The ancient legends of all nations of the world, on which from age
to age the generations of man have been nurtured, bear so striking a
resemblance to each other that we are led to believe there was once a
period when the whole human family was of one creed and one language.
But with increasing numbers came the necessity of dispersion; and that
ceaseless migration was commenced of the tribes of the earth from the
Eastern cradle of their race which has now continued for thousands of
years with undiminished activity.
From the beautiful Eden-land at the head of the Persian Gulf, where
creeds and culture rose to life, the first migrations emanated, and
were naturally directed along the line of the great rivers, by the
Euphrates and the Tigris and southward by the Nile; and there the first
mighty cities of the world were built, and the first mighty kingdoms of
the East began to send out colonies to take possession of the unknown
silent world around them. From Persia, Assyria, and Egypt, to Greece
and the Isles of the Sea, went forth the wandering tribes, carrying
with them, as signs of their origin, broken fragments of the primal
creed, and broken idioms of the primal tongue—those early pages in the
history of the human race, eternal and indestructible, which hundreds
of centuries have not been able to obliterate from the mind of man.
But as the early tribes diverged from the central parent stock,
the creed and the language began to assume new forms, according as
new habits of life and modes of thought were developed amongst the
wandering people, by the influence of climate and the contemplation
of new and striking natural phenomena in the lands where they found a
resting-place or a home. Still, amongst all nations a basis remained
of the primal creed and language, easily to be traced through all the
mutations caused by circumstances in human thought, either by higher
culture or by the debasement to which both language and symbols are
subjected amongst rude and illiterate tribes.
To reconstruct the primal creed and language of humanity from these
scattered and broken fragments, is the task which is now exciting so
keenly the energies of the ardent and learned ethnographers of Europe;
as yet, indeed, with but small success as regards language, for not
more, perhaps, than twenty words which the philologists consider may
have belonged to the original tongue have been discovered; that is,
certain objects or ideas are found represented in all languages by the
same words, and therefore the philologist concludes that these words
must have been associated with the ideas from the earliest dawn of
language; and as the words express chiefly the relations of the human
family to each other, they remained fixed in the minds of the wandering
tribes, untouched and unchanged by all the diversities of their
subsequent experience of life.
Meanwhile, in Europe there is diligent study of the ancient myths,
legends, and traditions of the world, in order to extract from them
that information respecting the early modes of thought prevalent
amongst the primitive race, and also the lines of the first migrations,
which no other monuments of antiquity are so well able to give.
Traditions, like rays of light, take their colour from the medium
through which they pass; but the scientific mythographic student
knows how to eliminate the accidental addition from the true primal
basis, which remains fixed and unchangeable; and from the numerous
myths and legends of the nations of the earth, which bear so striking
a conformity to each other that they point to a common origin, he
will be able to reconstruct the first articles of belief in the creed
of humanity, and to pronounce almost with certainty upon the primal
source of the lines of human life that now traverse the globe in all
directions. This source of all life, creed, and culture now on earth,
there is no reason to doubt, will be found in _Iran_, or Persia as we
call it, and in the ancient legends and language of the great Iranian
people, the head and noblest type of the Aryan races. Endowed with
splendid physical beauty, noble intellect, and a rich musical language,
the Iranians had also a lofty sense of the relation between man and
the spiritual world. They admitted no idols into their temples; their
God was the One Supreme Creator and Upholder of all things, whose
symbol was the sun and the pure, elemental fire. But as the world grew
older and more wicked the pure primal doctrines were obscured by human
fancies, the symbol came to be worshipped in place of the God, and the
debased idolatries of Babylon, Assyria, and the Canaanite nations were
the result. Egypt—grave, wise, learned, mournful Egypt—retained most
of the primal truth; but truth was held by the priests as too precious
for the crowd, and so they preserved it carefully for themselves and
their own caste. They alone knew the ancient and cryptic meaning of the
symbols; the people were allowed only to see the outward and visible
sign.
From Egypt, philosophy, culture, art, and religion came to Greece, but
the Greeks moulded these splendid elements after their own fashion, and
poured the radiance of beauty over the grave and gloomy mysticism of
Egypt. Everything hideous, terrible, and revolting was banished from
the Greek Mythology. The Greeks constructed no theory of a devil, and
believed in no hell, as a distinct and eternal abode for the lost souls
of men. The Greek gods were divinely beautiful, and each divinity in
turn was ready to help the mortal that invoked him. The dead in Hades
mourned their fate because they could no longer enjoy the glorious
beauty of life, but no hard and chilling dogmas doomed them there to
the tortures of eternal punishment. Earth, air, the heavens and the
sea, the storms and sunshine, the forests and flowers and the purple
grapes with which they crowned a god, were all to the Greek poet-mind
the manifestations of an all-pervading spiritual power and life. A
sublime Pantheism was their creed, that sees gods in everything, yet
with one Supreme God over all. Freedom, beauty, art, light, and joy,
were the elements of the Greek religion, while the Eternal Wisdom, the
Great Athené of the Parthenon, was the peculiar and selected divinity
of their own half divine race.
Meanwhile other branches of the primal Iranian stock were spreading
over the savage central forests of Europe, where they laid the
foundation of the great Teuton and Gothic races, the destined
world-rulers; but Nature to them was a gloomy and awful mother,
and life seemed an endless warfare against the fierce and powerful
elemental demons of frost and snow and darkness, by whom the beautiful
Sun-god was slain, and who reigned triumphant in that fearful season
when the earth was iron and the air was ice, and no beneficent God
seemed near to help. Hideous idols imaged these unseen powers, who were
propitiated by sanguinary rites; and the men and the god they fashioned
were alike as fierce and cruel as the wild beasts of the forest, and
the aspects of the savage nature around them.
Still the waves of human life kept rolling westward until they surged
over all the lands and islands of the Great Sea, and the wandering
mariners, seeking new homes, passed through the Pillars of Hercules out
into the Western Ocean, and coasting along by the shores of Spain and
France, founded nations that still bear the impress of their Eastern
origin, and are known in history as the Celtic race; while the customs,
usages, and traditions which their forefathers had learnt in Egypt or
Greece were carefully preserved by them, and transmitted as heirlooms
to the colonies they founded. From Spain the early mariners easily
reached the verdant island of the West in which we Irish are more
particularly interested. And here in our beautiful Ireland the last
wave of the great Iranian migration finally settled. Further progress
was impossible—the unknown ocean seemed to them the limits of the
world. And thus the wanderers of the primal race, with their fragments
of the ancient creed and mythic poet-lore, and their peculiar dialect
of the ancient tongue, formed, as it were, a sediment here which still
retains its peculiar affinity with the parent land—though the changes
and chances of three thousand years have swept over the people, the
legends, and the language. It is, therefore, in Ireland, above all,
that the nature and origin of the primitive races of Europe should be
studied. Even the form of the Celtic head shows a decided conformity to
that of the Greek races, while it differs essentially from the Saxon
and Gothic types. This is one of the many proofs in support of the
theory that the Celtic people in their westward course to the Atlantic
travelled by the coasts of the Mediterranean, as all along that line
the same cranial formation is found. Philologists also affirm that the
Irish language is nearer to Sanskrit than any other of the living and
spoken languages of Europe; while the legends and myths of Ireland can
be readily traced to the far East, but have nothing in common with the
fierce and weird superstitions of Northern mythology.
This study of legendary lore, as a foundation for the history of
humanity, is now recognized as such an important branch of ethnology
that a journal entirely devoted to comparative mythology has been
recently started in Paris, to which all nations are invited to
contribute—Sclaves, Teutons, and Celts, Irish legends being considered
specially important, as containing more of the primitive elements
than those of other Western nations. All other countries have been
repeatedly overwhelmed by alien tribes and peoples and races, but
the Irish have remained unchanged, and in place of adopting readily
the usages of invaders they have shown such remarkable powers of
fascination that the invaders themselves became _Hibernicis ipsis
Hiberniores_. The Danes held the east coast of Ireland for three
hundred years, yet there is no trace of Thor or Odin or the Frost
Giants, or of the Great World-serpent in Irish legend; but if we go
back in the history of the world to the beginning of things, when
the Iranian people were the only teachers of humanity, we come upon
the true ancient source of Irish legend, and find that the original
materials have been but very slightly altered, while amongst other
nations the ground-work has been overlaid with a dense palimpsest of
their own devising, suggested by their peculiar local surroundings.
Amongst the earliest religious symbols of the world are the Tree,
the Woman, and the Serpent—memories, no doubt, of the legend of
Paradise; and the reverence for certain sacred trees has prevailed in
Persia from the most ancient times, and become diffused among all the
Iranian nations. It was the custom in Iran to hang costly garments
on the branches as votive offerings; and it is recorded that Xerxes
before going to battle invoked victory by the Sacred Tree, and hung
jewels and rich robes on the boughs. And the poet Saadi narrates an
anecdote concerning trees which has the true Oriental touch of mournful
suggestion:—He was once, he says, the guest of a very rich old man who
had a son remarkable for his beauty. One night the old man said to
him, “During my whole life I never had but this son. Near this place
is a Sacred Tree to which men resort to offer up their petitions. Many
nights at the foot of this tree I besought God until He bestowed on me
this son.” Not long after Saadi overheard this young man say in a low
voice to his friend, “How happy should I be to know where that Sacred
Tree grows, in order that I might implore God for the death of my
father.”
The poorer class in Persia, not being able to make offerings of costly
garments, are in the habit of tying bits of coloured stuffs on the
boughs, and these rags are considered to have a special virtue in
curing diseases. The trees are often near a well or by a saint’s grave,
and are then looked upon as peculiarly sacred.
This account might have been written for Ireland, for the belief and
the ceremonial are precisely similar, and are still found existing to
this day both in _Iran_ and in _Erin_. But all trees were not held
sacred—only those that bore no eatable fruit that could nourish men;
a lingering memory of the tree of evil fruit may have caused this
prejudice, while the Tree of Life was eagerly sought for, with its
promised gift of immortality. In Persia the plane-tree was specially
reverenced; in Egypt, the palm; in Greece, the wild olive; and the oak
amongst the Celtic nations. Sometimes small tapers were lit amongst the
branches, to simulate by fire the presence of divinity. It is worthy of
note, while on the subject of Irish and Iranian affinities, that the
old Persian word for tree is _dar_, and the Irish call their sacred
tree, the oak, _darragh_.[1]
[1] The terms Dryad and Druid may be compared as containing the same
root and reference.
The belief in a race of supernatural beings, midway between man and the
Supreme God, beautiful and beneficent, a race that had never known the
weight of human life, was also part of the creed of the Iranian people.
They called them _Peris_, or _Feroüers_ (fairies); and they have some
pretty legends concerning the beautiful _Dukhtari Shah Periân_, the
“Daughter of the King of the Fairies,” for a sight of whose beauty
men pine away in vain desire, but if it is granted to them once to
behold her, they die. Every nation believes in the existence of these
mysterious spirits, with mystic and powerful influence over human life
and actions, but each nation represents them differently, according to
national habits and national surroundings. Thus, the Russians believe
in the phantom of the Ukraine, a beautiful young girl robed in white,
who meets the wanderer on the lonely snow steppes, and lulls him by
her kisses into that fatal sleep from which he never more awakens. The
legends of the Scandinavians, also, are all set in the framework of
their own experiences; the rending and crash of the ice is the stroke
of the god Thor’s hammer; the rime is the beard of the Frost Giant;
and when Balder, their Sun-god, is beginning to die at Midsummer, they
kindle pine-branches to light him on his downward path to hell; and
when he is returning to the upper world, after the winter solstice,
they burn the Yule-log, and hang lights on the fir-trees to illuminate
his upward path. These traditions are a remnant of the ancient sun
worship, but the peasants who kindle the Baal fires at Midsummer, and
the upper classes who light up the brilliant Christmas-tree, have
forgotten the origin of the custom, though the world-old symbol and
usage is preserved.
The _Sidhe_, or Fairies, of Ireland, still preserve all the gentle
attributes of their ancient Persian race, for in the soft and equable
climate of Erin there were no terrible manifestations of nature to be
symbolized by new images; and the genial, laughter-loving elves were in
themselves the best and truest expression of Irish nature that could
have been invented. The fairies loved music and dancing and frolic;
and, above all things, to be let alone, and not to be interfered with
as regarded their peculiar fairy habits, customs, and pastimes. They
had also, like the Irish, a fine sense of the right and just, and a
warm love for the liberal hand and kindly word. All the solitudes of
the island were peopled by these bright, happy, beautiful beings,
and to the Irish nature, with its need of the spiritual, its love
of the vague, mystic, dreamy, and supernatural, there was something
irresistibly fascinating in the belief that gentle spirits were around,
filled with sympathy for the mortal who suffered wrong or needed help.
But the fairies were sometimes wilful and capricious as children, and
took dire revenge if any one built over their fairy circles, or looked
at them when combing their long yellow hair in the sunshine, or dancing
in the woods, or floating on the lakes. Death was the penalty to all
who approached too near, or pried too curiously into the mysteries of
nature.
To the Irish peasant earth and air were filled with these mysterious
beings, half-loved, half-feared by them; and therefore they were
propitiated by flattery, and called “the good people,” as the Greeks
call the dread goddesses “the Eumenides.” Their voices were heard
in the mountain echo, and their forms seen in the purple and golden
mountain mist; they whispered amidst the perfumed hawthorn branches;
the rush of the autumn leaves was the scamper of little elves—red,
yellow, and brown—wind-delven, and dancing in their glee; and the
bending of the waving barley was caused by the flight of the Elf King
and his Court across the fields. They danced with soundless feet,
and their step was so light that the drops of dew they danced on
only trembled, but did not break. The fairy music was low and sweet,
“blinding sweet,” like that of the great god Pan by the river; they
lived only on the nectar in the cups of the flowers, though in their
fairy palaces sumptuous banquets were offered to the mortals they
carried off—but woe to the mortal who tasted of fairy food; to eat was
fatal. All the evil in the world has come by eating; if Eve had only
resisted that apple our race might still be in Paradise. The Sidhe look
with envy on the beautiful young human children, and steal them when
they can; and the children of a Sidhe and a mortal mother are reputed
to grow up strong and powerful, but with evil and dangerous natures.
There is also a belief that every seven years the fairies are obliged
to deliver up a victim to the Evil One, and to save their own people
they try to abduct some beautiful young mortal girl, and her they hand
over to the Prince of Darkness.
Dogmatic religion and science have long since killed the mythopoetic
faculty in cultured Europe. It only exists now, naturally and
instinctively, in children, poets, and the childlike races, like the
Irish—simple, joyous, reverent, and unlettered, and who have remained
unchanged for centuries, walled round by their language from the rest
of Europe, through which separating veil science, culture, and the cold
mockery of the sceptic have never yet penetrated.
Christianity was readily accepted by the Irish. The pathetic tale
of the beautiful young Virgin-Mother and the Child-God, for central
objects, touched all the deepest chords of feeling in the tender,
loving, and sympathetic Irish heart. The legends of ancient times were
not overthrown by it, however, but taken up and incorporated with the
new Christian faith. The holy wells and the sacred trees remained,
and were even made holier by association with a saint’s name. And to
this day the old mythology holds its ground with a force and vitality
untouched by any symptoms of weakness or decay. The Greeks, who are
of the same original race as our people, rose through the influence
of the highest culture to the fulness and perfectness of eternal
youth; but the Irish, without culture, are eternal children, with all
the childlike instincts of superstition still strong in them, and
capable of believing all things, because to doubt requires knowledge.
They never, like the Greeks, attained to the conception of a race
of beings nobler than themselves—men stronger and more gifted, with
the immortal fire of a god in their veins; women divinely beautiful,
or divinely inspired; but, also, the Irish never defaced the image
of God in their hearts by infidelity or irreligion. One of the most
beautiful and sublimely touching records in all human history is that
of the unswerving devotion of the Irish people to their ancient faith,
through persecutions and penal enactments more insulting and degrading
than were ever inflicted in any other land by one Christian sect upon
another.
With this peculiarly reverential nature it would be impossible to
make the Irish a nation of sceptics, even if a whole legion of German
Rationalists came amongst them to preach a crusade against all belief
in the spiritual and the unseen. And the old traditions of their race
have likewise taken firm hold in their hearts, because they are an
artistic people, and require objects for their adoration and love, not
mere abstractions to be accepted by their reason. And they are also a
nation of poets; the presence of God is ever near them, and the saints
and angels, and the shadowy beings of earth and air are perpetually
drawing their minds, through mingled love and fear, to the infinite
and invisible world. Probably not one tradition or custom that had
its origin in a religious belief has been lost in Ireland during the
long course of ages since the first people from Eastern lands arrived
and settled on our shores. The Baal fires are still lit at Midsummer,
though no longer in honour of the sun, but of St. John; and the
peasants still make their cattle pass between two fires—not, indeed,
as of old, in the name of Moloch, but of some patron saint. That all
Irish legends point to the East for their origin, not to the North,
is certain; to a warm land, not one of icebergs, and thunder crashes
of the rending of ice-bound rivers, but to a region where the shadow
of trees, and a cool draught from the sparkling well were life-giving
blessings. Well-worship could not have originated in a humid country
like Ireland, where wells can be found at every step, and sky and land
are ever heavy and saturated with moisture. It must have come from
an Eastern people, wanderers in a dry and thirsty land, where the
discovery of a well seemed like the interposition of an angel in man’s
behalf.
We are told also by the ancient chroniclers that serpent-worship once
prevailed in Ireland, and that St. Patrick hewed down the serpent idol
_Crom-Cruadh_ (the great worm) and cast it into the Boyne (from whence
arose the legend that St. Patrick banished all venomous things from
the island). Now as the Irish never could have seen a serpent, none
existing in Ireland, this worship must have come from the far East,
where this beautiful and deadly creature is looked upon as the symbol
of the Evil One, and worshipped and propitiated by votive offerings,
as all evil things were in the early world, in the hope of turning
away their evil hatred from man, and to induce them to show mercy and
pity; just as the Egyptians propitiated the sacred crocodile by subtle
flatteries and hung costly jewels in its ears. The Irish, indeed, do
not seem to have originated any peculiar or national cultus. Their
funeral ceremonies recall those of Egypt and Greece and other ancient
Eastern climes, from whence they brought their customs of the Wake,
the death chant, the mourning women, and the funeral games. In Sparta,
on the death of a king or great chief, they had a wake and “keen” not
common to the rest of Greece, but which they said they learned from the
Phœnicians; and this peculiar usage bears a striking resemblance to
the Irish practice. All the virtues of the dead were recited, and the
Greek “Eleleu,” the same cry as the “Ul-lu-lu” of the Irish, was keened
over the corpse by the chorus of hired mourning women. The custom of
selecting women in place of men for the chorus of lamentation prevailed
throughout all the ancient world, as if an open display of grief was
thought beneath the dignity of man. It was Cassandra gave the keynote
for the wail over Hector, and Helen took the lead in reciting praises
to his honour. The death chants in Egypt, Arabia, and Abyssinia all
bear a marked resemblance to the Irish; indeed the mourning cry is the
same in all, and the Egyptian lamentation “Hi-loo-loo! Hi-loo-loo!”
cried over the dead, was probably the original form of the Irish wail.
The Greeks always endeavoured to lessen the terrors of death, and for
this reason they established funeral games, and the funeral ceremonies
took the form of a festival, where they ate and drank and poured
libations of wine in honour of the dead. The Irish had also their
funeral games and peculiar dances, when they threw off their upper
garments, and holding hands in a circle, moved in a slow measure round
a woman crouched in the centre, with her hands covering her face.
Another singular part of the ceremony was the entrance of a woman
wearing a cow’s head and horns, as Io appears upon the scene in the
Prometheus of Æschylus. This woman was probably meant to represent the
horned or crescented moon, the antique Diana, the Goddess of Death.
The custom of throwing off the garments no doubt originally signified
the casting off the garment of the flesh. We brought nothing into this
world, and it is certain we carry nothing out. The soul must stand
unveiled before God.
In the islands off the West Coast of Ireland, where the most ancient
superstitions still exist, they have a strange custom. No funeral
wail is allowed to be raised until three hours have elapsed from the
moment of death, because, they say, the sound of the cries would
hinder the soul from speaking to God when it stands before Him, and
waken up the two great dogs that are watching for the souls of the
dead in order that they may devour them—and the Lord of Heaven Himself
cannot hinder them if once they waken. This tradition of watching by
the dead in silence, while the soul stands before God, is a fine and
solemn superstition, which must have had its origin amongst a people
of intense faith in the invisible world, and is probably of great
antiquity.
The sound of the Irish keen is wonderfully pathetic. No one could
listen to the long-sustained minor wail of the “Ul-lu-lu” without
strong emotion and even tears; and once heard it can never be
forgotten. Nor is there anything derogatory to grief in the idea
of hired mourners; on the contrary, it is a splendid tribute to
the dead to order their praises to be recited publicly before the
assembled friends; while there is something indescribably impressive
in the aspect of the mourning women crouched around the bier with
shrouded heads, as they rock themselves to and fro and intone the
solemn, ancient death-song with a measured cadence, sometimes rising
to a piercing wail. They seem like weird and shadowy outlines of an
old-world vision, and at once the imagination is carried back to the
far-distant East, and the time when all these funeral symbols had a
mysterious and awful meaning. Sometimes a wail of genuine and bitter
grief interrupts the chant of the hired mourners. An Irish keen which
was taken down from the lips of a bereaved mother some years ago, runs
thus in the literal English version—
“O women, look on me! Look on me, women! Have you ever seen any sorrow
like mine? Have you ever seen the like of me in my sorrow? Arrah, then,
my darling, my darling, ’tis your mother that calls you. How long you
are sleeping. Do you see all the people round you, my darling, and I
sorely weeping? Arrah, what is this paleness on your face? Sure there
was no equal to it in Erin for beauty and fairness, and your hair was
heavy as the wing of a raven, and your skin was whiter than the hand of
a lady. Is it the stranger must carry me to my grave, and my son lying
here?”
This touching lament is so thoroughly Greek in form and sentiment that
it might be taken for part of a chorus from the Hecuba of Euripides.
Even the “Arrah” reminds one of a Greek word used frequently by the
Greeks when commencing a sentence or asking a question, although the
resemblance may be only superficial.
The tales and legends told by the peasants in the Irish vernacular
are much more weird and strange, and have much more of the old-world
colouring than the ordinary fairy tales narrated in English by the
people, as may be seen by the following mythical story, translated from
the Irish, and which is said to be a thousand years old:—