We put 420 for a date to the Southern Renaissance in China, and
410 to the age that became Arthurian in Wales. The next thing in
China is 527, and the coming of Bodhidharma; the next thing in
Celtdom is 520, and the coming of Findian.
He was an Irishman, and had been studying in Wales; where,
certainly, there was great activity in churchly circles in those
days. Get a map of that country, and note all the place-names
beginning with _Llan,_--and you will see. There are countless
thousands of them. 'Llan' means 'the holy place of,' and the rest
of the name will be that of the saint who taught or preached
there: of whom, I believe, only David appears in the Catholic
calendar. They were most of them active in the fifth and
sixth centuries.
Findian, according to the _Encyclopaedia Britannica,_ had come
under the influence of three of the foremost of them: David,
Gildas, and Catwg the Wise; who were perhaps great men, if
we may judge by the results of their teaching, as Findian
transmitted it to those that came after him. We have seen that
Patrick opened no kind of golden age in Ireland, gave no impulse
to civilization or letters. The church he founded had fallen on
rather evil days since his death; and now Findian came to reform
things in the light of what he had learned in Wales. He began by
founding at Clonard a monastery on the Welsh plan. That was some
twenty-two years before Geoffrey's date for the passing of
Arthur. By the time Camlan had been fought, and the Crest-Wave
had left Wales, Findian had made a channel through which it
might flow into Ireland, and in the five-forties the Irish
illumination began.
We must say a word or two as to the kind of institution he
founded. There were several of them in Wales,--to be called
colleges, or even universities, as rightly as monasteries:--one
at Bangor in the north; two or three in Glamorgan; one at Saint
Davids. Students flocked to them by the thousands; there was
strict discipline, the ascetic life,--and also serious study,
religious and secular. It was all beautifully simple: each
student lived in his own hut,
"of clay and wattles made,"
--or, where stone might be plentiful, as it is in most parts of
Wales, of stone. Like a military camp, the whole place would be
surrounded with fosse and vallum. They grew their own corn and
vegetables, milked their own cows, fished in the streams, and
supported themselves. The sky roofed their lecture-halls; of
which the walls, if there were any, were the trees and the
mountains. But these places were real centers of learning, the
best there were in Europe in those days; and you needed not to
be a monk to attend them.
In Wales the strain of the Saxon wars kept them from their full
fruition. Celtic warfare was governed by a certain code: thus,
you, went to war only at such and such a time of the year;
invaded your neighbor's territory only through such and such a
stretch of his frontier; and no one need trouble to guard more
than the recognized doorway of his realm. Above all, you never
took an army through church lands. So through all the wars the
Britons might be waging among themselves to keep their hands in,
the monastery-colleges remained islands of peace, on friendly
terms with all the combatants. But Wales, with no natural
frontier, lay very open to invaders who knew no respect for
religion or learning. Twelve hundred of the student-monks of
Bangor, for example, were slaughtered in 613 by the Saxon
Ethelfrith;--whereafter the rest fled to Bardsey Island in
Cardigan Bay, and the great college at Bangor ceased to be.
Augustine of Canterbury, sent by the Pope to convert the English,
had summoned the Welsh bishops to a conference, and ordered them
to come under his sway and conform to Rome. They hardly knew
why, but disliked the idea. Outwardly, their divergence from
Catholicism was altogether trivial: they had their own way of
shaving their heads for the tonsure, and their own times for
celebrating Easter,--though truly, these are the kind of things
over which you fight religious wars. However, it was not these
details that worried them so much; but an uneasy sense they
derived, perhaps, from the tone of Augustine's summons. The
story runs that they took counsel among themselves, and agreed
that if he were a man sent from God, they would find him
humble-minded and mannered; whereof the sign should be, that he
would rise to greet them when they entered. But Augustine had
other ideas; and as the ambassador of the Vicar of Christ, rose
to greet no man. So still, not quite knowing why, they would have
no dealings with him; and went their ways after refusing to
assimilate their Church of the Circled Cross to his of the Cross
Uncircled;--whereupon he, to teach them a sound lesson, impelled
the Saxon kings to war. Fair play to him, he was dead before
that war brought about the massacre of the monks of Bangor,--who
had marched to Chester to pray for the Briton arms.
But when Findian went back to Ireland he found no such difficulties
in his way. Not till two hundred and seventy-five years later
was that island disturbed by foreign invaders; and whatever
domestic Kilkenny Cattery might be going forward, the colleges
were respected. His school at Clonard quickly grew* till
its students numbered three thousand; and in the forties, he
sent out twelve of the chief of them to found other such schools
throughout the island. Then the great age began; and for the
next couple of thirteen-decade periods Ireland was a really
brilliant center of light and learning. Not by any means merely,
or even chiefly, in theology; there was a wonderful quickening
of mental energies, a real illumination. The age became, as we
have seen, a sort of literary clearing-house for the whole Irish
past. If the surviving known Gaelic manuscripts were printed,
they would fill nearly fifty thousand quarto volumes, with matter
that mostly comes from before the year 800,--and which is still
not only interesting, but fascinating.
------
* _Encyclopaedia Britannica,_ article 'Ireland'; whence all re
Findian and the colleges.
------
The truth is, we seem to have in it the relics and wreckage of
the literary output of a whole foregone manvantara, or perhaps
several. For in the vast mass of epics and romances that comes
down, one distinguishes three main cycles: the _Mythological,_
the _Red Branch,_ and the _Fenian._ The first deals with the
Five Races that invaded or colonized Ireland: Partholanians,
Nemedians, Firbolgs, Gods, and Irish;--in all of it I suspect the
faint memories and _membra disjecta_ of old, old manvantaras:
indeed, the summing up of the history of created man. You will
have noted that the number of the races, as in Theosophic
teaching, is five. M. de Jubainville points out that the
creation of the world, or its gradual assumption of its present
form, goes on _pari passu_ with the evolution of its humanities,
and under their eyes; thus, when Partholan, the first invader,
arrived, there were but three lakes in Ireland, and nine rivers,
and one plain. This, too, is an echo of the secret doctrine;
and incidentally indicates how tremendously far back that first
invasion was thought to have been.
The Partholanians came into Ireland from the Great Plain, the
"Land of the Living," as the Irish called it, which is also the
Land of the Dead:--in other words, they came _into_ this world,
and not from another part of it. Their peculiarity was that they
were "no wiser the one than the other "; an allusion to the
mindlessness of the early humanities before the Manasaputra
incarnated in the mid-Third Root Race. Again, before their
coming, there was a people in Ireland called the Fomorians: they
came up from the sea, were gigantic and deformed; some of them
with but one foot or one arm, some with the heads of horses or
goats. That will remind you of the "water-men, terrible and bad"
in the Stanzas of Dzyan: the first attempts of the Earth or
unaided Nature to create men. But when the Partholanians fought
with and defeated these Fomoroh, they were said to have "freed
Ireland from a foreign foe"; this though the Fomorians were
there first, and though the Partholanians were "invaders," and
utterly ceased to be after a time, so that no drop of their blood
runs in Irish veins. Why, then, does Ireland identify itself
with the one race, and discard the other as "foreign foes"?--
Because the Partholanians represent the first human race, but the
Fomoroh or 'Water-men' were unhuman, and a kind of _lusus
naturae._ 'Fomoroh,' by the way, may very well be translated
'Water-men'; _fo_ I take to be the Greek _upo,_ 'under,' and
'mor' is the 'sea.' Now the Battle of Mag Itha, between
Partholan and the Fomorians, is a very late invention; not
devised, I think, until the eleventh century. And of course
there was no war or contact between the First Race and the
Water-men, who had been destroyed long before. This is a good
example of what came down in Pagan Ireland, and how the Christian
redactors treated it. They had heard of the existence of the
Fomoroh before the coming of Partholan, and thought it wise to
provide the latter with a war against them. Later, as we shall
see, the Fomoroh stood for the over-sea people westward,--the
Atlantean giant-sorcerers.
The second race of invaders, the Nemedians, were also given a war
with the Fomorians,--in the story of the seige of Conan's Tower.
But this story is told by Nennius as applying to the Milesians,
the Fifth Race Irish, and not to the Second Race Nemedians; and
probably relates to events in comparatively historical tiems,--
say a million years ago, or between that and the submersion of
Poseidonis about nine thousand B.C. One would imagine that
Ireland, from its position, must have been a main battle-ground
between the men of the Fifth and the Atlanteans, between the
White and the Black Magicians. Mr. Judge's _Bryan Kinnavan_
stories indicate that it was a grand stronghold of the former.
The Nemedians were akin to the Partholanians: the Second Race to
the First,--both mindless: they came after their predecessors
had all died out; and in their turn died or departed to the last
man. So we find in _The Secret Doctrine_ that the first two
humanities passed utterly and left no trace. If I go into all
this a little fully, it is because it illustrates so well the
system of _blinds_ under which the Inner Teaching was hidden, and
at the same time revealed, by the Initiate of every land. These
Celtic things seem never to have come under the eye of Mme.
Blavatsky at all; or how she might have drawn on them! I think
that nowhere else in the mythologies are the Five Root-Races, the
four past and the one existent, mentioned so clearly as here in
Ireland. For historic reasons at which we have glanced,--the
Roman occupation, which was hardly over before the Saxon
invasions began,--Wales has preserved infinitely less of the
records of ancient Celtic civilization than Ireland has; and yet
Professor Kund Meyer told me,--and surely no living man is better
qualified to make suct a statement,--that the whole of the
forgotten Celtic mythology might yet be recovered from old MSS.
hidden away in Welsh private libraries that have never been
examined. How much more then may be hoped for from Ireland!
The third invasion was by a threefold people: the Fir Domnan, or
Men of the Goddess Domna; the Fir Bolg, or Men of the Sacks;
and the Galioin. From these races there were still people in
Connacht in the seventeenth century who claimed their decent.
Generally all three are called by the one name of Firbolgs. They
were "avaricious, mean, uncouth, musicless, and inhospitable."
Then came the Tuatha De Danaan, "Gods and false gods," as Tuan
MacCarell told St. Finnen, "from whom everyone knows the Irish
men of learning are descended. It is likely they came into
Ireland from heaven, hence their knowledge and the excellence of
their teaching." Thus Tuan, who has just been made to allude to
them as "Gods and _false gods._" This Tuan, I should mention,
originally came into Ireland with Partholan; and, that history
might be preserved, kept on reincarnating there, and remembering
all his past lives. These Danaans conquered, and then ruled
over, the Firbolgs: it is a glyph of the Third or Lemurian
Race, of which the first three (and a half) sub-races were
mindless--the Fir Domnan, Fir Bolg and Galioin; then the Lords
of Mind incarnated and reigned over them, the Tuatha De Danaan,
wafted down from heaven in a druid cloud. So far we have a
pretty exact symbolic rendering of the Theosophic teaching.
The Danaans conquered the Firbolgs, it is said, at the Battle of
Moytura. Now there were two Battles of Moytura, of which this
was the first; it alludes to the incarnation of the Manasaputra,
and with it the clear symbolic telling of human history comes to
an end. So much, being very remote, was allowed to come down
without other disguise than that which the symbols afforded. But
at this point, which is the beginning of the mind-endowed
humanity we know, a mere eighteen million years ago, further
blinds became necessary. History, an esoteric science, had
still more to be camouflaged, lest memories should seize upon
indications too readily, and find out too much. Why this should
be, it is not the time to argue; enough to say that the wisdom
of antiquity decreed it.
There has always been some doubt as to the Second Battle of
Moytura. Because of a certain air with which it is invested,
scholars think now, for the most part, that it was a later
invention. But I do not think so: I think that air comes from
the extra layer of symbolism that is laid over it; from the
second coating of camouflage; from the fact that the few years
between the two battles represent several million years,--about
which the mythological history is silent, running them all
together, like street-lights you see a long way off. What
happened was this:
In the first battle Nuada, king of the Danaans, lost his hand;
and, because a king must be blemishless, lost his kinghood too.
It went to Bres son of Elatha; whose mother was Danaan, but
whose unknown father was of the Fomoroh. Note the change: the
first battle was with the Firbolgs, the mindless humanity of the
early third Race; now we are to deal with Fomorians, who have
come to symbolize the Black Magicians of Atlantis: the second
half of the Lemurian, and nearly the whole of the Atlantean
period, have elapse.--In person, Bres was handsome like the
Danaans; in character he was Fomorian altogether. This is the
sum of the history of later Lemuria and of Atlantis; Moytura,
and Nuada's loss of his hand and kinghood there, symbolize the
incarnation of the Manasaputra,--descent of Spirit into matter,--
and therewith, in time, their forgetting their own divinity. I
should say that it is Bres himself, rather than the Fomorians as
a whole, who stands symbol just now for the Atlantean sorcerers.
There is a subtle connexion between the Firbolgs and Fomoroh:
the former are the men, the latter the Gods, of the same race;
the Firbolgs stood originally for the mindless men of the early
third, men evolving up out of the lower kingdoms towards the
point of becoming human and mind-endowed; the Fomorians were the
Gods or so to say Spiritual Powers of those lower worlds; the
forces in opposition to upward evolution. So we see Bres of that
dual lineage: with magic from his Danaan mother, and blackness
from his Fomorian father: the Atlanteans, inheriting mind from
the Manasaputra, but turning their divine inheritance to the uses
of chaos and night.
As his reign represents the whole Atlantean period, we might
expect it to have begun well enough, and worsened as it went.
This was so; had he shown his colors from the first, it is not
to be thought that the Danaans would have tolerated him at all.
But it came to be, as time went on, that he oppressed Ireland
abominably; and at last they rose and drove him out. Nuada,
whose missing hand had been replaced with one of silver, was
restored in the kingship; henceforth he is called Nuada of the
Silver Hand. Here we have the return or redescent of the Divine
Dynasties who came to lead the men of the early Fifth Race
against the Atlantean giants. I shall beg leave now to tell you
the story of the Second Battle of Moytura.
Perhaps it was in Ireland that the White Adepts of the Fifth made
their first stand against the Atlanteans? Perhaps thence it
first got its epithet, _Sacred_ Ierne?--Bres, driven out by the
Gods, took refuge with his father the Fomorian king beyond the
western sea; who gave him an army with which to reconquer his
lost dominions. Now we come to the figure who represents the
Fifth Race. There are in Europe perhaps a dozen cities named
after Lugh Lamfada, the Irish (indeed Celtic) Sun-god: Lyons,
the most important of them, was Lug-dunum, the _dun_ or fortress
of Lugh. Lugh was a kind of counterpart to Bres; he was the son
of Cian, a Danaan, and a daughter of the Fomorian champion Balor
of the Mighty Blows, or of the Evil Eye. The story of his birth
is like that of Perseus, son of Zeus and Danae. Danae's son,
you remember, was fated to kill his grandfather Acrisius; so
Acrisius shut Danae in an inaccessable tower, that no son might
be born to her. The antiquity of the whole legend is suggested
by this nearness of the Greek and Irish versions;--even to the
similarity of the names of Dana and Danae: though Dana was not
the mother of Lugh, but of the whole race of the Gods: _Tuatha
De Danaan_ means, the 'Race of the Gods the Children of Dana.'
So you see it comes from the beginnings of the Fifth Race, a
million years ago; but how much better the history of that time
is preserved in the Irish than in the Greek version! As if the
Irish took it direct from history and symbolism, and the Greeks
from the Irish. And why not? since in the nature of things
Ireland must have been so much nearer the scene of action.
Lugh grew up among his mother's people, but remembered his divine
descent on his father's side; and when it came to the War of the
Fomoroh against Ireland, was for fighting for his father's
people. So he set out for Tara, where Nuada and the Gods were
preparing to meet the invasion; and whoever beheld him as he
came, it seemed to them as if they had seen the sun rising on a
bright day in summer.--"Open thou the portal!" said he; but the
knife was in the meat and the mead in the horn, and no man might
enter but a craftsman bearing his craft. "Oh then, I am a
craftsman," said Lugh; "I am a good carpenter." There was an
excellent carpenter in Tara already, and none other needed.-"It
is a smith I am," said Lugh. But they had a smith there who was
professor of the three new designs in smithcraft, and none else
would be desired. Then he was a champion; but they had Ogma son
of Ethlenn for champion, and would not ask a better. Then he was
a harper; and a poet; and an antiquary; and a necromancer;
and an artificer; and a cup-bearer. But they were well supplied
with men of all those crafts, and there was no place for him.--
"Then go and ask the king," said Lugh, "if he will not be needing
a man who is excellent in all those crafts at once"; and that
way he got admission.
After that he was drawing up the smiths and carpenters, and
inquiring into their abilities, and giving them their tasks in
preparation for the battle. There was Goibniu, the smith of the
Danaans.--"Though the men of Ireland should be fighting for seven
years," said Goibniu, "for every spear that falls off its handle,
and for every sword that breaks, I will put a new weapon in its
place; and no erring or missing cast shall be thrown with a
spear of my making; and no flesh it may enter shall ever taste
the sweets of life after;--and this is more than Dub the smith of
the Fomorians can do." And there was Creidne the Brazier: he
would not do less well than Goibniu the Smith would; and there
was Luchtine the Carpenter: evil on his beard if he did less
than Creidne;--and so with the long list of them.
It was on the first day of November the battle began; and when
the sun went to his setting, the weapons of the Fomorians were
all bent and notched, but those of the Gods were like new. And
new they were: new and new after every blow struck or cast
thrown. For with three strokes of his hammer Goibniu would be
fashioning a spear-head, and after the third stroke there could
be no bettering it. With three chippings of his knife, Luchtine
had cut a handle for it; and at the third chipping there would
be no fault to find with the handle either by Gods or men. And
as quickly as they made the spear-heads and the shafts, Creidne
the Brazier had the rivets made to rivet them; and if there were
bettering those rivets, it would not be by any known workmanship.
When Goibniu had made a spear-head, he took it in his tongs, and
hurled it at the lintel of the door so that it stuck fast there,
the socket outward. When Luchtine had made a spear-haft, he
hurled it out at the spear-head in the lintel; and it was good
hurling, not to be complained of: the end of the haft stuck in
the socket, and stuck firm. And as fast as those two men did
those two things, Creidne had his rivets ready, and threw them at
the spear-head; and so excellent his throwing, and the nicety of
his aim, no rivet would do less than enter the holes in the
socket, and drive on into the wood of the shaft;--and that way
there was no cast of a spear by the Gods at the hellions, but
there was a new spear in the smithy ready to replace it. Then
the Fomoroh sent a spy into the camp of the Gods, who achieved
killing Goibniu with one of the latter's own spears; and by
reason of that it was going ill with the Gods the next day in the
battle. And it was going worse with them because of Balor of the
Mighty Blows, and he taking the field at last for the Fomorians,--
"Balor as old as a forest, his mighty head helpless sunk,
And an army of men holding open his weary and death-dealing eye,"
--for wherever his glances fell, there death came. They fell on
Nuada of the Silver Hand, and he died,--albeit it is well known
that he was alive, and worshiped in Britain in Roman times, for a
temple to him has been found near the River Severn.--Then came
Lugh to avenge Nuada, and a bolt from his sling tore like the
dawn ray, like the meteor of heaven, over Moytura plain, and took
the evil eye of Balor in the midst, and drove it into his head;
and then the Fomorians were routed. And this, in truth, like
Camlan and Kurukshetra, is the battle that is forever being
fought: Balor comes death-dealing still; and still the sling of
Lugh Lamfada is driving its meteor shafts through heaven and
defeating him.
As for the defeat of the Gods by the Milesians, and their
retirement into the mountains,--that too is actual history told
under a thinnish veil of symbolism: the Fifth Race having been
started, the Sons of Wisdom, its first Gods and Adept Kings, who
had sown the seeds of all bright things that were to be in its
future civilizations, withdrew into the Unseen.
All this and much more,--the whole Mythological Cycle,--
represents what came over into Irish literature from ancient
manvantaric periods, and the compression of the records of
millions of years. A century seems a very long time while it is
passing; but at two or three millenniums ago, no longer than a
few autumns and winters; and at a million years' distance, the
doings and changes, the empires and dynasties of a hundred
centuries, look to the eyes of racial memory like the contents of
a single spring. So it is the history and wisdom of remote
multiplied ages that come down to us in these tales.
But with the Heroic Cycle we seem to be entering a near manvantara.
This is the noon-period of Irish literature, the Shakespeare-Milton
time; where the other was the dawn or Chaucer period. Or the
Mythological Cycle is the Vedic, and the Heroic, the Epic,
period, to take an Indian analogy; and this fits it better,
because the Irish, like the Indian, dawn-period is immensely
ancient and of immense duration. But when you come to the
Heroic time, with the stories of the high king Conary Mor,
and of the Red Branch Warriors, with for _piece de resistance_
the epic _Tann Bo Cuailgne,_ you seem (as you do in the
_Mahabharata_) to be standing upon actual memories, as much
historical as symbolic. Here all the figures, though titanic,
are at least half human, with a definite character assigned to
all of importance. They revel in huge dramatic action; move in
an heroic mistless sunlight. You can take part in the daily life
of the Red Branch champions as you can in that of the Greeks
before Troy; they seem real and clear-cut; you can almost
remember Deirdre's beauty and the sorrow of the doom of the
Children of Usna; you have a shrewd notion what Cuculain looked
like, and what Conall Carnach; you are familiar with the fire
trailed from the chariot wheels, the sods kicked up by the
horses' hoofs; you believe in them all, as you do in Odysseus
and Ajax, in Bhishma and Arjuna, in Hamlet and Falstaff;--as I
for my part never found it possible to believe in Malory's and
Tennyson's well-groomed gentlemen of the Table Round.
And then, after long lapse, came another age, and the Cycle of
the Fenians. It too is full of excellent tales, but all less
titanic and clearly-defined: almost, you might say, standing to
the Red Branch as Wordsworth and Keats to Shakespeare and Milton.
The atmosphere is on the whole dimmer, the figures are weaker;
there is not the same dynamic urge of creation. You come away
with an impression of the beauty of the forest through which the
Fenians wandered and camped, and less with an impression of the
personalities of the Fenians themselves. There is abundant
Natural Magic, but not the old Grand Manner; and you would not
recognise Finn or Oisin or Oscar, if you ment them, so easily as
you would Cuculain or Fergus MacRoy or Naisi. Civilization
appears to have declined far between the two ages, to have become
much less settled,--as it naturally would, with all that fighting
going on. I take it that all the stories of both cycles relate
to ages of the breakup of civilization: peaceful and civilized
times leave less impress on the racial memory. The Fenians are
distinctly further from such civilized times, however, than are
the Red Branch: they are a nomad company, but the Red Branch had
their capital at Emain Macha by Armagh in Ulster. But what
mystery, what sparkling magic environs them! Mr. Rollerstone
cites this as an example: Once three beautiful unknown youths
joined Finn's company; but stipulated that they should camp
apart, and be left alone during the nights. After awhile it fell
out what was the reason for this: one of them died between every
dusk and dawn, and the other two had to be watching him. That is
all that is said; but it is enough to keep your imagination at
work a long while.
--And then, the manvantara dies away in a dolphin glory of
mystical colors in the many tales of wondrous voyages and islands
in the Atlantic: such as the Voyage of Maelduin, of which
Tennyson's version gives you some taste of the brightness, but
none at all of the delicacy and mysterious beauty and grace.
Except the classical, this is the oldest written literature in
Europe; and I doubt there is any other that gives us such a wide
peep-hole into lost antiquity. Yes; perhaps it is the best lens
extant, west of India. It is a lens, of course, that distorts:
the long past is shown through a temperament,--made into poetry
and romance; not left bare scientific history. But perhaps
poetry and romance are after all the truest and final form of
history. Perhaps, in looking at recent ages, we are balked of
seeing their true underlying form by the dust of events and the
clamor of details; for eyes anointed they might resolve
themselves into Moyturas and Camlans endlessly fought; into
magical weapons magically forged; into Cuculains battling
eternally at the Watcher's Ford, he alone withstanding the great
host of this world's invaders, while all his companions are under
a druid sleep. . . . It is the most splendid scene or incident
in the _Tann Bo Cuailgne;_ and I cannot think of it, but it
calls up before my mind's eye another picture: that of a little
office in New York, and a desk, and rows of empty seats; and
another Irishman, lecturing to those empty seats . . . . but to
all humanity, really . . . . from the ranks of which his
companions should come to him presently; he would hold back the
hosts of darkness alone, waiting for their coming. And I cannot
think of this latter picture but it seems to me as if:
Cuculain rode from out the ages' prime,
The hero time, spacious and girt with gold,
For he had heard this earth was stained with crime.
With loud hoof-thunder, clangor, ring and rhyme,
With chariot-wheels flame-trailing where they rolled,
Cuculain rode from out the ages' prime.
I saw his eyes, how darkening, how sublime,
With what impatient pity and power ensouled;
(For he had heard this earth was stained with crime!)
Song on his lips--I heard the chant and chime.
The stars themselves danced to in days of old:--
Cuculain rode from out the ages' prime.
Love sped him on to out-speed the steeds of Time:
No bliss for him, and this world left a-cold,
Which, he had heard, was stained with grief and crime.
Here in this Iron Age's gloom and grime
The Ford of Time, the waiting years, to hold,
Cuculain came . . . . and from the Golden prime
Brought light to save this world grown dark with crime....
Well; from the schools of Findian and his disciples missionaries
soon began to go out over Europe. To preach Christianity, yes;
but distinctly as apostles of civilization as well. Columba left
Ireland to found his college at Iona in 563; and from Iona,
Aidan presently went into Northumbria of the Saxons, to found his
college at Lindisfarne. Northumbria was Christianized by these
Irishmen; and there, under their auspices, Anglo-Saxon culture
was born. In Whitby, one of their foundations, Caedmon arose to
start the poetry: a pupil of Irish teachers. At the other end
of England, Augustine from Rome had Christianized Kent; but no
culture came in or spread over England from Augustine and Kent
and Rome; Northumbria was the source of it all. You have only
to compare _Beowulf,_ the epic the Saxons brought with them from
the continent, with the poetry of Caedmon and Cynewulf, or with
such poems as _The Phoenix,_ to see how Irishism tinged the minds
of these Saxon pupils of Irish teachers with, as Stopford Brooke
says, "a certain imaginative passion, a love of natural beauty,
and a reckless wildness curiously mingled with an almost
scientific devotion to metrical form."
Ireland meanwhile was the heart of a regular circulation of
culture. Students poured in from abroad, drawn by the fame of
her learning; we have a poem in praise of generous Ireland from
an Anglo-Saxon prince who spent his exile there in study. Irish
teachers were at the court of Charlemagne; Irish teachers
missionarized Austria and Germany. When the Norsemen discovered
Iceland, they found Irish books there; probably Irish scholars
as well, for it has been noted (by Matthew Arnold) that the
Icelandic sagas, unlike any other Pre-Christian Teutonic
literature, bear strong traces of the Celtic quality of Style.
They had their schools everywhere. You hear of an Irish bishop
of Tarentum in the latter part of the seventh century; and a
hundred years later, of an Irish bishop of Salzburg in Austria.
This was Virgil--in Irish, Fergil, I imagine a native name of
Salzburg: a really noteworthy man. He taught, _at that time,_
that the world is a globe, and with people living at the
antipodes; for which teaching he was called to order by the
Pope: but we do not hear of his retracting. Last and greatest
of them all was Johannes Scotus Erigena, who died in 882: a very
bright particular star, and perhaps the one of the largest
magnitude between the Neo-Platonists and the great mystics of
later times, who came long after the new manvantara had dawned.
He is not to be classed with the Scholastics; he never
subordinated his philosophy to theology; but approached the
problems of existence from a high, sane, and Theosophic
standpoint: an independent and illuminated thinker. He taught
at the court of Charles the Bald of France; and was invited to
Oxford by Alfred in 877, and died abbot of Malmesbury five years
later,--having in his time propounded many tough nuts of
propositions for churchmen to crack and digest if they could.
As, that authority should be derived from reason, and not, as
they thought, vice versa; and that "damnation was simply the
consciousness of having failed to fulfill the divine purpose,"--
and not, as their pet theory was, a matter of high temperature of
eternal duration. The following are quotations from his work _De
Divisione Naturae;_ I take them from M. de Jubainville's _Irish
Mythological Cycle,_ where they are given as summing up Erigena's
philosophy,--and as an indication of the vigorous Pantheism of
Pre-christian Irish thought.
"We are informed by all the means of knowledge that beneath the
apparent diversity of beings subsists the One Being which is
their common foundation."
"When we are told that God makes all things, we are to understand
that God is in all things, that he is the substantial essence of
all things. For He alone possesses in himself all that which may
be truly said to exist. For nothing which is, is truly of
itself, but God alone; who alone exists _per se,_ spreading
himself over all things, and communicating to them all that which
in them truly corresponds to the notion of being."
I think we can recognise here, under a not too thick disguise of
churchly phraseology, the philosophy of the _Bhagavad-Gita._
Again:
"Do you not see how the creator of the universality of things
hold the first rank in the divisions of Nature? Not without
reason, indeed; since he is the basic principle of all things,
and is inseparable from all the diversity which he created,
without which he could not exist as creator. In him, indeed,
immutably and essentially, all things are; he is in himself
division and collection, the genus and the species, the whole and
the part of the created universe."
"What is a pure idea? It is, in proper terms, a theophany:
that is to say, a manifestator of God in the human soul."
You would be mildly surprised, to say the least of it, to hear at
the present day a native, say in Abyssinia, rise to talk in terms
like these: it is no whit less surprising to hear a man doing so
in ninth-century Europe. But an Irishman in Europe in those days
was much the same thing as an Oxford professor in the wilds of
Abyssinia would be now;--with this difference: that Ireland is a
part of Europe, and affected by the general European cycles (we
must suppose). Europe then was in thick pralaya (as Abyssinia is
now); but in the midst of it all there was Ireland, with her
native contrariness, behaving better than most people do in
high manvantara.
The impulse that made that age great for her never came far
enough down to awaken great creation in the plastic arts; but it
touched the fringes of them, and produced marvelous designing, in
jewel-work, and it the illumination of manuscripts. Concerning
the latter, I will quote this from Joyce's Short History of
Ireland; it may be of interest:--
"Its most marked characteristic is interlaced work formed by
bands, ribbons and cords, which are curved and twisted and
interwoven in the most intricate way, something like basket work
infinitely varied in pattern. These are intermingled and
alternated with zigzags, waves, spirals, and lozenges; while
here and there among the curves are seen the faces or forms of
dragons, serpents, or other strange-looking animals, their tails
or ears or tongues elongated and woven till they become merged or
lost in the general design. . . . The pattern is so minute and
complicated as to require the aid of a magnifying glass to
examine it. . . . Miss Stokes, who has examined the _Book of
Kells,_ says of it: 'No effort hitherto made to transcribe any
one page of it has the perfection of execution and rich harmony
of color which belongs to this wonderful book. It is no
exaggeration to say that, as with the microscopic works of
Nature, the stronger the magnifying power brought to bear on it,
the more is this perfection seen. No single false interlacement
or uneven curve in the spirals, no faint tiace of a trembling
hand or wandering thought can be detected.'"
The same author tells us that someone took the trouble to count,
through a magnifying glass, in the _Book of Armagh,_ in a "small
space scarcely three quarters of an inch in length by less than
half an inch in width, no less than one hundred and fifty-eight
interlacements of a slender ribbon pattern formed of white lines
edged with black ones."--One of these manuscripts, sometimes,
would be given as a king's ransom.
An unmasculine art, it may be said; and enormous laborious skill
spent upon tribial creation. But once again, the age was pralaya;
all Europe was passing into, or quite sunk in, pralaya. The Host
of Souls was not then holding the western world; there was but a
glint and flicker of their wings over Ireland as they passed
elsewhere; there was no thorough entering in to take possession.
But the island (perhaps) is the Western Lay-center, and a
critical spot; the veils of matter there are not very thick;
and that mere glint and flicker was enough to call forth all this
wonderful manifestation of beauty. If I emphasize over-much, it
is because all this talk about 'inferior races,'--and because
Ireland has come in for so much opprobrium, one way and another,
on that score. But people do not know, and they will not think,
that those races are superior in which the Crest-Wave is rearing
itself; and that their superiority cannot last: the Crest-Wave
passes from one to another, and in the nature of things can never
remain in any one for longer than its due season. It is as
certain that it will pass sometime from the regions it fills with
strength and glory now, as that it will sometime thrill into life
and splendor the lands that are now forlorn and helpless; and
for my part, seeing what the feeble dying away of it, or the far
foam flung,--no more than that,--raised up in Ireland once, I am
anxious to see the central glory of it rise there; I am keen to
know what will happen then. It will rise there, some time; and
perhaps that time may not be far off.--Oh if men could only look
at these national questions with calm scientific vision,
understanding the laws that govern national and racial life!
There would be none of these idiotic jealousies then; no
heart-burnings or contempt or hatred as between the nations;
there would be none of this cock-a-doodling arrogance that
sometimes makes nations in their heyday a laughing-stock
for the Gods. Instead we should see one single race, Humanity;
poured now into one national mold, now into another; but
always with the same duality: half divine, half devilish-idiotic;
--and while making the utmost best of each mold as they came
to inhabit it, the strong would find it their supreme business
to help the weak, and not exploit or contemn them. But it will
need the sound sense of Theosophy,--knowledge of Reincarnation,
the conviction of Human Brotherhood,--to work this change
in mankind.
Well; now to the things that brought Ireland down. In 795 the
Norwegians began their ravages, and they seem to have had a
peculiar spite against the monastery-colleges. That at Armagh
was sacked nine times in the ninth, and six times in the tenth
century. In the same period Glendalough was plundered seven
times; Clonard four times; Clonmacnois five times betnveen 838
and 845, and often afterwards. These are only samples: there
were scores of the institutions, and they were all sacked, burnt,
plundered, and ravaged, again and again. The scholars fled
abroad, taking their precious manuscripts with them; for which
reason many of the most valuable of these have been found in
monasteries on the continent. The age of brilliance was over.
For a couple of centuries, the Norwegians, and then the Danes,
were ruining Ireland; until Brian Boru did their quietus make at
Clontarf in 1014. Before the country had had time to recover,
the Norman conquest began: a thing that went on for centuries,
and never really finished; and that was much more ruinous even
than the invasions of the Norsemen. As to the Celtic Church,
which had fostered all that brilliance, its story is soon told.
In Wales, the Norman and Plantagenet kings of England were at
pains to bring the see of St. Davids under the sway of Canterbury
and into close communion with Rome: they and the Roman Church
fought hand in hand to destroy Celtic liberties. The Church of
the Circled Cross had never been an independent organization in
the sense that the Greek Church was: it had never had its own
Patriarchs or Popes; it was always in theory under Rome. But
secular events had kept the two apart; and while they did so,
the Celtic Church was virtually independent. In the eleventh and
twelfth Centuries the Welsh Church fought hard for its existence;
but Norman arms backed by Papal sanction proved too strong for
it; and despite the valor of the princes, and especially of that
gallant bishop-historian Gerald the Welshman, it succumbed.
As to Ireland: an English Pope, Adrian IV, born Nicholas
Brakespeare, presented the island to King Henry II; and King
Henry II with true courtesy returned the compliment by presenting
it to the Pope. The Synod of Cashel, called by Henry in 1172,
put Ireland under Rome; and the Church of the Circled Cross
ceased to be. There, in short and simple terms, you have the
history of it.
And therein, too, as I guess, you may see all sorts of interesting
phases of karmic working. For the Church of the Circled Cross,
that had done so well by Ireland in some things, had done
marvelously badly in others. There was a relic of political
stability in ancient Ireland,--in the office of the High-kings
of Tara. It is supposed now that it had grown up, you may
say out of nothing: had been established by some strong
warrior, to maintain itself as it might under such of his
successors as might be strong too. I have no doubt, on the other
hand, that it was really an ancient institution, once firmly
grounded, that had weakened since the general decay of the Celtic
Power. The Gods in their day had had their capital at Tara; and
until the middle of the fifth century A.D. Tara stood there as
the symbol of national unity. When Patrick came the position was
this: all Ireland was divided into innumerable small kingdoms
with their kinglets, with the Ard-righ of Tara as supreme over
them all as he could make himself. The hopefullest thing that
could have happened would have been the abolition of the kingdoms
and kinglets, and the establishment of the Ard-righ's authority
as absolute and final.
Dermot son of Fergus Kervall became High-king in 544. A chief
named Aed Guairy murdered one of Dermot's officers, and sought
sanctuary with St. Ruadan of Lorrha, one of Findian's twelve
apostles, to whom he was related. The king hailed him forth, and
brought him to Tara for trial. Thereupon the whole Church of
Ireland rose to a man against the mere layman, the king, who had
dared thus defy the spiritual powers. They came to Tara in a
body, fasted against him, and laid their heavy curse on him, on
Tara, and, in the result, on the kingship.--"Alas!" said Dermot,
"for the iniquitous contest that ye have waged against me,
seeing that it is Ireland's good I pursue, and to preserve her
discipline and royal right; but it is Ireland's unpeace and
murderousness ye endeavor after." *
------
* I quote this from Mr. Rollerstone's book.
------
Which was true. The same trouble came up in England six
centuries later, and might have ended in the same way. But the
dawn of a manvantara was approaching then, and the centrifugal
forces in England were slowly giving place to the centripetal:
national unity was ahead, and the first two strong Williams and
Henrys were able in the main to assert their kingly supremacy.
But in the Irish time not manvantara, but pralaya, was coming;
and this not for Ireland only, but for all Europe. In the
natural order of things, the centrifugal forces were increasing
always. That is why Dermot MacKervall failed, where Henry II in
part suceeded. There was nothing in the cycles to support him
against the saints. Tara, accursed, was abandoned, and fell into
ruin; and the symbol and center of Irish unity was gone. The
High-kingship, thus bereft of its traditional seat, grew weaker
and weaker; and Ireland, except by Brian Boru, a usurper, was
never after effectively governed. So when the Norsemen came
there was no strong secular power to defend the monasteries from
them, and the karma of St. Ruadan's churchly arrogance and
ambition fell on them. And when Strongbow and the Normans came,
there was no strong central monarchy to oppose them: the king of
Leinster invited them in, and the king of Ireland lacked the
backing of a united nation to drive them out; and Ireland fell.
Well; we have seen how often things tend to repeat themselves,--
but on a higher level,--after the lapse of fifteen centuries.
Patrick, probably, was born in or about 387. In 1887 or
thereabouts Theosophy was brought into Ireland. Patrick's coming
led eventually to the period of the Irish illumination; the
coming of Theosophy led in a very few years to the greatest Irish
illumination, in poetry and drama especially, that had been since
Ireland fell. But Patrick did not complete things; nor did that
first touch of Theosophy in the 'eighties and 'nineties of last
century. Theosophy, known in those days only to a score or so of
Irishmen, kindled wonderful fires: you know that English
literature is more alive in Ireland now than anywhere else in the
English-speaking world; and that that whole Celtic Renaissance
was born in the rooms of the Dublin Theosophical Society. Yet
there were to be eventualities: the Dublin Lodge was only a
promise; the Celtic Renaissance is only a promise. Theosophy
only bides its time until the storm of the world has subsided.
It will take hold upon marvelous Ireland yet; it will take hold
upon Sacred Ierne. What may we not expect then? When she had
but a feeble candle of Truth, in those ancient times, she stood
up a light-giver to the nations; how will it be when she has the
bright sun shining in her heart?
-------------
So now we have followed the history of the world, so far as we
might, for about a thousand years. We have seen the Mysteries
decline in Europe, and nothing adequate rise to take their place;
and, because of that sorrowful happening, the fall of European
civilization into an ever-increasing oblivion of the Spiritual
things. We have seen how in the East, in India and China,
spiritual movements did arise, and succeed in some sort in taking
the place of the Mysteries; and how in consequence civilization
there did in the main, for long ages, go forward undeclining and
stable. And we have watched the Crest-Wave, indifferent to all
national prides and conceits, flow from one race to another,
according to a defined geographical and temporal plan: one
nation after another enjoying its hour of greatness, and none
chosen of the Law or the Spirit to be lifted forever above its
fellows;--but a regular circulation of splendor about the globe,
like the blood through the veins: Greece, India, China; Rome,
Spain, Rome, Egypt, Persia, India, China: each repeating itself
as the cycles of its own lifetime might permit. And then, as the
main current passed eastward from dying Europe, a reserve of it,
a little European _Sishta,_ passing west: from Gaul to Britain,
from Britain to Ireland; from Ireland to Tirnanogue and
Wonderland,* there to hide for some centuries until the Great
Wave should roll westward again from China through Persia, Egypt,
Africa, Sicily and Spain, up into Europe: when the Little Wave,
returning magic-laden out of the Western Paradise should roll
back Europewards again through Ireland, twelfth-century Wales and
Brittany; and spray Christendom with foam from the sea! that
wash the shores of Fairyland: producing first what there was of
mystery and delicacy to uplift mankind in feudal chivalry; then
the wonder-note in poetry which has probably been one of the
strongest and subtlest antidotes against deathly materialism.
Hence one may understand the _raison d'etre_ for that strange
correspondence between Chinese and Celtic happenings which we
have noted: the main wave rolls east; the backwash west; and
they touch simultaneously the extremities of things, which
extremities are, Celtdom and China. In both you get the sense of
being at the limits of the world,--of having beyond you only
nonmaterial and magical realms:--Peng-lai in the East, Hy Brasil
in the West;--the Fortunate Islands of the Sunset, and the
Fortunate Islands of the Dawn.
We have seen opportunities coming to each nation in turn; but
that how they used them depended on themselves: on whether they
would turn them to spiritual or partly spiritual, or to wholly
material uses: whether they would side, in their hour of
prosperity, with the Gods--as China did to some extent; or with
the hellions, as in the main Europe did. And above all, we have
seen how the Gods will never accept defeat, but return ever and
again to the attack, and are in perpetual heroic rebellion
against the despotism of materialism and evil and human blindness;
and we know that the victory they so often failed to achieve
of old, they are out to win now, and in the way of winning it:
that we are in the crisis and most exciting of times, standing
to make the future ages golden; that the measure of the victory
the Gods shall win is somewhat in our own hands to decide. The
war-harps that played victory to Heaven at Moytura of old are
sounding in our ears now, if we will listen for them; and
when Point Loma was founded, it was as if once more the shaft
of Lugh the Sunbright took the eye of Balor Balcbeimnech in
the midst.
And so, at this point, we take leave of our voyaging together
through the past.
------
* Perhaps, if we knew anything about American history, to
America. One is tempted to put two and two together, in the
light of what we have seen, and note what they come to. The
great American Empires fell before Cortes and Pizarro, between
1520 and 1533. That surely marked the end of a manvantaa or
fifteen hundred years period of cultural activity; which then
would have begun between 20 and 33 A.D.--upon a backwash of the
cycle from Augustan Rome? We are not to imagine that any outward
link would be necessary. Is it possibly a fact that in those
centuries, the first five of our era roughly, when both Europe
and China were somewhat sterile for the most part,--the high tide
of culture and creation was mainly in the antipodes of each
other, America and India? And that after the fall of the Tang
glory in China (750) and the Irish illumination in the west
(775), some new phase of civilization began, somewhere between
the Rio Grande del Norte and the borders of Chile? The Incaic
Empire, like the Han and the Western Roman, we know lasted about
four centuries, or from the region of 1100-A.D.--But there we
must leave it, awaiting the work of discovery.