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