Chapter 54

Well now, he found MacCuill, MacCecht, and MacGrene the Son of the Sun, arranging to divide the kingdom between them; and they called on him to settle how the division should be.--"Act," said he, "according to the laws of justice, for the country you dwell in is a good one; it is rich in fruit and honey, in wheat and in fish; and in heat and cold it is temperate." From that they thought he would be designing to conquer it from them, and so forestalled his designs by killing him; but his companions escaped, and sailed back to the Great Plain. That was why the Milesians came to conquer Ireland. The chiefs of them were Eber Finn, and Eber Donn, and Eremon, and Amargin the Druid: the sons of Mile, the son of Bile the son of Bregon; thus their grandfather was the brother of that Ith whom the Gods of Ireland slew.

It was on a Thursday, the first of May, and the seventeenth day of the moon, that the Milesians arrived in Ireland; and as he set his right foot on the soil of it, Amargin chanted this poem:

I am the wave of the Ocean; I am the murmur of the billow; I am the ox of the seven combats; I am the vuture upon the rock; I am a tear of the sun; I am the fairest of plants; I am a wild boar in valor; I am a salmon in the water; I am a lake in the plain; I am a word of science; I am the spear-point that gives battle; I am the god who creates in the head the fire of thought. Who is it that enlightens the assembly upon the mountain, if not I? Who telleth the ages of the moon, if not I? Who showeth the place where the sun goes to rest?

They went forward to Tara, and summoned the kings of the Danaan Gods to give up the island to them; who asked three days to consider whether they would give battle, or surrender, or quit Ireland. On that request Amargin gave judgment: that it would be wrong for the Milesians to take the Gods unprepared that way; and that they should go to their ships again, and sail out the distance of nine waves from the shore, and then return; then if they could conquer Ireland fairly in battle, it should be theirs.

So they embarked, and put the nine waves between themselves and the shore, and waited. And the Danaans raised up a druid mist and a storm against them, whereby Ireland seemed to them no more than the size of a pig's back in the water; and by reason of that it has the name of Innis na Wic, the Island of the Pig. But if the Gods had magic, Amargin had better magic; and he sang that Invocation to the Land of Ireland; and at that the storm fell and the mist vanished. Then Eber Donn was exulting in his rage at the thought of putting the inhabitants to death; but the thought in his mind brought the storm again, and his ship went down, and he was drowned. But at last the remnant of them landed, and fought a battle with the Gods, and defeated them; whereafter the Gods put a druid invisibility on themselves, and retired into the hills; and there in their fairy palaces they remain to this day; indeed they do. They went back into the inwardness of things; whence, however, they were always appearing, and again vanishing into it; and all the old literature of Ireland is thridded through with the lights of their magic and their beauty, and their strange forthcomings and withdrawings. For example:

There was Midir the Proud, one of them. In the time of the great Caesar, Eochaid Airem was high king of Ireland; and he had for his queen Etain, reborn then as a mortal,--but a Danaan princess at one time, and the wife of Miidir. It was a fine evening in the summer, and Eochaid Airem was looking from the walls of Tara and admiring the beauty of the world. He saw an unknown warrior riding towards him; clad in purple tunic; his hair yellow as gold, and his blue eyes shining like candles. A five-pointed lance was in his hand; his shield was ornamented with beads of gold.

--"A hundred thousand welcomes to you," said the high king. "Who is it you are?"

--"I know well who you are," said the warrior, "and for a long time."

--"What name is on you?" said Eochaid.

--"Nothing illustrious about it in the world," said the other. "I am Midir of Bregleith."

--"What has brought you hither?"

--"I am come to play at chess with you."

--"I have great skill at chess," said the high king; and indeed, he was the best at it in Ireland, in those days.

--"We shall see about that," said Midir.

--"But the queen is sleeping in her chamber now," said Eochaid; "and it is there the chessboard is."

--"Little matter," said Midir, "I have here a board as good as yours is."

And that was the truth. His chessboard was of silver, glittering with precious stones at each corner. From a satchel wrought of shining metal he took his chessmen, which were of pure gold. Then he arranged them on the board.--"Play you," said he.

--"I will not play without a stake," said the king.

--"What will the stake be?" said Midir.

--"All one to me," said Eochaid.

--"If you win," said Midir, "I will give you fifty broad-chested horses with slim swift feet."

--"And if you win," said Eochaid Airem, sure of victory, "I will give you whatever you demand."

Midir won that game, and demanded Etain the queen. But the rules of chess are that the vanquished may claim his revenge,--a second game, that is, to decide the matter; and the high king proposed that it should be played at the end of a year. Midir agreed, and vanished.

The year ended, and Eochaid was at Tara; he had had the palace surrounded by a great armed host against Midir; and Etain was there with him. Here is the description of Etain:

"A clear comb of silver was held in her hand, the comb was adorned with gold; and near her, as for washing, was a basin of silver whereon four birds had been chased, and there were little bright gems of carbuncles on the rim of the basin. A bright purple mantle waved round her; and beneath it another mantle with fringes of silver: the outer one clasped over her bosom with a golden brooch. A tunic she wore, with a long hood that might cover her head attached to it; it was stiff and glossy with green silk beneath red embroidery of gold, and clasped over her breast with marvelously wrought clasps of gold and silver, so that men saw the bright gold and the green silk flashing against the sun. On her head were two tresses of golden hair, and each tress plaited into four strands, and at the end of each strand a little ball of gold. Each of her two arms was as white as the snow of a single night, and each of her two cheeks of the hue of the foxglove. Even and small the teeth in her head, and they shone like pearls. Her eyes were blue as the blue hyacinth, her lips delicate and crimson. . . . White as snow, or the foam of the wave, was her neck. . . . Her feet were slim and white as the ocean foam; evenly set were her eyes, and the eyebrows of a bluish black, such as you see on the shell of a beetle."

--What I call on you to note about that is something very unpoetic. It is not the flashing brightness, the grace, the evidence of an eye craving for beauty, and of a hand sure in the creation of beauty;--but the dress. The Irish writers got these ideas of dress without having contacted, for example, classical civilization, or any foreign civilization. The ideas were home-grown, the tradition Irish. The writer was describing what he was familiar with: the kind of dress worn by an Irish princess before Ireland had seen foreign fashions and customs. He was heightening picture for artistic effect, no doubt; but he was drawing with his eye on the object. I am inclined to think that imagination always must work upon a basis of things known; just as tradition must always be based on fact. Now then: try, will you, to imagine primitive savages dressing like that, or sufficiently nearly like that for one of their bards to work up such a picture on the actualities he had seen. I think you cannot do it. And this picture is not extraordinary; it is typical of what we commonly find in the ancient Irish stories. What it proves is that the Ireland that emerges into history, war-battered and largely decivilized by long unsettled conditions as she was, remembered and was the inheiritor of an Ireland consummately civilized.--But to return to the hall of Eochaid Airem:

Every door in it was locked; and the whole place filled with the cream of the war-host of the Gael, and apprehension on everyone, they not knowing would it be war and violence with Midir, or what it would be. So it had been all day; so it was now in the dusk of the evening. Then suddenly there stood Midir in the midst of them: Midir the Proud; never had he seemed fairer than then. No man had seen him enter; none knew how he had come. And then it was but putting his spear in his left hand for him, and putting his right arm about the waist of Etain, and rising through the air with her, and vanishing through the roof. And when the men of Ireland rushed out from the hall, they saw two swans circling above Tara and away, their long white necks yoked together with a yoke of moon-bright silver.

It was a long time the Gods were ruling in Ireland before the Milesians came. King after king reigned over them; and there are stories on stories, a rich literature for another nation, about the time of these Danaan Gods alone. One of them was Lir, the Boundless Deep. He had four children by his first wife; when she died, he married her sister, Aoife by name. Aoife was jealous of the love he had for his children, and was for killing them. But when it came to doing it, "her womanhood overcame her," and instead she put swanhood on the four of them, and the doom that swans they should be from that out for nine hundred years: three hundred on Lake Derryvaragh in West Meath, three hundred on the Straits of Moyle between Ireland and Scotland, three hundred on the Atlantic by Erris and Innishglory. After that the enchantment would end.

For that, Bov Derg, one of the Gods, changed her into a demon of the air, and she flew away shrieking, and was heard of no more. But there was no taking the fate from the swan-children; and the Danaans sought them on their lake, and found they had human speech left to them, and the gift of wonderful Danaan music. From all parts they came to the lake to talk with them and to hear them singing; and that way it was for three hundred years. Then they must depart, Fionuala and her three brothers, the swan-children, and wing their way to the northern sea, and be among the wild cliffs and the foam; and the worst of loneliness and cold and storm was the best fate there was for them. Their feathers froze to the rocks on the winter nights; but they filled the drear chasms of the tempest with their Danaan singing. It was Fionuala wrapped her plumage about her brothers, to keep them from the cold; she was their leader, heartening them. And if it was bad for them on the Straits of Moyle, it was worse on the Atlantic; three hundred years they were there, and bitter sorrow the fate on them.

When their time to be freed was near, they were for flying to the palace of Lir their father, at the hill of the White Field in Armagh. But long since the Milesians had come into Ireland, and the Danaans had passed into the hills and the unseen; and with the old centuries of their enchantment heavy on them, their eyes had grown no better than the eyes of mortals: gorse-grown hills they saw, and green nettles growing, and no sign of the walls and towers of the palace of Lir. And they heard the bells ringing from a church, and were frightened at the "thin, dreadful sound." But afterwards, in their misery, they took refuge with the saint in the church, and were converted, and joined him in singing the services. Then, after a while, the swanhood fell from them, and they became human, with the whole of their nine centuries heavy on them. "Lay us in one grave," said Fionuala to the saint; "and place Conn at my right hand, and Fiachra at my left, and Aed before my face; for there they were wont to be when I sheltered them many a winter night upon the seas of Moyle." So it was they were buried; but the saint sorrowed for them till the end of his days. And there, if you understand it, you have the forgotten story of Ireland.

She was once Danaan, and fortunate in the Golden Age. Then she was enchanted, and fell from her high estate; and sorrow and the wildness of ages of decivilizing wars were her portion; but she retained her wonderful Danaan gift of song. Then came Christianity, and she sang her swan-song in the services of the Church;--when she had overcome her terror of the ominous sound of the bells. She became human again: that is, enjoyed one more period of creative greatness, a faint revival of her old splendor; and then,--Ah, it was a long time ago; a long time the hermit had been sorrowing over her grave! But listen, by the lake of Derryvaragh, on the seas of Moyle, or by Erris and Innishglory, and you will hear still the ghostly echoes of the singing of Danaan swans. _Danaan_ swans: music better than of the world of men!

O Swan-child, come from the grave, and be bright as you were of old When you sing o'er the sun-bright wave in the Danaans' Age of Gold! Are you never remembering, darling, the truth that you knew well then, That there's nobody dies from the world, asthore, but is born in the world again.

It brings me naturally to the place where we take her up in our history. At the end of the fourth century, "the sea," says the Roman poet Claudian, "was foamy with the hostile oars of the Irish." Niall of the Nine Hostages was high king of Tara; and he was all for a life on the ocean wave and a home on the rolling deep. He raided the coasts of Britain annually, and any other coasts that came handy, carrying off captives where he might. One of these was a boy named Sucat, from Glamorgan: probably from Glamorgan, though it might have been from anywhere between the Clyde and the Loire. In time this Sucat escaped from his Irish slavery, entered the Church, took the Latin name of Patrick, and made it his business to Christianize Ireland. That was about the time when the Britons were throwing off the Roman yoke. He was at the height of his career in the middle of the fifth century.

Even if he did not make a clean and bloodless sweep of the whole country, Patrick was one of the most successful Christian missionaries that ever preached. There was some opposition by the druids, but it was not successful. He went to the courts of the kings, and converted them; and to say you had baptized a king, was as good as to say you had his whole clan captured; for it was a fractious unnatural clansman who would not go where his chieftain led. We are in an atmosphere altogether different from the rancor and fanaticism of the continent. Patrick,--there must have been something very winning and kindly about the man,-- roused no tradition of animosity. He never made Ireland hate her pagan past. When the Great Age came,--which was not till later, --not till the Crest-Wave had passed from Wales,--and Christian Irishmen took to writing down the old legends and stories, they were very tender to the memories of the Gods and heroes. It was in pity for the Children of Lir, that were turned into swans, that they were kept alive long enough to be baptized and sent to heaven. Can you fancy Latona and her children so received by Greekish or Latin monks into the Communion of Saints? But the Irish Church was always finding excuses for the salvation of the great figures of old. Some saint called up Cuculain from hell, converted him, and gave him a free pass that Peter at the Gates should honor. There was Conchobar MacNessa again. He was king of Ulster in the days of the Red Branch, the grand heroic cycle of Irish legend; Cuculain was the chief of his warriors. A brain-ball was driven through the skull of Conchobar from a sling; but sure, his druid doctors would never be phased by a trifle like that. They bound up the wound and healed him in a cauldron of cure; but warned him never to get excited or over-exert himself, or the brain-ball would come out and he would die; barring such accidents, he would do splendidly. And so he did for some years. Then one day a darkness came over the world, and he put his druids to finding out the cause of it. They told him they saw in their vision three crosses on a hill in the east of the world, and three men nailed on them; and the man in the middle with the likeness of the Son of God. With that the battle-fury came on Conchobar, and he fell to destroying the trees of the forest with his sword. "Oh that I were there!" he cried; "thus would I deal with his enemies." With the excitement and over-exertion, out came the brain-ball, and he died. And if God Almighty would not take Conchobar MacNessa, pagan as he was, into heaven for a thing like that,--sure, God Almighty was not half such a decent kindly creature as the Irish monk who invented the yarn.

So nothing comes down to us that has not passed the censorship of a race-proud priesthood, with perhaps never a drop of the wine of true wisdom in them, to help them discriminate and truth to shine through what they were passing on; but still, with a great deal of the milk of human kindness as a substitute, so far as it might be. They treasured the literary remains of druid days; liberally twisting them, to be sure, into consonance with Christian ideas of history and the fitness of things; but still they treasured them, and drew from them inspiration. Thus the whole past comes down euhemerized, cooked, and touched up. It comes down very glorious,--because the strongest feeling in Irish hearts was Irishism, race-consciousness. Whereas the Latin Church was fiercely against antiquity and all its monuments, the Celtic Church in Ireland was anxious above all things to preserve Celtic antiquity,--having first brought it into line with the one true faith. The records had to be kept,--and made to tally with the Bible. The godhood of the Gods had to be covered away, and you had to treat them as if they had been respectable children of Adam,--more or less respectable, at any rate. A descent from Noah had to be found for the legendary kings and heroes; and for every event a date corresponding with that of someone in the Bible. Above all, you had to pack the whole Irish past into the few thousand years since Noah came out of the Ark.--You get a glimpse in Wales of the struggle there was between Hebrao-Christian chronology and the Celtic sense of the age of the world: in the pedigree of an ancient family, where, it is said, about half way down the line this entry occurs after one of the names: "In his time Adam was expelled from Paradise." In Ireland, indeed, there was at least one man from before the Flood living in historic times: Fintan, whom, with others, Noah sent into the western world while the Ark was building. Here is one of Fintan's poems:

"If you inquire of me concerning Ireland, I know and can relate gladly all the invasions of it since the beginning of the delightful world. Out of the east came Cessair, a woman, daughter of Bith, with her fifty maidens, with her three men. The flood came upon Bith on his mountain without mystery; on Ladru at Ard Ladran; on Cessair at Cull Cesra. As for me, for the space of a year, beneath the rapid flood, on the height of a mighty wave, I enjoyed sleep which was exceeding good. Then, in Ireland, I found my way above the waters until Partholan came out of the East, from the land of the Greeks. Then, in Ireland, I enjoyed rest; Ireland was void till the son of Agnoman came, Nemed with the delightful manners. The Fir Bolg and the Fir Galioin came a long time after, and the Fir Domnan also; they landed at Erris in the west. Then came the Tuatha De Danaan in their hood of mist. I lived with them for a long time, though their age is far removed. After that came the sons of Mile out of Spain and the south. I lived with them; mighty were their battles. I had come to a great age, I do not conceal it, when the pure faith was sent to Ireland by the King of the Cloudy Heaven. I am the fair Fintan son of Bochra; I proclaim it aloud. Since the flood came here I am a great personage in Ireland."

In the middle of the sixth century he was summoned as a witness by the descendants of Niall of the Nine Hostages against King Dermot MacKerval, in a dispute as to the ancient divisions of Ireland. He came to Tara with nine companies in front of him, and nine companies behind: they were his descendants. This, mind you, is in strictly historical times. The king and his people received him kindly, and after he had rested a little, he told them his story, and that of Tara from its foundation. They asked him to give them some proof of his memory. "Right willingly," said Fintan. "I passed one day through a wood in West Munster; I brought home with me a red berry of the yew-tree, which I planted in my kitchen-garden, and it grew there till it was as tall as a man. Then I took it up, and re-planted it on the green lawn before the house, and it grew there until a hundred champions could find room under its foliage, to be sheltered there from wind and rain, and cold and heat. I remained so, and my yew remained so, spending our time alike, until at last all its leaves fell off from decay. When afterwards I thought of turning it to some profit, I went to it, and cut it from its stem; and I made of it seven vats, and seven keeves, and seven stans, and seven churns, and seven pitchers, and seven milans, and seven medars, with hoops for all. I remained so with my yew vessels until their hoops all fell off from decay and old age. After that I re-made them; but could only get a keeve out of the vat, and a stan out of the keeve, and a mug out of the stan, and a cilorn out of the mug, and a milan out of the cilom, and a medar out of the milan; and I leave it to Almighty God that I do not know where their dust is now, after their dissolution with me from decay." *

* De Jubainville, _Irish Mythological Cycle;_ when also Fintan's poem quoted above. ------

Now here is a strange relic of the Secret Teaching that comes down with this legend of Fintan. Each of the four Cardinal Points, it was said, had had its Man appointed to record all the wonderful events that had taken place in the world.* One of them was this Fintan, son of Bochra, son of Lamech, whose duty was to preserve the histories of Spain and Ireland, and the West in general. As we have seen, Spain is a glyph for the Great Plain, the Otherworld.

* See _The Secret Doctrine,_ for the Thesophical teaching. ------