“I could not put the pen aside
Till with my heart’s love I had tried
To fashion some poor skilless crown
For that dear head so low bowed down.”
From
the Celtic
It is but a step from Wales to Ireland.
From the one, you can see the “fair hills of
holy Ireland” in the heart of any decent sunset;
from the other, you can see Wales shining landed in
in any shining dawn. No Roman legion ever landed
in Ireland; yet all through Roman times boats must
have been slipping across and across; there must have
been constant communication, and there was, really,
no distinction of race. There was a time, I
believe, when they were joined, one island; and all
the seas were east of the Severn. Both peoples
were a mixture of Gaels and Cymry; only it happens
that the Gaelic or Q language survived in Ireland;
the Cymric or P language in Wales. So, having
touched upon Wales last week, and shown the Crest-Wave
flowing in there, this week, following that Wave westward,
I invoke the land of
Ireland!
Shining, shining sea!
Fertile, fertile mountain!
Gladed, gladed wood!
Abundant river, abundant
in water!
Fish-abounding lake!
It was what Amargin the Druid
sang, when the Gael first came into Ireland.
Here is the story of their coming:
Bregon built a tower in Spain.
He had a son named Ith; and one fine evening in winter
Ith was looking out over the horizon from Bregon’s
tower, and saw the coast of Ireland in the distance;
for “it is on a winter’s evening when the
air is pure that one’s sight carries farthest.”
So says the eleventh century bard who tells the tale:
he without knowing then that it was not in Spain
was Bregon’s tower, but on the Great Plain, which
is in the Atlantic, and yet not in this world at all.
Now this will tell you what you ought to know about
Ireland, and why it is we end our lectures with her.
We saw Wales near the border of things; looking out
from that cliff’s edge on to the unknown and
unseen, and aware of mysterious things beyond.
Now we shall see Ireland, westward again, down where
the little waves run in and tumble; sunlit waves along
shining sands; and with boats putting out at any time;
and indeed, so lively an intercourse going forward
always, that you never can be quite sure whether it
is in mortal Ireland or immortal Fairyland you are,
“So your soul
goes straying in a land more fair;
Half you tread the dew-wet
grasses, half wander there.”
For the wonder of Ireland is, that
it is the West Pole of things; there is no place else
nearer the Unseen; its next-door neighbor-land westward
is this Great Plain, whither sail the Happy Dead in
their night-dark coracles, to return, of
course, in due season; and all the peoplings of Ireland
were from this Great Plain. So you see why the
Crest-Wave, passing from dying Europe, “went
west” by way of Ireland.
I will tell you about that Great Plain: it is
“A marvelous land, full of music,
where primrose blossoms on the hair, and the body
is white as snow.
“There none speaks of mine
and thine; white are the teeth and black the
brows; eyes flash with many-colored lights, and the
hue of the fox-glove is on every cheek. . . .
“Though fair are the plains
of Ireland, few of them are so fair as the Great Plain.
The ale of Ireland is heady, but headier far the
ale of the Great Country. What a wonder of a
land it is! No youth there grows to old age.
Warm streams flow through it; the choicest mead and
wine. Men there are always comely and blemishless.”
Well; Ith set sail from the Great
Plain, with three times thirty warriors, and landed
at Corcaguiney in the south-west of Ireland; and at
that time the island inhabited less by men than by
Gods; it was the Tuatha De Danaan, the Race of the
Danaan Gods, that held the kingship there. Little
wonder, then, that the first name of Ireland we get
in the Greek writings is “Sacred Ierne, populous
with the Hibernians.”
Well now, he found MacCuill, MacCecht,
and MacGrene the Son of the Sun, arranging to divide
the kingdom between them; and they called on him to
settle how the division should be. “Act,”
said he, “according to the laws of justice,
for the country you dwell in is a good one; it is
rich in fruit and honey, in wheat and in fish; and
in heat and cold it is temperate.” From
that they thought he would be designing to conquer
it from them, and so forestalled his designs by killing
him; but his companions escaped, and sailed back to
the Great Plain. That was why the Milesians
came to conquer Ireland. The chiefs of them were
Eber Finn, and Eber Donn, and Eremon, and Amargin
the Druid: the sons of Mile, the son of Bile
the son of Bregon; thus their grandfather was the
brother of that Ith whom the Gods of Ireland slew.
It was on a Thursday, the first of
May, and the seventeenth day of the moon, that the
Milesians arrived in Ireland; and as he set his right
foot on the soil of it, Amargin chanted this poem:
I am the wave of the
Ocean;
I am the murmur of the
billow;
I am the ox of the seven
combats;
I am the vuture upon
the rock;
I am a tear of the sun;
I am the fairest of
plants;
I am a wild boar in
valor;
I am a salmon in the
water;
I am a lake in the plain;
I am a word of science;
I am the spear-point
that gives battle;
I am the god who creates
in the head the fire of thought.
Who is it that enlightens
the assembly upon the mountain,
if
not I?
Who telleth the ages
of the moon, if not I?
Who showeth the place
where the sun goes to rest?
They went forward to Tara, and summoned
the kings of the Danaan Gods to give up the island
to them; who asked three days to consider whether
they would give battle, or surrender, or quit Ireland.
On that request Amargin gave judgment: that
it would be wrong for the Milesians to take the Gods
unprepared that way; and that they should go to their
ships again, and sail out the distance of nine waves
from the shore, and then return; then if they could
conquer Ireland fairly in battle, it should be theirs.
So they embarked, and put the nine
waves between themselves and the shore, and waited.
And the Danaans raised up a druid mist and a storm
against them, whereby Ireland seemed to them no more
than the size of a pig’s back in the water; and
by reason of that it has the name of Innis na
Wic, the Island of the Pig. But if the Gods
had magic, Amargin had better magic; and he sang that
Invocation to the Land of Ireland; and at that the
storm fell and the mist vanished. Then Eber
Donn was exulting in his rage at the thought of putting
the inhabitants to death; but the thought in his mind
brought the storm again, and his ship went down, and
he was drowned. But at last the remnant of them
landed, and fought a battle with the Gods, and defeated
them; whereafter the Gods put a druid invisibility
on themselves, and retired into the hills; and there
in their fairy palaces they remain to this day; indeed
they do. They went back into the inwardness
of things; whence, however, they were always appearing,
and again vanishing into it; and all the old literature
of Ireland is thridded through with the lights of
their magic and their beauty, and their strange forthcomings
and withdrawings. For example:
There was Midir the Proud, one of
them. In the time of the great Cæsar, Eochaid
Airem was high king of Ireland; and he had for his
queen Étain, reborn then as a mortal, but
a Danaan princess at one time, and the wife of Miidir.
It was a fine evening in the summer, and Eochaid
Airem was looking from the walls of Tara and admiring
the beauty of the world. He saw an unknown warrior
riding towards him; clad in purple tunic; his hair
yellow as gold, and his blue eyes shining like candles.
A five-pointed lance was in his hand; his shield
was ornamented with beads of gold.
“A hundred thousand
welcomes to you,” said the high king. “Who
is it you are?”
“I know well who
you are,” said the warrior, “and for a
long time.”
“What name is on you?” said
Eochaid.
“Nothing illustrious
about it in the world,” said the other.
“I am Midir of Bregleith.”
“What has brought you hither?”
“I am come to play at chess with
you.”
“I have great skill
at chess,” said the high king; and indeed, he
was the best at it in Ireland, in those days.
“We shall see about that,”
said Midir.
“But the queen is
sleeping in her chamber now,” said Eochaid;
“and it is there the chessboard is.”
“Little matter,”
said Midir, “I have here a board as good as
yours is.”
And that was the truth. His
chessboard was of silver, glittering with precious
stones at each corner. From a satchel wrought
of shining metal he took his chessmen, which were
of pure gold. Then he arranged them on the board. “Play
you,” said he.
“I will not play without a stake,”
said the king.
“What will the stake be?”
said Midir.
“All one to me,” said Eochaid.
“If you win,”
said Midir, “I will give you fifty broad-chested
horses with slim swift feet.”
“And if you win,”
said Eochaid Airem, sure of victory, “I will
give you whatever you demand.”
Midir won that game, and demanded
Étain the queen. But the rules of chess
are that the vanquished may claim his revenge, a
second game, that is, to decide the matter; and the
high king proposed that it should be played at the
end of a year. Midir agreed, and vanished.
The year ended, and Eochaid was at
Tara; he had had the palace surrounded by a great
armed host against Midir; and Étain was there
with him. Here is the description of Étain:
“A clear comb of silver was
held in her hand, the comb was adorned with gold;
and near her, as for washing, was a basin of silver
whereon four birds had been chased, and there were
little bright gems of carbuncles on the rim of the
basin. A bright purple mantle waved round her;
and beneath it another mantle with fringes of silver:
the outer one clasped over her bosom with a golden
brooch. A tunic she wore, with a long hood that
might cover her head attached to it; it was stiff and
glossy with green silk beneath red embroidery of gold,
and clasped over her breast with marvelously wrought
clasps of gold and silver, so that men saw the bright
gold and the green silk flashing against the sun.
On her head were two tresses of golden hair, and each
tress plaited into four strands, and at the end of
each strand a little ball of gold. Each of her
two arms was as white as the snow of a single night,
and each of her two cheeks of the hue of the foxglove.
Even and small the teeth in her head, and they shone
like pearls. Her eyes were blue as the blue hyacinth,
her lips delicate and crimson. . . . White as
snow, or the foam of the wave, was her neck. . . .
Her feet were slim and white as the ocean foam; evenly
set were her eyes, and the eyebrows of a bluish black,
such as you see on the shell of a beetle.”
What I call on you to
note about that is something very unpoetic.
It is not the flashing brightness, the grace, the
evidence of an eye craving for beauty, and of a hand
sure in the creation of beauty; but the
dress. The Irish writers got these ideas of
dress without having contacted, for example, classical
civilization, or any foreign civilization. The
ideas were home-grown, the tradition Irish.
The writer was describing what he was familiar with:
the kind of dress worn by an Irish princess before
Ireland had seen foreign fashions and customs.
He was heightening picture for artistic effect, no
doubt; but he was drawing with his eye on the object.
I am inclined to think that imagination always must
work upon a basis of things known; just as tradition
must always be based on fact. Now then:
try, will you, to imagine primitive savages dressing
like that, or sufficiently nearly like that for one
of their bards to work up such a picture on the actualities
he had seen. I think you cannot do it.
And this picture is not extraordinary; it is typical
of what we commonly find in the ancient Irish stories.
What it proves is that the Ireland that emerges into
history, war-battered and largely decivilized by long
unsettled conditions as she was, remembered and was
the inheiritor of an Ireland consummately civilized. But
to return to the hall of Eochaid Airem:
Every door in it was locked; and the
whole place filled with the cream of the war-host
of the Gael, and apprehension on everyone, they not
knowing would it be war and violence with Midir, or
what it would be. So it had been all day; so
it was now in the dusk of the evening. Then
suddenly there stood Midir in the midst of them:
Midir the Proud; never had he seemed fairer than then.
No man had seen him enter; none knew how he had come.
And then it was but putting his spear in his left
hand for him, and putting his right arm about the
waist of Étain, and rising through the air with
her, and vanishing through the roof. And when
the men of Ireland rushed out from the hall, they saw
two swans circling above Tara and away, their long
white necks yoked together with a yoke of moon-bright
silver.
It was a long time the Gods were ruling
in Ireland before the Milesians came. King after
king reigned over them; and there are stories on stories,
a rich literature for another nation, about the time
of these Danaan Gods alone. One of them was Lir,
the Boundless Deep. He had four children by his
first wife; when she died, he married her sister,
Aoife by name. Aoife was jealous of the love
he had for his children, and was for killing them.
But when it came to doing it, “her womanhood
overcame her,” and instead she put swanhood
on the four of them, and the doom that swans they
should be from that out for nine hundred years:
three hundred on Lake Derryvaragh in West Meath, three
hundred on the Straits of Moyle between Ireland and
Scotland, three hundred on the Atlantic by Erris and
Innishglory. After that the enchantment would
end.
For that, Bov Derg, one of the Gods,
changed her into a demon of the air, and she flew
away shrieking, and was heard of no more. But
there was no taking the fate from the swan-children;
and the Danaans sought them on their lake, and found
they had human speech left to them, and the gift of
wonderful Danaan music. From all parts they came
to the lake to talk with them and to hear them singing;
and that way it was for three hundred years.
Then they must depart, Fionuala and her three brothers,
the swan-children, and wing their way to the northern
sea, and be among the wild cliffs and the foam; and
the worst of loneliness and cold and storm was the
best fate there was for them. Their feathers
froze to the rocks on the winter nights; but they
filled the drear chasms of the tempest with their Danaan
singing. It was Fionuala wrapped her plumage
about her brothers, to keep them from the cold; she
was their leader, heartening them. And if it
was bad for them on the Straits of Moyle, it was worse
on the Atlantic; three hundred years they were there,
and bitter sorrow the fate on them.
When their time to be freed was near,
they were for flying to the palace of Lir their father,
at the hill of the White Field in Armagh. But
long since the Milesians had come into Ireland, and
the Danaans had passed into the hills and the unseen;
and with the old centuries of their enchantment heavy
on them, their eyes had grown no better than the eyes
of mortals: gorse-grown hills they saw, and
green nettles growing, and no sign of the walls and
towers of the palace of Lir. And they heard the
bells ringing from a church, and were frightened at
the “thin, dreadful sound.” But afterwards,
in their misery, they took refuge with the saint in
the church, and were converted, and joined him in singing
the services. Then, after a while, the swanhood
fell from them, and they became human, with the whole
of their nine centuries heavy on them. “Lay
us in one grave,” said Fionuala to the saint;
“and place Conn at my right hand, and Fiachra
at my left, and Aed before my face; for there they
were wont to be when I sheltered them many a winter
night upon the seas of Moyle.” So it was
they were buried; but the saint sorrowed for them
till the end of his days. And there, if you
understand it, you have the forgotten story of Ireland.
She was once Danaan, and fortunate
in the Golden Age. Then she was enchanted, and
fell from her high estate; and sorrow and the wildness
of ages of decivilizing wars were her portion; but
she retained her wonderful Danaan gift of song.
Then came Christianity, and she sang her swan-song
in the services of the Church; when she
had overcome her terror of the ominous sound of the
bells. She became human again: that is,
enjoyed one more period of creative greatness, a faint
revival of her old splendor; and then, Ah,
it was a long time ago; a long time the hermit had
been sorrowing over her grave! But listen, by
the lake of Derryvaragh, on the seas of Moyle, or
by Erris and Innishglory, and you will hear still
the ghostly echoes of the singing of Danaan swans.
Danaan swans: music better than of the
world of men!
O Swan-child, come from
the grave, and be bright as you were
of
old
When you sing o’er
the sun-bright wave in the Danaans’ Age
of
Gold!
Are you never remembering,
darling, the truth that you knew
well
then,
That there’s nobody
dies from the world, asthore, but is
born
in the world again.
It brings me naturally to the place
where we take her up in our history. At the
end of the fourth century, “the sea,” says
the Roman poet Claudian, “was foamy with the
hostile oars of the Irish.” Niall of the
Nine Hostages was high king of Tara; and he was all
for a life on the ocean wave and a home on the rolling
deep. He raided the coasts of Britain annually,
and any other coasts that came handy, carrying off
captives where he might. One of these was a boy
named Sucat, from Glamorgan: probably from Glamorgan,
though it might have been from anywhere between the
Clyde and the Loire. In time this Sucat escaped
from his Irish slavery, entered the Church, took the
Latin name of Patrick, and made it his business to
Christianize Ireland. That was about the time
when the Britons were throwing off the Roman yoke.
He was at the height of his career in the middle of
the fifth century.
Even if he did not make a clean and
bloodless sweep of the whole country, Patrick was
one of the most successful Christian missionaries
that ever preached. There was some opposition
by the druids, but it was not successful. He
went to the courts of the kings, and converted them;
and to say you had baptized a king, was as good as
to say you had his whole clan captured; for it was
a fractious unnatural clansman who would not go where
his chieftain led. We are in an atmosphere altogether
different from the rancor and fanaticism of the continent.
Patrick, there must have been something
very winning and kindly about the man,
roused no tradition of animosity. He never made
Ireland hate her pagan past. When the Great
Age came, which was not till later, not
till the Crest-Wave had passed from Wales, and
Christian Irishmen took to writing down the old legends
and stories, they were very tender to the memories
of the Gods and heroes. It was in pity for the
Children of Lir, that were turned into swans, that
they were kept alive long enough to be baptized and
sent to heaven. Can you fancy Latona and her
children so received by Greekish or Latin monks into
the Communion of Saints? But the Irish Church
was always finding excuses for the salvation of the
great figures of old. Some saint called up Cuculain
from hell, converted him, and gave him a free pass
that Peter at the Gates should honor. There
was Conchobar MacNessa again. He was king of
Ulster in the days of the Red Branch, the grand heroic
cycle of Irish legend; Cuculain was the chief of his
warriors. A brain-ball was driven through the
skull of Conchobar from a sling; but sure, his druid
doctors would never be phased by a trifle like that.
They bound up the wound and healed him in a cauldron
of cure; but warned him never to get excited or over-exert
himself, or the brain-ball would come out and he would
die; barring such accidents, he would do splendidly.
And so he did for some years. Then one day a
darkness came over the world, and he put his druids
to finding out the cause of it. They told him
they saw in their vision three crosses on a hill in
the east of the world, and three men nailed on them;
and the man in the middle with the likeness of the
Son of God. With that the battle-fury came on
Conchobar, and he fell to destroying the trees of
the forest with his sword. “Oh that I were
there!” he cried; “thus would I deal with
his enemies.” With the excitement and
over-exertion, out came the brain-ball, and he died.
And if God Almighty would not take Conchobar MacNessa,
pagan as he was, into heaven for a thing like that, sure,
God Almighty was not half such a decent kindly creature
as the Irish monk who invented the yarn.
So nothing comes down to us that has
not passed the censorship of a race-proud priesthood,
with perhaps never a drop of the wine of true wisdom
in them, to help them discriminate and truth to shine
through what they were passing on; but still, with
a great deal of the milk of human kindness as a substitute,
so far as it might be. They treasured the literary
remains of druid days; liberally twisting them, to
be sure, into consonance with Christian ideas of history
and the fitness of things; but still they treasured
them, and drew from them inspiration. Thus the
whole past comes down euhemerized, cooked, and touched
up. It comes down very glorious, because
the strongest feeling in Irish hearts was Irishism,
race-consciousness. Whereas the Latin Church
was fiercely against antiquity and all its monuments,
the Celtic Church in Ireland was anxious above all
things to preserve Celtic antiquity, having
first brought it into line with the one true faith.
The records had to be kept, and made to
tally with the Bible. The godhood of the Gods
had to be covered away, and you had to treat them
as if they had been respectable children of Adam, more
or less respectable, at any rate. A descent from
Noah had to be found for the legendary kings and heroes;
and for every event a date corresponding with that
of someone in the Bible. Above all, you had
to pack the whole Irish past into the few thousand
years since Noah came out of the Ark. You
get a glimpse in Wales of the struggle there was between
Hebrao-Christian chronology and the Celtic sense of
the age of the world: in the pedigree of an
ancient family, where, it is said, about half way
down the line this entry occurs after one of the names:
“In his time Adam was expelled from Paradise.”
In Ireland, indeed, there was at least one man from
before the Flood living in historic times: Fintan,
whom, with others, Noah sent into the western world
while the Ark was building. Here is one of Fintan’s
poems:
“If you inquire of me concerning
Ireland, I know and can relate gladly all the invasions
of it since the beginning of the delightful world.
Out of the east came Cessair, a woman, daughter of
Bith, with her fifty maidens, with her three men.
The flood came upon Bith on his mountain without mystery;
on Ladru at Ard Ladran; on Cessair at Cull Cesra.
As for me, for the space of a year, beneath the rapid
flood, on the height of a mighty wave, I enjoyed sleep
which was exceeding good. Then, in Ireland,
I found my way above the waters until Partholan came
out of the East, from the land of the Greeks.
Then, in Ireland, I enjoyed rest; Ireland was void
till the son of Agnoman came, Nemed with the delightful
manners. The Fir Bolg and the Fir Galioin came
a long time after, and the Fir Domnan also; they landed
at Erris in the west. Then came the Tuatha De
Danaan in their hood of mist. I lived with them
for a long time, though their age is far removed.
After that came the sons of Mile out of Spain and
the south. I lived with them; mighty were their
battles. I had come to a great age, I do not
conceal it, when the pure faith was sent to Ireland
by the King of the Cloudy Heaven. I am the fair
Fintan son of Bochra; I proclaim it aloud. Since
the flood came here I am a great personage in Ireland.”
In the middle of the sixth century
he was summoned as a witness by the descendants of
Niall of the Nine Hostages against King Dermot MacKerval,
in a dispute as to the ancient divisions of Ireland.
He came to Tara with nine companies in front of him,
and nine companies behind: they were his descendants.
This, mind you, is in strictly historical times.
The king and his people received him kindly, and
after he had rested a little, he told them his story,
and that of Tara from its foundation. They asked
him to give them some proof of his memory. “Right
willingly,” said Fintan. “I passed
one day through a wood in West Munster; I brought
home with me a red berry of the yew-tree, which I
planted in my kitchen-garden, and it grew there till
it was as tall as a man. Then I took it up,
and re-planted it on the green lawn before the house,
and it grew there until a hundred champions could
find room under its foliage, to be sheltered there
from wind and rain, and cold and heat. I remained
so, and my yew remained so, spending our time alike,
until at last all its leaves fell off from decay.
When afterwards I thought of turning it to some profit,
I went to it, and cut it from its stem; and I made
of it seven vats, and seven keeves, and seven stans,
and seven churns, and seven pitchers, and seven milans,
and seven medars, with hoops for all. I remained
so with my yew vessels until their hoops all fell
off from decay and old age. After that I re-made
them; but could only get a keeve out of the vat, and
a stan out of the keeve, and a mug out of the stan,
and a cilorn out of the mug, and a milan out of
the cilom, and a medar out of the milan; and I leave it to Almighty God
that I do not know where their dust is now, after their dissolution with me from
decay.
Now here is a strange relic of the
Secret Teaching that comes down with this legend of
Fintan. Each of the four Cardinal Points, it
was said, had had its Man appointed to record all the
wonderful events that had taken place in the world.
One of them was this Fintan, son of Bochra, son of
Lamech, whose duty was to preserve the histories of
Spain and Ireland, and the West in general.
As we have seen, Spain is a glyph for the Great Plain,
the Otherworld.
From this universal euhemerization, this
loving preservation and careful cooking of the traditions
by the Christian redactors of them, we
get certain results. One is that ancient Ireland
remains for us in the colors of life: every figure
flashes before our eyes in a golden mellow light of
morning, at once extremely real and extremely magical:
not the Greek heroic age appears so flooded with
dawn-freshness, so realistic, so minutely drawn, nor
half so lit with glamor. Another result is that,
while strange gleams of Esotericism shine through, as
in that about the Four Recorders of the Four Cardinal
Points, things that it seemed undangerous
to the monks, because they did not understand their
significance, to let pass, we hear nothing
in Irish literature about the philosophy of the Druids.
Ireland retains her belief in magic to this day;
and his would be a hard skull that could know Ireland
intimately and escape that belief. So it seemed
nothing irreligious to the monks to let the Druids
remain magicians. But philosophy was another
matter entirely; and must be ruled out as conflicting
with the Christian scheme of things. From this
silence our Druid-Medicine-men Theorists draw great
comfort and unction for their pet belief. Reincarnation
appears in some stories as a sort of thing that might
happen in special cases; because “God is good
to the Irish,” and might be willing to give
them sometimes another chance. But nothing is
allowed to come down to imply it was known for a law
in Nature; no moral or philosophic bearing is attached
to it. This is just what you would expect.
The Christian censors of the literature had rejected
it as unchristian doctrine. They would hate to
have it thought that Irishmen could ever have believed
in such things; they would cover such belief up in
every possible way. You would find peasant-bards
in Wales to this day, men learned in the national
tradition, who are deacons in their chapels and druids
of the Gorsedd, and firm believers in Druidism.
They have founded a Gorsedd here in America lately,
with an active propaganda of Druidism, and lecturers
touring. They think of it as a kind of Pre-christian
Christianity; and would open their eyes wide to hear
that Reincarnation was the cornerstone teaching in
it. This may throw a little light on the attitude
of those early Irish Christians. But on
the other hand there were tales that could not be
preserved at all, that you could not tell at all,
without bringing a touch of reincarnation into them.
The universal doctrine survived in that way in Ireland,
as it survived as a rumor in the folk-lore in Wales.
There is the story, for instance,
of Mongan son of Fiachta, a historical chieftain killed
in 625. According to Tigernach, the oldest of
the Irish annalists, Finn MacCool died in A.D. 274.
Finn, you will remember, is the central figure of the
Fenian Cycle of sagas; he was the father of Oisin
and the leader of the Fenians; next to Cuculain, he
is the chiefest hero of Irish legend. I quote this story from M. de Jubainville.
Mongan had a quarrel with Forgoll,
his chief bard or file, as to the place where
Fothad Airgtech king of Ireland had been slain by
Cailte, one of Finn’s companions. Mongan
said it was on the banks of the Lame in Ulster, near
his own palace; Forgoll said it was at Dubtar in Leinster.
Forgoll, enraged at being contradicted by a mere
layman, threatened to pronounce awful incantations
against Mongan, which might put rat-hood on him, or
anything. The end of it was that Mongan was given
three days to prove his statement; if he should not
have done so by that time, he and all his possessions
were to become the property of the file.
Two days passed, and half the third,
and Mongan did nothing, but remained at his ease entirely,
never troubling in the world. As for his wife,
poor woman, from the moment he made the wager her
tears had not ceased to flow. “Make
an end of weeping,” said he; “help will
certainly come to us.”
Forgoll came to claim his bond. “Wait
you till the evening,” said Mongan. Evening
came, and if help was coming, there was no sign of
it. Mongan sat with his wife in the upper chamber;
Forgoll out before them waiting to take possession
of everything. Pitiless and revengeful the look
of Forgoll; the queen weeping and walling; Mongan
himself with no sign of care on him. “Be
not you sorrowful, woman,” said he; “the
one who is coming to help us is not far off; I hear
his footsteps on the Labrinne.” It is the
River Caragh, that flows into Dingle bay in the southwest;
a hundred leagues from where they were in the palace
at Donegore in the north-east of Antrim.
With that she was quiet for awhile;
but nothing happened, and she began weeping again. “Hush
now!” said Mongan; “I hear the feet of
the one that will help us crossing the Maine.”
It is another river in Kerry, between the Caragh
and the north-east: on the road, that is, between
Mongan’s palace and the Great Plain.
That way he was consoling her again
and again; and she again and again breaking out with
her lamentations. He was hearing the footsteps
at every river between Kerry and Antrim: at the
Liffey, and then the Boyne, and then the Dee, and after
that, at Carlingford Lough, and at last at Larne Water,
a little to the south of the palace. “Enough
of this folly,” said Forgoll; “pay you
me what is mine.” A man came in from the
ramparts; “What news with you?”
asks Mongan. “There is a warrior like
the men of old time approaching from the south, and
a headless spear-shaft in his hand.” “I
told you he would be coming,” said Mongan.
Before the words were out from between his teeth, the
warrior had leaped the three ramparts into the middle
of the dun, and in a moment was there between Mongan
and the file in the hall. “What is
it is troubling you?” said he.
“I and the file
yonder have made a wager about the death of Fothad
Airgtech,” said Mongan. “The file
said he died at Dubtar in Leinster; I said it was
false.”
“Then the file has lied,”
said the warrior.
“Thou wilt repent of that,”
cried Forgoll.
“That is not a good
speech,” said the warrior. “I will
prove what I say.” Then he turned to Mongan.
“We were with thee, Finn MacCool,” said
he,
“Hush!” said
Mongan; "it is wrong for thee to reveal a secret."
“Well then,”
said the warrior, “we were with Finn coming from
Alba. We met Fothad Airgtech near here, on the
banks of Larne Water. We fought a battle with
him. I cast my spear at him, so that it went
through his body, and the iron head quitted the shaft,
and went into earth beyond, and remained there.
This is the shaft of that spear,” said he,
holding up the headless shaft he had with him.
“The bare rock from which I hurled it will be
found, and the iron head is in the earth a little to
the east of it; and the grave of Fothad Airgtech a
little to the east of that again. A stone chest
is round his body; in the chest are his two bracelets
of silver, and his two arm-rings, and his collar of
silver. Over the grave is a stone pillar, and
on the end of the pillar that is in the earth is Ogham
writing, and it says, ’Here is Fothad Airgtech.
He was fighting with Finn when Cailte slew him.’”
Cailte had been one of the most renowned
of Finn’s companions; he had come now from the
Great Plain to save his old master. You will
note that remark of the latter’s when Cailte
let the fact escape him that he, Mongan, had been
Finn: “Hush! it is wrong for the to reveal
a secret.” That was the feeling of the
Christian redactors. Reincarnation was not a
thing for baptized lips to speak about.
But we are anticipating things:
the coming of Patrick did not bring about the great
literary revival which sent all these stories down
to us. Patrick Christianized Ireland: converted
the kings and established the church; and left the
bulk of the people pagan-hearted and pagan-visioned
still, as, glory be to God, they have been
ever since. I mean by that that under all vicissitudes
the Irish have never quite lost sight of the Inner
Life at the heart of things, as most of the rest of
us have. Time and men and circumstance, sorrow
and ignorance and falsity, have conspired to destroy
the race; but there is a vision there, however thwarted
and hedged in, and the people do not perish:
their woods and mountains are still full of a gay or
mournful, a wailing or a singing, but always a beautiful,
life. Patrick was a great man; but he never
could drive out the Danaan Gods, who had gone into
the hills when the Milesians came. He drove out
the serpents, they say; and a serpent was a name for
a Druid Adept: Taliesin says, in one of his
poems, ’Wyf dryw, wyf sarff,’ ‘I
am a druid, I am a serpent’; and we know from
H.P. Blavatsky how universal this symbol was,
with the meaning of an Initiate of the Secret Wisdom.
So perhaps Patrick did evict his Betters from that
land of evictions; it may be so; but not
the God-life in the mountains. But I judge from
the clean and easy sweep he made of things that Druidism
was at a low pass in Ireland when he came. It
had survived there five centuries since its vital
center and link with the Lodge had been destroyed at
Bibracte by Cæsar; and, I suppose, thus cut off, and
faced with no opposition to keep it pure and alert,
might well, and would naturally have declined.
Its central light no longer burning, political supremacy
itself would have hastened its decay; fostering arrogance
for spirituality, and worldliness for true Wisdom.
How then about the theory that some life and light
remained or was revivable in it in Britain?
Why claim that for Britain, which one would incline
to deny to Ireland and Gaul? Well; we
know that Druidism did survive in Gaul a long time
after the Romans had proscribed it. But Gaul
became very thoroughly Romanized. The Romans
and their civilization were everywhere; the Celtic
language quite died out; (Breton was brought in by
emigrants from Britain;) and where the Celtic
language had died, unlikely that Celtic thought would
survive. But in Britain, as we have seen, while
the Romans and their proscription were near enough
to provide a salutary opposition and constant peril,
there were many places in which the survivors of Suetonius’
massacre in Mona might have taken refuge. I take
it that in Ireland it suffered through lack of opposition;
in Gaul, it died of too effective opposition; but
in Britain there were midway conditions that may well
have allowed it to live on.
Beyond Christianizing the country,
it does not appear that Patrick did much for it.
It is not clear that Ireland made any progress in
material civilization then, or for that
matter, at any time since. We should know by
this time that these things are a matter of law.
Patrick found her essentially in pralaya, essentially
under the influence of centrifugalism; and you cannot
turn the ebbing tide, and make it flow before its time.
There was a queer mixture of intensive culture and
ruthless barbarism: an extreme passion on the
one hand for poetry and the things of the spirit, and
on the other, such savagery as continual warfare always
brings in its train. The literary class was
so strong that in the little kingdom of Tir Conall
in Donegal alone the value of ten thousand dollars
of the revenue was set aside yearly for its support
and purposes; whereby one would imagine
that for all things else they could but have had a
nickel or so left. This is culture with a vengeance.
There was, besides, wonderful skill in arts and crafts,
intricate designing in jewelry-work; and
all this is not to be called by another name than
the relics of a high civilization. But there
was no political unity; or only a loose bond under
the high kings at Tara, who had forever to be fighting
to maintain their authority. There was racial,
but not national consciousness.
But where in Europe was there national
consciousness? We should remember that it only
began to exist, or to reincarnate from times beyond
the horizon of history, in the thirteenth century
A.D. There would be a deal less sneering at Ireland
were only these facts known. England was perhaps
the first country in which it became effective:
the wars of the first and third Edwards called it
into being there. Joan lit the fires of it in
France; she mainly; in the fourteen-twenties
and thirties. Spain had to wait for Ferdinand
and Isabel; Sweden for Gustavus Vasa; Holland for
William the Silent; Italy for Victor Emmanuel; Germany
for Bismarck. Wales was advancing towards it,
in an imperfect sort of way, rather earlier than England;
but the Edwardian conquest put the whole idea into
abeyance for centuries. So too Ireland:
she was half-conquered by the Normans, broken, racked,
ruined and crucified, a century before the idea of
Nationhood had come into existence, and while centrifugalism
was still the one force in Europe. It is thus
quite beside the point to say that she was never a
nation, even in the days of her native rule.
Of course she was not. Nor was England, in those
times; nor any other. In every part of the continent
the centrifugal forces were running riot; though in
some there were strong fighting kings to hold things
together. This by way of hurling one more spear
at the old cruel doctrine of race inferiorities and
superiorities: at Unbrotherliness and all its
wicked works and ways. I was the European pralaya;
when your duty to your neighbor was everywhere and
always to fight him, to get in the first blow; to
kill him before he killed you, and thank God for his
mericies. So Ireland was not exceptional in
that way. Where she was exceptional, bless her
sweet heart, lay, as we shall see, in the fact that
while all the rest were sunk in ignorance and foulest
barbarism, and mentall utterly barren, she
alone had the grace to combine her Kilkenny Cattery
with an exquisite and wonderful illumination of culture.
While she tore herself to pieces with one hand, with
the other she was holding up the torch of learning, and
a very real learning too, to benighted
Europe; and then (bedad!) she found another
hand again, to be holding the pen with it, and to
produce a literature to make the white angels of God
as green as her own holy hills with envy! That
was Ireland!
The Crest-Wave rolled in to her; the
spiritual forces descended far enough to create a
cultural illumination, but not far enough to create
political stability. We have seen before that
they touch the artistic creative planes, in their
descent, before they reach the more material planes.
So her position is perfectly comprehensible.
The old European manvantara was dying; elsewhere
it was dead. Its forces, when they passed away
through Ireland, were nearly exhausted; in no condition
whatever to penetrate to the material plane and make
political greatnesses and strengths. But they
found in her very soil and atmosphere a spiritual
something which enabled them to produce a splendor
of literary creation that perhaps had had no parallel
in Europe since Periclean days: Yes, surely
Ireland was much more creative than Augustan Rome.
Have any of you heard of literary
savages? Of wild men of the woods, your true
prognathous primitives, that in a bare couple of generations,
and upon no contact with civilized races, rose from
their native pithecanthropism to be the wonderful beacon
of the West or East? You have not, and cannot
imagine it; nor could it ever be. A great literary
habit is only acquired in long ages of settled civilization;
and there were long ages of settled civilization behind
Ireland; and when, about thirteen decades
after Patrick’s coming, she flamed up into cultural
creation, she was but returning to what was proper
to her soul; in the midst of her dissolution, she
was but groping after an olden self. That olden
self, very likely, she had even by that time more than
half forgotten; and we now can only see it refracted,
as it were, through the lens of those first Christian
centuries, and with the eyes of those Christian monks
and bards. How would they have seen them? There
was that spirit of euhemerization: of making
ancient things conform to new Christian ideas.
They had the Kilkenny Catterwauling in their ears
daily; would they have allowed to any Pagan times
a quieter less dissonant music? Could they have
imagined it, indeed? I doubt. Kilkennyism
would have appeared to them the natural state of things.
Were you to look back into Paganism for your Christian
millennium, to come not till Christ came again?
Were you to search there for peace on earth and mercy
mild? there in the long past, when all the
near past was war? Besides, there was that
ancientest of Mariners, Noah, but a few thousand years
back; and you had to make things fit.
So I find nothing in it conclusive,
if the legends tell of no conditions different from
those Patrick found: Kilkenny Cattery in politics,
intensive culture in the things of the spirit; and
I see no difficulty in the co-existence of the two.
The cultured habit had grown in forgotten civilized
ages; the Cattery was the result of national or racial
pralaya; of the break-up of the old civilization,
and the cyclic necessary night-time between it and
the birth of another. Let us remember that during
the Thirty Years War, in mid-manvantara, Europeans
sunk into cannibalism; let us remember the lessons
of our own day, which show what a very few years of
war, so it be intense enough, can do toward reducing
civilized to the levels of savage consciousness.
So when we find Ireland, in this fourth century,
always fighting, and the women as well
as the men; and when we find a tribe in Scotland,
the Attacotti, with a reputation for cannibalism; we
need not for a moment imagine that things had always
been like that. It is not that man is naturally
a savage, and may from the heights of civilization
quickly relapse into savagery; it is that he is a
dual being, with the higher part of his nature usually
in abeyance, and its place taken, when it is taken
at all, by the conventions of law and order; and so
the things that are only thought, or perhaps secretly
practised, in times of civilization, as soon as war
has broken down the conventions, find their full expression
in action, and others along with them.
So Patrick found Ireland, what she has been mostly
since, a grand Kilkenny Cattery; but with the literary
habit of an older and better day surviving, and nearly
ready to be awakened into transcendent splendor.
The echoes of the Danaan music were ringing in her
still; and are now, heaven knows; and how
would they not be, when what to our eyes are the hills
of her green with fern, to eyes anointed, and to the
vision of the spirit, are the palaces of the Danaan
Sidhe, and the topless towers of Fairyland?
I shall come to my history next week;
meanwhile here for you is the Song of Finn in Praise
of May, a part of it, as Mr. Rollertone translates
it, to give a taste of the literary habit of Pre-christian
Ireland:
May day! delightful
day!
Bright colors play the
vales along;
Now wakes at morning’s
slender ray,
Wild and gay, the blackbird’s
song.
Now comes the bird of
dusty hue,
The loud cuckoo, the
summer lover;
Broad-branching trees
are thick with leaves;
The bitter evil time
is over.
Swift horses gather
nigh,
Where half dry the river
goes;
Tufted heather crowns
the height;
Weak and white the bog-down
blows.
Corncrake singing, from
eve til morn,
Deep in corn, the strenuous
bird;
Sings the virgin waterfall,
White and tall, her
one sweet word.
Loaded bough of little
power
Goodly flower-harvests
win;
Cattle roam with muddy
flanks;
Busy ants go out and
in.
Carols loud the lark
on high,
Small and shy, his tireless
lay,
Singing in wildest,
merriest mood
Of delicate-hued delightful
May.
And here, from the same source, are
the Delights of Finn, as his son Oisin sang
them to Patrick:
These are the things
that were dear to Finn,
The din of battle, the
banquet’s glee,
The bay of his hounds
through the rough glen ringing,
And the blackbird singing
in Letterlee.
The Shingle grinding
along the shore,
When they dragged his
war-boats down to the sea;
The dawn-wind whistling
his spears among.
And the magic song of
his ministrels three.
Whereby you may know, if you consider
it rightly, what great strain of influence flows in
from the Great Plain and the Land of Youth, that may
yet help towards the salvation of Europe. When
you turn your eyes on the diaphanous veil of the Mighty
Mother, and see it sparkling and gleaming like that,
it is but a step to seeing the motions of the Great
Life behind; but a step to seeing
‘Eternal Beauty
wander on her way;’
that Beauty which is the
grand Theophany or manifestation of God. It
would not be, it could not exist, but that the Spirit
is here; but that the Gods are here, and clearly visible;
talk not of the Supreme Self, and shut your eyes meanwhile
to the Beauty of the World which is the light that
shines from It, and the sign of Its presence!
And the consciousness of this Beauty is one which,
since Ireland, thrilled from the Otherworld, arose
and sang, has been forcing itself ever more and more
through the minds, chiefly of poets, of a Europe exiled
from truth. I cannot over-estimate the importance
of this delight in and worship of Beauty in Nature,
which the wise Chinese considered the path to the
highest things in Art. Europe has inherited,
mainly from the Greeks and the time the western world
fell into ignorance, a preoccupation with human personality:
in Art and Literature, I mean, as well as in life.
We are individuals, and would peg out claims for
ourselves even in the Inner World; and by reason of
that the Inner World is mostly shut away from us; for
there, as the poem I quoted about the Great Plain
says, “none talk of ‘mine’ and ‘thine.’”
But down through the centuries of Christendom, after
our catching it so near its source in magical Ireland,
comes this other music: this listening, not for
the voices of passion, and indecision, and the self-conceit
which is the greatest fool’s play of all, within
our personal selves, but for the meditations
of the Omnipresent as they are communicated through
the gleam on water, through the breath and delicacy
of flowers, through the
‘blackbird’s
singing in Letterlee,’
this tendency to ‘seek
in the Impersonal’ (Nature is impersonal) ‘for
the Eternal Self.’
So here, in these fourth, fifth, sixth
and seventh centuries, I find the forces ‘going
west,’ through Gaul, through Wales, through
Ireland, to the Great Plain; there to recover themselves
bathing in the magical Fountain of Youth which is so
near to the island the Greeks called “Sacred
Ierne of the Hibernians.” It may be that
the finest part of them has not come back yet; but
will re-emerge, spiritual and saving, through this
same gateway. One would be ashamed of the Host
of the Gods, were they not doing strenuous battle
in the unseen for the regeneration of this poor Ireland,
that will yet mean so much to the world: and
one would marvel at the hellions, indeed one would,
were they in their turn not moving heaven and earth,
with their best battle-breaking champions in the fore-front,
to maintain their strangle-hold on her tortured and
beautiful soul.