of madness caused by Gwenhwyvar's jealous expulsion of Elayne his
fairy-sweetheart,--quite a parallel case to that of Cuchulainn when his
wife Emer expelled his fairy-mistress Fand,--fought against a wild boar
and was terribly wounded, and how afterwards he was nursed by his own
Elayne in Fairyland, and healed and restored to his right mind by the
Sangreal. Then Sir Ector and Sir Perceval found him there in the Joyous
Isle enjoying the companionship of Elayne, where he had been many years,
and from that world of Faerie induced him to return to Arthur's court.
And, finally, comes the most important element of all to show how
closely related Lancelot is with the fairy world and its people, and how
inseparable from that invisible realm another of the fundamental
elements in the life of Arthur is--the Quest of the Holy Grail, and the
story of Galahad, who of all the knights was pure and good enough to
behold the Sacred Vessel, and who was the offspring of the foster-son of
the Lady of the Lake and the fairy woman Elayne.[291]
In the strange old Welsh tale of _Kulhwch and Olwen_ we find Arthur and
his knights even more closely identified with the fairy realm than in
Malory and the Norman-French writers; and this is important, because the
ancient tale is, as scholars think, probably much freer from foreign
influences and re-working than the better-known romances of Arthur, and
therefore more in accord with genuine Celtic beliefs and folk-lore, as
we shall quickly see. The court of King Arthur to which the youth
Kulhwch goes seeking aid in his enterprise seems in some ways--though
the parallel is not complete enough to be emphasized--to be a more
artistic, because literary, picture of that fairy court which the Celtic
peasant locates under mountains, in caverns, in hills, and in knolls, a
court quite comparable to that of the Irish _Sidhe_-folk or Tuatha De
Danann. Arthur is represented in the midst of a brilliant life where, as
in the fairy palaces, there is much feasting; and Kulhwch being invited
to the feasting says, 'I came not here to consume meat and drink.'
And behold what sort of personages from that court Kulhwch has pledged
to him, so that by their supernatural assistance he may obtain Olwen,
herself perhaps a fairy held under fairy enchantment[292]: the sons of
Gwawrddur Kyrvach, whom Arthur had power to call from the confines of
hell; Morvran the son of Tegid, who, because of his ugliness, was
thought to be a demon; Sandde Bryd Angel, who was so beautiful that
mortals thought him a ministering angel; Henbedestyr, with whom no one
could keep pace 'either on horseback, or on foot', and who therefore
seems to be a spirit of the air; Henwas Adeinawg, with whom 'no
four-footed beast could run the distance of an acre, much less go beyond
it'; Sgilti Yscawndroed, who must have been another spirit or fairy, for
'when he intended to go on a message for his Lord (Arthur, who is like a
Tuatha De Danann king), he never sought to find a path, but knowing
whither he was to go, if his way lay through a wood he went along the
tops of the trees', and 'during his whole life, a blade of reed-grass
bent not beneath his feet, much less did one ever break, so lightly did
he tread'; Gwallgoyc, who 'when he came to a town, though there were
three hundred houses in it, if he wanted anything, he would not let
sleep come to the eyes of any whilst he remained there'; Osla
Gyllellvawr, who bore a short broad dagger, and 'when Arthur and his
hosts came before a torrent, they would seek for a narrow place where
they might pass the water, and would lay the sheathed dagger across the
torrent, and it would form a bridge sufficient for the armies of the
three Islands of Britain, and of the three islands adjacent, with their
spoil.' It seems very evident that this is the magic bridge, so often
typified by a sword or dagger, which connects the world invisible with
our own, and over which all shades and spirits pass freely to and fro.
In this case we think Arthur is very clearly a ruler of the spirit
realm, for, like the great Tuatha De Danann king Dagda, he can command
its fairy-like inhabitants, and his army is an army of spirits or
fairies. The unknown author of _Kulhwch_, like Spenser in modern times
in his _Faerie Queene_, seems to have made the Island of Britain the
realm of Faerie--the Celtic Otherworld--and Arthur its king. But let us
take a look at more of the men pledged to Kulhwch from among Arthur's
followers: Clust the son of Clustveinad, who possessed clairaudient
faculties of so extraordinary a kind that 'though he were buried seven
cubits beneath the earth, he would hear the ant fifty miles off rise
from her nest in the morning'; and the wonderful Kai, who could live
nine days and nine nights under water, for his breath lasted this long,
and he could exist the same length of time without sleep. 'A wound from
Kai's sword no physician could heal.' And at will he was as tall as the
highest tree in the forest. 'And he had another peculiarity: so great
was the heat of his nature, that, when it rained hardest, whatever he
carried remained dry for a handbreadth above and a handbreadth below his
hand; and when his companions were coldest, it was to them as fuel with
which to light their fire.'
Yet besides all these strange knights, Arthur commanded a being who is
without any reasonable doubt a god or ruler of the subjective
realm--'Gwynn ab Nudd, whom God has placed over the brood of devils in
Annwn, lest they should destroy the present race. He will never be
spared thence.' Whatever each one of us may think of this wonderful
assembly of warriors and heroes who recognized in Arthur their chief,
they are certainly not beings of the ordinary type,--in fact they seem
not of this world, but of that hidden land to which we all shall one day
journey.[293] But to avoid too much conjecture and to speak with a
degree of scientific exactness as to how Arthur and these companions of
his are to be considered, let us undertake a brief investigation into
the mythological character and nature of the chief one of them next to
the great hero--Gwynn ab Nudd. Professor J. Loth has said that 'nothing
shows better the evolution of mythological personages than the history
of Gwynn';[294] and in Irish we have the equivalent form of Nudd in the
name Nuada--famous for having had a hand of silver; and Nuada of the
Silver Hand was a king of the Tuatha De Danann. The same authority thus
describes Gwynn, the son of Nudd:--'Gwynn, like his father Nudd, is an
ancient god of the Britons and of the Gaels. Christian priests have made
of him a demon. The people persisted in regarding him as a powerful and
rich king, the sovereign of supernatural beings.'[295] And referring to
Gwynn, Professor Loth in his early edition of _Kulhwch_ says:--'Our
author has had an original idea: he has left him in hell, to which place
Christianity had made him descend, but for a motive which does him the
greatest honour: God has given him the strength of demons to control
them and to prevent them from destroying the present race of men: he is
indispensable down there.'[295] Lady Guest calls Gwynn the King of
Faerie,[296] the ruler of the _Tylwyth Teg_ or 'Family of Beauty', who
are always joyful and well-disposed toward mortals; and also the ruler
of the Elves (Welsh _Ellyllon_), a goblin race who take special delight
in misleading travellers and in playing mischievous tricks on men. It is
even said that Gwynn himself is given to indulging in the same
mischievous amusements as his elvish subjects.
The evidence now set forth seems to suggest clearly and even definitely
that Arthur in his true nature is a god of the subjective world, a ruler
of ghosts, demons, and demon rulers, and fairies; that the people of his
court are more like the Irish _Sidhe_-folk than like mortals; and that
as a great king he is comparable to Dagda the over-king of all the
Tuatha De Danann. Arthur and Osiris, two culture heroes and sun-gods, as
we suggested at first, are strikingly parallel. Osiris came from the
Otherworld to this one, became the first Divine Ruler and Culture Hero
of Egypt, and then returned to the Otherworld, where he is now a king.
Arthur's father was a ruler in the Otherworld, and Arthur evidently came
from there to be the Supreme Champion of the Brythons, and then returned
to that realm whence he took his origin, a realm which poets called
Avalon. The passing of Arthur seems mystically to represent the sunset
over the Western Ocean: Arthur disappears beneath the horizon into the
Lower World which is also the Halls of Osiris, wherein Osiris journeys
between sunset and sunrise, between death and re-birth. Merlin found the
infant Arthur floating on the waves: the sun rising across the waters is
this birth of Arthur, the birth of Osiris. In the chapter on Re-birth,
evidence will be offered to show that as a culture hero Arthur is to be
regarded as a sun-god incarnate in a human body to teach the Brythons
arts and sciences and hidden things--even as Prometheus and Zeus are
said to have come to earth to teach the Greeks; and that as a
sixth-century warrior, Arthur, in accordance with the Celtic Doctrine of
Re-birth, is an ancient Brythonic hero reincarnate.
THE LITERARY EVOLUTION AND THE ANTIQUITY OF THE BRYTHONIC FAIRY-ROMANCES
After the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, the ancient fairy-romances
of the Brythons began to exercise their remarkable literary influence as
we see it now in the evolution of the Arthurian Legend. And in this
evolution of the Arthurian Legend we find the proof of the antiquity of
the Brythonic Fairy-Faith, just as we find in the old Irish manuscripts
the proof of the antiquity of the Gaelic Fairy-Faith.
Long before 1066, Gildas gives the first recorded germs of the Arthurian
story in his _De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae_, though they are
hardly distinguishable as such. His failure to mention the name of
Arthur, though treating of the whole period when Arthur is supposed to
have lived, he himself being contemporary with the period, raises the
very difficult question which we have already mentioned, Did the mighty
Brythonic hero ever have an actual historical existence? Almost three
hundred years later--a period sufficiently removed from Gildas to have
made Arthur the supreme champion of the falling Brythons, granting that
he did exist during the sixth century as a Brythonic chieftain--in the
_Historia Britonum_, completed about the year 800, and attributed to
Nennius, Arthur, for the first time in a known manuscript, is mentioned
as a character of British history.[297] All that can be definitely said
of the narrative of Nennius 'is that it represents more or less
inconsistent British traditions of uncertain age'.[297] That it is not
always historical, many scholars are agreed. Dr. R. H. Fletcher says,
'There is always the possibility that Arthur never existed at all, and
that even Nennius's comparatively modest eulogy has no firmer foundation
than the persistent stories of ancient Celtic myth or the patriotic
figments of the ardent Celtic imagination.'[298] Sir John Rhys also
propounds a similar view.[299] Thus, for example, Nennius states that
Arthur in one battle slew single handed more than nine hundred men; and,
again, that the number of Arthur's always-successful battles was twelve,
as though Arthur were the sun or a sun-god, and his battles the twelve
months of the solar year.[298]
Between Nennius and Geoffrey of Monmouth there is an intermediate stage
in the development of the Arthurian Legend, during which the character
of Arthur tends to become more romantic; but for our purpose this period
is of slight importance. Thereafter, by means of Geoffrey's famous
_Historia Regum Britanniae_, written about 1136, the Arthurian Legend
gained popularity throughout Western Europe. In this work Arthur ceases
to be purely historical, and appears as a great king enveloped in the
mythical atmosphere of a Celtic hero, and with him Merlin and Lear are
for the first time definitely enshrined in the literature of
Britain.[300] Arthur's career is completely sketched in the _Historia_,
from birth to his mysterious departure for the Isle of Avalon after the
last fight with Modred, when fairy women take him to cure him of his
wounds (Book XI, 1-2). Geoffrey, thus the father of the Arthurian Legend
in English and European literature, was undoubtedly a Welshman who
probably had natural opportunities of knowing the true character of
Arthur from genuine Brythonic sources, though we know little about his
life. His _Historia_, as the researches of scholars have shown, was the
sum total in his time of all Arthurian history and myth, whether written
or orally transmitted, which he could collect; just as Malory's _Le
Morte d'Arthur_ was a compendium of Arthurian material in the time of
Edward IV.
There followed many imitations and translations of the _Historia_. The
most important of these appeared in 1155, _Le Roman de Brut_ or 'The
Story of Brutus', by the Norman poet Wace. The _Brut_, though
fundamentally a rimed version of the _Historia_, is much more than a
mere translation: Wace has improved on it; and he gives a convincing
impression that he had access to Celtic Arthurian stories not drawn upon
by Geoffrey, for he gives new touches about Gawain, mentions the
Britons' expectation of Arthur's return from Faerie, and the institution
of the Round Table.[301]
Somewhere about the year 1200, Layamon, a simple-hearted Saxon priest,
wrote another _Brut_, based upon the metrical one by Wace; and in the
literature of England, Layamon's work is the most valuable single
production between the Conquest and Chaucer. The life of Layamon is very
obscure, but it seems reasonably certain that for a long time he lived
on the Welsh marches in North Worcestershire, in the midst of living
Brythonic traditions, which he used at first hand; and, as a result, we
find in his _Brut_ legends not recorded in Geoffrey, or Wace, or in any
earlier or contemporary literature. For our purposes the most
interesting of many interesting additions made by Layamon are the
curious passages about the fairy elves at Arthur's birth, and about the
way in which Arthur was taken by them to their queen Argante in Avalon
to be cured of his wounds:--'The time came that was chosen, then was
Arthur born. So soon as he came on earth elves took him; they enchanted
the child into magic most strong; they gave him might to be the best of
all knights; they gave him another thing, that he should be a rich king;
they gave him the third, that he should live long; they gave to him the
prince virtues most good, so that he was most generous of all men alive.
This the elves gave him, and thus the child thrived.'[302]
In the last fatal battle Modred is slain and Arthur is grievously
wounded. As Arthur lies wounded, Constantine, Cador's son, the earl of
Cornwall, and a relative of Arthur, comes to him. Arthur greets him with
these words:--'"Constantine, thou art welcome; thou wert Cador's son. I
give thee here my kingdom.... And I will fare to Avalun, to the fairest
of all maidens, to Argante the queen, and elf most fair, and she shall
make my wounds all sound; make me all whole with healing draughts. And
afterwards I will come [again] to my kingdom, and dwell with the Britons
with mickle joy." Even with the words, there approached from the sea
that was, a short boat, floating with the waves; and two women therein,
wondrously formed; and they took Arthur anon, and bare him quickly, and
laid him softly down, and forth gan depart. Then it was accomplished
that Merlin whilom said, that mickle care (sorrow) should be of Arthur's
departure. The Britons believe that he is alive, and dwelleth in Avalun
with the fairest of all elves; and the Britons even yet expect when
Arthur shall return.'[303]
During this same period, Giraldus Cambrensis (1147-1223) in his
_Itinerarium Cambriae_ (Book I, c. 8) collected a popular Otherworld
tale. It is about a priest named Elidorus, who when a boy in Gower, the
western district of Glamorganshire, had free passage between this world
of ours and an underground country inhabited by a race of little people
who spoke a language like Greek. This tends to prove that the
Fairy-Faith was then flourishing among the people of Wales.
It was chiefly during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that the
Arthurian Legend as a thing of literature began to take definite shape.
The old romances of the Brythons were cultivated and revised, and
written down by men and women of literary genius. Chrétien de Troyes,
who recorded a large number of legendary stories in verse, Marie de
France, famous for her _Lais_, Thomas, the author of the chief version
of the _Tristan_ legend,[304] Béroul, who recorded a less important
version of this legend,[305] and Robert de Boron, who did much to
develop the legend of the Holy Grail, were among the greatest workers in
the French Celtic Revival of this time.
Professor Brown has shown that 'almost every incident in Chrétien's
_Iwain_ was suggested by an ancient Celtic tale, dealing with the
familiar theme of a journey to win a fairy mistress in the
Otherworld.'[306] The fay whom Iwain marries is called Laudine; and,
like one of the fairies who live in sacred waters, she has her favourite
fountain which the knight guards, as though he were the Black Knight in
the old Welsh tale of _The Lady of the Fountain_. Both Gaston Paris and
Alfred Nutt have also recognized the tale of _Iwain_ as a fairy
romance.[307] Professor Loth observes that, 'It is not impossible that
Chrétien had known, among fairy legends, Armorican legends, concerning
the fairies of waters, whose rôle is identical with that of the Welsh
_Tylwyth Teg_.'[308]
In _Lanval_, one of the _Lais_[309] by Marie de France, written during
the twelfth century, probably while its author was living in England, we
have direct proof that there was then flourishing in Brittany--well
known to Marie de France, who was French by birth and training--a
popular belief in fairy women who lived in the Otherworld, and who could
_take_ mortals on whom their love fell. It is probable that the older
lay, to which Marie de France refers in the beginning of her _Lanval_,
may have been the anonymous one of _Graelent_, sometimes improperly
attributed to her. Zimmer and Foerster place the origin of _Graelent_ in
Brittany[310]; and the similarity of the heroes in the two poems seems
to be due to a very ancient Brythonic Fairy-Faith. Dr. Schofield sees in
_Graelent_ an older form of the more polished _Lanval_; and remarks that
the chief difference in the two _lais_ is found in the way the hero
meets the fairy women. In the case of Lanval, when he leaves the court,
he goes to rest beside a river where two beautiful maidens come to him;
Graelent is alone in the woods when he sees a hind whiter than snow, and
following it comes to a place where fairy damsels are bathing in a
fountain. There seems to be no doubt that in both poems the maidens and
damsels are fairies quite like the Tuatha De Danann, with power to cast
their spell over beautiful young men whom they wish to have for
husbands. In _Guingemor_, another of the old Breton lays, ascribed by
Gaston Paris to Marie de France, we find again fairy-romance episodes
similar to those in _Lanval_ and _Graelent_.[311] The _Lais_ of Marie de
France had many imitators in England. Chaucer, too, has made it clear
that he knew a good deal about the old Breton _lais_ and their subjects
or 'matter', for in the _Prologue to the Frankeleyn's Tale_ he writes:--
Thise olde gentil Britons in hir dayes
Of diverse aventures maden layes,
Rymeyed in hir firste Briton tonge.
We may now briefly examine, in a general way, some of the most
noteworthy of the more obscure, but for us important Old French
fairy-romances of a kindred Brythonic or Arthurian character, called
_Romans d'Aventure_ and _Romans Bretons_, wherein _fées_ appear or are
mentioned: i. e. _Le Bel Inconnu_, _Blancadin_, _Brun de la Montaigne_,
_Claris et Laris_, _Dolopathos_, _Escanor_, _Floriant et Florete_,
_Partonopeus_, _La Vengeance Raguidel_, _Joufrois_, and _Amada et
Ydoine_.[312] In these romances, fairies commonly appear as most
beautiful supernormal women who love mortal heroes. They are seen
chiefly at night, frequenting forests and fountains, and like all
fairies disappear at or before cock-crow. They are skilled in magic and
astrology; like the Greek Fates, some of them spin and weave and have
great influence over the lives of mankind. They are represented as
relatively immortal, so long is their span of life compared to ours;
but, ultimately, they seem to be subject to a change such as we call
death. This indeed is never specifically mentioned, only implied by the
statements that they enjoy childhood and then womanhood, being thus
created and not eternal beings. Some are very prominent figures, like
_Morgain la Fée_, Arthur's sister. In most cases they are beneficent,
and frequently act as guardian spirits for their special hero, just as
the Lake Lady for Arthur and the _Morrigu_ for Cuchulainn. So strong is
the faith in these _fées_ that a man meeting unusual success is often
described as _féed_--that is endowed with fairy power or under fairy
protection, as Perceval's adversary, the Knight of the Dragon,
states.[313] In _Joufrois_, too, the power of the fairies, or else the
special protection of God, is considered the cause of success in
arms.[314] In _Brun de la Montaigne_, _Morgain la Fée_ is represented as
the cousin of Arthur; and Butor, the father of Brun, mentions several
localities in different lands, which, like the Forest of Brocéliande in
Brittany, the chief theatre of this romance, are fairy haunts; and he
names them as being under the dominion of Arthur, who is described as a
great fairy king.[315]
Such fairy romances as the above (and they are but a few examples
selected from among a vast number) often localized in Brittany, raise
the perplexing and far-reaching problem concerning the origin of the
'Matter of Britain'. The most reasonable position to take with respect
to this problem would seem to be that Celtic traditions flourished
wherever there were Gaels and Brythons, that there was much interchange
of these traditions between one Celtic country and another--especially
between Wales and Ireland and across the channel between Brittany and
South England, including Cornwall and Wales, both before and after the
Christian era. Further, the Arthurian fairy-romances, based upon such
interchanged Celtic traditions, grew up with a Brythonic background,
chiefly after the Norman Conquest, both in Armorica and in Britain, and
became in the later Middle Ages one of the chief glories of English and
of European literature.
In concluding this slight examination of Brythonic fairy-romances, we
may very briefly suggest by means of a few selected examples what
fairies are like in the _Mabinogion_ stories and in the _Four Ancient
Books of Wales_. _Kulhwch and Olwen_, the chief literary treasure-house
of ancient magical and mystical Otherworld and fairy traditions of the
Brythons, which we have already considered in relation to Arthur,
'appears to be built upon Arthurian and other legends of native
growth.'[316] Unmistakable Welsh parallels to the Irish fairy-belief
appear in the _Mabinogi of Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed_, where the two chief
incidents are Pwyll's journey to the Otherworld after he and Arawn its
ruler have exchanged shapes and kingdoms for a year, and the marriage of
Pwyll to a fairy damsel; in the _Mabinogi_ of _Manawyddan_, which
contains much magic and shape-shifting, and the description of a fairy
castle belonging to Llwyd; and in the _Mabinogi_ of _Branwen, the
Daughter of Llyr_, where there is the episode of the seven-year feast at
Harlech over the Head of Bran, during which the Birds of Rhiannon's
realm sing so sweetly that time passes abnormally fast. The
subject-matter of the four true _Mabinogion_ (composed before the
eleventh century) is, as Sir John Rhys has pointed out, the fortunes
of three clans of superhuman beings comparable to the Irish Tuatha De
Danann: (1) the Children of Llyr, (2) the Children of Don, (3) and the
Family of Pwyll.[317] Herein, then, the ancient Gaelic and Brythonic
Fairy-Faiths coincide, and show the unity of the Celtic race which
evolved them.
In the _Four Ancient Books of Wales_, which are poetical compositions,
whereas the _Mabinogion_ tales are prose with extremely little verse,
there are certain interesting passages to illustrate the ancient
Fairy-Faith of the Brythons from some of its purest sources. The first
selected example comes from the _Black Book of Caermarthen_. It is a
poem, sometimes called the _Avallenau_, from among the poems relating to
the Battle of Arderydd; and it represents _Myrddin_ or Merlin, the
famous magician of Arthur, quite at the mercy of sprites. The passage is
an interesting one as showing that in the region where Merlin is
supposed to be under the enchantment of the fairy woman Vivian he was
regarded as no longer able to exercise his wonted control over spirits
like fairies. As in ancient non-Celtic belief, where the loss of
chastity in a magician, that is to say in one able to command certain
orders of invisible beings, always leads to his falling under their
lawless power, so was it with Merlin when overcome by Vivian. And this
is Merlin's lamentation:--
Ten years and forty, as the toy of lawless ones,
Have I been wandering in gloom among sprites.
After wealth in abundance and entertaining minstrels,
I have been [here so long that] it is useless for gloom and sprites to
lead me astray.[318]
In a dialogue between Myrddin and his sister Gwenddydd, contained in the
_Red Book of Hergest I_,[319] there is a curious reference to ghosts of
the mountain who, just like fairies that live in the mountains, steal
away men's reason when they _strike_ them,--in death which may appear
natural, in sickness, or in accident. And after his death--after he has
been _taken_ by these ghosts of the mountain--Myrddin returns as a ghost
and speaks from the grave a prophecy which 'the ghost of the mountain in
Aber Carav'[320] told him. Not only do these passages prove the Celtic
belief in ghosts like fairies to have existed anciently in Wales; but
they show also that the recorded Fairy-Faith of the Brythons, like that
of the Gaels of Ireland and Scotland, directly attests and confirms our
Psychological Theory. Like a record from the official proceedings of the
Psychical Research Society itself, they form one of the strongest proofs
that fairies, ghosts, and shades were confused, all alike, in the mind
of the Welsh poet, mingling together in that realm where mortals see
with a new vision, and exist with a body invisible to us.
Our study of the literary evolution of the Brythonic fairy-romances
shows that as early as about the year 800 Arthurian traditions were
known, though possibly Arthur himself never had historical existence. By
about 1136, when Geoffrey's famous _Historia_ appeared, these traditions
were already highly developed in Britain, and Arthur had become a great
Brythonic hero enveloped in a halo of romance and myth, and, as an
Otherworld being, was definitely related to Avalon and its fairy
inhabitants. This new literary material of Celtic origin opened up to
Europe by Geoffrey rapidly began to influence profoundly the form of
continental as well as English poetry and prose, chiefly through the
writers of the Norman-French period of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. In itself it was in no wise essentially different from what
we find as fairy romances in the old Irish manuscripts written during
the same and earlier periods. Welsh literature, however it may be
related to Irish, shows a common origin with it. The four true
_Mabinogion_ as stories are earlier than 1100; _Kulhwch and Olwen_ in
its present form most probably dates from the latter half of the twelfth
century; the _Four Ancient Books of Wales_ date from the twelfth to the
fifteenth centuries as manuscripts. In both ancient and modern times
there was much interchange of material between Irish Gaels and Brythons;
and Brittany as well as Britain and Ireland undoubtedly contributed to
the evolution of the complex fairy romances which formed the germ of the
Arthurian Legend.
When we stop to consider how long it may have taken the Brythonic
Fairy-Faith, as well as that of the Gaels, to become so widespread and
popular among the Celtic peoples that it could take such definite shape
as it now shows in all the oldest manuscripts in different languages, we
can easily wander backward into periods of enlightenment and
civilization beyond the horizon of our little fragments of recorded
history. Who can tell how many ages ago the Fairy-Faith began its first
evolution, or who can say that there was ever a Celt who did not believe
in, or know about fairies?
SECTION II
THE RECORDED FAIRY-FAITH
CHAPTER VI
THE CELTIC OTHERWORLD[321]
'In Ireland this world and the world we go to after death are not
far apart.'--W. B. YEATS.
'Many go to the Tir-na-nog in sleep, and some are said to have
remained there, and only a vacant form is left behind without the
light in the eyes which marks the presence of a soul.'--A. E.
General ideas of the Otherworld: its location; its subjectivity;
its names; its extent; Tethra one of its kings--The Silver Branch
and the Golden Bough; and Initiations--The Otherworld the
Heaven-World of all religions--Voyage of Bran--Cormac in the Land
of Promise--Magic Wands--Cuchulainn's Sick-Bed--Ossian's return
from Fairyland--Lanval's going to Avalon--Voyage of
Mael-Duin--Voyage of Teigue--Adventures of Art--Cuchulainn's and
Arthur's Otherworld Quests--Literary Evolution of idea of Happy
Otherworld.
GENERAL DESCRIPTION
The Heaven-World of the ancient Celts, unlike that of the Christians,
was not situated in some distant, unknown region of planetary space, but
here on our own earth. As it was necessarily a subjective world, poets
could only describe it in terms more or less vague; and its exact
geographical location, accordingly, differed widely in the minds of
scribes from century to century. Sometimes, as is usual to-day in
fairy-lore, it was a subterranean world entered through caverns, or
hills, or mountains, and inhabited by many races and orders of invisible
beings, such as demons, shades, fairies, or even gods. And the
underground world of the _Sidhe_-folk, which cannot be separated from
it, was divided into districts or kingdoms under different fairy kings
and queens, just as the upper world of mortals. We already know how the
Tuatha De Danann or _Sidhe_-folk, after their defeat by the Sons of Mil
at the Battle of Tailte, retired to this underground world and took
possession of its palaces beneath the green hills and vales of Ireland;
and how from there, as gods of the harvest, they still continued to
exercise authority over their conquerors, or marshalled their own
invisible spirit-hosts in fairy warfare, and sometimes interfered in the
wars of men.
More frequently, in the old Irish manuscripts, the Celtic Otherworld was
located in the midst of the Western Ocean, as though it were the
'double' of the lost Atlantis;[322] and Manannan Mac Lir, the Son of the
Sea--perhaps himself the 'double' of an ancient Atlantean king--was one
of the divine rulers of its fairy inhabitants, and his palace, for he
was one of the Tuatha De Danann, was there rather than in Ireland; and
when he travelled between the two countries it was in a magic chariot
drawn by horses who moved over the sea-waves as on land. And fairy women
came from that mid-Atlantic world in magic boats like spirit boats, to
charm away such mortal men as in their love they chose, or else to take
great Arthur wounded unto death. And in that island world there was
neither death nor pain nor scandal, nought save immortal and unfading
youth, and endless joy and feasting.
Even yet at rare intervals, like a phantom, Hy Brasil appears far out on
the Atlantic. No later than the summer of 1908 it is said to have been
seen from West Ireland, just as that strange invisible island near
Innishmurray, inhabited by the invisible 'gentry', is seen--once in
seven years. And too many men of intelligence testify to having seen Hy
Brasil at the same moment, when they have been together, or separated,
as during the summer of 1908, for it to be explained away as an ordinary
illusion of the senses. Nor can it be due to a mirage such as we know,
because neither its shape nor position seems to conform to any known
island or land mass. The Celtic Otherworld is like that hidden realm of
subjectivity lying just beyond the horizon of mortal existence, which we
cannot behold when we would, save with the mystic vision of the Irish
seer. Thus in the legend of Bran's friends, who sat over dinner at
Harlech with the Head of Bran for seven years, three curious birds acted
as musicians, the Three Birds of Rhiannon, which were said to sing the
dead back to life and the living into death;--but the birds were not in
Harlech, they were out over the sea in the atmosphere of Rhiannon's
realm in the bosom of Cardigan Bay.[323] And though we might say of that
Otherworld, as we learn from these Three Birds of Rhiannon, and as
Socrates would say, that its inhabitants are come from the living and
the living in our world from the dead there, yet, as has already been
set forth in chapter iv, we ought not to think of the _Sidhe_-folk, nor
of such great heroes and gods as Arthur and Cuchulainn and Finn, who are
also of its invisible company, as in any sense half-conscious shades;
for they are always represented as being in the full enjoyment of an
existence and consciousness greater than our own.
In Irish manuscripts, the Otherworld beyond the Ocean bears many names.
It is _Tír-na-nog_, 'The Land of Youth'; _Tír-Innambéo_, 'The Land of
the Living'; _Tír Tairngire_, 'The Land of Promise'; _Tír N-aill_, 'The
Other Land (or World)'; _Mag Már_, 'The Great Plain'; and also _Mag
Mell_, 'The Plain Agreeable (or Happy).'
But this western Otherworld, if it is what we believe it to be--a
poetical picture of the great subjective world--cannot be the realm of
any one race of invisible beings to the exclusion of another. In it all
alike--gods, Tuatha De Danann, fairies, demons, shades, and every sort
of disembodied spirits--find their appropriate abode; for though it
seems to surround and interpenetrate this planet even as the X-rays
interpenetrate matter, it can have no other limits than those of the
Universe itself. And that it is not an exclusive realm is certain from
what our old Irish manuscripts record concerning the Fomorian
races.[324] These, when they met defeat on the battle-field of Moytura
at the hands of the Tuatha De Danann, retired altogether from Ireland,
their overthrow being final, and returned to their own invisible
country--a mysterious land beyond the Ocean, where the dead find a new
existence, and where their god-king Tethra ruled, as he formerly ruled
in this world. And the fairy women of Tethra's kingdom, even like those
who came from the Tuatha De Danann of Erin, or those of Manannan's
ocean-world, enticed mortals to go with them to be heroes under their
king, and to behold there the assemblies of ancestors. It was one of
them who came to Connla, son of Conn, supreme king of Ireland; and this
was her message to him:--'The immortals invite you. You are going to be
one of the heroes of the people of Tethra. You will always be seen
there, in the assemblies of your ancestors, in the midst of those who
know and love you.' And with the fairy spell upon him the young prince
entered the glass boat of the fairy woman, and his father the king, in
great tribulation and wonder, beheld them disappear across the waters
never to return.[324]
THE SILVER BRANCH[325] AND THE GOLDEN BOUGH
To enter the Otherworld before the appointed hour marked by death, a
passport was often necessary, and this was usually a silver branch of
the sacred apple-tree bearing blossoms, or fruit, which the queen of the
Land of the Ever-Living and Ever-Young gives to those mortals whom she
wishes for as companions; though sometimes, as we shall see, it was a
single apple without its branch. The queen's gifts serve not only as
passports, but also as food and drink for mortals who go with her. Often
the apple-branch produces music so soothing that mortals who hear it
forget all troubles and even cease to grieve for those whom the fairy
women _take_. For us there are no episodes more important than those in
the ancient epics concerning these apple-tree talismans, because in them
we find a certain key which unlocks the secret of that world from which
such talismans are brought, and proves it to be the same sort of a place
as the Otherworld of the Greeks and Romans. Let us then use the key and
make a few comparisons between the Silver Branch of the Celts and the
Golden Bough of the Ancients, expecting the two symbols naturally to
differ in their functions, though not fundamentally.
It is evident at the outset that the Golden Bough was as much the
property of the queen of that underworld called Hades as the Silver
Branch was the gift of the Celtic fairy queen, and like the Silver Bough
it seems to have been the symbolic bond between that world and this,
offered as a tribute to Proserpine by all initiates, who made the mystic
voyage in full human consciousness. And, as we suspect, there may be
even in the ancient Celtic legends of mortals who make that strange
voyage to the Western Otherworld and return to this world again, an echo
of initiatory rites--perhaps druidic--similar to those of Proserpine as
shown in the journey of Aeneas, which, as Virgil records it, is
undoubtedly a poetical rendering of an actual psychic experience of a
great initiate.
In Virgil's classic poem the Sibyl commanded the plucking of the sacred
bough to be carried by Aeneas when he entered the underworld; for
without such a bough plucked near the entrance to Avernus from the
wondrous tree sacred to Infernal Juno (i. e. Proserpine) none could
enter Pluto's realm.[326] And when Charon refused to ferry Aeneas across
the Stygian lake until the Sibyl-woman drew forth the Golden Bough from
her bosom, where she had hidden it, it becomes clearly enough a passport
to Hades, just as the Silver Branch borne by the fairy woman is a
passport to _Tír N-aill_; and the Sibyl-woman who guided Aeneas to the
Greek and Roman Otherworld takes the place of the fairy woman who leads
mortals like Bran to the Celtic Otherworld.[327]
THE OTHERWORLD IDEA LITERALLY INTERPRETED
With this parallel between the Otherworld of the Celts and that of the
Ancients seemingly established, we may leave poetical images and seek a
literal interpretation for the animistic idea about those realms. The
Rites of Proserpine as conducted in the Mysteries of Antiquity furnish
us with the means; and in what Servius has written we have the material
ready.[328] Taking the letter Y, which Pythagoras said is like life with
its dividing ways of good and evil, as the mystic symbol of the branch
which all initiates like Aeneas offered to Proserpine in the subjective
world while there out of the physical body, he says of the initiatory
rites:--'He (the poet) could not join the Rites of Proserpine without
having the branch to hold up. And by "_going to the shades_" _he_ (the
poet) _means celebrating the Rites of Proserpine_.'[328] This passage is
certainly capable of but one meaning; and we may perhaps assume that
the invisible realm of the Ancients, which is called Hades, is like the
Celtic Otherworld located in the Western Ocean, and is also like, or has
its mythological counterpart in, the Elysian Fields to the West,
reserved by the Greeks and Romans for their gods and heroes, and in the
Happy Otherworld of Scandinavian, Iranian, and Indian mythologies. It
must then follow that all these realms--though placed in different
localities by various nations, epochs, traditions, scribes, and poets
(even as the under-ground world of the Tuatha De Danann in Ireland
differs from that ruled over by one of their own race, Manannan the Son
of the Sea)--are simply various ways which different Aryan peoples have
had of looking at that one great invisible realm of which we have just
spoken, and which forms the Heavenworld of every religion, Aryan and
non-Aryan, known to man. And if this conclusion is accepted, and it
seems that it must be, merely on the evidence of the literary or
recorded Celtic Fairy-Faith, our Psychological Theory stands proven.
The Rites of Proserpine had many counterparts. Thus, to pass on to
another parallel, in the Mysteries of Eleusis the disappearance of the
Maiden into the under-world, into Hades, the land of the dead, was
continually re-enacted in a sacred drama, and it no doubt was one of the
principal rites attending initiation. In our study of the Celtic
Doctrine of Re-birth, we shall return to this subject of Celtic
Initiation.
THE VOYAGE OF BRAN, SON OF FEBAL
We are well prepared now to enjoy the best known voyages which men,
heroes, and god-men, are said to have made to Avalon, or the Land of the
Living, through the invitation of a fairy woman or else of the god
Manannan himself; and probably the most famous is that of the _Voyage of
Bran, Son of Febal_, as so admirably translated from the original old
Irish saga by Dr. Kuno Meyer.[329] Perhaps in all Celtic literature no
poem surpasses this in natural and simple beauty.
One day Bran heard strange music behind him as he was alone in the
neighbourhood of his stronghold; and as he listened, so sweet was the
sound that it lulled him to sleep. When he awoke, there lay beside him a
branch of silver so white with blossoms that it was not easy to
distinguish the blossoms from the branch. Bran took up the branch and
carried it to the royal house, and, when the hosts were assembled
therein, they saw a woman in strange raiment standing on the floor.
Whence she came and how, no one could tell. And as they all beheld her,
she sang fifty quatrains to Bran:--
A branch of the apple-tree from Emain
I bring, like those one knows;
Twigs of white silver are on it,
Crystal brows with blossoms.
There is a distant isle,
Around which sea-horses glisten:
A fair course against the white-swelling surge,--
Four feet uphold it.
* * * * *
When the song was finished, 'the woman went from them while they knew
not whither she went. And she took her branch with her. The branch
sprang from Bran's hand into the hand of the woman, nor was there
strength in Bran's hand to hold the branch.' The next day, with the
fairy spell upon him, Bran begins the voyage towards the setting sun. On
the ocean he meets Manannan riding in his magic chariot over the
sea-waves; and the king tells Bran that he is returning to Ireland after
long ages. Parting from the Son of the Sea, Bran goes on, and the first
island he and his companions reach is the 'Island of Joy', where one of
the party is set ashore; the second isle is the 'Land of Women', where
the queen draws Bran and his followers to her realm with a magic clew,
and then entertains them for what seems no more than a year, though 'it
chanced to be many years'. After a while, home-sickness seizes the
adventurers and they come to a unanimous decision to return to Ireland;
but they depart under a taboo not to set foot on earth, or at least not
till holy water has been sprinkled on them. In their coracle they arrive
before a gathering at Srub Brain, probably in West Kerry, and Bran (who
may now possibly be regarded as an apparition temporarily returned from
the Otherworld to bid his people farewell) announces himself, and this
reply is made to him:--'We do not know such a one, though the Voyage of
Bran is in our ancient stories.' Then one of Bran's party, in his
eagerness to land, broke the taboo; he 'leaps from them out of the
coracle. As soon as he touched the earth of Ireland, forthwith he was a
heap of ashes, as though he had been in the earth for many hundred
years.... Thereupon, to the people of the gathering, Bran told all his
wanderings from the beginning until that time. And he wrote these
quatrains in Ogam, and then bade them farewell. And from that hour his
wanderings are not known.'
CORMAC'S ADVENTURE IN THE LAND OF PROMISE[330]
In _Cormac's Adventure in the Land of Promise_, there is again a magic
silver branch with three golden apples on it:--'One day, at dawn in
May-time, Cormac, grandson of Conn, was alone on Múr Tea in Tara. He saw
coming towards him a sedate(?), grey-headed warrior.... A branch of
silver with three golden apples on his shoulder. Delight and amusement
to the full was it to listen to the music of that branch, for men sore
wounded, or women in child-bed, or folk in sickness, would fall asleep
at the melody when that branch was shaken.' And the warrior tells Cormac
that he has come from a land where only truth is known, where there is
'neither age nor decay nor gloom nor sadness nor envy nor jealousy nor
hatred nor haughtiness'. On his promising the unknown warrior any three
boons that he shall ask, Cormac is given the magic branch. The
grey-headed warrior disappears suddenly; 'and Cormac knew not whither
he had gone.'
'Cormac turned into the palace. The household marvelled at the branch.
Cormac shook it at them, and cast them into slumber from that hour to
the same time on the following day. At the end of a year the warrior
comes into his meeting and asked of Cormac the consideration for his
branch. "It shall be given," says Cormac. "I will take [thy daughter]
Ailbe to-day," says the warrior. So he took the girl with him. The women
of Tara utter three loud cries after the daughter of the king of Erin.
But Cormac shook the branch at them, so that he banished grief from them
all and cast them into sleep. That day month comes the warrior and takes
with him Carpre Lifechair (the son of Cormac). Weeping and sorrow ceased
not in Tara after the boy, and on that night no one therein ate or
slept, and they were in grief and in exceeding gloom. But Cormac shook
the branch at them, and they parted from [their] sorrow. The same
warrior comes again. "What askest thou to-day?" says Cormac. "Thy wife,"
saith he, "even Ethne the Longsided, daughter of Dunlang king of
Leinster." Then he takes away the woman with him.' Thereupon Cormac
follows the messenger, and all his people go with him. But 'a great mist
was brought upon them in the midst of the plain of the wall. Cormac
found himself on a great plain alone'. It is the 'Land of Promise'.
Palaces of bronze, and houses of white silver thatched with white birds'
wings are there. 'Then he sees in the garth a shining fountain, with
five streams flowing out of it, and the hosts in turn a-drinking its
water. Nine hazels of Buan grow over the well. The purple hazels drop
their nuts into the fountain, and the five salmon which are in the
fountain sever them, and send their husks floating down the streams. Now
the sound of the falling of those streams is more melodious than any
music that [men] sing.'[331]
Cormac having entered the fairy palace at the fountain beholds 'the
loveliest of the world's women'. After she has been magically bathed, he
bathes, and this, apparently, is symbolical of his purification in the
Otherworld. Finally, at a feast, the warrior-messenger sings Cormac to
sleep; and when Cormac awakes he sees beside him his wife and children,
who had preceded him thither to the Land of Promise. The
warrior-messenger who _took_ them all is none other than the great god
Manannan Mac Lir of the Tuatha De Danann.
There in the Otherworld, Cormac gains a magic cup of gold richly and
wondrously wrought, which would break into three pieces if 'three words
of falsehood be spoken under it', and the magic silver branch; and
Manannan, as the god-initiator, says to Ireland's high king:--'Take thy
family then, and take the Cup that thou mayest have it for discerning
between truth and falsehood. And thou shalt have the Branch for music
and delight. And on the day that thou shalt die they all will be taken
from thee. I am Manannan, son of Ler, king of the Land of Promise; _and
to see the Land of Promise was the reason I brought [thee] hither...._
The fountain which thou sawest, with the five streams out of it, is the
Fountain of Knowledge, and the streams are the five senses through which
knowledge is obtained (?). And no one will have knowledge who drinketh
not a draught out of the fountain itself and out of the streams. The
folk of many arts are those who drink of them both.'
'Now on the morrow morning, when Cormac arose, he found himself on the
green of Tara, with his wife and his son and daughter, and having his
Branch and his Cup. Now that was afterwards [called] "Cormac's Cup", and
it used to distinguish between truth and falsehood with the Gael.
Howbeit, as had been promised him [by Manannan], it remained not after
Cormac's death.'[332]
This beautiful tale evidently echoes in an extremely poetical and
symbolical manner a very ancient Celtic initiation of a king and his
family into the mystic cult of the mighty god Manannan, Son of the Sea.
They enter the Otherworld in a trance state, and on waking are in Erin
again, spiritually enriched. The Cup of Truth is probably the symbol of
having gained knowledge of the Mystery of Life and Death, and the
Branch, that of the Peace and Joy which comes to all who are truly
Initiated; for to have passed from the realm of mortal existence to the
Realm of the Dead, of the Fairy-Folk, of the Gods, and back again, with
full human consciousness all the while, was equivalent to having gained
the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of Life, the Cup of Truth, and to
having bathed in the Fountain of Eternal Youth which confers triumph
over Death and unending happiness. Thus we may have here a Celtic
poetical parallel to the initiatory journey of Aeneas to the Land of the
Dead or Hades.
THE MAGIC WAND OF GODS, FAIRIES, AND DRUIDS
Manannan of the Tuatha De Danann, as a god-messenger from the invisible
realm bearing the apple-branch of silver, is in externals, though not in
other ways, like Hermes, the god-messenger from the realm of the gods
bearing his wand of two intertwined serpents.[333] In modern fairy-lore
this divine branch or wand is the magic wand of fairies; or where
messengers like old men guide mortals to an underworld it is a staff or
cane with which they strike the rock hiding the secret entrance.
The Irish Druids made their wands of divination from the yew-tree; and,
like the ancient priests of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, are believed to
have controlled spirits, fairies, daemons, elementals, and ghosts while
making such divinations. It will help us to understand how closely the
ancient symbols have affected our own life and age--though we have
forgotten their relation with the Otherworld--by offering a few
examples, beginning with the ancient Irish bards who were associated
with the Druids. A wand in the form of a symbolic branch, like a little
spike or crescent with gently tinkling bells upon it, was borne by them;
and in the piece called _Mesca Ulad_ or 'Inebriety of the
Ultonians'[334] it is said of the chief bard of Ulster, Sencha, that in
the midst of a bloody fray he 'waved the peaceful branch of Sencha, and
all the men of Ulster were silent, quiet'. In _Agallamh an dá Shuadh_ or
the 'Dialogue of the two Sages',[335] the mystic symbol used by gods,
fairies, magicians, and by all initiates who know the mystery of life
and death, is thus described as a Druid symbol:--'Neidhe' (a young bard
who aspired to succeed his father as chief poet of Ulster), 'made his
journey with a silver branch over him. The _Anradhs_, or poets of the
second order, carried a silver branch, but the _Ollamhs_, or chief
poets, carried a branch of gold; all other poets bore a branch of
bronze.'[336] Modern and ancient parallels are world-wide, among the
most civilized as among the least civilized peoples, and in civil or
religious life among ourselves. Thus, it was with a magic rod that Moses
struck the rock and pure water gushed forth, and he raised the same rod
and the Red Sea opened; kings hold their sceptres no less than Neptune
his trident; popes and bishops have their croziers; in the Roman Church
there are little wand-like objects used to perform benedictions; high
civil officials have their mace of office; and all the world over there
are the wands of magicians and of medicine-men.
THE SICK-BED OF CUCHULAINN
We turn now to the story of the _Sick-Bed of Cuchulainn_.[337] And this
is how the great hero of Ulster was fairy-struck. Manannan Mac Lir,
tiring of his wife Fand, had deserted her, and so she, wishing to marry
Cuchulainn, went to Ireland with her sister Liban. Taking the form of
two birds bound together by a chain of red gold, Fand and Liban rested
on a lake in Ulster where Cuchulainn should see them as he was hunting.
To capture the two birds, Cuchulainn cast a javelin at them, but they
escaped, though injured. Disappointed at a failure like this, which for
him was most unusual, Cuchulainn went away to a menhir where he sat down
and fell asleep. Then he saw two women, one in a green and one in a
crimson cloak; and the woman in green coming up to him laughed and
struck him with a whip-like object. The woman in crimson did likewise,
and alternately the two women kept striking him till they left him
almost dead. And straightway the mighty hero of the Red Branch Knights
took to his bed with a strange malady, which no Druid or doctor in all
Ireland could cure.
Till the end of a year Cuchulainn lay on his sick-bed at Emain-Macha
without speaking to any one. Then--the day before _Samain_ (November
Eve)--there came to him an unknown messenger who sang to him a wonderful
song, promising to cure him of his malady if he would only accept the
invitation of the daughters of Aed Abrat to visit them in the
Otherworld. When the song was ended, the messenger departed, 'and they
knew not whence he came nor whither he went.' Thereupon Cuchulainn went
to the place where the malady had been put on him, and there appeared to
him again the woman in the green cloak. She let it be known to
Cuchulainn that she was Liban, and that she was longing for him to go
with her to the Plain of Delight to fight against Labraid's enemies.
And she promised Cuchulainn as a reward that he would get Fand to wife.
But Cuchulainn would not accept the invitation without knowing to what
country he was called. So he sent his charioteer Laeg to bring back from
there a report. Laeg went with the fairy woman in a boat of bronze, and
returned; and when Cuchulainn heard from him the wonderful glories of
that Otherworld of the _Sidhe_ he willingly set out for it.
After Cuchulainn had overthrown Labraid's enemies and had been in the
Otherworld a month with the fairy woman Fand, he returned to Ireland
alone; though afterwards in a place agreed upon, Fand joined him. Emer,
the wife of Cuchulainn, was overcome with jealousy and schemed to kill
Fand, so that Fand returned to her husband the god Manannan and he
received her back again. When she was gone Cuchulainn could not be
consoled; but Emer obtained from the Druids a magic drink for
Cuchulainn, which made him forget all about the Otherworld and the fairy
woman Fand. And another drink the Druids gave to Emer so that she forgot
all her jealousy; and then Manannan Mac Lir himself came and shook his
mantle between Cuchulainn and Fand to prevent the two ever meeting
again. And thus it was that the _Sidhe_-women failed to steal away the
great Cuchulainn. The magic of the Druids and the power of the Tuatha De
Danann king triumphed; and the Champion of Ulster did not go to the
Otherworld until he met a natural death in that last great fight.[338]
OSSIAN'S RETURN FROM FAIRYLAND[339]
Ossian too, like Cuchulainn, was enticed into Fairyland by a fairy
woman:--She carries him away on a white horse, across the Western Ocean;
and as they are moving over the sea-waves they behold a fair maid on a
brown horse, and she holding in her right hand a golden apple. After the
hero had married his fairy abductress and lived in the Otherworld for
three hundred years, an overpowering desire to return to Ireland and
join again in the councils of his dearly beloved Fenian Brotherhood took
possession of him, and he set out on the same white horse on which he
travelled thence with the fairy princess, for such was his wife. And
she, as he went, thrice warned him not to lay his 'foot on level
ground', and he heard from her the startling announcement that the
Fenians were all gone and Ireland quite changed.
Safe in Ireland, Ossian seeks the Brotherhood, and though he goes from
one place to another where his old companions were wont to meet, not one
of them can he find. And how changed is all the land! He realizes at
last how long he must have been away. The words of his fairy wife are
too sadly true.
While Ossian wanders disconsolately over Ireland, he comes to a
multitude of men trying to move an enormous slab of marble, under which
some other men are lying. 'Ossian's assistance is asked, and he
generously gives it. But in leaning over his horse, to take up the stone
with one hand, the girth breaks, and he falls. Straightway the white
horse fled away on his way home, and Ossian became aged, decrepit, and
blind.'[340]
THE GOING OF LANVAL TO AVALON
The fairy romances which were recorded during the mediaeval period in
continental Europe report a surprisingly large number of heroes who,
like Cuchulainn and Ossian, fell under the power of fairy women or
_fées_, and followed one of them to the Apple-Land or Avalon. Besides
Arthur, they include Sir Lancelot, Sir Gawayne, Ogier, Guingemor and
Lanval (see pp. 325-6). The story of Lanval is told by Marie de France
in one of her _Lais_, and is so famous a one that we shall briefly
outline it:--
Lanval was a mediaeval knight who lived during the time of King Arthur
in Brittany. He was young and very beautiful, so that one of the fairy
damsels fell in love with him; and in the true Irish fashion--himself
and his fairy sweetheart mounted on the same fairy horse--the two went
riding off to Fairyland:--
On the horse behind her
With full rush Lanval jumped.
With her he goes away into Avalon,
According to what the Briton tells us,
Into an isle, which is very beautiful.[341]
THE VOYAGE OF TEIGUE, SON OF CIAN
There is another type of _imram_ in which through adventure rather than
through invitation from one of the fairy beings, men enter the
Otherworld; as illustrated by the _Voyage of Mael-Duin_,[342] and by the
still more beautiful _Voyage of Teigue, Son of Cian_. This last old
Irish story summarizes many of the Otherworld elements we have so far
considered, and (though it shows Christian influences) gives us a very
clear picture of the Land of Youth amid the Western Ocean--a land such
as Ponce De Leon and so many brave navigators sought in America:--
Teigue, son of Cian, and heir to the kingship of West Munster, with his
followers set out from Ireland to recover his wife and brethren who had
been stolen by Cathmann and his band of sea-rovers from Fresen, a land
near Spain. It was the time of the spring tide, when the sea was rough,
and storms coming on the voyagers they lost their way. After about nine
weeks they came to a land fairer than any land they had ever beheld--it
was the Happy Otherworld. In it were many 'red-laden apple-trees, with
leafy oaks too in it, and hazels yellow with nuts in their clusters';
and 'a wide smooth plain clad in flowering clover all bedewed with
honey'. In the midst of this plain Teigue and his companions descried
three hills, and on each of them an impregnable place of strength. At
the first stronghold, which had a rampart of white marble, Teigue was
welcomed by 'a white-bodied lady, fairest of the whole world's women';
and she told him that the stronghold is the abode 'of Ireland's kings:
from Heremon son of Milesius to Conn of the Hundred Battles, who was the
last to pass into it'. Teigue with his people moved on till they gained
the middle _dún_, the _dún_ with a rampart of gold. There also 'they
found a queen of gracious form, and she draped in vesture of a golden
fabric', who tells them that they are in the Earth's fourth paradise.
At the third _dún_, the _dún_ with a silver rampart, Teigue and his
party met Connla, the son of Conn of the Hundred Battles. 'In his hand
he held a fragrant apple having the hue of gold; a third part of it he
would eat, and still, for all he consumed, never a whit would it be
diminished.' And at his side sat a young woman of many charms, who spake
thus to Teigue:--'I had bestowed on him (i. e. felt for him) true
affection's love, and therefore wrought to have him come to me in this
land; where our delight, both of us, is to continue in looking at and in
perpetual contemplation of one another: above and beyond which we pass
not, to commit impurity or fleshly sin whatsoever.' Both Connla and his
friend were clad in vestments of green--like the fairy-folk; and their
step was so light that hardly did the beautiful clover-heads bend
beneath it. And the apple 'it was that supported the pair of them and,
when once they had partaken of it, nor age nor dimness could affect
them'. When Teigue asked who occupied the _dún_ with the silver rampart
the maiden with Connla made this reply:--'In that one there is not any
one. For behoof of the righteous kings that after acceptance of the
Faith shall rule Ireland it is that yonder _dún_ stands ready; and we
are they who, until such those virtuous princes shall enter into it,
keep the same: in the which, Teigue my soul, thou too shalt have an
appointed place.' 'Obliquely across the most capacious palace Teigue
looked away' (as he was observing the beauty of the yet uninhabited
_dún_), 'and marked a thickly furnished wide-spreading apple-tree that
bare blossoms and ripe fruit both. "What is that apple-tree beyond?" he
asked [of the maiden], and she made answer:--"That apple-tree's fruit it
is that for meat shall serve the congregation which is to be in this
mansion, _and a single apple of the same it was that brought (coaxed
away) Connla to me_."'
Then the party rested, and there came towards them a whole array of
feminine beauty, among which was a lovely damsel of refined form who
foretold to Teigue the manner and time of his death, and as a token she
gave him 'a fair cup of emerald hue, in which are inherent many virtues:
for [among other things] though it were but water poured into it,
incontinently it would be wine'. And this was her farewell message to
Teigue:--'From that (the cup), let not thine hand part; but have it for
a token: when it shall escape from thee, then in a short time after
shalt thou die; and where thou shalt meet thy death is in the glen that
is on Boyne's side: there the earth shall grow into a great hill, and
the name that it shall bear will be _croidhe eisse_; there too (when
thou shalt first have been wounded by a roving wild hart, after which
Allmarachs will slay thee) I will bury thy body; but thy soul shall come
with me hither, where till the Judgement's Day thou shalt assume a body
light and ethereal.'
As the party led by Teigue were going down to the seashore to depart,
the girl who had been escorting them asked 'how long they had been in
the country'. 'In our estimation,' they replied, 'we are in it but one
single day.' She, however, said: 'For an entire twelvemonth ye are in
it; during which time ye have had neither meat nor drink, nor, how long
soever ye should be here, would cold or thirst or hunger assail you.'
And when Teigue and his party had entered their _currach_ they looked
astern, but 'they saw not the land from which they came, for
incontinently an obscuring magic veil was drawn over it'.[343]
THE ADVENTURES OF ART, SON OF CONN
This interesting _imram_ combines, in a way, the type of tale wherein a
fairy woman comes from the Otherworld to our world--though in this tale
she is banished from there--and the type of tale wherein the Otherworld
is found through adventure:--
Bécuma Cneisgel, a woman of the Tuatha De Danann, because of a
transgression she had committed in the Otherworld with Gaidiar,
Manannan's son, was banished thence. She came to Conn, high king of
Ireland, and she bound him to do her will; and her judgement was that
Art, the son of Conn, should not come to Tara until a year was past.
During the year, Conn and Bécuma were together in Tara, 'and there was
neither corn nor milk in Ireland during that time.' The Tuatha De Danann
sent this dreadful famine; for they, as agricultural gods, thus showed
their displeasure at the unholy life of Ireland's high king with the
evil woman whom they had banished. The Druids of all Ireland being
called together, declared that to appease the Tuatha De Danann 'the son
of a sinless couple should be brought to Ireland and slain before Tara,
and his blood mingled with the soil of Tara' (cf. p. 436). It was Conn
himself who set out for the Otherworld and found there the sinless boy,
the son of the queen of that world, and he brought him back to Tara. A
strange event saves the youth:--'Just then they (the assembly of people
and Druids, with Conn, Art, and Finn) heard the lowing of a cow, and a
woman wailing continually behind it. And they saw the cow and the woman
making for the assembly.' The woman had come from the Otherworld to save
Segda; and the cow was accepted as a sacrifice in place of Segda, owing
to the wonders it disclosed; for its two bags when opened contained two
birds--one with one leg and one with twelve legs, and 'the one-legged
bird prevailed over the bird with twelve legs'. Then rising up and
calling Conn aside, the woman declared to him that until he put aside
the evil woman Bécuma 'a third of its corn, and its milk, and its mast'
should be lacking to Ireland. 'And she took leave of them then and went
off with her son, even Segda. And jewels and treasures were offered to
them, but they refused them.'
In the second part of this complex tale, Bécuma and Art are together
playing a game. Art finally loses, because the men of the _sidh_ (like
invisible spirits) began to steal the pieces with which he and the woman
play; and, as a result, Bécuma put on him this taboo:--'Thou shalt not
eat food in Ireland until thou bring with thee Delbchaem, the daughter
of Morgan.' 'Where is she?' asked Art. 'In an isle amid the sea, and
that is all the information that thou wilt get.' 'And he put forth the
coracle, and travelled the sea from one isle to another until he came to
a fair, strange island,' the Otherworld. The blooming women of that land
entertain the prince of Ireland during six weeks, and instruct him in
all the dangers he must face and the conquests he must make.
Having successfully met all the ordeals, Art secures Delbchaem, daughter
of Morgan the king of the 'Land of Wonders', and returns to Ireland.
'She had a green cloak of one hue about her, with a gold pin in it over
her breast, and long, fair, very golden hair. She had dark-black
eye-brows, and flashing grey eyes in her head, and a snowy-white body.'
And upon seeing the chaste and noble Delbchaem with Art, Bécuma, the
banished woman of the Tuatha De Danann, lamenting, departs from Tara for
ever.[344]
OTHERWORLD QUESTS OF CUCHULAINN AND OF ARTHUR
There is yet the distinct class of tales about journeys to a fairy world
which is a Hades world beneath the earth, or in some land of death,
rather than amid the waves of the Western Ocean. Thus there is a curious
poem in the _Book of the Dun Cow_ describing an expedition led by
Cuchulainn to the stronghold of Scáth in the land of Scáth, or, as the
name means, land of Shades, where the hero gains the king's
cauldron.[345] And the poem suggests why so few who invaded that Hades
world ever returned--perhaps why, mystically speaking, so few men could
escape either through initiation or re-birth the natural confusion and
forgetfulness arising out of death.
In the _Book of Taliessin_ a weird poem, _Preiddeu Annwfn_, or the
'Spoils of Annwn', describes, in language not always clear, how the
Brythonic Arthur made a similar journey to the Welsh Hades world named
Annwn, where he, like Cuchulainn in Scáth, gained possession of a magic
cauldron--a pagan Celtic type of the Holy Grail--which furnishes
inexhaustible food though 'it will not boil the food of a coward'. But
in stanzas iii and iv of _Preiddeu Annwfn_, Annwn, or Uffern as it is
otherwise called, is not an underground realm, but some world to be
reached like the Gaelic Land of Promise by sea. Annwn is also called
Caer Sidi, which in another poem of the _Book of Taliessin_ (No. XIV) is
thought of as an island of immortal youth amid 'the streams of the
ocean' where there is a food-giving fountain.[346]
LITERARY EVOLUTION OF THE HAPPY OTHERWORLD IDEA
We have now noticed two chief classes of Otherworld legends. In one
there is the beautiful and peaceful _Tír Innambéo_ or 'Land of the
Living' under Manannan's rule across the seas, and its fairy inhabitants
are principally women who lure away noble men and youths through love
for them; in the other there is a Hades world--often confused with the
former--in which great heroes go on some mysterious quest. Sometimes
this Hades world is inseparable from the underground palaces or world of
the Tuatha De Danann. Again, it may be an underlake fairy-realm like
that entered by Laeghaire and his fifty companions (see p. 302); or, as
in _Gilla Decair_,[347] of late composition, it is an under-well land
wherein Dermot has adventures. And, in a similar tale, Murough, on the
invitation of a mysterious stranger who comes out of a lake and then
disappears 'like the mist of a winter fog or the whiff of a March wind',
dives beneath the lake's waters, and is escorted to the palace of King
Under-Wave, wherein he sees the stranger as the water-king himself
sitting on a golden throne (cf. pp. 63-4). In continual feasting there
Murough passes a day and a year, thinking the time only a few days.[348]
As a rule the Hades world, or underground and under-wave world, is
unlike Manannan's peaceful ocean realm, being often described as a place
of much strife; and mortals are usually induced to enter it to aid in
settling the troubles of its fairy inhabitants.
All the numerous variations of Otherworld tales now extant in Celtic
literature show a common pre-Christian origin, though almost all of them
have been coloured by Christian ideas about heaven, hell, and purgatory.
From the earliest tales of the over-sea Otherworld type, like those of
Bran, Maelduin, and Connla, all of which may go back to the early eighth
century as compositions, the christianizing influence is already clearly
begun; and in the _Voyage of Snedgus and of Mac Riagla_, of the late
ninth century, this influence predominates.[349] Purely Christian texts
of about the same period or later describe the Christian heaven as
though it were the pagan Otherworld. Some of these, like the Latin
version of the tale of _St. Brandan's Voyage_, greatly influenced
European literature, and probably contributed to the discovery of the
New World.[349]
The combination of Christian and pagan Celtic ideas is well shown in the
_Voyage of the Húi Corra_[350]:--'Thereafter a wondrous island was
shown to them. A psalm-singing venerable old man, with fair, builded
churches and beautiful bright altars. Beautiful green grass therein. A
dew of honey on its grass. Little ever-lovely bees and fair,
purple-headed birds a-chanting music therein, so that [merely] to listen
to them was enough of delight.' But in another passage the Christian
scribe describes Otherworld birds as souls, some of them in hell:--'"Of
the land of Erin am I," quoth the bird, "and I am the soul of a woman,
and I am a monkess unto thee," she saith to the elder.... "Come ye to
another place," saith the bird, "to hearken to yon birds. The birds that
ye see are the souls that come on Sunday out of hell."' Still other
islands are definitely made into Christian hells full of fire, wherein
wailing and shrieking men are being mangled by the beaks and talons of
birds.
But sometimes, like the legends about the Tuatha De Danann, the legends
about the Otherworld were taken literally and most seriously by some
early Irish-Christian saints. Professor J. Loth records a very
interesting episode, how St. Malo and his teacher Brandan actually set
out on an ocean voyage to find the Heaven-world of the pagan
Celts:--'Saint Malo, when a youth, embarks with his teacher Brandan in a
boat, in search of that mysterious country; after some days, the waves
drive him back rebuffed and discouraged upon the seashore. An angel
opens his eyes: the land of eternal peace and of eternal youth is that
which Christianity promises to its elect.'[351]
Not only was the Celtic Otherworld gradually changed into a Christian
Heaven, or Hell, from the eighth century onward, but its divine
inhabitants soon came to suffer the rationalization commonly applied to
their race; and the transcribers began to set them down as actual
personages of Irish history. As we have already observed, the Tuatha De
Danann were shorn of their immortality, and were given in exchange all
the passions and shortcomings of men, and made subject to disease and
death. This perhaps was a natural anthropomorphic process such as is
met with in all mythologies. Celtic myth and mysticism, wherein may yet
be read the deepest secrets of life and death, supplied names and
legends to fill out a christianized scheme of Irish chronology, which
was made to begin some six thousand years ago with Adam.
A few of the pagan legends, however, met very fair treatment at the
hands of poetical and patriotic Christian transcribers. Thus in
_Adamnan's Vision_,[352] though the Celtic Otherworld has become 'the
Land of the Saints', its primal character is clearly discernible: to
reach it a sea voyage is necessary; and it is a land where there is no
pride, falsehood, envy, disease or death, 'wherein is delight of every
goodness.' In it there are singing birds, and for sustenance while there
the voyagers need only to hear its music and 'sate themselves with the
odour which is in the Land'.
Again, in the _Book of Leinster_, and in later MSS., there is a
_dinnshenchas_ of almost primal pagan purity. It alludes to _Clidna's
Wave_, that of Tuag Inbir:--To Tuag, daughter of Conall, Manannan the
sea-god sent a messenger, a Druid of the Tuatha De Danann in the shape
of a woman. The Druid chanted a sleep spell over the girl, and while he
left her on the seashore to look for a boat in which to embark for the
'Land of Everliving Women', a wave of the flood tide came and drowned
her. But the Oxford version of the same tale doubts whether the maiden
was drowned, for it suggests, 'Or maybe it (the wave) was Manannan
himself that was carrying her off.'[353] Thus the scribe understood that
to go to Manannan's world literally meant entering a sleep or trance
state, or, what is equivalent in the case of the maiden whom Manannan
summoned, the passage through death from the physical body. And still,
to-day, the Irish peasant believes that the 'good people' take to their
invisible world all young men or maidens who meet death; or that one
under a fairy spell may go to their world for a short time, and come
back to our world again.
We have frequently emphasized how truly the modern Celtic peasant in
certain non-commercialized localities has kept to the faith of his pagan
ancestors, while the learned Christian scribes have often departed
widely from it. The story of the voyage of Fionn to the Otherworld,[354]
which Campbell found living among Scotch peasants as late as the last
century, adds a striking proof of this assertion. So does Michael
Comyn's peasant version of Ossian in the 'Land of Youth' (as outlined
above, p. 346), which, though dating from about 1749, has all the
natural character of the best ancient tales, like those about Bran and
Cormac. We are inclined, therefore, to attach a value even higher than
we have already done to the testimony of the living Fairy-Faith which
confirms in so many parallel ways, as has been shown, the Fairy-Faith of
the remote past. Mr. W. B. Yeats, the Irish poet, adequately sums up
this matter by saying, 'But the Irish peasant believes that the utmost
he can dream was once or still is a reality by his own door. He will
point to some mountain and tell you that some famous hero or beauty
lived and sorrowed there, or he will tell you that Tir-na-nog, the
Country of the Young, the old Celtic paradise--the Land of the Living
Heart, as it used to be called--is all about him.'[355]
At the end of his long and careful study of the Celtic Otherworld,
Alfred Nutt arrived at the tentative conclusion which coincides with our
own, that 'The vision of a Happy Otherworld found in Irish mythic
romances of the eighth and following centuries is substantially
pre-Christian', that its closest analogues are in Hellenic myth, and
that with these 'it forms the most archaic Aryan presentation of the
divine and happy land we possess'.[356]
SECTION II
THE RECORDED FAIRY-FAITH
CHAPTER VII
THE CELTIC DOCTRINE OF RE-BIRTH[357]
'It seems as if Ossian's was a premature return. To-day he might
find comrades come back from Tir-na-nog for the uplifting of their
race. Perhaps to many a young spirit standing up among us Cailte
might speak as to Mongan, saying: "I was with thee, with
Finn."'--A. E.
Re-birth and Otherworld--As a Christian doctrine--General
historical survey--According to the Barddas MSS.; according to
ancient and modern authorities--Reincarnation of the Tuatha De
Danann--King Mongan's re-birth--Etain's birth--Dermot's
pre-existence--Tuan's re-birth--Re-birth among Brythons--Arthur as
a reincarnate hero--Non-Celtic parallels--Re-birth among modern
Celts: in Ireland; in Scotland; in the Isle of Man; in Wales; in
Cornwall; in Brittany--Origin and evolution of Celtic Re-birth
Doctrine.
RELATION WITH THE OTHERWORLD
However much the conception of the Otherworld among the ancient Greeks
may have differed from that among the Celts, it was to both peoples
alike inseparably connected with their belief in re-birth. Alfred Nutt,
who studied this intimate relation more carefully perhaps than any other
Celtic folk-lorist, has said of it:--'In Greek mythology as in Irish,
the conception of re-birth proves to be a dominant factor of the same
religious system in which Elysium is likewise an essential feature.'
Death, as many initiates have proclaimed in their mystical writings, is
but a going to that Otherworld from this world, and Birth a coming back
again;[358] and Buddha announced it as his mission to teach men the way
to be delivered out of this eternal Circle of Existence.
HISTORICAL SURVEY OF THE RE-BIRTH DOCTRINE
Among ourselves the doctrine may seem a strange one, though among the
great nations of antiquity--the Egyptians, Indians, Greeks, and
Celts--it was taught in the Mysteries and Priest-Schools, and formed the
corner-stone of the most important philosophical systems like those of
Buddha, Pythagoras, Plato, the Neo-Platonists, and the Druids. The
Alexandrian Jews, also, were familiar with the doctrine, as implied in
the _Wisdom of Solomon_ (viii. 19, 20), and in the writings of Philo. It
was one of the teachings in the Schools of Alexandria, and thus directly
shaped the thoughts of some of the early Church Fathers--for example,
Tertullian of Carthage (circa A. D. 160-240), and Origen of Alexandria
(circa A. D. 185-254). It is of considerable historical importance for
us at this point to consider at some length if Christians in the first
centuries held or were greatly influenced by the re-birth doctrine,
because, as we shall presently observe, the probable influence of
Christian on pagan Celtic beliefs may have been at a certain period very
deep and even the most important reshaping influence.
As an examination of Origen's _De Principiis_ proves, Origen himself
believed in the doctrine.[359] But the theologians who created the Greek
canons of the Fifth Council disagreed with Origen's views, and
condemned Origen for believing, among other things called by them
heresies, that Jesus Christ will be reincarnated and suffer on earth a
second time to save the daemons,[360] an order of spiritual beings
regarded by some ancient philosophers as destined to evolve into human
souls. Tertullian, contemporary with Origen, in his _De Anima_ considers
whether or not the doctrine of re-birth can be regarded as Christian in
view of the declaration by Jesus Christ that John the Baptist was Elias
(or Elijah), the old Jewish prophet, come again:--'And if ye are willing
to receive it (or him), this (John the Baptist) is Elijah, which is to
come. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.'[361] Tertullian
concludes, and modern Christian theologians frequently echo him (upon
comparing Malachi iv. 5), that all the New Testament writers mean to
convey is that John the Baptist possessed or acted in 'the spirit and
power' of Elias, but was not actually a reincarnation of Elias, since he
did not possess 'the soul and body' of Elias.[362] Had Tertullian been a
mystic and not merely a theologian with a personal bias against the
mystery teachings, which bias he shows throughout his _De Anima_, it is
quite evident that he would have been on this doctrinal matter in
agreement with Origen, who was both a mystic and a theologian,[363] and,
then, probably with such an agreement of these two eminent Church
Fathers on record before the time when Christian councils met to
determine canonical and orthodox beliefs, the doctrine of re-birth would
never have been expurgated from Christianity.[364]
In the _Pistis Sophia_,[365] an ancient Gnostic-Christian work, which
contains what are alleged to be some of Jesus Christ's esoteric
teachings to his disciples, it is clearly stated (contrary to
Tertullian's argument, but in accord with what we may assume Origen's
view would have been) that John the Baptist was the reincarnation of
Elias.[366] The same work further expounds the doctrine of re-birth as
a teaching of Jesus Christ which applies not to particular personages
only, like Elias, but as a universal law governing the lives of all
mankind.[367]
As our discussion has made evident, during the first centuries the
re-birth doctrine was undoubtedly well known to Alexandrian Christians.
Among other early Christian theologians and philosophers who held some
form of a re-birth doctrine, were Synesius, Bishop of Ptolemais (circa
375-414), Boethius, a Roman (circa 475-525), and Psellus, a native of
Andros (second half of ninth century). In addition to the many
Gnostic-Christian sects, the Manichaeans, who comprised more than
seventy sects connected with the primitive Church, also promulgated the
re-birth doctrine.[368] Along with the condemnation of the Gnostics and
Manichaeans as heretical, the doctrine of re-birth was likewise
condemned by various ecclesiastical bodies and councils. This was the
declaration by the Council of Constantinople in 553:--'Whosoever shall
support the mythical doctrine of the pre-existence of the Soul, and the
consequent wonderful opinion of its return, let him be anathema.' And
so, after centuries of controversy, the ancient doctrine ceased to be
regarded as Christian.[369] It is very likely, however, as will be
shown in due order, that a few of the early Celtic missionaries, always
famous for their Celtic independence even in questions touching
Christian theology and government, did not feel themselves bound by the
decisions of continental Church Councils with respect to this particular
doctrine.
During the mediaeval period in Europe, the re-birth doctrine continued
to live on in secret among many of the alchemists and mystical
philosophers, and among such Druids as survived religious persecution;
and it has come down from that period to this through Orders like the
Rosicrucian Order--an Order which seems to have had an unbroken
existence from the Middle Ages or earlier--and likewise through the
unbroken traditions of modern Druidism. In our own times there is what
may be called a renaissance of the ancient doctrine in Europe and
America--especially in England, Germany, France, and the United
States--through various philosophical or religious societies; some of
them founding their teachings and literature on the ancient and
mediaeval mystical philosophers, while others stand as the
representatives in the West of the mystical schools of modern India,
which, like modern Druidism, claim to have existed from what we call
prehistoric times.[370] To-day in the Roman Church eminent theologians
have called the doctrine of Purgatory the Christian counterpart of the
philosophical doctrine of re-birth;[371] and the real significance of
this opinion will appear in our later study of St. Patrick's Purgatory
which, as we hold, is connected more or less definitely with the
pagan-Irish doctrines of the underworld of the _Sidhe_-folk and spirits,
as well as shades of the dead, and with the Celtic-Druidic Doctrine of
Reincarnation.
Scientifically speaking, as shown in the Welsh Triads of Bardism, the
ancient Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth represented for the priestly and
bardic initiates an exposition of the complete cycle of human evolution;
that is to say, it included what we now call Darwinism--which explains
only the purely physical evolution of the body which man inhabits as an
inheritance from the brute kingdom--and also besides Darwinism, a
comprehensive theory of man's own evolution as a spiritual being both
apart from and in a physical body, on his road to the perfection which
comes from knowing completely the earth-plane of existence. And in time,
judging from the rapid advance of the present age, our own science
through psychical research may work back to the old mystery teachings
and declare them scientific. (See chap. xii.)
ACCORDING TO THE BARDDAS MSS.
With this preliminary survey of the subject we may now proceed to show
how in the Celtic scheme of evolution the Otherworld with all its gods,
fairies, and invisible beings, and this world with all its visible
beings, form the two poles of life or conscious existence. Let us begin
with purely philosophical conceptions, going first to the Welsh
_Barddas_,[372] where it is said 'There are three circles of existence:
the circle of Ceugant (the circle of Infinity), where there is neither
animate nor inanimate save God, and God only can traverse it; the circle
of Abred (the circle of Re-birth), where the dead is stronger than the
living, and where every principal existence is derived from the dead,
and man has traversed it; and the circle of Gwynvyd (the circle of the
white, i. e. the circle of Perfection), where the living is stronger
than the dead, and where every principal existence is derived from the
living and life, that is, from God, and man shall traverse it; nor will
man attain to perfect knowledge, until he shall have fully traversed the
circle of Gwynvyd, for no absolute knowledge can be obtained but by the
experience of the senses, from having borne and suffered every condition
and incident'.[373] ... 'The three stabilities of knowledge: to have
traversed every state of life; to remember every state and its
incidents; and to be able to traverse every state, as one would wish,
for the sake of experience and judgement; and this will be obtained in
the circle of Gwynvyd.'[374]
Thus _Barddas_ expounds the complete Bardic scheme of evolution as one
in which the monad or soul, as a knowledge of physical existence is
gradually unfolded to it, passes through every phase of material
embodiment before it enters the human kingdom, where, for the first time
exercising freewill in a physical body, it becomes responsible for all
its acts. The Bardic doctrine as otherwise stated is 'that the soul
commenced its course in the lowest water-animalcule, and passed at death
to other bodies of a superior order, successively, and in regular
gradation, until it entered that of man. Humanity is a state of liberty,
where man can attach himself to either good or evil, as he
pleases'.[375] Once in the human kingdom the soul begins a second period
of growth altogether different from that preceding--a period of growth
toward divinity; and with this, in our study, we are chiefly concerned.
It seems clear that the circle of Gwynvyd finds its parallel in the
Nirvana of Buddhism, being, like it, a state of absolute knowledge and
felicity in which man becomes a divine being, a veritable god.[376] We
see in all this the intimate relation which there was thought to be
between what we call the state of life and the state of death, between
the world of men and the world of gods, fairies, demons, spirits, and
shades. Our next step must be to show, first, what some other
authorities have had to say about this relation, and then, second, and
fundamentally, that gods or fairy-folk like the _Sidhe_ or Tuatha De
Danann could come to this world not only as we have been seeing them
come as fairy women, fairy men, and gods, at will visible or invisible
to mortals, but also through submitting to human birth.
ACCORDING TO ANCIENT AND MODERN AUTHORITIES
First, therefore, for opinions; and we may go to the ancients and then
to the moderns. Here are a few from Julius Caesar:--'In particular they
(the Druids) wish to inculcate this idea, that souls do not die, but
pass from one body to another.'[377] 'The Gauls declare that they have
all sprung from their father Dis (or Pluto), and this they say was
delivered to them by the Druids.'[377] And the testimony of Caesar is
confirmed by Diodorus Siculus,[378] and by Pomponius Mela.[379] Lucan,
in the _Pharsalia_,[380] addressing the Druids on their doctrine of
re-birth says:--'If you know what you sing, death is the centre of a
long life.' And again in the same passage he observes:--'Happy the folk
upon whom the Bear looks down, happy in this error, whom of fears the
greatest moves not, the dread of death. Hence their warrior's heart
hurls them against the steel, hence their ready welcome of death, and
the thought that it were a coward's part to grudge a life sure of its
return.'[381] Dr. Douglas Hyde, in his _Literary History of Ireland_ (p.
95), speaking for the Irish people, says of the re-birth doctrine:--'...
the idea of re-birth which forms part of half a dozen existing Irish
sagas, was perfectly familiar to the Irish Gael....' According to
another modern Celtic authority, D'Arbois de Jubainville, two chief
Celtic doctrines or beliefs were the return of the ghosts of the dead
and the re-birth of the same individuality in a new human body here on
this planet.[382]
REINCARNATION OF THE TUATHA DE DANANN
We proceed now directly to show that there was also a belief, probably
widespread, among the ancient Irish that divine personages, national
heroes who are members of the Tuatha De Danann or _Sidhe_ race, and
great men, can be reincarnated, that is to say, can descend to this
plane of existence and be as mortals more than once. This aspect of the
Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth has been clearly set forth by the
publications of such eminent Celtic folk-lorists as Alfred Nutt and Miss
Eleanor Hull. Miss Hull, in her study of _Old Irish Tabus, or
Gesa_,[383] referring to the Cuchulainn Cycle of Irish literature and
mythology, writes thus:--'There is no doubt that all the chief
personages of this cycle were regarded as the direct descendants, or it
would be more correct to say, as avatars or reincarnations of the early
gods. Not only are their pedigrees traced up to the Tuatha Dé Danann,
but there are indications in the birth-stories of nearly all the
principal personages that they are looked upon simply as divine beings
reborn on the human plane of life. These indications are mysterious,
and most of the tales which deal with them show signs of having been
altered, perhaps intentionally, by the Christian transcribers. The
doctrine of re-birth was naturally not one acceptable to them.... The
goddess Etain becomes the mortal wife of a king of Ireland....
Conchobhar, moreover, is spoken of as a terrestrial god;[384] and
Dechtire, his sister, and the mother of Cúchulainn, is called a
goddess.[385] In the case of Cúchulainn himself, it is distinctly noted
that he is the avatar of Lugh lamhfada (long-hand), the sun-deity[386]
of the earliest cycle. Lugh appears to Dechtire, the mother of
Cúchulainn, and tells her that he himself is her little child, i. e.
that the child is a reincarnation of himself; and Cúchulainn, when
inquired of as to his birth, points proudly to his descent from Lugh.
When, too, it is proposed to find a wife for the hero, the reason
assigned is, that they knew "that his re-birth would be of himself" (i.
e. that only from himself could another such as he have origin).'[387]
We have in this last a clue to the popular Irish belief regarding the
re-birth of beings of a god-like nature. D'Arbois de Jubainville has
shown,[388] also, that the grandfather of Cuchulainn, son of Sualtaim,
was from the country of the _Sidhe_, and so was Ethné Ingubé, the sister
of Sualtaim. And Dechtire, the mother of Cuchulainn, was the daughter of
the Druid Cathba and the brother of King Conchobhar. Thus the ancestry
of the great hero of the Red Branch Knights of Ulster is both royal and
divine. And Conall Cernach, Cuchulainn's comrade and avenger, apparently
from a tale in the _Cóir Anmann_ (Fitness of Names), composed probably
during the twelfth century, was also a reincarnated Tuatha De Danann
hero.[389]
Practically all the extant manuscripts dealing with the ancient
literature and mythology of the Gaels were written by Christian scribes
or else copied by them from older manuscripts, so that, as Miss Hull
points out, what few Irish re-birth stories have come down to us--and
they are probably but remnants of an extensive re-birth literature like
that of India--have been more or less altered. Yet to these scholarly
scribes of the early monastic schools, who kept alive the sacred fire of
learning while their own country was being plundered by foreign invaders
and the rest of mediaeval Europe plunged in warfare, the world owes a
debt of gratitude; for to their efforts alone, in spite of a reshaping
of matter naturally to be expected, is due almost everything recorded on
parchments concerning pagan Ireland.
THE RE-BIRTH STORY CONCERNING KING MONGAN
We have preserved to us a remarkable re-birth story in which the
characters are known to be historical.[390] It concerns a quarrel
between the king of Ulster, Mongan, son of Fiachna--who, according to
the _Annals of Ireland by the Four Masters_ (i. 245), was killed in A.
D. 620 by Arthur, son of Bicor--and Forgoll, the poet of Mongan.[391]
The dispute between them was as to the place of the death of Fothad
Airgdech, a king of Ireland who was killed by Cailte, one of the
warriors of Find, in a battle whose date is fixed by the _Four Masters_
in A. D. 285.[392] Forgoll pretended that Fothad had been killed at
Duffry, in Leinster, and Mongan asserted that it was on the river Larne
(anciently Ollarba) in County Antrim. Enraged at being contradicted,
even though it were by the king, Forgoll threatened Mongan with terrible
incantations; and it was agreed that unless Mongan proved his assertion
within three days, his queen should pass under the control of Forgoll.
Mongan, however, had spoken truly and with certain secret knowledge, and
felt sure of winning.
When the third day was almost expired and Forgoll had presented himself
ready to claim the wager, there was heard coming in the distance the one
whom Mongan awaited. It was Cailte himself, come from the Otherworld to
bear testimony to the truthfulness of the king and to confound the
audacious presumptions of the poet Forgoll. It was evening when he
reached the palace. The king Mongan was seated on his throne, and the
queen at his right full of fear about the outcome, and in front stood
the poet Forgoll claiming the wager. No one knew the strange warrior as
he entered the court, save the king.
Cailte, when fully informed of the quarrel and the wager, quickly
announced so that all heard him distinctly, 'The poet has lied!' 'You
will regret those words,' replied the poet. 'What you say does not well
become you,' responded Cailte in turn, 'for I will prove what I say.'
And straightway Cailte revealed this strange secret: that he had been
one of the companions in arms under the great warrior Find, who was also
his teacher, and that Mongan, the king before whom he spoke, was the
reincarnation of Find:--
'We were with thee,' said Cailte, addressing the king. 'We were with
Find.' 'Know, however,' replied Mongan, 'that you do wrong in revealing
a secret.' But the warrior continued: 'We were therefore with Find. We
came from Scotland. We encountered Fothad Airgdech near here, on the
shores of the Ollarba. We gave him furious battle. I cast my spear at
him in such a manner that it passed through his body, and the iron
point, detaching itself from the staff, became fixed in the earth on the
other side of Fothad. Behold here [in my hand] the shaft of that spear.
There will be found the bare rock from the top of which I let fly my
weapon. There will be found a little further to the east the iron point
sunken in the earth. There will be found again a little further, always
to the east, the tomb of Fothad Airgdech. A coffin of stone covers his
body; his two bracelets of silver, his two arm-rings, and his
neck-torque of silver are in the coffin. Above the tomb rises a
pillar-stone, and on the upper extremity of that stone which is planted
in the earth one may read an inscription in ogam: _Here reposes Fothad
Airgdech; he was fighting against Find when Cailte slew him_.'
And to the consternation of Forgoll, what this warrior who came from the
Otherworld declared was true, for there were found the place indicated
by him, the rock, the spear-head, the pillar-stone, the inscription, the
coffin of stone, the body in it, and the jewellery. Thus Mongan gained
the wager; and the secret of his life which he alone had known was
revealed--he was Find re-born[393]; and Cailte, his old pupil and
warrior-companion, had come from the land of the dead to aid
him[393]:--'It was Cailte, Find's foster-son, that had come to them.
Mongan, however, was Find, though he would not let it be told.'[393] But
not only was Mongan an Irish king, he was also a god, the son of the
Tuatha De Danann Manannan Mac Lir: 'this Mongan is a son of Manannan Mac
Lir, though he is called Mongan, son of Fiachna.'[394] And so it is that
long after their conquest the People of the Goddess Dana ruled their
conquerors, for they took upon themselves human bodies, being born as
the children of the kings of Mil's Sons.
There are other episodes which show very clearly the relationship
between Mongan incarnated in a human body and his divine father
Manannan. Thus, 'When Mongan was three nights old, Manannan came for him
and took him with him to bring up in the Land of Promise, and vowed
that he would not let him back into Ireland before he were twelve years
of age.' And after Mongan has become Ulster's high king, Manannan comes
to him to rouse him out of human slothfulness to a consciousness of his
divine nature and mission, and of the need of action: Mongan and his
wife were frittering away their time playing a game, when they beheld a
dark black-tufted little cleric standing at the door-post, who
said:--'"This inactivity in which thou art, O Mongan, is not an
inactivity becoming a king of Ulster, not to go to avenge thy father on
Fiachna the Black, son of Deman, though Dubh-Lacha may think it wrong to
tell thee so...." Mongan seized the kingship of Ulster, and the little
cleric who had done the reason was Manannan the great and mighty.'[395]
In the ancient tale of the _Voyage of Bran_--probably composed in its
present form during the eighth, possibly the seventh, century A.
D.--there is another version of the Mongan Re-birth Story, which, being
later in origin and composition than the _Voyage_ itself, was
undoubtedly clumsily inserted into the manuscript, as scholars
think.[396] Therein, Mongan as the offspring of Manannan by the woman of
Line-mag--quite after the theory of the Christian Incarnation--is
described as 'a fair man in a body of white clay'. This and what follows
in the introductory quatrain show how early Celtic doctrines correspond
to or else were originated by those of the Christians. And the
transcriber seeing the parallels, glossed and altered the text which he
copied by introducing Christian phraseology so as to fit it in with his
own idea--altogether improbable--that the references are to the coming
of Jesus Christ. The references are to Manannan and to the woman of
Line-mag, who by him was to be the mother of Mongan--as Mary the wife of
Joseph was the mother of Jesus Christ by God the Father:--
A noble salvation will come
From the King who has created us,
A white law will come over seas,
Besides being God, He will be man.
This shape, he on whom thou lookest,
Will come to thy parts;
'Tis mine to journey to her house,
To the woman in Line-mag.
For it is Moninnan, the son of Ler,
From the chariot in the shape of a man,
* * * * *
He will delight the company of every fairy-knoll,
He will be the darling of every goodly land,
He will make known secrets--a course of wisdom--
In the world, without being feared.
To him is attributed the power of shape-shifting, which is not
transmigration into animal forms, but a magical power exercised by him
in a human body.
He will be throughout long ages
An hundred years in fair kingship
* * * *
Moninnan, the son of Ler
Will be his father, his tutor.
At his death
The white host (the angels or fairies) will take him under a wheel
(chariot) of clouds
To the gathering where there is no sorrow.[397]
THE BIRTH OF ETAIN OF THE TUATHA DE DANANN[398]
Another clear example of one of the Tuatha De Danann being born as a
mortal is recorded in the famous saga of the _Wooing of Etain_. Three
fragments of this story exist in the _Book of the Dun Cow_. The first
tells how Etain Echraide, daughter of Ailill and wife of Midir (a great
king among the _Sidhe_ people) was driven out of Fairyland by the
jealousy of her husband's other wife, and how after being wafted about
on the winds of this world she fell invisibly into the drinking-cup of
the wife of Etar of Inber Cichmaine, who was an Ulster chieftain. The
chieftain's wife swallowed her; and, in due time, gave birth to a
girl:--'It was one thousand and twelve years from the first begetting
of Etain by Ailill to the last begetting by Etar.' Etain, retaining her
own name, grew up thence as an Irish princess.[399]
One day an unknown man of very stately aspect suddenly appeared to Etain
the princess; and as suddenly disappeared, after he had sung to her a
wonderful song designed to arouse in her the subconscious memories of
her past existence among the _Sidhe_:--
So is Etain here to-day....
Among little children is her lot....
It is she was gulped in the drink
By Etar's wife in a heavy draught.
The scribe ends this part of the story by letting it be known that Midir
has struck off the head of his other wife, Fuamnach, the cause of all
Etain's trouble.
The second section of the tale introduces Etain as queen of Eochaid
Airem, high king of Ireland, and the most curious and important part of
it shows how she was loved by Ailill Aenguba. Ailill, so far as blood
kinship went, was the brother of Eochaid, though apparently either an
incarnation of Midir or else possessed by him: Etain acceded to his
love, but he was under a strange love-weakness; and on two occasions
when he attempted to advance his desires an overpowering sleep fell on
him, and each time Etain met a man in Ailill's shape--as though it were
his 'double'--bemoaning his weakness. On a third occasion she asked who
the man was, and he declared himself to be Midir, and besought her to
return with him to the Otherworld. But her worldly or human memory
clouded her subconscious memory, and she did not recognize Midir, yet
promised to go with him on gaining Eochaid's permission. After this
event, curiously enough, Ailill was healed of his strange love-malady.
In the third part of the story, Midir and Eochaid are playing games.
Midir loses the first two and with them great riches, but winning the
third claims the right to place his arms about Etain and kiss her.
Eochaid asked a month's delay. The last day of the month had passed. It
was night. Eochaid in his palace at Tara awaited the coming of his
rival, Midir; and though all the doors of the palace had been firmly
closed for the occasion, and armed soldiers surrounded the queen, Midir
like a spirit suddenly stood in the centre of the court and claimed the
wager. Then, grasping and kissing Etain, he mounted in the air with her
and very quickly passed out through the opening of the great chimney. In
consternation, King Eochaid and his warriors hurried without the palace;
and there, on looking up, they saw two white swans flying over Tara,
bound together by a golden chain.[400]
THE PRE-EXISTENCE OF DERMOT
With a difficult task before him, Dermot--as was the case with
Mongan--is reminded of his pre-existence as a hero in the Otherworld
with Manannan Mac Lir and Angus Oge:--'Now spoke Fergus Truelips, Finn's
ollave, and said: "Cowardly and punily thou shrinkest, Dermot; for with
most potent Manannan, son of Lir, thou studiedst and wast brought up, in
the Land of Promise and in the bay-indented coasts; with Angus Oge, too,
the Daghda's son, wast most accurately taught; and it is not just that
now thou lackest even a moderate portion of their skill and daring, such
as might serve to convey Finn and his party up this rock or bastion." At
these words Dermot's face grew red; he laid hold on Manannan's magic
staves that he had, and, as once again he redly blushed, by dint of
skill in martial feats he with a leap rose on his javelin's shafts and
so gained his two soles' breadth of the solid glebe that overhung the
water's edge.'[401]
RE-BIRTH OF TUAN
Tuan, as the son of Starn, lived one hundred years as the brother of
Partholon, the first man to reach Ireland; and then, after two hundred
and twenty years, was re-born as the son of Cairell. This story in its
oldest form is preserved in the _Book of the Dun Cow_, and seems to have
been composed during the late ninth or early tenth century.[402]
RE-BIRTH AMONG THE BRYTHONS
Such then are the re-birth stories of the Gaels. Among the Brythons the
same ancient doctrine prevailed, though we have fewer clear records of
it. Of the Brythonic Re-birth Doctrine as philosophically expounded in
_Barddas_, mention has already been made.
In the ancient Welsh story about Taliessin, Gwion after many
transformations, magical in their nature, is re-born as that great poet
of Wales, his mother being a goddess, Caridwen, who dwells beneath the
waters of Lake Tegid. In its present mystical form this tale cannot be
traced further than the end of the sixteenth century, though the
transformation incidents are presupposed in the _Book of Taliessin_, a
thirteenth-century manuscript.[403] Besides being the re-birth of Gwion,
Taliessin may be regarded as a bardic initiate high in degree, who is
possessed of all magical and druidical powers.[403] He made a voyage to
the Otherworld, Caer Sidi; and this seems to indicate some close
connexion between ancient rites of initiation and his occult knowledge
of all things.[404] Like the Irish re-birth and Otherworld tales, it
also suggests the relation between the world of death or Faerie and the
world of human embodiment.
From his harrying of Hades, the Brythonic Gwydion secured the Head of
Hades' Cauldron of Regeneration or Re-birth; and when corpses of slain
warriors are thrown into it they arise next day as excellent as ever,
except that they are unable to speak; which circumstance may be equal to
saying that the ordinary uninitiated man when re-born is unable to speak
of his previous incarnation, because he has no memory of it. This
Cauldron of Re-birth, like so many objects mentioned in the ancient
bardic literature, is evidently a mystic symbol: it suggests the same
correspondences, as propounded in the modern _Barddas_, between the dead
and the living, between death and re-birth; and Gwydion having been a
great culture hero of Wales probably promulgated a doctrine of re-birth,
and hence is described as being able to resuscitate the dead.[405]
KING ARTHUR AS A REINCARNATED HERO
Judging from substantial evidence set forth above in chapter V, the most
famous of all Welsh heroes, Arthur, equally with Cuchulainn his Irish
counterpart, can safely be considered both as a god apart from the human
plane of existence, and thus like the Tuatha De Danann or Fairy-Folk,
and also like a great national hero and king (such as Mongan was)
incarnated in a physical body. The taking of Arthur to Avalon by his
life-guardian, the Lady of the Lake, and by his own sister, and by two
other fairy women who live in that Otherworld of Sacred Apple-Groves, is
sufficient in itself, we believe, to prove him of a descent more divine
than that of ordinary men. And the belief in his return from that
Otherworld--a return so confidently looked for by the Brythonic
peoples--seems to be a belief (whether recognized as such or not) that
the Great Hero will be reincarnated as a Messiah destined to set them
free. In Avalon, Arthur lives now, and 'It is from there that the
Britons of England and of France have for a long time awaited his
coming'.[406] And Malory expressing the sentiment in his age
writes[407]:--'Yet some men say in many parts of England that King
Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of our Lord Jesu into another
place; and men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the holy
cross. I will not say it shall be so, but rather I will say, here in
this world he changed his life.' If we consider Arthur's passing and
expected return, as many do, in a purely mythological aspect, we must
think of him for the time as a sun-god, and yet even then cannot escape
altogether from the re-birth idea; for, as a study of ancient Egyptian
mythology shows, there is still the same set of relations.[408] There
are the sun-symbols always made use of to set forth the doctrine of
re-birth, be it Egyptian, Indian, Mexican, or Celtic:--the death of a
mortal like the passing of Arthur is represented by the sun-set on the
horizon between the visible world here and the invisible world beyond
the Western Ocean, and the re-birth is the sunrise of a new day.
NON-CELTIC PARALLELS
As a non-Celtic parallel to what has preceded concerning the Otherworld
of the Celts and their Doctrine of Re-birth, we offer the second of the
_Stories of the High-priests of Memphis_, as published by Mr. F. L.
Griffith from ancient manuscripts.[409] It is a history of Si-Osiri (the
son of Osiris), whose father was Setme Khamuas. This wonderful divine
son when still a child took his human father on a journey to see Amenti,
the Otherworld of the Dead; and when twelve years of age he was wiser
than the wisest of the scribes and unequalled in magic. At this period
in his life there arrived in Egypt an Ethiopian magician who came with
the object of humbling the kingdom; but Si-Osiri read what was in the
unopened letter of the stranger, and knew that its bearer was the
reincarnation of 'Hor the son of the Negress', the most formidable of
the three Ethiopian magicians who fifteen hundred years before had waged
war with the magicians of Egypt. At that time the Egyptian Hor, the son
of Pa-neshe, had defeated the great magician of Ethiopia in the final
struggle between White and Black Magic which took place in the presence
of the Pharaoh.[410] And 'Hor the son of the Negress' had agreed not to
return to Egypt again for fifteen hundred years. But now the time was
elapsed, and, unmasking the character of the messenger, Si-Osiri
destroyed him with magical fire. After this, Si-Osiri revealed himself
as the reincarnation of Hor the son of Pa-neshe, and declared that
Osiris had permitted him to return to earth to destroy the powerful
hereditary enemy of Egypt. When the revelation was made, Si-Osiri
'passed away as a shade', going back again, even as the Celtic Arthur,
into the realm invisible from which he came.
As in ancient Ireland, where many kings or great heroes were regarded as
direct incarnations or reincarnations of gods or divine beings from the
Otherworld, so in Egypt the Pharaohs were thought to be gods in human
bodies, sent by Osiris to rule the Children of the Sun.[411] In Mexico
and Peru there was a similar belief.[412] In the Indian _Mahâbhârata_,
Râma and Krishna are at once gods and men.[413] The celebrated
philosophical poem known as the _Bhagavadgîtâ_ also asserts Krishna's
descent from the gods; and the same view is again enforced and extended
in the _Hari-vansa_ and especially in the _Bhâgavata Purâna_.[413] The
Indian _Laws of Manu_ say that 'even an infant king must not be despised
from an idea that he is a mere mortal; for he is a great deity in human
form'.[414] In ancient Greece it was a common opinion that Zeus was
reincarnated from age to age in the great national heroes. 'Alexander
the Great was regarded not merely as the son of Zeus, but as Zeus
himself.' And other great Greeks were regarded as gods while living on
earth, like Lycurgus the Spartan law-giver, who after his death was
worshipped as one of the divine ones.[415]
Among the great philosophers, the ancient doctrine of re-birth was a
personal conviction: Buddha related very many of his previous
reincarnations, according to the _Gâtakamâlâ_; Pythagoras is said to
have gone to the temple of Here and recognized there an ancient shield
which he had carried in a previous life when he was Euphorbus, a Homeric
hero.[416] From what Plato, in his _Meno_, quoted from an old poet, it
seems very probable that there may be some sort of relationship between
legends mentioning the Rites of Proserpine, like the legend of Aeneas in
Virgil, and certain of the Irish Otherworld and Re-birth legends among
the Gaels, as we have already suggested:--'For from whomsoever
Persephone hath accepted the atonement of ancient woe, their souls she
sendeth up once more to the upper sun in the ninth year. From these grow
up glorious kings and men of swift strength, and men surpassing in
poetical skill; and for all future time they are called holy heroes
among men.' Among modern philosophers and poets in Europe and America
the same ideas find their echo: Wordsworth in his _Ode to Immortality_
definitely inculcates pre-existence; Emerson in his _Threnody_, and
Tennyson in his _De Profundis_, seem committed to the re-birth doctrine,
and Walt Whitman in his _Leaves of Grass_ without doubt accepted it as
true. Certain German philosophers, too, appear to hold views in harmony
with what is also the Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth, e. g. Schopenhauer, in
_The World as Will and Idea_, J. G. Fichte, in _The Destiny of Man_, and
Herder, in _Dialogues on Metempsychosis_. The Emperor of Japan is still
the Divine Child of the Sun, the head of the _Order of the Rising Sun_,
and is always regarded by his subjects as the incarnation of a great
being. The Great Lama of Thibet is believed to reincarnate immediately
after death.[417] William II of Germany seems to echo, perhaps
unconsciously, the same doctrine when he claims to be ruling by divine
right.[418]
That the Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth is a direct and complete
confirmation of the Psychological Theory of the nature and origin of the
belief in fairies is self-evident. Could it be shown to be
scientifically plausible in itself, as well-educated Celts consider it
to be--and much evidence to be derived from a study of states of
consciousness, e. g. dreams, somnambulism, trance, crystal-gazing,
changed personality, subconsciousness, and so forth, indicates that it
might be shown to be so--it would effectively prove the theory. Fairies
would then be beings of the Otherworld who can enter the human plane of
life by submitting to the natural process of birth in a physical body,
and would correspond to the _Alcheringa_ ancestors of the Arunta. In
chapter xii following, such a proof of the theory is attempted.
RE-BIRTH AMONG MODERN CELTS
One of the chief objects of this chapter is to show that the Re-birth
Doctrine of the Celts, like most beliefs bound up with the Fairy-Faith,
still survives; thus further proving that Celtic tradition is an
unbroken thing from times prehistoric until to-day. We shall therefore
proceed to bring forward the following original material, collected by
ourselves, as evidence on this point:--
_In Ireland_
In Ireland I found two districts where the Re-birth Doctrine has not
been wholly forgotten. The first one is in the country round Knock Ma,
near Tuam. After Mrs. ---- had told me about fairies, I led up to the
subject of re-birth, and the most valuable of all my Irish finds
concerning the belief was the result. For this woman of Belclare told me
that it was believed by many of the old people, when she was a girl
living a few miles west of Knock Ma, that they had lived on this earth
before as men and women; but, she added, 'You could hardly get them to
talk about their belief. It was a sort of secret which they who held it
discussed freely only among themselves.' They believed, too, that
disease and misfortune in old age come as a penalty for sins committed
in a former life.[419] This expiatory or purgatorial aspect of the
Re-birth Doctrine seems to have been more widespread than the doctrine
in its bare outlines; for the Belclare woman in speaking of it was able
to recall from memories of forty-five or fifty years ago what was then a
popular story about a disease-worn man and an eel-fisherman:--
The diseased man as he watches the eel-fisherman taking up his baskets,
contrasts his own wretched physical condition with the vigour and good
health of the latter, and attributes the misfortune which is upon
himself to bad actions in a life prior to the one he is then living. And
here is the unhappy man's lamentation:--
Fliuch, fuar atâ mo leabaidh;
Atâ fearthâinn agus geur-ghaoith;
Atâim ag îoc na h-uaille,
A's tusa ag faire do chliaibhîn.
(Wet, cold is my bed;
There is rain and sharp wind;
I am paying for pride,
And you watching your [eel-]basket.)
The teller of the story insisted on giving me these verses in Irish, for
she said they have much less meaning in English, and I took them down;
and to verify them and the story in which they find a place, I went to
the cottage a second time. There is no doubt, therefore, that the legend
is a genuine echo of the religion of pre-Christian Ireland, in which
reincarnation appears to have been clearly inculcated and was probably
the common belief.
I once asked Steven Ruan, the Galway piper, if he had ever heard of such
a thing as people being born more than once here on this earth, seeing
that I was seeking for traces of the old Irish Doctrine of Re-birth. The
answer he gave me was this:--'I have often heard it said that people
born and dead come into this world again. I have heard the old people
say that we have lived on this earth before; and I have often met old
men and women who believed they had lived before. The idea passed from
one old person to another, and was a common belief, though you do not
hear much about it now.'
A highly educated Irishman now living in California tells me of his own
knowledge that there was a popular and sincere belief among many of the
Irish people throughout Ireland that Charles Parnell, their great
champion in modern times, was the reincarnation of one of the old Gaelic
heroes. This shows how the ancient doctrine is still practically
applied. There is also an opinion held by certain very prominent
Irishmen now living in Ireland, with whom I have been privileged to
discuss the re-birth doctrine, that both Patrick and Columba are
likewise to be regarded as ancient Gaelic heroes, who were reincarnated
to work for the uplifting of the Gael.[420]
A legend concerning Lough Gur, County Limerick, indicates that the
sleeping-hero type of tale is a curious aspect of an ancient re-birth
doctrine. In such tales, heroes and their warrior companions are held
under enchantment, awaiting the mystic hour to strike for them to issue
forth and free their native land from the rule of the Saxon. Usually
they are so held within a mysterious cavern, as is the case of Arthur
and his men, according to differently localized Welsh stories; or they
are in the depths of magic hills and mountains like most Irish heroes.
The heroes under enchantment with their companions are to be considered
as resident in the Otherworld, and their return to human action as a
return to the human plane of life. The Lough Gur legend is about Garret
Fitzgerald, the Earl of Desmond, who rebelled against Queen Elizabeth.
Modern folk-tradition regards him as the guardian deity of the Lough,
and as dwelling in an enchanted palace situated beneath its waters. As
Count John de Salis, whose ancestral home is the Lough Gur estate,
assures me, the peasants of the region declare themselves convinced that
the earl once in seven years appears riding across the lake surface on a
phantom white horse shod with shoes of silver; and they believe that
when the horse's silver shoes are worn out the enchantment will end.
Then, like Arthur when his stay in Avalon ends, Garret Fitzgerald will
return to the world of human life again to lead the Irish hosts to
victory.[421]
_In Scotland_
Dr. Alexander Carmichael, author of _Carmina Gadelica_, who as a
folk-lorist has examined modern peasant beliefs throughout the Highlands
and Islands more thoroughly than any other living Scotsman, informs me
that apparently there was at one time in the Highlands a definite belief
in the ancient Celtic Re-birth Doctrine, because he has found traces of
it there, though these traces were only in the vaguest and barest
outline.
_In the Isle of Man_
Mr. William Cashen, keeper of Peel Castle, reported as follows with
respect to a re-birth doctrine in the Isle of Man:--'Here in the Island
among old Manx people I have heard it said, but only in a joking way,
that we will come back to this earth again after some thousands of
years. The idea wasn't very popular nor often discussed, and there is no
belief in it now to my knowledge. It seems to have come down from the
Druids.'
This is Mr. William Oates' testimony, given at Ballasalla:--'Some held a
belief in the coming back (re-birth) of spirits. I can't explain it. A
certain Manxman I knew used to talk about the transmigration of spirits;
but I shall not give his name, since many of his family still live here
on the Island.'
Mr. Thomas Kelley, of Glen Meay, had no clear idea about the ancient
Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth, though he said:--'My grandfather had a
notion that he would be back here again at the Resurrection to claim his
land.' This undoubtedly shows how the Christian doctrine of the
Resurrection and the Celtic one of Re-birth may have blended, both being
based on the common idea of a physical post-existence.
_In Wales_
In the Pentre Evan country where I discovered such rich folk-lore, I
found my chief witness from there not unfamiliar with the ancient Celtic
belief in Re-birth. One day I asked her if she had ever heard the old
folk say that they had lived before on this earth as men and women.
Somewhat surprised at the question, for to answer it would reveal
half-secret thoughts of which, as it proved, not even her own nephew or
niece had knowledge, she hesitated a moment, and, then, looking at me
intently, said with great earnestness, 'Yes; and I often believe myself
that I have lived before.' And because of the unusual question, which
seemed to reveal on my part familiarity with the belief, she added, 'And
I think you must be of the same opinion as to yourself.' She explained
then that the belief was a rare one now, and held by only a few of the
oldest of her old acquaintances in that region, and they seldom talk
about it to their children for fear of being laughed at.
Mr. J. Ceredig Davies, the well-known folk-lorist of Llanilar, near
Aberystwyth, speaking of the Welsh Re-birth Doctrine, said he remembers,
while in Patagonia, having discussed Druidism with a friend there, the
late John Jones, originally of Bala, North Wales, and hearing him
remark, 'Indeed, I have a half-belief that I have been in this world
before.'
Mr. Jones, our witness from Pontrhydfendigaid, offers testimony of the
highest value concerning Druidism and the doctrine of re-birth in
Central Wales, as follows:--'Taliessin believed in re-birth, and he was
the first to interpret the Druidic laws. He believed that from age to
age he had been in many human bodies. He believed that he possessed the
same soul as Enoch and Eli, that he had been a judge sitting on the case
of Jesus Christ--"I was a judge at the Crucifixion," he is reported as
saying--and that he had been a prisoner in bonds at the Court of
Cynfelyn, not far from Aberystwyth, for a year and a day. Two hundred
years ago, belief in re-birth was common. Many still held it when I was
a boy. And even yet here in this region some people are imbued with the
ancient faith of the Druids, and firmly believe that the spirit migrates
from one body to another. It is said, too, that a pregnant woman is able
to determine what kind of a child she will give birth to.'[422]
Mr. Jones's use of the phrase 'migrate from one body to another' led us
to suspect that it might refer to transmigration, i. e. re-birth into
animal bodies, which Dr. Tylor in _Primitive Culture_{4} (ii. 6-11, 17,
&c.) shows is a distorted or corrupted interpretation of what he calls
the reasonable and straightforward doctrine of re-birth into human
bodies only. But when we questioned Mr. Jones further about the matter
he said:--'The belief I refer to is re-birth into human bodies. I have
heard of witches being able to change their own body into the body of an
animal or demon, but I never heard of men transmigrating into the bodies
of animals. Some people have said that the Druids taught transmigration
of this sort, but I do not think they did--though Welsh poets seem to
have made use of such a doctrine for the sake of poetry.'
In order to gain evidence concerning the Re-birth Doctrine as concrete
as possible from so important a witness as Mr. Jones, we asked him
further if he could recall the names of one or two of his old
acquaintances who believed in it; and he said:--'One old character named
Thomas Williams, a dyer by trade, nearly believed in it, and Shôn Evan
Rolant firmly believed in it. Rolant was the owner of Old Abbey Farm on
the Cross-Wood Estate, and originally was a well-to-do and respectable
farmer, but in consequence of mortgages on the estate he lost his
property. After being dispossessed and badly treated, he used to recite
the one hundred and ninth Psalm, to bring curses upon those who worked
against him in the dispossession process; and it was thought that he
succeeded in bringing curses upon them.'
The Rev. T. M. Morgan, Vicar of Newchurch parish, near Carmarthen, who
has already offered valuable evidence concerning the _Tylwyth Teg_ (see
pp. 149-51), contributes additional material about the Doctrine of
Re-birth in South Wales:--'My father said there used to be expressed in
Cardiganshire before his time, a belief in re-birth. This was in accord
with Druidism, namely, that all human beings formerly existed on the
moon, the world of middle light, and the queen of heaven; that those who
there lived a righteous life were thence born on the sun, and thence
onward to the highest heaven; and that those whose moon life had been
unrighteous were born on this earth of suffering and sin. Through
right-living on earth souls are able to return to the moon, and then
evolve to the sun and highest heaven; or, through wrong living on earth,
souls are born in the third condition, which is one of utter darkness
and of still greater suffering and sin than our world offers. But even
from this lowest condition souls can work upwards to the highest glory
if they strive successfully against evil. The Goddess of Heaven or
Mother of all human beings was known as _Brenhines-y-nef_. I am unable
to tell if she is the moon itself or lived in the moon. On the other
hand, the sun was considered the father of all human beings. According
to the old belief, every new moon brings the souls who were unfit to be
born on the sun, to deposit them here on our earth. Sometimes there are
more souls seeking embodiment on earth than there are infant bodies to
contain them. Hence souls fight among themselves to occupy a body.
Occasionally one soul tries to drive out from a body the soul already in
possession of it, in order to possess it for itself. In consequence of
such struggling of soul against soul, men in this world manifest madness
and tear themselves. Whenever such a condition showed itself, the person
exhibiting it was called a _Lloerig_ or "one who is moon-torn"--_Lloer_
meaning moon, and _rhigo_ to notch or tear; and in the English word
_lunatic_, meaning "moon-struck", we have a similar idea.'[423]
Mr. David Williams, J.P., of Carmarthen, who has already told us much
about Welsh fairies (see pp. 151-3), offers equally valuable information
about the 'Three Circles of Existence' and the Druidic scheme of
soul-evolution, as follows:--'According to the Druids, there are three
Circles through which souls must pass. The first is _Cylch y Ceugant_,
the second _Cylch Abred_, the third _Cylch y Gwynfyd_. The name of each
circle refers to a special kind of spiritual training, and if in
reaching the second circle you do not gain its perfection by completing
all its provisions [probably in due order and time], you must begin
again in Circle One; but if you reach the perfection of Circle Two you
go on to Circle Three. In Circle One, which is unlocated, the soul has
no condition of bodily existence as in Circle Two. The second Circle
appears to be a state something like the one we are in now--a mixture of
good and evil. The third Circle is a state of perfection and
blessedness. In it the soul's environments correspond to all its wishes
and desires, and there is contact with God.' At this point I asked if
there was loss of individuality in Circle Three, and Mr. Williams
replied:--'No, there is not loss of individuality.' Hence, as we
suggest, _Cylch y Gwynfyd_ is the Druidic parallel to the Nirvana of
Indian metaphysics--being like it, a state of perfect and unlimited
self-consciousness which man never knows in earth-life. And, finally,
Mr. Williams said in relation to re-birth:--'About the years 1780-1820
there lived an old bard in Glamorganshire who was actually a Druid,
though he professed to be a Christian as well, and he believed fully in
re-birth. His common name was Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg); and he
[with Owen Jones and William O. Pughe] edited the famous _Archaiology of
Wales_.'
_In Cornwall_