The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries Part 61

[321] Chief general references: H. D'Arbois de Jubainville, _L'epopee 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.

Rhys, _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 geologicas de la existencia de la Atlantida_, 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 291{a}; cf. Rhys, _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] Cla.s.sical 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 pa.s.sages 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 G.o.ds, 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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'ep. 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-cla.s.sic 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'ep. celt. en Irl._, pp.

449-500.

[343] _Silva Gadelica_, ii. 385-401. The MS. text, _Echira Thaidg mheic Chein_, 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 _eriu_, 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. Rhys, _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'emigration 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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, a.s.syria_; 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 G.o.d 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, _Origene_, in _Dict. de Theologie_, v. 69.