I had not thought to speak to you further about Celtic things.
But there is something in them here which concerns the spiritual
history of the race; something to note, that may help us to
understand the Great Plan. So, having beckoned you last week to
the edge of the world and the fountain of dawn, and to see
Bodhidharma standing there and evoking out of the deep a new
order of ages, I find myself now lured by a westward trail, and
must jump the width of two continents with you, and follow this
track whither it leads: into the heart and flame of mysterious
sunset. I hope, and the Gwerddonau Llion, the Green Spots of the
Flood,--Makarn Nesoi, Tirnanogue, the Islands of the Blest.
We saw that while the great flow of the cycles from dying Rome
ran in wave after wave eastward, there was a little backwash
also, by reason of which almost the last glow we saw in the west
was in fourth century Gaul, in the literary renaissance there
which centers round the name of Ausonius. Now in later history
we find every important French cycle tending to be followed by
one in England: as Chaucer followed Jean de Meung; Shakespeare,
Ronsard and the Pleyade; Dryden and Pope, Moliere and Racine;
Wordsworth and Shelley, the Revolution. And we have seen China
wake in 420; and we have noted, in the first of these lectures,
the strange fact that whenever China 'gets busy,' we see a sort
of reflexion of it among the Celts of the west. And we shall
come presently to one of the most curious episodes in history,--
the Irish Renaissance in the sixth century: when all Europe else
was dead and buried under night and confusion, and Ireland only,
standing like a white pillar to the west, a blazing beacon of
culture and creative genius. Now if you see a wave rising in
fourth-century Gaul, and a wave breaking into glorious foam in
sixth- and seventh-century Ireland,--what would you suspect?--
Why, naturally, that it was the same wave, and had flowed through
the country that lies between: common sense would tell you to
expect something of a Great Age in fifth- and early sixth-century
Britain. And then comes tradition,--which is nine times out of
ten the truest vehicle of history,--and shouts that your
expectations are correct. For within this time came Arthur.
You know that in the twelfth century Geoffrey of Monmouth
published what he claimed to be a History of the Kings of Britain
from the time of the coming there of the Trojans; and that it
was he mainly who was responsible for floating the Arthurian
Legend on to the wide waters of European literature. What
percentage of history there may be in his book; how much of it
he did not "make out of whole cloth," but founded on genuine
Welsh or Breton traditions, is at present unknowable;--the
presumption being that it is not much. But here is a curious
fact that I only came on this week. The Romans were expelled
from Britain in 410, remember. Arthur passed from the world of
mortals on the night after Camlan, that
"last weird battle in the west,"
when
"All day long the noise of battle rolled
Among the mountains by the wintry sea,
Till all King Arthur's Table, man by man,
Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their lord
King Arthur."
Now the reign of Arthur may be supposed to represent the
culmination of a national revival among the British Celts; and,
--this is the detail I was pleased to come upon,--according to
Geoffrey, Camlan was fought in 542;--a matter of thirteen decades
(and two years) after the expulsion of the Romans. So that, I
say, it looks as if there were some cyclic reality behind it.
Geoffrey of Monmouth did not know that such periods of national
revival do last as a general rule for thirteen decades. He had
some other guide to help him to that 542 for Camlan.
History knows practically nothing about fifth-century Britain.
It has been looking at it, since scientific methods came in,
through Teutonic (including Anglo-Saxon) or Latin eyes; and seen
very little indeed but confusion. Britain like the rest of the
western empire, suffered the incursions of northern barbarism;
but unlike most of the rest, it fought, and not as a piece of
Rome, but as Celtic Britain;--fought, and would not compromise
nor understand that it was defeated. It took eight centuries of
war, and the loss of all England, and the loss of all Wales, to
teach, it that lesson; and even then it was by no means sure.
In the twelve-eighties, when last Llewelyn went to war, he
was still hoping, not to save Wales from the English, but to
re-establish the Celtic Kingdom of Britain, Arthur's Empire, and to
wear the high crown of London. The men that marched to Bosworth
Field under Harri Tudor, two centuries later, went with the same
curious hope and assurance. It was a racial mold of mind, and
one of extraordinary strength and persistence,--and one totally
unjustified by facts in what were then the present and future.
But I do not believe such molds can ever be fudged up out of
nothing: _ex nihilo nihil_ is as true here as elsewhere. So we
must look for the cause and formation of this mold in the past.
Something, I think, within that first cycle of Welsh history must
have impressed it on the Welsh mind: some national flowering;
some great figure, one would say.--Arthur? He is like Vikramaditya
of Ujjain; no one know whether he existed at all. There is
no historic evidence; but rather the reverse. But then
there are all those mountains and things named after him, "from
the top of Pengwaed in Cornwall to the bottom of Dinsol in the
North"; and, there is the Arthurian Legend, with such great
vitality that it drove out the national Saxon legends from
England, and quenched the Charlemagne legend in France, and made
itself master of the mind of western Europe in the Middle Ages;--
I imagine there would have been an Arthur. Some chieftain
who won battles; held up the Saxon advance for a long time,
probably; and reminded his people of some ancient hero, or
perhaps of a God Artaios, thought to be reincarnate in him.
Not that I believe that the mold of mind of which we have
been speaking could have been created in the fifth and sixth
centuries. Whoever Arthur was--the Arthur of that time,--however
great and successful, he could but have reigned over some part of
Britain, precariously resisting and checking the barbarians; but
tradition tells of a very Chakravartin, swaying the western
world. No; that mold certainly was a relic of the lost Celtic
empire. It had grown dim during the Roman domination; but it
had survived, and the coming in of the Crest-Wave had put new
life into it. Nothing could have put new life into it, it seems
to me, but such a coming in of the Crest-Wave,--to make it endure
and inspire men as it did. I think it is certain the Crest-Wave,
--a backwash of it, a little portion of it, but enough to
make life hum and the age important,--was among the Welsh between
410 and 542. The wave was receding towards the Western Laya-Center;
and gathered force as it rolled from Ausonius' Gaul to Taliesin's
Wales, and from Tallesin's Wales to Ireland.
Let us look at the probabilities in Britain in 410, seeing what
we can. Three hundred years of Roman rule had left that
province, I cannot doubt, rich and populous, with agriculture in
a better condition than it has been since:--remember the corn
Julian brought thence to feed Gaul. We must think of a large
population, Roman and Romanized, mixed of every race in the Roman
world, in the cities; and of another population, still Celtic,
in the mountains of northern England, in the western Scottish
Lowlands, and especially in Wales. It was the former element,
the cities, that appealed to Aetius for help against the Picts
and Scots; the latter, dwelling in less accessible places,
fought as soon as they felt the invaders' pressure. Wales itself
had never been all held by the Romans. The legions had covered
the south from Caerleon in Monmouthshire to Saint Davids in
Penfro, a region held by Silures and Gaelic Celts. They
had marched along the northern coast to the island of Mona,
establishing, just as Edward the Conqueror did in his day,
strongholds from which to dominate the dangerous mountains:
these regions also were held by Gaels. But just south of those
mountains, in what are now the counties of Meirionydd and
Montgomery, there was a great piece of Wales which they seem
never to have penetrated; and it was held by the Cymric
Ordovices, Welsh, not Irish, by language.
About this time there was a great upheaval of the Irish; who
conquered western Scotland, and established there sooner or later
the Scottish kingdom of history. They also invaded Wales and
England, and sent their fleets far and wide: they were the
'Picts and Scots' of the history-books. There seems also to have
been an invasion and conquest of Wales, from the north, by the
Welsh; who, joining forces with the Welsh Ordovices whom they
found already in the unconquered un-Roman part, established in
the course of time the kingdom and House of Cunedda, which
reigned till the Edwardian Conquest. It is pretty safe to say
that the Romanized cities and the Romanized population generally
offered no great resistance to the Saxons; mixed with them
fairly readily, and went to form perhaps the basis of the English
race; that they lost their language and culture is due to the
fact that they were cut off from the sources of these on the
continent, and, being of an effete civilization, were far less in
vigor than the Saxon incomers. And as we saw in the first of
these lectures, there was probably a large Teutonic or Saxon
element in Britain since before the days of Julius Caesar.
But there seems to have been a time during those thirteen decades
that followed the eviction of the Romans, when the Celtic
element, wakened to life and receiving an impulse from the
Crest-Wave, caught up the sovereignty that the Romans had dropped,
remembered its Ancient greatness, and nourished vigorous hopes.
To the Welsh mind, the age has appeared one of old unhappy
far-off things,--unhappy, because of their tragic ending at Camlan;--
but grandiose. Titanic vague figures loom up: Arthur, the type
of all hero-kings; Taliesin, type of all prophet-bards; Merlin,
type of magicians. Tennyson caught the spirit of it in the grand
moments of the _Morte D'Arthur;_ and missed it by a thousand
miles elsewhere in the _Idylls._ The spirit, the atmosphere, is
that of a glory receding into the unknown and the West of Wonder;
into Lyonnesse, into Avallon, into the Sunset Isles. There is a
sense of being on the brink of the world; with the 'arm
clothed in white samite' reaching in from a world beyond,--that
Otherworld to which the wounded Arthur, barge-borne over the
nightly waters by the Queens of Faerie, went to heal him of his
wounds, and to await the cyclic hour for his retum. He is the
symbol of--what shall we say?--civilization, culture, or the
spiritual sources of these, the light that alone can keep them
sweet and wholesome; that light has died from the broken Roman
world, and passes now west-ward through the Gates of the Sunset:
through Wales, through Ireland, the Laya-Center; into the
Hidden, the Place of the Spirit; into Avallon, which is Ynys
Afallen, the 'Isle of Apple-trees';--whence to return in its
time:--_Rex quondam, rexque futurus._
There is a poem by Myrddin Gwyllt, traditionally of the sixth
century, about that Garth of Apple-trees; which he will have a
secret place in the Woods of Celyddon, the Occult Land, and not
an island in the sea at all; and in this poem it has always
seemed to me that one gets a clue to the real and interesting
things of history. He claims in it to be the last of the
white-robed Guardians of the Sacred Tree, the fruit of which
none of the black-robed,--no 'son of a monk,'--shall ever
enjoy. There has been a battle, in which the true order
of the world has gone down; but there Myrddin stays to guard
the 'Tree' against the 'Woodmen,'--whom also he seems to
identify with the 'black-robed' and the priests Myrddin
Gwyllt, by the by, is one of the two figures in Welsh tradition
who have combined to become the Merlin of European tradition;
the other was Myrddin Emrys the magician. I take great risks,
gentlemen but wish to give you a taste, as I think the sound
of some lines from the original may, and doubt any translation
can, of the old and haughty sense of mystery and grandeur
embodied in the poem; because it is this feeling, perhaps
the last echo of the Western Mysteries, that is so characteristic
of the literature that claims to come down to us from this age:
Afallen beren, bren ailwyddfa,
Cwn coed cylch ei gwraidd dywasgodfa;
A mi ddysgoganaf dyddiau etwa
Medrawd ac Arthus modur tyrfa;
Camlan darwerthin difiau yna;
Namyn saith ni ddyraith o'r cymanfa.
Afallen bere, beraf ei haeron,
A dyf yn argel yn argoed Celyddon;
Cyt ceiser ofer fydd herwydd ei hafon,
Yn y ddel Cadwaladr at gynadl Rhyd Theon,
A Chynan yn erbyn cychwyn y Saeson.
Cymru a orfydd; cain fydd ei Dragon;
Caffant pawb ei deithi; llawen fi Brython!
Caintor cyrn elwch cathl heddwch a hinon.
What it means appears to be something of this sort:
Sweet and beautiful Tree of the trees!
The Wood-dogs guard the circle of its roots;
But I will foretell, a day shall be
When Modred and Authur shall rush to the conflict;
Again shall they come to the Battle at Camlan,
And but seven men shall escape from that meeting.
Sweet Apple-tree, sweetest its fruitage!
It grows in secret in the Woods of Celyddon;
In vain shall they seek it on the banks of its stream there,
Till Cadwaladr shall come to Rhyd Theon,
And Cynan, opposing the tumult of Saxons,
Wales shall arise then; bright shall be her Dragon;
All shall have their just reward; joy is me for the Brython!
The horns of joy shall sound then the song of peace and
calmness....
The sweet fruits of the Tree, he says, are the "prisoners of
words," (_carcharorion geirau_)--which is just what one would
say, under a stress of inspiration, about the truths of the
Secret Wisdom;--and they shall not be found, he says,--they shall
be sought in vain,--until the _Maban Huan,_ the 'Child of the
Sun,' shall come. The whole poem is exceedingly obscure; a
hundred years ago, the wise men of Wales took it as meaning much
what I think it means: the passing of the real wisdom of the
Mysteries,--of Neo-druidism,--away from the world and the
knowledge of men, to a secret place where the Woodmen, the
Black-robed, could not find to destroy it;--until, after ages,
a Leader of the Hosts of Light should come--you see it is
here Cadwaladr, but Cadwaladr simply means 'Battle-Leader,'
--and the age-old battle between light and darkness, Arthur
and Modred, should be fought again, and this time won, and
the Mysteries re-established.--If I have succeeded in conveying
to you anything of the atmosphere of this poem, I have given
you more or less that of most of the poetry attributed to
this period; there is a large mass of it: some of the poems,
like the long _Gododin_ of Aneurin, merely telling of battles;
others, like the splendid elegies of Llywarch Hen, being
laments,--but with a marvelous haughty uplift to them; and
others again, those attributed to Taliesin, strewn here and
there with passages that . . . move me strangely . . . and
remind me (to borrow a leaf from the Imagists) of a shower
of diamonds struck from some great rock of it; and of a
sunset over purple mountains; and of the Mysteries of Antiquity;
and of the Divine Human Soul. Much of this poetry is unintelligible;
much of it undoubtedly of far later origin; and the names of
Taliesin and Myrddin, all through the centuries spells for
Celts to conjure with, are now the laughing-stock of a brand-new
scholarship that has tidied them up into limbo in the usual
way. It is what happens when you treat poetry with the brain-mind,
instead of with the creative imagination God gave you to treat
it with: when you dissect it, instead of feeding your soul
with it. But this much is true, I think: out of this poetry,
the occasional intelligible flashes of it, rings out a much
greater note than any I know of in our Welsh literature since:
a sense of much profounder, much less provincial things: the
Grand Manner,--of which we have had echoes since, in the long
centuries of our provincialism; but only I think echoes;
--but you shall find something more than echoes of it, say
in Llywarch Hen, in a sense of heroic uplift, of the titanic
unconquerableness that is in the Soul;--and in Taliesin, in a
sense of the wizardly all-pervadingness of that Soul in space
and time:
"I know the imagination of the oak-trees."
"Not of father and mother,
When I became,
My creator created me;
But of nine-formed faculties,
Of the Fruit of fruits,
Of the fruit of primordial God;
Of primroses and mountain flowers,
Of the blooms of trees and shrubs,
Of Earth, of an earthly course,
When I became,--
Of the blooms of the nettle,
Of the foam of the Ninth Wave.
I was enchanted by Math
Before I became immortal.
I was enchanted by Gwydion,
The purifier of Brython,
Of Eurwys, of Euron,
Of Euron, of Modron,--
Of Five Battalions of Initiates,
High Teachers, the children of Math."
--Now Math--he was a famous wizard of old--means 'sort,' 'kind';
and so implies such ideas as 'differentiation,' 'heterogeneity.'
To say that you were enchanted by Math before you became
immortal, is as much as to say that before the great illumination,
the initiation, one is under the sway of this illusionary world
of separatenesses;--as for being 'enchanted by Gwydion,' that
name is, I suppose, etymologically the same as the Sanskrit
_Vidya,_ or _Budha;_ he is the 'Purifier' of those 'Five
Battalions of--_'Celfyddon,'_ the word is 'artists,' 'skillful
ones'; but again I imagine, it is connected with the word
_Celi,_ 'occult' or 'secret'; so that being 'enchanted by' him
would mean simply, being initiated into the Occult Wisdom. It is
difficult for a student of symbolism not to believe that there
were Theosophical activities in fifth- and sixth-century Britain.
Another glimpse of the feeling of the age you get in the two
oldest Arthurian romances: _The Dream of Rhonobwy,_ and _Culhwch
and Olwen._ They were written, in the form in which we have
them, not until the last centuries of Welsh independence,--when
there was another national illumination; and indeed all the
literature of this early time comes to us through the bards of
the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They transmitted it;
wrote it down; added to and took away from it; altered it: a
purely brain-mind scholarship might satisfy itself that they
invented it; but criticism, to be of any use at all, must be
endowed with a certain delicacy and intuition; it must rely on
better tools than the brain-mind. Matthew Arnold, who had such
qualifications, compared the work of the later bards to peasants'
huts built on and of the ruins of Ephesus; and it is still
easier for us, with the light Theosophy throws on all such
subjects, to see the greater and more ancient work through the
less and later. I shall venture to quote from _Culhwch and
Olwen:_ a passage that some of you may know very well already.
Culhwch the son of Cilydd the son of the Prince of Celyddon rides
out to seek the help of Arthur:
"And the youth pricked forth upon a steed with head dappled gray,
of four winters old, firm of limb, with shell-formed hoofs,
having a bridle of linked gold on his head, and upon him a saddle
of costly gold. In his hands were two spears of silver, sharp,
well-tempered, headed with steel, three ells in length, of an
edge to wound the wind and cause blood to flow, and that faster
than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon
the earth when the dew of June is at its heaviest. A gold-hilted
sword was at his side, the blade of which was of gold, bearing a
cross of inlaid gold of the hue of the lightning of heaven;
his war-horn was of ivory. Before him were two brindled
white-breasted greyhounds, having strong collars of rubies about
their necks, reaching from the shoulder to the ear. And the one
that was on the right side bounded across to the left side, and
the one that was on the left to the right, and like two sea-swallows
sported they around him. And his courser cast up four sods with
his four hoofs like four swallows in the air, now above his head
and now below. About him was a four-cornered cloth of purple,
having an apple of gold at each corner; and every one of the
apples was of the value of a hundred kine. And there was
precious gold of the value of three hundred kine upon his shoes
and upon his stirrups, from his knee to the tip of his toe. And
the blade of reed-grass bent not beneath him, as he journeyed
towards the gates of Arthur's palace."
So far we have the glittering imagination of the twelfth-century
bard; you might think working in a medium not wholly Celtic, but
Norman-influenced as well; imagining his Arthurian Culhwch in
terms of the knights he had seen at the courts of the Lords
Marchers,--were it not that just such descriptions are the
commonplaces of Irish Celticism, where they come from a time and
people that had never seen Norman knights at all. But now you
begin to leave regions where Normans can be remembered or
imagined at all:
"Spake the youth, 'Is there a porter?'--'There is; and unless
thou holdest thy peace, small will be thy welcome. I am the
porter of Arthur's hall on the first day of January in every
year; and on every other day than this the post is filled by
Huandaw, and Gogigwc, and Llaescenym, and Penpingion who goeth
upon his head to save his feet, neither towards the heavens nor
towards the earth, but like a rolling stone upon the floor of
the court.'--'Open thou the portal.'--'I will not open it.'--
'Wherefore not?'--'The knife is in the meat and the drink is in
the horn, and there is revelry in Arthur's court; and no man may
enter but a craftsman bearing his craft, or the son of the king
of a privileged country. But there will be refreshment for thy
dogs and for thy horse, and for thee there will be collops cooked
and peppered, and luscious wine and mirthful song,--and food for
fifty men shall be set before thee in the guest chamber, where
the stranger and the sons of other countries eat, who come not
into the precincts of the palace of Arthur. Said the youth,
'That will I not do. If thou openest the portal, it is well. If
thou dost not open it, I will bring disgrace upon thy lord and an
evil report upon thee. And I will set up three shouts at this
very gate, than which none were ever more deadly, from the top of
Pengwaed in Cornwall to the bottom of Dinsol in the North, and to
Esgair Oerfel in Ireland.'--'Whatsoever clamor thou mayest make,'
said Glewlwyd Gafaelfawr, against the rules of Arthur's court
thou shalt not enter until I first go and consult with Arthur.'
"Then Glewlwyd went into the hall. And Arthur said to him, 'Hast
thou news from the gate?'--Half of my life is past, and half of
thine. I was heretofore in Caer Se and As Se, in Sach and
Salach, in Lotor and Ffotor, in India the Greater and India the
Less. And I was with thee in the Battle of Dau Ynyr, when the
twelve hostages were brought from Norway. And I have also been
in Europe and in Africa and in the islands of Corsica, and in
Caer Brythwch and Brythach and Ferthach; and I was present when
thou didst conquer Greece in the East. And I have have been
in Caer Oeth and Annoeth and Caer Nefenhir: nine supreme
sovereigns, handsome men, saw we there; but never did I behold a
man of equal dignity to him who is now at the door of the
portal.' Then said Arthur:--'If walking thou didst enter here,
return thou running. And everyone that beholds the light, and
everyone that opens and shuts the eye, let him show him respect
and serve him; some with gold-mounted drinking-horns, others
with collops cooked and peppered, until such time as food and
drink can be set before him."
Culhwch came in, and asked a boon of Arthur; and Arthur answered
that he should receive whatsoever his tongue might name, "as far
as the wind dries and the rain moistens and the sun revolves and
the sea encircles and the earth extends; save only my ship and
my mantle, and Caledfwlch my sword, and Rhongomiant my lance, and
Wynebgwrthucher my shield, and Carnwenhau my dagger and Gwen
Hwyfar my wife. By the truth of heaven thou shalt receive it
cheerfully, name what thou wilt." So Culhwch made his request;--
and it is really here that the ancient ages come trooping in:--
"I crave of thee that thou obtain for me Olwen the daughter of
Yspaddaden Head of Giants; and this boon I seek likewise at the
hands of thy warriors. I seek it from Cai, and Bedwyr, and
Greidawl Galldonyd, and Greid the son of Eri, and Cynddelig
Cyfarwvdd, and Tathal Cheat-the-Light, and Maelwys the son of
Baeddan, and"--well, there are hundreds of them; but I must
positively give you a few; they are all, it is likely, the
denizens of ancient Celtic God-worlds and fairy-worlds and
goblin-worlds,--"and Duach and Grathach and Nerthach the sons of
Gwawrddur Cyrfach (these men came forth from the confines of
hell); and Huell the son of Caw (he never yet made a request at
the hands of any lord.) And Taliesin the Chief of Bards, and
Manawyddan son of the Boundless, and Cormorant the son of Beauty
(no one struck him in the Battle of Camlan by reason of his
ugliness; all thought he was an auxiliary devil. Hair had he
upon him like the hair of a stag). And Sandde Bryd Angel (no one
touched him with a spear in the Battle of Camlan by reason of his
beauty; all thought he was a ministering angel). And Cynwyl
Sant (the third man who escaped from the Battle of Camlan; and
he was the last that parted from Authur upon Henrtoen his horse).
And Henwas the Winged the son of Erim; (unto these three men
belonged these three peculiarities: with Henbedestyr there was
not anyone that could keep pace, either on horseback or on foot;
with Henwas Adeiniog no fourfooted beast could run the distance
of an acre, much less could it go beyond it; and as to Sgilti
Ysgawndroed, when he intended to go on a message for his lord, he
never sought to find a path, but knowing whither he was to go, if
his way led through a wood he went along the tops of the trees.
During his whole life a blade of grass bent not beneath his feet,
much less did it break, so light was his tread.) Teithi Hen the
son of Gwynhan (his dominions were swallowed by the sea, and he
himself barely escaped, and he came to Arthur; and his knife had
this peculiarity: from the time he came there no haft would ever
remain on it; and owing to this a sickness came on him, and he
pined away during the remainder of his life, and of this he
died.) Drem the son of Dremidyd (when the gnat arose in the
morning with the sun, Drem could see it from Gelli Wis in
Cornwall as far off as Pen Blathaon in North Britain.) And Eidol
the son of Ner, and Glwyddyn Saer (who built Ehangwen, Arthur's
hall.) Henwas and Henwyneb, (an old companion unto Arthur).
Gwallgoyc another. (When he came to a town, though there were
three hundred houses in it, if he wanted anything, he would let
sleep come to the eyes of no man until he had it.) Osla
Gyllellfawr (he bore a short broad dagger. When Arthur and his
hosts came before a torrent, they would seek a narrow place where
they might cross the water, and lay the sheathed dagger across
the torrent, and it would be a bridge enough for the armies of
the Three Islands of the Mighty and the three islands near
thereby, with all their spoils.) The sons of Llwch Llawyniog
from beyond the raging sea. Celi and Cueli and Gilla Coes Hydd,
(who could clear three hundred acres at a bound: the chief
leaper of Ireland was he). Sol and Gwadyn Ossol and Gwadyn
Odyeith. (Sol could stand all day upon one foot. Gwadyn Ossol,
if he stood upon the top of the highest mountain in the world, it
would become a level plain under his feet. Gwadyn Odyeith,--the
soles of his feet emitted sparks when they struck upon things
hard, like the heated mass drawn out of the forge. He cleared
the way for Arthur when they came to any stoppage.) Hireerwm and
Hiratrwm (the day they went upon a visit three cantref provided
for their entertainment, and they feasted until noon and drank
until night and they they devoured the heads of vermin as if they
had never eaten anything in their lives. When they made a visit
they left neither the fat not the lean, the hot nor the cold, the
sour nor the sweet, the fresh not the salt, the boiled nor the
raw.) Huarwar the son of Aflawn (who asked Arthur such a boon as
would satisfy him; it was the third great plague of Cornwall
when he received it. None could get a smile from him but when he
was satisfied.) Sugyn the sone of Sugnedydd (who could suck up
the sea on which there were three hundred ships, so broad-chested
he was). Uchtryd Faryf Draws (who spread his red untrimmed beard
over the eight-and-forty rafters that were in Arthur's hall).
Bwlch and Cyfwlch and Sefwlch the three sons of Cleddyf Cyfwlch,
the three grandsons of Cleddyf Difwlch. (Their three shields
were three gleaming glitterers. Their three spears were three
pointed piercers. Their three swords were three griding
gashers,--Gles, and Glessic, and Gleisad.) Clust the son of
Clustfeinad; (though he were buried seven cubits beneath the
earth, he would hear the ant fifty miles off rise from her nest
in the norning). Medyr the son of Methredydd; (from Belli Wic
he could in a twinkling")--
Well; one must stop somewhere; Culhwch himself was in no hurry
to. He went on until the armies of the Island of the Mighty and
the chief ladies of Arthur's court, with all their peculiarities,
had been enumerated. But here, I say, you are let into an elder
world; beyond this one in space, beyond it in time. You are on
the precipice edge of the world's end, and mist fills the chasm
before you; and out of the mist, things vast and gigantic,
things half human and things not half human, present themselves,
stirring your wonder, and withdraw leaving your imagination
athirst. "These men came forth from the confines of hell" ....
Who wrote of them had news, I think, of terrific doings in
Atlantis, when earth shook to the tread of giant hosts. I
confess that to me all things European, after this, look a little
neat and dapper. I look from the cliffs at the limit of things,
out over
.....the sunset bound of Lyonnesse,
A land of old upheaven from the abyss
By fire, to sink into the abyss again;
Where fragments of forgotten people dwelt:
--it is not in this world; belongs not to this Fifth Race; but
is more ancient, fantasmal, and portentous.
Has it ever occurred to you that no body of men, no movement, no
nation for that matter, can choose for itself a symbol that does
not actually express it? The flags of the nations are all, for
those that can read them, the sign manuals of the souls of the
nations, wherein the status of each is written plain; though
those that chose the symbol, and those that glory in it, may have
no idea how they are thus revealing or exposing themselves.--No,
I am not going to speak of the Dragon; which, by all traditions,
was the symbol chosen for the monarchy set up by the fifth-century
Britons; nor to remind you--and yet it is worth remembering,--
that the Dragon is the symbol of the Esoteric Wisdom;--I am
going to speak of something else.--You take some form, some
picture; and it seems to you in some inexplicable way inspiring;
and you adopt it, and say _In hoc signo vincam._ Why? You
know nothing about symbolism; and yet, if you have any inner
life, those who understand symbolism can read your inner
life in you symbol. That is because symbolism is a universal
science, real, and with nothing arbitrary about it; and because
something in your subconsciousness wiser than you has directed
you choice, and means you to be expressed.
Take one of the most universal symbols of all: the Cross. In one
form or another we find it all over the world. In ancient Egypt,
where it is called the _Ankh,_ and is drawn as a capital T with a
circle above. There it symbolizes life in the largest sense.
The circle above stands for Spirit; the Tau or cross below, for
matter: thus it pictures the two in their true relation the one
to the other.--The Christian Church, as it grew up in the last
centuries of the Roman empire, chose for itself a symbol,--in
which Constantine went forth to conquer. It was the four limbs
of the cross: simply the symbol of Matter.
But somehow, the Christian Church in the Celtic Isles did not
adopt this symbol, or rather this form of it. It took what is
called the Celtic Cross: the Cross, which is matter, with the
Circle, which is Spirit, imposed over the upper part of it. Now
if you brought a man from India, or China, or anywhere, who knew
nothing about European history or Christianity, but understood
the ancient science of symbolism; and showed him these two
crosses, the Celtic and the Latin; he would tell you at once
that the one, the Latin, stood for a movement wholly unspiritual;
and that the other, the Celtic, stood for a movement with some
spiritual light in it. How much, I am not prepared to say.
One of the chief formative forces in Christian theology was Saint
Augustine of Hippo, born in 354, died in 430. He taught that man
was Originally sinful, naturally depraved; and that no effort of
his own will could make him otherwise: all depended on the Grace
of God, something from without, absolutely beyond control of
volition. Then rose up a Welshman by the name of Morgan,--or he
may have been an Irishman; some say so; only Morgan is a Welsh,
not an Irish name; and evidence is lacking that there were Irish
Christians at that time; he was a Celt, 'whatever';--and went to
Rome, teaching and preaching. His doctrine was that man is not
originally sinful and naturally depraved; he had the temerity to
declare that pagans, especially those who had never heard of
Christianity, were not by God's ineffable mercy damned to
everlasting hell; that unbaptized infants were not destined to
frizzle eternally; that what a man ought to do, that he had the
power, within his own being, to do; and that his salvation lay
in his own hands. They translated his Welsh name (which means
'Sea-born') into the Greek--Pelagius; and dubbed his damnable
heresy 'Pelagianism'; and it was a heresy that flourished a good
deal in the Celtic Isles;--his writings came down in Ireland.
The incident is not much in itself; but something. Not that the
Celtic Church of David and Patrick was Pelagian; it was not. In
the matter of doctrine it is impossible to distinguish it from
the Church on the continent. But Pelagianism may suggest that
there were in Britain relics of an elder light.
Did some echo of ancient wisdom, Druidic, survive in Britain from
Pre-roman days? It is a question that has been much fought over;
and one that, nowadays, the learned among my countrymen answer
very rabidly in the negative. You have but to propound it in a
whisper, to make them foam heartily at the mouth. Bless you,
they know that it didn't, and can prove it over and over;
because--because--it couldn't have, and you are a fool for
thinking it could. Here is the position taken by modern
scholarship (as a rule): we know nothing about the philosophy of
the Druids, and do not believe they had one. They could not have
had one; and the classical writers who said they had simply knew
nothing about it. It may be useful to quote what some of these
classical writers say.
"They (the Druids) speak the language of the Gods," says Diodorus
Siculus (v, 31, 4); who describes them also as "exhorting
combatants to peace, and taming them like wild beasts by
enchantment" (v, 31, 5). They taught men, says Diogenes
Laertius, "to worship the Gods, to do no evil, and to exercise
courage" (6). They taught "many things regarding the stars and
their motions, the extent of the universe and the earth, and the
nature of things, and the power and might of the immortal Gods,"
says Caesar (iv, 14.); and Strabo speaks of their teaching in
moral science (iv, 4, 4). "And ye, ye Druids," says Lucan, "to
you only is given knowledge or ignorance (whichever it be) of the
Gods and the powers of heaven. . . . From you we learn that the
borne of man's ghost is not the senseless grave, not the pale
realm of the monarch below." (i, 451 sq,) "The Druids wish to
impress this in particular: that souls do not perish, but pass
from one to another after death." (Caesar, iv, 14) Diodorus
testifies that "among them the doctrine of Pythagoras prevailed,
that the souls of men are immortal, and after completing their
term of existence, live again, the soul passing into another
body" (v, 28). Says Valerius Maximus: "They would fain make us
believe that the souls of men are immortal. I would be tempted
to call these breeches-warers fools, if their doctrine were not
the same as that of the mantle-clad Pythagoras"; and he goes on
to speak of the Celtic custom of lending money to be repaid in a
future life (vi, 6, 10). Timagenes, Strabo, and mela also bear
witness to their teaching the immortality of the soul.
I may say at once that I copy all these quotations from a book
written largely to prove that the Druids were savage medicine-men
with no philosophy at all: it is, _The Religion of the Ancient
Celts,_ by Canon MacCulloch. The argument used by this learned
divine is very simple. The Druids were savage medicine-men,
and could have known nothing about Pythagoras' teachings or
Pythagoras himself. Therefore they didn't. All the classical
writers were exaggerating, or inventing, or copying from one
another.--It never occurs to our Canon to remember Iamblichus'
statement that the Druids did not borrow or learn from Pythagoras,
but Pythagoras from them. He quotes with no sign of doubt
the things said by the classical writers about barbaric Druid
rites; never dreaming that in respect to these there may
have been invention, exaggeration, or copying one from another--
and that other chiefly the gentle Julius who--but I have
mentioned _his_ exploit before.
Holding to such firm preconceptions as these,--and being in
total ignorance of the fact that the Esoteric Wisdom was once
universal, and therefore naturally the same with Pythagoras as
with anyone else who had not lost it, whether he and the Druids
had ever heard of each other or not,--it becomes quite easy for
my learned countryment to scout the idea that any such doctrine
or system could have survived among the Britons until the fifth
century, and revived then. Yet Nennius, by the way, asserts that
Vortigern (the king who called in the Saxons) had 'Magi' with
him; which word in the Irish text appears as 'Druids': and
Canon MacCulloch himself speaks of this as evidence of a
recrudescence of Druidism at that time.
With those quotations from the classical writers in view--if
with nothing else,--I think we may call Reincarnation.... the
characteristic doctrine of Druidism. It so appeared to the
Romans; it was that doctrine, which with themselves had been
obscured by skepticism, worldliness, and the outwornness of their
spiritual perceptions, that struck them as the most noteworthy,
most surprising thing in Druidic teaching. It stood in sharp
contrast, too, with the beliefs of Christianity; so that,
supposing it, and the system that taught it, had died during the
Roman occupation of Britain, there really was nowhere from
which it might have been regained. Wales has been, until
very recently, extraordinarily cut off from the currents of
civilization and world-thought. She has dwelt aloof among her
mountains, satisfied with an interesting but exceedingly narrow
little culture of her own. You might almost say that from the
time the Romans left Britain there was no channel through which
ideas might flow in to her; and this idea, especially, was
hardly in Europe to flow in. And yet this idea has curiously
persisted in Wales, as a tradition among the unlettered, even to
our own day. Dr. Evans-Wentz, of Berkeley, Oxford, and Rennes
Universities, in this present twentieth century, found old people
among the peasantry who knew something about it, had heard of it
from their elders; there was nothing new or unfamiliar about it
to them; and this though nearly all Welsh folklore, even belief
in the fairies, almost suffered extinction during the Religious
Revivals of the eighteenth century and since. They say the
chapels frightened the fairies out of Wales; it is not quite
true; but you can understand how wave after wave of fervid
Calvinism would have dealt with a tradition like that of
Reincarnation. And yet echoes of it linger, and Dr. Wentz found
them. I myself remember hearing of a servant-girl from the
mountains to whom her mistress (from whom I heard it) introduced
the subject. The girl expressed no surprise whatever: indeed to
goodness she shouldn' wonder, so there; her father was a druid,
miss, indeed and had told her about it when she was a child.
We have collateral evidence,--in Nennius, I believe,--for the
existence of several famed poets among the Welsh at that time;
and Tallesin' is one of the names mentioned. Seventy-seven poems
come down ascribed to him: I quoted some lines from one of them;
here now are some line from another. The child Taliesin is
discovered in the court of Maelgwr Gwynedd, where he has
confounded the bards with his magic; and is called forth to
explain himself. He does so in the following verses:
Primary Chief Bard am I to Elphin,
And my original country is the Region of the Summer Stars;
Idno and Heinin called me Merddin;
At length every being shall call me Taliesin.
I was with my Lord in the highest sphere
When Lucifer fell into the depths of hell;
I have borne a banner before Alexander;
I know the names of the stars from north to south.
I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain;
I was in the Court of Don (the Milky Way) before the birth
of Gwydion;
I was on the high cross of the merciful Son of God;
I have been three periods in the prison of Arianrhod.
I was in Asia with Noah in the Ark;
I saw the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah;
I was in India when Rome was built;
I am now come here to the remnant of the Trojans.
I was with my Lord in the ass's manger;
I strengthened Moses through the waters of Jordan;
I was in the firmament from the Cauldron of Ceridwen
I shall be on earth until the day of doom. *
------
* I quote it from Mr. T.W. Rollestone's _Myths and Legends of the
Celtic Race._ The poem appeares in the _Hanes Taliesin,_ in Lady
Guest's _Mabinogion._
------
Now, what would common sense have to say about things like that?
Simply, I think, that they are echoes that came down in Wales
through the ages, of a teaching that once was known. They do
not,--they would not,--no one would expect them to,--give the
true and exact features and the inwardness of such teaching, but
they do reflect the haunting reminiscences of a race that once
believed in Reincarnation so firmly, that people were ready to
lend money not to be repaid until a future life on earth. If you
can prove that that poem not written until the thirteenth, or
sixteenth, or eighteenth century, all the better; it only shows
the greater strength, the longer endurance, of the tradition;
and therefore, the greater reality of that from which the
tradition came. It is the ghost of something which once was
living; and the longer you can show the ghost surviving,--the
more living in its day was the something it survived from. Your
Tamerlanes and Malek Rics can be used to frighten babies for
centures;--their ghosts walk in that sense; their memories
linger;--but your Tomlinsons die and are done with, and no wind
carries rumors of them after.
And the name of Taliesin,--whom you may say we know to have been
a Welsh poet of the sixth century,--is made the peg on which to
hang these floating reminiscences of Druidic teaching;--and the
story told about him,--a story replete with universal symbolism,
--is, for anyone who has studied that science, clearly symbolic
of the initiation of a Teacher of the Secret Doctrine.
What is it accounts for race-persistence? _Not_ just what you
see on the physical plane. There is what we should call an
astral mold; and this is fed and nourished,--its edges kept
firm and distinct,--by forces from the plane of causes, the
thought-plane. When this mold has been well established,--as by
centuries of national greatness and power,--all sorts of waves of
outer circumstance may roll over the race, and apparently wash
its raciality clean away; and yet something in the unseen
operates to resist, and, when the waves recede, to raise up first
the old race-consciousness, and finally national existence again.
Take Ireland for example. It has been over-run and over-run so
much that many authorities would deny the existence of any Celtic
blood there at all. But what is absolutely undeniable is that a
distinct and well-defined racial type exists there; and that it
corresponds largely to the racial type--I do not mean physical so
much as spiritual,--that the Greek and Roman writers ascribed to
the Celtic Gauls. It is often claimed that an Irishman is merely
an inferior kind of Englishman, and that there is little
difference in blood between the two; but those who make this
claim most loudly would not dream of denying the difference of
the mental types; they are generally the ones who see most
difference. Why was it that the children of the Norman invaders
of Ireland became _Hiberniores ipsis Hiberniis?_ Because of the
astral mold, certainly. It is race-consciousness that makes
race, and not the other way; and there is something behind that
makes race-consciousness; so that even where calamity has
smashed up the latter and put it altogether in abeyance, the
seeds of it remain, in the soil and on the inner planes, to
sprout again in their day; when the Crest-Wave rolls in; when
Souls come to revive them. It may be that this will never
happen, of course; but it seems to me that where Nature wishes
to put an end to these racial recrudescences, she must take
strong steps.
Though the British Celts had been under Roman rule for four
centuries, their language today is Celtic.--Why?--Because there
was what you may call a very old, well-established and strong
Celtic-speaking astral mold. We absorbed a large number of Latin
words; but assimilated them to the Celtic mold so that you would
never recognise them; whereas in a page of English the Latin
borrowings stand out by the score. Look at that _ascend,_ for
instance: Latin _ascendere_ parading itself naked and unashamed,
and making no pretense whatever to be anything else. You shall
find _ascendere,_ too, on any page of Welsh; or rather, you
shall not find him, by reason of his skillful camouflage. He has
cut off his train, as in English; but he has cut off more of it:
the _d_ of the stem, as well as the ending. He has altered both
his vowels, and one of his three remaining consonants; and
appears as _esgyn,_ to walk the pages undetected for an alien by
that vigilant police, the Celtic sense of euphony. He is typical
of a thousand others. Wherefore the difference?--The English
were a new people in process of formation, and besides with a
whole heap of Latin blood in them from the Roman province; their
mold was faintly formed, or only forming; but the Celts had
formed theirs rigidly in ancient times.
Again: when in the ninth century Hywel Dda king of Wales
codified the laws of his country, the result was a Celtic code
without, I think, any relation to Roman law; though Roman law
had prevailed in Roman Britain for three centuries or so. What
strong Celtic molds must have persisted, to cause this! Roman
law imposed itself on nearly all Europe, including many peoples
that never were under Roman rule; and yet here was this people,
that had been all that time under the Romans, oblivious of Roman
law, uninfluenced by it, practically speaking;--and returning at
the first opportunity to the kind of laws they had had before the
Romans were born or thought of.
Druidism had been proscribed, as a practice, during Roman times.
The worship of the Celtic Gods had continued; but they had been
assimilated to those of the empire;--which would be a much more
difficult thing to do were the Gods, as your modern learned
suppose, mere fictions of the superstitious, and not the symbols
of, or the Powers behind, the forces of Nature. So Celtic
religion outwardly was submerged in Roman religion; and then
later. Christianity came in. But the science, the institutions,
and the philosophy of the Druids had been part and parcel of the
inner life of the race perhaps as long as their laws and language
had; and your Celt runs by nature to religion, or even to
religiosity,--ultra-religion. Is it likely that, while he kept
his laws and language, he let his religion go? And when it was
not an arbitrary farrago of dogmas, like some we might mention;
but a philosophy of the soul so vivid that he counted death
little more to fuss about than going to sleep?
When should those old ideas have reappeared,--when should the
racial astral molds have been brought out and furbished up with
new strength to make them endure? Why, when the Roman dominion
came to an end; when the people were turning for inspiration to
their own things, and away from Latin things; when they were
forgoing Latin for Celtic; reviving Celtic laws and customs;
trying to forget they had been subjected to foreigners, and to
remember and resurrect the old Monarchy of Britain. Christianity
would not give them all the difference from Romanism that they
wanted,--that the most ardent among them wanted: the Romans were
Christians too;--but there was that other ancient thing which the
Romans had proscribed. It still existed, in Ireland for example;
and for that matter, there were plenty of places in Britain where
the Roman arm could never have reached it. Matthew Arnold saw
these things in his day, and argued for the Neo-druidism of the
sixth century. He was a man accustomed to deal in ideas. You
may easily train your mind to an acuteness and sagacity in
dealing with grammatical roots, and forms, that will not help you
in dealing with ideas.
To sum up, then: I believe there was an influx of the Crest-Wave
into Britain, from about 410 to 540: a national awakenment, with
something of greatness to account for the Arthurian legend; and
with something of spiritual illumination, through a revival of
Druidic Wisdom to account for the rumor of Taliesin. I am not
sure but that this influenced the Celtic Church: I am not sure
but that David, and Cadoc, and Teilo, and Padarn, fathers of that
church, were men pervious to higher influences; and that the
monastery-colleges they presided over were real seats of lerning,
unopposed to, if not in league with, the light.