Chapter XII The Celtic Doctrine of Re-Birth and Otherworld Scientifically Examined
‘If all things which partook of life were to die, and after they were dead remained in the form of death, and did not come to life again, all would at last die, and nothing would be alive—what other result could there be?’—Socrates, as reported by Plato.
‘The soul, if immortal, existed before our birth. What is incorruptible must be ungenerable.’—Hume.
‘If there be no reasons to suppose that we have existed before that period at which our existence apparently commences, then there are no grounds for supposing that we shall continue to exist after our existence has apparently ceased.’—Shelley.
The extension of the terms Fairy and Fairyland—The real man as an invisible force acting through a body-conductor—A psychical organ essential for memory—Pre-existence a scientific necessity—The vitalistic view of evolution—Old theory of heredity disproved—Embryology supports re-birth doctrine—Psycho-physical evolution—Memory of previous existences in subconsciousness—Examples—Dream psychology furnishes clearest illustrations—No post-existence without pre-existence—Resurrection as re-birth—The Circle of Life—The mystical corollary—Conclusion: the Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth and Otherworld is essentially scientific.
In the esoteric Fairy-Faith, the terms Fairy and Fairyland attain their broadest meaning. To the Celtic mystic, the universe is divisible into two interpenetrating parts or aspects: the visible in which we are now, and the invisible which is Fairyland or the Otherworld; and a fairy is an intelligent being, either embodied as a member of the human race or else resident in the Otherworld. The latter class includes many distinct hierarchies and lower orders. Some, like the highest of the Tuatha De Danann, who are the same in character as the gods of the Greeks and Hindoos, are superhuman; others are the souls of the dead; while many are subhuman and have never been embodied in gross physical bodies. These last include daemons (incorrectly regarded by Christian and other theologies as being in all cases evil, and called demons); and other like spirits, such as those which Dr. Tylor, in Primitive Culture, has designated nature spirits (leprechauns, pixies, knockers, corrigans, lutins, little folk, elves generally, and their counterparts in all non-Celtic Fairy-Faiths), which are the elementals of mediaeval mystics.
In the preceding chapter chiefly the lower species of fairies were under consideration, but now the higher orders (including human souls embodied and disembodied), in their relation toward one another, are to be considered independently. It becomes necessary, then, to present here a view of life and death not yet scientifically orthodox.
The Celt in all ages of his long history, like the ancient Greek thinkers with whom his ancestors were contemporary, has always been inclined, unlike modern scientists, to seek an explanation for the phenomena of evolutionary life by postulating a noumenal world of causes as the background of the phenomenal world of effects. To-day, the rapid march of scientific pioneers, chiefly those in psychical research, is bringing our own cold and exact science very close to that indefinable boundary which separates the two worlds; and for that reason alone a presentation of the Celtic theory of the causes operating to produce death and birth will be, at least by way of suggestion, of some value.
Facts of common everyday knowledge are apt to lose their significance through too great familiarity. A fact of this character is that when each child is born it must awaken into life. Often it is not known whether the newly-born babe is dead or alive until it stretches forth its arms and breathes or cries. And this phenomenon of our first awakening and entry upon the visible plane of life and conscious action seems to corroborate what the early Celt who thoughtfully observed it held to be true, and what the Celt of to-day holds to be true: that the material substance composing the body of man is merely a means of expression for life, a conductor for an unknown force which exhibits volition and individual consciousness; just as material substance in a condition called inanimate is a conductor for another unknown force called electricity, which does not exhibit any volition or consciousness. Destroy the human body, and there is no manifestation of its life force; destroy a wire, and there is no manifestation of electric light: the human body seems to be merely incidental in the history of the individual consciousness, as a wire is incidental to electric light.
But is this consciousness of man which we call life simply a phenomenon of matter non-existent without a physical means of expression, or does it—like electricity after the wire is destroyed—continue to exist in an unmanifested state when the human body is cold and motionless in death? And in the case of a child born dead has this consciousness found some organic imperfection in the newly-constructed infant body which made its manifestation impossible? A few thoughts to aid in answering these questions will probably suggest themselves if we briefly consider the great difference between a human body in life and a human body in death. In life, there is the highly organized, delicately adjusted, perfectly balanced human body responding to the will of an invisible power; and it is admitted by all schools of philosophers, moralists, and scientists that this invisible power—whatever it may be—is the real man.
This invisible power, beginning its manifestation through a microscopic bit of germ-plasm, gradually builds for itself a more and more complex physical habitation, until, after the short space of nine months, it claims membership among the ranks of men. During the many years of its sojourn on our planet, it renews its habitation many times. Every atom it began with in childhood is discarded and replaced by a new one long before the age of manhood is reached, and yet upon reaching manhood the invisible power remembers what it did in a child’s frame. This indicates that memory or consciousness as a psychical process does not depend essentially upon a material brain nor upon a certain grouping of ever-changing brain-substance; for if it did, apparently it would slowly and imperceptibly undergo change as completely as the whole physical body and brain. This physiological process furnishes sufficient data to allow us to postulate that there is a psychical organ of memory behind the physical sense-consciousness, and that such an organ in itself is, at least during a human-life period, unchanging in its composition. Without such an organ, the process of memory when more fully analysed (in a way we cannot here attempt) is inexplicable.608
The simplest hypothesis is to conceive that organ as the one connected with the subconsciousness or super-sense-consciousness, by means of which the invisible power or rememberer is able to remember and to impress its memory upon the temporary and continually unstable physical brain. In the process of memory there must be first of all a thing to be remembered; second, a record of that thing to be remembered; and third, something to remember that thing. The thing remembered is the result of a conscious experience, the record of it the result of its impress at the time it was experienced, but the rememberer is neither.
That invisible power, which we have called the real man, animates the body, it places food in it as fuel to produce animal heat, animal vitality and force, and tries to keep it in good working order as long as possible. If the body is imperfect at birth or becomes so later, that invisible power is forced to act through it imperfectly; if the brain is diseased, there is insanity, if undeveloped, idiocy; and when the body ceases to respond either perfectly or imperfectly, the invisible power must surrender it entirely, and there is what we call death.
Now what is this invisible power or force which has entirely vanished, leaving the physical body and brain cold and motionless? Let us see if there is an answer. Chemical analysis proves that the visible parts of the body of man are merely transformed gases; but in a complete analysis of a living body such as man’s there are certain elements to be considered which are always invisible.609 Thus at death there is instantly a cessation of all bodily consciousness—of all willing, thinking, movement. The power which has made the body conscious, and which cannot be compared to any known form of matter, is entirely gone. But there is left in the body a moment after its departure everything which we know to be material—the animal heat, the animal magnetism, the animal vitality. When these are gone, the body is cold and stiff, and in no essential way unlike any other mass of inert matter. If heat be applied to the body, or magnetism, or vital forces, there is nothing in it to retain them any more than there would be in a stone. The real man is gone. Then the body begins to disintegrate. The law of the conservation of energy and the indestructibility of matter makes it certain that in the process of death nothing has been lost, certainly nothing material. The animal heat has gone off somewhere in the atmosphere or in some other matter; the animal magnetism and vitality are momentarily lost sight of, but soon they will be attached to other organic beings such as plants or animals to begin a new cycle of embodiment. The physical constituents of the body will go to their appropriate places, into the air as gases, into the water as fluids, into the earth as salts and minerals, and in a short time may form the parts of a flower, or fruit, or animal. But where or what is the willing, the thinking, the remembering, the directing force which once controlled all these and held them together in unity? Ultra-violet rays are invisible, but they show their existence through their chemical action; similarly a soul or Ego may exist invisibly and show its existence through the vital and physical unity manifested by a living human being. As we have already seen in the preceding chapter, there are a number of the first men of science who feel that when all the data of the latest scientific discoveries in the realm of psychology and of psychical research are impartially examined there is no escape from some such hypothesis as the ancient hypothesis of a soul.
If we accept the soul hypothesis, as it seems we must, and regard a soul as an indestructible unit of invisible power possessing consciousness and volition, and normally able to exist independently of a human body, then it becomes a logical and a scientific necessity to postulate its pre-existence, because as such a unit it is indestructible, in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy and indestructibility of matter. We speak here not of the ordinary soul or human personal consciousness, but of that Ego which Celtic mystics conceive as the permanent principle (though probably itself relative to some still higher power) behind the personality—which, in turn, they believe is a temporary combination wholly dependent upon the Ego. Accordingly, it is scientifically possible for such a soul as a homogeneous unit of force or conscious energy to pass from one mass of matter or physical body to another without disintegration, diminution, or loss of its own identity. It is scientifically certain, also, from experiments performed to test the power of resistance to decomposition exhibited by the force which we call life in an organic body, that such a force is capable of outwearing many physical embodiments.610 Recent demonstrations tend to show that the heredity hypothesis cannot be held to account fully for such widely varied character or soul individuality as may be exhibited by members of one family. We must therefore account for mental, moral, and certainly psychical inequalities among our race by some other hypothesis; and no hypothesis is more scientific, more in line with known physiological and psychical processes, or more in accord with the law of evolution, than that of re-birth.
The theory of the mechanical transmission of acquired characteristics in a purely physical manner through the germ-plasm is no longer tenable when all the data of physiology and psychology are admitted. A vitalistic view of evolution is rapidly developing in the scientific world, and the weight of evidence is decidedly in favour of regarding all evolutionary processes, reaching from the lowest to the highest organisms, as illustrating a gradual unfolding in the sensuous world of a pre-existing psychical power through an ever-increasing complexity of specialized structures, this complexity being brought about by natural selection. Such a view is also strongly supported if not confirmed by the general scientific belief that spontaneous generation of life is and always has been impossible on our planet or on any planet: there must have been life before its physical manifestation or its physical evolution began.
We may regard this psychical power as like a vast reservoir of consciousness ever trying to force itself through matter, the walls of the reservoir. Through the microscopic body of an amoeba there has percolated a very minute drop from the reservoir. As evolution advances, the walls of the reservoir become more and more porous, and little by little the drop increases to a tiny rivulet. Through the higher animals, the tiny rivulet flows as a brook. Through man as he is, the brook flows as a deep and broad river. Throughout the completely evolved man of the far distant future, the deep and broad river will have overflowed all its banks, it will have inundated and completely overwhelmed the animal-human nature of the individual through whom it flows, as the whole volume of the vast reservoir pours itself out. The ordinary consciousness of man will then have been transmuted into the subconsciousness, of which it had always been a pale reflection. In other words, if the theory of the mechanical transmission of acquired characteristics has failed, as seems to be the case, then we must assume that there is, as the bearer of all gains made from generation to generation, some sort of psychical or vitalistic principle. This, making use of the germ-plasm merely as a physical basis for its manifestation, begins to build up a body suited to its further evolutionary needs.
The brilliant discoveries of Dr. Jacques Loeb and of M. Yves Delage have demolished absolutely the old idea that each organ and each tissue contained in embryo in the normal egg-germ must develop in a particular and co-ordinate way into a normal organism and after the parental type: it is possible to make a head grow where there ought to be feet; and at Zürich, Standfuss, solely through changing the temperature of his laboratory, was able to obtain from the same species of butterfly forms which were tropical and forms which were arctic.611 All this helps to establish the hypothesis, which amounts to certainty, that the conformation of a physical body, or even the kind of species to be born, is directly determined by physical environment and not by heredity, and that the chief factor to consider in organisms is the life animating the body. Physical environment affects only the physical organism; it does not affect the invisible and unknown life-principle resident within the physical organism.
The process of fertilization is a physical process. As such it is simply initiatory to embryonic evolution which also is physical. Once the proper physical conditions are set up by the parents, life pursues its marvellous progress in the womb of the human mother, from the amoeba-like initial embryo to man. That is to say, parents set in motion the laws governing the reproduction of physical bodies. They create such conditions as enable the invisible life-force to begin its physical manifestation.612 In the two fused germs from the parents resides the physical inheritance of the offspring, to be outwardly shaped by environment; but the physical inheritance is a thing distinct from the psychical part of the living being, just as much as the dead human body is a thing apart from the life which has left it. Though the old heredity theory is overthrown by late discoveries, the question as to what life is in human bodies under all possible environmental conditions remains unsolved; and so do the questions why there should be sports in nature, which among man are called geniuses, and why every human being has a distinct and highly developed individual character, essentially unlike that of his immediate ancestors.
Embryology proves conclusively that the human embryo retraces in its growth the evolution of lower life-forms. At first consisting of two single cells fused into one, it is like the amoeba. By cell-division it grows and progresses step by step through each lower realm of being until it comes to be a water-creature with gills; and science teaches that all organic life on this planet once dwelt in the seas. It grows progressively out of the water-world stage of organic life into the world of air-breathing creatures. Nature at last achieves her highest product, and a human being is born out of the Womb of Time. The initial microscopic bit of germ-plasm is endowed with power of motion, thought, and human consciousness, with dominion over all the lower kingdoms through which by right of ancient conquests it passed in the brief period of nine months. On every side the problem of life is full of poetry and wonder; it is the greatest mystery.
Not only can we thus study the age-long evolution of the physical man, but we have recently acquired sufficient scientific data to lay foundations for a study of the evolution of the psychical man. Thus, for example, instincts seem to be nothing more than habits which through unknown periods of time have become so ingrained in the constitution of man, and of all animals, that now they have become second nature and usually are exercised without the need of reasoning processes. The influence from innate sensuous experiences rises into consciousness as the life of every normal child and youth unfolds itself; and these experiences in their full expansion, when the age of maturity has been reached, constitute in their unity what we call character, which, in one sense, may be defined as the sum total of instincts of every kind. From such a point of view, the psychical or invisible power in man is merely a bundle of acquired habits which make use of the bodily organism in order to express themselves—in the same way, as we have pointed out, that electrical forces manifest their presence through a conductor. If these habits be good, we call their possessor a good man; if evil, we call him an evil man.
The theory of Charles Darwin suggests that all evolutionary progress is directed to the acquirement of newer and ever higher instincts. And if this process be the true one, that is to say, if all instincts, which in their finer distinctions mark off species from species in all animal kingdoms, be as Darwin thought—and as is to-day more clearly evident—the result of a long and gradual evolution through experience in a sensuous realm of existence, then it would seem to follow that there must be some kind of a monad (probably a non-sensuous one) to which such acquired instincts can attach themselves. Such a monad, too, must have been a percipient and hence a recorder of such ever-accumulating experiences throughout an inconceivably long chain of lives, and it of itself must, while so perceiving and recording, not be subject to the transitoriness of the sensuous realm wherein it gathers together these instincts, which in their unified expression form its personality or human character.
In harmony with the vitalistic view of evolution, which implies a pre-existent psychical power continually striving to express itself completely through matter, yet normally able to exist independently of a physical means of expression, we should regard such high mental processes as judgement, reasoning, analysis and synthesis, and spatial perception, along with memory, as resultants of very great experience in a sensuous world, on which in our present psycho-physical constitution such processes appear to have direct bearing. In other words, for man to be able to exercise such high mental processes there is need to postulate incalculable ages of specialization in the nervous apparatus, and in psycho-physical adjustment, of a kind which has thus enabled the psychical power to express itself to such a supreme degree in the realm of mind and matter. The same vitalistic argument is applicable to the lower mental processes and to the instinctual powers in man, because we cannot at any time, in viewing the complete evolution of man as a twofold being composed of a physical and a psychical part, force aside Fechner’s conviction that the problem is a psycho-physical one. A study of sexual instincts in children seems to confirm this.613
Such a psychical and vitalistic hypothesis is, as we have seen, strongly supported by embryology; and embryology proves conclusively the need of long ages of physical evolution for the development of each tissue and highly specialized organ in the human body. Certain French and German and other scientists of the vitalistic school have demonstrated physiologically the need of a pre-existent power as the unifying principle which attracts and compels material atoms to group themselves into the pattern of the human body614—or, as we may add, of any organic body. Psychical researchers at the outset of their science seem apparently to have demonstrated psychologically the post-existence of the personal consciousness-unity; and it is very likely when further progress has been made in psychics that there will arise a logical need to postulate, in addition to the personal consciousness-unity, a hypothetical pre-existent soul-monad as the unifying principle which attracts and compels psychical atoms of experience (if such an expression may be used) to group themselves into the personal consciousness-unity which appears to survive the death of the gross physical body—for a long or short time, as future research may show.615 Such a soul-monad, to follow the view held by Celtic mystics, led by acquired instincts which were transmitted to it through the personality (held by the Celtic esoteric doctrine to be a temporary combination), apparently weaves out of matter the body-unit adapted to its further evolution, in a way analogous to that in which a silkworm is led by acquired instincts to weave a cocoon. This body-unit is twofold: (1) the visible body derived from the visible elements of matter; and (2) the invisible or ghost-body derived from the invisible or ethereal elements of matter.
Strictly speaking, for the Celtic mystic this soul-monad is something upon which the personal consciousness depends for its psychical unity in precisely the same way as the physical body depends upon the personal consciousness for its physical unity. The Celtic mystic holds that just as the body-unity falls back again into its primal elements of matter, so the personal consciousness-unity (apparently able to survive in the ghost-body for a long period after its separation from the grosser physical envelope or human body) also in due time is discarded by the soul-monad or individuality, and then falls back into its primal psychical constituents. In other words, the Celtic Esoteric Doctrine of Re-birth correctly interpreted does not conceive personal immortality, but it conceives a greater kind of immortality—the immortality of the unknown principle which gives unity to each temporary personality it makes use of, and which we prefer to designate as the individuality, the impersonator. And this individuality is the bearer of all evolutionary gains made in each temporary personality through which it reflects itself: it is the permanent evolving principle.
Perhaps an analogy drawn from nature will make the Celtic position clearer: we may say that the personality occupies a position between the human body and the soul-monad, just as the moon occupies a position between the earth and the sun. Personal consciousness is to the human body what the moonlight is to the earth, merely a pale reflection from a third thing, the soul-monad or individuality, which is the ultimate source of both sets of unities, the material or body-unity in its twofold aspect and the psychical or personal consciousness-unity. Each personality is temporary, while the individuality, like the sun in relation to the earth and moon, is capable of at least a relative immortality: the sun’s light, as science holds, existed before there was any moon to reflect it on to the earth, and may continue to exist when both the moon and earth are disintegrated. The essential nature of the sun’s energy or life remains unknown to science; so does the essential nature of the energy or life manifesting itself as the individuality. Though all such analogies are more or less weak, this one adequately fits in with the theories concerning the Celtic Esoteric Doctrine of Re-birth which the most learned of contemporary Celts, chiefly mystics, have favoured us with; and it is our rare privilege to put these theories on record for whatever they may be worth. The best hypothesis is always the one which best explains all available data, and, to our mind, when very minutely examined, in a way which (chiefly for reasons of space) cannot be attempted here, this Celtic hypothesis concerning the nature and destiny of man is the best hitherto adduced.616
Objectors to the Re-birth Doctrine as held by the Celts and other peoples anciently and now, naturally ask why, if we have lived before here on earth in physical bodies, we do not remember it. But the shallowness and unscientific nature of this question is at once apparent to psychologists who know that there exists in man a subconscious mind which in the great mass of people is almost totally dormant. ‘The subconscious self,’ wrote William James, ‘is nowadays a well-accredited psychological entity.... Apart from all religious considerations, there is actually and literally more life in our total soul than we are at any time aware of.’ And he added:—‘It thus is “scientific” to interpret all otherwise unaccountable invasive alternations of consciousness as results of the tension of subliminal memories reaching a bursting point.’617 Intuition, which all men have experienced, would seem to be the result of a momentary contact by the physical brain with its psychical counterpart—the subconscious self, the individuality as distinguished from the personality.
Certain observed psychological processes in ordinary men and women, who never really know that they have a subconsciousness or Transcendental Self, prove that it exists even for them, and any part of man which exists and functions of itself can be developed so as to be consciously perceived. This is incontestable. Let us point out a few of these observed and recorded psychological processes. There may be an unsolved problem in the mind, or inability to recall a certain name or fact, and then a sudden, unexpected intuitional solving of the problem and an instantaneous recollecting of the desired facts, at a time when the ordinary mind may be entirely absorbed in altogether foreign thoughts. Again, many persons through accident or disease have lost their memory to such an extent as to require complete re-education, and then in time, gradually or instantaneously, as the case may be, have completely recovered it.618 And we noticed in our study of supernatural lapse of time (p. 469) that at the moment of accidental loss of consciousness, as in drowning for example, all forgotten details of life are instantaneously reproduced in a complete panorama. These psychological processes support what we have said above with respect to a psychical organ being behind the sense-consciousness, and seem thus to prove that the subconscious mind is the place for recording permanently all experiences.619 Under hypnosis, a subject may be requested to perform a certain act, let us say 11,999 minutes after the moment of making the request. When the hypnotic condition is removed, the subject has no personal consciousness of the suggestion, but, as different experiments have proved conclusively, he invariably performs the act exactly at the expiration of the 11,999 minutes without knowing why he does so. This proves that there is a subconsciousness in man which can take full cognizance of such a suggestion, which can keep count of the passing of time and then cause the unconscious personality to act in response to its will.620 Again, in extreme old age people who have come to have an imperfect memory or none at all in their normal consciousness, under abnormal conditions (which seemingly are due to a temporary influx of a latent psychical power into the physical body and brain, or else to an awakening of a dormant force within the physical body and brain themselves) often regain, for a time, complete and clear memory of their childhood. This proves that the memory is somewhere still perfect, and that it does not reside in the consciousness of the age-exhausted physical brain and memory. Albert Moll, in his treatise on hypnotism, says that events in the normal life which have dropped out of memory can be remembered in hypnosis:—‘An English officer in Africa was hypnotized by Hansen, and suddenly began to speak a strange language. This turned out to be Welsh, which he had learnt as a child, but had forgotten.’621 And even memory of acts done in hypnotic somnambulism can be awakened in the normal state.622 Furthermore, through psycho-analysis, as Professor Freud has shown, forgotten dreams and dreams which were never complete in the ordinary consciousness can be recovered in their entirety out of the subconsciousness.623 How many of us can recall without some mental stimulus certain acts performed ten years ago? A good deal of our present life is no longer vivid, much of it is forgotten, and in old age many of the memories of youth and of mature life will be subconscious. If this brain, whose total existence is comprised between birth and death, cannot remember in a normal way all its own experiences, how could it be expected to know anything at all of hypothetical past lives where there were various physical brains long ago disintegrated—unless the hypothetically ever-existing transcendental individuality, whose consciousness is the subconsciousness, be made by some unusual psychical stimuli to transmit its memory of the past lives to each new brain it creates? In other words, to have memory of pre-existent conditions there must be continuity of association with present conditions. If such continuity exists, it exists in the subconsciousness. And if it exists therein, then in order to recall in the present personal or ordinary consciousness, which began at birth, memory of an anterior state of consciousness, it would be necessary to hold impressed upon the present physical brain and body a clear and unremittent consciousness of the subconsciousness. In relation to our personal consciousness, apparently our greatest powers lie in the subconsciousness which is sleeping and in embryo, awaiting to be born into the consciousness of this world through the slow process of evolutionary gestation. In the case of a Buddha, who on good historical authority is said to have been able to recall all past existences from the lowest to the highest, this evolutionary process seems to have reached completion.624
Under ordinary conditions, individuals have been known to see a place which they have never seen before, or to do a thing which they have never done before in this life nor in any conscious dream-state, and yet feel that they have seen the place before and done the thing before. M. Th. Ribot, in his Diseases of Memory (chapter iv), has brought together many cases of this kind. Some are undoubtedly explicable as forgotten experiences of the present life. Others, to our mind, strongly support the theory of pre-existent experiences preserved in memory in the subconsciousness.
Under chloroform, or other anaesthetics, patients often recover for the time being forgotten facts of experience, and sometimes appear to make momentary contact with their subconsciousness and to exhibit therein another personality. In certain well-defined types of double personality, which are not the kind due to demon-possession nor to spirit-possession as in ‘mediumship’, there are two memories, ‘each complete and absolutely independent of the other.’625 And in similar cases, where the subject exhibits alternately numerous personalities, we see the individuality, that is to say the subconscious man, exhibiting, as a dramatist might, various characters or personalities of probable past existences according as each is most active at the moment. Similarly, crystal-gazing sometimes seems not only to revive lost memories of this life, but also to call up subconscious memories of some unknown state of consciousness which may be from a previous life.626
M. Ribot has made it clear from his careful study of numerous cases of amnesia (loss of memory) that ‘recollections return in an inverse order to that in which they disappear’. For example, a celebrated Russian astronomer lost all memory save that of his childhood, and in recovering it there appeared first the recollections of youth, then those of middle age, then the experiences of later years, and, finally, the most recent events. Many even more marked examples of the law of regression in amnesia are given by M. Ribot. We conclude from them that all strange and apparently long-forgotten facts of experience arising in consciousness out of the subconsciousness, as in the different cases which have been cited above, would necessarily be those which have been the longest lost to memory; and hence if they cannot be attached to this present life then they can only be derived from a former life, because every primary detail of memory must always originate from an experience at some past period of time. M. Ribot himself, in his conclusion to The Diseases of Memory, makes this significant observation with respect to the law of regression in amnesia:—‘This law of regression provides us with an explanation for extraordinary revivification of certain recollections when the mind turns backward to conditions of existence that had apparently disappeared for ever.’
In dreams there is a great wealth of latent memory; sometimes memory of the present waking life, but often not capable, apparently, of being attached to it, nor explicable as due to the soul wandering from the body during sleep: the hypothesis of re-birth seems to be the only adequate one here. Certain dreams suggest that man possesses innate memories extending backwards to prehistoric times (cf. p. 5 above). This fits in with Professor Freud’s theory in his Die Traumdeutung, that ‘the dream is nothing else than the concealed fulfilment of a repressed wish.’ Some dreams are ‘in the form of frightful, cruel, horrible scenes, which seem frightful to us, but in a certain depth of the unconscious satisfy wishes which, in the “prehistoric” ages of our own mental development, were actually recognized as desires.’627 This also supports our vitalistic view of the evolution of human instincts. Again, in somnambulism there is a much more exalted memory, and clear cases are on record of facts being then consciously present which cannot be accounted for save through the same hypothesis.628
If we keep in mind the psychology of the dream state, we shall probably get the clearest intellectual theory as to why, if pre-existence be true, we do not remember various previous states of existence. In our present state of consciousness we may enter a dream state, in that dream state by dreaming we enter a second dream state, and theoretically, though not by common experience, there may be no limit to superimposed dream states, each one in itself a state of consciousness distinct from the waking consciousness. Accordingly, if, as Wordsworth put it, ‘our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting’ of another state of consciousness, and death the abrupt ending of that sleep of dreams and a waking up, or if the direct opposite be true, and death is the entrance to a sleep and dream state of consciousness, it becomes very clear how difficult it would be for us here now either to recall what we may have dreamt or have actually done in another state of conscious existence corresponding to our present one. The subtle thinkers of modern India, who completely accept the doctrine of re-birth as a universal law, have summed up this abstruse aspect of the dream psychology as follows:—‘The first or spiritual state was ecstasy; from ecstasy it (the Ego) forgot itself into deep sleep; from deep sleep it awoke out of unconsciousness, but still within itself, into the internal world of dreams; from dreaming it passed finally into the thoroughly waking state, and the outer world of sense.’629 But our own psychologists are not yet far enough advanced to accept this; much more work in psychical research must first be done before it will be possible for them to announce to the West that pre-existence is a necessary condition for post-existence which they now hypothetically accept. If for the present our standpoint be that of our own psychologists, we may then think of the human consciousness as a spectrum whose central parts alone are visible to us. Beyond at either end lies an unseen and to us unknown region, awaiting its explorer from the West. ‘Each one of us is in reality an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows—an individuality which can never express itself completely through any corporeal manifestation. The Self manifests through the organism; but there is always some part of the Self unmanifested; and always, as it seems, some power of organic expression in abeyance or reserve.’630 William James stated the position thus:—‘The B. region’ (another name for the region of subconsciousness), ‘then, is obviously the larger part of each of us, for it is the abode of everything that is latent, and the reservoir of everything that passes unrecorded and unobserved.’631
Men of science see no way of accepting the doctrine of the resurrection of the physical body as at present interpreted by Christian theology; but the late Professor Th. Henri Martin, Dean of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Rennes, has suggested in his La Vie future that the doctrine may be the exoteric interpretation of a long-forgotten esoteric truth; namely, that the soul may be resurrected in a new physical body, and this is scientifically possible.632
The ancient scientists called Life a Circle. In the upper half of this Circle, or here on the visible plane, we know that in the physiological history of man and of all living things there is first the embryonic or prenatal state, then birth; and as life, like a sun, rises in its new-born power toward the zenith, there is childhood, youth, and maturity; and then, as it passes the zenith on its way to the horizon, there is decline, old age, and, finally, death; and as a scientific possibility we have in the lower half of the Circle, in Hades or the Otherworld of the Celts and of all peoples, corresponding processes between death and a hypothetical but logically necessary re-birth.633
The logical corollary to the re-birth doctrine, and an integral part of the Celtic esoteric theory of evolution, is that there have been human races like the present human race who in past aeons of time have evolved completely out of the human plane of conscious existence into the divine plane of conscious existence. Hence the gods are beings which once were men, and the actual race of men will in time become gods. Man now stands related to the divine and invisible world in precisely the same manner that the brute stands related to the human race. To the gods, man is a being in a lower kingdom of evolution. According to the complete Celtic belief, the gods can and do enter the human world for the specific purposes of teaching men how to advance most rapidly toward the higher kingdom. In other words, all the Great Teachers, e. g. Jesus, Buddha, Zoroaster, and many others, in different ages and among various races, whose teachings are extant, are, according to a belief yet held by educated and mystical Celts, divine beings who in inconceivably past ages were men but who are now gods, able at will to incarnate into our world, in order to emphasize the need which exists in nature, by virtue of the working of evolutionary laws (to which they themselves are still subject), for man to look forward, and so strive to reach divinity rather than to look backward in evolution and thereby fall into mere animalism. The stating of this mystical corollary makes the exposition of the Fairy-Faith complete, at least in outline.
As shown by the Barddas MSS. in our chapter vii, the Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth is the scientific extension of Darwin’s law as corrected,634 that alone through traversing the Circle of Life man reaches that destined perfection which natural analogies, life’s processes as exhibited by living things, and evolution, suggest, and from which at present man is so far removed. There seems to emerge this postulate: the world is the object of normal consciousness, the Ego or Soul-Monad the object of subconsciousness; and the subconsciousness cannot be realized in the world until through the normal consciousness of man the Ego is able to function completely, and so endow man with full self-consciousness in matter, which endowment seems to be the goal of all planetary evolution.
We conclude that the Otherworld of the Celts and their Doctrine of Re-birth accord thoroughly in their essentials with modern science; and, accordingly, with other essential elements in the complete Celtic Fairy-Faith which we have in the preceding chapter found to be equally scientific, establish our Psychological Theory of the Nature and Origin of that Fairy-Faith upon a logical and solid foundation; and we now submit this study to the judgement of our readers. With more complete evidence in the future, both from folk-lore and from science, there will be, we trust, a better vindication of the Theory, and perhaps finally there will come about its transformation into what it but seems to us to be now—a Fact.
Some beliefs which a century ago were regarded as absurdities are now regarded as fundamentally scientific. In the same way, what in this generation is heretical alike to the Christian theologian and to the man of science may in coming generations be accepted as orthodox.
Footnotes
1 Quite appropriately it means place of cairns or tumuli—those prehistoric monuments religious and funereal in their purposes. Carnac seems to be a Gallo-Roman form. According to Professor J. Loth, the Breton (Celtic) forms would be: old Celtic, Carnāco-s; old Breton (ninth-eleventh century), Carnoc; Middle Breton (eleventh-sixteenth century), Carneuc; Modern Breton, Carnec.
2 For we cannot offer any proof of what at first sight appears like a philological relation or identity between Carnac and Karnak.
3 Andrew Lang, Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth (London, 1893), p. xviii; and History of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1900-07).
4 Cf. David MacRitchie’s published criticisms of our Psychological Theory in The Celtic Review (January 1910), entitled Druids and Mound-Dwellers; also his first part of these criticisms, ib. (October 1909), entitled A New Solution of the Fairy Problem.
5 Alexander Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica (Edinburgh, 1900), i, p. xix.
6 The ceilidh of the Western Hebrides corresponds to the veillée of Lower Brittany (see pp. 221 ff.), and to similar story-telling festivals which formerly flourished among all the Celtic peoples. ‘The ceilidh is a literary entertainment where stories and tales, poems, and ballads, are rehearsed and recited, and songs are sung, conundrums are put, proverbs are quoted, and many other literary matters are related and discussed.’—Alexander Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica, i, p. xviii.
7 I am indebted for this information to the late Mr. Davies, the competent scholar and antiquarian of Newcastle-Emlyn, where for many years he has been vicar.
8 In the Gnosis, St. Michael symbolizes the sun, and thus very appropriately at St. Michael’s Mount, Cornwall, at Mont St. Michel, Carnac, and also at Mont St. Michel on the coast of Normandy, replaced the Great God of Light and Life, held in supreme honour among the ancient Celts.
9 In this connexion we may think of the North and South Magnetic Poles of the earth as centres of definite yet invisible forces which can be detected, and to some extent measured scientifically.
10 Anglo-Irish for rath, a circular earthen fort.
11 Throughout Ireland there are many ancient, often prehistoric, earthworks or tumuli, which are popularly called forts, raths, or dúns, and in folk-belief these are considered fairy hills or the abodes of various orders of fairies. In this belief we see at work a definite anthropomorphism which attributes dwellings here on earth to an invisible spirit-race, as though this race were actually the spirits of the ancient Irish who built the forts. As we proceed, we shall see how important and varied a part these earthworks play in the Irish Fairy-Faith (cf. chapter viii, on Archaeology).
12 An Irish mystic, and seer of great power, with whom I have often discussed the Fairy-Faith in its details, regards ‘fairy paths’ or ‘fairy passes’ as actual magnetic arteries, so to speak, through which circulates the earth’s magnetism.
13 ‘Irish scholars differ as to the signification of Meadha. Some say that it is the genitive case of Meadh, the name of some ancient chieftain who was buried in the hill. Knock Magh is the spelling often used by writers who hold that the name means “Hill of the Plain”.’—John Glynn.
14 On September 8, 1909, about a year after this testimony was given, Mr. ——, our seer-witness, at his own home near Grange, told to me again the same essential facts concerning his psychical experiences as during my first interview with him, and even repeated word for word the expressions the ‘gentry’ used in communicating with him. Therefore I feel that he is thoroughly sincere in his beliefs and descriptions, whatever various readers may think of them. As his neighbours said to me about him—and I interviewed a good many of them—‘Some give in to him and some do not’; but they always spoke of him with respect, though a few naturally consider him eccentric. At the time of our second meeting (which gave me a chance to revise the evidence as first taken down) Mr. —— made this additional statement:—‘The gentry do not tell all their secrets, and I do not understand many things about them, nor can I be sure that everything I tell concerning them is exact.’
15 A learned and more careful Irish seer thinks this head-dress should really be described as an aura.
16 I have been told by a friend in California, who is a student of psychical sciences, that there exist in certain parts of that state, notably in the Yosemite Valley, as the Red Men seem to have known, according to their traditions, invisible races exactly comparable to the ‘gentry’ of this Ben Bulbin country such as our seer-witness describes them and as other seers in Ireland have described them, and quite like the ‘people of peace’ as described by Kirk, the seventh son, in his Secret Commonwealth (see this study, p. 85 n.). These California races are said to exist now, as the Irish and Scotch invisible races are said to exist now, by seers who can behold them; and, like the latter races, are described as a distinct order of beings who have never been in physical embodiments. If we follow the traditions of the Red Men, the Yosemite invisible tribes are probably but a few of many such tribes scattered throughout the North American continent; and equally with their Celtic relatives they are described as a warlike race with more than human powers over physical nature, and as able to subject or destroy men.
17 This refers to a tale told by Hugh Currid, in August, 1908, about Father Patrick and Father Dominick, which is here omitted because re-investigation during my second visit to Grange, in September, 1909, showed the tale to have been incorrectly reported. The same story, however, based upon facts, according to several reliable witnesses, was more accurately told by Patrick Waters at the time of my re-investigation, and appears on page 51.
18 It happened that I had in my pocket a fossil, picked out of the neighbouring sea-cliff rocks, which are very rich in fossils. I showed this to Pat to ascertain if what he had had in his hand looked anything like it, and he at once said ‘No’.
19 After this Ossianic fragment, which has been handed down orally, I asked Pat if he had ever heard the old people talk about Dermot and Grania, and he replied:—‘To be sure I have. Dermot and Grania used to live in these parts. Dermot stole Finn MacCoul’s sister, and had to flee away. He took with him a bag of sand and a bunch of heather; and when he was in the mountains he would put the bag of sand under his head at night, and then tell everybody he met that he had slept on the sand (the sea-shore); and when on the sand he would use the bunch of heather for a pillow, and say he had slept on the heather (the mountains). And so nobody ever caught him at all.’
20 As to probable proof that there was an Atlantis, see p. 333 n.
21 This refers to Robert Kirk, minister of Aberfoyle, who wrote The Secret Commonwealth (see this study, p. 85 n.).
22 In going from East Ireland to Galway, during the summer of 1908, I passed through the country near Mullingar, where there was then great excitement over a leprechaun which had been appearing to school-children and to many of the country-folk. I talked with some of the people as I walked through part of County Meath about this leprechaun, and most of them were certain that there could be such a creature showing itself; and I noticed, too, that they were all quite anxious to have a chance at the money-bag, if they could only see the little fellow with it. I told one good-natured old Irishman at Ballywillan—where I stopped over night—as we sat round his peat fire and pot of boiling potatoes, that the leprechaun was reported as captured by the police in Mullingar. ‘Now that couldn’t be, at all,’ he said instantly, ‘for everybody knows the leprechaun is a spirit and can’t be caught by any blessed policeman, though it is likely one might get his gold if they got him cornered so he had no chance to run away. But the minute you wink or take your eyes off the little devil, sure enough he is gone.’
23 Cf. David Fitzgerald, Popular Tales of Ireland, in Rev. Celt., iv. 185-92; and All the Year Round, New Series, iii. ‘This woman guardian of the lake is called Toice Bhrean, “untidy” or “lazy wench”. According to a local legend, she is said to have been originally the guardian of the sacred well, from which, owing to her neglect, Lough Gur issued; and in this rôle she corresponds to Liban, daughter of Eochaidh Finn, the guardian of the sacred well from which issued Lough Neagh, according to the Dinnshenchas and the tale of Eochaidh MacMairido.’—J. F. Lynch.
24 It was on the bank of the little river Camóg, which flows near Lough Gur, that the Earl of Desmond one day saw Aine as she sat there combing her hair. Overcome with love for the fairy-goddess, he gained control over her through seizing her cloak, and made her his wife. From this union was born the enchanted son Geróid Iarla, even as Galahad was born to Lancelot by the Lady of the Lake. When Geróid had grown into young manhood, in order to surpass a woman he leaped right into a bottle and right out again, and this happened in the midst of a banquet in his father’s castle. His father, the earl, had been put under taboo by Aine never to show surprise at anything her magician son might do, but now the taboo was forgotten, and hence broken, amid so unusual a performance; and immediately Geróid left the feasting and went to the lake. As soon as its water touched him he assumed the form of a goose, and he went swimming over the surface of the Lough, and disappeared on Garrod Island.
According to one legend, Aine, like the Breton Morgan, may sometimes be seen combing her hair, only half her body appearing above the lake. And in times of calmness and clear water, according to another legend, one may behold beneath Aine’s lake the lost enchanted castle of her son Geróid, close to Garrod Island—so named from Geróid or ‘Gerald’.
Geróid lives there in the under-lake world to this day, awaiting the time of his normal return to the world of men (see our chapter on re-birth, p. 386). But once in every seven years, on clear moonlight nights, he emerges temporarily, when the Lough Gur peasantry see him as a phantom mounted on a phantom white horse, leading a phantom or fairy cavalcade across the lake and land. A well-attested case of such an apparitional appearance of the earl has been recorded by Miss Anne Baily, the percipient having been Teigue O’Neill, an old blacksmith whom she knew (see All the Year Round, New Series, iii. 495-6, London, 1870). And Moll Riall, a young woman also known to Miss Baily, saw the phantom earl by himself, under very weird circumstances, by day, as she stood at the margin of the lake washing clothes (ib., p. 496).
Some say that Aine’s true dwelling-place is in her hill; upon which on every St. John’s Night the peasantry used to gather from all the immediate neighbourhood to view the moon (for Aine seems to have been a moon goddess, like Diana), and then with torches (cliars) made of bunches of straw and hay tied on poles used to march in procession from the hill and afterwards run through cultivated fields and amongst the cattle. The underlying purpose of this latter ceremony probably was—as is the case in the Isle of Man and in Brittany (see pp. 124 n., 273), where corresponding fire-ceremonies surviving from an ancient agricultural cult are still celebrated—to exorcise the land from all evil spirits and witches in order that there may be good harvests and rich increase of flocks. Sometimes on such occasions the goddess herself has been seen leading the sacred procession (cf. the Bacchus cult among the ancient Greeks, who believed that the god himself led his worshippers in their sacred torch-light procession at night, he being like Aine in this respect, more or less connected with fertility in nature). One night some girls staying on the hill late were made to look through a magic ring by Aine, and lo the hill was crowded with the folk of the fairy goddess who before had been invisible. The peasants always said that Aine is ‘the best-hearted woman that ever lived’ (cf. David Fitzgerald, Popular Tales of Ireland, in Rev. Celt., iv. 185-92).
In Silva Gadelica (ii. 347-8), Aine is a daughter of Eogabal, a king of the Tuatha De Danann, and her abode is within the sidh, named on her account ‘Aine cliach, now Cnoc Aine, or Knockany’. In another passage we read that Manannan took Aine as his wife (ib., ii. 197). Also see in Silva Gadelica, ii, pp. 225, 576.
25 ‘In some local tales the Bean-tighe, or Bean a’tighe is termed Bean-sidhe (Banshee), and Bean Chaointe, or “wailing woman”, and is identified with Aine. In an elegy by Ferriter on one of the Fitzgeralds, we read:—
Aine from her closely hid nest did awake,
The woman of wailing from Gur’s voicy lake.
‘Thomas O’Connellan, the great minstrel bard, some of whose compositions are given by Hardiman, died at Lough Gur Castle about 1700, and was buried at New Church beside the lake. It is locally believed that Aine stood on a rock of Knock Adoon and “keened” O’Connellan whilst the funeral procession was passing from the castle to the place of burial.’—J. F. Lynch.
A Banshee was traditionally attached to the Baily family of Lough Gur; and one night at dead of night, when Miss Kitty Baily was dying of consumption, her two sisters, Miss Anne Baily and Miss Susan Baily, who were sitting in the death chamber, ‘heard such sweet and melancholy music as they had never heard before. It seemed to them like distant cathedral music.... The music was not in the house.... It seemed to come through the windows of the old castle, high in the air.’ But when Miss Anne, who went downstairs with a lighted candle to investigate the weird phenomenon, had approached the ruined castle she thought the music came from above the house; ‘and thus perplexed, and at last frightened, she returned.’ Both sisters are on record as having distinctly heard the fairy music, and for a long time (All the Year Round, New Series, iii. 496-7; London, 1870).
26 ‘The Buachailleen is most likely one of the many forms assumed by the shape-shifting Fer Fi, the Lough Gur Dwarf, who at Tara, according to the Dinnshenchas of Tuag Inbir (see Folk-Lore, iii; and A. Nutt, Voyage of Bran, i. 195 ff.), took the shape of a woman; and we may trace the tales of Geróid Iarla to Fer Fi, who, and not Geróid, is believed by the oldest of the Lough Gur peasantry to be the owner of the lake. Fer Fi is the son of Eogabal of Sídh Eogabail, and hence brother to Aine. He is also foster-son of Manannan Mac Lir, and a Druid of the Tuatha De Danann (cf. Silva Gadelica, ii. 225; also Dinnshenchas of Tuag Inbir). At Lough Gur various tales are told by the peasants concerning the Dwarf, and he is still stated by them to be the brother of Aine. For the sake of experiment I once spoke very disrespectfully of the Dwarf to John Punch, an old man, and he said to me in a frightened whisper: “Whisht! he’ll hear you.” Edward Fitzgerald and other old men were very much afraid of the Dwarf.’—J. F. Lynch.
27 ‘Compare the tale of Excalibur, the Sword of King Arthur, which King Arthur before his death ordered Sir Bedivere to cast into the lake whence it had come.’—J. F. Lynch.
28 ‘It is commonly believed by young and old at Lough Gur that a human being is drowned in the Lake once every seven years, and that it is the Bean Fhionn, or “White Lady” who thus takes the person.’—J. F. Lynch.
29 It was the belief of the Rev. Robert Kirk, as expressed by him in his Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns, and Fairies, that the fairy tribes are a distinct order of created beings possessing human-like intelligence and supernormal powers, who live and move about in this world invisible to all save men and women of the second-sight (see this study, pp. 89, 91 n.).
30 The Rev. Robert Kirk, in his Secret Commonwealth, defines the second-sight, which enabled him to see the ‘good people’, as ‘a rapture, transport, and sort of death’. He and our present witness came into the world with this abnormal faculty; but there is the remarkable case to record of the late Father Allen Macdonald, who during a residence of twenty years on the tiny and isolated Isle of Erisgey, Western Hebrides, acquired the second-sight, and was able some years before he died there (in 1905) to exercise it as freely as though he had been a natural-born seer.
31 In his note to Le Chant des Trépassés (Barzaz Breiz, p. 507), Villemarqué reports that in some localities in Lower Brittany on All Saints Night libations of milk are poured over the tombs of the dead. This is proof that the nature of fairies in Scotland and of the dead in Brittany is thought to be the same.
32 ‘In many parts of the Highlands, where the same deity is known, the stone into which women poured the libation of milk is called Leac na Gruagaich, “Flag-stone of the Gruagach.” If the libation was omitted in the evening, the best cow in the fold would be found dead in the morning.’—Alexander Carmichael.
33 Dr. George Henderson, in The Norse Influence on Celtic Scotland (Glasgow, 1901), p. 101, says:—‘Shony was a sea-god in Lewis, where ale was sacrificed to him at Hallowtide. After coming to the church of St. Mulvay at night a man was sent to wade into the sea, saying: “Shony, I give you this cup of ale hoping that you will be so kind as to give us plenty of sea-ware for enriching our ground the ensuing year.” As ō from Norse would become o, and fn becomes nn, one thinks of Sjöfn, one of the goddesses in the Edda. In any case the word is Norse.’ It seems, therefore, that the Celtic stock in Lewis have adopted the name Shony or Shoney, and possibly also the god it designates, through contact with Norsemen; but, at all events, they have assimilated him to their own fairy pantheon, as we can see in their celebrating special libations to him on the ancient Celtic feast of the dead and fairies, Halloween.
34 This, as Dr. Carmichael told me, I believe very justly represents the present state of folk-lore in many parts of the Highlands. There are, it is true, old men and women here and there who know much about fairies, but they, fearing the ridicule of a younger and ‘educated’ generation, are generally unwilling to admit any belief in fairies.
35 The following note by Miss Tolmie is of great interest and value, especially when one bears in mind Cuchulainn’s traditional relation with Skye (see p. 4):—‘The Koolian range should never be written Cu-chullin. The name is written here with a K, to ensure its being correctly uttered and written. It is probably a Norse word; but, as yet, a satisfactory explanation of its origin and meaning has not been published. In Gaelic the range is always alluded to (in the masculine singular) as the Koolian.’
36 Dr. Alexander Carmichael found that the scene of this widespread tale is variously laid, in Argyll, in Perth, in Inverness, and in other counties of the Highlands. From his own collection of folk-songs he contributes the following verses to illustrate the song (existing in numerous versions), which the maiden while invisible used to sing to the cows of Colin:—
Crodh Chailean! crodh Chailean!
Crodh Chailean mo ghaoil,
Crodh Chailean mo chridhe,
Air lighe cheare fraoish.
(Cows of Colin! cows of Colin!
Cows of Colin of my love,
Cows of Colin of my heart,
In colour of the heather-hen.)
In one of Dr. Carmichael’s versions, ‘Colin’s wife and her infant child had been lifted away by the fairies to a fairy bower in the glen between the hills.’ There she was kept nursing the babes which the fairies had stolen, until ‘upon Hallow Eve, when all the bowers were open’, Colin by placing a steel tinder above the lintel of the door to the fairy bower was enabled to enter the bower and in safety lead forth his wife and child.
37 In this beautiful fairy legend we recognize the fairy woman as one of the Tuatha De Danann-like fairies—one of the women of the Sidhe, as Irish seers call them.
38 It is interesting to know that the present inhabitants of Barra, or at least most of them, are the descendants of Irish colonists who belonged to the clan Eoichidh of County Cork, and who emigrated from there to Barra in A. D. 917. They brought with them their old customs and beliefs, and in their isolation their children have kept these things alive in almost their primitive Celtic purity. For example, besides their belief in fairies, May Day, Baaltine, and November Eve are still rigorously observed in the pagan way, and so is Easter—for it, too, before being claimed by Christianity, was a sun festival. And how beautiful it is in this age to see the youths and maidens and some of the elders of these simple-hearted Christian fisher-folk climb to the rocky heights of their little island-home on Easter morn to salute the sun as it rises out of the mountains to the east, and to hear them say that the sun dances with joy that morning because the Christ is risen. In a similar way they salute the new moon, making as they do so the sign of the cross. Finn Barr is said to have been a County Cork man of great sanctity; and he probably came to Barra with the colony, for he is the patron saint of the island, and hence its name. (To my friend, Mr. Michael Buchanan, of Barra, I am indebted for this history and these traditions of his native isle.)
39 ‘Sluagh, “hosts,” the spirit-world. The “hosts” are the spirits of mortals who have died.... According to one informant, the spirits fly about in great clouds, up and down the face of the world like the starlings, and come back to the scenes of their earthly transgressions. No soul of them is without the clouds of earth, dimming the brightness of the works of God, nor can any win heaven till satisfaction is made for the sins of earth.’—Alexander Carmichael, Carmina Gadelica, ii. 330.
40 This curious tale suggests that certain of the fairy women who entice mortals to their love in modern times are much the same, if not the same, as the succubi of Middle-Age mystics. But it is not intended by this observation to confuse the higher orders of the Sidhe and all the fairy folk like the fays who come from Avalon with succubi; though succubi and fairy women in general were often confused and improperly identified the one with the other. It need not be urged in this example of a ‘fairy woman’ that we have to do not with a being of flesh and blood, whatever various readers may think of her.
41 ‘“Willy-the-Fairy,” otherwise known as William Cain, is the musician referred to by the late Mr. John Nelson (p. 131). The latter’s statement that William Cain played one of these fairy tunes at one of our Manx entertainments in Peel is perfectly correct.’—Sophia Morrison.
42 This is the Mid-world of Irish seers, who would be inclined to follow the Manx custom and call the fairies ‘the People of the Middle World’.
43 ‘May 11 == in Manx Oie Voaldyn, “May-day Eve.” On this evening the fairies were supposed to be peculiarly active. To propitiate them and to ward off the influence of evil spirits, and witches, who were also active at this time, green leaves or boughs and sumark or primrose flowers were strewn on the threshold, and branches of the cuirn or mountain ash made into small crosses without the aid of a knife, which was on no account to be used (steel or iron in any form being taboo to fairies and spirits), and stuck over the doors of the dwelling-houses and cow-houses. Cows were further protected from the same influences by having the Bollan-feaill-Eoin (John’s feast wort) placed in their stalls. This was also one of the occasions on which no one would give fire away, and on which fires were and are still lit on the hills to drive away the fairies.’—Sophia Morrison.
44 I am wholly indebted to Miss Morrison for these Manx verses and their translation, which I have substituted for Mrs. Moore’s English rendering. Miss Morrison, after my return to Oxford, saw Mrs. Moore and took them down from her, a task I was not well fitted to do when the tale was told.
45 It has been suggested, and no doubt correctly, that these murmuring sounds heard on Dalby Mountain are due to the action of sea-waves, close at hand, washing over shifting masses of pebbles on the rock-bound shore. Though this be the true explanation of the phenomenon itself, it only proves the attribution of cause to be wrong, and not the underlying animistic conception of spiritual beings.
46 In this mythological role, Manannan is apparently a sun god or else the sun itself; and the Manx coat of arms, which is connected with him, being a sun symbol, suggests to us now ages long prior to history, when the Isle of Man was a Sacred Isle dedicated to the cult of the Supreme God of Light and Life, and when all who dwelt thereon were regarded as the Children of the Sun.
47 Sir John Rhŷs tells me that this Snowdon fairy-lore was contributed by the late Lady Rhŷs, who as a girl lived in the neighbourhood of Snowdon and heard very much from the old people there, most of whom believed in the fairies; and she herself then used to be warned, in the manner mentioned, against being carried away into the under-lake Fairyland.
48 Cf. Celtic Folklore, Welsh and Manx, pp. 683-4 n., where Sir John Rhŷs says of his friend, Professor A. C. Haddon:—‘I find also that he, among others, has anticipated me in my theory as to the origins of the fairies: witness the following extract from the syllabus of a lecture delivered by him at Cardiff in 1894 on Fairy Tales:—“What are the fairies?—Legendary origin of the fairies. It is evident from fairy literature that there is a mixture of the possible and the impossible, of fact and fancy. Part of fairydom refers to (1) spirits that never were embodied: other fairies are (2) spirits of environment, nature or local spirits, and household or domestic spirits; (3) spirits of the organic world, spirits of plants, and spirits of animals; (4) spirits of men, or ghosts; and (5) witches and wizards, or men possessed with other spirits. All these, and possibly other elements, enter into the fanciful aspects of Fairyland, but there is a large residuum of real occurrences; these point to a clash of races, and we may regard many of these fairy sagas as stories told by men of the Iron Age of events which happened to men of the Bronze Age in their conflicts with men of the Neolithic Age, and possibly these, too, handed on traditions of the Paleolithic Age.”’
49 This is the one tale I have found in North Wales about a midwife and fairies—a type of tale common to West Ireland, Isle of Man, Cornwall, and Brittany, but in a reverse version, the midwife there being (as she is sometimes in Welsh versions) one of the human race called in by fairies. If evidence of the oneness of the Celtic mind were needed we should find it here (cf. pp. 50, 54, 127, 175, 182, 205). There are in this type of fairy-tale, as the advocates of the Pygmy Theory may well hold, certain elements most likely traceable to a folk-memory of some early race, or special class of some early race, who knew the secrets of midwifery and the use of medicines when such knowledge was considered magical. But in each example of this midwife story there is the germ idea—no matter what other ideas cluster round it—that fairies, like spirits, are only to be seen by an extra-human vision, or, as psychical researchers might say, by clairvoyance.
50 After this remarkable story, Mrs. Jones told me about another very rare psychical experience of her own, which is here recorded because it illustrates the working of the psychological law of the association of ideas:—‘My husband, Price Jones, was drowned some forty years ago, within four miles of Arms Head, near Bangor, on Friday at midday; and that night at about one o’clock he appeared to me in our bedroom and laid his head on my breast. I tried to ask him where he came from, but before I could get my breath he was gone. I believed at the time that he was out at sea perfectly safe and well. But next day, Saturday, at about noon, a message came announcing his death. I was as fully awake as one can be when I thus saw the spirit of my husband. He returned to me a second time about six months later.’ Had this happened in West Ireland, it is almost certain that public opinion would have declared that Price Jones had been taken by the ‘gentry’ or ‘good people’.
51 Here we find the Tylwyth Teg showing quite the same characteristics as Welsh elves in general, as Cornish pixies, and as Breton corrigans, or lutins; that is, given to dancing at night, to stealing children, and to deceiving travellers.
52 This folk-belief partially sustains the view put forth in our chapter on Environment, that St. David’s during pagan times was already a sacred spot and perhaps then the seat of a druidic oracle.
53 Here we have an example of the Tylwyth Teg being identified with a prehistoric race, quite in accordance with the argument of the Pygmy Theory. We have, however, as the essential idea, that the Tylwyth Teg heard singing were the spirits of this prehistoric race. Thus our contention that ancestral spirits play a leading part in the fairy-belief is sustained, and the Pygmy Theory appears quite at its true relative value—as able to explain one subordinate ethnological strand in the complex fabric of the belief.
54 This story is much like the one recorded by Giraldus Cambrensis about a boy going to Fairyland and returning to his mother (see this study, p. 324). The possibility that it may be an independent version of the folk-tale told to Cambrensis which has continued to live on among the people makes it highly interesting.
Mr. Jones gives further evidence on the re-birth doctrine in Wales (pp. 388-9), and concerning Merlin and sacrifice to appease place-spirits (pp. 436-7).
55 As a result of his researches, the Rev. T. M. Morgan has just published a new work, entitled The History and Antiquities of the Parish of Newchurch (Carmarthen, 1910).
56 In these last two anecdotes, as in modern ‘Spiritualism’, we observe a popular practice of necromancy or the calling up of spirits, so-called ‘materialization’ of spirits, and spirit communication through a human ‘medium’, who is the dyn hysbys, as well as divination, the revealing of things hidden and the foretelling of future events. This is direct evidence that Welsh fairies or the Tylwyth Teg were formerly the same to Welshmen as spirits are to Spiritualists now. We seem, therefore, to have proof of our Psychological Theory (see chap. xi).
57 Here we have a combination of many distinct elements and influences. As among mortals, so among the Tylwyth Teg there is a king; and this conception may have arisen directly from anthropomorphic influences on the ancient Brythonic religion, or it may have come directly from druidic teachings. The locating of Gwydion ab Don, like a god, in a heaven-world, rather than like his counterpart, Gwynn ab Nudd, in a hades-world, is probably due to a peculiar admixture of Druidism and Christianity: at first, both gods were probably druidic or pagan, and the same, but Gwynn ab Nudd became a demon or evil god under Christian influences, while Gwydion ab Don seems to have curiously retained his original good reputation in spite of Christianity (cf. p. 320). The name Gwenhidw reminds us at once of Arthur’s queen Gwenhwyvar or ‘White Apparition’; and the sheep of Gwenhidw can properly be explained by the Naturalistic Theory. It seems, however, that analogy was imaginatively suggested between the Queen Gwenhidw as resembling the Welsh White Lady or a ghost-like being, and her sheep, the clouds, also of a necessarily ghost-like character. All this is an admirable illustration of the great complexity of the Fairy-Faith.
58 The parallel between this Welsh method of conferring vision and the Breton method is very striking (cf. p. 215).
59 This is the substance of the story as it was told to me by a gentleman who lives within sight of the farm where the image is said to have been found. And one day he took me to the house and showed me the room and the place in the wall where the find was made. The old manor is one of the solidest and most picturesque of its kind in Wales, and, in spite of its extreme age, well preserved. He, being as a native Welshman of the locality well acquainted with its archaeology, thinks it safe to place an age of six to eight hundred years on the manor. What is interesting about this matter of age arises from the query, Was the image one of the Virgin or of some Christian saint, or was it a Druid idol? Both opinions are current in the neighbourhood, but there is a good deal in favour of the second. The region, the little valley on whose side stands the Pentre Evan Cromlech, the finest in Britain, is believed to have been a favourite place with the ancient Druids; and in the oak groves which still exist there tradition says there was once a flourishing pagan school for neophytes, and that the cromlech instead of being a place for interments or for sacrifices was in those days completely enclosed, forming like other cromlechs a darkened chamber in which novices when initiated were placed for a certain number of days—the interior being called the ‘Womb or Court of Ceridwen’.
60 The same remedy is prescribed in Brittany when mischievous lutins or corrigans lead a traveller astray, in Ireland when the good people lead a traveller astray; and at Rollright, Oxfordshire, England, an old woman told me that it is efficacious against being led astray through witchcraft. Obviously the fairy and witch spell are alike.
61 The same sort of a story as this is told in Lower Brittany, where the corrigans or lutins slaughter a farmer’s fat cow or ox and invite the farmer to partake of the feast it provides. If he does so with good grace and humour, he finds his cow or ox perfectly whole in the morning, but if he refuses to join the feast or joins it unwillingly, in the morning he is likely to find his cow or ox actually dead and eaten.
62 See Sir John Rhŷs, Celtic Folk-Lore: Welsh and Manx (Oxford, 1901), passim.
63 The New English Dictionary, s.v. Pixy, gives rather vaguely a Swedish dialect word, pysg, a small fairy. It also mentions pix as a Devon imprecation, ‘a pix take him.’ I suspect the last is only an umlaut form of a common Shakespearean imprecation. If not, it is interesting, and reminds one of the fate of Margery Dawe, ‘Piskies came and carr’d her away.’
64 ‘Some say that the Phoenicians never came to Cornwall at all, and that their Ictis was Vectis (the Isle of Wight) or even Thanet.’—Henry Jenner.
65 ‘This is, I think, the usual Cornish belief.’—Henry Jenner.
66 ‘About Porth Curnow and the Logan Rock there are little spots of earth in the face of the granite cliffs where sea-daisies (thrift) and other wild flowers grow. These are referred to the sea pisky, and are known as “piskies’ gardens.”’—Henry Jenner.
67 I was told by another Cornishman that, in a spirit of municipal rivalry and fun, the Penzance people like to taunt the people of Newlyn (now almost a suburb of Penzance) by calling them Buccas, and that the Newlyn townsmen very much resent being so designated. Thus what no doubt was originally an ancient cult to some local sea-divinity called Bucca, has survived as folk-humour. (See Mr. Jenner’s Introduction, p. 164.)
68 ‘Another version, which is more usual, is that the pisky anointed the person’s eyes and so rendered itself visible.’—Henry Jenner.
69 This is a natural outcropping of greenstone on a commanding hill just above the vicarage in Newlyn, and concerning it many weird legends survive. In pre-Christian times it was probably one of the Cornish sacred spots for the celebration of ancient rites—probably in honour of the Sun—and for divination.
70 For more about the Tolcarne Troll see chapter on Celtic Re-birth p. 391.
71 Mr. John B. Cornish, solicitor, of Penzance, told me that when he once suggested to an old miner who fully believed in the ‘knockers’, that the noises they were supposed to make were due to material causes, the old miner became quite annoyed, and said, ‘Well, I guess I have ears to hear.’
72 For the Cornish folk-lore already published by Miss M. A. Courtney, the reader is referred to her work, Cornish Feasts and Folk-Lore (Penzance, 1890).
73 A curious holed stone standing between two low menhirs on the moors beyond the Lanyon Dolmen, near Madron; but in Borlase’s time (cf. his Antiquities of Cornwall, ed. 1769, p. 177) the three stones were not as now in a direct line. The Men-an-Tol has aroused much speculation among archaeologists as to its probable use or meaning. No doubt it was astronomical and religious in its significance; and it may have been a calendar stone with which ancient priests took sun observations (cf. Sir Norman Lockyer, Stonehenge and Other Stone Monuments); or it may have been otherwise related to a sun cult, or to some pagan initiatory rites.
74 I asked what a nath is, and Mr. Spragg explained:—‘A nath is a bird with a beak like that of a parrot, and with black and grey feathers. The naths live on sea-islands in holes like rabbits, and before they start to fly they first run.’ The nath, as Mr. Henry Jenner informs me, is the same as the puffin (Fratercula arctica), called also in Cornwall a ‘sea parrot’.
75 Sometimes it is necessary to turn your coat inside out. A Zennor man said that to do the same thing with your socks or stockings is as good. In Ireland this strange psychological state of going astray comes from walking over a fairy domain, over a confusing-sod, or getting into a fairy pass.
76 Cf. F. M. Luzel, Contes populaires de Basse-Bretagne (Paris, 1887), i. 177-97; following the account of Ann Drann, a servant at Coat-Fual, Plouguernevel (Côtes-du-Nord), November 1855.
77 My Breton friend, M. Goulven Le Scour, was born November 20, 1851, at Kerouledic in Plouneventer, Finistère. He is an antiquarian, a poet, and, as we shall see, a folk-lorist of no mean ability. In 1902, at the Congrès d’Auray of Breton poets and singers, he won two prizes for poetry, and, in 1901, a prize at the Congrès de Quimperlé or Concours de Recueils poétiques.
78 This story concerns persons still living, and, at M. Le Scour’s suggestion, I have omitted their names.
79 By a Carnac family I was afterwards given a sprig of such blessed box-wood, and was assured that its exorcizing power is still recognized by all old Breton families, most of whom seem to possess branches of it.
80 This idea seems related to the one in the popular Morbihan legend of how St. Cornely, the patron saint of the country and the saint who presides over the Alignements and domestic horned animals, changed into upright stones the pagan forces opposing him when he arrived near Carnac; and these stones are now the famous Alignements of Carnac.
81 Luzel, op. cit., iii. 226-311; i. 128-218; ii. 349-54.
82 Ib., ii. 269; cf. our study, p. 93.
83 According to the annotations to a legend recorded by Villemarqué, in his Barzaz Breiz, pp. 39-44, and entitled the Submersion de la Ville d’Is, St. Guenolé was traditionally the founder of the first monastery raised in Armorica; and Dahut the princess stole the key from her sleeping father in order fittingly to crown a banquet and midnight debaucheries which were being held in honour of her lover, the Black Prince.
84 Luzel, op. cit., ii. 257-68; i. 3-13.
85 P. Sébillot, Traditions et superstitions de la Haute-Bretagne (Paris, 1882), i. 100.
86 General references: Sébillot, ib.; and his Folk-Lore de France (Paris, 1905).
87 Sébillot, Traditions et superstitions de la Haute-Bretagne, i. 73-4.
88 Ib., i. 102, 103-4.
89 Sébillot, Traditions et superstitions de la Haute-Bretagne, i. 83.
90 Ib., i. 90-1.
91 Cf. ib., i. 109.
92 Cf. ib., i. 74-5, &c.
93 Cf. Sébillot, Traditions et superstitions de la Haute-Bretagne, i. 74-5, &c.
94 In Lower Brittany the corrigan tribes collectively are commonly called Corrikêt, masculine plural of Corrik, diminutive of Corr, meaning ‘Dwarf’; or Corriganed, feminine plural of Corrigan, meaning ‘Little Dwarf’. Many other forms are in use. (Cf. R. F. Le Men, Trad. et supers. de la Basse-Bretagne, in Rev. Celt., i. 226-7.)
95 Cf. Foyer breton, i. 199.
96 By ‘E. R.’, in Mélusine (Paris), i. 114.
97 This account about corrigans, more rational than any preceding it, may possibly refer to a dream or trance-like state of mind on the part of the young girl; and if it does, we can then compare the presence of a mortal at this corrigan sabbath, or even at the ordinary witches’ sabbath, to the presence of a mortal in Fairyland. And according to popular Breton belief, as reliable peasants assure me, during dreams, trance, or ecstasy, the soul is supposed to depart from the body and actually see spirits of all kinds in another world, and to be then under their influence. While many details in the more conventional corrigan stories appear to reflect a folk-memory of religious dances and songs, and racial, social, and traditional usages of the ancient Bretons, the animistic background of them could conceivably have originated from psychical experiences such as this girl is supposed to have had.
98 Villemarqué, Barzaz Breiz (Paris, 1867), pp. 33, 35.
99 J. Loth, in Annales de Bretagne (Rennes), x. 78-81.
100 E. Renan, Essais de morale et de critique (Paris, 1859), p. 451.
101 In Ireland it is commonly held that a seer beholding a fairy can make a non-seer see it also by coming into bodily rapport with the non-seer (cf. p. 152).
102 It is sometimes believed that phantom washerwomen are undergoing penance for having wilfully brought on an abortion by their work, or else for having strangled their babe.
103 Every parish in the uncorrupted parts of Brittany has its own Ankou, who is the last man to die in the parish during the year. Each King of the Dead, therefore, never holds office for more than twelve months, since during that period he is certain to have a successor. Sometimes the Ankou is Death itself personified. In the Morbihan, the Ankou occasionally may be seen as an apparition entering a house where a death is about to occur; though more commonly he is never seen, his knocking only is heard, which is the rule in Finistère. In Welsh mythology, Gwynn ab Nudd, king of the world of the dead, is represented as playing a rôle parallel to that of the Breton Ankou, when he goes forth with his fierce hades-hounds hunting the souls of the dying. (Cf. Rhŷs, Arth. Leg., p. 155.)
104 Cf. A. Le Braz, La Légende de la Mort; Introduction by L. Marillier (Paris, 1893), pp. 31, 40.
105 Cf. Le Braz, La Légende de la Mort; Introduction by Marillier, pp. 47, 46, 7-8, 40, 45, 46.
106 Cf. Le Braz, La Légende de la Mort; Introduction by Marillier, p. 43.
107 Ib.; Notes by G. Dottin (Paris, 1902), p. 44.
108 Ib.; Introduction by Marillier, pp. 19, 23, 68.
109 Cf. ib.; Introduction by Marillier, pp. 53 ff., 68.
110 A Breton night’s entertainment held in a peasant’s cottage, stable, or other warm outhouse. In parts of the Morbihan and of Finistère where the old Celtic life has escaped modern influences, almost every winter night the Breton Celts, like their cousins in very isolated parts of West Ireland and in the Western Hebrides, find their chief enjoyment in story-telling festivals, some of which I have been privileged to attend.
111 The word in the MS. is boiteux, and in relation to a devil or demon this seems to be the proper rendering.
112 B. Spencer and F. T. Gillen, Nat. Tribes of Cent. Aust. (London, 1899), chapters xi, xv.
113 R. H. Codrington, Journ. Anthrop. Inst. x. 261; The Melanesians (Oxford, 1891), pp. 123, 151, &c.; also cf. F. W. Christian, The Caroline Islands (London, 1899), pp. 281 ff., &c.
114 H. Callaway, The Religious System of the Amazulu (London, 1868), pp. 226-7.
115 C. G. Leland, Memoirs (London, 1893), i. 34.
116 R. C. Temple, Legends of the Panjab, in Folk-Lore, x. 395.
117 W. W. Skeat, Malay Magic (London, 1900), passim.
118 Hardouin, Traditions et superstitions siamoises, in Rev. Trad. Pop., v. 257-67.
119 Ella G. Sykes, Persian Folklore, in Folk-Lore, xii. 263.
120 I am directly indebted for this information to a friend who is a member of Lincoln College, Oxford, Mr. Mohammed Said Loutfy, of Barkein, Lower Egypt. Mr. Loutfy has come into frequent and very intimate contact with these animistic beliefs in his country, and he tells me that they are common to all classes of almost all races in modern Egypt. The common Egyptian spellings are afreet, in the singular, and afaareet in the plural, for spiritual beings, who are usually described by percipients as of pygmy stature, but as being able to assume various sizes and shapes. The djinns, on the contrary, are described as tall spiritual beings possessing great power.
121 J. C. Lawson, Modern Greek Folk-Lore (Cambridge, 1910), pp. 131-7, 139-46, 163.
122 L. Sainéan, Les Fées méchantes d’après les croyances du peuple roumain, in Mélusine, x. 217-26, 243-54.
123 Cf. C. G. Leland, Etruscan Roman Remains in Pop. Trad. (London, 1892), pp. 162, 165, 223, &c.
124 H. C. Coote, The Neo-Latin Fay, in Folk-Lore Record, ii. 1-18.
125 We cannot here attempt to present, even in outline, all the complex ethnological arguments for and against the existence in prehistoric times of European pygmy races. Attention ought, however, to be called to the remarkable finds recently made in the Grotte des Enfants, at Mentone, France. A certain number of well-preserved skeletons of probably the earliest men who dwelt on the present land surface of Europe, which were found there, suggest that different racial stocks, possibly in succession, have preceded the Aryan stock. The first race, as indicated by two small negroid-looking skeletons of a woman, 1,580 mm. (62·21 inches), and of a boy 1,540 mm. (60·63 inches) in height, found in the lowest part of the Grotte, was probably Ethiopian. The succeeding race was probably Mongolian, judging from other remains found in another part of the same Grotte, and especially from the Chancelade skeleton with its distinctly Eskimo appearance, only 1,500 mm. (59·06 inches) high, discovered near Perigneux, France. The race succeeding this one was possibly the one out of which our own Aryan race evolved. In relation to the Pygmy Theory these recent finds are of the utmost significance. They confirm Dr. Windle’s earlier conclusion, that, contrary to the argument advanced to support the Pygmy Theory, the neolithic races of Central Europe were not true pygmies—a people whose average stature does not exceed four feet nine inches (cf. B. C. A. Windle, Tyson’s Pygmies of the Ancients, London, 1894, Introduction). And, furthermore, these finds show, as far as any available ethnological data can, that there are no good reasons for believing that European and, therefore, Celtic lands were once dominated by pygmies even in epochs so remote that we can only calculate them in tens of thousands of years. Nevertheless, it is very highly probable that a folk-memory of Lappish, Pictish, or other small but not true pygmy races, has superficially coloured the modern fairy traditions of Northern Scotland, of the Western Hebrides (where what may prove to have been Lapps’ or Picts’ houses undoubtedly remain), of Northern Ireland, of the Isle of Man, and slightly, if indeed at all, the fairy traditions of other parts of the Celtic world (cf. David MacRitchie, The Testimony of Tradition, London, 1890; and his criticism of our own Psychological Theory, in the Celtic Review, October 1909 and January 1910, entitled respectively, A New Solution of the Fairy Problem, and Druids and Mound-Dwellers).
Again, the very small flint implements frequently found in Celtic lands and elsewhere have perhaps very reasonably been attributed to a long-forgotten pygmy race; though we must bear in mind in this connexion that it would be very unwise to conclude definitely that no race save a small-statured race could have made and used such implements: American Red Men were, when discovered by Europeans, and still are, making and using the tiniest of arrow-heads, precisely the same in size and design as those found in Celtic lands and attributed to pygmies. The use of small flint implements for special purposes, e. g. arrows for shooting small game like birds, for spearing fish, and for use in warfare as poisoned arrows, seems to have been common to most primitive peoples of normal stature. Contemporary pygmy races, far removed from Celtic lands, are also using them, and no doubt their prehistoric ancestors used them likewise.
126 J. G. Campbell, The Fians (London, 1891), p. 239. An Irish dwarf is minutely described in Silva Gadelica (ii. 116), O’Grady’s translation. Again, in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur (B. XII. cc. i-ii) a dwarf is mentioned.
127 Campbell, The Fians, p. 265.
128 S. H. O’Grady, Silva Gadelica (London, 1892), ii. 199.
129 Commentary on the Senchas Már, i. 70-1, Stokes’s translation, in Rev. Celt., i. 256-7.
130 Sir John Rhŷs, Hibbert Lectures (London, 1888), p. 592. Dwarfs supernatural in character also appear in the Mabinogion, and one of them is an attendant on King Arthur. In Béroul’s Tristan, Frocin, a dwarf, is skilled in astrology and magic, and in the version by Thomas we find a similar reference.
131 Tylor, Prim. Cult.,4 i. 385.
132 Cf. Windle, op. cit., Intro., p. 57.
133 Hunt, Anthrop. Mems., ii. 294; cf. Windle, op. cit., Intro., p. 57.
134 Smith, Myths of the Iroquois, in Amer. Bur. Eth., ii. 65.
135 Skeat, Malay Magic, p. 329.
136 Monier-Williams, Brāhminism and Hindūism (London, 1887), p. 236.
137 Codrington, The Melanesians, p. 152.
138 Dwarfs in the East, in Folk-Lore, iv. 401-2.
139 Lacouperie, Babylonian and Oriental Record, v; cf. Windle, op. cit., Intro., pp. 21-2.
140 A. H. S. Landor, Alone with the Hairy Ainu (London, 1893), p. 251; also Windle, op. cit., Intro., pp. 22-4.
141 J. G. Frazer, Golden Bough2 (London, 1900), i. 248 ff.
142 Cf. A. Wiedemann, Ancient Egyptian Doctrine Immortality (London, 1895), p. 12.
143 Cf. A. E. Crawley, Idea of the Soul (London, 1909), p. 186.
144 Examples are in Orcagna’s fresco of ‘The Triumph of Death’, in the Campo Santo of Pisa (cf. A. Wiedemann, Anc. Egy. Doct. Immort., p. 34 ff.); and over the porch of the Cathedral Church of St. Trophimus, at Arles.
145 Cf. Crawley, op. cit., p. 187.
146 General references: Eliphas Levi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (Paris); Paracelsus; A. E. Waite, The Occult Sciences (London, 1891).
147 W. B. Yeats, Irish Fairy and Folk-Tales (London), p. 2.
148 W. B. Yeats, The Celtic Twilight (London, 1902), p. 92 n.
149 In this connexion should be read Mr. Jenner’s Introduction, pp. 167 ff.
150 Cf. Cririe, Scottish Scenery (London, 1803), pp. 347-8; P. Graham, Sketches Descriptive of Picturesque Scenery on the Southern Confines of Perthshire (Edinburgh, 1812), pp. 248-50, 253; Mahé, Essai sur les Antiquités du Départ. du Morbihan (Vannes, 1825); Maury, Les Fées du Moyen-Age (Paris, 1843).
151 David MacRitchie, Druids and Mound Dwellers, in Celtic Review (January 1910); and his Testimony of Tradition.
152 K. Meyer and A. Nutt, Voyage of Bran (London, 1895-7), ii 231-2.
153 Cf. Tylor, Prim. Cult.,4 ii. 61.
154 Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore, pp. 356, 359.
155 Rhŷs, Hib. Lect., p. 201; Jubainville, Cyc. Myth. Irl., pp. 106-8.
156 E. O’Curry, Manners and Customs (Dublin, 1873), I. cccxx; from Book of Ballymote, fol. 145, b. b.
157 Codrington, The Melanesians, p. 286.
158 Ib., p. 275.
159 Ib., pp. 226, 208-9.
160 Crawley, Idea of the Soul, p. 114.
161 Codrington, The Melanesians, p. 289.
162 Ib., p. 194.
163 Cf. Crawley, Idea of the Soul, chap. iv.
164 For a thorough and scientific discussion of this matter, see J. L. Nevius, Demon Possession (London, 1897).
165 N. G. Mitchell-Innes, Birth, Marriage, and Death Rites of the Chinese, in Folk-Lore Journ., v. 225. Very curiously, the pagan Chinese mother uses the sign of the cross against the demon as Celtic mothers use it against fairies; and no exorcism by Catholic or Protestant to cure a fairy changeling or to drive out possessing demons is ever performed without this world-wide and pre-Christian sign of the cross (see pp. 270-1).
166 R. R. Marett, The Threshold of Religion (London, 1909), p. 58, &c.; p. 67.
167 W. James, Confidences of a ‘Psychical Researcher’, in American Magazine (October 1909).
168 Frazer, The Golden Bough3 (London, 1911), i. 220.
169 Frazer, The Golden Bough,3 i. 221-2.
170 Ib., chap. iv.
171 See Apuleius, De Deo Socratis; Cicero, De Natura Deorum (lib. i); Iamblichus, De Mysteriis Aegypt., Chaldaeor., Assyrior.; Plato, Timaeus, Symposium, Politicus, Republic, ii. iii. x; Plutarch, De Defectu Oraculorum, The Daemon of Socrates, Isis and Osiris; Proclus, Commmentarius in Platonis Alcibiadem.
172 Pliny, Natural History, xxx. 14.
173 Cf. G. Dottin, La Religion des Celtes (Paris, 1904), p. 44.
174 The neo-Platonists generally, including Porphyry, Julian, Iamblichus, and Maximus, being persuaded of man’s power to call up and control spirits, called white magic theurgy, or the invoking of good spirits, and the reverse goêty, or the calling up and controlling of evil spirits for criminal purposes. Cf. F. Lélut, Du Démon de Socrate (Paris, 1836).
If white magic be correlated with religion as religion is popularly conceived, namely the cult of supernatural powers friendly to man, and black magic be correlated with magic as magic tends to be popularly conceived, namely witchcraft and devil-worship, we have a satisfactory historical and logical basis for making a distinction between religion and magic; religion (including white magic) is a social good, magic (black magic) is a social evil. Such a distinction as Dr. Frazer makes is untenable within the field of true magic.
175 Cf. B. Jowett, Dialogues of Plato (Oxford, 1892), i. 573.
176 Cf. Meyer and Nutt, Voyage of Bran (London, 1895-7), i. 146.
177 Campbell, The Fians, p. 195.
178 Cf. Stokes’s trans. in Rev. Celt., i. 261.
179 Cf. Stokes’s trans. in Rev. Celt., xv. 307.
180 From the Conception of Mongán, cf. Meyer, Voyage of Bran, i. 77.
181 Quoted and summarized from Projectors of ‘Malicious Animal Magnetism’, in Literary Digest, xxxix. No. 17, pp. 676-7 (New York and London, October 23, 1909).
182 Cf. Nevius, Demon Possession, pp. 300-1.
183 For a fuller discussion of the history of witchcraft see The Superstitions of Witchcraft, by Howard Williams, London, 1865.
184 Cf. J. Quicherat, Procès (Paris, 1845), passim.
185 Ib., i. 178.
186 Codrington, The Melanesians, pp. 127, 200, 202-3 ff.
187 Bergier, Dict. de Théol. (Paris, 1848), ii. 541-2, &c.
188 W. Stokes, Tripartite Life (London, 1887), pp. 13, 115.
189 I am personally indebted to Dr. W. J. Watson, of Edinburgh, for having directed my attention to this curious passage, and for having pointed out its probable significance in relation to druidical practices.
190 Adamnan, Life of S. Columba, B. II, cc. xvi, xvii.
191 For this fact I am personally indebted to Mrs. W. J. Watson, of Edinburgh.
192 Stokes, Tripartite Life, pp. clxxx, 303, 305; from Book of Armagh, fo. 9, A 2, and fo. 9, B 2.
193 Bergier, Dict. de Théol., ii. 545, 431, 233.
194 See Instruction sur le Rituel, par l’Évêque de Toulon, iii. 1-16. ‘In the Greek rite (of baptism), the priest breathes thrice on the catechumen’s mouth, forehead, and breast, praying that every unclean spirit may be expelled.’—W. Bright, Canons of First Four General Councils (Oxford, 1892), p. 122.
195 Cf. Godescard, Vies des Saints (Paris, 1835), xiii. 254-66.
196 De Incarnatione Verbi (ed. Ben.), i. 88; cf. Godescard, op. cit., xiii. 254-66.
197 Godescard, Vies des Saints, xiii. 263-4.
198 Par Joly de Choin, Évêque de Toulon, i. 639.
199 Bergier, Dict. de Théol., ii. 335.
200 Stokes, Tripartite Life, Intro., p. 162.
201 J. E. Mirville, Des Esprits (Paris, 1853), i. 475.
202 Instructions sur le Rituel, par Joly de Choin, iii. 276-7.
203 G. Evans, Exorcism in Wales, in Folk-Lore, iii. 274-7.
204 W. Crooke, in Folk-Lore, xiii. 189-90.
205 For ancient usages see F. Lenormant, Chaldean Magic (London, 1877), pp. 103-4; Iamblichus and other Neo-Platonists; and for modern usages see Marett, Threshold of Religion, chap. iii.
206 Cf. Marett, Is Taboo a Negative Magic? in The Threshold of Religion, pp. 85-114.
207 Codrington, The Melanesians, p. 277.
208 Eastman, Dacotah, p. 177; cf. Tylor, Prim. Cult.,4 ii. 52 n.
209 Shortland, Trad. of New Zeal., p. 150; cf. Tylor, op. cit., ii. 51-2.
210 Precisely like Celtic peasants, primitive peoples often fail to take into account the fact that the physical body is in reality left behind upon entering the trance state of consciousness known to them as the world of the departed and of fairies, because there they seem still to have a body, the ghost body, which to their minds, in such a state, is undistinguishable from the physical body. Therefore they ordinarily believe that the body and soul both are taken.
211 Frazer, Golden Bough,2 passim.
212 Cf. ib., i. 344 ff., 348; iii. 390.
213 Codrington, The Melanesians, pp. 177, 218-9.
214 Cf. Eleanor Hull, Old Irish Tabus or Geasa, in Folk-Lore, xii. 41 ff.
215 Cf. Frazer, Golden Bough,2 i. 233 ff., 343.
216 Cf. E. J. Gwynn, On the Idea of Fate in Irish Literature, in Journ. Ivernian Society (Cork), April 1910.
217 Cf. our evidence, pp. 38, 44; also Kirk’s Secret Commonwealth (c. i), where it is said of the ‘good people’ or fairies that their bodies are so ‘plyable thorough the Subtilty of the Spirits that agitate them, that they can make them appear or disappear att Pleasure. Some have Bodies or Vehicles so spungious, thin, and delecat, that they are fed by only sucking into some fine spirituous Liquors, that pierce lyke pure Air and Oyl’.
218 Laws, iv; cf. Jowett, Dialogues of Plato, v. 282-90.
219 Chief general references: Le Cycle Mythologique Irlandais (Paris, 1884) and L’Épopée celtique en Irlande (Paris, 1892)—both by H. D’Arbois de Jubainville. Chief sources: The Book of Armagh, a collection of ecclesiastical MSS. probably written at Armagh, and finished in A. D. 807 by the learned scribe Ferdomnach of Armagh; the Leabhar na h-Uidhre or ‘Book of the Dun Cow’, the most ancient of the great collections of MSS. containing the old Irish romances, compiled about A. D. 1100 in the monastery of Clonmacnoise; the Book of Leinster, a twelfth-century MS. compiled by Finn Mac Gorman, Bishop of Kildare; the Yellow Book of Lecan (fifteenth century); and the Book of Lismore, an old Irish MS. found in 1814 by workmen while making repairs in the castle of Lismore, and thought to be of the fifteenth century. The Book of Lismore contains the Agallamh na senórach or ‘Colloquy of the Ancients’, which has been edited by S. H. O’Grady in his Silva Gadelica (London, 1892), and by Whitley Stokes, Ir. Texte, iv. 1. For additional texts and editions of texts see Notes by R. I. Best to his translations of Le Cycle Mythologique Irlandais (Dublin, 1903).
220 Cf. Le Cycle Myth. Irl., pp. 144-5.
221 Cf. Le Cycle Myth. Irl., pp. 266-7. From the way they are described in many of the old Irish manuscripts, we may possibly regard the Tuatha De Danann as reflecting to some extent the characteristics of an early human population in Ireland. In other words, on an already flourishing belief in spiritual beings, known as the Sidhe, was superimposed, through anthropomorphism, an Irish folk-memory about a conquered pre-Celtic race of men who claimed descent from a mother goddess called Dana.
222 Page 10, col. 2, ll. 6-8; cf. Le Cycle Myth. Irl., p. 143.
223 Rhŷs, Hib. Lect., p. 581 n.; and Cóir Anmann, in Ir. Texte, III, ii. 355.
224 Kuno Meyer’s trans. in Voy. of Bran, ii. 300.
225 Cf. Standish O’Grady, Early Bardic Literature (London, 1879), pp. 65-6.
226 L. U.; cf. A. Nutt, Voy. of Bran, i. 157-8.
227 Before Caeilte appears, Patrick is chanting Mass and pronouncing benediction ‘on the rath in which Finn Mac Cumall (the slain leader of the Fianna) has been: the rath of Drumderg’. This chanting and benediction act magically as a means of calling up the ghosts of the other Fianna, for, as the text continues, thereupon ‘the clerics saw Caeilte and his band draw near them; and fear fell on them before the tall men with their huge wolf-dogs that accompanied them, for they were not people of one epoch or of one time with the clergy. Then Heaven’s distinguished one, that pillar of dignity and angel on earth, Calpurn’s son Patrick, apostle of the Gael, rose and took the aspergillum to sprinkle holy water on the great men; floating over whom until that day there had been [and were now] a thousand legions of demons. Into the hills and “skalps”, into the outer borders of the region and of the country, the demons forthwith departed in all directions; after which the enormous men sat down’ (Silva Gadelica, ii. 103). Here, undoubtedly, we observe a literary method of rationalizing the ghosts of the Fianna; and their sudden and mysterious coming and personal aspects can be compared with the sudden and mysterious coming and personal aspects of the Tuatha De Danann as recorded in certain Irish manuscripts.
228 Kuno Meyer’s trans. in Rev. Celt., x. 214-27. This tale is probably as old as the ninth or tenth century, so far as its present form is concerned, though representing very ancient traditions (Nutt, Voy. of Bran, i. 209).
229 Stokes’s trans. in Rev. Celt., xxii. 36-40. This text is one of the earliest with references to fairy beings, and may go back to the eighth or ninth century as a literary composition, though it too represents much older traditions.
230 E. O’Curry, Lectures on Manuscript Materials (Dublin, 1861), p. 504.
231 In the Book of Leinster, pp. 245-6; cf. Le Cycle Myth. Irl., p. 269.
232 Cf. Mesca Ulad, Hennessy’s ed., in Todd Lectures, Ser. 1 (Dublin, 1889), p. 2.
233 Cf. Le Cycle Myth. Irl., pp. 273-6.
234 Cf. Le Cycle Myth. Irl., pp. 273-6.
235 Cf. Silva Gadelica, ii. 222-3.
236 Ib., ii. 343-7.
237 Ib., ii. 94-6.
238 Silva Gadelica, ii. 204-20.
239 Silva Gadelica, ii. 290-1. In many old texts mortals are not forcibly taken; but go to the fairy world through love for a fairy woman; or else to accomplish there some mission.
No doubt the most curious elements in this text are those which represent the prince and his warrior companions, fresh come from Fairyland, as in some mysterious way so changed that they must neither dismount from their horses and thus come in contact with the earth, nor allow any mortal to touch them; for to his father the king who came forward in joy to embrace him after having mourned him as dead, Laeghaire cried, ‘Approach us not to touch us!’ Some unknown magical bodily transmutation seems to have come about from their sojourn among the Tuatha De Danann, who are eternally young and unfading—a transmutation apparently quite the same as that which the ‘gentry’ are said to bring about now when one of our race is taken to live with them. And in all fairy stories no mortal ever returns from Fairyland a day older than on entering it, no matter how many years may have elapsed. The idea reminds us of the dreams of mediaeval alchemists who thought there exists, if one could only discover it, some magic potion which will so transmute every atom of the human body that death can never affect it. Probably the Christian scribe in writing down these strange words had in mind what Jesus said to Mary Magdalene when she beheld him after the Resurrection:—‘Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended unto the Father.’ The parallel would be a striking and exact one in any case, for it is recorded that Jesus after he had arisen from the dead—had come out of Hades or the invisible realm of subjectivity which, too, is Fairyland—appeared to some and not to others—some being able to recognize him and others not; and concerning the nature of Jesus’s body at the Ascension not all theologians are agreed. Some believe it to have been a physical body so purified and transmuted as to be like, or the same as, a spiritual body, and thus capable of invisibility and of entrance into the Realm of Spirit. The Scotch minister and seer used this same parallel in describing the nature and power of fairies and spirits (p. 91); hence it would seem to follow, if we admit the influence in the Irish text to be Christian, that early, like modern Christians, have, in accordance with Christianity, described the nature of the Sidhe so as to correspond with what we know it to be in the Fairy-Faith itself, both anciently and at the present day.
240 Death of Muirchertach, Stokes’s trans., in Rev. Celt., xxiii. 397.
241 Cf. J. Loth, Les Mabinogion (Paris, 1889), i. 38-52.
242 Silva Gadelica, ii. 187-92.
243 Silva Gadelica, ii. 142-4.
244 Campbell, The Fians, pp. 79-80. In Silva Gadelica, ii. 522, it is stated that the mother of Ossian bore him whilst in the shape of a doe. The mother of Ossian in animal shape may be an example of an ancient Celtic totemistic survival.
245 Silva Gadelica, ii. 311-24.
246 Silva Gadelica, ii. 311-24.
247 For an enumeration of the Tuatha De Danann chieftains and their respective territories see Silva Gadelica, ii. 225.
248 Cf. Le Cycle Myth. Irl., p. 285.
249 I am personally indebted for these names to Dr. Douglas Hyde.
250 Cf. Le Cycle Myth. Irl., pp. 284-9; cf. Rev. Celt., iii. 347.
251 Cf. E. S. Hartland, Science of Fairy Tales (London, 1891), cc. x-xi.
252 Stokes’s trans. in Rev. Celt., xvi. 274-5.
253 Silva Gadelica, ii. 222 ff.; ii. 290. In another version of the second tale, referred to above (on page 295), Laeghaire and his fifty companions enter the fairy world through a dún.
254 Sometimes, as in Da Choca’s Hostel (Rev. Celt., xxi. 157, 315), the Badb appears as a weird woman uttering prophecies. In this case the Badb watches over Cormac as his doom comes. She is described as standing on one foot, and with one eye closed (apparently in a bird’s posture), as she chanted to Cormac this prophecy:—‘I wash the harness of a king who will perish.’
255 Synonymous names are Badb-catha, Fea, Ana. Cf. Rev. Celt., i. 35-7.
256 Cf. Hennessy, Ancient Irish Goddess of War, in Rev. Celt., i. 32-55.
257 Stokes, Second Battle of Moytura, in Rev. Celt., xii. 109-11.
258 Luzel, Contes populaires de Basse Bretagne, iii. 296-311.
259 The Celtic examples recall non-Celtic ones: the raven was sacred among the ancient Scandinavians and Germans, being looked upon as the emblem of Odin; in ancient Egypt and Rome commonly, and to a less extent in ancient Greece, gods often declared their will through birds or even took the form of birds; in Christian scriptures the Spirit of God or the Holy Ghost descended upon Jesus at his baptism in the semblance of a dove; and it is almost a world-wide custom to symbolize the human soul under the form of a bird or butterfly. Possibly such beliefs as these are relics of a totemistic creed which in times long previous to history was as definitely held by the ancestors of the nations of antiquity, including the ancient Celts, as any totemistic creed to be found now among native Australians or North American Red Men. At all events, in the story of a bird ancestry of Conaire we seem to have a perfectly clear example of a Celtic totemistic survival—even though Dr. Frazer may not admit it as such (cf. Rev. Celt., xxii. 20, 24; xii. 242-3).
260 Hennessy, The Ancient Irish Goddess of War, in Rev. Celt., i. 32-57.
261 Aoibheall, who came to tell Brian Borumha of his death at Clontarf, was the family banshee of the royal house of Munster. Cf. J. H. Todd, War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill (London, 1867), p. 201.
262 Hyde, Literary History of Ireland, p. 440.
263 Cf. Hennessy, in Rev. Celt., i. 39-40. In place of badb, Dr. Hyde (Lit. Hist. Irl., p. 440) uses the word vulture.
264 Hennessy, in Rev. Celt., i. 52.
265 Chief general reference: Sir John Rhŷs, Arthurian Legend (Oxford, 1891). Chief sources: Nennius, Historia Britonum (circa 800); Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae (circa 1136); Wace, Le Roman de Brut (circa 1155); Layamon’s Brut (circa 1200); Marie de France, Lais (twelfth-thirteenth century); The Four Ancient Books of Wales (twelfth-fifteenth century), edited by W. F. Skene; The Mabinogion (based on the Red Book of Hergest, a fourteenth-century manuscript), edited by Lady Charlotte Guest, Sir John Rhŷs and J. G. Evans, and Professor J. Loth; Malory, Le Morte D’Arthur (1470); The Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, collected out of ancient manuscripts (Denbigh, 1870); Iolo Manuscripts, a selection of ancient Welsh manuscripts (Llandovery, 1848).
266 In a Welsh poem of the twelfth century (see W. F. Skene, Four Ancient Books, Edinburgh, 1868, ii. 37, 38) wherein the war feats of Prince Geraint are described, his men, who lived and fought a long time after the period assigned to Arthur, are called the men of Arthur; and, as Sir John Rhŷs thinks, this is good evidence that the genuine Arthur was a mythical figure, one might almost be permitted to say a god, who overshadows and directs his warrior votaries, but who, never descending into the battle, is in this respect comparable with the Irish war-goddess the Badb (cf. Rhŷs, Celtic Britain, London, 1904, p. 236).
267 Cf. Rhŷs, Arth. Leg., chap. 1.
268 Cf. Rhŷs, Arth. Leg., pp. 24, 48. Sir John Rhŷs sees good reasons for regarding Arthur as a culture hero, because of Arthur’s traditional relation with agriculture, which most culture heroes, like Osiris, have taught their people (ib., pp. 41-3).
269 Cf. G. Maspero, Contes populaires de l’Égypte Ancienne3 (Paris, 1906), Intro., p. 57.
270 Sommer’s Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, iii. 1.
271 Rhŷs, Arth. Leg., p. 9.
272 I am indebted to Professor J. Loth for help with this etymology.
273 Cf. Rhŷs, Arth. Leg., p. 22.
274 i. 10; ii. 21b; iii. 70; cf. Rhŷs, Arth. Leg., p. 60.
275 See Williams’ Seint Greal, pp. 278, 304, 341, 617, 634, 658, 671; Rhŷs, Arth. Leg., p. 61.
276 Cf. Rhŷs, Arth. Leg., pp. 51, 35; and see our study, pp. 374-6.
277 Chevalier de la Charrette (ed. by Tarbé), p. 22; Romania, xii. 467, 515; cf. Rhŷs, Arth. Leg., p. 54.
278 Romania, xii. 467-8, 473-4; cf. Rhŷs, Arth. Leg., p. 55.
279 Cf. Tylor, Prim. Cult.,4 ii. 93-4.
280 Romania, xii. 508; cf. Rhŷs, Arth. Leg., p. 54.
281 Book XIX, c. i.
282 In the Lebar Brecc there is a tract describing eight Eucharistic Colours and their mystical or hidden meaning; and green is so described that we recognize in its Celtic-Christian symbolism the same essential significance as in the writings of both pagan and non-Celtic Christian mystics, thus:—‘This is what the Green denotes, when he (the priest) looks at it: that his heart and his mind be filled with great faintness and exceeding sorrow: for what is understood by it is his burial at the end of life under mould of earth; for green is the original colour of every earth, and therefore the colour of the robe of Offering is likened unto green’ (Stokes, Tripartite Life, Intro., p. 189). During the ceremonies of initiation into the Ancient Mysteries, it is supposed that the neophyte left the physical body in a trance state, and in full consciousness, which he retained afterwards, entered the subjective world and beheld all its wonders and inhabitants; and that coming out of that world he was clothed in a robe of sacred green to symbolize his own spiritual resurrection and re-birth into real life—for he had penetrated the Mystery of Death and was now an initiate. Even yet there seems to be an echo of the ancient Egyptian Mysteries in the Festival of Al-Khidr celebrated in the middle of the wheat harvest in Lower Egypt. Al-Khidr is a holy personage who, according to the belief of the people, was the Vizier of Dhu’l-Karnen, a contemporary of Abraham, and who, never having died, is still living and will continue to live until the Day of Judgement. And he is always represented ‘clad in green garments, whence probably the name’ he bears. Green is thus associated with a hero or god who is immortal and unchanging, like the Tuatha De Danann and fairy races (see Sir Norman Lockyer’s Stonehenge and Other Stone Monuments, London, 1909, p. 29). In modern Masonry, which preserves many of the ancient mystic rites, and to some extent those of initiation as anciently performed, green is the symbol of life, immutable nature, of truth, and victory. In the evergreen the Master Mason finds the emblem of hope and immortality. And the masonic authority who gives this information suggests that in all the Ancient Mysteries this symbolism was carried out—green symbolizing the birth of the world and the moral creation or resurrection of the initiate (General History, Cyclopedia, and Dictionary of Freemasonry, by Robert Macoy, 33o, New York, 1869).
283 Myv. Arch., i. 175. The text itself in this work is said to be copied from the Green Book—now unknown. Cf. Rhŷs, Arth. Leg. p. 56 n.
284 In this text, the Gwenhwyvar who is in the power of Melwas is referred to as Arthur’s second wife Gwenhwyvar, for according to the Welsh Triads (i. 59; ii. 16; iii. 109) there are three wives of Arthur all named Gwenhwyvar. As Sir John Rhŷs observes, no poet has ever availed himself of all three, for the evident reason that they would have spoilt his plot (Arth. Leg., p. 35).
285 D. ab Gwilym’s Poetry (London, 1789), poem cxi, line 44. Cf. Rhŷs, Arth. Leg., p. 66.
286 Malory, Book I, c. xxv. One account of Arthur’s sword Caledvwlch or Caleburn describes it as having been made in the Isle of Avalon (Lady Ch. Guest’s Mabinogion, ii. 322 n.; also Myv. Arch., ii. 306).
287 Malory, Book IX, c. xv; Sir John Rhŷs takes the Lady of the Lake who sends Arthur the sword and the one who aids him afterwards (though, apparently by error, two characters in Malory) as different aspects of the one lake-lady Morgen (Arth. Leg., p. 348).
288 Merlin explained to Arthur that King Loth’s wife was Arthur’s own sister (Sommer’s Malory, i. 64-5); and King Loth is one of the rulers of the Otherworld.
289 Book XXI, c. vi.
290 This poem, according to Gaston Paris, was translated during the late twelfth century from a French original now lost (Romania, x. 471). Cf. Rhŷs, Arth. Leg., p. 127.
291 Malory, Book XII, cc. iii-x; Rhŷs, Arth. Leg., pp. 145, 164. Galahad, however, does not belong to the more ancient Arthurian romances at all, so far as scholars can determine; and, therefore, too much emphasis ought not to be placed on this episode in connexion with the character of Arthur.
292 We should like to direct the reader’s attention to the interesting similarity shown between this old story of Kulhwch and Olwen and the fairy legend which we found living in South Wales, and now recorded by us on page 161, under the title of Einion and Olwen. As we have there suggested, the legend seems to be the remnant of a very ancient bardic tale preserved in the oral traditions of the people; and the prevalence of such bardic traditions in a part of Wales where some of the Mabinogion stories either took shape, or from where they drew folk-lore material, would make it probable that there may even be some close relationship between the Olwen of the story and the Olwen of our folk-tale. If it could be shown that there is, we should be able at once to regard both Olwens as ‘Fair-Folk’ or of the Tylwyth Teg, and the quest of Kulhwch as really a journey to the Otherworld to gain a fairy wife.
293 We may even have in the story of Kulhwch and Olwen a symbolical or mystical account of ancient Brythonic rites of initiation, which have also directly to do with the spiritual world and its invisible inhabitants.
294 Cf. J. Loth, Les Mabinogion (Paris, 1889), p. 252 n.
295 Cf. J. Loth, Le Mabinogi de Kulhwch et Olwen (Saint-Brieuc, 1888), Intro., p. 7.
296 Lady Ch. Guest’s Mabinogion (London, 1849), ii. 323 n.
297 Cf. R. H. Fletcher, Arthurian Material in the Chronicles, in Harv. Stud. and Notes in Phil. and Lit., x. 20-1.
298 Fletcher, ib., x. 29; 26.
299 Rhŷs, Arth. Leg., p. 7; and Rhŷs, The Welsh People3 (London, 1902), p. 105.
300 Cf. Fletcher, op. cit., x. 43-115; from ed. by San-Marte (A. Schulz), Gottfried’s von Monmouth Hist. Reg. Brit. (Halle, 1854), Eng. trans. by A. Thompson, The British History, &c. (1718).
301 Cf. Fletcher, op. cit., pp. 117-44.
302 Sir Frederic Madden, Layamon’s Brut (London, 1847), ii. 384. Here the Germanic elves are by Layamon made the same in character and nature as Brythonic elves or fairies.
303 Madden, Layamon’s Brut, ii. 144.
304 J. Bédier’s ed., Société des anciens textes français (Paris, 1902).
305 E. Muret’s ed., Société des anciens textes français (Paris, 1903).
306 A. C. L. Brown, The Knight and the Lion; also, by same author, Iwain, in Harv. Stud. and Notes in Phil. and Lit., vii. 146, &c.
307 Celtic Mag., xii. 555; Romania (1888); cf. Brown, ib.
308 J. Loth, Les Romans arthuriens, in Rev. Celt., xiii. 497.
309 Bibliotheca Normannica, iii, Die Lais der Marie de France, pp. 86-112.
310 Cf. W. H. Schofield, The Lays of Graelent and Lanval, and the Story of Wayland, in Pub. Mod. Lang. Ass. of America, xv. 176.
311 Cf. Schofield, The Lay of Guingamor, in Harv. Stud. and Notes in Phil. and Lit., v. 221-2.
312 For editions, and fuller details of the fairy elements, see De La Warr B. Easter, A Study of the Magic Elements in the Romans d’Aventure and the Romans Bretons (Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, 1906). See also Lucy A. Paton, Studies in the Fairy Mythology of the Arthurian Romance, Radcliffe College Monograph XIII (New York, 1903).
313 Perc., vi. 235; cf. Easter’s Dissertation, p. 42 n.
314 Joufrois, 3179 ff.; ed. Hofmann und Muncker (Halle, 1880); cf. Easter’s Diss., pp. 40-2 n.
315 Brun, 562 ff., 3237, 3251, 3396, 3599 ff.; ed. Paul Meyer (Paris, 1875); cf. ib., pp. 42 n., 44 n.
316 E. Anwyl, The Four Branches of the Mabinogi, in Zeit. für Celt. Phil. (London, Paris, 1897), i. 278.
317 Cf. Nutt, Voy. of Bran, ii. 19, 21.
318 Black Book of Caermarthen, xvii, stanza 7, ll. 5-8. This book dates from 1154 to 1189 as a manuscript; cf. Skene, Four Anc. Books, i. 3, 372.
319 Stanzas 19-20. This book took shape as a manuscript from the fourteenth to fifteenth century, according to Skene. Cf. Skene, Four Anc. Books, i. 3, 464.
320 See A Fugitive Poem of Myrddin in his Grave. Red Book of Hergest, ii. Skene, ib., i. 478-81, stanza 27.
321 Chief general references: H. D’Arbois de Jubainville, L’Épopée celtique en Irlande, Le Cycle Mythologique Irlandais; Kuno Meyer and Alfred Nutt, The Happy Otherworld and the Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth. Chief sources: the Leabhar na h-Uidhre (A. D. 1100); the Book of Leinster (twelfth century); the Lais of Marie de France (twelfth to thirteenth century); the White Book of Rhyderch, Hengwrt Coll. (thirteenth to fourteenth century); the Yellow Book of Lecan (fifteenth century); the Book of Lismore (fifteenth century); the Book of Fermoy (fifteenth century); the Four Ancient Books of Wales (twelfth to fifteenth century).
322 One of the commonest legends among all Celtic peoples is about some lost city like the Breton Is, or some lost land or island (cf. Rhŷs, Arth. Leg., c. xv, and Celtic Folk-Lore, c. vii); and we can be quite sure that if, as some scientists now begin to think (cf. Batella, Pruebas geológicas de la existencia de la Atlántida, in Congreso internacional de Americanistas, iv., Madrid, 1882; also Meyers, Grosses Konversations-Lexikon, ii. 44, Leipzig und Wien, 1903) Atlantis once existed, its disappearance must have left from a prehistoric epoch a deep impress on folk-memory. But the Otherworld idea being in essence animistic is not to be regarded, save from a superficial point of view, as conceivably having had its origin in a lost Atlantis. The real evolutionary process, granting the disappearance of this island continent, would seem rather to have been one of localizing and anthropomorphosing very primitive Aryan and pre-Aryan beliefs about a heaven-world, such as have been current among almost all races of mankind in all stages of culture, throughout the two Americas and Polynesia as well as throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa. (Cf. Tylor, Prim. Cult.,4 ii. 62, 48, &c.)
323 White Book of Rhyderch, folio 291a; cf. Rhŷs, Arth. Leg., pp. 268-9.
324 From Echtra Condla, in the Leabhar na h-Uidhre. Cf. Le Cycle Myth. Irl., pp. 192-3.
325 Cf. Eleanor Hull, The Silver Bough in Irish Legend, in Folk-Lore, xii.
326 Cf. Eleanor Hull, op. cit., p. 431.
327 Classical parallels to the Celtic Otherworld journeys exist in the descent of Dionysus to bring back Semele, of Orpheus to recover his beloved Eurydike, of Herakles at the command of his master Eurystheus to fetch up the three-headed Kerberos—as mentioned first in Homer’s Iliad (cf. Tylor, Prim. Cult.,4 ii. 48); and chiefly in the voyage of Odysseus across the deep-flowing Ocean to the land of the departed (Homer, Odyss. xi).
328 Servius, ad Aen., vi. 136 ff.
329 Voy. of Bran, i, pp. 2 ff. The tale is based on seven manuscripts ranging in age from the Leabhar na h-Uidhre of about A. D. 1100 to six others belonging to the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries (cf. ib., p. xvi).
330 This tale exists in several manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; i. e. Book of Ballymote, and Yellow Book of Lecan, as edited and translated by Stokes, in Irische Texte, III. i. 183-229; cf. Voy. of Bran, i. 190 ff.; cf. Le Cycle Myth. Irl., pp. 326-33.
331 The fountain is a sacred fountain containing the sacred salmon; and the nine hazels are the sacred hazels of inspiration and poetry. These passages are among the most mystical in Irish literature. Cf. pp. 432-3.
332 Cf. Stokes’s trans. in Irische Texte (Leipzig, 1891), III. i. 211-16.
333 The Greeks saw in Hermes the symbol of the Logos. Like Manannan, he conducted the souls of men to the Otherworld of the gods, and then brought them back to the human world. Hermes ‘holds a rod in his hands, beautiful, golden, wherewith he spellbinds the eyes of men whomsoever he would, and wakes them again from sleep’—in initiations; while Manannan and the fairy beings lure mortals to the fairy world through sleep produced by the music of the Silver Branch.—Hippolytus on the Naasenes (from the Hebrew Nachash, meaning a ‘Serpent’), a Gnostic school; cf. G. R. S. Mead, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, pp. 198, 201. Or again, ‘the Caduceus, or Rod of Mercury (Hermes), and the Thyrsus in the Greek Mysteries, which conducted the soul from life to death, and from death to life, figured forth the serpentine power in man, and the path whereby it would carry the “man” aloft to the height, if he would but cause the “Waters of the Jordan” to “flow upwards”.’—G. R. S. Mead. ib., p. 185.
334 Cf. Hennessy’s ed. in Todd Lectures, ser. I. i. 9.
335 Among the early ecclesiastical manuscripts of the so-called Prophecies. See E. O’Curry, Lectures, p. 383.
336 Cf. Eleanor Hull, op. cit., pp. 439-40.
337 Now in three versions based on the L. U. MS. Our version is collated from O’Curry’s translation in Atlantis, i. 362-92, ii. 98-124, as revised by Kuno Meyer, Voy. of Bran, i. 152 ff.; and from Jubainville’s translation in L’Ép. celt. en Irl., pp. 170-216.
338 As Alfred Nutt pointed out, ‘There is no parallel to the position or to the sentiments of Fand in the post-classic literature of Western Europe until we come to Guinevere and Isolt, Ninian and Orgueilleuse’ (Voy. of Bran, i. 156 n.).
339 See poem Tir na nog (Land of Youth), by Michael Comyn, composed or collected about the year 1749. Ed. by Bryan O’Looney, in Trans. Ossianic Soc., iv. 234-70.
340 Laeghaire, who also came back from Fairyland on a fairy horse, and fifty warriors with him each likewise mounted, to say good-bye for ever to the king and people of Connaught, were warned as they set out for this world not to dismount if they wished to return to their fairy wives. The warning was strictly observed, and thus they were able to go back to the Sidhe-world (see p. 295).
341 Cf. Bibliotheca Normannica, iii, Die Lais der Marie de France, pp. 86-112.
342 Cf. Stokes’s trans., in Rev. Celt., ix. 453-95, x. 50-95. Most of the tale comes from the L. U. MS.; cf. L’Ép. celt. en Irl., pp. 449-500.
343 Silva Gadelica, ii. 385-401. The MS. text, Echira Thaidg mheic Chéin, or ‘The Adventure of Cian’s son Teigue’, is found in the Book of Lismore.
344 Summarized and quoted from translation by R. I. Best, in Ériu, iii. 150-73. The text is found in the Book of Fermoy (pp. 139-45), a fifteenth-century codex in the Royal Irish Academy.
345 Folios 113-15, trans. O’Beirne Crow, Journ. Kilkenny Archae. Soc. (1870-1), pp. 371-448; cf. Rhŷs, Hib. Lect., pp. 260-1.
346 Cf. Skene, Four Ancient Books of Wales, i. 264-6, 276, &c.
347 Cf. Silva Gadelica, ii. 301 ff., from Additional MS. 34119, dating from 1765, in British Museum.
348 Giolla an Fhiugha, or ‘The Lad of the Ferrule’, trans. by Douglas Hyde, in Irish Texts Society, London, 1899.
349 Cf. Meyer and Nutt, Voy. of Bran, i. 147, 228, 230, 235; 161.
350 The bulk of the text comes from the Book of Fermoy. Cf. Stokes’s trans. in Rev. Celt., xiv. 59, 49, 53, &c.
351 J. Loth, L’Émigration bretonne en Armorique (Paris, 1883), pp. 139-40.
352 Ed. and trans. by W. Stokes, Calcutta, 1866. This Vision has been erroneously ascribed to the celebrated Abbot of Iona, who died in 703; but Professor Zimmer has regarded it as a ninth-century composition; cf. Voy. of Bran, i. 219 ff.
353 Cf. Voy. of Bran, i. 195 ff.
354 See J. G. Campbell, The Fians, pp. 260-7.
355 The Literary Movement in Ireland, in Ideals in Ireland, ed. by Lady Gregory (London, 1901), p. 95.
356 Cf. Voy. of Bran, i. 331.
357 General reference: Essay upon the Irish Vision of the happy Otherworld and the Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth, by Alfred Nutt in Kuno Meyer’s Voyage of Bran. Chief sources: Leabhar na h-Uidhre; Book of Leinster; Four Ancient Books of Wales; Mabinogion; Silva Gadelica; Barddas, a collection of Welsh manuscripts made about 1560; and the Annals of the Four Masters, compiled in the first half of the seventeenth century.
358 Cf. Plato, Republic, x; Phaedo; Phaedrus, &c.; Iamblichus, Concerning the Mysteries of Egypt, Chaldaea, Assyria; Plutarch, Mysteries of Isis (De Iside et Osiride).
359 He says:—‘I, for my part, suspect that the spirit was implanted in them (rational creatures, men) from without’ (De Principiis, Book I, c. vii. 4);... ‘the cause of each one’s actions is a pre-existing one; and then every one, according to his deserts, is made by God either a vessel unto honour or dishonour’ (ib., Book III, c. i. 20). ‘Whence we are of opinion that, seeing the soul, as we have frequently said, is immortal and eternal, it is possible that, in the many and endless periods of duration in the immeasurable and different worlds, it may descend from the highest good to the lowest evil, or be restored from the lowest evil to the highest good’ (ib., Book III, c. i, 21);... ‘every one has the reason in himself, why he has been placed in this or that rank in life’ (ib., Book III, c. v, 4).
360 Cf. Bergier, Origène, in Dict. de Théologie, v. 69.
361 Holy Bible, Revised Version, St. Matt. xi. 14-15; cf. St. Matt. xvii. 10-13, St. Mark ix. 13, St. Luke vii. 27, St. John i. 21.
362 Tertullian’s conclusion is as follows:—‘These substances (“soul and body”) are, in fact, the natural property of each individual; whilst “the spirit and power” (cf. Mal. iv. 5) are bestowed as external gifts by the grace of God, and so may be transferred to another person according to the purpose and will of the Almighty, as was anciently the case with respect to the spirit of Moses’ (cf. Num. xii. 2).—De Anima c. xxxv; cf. trans, in Ante-Nicene Christian Library (Edinburgh, 1870), xv. 496-7.
363 Origen says:—‘But that there should be certain doctrines not made known to the multitude, which are [revealed] after the exoteric ones have been taught, is not a peculiarity of Christianity alone, but also of philosophic systems, in which certain truths are exoteric and others esoteric’ (Origen against Celsus, Book I, c. vii).
364 How Tertullian almost literally accepted the re-birth doctrine is shown in his Apology, chapter xlviii, concerning the resurrection of the body. It is the corrupted form of the doctrine, viz. transmigration of human souls into animal bodies, which he therein, as well as in his De Anima and elsewhere, chiefly and logically combats, as Origen also combated it. He first shows why a human soul must return into a human body in accordance with natural analogy, every creature being after its own kind always; and then, because the purpose of the Resurrection is the judgement, that the soul must return into its own body. And he concludes:—‘It is surely more worthy of belief that a man will be restored from a man, any given person from any given person, but still a man; so that the same kind of soul may be reinstated in the same mode of existence, even if not into the same outward form’ (The Apology of Tertullian for the Christians; cf. trans. by T. H. Bindley, Oxford, 1890, pp. 137-9).
365 British Museum MS. Add. 5114, vellum—a Coptic manuscript in the dialect of Upper Egypt. Its undetermined date is placed by Woide at latest about the end of the fourth century. It was evidently copied by one scribe from an older manuscript, the original probably having been the Apocalypse of Sophia, by Valentius, the learned Gnostic who lived in Egypt for thirty years during the second century. See the translation of the Schwartze’s parallel Latin version of Pistis Sophia and its introduction, both by G. R. S. Mead (London, 1896).
366 The chief passages are as follows, Jesus being the speaker:—‘Moreover, in the region of the soul of the rulers, destined to receive it, I found the soul of the prophet Elias, in the aeons of the sphere, and I took him, and receiving his soul also, I brought it to the virgin of light, and she gave it to her receivers; they brought it to the sphere of the rulers, and cast it into the womb of Elizabeth. Wherefore the power of the little Iaô, who is in the midst, and the soul of Elias the prophet, are united with the body of John the Baptist. For this cause have ye been in doubt aforetime, when I said unto you, “John said, I am not the Christ”; and ye said unto me, “It is written in the Scripture, that when the Christ shall come, Elias will come before him, and prepare his way.” And I, when ye had said this unto me, replied unto you, “Elias verily is come, and hath prepared all things, according as it is written; and they have done unto him whatsoever they would.” And when I perceived that ye did not understand that I had spoken concerning the soul of Elias united with John the Baptist, I answered you openly and face to face with the words, “If ye will receive it, John the Baptist is Elias who, I said, was for to come”’ (Pistis Sophia, Book I, 12-13, Mead’s translation).
367 ‘The Saviour answered and said unto his disciples:—“Preach ye unto the whole world, saying unto men, ‘Strive together that ye may receive the mysteries of light in this time of stress, and enter into the kingdom of light. Put not off from day to day, and from cycle to cycle, in the belief that ye will succeed in obtaining the mysteries when ye return to the world in another cycle’”’ (Pistis Sophia, Book II, 317, Mead’s translation).
368 Cf. Bergier, Manichéisme, in Dict. de Théol., iv. 211-13.
369 The Refutation of Irenaeus, until quite recently, has been the chief source of much of our knowledge concerning Gnosticism. It was written during the second century at Lyons, by Irenaeus, a bishop of Gaul, far from any direct contact with the still flourishing Gnosticism. But now with the discovery of genuine manuscripts of Gnostic works: (1) the Askew Codex, vellum, British Museum, London, containing the Pistis Sophia (see above, p. 361 n.) and extracts from the Books of the Saviour; (2) the Bruce Codex (two MSS.), papyrus, Bodleian Library, Oxford, containing the fragmentary Book of the Great Logos, an unknown treatise, and fragments; and (3) the Akhmīm Codex (discovered in 1896), papyrus, Egyptian Museum, Berlin, containing The Gospel of Mary (or Apocryphon of John), The Wisdom of Jesus Christ, and The Acts of Peter, we are able to check from original sources the Fathers in many of their writings and canons concerning Gnostic ‘heresies’; and find that Irenaeus, the last refuge of Christian haeresiologists, has so condensed and paraphrased his sources that we cannot depend upon him at all for a consistent exposition of Gnostic doctrines, which with more or less prejudice he is trying to refute. It is true that the age of these manuscripts has not been satisfactorily determined; in fact most of them have not yet been carefully studied. Very probably, however, as appears to be the case with the Pistis Sophia, they have been copied from manuscripts which were contemporary with or earlier than the time of Irenaeus, and hence may be regarded as good authority in determining Gnostic teachings. (Cf. all of above note with G. R. S. Mead, Fragments of a Faith Forgotten, London, 1900, pp. 147, 151-3.)
Many unprejudiced scholars are now unwilling to admit the rulings of the Church Councils which determined what was orthodox and what heretical doctrines among the Gnostic-Christians, because many of their dogmatic decisions were based upon the unscholarly Refutation of Irenaeus and upon other equally unreliable evidence. The data which have accumulated in the hands of scholars about early Christian thought and Gnosticism are now much more complete and trustworthy than the similar data were upon which the Council of Constantinople in 553 based its decision with respect to the doctrine of re-birth; and the truth coming to be recognized seems to be that the Gnostics rather than the Church Fathers, who adopted from them what doctrines they liked, condemning those they did not like, should henceforth be regarded as the first Christian theologians, and mystics. If this view of the very difficult and complex matter be accepted, then modern Christianity itself ought to be allowed to resume what thus appears to have been its original position—so long obscured by the well-meaning, but, nevertheless, ill-advised ecclesiastical councils—as the synthesizer of pagan religions and philosophies. Some such view has been accepted by many eminent Christian theologians since Origen: i. e. the Cambridge Platonist, Henry More, openly advocated the re-birth doctrine in the seventeenth century; and in later times it has been preached from Christian pulpits by such men as Henry Ward Beecher and Phillips Brooks.
370 See A. Bertrand, La Religion des Gaulois, les Druides et le Druidisme (Paris, 1897); H. Jennings, The Rosicrucians (London, 1887); the Work of Paracelsus; H. Cornelius Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia (Paris, 1567); H. P. Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled, and the Secret Doctrine (London, 1888); and Hermetic Works, by Anna Kingsford and E. Maitland (London, 1885).
371 Cf. Bergier, Purgatoire, in Dict. de Théol., v. 409. A Celt, a professed faithful and fervent adherent of the Church of Rome, whom I met in the Morbihan where he now lives, told me that he believes thoroughly in the doctrine of re-birth, and that it is according to his opinion the proper and logical interpretation of the doctrine of Purgatory; and he added that there are priests in his Church who have told him that their personal interpretation of the purgatorial doctrine is the same. Thus some Roman Catholics do not deny the re-birth doctrine. And such conversations as this with Catholic Celts in Ireland and Brittany lead me to believe that to a larger extent than has been suspected the old Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth may have been one of the chief foundations for the modern Roman Catholic Doctrine of Purgatory, whose origin is not clearly indicated in any theological works. For us this probability is important as well as interesting, and especially so when we remember the profound influence which the Celtic St. Patrick’s Purgatory certainly exerted on the Church during the Middle Ages when the doctrine of Purgatory was taking definite shape (see our chapter x).
372 Barddas (Llandovery, 1862) is ‘a collection (by Iolo Morganwg, a Bard) of original documents, illustrative of the theology, wisdom, and usage of the Bardo-Druidic System of the Isle of Britain’. The original manuscripts are said to have been in the possession of Llywelyn Sion, a Bard of Glamorgan, about 1560. Barddas shows considerable Christian influence, yet in its essential teachings is sufficiently distinct. Though of late composition, Barddas seems to represent the traditional bardic doctrines as they had been handed down orally for an unknown period of time, it having been forbidden in earlier times to commit such doctrines to writing. We are well aware also of the adverse criticisms passed upon these documents; but since no one questions their Celtic origin—whether it be ancient or more modern—we are content to use them.
373 Barddas, i, 189-91.
374 Barddas, i, 177.
375 Preface to Barddas, xlii.
376 One of the greatest errors formerly made by European Sanskrit scholars and published broadcast throughout the West, so that now it is popularly accepted there as true, is that Nirvana, the goal of Indian philosophy and religion, means annihilation. It does mean annihilation (evolutionary transmutation of lower into higher), but only of all those forces or elements which constitute man as an animal. The error arose from interpreting exoterically instead of esoterically, and was a natural result of that system of western scholarship which sees and often cares only to examine external aspects. Native Indian scholars who have advised us in this difficult problem prefer to translate Nirvana as ‘Self-realization’, i. e. a state of supernormal consciousness (to be acquired through the evolution of the individual), as much superior to the normal human consciousness as the normal human consciousness is superior to the consciousness existing in the brute kingdom.
377 De Bel. Gal., lib. vi. 14. 5; vi. 18. 1.
378 Book V, 31. 4.
379 De Situ Orbis, iii. c. 2: ‘One point alone of the Druids’ teaching has become generally known among the common people (in order that they should be braver in war), that souls are eternal and there is a second life among the shades.’
380 i. 449-62.
381 Lucan, i. 457-8; i. 458-62.
382 Cf. Le Cycle Myth. Irl., pp. 345, 347 ff.
383 Folk-Lore, xii. 64, &c.; also cf. Eleanor Hull, The Cuchullin Saga in Irish Literature (London, 1898), Intro., p. 23, &c.
384 What is probably the oldest form of a tale concerning Conchobhar’s birth makes Conchobhar ‘the son of a god who incarnated himself in the same way as did Lug and Etain’ (cf. Voy. of Bran, ii. 73).
385 See Leabhar na h-Uidhre, 101b; and Book of Leinster, 123b:—‘Cúchulainn mc dea dechtiri.’
386 We have already mentioned the belief that gods having their abode in the sun could leave it to assume bodies here on earth and become culture heroes and great teachers (see p. 309).
387 From Wooing of Emer in Leabhar na h-Uidhre; cf. Voy. of Bran, ii. 97.
388 L’Épopée celt. en Irl., p. 11.
389 Cf. Voy. of Bran, ii. p. 74 ff.
390 In the Leabhar na h-Uidhre, 133a-134b; cf. Le Cycle Myth. Irl., pp. 336-43; cf. Voy. of Bran, i. 49-52; cf. O’Curry, Manners and Customs, iii. 175.
391 Cf. Stokes’s ed. Annals of Tigernach, Third Frag. in Rev. Celt. xvii. 178. In the piece called Tucait baile Mongâin in the Leabhar na h-Uidhre, p. 134, col. 2, ‘Mongan is seen living with his wife the year of the death of Ciaran mac int Shair, and of Tuathal Mael-Garb, that is to say in 544,’ following the Chronicum Scotorum, Hennessy’s ed., pp. 48-9. As D’Arbois de Jubainville adds, the Irish chronicles of this epoch are only approximate in their dates. Thus, while the Four Masters (i. 243) makes the death of Mongan A. D. 620, the Annals of Ulster makes it A. D. 625, the Chronicum Scotorum A. D. 625, the Annals of Clonmacnoise, A. D. 624, and Egerton MS. 1782 A. D. 615 (cf. Voy. of Bran, i. 137-9).
392 J. O’Donovan, Annals of Ireland by the Four Masters (Dublin, 1856), i. 121.
393 Cf. Le Cycle Myth. Irl., pp. 336-43; O’Curry, Manners and Customs iii. 175; L. U., 133a-134b; and Voy. of Bran, i. 52.
394 Voy. of Bran, i. 44-5; from The Conception of Mongan.
395 Meyer’s version, Voy. of Bran, i. 73-4.
396 Cf. Voy. of Bran, i. 137.
397 Voy. of Bran, i. 22-8, quatrains 48-59, &c.
398 In L. U.; cf. Le Cycle Myth. Irl., pp. 311-22; and Voy. of Bran, ii. 47-53.
399 In the Irish conception of re-birth there is no change of sex: Lug is re-born as a boy, in Cuchulainn; Finn as Mongan; Etain as a girl. But it seems that Etain as a mortal had no consciousness of her previous divine existence, while Cuchulainn and Mongan knew their non-human origin and pre-existence.
400 Some time after this, according to one part of the tale, Eochaid stormed Midir’s fairy palace—for the purpose localized in Ireland—and won Etain back, but the fairies cast a curse on his race for this, and Conaire, his grandson, fell a victim to it. Such a recovering of Etain by Eochaid may vaguely suggest a re-birth of Etain, through the power exerted by Eochaid, who, being a king, is to be regarded in his non-human nature as one of the Tuatha De Danann himself, like Midir his rival.
401 Cf. The Gilla decair, in Silva Gadelica, pp. 300-3.
402 Cf. Voy. of Bran, ii. 76 ff. The Christian scribe’s version fills up the space between Tuan’s death and re-birth by making him pass eighty years as a stag, twenty as a wild boar, one hundred as an eagle, and twenty as a salmon (ib., p. 79). In this particular example, the uninitiated scribe (evidently having failed to grasp an important aspect of the re-birth doctrine as this was esoterically explained in the Mysteries, namely, that between death and re-birth, while the conscious Ego is resident in the Otherworld, the physical atoms of the discarded human body may transmigrate through various plant and animal bodies) appears to set forth as Celtic an erroneous doctrine of the transmigration of the conscious Ego itself (see p. 513 n.). In other texts, for example in the song which Amairgen (considered the Gaelic equivalent or even original of the Brythonic Taliessin) sang as he, with the conquering Sons of Mil, set foot on Ireland, there are similar transformations, attributed to certain heroes like Taliessin (see the Mabinogion) and Tuan mac Cairill during their disembodied states after death and until re-birth. But these transformations seem to echo poetically, and often rationally, a very mystical Celtic pantheism, in which Man, regarded as having evolved upwards through all forms and conditions of existence, is at one with all creation:—
I am the wind which blows o’er the sea;
I am the wave of the deep;
I am the bull of seven battles;
I am the eagle on the rock;
I am a tear of the sun;
I am the fairest of plants;
I am a boar for courage;
I am a salmon in the water;
I am a lake in the plain;
I am the world of knowledge;
I am the head of the battle-dealing spear;
I am the god who fashions fire in the head;
Who spreads light in the gathering on the mountain?
Who foretells the ages of the moon?
Who teaches the spot where the sun rests?
And Amairgen also says:—‘I am,’ [Taliessin] ‘I have been’ (Book of Invasions; cf. Voy. of Bran, ii. 91-2; cf. Rhŷs, Hib. Lect., p. 549; cf. Skene, Four Ancient Books, i. 276 ff.).
In later times, especially among non-bardic poets, there has been a similar tendency to misinterpret this primitive mystical Celtic pantheism into the corrupt form of the re-birth doctrine, namely transmigration of the human soul into animal bodies. Dr. Douglas Hyde has sent to me the following evidence:—‘I have a poem, consisting of nearly one hundred stanzas, about a pig who ate an Irish manuscript, and who by eating it recovered human speech for twenty-four hours and gave his master an account of his previous embodiments. He had been a right-hand man of Cromwell, a weaver in France, a subject of the Grand Signor, &c. The poem might be about one hundred or one hundred and fifty years old.’ It is probable that the poet who composed this poem intended to add a touch of modern Irish humour by making use of the pig. We should, nevertheless, bear in mind that the pig (or, as is more commonly the rule, the wild boar) holds a very curious and prominent position in the ancient mythology of Ireland, and of Wales as well. It was regarded as a magical animal (cf. p. 451 n.); and, apparently, was also a Druid symbol, whose meaning we have lost. Possibly the poet may have been aware of this. If so, he does not necessarily imply transmigration of the human soul into animal bodies; but is merely employing symbolism.
403 See Taliessin in the Mabinogion, and the Book of Taliessin in Skene’s Four Ancient Books, i. 523 ff.; cf. Nutt, Voy. of Bran, ii. 84, and Rhŷs, Hib. Lect., pp. 548, 551.
404 Cf. Rhŷs, Hib. Lect., pp. 548-50.
405 Cf. Rhŷs, Hib. Lect., p. 259; and Arth. Leg., p. 252.
406 Loth, Les Mabinogion, Kulhwch et Olwen, p. 187 n.
407 Le Morte D’Arthur, Book XXI, c. vii.
408 See works on Egyptian mythology and religion, by Maspero; also Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, p. 84, &c.
409 F. L. Griffith, Stories of the High-priests of Memphis (Oxford, 1900), c. iii. The text of this story is written on the back of two Greek documents, bearing the date of the seventh year of the Emperor Claudius (A. D. 46-7), not before published.
410 It is interesting to compare with this episode the episodes of how the magic of St. Patrick prevailed over the magic of the Druids when the old and the new religions met in warfare on the Hill of Tara, in the presence of the high king of Ireland and his court.
411 E. A. Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians (London, 1904), p. 3.
412 Prescott, Conquest of Mexico and Conquest of Peru.
413 W. Crooke, The Legends of Krishna, in Folk-Lore, xi. 2-3 ff.
414 Laws of Manu, vii. 8, trans, by G. Bühler.
415 A. B. Cook, European Sky-God, in Folk-Lore, xv. 301-4.
416 Cf. Lucian, Somn., 17, &c. See Tylor, Prim. Cult.,4 ii. 13; also Tertullian, De Anima, c. xxviii, where Pythagoras is described as having previously been Aethalides, and Euphorbus, and the fisherman Pyrrhus.
417 Cf. Huc, Souvenirs d’un voyage dans la Tartarie et le Thibet, i. 279 ff.
418 The doctrine of kingly rule by divine right was substituted after the conversion of the Roman Empire for the very ancient belief that the emperor was a god incarnate (not necessarily reincarnate); and the same christianized aspect of a pre-Christian doctrine stands behind the English kingship at the present day.
419 A curious parallel to this Irish doctrine that through re-birth one suffers for the sins committed in a previous earth-life is found in the Christian scriptures, where in asking Jesus about a man born blind, ‘Rabbi, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind?’ the disciple exhibits what must have been a popular Jewish belief in re-birth quite like the Celtic one. See St. John ix. 1-2. Though the Rabbis admitted the possibility of ante-natal sin in thought, this passage seems to point unmistakably to a Jewish re-birth doctrine.
420 It is interesting to note in connexion with these two complementary ideas what has been written by Mr. Standish O’Grady concerning strange phenomena witnessed at the time of Charles Parnell’s funeral:—‘While his followers were committing Charles Parnell’s remains to the earth, the sky was bright with strange lights and flames. Only a coincidence possibly; and yet persons not superstitious have maintained that there is some mysterious sympathy between the human soul and the elements.... Those strange flames recalled to my memory what is told of similar phenomena said to have been witnessed when tidings of the death of the great Christian Saint, Columba, overran the north-west of Europe, as perhaps truer than I had imagined.’—Ireland: Her Story, pp. 211-12.
421 Cf. M. Lenihan, Limerick; its History and Antiquities (Dublin, 1866), p. 725.
422 I take this to mean, somewhat as in the similar case of Dechtire, the mother of Cuchulainn (see p. 369, above), that the kind of soul or character which will be reincarnated in the child is determined by the psychic prenatal conditions which a mother consciously or unconsciously may set up. If this interpretation, as it seems to be, is correct, we have in this Welsh belief a surprising comprehension of scientific laws on the part of the ancient Welsh Druids—from whom the doctrine comes—which equals, and surpasses in its subtlety, the latest discoveries of our own psychological embryology, criminology, and so-called laws of heredity.
423 The reader is referred to the Rev. T. M. Morgan’s latest publication, The History and Antiquities of the Parish of Newchurch, Carmarthenshire (Carmarthen, 1910), pp. 155-6.
424 I found, however, that the original re-birth doctrine has been either misinterpreted or else corrupted—after Dr. Tylor’s theory—into transmigration into animal bodies among certain Cornish miners in the St. Just region.
425 The primitive character of the Incarnation doctrine is clear: Origen, in refuting a Jewish accusation against Christians, apparently the natural outgrowth of deep-seated hatred and religious prejudice on the part of the Jews, that Jesus Christ was born through the adultery of the Virgin with a certain soldier named Panthera, argues ‘that every soul, for certain mysterious reasons (I speak now according to the opinions of Pythagoras, and Plato, and Empedocles, whom Celsus frequently names), is introduced into a body, and introduced according to its deserts and former actions’. And, according to Origen’s argument, to assign to Jesus Christ a birth more disgraceful than any other is absurd, because ‘He who sends souls down into the bodies of men’ would not have thus ‘degraded Him who was to dare such mighty acts, and to teach so many men, and to reform so many from the mass of wickedness in the world’. And Origen adds:—‘It is probable, therefore, that this soul also which conferred more benefit by its residence in the flesh than that of many men (to avoid prejudice, I do not say “all”), stood in need of a body not only superior to others, but invested with all excellence’ (Origen against Celsus, Book I, c. xxxii).
It is interesting to compare with Origen’s theology the following passage from the Pistis Sophia, wherein Jesus in the alleged esoteric discourse to his disciples refers to the pre-existence of their souls:—‘I took them from the hands of the twelve saviours of the treasure of light, according to the command of the first mystery. These powers, therefore, I cast into the wombs of your mothers, when I came into the world, and they are those which are in your bodies this day’ (Pistis Sophia, i. II, Mead’s translation).
426 Cf. Nutt, Voy. of Bran, ii. 27 ff., 45 ff., 54 ff., 98-102.
427 Cf. ib., p. 105.
428 In this chapter, largely the result of my own special research and observations in Celtic archaeology, I wish to acknowledge the very valuable suggestions offered to me by Professor J. Loth, both in his lectures and personally.
429 See David MacRitchie, Fians, Fairies, and Picts; also his Testimony of Tradition.
430 Myers, in the Survival of the Human Personality (ii. 55-6), shows that ‘the departed spirit, long after death, seems pre-occupied with the spot where his bones are laid’. Among contemporary uncultured races there exists a theory parallel to this one arrived at through careful scientific research, namely, that ghosts haunt graves and monuments connected with the dead: according to the Australian Arunta the ‘double’ hovers near its body until the body is reduced to dust, the spirit or soul of the deceased having separated from this ‘double’ or ghost at the time of death or soon afterwards (Spenser and Gillen, Nat. Tribes of Cent. Aust.).
431 See Les Grottes, t. i; Les Menhirs, Les Dolmens, Les Tumulus, and Cultes et observances mégalithiques, t. iv.
432 On April 17, 1909, at Carnac, in a natural fissure in the body of the finest menhir at the head of the Alignement of Kermario, I found quite by chance, while making a very careful examination of the geological structure of the menhir, a Roman Catholic coin (or medal) of St. Peter. The place in the menhir where this coin was discovered is on the south side about fifteen inches above the surface of the ground. The menhir is very tall and smoothly rounded, and there is no possible way for the coin to have fallen into the fissure by accident. Nor is there any probability that the coin was placed there without a serious purpose; and it is an object such as only an adult would possess. An examination of the link remaining on the coin, which no doubt formerly connected it with a necklace or string of prayer-beads, shows that it has been purposely opened so as to free it at the time it was deposited in the stone. Had the coin been accidentally torn away from a chain or string of prayer-beads the link would have presented a different sort of opening. But it would be altogether unreasonable to suppose that by any sort of chance the coin could have reached the place where I found it. I showed the coin to M. Z. Le Rouzic, of the Carnac Museum, and he considers it, as I do, as evidence or proof of a cult rendered to stones here in Brittany. The coin must have been secretly placed in the menhir by some pious peasant as a direct ex voto for some favour received or demanded. The coin is somewhat discoloured, and has probably been some years in the stone, though it cannot be very old. And the offering of a coin to the spirit residing in a menhir is parallel to throwing coins, pins, or other objects into sacred fountains, which, as we know, is an undisputed practice.
433 Cf. A. C. Kruijt, Het Animisme in den Indischen Archipel; quoted in Crawley’s Idea of the Soul, p. 133.
434 Cf. Weidemann, Ancient Egyptian Doct. Immortality, p. 21.
435 Cf. Mahé, Essai.
436 Tylor, Prim. Cult.,4 ii. 143 ff., 169, 172.
437 Marett, The Threshold of Religion, c. i.
438 Mahé, Essai, p. 230.
439 A famous controversy exists as to whether the Coronation Stone now in Westminster Abbey is the Lia Fáil, or whether the pillar-stone still at Tara is the Lia Fáil. See article by E. S. Hartland in Folk-Lore, xiv. 28-60.
440 These ‘idols’ probably were not true images, but simply unshaped stone pillars planted on end in the earth; and ought, therefore, more properly to be designated fetishes.
441 Stokes, in Rev. Celt., i. 260; Rhŷs, Hib. Lect., pp. 200-1.
442 Very much first-class evidence suggests that the menhir was regarded by the primitive Celts both as an abode of a god or as a seat of divine power, and as a phallic symbol (cf. Jubainville, Le culte des menhirs dans le monde celtique, in Rev. Celt., xxvii. 313). As a phallic symbol, the menhir must have been inseparably related to a Celtic sun-cult; because among all ancient peoples where phallic worship has prevailed, the sun has been venerated as the supreme masculine force in external nature from which all life proceeds, while the phallus has been venerated as the corresponding force in human nature.
443 Silva Gadelica, ii. 137.
444 Professor J. Loth says:—‘Étymologiquement, le mot est composé de CROM, courbe, arque, formant creux, convexe, et de LLECH, pierre plate’ (Rev. Celt., xv. 223, Dolmen, Leach-Derch, Peulvan, Menhir, Cromlech). In Cornwall, Wales, and Ireland, instead of the peculiarly Breton word dolmen (composed of dol [for tol == tavl], meaning table, and of men [Middle Breton maen], meaning stone) the word cromlech is used. Cromlech is the Welsh equivalent for the Breton dolmen, but Breton archaeologists use cromlech to describe a circle formed by menhirs.
445 Rhŷs, Hib. Lect., pp. 193-4.
446 Ib., p. 192; from Sans-Marte’s edition, pp. 108-9, 361.
447 Ib., p. 193.
448 Ib., pp. 194-5; cf. Bibliotheca of Diodorus Siculus, ii. c. 47.
449 Edith F. Carey, Channel Island Folklore (Guernsey, 1909).
450 Mahé, Essai, p. 198.
451 Mahé, Essai, pp. 287-9.
452 The place for holding a gorsedd for modern Welsh initiations, under the authority of which the Eisteddfod is conducted, must also be within a circle of stones, ‘face to face with the sun and the eye of light, as there is no power to hold a gorsedd under cover or at night, but only where and as long as the sun is visible in the heavens’ (Rhŷs, Hib. Lect., pp. 208-9; from Iolo MSS., p. 50).
453 Recently before the Oxford Anthropological Society, Dr. Murray argued that the satyrs of Greek drama may originally have been masked initiators in Greek initiations. (Cf. The Oxford Magazine, February 3, 1910, p. 173.)
454 Edith F. Carey, op. cit.
455 Mahé, Essai, pp. 126-9.
456 Mahé, Essai, pp. 126-9.
457 Rhŷs, Arth. Leg., p. 339.
458 Edith F. Carey, op. cit.
459 Montelius’ Les Temps préhistoriques en Suède, par S. Reinach, p. 126. (Paris, 1895).
460 H. Schliemann, Mycenae (London, 1878), p. 213.
461 Walhouse, in Journ. Anthrop. Inst., vii. 21. These Dravidians are slightly taller than the pure Negritos, their probable ancestors; and Indian tradition considers them to be the builders of the Indian dolmens, just as Celtic tradition considers fairies and corrigans (often described as dark or even black-skinned dwarfs) to be the builders of dolmens and megaliths among the Celts. Apparently, in such folk-traditions, which correctly or incorrectly regard fairies, corrigans, or Dravidians as the builders of ancient stone monuments, there has been preserved a folk-memory of early races of men who may have been Negritos (pygmy blacks). These races, through a natural anthropomorphic process, came to be identified with the spirits of the dead and with other spiritual beings to whom the monuments were dedicated and at which they were worshipped. Here, again, the Pygmy Theory is seen at its true relative value: it is subordinate to the fundamental animism of the Fairy-Faith.
462 J. Déchelette, Manuel d’Archéologie préhistorique (Paris, 1908), i. 468, 302, 308, 311, 576, 610, &c.
463 This famous chambered tumulus ‘measures nearly 700 feet in circumference, or about 225 feet in diameter, and between 40 and 50 feet in height’ (G. Coffey, in Rl. Ir. Acad. Trans. [Dublin, 1892], xxx. 68).
464 G. Coffey, in Rl. Ir. Acad. Trans., xxx. 73-92.
465 Fol. 190 b; trans. O’Curry, Lectures, p. 505.
466 Mr. Coffey quotes from the Senchus-na-Relec, in L. U., this significant passage:—‘The nobles of the Tuatha De Danann were used to bury at Brugh (i. e. the Dagda with his three sons; also Lugaidh, and Oe, and Ollam, and Ogma, and Etan the Poetess, and Corpre, the son of Etan)’ (G. Coffey, op. cit., xxx. 77). The manuscript, however, being late and directly under Christian influence, echoes but imperfectly very ancient Celtic tradition: the immortal god-race are therein rationalized by the transcribers, and made subject to death.
467 W. C. Borlase, Dolmens of Ireland (London, 1897), ii. 346 n.
468 As translated in the Silva Gadelica, ii. 109-11.
469 Borlase, op. cit., ii. 346-7 n.
470 Borlase, op. cit., ii. 346-7 n.
471 Ib., ii. 347 n.
472 A good example of a saint’s stone bed can be seen now at Glendalough, the stone bed of St. Kevin, high above a rocky shore of the lake.
473 Coffey, op. cit., xxx. 73-4, from R. I. A. MS., by Michael O’Longan, dated 1810, p. 10, and translated by Douglas Hyde.
474 Coffey, op. cit., xxv. 73-4, from R. I. A. MS. by Michael O’Longan, dated 1810, p. 10, and trans. by Douglas Hyde.
475 Borlase, op. cit., ii. 347 n.
476 O’Donovan, Four Masters, i. 22 n.
477 Rhŷs, Hib. Lect., pp. 148-50.
478 Cf. O’Curry, Manners and Customs, ii. 122; iii. 5, 74, 122; Rhŷs, Hib. Lect., pp. 150, 150 n.; Jubainville, Essai d’un Catalogue, p. 244.
479 Rhŷs, Hib. Lect., p. 194.
480 Math ab Mathonwy’s Irish counterpart is Math mac Umóir, the magician (Book of Leinster, f. 9b; cf. Rhŷs, Trans. Third Inter. Cong. Hist. Religions, Oxford, 1908, ii. 211).
481 Rhŷs, ib., pp. 225-6; cf. R. B. Mabinogion, p. 60; Triads, i. 32, ii. 20, iii. 90. A fortified hill-top now known as Pen y Gaer, or ‘Hill of the Fortress’, on the western side of the Conway, on a mountain within sight of the railway station of Tal y Cafn, Carnarvonshire, is regarded by Sir John Rhŷs as the site of a long-forgotten cult of Math the Ancient. (Rhŷs, ib., p. 225).
482 This stone basin, now in the centre of the inner chamber, seems originally to have stood in the east recess, the largest and most richly inscribed. It is 4 feet long, 3 feet 6 inches across, and 1 foot thick. (Coffey, op. cit., xxx. 14, 21).
483 Cf. W. M. Flinders Petrie, The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh (London, 1883), p. 201.
484 All of the chief megaliths of this type, together with the chief alignements, which I have personally inspected—with the aid of a compass—in Ireland, Scotland, Isle of Man, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany, are definitely aligned east and west. It cannot be said, however, that all megalithic monuments throughout Celtic countries show definite orientation (see Déchelette’s Manuel d’Archéologie).
485 L. P. McCarty, The Great Pyramid Jeezeh (San Francisco, 1907), p. 402.
486 Jubainville, Le Cycle Myth. Irl., p. 28.
487 Maspero, Les Contes populaires de l’Égypte Ancienne,3 p. 74 n.
488 Tylor, Prim. Cult.,4 ii. 426.
489 W. H. Prescott, Conquest of Peru, i, c. 3.
490 Rochefort, Iles Antilles, p. 365; cf. Tylor, P. C.,4 ii. 424.
491 Colebrooke, Essays, vols. i, iv, v; cf. Tylor, P. C.,4 425.
492 Illus. Hist. and Pract. of Thugs (London, 1837), p. 46; cf. Tylor, P. C.,4 ii. 425.
493 Augustin, de Serm. Dom. in Monte, ii. 5; cf. Tylor, P. C.,4 ii. 427-8.
494 Ezek. viii. 16. The popular opinion that Christians face the east in prayer, or have altars eastward because Jerusalem is eastward, does not fit in with facts.
495 Cf. Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, p. 88; also Tylor, Prim. Cult.,4 ii. 48-9.
496 Though not a Mason, the writer draws his knowledge from Masons of the highest rank, and from published works by Masons like Mr. Carty’s The Great Pyramid Jeezeh.
497 Cf. Borlase, Dolmens of Ireland, ii. 347 n.
498 C. Piazzi Smyth, Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid (London, 1890).
499 Flinders Petrie, The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, pp. 169, 222.
500 C. Piazzi Smyth, op. cit.
501 In 1770, when New Grange apparently was not covered with a growth of trees as now, Governor Pownall visited it and described it as like a pyramid in general outline: ‘The pyramid in its present state’ is ‘but a ruin of what it was’ (Coffey, op. cit., xxx. 13).
502 Le Dr. G. de C., Locmariaquer et Gavr’inis (Vannes, 1876), p. 18.
503 According to Le Dr. G. de C., op. cit., p. 18.
504 Mr. Coffey says of similar details in Irish tumuli:—‘In the construction of such chambers it is usual to find a sort of sill or low stone placed across the entrance into the main chamber, and at the openings into the smaller chambers or recesses; such stones also occur laid at intervals across the bottom of the passages. This forms a marked feature in the construction at Dowth, and in the cairns on the Loughcrew Hills, but is wholly absent at New Grange’ (op. cit., xxx. 15). New Grange, however, has suffered more or less from vandalism, and originally may have contained similar stone sills.
505 Flinders Petrie, The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, p. 216.
506 Maspero, op. cit., p. 69 n., &c. The world-wide anthropomorphic tendency to construct tombs for the gods and for the dead after the plan of earthly dwellings is as evident in the excavations at Mycenae as in ancient Egypt and in Celtic lands.
507 Cf. Bruns, Canones apostolorum et conciliorum saeculorum, ii. 133.
508 Cf. F. Maassen, Concilia aevi merovingici, p. 133.
509 Cf. Boretius, Capitularia regum Francorum, i. 59; for each of the above references cf. Jubainville, Le culte des menhirs dans le monde celtique, in Rev. Celt., xxvii. 317.
510 Cf. Mahé, Essai, p. 427.
511 See Villemarqué sur Bretagne.
512 Cf. Mahé, Essai, p. 326; quoted from De Glor. Conf., c. 2.
513 Cf. Mahé, Essai, p. 326; quoted from De Glor. Conf., c. 2.
514 Cf. Mahé, Essai, p. 326; quoted from Goth., lib. ii.
515 A. W. Moore, in Folk-Lore, v. 212-29.
516 Cf. Rhŷs, Arthurian Legend, p. 247.
517 Borlase, Dolmens of Ireland, iii. 729.
518 Stokes, Tripartite Life of Patrick, pp. 99-101.
519 Ib., text, pp. 123, 323, and Intro., p. 159.
520 Book II, 69-70; see our study, p. 267.
521 Rennes Dinnshenchas, Stokes’s trans. in Rev. Celt., xv. 457.
522 Cf. Mahé, Essai, p. 323.
523 The Celts may have viewed the mistletoe on the sacred oak as the seat of the tree’s life, because in the winter sleep of the leafless oak the mistletoe still maintains its own foliage and fruit, and like the heart of a sleeper continues pulsing with vitality. The mistletoe thus being regarded as the heart-centre of the divine spirit in the oak-tree was cut with a golden sickle by the arch-druid clad in pure white robes, amid great religious solemnity, and became a vicarious sacrifice or atonement for the worshippers of the tree god. (Cf. Frazer, G. B.,2 iii. 447 ff.)
524 Pliny, Nat. Hist., xvi. 95; cf. Rhŷs, Hib. Lect., p. 218.
525 Dissert., viii; cf. Rhŷs, ib., p. 219.
526 Meineke’s ed., xii. 5, 1; cf. Rhŷs, ib., p. 219. The oak-tree is pre-eminently the holy tree of Europe. Not only Celts, but Slavs, worshipped amid its groves. To the Germans it was their chief god; the ancient Italians honoured it above all other trees; the original image of Jupiter on the Capitol at Rome seems to have been a natural oak-tree. So at Dodona, Zeus was worshipped as immanent in a sacred oak. Cf. Frazer, G. B.,2 iii. 346 ff.
527 Cf. Mahé, Essai, pp. 333-4; quotation from Hist. du Maine, i. 17.
528 Cf. Mahé, Essai, p. 334; quoted from Lib. VII, indict. i, epist. 5.
529 Stokes, Tripartite Life, p. 409.
530 Cf. Wood-Martin, Traces of the Older Faiths in Ireland, i. 305.
531 W. Gregor, Notes on Beltene Cakes, in Folk-Lore, vi. 5.
532 Temple, Legends of the Panjab, in Folk-Lore, x. 406.
533 Lefèvre, Le Culte des Morts chez les Latins, in Rev. Trad. Pop., ix. 195-209.
534 See Folk-Lore, vi. 192.
535 The term ‘People of Peace’ seems, however, to have originated from confounding sid, ‘fairy abode,’ and síd, ‘peace.’
536 Cf. Le Cycle Myth. Irl., p. 102.
537 The crocodile as the mystic symbol of Sîtou provides one key to unlock the mysteries of what eminent Egyptologists have erroneously called animal worship, erroneously because they have interpreted literally what can only be interpreted symbolically. The crocodile is called the ‘son of Sîtou’ in the Papyrus magique, Harris, pl. vi, ll. 8-9 (cf. Maspero, Les Contes populaires de l’Égypte Ancienne,539 Intro., p. 56); and as the waters seem to swallow the sun as it sinks below the horizon, so the crocodile, as Sîtou representing the waters, swallows the Children of Osiris, as the Egyptians called themselves. On the other hand, Osiris is typified by the white bull, in many nations the sun emblem, white being the emblem of purity and light, while the powers of the bull represent the masculinity of the sun, which impregnates all nature, always thought of as feminine, with life germs.
538 Cf. Maspero, op. cit., Intro., p. 49.
539 Cf. Borlase, Dolmens of Ireland, iii. 854.
540 Cf. Lefèvre, Rev. Trad. Pop., ix. 195-209.
541 J. G. Campbell collected in Scotland two versions of a parallel episode, but concerning Loch Lurgan. In both versions the flight begins by Fionn’s foster-mother carrying Fionn, and in both, when she is tired, Fionn carries her and runs so fast that when the loch is reached only her shanks are left. These he throws out on the loch, and hence its name Loch Lurgan, ‘Lake of the Shanks.’ (The Fians, pp. 18-19).
542 During the seventeenth century, the English government, acting through its Dublin representatives, ordered this original Cave or Purgatory to be demolished; and with the temporary suppression of the ceremonies which resulted and the consequent abandonment of the island, the Cave, which may have been filled up, has been lost.
543 Thomas Wright, St. Patrick’s Purgatory (London, 1844), pp. 67-8.
544 Wright, op. cit., p. 69.
545 In the face of all the legends told of pilgrims who have been in Patrick’s Purgatory, it seems that either through religious frenzy like that produced in Protestant revivals, or else through some strange influence due to the cave itself after the preliminary disciplines, some of the pilgrims have had most unusual psychic experiences. Those who have experienced fasting and a rigorous life for a prescribed period affirm that there results a changed condition, physical, mental, and spiritual, so that it is very probable that the Christian pilgrims to the Purgatory, like the pagan pilgrims who ‘fasted on’ the Tuatha De Danann in New Grange, were in good condition to receive impressions of a psychical nature such as the Society for Psychical Research is beginning to believe are by no means rare to people susceptible to them. Neophytes seeking initiation among the ancients had to undergo even more rigorous preparations than these; for they were expected while entranced to leave their physical bodies and in reality enter the purgatorial state, as we shall presently have occasion to point out.
546 Wright, St. Patrick’s Purgatory, pp. 62 ff.
547 L. R. Farnell, Cults of the Greek States (Oxford, 1907), iii. 126-98, &c.
548 Cf. Athenaeus, 614 A; Aristoph., Nubes, 508; and Harper’s Dict. Class. Lit. and Antiq., p. 1615.
549 Cf. O. Seyffert, Dict. Class. Antiquities, trans. (London, 1895), Mithras.
550 Brasseur, Mexique, iii. 20, &c.; Tylor, P. C.,4 ii. 45.
551 Cf. Hutton Webster, Primitive Secret Societies (New York, 1908), p. 38, and passim.
552 In the ancient Greek world the annual celebration of the Mysteries drew great concourses of people from all regions round the Mediterranean; to the modern Breton world the chief religious Pardons are annual events of such supreme importance that, after preparing plenty of food for the pilgrimage, the whole family of a pious peasant of Lower Brittany will desert farm and work dressed in their beautiful and best costumes for one of these Pardons, the most picturesque, the most inspiring, and the highest folk-festivals still preserved by the Roman Church; while to Roman Catholics in all countries a pilgrimage to Lough Derg is the sacred event of a lifetime.
In the Breton Pardons, as in the purgatorial rites, we seem to see the survivals of very ancient Celtic Mysteries strikingly like the Mysteries of Eleusis. The greatest of the Pardons, the Pardon of St. Anne d’Auray, will serve as a basis for comparison; and while in some respects it has had a recent and definitely historical origin (or revival), this origin seems on the evidence of archaeology to have been a restoration, an expansion, and chiefly a Christianization of prehistoric rites then already partly fallen into decay. Such rites remained latent in the folk-memory, and were originally celebrated in honour of the sacred fountain, and probably also of Isis and the child, whose terra-cotta image was ploughed up in a neighbouring field by the famous peasant Nicolas, and naturally regarded by him and all who saw it as of St. Anne and the Holy Child. Thus, in the Pardon of St. Anne d’Auray, which extends over three days, there is a torch-light procession at night under ecclesiastical sanction; as in the Ceres Mysteries, wherein the neophytes with torches kindled sought all night long for Proserpine. There are purification rites, not especially under ecclesiastical sanction, at the holy fountain now dedicated to St. Anne, like the purification rites of the Eleusinian worshippers at the sea-shore and their visit to a holy well. There are mystery plays, recently instituted, as in Greek initiation ceremonies; sacred processions, led by priests, bearing the image of St. Anne and other images, comparable to Greek sacred processions in which the god Iacchos was borne on the way to Eleusis. The all-night services in the dimly-lighted church of St. Anne, with the special masses in honour of the Christian saints and for the dead, are parallel to the midnight ceremonies of the Greeks in their caves of initiation and to the libations to the gods and to the spirits of the departed at Greek initiations. Finally, in the Greek mysteries there seems to have been some sort of expository sermon or exhortation to the assembled neophytes quite comparable to the special appeal made to the faithful Catholics assembled in the magnificent church of St. Anne d’Auray by the bishops and high ecclesiastics of Brittany. (For these Classical parallels compare Farnell, Cults of the Greek States, iii, passim.)
553 Cf. Rhŷs, Hib. Lect., p. 411, &c.
554 O’Curry, Lectures, pp. 586-7.
555 There is this very significant legend on record about the Cave of Cruachan:—‘Magh Mucrime, now, pigs of magic came out of the cave of Cruachain, and that is Ireland’s gate of Hell.’ And ‘Out of it, also, came the Red Birds that withered up everything in Erin that their breath would touch, till the Ulstermen slew them with their slings.’ (B. of Leinster, p. 288a; Stokes’s trans., in Rev. Celt., xiii. 449; cf. Silva Gadelica, ii. 353.)
556 Forbes, Lives of S. Ninian and S. Kentigern (Edinburgh, 1874), pp. 285, 345.
557 Cf. Wright, St. Patrick’s Purgatory, pp. 81-2.
558 Cf. Godescard, Vies des Saints, xi. 24; also Bergier, Dict. de Théol., v. 405.
559 Cf. Godescard, Vies des Saints, xi. 32. But there is some disagreement in this matter of dates: Petrus Damianus, Vita S. Odilonis, in the Bollandist Acta Sanctorum, January 1, records a legend of how the Abbot Odilon decreed that November 2, the day after All Saints’ Day, should be set apart for services for the departed (cf. Tylor, Prim. Cult.,4 ii. 37 n.).
560 Cf. Godescard, Vies des Saints, xi. 1 n.
561 Part II, sec. 4; c. 4, par. 8; cf. Bergier, Dict. de Théol., iv. 322.
562 P. 11a, l. 19; in Stokes’s Tripartite Life, Intro., p. 194.
563 Enchiridion, chap. cx; Testament of St. Ephrem (ed. Vatican), ii. 230, 236; Euseb., de Vita Constant., liv. iv, c. lx. 556, c. lxx. 562; cf. Godescard, Vies des Saints, xi. 30-1.
564 St. Ambroise, de Obitu Theodosii, ii. 1197; cf. Godescard, Vies des Saints, xi. 31 n.
565 Cf. Godescard, Vies des Saints, xi. 31-2.
566 I am indebted to Mr. William McDougall, M.A., Wilde Reader in Mental Philosophy in the University of Oxford, for having read through and criticized the first draft of this section; and while he is in no way responsible for the views set forth herein, nevertheless his suggestions for the improvement of their scientific framework have been of very great value. I must also express my obligation to him for having suggested through his Oxford lectures a good share of the important material interwoven into chapter xii touching the vitalistic view of evolution.
567 Cf. C. Du Prel, Philosophy of Mysticism (London, 1889), i. 7, 11.
568 T. Ribot, The Diseases of Personality; cf. J. L. Nevius, Demon Possession (London, 1897), pp. 234-5.
569 Proc. S. P. R. (London), v. 167; cf. A. Lang, Making of Religion, p. 64.
570 W. James, Confidences of a ‘Psychical Researcher’, in American Magazine (October 1909).
571 A. Lang, Cock Lane and Common Sense (London, 1896), p. 35.
572 According to Professor Freud, the well-known neurologist of Vienna, external stimuli are not admitted to the dream-consciousness in the same manner that they would be admitted to the waking-consciousness, but they are disguised and altered in particular ways (cf. S. Freud, Die Traumdeutung, 2nd ed., Vienna, 1909; and S. Ferenczi, The Psychological Analysis of Dreams, in Amer. Journ. Psych., April 1910, No. 2, xxi. 318, &c.).
573 Du Prel, op. cit., i. 135.
574 G. F. Stout, Mr. F. W. Myers on ‘Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death’, in Hibbert Journal, ii, No. 1 (London, October 1903), p. 56.
575 F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (London, 1903), i. 131.
576 R. L. Stevenson, Across the Plains, chapter on Dreams.
577 Stout, op. cit., p. 54.
578 Freud, op. cit.; Ferenczi, op. cit.; E. Jones, Freud’s Theory of Dreams, in Amer. Journ. Psych., April 1910, No. 2, xxi. 283-308.
579 Freud, The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis, in Amer. Journ. Psych., April 1910, No. 2, xxi. 203.
580 Du Prel, op. cit., i. 33.
581 Myers, op. cit., i. 134.
582 Fechner, Zentralblatt für Anthropologie, p. 774; cf. Du Prel, op. cit., i. 92.
583 Haddock, Somnolism and Psychism, p. 213; cf. Du Prel, op. cit., i. 93.
584 Perty, Mystische Erscheinungen, i. 305; cf. Du Prel, op. cit., ii. 63.
585 Kerner, Seherin v. Prevorst, p. 196; cf. Du Prel, op. cit., ii. 65.
586 Chardel, Essai de Psychologie, p. 344; cf. Du Prel, op. cit., ii. 64.
587 Cf. Du Prel, op. cit., i. 88-9.
588 Myers, op. cit., chapter vi.
589 Stout, op. cit., pp. 64, 61-2.
590 Lang, Mr. Myers’s Theory of ‘The Subliminal Self’, in Hibbert Journal, ii, No. 3 (April 1904), p. 530.
591 The peculiar and often unique characteristics of the fairy-folk of any given fairy-faith, as we have pointed out in chapter iii (pp. 233, 282), are to be regarded as being merely anthropomorphically coloured reflections of the social life or environment of the particular ethnic group who hold the particular fairy-faith; and, as Mr. Lang here suggests, when they are stripped of these superficial characteristics, which are due to such social psychology, they become ghosts of the dead or other spiritual beings.
Our own researches lead us to the conviction that behind the purely mythical aspect of these fairy-faiths there exists a substantial substratum of real phenomena not yet satisfactorily explained by science; that such phenomena have been in the past and are at the present time the chief source of the belief in fairies, that they are the foundation underlying all fairy mythologies. We need only refer to the following phenomena observed among Celtic and other peoples, and attributed by them to ‘fairy’ or ‘spirit’ agency: (1) music which competent percipients believe to be of non-human origin, and hence by the Celts called ‘fairy’ music, whether this be vocal or instrumental in sound; (2) the movement of objects without known cause; (3) rappings and other noises called ‘supernatural’ (cf. pp. 81 n., 481-4, 488; also pp. 47, 57, 61, 67, 71, 72, 74, 88, 94, 98, 101, 120, 124, 125, 131, 132, 134, 139, 148, 156, 172, 181, 187, 213, 218, 220, &c.).
592 It is our hope that this book will help to lessen the marked deficiency of recorded testimony concerning ‘fairy’ beings and ‘fairy’ phenomena observed by reliable percipients. We have endeavoured to demonstrate that genuine ‘fairy’ phenomena and genuine ‘spirit’ phenomena are in most cases identical. Hence we believe that if ‘spirit’ phenomena are worthy of the attention of science, equally so are ‘fairy’ phenomena. The fairy-belief in its typical or conventional aspects (apart from the animism which we discovered at the base of the belief) is, as was pointed out in our anthropological examination of the evidence (pp. 281-2), due to a very complex social psychology. In this chapter we have eliminated all social psychology, as not being the essential factor in the Fairy-Faith. Therefore, from our point of view, Mr. Lang’s implied explanation of the typical fairy-visions, that they are due to ‘suggestion acting on the subconscious self’, does not apply to the rarer kind of fairy visions which form part of our x-quantity (see pp. 60-6, 83-4, &c.). If it does, then it also applies to all non-Celtic visions of spirits, in ancient and in modern times; and the animistic hypothesis now accepted by most psychical researchers, namely, that discarnate intelligences exist independent of the percipient, must be set aside in favour of the non-animistic hypothesis. If, on the other hand, it be admitted that ‘fairy’ phenomena are, as we maintain, essentially the same as ‘spirit’ phenomena, then the belief in fairies ceases to be purely mythical, and ‘fairy’ visions by a Celtic seer who is physically and psychically sound do not seem to arise from that seer’s suggestion acting on his own subconsciousness; but certain types of ‘fairy’ visions undoubtedly do arise from suggestion, coming from a ‘fairy’ or other intelligence, acting on the conscious or subconscious content of the percipient’s mind (cf. pp. 484-7).
593 Lang, Cock Lane and Common Sense, pp. 208, 35.
594 Sir Oliver Lodge, Psychical Research, in Harper’s Mag., August 1908 (New York and London).
595 Sir Oliver Lodge, The Survival of Man (London, 1909), p. 339.
596 James, op. cit., pp. 587-9.
597 Readers are referred to such authoritative works as the Phantasms of the Living (London, 1886), by Gurney, Myers, and Podmore; to the Report on the Census of Hallucinations of Modern Spiritualism, by Professor Sidgwick’s Committee; to the Naturalisation of the Supernatural (New York and London, 1908), by F. Podmore; to the Survival of the Human Personality, by F. W. H. Myers; and other like works, all of which originate from the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research (London).
598 C. Flammarion, Mysterious Psychic Forces, pp. 441, 431.
599 Sir Wm. Crookes, Notes of an Enquiry into Phenomena called Spiritual, during the years 1870-73 (London), Part III, p. 87.
600 See Quart. Journ. Science (July 1871).
601 Cf. Lang, Cock Lane and Common Sense, p. 281; and for other cases of objects moved without contact see ib., pp. 50, 52, 53, 58, 122 ff. See also F. Podmore’s article on Poltergeists, in Proceedings S. P. R., xii. 45-115; and his Naturalisation of the Supernatural, chapter vii.
602 Sir Wm. Crookes, op. cit., Part III, p. 100.
603 Ib., p. 94.
604 Lang, Cock Lane and Common Sense, pp. 60, 81, 139, &c.
605 Using as a basis the data of Professor Sidgwick’s Committee and the results earlier obtained by Gurney, Myers, and Podmore (see Phantasms of the Living), Mr. William McDougall shows concisely the probability of an apparition appearing within twelve hours of the death of the individual whom it represents. He says:—‘... of all recognized apparitions of living persons, only one in 19,000 may be expected to be a death-coincidence of this sort. But the census shows that of 1,300 recognized apparitions of living persons 30 are death-coincidences, and that is equivalent to 440 in 19,000. Hence, of recognized hallucinations, those coincident with death are 440 times more numerous than we should expect, if no causal relation obtained.’ And Mr. McDougall concludes: ‘... since good evidence of telepathic communication has been experimentally obtained, the least improbable explanation of these death-apparitions is that the dying person exerts upon his distant friend some telepathic influence which generates an hallucinatory perception of himself’ (Hallucinations, in Ency. Brit., 11th ed., xii. 863).
606 Myers, op. cit., ii. 65, 45 ff., 49 ff., &c.
607 Nevius, Demon Possession, Introduction, pp. iv, vii; pp. 240-2, 144-5. In accordance with all such phenomena, psychical researchers have logically called spirits manifesting themselves through the body of a living person possessing spirits. And as in the case of Chinese demon-possession, the phenomena of mediumship often result in the moral derangement, insanity, or even suicide on the part of ‘mediums’ who so unwisely exhibit it without special preparation or no preparation at all, and too often in complete ignorance of a possible gradual undermining of their psychic life, will-power, and even physical health. All of this seems to offer direct and certain evidence to sustain Christians and non-Christians in their condemnation of all forms of necromancy or calling up of spirits. The following statement will make our position towards mediumship of the most common kind clear:
In Druidism, for one example, disciples for training in magical sciences are said to have spent twenty years in severe study and special psychical training before deemed fit to be called Druids and thus to control daemons, ghosts, or all invisible entities capable of possessing living men and women. And even now in India and elsewhere there is reported to be still the same ancient course of severe disciplinary training for candidates seeking magical powers. But in modern Spiritualism conditions are altogether different in most cases, and ‘mediums’ instead of controlling with an iron will, as a magician does, spirits which become manifest in séances, surrender entirely their will-power and whole personality to them.
608 Cf. Sigmund Freud, The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis, in Amer. Journ. Psych., xxi, No. 2 (April 1910).
609 The fact that all matter is capable of assuming a gaseous or invisible state furnishes good scientific reasons for postulating the actual existence of intelligent beings possessed of an invisible yet physical body. There may well be on and about our planet many distinct invisible organic life-forms undiscovered by zoologists. To deny such a possibility would be unscientific.
610 Cf. Communication adressée au Dr J. Dupré, p. 382 of an essay on La Métempsycose basée sur les Principes de la Biologie et du Magnétisme physiologique, in Le Hasard (Paris, 1909), by P. C. Revel. Cases of regeneration among the aged are known, and these show how the subliminal life-forces try to renew the physical body when it is worn out (cf. Revel, ib., p. 372).
611 Cf. Revel, op. cit., p. 295 ff.
612 If scientists discover, as they probably will in time, what they call the secret of life, they will not have discovered the secret of life at all. What they will have discovered will be the physical conditions under which life manifests itself. In other words, science will most likely soon be able to set up artificially in a laboratory such physical conditions as exist in nature naturally, and by means of which life is able to manifest itself through matter. Life will still be as great a mystery as it is to-day; though short-sighted materialists are certain to announce to an eager world that the final problem of the universe has been solved and that life is merely the resultant of a subtle chemical compound.
613 Professor Freud, after long and careful study, arrived at the following conclusion:—‘The child has his sexual impulse and activities from the beginning, he brings them with him into the world, and from these the so-called normal sexuality of adults emerges by a significant development through manifold stages.’ And Dr. Sanford Bell, in an earlier writing entitled A Preliminary Study of the Emotions of Love between the Sexes (see Amer. Journ. Psych., 1902), came to a similar conclusion (cf. Freud, op. cit., pp. 207-8).
614 Cf. Hans Driesch, The Science and Philosophy of the Organism (London, 1908); and Henri Bergson, L’Évolution créatrice (Paris, 1908).
615 This Celtic view of non-personal immortality completely fits in with all the voluminous data of psychical research: after forty years of scientific research into psychics there are no proofs yet adduced that the human personality as a self-sufficient unit of consciousness survives indefinitely the death of its body. Granted that it does survive as a ghost for an undetermined period, generally to be counted in years, during which time it seems to be gradually fading out or disintegrating, there is no reliable evidence anywhere to show that a personality as such has manifested through a ‘medium’ or otherwise after an interval of one thousand years, or even of five hundred years. We have, in fact, no knowledge of the survival of a human personality one hundred years after, and probably there are no good examples of such a survival twenty-five years after the death of the body. Such an eminent psychical researcher as William James recognized this drift of the data of psychics, and when he died he held the conviction that there is no personal immortality (see p. 505 n. following).
616 Though not inclined toward the vitalistic view of human evolution, M. Th. Ribot very closely approaches the Celtic view of the Ego (or individuality) as being the principle which gives unity to different personalities, but he does not have in mind personalities in the sense implied by the Celtic Esoteric Doctrine of Re-birth:—‘The Ego subjectively considered consists of a sum of conscious states’ (comparable to personalities).... ‘In brief, the Ego may be considered in two ways: either in its actual form, and then it is the sum of existing conscious states; or, in its continuity with the past, and then it is formed by the memory according to the process outlined above. It would seem, according to this view, that the identity of the Ego depended entirely upon the memory. But such a conception is only partial. Beneath the unstable compound phenomenon in all its protean phases of growth, degeneration, and reproduction, there is a something that remains: and this something is the undefined consciousness, the product of all the vital processes, constituting bodily perception and what is expressed in one word—the cœnæsthesis.’ (The Diseases of Memory, pp. 107-8).
William James, the greatest psychologist of our epoch, after a long and faithful life consecrated to the search after a true understanding of human consciousness, finally arrived at substantially the same conviction as Fechner did, that there is no personal immortality, but that the personality ‘is but a temporary and partial separation and circumscription of a part of a larger whole, into which it is reabsorbed at death’ (W. McDougall, In Memory of William James, in Proc. S. P. R., Part LXII, vol. xxv, p. 28). He thus virtually accepted the mystic’s view that the personality after the death of the body is absorbed into a higher power, which, to our mind, is comparable with the Ego conceived as the unifying principle behind personalities. In one of his last writings, James explained his belief in such a manner as to make it coincide at certain points with the view held by modern Celtic mystics which has been presented above; the difference being that, unlike these mystics, James was not prepared to say (though he raised the question) whether or not behind the ‘mother-sea’ of consciousness there is, as Fechner believed, a hierarchy of consciousnesses (themselves subordinate to still higher consciousnesses, and comparable with so many Egos or Individualities) which send out emanations as temporary human personalities. The organic psychical forms (if we may use such an expression) of such temporary human personalities would have to be regarded from James’s point of view as being built up out of the psychical elements constituting the ‘mother-sea’ of consciousness, just as the human body is built up out of the physical elements in the realm of matter:—‘Out of my experience, such as it is (and it is limited enough) one fixed conclusion dogmatically emerges, and that is this, that we with our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest. The maple and the pine may whisper to each other with their leaves, and Conanicut and Newport hear each other’s foghorns. But the trees also commingle their roots in the darkness underground, and the islands also hang together through the ocean’s bottom. Just so there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality’ (used as synonymous with personality and not in our distinct sense) ‘builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir. Our “normal” consciousness’ (the personality as we distinguish it from the Ego or individuality) ‘is circumscribed for adaptation to our external earthly environment, but the fence is weak in spots, and fitful influences from beyond break in, showing the otherwise unverifiable common connexion. Not only psychic research, but metaphysical philosophy and speculative biology are led in their own ways to look with favour on some such “pan-psychic” view of the universe as this.’ (W. James, The Confidences of a Psychical Researcher, in The American Magazine, October 1909). Again, James wrote:—‘The drift of all the evidence we have seems to me to sweep us very strongly towards the belief in some form of superhuman life with which we may, unknown to ourselves, be co-conscious.’ (A Pluralistic Universe, New York, 1909, p. 309.)
617 W. James, Varieties of Religious Experience (London, 1902), pp. 511, 236 n.
618 M. Th. Ribot, in Diseases of Memory (London, 1882), pp. 82-98 ff., gives numerous examples of such loss and recovery of memory.
619 Cf. Freud, op. cit., pp. 192, 204-5, &c.
620 Cf. A. Moll, Hypnotism (London, 1890), pp. 141 ff., 126.
621 Cf. A. Moll, Hypnotism (London, 1890), pp. 141 ff., 126.
622 Cf. Freud, op. cit., p. 192.
623 Freud, Die Traumdeutung, 2nd ed. (Vienna, 1906); cf. S. Ferenczi, The Psychological Analysis of Dreams, in Amer. Journ. Psych. (April 1910), xxi, No. 2, p. 326.
624 A similar state of high development is to be assumed for a great Celtic hero like Arthur, who were he to be re-born would (as is said to have been the case with King Mongan, the reincarnation of Finn) bring with him memory of his past: unlike the consciousness of the normal man, the consciousness of one of the Divine Ones is normally the subconsciousness, the consciousness of the individuality; and not the personal consciousness, which, like the personality, is non-permanent in itself. This further illustrates the Celtic theory of non-personal immortality.
625 Ribot, op. cit., p. 100 ff.
626 Cf. Lang, Cock Lane and Common Sense, pp. 217 ff. Blackwood’s Magazine, cxxix (January 1881), contains a remarkable account of a child who remembered previous lives. Lord Lindsay, in his Letters (ed. of 1847, p. 351), refers to a feeling when he beheld the river Kadisha descending from Lebanon, of having in a previous life seen the same scene. Dickens in his Pictures from Italy testifies to a parallel experience. E. D. Walker, in his interesting work on Reincarnation (pp. 42-5) has brought together many other well-attested cases of people who likewise have thought they could remember fragments of a former state of conscious existence. In his diary, under date of February 17, 1828, Sir Walter Scott wrote as follows:—‘I cannot, I am sure, tell if it is worth marking down, that yesterday, at dinner-time, I was strangely haunted by what I would call the sense of pre-existence, viz. a confused idea that nothing that passed was said for the first time.’ Lockhart, Life of Scott (first ed.), vii. 114. Bulwer Lytton in Godolphin (chapter xv), and Edgar Allen Poe in Eureka, record similar experiences. Mr. H. Fielding Hall, in The Soul of a People4 (London, 1902), pp. 290-308, reports several very remarkable cases of responsible natives of Burma who stated that they could recall former lives passed by them as men and women. Mr. Hall has carefully investigated these cases, and gives us the impression that they are worthy of scientific consideration.
627 Cf. Ferenczi, op. cit., p. 316, &c. Professor Freud’s theory of dreams supports entirely, but does not imply our hypothesis that some (and probably many) abnormal dreams of a rare kind, whether good or bad in tendency, may be due to the latent content of subconsciousness, out of which they undoubtedly arise, having been collected and carried over from a previous state of consciousness parallel to our present one. In respect to our present life Professor Freud holds, as a result of psycho-analysis of thousands of dream subjects, that the latent content of every dream in the adult is directly dependent upon mental processes which frequently reach back to the earliest childhood; and he gives detailed cases in illustration. In other words, there is always a latent dream-material behind the conscious dream-content, and probably a part of it was innate in the child at birth, and hence, according to our view, was pre-existent. (Cf. Ernest Jones, Freud’s Theory of Dreams, in Amer. Journ. Psych., April 1910, xxi, No. 2, pp. 301 ff.)
628 Cf. Du Prel, Philosophy of Mysticism, ii. 25 ff., 34 ff.
629 The Dream of Ravan, in Dublin Univ. Mag., xliii. 468.
630 Myers, in Proc. S. P. R., vii. 305.
631 James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 483.
632 The esoteric teaching in many of the mystic schools of antiquity was that the atoms of each human body transmigrate through all lower forms of life during the long period supposed to intervene between death and re-birth of the individuality. This doctrine seems to be one of the main sources of the corruption which crept into the ancient re-birth doctrines and transformed many of them into doctrines of transmigration of the human soul into animal and plant bodies; and some unscrupulous priesthoods openly taught such corrupted doctrines as a means of making the ignorant populace submissive to ecclesiastical rule, the theological theory expounded by such priesthoods being that the evil-doer, but not the keeper of the letter of the canonical law, is condemned to expiate his sins through birth in brute bodies. The pure form of the mystic doctrine was that after the lapse of the long period of disembodiment the individuality reconstructs its human body anew by drawing to itself the identical atoms which constituted its previous human body—these atoms, and not the individuality, having transmigrated through all the lower kingdoms. Such an esoteric doctrine probably lies behind the exoteric Egyptian teaching that the human soul after the death of its body passes through all plant and animal bodies during a period of three thousand years, after which it returns to human embodiment. Some scholars have held that the exoteric interpretation of this theory and its consequent literal interpretation as a transmigration doctrine led the Egyptians to mummify the bodies of their dead. Cf. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book III, ll. 843-61; and Herodotus, Book II, on Egypt.
633 Cf. Dr. L. S. Fugairon’s La Survivance de l’âme, ou la Mort et la Renaissance chez les êtres vivants; études de physiologie et d’embryologie philosophiques (Paris, 1907); cf. Revel, Le Hasard, p. 457.
634 Darwin never considered or attempted to suggest what it is that of itself really evolves, for it cannot be the physical body which only grows from immaturity to maturity and then dissolves. Darwin thus overlooked the essential factor in his whole doctrine; while the Druids and other ancients, wiser than we have been willing to admit, seem not only to have anticipated Darwin by thousands of years, but also to have quite surpassed him in setting up their doctrine of re-birth, which explains both the physical and psychical evolution of man.