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The Crest Wave of Evolution by Kenneth Morris

K >> Kenneth Morris >> The Crest Wave of Evolution




"There none speaks of _mine and thine;_ white are the teeth and
black the brows; eyes flash with many-colored lights, and the
hue of the fox-glove is on every cheek. . . .

"Though fair are the plains of Ireland, few of them are so fair
as the Great Plain. The ale of Ireland is heady, but headier far
the ale of the Great Country. What a wonder of a land it is!
No youth there grows to old age. Warm streams flow through
it; the choicest mead and wine. Men there are always comely
and blemishless."

Well; Ith set sail from the Great Plain, with three times thirty
warriors, and landed at Corcaguiney in the south-west of Ireland;
and at that time the island inhabited less by men than by Gods;
it was the Tuatha De Danaan, the Race of the Danaan Gods, that
held the kingship there. Little wonder, then, that the first
name of Ireland we get in the Greek writings is "Sacred Ierne,
populous with the Hibernians."

Well now, he found MacCuill, MacCecht, and MacGrene the Son of
the Sun, arranging to divide the kingdom between them; and they
called on him to settle how the division should be.--"Act," said
he, "according to the laws of justice, for the country you dwell
in is a good one; it is rich in fruit and honey, in wheat and in
fish; and in heat and cold it is temperate." From that they
thought he would be designing to conquer it from them, and so
forestalled his designs by killing him; but his companions
escaped, and sailed back to the Great Plain. That was why the
Milesians came to conquer Ireland. The chiefs of them were Eber
Finn, and Eber Donn, and Eremon, and Amargin the Druid: the
sons of Mile, the son of Bile the son of Bregon; thus their
grandfather was the brother of that Ith whom the Gods of
Ireland slew.

It was on a Thursday, the first of May, and the seventeenth day
of the moon, that the Milesians arrived in Ireland; and as he
set his right foot on the soil of it, Amargin chanted this poem:

I am the wave of the Ocean;
I am the murmur of the billow;
I am the ox of the seven combats;
I am the vuture upon the rock;
I am a tear of the sun;
I am the fairest of plants;
I am a wild boar in valor;
I am a salmon in the water;
I am a lake in the plain;
I am a word of science;
I am the spear-point that gives battle;
I am the god who creates in the head the fire of thought.
Who is it that enlightens the assembly upon the mountain,
if not I?
Who telleth the ages of the moon, if not I?
Who showeth the place where the sun goes to rest?

They went forward to Tara, and summoned the kings of the Danaan
Gods to give up the island to them; who asked three days to
consider whether they would give battle, or surrender, or quit
Ireland. On that request Amargin gave judgment: that it would
be wrong for the Milesians to take the Gods unprepared that way;
and that they should go to their ships again, and sail out the
distance of nine waves from the shore, and then return; then if
they could conquer Ireland fairly in battle, it should be theirs.

So they embarked, and put the nine waves between themselves and
the shore, and waited. And the Danaans raised up a druid mist
and a storm against them, whereby Ireland seemed to them no more
than the size of a pig's back in the water; and by reason of
that it has the name of Innis na Wic, the Island of the Pig. But
if the Gods had magic, Amargin had better magic; and he sang
that Invocation to the Land of Ireland; and at that the storm
fell and the mist vanished. Then Eber Donn was exulting in his
rage at the thought of putting the inhabitants to death; but the
thought in his mind brought the storm again, and his ship went
down, and he was drowned. But at last the remnant of them
landed, and fought a battle with the Gods, and defeated them;
whereafter the Gods put a druid invisibility on themselves, and
retired into the hills; and there in their fairy palaces they
remain to this day; indeed they do. They went back into the
inwardness of things; whence, however, they were always
appearing, and again vanishing into it; and all the old
literature of Ireland is thridded through with the lights of
their magic and their beauty, and their strange forthcomings and
withdrawings. For example:

There was Midir the Proud, one of them. In the time of the great
Caesar, Eochaid Airem was high king of Ireland; and he had for
his queen Etain, reborn then as a mortal,--but a Danaan princess
at one time, and the wife of Miidir. It was a fine evening in
the summer, and Eochaid Airem was looking from the walls of Tara
and admiring the beauty of the world. He saw an unknown warrior
riding towards him; clad in purple tunic; his hair yellow as
gold, and his blue eyes shining like candles. A five-pointed
lance was in his hand; his shield was ornamented with beads
of gold.

--"A hundred thousand welcomes to you," said the high king. "Who
is it you are?"

--"I know well who you are," said the warrior, "and for a long
time."

--"What name is on you?" said Eochaid.

--"Nothing illustrious about it in the world," said the other. "I
am Midir of Bregleith."

--"What has brought you hither?"

--"I am come to play at chess with you."

--"I have great skill at chess," said the high king; and indeed,
he was the best at it in Ireland, in those days.

--"We shall see about that," said Midir.

--"But the queen is sleeping in her chamber now," said Eochaid;
"and it is there the chessboard is."

--"Little matter," said Midir, "I have here a board as good as
yours is."

And that was the truth. His chessboard was of silver, glittering
with precious stones at each corner. From a satchel wrought of
shining metal he took his chessmen, which were of pure gold.
Then he arranged them on the board.--"Play you," said he.

--"I will not play without a stake," said the king.

--"What will the stake be?" said Midir.

--"All one to me," said Eochaid.

--"If you win," said Midir, "I will give you fifty broad-chested
horses with slim swift feet."

--"And if you win," said Eochaid Airem, sure of victory, "I will
give you whatever you demand."

Midir won that game, and demanded Etain the queen. But the rules
of chess are that the vanquished may claim his revenge,--a second
game, that is, to decide the matter; and the high king proposed
that it should be played at the end of a year. Midir agreed,
and vanished.

The year ended, and Eochaid was at Tara; he had had the palace
surrounded by a great armed host against Midir; and Etain was
there with him. Here is the description of Etain:

"A clear comb of silver was held in her hand, the comb was
adorned with gold; and near her, as for washing, was a basin of
silver whereon four birds had been chased, and there were little
bright gems of carbuncles on the rim of the basin. A bright
purple mantle waved round her; and beneath it another mantle
with fringes of silver: the outer one clasped over her bosom
with a golden brooch. A tunic she wore, with a long hood that
might cover her head attached to it; it was stiff and glossy
with green silk beneath red embroidery of gold, and clasped over
her breast with marvelously wrought clasps of gold and silver, so
that men saw the bright gold and the green silk flashing against
the sun. On her head were two tresses of golden hair, and each
tress plaited into four strands, and at the end of each strand a
little ball of gold. Each of her two arms was as white as the
snow of a single night, and each of her two cheeks of the hue of
the foxglove. Even and small the teeth in her head, and they
shone like pearls. Her eyes were blue as the blue hyacinth, her
lips delicate and crimson. . . . White as snow, or the foam of
the wave, was her neck. . . . Her feet were slim and white as the
ocean foam; evenly set were her eyes, and the eyebrows of a
bluish black, such as you see on the shell of a beetle."

--What I call on you to note about that is something very
unpoetic. It is not the flashing brightness, the grace, the
evidence of an eye craving for beauty, and of a hand sure in the
creation of beauty;--but the dress. The Irish writers got these
ideas of dress without having contacted, for example, classical
civilization, or any foreign civilization. The ideas were
home-grown, the tradition Irish. The writer was describing what
he was familiar with: the kind of dress worn by an Irish princess
before Ireland had seen foreign fashions and customs. He was
heightening picture for artistic effect, no doubt; but he was
drawing with his eye on the object. I am inclined to think that
imagination always must work upon a basis of things known; just
as tradition must always be based on fact. Now then: try,
will you, to imagine primitive savages dressing like that, or
sufficiently nearly like that for one of their bards to
work up such a picture on the actualities he had seen. I
think you cannot do it. And this picture is not extraordinary;
it is typical of what we commonly find in the ancient Irish
stories. What it proves is that the Ireland that emerges
into history, war-battered and largely decivilized by long
unsettled conditions as she was, remembered and was the inheiritor
of an Ireland consummately civilized.--But to return to the
hall of Eochaid Airem:

Every door in it was locked; and the whole place filled with the
cream of the war-host of the Gael, and apprehension on everyone,
they not knowing would it be war and violence with Midir, or what
it would be. So it had been all day; so it was now in the dusk
of the evening. Then suddenly there stood Midir in the midst of
them: Midir the Proud; never had he seemed fairer than then.
No man had seen him enter; none knew how he had come. And then
it was but putting his spear in his left hand for him, and
putting his right arm about the waist of Etain, and rising
through the air with her, and vanishing through the roof. And
when the men of Ireland rushed out from the hall, they saw two
swans circling above Tara and away, their long white necks yoked
together with a yoke of moon-bright silver.

It was a long time the Gods were ruling in Ireland before the
Milesians came. King after king reigned over them; and there
are stories on stories, a rich literature for another nation,
about the time of these Danaan Gods alone. One of them was Lir,
the Boundless Deep. He had four children by his first wife;
when she died, he married her sister, Aoife by name. Aoife was
jealous of the love he had for his children, and was for killing
them. But when it came to doing it, "her womanhood overcame
her," and instead she put swanhood on the four of them, and the
doom that swans they should be from that out for nine hundred
years: three hundred on Lake Derryvaragh in West Meath, three
hundred on the Straits of Moyle between Ireland and Scotland,
three hundred on the Atlantic by Erris and Innishglory. After
that the enchantment would end.

For that, Bov Derg, one of the Gods, changed her into a demon of
the air, and she flew away shrieking, and was heard of no more.
But there was no taking the fate from the swan-children; and the
Danaans sought them on their lake, and found they had human
speech left to them, and the gift of wonderful Danaan music.
From all parts they came to the lake to talk with them and to
hear them singing; and that way it was for three hundred years.
Then they must depart, Fionuala and her three brothers, the
swan-children, and wing their way to the northern sea, and be among
the wild cliffs and the foam; and the worst of loneliness and
cold and storm was the best fate there was for them. Their
feathers froze to the rocks on the winter nights; but they
filled the drear chasms of the tempest with their Danaan singing.
It was Fionuala wrapped her plumage about her brothers, to keep
them from the cold; she was their leader, heartening them. And
if it was bad for them on the Straits of Moyle, it was worse on
the Atlantic; three hundred years they were there, and bitter
sorrow the fate on them.

When their time to be freed was near, they were for flying to the
palace of Lir their father, at the hill of the White Field in
Armagh. But long since the Milesians had come into Ireland, and
the Danaans had passed into the hills and the unseen; and with
the old centuries of their enchantment heavy on them, their eyes
had grown no better than the eyes of mortals: gorse-grown hills
they saw, and green nettles growing, and no sign of the walls and
towers of the palace of Lir. And they heard the bells ringing
from a church, and were frightened at the "thin, dreadful sound."
But afterwards, in their misery, they took refuge with the saint
in the church, and were converted, and joined him in singing the
services. Then, after a while, the swanhood fell from them, and
they became human, with the whole of their nine centuries heavy
on them. "Lay us in one grave," said Fionuala to the saint;
"and place Conn at my right hand, and Fiachra at my left, and Aed
before my face; for there they were wont to be when I sheltered
them many a winter night upon the seas of Moyle." So it was they
were buried; but the saint sorrowed for them till the end of his
days. And there, if you understand it, you have the forgotten
story of Ireland.

She was once Danaan, and fortunate in the Golden Age. Then she
was enchanted, and fell from her high estate; and sorrow and the
wildness of ages of decivilizing wars were her portion; but
she retained her wonderful Danaan gift of song. Then came
Christianity, and she sang her swan-song in the services of the
Church;--when she had overcome her terror of the ominous sound of
the bells. She became human again: that is, enjoyed one more
period of creative greatness, a faint revival of her old
splendor; and then,--Ah, it was a long time ago; a long time
the hermit had been sorrowing over her grave! But listen, by the
lake of Derryvaragh, on the seas of Moyle, or by Erris and
Innishglory, and you will hear still the ghostly echoes of the
singing of Danaan swans. _Danaan_ swans: music better than of
the world of men!

O Swan-child, come from the grave, and be bright as you were
of old
When you sing o'er the sun-bright wave in the Danaans' Age
of Gold!
Are you never remembering, darling, the truth that you knew
well then,
That there's nobody dies from the world, asthore, but is
born in the world again.

It brings me naturally to the place where we take her up in our
history. At the end of the fourth century, "the sea," says the
Roman poet Claudian, "was foamy with the hostile oars of the
Irish." Niall of the Nine Hostages was high king of Tara; and
he was all for a life on the ocean wave and a home on the rolling
deep. He raided the coasts of Britain annually, and any other
coasts that came handy, carrying off captives where he might.
One of these was a boy named Sucat, from Glamorgan: probably
from Glamorgan, though it might have been from anywhere between
the Clyde and the Loire. In time this Sucat escaped from his
Irish slavery, entered the Church, took the Latin name of
Patrick, and made it his business to Christianize Ireland. That
was about the time when the Britons were throwing off the Roman
yoke. He was at the height of his career in the middle of the
fifth century.

Even if he did not make a clean and bloodless sweep of the whole
country, Patrick was one of the most successful Christian
missionaries that ever preached. There was some opposition by
the druids, but it was not successful. He went to the courts of
the kings, and converted them; and to say you had baptized a
king, was as good as to say you had his whole clan captured; for
it was a fractious unnatural clansman who would not go where his
chieftain led. We are in an atmosphere altogether different from
the rancor and fanaticism of the continent. Patrick,--there must
have been something very winning and kindly about the man,--
roused no tradition of animosity. He never made Ireland hate her
pagan past. When the Great Age came,--which was not till later,
--not till the Crest-Wave had passed from Wales,--and Christian
Irishmen took to writing down the old legends and stories, they
were very tender to the memories of the Gods and heroes. It was
in pity for the Children of Lir, that were turned into swans,
that they were kept alive long enough to be baptized and sent to
heaven. Can you fancy Latona and her children so received by
Greekish or Latin monks into the Communion of Saints? But the
Irish Church was always finding excuses for the salvation of the
great figures of old. Some saint called up Cuculain from hell,
converted him, and gave him a free pass that Peter at the Gates
should honor. There was Conchobar MacNessa again. He was king
of Ulster in the days of the Red Branch, the grand heroic cycle
of Irish legend; Cuculain was the chief of his warriors. A
brain-ball was driven through the skull of Conchobar from a
sling; but sure, his druid doctors would never be phased by a
trifle like that. They bound up the wound and healed him in a
cauldron of cure; but warned him never to get excited or
over-exert himself, or the brain-ball would come out and he would
die; barring such accidents, he would do splendidly. And so he
did for some years. Then one day a darkness came over the world,
and he put his druids to finding out the cause of it. They told
him they saw in their vision three crosses on a hill in the east
of the world, and three men nailed on them; and the man in the
middle with the likeness of the Son of God. With that the
battle-fury came on Conchobar, and he fell to destroying the
trees of the forest with his sword. "Oh that I were there!" he
cried; "thus would I deal with his enemies." With the excitement
and over-exertion, out came the brain-ball, and he died. And if
God Almighty would not take Conchobar MacNessa, pagan as he was,
into heaven for a thing like that,--sure, God Almighty was not
half such a decent kindly creature as the Irish monk who invented
the yarn.

So nothing comes down to us that has not passed the censorship of
a race-proud priesthood, with perhaps never a drop of the wine of
true wisdom in them, to help them discriminate and truth to shine
through what they were passing on; but still, with a great deal
of the milk of human kindness as a substitute, so far as it
might be. They treasured the literary remains of druid days;
liberally twisting them, to be sure, into consonance with
Christian ideas of history and the fitness of things; but still
they treasured them, and drew from them inspiration. Thus the
whole past comes down euhemerized, cooked, and touched up. It
comes down very glorious,--because the strongest feeling in Irish
hearts was Irishism, race-consciousness. Whereas the Latin
Church was fiercely against antiquity and all its monuments, the
Celtic Church in Ireland was anxious above all things to preserve
Celtic antiquity,--having first brought it into line with the one
true faith. The records had to be kept,--and made to tally with
the Bible. The godhood of the Gods had to be covered away, and
you had to treat them as if they had been respectable children of
Adam,--more or less respectable, at any rate. A descent from
Noah had to be found for the legendary kings and heroes; and for
every event a date corresponding with that of someone in the
Bible. Above all, you had to pack the whole Irish past into
the few thousand years since Noah came out of the Ark.--You
get a glimpse in Wales of the struggle there was between
Hebrao-Christian chronology and the Celtic sense of the age of
the world: in the pedigree of an ancient family, where, it
is said, about half way down the line this entry occurs after one
of the names: "In his time Adam was expelled from Paradise." In
Ireland, indeed, there was at least one man from before the Flood
living in historic times: Fintan, whom, with others, Noah sent
into the western world while the Ark was building. Here is one
of Fintan's poems:

"If you inquire of me concerning Ireland, I know and can relate
gladly all the invasions of it since the beginning of the
delightful world. Out of the east came Cessair, a woman,
daughter of Bith, with her fifty maidens, with her three men.
The flood came upon Bith on his mountain without mystery; on
Ladru at Ard Ladran; on Cessair at Cull Cesra. As for me, for
the space of a year, beneath the rapid flood, on the height of a
mighty wave, I enjoyed sleep which was exceeding good. Then, in
Ireland, I found my way above the waters until Partholan came out
of the East, from the land of the Greeks. Then, in Ireland, I
enjoyed rest; Ireland was void till the son of Agnoman came,
Nemed with the delightful manners. The Fir Bolg and the Fir
Galioin came a long time after, and the Fir Domnan also; they
landed at Erris in the west. Then came the Tuatha De Danaan in
their hood of mist. I lived with them for a long time, though
their age is far removed. After that came the sons of Mile out
of Spain and the south. I lived with them; mighty were their
battles. I had come to a great age, I do not conceal it,
when the pure faith was sent to Ireland by the King of the
Cloudy Heaven. I am the fair Fintan son of Bochra; I proclaim
it aloud. Since the flood came here I am a great personage
in Ireland."

In the middle of the sixth century he was summoned as a witness
by the descendants of Niall of the Nine Hostages against King
Dermot MacKerval, in a dispute as to the ancient divisions of
Ireland. He came to Tara with nine companies in front of him,
and nine companies behind: they were his descendants. This,
mind you, is in strictly historical times. The king and his
people received him kindly, and after he had rested a little, he
told them his story, and that of Tara from its foundation.
They asked him to give them some proof of his memory. "Right
willingly," said Fintan. "I passed one day through a wood in West
Munster; I brought home with me a red berry of the yew-tree,
which I planted in my kitchen-garden, and it grew there till it
was as tall as a man. Then I took it up, and re-planted it on
the green lawn before the house, and it grew there until a
hundred champions could find room under its foliage, to be
sheltered there from wind and rain, and cold and heat. I
remained so, and my yew remained so, spending our time alike,
until at last all its leaves fell off from decay. When afterwards
I thought of turning it to some profit, I went to it, and cut it
from its stem; and I made of it seven vats, and seven keeves, and
seven stans, and seven churns, and seven pitchers, and seven
milans, and seven medars, with hoops for all. I remained so with
my yew vessels until their hoops all fell off from decay and old
age. After that I re-made them; but could only get a keeve out
of the vat, and a stan out of the keeve, and a mug out of the
stan, and a cilorn out of the mug, and a milan out of the cilom,
and a medar out of the milan; and I leave it to Almighty
God that I do not know where their dust is now, after their
dissolution with me from decay." *

------
* De Jubainville, _Irish Mythological Cycle;_ when also Fintan's
poem quoted above.
------

Now here is a strange relic of the Secret Teaching that comes
down with this legend of Fintan. Each of the four Cardinal
Points, it was said, had had its Man appointed to record all the
wonderful events that had taken place in the world.* One of them
was this Fintan, son of Bochra, son of Lamech, whose duty was to
preserve the histories of Spain and Ireland, and the West in
general. As we have seen, Spain is a glyph for the Great Plain,
the Otherworld.

------
* See _The Secret Doctrine,_ for the Thesophical teaching.
------

From this universal euhemerization,--this loving preservation and
careful cooking of the traditions by the Christian redactors of
them,--we get certain results. One is that ancient Ireland
remains for us in the colors of life: every figure flashes
before our eyes in a golden mellow light of morning, at once
extremely real and extremely magical: not the Greek heroic age
appears so flooded with dawn-freshness, so realistic, so minutely
drawn, nor half so lit with glamor. Another result is that,
while strange gleams of Esotericism shine through,--as in that
about the Four Recorders of the Four Cardinal Points,--things
that it seemed undangerous to the monks, because they did not
understand their significance, to let pass,--we hear nothing in
Irish literature about the philosophy of the Druids. Ireland
retains her belief in magic to this day; and his would be a hard
skull that could know Ireland intimately and escape that belief.
So it seemed nothing irreligious to the monks to let the Druids
remain magicians. But philosophy was another matter entirely;
and must be ruled out as conflicting with the Christian scheme of
things. From this silence our Druid-Medicine-men Theorists draw
great comfort and unction for their pet belief. Reincarnation
appears in some stories as a sort of thing that might happen in
special cases; because "God is good to the Irish," and might be
willing to give them sometimes another chance. But nothing is
allowed to come down to imply it was known for a law in Nature;
no moral or philosophic bearing is attached to it. This is just
what you would expect. The Christian censors of the literature
had rejected it as unchristian doctrine. They would hate to have
it thought that Irishmen could ever have believed in such things;
they would cover such belief up in every possible way. You would
find peasant-bards in Wales to this day, men learned in the
national tradition, who are deacons in their chapels and druids
of the Gorsedd, and firm believers in Druidism. They have
founded a Gorsedd here in America lately, with an active
propaganda of Druidism, and lecturers touring. They think of it
as a kind of Pre-christian Christianity; and would open their
eyes wide to hear that Reincarnation was the cornerstone teaching
in it. This may throw a little light on the attitude of those
early Irish Christians.--But on the other hand there were tales
that could not be preserved at all, that you could not tell at
all, without bringing a touch of reincarnation into them. The
universal doctrine survived in that way in Ireland, as it
survived as a rumor in the folk-lore in Wales.

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