholder
Cornwall - The Pixies turned the milk sour
Identifier
014018
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
This is just funny and those who told it knew it to be funny.
A description of the experience
HENRY JENNER, Member of the Gorsedd of the Bards of Brittany; Fellow and Local Secretary for Cornwall of the Society of Antiquaries; author of A Handbook of the Cornish Language BOSPOWES, HAYLE, CORNWALL,
July 1910
In spite of Protestantism, school-boards, and education committees, 'pisky-pows' are still placed on the ridge-tiles of West Cornish cottages, to propitiate the piskies and give them a dancing-place, lest they should turn the milk sour, and St. Just and Morvah folk are still 'pisky-led' on the Gump (an Ûn Gumpas, the Level Down, between Chûn Castle and Cam Kenidjack), and more rarely St. Columb and Roche folk on Goss Moor. ....................
It was only last winter, in a cottage not a hundred yards from where I am writing, that milk was set at night for piskies, who had been knocking on walls and generally making nuisances of themselves. Apparently the piskies only drank the 'astral 'part of the milk (whatever that may be) and then the neighbouring cats drank what was left, and it disagreed with them.
I cannot vouch for the truth of the part about the piskies and the 'astral' milk--I give it as it was told to me by the occupant of the cottage, who was not unacquainted with 'occult' terminology--but I do know that the milk was consumed, and that the cats, one of which was my own, were with one accord unwell all over the place.
But for the present purpose it does not matter whether these things really happened or not.
The point is that people thought they happened.