Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 https://archive.org/details/celtcosmosOOryan T 7 f2- F "7 b %- V-z- THE CELT AND THE COSMOS. THE CELT AND THE COSMOS W. BY P. RYAN. LONDON DAVID NUTT. 1 7, Grape Street, Editorial : New Oxford Street, 6, Bloomsbury Street, W. C. & * 1661 BOSTON COLLEGE LIBRARY CriESTN UT HILL, MASS. CONTENTS. Page, Fairyland and the Vatican 7 In Druid Days 21 A Druid to a Pupil 24 A Pupil to a Druid 25 The Druid answers 27 Reverie En Route 29 When Evolutionist and Poet Join Hands. 29 The Great “Goals'” That are only Milestones 31 Pilgrims All 35 Through Defeat to Triumph 36 A Week In Wonderland 37 Gods and Wage-Slaves 38 Looking Outward 40 How Light of Seers and Prophets bas heen Lost 42 They That Work Against Nature 45 The Nightmare of “Evil” 47 CONTENTS Page. Our Million-fold Selfhood 49 Essentials 50 A Mystic To a Theologian 50 Between Two Wonderlands 52 The “Time-Spirit.” ,53 The Boyne and The Wizard 54 Crucifixion and Resurrection 54 Ruin, Remembrance, and Rebuilding. ... 55 The Old Race and The New 58 The Real Ireland 58 In Time and in the Eternal 59 The Old Place and the New People. ... 61 When The Gods Will Come ... ... 63 FAIRYLAND AND THE VATICAN. A FORK WORD. For some years certain Irish people have been trying to re-discover Ireland, present and past. With all the agrarian contention and political stress ; with the peculiar relation of the country to Rome on the one hand, to England on the other ; with the attraction and distraction of America ; with the parody of education that long prevailed, and is only partially amended yet ; through the break with tradition and the psycho- logical and intellectual confusion caused by the prolonged ban and subsequent neglect of the Irish language ; with the decay of the social and co- operative spirit of more Gaelic ages : the Irish mind in general was not deep, serene, or able to render an attractive account of itself to the world. The real Ireland was hard to find. The inner life and achievement of the Ireland of the past had grown vague and dim. The movements and the clash of ideas since the later years of the nineteenth century have made an appreciable difference. There has been a certain beauty and intensity of life, often in 7 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS despite of episcopal and clerical repression, and not infrequently in juxtaposition with stagnation and decay. Observers may give honestly optimistic or honestly pessimistic accounts of contemporary Ireland ; it is a matter of insight, temperament, and responsiveness. For a long spell in recent years, in connection with the Irish language movement, and as editor, first in the Boyne Valley and subsequently in Dublin, of journals*) that stood for freedom of thought and expression against the higher and conservative Catholic authorities — while eagerly supported by some of the younger priests and numerous layman — and that preached what was regarded as a revol- utionary social faith, I had a peculiar opportunity of realising the complicated factors and forces. It was a difficult struggle in some respects ; it seemed toilsome to many friends and spectators. It was beautiful to me, as a whole, largely on account of the enkindled mind with which I found myself in contact. I recall the time to-day as a period of rare intensive mental culture, as a vivid life within life, mine and not mine. I have tried to give a just account of the main experiences and impressions of those years in 66 The Pope’s Green Island”, published in Britain and America in 1912. In a novel, “The Plough and *) The “Irish Peasant” and the “Irish Nation”. 8 FAIRYLAND AND THE VATICAN the Cross”, issued a couple of years earlier in Ire- land and America, the psychology and stress of different orders of laic and cleric were presented in a freer form and spirit. About the same time in a novel in Irish, “Caoimh’in O’Cearnaigh ”, I tried to interpret the new zest of life and thought in Gaelic quarters. Both novels, written in the height of the struggle with the conservative Churchmen, added much to the joy of life, subjective and object- ive. Writing in those days was an intense reality, and discussion was eager, sometimes vehement. Readers abroad expressed considerable surprise over the suggestion of so great a share of theological clash and psychological ardour in the country ; they had not reckoned on any “ modernism ” or on more than a vague sort of mysticism — of course real mysticism is never vague — in our avowedly ultra- clerical island. But the facts — and the soul-facts — were even as I had tried to indicate. While ideas of re-embodiment, creative evolution, progression through the development of higher mentality, and consequent action, are part of the faith or philosophy of a larger contemporary Irish element than the casual observer has any means of knowing, it is also true that to other Irish workers such ideas are partly attractive and partly disturb- ing ; they appeal to something sub-conscious in those workers’ natures, while, naturally, they cannot be reconciled with habitual and formalised theology 9 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS There often has been, and there is to-day, a clash between Celtic or Gaelic ideas and ecclesiasticism. English power and policy in Ireland — through the Penal Laws against Catholics, the ruin of education on Irish lines, and the later enthronement of the episcopacy and priesthood as dictators in Irish schools — have tended decisively for Romanisation or Vaticanism — alien in a large measure to essential Catholicity — against Celticism, though the latter has shown a remarkable vitality. In our own day the Celt or Gael is re-asserting himself anew, in education and otherwise, and, as ever, the trend of his spirit is displeasing and disconcerting to his ultramontane mentors. His inner self finds much that is alien in Vaticanism and official Maynooth. His religion is more mystical, his ideals more natural. His deeper philosophy of life and destiny does not square with material Hell and Devil ; it has dreams of high achievement and a sense of en- chantment. But, of course, there are various types of Gaels, from thinkers and “ music-makers ” to those who might have stepped out of folk-lore. Racial, social, intellectual, and spiritual generalisations are rather to be distrusted. Every individuality is the resultant of forces and experiences complex in their nature and distinctive in their effect. There is a medley of unfounded generalisations and superstitions regarding the Celts. Celtic history 10 FAIRYLAND AND THE VATICAN and psychology remain for the most part unwritten and uninterpreted. In modern times, especially amongst the “ Anglo-Saxon ” peoples, the Celt or Gael has been deemed a wistful weakling, a fatalist, a spectral or elusive entity loving misty moonlight, remote haunted hills and shadowy waters. What dreamers may even journalists be ! But perhaps they have taken one or two of our neo-Celtic poets too literally and seriously. When we remember the Celt as art-worker, poet, saga-maker, builder, tamer of forests and charmer of wastes into fertility, framer of a complex legal system, romantic voyager and explorer, philosopher, fighter, missionary, festal devotee, and much more, we well may wonder at the moony-cum-sombre illusion that seems to pass in some quarters for his nature and history. The truth is that he has gone far towards making the best of both worlds — or rather let us say the essential inner world and its outer reflection — Platonist, artist, lover of Nature and Life as he has been. “A.E.” has said: “This idea of man’s expansion into divinity, which is the highest teaching of every race, is one which shone like a star at the dawn of our Celtic history also.” He has declared also that the real gods of the people have always been their heroes. “Those Titan figures, Cuchulainn, Fionn, Oscar, Oisin, Caoilte, all a mixed gentleness and fire, have commanded for generations that 11 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS spontaneous love which is the only true worship paid by man.” An intensity of devotion to high heroic character and action is certainly one of the most striking of Gaelic traits ; and even when the Gaels had become dispossessed, broken, and forlorn in the land of their fathers — only a remnant of the old chivalry and culture remaining — this trait was not suppressed by the theology which represented man as a worm and a miserable sinner. The hero -memories, the sense of the heroic, the feeling for the heroic, held their place, more or less, against the lean and pessimistic philosophy of the priests. This is a golden fact of mediaeval and even modern Irish history. The ministers of the Vatican have not driven the Fianna or fairyland from the mind of the real Ireland. As to the earlier eras, historians have regretted the fact that the gods and goddesses of the ancient Gael, and his ideas of divinity and destiny, are indefinite or elusive. They cannot seize and deal with them as they might with a period of French or English literature. For my own part I am glad ; a mythology that is definite and detailed smacks too much of men’s minds and too little of gods. Men may have gleams and intuitions of super- normal forces and potencies, but when they try to formalise and systematise them they come to grief. They leave vision and intuition for intellec- tualism and theology. It is vain to try to bring 12 FAIRYLAND AND THE VATICAN the gods down to the ken of normal man ; rather should we try to raise ourselves towards the gods by the spiritualisation of the self, by the evolution of mentality. This the Druids appeared to realise. I do not believe that in any age of old the seers and teachers of the Gael had a carefully defined and elaborate mythology. They were more concer- ned with the courses of heroes, the conduct of men, the development of psychic senses, the sphere of ideas. We must really learn about the higher worlds for ourselves, by self-development and expe- rience ; they cannot be conveyed to us at second- hand. It is natural, then, that while we have a store of knowledge about the social and artistic concerns of the Gael — royal Tara, Taillte, Emhain, etc., loom spaciously and richly in our imaginations— and while we have a good deal also that suggests psychic sensitiveness and responsiveness, we have only hints and gleams of higher potencies or gods. We are not disturbed and restricted by elaborate detail about the Dagda, the great life-god, or Manannan whose wonder-realm was the sea, or Dianceacht, the god of healing and health ; while of Angus Og, the god of youth and love, we have only broad, beautiful touches, such as the story that his mystic birds sang over lovers, thus sugges- ting the association of love with divinity and spiritual harmony. The Celt was not so much told about the gods as sent, or inspired to go, in IS THE CELT AND THE COSMOS quest of them, in himself and life. Several of the stories of adventure and exploration really concern psychic or mental states. One of the most memo- rable of the old Irish creations, the romance of Tir na n-Og and kindred isles of Immortal Youth and ecstacy — the wonderland beyond the World of Waters — symbolises a soul-state, experience of a part of the Kingdom of Heaven within. But our Celtic realm, besides divinity and wonder, shows an artistic and festive social order, a joyous homeliness ; and the heaven-world and the eager earth-world often interpenetrate. (“ Celtic" of course is a general, a conveniently descriptive term. Celtic civilisation in Ireland absorbed much that was pre-Celtic or “foreign.”) Unnumbered are the names and symbols that to us stand for soul-facts. They are not like far-off things, or matters merely studied as history or tradition. They might be part of our subliminal selves. We respond to them as to intimate and sacred realities. To-day the old Celtic, and once wide-spread, doctrine of reincarnation is a living faith again with diverse minds in Ireland. In connection with kindred doctrines it helps them towards a philo- sophical and heartening hypothesis of evolution and destiny. It would explain sometlng of what we feel in regard to the older Celtic entities and verities I have been considering. If our real or subliminal selves have been manifested in other 14 FAIRYLAND AND THE VATICAN lives and bygone roles in Eirinn, *) then this strange psychometry is natural : this enthusiasm of ours is in part reminiscence ; our interior and essential natures carry the olden glow and the wider memory, and these respond, with an intensity inexplicable to our ordinary consciousness, to the old names and the old environment. Or what we call Ireland, like all the earth and all the cosmos, may be but the body and garb of subtle and inscrutable being, our real relation to which is at present a mystery far beyond the possibility of even the dimmest intellectual realisation. Another view of reincarnation is suggested in “A Pupil to a Druid’’ 1 . By some who do not accept the customary theology, Catholic or Prote- stant, the doctrine is regarded as somewhat danger- ous. Granted, they urge, that as we sow we reap, in accordance with inevitable law, that our mental lives determine our next state, the very fact of a profound belief that our essential individualities, our real selves, must return again and again to earth, unduly binds us to mundane affairs, and tends in itself to unnecessary reincarnations. Were we to assume that we would not return, or were we to work at our best and highest, preserving an open mind, a sense of detachment, we might pass *) Eirfe, nominative case, Eirinn, dative (in Irish, after every preposition). “In Eirinn ” (i n-Eirinn) is so familiar in Irish that one drops into the habit of using it also in English. 15 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS inevitably, at the change we call death, to a higher plane of being and return to place and time, as we know them, no more. Intensive mental cultivation, social energy and brotherhood, and intellectual open- mindedness, are held to be the wiser philosophy. Man is called to be a thinker and a doer, full of faith and unafraid, and unaffected by immediate results ; but in the bodily condition it is manifestly impossible that he could understand more than a fraction of being, more than a little arc of the cycle through which he, or the greater nature of which he is part, has to go. The philosophy which affects to be final, to declare the ultimate law and scope of the universe, is vain and illusive. Thus both theologians and scientists presume too much. To many of us the objective happenings of to-day, or yesterday, or the long ago, are only of incidental interest. What is of moment is the eternal hap- pening : what befalls the essence not the outer manifestation. We are only concerned with the past in so far as it is abiding and potent in the present, and continuing into the future. Our Celtic sense of past and future is really, at its best, a more vivid and comprehensive awareness in the present. Past and future flame for us into present inspiration. Dr. Hyde’s joyous inlook to antiquity led to the founding of the Gaelic League; “A.E’s” mental contact with earth-god and earth-goddess of the Celt warmed his philosophy of agricultural co-opera- 16 FAIRYLAND AND THE VATICAN tion ; and Padraic MacPiarais is most intensely the enthusiast for the Boy-Corps of the old Emhain Macha when he stands among his pupils in that educational dream-world come true at Sgoil Eanna,*) between the Dublin Mountains and the Bay. Our avowed historians have scarcely dealt at all with essential Irish history. Polemics and special pleading in regard to mediaeval and modern issues between Ireland and England (or adventurers and officials thereof) have tended to a great deal of fieriness and superficiality and the ignoring of the deeper psychological drama of the Irish people. This even in peaceful times has tempted scarcely any interpreters. Even a salient irony, like the compromise resulting from the clash of Celtic and Roman ideas, has never been adequately revealed. Yet how the Irish Catholic countryman has tragic- ally tried for ages to reconcile himself at one and the same time to fairyland, Tir na n-Og, and the Vatican, how he has accepted both Fionn and the Devil (whom he feared and yet made fun of) is one of the romances of theology and life. How the Catholic clergy have wrought a weird and wondrous epic about a non-human St. Patrick, and left the mystical Erigena a shadow, is romance and irony of another order. How throughout the tragic *) Sgoil £anna, St. Enda’8 College, the noted bilingual institution at Rathfarnham. 17 % THE CELT AND THE COSMOS night of the Penal Laws and persecutions the Gaelic folk maintained an intellectual hinterland, a culture- tradition, that could bring poets like Eoghan Rua O'Suilleavain (the “ Irish Burns”) to popularity and power, is a moving saga in itself. We enlarge and intensify our mental Kingdom of Ireland at the thought of it. These are only a few typical features of a long story. Contemporary Ireland, as I suggested at the outset, is exceedingly complex. To my mind what is most alluring and gladdening therein is psychic and mystical, and is tending, as true mysticism must always do, to inspire and re-create. If there is a sadly stagnant Ireland there are also elements in which the older Celtic Ireland, with the added experience souls have gained meanwhile, would seem to be coming to birth anew: a new Ireland of vision and action, though it may sometimes grow confused, uncertain, or vexed by the tangle of surface troubles and appearances. We see it manifested in the haunts where the finer ideals and activities of the Gaelic League are maintained, in institutions like Sgoil Eanna, in the Co-operative movement, the L T nited Irishwomen, the uprising of Labour, etc. But it is not seen by pessimists, formalists, and tourists. Spiritual kinship and sympathy are necessary. On the other hand it is not difficult to establish a case that conduces to pessimism. British Offici- alism mars Irish development on natural lines, and 18 FAIRYLAND AND THE VATICAN conservative ecclesiasticism, as younger priests have begun to feel, is a menace to nationality and a trial to real religion. It grows more formalised and autocratic, even as the mystical spirit and mental activity advance in other quarters. At the same time I am certain that its power and poss- ibilities are over-estimated. Its weakness is apparent when moral courage and ideas begin to assert them- selves. On the deeper spirit of young Ireland it has little hold or influence. After all that may be said and sung on the charm of our Celtic and Gaelic world in any or all generations, I would not unduly emphasise the factors of race, country, civilisation in the story of the experiences and destinies of souls. The unfathomable Individuality, the far-faring Self, is before and after them. It is embodied in them, utilises them en route ; but they as we normally know them are only form and manifestation withal, though underlying them there may be occult being that we know not. But whatever may be the ultimate essence and meaning of race and civilisation those of the Celt in Ireland have provided magic environment and high adventure for souls therein embodied generation after generation. However, we are necessarily more attracted by the thought and the vision of the experiences and achievements yet to be. Renewal and Becoming are eternal processes. The souls embodied to-day have not 19 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS to look to antiquity for beauty and magic, but to look inward, and to try to bring the outer life and the sense-life into harmony with the inner and the supersensible. Celtic “ wistfulness ” and 66 fatalism ” would be ineptitude and futility. Even if the “past” were the failure and tragedy that some theorists imagine, it would only represent the earth-arc of an illimitable cycle or cycles ; those who failed in our sphere of time and place did not necessarily fail when they passed to others ; and anyhow it would be no reason why we should go on failing. To-day as ever the world is new and potentially divine for the Celt ; it is his real nature and duty to re-create and realise himself in great action, as the outcome of vision and high thought. And the main purpose of authentic religion and poetry is to hearten him with the knowledge that he is a divine being at a momen- tous stage of a Journey. 20 IN DRUID DAYS. (Revealing a spirit that revives and becomes potent in our own time). A DRUID TO A PUPIL Beginning there was never, and no ending there shall be. All existence is manifestation and be- coming. Seeds unfold into crops, and morning into noon and eve, and infancy into manhood and old age, and star-matter into spheres; but all these are only stages of a journey, in time-cycles within greater cycles. In the mineral and the vegetable and the animal worlds, even as in the human kingdom we tenant, are this ebb and flow and change unending. The essence that appeareth awhile as leaf and flower, or that manifesteth as greyhound or songbird, returneth to its inner shrine, and re-appeareth in due season, as harmoniously and as surely as the essence reflected in time as man or woman. And on planes beyond the reaches of the normal human senses, other beings in similar wise pursue their own cyclic courses. As the essences manifested as men have travelled, 21 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS in myriad ages, through the planes “ below ” us, so, after myriad other ages, will the essences in stones and trees and birds be infused with soul and manifested as human entities, while we shall be travelling and labouring through higher and diviner destinies. From kingdom unto kingdom, from plane unto plane is slow; in each we have manifold reincar- nation and achieving; but attaining the human sphere the wise and ordered mentality can accelerate the progression. Those who have trained and concentrated their super-normal senses have the vision of higher stages of the sequent cosmic movement. But the greatest manifested in the guises of men cannot hint of the ultimate purport or sound the secret of being. They know but the glory of learning and achiev- ing, the magic of going on, through form after form, through life after life. We are all spiritual essences ; from the spiritual world we come forth ; to the realm of spirit we return. A life-stage is as soil in which the soul is set and groweth, even as a seed is sown and groweth. But no human entity under the stars is conscious of more than a fraction of the functions and the potencies for ever in being and ordered action in itself. 22 IN DRUID DAYS Below the normal consciousness a whole kingdom is body-building and moulding. Digestion is as wondrous as a garden or a saga. And above the normal consciousness higher parts of our being perform labours untold and trans- cendent. So “we” can render no full and final judgment of anything — “good” or “evil” — as “we” see but in fragments and at angles. We only know — as after great action we brood and try to link “ourselves” with the greater natures of which we are part — that the Course and the Whole are wondrous and beauteous beyond telling. We and our brethren far and near speak of the gods above and within and around us. But the ultimate Gods, the Children of the Father, we know not. Him we call Angus, God of Love, and the Dagda, God of Life, and that our friends even unto the far Eastern world call by other names, only express our highest vision of eternal formative and guiding potencies. The greater the vision and the life the more glorious the gods of a people. But the wise know that even these are but reflections of ineffable realities; and the ineffable realities are manifesta- tions of the one underlying, incognisable Reality. Many races have their cherished stories of how 23 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS the world, as we understand it, was “made” and what were the great “primeval” manifestations. These exalt and enkindle imaginations, but they are only symbols. They mirror truth that were too dazzling for the folkmind. If a god were to stand in our midst and detail his godly memory of the unfolding of the universe we could not grasp and remember and retell it. We could only impart a human reflection. Many races are proud of the life-experience they can recall and the more that their fathers have passed down to them. They shrine it in song and high story, like those that are chanted and told at our Gaelic hostings and feasts. It is a gracious and ennobling custom. Dear and kindly are the lands and races in which we have had many incarnations. But they are only passing scenes and accomp- animents. We must not dwell overmuch on them, nor deem one race greater or more strange than another. It is only an entity with a different conscious and sub-conscious experience. We have lived and wrought in many races, we may be re-born in many more. Only part of what we have been and are is of Gaelic making and moulding. Our Gaelic heritage and consciousness are a chapter in a story whose whole is of uncounted aeons and planes. 24 IN DRUID DAYS Let our mental lives be heroic and exalted. Thus shall we help to prepare great future lives and destinies. Mentality is the father of futurity. Consciously or unconsciously we are eternally creators and re-creators. Let us try to be more ardent co-operators in the eternal scheme of cosmic unfolding and becoming. The more we strive and co-operate the more we grow and know. The druids love all life and its magic. But they write nothing. They work and learn and wait. Why should they be recorders in a passing exist- ence of the myriad existences ? All they know is, though glorious, incidental. The wisest are wond- ering pupils conning simple lessons of Being. A PUPIL TO A DRUID It is wondrous, O druid, to listen to thy story of the great Self of which I am part, and to thy lore of the supersensible worlds and the gods and the march and music of Being in the regions that our senses may not ken. But what if thou and all the seers of the East and West but dream ? This strange self of ours is a wizard beyond all wizards. Can we trust the wonder- tale it tells, the wonder- web it weaves? If indeed we are gods and there are mightier gods beyond us our lives are strange chapters and 25 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS distractions for godhood, though they have golden gleams. Ploughing the ground, and hunting the deer, and gathering to the feast, and chanting the ancient lay, and drinking the new mead, are meet and sweet for men, but idle and vain for gods. Methinks at times that man is the highest of all beings, that only in this life of ours is he alive and coherent, and that the world we see is the real world. I think that his state after death is as the state of the flowers and leaves in winter, or as his own state in the night of sleep and dream : suspended activity, resting, and recuperation. When he is re-embodied and re-born his whole and real life is resumed. Again is he called to the glory of being a hero and an achiever, of making Eir& a Tir na n-Og. His earth-life is not limitation, but expansion. Nay, there is no real life but here in the body. The long intervals between incarnations are but the languor and the sleep of the self. We shake the languor away, put on bodies like armour and come forth to enjoyment and to action. So I love the dear glens and streams on which we gaze. They are holy to me as kindred. I revel in life and light. I think of death as a call from the feast of life, and the long wait for my new body and destiny as waste and inertia. 26 IN DRUID DAYS I long to discover the secret of evading the rude interruption and break of death. I shrink from the useless night between life and life. We esteem existence too little ; we are obsessed by the thought of grander subjective states, inner heavens of the cosmos, as we deem them ; we surrender our souls to illusion, and so we are drawn after a few score years into the void. Give me being and activity unending amid the men and on the plains of Eirinn ! THE DRUID ANSWERS My son, it is thine outer self hath spoken. Not thee, but a mood hath complained ; it is casual and transient as weather. Thy real life hath not yet awoken within thee. The seers do not deal with dreams. The farmer tilleth the soil, and the harper learneth the powers of his harp ; and the seeking seers in awe and rapture grasp and guide their greater nature. Thus they walk amid reality, and all they unfold is experience. The soul's courses of which they tell are as clear and sequent to them as the great roads from Tam to the wayfarers of Eirinn. Terrible and glorious are the ways they pass before they see and act as souls. And even they can convey and reveal but an 27 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS image and symbol of the Path — yet enough to make men marvel, and athirst to follow. All who would truly know must tread the self- same Way. Every Self must slay the dragon of self and open the gate of the realm of Knowledge. The true learner and the true teacher in the School of Life are one. 28 REVERIE EX ROUTE. WHEN EVOLUTIONIST AND POET JOIN HANDS. I am grateful to the great evolutionists. Of the many-moded, many-coloured garments of the universe they have told me; the processes by which those garments have been made and remade they have related. Nay, they have revealed the wondrous body, the majestic framework. From the simple forms to the complex, from the protoplasm to the stellar glory, it is a fairy-tale whose stages are aeons. It is cosmic magic, it is a universal epic of Law and Becoming steeped in beauty. But withal it is a story of forms. The proto- plasm is as mystical as the planet. The 44 beginning,'” that was no beginning, in the weirdness of its secret is even as every wonder- stage of the unfolding. Darker than the deep sea’s heart is the mystery of the Essences manifested and the meaning of the Dweller in the Body. If I have the evolutionist on one hand, I need the poet and the seer on the other, or I am lost and unseeing. 29 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS And the poet and the seer, when they have chanted and revealed their all, leave the heart of the secret still veiled, the core of the beauty still a quest. The evolutionist instructs me in the alphabet of a book of books. The seer teaches me to read. The poet re-reads in an ecstasy of music. But I must train and tune my own soul if little or much of the deep, divine meaning is to come home to me. Looking inward not outward, freeing the soul from the dominion of appearances, fanning its secret flame until it glows : that is the way of Knowledge. All our wisdom and sanctity depends upon the illumination and infallibility of the soul In my brief earth-life as I know it I have put forth sundry personalities and selves, as a tree puts forth leaves, or as the soil groweth crops. They have changed and faded and passed away. A creative, enduring, underlying self remains. In time and tide I never can discover its core. It is inexhaustible, immeasurable. There is potency below all the cognisable potentialities. There is a Self that ever inspires and ever eludes the self which works in time and place. It is here, it is now, it is everywhere, it is timeless, it bides in me and in all the reaches of the visible and invisible. Every unit of the race, and of all races, has 30 REVERIE EN ROUTE even such a master-self. The more we realise it the more we enlarge our sense and power of progression. We learn that our higher selves are august travel- lers through form and unfoldment, master-builders on many planes, eternal partners in a cosmic scheme of creativeness and realisation. Our normal selves are dim reflections of our inner selves. Our inner selves are manifestations of the One and Ultimate Reality. Yea, there is many-moded evolution and unfold- ing, and in the cyclic process and panorama forms, forces, planetary systems, universes, spirits, spiritual hierarchies, Logoi, have their outgoing and their returning. But all is part of the reverie and self-realisation of the One Reality. Esoterically and ultimately all is Eternal Thought and Being. THE GREAT “GOALS 1 ’ THAT ARE ONLY MILESTONES. I return from the many-mooded city to a lonely room, and feel even as a tired and dissatisfied monarch, who wants to put cares of State and councillors and courtiers and servants away, and be alone in the joy of reverie with his human self awhile. My task is as difficult as the monarch’s. Cour- tiers and servitors are about me, unseen but 31 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS tantalising and engaging. Thoughts, impressions, moods and memories are they. They would lure me to highways and by-ways ; they would bear me on roads that have no ending. They are not mine, and they are not I, and I long to escape from them into my own universe. Even Nature, with all her majestic peace and apparent isolation, is a temptress. The stars, as I crossed the threshold, would allure me to the study of immensity and mystery. They seemed to say that turning from the dome of Heaven to a doorway in a dim street was futility and foolishness. 66 Come,'’ did they plead, “ and tread the irradiant high roads of the universe. Hither have come all the poets and seers of the unnumbered and august generations.” And even here, within four walls, there is the lure of mighty companies. The Hindu and the Greek and the Egyptian call me from simple book-shelves to see how worlds were made, and are eternally re-made, and to witness the Ever-becom- ing and the cosmic adventures of souls and spirits. Yet in these hours between night and morning I would not speak with even the Bible-makers of mankind, the Watchers and the Knowers of the ages. I would hear my own soul speak. I would stand aside, not only from the interests of time and men, but from the grand intuitions 32 REVERIE EN ROUTE in the pages of the seers, and try to be at one with my own spirit. In its own divine sphere it is a creator, part of eternal creation. Time and movements, nations and empires are only as dust-drama whirled forth on the outer rim of the earth-cycle. They are not essence, they are only the reflection of essence. The Fall of Man, his going into Exile, is his identification with the illusive life of the surface. He is far from even the outer courts of Reality till he divests himself of all he calls 46 interests.” His intellect is no more than a diver's apparatus. Language he must use charily as stepping-stones with which he does not identify himself. Most poetry is no more than a beautiful and distracting intoxication. Would he seek infinity and eternity he must turn inward, ever inward. And only a little, a glorious little, thereof will he find to-day, or after many days, or after many lives. He may rise to heights of ecstacy, and his soul- vision, coming first in glimpses, may become his normal vision. Yet even so, he will be but a learner, a beginner. I distrust all the poets and seers who speak of Eternal Beauty and of harmony with the Ideal, and of Union with the Father, the Ultimate, the One Essence, in any life, at any earth-stage, at any soul-stage, at any star-stage. 33 3 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS To be a Plato, a Buddha, nay, to be a Deva, an Archangel, is to be still but a step on the way to godliness. Poets and lovers, saints and seers, are dazzled and overjoyed by an access of vision, and deem the added gleam the All. Nothing conceivable or realisable by the highest soul is all-sufficing or final. The self must go deeper into the fathoms of the Self. It must go on creating. It must refuse to rest or identify itself with the things of any sphere or soul-state. Sympathy combined with detachment gives us the key to one law of eternal progression. We reach a hint of the essence of the truth taught by Buddha and Jesus. We begin to understand that essential Buddhism or Christianity is not an end but another beginning. Love all, be bound to nothing, be attached to none : that is, regard nothing as an end, a satis- faction, a finality, but at the best and highest as a stage, something on a Journey, even as thyself. The Kingdom of Heaven is within, and the Within is illimitable, unfathomable. Go on, ever on, go deeper, ever deeper. From the ark of thine higher self study all stages, all worlds, all beings with whom thou comest in contact in thy progression, which is realisation. Look with loving interest on all, but be lost in none. Thou and they are en route. 34 REVERIE EN ROUTE PILGRtMS ALL. (By the sea near Dublin). The flowers, the waves of the soft blue sea, the circling, august hills, the playing children whose voices are faint music in the distance, are all my friends, my happy friends. We look in this lovely hour of time, as if there were neither sorrow nor change, as if we were set in a wonderland to be its denizens for ever. But we are all on a mysterious pilgimage. Yea, even the serene and stately hills are part of the aeon-long order of unfoldment and Becoming. All the essences manifested here in wave and flower and child-form and sky and soul shall be associated again in a thousand guises upon other planes of growiug and being. We are transient; we are eternal. The poets whose music, the seers whose vision, fill my memory and hearten my soul this hour, are also my friends, my happy friends, my god- taught friends. And they also are pilgrims, far higher on the Path than we, more gloriously conscious of their kinship with the flowers, and the sea, and the hills, and the child-forms, and with the light that under- lies and vivifies those pilgrims of wave and foliage and childhood. And the toilers in the pits and the idling tramps 85 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS in the country places, and the wastrels in the city taverns, and the idlers in the mansions, and the weeping mothers and the harassed fathers in the slums — they too, are our friends. O waves and hills and children! our unhappy friends are they all. They are a little more bonded than we. They are tangled in passing toils and illusions. They are dulled by circumstance. But they, too, are pilgrims. They shall soften and sweeten into their higher and divine destiny, even as winter shall soften and sweeten into spring. It may be to-morrow, it may be in far further lives to be. Play, ye children, shine, O sea, and you, ye flowers and encircling hills, glow your brightest and your gladdest. The music and the beauty in mystic wise shall reach them. And I — I have dreamed too long. I have been idly and selfishly joyful. I shall go forth and help them. THROUGH DEFEAT TO TRIUMPH. If I strive and fail and fall on the physical plane is the striving of no avail, is my life a vain thing? In the Kingdom of Mind I may be a victor of victors. I may have heartened and exalted my soul for august achievements to be. In the struggle and the seeming defeat I may 36 REVERIE EN ROUTE have released long dormant energies of my indiv- iduality. So my soul can sing the victor’s song, and go on. Crushed and broken in this place of partial seeing and seeming, my real and enduring self is ecstatic and in tune with divine company. The earth-ego is a transient shape, a lotus in the water, a leaf on a branch of a tree enrooted in eternity. If wind and rain fret the leaf, can they touch the eternal reality ? Nay, no more than the pen-point’s breaking touches the writing poet’s inspiration. A WEEK IN WONDERLAND. When I think at a week’s close of my labour of the week I am humiliated. I have seen auroral dawns, and resplendent noons, and hallowed evenings, and in the lustrous nights I have looked across the deeps of space through shining worlds on worlds, where radiant souls are working. Souls on divine adventures have passed and repassed me in thousands on the highways and the by-ways. I have been through wonderlands every moment of every hour of every day of the seven. What is the measure of my achievement? 37 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS GODS AND WAGE-SLAVES. Many men brood and fret over the problem of evil. I am appalled by the problem of futility. When I follow the thought and the tidings of the seers, when my soul responds to their vision, the universe is a sea of joy. Then I know we are beings with august tasks and eternal purposes. Then I am one with the legions of the mighty living, and the joyous dead who are not dead, but have only changed their forms. I feel their pres- ence in the eternal Now. Old Athens, and old Egypt, and the immemorial India, are as near me as the soul of London or Eirinn. We all sing with the stars that know neither rising nor setting, evening nor morning, dimness nor decay, as we do the mighty work of the cosmos. But alas, when I look outward and around me, into suburbs and senates, and shops and empires, is it not all a meandering medley of futility ? My own existence is a futility in the complexity of futilities. Only in my hidden life have I poise or peace or joy. My career as known to friends and fellow- workers seems as a sorry patch-garb that I shrink from ever wearing again, or as a secret of which I am sorely ashamed. I blush for my crawling of years, my feeble life-building, the parody of myself I have exposed in the universe. 38 REVERIE EN ROUTE I long to recall it, thrust it aside, extinguish it, and cry aloud : “ It is not I. It is not my life. I will begin in earnest here and now. I will think and act as a soul, be a creator and an achiever.” Have most men, or all men, this shamed and startled feeling in some sudden lonely hour of reverie? Do we all understand in some moment of moments, in some day of days, that we are gods who have forgotten our godhood and taken muddle and meanness for our destiny ? If we are gods and the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, then sadly our earth-parts reveal how far gods can fall into sordid sleep, be bonded and bounded by illusion, and hypnotised by foolishness. Oh, the gods who set nation against nation, murder mind and exploit body, spend viciously the profits of fetid and sweated factories, wax fat on slum -rents, adulterate food, grind the faces of the poor and poison them ! And even when honest and decorous, what humdrum and material-minded gods we be ! Look round you, behold what is happening within all the horizons. What countless scrambles and straining, anxieties and fevers, for the finding of food and garb for the body ! The trend and end of the millions are meal- time. Their cosmos is even as a cook-shop. Oh, gods ! Oh wage-slaves ! Your salient expe- 39 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS rience of Mystery and Law is the process of digestion varied by toil and sleep. O descent into Hell that leaves no memory of Heaven ! O gods ! O wage-slaves, and sad heirs of the Kingdom of Servility ! Yet above us the stars gleam, and within us and around us the eternal currents are coursing. And our souls that we have forgotten are more enduring than the stars and greater than the eternal currents. An aeon cometh when a glorious resurrection into the Real World shall be ours. In mud and mire and misery to-day we are laying, though we know it not, the foundations of the House of Life. x\nd the meanest of wage- slaves shall be master-builders. LOOKING OUTWARD. At times methinks our earth is a by-planet of no more import in the cosmos than a cellar in a palace. It may be that marred or incapable souls who cannot keep pace with the currents of the creative universe are consigned to our globe for embodiment, and for a feeble experiment in living ; a dim and dull reflection of life in the planets and on the planes where beings really live. 40 REVERIE EN ROUTE It may be that the golden ages in the tradi- tions of races are psychic memories of existence on other globes, before our inability to keep the march and rhythm of the evolving universe was demonstrated. Through most of its earth-history the race seems to be following dimly and waveringly some scheme of life whose plan and purpose it has forgotten. We are seemingly not whole, coherent beings ; we lack vital awareness and consciousness. Our existence may be the stupor of immortals and when we awake we shall judge it as now we judge confusedly-remembered dreaming. The sages and the heroes are gone, and the gods appear no more. Never a Plato or an Erigena discourses again ; the strength of Cuchulainn and Fionn is a dream ; even love is divorced from godliness, and lovers hear the birds of Angus Og no longer. Ours is the planet of petty achievements. We are a feverish imitation humanity. We are idols that worship other idols. What do our souls think of our futility? Or do they reck of us at all? Are our souls, on their mysterious mission, any more conscious of us than we — the vain, normal we — are conscious of the silent-working cells of our bodies? 41 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS And what do the high gods think of the hope that after one wavering life the selves we habi- tually know will be rewarded by an eternal heaven ? It were truly a wondrous sequel to a poor prelude. Or can the thought be the reflection of the vision of immeasurably greater selves than those that play at life in our habitual wilful, unheroic way ? Does this, his daring and glorious faith, suggest after all that man is the poor but serviceable carrier of a veiled god on a pilgrimage of which he knows but dimly ? Then let him do his carrying well! To be the conveyer of a god through his earth-course is a glorious role and destiny. But ah me ! how much serener, wiser servants we could all be for the gods whom it is our privilege to carry during their inscrutable journeys through materiality ! HOW LIGHT OF SEERS AND PROPHETS HAS BEEN LOST, How sadly have races and nations lost the soul of the world’s Bibles and the ecstatic sense of the Reality permeating the heaven-embodying universe. They are the tale and testament of cosmic seers and prophets, of poets in divine mornings of the spirit ; and hardening men and darkening ages have re-made them in their own image. All the revelations of the world-teachers and 42 REVERIE EN ROUTE Bible-makers are cosmic and spiritual at basis, because the universal unfolding of which they tell — including man’s spirit and path — is a story of the emanation and adventure of Spirit. Those who hear or read the revealings realise and remember them in the terms and with the limit- ations of their particular spheres and consciousness. The truth about the cosmos and its becoming, about man and his path, would seem different, would mean something ever narrowing, to an audience of archangels, an audience of men with psychic vision, an audience of spiritual-minded normal men, an audience of bonded ordinary men, an audience of “ savages,” and an audience of blind men, though it might be told in the self-same terms to all. There is only one story, one cosmos; but it is seen from different states, and in different aspects. We do not know it as the animals or our blind brethren know it. If we want to know it here and now still more truly than we do we must spiritu- alise ourselves and our vision. The Mysteries of old were designed to give men this higher vision that means knowledge. It must be gained in the soul and spirit as the seers of Egypt and India, Greeks and Celts and Druids knew. Gnostic and early Christian seers, brooding on the Passion and Crucifixion, told that when Jesus suffered on the Cross in the human sphere He was 43 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS divinely and joyously conscious in the higher or inner sphere of godhood. The Crucifixion of the Christos to those seers symbolised an eternal, not a temporary, process. The Christos is the divinity in the cosmos and in us all. It is an eternal and ineffable Reality. Essentially, on its own plane, it is free and omnipotent. It suffers on the Cross of Matter and manifestation, but is ever raising materiality and corporality to the state and consciousness of divinity, and thus accomplishing its “ redemption.'” Aquinas expressed a kindred thought when he said that the Incarnation, the Via ad Deum , is eternally in being. Unhappily the wondrous reality of the eternal Christos has been materialised, personified, and localised. The Christ-idea has been narrowed and formalised even as the Eden-idea. Obsessed by time and place and temporal pano- rama we lose the sense of the psychic and spiritual worlds, of which things tangible are embodiments and reflections; we lose the sense of the cosmic Christos, of whom the supreme mystic and achiever we revere as Jesus was a manifestation. All earth-lives and courses are only fractions and segments of immeasurable and dimly realised realities. Through soul-labour and experience is the way to ever clearer and surer understanding thereof. 44 REVERIE EN ROUTE The corporal self is but a temporary servant, the intellect an incidental apparatus. The literal reading of world* scriptures, and all that fear and unreason have built and based thereon, have marred minds and hindered racial evolution by concentrating attention on the rela- tively unimportant material mould and bodily state. These are but as husk and shell. And the “ Fall v> into materiality was and is purposive. The creative Power did not and could not make a mistake. What happened was inevit- able, and according to creative law and being. If we do not think so it is because we have read a crude and unworthy meaning into a symbol-story, and read a similarly unhappy meaning into life. The more we learn of the cosmic and eternal course, or changing soul-states, of man and all other beings, the more surely we realise that, howsoever it may seem from the view-point of time, and one incidental life-spell, there is no chaos therein, but inevitable cause and effect. It is a fruitful stage, an essential experience in an illimitable story, an eternal destiny. THEY THAT WORK AGAINST NATURE. Countless theologians and lawyers have militated against Religion and Law. They have hindered spirituality aud evolution. They have worked against nature. 45 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS They have stood, not for essence and spirit and principle, but for precedent and for specious authority and tedious surface detail. They have been obsessed by formulae and the dry outer husk of things. Creativeness is alien and unknown to them. As things were — on the outside — so must things be again and ever, say they. They have no vital inner life, no harmonious divine movement, no sense of artistry whatever. Nature is an artist everywhere. Look inward or look outward, and behold : ever the creative essence endures, but there is a perennial magic of surprise and freshness and sweetness. Mentally and humanly we are all part of an immemorial romance of Becoming, but in every aeon and life and year and moment the way and the working are new. It is even so in Nature’s outer sphere of beauty. The forms — flowers, leaves, all — change and pass and return irradiantly new. The creative essence is ever in being, the presentments are beautiful and novel at every reappearing stage and scene. Think, oh ye theologians and lawyers, of essence and spirit, and shun the deadening worship of the surface monotony ye call unity and precedent. Nature’s unity is interior, and she never works from precedent. She creates and enjoys and sings. 46 REVERIE EN ROUTE Without creation and movement there is death- in-life. Stagnation and satisfaction with stagnation are anomalies. THE NIGHTMARE OF “ EVIL. 1 ” When we fretfully lament the existence of a mysterious force we call evil we begin in the wrong way and at the wrong point, taking our stand on a legend and accepting an illusion. The notion of a mysterious offended Power and a crude Fall from innocence in a dateless age, punished by aeons of tribulation and confusion, with a possible Hell at the end of a life, hides both God and Man from us. We make the cosmos a slave-mart, divinity a dream, and destiny a melodrama. We should begin with ourselves ond our sur- roundings. Before we frame any theory of the inevitability and permanence of evil we should fraternally and heroically withstand, fight down, and extirpate all the manifold evil that is patently eradicable. Is there any conceivable evil that is not, or has not been, man-made, or that man could not abolish through fraternity, justice, harmony with the highest law he has realised, and the development of his greater self? Living according to the highest standards, follow- 47 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS ing the greatest guides and examples of the race, making justice, unselfishness, charity, inner and outer harmony, the unfailing and unflinching order — all nations like great human households, in one loving and ardent world-commune — what would humanity know of evil ? The ills and ordeals that have haunted and cursed it would pass away like dreams. Freed from those terrors and torturings the sweeter and deeper essentials of man’s nature would come into being and action ; he would gradually acquire untold insight into Nature and her laws or habits, and consequent power over her forces. She would be his ministering servant and his pliable medium. After even a few' hundred years human nature and the planet w'ould seem to have been re-created. To say that this is a dream, human nature being what it is, is only to beg the question. It means that the tyranny lies in human nature, not in a mysterious Force of Evil outside and beyond it. It means that man has not the courage and the endurance to make his potencies actualities. Then he should blame his own neglect and perversity not an inscrutable Power circumventing and thwarting him. Individually and collectively we have ourselves wrought our evil, in this life and in former lives. And we lack the wisdom and the staying-pow T er that w'ould undo it. 48 REVERIE EN ROUTE Grapple with man-made evil, interior and exterior. Suppress it as far as you can, faithfully follow your fairest ideals to the end of your days. Leave the mission and the ideal as an order and a heritage to your children. Let the race continue age after age in this faith and this labour for divinity. A new Man, a new Mentality, and a new Earth, shall be the harvest. OUR MILLION-FOLD SELFHOOD. Seers say we are three-fold beings: body, soul, and spirit. Also, say they, we are sevenfold. Haply we are million-fold. In my corporal guise I am of the physical world. But my body is no more I than the garb I wear is I. I do not think in garb, I am not obsessed by garb. When it grows old, without regret or pain I cast it away and put on new ; and still I am one and the same. The physical body is but garb, the biding in the physical sphere but an incident. Even here I realise that there are many inter- penetrating worlds. I shall be fully conscious in them all in due season. I can afford to be patient; I have manifold cause to be joyous. 49 4 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS Every stage and every state must bring me nearer to conscious godhood, and untold opportunities and powers of service. ESSENTIALS. O, well it were to love deeply and divinely and to work for an ideal unceasingly. Without love and without ideal, cold is the contemplation of the universe. With these it shines and allures us; without them it is night with no light and no voice. We are intruders astray in it; we are meaning- less and vexing to ourselves. With love and the ideal I am able to preach the Gospel to myself, and to believe it. A MYSTIC TO A THEOLOGIAN. My spirit, ray real self, accepted on another plane the necessity or duty of putting on the bodily condition for the sake of experience or amendment, or as part of its natural lot and destiny in the cosmic scheme in which we are all partakers or creators, or, at the lowest, under- standing and willing servants. Our souls, our subliminal selves, are not in the dark or puzzled. They are intelligent and devoted ministers of the Master of Life. 50 REVERIE EN ROUTE When this earth-life is over, my spirit, the real 46 1”, will judge what I have done and left undone or unfinished. Divine and unerring Law will determine the further path and progression : whether I am bound to return again and again to earth, to retrieve or amend or complete, or whether I pass on to other spheres. Many a time even my limited earth-personality can feel that I am wasting something greater than gold, yea greater and grander than starfire : that I am only a wayward and erratic Tiller of the Soil I might make ever more fruitful, ever more subtle and sacred. Yet again there are moments when I feel that I love the soil and the labour overmuch. I could strive for an aeon by the Boyne and the Liffey, were it mine to sow thought and create, and witness the rebirth and unfolding of a civilisation. Why is Eire deemed doleful ? In the magic of morning, in the starry stillness of the night, when I stand between the hills and the sea, she seems an eternal spirit. At the feasts and the hostings of the Gael ages and mysteries meet and commingle. We loved and laboured in those vales aforetime. Our joy of to-day is in part reminiscence^ in part the response of our souls to the eternal Eire that is spirit. 51 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS BETWEEN TWO WONDERLANDS. Forces and mysteries, principalities and powers, of which our understanding is dim, fill the kingdom of the body. The circulation of the blood is as wondrous and romantic as the progress of the Gulf Stream or the earth’s diurnal and seasonal pilgrimage. The process of digestion, tissue-building, blood- nourishing, life-cherishing, is as marvellous as the evolution of winter into spring and sequent summer and harvest. Yea, we contain kingdoms of perennial re- creation. Our material frames are compounded of magic. Of these winders our conscious selves are un- aware. And beyond our conscious selves our subliminal selves move in mystical orbits and fulfil their spacious destinies. We — the conscious “we” — live between “lower” and “upper” wonderlands. But it is ours, in one life or many, to grow aware and awake to the higher w r orlds, to respond to divinity itself. As yet our conscious life is no more than an opening bud of one branch of the illimitable Tree of cosmic Being. 52 REVERIE EN ROUTE THE U TIME SPIRIT Wiseacres tell us that we are all the servants of the time-spirit : that we take our psychic orders from the time-spirit. I am my own time-spirit. I am a hundred thousand time-spirits. When I am done with the ministering of time- spirits I bid them hence and put time itself away. I travel with Pythagoras when I will. I call Plato to my side ; nay, within the secret places of my spirit. I enter all the temples and shrines of Egypt. I am rapt at Eleusis and Samothrace. I go of mornings to where the Vedas are in the making. In the evenings I repair unto the druids of the west. I pass from Stonehenge to Bru na Boinne, and hear the music of the Birds of Angus. I hie me to a home in Atlantis. I hold the ford with Cuchulainn. I pass through the World of Waters to Tir na n Og. I list to Christ and Buddha, and lo ! I am in the heart of the Co-operative Commonwealth. Between the rising of the sun and the setting of the stars I am of all time and no time. All the ages seem as circles in the water, changes of one eternal soul-state. 53 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS THE BOYNE AND THE WIZARD. I see the lily in the waters of the Boyne, I see the sun in the noonday heaven. I see not the Lily nor the Boyne nor the Sun nor the Heaven. I only see reflections that are cast by the wizard symbolist Time on the witching screen of Space. Wondrous is the artistry of the picture; but the picture is not They . They are as far, and as near, as the angels. CRUCIFIXION AND RESURRECTION. We come to realise a little of the meaning of our drama in any one life when we know that crucifixion and resurrection are eternal processes. If we are obsessed by the desires and interests of the day, and athirst for selfish triumph in the actual world, so that we resist crucifixion in our personal selves, we cannot rise out of eorporality and illusion into serene joy of the soul, into responsiveness to Reality, and the sense of the august spiritual unfolding through which it is our real nature to pass. For the ends and the causes we have weighed and profoundly believe in we must struggle with all our might. But we — our real selves — are more than the causes. 54 REVERIE EN ROUTE The struggle for the causes in our human arena is our intellectual and spiritual exercise. We partake of it and pass on. We have the long roads and soul-states of the universe to travel yet. And we shall follow the causes and the quest in more subtle and majestic wise in other soul-spheres. “Down here” we cannot fathom their diviner essence. What happens to our bodies and our surface- selves is incidental. They are servants of our souls in this time-and-space interlude, and no more. They are our souls’ diving apparatus in the sea of materiality. RUIN, REMEMBRANCE, AND RE-BUILDING. When we toil afar from Ireland in the places we call exile, or when we strive at home in what seems a ruined land : strive for thought and the gospel of man’s divinity, and the ideal of a nati- onality of the spirit : There are hours when our souls sink; we seem idealists vainly warring with futility. Principalities and powers, earth-demons, degrading actualities encompass us, smite us, laugh our hopes to scorn. Our inner kingdom, we deemed eternal at the dawn, seems as Fata Morgana on the waters. 55 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS Wistfully we think of the chivalry, the high heroic hearts, the queenly-souled women, the romance and the wonderland, the lightsome civili- sation and the mystic mind, of the vanished ages of Gaeldom. And our hearts tell us that had that shining civilisation remained unspoiled and untorn, had it been left to flower and re-flower, the Gael had not been a ruin and a forlorn dreamer and a tragic wanderer in the world. He w T ould have remained a doer and a light- giver, he w r ould have grown a master-builder. To-day the ancestral land would be a place of pride, a home of colour and song, the haunt of a creative and reverent chivalry in which we all would be sharers, by which w r e all w r ould be sheltered and heartened. But we only vex our natures and retard our souls through this obsession by one part and phase of the story. Why was the Gaels’ civilisation broken? Why was it all but ruined? Were the invaders and spoilers alone the guilty ? Was there a weakness or a want in our fathers that helped to bring them down? Were they undone by evil Karma? In far for- gotten ages had the race in rage or pride wronged or ravaged another? 56 REVERIE EN ROUTE Or was it all a deep purposive and chastening experience ? Be sure the story has not ended. What was lofty and leal in the flowering civilisation of the Gael has not been destroyed. Essences know not destruction or decay. Only their mould and form suffer change. The essence of our olden chivalry has not perished. What of it is not re-embodied in us is indrawn to its soul-state. The seeming burial and winter are the prelude to resurrection and spring. And the destroying aud spoiling invaders P What they wrought against light and beauty they are fated to undo. They have suffered or are suffering; if not on this plane of being then on others. Let us pity their memory; let us wish them fair return unto harmony and peace and divine reconstruction. And let us be glad for the race-faith and ideal, the civilisation that is latent within ourselves. Let us cherish and apply it ardently. Let us create beauty and unfold wonder anew. For men and races re-building is more glorious than proud remembering. The non-creators are the lost. 57 THE OLD RACE AND THE NEW. THE REAL IRELAND. I have dwelt in the saga-lands of the Gael ; I have revelled at Tara. I have fared with the Red Branch Knights, I have sported and sung with the Fianna. As I worshipped at Bru na Boinne *) my old self passed into twilight, And a Self, obscured long days, felt the gleam and the call of godhood. I stood in a world of wonder, a world serene and high-fated, A mystic essence that ever unfolded to deeper Being, And I knew I was part thereof and my everyday self was a shadow. That is the real Eire that glows and gladdens for ever, The Wonderland that is timeless, where our souls are at work unceasing. It is earth with the light of star and the breath of spirit. *) Scene of the great pre-Christian memorials and temples by the Boyne. 58 THE OLD RACE AND THE NEW The Selves that are tenants there are creators and music-makers. Wherever their bodies fare, and however lowly their guises. Aloof and chosen are they, co-operators with godhood. They walk in magic and peace through the world of fever and seeming. IN TIME AND IN THE ETERNAL. A people are we whose story is writ from without and in fragments. Blind is History’s muse to the deep Life lived in Eirinn, To the hero-soul and the elfin heart a-gleam at the core of it, To the communal mind like a feast and a song through the ages, To the psychic sense that kept youth and age in the self’s weird inlands, Made haunting the rath and dun, sacred the lonely well-spring; With Tir na n-Og*) ever shining beyond the World of Waters. *) The Earth-World, the World of Waters, and Tir na n-Og or the Land of Immortal Youth, are three stages in noted Gaelic story. They correspond esoterically to the physical* psychic, and mental planes of certain mystical literature. 59 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS Rounded is Deed with Dream in our human and soulful faring, We have followed Heroes without, within "were the Gods our leaders. What care we then if for ages our earth-seen record is tangled? The soul-fact, the heavenly truth, is the inner Kingdom of Eirinn, The psychic and mental selves that in stress and dream she has fitted For the farther and grander faring in the widening cosmic saga. What the Celt has meant in time is as buds to Spring’s secret magic : The mystery and the glory are his meaning in the Eternal. Not how Cuchulainn strove, nor how Deirdre loved in our fathers’ heyday, Nor any achievement of old, is for us the key- stone of Gaeldom, But what we are making to music to-day in the shrines of the spirit. A tale that is told, the hero-deeds in the days of our fathers; It is more a thousand-fold that from morn to spell-sweet night-time. 60 THE OLD RACE AND THE NEW The soul-force embodied in us shall create and achieve unceasing. To leave its godhood unused is the darkest doom of a people. THE OLD PLACE AND THE NEW PEOPLE. (A souvenir of Gaelic League activities and festivals). Under our eyes is Ireland mysteriously re-peopled ? The old, cold towns are aglow in the gala-days of the Feiseanna *). Friends look in wondering wise into friends 1 unfa- miliar faces. We who were lowly have risen and entered our Kingdom. Fionn and Oisin are as real as kinsfolk and neigh- bours. They might dwell at the roadway’s end or be hunting over the mountain. In the pipers’ music they cry, they speak in the shanachies’ stories. Deirdre’s joy is undimmed; the Ford is held by Cuchulainn ; Far o’er the magical earth speeds the Light-Sling of Lu the Longhanded. Fairyland leaps and laughs in the eyes of the festal children. *) Gaelic Festivals (Pronounced Fesh-ana). 61 THE CELT AND THE COSMOS Light of Tara and Tir na n-Og is a-gleam at cuaird and ceilidh. The Muinteoiri Taisdil *), the culture-bearers, fare to the farthest hamlets; Smith and stone-breaker and ploughboy feel the olden romance of learning. The humble group by the heathlands high-hearted is as Sgoil Banna. A race looks not back but inward, a race is to-day re-bora. The Flame that is clothed in clay young people and old discover. They serve the eternal Eire, star in the cosmos of spirit. *) Gaelic Travelling Teachers. 62 WHEN THE GODS WILL COME. Let us strive our souls' best, and be calm, whatever we reap as harvest Let us rail not at Fate — we are Fate— nor appeal to the sods to aid us; But rather call up for the strife the great dormant gods within us. __ „ God s will only a: wer to gods. Sense or sight of the heaven- orld never Shall be ours til 1 -ve wake our godhood, and enter serene as kindred. f Shame upon us to nurse tire thought that our paltry and puny selfhood Could be meet for the gods to side with, or know the gods if they answered And stood in our midst The moment that finds us pure and exalted, The deep subtle fortes within us brought into being and action, Then shall the gods be with us, Light where long was illusion. The veil we have spread on the Real gone like a phantom at morning. es ACME BOOKBINDING CO., INC. DEC 2 8 1983 ICO CAMBRIDGE STREET CHARLESTOWN, MASS. BOSTON COLLEGE 3 903 - 01138388 2