Books: AE in the Irish Theosophist
G >>
George William Russell >> AE in the Irish Theosophist
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 | 13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20
The following description of a giant, taken from the story of
Diarmuid, refers to still another aspect of our occult nature.
"He has, but one eye only in the fair middle of his black forehead.
.... He is, moreover, so skilled in magic that fire could not burn
him, water could not drown him, and weapons would not wound him.
...... He is fated not to die until there be struck upon him three
blows of the iron club he has. He sleeps in the top of that Quicken
tree by night, and he remains at its foot by day to watch it. ....
The berries of the tree have the virtues of the trees of faeryland."
The Quicken tree is the network of nerves in the magnetic astral body.
Readers of the Upanishads will remember the description of the arteries,
thin as a hair split a thousand times, which proceed from the heart,
and in which the Ego rests during deep sleep. It has just the same
significance in the legend. The meaning will be still better
understood by a comparison of the youthful Finn in his encounter
with a similar one-eye Titan. There is a most interesting version
of this in Curtin's Irish Myths and Folk-Tales. Too long to quote
in its entirety, the story runs as follows. Finn meets a giant
who carries a salmon in his hand. This Titan has "but one eye as
large as the sun in the heavens." He gives the fish to Finn to
cook. The moment the giant closed his eye he began to breathe
heavily. "Every time he drew breath he dragged Finn, the spit,
the salmon, and all the goats to his mouth, and every time drove
a breath out of himself he threw them back to the places they were
in before." While Finn is cooking the salmon he burns it, and in
trying to hide the blister he burns his thumb. To ease the pain
he put his thumb between his teeth, and chewed it through to the
bone and marrow. He then received the knowledge of all things.
He was drawn up the next minute to the giant's eye, and plunged
the hot spit (a bar of red-hot iron, says another account) into
the eye of the giant. He passes the infuriate giant at the door
of the cave something after the fashion of Ulysses, by bringing
the flocks out and himself escaping under the fleece of the largest
goat or ram.
The meaning of this story, with all its quaint imagery, is not
difficult. It is an allegory describing the loss of the third eye.
The cave is the body. The fish is a phallic symbol, and the cooking
of it refers to the fall of the early ethereal races into generation
and eventually into gross sensuality. The synthetic action of the
highest spiritual faculty, in which all the powers of man are present,
is shown by the manner in which everything in the cave is dragged
up to the giant's head. When Finn destroys the eye by plunging
into it a bar of red-hot iron, it simply means that the currents
started in the generative organs rose up through the spinal cord
to the brain, and, acting upon the pineal gland, atrophied or
petrified it. The principle of desire is literally the spirit of
the metal iron, and a clairvoyent could see these red fires mounting
up by the way of the spinal canal to the brain and there smothering
any higher feelings. The escape of Finn under the fleece of the
ram means that, having destroyed the spiritual eye, he could only
use the organ of psychic clairvoyance, which is symbolized here,
as in the mysticism of other countries, by the ram.
This symbolism, so grotesque and unmeaning today, was once perfectly
lucid and was justified in its application. A clairvoyant could
see in the aura of man around every centre the glow, colour and
form which gave rise to the antique symbol. One of the Gods is
described as "surrounded by a rainbow and fiery dews." Cuchullin,
whose hair, dark (blue?) close to the skin, red beyond, and ending
in brilliant gold, makes Professor Rhys elaborate him into a solar
myth, is an adept who has assimilated the substance of the three
worlds, the physical, the psychic and the heavenworld; therefore
his hair (aura) shows the three colours. He has the sevenfold
vision also, indicated by the seven pupils in his eyes. Volumes
of unutterably dreary research, full of a false learning, have
been written about these legends. Some try to show that much of
the imagery arose from observation of the heavenly bodies and the
procession of the seasons. But who of the old bards would have
described nature other than as she is? The morning notes of Celtic
song breathe the freshness of spring and are full of joy in nature.
They could communicate this much better than most of their critics
could do. It is only the world within which could not be rendered
otherwise than by myth and symbol. We do not need scholarship so
much as a little imagination to interpret them. We shall understand
the divine initiators of our race by believing in our own divinity.
As we nourish the mystic fire, we shall find many things of the
early world, which now seem grotesque and unlovely to our eyes,
growing full of shadowy and magnificent suggestion. Things that
were distant and strange, things abhorrent, the blazing dragons,
winged serpents and oceans of fire which affrighted us, are seen
as the portals through which the imagination enters a more beautiful,
radiant world. The powers we dared not raise our eyes to--heroes,
dread deities and awful kings--grow as brothers and gay children
around the spirit in its resurrection and ascension. For there
is no pathway in the universe which does not pass through man,
and no life which is not brother to our life.
--March-April, 1895
Review: "Lyrics" by R.H. Fitzpatrick [London: W. Stewart and Co.]
While one race sinks into night another renews its dawn. The Celtic
Twilight is the morning-time and the singing of birds is prophetic
of the new day. We have had to welcome of late years one sweet
singer after another, and now comes a volume of lyrics which has
that transcendental note which is peculiar to our younger writers.
It is full of the mystery and commingling of the human and the
divine soul:
"Hail, thou living spirit!
Whose deep organ blown
By lips that more inherit
Than all music known;
Art is but the echo of thy mysterious tone."
These lyrics, I imagine, have been wrought in solitary wanderings,
in which the forms and shows of things and human hopes and fears
have been brooded upon until the intensity of contemplation has
allied them with that soul of Nature in which the poet finds the
fulfilment of all dreams and ideals. And in this refining back
to an Over-Soul there is no suggestion of the student of academic
philosophy, no over-wrought intellectualism. Such references
arise naturally out of his thought and illuminate it. One can
imagine how such lyrics were engendered:
"I stood and twirled a feathered stalk,
Or drank the clover's honey sap,
Happiest without talk.
"The summer tidal waves of night
Slowly in silence rippled in:
They steeped the feet of blazing light,
And hushed day's harsher din."
This aloofness from conflict, it if has hindered him from fully
accepting and justifying life, the highest wisdom of the poet, has
still its compensations. He has felt the manifold meaning of the
voices through whose unconsciousness Nature speaks, the songs of
birds, the aerial romance and intermingling of light and shadow,
and has vision of the true proportion of things in that conflict
he has turned his back on:
"All things sip,
And sip at life; but Time for ever drains
The ever-filing cup in rivalship,
And wipes the generations from his lip,
While Art looks down from his serene domains."
--June 15, 1895
--"YES, AND HOPE."
They bring none to his or to her terminus or to be content and full,
Whom they take they take into space to behold the birth of stars,
to learn one of the meanings. To launch off with absolute faith,
to sweep through the ceaseless rings and never be quiet again.
--Whitman
Here is inspiration--the voice of the soul. And we, who professed
to bring such wisdom, what have we to say? Have we uttered with
equal confidence such hopes, or with such daring and amplitude of
illustration? Let us confess we have not. There are one or two
exceptions which will occur to everyone. Now, as we adventure afresh,
let us see what it is has brought despondency and failure in our work
upon us in the past. I think it is because we have been saying
things we have never realized; we have been repeating without
imagination the words of those few leaders. We have lowered their
heroic tone because we thought we were speaking to a fallen people
who could not respond to our highest. But it was not the way, it
was not the way. It is not with the dust we have brotherhood, but
with the ancient spirit it clouds over. To this spirit we must
speak heart to heart as we know how. I would not willingly recognize
aught in anyone but the divine. Often indeed the form or surface
far removed from beauty makes us falter, and we speak to that form
and so the soul is not stirred; it will not respond. But an equal
temper arouses it. To whoever hails in it the lover, the hero,
the magician, it will answer, but not to him who accosts it as Mr.
So-and-So. Every word which really inspires is spoken as if the
Golden Age had never passed. The great teachers ignore the personal
identity and speak to the eternal pilgrim. Do we not treasure
most their words which remind us of our divine origin? So we must
in our turn speak. How often do we not long to break through the
veils which divide us from some one, but custom, convention, or a
fear of being misunderstood prevent us, and so the moment departs
whose heat might have burned through every barrier. Out with it--
out with it, the hidden heart, the love that is voiceless, the
secret tender germ of an infinite forgiveness. That speaks to
the heart. That pierces through many a vesture of the Soul.
Our companion struggles in some labyrinth of passion. We help him,
we think with ethics, with the moralities. Ah, very well they are;
well to know and to keep, but wherefore? For their own sake? No,
but that the King may arise in his beauty. We write that in letters,
in books, but to the face of the fallen who brings back remembrance?
Who calls him by his secret name? Let a man but feel for that is
his battle, for that his cyclic labor, and a warrior who is invincible
fights for him and he draws upon divine powers. Let us but get that
way of looking at things which we call imaginative, and how everything
alters. For our attitude to man and to nature, expressed or not,
has something of the effect of ritual, of evocation. As our
aspiration so is our inspiration. We believe in life universal,
in a brotherhood which links the elements to man, and makes the
glow-worm feel far off something of the rapture of the seraph hosts.
Then we go out into the living world, and what influences pour
through us! We are "at league with the stones of the field." The
winds of the world blow radiantly upon us as in the early time.
We feel wrapt about with love, with an infinite tenderness that
caresses us. Alone in our rooms as we ponder, what sudden abysses
of light open within us! The Gods are so much nearer than we dreamed.
We rise up intoxicated with the thought, and reel out seeking an
equal companionship under the great night and the stars.
Let us get near to realities. We read too much. We think of that
which is "the goal, the Comforter, the Lord, the Witness, the resting-
place, the asylum and the Friend." Is it by any of these dear and
familiar names? Alas, our souls are becoming mere bundles of theories.
We follow the trail of the Monad, but often it is only in the pages
of The Secret Doctrine. And we talk much of Atma, Buddhi, and Manas.
Could we not speak of them in our own tongue and the language of
today will be as sacred as any of the past. No wonder that the
Manasa do not incarnate. We cannot say we do pay reverence to
these awful powers. We repulse the living truth by our doubts and
reasonings. We would compel the Gods to fall in with our philosophy
rather than trust in the heavenly guidance. We make diagrams of them.
Ah, to think of it, those dread deities, the divine Fires, to be
so enslaved! We have not comprehended the meaning of the voice
which cried, "Prepare ye the way of the Lord," or this, "Lift up
your heads O y gates. Be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and
the King of Glory shall come in." Nothing that we read is useful
unless it calls up living things in the soul. To read a mystic
book truly is to invoke the powers. If they do not rise up plumed
and radiant, the apparitions of spiritual things, then is our labor
barren. We only encumber the mind with useless symbols. They
knew better ways long ago. "Master of the Green-waving Planisphere,
..... Lord of the Azure Expanse, .... it is thus we invoke," cried
the magicians of old.
And us, let us invoke them with joy, let us call upon them with love,
the Light we hail, or the Divine Darkness we worship with silent
breath, hymning it in our hearts with quietude and more enraptured
awe. That silence cries aloud to the Gods. Then they will approach
us. Then we may learn that speech of many colors, for they will
not speak in our mortal tongue; they will not answer to the names
of men. Their names are rainbow glories. Yet these are mysteries
and they cannot be reasoned out or argued over. We cannot speak
truly of them from report, or description, or from what another
has written. A relation to the thing in itself alone is our warrant,
and this means we must set aside our intellectual self-sufficiency
and await guidance. It will surely come to those who wait in trust,
a glow, a heat in the heart announcing the awakening of the Fire.
And, as it blows with its mystic breath into the brain, there is
a hurtling of visions, a brilliance of lights, a sound as of great
waters vibrant and musical in their flowing, and murmurs from a
single yet multitudinous being. In such a mood, when the far
becomes near, the strange familiar, and the infinite possible, he
wrote from whose words we get the inspiration:
"To launch off with absolute faith, to sweep through the ceaseless
rings and never be quiet again."
Such a faith and such an unrest be ours: faith which is mistrust
of the visible; unrest which is full of a hidden surety and radiance.
We, when we fall into pleasant places, rest and dream our strength
away. Before every enterprise and adventure of the soul we calculate
in fear our power to do. But remember, "Oh, disciple, in thy work
for thy brother thou has many allies; in the winds, in the air,
in all the voices of the silent shore." These are the far-wandered
powers of our own nature and they turn again home at our need.
We came out of the Great Mother-Life for the purposes of soul.
Are her darlings forgotten where they darkly wander and strive?
Never. Are not the lives of all her heroes proof? Though they
seem to stand alone the eternal Mother keeps watch on them, and
voices far away and unknown to them before arise in passionate
defence, and hearts beat warm to help them. Aye, if we could look
within we would see vast nature stirred on their behalf, and
institutions shaken, until the truth they fight for triumphs, and
they pass, and a wake of glory ever widening behind them trails
down the ocean of the years.
Thus the warrior within us works, or, if we choose to phrase it so,
it is the action of the spiritual will. Shall we not, then, trust
in it and face the unknown defiant and fearless of its dangers.
Though we seem to go alone to the high, the lonely, the pure, we
need not despair. Let no one bring to this task the mood of the
martyr or of one who thinks he sacrifices something. Yet let all
who will come. Let them enter the path, "Yes, and hope," facing
all things in life and death with a mood at once gay and reverent,
as beseems those who are immortal--who are children today, but
whose hands tomorrow may grasp the sceptre, sitting down with the
Gods as equal and companions.
--August 1895
Content
Who are exiles? as for me
Where beneath the diamond dome
Lies the light on hill or tree
There my palace is and home.
We are outcasts from Deity; therefore we defame the place of our
exile. But who is there may set apart his destiny from the earth
which bore him? I am one of those who would bring back the old
reverence for the Mother, the magic, the love. I think, metaphysician,
you have gone astray. You would seek within yourself for the fountain
of life. Yes, there is the true, the only light. But do not dream
it will lead you further away from the earth, but rather deeper into
its heart. By it you are nourished with those living waters you
would drink. You are yet in the womb and unborn, and the Mother
breathes for thee the diviner airs. Dart out thy furthest ray of
thought to the original, and yet thou has not found a new path of
thine own. Thy ray is still enclosed in the parent ray, and only
on the sidereal streams are you borne to the freedom of the deep,
to the sacred stars whose distance maddens, and to the lonely Light
of Lights.
Let us, therefore, accept the conditions and address ourselves with
wonder, with awe, with love, as we well may, to that being in whom
we move. I abate no jot of those vaster hopes, yet I would pursue
that ardent aspiration, content as to here and today. I do not
believe in a nature red with tooth and claw. If indeed she appears
so terrible to any it is because they themselves have armed her.
Again, behind the anger of the Gods there is a love. Are the rocks
barren? Lay thy brow against them and learn what memories they keep.
Is the brown earth unbeautiful? Yet lie on the breast of the Mother
and thou shalt be aureoled with the dews of faery. The earth is
the entrance to the Halls of Twilight. What emanations are those
that make radiant the dark woods of pine! Round every leaf and
tree and over all the mountains wave the fiery tresses of that
hidden sun which is the soul of the earth and parent of they soul.
But we think of these things no longer. Like the prodigal we have
wandered far from our home, but no more return. We idly pass or
wait as strangers in the halls our spirit built.
Sad or fain no more to live?
I have pressed the lips of pain:
With the kisses lovers give
Ransomed ancient powers again.
I would raise this shrinking soul to a more universal acceptance.
What! does it aspire to the All, and yet deny by its revolt and
inner protest the justice of Law. From sorrow we shall take no
less and no more than from our joys. For if the one reveals to
the soul the mode by which the power overflows and fills it here,
the other indicates to it the unalterable will which checks excess
and leads it on to true proportion and its own ancestral ideal.
Yet men seem for ever to fly from their destiny of inevitable beauty;
because of delay the power invites and lures no longer but goes out
into the highways with a hand of iron. We look back cheerfully
enough upon those old trials out of which we have passed; but we
have gleaned only an aftermath of wisdom and missed the full harvest
if the will has not risen royally at the moment in unison with the
will of the Immortal, even though it comes rolled round with terror
and suffering and strikes at the heart of clay.
Through all these things, in doubt, despair, poverty, sick feeble
or baffled, we have yet to learn reliance. "I will not leave thee
or forsake thee," are the words of the most ancient spirit to the
spark wandering in the immensity of its own being. This high
courage brings with it a vision. It sees the true intent in all
circumstance out of which its own emerges to meet it. Before it
the blackness melts into forms of beauty, and back of all illusions
is seen the old enchanter tenderly smiling, the dark, hidden Father
enveloping his children.
All things have their compensations. For what is absent here there
is always, if we seek, a nobler presence about us.
Captive, see what stars give light
In the hidden heart of clay:
At their radiance dark and bright
Fades the dreamy King of Day.
We complain of conditions, but this very imperfection it is which
urges us to arise and seek for the Isles of the Immortals. What
we lack recalls the fulness. The soul has seen a brighter day
than this and a sun which never sets. Hence the retrospect: "Thou
has been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy
covering, the sardius, topaz and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx,
the jasper, the sapphire, emerald .... Thou was upon the holy
mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the
stones of fire." We would point out these radiant avenues of return;
but sometimes we feel in our hearts that we sound but cockney
choices, as guides amid the ancient temples, the cyclopean crypts
sanctified by the mysteries. To be intelligible we replace the
opalescent shining by the terms of the anatomist, and we speak of
the pineal gland and the pituitary body in the same breath with
the Most High. Yet when the soul has the vision divine it knows
not it has a body. Let it remember, and the breath of glory kindles
it no more; it is once again a captive. After all, it does not
make the mysteries clearer to speak in physical terms and do violence
to our intuitions. If we ever use these centres, as fires we shall
see them, or they shall well up within us as fountains of potent
sound. We may satisfy people's minds with a sense correspondence,
and their souls may yet hold aloof. We shall only inspire by the
magic of a superior beauty. Yet this too has its dangers. "Thou
has corrupted thy wisdom by reason of they brightness," continues
the seer. If we follow too much the elusive beauty of form we
will miss the spirit. The last secrets are for those who translate
vision into being. Does the glory fade away before thee? Say
truly in they heart, "I care not. I will wear the robes I am
endowed with today." Thou are already become beautiful, being
beyond desire and free.
Night and day no more eclipse
Friendly eyes that on us shine,
Speech from old familiar lips,
Playmates of a youth divine.
To childhood once again. We must regain the lost state. But it
is to the giant and spiritual childhood of the young immortals we
must return, when into their clear and translucent souls first fell
the rays of the father-beings. The men of old were intimates of
wind and wave and playmates of many a brightness long since forgotten.
The rapture of the fire was their rest; their outgoing was still
consciously through universal being. By darkened images we may
figure something vaguely akin, as when in rare moments under the
stars the big dreamy heart of childhood is pervaded with quiet and
brimmed full with love. Dear children of the world so tired today--
so weary seeking after the light. Would you recover strength and
immortal vigor? Not one star alone, your star, shall shed its happy
light upon you, but the All you must adore. Something intimate,
secret, unspeakable, akin to thee will emerge silently, insensibly,
and ally itself with thee as thou gatherest thyself from the four
quarters of the earth. We shall go back to the world of the dawn,
but to a brighter light than that which opened up this wondrous
story of the cycles. The forms of elder years will reappear in
our vision, the father-beings once again. So we shall grow at
home amid these grandeurs, and with that All-Presence about us
may cry in our hearts, "At last is our meeting, Immortal. Oh,
starry one, now is our rest!"
Brothers weary, come away;
We will quench the heart's desire
Past the gateways of the day
In the rapture of the fire.
--October 15, 1895
The Enchantment of Cuchullain
--By AE and Aretas (G.W. Russell and James M. Pryse)
While our vision, backward cast,
Ranged the everliving past,
Through a haze of misty things--
Luminous with quiverings
Musical as starry chimes--
Rose a hero of old times,
In whose breast the magic powers
Slumbering from primeval hours,
Woke at the enchantment wild
Of Aed Abrait's lovely child;
Still for all her Druid learning
With the wild-bird heart, whose yearning
Blinded at his strength and beauty,
Clung to love and laughed at duty.
Warrior chief, and mystic maid,
Through your stumbling footsteps strayed,
This at least in part atones--
Jewels were your stumbling-stones!
I. The Birds of Angus
The birds were a winging rapture in the twilight. White wings,
grey wings, brown wings, fluttered around and over the pine trees
that crowned the grassy dun. The highest wings flashed with a
golden light. At the sound of voices they vanished.
"How then shall we go to the plains of Murthemney? We ought not
to be known. Shall we go invisibly, or in other forms? We must
also fly as swiftly as the birds go."
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 | 13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20