"A marvelous land, full of music, where primrose blossoms on the
hair, and the body is white as snow.
"There none speaks of _mine and thine;_ white are the teeth and
black the brows; eyes flash with many-colored lights, and the
hue of the fox-glove is on every cheek. . . .
"Though fair are the plains of Ireland, few of them are so fair
as the Great Plain. The ale of Ireland is heady, but headier far
the ale of the Great Country. What a wonder of a land it is!
No youth there grows to old age. Warm streams flow through
it; the choicest mead and wine. Men there are always comely
and blemishless."
Well; Ith set sail from the Great Plain, with three times thirty
warriors, and landed at Corcaguiney in the south-west of Ireland;
and at that time the island inhabited less by men than by Gods;
it was the Tuatha De Danaan, the Race of the Danaan Gods, that
held the kingship there. Little wonder, then, that the first
name of Ireland we get in the Greek writings is "Sacred Ierne,
populous with the Hibernians."
Well now, he found MacCuill, MacCecht, and MacGrene the Son of
the Sun, arranging to divide the kingdom between them; and they
called on him to settle how the division should be.--"Act," said
he, "according to the laws of justice, for the country you dwell
in is a good one; it is rich in fruit and honey, in wheat and in
fish; and in heat and cold it is temperate." From that they
thought he would be designing to conquer it from them, and so
forestalled his designs by killing him; but his companions
escaped, and sailed back to the Great Plain. That was why the
Milesians came to conquer Ireland. The chiefs of them were Eber
Finn, and Eber Donn, and Eremon, and Amargin the Druid: the
sons of Mile, the son of Bile the son of Bregon; thus their
grandfather was the brother of that Ith whom the Gods of
Ireland slew.
It was on a Thursday, the first of May, and the seventeenth day
of the moon, that the Milesians arrived in Ireland; and as he
set his right foot on the soil of it, Amargin chanted this poem:
I am the wave of the Ocean;
I am the murmur of the billow;
I am the ox of the seven combats;
I am the vuture upon the rock;
I am a tear of the sun;
I am the fairest of plants;
I am a wild boar in valor;
I am a salmon in the water;
I am a lake in the plain;
I am a word of science;
I am the spear-point that gives battle;
I am the god who creates in the head the fire of thought.
Who is it that enlightens the assembly upon the mountain,
if not I?
Who telleth the ages of the moon, if not I?
Who showeth the place where the sun goes to rest?
They went forward to Tara, and summoned the kings of the Danaan
Gods to give up the island to them; who asked three days to
consider whether they would give battle, or surrender, or quit
Ireland. On that request Amargin gave judgment: that it would
be wrong for the Milesians to take the Gods unprepared that way;
and that they should go to their ships again, and sail out the
distance of nine waves from the shore, and then return; then if
they could conquer Ireland fairly in battle, it should be theirs.
So they embarked, and put the nine waves between themselves and
the shore, and waited. And the Danaans raised up a druid mist
and a storm against them, whereby Ireland seemed to them no more
than the size of a pig's back in the water; and by reason of
that it has the name of Innis na Wic, the Island of the Pig. But
if the Gods had magic, Amargin had better magic; and he sang
that Invocation to the Land of Ireland; and at that the storm
fell and the mist vanished. Then Eber Donn was exulting in his
rage at the thought of putting the inhabitants to death; but the
thought in his mind brought the storm again, and his ship went
down, and he was drowned. But at last the remnant of them
landed, and fought a battle with the Gods, and defeated them;
whereafter the Gods put a druid invisibility on themselves, and
retired into the hills; and there in their fairy palaces they
remain to this day; indeed they do. They went back into the
inwardness of things; whence, however, they were always
appearing, and again vanishing into it; and all the old
literature of Ireland is thridded through with the lights of
their magic and their beauty, and their strange forthcomings and
withdrawings. For example:
There was Midir the Proud, one of them. In the time of the great
Caesar, Eochaid Airem was high king of Ireland; and he had for
his queen Etain, reborn then as a mortal,--but a Danaan princess
at one time, and the wife of Miidir. It was a fine evening in
the summer, and Eochaid Airem was looking from the walls of Tara
and admiring the beauty of the world. He saw an unknown warrior
riding towards him; clad in purple tunic; his hair yellow as
gold, and his blue eyes shining like candles. A five-pointed
lance was in his hand; his shield was ornamented with beads
of gold.
--"A hundred thousand welcomes to you," said the high king. "Who
is it you are?"
--"I know well who you are," said the warrior, "and for a long
time."
--"What name is on you?" said Eochaid.
--"Nothing illustrious about it in the world," said the other. "I
am Midir of Bregleith."
--"What has brought you hither?"
--"I am come to play at chess with you."
--"I have great skill at chess," said the high king; and indeed,
he was the best at it in Ireland, in those days.
--"We shall see about that," said Midir.
--"But the queen is sleeping in her chamber now," said Eochaid;
"and it is there the chessboard is."
--"Little matter," said Midir, "I have here a board as good as
yours is."
And that was the truth. His chessboard was of silver, glittering
with precious stones at each corner. From a satchel wrought of
shining metal he took his chessmen, which were of pure gold.
Then he arranged them on the board.--"Play you," said he.
--"I will not play without a stake," said the king.
--"What will the stake be?" said Midir.
--"All one to me," said Eochaid.
--"If you win," said Midir, "I will give you fifty broad-chested
horses with slim swift feet."
--"And if you win," said Eochaid Airem, sure of victory, "I will
give you whatever you demand."
Midir won that game, and demanded Etain the queen. But the rules
of chess are that the vanquished may claim his revenge,--a second
game, that is, to decide the matter; and the high king proposed
that it should be played at the end of a year. Midir agreed,
and vanished.
The year ended, and Eochaid was at Tara; he had had the palace
surrounded by a great armed host against Midir; and Etain was
there with him. Here is the description of Etain:
"A clear comb of silver was held in her hand, the comb was
adorned with gold; and near her, as for washing, was a basin of
silver whereon four birds had been chased, and there were little
bright gems of carbuncles on the rim of the basin. A bright
purple mantle waved round her; and beneath it another mantle
with fringes of silver: the outer one clasped over her bosom
with a golden brooch. A tunic she wore, with a long hood that
might cover her head attached to it; it was stiff and glossy
with green silk beneath red embroidery of gold, and clasped over
her breast with marvelously wrought clasps of gold and silver, so
that men saw the bright gold and the green silk flashing against
the sun. On her head were two tresses of golden hair, and each
tress plaited into four strands, and at the end of each strand a
little ball of gold. Each of her two arms was as white as the
snow of a single night, and each of her two cheeks of the hue of
the foxglove. Even and small the teeth in her head, and they
shone like pearls. Her eyes were blue as the blue hyacinth, her
lips delicate and crimson. . . . White as snow, or the foam of
the wave, was her neck. . . . Her feet were slim and white as the
ocean foam; evenly set were her eyes, and the eyebrows of a
bluish black, such as you see on the shell of a beetle."
--What I call on you to note about that is something very
unpoetic. It is not the flashing brightness, the grace, the
evidence of an eye craving for beauty, and of a hand sure in the
creation of beauty;--but the dress. The Irish writers got these
ideas of dress without having contacted, for example, classical
civilization, or any foreign civilization. The ideas were
home-grown, the tradition Irish. The writer was describing what
he was familiar with: the kind of dress worn by an Irish princess
before Ireland had seen foreign fashions and customs. He was
heightening picture for artistic effect, no doubt; but he was
drawing with his eye on the object. I am inclined to think that
imagination always must work upon a basis of things known; just
as tradition must always be based on fact. Now then: try,
will you, to imagine primitive savages dressing like that, or
sufficiently nearly like that for one of their bards to
work up such a picture on the actualities he had seen. I
think you cannot do it. And this picture is not extraordinary;
it is typical of what we commonly find in the ancient Irish
stories. What it proves is that the Ireland that emerges
into history, war-battered and largely decivilized by long
unsettled conditions as she was, remembered and was the inheiritor
of an Ireland consummately civilized.--But to return to the
hall of Eochaid Airem:
Every door in it was locked; and the whole place filled with the
cream of the war-host of the Gael, and apprehension on everyone,
they not knowing would it be war and violence with Midir, or what
it would be. So it had been all day; so it was now in the dusk
of the evening. Then suddenly there stood Midir in the midst of
them: Midir the Proud; never had he seemed fairer than then.
No man had seen him enter; none knew how he had come. And then
it was but putting his spear in his left hand for him, and
putting his right arm about the waist of Etain, and rising
through the air with her, and vanishing through the roof. And
when the men of Ireland rushed out from the hall, they saw two
swans circling above Tara and away, their long white necks yoked
together with a yoke of moon-bright silver.
It was a long time the Gods were ruling in Ireland before the
Milesians came. King after king reigned over them; and there
are stories on stories, a rich literature for another nation,
about the time of these Danaan Gods alone. One of them was Lir,
the Boundless Deep. He had four children by his first wife;
when she died, he married her sister, Aoife by name. Aoife was
jealous of the love he had for his children, and was for killing
them. But when it came to doing it, "her womanhood overcame
her," and instead she put swanhood on the four of them, and the
doom that swans they should be from that out for nine hundred
years: three hundred on Lake Derryvaragh in West Meath, three
hundred on the Straits of Moyle between Ireland and Scotland,
three hundred on the Atlantic by Erris and Innishglory. After
that the enchantment would end.
For that, Bov Derg, one of the Gods, changed her into a demon of
the air, and she flew away shrieking, and was heard of no more.
But there was no taking the fate from the swan-children; and the
Danaans sought them on their lake, and found they had human
speech left to them, and the gift of wonderful Danaan music.
From all parts they came to the lake to talk with them and to
hear them singing; and that way it was for three hundred years.
Then they must depart, Fionuala and her three brothers, the
swan-children, and wing their way to the northern sea, and be among
the wild cliffs and the foam; and the worst of loneliness and
cold and storm was the best fate there was for them. Their
feathers froze to the rocks on the winter nights; but they
filled the drear chasms of the tempest with their Danaan singing.
It was Fionuala wrapped her plumage about her brothers, to keep
them from the cold; she was their leader, heartening them. And
if it was bad for them on the Straits of Moyle, it was worse on
the Atlantic; three hundred years they were there, and bitter
sorrow the fate on them.
When their time to be freed was near, they were for flying to the
palace of Lir their father, at the hill of the White Field in
Armagh. But long since the Milesians had come into Ireland, and
the Danaans had passed into the hills and the unseen; and with
the old centuries of their enchantment heavy on them, their eyes
had grown no better than the eyes of mortals: gorse-grown hills
they saw, and green nettles growing, and no sign of the walls and
towers of the palace of Lir. And they heard the bells ringing
from a church, and were frightened at the "thin, dreadful sound."
But afterwards, in their misery, they took refuge with the saint
in the church, and were converted, and joined him in singing the
services. Then, after a while, the swanhood fell from them, and
they became human, with the whole of their nine centuries heavy
on them. "Lay us in one grave," said Fionuala to the saint;
"and place Conn at my right hand, and Fiachra at my left, and Aed
before my face; for there they were wont to be when I sheltered
them many a winter night upon the seas of Moyle." So it was they
were buried; but the saint sorrowed for them till the end of his
days. And there, if you understand it, you have the forgotten
story of Ireland.
She was once Danaan, and fortunate in the Golden Age. Then she
was enchanted, and fell from her high estate; and sorrow and the
wildness of ages of decivilizing wars were her portion; but
she retained her wonderful Danaan gift of song. Then came
Christianity, and she sang her swan-song in the services of the
Church;--when she had overcome her terror of the ominous sound of
the bells. She became human again: that is, enjoyed one more
period of creative greatness, a faint revival of her old
splendor; and then,--Ah, it was a long time ago; a long time
the hermit had been sorrowing over her grave! But listen, by the
lake of Derryvaragh, on the seas of Moyle, or by Erris and
Innishglory, and you will hear still the ghostly echoes of the
singing of Danaan swans. _Danaan_ swans: music better than of
the world of men!
O Swan-child, come from the grave, and be bright as you were
of old
When you sing o'er the sun-bright wave in the Danaans' Age
of Gold!
Are you never remembering, darling, the truth that you knew
well then,
That there's nobody dies from the world, asthore, but is
born in the world again.
It brings me naturally to the place where we take her up in our
history. At the end of the fourth century, "the sea," says the
Roman poet Claudian, "was foamy with the hostile oars of the
Irish." Niall of the Nine Hostages was high king of Tara; and
he was all for a life on the ocean wave and a home on the rolling
deep. He raided the coasts of Britain annually, and any other
coasts that came handy, carrying off captives where he might.
One of these was a boy named Sucat, from Glamorgan: probably
from Glamorgan, though it might have been from anywhere between
the Clyde and the Loire. In time this Sucat escaped from his
Irish slavery, entered the Church, took the Latin name of
Patrick, and made it his business to Christianize Ireland. That
was about the time when the Britons were throwing off the Roman
yoke. He was at the height of his career in the middle of the
fifth century.
Even if he did not make a clean and bloodless sweep of the whole
country, Patrick was one of the most successful Christian
missionaries that ever preached. There was some opposition by
the druids, but it was not successful. He went to the courts of
the kings, and converted them; and to say you had baptized a
king, was as good as to say you had his whole clan captured; for
it was a fractious unnatural clansman who would not go where his
chieftain led. We are in an atmosphere altogether different from
the rancor and fanaticism of the continent. Patrick,--there must
have been something very winning and kindly about the man,--
roused no tradition of animosity. He never made Ireland hate her
pagan past. When the Great Age came,--which was not till later,
--not till the Crest-Wave had passed from Wales,--and Christian
Irishmen took to writing down the old legends and stories, they
were very tender to the memories of the Gods and heroes. It was
in pity for the Children of Lir, that were turned into swans,
that they were kept alive long enough to be baptized and sent to
heaven. Can you fancy Latona and her children so received by
Greekish or Latin monks into the Communion of Saints? But the
Irish Church was always finding excuses for the salvation of the
great figures of old. Some saint called up Cuculain from hell,
converted him, and gave him a free pass that Peter at the Gates
should honor. There was Conchobar MacNessa again. He was king
of Ulster in the days of the Red Branch, the grand heroic cycle
of Irish legend; Cuculain was the chief of his warriors. A
brain-ball was driven through the skull of Conchobar from a
sling; but sure, his druid doctors would never be phased by a
trifle like that. They bound up the wound and healed him in a
cauldron of cure; but warned him never to get excited or
over-exert himself, or the brain-ball would come out and he would
die; barring such accidents, he would do splendidly. And so he
did for some years. Then one day a darkness came over the world,
and he put his druids to finding out the cause of it. They told
him they saw in their vision three crosses on a hill in the east
of the world, and three men nailed on them; and the man in the
middle with the likeness of the Son of God. With that the
battle-fury came on Conchobar, and he fell to destroying the
trees of the forest with his sword. "Oh that I were there!" he
cried; "thus would I deal with his enemies." With the excitement
and over-exertion, out came the brain-ball, and he died. And if
God Almighty would not take Conchobar MacNessa, pagan as he was,
into heaven for a thing like that,--sure, God Almighty was not
half such a decent kindly creature as the Irish monk who invented
the yarn.
So nothing comes down to us that has not passed the censorship of
a race-proud priesthood, with perhaps never a drop of the wine of
true wisdom in them, to help them discriminate and truth to shine
through what they were passing on; but still, with a great deal
of the milk of human kindness as a substitute, so far as it
might be. They treasured the literary remains of druid days;
liberally twisting them, to be sure, into consonance with
Christian ideas of history and the fitness of things; but still
they treasured them, and drew from them inspiration. Thus the
whole past comes down euhemerized, cooked, and touched up. It
comes down very glorious,--because the strongest feeling in Irish
hearts was Irishism, race-consciousness. Whereas the Latin
Church was fiercely against antiquity and all its monuments, the
Celtic Church in Ireland was anxious above all things to preserve
Celtic antiquity,--having first brought it into line with the one
true faith. The records had to be kept,--and made to tally with
the Bible. The godhood of the Gods had to be covered away, and
you had to treat them as if they had been respectable children of
Adam,--more or less respectable, at any rate. A descent from
Noah had to be found for the legendary kings and heroes; and for
every event a date corresponding with that of someone in the
Bible. Above all, you had to pack the whole Irish past into
the few thousand years since Noah came out of the Ark.--You
get a glimpse in Wales of the struggle there was between
Hebrao-Christian chronology and the Celtic sense of the age of
the world: in the pedigree of an ancient family, where, it
is said, about half way down the line this entry occurs after one
of the names: "In his time Adam was expelled from Paradise." In
Ireland, indeed, there was at least one man from before the Flood
living in historic times: Fintan, whom, with others, Noah sent
into the western world while the Ark was building. Here is one
of Fintan's poems:
"If you inquire of me concerning Ireland, I know and can relate
gladly all the invasions of it since the beginning of the
delightful world. Out of the east came Cessair, a woman,
daughter of Bith, with her fifty maidens, with her three men.
The flood came upon Bith on his mountain without mystery; on
Ladru at Ard Ladran; on Cessair at Cull Cesra. As for me, for
the space of a year, beneath the rapid flood, on the height of a
mighty wave, I enjoyed sleep which was exceeding good. Then, in
Ireland, I found my way above the waters until Partholan came out
of the East, from the land of the Greeks. Then, in Ireland, I
enjoyed rest; Ireland was void till the son of Agnoman came,
Nemed with the delightful manners. The Fir Bolg and the Fir
Galioin came a long time after, and the Fir Domnan also; they
landed at Erris in the west. Then came the Tuatha De Danaan in
their hood of mist. I lived with them for a long time, though
their age is far removed. After that came the sons of Mile out
of Spain and the south. I lived with them; mighty were their
battles. I had come to a great age, I do not conceal it,
when the pure faith was sent to Ireland by the King of the
Cloudy Heaven. I am the fair Fintan son of Bochra; I proclaim
it aloud. Since the flood came here I am a great personage
in Ireland."
In the middle of the sixth century he was summoned as a witness
by the descendants of Niall of the Nine Hostages against King
Dermot MacKerval, in a dispute as to the ancient divisions of
Ireland. He came to Tara with nine companies in front of him,
and nine companies behind: they were his descendants. This,
mind you, is in strictly historical times. The king and his
people received him kindly, and after he had rested a little, he
told them his story, and that of Tara from its foundation.
They asked him to give them some proof of his memory. "Right
willingly," said Fintan. "I passed one day through a wood in West
Munster; I brought home with me a red berry of the yew-tree,
which I planted in my kitchen-garden, and it grew there till it
was as tall as a man. Then I took it up, and re-planted it on
the green lawn before the house, and it grew there until a
hundred champions could find room under its foliage, to be
sheltered there from wind and rain, and cold and heat. I
remained so, and my yew remained so, spending our time alike,
until at last all its leaves fell off from decay. When afterwards
I thought of turning it to some profit, I went to it, and cut it
from its stem; and I made of it seven vats, and seven keeves, and
seven stans, and seven churns, and seven pitchers, and seven
milans, and seven medars, with hoops for all. I remained so with
my yew vessels until their hoops all fell off from decay and old
age. After that I re-made them; but could only get a keeve out
of the vat, and a stan out of the keeve, and a mug out of the
stan, and a cilorn out of the mug, and a milan out of the cilom,
and a medar out of the milan; and I leave it to Almighty
God that I do not know where their dust is now, after their
dissolution with me from decay." *
------
* De Jubainville, _Irish Mythological Cycle;_ when also Fintan's
poem quoted above.
------
Now here is a strange relic of the Secret Teaching that comes
down with this legend of Fintan. Each of the four Cardinal
Points, it was said, had had its Man appointed to record all the
wonderful events that had taken place in the world.* One of them
was this Fintan, son of Bochra, son of Lamech, whose duty was to
preserve the histories of Spain and Ireland, and the West in
general. As we have seen, Spain is a glyph for the Great Plain,
the Otherworld.
------
* See _The Secret Doctrine,_ for the Thesophical teaching.
------
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.