Part 55

From this universal euhemerization,--this loving preservation and careful cooking of the traditions by the Christian redactors of them,--we get certain results. One is that ancient Ireland remains for us in the colors of life: every figure flashes before our eyes in a golden mellow light of morning, at once extremely real and extremely magical: not the Greek heroic age appears so flooded with dawn-freshness, so realistic, so minutely drawn, nor half so lit with glamor. Another result is that, while strange gleams of Esotericism shine through,--as in that about the Four Recorders of the Four Cardinal Points,--things that it seemed undangerous to the monks, because they did not understand their significance, to let pass,--we hear nothing in Irish literature about the philosophy of the Druids. Ireland retains her belief in magic to this day; and his would be a hard skull that could know Ireland intimately and escape that belief. So it seemed nothing irreligious to the monks to let the Druids remain magicians. But philosophy was another matter entirely; and must be ruled out as conflicting with the Christian scheme of things. From this silence our Druid-Medicine-men Theorists draw great comfort and unction for their pet belief. Reincarnation appears in some stories as a sort of thing that might happen in special cases; because "God is good to the Irish," and might be willing to give them sometimes another chance. But nothing is allowed to come down to imply it was known for a law in Nature; no moral or philosophic bearing is attached to it. This is just what you would expect. The Christian censors of the literature had rejected it as unchristian doctrine. They would hate to have it thought that Irishmen could ever have believed in such things; they would cover such belief up in every possible way. You would find peasant-bards in Wales to this day, men learned in the national tradition, who are deacons in their chapels and druids of the Gorsedd, and firm believers in Druidism. They have founded a Gorsedd here in America lately, with an active propaganda of Druidism, and lecturers touring. They think of it as a kind of Pre-christian Christianity; and would open their eyes wide to hear that Reincarnation was the cornerstone teaching in it. This may throw a little light on the attitude of those early Irish Christians.--But on the other hand there were tales that could not be preserved at all, that you could not tell at all, without bringing a touch of reincarnation into them. The universal doctrine survived in that way in Ireland, as it survived as a rumor in the folk-lore in Wales.

There is the story, for instance, of Mongan son of Fiachta, a historical chieftain killed in 625. According to Tigernach, the oldest of the Irish annalists, Finn MacCool died in A.D. 274. Finn, you will remember, is the central figure of the Fenian Cycle of sagas; he was the father of Oisin and the leader of the Fenians; next to Cuculain, he is the chiefest hero of Irish legend. I quote this story from M. de Jubainville.*

* But without word-for-word exactitude; hence the absence of inverted commas. The same remark applies to all the stories quoted, or nearly quoted, from Mr. Rollerstone'e book. ------

Mongan had a quarrel with Forgoll, his chief bard or _file,_ as to the place where Fothad Airgtech king of Ireland had been slain by Cailte, one of Finn's companions. Mongan said it was on the banks of the Lame in Ulster, near his own palace; Forgoll said it was at Dubtar in Leinster. Forgoll, enraged at being contradicted by a mere layman, threatened to pronounce awful incantations against Mongan, which might put rat-hood on him, or anything. The end of it was that Mongan was given three days to prove his statement; if he should not have done so by that time, he and all his possessions were to become the property of the file.

Two days passed, and half the third, and Mongan did nothing, but remained at his ease entirely, never troubling in the world. As for his wife, poor woman, from the moment he made the wager her tears had not ceased to flow.--"Make an end of weeping," said he; "help will certainly come to us."

Forgoll came to claim his bond.--"Wait you till the evening," said Mongan. Evening came, and if help was coming, there was no sign of it. Mongan sat with his wife in the upper chamber; Forgoll out before them waiting to take possession of everything. Pitiless and revengeful the look of Forgoll; the queen weeping and walling; Mongan himself with no sign of care on him.--"Be not you sorrowful, woman," said he; "the one who is coming to help us is not far off; I hear his footsteps on the Labrinne." It is the River Caragh, that flows into Dingle bay in the southwest; a hundred leagues from where they were in the palace at Donegore in the north-east of Antrim.

With that she was quiet for awhile; but nothing happened, and she began weeping again.--"Hush now!" said Mongan; "I hear the feet of the one that will help us crossing the Maine." It is another river in Kerry, between the Caragh and the north-east: on the road, that is, between Mongan's palace and the Great Plain.

That way he was consoling her again and again; and she again and again breaking out with her lamentations. He was hearing the footsteps at every river between Kerry and Antrim: at the Liffey, and then the Boyne, and then the Dee, and after that, at Carlingford Lough, and at last at Larne Water, a little to the south of the palace.--"Enough of this folly," said Forgoll; "pay you me what is mine." A man came in from the ramparts;--"What news with you?" asks Mongan.--"There is a warrior like the men of old time approaching from the south, and a headless spear-shaft in his hand."--"I told you he would be coming," said Mongan. Before the words were out from between his teeth, the warrior had leaped the three ramparts into the middle of the dun, and in a moment was there between Mongan and the file in the hall.--"What is it is troubling you?" said he.

--"I and the file yonder have made a wager about the death of Fothad Airgtech," said Mongan. "The file said he died at Dubtar in Leinster; I said it was false."

--"Then the file has lied," said the warrior.

--"Thou wilt repent of that," cried Forgoll.

--"That is not a good speech," said the warrior. "I will prove what I say." Then he turned to Mongan. "We were with thee, Finn MacCool," said he,--

--"Hush!" said Mongan; _"it is wrong for thee to reveal a secret."_

--"Well then," said the warrior, "we were with Finn coming from Alba. We met Fothad Airgtech near here, on the banks of Larne Water. We fought a battle with him. I cast my spear at him, so that it went through his body, and the iron head quitted the shaft, and went into earth beyond, and remained there. This is the shaft of that spear," said he, holding up the headless shaft he had with him. "The bare rock from which I hurled it will be found, and the iron head is in the earth a little to the east of it; and the grave of Fothad Airgtech a little to the east of that again. A stone chest is round his body; in the chest are his two bracelets of silver, and his two arm-rings, and his collar of silver. Over the grave is a stone pillar, and on the end of the pillar that is in the earth is Ogham writing, and it says, 'Here is Fothad Airgtech. He was fighting with Finn when Cailte slew him.'"

Cailte had been one of the most renowned of Finn's companions; he had come now from the Great Plain to save his old master. You will note that remark of the latter's when Cailte let the fact escape him that he, Mongan, had been Finn: "Hush! it is wrong for the to reveal a secret." That was the feeling of the Christian redactors. Reincarnation was not a thing for baptized lips to speak about.

But we are anticipating things: the coming of Patrick did not bring about the great literary revival which sent all these stories down to us. Patrick Christianized Ireland: converted the kings and established the church; and left the bulk of the people pagan-hearted and pagan-visioned still,--as, glory be to God, they have been ever since. I mean by that that under all vicissitudes the Irish have never quite lost sight of the Inner Life at the heart of things, as most of the rest of us have. Time and men and circumstance, sorrow and ignorance and falsity, have conspired to destroy the race; but there is a vision there, however thwarted and hedged in,--and the people do not perish: their woods and mountains are still full of a gay or mournful, a wailing or a singing, but always a beautiful, life. Patrick was a great man; but he never could drive out the Danaan Gods, who had gone into the hills when the Milesians came. He drove out the serpents, they say; and a serpent was a name for a Druid Adept: Taliesin says, in one of his poems, _'Wyf dryw, wyf sarff,'_ 'I am a druid, I am a serpent'; and we know from H.P. Blavatsky how universal this symbol was, with the meaning of an Initiate of the Secret Wisdom. So perhaps Patrick did evict his Betters from that land of evictions; it may be so;--but not the God-life in the mountains. But I judge from the clean and easy sweep he made of things that Druidism was at a low pass in Ireland when he came. It had survived there five centuries since its vital center and link with the Lodge had been destroyed at Bibracte by Caesar; and, I suppose, thus cut off, and faced with no opposition to keep it pure and alert, might well, and would naturally have declined. Its central light no longer burning, political supremacy itself would have hastened its decay; fostering arrogance for spirituality, and worldliness for true Wisdom. How then about the theory that some life and light remained or was revivable in it in Britain? Why claim that for Britain, which one would incline to deny to Ireland and Gaul?-- Well; we know that Druidism did survive in Gaul a long time after the Romans had proscribed it. But Gaul became very thoroughly Romanized. The Romans and their civilization were everywhere; the Celtic language quite died out; (Breton was brought in by emigrants from Britain;)--and where the Celtic language had died, unlikely that Celtic thought would survive. But in Britain, as we have seen, while the Romans and their proscription were near enough to provide a salutary opposition and constant peril, there were many places in which the survivors of Suetonius' massacre in Mona might have taken refuge. I take it that in Ireland it suffered through lack of opposition; in Gaul, it died of too effective opposition; but in Britain there were midway conditions that may well have allowed it to live on.

Beyond Christianizing the country, it does not appear that Patrick did much for it. It is not clear that Ireland made any progress in material civilization then,--or for that matter, at any time since. We should know by this time that these things are a matter of law. Patrick found her essentially in pralaya, essentially under the influence of centrifugalism; and you cannot turn the ebbing tide, and make it flow before its time. There was a queer mixture of intensive culture and ruthless barbarism: an extreme passion on the one hand for poetry and the things of the spirit,--and on the other, such savagery as continual warfare always brings in its train. The literary class was so strong that in the little kingdom of Tir Conall in Donegal alone the value of ten thousand dollars of the revenue was set aside yearly for its support and purposes;--whereby one would imagine that for all things else they could but have had a nickel or so left. This is culture with a vengeance. There was, besides, wonderful skill in arts and crafts, intricate designing in jewelry-work;--and all this is not to be called by another name than the relics of a high civilization. But there was no political unity; or only a loose bond under the high kings at Tara, who had forever to be fighting to maintain their authority. There was racial, but not national consciousness.

But where in Europe was there national consciousness? We should remember that it only began to exist, or to reincarnate from times beyond the horizon of history, in the thirteenth century A.D. There would be a deal less sneering at Ireland were only these facts known. England was perhaps the first country in which it became effective: the wars of the first and third Edwards called it into being there. Joan lit the fires of it in France; she mainly;--in the fourteen-twenties and thirties. Spain had to wait for Ferdinand and Isabel; Sweden for Gustavus Vasa; Holland for William the Silent; Italy for Victor Emmanuel; Germany for Bismarck. Wales was advancing towards it, in an imperfect sort of way, rather earlier than England; but the Edwardian conquest put the whole idea into abeyance for centuries. So too Ireland: she was half-conquered by the Normans, broken, racked, ruined and crucified, a century before the idea of Nationhood had come into existence, and while centrifugalism was still the one force in Europe. It is thus quite beside the point to say that she was never a nation, even in the days of her native rule. Of course she was not. Nor was England, in those times; nor any other. In every part of the continent the centrifugal forces were running riot; though in some there were strong fighting kings to hold things together. This by way of hurling one more spear at the old cruel doctrine of race inferiorities and superiorities: at Unbrotherliness and all its wicked works and ways. I was the European pralaya; when your duty to your neighbor was everywhere and always to fight him, to get in the first blow; to kill him before he killed you, and thank God for his mericies. So Ireland was not exceptional in that way. Where she was exceptional, bless her sweet heart, lay, as we shall see, in the fact that while all the rest were sunk in ignorance and foulest barbarism, and mentall utterly barren,--she alone had the grace to combine her Kilkenny Cattery with an exquisite and wonderful illumination of culture. While she tore herself to pieces with one hand, with the other she was holding up the torch of learning,--and a very real learning too, --to benighted Europe; and _then_ (bedad!) she found another hand again, to be holding the pen with it, and to produce a literature to make the white angels of God as green as her own holy hills with envy! _That_ was Ireland!

The Crest-Wave rolled in to her; the spiritual forces descended far enough to create a cultural illumination, but not far enough to create political stability. We have seen before that they touch the artistic creative planes, in their descent, before they reach the more material planes. So her position is perfectly comprehensible. The old European manvantara was dying; elsewhere it was dead. Its forces, when they passed away through Ireland, were nearly exhausted; in no condition whatever to penetrate to the material plane and make political greatnesses and strengths. But they found in her very soil and atmosphere a spiritual something which enabled them to produce a splendor of literary creation that perhaps had had no parallel in Europe since Periclean days: Yes, surely Ireland was much more creative than Augustan Rome.

Have any of you heard of literary savages? Of wild men of the woods, your true prognathous primitives, that in a bare couple of generations, and upon no contact with civilized races, rose from their native pithecanthropism to be the wonderful beacon of the West or East? You have not, and cannot imagine it; nor could it ever be. A great literary habit is only acquired in long ages of settled civilization; and there were long ages of settled civilization behind Ireland;--and when, about thirteen decades after Patrick's coming, she flamed up into cultural creation, she was but returning to what was proper to her soul; in the midst of her dissolution, she was but groping after an olden self. That olden self, very likely, she had even by that time more than half forgotten; and we now can only see it refracted, as it were, through the lens of those first Christian centuries, and with the eyes of those Christian monks and bards. How would they have seen them?--There was that spirit of euhemerization: of making ancient things conform to new Christian ideas. They had the Kilkenny Catterwauling in their ears daily; would they have allowed to any Pagan times a quieter less dissonant music? Could they have imagined it, indeed?--I doubt. Kilkennyism would have appeared to them the natural state of things. Were you to look back into Paganism for your Christian millennium, to come not till Christ came again? Were you to search there for peace on earth and mercy mild?--there in the long past, when all the near past was war?--Besides, there was that ancientest of Mariners, Noah, but a few thousand years back; and you had to make things fit.

So I find nothing in it conclusive, if the legends tell of no conditions different from those Patrick found: Kilkenny Cattery in politics, intensive culture in the things of the spirit; and I see no difficulty in the co-existence of the two. The cultured habit had grown in forgotten civilized ages; the Cattery was the result of national or racial pralaya; of the break-up of the old civilization, and the cyclic necessary night-time between it and the birth of another. Let us remember that during the Thirty Years War, in mid-manvantara, Europeans sunk into cannibalism; let us remember the lessons of our own day, which show what a very few years of war, so it be intense enough, can do toward reducing civilized to the levels of savage consciousness. So when we find Ireland, in this fourth century, always fighting,-- and the women as well as the men; and when we find a tribe in Scotland, the Attacotti, with a reputation for cannibalism;--we need not for a moment imagine that things had always been like that. It is not that man is naturally a savage, and may from the heights of civilization quickly relapse into savagery; it is that he is a dual being, with the higher part of his nature usually in abeyance, and its place taken, when it is taken at all, by the conventions of law and order; and so the things that are only thought, or perhaps secretly practised, in times of civilization, as soon as war has broken down the conventions, find their full expression in action,--and others along with them. So Patrick found Ireland, what she has been mostly since, a grand Kilkenny Cattery; but with the literary habit of an older and better day surviving, and nearly ready to be awakened into transcendent splendor. The echoes of the Danaan music were ringing in her still; and are now, heaven knows;--and how would they not be, when what to our eyes are the hills of her green with fern, to eyes anointed, and to the vision of the spirit, are the palaces of the Danaan Sidhe, and the topless towers of Fairyland?

I shall come to my history next week; meanwhile here for you is the _Song of Finn in Praise of May,_ a part of it, as Mr. Rollertone translates it, to give a taste of the literary habit of Pre-christian Ireland:

May day! delightful day! Bright colors play the vales along; Now wakes at morning's slender ray, Wild and gay, the blackbird's song.

Now comes the bird of dusty hue, The loud cuckoo, the summer lover; Broad-branching trees are thick with leaves; The bitter evil time is over.

Swift horses gather nigh, Where half dry the river goes; Tufted heather crowns the height; Weak and white the bog-down blows.

Corncrake singing, from eve til morn, Deep in corn, the strenuous bird; Sings the virgin waterfall, White and tall, her one sweet word. Loaded bough of little power Goodly flower-harvests win; Cattle roam with muddy flanks; Busy ants go out and in.

Carols loud the lark on high, Small and shy, his tireless lay, Singing in wildest, merriest mood Of delicate-hued delightful May.

And here, from the same source, are the _Delights of Finn,_ as his son Oisin sang them to Patrick:

These are the things that were dear to Finn,-- The din of battle, the banquet's glee, The bay of his hounds through the rough glen ringing, And the blackbird singing in Letterlee.

The Shingle grinding along the shore, When they dragged his war-boats down to the sea; The dawn-wind whistling his spears among. And the magic song of his ministrels three.

Whereby you may know, if you consider it rightly, what great strain of influence flows in from the Great Plain and the Land of Youth, that may yet help towards the salvation of Europe. When you turn your eyes on the diaphanous veil of the Mighty Mother, and see it sparkling and gleaming like that, it is but a step to seeing the motions of the Great Life behind; but a step to seeing

'Eternal Beauty wander on her way;'

--that Beauty which is the grand Theophany or manifestation of God. It would not be, it could not exist, but that the Spirit is here; but that the Gods are here, and clearly visible; talk not of the Supreme Self, and shut your eyes meanwhile to the Beauty of the World which is the light that shines from It, and the sign of Its presence! And the consciousness of this Beauty is one which, since Ireland, thrilled from the Otherworld, arose and sang, has been forcing itself ever more and more through the minds, chiefly of poets, of a Europe exiled from truth. I cannot over-estimate the importance of this delight in and worship of Beauty in Nature, which the wise Chinese considered the path to the highest things in Art. Europe has inherited, mainly from the Greeks and the time the western world fell into ignorance, a preoccupation with human personality: in Art and Literature, I mean, as well as in life. We are individuals, and would peg out claims for ourselves even in the Inner World; and by reason of that the Inner World is mostly shut away from us;--for there, as the poem I quoted about the Great Plain says, "none talk of 'mine' and 'thine.'" But down through the centuries of Christendom, after our catching it so near its source in magical Ireland, comes this other music: this listening, not for the voices of passion, and indecision, and the self-conceit which is the greatest fool's play of all, within our personal selves,--but for the meditations of the Omnipresent as they are communicated through the gleam on water, through the breath and delicacy of flowers, through the

'blackbird's singing in Letterlee,'

--this tendency to 'seek in the Impersonal' (Nature is impersonal) 'for the Eternal Self.'

So here, in these fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh centuries, I find the forces 'going west,' through Gaul, through Wales, through Ireland, to the Great Plain; there to recover themselves bathing in the magical Fountain of Youth which is so near to the island the Greeks called "Sacred Ierne of the Hibernians." It may be that the finest part of them has not come back yet; but will re-emerge, spiritual and saving, through this same gateway. One would be ashamed of the Host of the Gods, were they not doing strenuous battle in the unseen for the regeneration of this poor Ireland, that will yet mean so much to the world: and one would marvel at the hellions, indeed one would, were they in their turn not moving heaven and earth, with their best battle-breaking champions in the fore-front, to maintain their strangle-hold on her tortured and beautiful soul.

XXVII. THE IRISH ILLUMINATION

We put 420 for a date to the Southern Renaissance in China, and 410 to the age that became Arthurian in Wales. The next thing in China is 527, and the coming of Bodhidharma; the next thing in Celtdom is 520, and the coming of Findian.