IRISH SCENES: by Fred J. Dick, M. Inst. C. E., M. Inst. C. E. I.
TO the archaeologist, the geologist, the folk-lorist, and the lover of nature in all her aspects, perhaps no area of similar extent is more replete with interest than that of Ireland. As to fairies, the county Sligo folk will tell you they have more of them to the square yard than can be found in a square mile of the county Kerry. Folk-lorists will doubtless pass upon this claim intelligently, when they wear the right sort of spectacles. Fairies aside, however, hardly a square mile of the country lacks some ruin of great antiquity.
Nearly two thousand years have elapsed since Baile Atha Cliath Duibhlinne (the town of the hurdle-ford on the black river), now Dublin, began to share with Tara the honor of being chief city. Dublin, therefore, has no known history that could be called really ancient; for in the light of the Theosophical teachings and records, two thousand years is merely modern. Tara, on the other hand, was a center of national life and government so ancient as to be probably coeval with Brugh na Boinne. Which means they were there "before the flood," or in other words, long before Poseidon went down, some eleven or twelve thousand years ago.
The fact that the city of Tara was set on a hill, suggests the idea that there may have been a time, once, when cities having certain high functions to fulfil, were usually set on hills.
In correspondence with the withdrawal of the higher influences of the Tuatha de Danaans from visible participation in Irish life, and the reign of the Formorians and their heirs, leading Ireland in common with other places to descent through dark ages, it was fitting that regal and poetic Tara should fade, and Dublin rise with its distilleries, breweries, and vivisection halls, and with many of its folk within hospitals, poor-houses, and insane asylums—in accentuation of the modern spirit. That such conditions are, in point of fact, unnecessary, can easily be deduced from the study of certain small races who have not wholly forgotten some essential principles in the art of living.
Nevertheless, Dublin, equally with other parts of Ireland, has its bright side. Much of its social life is vivacious, artistic, and literary in high degree, surpassing many cities in these respects. This city began to assume its present appearance in the eighteenth century, when Sackville street, as then named, was built. It is one of the finest streets in Europe. The munificent grants of the Irish parliament enabled many handsome public buildings to be constructed, as well as hospitals, harbors, canals, etc. Among the finest of the public edifices is that of the old houses of parliament, now occupied as a bank.
The first meeting of the Irish parliament within the part of this structure then completed, took place in 1731; but entire legislative independence was only reached in 1782. Eighteen years later, owing to some rather meretricious influences, the parliament voted away its rights; and the Union occurred in 1800. The building, which took many years to complete, possesses majesty in design combined with simplicity in arrangement, and has few rivals. Constructed of Portland stone, the style is chastely classic, owing nothing to extraneous embellishment—the mere outline producing a harmonious effect. The principal front is formed by an Ionic colonnade, raised on a flight of steps, and ranged round three sides of a spacious quadrangle. In the central part a portico projects, formed of four Ionic columns, sustaining a tympanum with the royal arms, while the apex is adorned with a colossal statue—Hibernia—with others representing Fidelity and Commerce on the western and eastern points. From the outer ends of these colonnades the building sweeps eastward and westward in circular form, the walls, unpierced by openings, standing behind rows of Corinthian columns, and having the interspaces tastefully indented by niches. Over the eastern portico are statues of Fortitude, Justice, and Liberty. The original designer of this noble edifice is unknown. The House of Lords has been left practically untouched to this day, save that the Speaker's chair is now in the Royal Irish Academy.
On the opposite side of College Green is the extensive Corinthian façade of Trinity College; and passing a short way towards Sackville (now O'Connell) street, one reaches the Carlisle Bridge, from which can be seen another magnificent building called the Custom House (though so immense as to accommodate many government offices), as well as the Four Courts and other massive structures, so numerous as to give the impression of a people possessing energy, taste, and industry. Since the early years of the nineteenth century, however, there have been no fine buildings added, if we except the splendid pile of the Science and Art Museums and Library in Kildare street.
The environs of Dublin, within a dozen miles or so, possess singular charm and variety; and on Sundays the good folk keep the jaunting-cars busy throughout the regions from Delgany, Powerscourt and the Dublin mountains, to Leixlip, Howth and Malahide. Not many know that Malahide Castle contains an altar-piece from the oratory of Mary Queen of Scots, at Holyrood, for which Charles II gave two thousand pounds sterling. Among the valuable paintings in this Castle is a portrait of Charles I by Vandyke.
There is a territory within almost equally easy reach of Dublin, whose loveliness excels anything of the kind in Ireland except possibly the Blackwater in county Waterford. It is the Boyne valley between Slane and Beauparc. Everyone in Dublin admits it lovely—but no one has seen it!
In the north and west of Ireland the scenery is frequently wild and stern. Of this character is Fairhead on the Antrim Coast, the Robogdium Promontorium of Ptolemy the geographer, where on one's northward journey is obtained the first glimpse of the remarkable columnar basalt formation met with in profusion in the Giant's Causeway region. One of the basaltic pillars forming the stupendous natural colonnade over six hundred feet high at Fairhead, is a rectangular prism 33 feet by 36 on the sides, and 319 feet in height, and is the largest basaltic pillar known.
Further along this coast is the rope-bridge at Carrick-a-Rede, which sways in the wind as you walk over it, while the Atlantic waves boil in the appalling chasm beneath; and woe to you, if overcome by terror you attempt to lean on the thin hand-line.
The coast scenery in the vicinity of the Giant's Causeway is grandly impressive, as seen from a boat. The promontory called the Pleaskin, consisting of terrace upon terrace of columnar basalt, and the succession of extraordinary rock groups such as the Sea Gulls, the King and his Nobles, the Nursing Child, the Priest and his Flock, the Chimney Rock, the Giant's Organ, and finally the Causeway itself, form astonishing instances of nature's sportfulness.
The pillars in the Causeway number about forty thousand, and are composed mainly of irregular hexagonal prisms varying from fifteen to twenty-six inches in diameter, but all fitting together compactly. Among other features of the place is the Giant's Amphitheatre, which is exactly semi-circular, with the slopes at the same angle all round; while around the uppermost part runs a row of columns eighty feet high. As a German writer, Kahl, continues:
Then comes a broad rounded projection, like an immense bench, for the accommodation of the giant guests of Finn MacCumhal; then again a row of columns sixty feet high, and then again a gigantic bench, and so down to the bottom, where the water is enclosed by a circle of black boulder stones, like the limits of the arena.
Lomaland Photo. and Engraving Dept.
THE OLD HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT—NOW THE BANK OF IRELAND; COLLEGE GREEN, DUBLIN
Lomaland Photo. and Engraving Dept.
AN IRISH PEASANT WOMAN
Lomaland Photo. and Engraving Dept.
AN IRISH FARMER
Lomaland Photo. and Engraving Dept.
PART OF THE GIANTS' CAUSEWAY, ANTRIM, IRELAND
We should have to go back to the era when the Bamian statues were carved out of the living rock (see The Secret Doctrine, ii, 388) to find giants tall enough to occupy this amphitheater gracefully.
The convulsion which lowered the Giants' Causeway, with its substratum of ocher, below the upper tier level of the Pleaskin, produced the landslide at the Giants' Organ, and submerged the continuous land connexion with Staffa, must have belonged to far pre-Atlantean times (the Atlantean continental system proper having ended nearly a million years ago), and be referable to the Secondary Age, when there really were giants somewhat approaching the size suggested. It must have been far back in Lemurian times, for the sinking and transformation of the Lemurian continental systems began in the vicinity of Norway, and ended at Atlantean Lankâ, of which Ceylon was the northern highland.
There are traditions of enormous giants in many parts of Ireland. Thus the rope-bridge chasm above mentioned, is said to have been cut by a stroke of Finn MacCumhal's sword, a feat that would have been difficult for even a Lemurian giant. The legends in Kerry express, by similar exaggeration, the size and strength of a former giant race.
This reminds us that the Raphaim (phantoms), Nephilim (fallen ones), and Gibborim (mighty ones) of the Bible refer to the First and Second semi-ethereal Races, the Third (Lemurian), and the Fourth (Atlantean) respectively.
But in order to grasp this subject intelligently, the reader may be referred to those volumes which it will be more and more the principal business of the scholars, archaeologists, and scientific men of the twentieth century to study, interpret and vindicate (vindication is already in full stride), namely, The Secret Doctrine, written by H. P. Blavatsky.
True glory consists in doing that which deserves to be written, in writing what deserves to be read, and in so living as to make the world happier for our living in it.—Pliny
THE BLUEBELLS OF WERNOLEU: a Welsh Legend
by Kenneth Morris
OUT of the bluebell bloom of the night
When the east's agloom and the west's agleam.
Over the wern at Alder-Light
And the dark stile and the stream,
There's dew comes dropping of dream-delight
To the deeps where the bluebells dream.
It's then there's brooding on wizard stories
All too secret for speech or song,
And rapture of rose and daffodil glories
Where the lone stream wandereth long;
And I think the whole of the Druids' lore is
Known to the bluebell throng.
For they say that a sky-bee wandered of old
From her island hive in the Pleiades,
Winging o'er star-strewn realms untold,
And the brink of star-foamed seas—
Thighs beladen with dust of gold,
As is the wont of bees.
She left the hives of magical pearl,
Of dark-heart sapphire and pearl and dreams,
Where the flowers of the noon and the night unfurl
Their rose-rimmed blooms and beams—
Fain of the wandering foam awhirl
On the wild Dimetian streams,
Of the rhododendron bloom on the hills—
(There's dear, red bloom in the pine-dark dell)—
Of rhododendron and daffodils,
And the blue campanula bell,
And the cuckoo-pint by the tiny rills
That rise in Tybie's Well.
(And where's the wonder, if all were known?
There's many in Michael's hosts that ride
Would lay down scepter and crown and throne,
And their aureoled pomp and pride,
So they might wander and muse alone
An hour by the Teifi side.
And if anything lovely is under the sky,
That the eye beholds, or the proud heart dreams,
When the pomp of the world goes triumphing by,
When the sea with the sunlight gleams—
It's show you a lovelier thing could I,
'Twixt Tywi and Teifi streams.
Let be! whatever of praise be sung,
Here's one could never make straight the knee,
Nor stay the soul from its paeans flung
Where the winds might flaunt them free,
For a thousand o' mountains, cloud-fleece hung,
'Twixt Hafren Hen and the sea.)
Musing, down through the firmament vales,
Here and there in a thousand flowers,
Even till at last she was wandering Wales,
Lured by the pure June hours,
Lured by the glamor of ancient tales,
And the glory of age-old towers.
Peony splendor of eve and dawn.
Tulips abloom on the border of day,
West on fire with the sun withdrawn,
Night and the Milky Way—
Ah, it was midnight's bluebell lawn
Most in her heart held sway.
O'er Bettws Mountain she came down slowly,
Drowsy winged through the tangled wern;
Where in the sky was there hill so holy,
With so much glamor to burn,
As the hyacinth wilds beyond Wernoleu,
With their white bells 'mid the fern?
Musing, round by the wern she wandered
From bell to bell with her wings acroon,
There where they laughed and nodded and pondered
Through the beautiful hours of June;
Bluebell-dark were the dreams she squandered
On the gold and green of noon.
And the wild white hyacinths, wondering, heard her,
Suddenly caught by her starry song;
Gave no more ear to the woodland bird, or
Heeded the wild bee throng,
Or laughed with delight of the sunbright verdure
Of fern they had loved so long.
Marvelous thought took hold of them wholly,
Azure of mingled darkness and light,
And they deepened to dark-heart sapphire slowly
With brooding on the splendor of night;
And the first of the bluebells of white Wernoleu
Bloomed, night-blueness dight.
And that's why the wern at Alder-Light
Is sweet with silence and deep in dream,
In that wizard region of dream-delight
Beyond the stile and the stream,
When the dews have fallen from the bloom of night
On the glooms where the bluebells gleam.
International Theosophical Headquarters
Point Loma, California
THE SOUL AT THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION:
by Henry Travers
THE majority of people are not very original and independent in their thinking, and consequently prefer to await the sanction of some recognized authority before accepting a doctrine. For this reason it is scarcely just to lay all the blame on the institutions, ecclesiastical and otherwise, which supply this demand. For this reason, too, it will be a matter of considerable moment that a professor at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science should have brought forward arguments which, according to the report of his address, "help the belief that man has a soul."
The arguments brought forward are as old as man himself, it is true; but doctrines are judged largely according to their immediate source. Thus a new color, an additional weight, is given to the idea that the eye has been made by "some external agency cognizant of all the properties of light," and to the idea that the brain is an instrument played upon by some power that is not material. We have heard this from the pulpit, perhaps; now we hear it from the lecture table; so we can believe it a little more strongly than we did before.
The lecturer's cautious remarks, as gathered from a brief report, seem to indicate a belief on his part that there may be a soul after all. The report is headed, "Eye and Brain Show a Soul Possibly Independent of Life." His view is said to be regarded by physiologists as offering a great stimulus to research, and "it provides for the general public a new exposition of the theory of belief in a divinity." The eye and the brain are such wonderful instruments that they surely must have been made by some intelligent power. That is the argument, and it surely must have occurred to many people before. "The brain's workings and the will-power suggested," he said, "that the brain was mysteriously affected by invisible and untraceable harmonies." The following is of interest to Darwinists:
It was natural to suppose, he declared, the existence of some external agent over and above natural selection, which [latter] would have done no more than assist in the process.
Natural selection is in fact no more than a phrase descriptive of the process itself; it can neither help nor hinder, any more than the theory of the law of gravitation can pull down a stone or the calculus of probabilities affect the destiny of a soul.
One feels as if the ancient faiths of humanity, after being confirmed and appealed against times without number, had been laid before a final court of appeal, which, after many painstaking and protracted labors, had at last begun to hand down opinions, slowly and carefully. The existence of the soul has at last been established beyond all possible cavil. It has passed all the courts, there is no further appeal, it is law. The most irrational rationalist, the most credulous sceptic, the most visionary materialist, may now believe in the soul. There really is one. At least "there was some loophole for the view that mind was not directly associated with life or living matter, but only indirectly with certain dispositions of dynamic state that were sometimes present within certain parts of it." (Times report.) At present, then, we may believe in a soul—cautiously. One wonders if the British Association will ever get so far as to say that we must believe in a soul.
But why should there be only one soul? Why not separate souls for the eye, the brain, the heart, the liver—all equally wonderful? The fact is that such problems as this have been debated from time immemorial, and one can but refer the curious to the world's literature. While our learned men are cautiously speculating about "a soul," the literature of Hindûstân (to take a single instance), thousands of years old, summarizes the tenets of many different schools of philosophy on the subject of the various souls in man, the faculties of these souls, the nature of the mind, its numerous powers and functions, the inner senses and their external organs, and so forth. And back of all lies the inscrutable Self of man, the Master and possessor of all these powers. Verily we have much yet to learn—the road we are going. It looks like a snail verifying the tracks of a bird. It looks as if these physiologists had just arrived at the edge of the sea, near enough to get their feet wet so as to know there is a sea. And now they are talking about a promising field of investigation.
Of course these physiologists are souls, the same as the rest of us, and they have minds and other faculties which they use all the time. But what they are doing is to bring a little of this actual practical knowledge down to the plane of formal theory. An extraordinary duality of the mind, truly! To be a soul, to act as a soul, and yet to live half in and half out of a mental state wherein conditions are entirely different! One sometimes wonders what bearing these speculations have upon actual life at all. The achievements of science lie mainly in the region of applied mechanics and chemistry. Physiology brings us closer into contact with vital questions that cannot be ignored and that yet lie without the prescribed domain.
The zoological professor also indulged in a little flight of the imagination; for in lecturing on "The Greater Problems of Biology," he made "Wonderment" a part of his theme. He pointed out that the problems of consciousness and the mystery of the reasoning soul were not for the biologist but the psychologist.
Beyond and remote from physical causation lay the End, the Final Cause of the philosopher, the reason why, in the which were hidden the problems of organic harmony and autonomy and the mysteries of apparent purpose, adaptation, fitness, and design. Here, in the region of teleology, the plain rationalism that guided them through the physical facts and causes began to disappoint them, and Intuition, which was of close kin to Faith [capitals not ours], began to make herself heard.
This is enough to make Tyndall turn in his grave, thereby causing an earthquake in Scotland. He was so very satisfied with the plain rationalism, and died before it began to disappoint. What would he have said of Intuition, if not that it is a secretion of one of our glands? It seems to have taken a long time to realize that purpose, design, etc., are qualities of mind and not of matter. It is absolutely essential that physiologists should study mind and soul, even though their immediate object be the body. What geologist could adequately study the earth if he ignored the existence of the air and the sea?