In Wales the strain of the Saxon wars kept them from their full fruition. Celtic warfare was governed by a certain code: thus, you, went to war only at such and such a time of the year; invaded your neighbor's territory only through such and such a stretch of his frontier; and no one need trouble to guard more than the recognized doorway of his realm. Above all, you never took an army through church lands. So through all the wars the Britons might be waging among themselves to keep their hands in, the monastery-colleges remained islands of peace, on friendly terms with all the combatants. But Wales, with no natural frontier, lay very open to invaders who knew no respect for religion or learning. Twelve hundred of the student-monks of Bangor, for example, were slaughtered in 613 by the Saxon Ethelfrith;—whereafter the rest fled to Bardsey Island in Cardigan Bay, and the great college at Bangor ceased to be.
Augustine of Canterbury, sent by the Pope to convert the English, had summoned the Welsh bishops to a conference, and ordered them to come under his sway and conform to Rome. They hardly knew why, but disliked the idea. Outwardly, their divergence from Catholicism was altogether trivial: they had their own way of shaving their heads for the tonsure, and their own times for celebrating Easter,—though truly, these are the kind of things over which you fight religious wars. However, it was not these details that worried them so much; but an uneasy sense they derived, perhaps, from the tone of Augustine's summons. The story runs that they took counsel among themselves, and agreed that if he were a man sent from God, they would find him humble-minded and mannered; whereof the sign should be, that he would rise to greet them when they entered. But Augustine had other ideas; and as the ambassador of the Vicar of Christ, rose to greet no man. So still, not quite knowing why, they would have no dealings with him; and went their ways after refusing to assimilate their Church of the Circled Cross to his of the Cross Uncircled;—whereupon he, to teach them a sound lesson, impelled the Saxon kings to war. Fair play to him, he was dead before that war brought about the massacre of the monks of Bangor,—who had marched to Chester to pray for the Briton arms.
But when Findian went back to Ireland he found no such difficulties in his way. Not till two hundred and seventy-five years later was that island disturbed by foreign invaders; and whatever domestic Kilkenny Cattery might be going forward, the colleges were respected. His school at Clonard quickly grew* till its students numbered three thousand; and in the forties, he sent out twelve of the chief of them to found other such schools throughout the island. Then the great age began; and for the next couple of thirteen-decade periods Ireland was a really brilliant center of light and learning. Not by any means merely, or even chiefly, in theology; there was a wonderful quickening of mental energies, a real illumination. The age became, as we have seen, a sort of literary clearing-house for the whole Irish past. If the surviving known Gaelic manuscripts were printed, they would fill nearly fifty thousand quarto volumes, with matter that mostly comes from before the year 800,—and which is still not only interesting, but fascinating.
——— * Encyclopaedia Britannica, article 'Ireland'; whence all re Findian and the colleges. ———
The truth is, we seem to have in it the relics and wreckage of the literary output of a whole foregone manvantara, or perhaps several. For in the vast mass of epics and romances that comes down, one distinguishes three main cycles: the Mythological, the Red Branch, and the Fenian. The first deals with the Five Races that invaded or colonized Ireland: Partholanians, Nemedians, Firbolgs, Gods, and Irish;—in all of it I suspect the faint memories and membra disjecta of old, old manvantaras: indeed, the summing up of the history of created man. You will have noted that the number of the races, as in Theosophic teaching, is five. M. de Jubainville points out that the creation of the world, or its gradual assumption of its present form, goes on pari passu with the evolution of its humanities, and under their eyes; thus, when Partholan, the first invader, arrived, there were but three lakes in Ireland, and nine rivers, and one plain. This, too, is an echo of the secret doctrine; and incidentally indicates how tremendously far back that first invasion was thought to have been.
The Partholanians came into Ireland from the Great Plain, the "Land of the Living," as the Irish called it, which is also the Land of the Dead:—in other words, they came into this world, and not from another part of it. Their peculiarity was that they were "no wiser the one than the other "; an allusion to the mindlessness of the early humanities before the Manasaputra incarnated in the mid-Third Root Race. Again, before their coming, there was a people in Ireland called the Fomorians: they came up from the sea, were gigantic and deformed; some of them with but one foot or one arm, some with the heads of horses or goats. That will remind you of the "water-men, terrible and bad" in the Stanzas of Dzyan: the first attempts of the Earth or unaided Nature to create men. But when the Partholanians fought with and defeated these Fomoroh, they were said to have "freed Ireland from a foreign foe"; this though the Fomorians were there first, and though the Partholanians were "invaders," and utterly ceased to be after a time, so that no drop of their blood runs in Irish veins. Why, then, does Ireland identify itself with the one race, and discard the other as "foreign foes"?— Because the Partholanians represent the first human race, but the Fomoroh or 'Water-men' were unhuman, and a kind of lusus naturae. 'Fomoroh,' by the way, may very well be translated 'Water-men'; fo I take to be the Greek upo, 'under,' and 'mor' is the 'sea.' Now the Battle of Mag Itha, between Partholan and the Fomorians, is a very late invention; not devised, I think, until the eleventh century. And of course there was no war or contact between the First Race and the Water-men, who had been destroyed long before. This is a good example of what came down in Pagan Ireland, and how the Christian redactors treated it. They had heard of the existence of the Fomoroh before the coming of Partholan, and thought it wise to provide the latter with a war against them. Later, as we shall see, the Fomoroh stood for the over-sea people westward,—the Atlantean giant-sorcerers.
The second race of invaders, the Nemedians, were also given a war with the Fomorians,—in the story of the seige of Conan's Tower. But this story is told by Nennius as applying to the Milesians, the Fifth Race Irish, and not to the Second Race Nemedians; and probably relates to events in comparatively historical tiems,— say a million years ago, or between that and the submersion of Poseidonis about nine thousand B.C. One would imagine that Ireland, from its position, must have been a main battle-ground between the men of the Fifth and the Atlanteans, between the White and the Black Magicians. Mr. Judge's Bryan Kinnavan stories indicate that it was a grand stronghold of the former.
The Nemedians were akin to the Partholanians: the Second Race to the First,—both mindless: they came after their predecessors had all died out; and in their turn died or departed to the last man. So we find in The Secret Doctrine that the first two humanities passed utterly and left no trace. If I go into all this a little fully, it is because it illustrates so well the system of blinds under which the Inner Teaching was hidden, and at the same time revealed, by the Initiate of every land. These Celtic things seem never to have come under the eye of Mme. Blavatsky at all; or how she might have drawn on them! I think that nowhere else in the mythologies are the Five Root-Races, the four past and the one existent, mentioned so clearly as here in Ireland. For historic reasons at which we have glanced,—the Roman occupation, which was hardly over before the Saxon invasions began,—Wales has preserved infinitely less of the records of ancient Celtic civilization than Ireland has; and yet Professor Kund Meyer told me,—and surely no living man is better qualified to make suct a statement,—that the whole of the forgotten Celtic mythology might yet be recovered from old MSS. hidden away in Welsh private libraries that have never been examined. How much more then may be hoped for from Ireland!
The third invasion was by a threefold people: the Fir Domnan, or Men of the Goddess Domna; the Fir Bolg, or Men of the Sacks; and the Galioin. From these races there were still people in Connacht in the seventeenth century who claimed their decent. Generally all three are called by the one name of Firbolgs. They were "avaricious, mean, uncouth, musicless, and inhospitable." Then came the Tuatha De Danaan, "Gods and false gods," as Tuan MacCarell told St. Finnen, "from whom everyone knows the Irish men of learning are descended. It is likely they came into Ireland from heaven, hence their knowledge and the excellence of their teaching." Thus Tuan, who has just been made to allude to them as "Gods and false gods." This Tuan, I should mention, originally came into Ireland with Partholan; and, that history might be preserved, kept on reincarnating there, and remembering all his past lives. These Danaans conquered, and then ruled over, the Firbolgs: it is a glyph of the Third or Lemurian Race, of which the first three (and a half) sub-races were mindless—the Fir Domnan, Fir Bolg and Galioin; then the Lords of Mind incarnated and reigned over them, the Tuatha De Danaan, wafted down from heaven in a druid cloud. So far we have a pretty exact symbolic rendering of the Theosophic teaching.
The Danaans conquered the Firbolgs, it is said, at the Battle of Moytura. Now there were two Battles of Moytura, of which this was the first; it alludes to the incarnation of the Manasaputra, and with it the clear symbolic telling of human history comes to an end. So much, being very remote, was allowed to come down without other disguise than that which the symbols afforded. But at this point, which is the beginning of the mind-endowed humanity we know, a mere eighteen million years ago, further blinds became necessary. History, an esoteric science, had still more to be camouflaged, lest memories should seize upon indications too readily, and find out too much. Why this should be, it is not the time to argue; enough to say that the wisdom of antiquity decreed it.