I once saw a young Irish woman, fresh from a convent school, cast into
a profound trance, though not by a method known to any hypnotist. In
her waking state she thought the apple of Eve was the kind of apple
you can buy at the greengrocer’s, but in her trance she saw the Tree
of Life with ever-sighing souls moving in its branches instead of sap,
and among its leaves all the fowls of the air, and on its highest bough
one white fowl bearing a crown. When I went home I took from the shelf
a translation of _The Book of Concealed Mystery_, an old Jewish book,
and cutting the pages came upon this passage, which I cannot think I
had ever read: ‘The Tree, ... is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and
of Evil ... in its branches the birds lodge and build their nests, the
souls and the angels have their place.’
I once saw a young Church of Ireland man, a bank clerk in the west of
Ireland, thrown in a like trance. I have no doubt that he, too, was
quite certain that the apple of Eve was a greengrocer’s apple, and yet
he saw the tree and heard the souls sighing through its branches, and
saw apples with human faces, and laying his ear to an apple heard
a sound as of fighting hosts within. Presently he strayed from the
tree and came to the edge of Eden, and there he found himself not by
the wilderness he had learned of at the Sunday-school, but upon the
summit of a great mountain, of a mountain ‘two miles high.’ The whole
summit, in contradiction to all that would have seemed probable to his
waking mind, was a great walled garden. Some years afterwards I found
a mediæval diagram, which pictured Eden as a walled garden upon a high
mountain.
Where did these intricate symbols come from? Neither I nor the one
or two people present or the seers had ever seen, I am convinced,
the description in _The Book of Concealed Mystery_, or the mediæval
diagram. Remember that the images appeared in a moment perfect in
all their complexity. If one can imagine that the seers or that I
myself or another had read of these images and forgotten it, that the
supernatural artist’s knowledge of what was in our buried memories
accounted for these visions, there are numberless other visions to
account for. One cannot go on believing in improbable knowledge for
ever. For instance, I find in my diary that on December 27, 1897, a
seer to whom I had given a certain old Irish symbol, saw Brigit, the
goddess, holding out ‘a glittering and wriggling serpent,’ and yet I
feel certain that neither I nor he knew anything of her association
with the serpent until _Carmina Gadelica_ was published a few months
ago. And an old Irish woman who can neither read nor write has
described to me a woman dressed like Dian, with helmet, and short skirt
and sandals, and what seemed to be buskins. Why, too, among all the
countless stories of visions that I have gathered in Ireland, or that
a friend has gathered for me, are there none that mix the dress of
different periods? The seers when they are but speaking from tradition
will mix everything together, and speak of Finn mac Cool going to the
Assizes at Cork. Almost every one who has ever busied himself with such
matters has come, in trance or dream, upon some new and strange symbol
or event, which he has afterwards found in some work he had never read
or heard of. Examples like this are as yet too little classified, too
little analyzed, to convince the stranger, but some of them are proof
enough for those they have happened to, proof that there is a memory of
nature that reveals events and symbols of distant centuries. Mystics
of many countries and many centuries have spoken of this memory; and
the honest men and charlatans, who keep the magical traditions which
will some day be studied as a part of folk-lore, base most that is
of importance in their claims upon this memory. I have read of it in
Paracelsus and in some Indian book that describes the people of past
days as still living within it, ‘Thinking the thought and doing the
deed.’ And I have found it in the prophetic books of William Blake, who
calls its images ‘the bright sculptures of Los’s Halls’; and says that
all events, ‘all love stories,’ renew themselves from those images. It
is perhaps well that so few believe in it, for if many did many would
go out of parliaments and universities and libraries and run into the
wilderness to so waste the body, and to so hush the unquiet mind that,
still living, they might pass the doors the dead pass daily; for who
among the wise would trouble himself with making laws or in writing
history or in weighing the earth if the things of eternity seemed ready
to hand?