The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries Part 37

In dreams there is a great wealth of latent memory; sometimes memory of the present waking life, but often not capable, apparently, of being attached to it, nor explicable as due to the soul wandering from the body during sleep: the hypothesis of re-birth seems to be the only adequate one here. Certain dreams suggest that man possesses innate memories extending backwards to prehistoric times (cf. p. 5 above). This fits in with Professor Freud's theory in his _Die Traumdeutung_, that 'the dream is nothing else than the concealed fulfilment of a repressed wish.' Some dreams are 'in the form of frightful, cruel, horrible scenes, which seem frightful to us, but in a certain depth of the unconscious satisfy wishes which, in the "prehistoric" ages of our own mental development, were actually recognized as desires.'[627] This also supports our vitalistic view of the evolution of human instincts. Again, in somnambulism there is a much more exalted memory, and clear cases are on record of facts being then consciously present which cannot be accounted for save through the same hypothesis.[628]

If we keep in mind the psychology of the dream state, we shall probably get the clearest intellectual theory as to why, if pre-existence be true, we do not remember various previous states of existence. In our present state of consciousness we may enter a dream state, in that dream state by dreaming we enter a second dream state, and theoretically, though not by common experience, there may be no limit to superimposed dream states, each one in itself a state of consciousness distinct from the waking consciousness. Accordingly, if, as Wordsworth put it, 'our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting' of another state of consciousness, and death the abrupt ending of that sleep of dreams and a waking up, or if the direct opposite be true, and death is the entrance to a sleep and dream state of consciousness, it becomes very clear how difficult it would be for us here now either to recall what we may have dreamt or have actually done in another state of conscious existence corresponding to our present one. The subtle thinkers of modern India, who completely accept the doctrine of re-birth as a universal law, have summed up this abstruse aspect of the dream psychology as follows:--'The first or spiritual state was ecstasy; from ecstasy it (the Ego) forgot itself into deep sleep; from deep sleep it awoke out of unconsciousness, but still within itself, into the internal world of dreams; from dreaming it pa.s.sed finally into the thoroughly waking state, and the outer world of sense.'[629] But our own psychologists are not yet far enough advanced to accept this; much more work in psychical research must first be done before it will be possible for them to announce to the West that pre-existence is a necessary condition for post-existence which they now hypothetically accept. If for the present our standpoint be that of our own psychologists, we may then think of the human consciousness as a spectrum whose central parts alone are visible to us.

Beyond at either end lies an unseen and to us unknown region, awaiting its explorer from the West. 'Each one of us is in reality an abiding psychical ent.i.ty far more extensive than he knows--an individuality which can never express itself completely through any corporeal manifestation. The Self manifests through the organism; but there is always some part of the Self unmanifested; and always, as it seems, some power of organic expression in abeyance or reserve.'[630] William James stated the position thus:--'The B. region' (another name for the region of subconsciousness), 'then, is obviously the larger part of each of us, for it is the abode of everything that is latent, and the reservoir of everything that pa.s.ses unrecorded and un.o.bserved.'[631]

Men of science see no way of accepting the doctrine of the resurrection of the physical body as at present interpreted by Christian theology; but the late Professor Th. Henri Martin, Dean of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Rennes, has suggested in his _La Vie future_ that the doctrine may be the exoteric interpretation of a long-forgotten esoteric truth; namely, that the soul may be resurrected in a new physical body, and this is scientifically possible.[632]

The ancient scientists called Life a Circle. In the upper half of this Circle, or here on the visible plane, we know that in the physiological history of man and of all living things there is first the embryonic or prenatal state, then birth; and as life, like a sun, rises in its new-born power toward the zenith, there is childhood, youth, and maturity; and then, as it pa.s.ses the zenith on its way to the horizon, there is decline, old age, and, finally, death; and as a scientific possibility we have in the lower half of the Circle, in Hades or the Otherworld of the Celts and of all peoples, corresponding processes between death and a hypothetical but logically necessary re-birth.[633]

The logical corollary to the re-birth doctrine, and an integral part of the Celtic esoteric theory of evolution, is that there have been human races like the present human race who in past aeons of time have evolved completely out of the human plane of conscious existence into the divine plane of conscious existence. Hence the G.o.ds are beings which once were men, and the actual race of men will in time become G.o.ds. Man now stands related to the divine and invisible world in precisely the same manner that the brute stands related to the human race. To the G.o.ds, man is a being in a lower kingdom of evolution. According to the complete Celtic belief, the G.o.ds can and do enter the human world for the specific purposes of teaching men how to advance most rapidly toward the higher kingdom. In other words, all the Great Teachers, e. g. Jesus, Buddha, Zoroaster, and many others, in different ages and among various races, whose teachings are extant, are, according to a belief yet held by educated and mystical Celts, divine beings who in inconceivably past ages were men but who are now G.o.ds, able at will to incarnate into our world, in order to emphasize the need which exists in nature, by virtue of the working of evolutionary laws (to which they themselves are still subject), for man to look forward, and so strive to reach divinity rather than to look backward in evolution and thereby fall into mere animalism. The stating of this mystical corollary makes the exposition of the Fairy-Faith complete, at least in outline.

As shown by the Barddas MSS. in our chapter vii, the Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth is the scientific extension of Darwin's law as corrected,[634]

that alone through traversing the Circle of Life man reaches that destined perfection which natural a.n.a.logies, life's processes as exhibited by living things, and evolution, suggest, and from which at present man is so far removed. There seems to emerge this postulate: the world is the object of normal consciousness, the Ego or Soul-Monad the object of subconsciousness; and the subconsciousness cannot be realized in the world until through the normal consciousness of man the Ego is able to function completely, and so endow man with full self-consciousness in matter, which endowment seems to be the goal of all planetary evolution.

We conclude that the Otherworld of the Celts and their Doctrine of Re-birth accord thoroughly in their essentials with modern science; and, accordingly, with other essential elements in the complete Celtic Fairy-Faith which we have in the preceding chapter found to be equally scientific, establish our Psychological Theory of the Nature and Origin of that Fairy-Faith upon a logical and solid foundation; and we now submit this study to the judgement of our readers. With more complete evidence in the future, both from folk-lore and from science, there will be, we trust, a better vindication of the Theory, and perhaps finally there will come about its transformation into what it but seems to us to be now--a Fact.

Some beliefs which a century ago were regarded as absurdities are now regarded as fundamentally scientific. In the same way, what in this generation is heretical alike to the Christian theologian and to the man of science may in coming generations be accepted as orthodox.

INDEX

_Ad.a.m.nan's Vision_, 356.

Aeneas, Journey of, 336-7, 343, 382, 445.

Aengus, 62, 292, 301, 376, 397, 413-4.

---- Cult of, 415 ff., 450.

---- Dun, 2, 41, 416-8.

_Agallamh_, 28, 283 n., 286, 290, 292, 295, 402, 412.

---- _an da Shuadh_, 344.

Ailill, 288-9, 301, 374-5, 440.

Aine, 79, 80 n., 83, 301.

Alchemists, 240, 244, 261, 276, 296 n.

Alignements, xv, 199 n., 393, 399, 419 ff.: _see_ Archaeology.

All Saints (_La Toussaint_), 439, 453: _see_ _Samain_, and November Day.

Angel, 7, 12, 85, 238, 240-1, 263-4, 267, 272, 374: _see_ Fallen Angels, and St. Michael.

Angels and Science, 481.

Anglesey, 10, 138-9, 141-2.

Animism, 55, 226 ff., 282, 457 ff.: _see_ Dead, and Death.

---- Pre-, 253, 401.

---- Science and, 459 ff.

_Ankou_, 16, 29, 218, 220.

---- Science and, 484.

_Annwn_, 319, 353.

Anthropology, 226-82.

Antrim, 73, 371.

Apollo, 403, 405-6, 421.

Apparitions, Science and, 480, 484 ff.

Aranmore, 2, 4, 40, 416.

Archaeology, xv, 2, 9, 10, 12-5, 31, 52, 78, 81, 118-9, 137 n., 148, 154, 157 n., 163, 165 ff., 172, 179, 210, 221, 234 n., 393, 397-426, 450 n.

Armagh, 74-5, 443.

---- _Book of_, 283 n., 291.

_Art, Voyage of_, 351-2.

Arthur, 9, 10, 12-3, 82 n., 163, 183, 238, 304, 308 ff., 333-4, 353, 381, 429, 437, 441, 447: _see_ Re-birth.

Arthur, Bird, as, 183, 185.

Arthurian Legend, 9, 260, 308 ff.: _see_ Arthur.

Astral Body, 29.

---- Light, 133.

---- Milk, 164.

---- Plane, 167, 171.

---- Spirits, 167, 171.