Books: AE in the Irish Theosophist
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George William Russell >> AE in the Irish Theosophist
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For the hero with us there is ample scope and need. There are the
spectres of ignoble hopes, the lethal influences of a huge material
civilisation wafted to us from over seas, which must be laid. Oh,
that a protest might be made ere it becomes more difficult, ere
this wild, beautiful land of ours be viewed only as a lure to draw
money from the cockney tourist, and the immemorial traditions around
our sacred hills be of value only to advertise the last hotel. Yet
to avert the perils arising from external causes is but a slight
task compared with the overcoming of obstacles already existent within.
There is one which must be removed at whatever cost, though the hero
may well become the martyr in the attempt. It is a difficulty which
has its strength from one of the very virtues of the people, their
reverence for religion. This in itself is altogether well. But
it is not well when the nature of that religion enables its priests
to sway men from their natural choice of hero and cause by the threat
of spiritual terrors. I say that where this takes place to any
great extent, as it has with us, it is not a land a freeman can
think of with pride. It is not a place where the lover of freedom
can rest, but he must spend sleepless nights, must brood, must scheme,
must wait to strike a blow. To the thought of freedom it must be
said to our shame none of the nobler meaning attaches here. Freedom
to speak what hopes and ideals we may have; to act openly for what
cause we will; to allow that freedom to others--that liberty is
denied. There are but too many places where to differ openly from
the priest in politics is to provoke a brawl, where to speak as
here with the fearlessness of print would be to endanger life.
With what scorn one hears the aspiration from public freedom from
lips that are closed with the dread by their own hearthside! Let
freedom arise where first it is possible in the hearts of men, in
their thoughts, in speech between one and another, and then the
gods may not deem us unworthy of the further sway of our national
life. I would that some of the defiant spirit of the old warrior
brood were here, not indeed to provoke strife between man and man,
or race and race, but rather that we might be fearless in the
spirit of one who said "I do not war against flesh and blood, but
against principalities and powers"--and against influences which
fetter progress, against an iron materialism where the beauty of
life perishes, let us revolt, let us war for ever.
But with all this I, like others who have narrowly watched the signs
of awakening life, do not doubt but that these things will pass as
greater potencies throng in and impel to action. Already the rush
of the earth-breath begins to fill with elation our island race and
uplift them with the sense of power; and through the power sometimes
flashes the glory, the spiritual radiance which will be ours hereafter,
if old prophecy can be trusted and our hearts prompt us true. Here
and there some rapt dreamer more inward than the rest sees that
Tir-na-noge was no fable, but is still around him with all its mystic
beauty for ever. The green hills grow alive with the star-children
fleeting, flashing on their twilight errands from gods to men.
When the heart opens to receive them and the ties which bind us to
unseen nature are felt our day will begin and the fires awaken,
our isle will be the Sacred Island once again and our great ones
the light-givers to humanity, not voicing new things, but only of
the old, old truths one more affirmation; for what is all wisdom,
wherever uttered, whether in time past or today, but the One Life,
the One Breath, chanting its innumerable tones of thought and joy
and love in the heart of man, one voice throughout myriad years
whose message eterne is this--you are by your nature immortal,
and you may be, if you will it, divine.
--Jan. 15, Feb. 15, 1897
Our Secret Ties
Our deepest life is when we are alone. We think most truly, love
best, when isolated from the outer world in that mystic abyss we
call soul. Nothing external can equal the fulness of these moments.
We may sit in the blue twilight with a friend, or bend together by
the hearth, half whispering, or in a silence populous with loving
thoughts mutually understood; then we may feel happy and at peace,
but it is only because we are lulled by a semblance to deeper
intimacies. When we think of a friend, and the loved one draws nigh,
we sometimes feel half-pained, for we touched something in our
solitude which the living presence shut out; we seem more apart,
and would fain cry out--"Only in my deep heart I love you, sweetest
heart; call me not forth from this; I am no more a spirit if I
leave my throne." But these moods, though lit up by intuitions
of the true, are too partial, they belong too much to the twilight
of the heart, they have too dreamy a temper to serve us well in life.
We should wish rather for our thoughts a directness such as belongs
to the messengers of the gods, swift, beautiful, flashing presences
bent on purposes well understood.
What we need is that this interior tenderness shall be elevated
into seership, that what in most is only yearning or blind love
shall see clearly its way and hope and aim. To this end we have
to observe more intently the nature of the interior life. We find,
indeed, that it is not a solitude at all, but dense with multitudinous
being: instead of being alone we are in the thronged highways of
existence. For our guidance when entering here many words of warning
have been uttered, laws have been outlined, and beings full of wonder,
terror, and beauty described. Yet there is a spirit in us deeper
than our intellectual being which I think of as the Hero in man,
who feels the nobility of its place in the midst of all this, and
who would fain equal the greatness of perception with deeds as great.
The weariness and sense of futility which often falls upon the mystic
after much thought is due, I think, to this, that here he has duties
demanding a more sustained endurance just as the inner life is so
much vaster and more intense than the life he has left behind.
Now, the duties which can be taken up by the soul are exactly those
which it feels most inadequate to perform when acting as an embodied
being. What shall be done to quiet the heart-cry of the world:
how answer the dumb appeal for help we so often divine below eyes
that laugh? It is sadder than sorrow to think that pity with no
hands to heal, that love without a voice to speak, should helplessly
heap their pain upon pain while earth shall endure. But there is
a truth about sorrow which I think may make it seem not so hopeless.
There are fewer barriers than we think: there is, in fact, an inner
alliance between the soul who would fain give and the soul who is
in need. Nature has well provided that not one golden ray of all
our thoughts is sped ineffective through the dark; not one drop
of the magical elixirs love distills is wasted. Let us consider
how this may be. There is a habit we nearly all have indulged in:
we often weave little stories in our minds expending love and pity
upon the imaginary beings we have created. But I have been led to
think that many of these are not imaginary, that somewhere in the
world beings are thinking, loving, suffering just in that way, and
we merely reform and live over again in our life the story of
another life. Sometimes these faraway intimates assume so vivid
a shape, they come so near with their appeal for sympathy that the
pictures are unforgettable, and the more I ponder over them the
more it seems to me that they often convey the actual need of some
soul whose cry for comfort has gone out into the vast, perhaps to
meet with an answer, perhaps to hear only silence. I will supply
an instance. I see a child, a curious, delicate little thing,
seated on the doorstep of a house. It is an alley in some great
city; there is a gloom of evening and vapour over the sky; I see
the child is bending over the path; he is picking cinders and
arranging them, and, growing closer, as I ponder, I become aware
that he is laying down in gritty lines the walls of a house, the
mansion of his dream. Here spread along the pavement are large
rooms, these for his friends, and a tiny room in the centre, that
is his own. So his thought plays. Just then I catch a glimpse
of the corduroy trousers of a passing workman, and a heavy boot
crushes through the cinders. I feel the pain in the child's heart
as he shrinks back, his little love-lit house of dreams all rudely
shattered. Ah, poor child, building the City Beautiful out of a
few cinders, yet nigher, truer in intent than many a stately, gold-
rich palace reared by princes, thou wert not forgotten by that
mighty spirit who lives through the falling of empires, whose home
has been in many a ruined heart. Surely it was to bring comfort
to hearts like thine that that most noble of all meditations was
ordained by the Buddha. "He lets his mind pervade one quarter of
the world with thoughts of Love, and so the second, and so the
third, and so the fourth. And thus the whole wide world, above,
below, around, and everywhere, does he continue to pervade with
heart of Love far-reaching, grown great, and beyond measure."
The love, though the very fairy breath of life, should by itself
and so imparted have a sustaining power some may question, not those
who have felt the sunlight fall from distant fiends who think of them;
but, to make clearer how it seems to me to act, I say that love,
Eros, is a being. It is more than a power of the soul, though it
is that also; it has a universal life of its own, and just as the
dark heaving waters do not know what jewel lights they reflect with
blinding radiance, so the soul, partially absorbing and feeling the
ray of Eros within it, does not know that often a part of its nature
nearer to the sun of love shines with a brilliant light to other
eyes than its own. Many people move unconscious of their won charm,
unknowing of the beauty and power they seem to others to impart.
It is some past attainment of the soul, a jewel won in some old
battle which it may have forgotten, but none the less this gleams
on its tiara and the star-flame inspires others to hope and victory.
If is true here than many exert a spiritual influence they are
unconscious of, it is still truer of the spheres within. Once the
soul has attained to any possession like love, or persistent will,
or faith, or a power of thought, it comes into psychic contact with
others who are struggling for these very powers. The attainment
of any of these means that the soul is able to absorb and radiate
some of the diviner elements of being. The soul may or may not be
aware of the position it is placed in and its new duties, but yet
that Living Light, having found a way into the being of any one
person, does not rest there, but sends its rays and extends its
influence on and on to illumine the darkness of another nature.
So it comes that there are ties which bind us to people other than
those whom we meet in our everyday life. I think they are more
real ties, more important to understand, for if we let our lamp go
out some far away who had reached out in the dark and felt a steady
will, a persistent hope, a compassionate love, may reach out once
again in an hour of need, and finding no support may give way and
fold the hands in despair. Often indeed we allow gloom to overcome
us and so hinder the bright rays in their passage; but would we
do it so often if we thought that perhaps a sadness which besets us,
we do not know why, was caused by some heart drawing nigh to ours
for comfort, that our lethargy might make it feel still more its
helplessness, while our courage, our faith, might cause "our light
to shine in some other heart which as yet has no light of its own."
--March 15, 1897
Priest or Hero?
"I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contained
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
No one kneels to another, nor to one of his kind that lived thousands
of years ago." ---Walt Whitman
I have prefixed some ideas about spiritual freedom addressed to
the people of Ireland with these lines from the poet of another
land, because national sentiment seems out of date here, the old
heroism slumbers, alien thought and an exotic religion have
supplanted our true ideals and our natural spirituality. I hope
that the scornful words of one who breathed a freer air might
sting to shame those who have not lost altogether the sentiment
of human dignity, who have still some intuitions as to how far
and how wisely a man may abase himself before another, whether
that other claim divine authority or not. For this is the true
problem which confronts us as a nation, and all else is insignificant
beside. We have found out who are the real rulers here, who dictate
politics and public action with no less authority than they speak
upon religion and morals, It was only the other day that a priest,
one of our rulers, declared that he would not permit a political
meeting to be held in his diocese and this fiat was received with
a submission which showed how accurately the politician gauged
the strength opposed to him. And this has not been the only
occasion when this power has been exerted: we all know how many
national movements have been interfered with or thwarted; we know
the shameful revelations connected with the elections a few years
back; we know how a great leader fell; and those who are idealists,
God's warriors battling for freedom of thought, whose hope for the
world is that the intuitions of the true and good divinely implanted
in each man's breast shall supersede tradition and old authority,
cannot but feel that their opinions, so much more dangerous to
that authority than any political ideal, must, if advocated, bring
them at last to clash with the priestly power. It is not a war
with religion we would fain enter upon; but when those who claim
that heaven and hell shut and open at their bidding for the spirit
of man, use the influence which belief in that claim confers, as
it has been here, to fetter free-will in action, it is time that
the manhood of the nation awoke to sternly question that authority,
to assert its immemorial right to freedom.
There live of old in Eri a heroic race whom the bards sang as
fearless. There was then no craven dread of the hereafter, for
the land of the immortals glimmered about them in dream and vision,
and already before the decaying of the form the spirit of the hero
had crossed the threshold and clasped hands with the gods. No demon
nature affrighted them: from them wielding the flaming sword of
will the demons fled away as before Cuculain vanished in terror
shadowy embattled hosts. What, I wonder, would these antique
heroes say coming back to a land which preserves indeed their
memory but emulates their spirit no more? We know what the bards
thought when heroic Ireland became only a tradition; when to
darkened eyes the elf-lights ceased to gleam, luring no more to
the rich radiant world within, the Druidic mysteries, and the
secret of the ages. In the bardic tales their comrade Ossian
voices to Patrick their scorn of the new. Ah, from the light and
joy of the faery region, from that great companionship with a race
half divine, come back to find that but one divine man had walked
the earth, and as for the rest it was at prayer and fasting they
ought to be! And why? Because, as Patrick explained to Ossian,
if they did not they would go to hell. And this is the very thing
the Patricks ever since have been persuading the Irish people to
believe, adding an alien grief unto their many sorrows, foisting
upon them a vulgar interpretation of the noble idea of divine justice
to cow them to submission with the threat of flame. Ossian, chafing
and fuming under the priestly restriction, declared his preference
for hell with the Finians to paradise with Patrick. His simple
heroic mind found it impossible to believe that the pure, gentle
but indomitable spirits of his comrades could be anywhere quenched
or quelled, but they must at last arise exultant even from torment.
When Ossian rejects the bribe of paradise to share the darker world
and the fate of his companions, there spake the true spirit of man;
spark of illimitable deity; shrouded in form, yet radiating
ceaselessly heroic thoughts, aspirations, deathless love; not to
be daunted, rising again and again from sorrow with indestructible
hope; emerging ever from defeat, its glooms smitten through and
through with the light of visions vast and splendid as the heavens.
Old bard, old bard, from Tir-na-noge where thou, perchance wrapt
by that beauty which called thee from earth, singest immortal songs,
would that one lightning of they spirit could pierce the hearts
now thronged with dread, might issue from lips which dare not speak.
I do not question but that the heroic age had its imperfections,
or that it was not well that its too warlike ardour was tempered
by the beautiful, pathetic and ennobling teaching of Christ. The
seed of new doctrines bore indeed many lovely but exotic blossoms
in the saintly times, and also many a noxious weed. For religion
must always be an exotic which makes a far-off land sacred rather
than the earth underfoot: where the Great Spirit whose home is
the vast seems no more a moving glamour in the heavens, a dropping
tenderness at twilight, a visionary light on the hills, a voice in
man's heart; when the way of life is sought in scrolls or is heard
from another's lips. The noxious weed, the unendurable bitter which
mingled with the sweet and true in this exotic religion was the
terrible power it put into the hands of men somewhat more learned
in their ignorance of God than those whom they taught: the power
to inflict a deadly wrong upon the soul, to coerce the will by
terror from the course conscience had marked out as true and good.
That power has been used unsparingly and at times with unspeakable
cruelty whenever those who had it thought their influence was being
assailed, for power is sweet and its use is not lightly laid aside.
As we read our island history there seems a ruddy emblazonry on
every page, a hue shed from behind the visible, the soul dropping
its red tears of fire over hopes for ever dissolving, noble ambitions
for ever foiled. Always on the eve of success starts up some fatal
figure weaponed with the keys of the hereafter, brandishing more
especially the key of the place of torment, warning most particularly
those who regard that that key shall not get rusty from want of
turning if they disobey. It has been so from the beginning, from
the time of the cursing of Tara, where the growing unity of the
nations was split into fractions, down to the present time. I
often doubt if the barbarities in eastern lands which we shudder
at are in reality half so cruel, if they mean so much anguish as
this threat of after-torture does to those who believe in the power
of another to inflict it. It wounds the spirit to the heart: its
consciousness of its own immortality becomes entwined with the
terror of as long enduring pain. It is a lie which the all-
compassionate Father-Spirit never breathed into the ears of his
children, a lie which has been told here century after century with
such insistence that half the nation has the manhood cowed out of it.
The offence of the dead chief whose followers were recently assailed
weighed light as a feather in the balance when compared with the
sin of these men and their shameful misuse of religious authority
in Meath a little while ago. The scenes which took place there,
testified and sworn to by witness in the after trials, were only
a copy of what generally took place. They will take place again
if the necessity arises. That is a bitter fact.
A dim consciousness that their servitude is not to God's law but
to man's ambition is creeping over the people here. That is a very
hopeful sign. When a man first feels he is a slave he begins to
grow grey inside, to get moody and irritable. The sore spot becomes
more sensitive the more he broods. At last to touch it becomes
dangerous. For, from such pent-up musing and wrath have sprung
rebellions, revolutions, the overthrow of dynasties and the fall
of religions, aye, thrice as mighty as this. That Thought of freedom
lets loose the flood-gates of an illimitable fire into the soul;
it emerges from its narrow prison-cell of thought and fear as the
sky-reaching genie from the little copper vessel in the tale of
Arabian enchantment; it lays hand on the powers of storm and
commotion like a god. It would be politic not to press the
despotism more; but it would be a pity perhaps if some further
act did not take place, just to see a nation flinging aside the
shackles of superstition; disdainful of threats, determined to
seek its own good, resolutely to put aside all external tradition
and rule; adhering to its own judgment, though priests falsely
say the hosts of the everlasting are arrayed in battle against it,
though they threaten the spirit with obscure torment for ever and
ever: still to persist, still to defy, still to obey the orders
of another captain, that Unknown Deity within whose trumpet-call
sounds louder than all the cries of men. There is great comfort,
my fellows, in flinging fear aside; an exultation and delight
spring up welling from inexhaustible deeps, and a tranquil sweetness
also ensues which shows that the powers ever watchful of human
progress approve and applaud the act.
In all this I do not aim at individuals. It is not with them I
would war but with tyranny. They who enslave are as much or more
to be pitied than those whom they enslave. They too are wronged
by being placed and accepted in a position of false authority.
They too enshrine a ray of the divine spirit, which to liberate
and express is the purpose of life. Whatever movement ignores the
needs of a single unity, or breeds hate against it rather than
compassion, is so far imperfect. But if we give these men, as we
must, the credit of sincerity, still opposition is none the less
a duty. The spirit of man must work out its own destiny, learning
truth out of error and pain. It cannot be moral by proxy. A
virtuous course into which it is whipt by fear will avail it nothing,
and in that dread hour when it comes before the Mighty who sent it
forth, neither will the plea avail it that its conscience was in
another's keeping.
The choice here lies between Priest and Hero as ideal, and I say
that whatever is not heroic is not Irish, has not been nourished
at the true fountain wherefrom our race and isle derive their mystic
fame. There is a life behind the veil, another Eri which the bards
knew, singing it as the Land of Immortal Youth. It is not hidden
from us, though we have hidden ourselves from it, so that it has
become only a fading memory in our hearts and a faery fable upon
our lips. Yet there are still places in this isle, remote from
the crowded cities where men and women eat and drink and wear out
their lives and are lost in the lust for gold, where the shy peasant
sees the enchanted lights in mountain and woody dell, and hears
the faery bells pealing away, away, into that wondrous underland
whither, as legends relate, the Danann gods withdrew. These things
are not to be heard for the asking; but some, more reverent than
the rest, more intuitive, who understand that the pure eyes of a
peasant may see the things kings and princes, aye, and priests,
have desired to see and have not seen; that for him may have been
somewhat lifted the veil which hides from men the starry spheres
where the Eternal Beauty abides in the shining--these have heard
and have been filled with the hope that, if ever the mystic truths
of life could be spoken here, there would be enough of the old
Celtic fire remaining to bring back the magic into the isle. That
direct relation, that vision, comes fully with spiritual freedom,
when men no longer peer through another's eyes into the mysteries,
when they will not endure that the light shall be darkened by
transmission, but spirit speaks with spirit, drawing light from
the boundless Light alone.
Leaving aside the question of interference with national movements,
another charge, one of the weightiest which can be brought against
the priestly influence in this island, is that it has hampered the
expression of native genius in literature and thought. Now the
country is alive with genius, flashing out everywhere, in the
conversation even of the lowest; but we cannot point to imaginative
work of any importance produced in Ireland which has owed its
inspiration to the priestly teaching. The genius of the Gael could
not find itself in their doctrines; though above all things mystical
it could not pierce its way into the departments of super-nature
where their theology pigeon-holes the souls of the damned and the
blessed. It knew of the Eri behind the veil which I spoke of, the
Tir-na-noge which as a lamp lights up our grassy plains, our haunted
hills and valleys. The faery tales have ever lain nearer to the
hearts of the people, and whatever there is of worth in song or
story has woven into it the imagery handed down from the dim druidic
ages. This is more especially true today, when our literature is
beginning to manifest preeminent qualities of imagination, not the
grey pieties of the cloister, but natural magic, beauty, and heroism.
Our poets sing Ossian wandering the land of the immortals; or we
read in vivid romance of the giant chivalry of the Ultonians, their
untamable manhood, the exploits of Cuculain and the children of Rury,
more admirable as types, more noble and inspiring than the hierarchy
of little saints who came later on and cursed their memories.
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