As a rule the Hades world, or underground and under-wave world, is unlike Manannan’s peaceful ocean realm, being often described as a place of much strife; and mortals are usually induced to enter it to aid in settling the troubles of its fairy inhabitants.
All the numerous variations of Otherworld tales now extant in Celtic literature show a common pre-Christian origin, though almost all of them have been coloured by Christian ideas about heaven, hell, and purgatory. From the earliest tales of the over-sea Otherworld type, like those of Bran, Maelduin, and Connla, all of which may go back to the early eighth century as compositions, the christianizing influence is already clearly begun; and in the Voyage of Snedgus and of Mac Riagla, of the late ninth century, this influence predominates.[349] Purely Christian texts of about the same period or later describe the Christian heaven as though it were the pagan Otherworld. Some of these, like the Latin version of the tale of St. Brandan’s Voyage, greatly influenced European literature, and probably contributed to the discovery of the New World.[349]
The combination of Christian and pagan Celtic ideas is well shown in the Voyage of the Húi Corra[350]:—‘Thereafter a wondrous island was shown to them. A psalm-singing venerable old man, with fair, builded churches and beautiful bright altars. Beautiful green grass therein. A dew of honey on its grass. Little ever-lovely bees and fair, purple-headed birds a-chanting music therein, so that [merely] to listen to them was enough of delight.’ But in another passage the Christian scribe describes Otherworld birds as souls, some of them in hell:—‘“Of the land of Erin am I,” quoth the bird, “and I am the soul of a woman, and I am a monkess unto thee,” she saith to the elder.... “Come ye to another place,” saith the bird, “to hearken to yon birds. The birds that ye see are the souls that come on Sunday out of hell.”’ Still other islands are definitely made into Christian hells full of fire, wherein wailing and shrieking men are being mangled by the beaks and talons of birds.
But sometimes, like the legends about the Tuatha De Danann, the legends about the Otherworld were taken literally and most seriously by some early Irish-Christian saints. Professor J. Loth records a very interesting episode, how St. Malo and his teacher Brandan actually set out on an ocean voyage to find the Heaven-world of the pagan Celts:—‘Saint Malo, when a youth, embarks with his teacher Brandan in a boat, in search of that mysterious country; after some days, the waves drive him back rebuffed and discouraged upon the seashore. An angel opens his eyes: the land of eternal peace and of eternal youth is that which Christianity promises to its elect.’[351]
Not only was the Celtic Otherworld gradually changed into a Christian Heaven, or Hell, from the eighth century onward, but its divine inhabitants soon came to suffer the rationalization commonly applied to their race; and the transcribers began to set them down as actual personages of Irish history. As we have already observed, the Tuatha De Danann were shorn of their immortality, and were given in exchange all the passions and shortcomings of men, and made subject to disease and death. This perhaps was a natural anthropomorphic process such as is met with in all mythologies. Celtic myth and mysticism, wherein may yet be read the deepest secrets of life and death, supplied names and legends to fill out a christianized scheme of Irish chronology, which was made to begin some six thousand years ago with Adam.
A few of the pagan legends, however, met very fair treatment at the hands of poetical and patriotic Christian transcribers. Thus in Adamnan’s Vision,[352] though the Celtic Otherworld has become ‘the Land of the Saints’, its primal character is clearly discernible: to reach it a sea voyage is necessary; and it is a land where there is no pride, falsehood, envy, disease or death, ‘wherein is delight of every goodness.’ In it there are singing birds, and for sustenance while there the voyagers need only to hear its music and ‘sate themselves with the odour which is in the Land’.
Again, in the Book of Leinster, and in later MSS., there is a dinnshenchas of almost primal pagan purity. It alludes to Clidna’s Wave, that of Tuag Inbir:—To Tuag, daughter of Conall, Manannan the sea-god sent a messenger, a Druid of the Tuatha De Danann in the shape of a woman. The Druid chanted a sleep spell over the girl, and while he left her on the seashore to look for a boat in which to embark for the ‘Land of Everliving Women’, a wave of the flood tide came and drowned her. But the Oxford version of the same tale doubts whether the maiden was drowned, for it suggests, ‘Or maybe it (the wave) was Manannan himself that was carrying her off.’[353] Thus the scribe understood that to go to Manannan’s world literally meant entering a sleep or trance state, or, what is equivalent in the case of the maiden whom Manannan summoned, the passage through death from the physical body. And still, to-day, the Irish peasant believes that the ‘good people’ take to their invisible world all young men or maidens who meet death; or that one under a fairy spell may go to their world for a short time, and come back to our world again.
We have frequently emphasized how truly the modern Celtic peasant in certain non-commercialized localities has kept to the faith of his pagan ancestors, while the learned Christian scribes have often departed widely from it. The story of the voyage of Fionn to the Otherworld,[354] which Campbell found living among Scotch peasants as late as the last century, adds a striking proof of this assertion. So does Michael Comyn’s peasant version of Ossian in the ‘Land of Youth’ (as outlined above, p. [346]), which, though dating from about 1749, has all the natural character of the best ancient tales, like those about Bran and Cormac. We are inclined, therefore, to attach a value even higher than we have already done to the testimony of the living Fairy-Faith which confirms in so many parallel ways, as has been shown, the Fairy-Faith of the remote past. Mr. W. B. Yeats, the Irish poet, adequately sums up this matter by saying, ‘But the Irish peasant believes that the utmost he can dream was once or still is a reality by his own door. He will point to some mountain and tell you that some famous hero or beauty lived and sorrowed there, or he will tell you that Tir-na-nog, the Country of the Young, the old Celtic paradise—the Land of the Living Heart, as it used to be called—is all about him.’[355]
At the end of his long and careful study of the Celtic Otherworld, Alfred Nutt arrived at the tentative conclusion which coincides with our own, that ‘The vision of a Happy Otherworld found in Irish mythic romances of the eighth and following centuries is substantially pre-Christian’, that its closest analogues are in Hellenic myth, and that with these ‘it forms the most archaic Aryan presentation of the divine and happy land we possess’.[356]