The Crest-Wave Of Evolution Part 36

It brings me naturally to the place where we take her up in our history. At the end of the fourth century, "the sea," says the Roman poet Claudian, "was foamy with the hostile oars of the Irish." Niall of the Nine Hostages was high king of Tara; and he was all for a life on the ocean wave and a home on the rolling deep. He raided the coasts of Britain annually, and any other coasts that came handy, carrying off captives where he might.

One of these was a boy named Sucat, from Glamorgan: probably from Glamorgan, though it might have been from anywhere between the Clyde and the Loire. In time this Sucat escaped from his Irish slavery, entered the Church, took the Latin name of Patrick, and made it his business to Christianize Ireland. That was about the time when the Britons were throwing off the Roman yoke. He was at the height of his career in the middle of the fifth century.

Even if he did not make a clean and bloodless sweep of the whole country, Patrick was one of the most successful Christian missionaries that ever preached. There was some opposition by the druids, but it was not successful. He went to the courts of the kings, and converted them; and to say you had baptized a king, was as good as to say you had his whole clan captured; for it was a fractious unnatural clansman who would not go where his chieftain led. We are in an atmosphere altogether different from the rancor and fanaticism of the continent. Patrick,--there must have been something very winning and kindly about the man,-- roused no tradition of animosity. He never made Ireland hate her pagan past. When the Great Age came,--which was not till later, --not till the Crest-Wave had pa.s.sed from Wales,--and Christian Irishmen took to writing down the old legends and stories, they were very tender to the memories of the G.o.ds and heroes. It was in pity for the Children of Lir, that were turned into swans, that they were kept alive long enough to be baptized and sent to heaven. Can you fancy Latona and her children so received by Greekish or Latin monks into the Communion of Saints? But the Irish Church was always finding excuses for the salvation of the great figures of old. Some saint called up Cuculain from h.e.l.l, converted him, and gave him a free pa.s.s that Peter at the Gates should honor. There was Conchobar MacNessa again. He was king of Ulster in the days of the Red Branch, the grand heroic cycle of Irish legend; Cuculain was the chief of his warriors. A brain-ball was driven through the skull of Conchobar from a sling; but sure, his druid doctors would never be phased by a trifle like that. They bound up the wound and healed him in a cauldron of cure; but warned him never to get excited or over-exert himself, or the brain-ball would come out and he would die; barring such accidents, he would do splendidly. And so he did for some years. Then one day a darkness came over the world, and he put his druids to finding out the cause of it. They told him they saw in their vision three crosses on a hill in the east of the world, and three men nailed on them; and the man in the middle with the likeness of the Son of G.o.d. With that the battle-fury came on Conchobar, and he fell to destroying the trees of the forest with his sword. "Oh that I were there!" he cried; "thus would I deal with his enemies." With the excitement and over-exertion, out came the brain-ball, and he died. And if G.o.d Almighty would not take Conchobar MacNessa, pagan as he was, into heaven for a thing like that,--sure, G.o.d Almighty was not half such a decent kindly creature as the Irish monk who invented the yarn.

So nothing comes down to us that has not pa.s.sed the censorship of a race-proud priesthood, with perhaps never a drop of the wine of true wisdom in them, to help them discriminate and truth to shine through what they were pa.s.sing on; but still, with a great deal of the milk of human kindness as a subst.i.tute, so far as it might be. They treasured the literary remains of druid days; liberally twisting them, to be sure, into consonance with Christian ideas of history and the fitness of things; but still they treasured them, and drew from them inspiration. Thus the whole past comes down euhemerized, cooked, and touched up. It comes down very glorious,--because the strongest feeling in Irish hearts was Irishism, race-consciousness. Whereas the Latin Church was fiercely against antiquity and all its monuments, the Celtic Church in Ireland was anxious above all things to preserve Celtic antiquity,--having first brought it into line with the one true faith. The records had to be kept,--and made to tally with the Bible. The G.o.dhood of the G.o.ds had to be covered away, and you had to treat them as if they had been respectable children of Adam,--more or less respectable, at any rate. A descent from Noah had to be found for the legendary kings and heroes; and for every event a date corresponding with that of someone in the Bible. Above all, you had to pack the whole Irish past into the few thousand years since Noah came out of the Ark.--You get a glimpse in Wales of the struggle there was between Hebrao-Christian chronology and the Celtic sense of the age of the world: in the pedigree of an ancient family, where, it is said, about half way down the line this entry occurs after one of the names: "In his time Adam was expelled from Paradise." In Ireland, indeed, there was at least one man from before the Flood living in historic times: Fintan, whom, with others, Noah sent into the western world while the Ark was building. Here is one of Fintan's poems:

"If you inquire of me concerning Ireland, I know and can relate gladly all the invasions of it since the beginning of the delightful world. Out of the east came Cessair, a woman, daughter of Bith, with her fifty maidens, with her three men.

The flood came upon Bith on his mountain without mystery; on Ladru at Ard Ladran; on Cessair at Cull Cesra. As for me, for the s.p.a.ce of a year, beneath the rapid flood, on the height of a mighty wave, I enjoyed sleep which was exceeding good. Then, in Ireland, I found my way above the waters until Partholan came out of the East, from the land of the Greeks. Then, in Ireland, I enjoyed rest; Ireland was void till the son of Agnoman came, Nemed with the delightful manners. The Fir Bolg and the Fir Galioin came a long time after, and the Fir Domnan also; they landed at Erris in the west. Then came the Tuatha De Danaan in their hood of mist. I lived with them for a long time, though their age is far removed. After that came the sons of Mile out of Spain and the south. I lived with them; mighty were their battles. I had come to a great age, I do not conceal it, when the pure faith was sent to Ireland by the King of the Cloudy Heaven. I am the fair Fintan son of Bochra; I proclaim it aloud. Since the flood came here I am a great personage in Ireland."

In the middle of the sixth century he was summoned as a witness by the descendants of Niall of the Nine Hostages against King Dermot MacKerval, in a dispute as to the ancient divisions of Ireland. He came to Tara with nine companies in front of him, and nine companies behind: they were his descendants. This, mind you, is in strictly historical times. The king and his people received him kindly, and after he had rested a little, he told them his story, and that of Tara from its foundation.

They asked him to give them some proof of his memory. "Right willingly," said Fintan. "I pa.s.sed one day through a wood in West Munster; I brought home with me a red berry of the yew-tree, which I planted in my kitchen-garden, and it grew there till it was as tall as a man. Then I took it up, and re-planted it on the green lawn before the house, and it grew there until a hundred champions could find room under its foliage, to be sheltered there from wind and rain, and cold and heat. I remained so, and my yew remained so, spending our time alike, until at last all its leaves fell off from decay. When afterwards I thought of turning it to some profit, I went to it, and cut it from its stem; and I made of it seven vats, and seven keeves, and seven stans, and seven churns, and seven pitchers, and seven milans, and seven medars, with hoops for all. I remained so with my yew vessels until their hoops all fell off from decay and old age. After that I re-made them; but could only get a keeve out of the vat, and a stan out of the keeve, and a mug out of the stan, and a cilorn out of the mug, and a milan out of the cilom, and a medar out of the milan; and I leave it to Almighty G.o.d that I do not know where their dust is now, after their dissolution with me from decay." *

------ * De Jubainville, _Irish Mythological Cycle;_ when also Fintan's poem quoted above.

Now here is a strange relic of the Secret Teaching that comes down with this legend of Fintan. Each of the four Cardinal Points, it was said, had had its Man appointed to record all the wonderful events that had taken place in the world.* One of them was this Fintan, son of Bochra, son of Lamech, whose duty was to preserve the histories of Spain and Ireland, and the West in general. As we have seen, Spain is a glyph for the Great Plain, the Otherworld.

------ * See _The Secret Doctrine,_ for the Thesophical teaching.

From this universal euhemerization,--this loving preservation and careful cooking of the traditions by the Christian redactors of them,--we get certain results. One is that ancient Ireland remains for us in the colors of life: every figure flashes before our eyes in a golden mellow light of morning, at once extremely real and extremely magical: not the Greek heroic age appears so flooded with dawn-freshness, so realistic, so minutely drawn, nor half so lit with glamor. Another result is that, while strange gleams of Esotericism shine through,--as in that about the Four Recorders of the Four Cardinal Points,--things that it seemed undangerous to the monks, because they did not understand their significance, to let pa.s.s,--we hear nothing in Irish literature about the philosophy of the Druids. Ireland retains her belief in magic to this day; and his would be a hard skull that could know Ireland intimately and escape that belief.

So it seemed nothing irreligious to the monks to let the Druids remain magicians. But philosophy was another matter entirely; and must be ruled out as conflicting with the Christian scheme of things. From this silence our Druid-Medicine-men Theorists draw great comfort and unction for their pet belief. Reincarnation appears in some stories as a sort of thing that might happen in special cases; because "G.o.d is good to the Irish," and might be willing to give them sometimes another chance. But nothing is allowed to come down to imply it was known for a law in Nature; no moral or philosophic bearing is attached to it. This is just what you would expect. The Christian censors of the literature had rejected it as unchristian doctrine. They would hate to have it thought that Irishmen could ever have believed in such things; they would cover such belief up in every possible way. You would find peasant-bards in Wales to this day, men learned in the national tradition, who are deacons in their chapels and druids of the Gorsedd, and firm believers in Druidism. They have founded a Gorsedd here in America lately, with an active propaganda of Druidism, and lecturers touring. They think of it as a kind of Pre-christian Christianity; and would open their eyes wide to hear that Reincarnation was the cornerstone teaching in it. This may throw a little light on the att.i.tude of those early Irish Christians.--But on the other hand there were tales that could not be preserved at all, that you could not tell at all, without bringing a touch of reincarnation into them. The universal doctrine survived in that way in Ireland, as it survived as a rumor in the folk-lore in Wales.

There is the story, for instance, of Mongan son of Fiachta, a historical chieftain killed in 625. According to Tigernach, the oldest of the Irish annalists, Finn MacCool died in A.D. 274.

Finn, you will remember, is the central figure of the Fenian Cycle of sagas; he was the father of Oisin and the leader of the Fenians; next to Cuculain, he is the chiefest hero of Irish legend. I quote this story from M. de Jubainville.*

------ * But without word-for-word exact.i.tude; hence the absence of inverted commas. The same remark applies to all the stories quoted, or nearly quoted, from Mr. Rollerstone'e book.

Mongan had a quarrel with Forgoll, his chief bard or _file,_ as to the place where Fothad Airgtech king of Ireland had been slain by Cailte, one of Finn's companions. Mongan said it was on the banks of the Lame in Ulster, near his own palace; Forgoll said it was at Dubtar in Leinster. Forgoll, enraged at being contradicted by a mere layman, threatened to p.r.o.nounce awful incantations against Mongan, which might put rat-hood on him, or anything. The end of it was that Mongan was given three days to prove his statement; if he should not have done so by that time, he and all his possessions were to become the property of the file.

Two days pa.s.sed, and half the third, and Mongan did nothing, but remained at his ease entirely, never troubling in the world. As for his wife, poor woman, from the moment he made the wager her tears had not ceased to flow.--"Make an end of weeping," said he; "help will certainly come to us."

Forgoll came to claim his bond.--"Wait you till the evening,"

said Mongan. Evening came, and if help was coming, there was no sign of it. Mongan sat with his wife in the upper chamber; Forgoll out before them waiting to take possession of everything.

Pitiless and revengeful the look of Forgoll; the queen weeping and walling; Mongan himself with no sign of care on him.--"Be not you sorrowful, woman," said he; "the one who is coming to help us is not far off; I hear his footsteps on the Labrinne."

It is the River Caragh, that flows into Dingle bay in the southwest; a hundred leagues from where they were in the palace at Donegore in the north-east of Antrim.

With that she was quiet for awhile; but nothing happened, and she began weeping again.--"Hush now!" said Mongan; "I hear the feet of the one that will help us crossing the Maine." It is another river in Kerry, between the Caragh and the north-east: on the road, that is, between Mongan's palace and the Great Plain.

That way he was consoling her again and again; and she again and again breaking out with her lamentations. He was hearing the footsteps at every river between Kerry and Antrim: at the Liffey, and then the Boyne, and then the Dee, and after that, at Carlingford Lough, and at last at Larne Water, a little to the south of the palace.--"Enough of this folly," said Forgoll; "pay you me what is mine." A man came in from the ramparts;--"What news with you?" asks Mongan.--"There is a warrior like the men of old time approaching from the south, and a headless spear-shaft in his hand."--"I told you he would be coming," said Mongan.

Before the words were out from between his teeth, the warrior had leaped the three ramparts into the middle of the dun, and in a moment was there between Mongan and the file in the hall.--"What is it is troubling you?" said he.

--"I and the file yonder have made a wager about the death of Fothad Airgtech," said Mongan. "The file said he died at Dubtar in Leinster; I said it was false."

--"Then the file has lied," said the warrior.

--"Thou wilt repent of that," cried Forgoll.

--"That is not a good speech," said the warrior. "I will prove what I say." Then he turned to Mongan. "We were with thee, Finn MacCool," said he,--

--"Hush!" said Mongan; _"it is wrong for thee to reveal a secret."_

--"Well then," said the warrior, "we were with Finn coming from Alba. We met Fothad Airgtech near here, on the banks of Larne Water. We fought a battle with him. I cast my spear at him, so that it went through his body, and the iron head quitted the shaft, and went into earth beyond, and remained there. This is the shaft of that spear," said he, holding up the headless shaft he had with him. "The bare rock from which I hurled it will be found, and the iron head is in the earth a little to the east of it; and the grave of Fothad Airgtech a little to the east of that again. A stone chest is round his body; in the chest are his two bracelets of silver, and his two arm-rings, and his collar of silver. Over the grave is a stone pillar, and on the end of the pillar that is in the earth is Ogham writing, and it says, 'Here is Fothad Airgtech. He was fighting with Finn when Cailte slew him.'"

Cailte had been one of the most renowned of Finn's companions; he had come now from the Great Plain to save his old master. You will note that remark of the latter's when Cailte let the fact escape him that he, Mongan, had been Finn: "Hush! it is wrong for the to reveal a secret." That was the feeling of the Christian redactors. Reincarnation was not a thing for baptized lips to speak about.

But we are antic.i.p.ating things: the coming of Patrick did not bring about the great literary revival which sent all these stories down to us. Patrick Christianized Ireland: converted the kings and established the church; and left the bulk of the people pagan-hearted and pagan-visioned still,--as, glory be to G.o.d, they have been ever since. I mean by that that under all vicissitudes the Irish have never quite lost sight of the Inner Life at the heart of things, as most of the rest of us have.

Time and men and circ.u.mstance, sorrow and ignorance and falsity, have conspired to destroy the race; but there is a vision there, however thwarted and hedged in,--and the people do not perish: their woods and mountains are still full of a gay or mournful, a wailing or a singing, but always a beautiful, life. Patrick was a great man; but he never could drive out the Danaan G.o.ds, who had gone into the hills when the Milesians came. He drove out the serpents, they say; and a serpent was a name for a Druid Adept: Taliesin says, in one of his poems, _'Wyf dryw, wyf sarff,'_ 'I am a druid, I am a serpent'; and we know from H.P.

Blavatsky how universal this symbol was, with the meaning of an Initiate of the Secret Wisdom. So perhaps Patrick did evict his Betters from that land of evictions; it may be so;--but not the G.o.d-life in the mountains. But I judge from the clean and easy sweep he made of things that Druidism was at a low pa.s.s in Ireland when he came. It had survived there five centuries since its vital center and link with the Lodge had been destroyed at Bibracte by Caesar; and, I suppose, thus cut off, and faced with no opposition to keep it pure and alert, might well, and would naturally have declined. Its central light no longer burning, political supremacy itself would have hastened its decay; fostering arrogance for spirituality, and worldliness for true Wisdom. How then about the theory that some life and light remained or was revivable in it in Britain? Why claim that for Britain, which one would incline to deny to Ireland and Gaul?-- Well; we know that Druidism did survive in Gaul a long time after the Romans had proscribed it. But Gaul became very thoroughly Romanized. The Romans and their civilization were everywhere; the Celtic language quite died out; (Breton was brought in by emigrants from Britain;)--and where the Celtic language had died, unlikely that Celtic thought would survive.

But in Britain, as we have seen, while the Romans and their proscription were near enough to provide a salutary opposition and constant peril, there were many places in which the survivors of Suetonius' ma.s.sacre in Mona might have taken refuge. I take it that in Ireland it suffered through lack of opposition; in Gaul, it died of too effective opposition; but in Britain there were midway conditions that may well have allowed it to live on.

Beyond Christianizing the country, it does not appear that Patrick did much for it. It is not clear that Ireland made any progress in material civilization then,--or for that matter, at any time since. We should know by this time that these things are a matter of law. Patrick found her essentially in pralaya, essentially under the influence of centrifugalism; and you cannot turn the ebbing tide, and make it flow before its time.

There was a queer mixture of intensive culture and ruthless barbarism: an extreme pa.s.sion on the one hand for poetry and the things of the spirit,--and on the other, such savagery as continual warfare always brings in its train. The literary cla.s.s was so strong that in the little kingdom of Tir Conall in Donegal alone the value of ten thousand dollars of the revenue was set aside yearly for its support and purposes;--whereby one would imagine that for all things else they could but have had a nickel or so left. This is culture with a vengeance. There was, besides, wonderful skill in arts and crafts, intricate designing in jewelry-work;--and all this is not to be called by another name than the relics of a high civilization. But there was no political unity; or only a loose bond under the high kings at Tara, who had forever to be fighting to maintain their authority.

There was racial, but not national consciousness.

But where in Europe was there national consciousness? We should remember that it only began to exist, or to reincarnate from times beyond the horizon of history, in the thirteenth century A.D. There would be a deal less sneering at Ireland were only these facts known. England was perhaps the first country in which it became effective: the wars of the first and third Edwards called it into being there. Joan lit the fires of it in France; she mainly;--in the fourteen-twenties and thirties.

Spain had to wait for Ferdinand and Isabel; Sweden for Gustavus Vasa; Holland for William the Silent; Italy for Victor Emmanuel; Germany for Bismarck. Wales was advancing towards it, in an imperfect sort of way, rather earlier than England; but the Edwardian conquest put the whole idea into abeyance for centuries. So too Ireland: she was half-conquered by the Normans, broken, racked, ruined and crucified, a century before the idea of Nationhood had come into existence, and while centrifugalism was still the one force in Europe. It is thus quite beside the point to say that she was never a nation, even in the days of her native rule. Of course she was not. Nor was England, in those times; nor any other. In every part of the continent the centrifugal forces were running riot; though in some there were strong fighting kings to hold things together.

This by way of hurling one more spear at the old cruel doctrine of race inferiorities and superiorities: at Unbrotherliness and all its wicked works and ways. I was the European pralaya; when your duty to your neighbor was everywhere and always to fight him, to get in the first blow; to kill him before he killed you, and thank G.o.d for his mericies. So Ireland was not exceptional in that way. Where she was exceptional, bless her sweet heart, lay, as we shall see, in the fact that while all the rest were sunk in ignorance and foulest barbarism, and mentall utterly barren,--she alone had the grace to combine her Kilkenny Cattery with an exquisite and wonderful illumination of culture. While she tore herself to pieces with one hand, with the other she was holding up the torch of learning,--and a very real learning too, --to benighted Europe; and _then_ (bedad!) she found another hand again, to be holding the pen with it, and to produce a literature to make the white angels of G.o.d as green as her own holy hills with envy! _That_ was Ireland!

The Crest-Wave rolled in to her; the spiritual forces descended far enough to create a cultural illumination, but not far enough to create political stability. We have seen before that they touch the artistic creative planes, in their descent, before they reach the more material planes. So her position is perfectly comprehensible. The old European manvantara was dying; elsewhere it was dead. Its forces, when they pa.s.sed away through Ireland, were nearly exhausted; in no condition whatever to penetrate to the material plane and make political greatnesses and strengths. But they found in her very soil and atmosphere a spiritual something which enabled them to produce a splendor of literary creation that perhaps had had no parallel in Europe since Periclean days: Yes, surely Ireland was much more creative than Augustan Rome.

Have any of you heard of literary savages? Of wild men of the woods, your true prognathous primitives, that in a bare couple of generations, and upon no contact with civilized races, rose from their native pithecanthropism to be the wonderful beacon of the West or East? You have not, and cannot imagine it; nor could it ever be. A great literary habit is only acquired in long ages of settled civilization; and there were long ages of settled civilization behind Ireland;--and when, about thirteen decades after Patrick's coming, she flamed up into cultural creation, she was but returning to what was proper to her soul; in the midst of her dissolution, she was but groping after an olden self.

That olden self, very likely, she had even by that time more than half forgotten; and we now can only see it refracted, as it were, through the lens of those first Christian centuries, and with the eyes of those Christian monks and bards. How would they have seen them?--There was that spirit of euhemerization: of making ancient things conform to new Christian ideas. They had the Kilkenny Catterwauling in their ears daily; would they have allowed to any Pagan times a quieter less dissonant music? Could they have imagined it, indeed?--I doubt. Kilkennyism would have appeared to them the natural state of things. Were you to look back into Paganism for your Christian millennium, to come not till Christ came again? Were you to search there for peace on earth and mercy mild?--there in the long past, when all the near past was war?--Besides, there was that ancientest of Mariners, Noah, but a few thousand years back; and you had to make things fit.

So I find nothing in it conclusive, if the legends tell of no conditions different from those Patrick found: Kilkenny Cattery in politics, intensive culture in the things of the spirit; and I see no difficulty in the co-existence of the two. The cultured habit had grown in forgotten civilized ages; the Cattery was the result of national or racial pralaya; of the break-up of the old civilization, and the cyclic necessary night-time between it and the birth of another. Let us remember that during the Thirty Years War, in mid-manvantara, Europeans sunk into cannibalism; let us remember the lessons of our own day, which show what a very few years of war, so it be intense enough, can do toward reducing civilized to the levels of savage consciousness. So when we find Ireland, in this fourth century, always fighting,-- and the women as well as the men; and when we find a tribe in Scotland, the Attacotti, with a reputation for cannibalism;--we need not for a moment imagine that things had always been like that. It is not that man is naturally a savage, and may from the heights of civilization quickly relapse into savagery; it is that he is a dual being, with the higher part of his nature usually in abeyance, and its place taken, when it is taken at all, by the conventions of law and order; and so the things that are only thought, or perhaps secretly practised, in times of civilization, as soon as war has broken down the conventions, find their full expression in action,--and others along with them. So Patrick found Ireland, what she has been mostly since, a grand Kilkenny Cattery; but with the literary habit of an older and better day surviving, and nearly ready to be awakened into transcendent splendor. The echoes of the Danaan music were ringing in her still; and are now, heaven knows;--and how would they not be, when what to our eyes are the hills of her green with fern, to eyes anointed, and to the vision of the spirit, are the palaces of the Danaan Sidhe, and the topless towers of Fairyland?

I shall come to my history next week; meanwhile here for you is the _Song of Finn in Praise of May,_ a part of it, as Mr.

Rollertone translates it, to give a taste of the literary habit of Pre-christian Ireland:

May day! delightful day!

Bright colors play the vales along; Now wakes at morning's slender ray, Wild and gay, the blackbird's song.

Now comes the bird of dusty hue, The loud cuckoo, the summer lover; Broad-branching trees are thick with leaves; The bitter evil time is over.

Swift horses gather nigh, Where half dry the river goes; Tufted heather crowns the height; Weak and white the bog-down blows.

Corncrake singing, from eve til morn, Deep in corn, the strenuous bird; Sings the virgin waterfall, White and tall, her one sweet word.

Loaded bough of little power Goodly flower-harvests win; Cattle roam with muddy flanks; Busy ants go out and in.

Carols loud the lark on high, Small and shy, his tireless lay, Singing in wildest, merriest mood Of delicate-hued delightful May.

And here, from the same source, are the _Delights of Finn,_ as his son Oisin sang them to Patrick:

These are the things that were dear to Finn,-- The din of battle, the banquet's glee, The bay of his hounds through the rough glen ringing, And the blackbird singing in Letterlee.