I was in Canaan when Absalom was slain;
I was in the Court of Don (the Milky Way) before the birth
of Gwydion;
I was on the high cross of the merciful Son of God;
I have been three periods in the prison of Arianrhod.
I was in Asia with Noah in the Ark;
I saw the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah;
I was in India when Rome was built;
I am now come here to the remnant of the Trojans.
I was with my Lord in the ass's manger;
I strengthened Moses through the waters of Jordan;
I was in the firmament from the Cauldron of Ceridwen
I shall be on earth until the day of doom. *
———
* I quote it from Mr. T.W. Rollestone's Myths and Legends of the
Celtic Race. The poem appeares in the Hanes Taliesin, in Lady
Guest's Mabinogion.
———
Now, what would common sense have to say about things like that? Simply, I think, that they are echoes that came down in Wales through the ages, of a teaching that once was known. They do not,—they would not,—no one would expect them to,—give the true and exact features and the inwardness of such teaching, but they do reflect the haunting reminiscences of a race that once believed in Reincarnation so firmly, that people were ready to lend money not to be repaid until a future life on earth. If you can prove that that poem not written until the thirteenth, or sixteenth, or eighteenth century, all the better; it only shows the greater strength, the longer endurance, of the tradition; and therefore, the greater reality of that from which the tradition came. It is the ghost of something which once was living; and the longer you can show the ghost surviving,—the more living in its day was the something it survived from. Your Tamerlanes and Malek Rics can be used to frighten babies for centures;—their ghosts walk in that sense; their memories linger;—but your Tomlinsons die and are done with, and no wind carries rumors of them after.
And the name of Taliesin,—whom you may say we know to have been a Welsh poet of the sixth century,—is made the peg on which to hang these floating reminiscences of Druidic teaching;—and the story told about him,—a story replete with universal symbolism, —is, for anyone who has studied that science, clearly symbolic of the initiation of a Teacher of the Secret Doctrine.
What is it accounts for race-persistence? Not just what you see on the physical plane. There is what we should call an astral mold; and this is fed and nourished,—its edges kept firm and distinct,—by forces from the plane of causes, the thought-plane. When this mold has been well established,—as by centuries of national greatness and power,—all sorts of waves of outer circumstance may roll over the race, and apparently wash its raciality clean away; and yet something in the unseen operates to resist, and, when the waves recede, to raise up first the old race-consciousness, and finally national existence again. Take Ireland for example. It has been over-run and over-run so much that many authorities would deny the existence of any Celtic blood there at all. But what is absolutely undeniable is that a distinct and well-defined racial type exists there; and that it corresponds largely to the racial type—I do not mean physical so much as spiritual,—that the Greek and Roman writers ascribed to the Celtic Gauls. It is often claimed that an Irishman is merely an inferior kind of Englishman, and that there is little difference in blood between the two; but those who make this claim most loudly would not dream of denying the difference of the mental types; they are generally the ones who see most difference. Why was it that the children of the Norman invaders of Ireland became Hiberniores ipsis Hiberniis? Because of the astral mold, certainly. It is race-consciousness that makes race, and not the other way; and there is something behind that makes race-consciousness; so that even where calamity has smashed up the latter and put it altogether in abeyance, the seeds of it remain, in the soil and on the inner planes, to sprout again in their day; when the Crest-Wave rolls in; when Souls come to revive them. It may be that this will never happen, of course; but it seems to me that where Nature wishes to put an end to these racial recrudescences, she must take strong steps.
Though the British Celts had been under Roman rule for four centuries, their language today is Celtic.—Why?—Because there was what you may call a very old, well-established and strong Celtic-speaking astral mold. We absorbed a large number of Latin words; but assimilated them to the Celtic mold so that you would never recognise them; whereas in a page of English the Latin borrowings stand out by the score. Look at that ascend, for instance: Latin ascendere parading itself naked and unashamed, and making no pretense whatever to be anything else. You shall find ascendere, too, on any page of Welsh; or rather, you shall not find him, by reason of his skillful camouflage. He has cut off his train, as in English; but he has cut off more of it: the d of the stem, as well as the ending. He has altered both his vowels, and one of his three remaining consonants; and appears as esgyn, to walk the pages undetected for an alien by that vigilant police, the Celtic sense of euphony. He is typical of a thousand others. Wherefore the difference?—The English were a new people in process of formation, and besides with a whole heap of Latin blood in them from the Roman province; their mold was faintly formed, or only forming; but the Celts had formed theirs rigidly in ancient times.
Again: when in the ninth century Hywel Dda king of Wales codified the laws of his country, the result was a Celtic code without, I think, any relation to Roman law; though Roman law had prevailed in Roman Britain for three centuries or so. What strong Celtic molds must have persisted, to cause this! Roman law imposed itself on nearly all Europe, including many peoples that never were under Roman rule; and yet here was this people, that had been all that time under the Romans, oblivious of Roman law, uninfluenced by it, practically speaking;—and returning at the first opportunity to the kind of laws they had had before the Romans were born or thought of.
Druidism had been proscribed, as a practice, during Roman times. The worship of the Celtic Gods had continued; but they had been assimilated to those of the empire;—which would be a much more difficult thing to do were the Gods, as your modern learned suppose, mere fictions of the superstitious, and not the symbols of, or the Powers behind, the forces of Nature. So Celtic religion outwardly was submerged in Roman religion; and then later. Christianity came in. But the science, the institutions, and the philosophy of the Druids had been part and parcel of the inner life of the race perhaps as long as their laws and language had; and your Celt runs by nature to religion, or even to religiosity,—ultra-religion. Is it likely that, while he kept his laws and language, he let his religion go? And when it was not an arbitrary farrago of dogmas, like some we might mention; but a philosophy of the soul so vivid that he counted death little more to fuss about than going to sleep?