Books: AE in the Irish Theosophist
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George William Russell >> AE in the Irish Theosophist
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The genius of the Gael is awakening after a night of troubled dreams.
I returns instinctively to the beliefs of its former day and finds
again the old inspiration. It seeks the gods on the mountains,
still enfolded by their mantle of multitudinous traditions, or
sees them flash by in the sunlit diamond airs. How strange, but
how natural is all this! It seems as if Ossian's was a premature
return. Today he might find comrades come back from Tir-na-noge
for the uplifting of their race. Perhaps to many a young spirit
starting up among us Caolte might speak as to Mongan, saying: "I
was with thee, with Finn." Hence, it may be, the delight with
which we hear Standish O'Grady declaring that the bardic divinities
will remain: "Nor, after centuries of obscuration, is their power
to quicken, purify, and exalt, yet dead. Still they live and reign,
and shall reign." After long centuries--the voice of a spirit ever
youthful, yet older than all the gods, who with its breath of sunrise-
coloured flame jewels with richest lights the visions of earth's
dreamy-hearted children. Once more out of the Heart of the Mystery
is heard the call of "Come away," and after that no other voice
has power to lure: there remain only the long heroic labours which
end in companionship with the gods.
These voices do not stand for themselves alone. They are heralds
before a host. No man has ever spoken with potent utterance who
did not feel the secret urging of dumb, longing multitudes, whose
aspirations and wishes converge on and pour themselves into fearless
heart. The thunder of the waves is deeper because the tide is rising.
Those who are behind do not come only with song and tale, but with
stern hearts bent on great issues, among which, not least, is the
intellectual liberation of Ireland. That is an aim at which some
of our rulers may well grow uneasy. Soon shall young men, fiery-
hearted, children of Eri, a new race, roll our their thoughts on
the hillsides, before your very doors, O priests, calling your
flocks from your dark chapels and twilight sanctuaries to a temple
not built with hands, sunlit, starlit, sweet with the odour and
incense of earth, from your altars call them to the altars of the
hills, soon to be lit up as of old, soon to be the blazing torches
of God over the land. These heroes I see emerging. Have they not
come forth in every land and race when there was need? Here, too,
they will arise. Ah, may darlings, you will have to fight and suffer:
you must endure loneliness, the coldness of friends, the alienation
of love; warmed only by the bright interior hope of a future you
must toil for but may never see, letting the deed be its own reward;
laying in dark places the foundations of that high and holy Eri
of prophecy, the isle of enchantment, burning with druidic splendours,
bright with immortal presences, with the face of the everlasting
Beauty looking in upon all its ways, divine with terrestrial mingling
till God and the world are one.
There waits brooding in this isle a great destiny, and to accomplish
it we must have freedom of thought. That is the greatest of our
needs, for thought is the lightning-conductor between the heaven-
world and earth. We want fearless advocates who will not be turned
aside from their course by laughter or by threats. Why is it that
the spirit of daring, imaginative enquiry is so dead here? An
incubus of spiritual fear seems to beset men women so that they
think, if they turn from the beaten track seeking the true, they
shall meet, not the divine with outstretched hands, but a demon;
that the reward for their search will not be joy or power but
enduring pain. How the old bard swept away such fears! "If thy
God were good," said Ossian, "he would call Finn into his dun."
Yes, the heroic heart is dear to the heroic heart. I would back
the intuition of an honest soul for truth against piled-up centuries
of theology. But this high spirit is stifled everywhere by a dull
infallibility which is yet unsuccessful, on its own part, in awakening
inspiration; and, in the absence of original though, we pick over
the bones of dead movements, we discuss the personalities of the
past, but no one asks the secrets of life or of death. There are
despotic hands in politics, in religion, in education, strangling
any attempt at freedom. Of the one institution which might naturally
be supposed to be the home of great ideas we can only say, reversing
the famous eulogy on Oxford, it has never given itself to any
national hero or cause, but always to the Philistine.
With the young men who throng the literary societies the intellectual
future of Ireland rests. In them are our future leaders. Out of
these as from a fountain will spring--what? Will we have another
generation of Irishmen at the same level as today, with everything
in a state of childhood, boyish patriotism, boyish ideals, boyish
humour? Or will they assimilate the aged thought of the world and
apply it to the needs of their own land? I remember reading somewhere
a description by Turgenieff of his contemporaries as a young man;
how they sat in garrets, drinking execrably bad coffee or tea. But
what thoughts! They talked of God, of humanity, of Holy Russia;
and out of such groups of young men, out of their discussions,
emanated that vast unrest which has troubled Europe and will trouble
it still more. Here no questions are asked and no answers are
received. There is a pitiful, blind struggle for a nationality
whose ideas are not definitely conceived. What is the ideal of
Ireland as a nation? It drifts from mind to mind, a phantom thought
lacking a spirit, but a spirit which will surely incarnate. Perhaps
some of our old heroes may return. Already it seems as if one had
been here; a sombre Titan earlier awakened than the rest who passed
before us, and sounded the rallying note of our race before he
staggered to his tragic close. Others of brighter thought will
follow to awaken the fires which Brigid in her vision saw gleaming
beyond dark centuries of night, and confessed between hope and
tears to Patrick. Meanwhile we must fight for intellectual freedom;
we must strive to formulate to ourselves what it is we really wish
for here, until at last the ideal becomes no more phantasmal but
living; until our voices in aspiration are heard in every land,
and the nations become aware of a new presence amid their councils,
a last and most beautiful figure, as one after the cross of pain,
after the shadowy terrors, with thorn-marks on the brow from a
crown flung aside, but now radiant, ennobled after suffering, Eri,
the love of so many dreamers, priestess of the mysteries, with the
chant of beauty on her lips and the heart of nature beating in
her heart.
--April 15-May 15, 1897
The Age of the Spirit
I am a part of all that I have met:
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untraveled world .....
....... Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
--Ulysses
We are no longer children as we were in the beginning. The spirit
which, prompted by some divine intent, flung itself long ago into
a vague, nebulous, drifting nature, though it has endured through
many periods of youth, maturity, and age, has yet had its own
transformations. Its gay, wonderful childhood gave way, as cycle
after cycle coiled itself into slumber, to more definite purposes,
and now it is old and burdened with experiences. It is not an age
that quenches its fire, but it will not renew again the activities
which gave it wisdom. And so it comes that men pause with a feeling
which they translate into weariness of life before the accustomed
joys and purposes of their race. They wonder at the spell which
induced their fathers to plot and execute deeds which seem to them
to have no more meaning than a whirl of dust. But their fathers
had this weariness also and concealed it from each other in fear,
for it meant the laying aside of the sceptre, the toppling over
empires, the chilling of the household warmth, and all for a voice
whose inner significance revealed itself but to one or two
among myriads.
The spirit has hardly emerged from the childhood with which nature
clothes it afresh at every new birth, when the disparity between
the garment and the wearer becomes manifest: the little tissue
of joys and dreams woven about it found inadequate for shelter:
it trembles exposed to the winds blowing out of the unknown. We
linger at twilight with some companion, still glad, contented, and
in tune with the nature which fills the orchards with blossom and
sprays the hedges with dewy blooms. The laughing lips give utterance
to wishes--ours until that moment. Then the spirit, without warning,
suddenly falls into immeasurable age: a sphynx-like regard is upon
us: our lips answer, but far from the region of elemental being we
inhabit, they syllable in shadowy sound, out of old usage, the
response, speaking of a love and a hope which we know have vanished
from us for evermore. So hour by hour the scourge of the infinite
drives us out of every nook and corner of life we find pleasant.
And this always takes place when all is fashioned to our liking:
then into our dream strides the wielder of the lightning: we get
glimpse of the great beyond thronged with mighty, exultant, radiant
beings: our own deeds become infinitesimal to us: the colours
of our imagination, once so shining, grow pale as the living lights
of God glow upon them. We find a little honey in the heart which
we make sweeter for some one, and then another lover, whose forms
are legion, sighs to us out of its multitudinous being: we know
that the old love is gone. There is a sweetness in song or in the
cunning reimaging of the beauty we see; but the Magician of the
Beautiful whispers to us of his art, how we were with him when he
laid the foundations of the world, and the song is unfinished,
the fingers grow listless. As we receive these intimations of
age our very sins become negative: we are still pleased if a voice
praises us, but we grow lethargic in enterprises where the spur
to activity is fame or the acclamation of men. At some point in
the past we struggled mightily for the sweet incense which men
offer to a towering personality: but the infinite is for ever
within man: we sighed for other worlds and found that to be saluted
as victor by men did not mean acceptance by the gods.
But the placing of an invisible finger upon our lips when we would
speak, the heart-throb of warning where we would love, that we
grow contemptuous of the prizes of life, does not mean that the
spirit has ceased from its labours, that the high-built beauty of
the spheres is to topple mistily into chaos, as a mighty temple
in the desert sinks into the sand, watched only by a few barbarians
too feeble to renew its ancient pomp and the ritual of its once
shining congregations. Before we, who were the bright children
of the dawn, may return as the twilight race into the silence,
our purpose must be achieved, we have to assume mastery over that
nature which now overwhelms us, driving into the Fire-fold the
flocks of stars and wandering fires. Does it seem very vast and
far away? Do you sigh at the long, long time? Or does it appear
hopeless to you who perhaps return with trembling feet evening
after evening from a little labour? But it is back of all these
things that the renewal takes place, when love and grief are dead;
when they loosen their hold on the spirit and its sinks back into
itself, looking out on the pitiful plight of those who, like it,
are the weary inheritors of so great destinies: then a tenderness
which is the most profound quality of its being springs up like
the outraying of the dawn, and if in that mood it would plan or
execute it knows no weariness, for it is nourished from the First
Fountain. As for these feeble children of the once glorious spirits
of the dawn, only a vast hope can arouse them from so vast a despair,
for the fire will not invigorate them for the repetition of petty
deeds but only for the eternal enterprise, the purpose of the
immemorial battle waged through all the ages, the wars in heaven,
the conflict between Titan and Divinity, which were part of the
never-ending struggle of the human spirit to assert its supremacy
over nature. Brotherhood, the declaration of ideals and philosophies,
are but calls to the hosts, who lie crushed by this mountain nature
piled above them, to arise again, to unite, to storm the heavens
and sit on the seats of the mighty.
As the titan in man ponders on this old, old purpose wherefor all
its experience was garnered, the lightnings will once more begin
to play through him and animate his will. So like the archangel
ruined let us arise from despair and weariness with inflexible
resolution, pealing once more the old heroic shout to our fallen
comrades, until those great powers who enfold us feel the stirring
and the renewal, and the murmur runs along the spheres, "The buried
Titan moves once again to tear the throne from Him."
--June 1897
A Thought Along the Road
They torture me also.--Krishna
The night was wet: and, as I was moving down the streets, my mind
was also journeying on a way of its own, and the things which were
bodily present before me were no less with me in my unseen traveling.
Every now and then a transfer would take place, and some of the
moving shadows in the street would begin walking about in the clear
interior light. The children of the city, crouched in the doorways,
or racing through the hurrying multitude and flashing lights, began
their elfin play again in my heart; and that was because I had
heard these tiny outcasts shouting with glee. I wondered if the
glitter and shadow of such sordid things were thronged with
magnificence and mystery for those who were unaware of a greater
light and deeper shade which made up the romance and fascination
of my own life. In imagination I narrowed myself to their ignorance,
littleness, and youth, and seemed for a moment to flit amid great
uncomprehended beings and a dim wonderful city of palaces.
Then another transfer took place and I was pondering anew, for a
face I had seen flickering through the warm wet mist haunted me;
it entered into the realm of the interpreter, and I was made aware
by the pale cheeks, and by the close-shut lips of pain, and by
some inward knowledge, that there the Tree of Life was beginning
to grow, and I wondered why it is that it always springs up through
a heart in ashes: I wondered also if that which springs up, which
in itself is an immortal joy, has knowledge that its shoots are
piercing through such anguish; or again, if it was the piercing
of the shoots which caused the pain, and if every throb of the
beautiful flame darting upward to blossom meant the perishing of
some more earthly growth which had kept the heart in shadow.
Seeing to how so many thoughts spring up from such a simple thing,
I questioned whether that which started the impulse had any share
in the outcome, and if these musing of mine in any way affected
their subject. I then began thinking about those secret ties on
which I have speculated before, and in the darkness my heart grew
suddenly warm and glowing, for I had chanced upon one of those
shining imaginations which are the wealth of those who travel upon
the hidden ways. In describing that which comes to us all at once,
there is a difficulty in choosing between what is first and what
is last to say: but, interpreting as best I can, I seemed to
behold the onward movement of a Light, one among many Lights, all
living, throbbing, now dim with perturbations, and now again clear,
and all subtly woven together, outwardly in some more shadowy shining,
and inwardly in a greater fire, which, though it was invisible,
I knew to be the Lamp of the World. This Light which I beheld I
felt to be a human soul, and these perturbations which dimmed it
were its struggles and passionate longings for something, and that
was for a more brilliant shining of the light within itself: it
was in love with its own beauty, enraptured by its own lucidity;
and I saw that as these things were more beloved they grew paler,
for this light is the love which the Mighty Mother has in her heart
for her children, and she means that it shall go through each one
unto all, and whoever restrains it in himself is himself shut out;
not that the great heart has ceased in its love for that soul, but
that the soul has shut itself off from influx, for ever imagination
of man is the opening or the closing of a door to the divine world:
now he is solitary, cut off, and, seemingly to himself, on the
desert and distant verge of things: and then his thought throws
open the swift portals; he hears the chant of the seraphs in his
heart, and he is made luminous by the lighting of a sudden aureole.
This soul which I watched seemed to have learned at last the secret
love: for, in the anguish begotten by its loss, it followed the
departing glory in penitence to the inmost shrine where it ceased
altogether; and because it seemed utterly lost and hopeless of
attainment and capriciously denied to the seeker, a profound pit
arose in the soul for those who, like it were seeking, but still
in hope, for they had not come to the vain end of their endeavors.
I understood that such pity is the last of the precious essences
which make up the elixir of immortality, and when it is poured
into the cup it is ready for drinking. And so it was with this
soul which drew brilliant with the passage of eternal light through
its new purity of self-oblivion, and joyful in the comprehension
of the mystery of the secret love, which, though it has been declared
many times by the greatest of teachers among men, is yet never known
truly unless the Mighty Mother has herself breathed it in the heart.
And now that the soul had divined this secret, the shadowy shining
which was woven in bonds of union between it and its fellow-lights
grew clearer; and a multitude of these strands were, so it seemed,
strengthened and placed in its keeping: along these it was to send
the message of the wisdom and the love which were the secret sweetness
of its own being. Then a spiritual tragedy began, infinitely more
pathetic than the old desolation, because it was brought about by
the very nobility of the spirit. This soul, shedding its love like
rays of glory, seemed itself the centre of a ring of wounding spears:
it sent forth love and the arrowy response came hate-impelled: it
whispered peace and was answered by the clash of rebellion: and
to all this for defence it could only bare more openly its heart
that a profounder love from the Mother Nature might pass through
upon the rest. I knew this was what a teacher, who wrote long ago,
meant when he said: "Put on the whole armour of god," which is
love and endurance, for the truly divine children of the Flame are
not armed otherwise: and of those protests, sent up in ignorance
or rebellion against the whisper of the wisdom, I saw that some
melted in the fierce and tender heat of the heart, and there came
in their stead a golden response which made closer the ties, and
drew these souls upward to an understanding and to share in the
overshadowing nature: and this is part of the plan of the Great
Alchemist, whereby the red ruby of the heart is transmuted into
the tenderer light of the opal; for the beholding of love made
bare acts like the flame of the furnace, and the dissolving passions,
through an anguish of remorse, the lightnings of pain, and through
an adoring pity, are changed into the image they contemplate and
melt in the ecstasy of self-forgetful love, the spirit which lit
the thorn-crowned brows, which perceived only in its last agony
the retribution due to its tormentors, and cried out, "Father,
forgive them, for they know not what they do."
Now although the love of the few may alleviate the hurt due to the
ignorance of the mass, it is not in the power of anyone to withstand
for ever this warfare; for by the perpetual wounding of the inner
nature it is so wearied that the spirit must withdraw from a
tabernacle grown too frail to support the increase of light within
and the jarring of the demoniac nature without: and at length
comes the call which means, for a while, release, and a deep rest
in regions beyond the paradise of lesser souls. So, withdrawn
into the Divine Darkness, vanished the Light of my dream. And
now it seemed as if this wonderful weft of souls intertwining as
one being must come to naught; and all those who through the gloom
had nourished a longing for the light would stretch out hands in
vain for guidance: but that I did not understand the love of the
Mother, and that although few, there is no decaying of her heroic
brood; for, as the seer of old caught at the mantle of him who
went up in the fiery chariot, so another took up the burden and
gathered the shining strands together: and to this sequence of
spiritual guides there is no ending.
Here I may say that the love of the Mother, which, acting through
the burnished will of the hero, is wrought to highest uses, is in
reality everywhere, and pervades with profoundest tenderness the
homeliest circumstance of daily life; and there is not lacking,
even among the humblest, an understanding of the spiritual tragedy
which follows upon every effort of the divine nature bowing itself
down in pity to our shadowy sphere; an understanding in which the
nature of the love is gauged through the extent of the sacrifice
and pain which is overcome. I recall the instance of an old Irish
peasant, who, as he lay in hospital wakeful from a grinding pain
in his leg, forgot himself in making drawings, rude yet reverently
done, of incidents in the life of the Galilean teacher. One of
these which he showed me was a crucifixion, where, amidst much
grotesque symbolism, were some tracings which indicated a purely
beautiful intuition; the heart of this crucified figure, no less
than the brow, was wreathed about with thorns and radiant with light:
"For that," said he, was where he really suffered." When I think
of this old man, bringing forgetfulness of his own bodily pain
through contemplation of the spiritual suffering of his own, nobly
undergone, had given him understanding, and he had laid his heart
in love against the Heart of Many Sorrows, seeing it wounded by
unnumbered spears yet burning with undying love.
Though much may be learned by observance of the superficial life
and actions of a spiritual teacher, it is only in the deeper life
of meditation and imagination that it can be truly realized; for
the soul is a midnight blossom which opens its leaves in dream,
and its perfect bloom is unfolded only where another sun shines
in another heaven: there it feels what celestial dews descend on it,
and what influences draw it up to its divine archetype: here in
the shadow of earth root intercoils with root and the finer
distinctions of the blossom are not perceived. If we knew also
who they really are, who sometimes in silence, and sometimes with
the eyes of the world at gaze, take upon them the mantle of teacher,
an unutterable awe would prevail; for underneath a bodily presence
not in any sense beautiful may burn the glory of some ancient
divinity, some hero who laid aside his sceptre in the enchanted
land to rescue old-time comrades fallen into oblivion: or again,
if we had the insight of the simple old peasant into the nature
of this enduring love, out of the exquisite and poignant emotions
kindled would arise the flame of a passionate love which would
endure long aeons of anguish that it might shield, though but for
a little, the kingly hearts who may not shield themselves.
But I too, who write, have launched the rebellious spear, or in
lethargy have ofttimes gone down the great drift numbering myself
among those who not being with must needs be against: therefor I
make no appeal; they only may call who stand upon the lofty
mountains; but I reveal the thought which arose like a star in
my soul with such bright and pathetic meaning, leaving it to you
who read to approve and apply it.
--July 15, 1897
The Fountains of Youth
I heard that a strange woman, dwelling on the western coast, who
had the repute of healing by faery power, said a little before she
died, "There's a cure for all things in the well at Ballykeele":
and I know not why at first, but her words lingered with me and
repeated themselves again and again, and by degrees to keep
fellowship with the thought they enshrined came more antique
memories, all I had heard or dreamed of the Fountains of Youth;
for I could not doubt, having heard these fountains spoken of by
people like herself, that her idea had a druid ancestry. Perhaps
she had bent over the pool until its darkness grew wan and bright
and troubled with the movements of a world within and the
agitations of a tempestuous joy; or she had heard, as many still
hear, the wild call to "Come away," from entreating lips and flame-
encircled faces, or was touched by the star-tipped fingers, and
her heart from the faery world came never back again to dwell as
before at ease in this isle of grey mists and misty sunlight.
These things are not fable only, for Ireland is still a land of
the gods, and in out of the way places we often happen on wonderlands
of romance and mystic beauty. I have spoken to people who have
half parted from their love for the world in a longing for the
pagan paradise of Tir-na-nog, and many who are outwardly obeisant
to another religion are altogether pagan in their hearts, and Meave
the Queen of the Western Host is more to them than Mary Queen of
Heaven. I was told of this Meave that lately she was seen in
vision by a peasant, who made a poem on her, calling her "The
Beauty of all Beauty": and the man who told me this of his friend
had himself seen the jetted fountains of fire-mist winding up in
spiral whirls to the sky, and he too had heard of the Fountains
of Youth.
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