Such then are the re-birth stories of the Gaels. Among the Brythons the same ancient doctrine prevailed, though we have fewer clear records of it. Of the Brythonic Re-birth Doctrine as philosophically expounded in Barddas, mention has already been made.
In the ancient Welsh story about Taliessin, Gwion after many transformations, magical in their nature, is re-born as that great poet of Wales, his mother being a goddess, Caridwen, who dwells beneath the waters of Lake Tegid. In its present mystical form this tale cannot be traced further than the end of the sixteenth century, though the transformation incidents are presupposed in the Book of Taliessin, a thirteenth-century manuscript.[403] Besides being the re-birth of Gwion, Taliessin may be regarded as a bardic initiate high in degree, who is possessed of all magical and druidical powers.[403] He made a voyage to the Otherworld, Caer Sidi; and this seems to indicate some close connexion between ancient rites of initiation and his occult knowledge of all things.[404] Like the Irish re-birth and Otherworld tales, it also suggests the relation between the world of death or Faerie and the world of human embodiment.
From his harrying of Hades, the Brythonic Gwydion secured the Head of Hades’ Cauldron of Regeneration or Re-birth; and when corpses of slain warriors are thrown into it they arise next day as excellent as ever, except that they are unable to speak; which circumstance may be equal to saying that the ordinary uninitiated man when re-born is unable to speak of his previous incarnation, because he has no memory of it. This Cauldron of Re-birth, like so many objects mentioned in the ancient bardic literature, is evidently a mystic symbol: it suggests the same correspondences, as propounded in the modern Barddas, between the dead and the living, between death and re-birth; and Gwydion having been a great culture hero of Wales probably promulgated a doctrine of re-birth, and hence is described as being able to resuscitate the dead.[405]
King Arthur as a Reincarnated Hero
Judging from substantial evidence set forth above in [chapter v], the most famous of all Welsh heroes, Arthur, equally with Cuchulainn his Irish counterpart, can safely be considered both as a god apart from the human plane of existence, and thus like the Tuatha De Danann or Fairy-Folk, and also like a great national hero and king (such as Mongan was) incarnated in a physical body. The taking of Arthur to Avalon by his life-guardian, the Lady of the Lake, and by his own sister, and by two other fairy women who live in that Otherworld of Sacred Apple-Groves, is sufficient in itself, we believe, to prove him of a descent more divine than that of ordinary men. And the belief in his return from that Otherworld—a return so confidently looked for by the Brythonic peoples—seems to be a belief (whether recognized as such or not) that the Great Hero will be reincarnated as a Messiah destined to set them free. In Avalon, Arthur lives now, and ‘It is from there that the Britons of England and of France have for a long time awaited his coming’.[406] And Malory expressing the sentiment in his age writes[407]:—‘Yet some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of our Lord Jesu into another place; and men say that he shall come again, and he shall win the holy cross. I will not say it shall be so, but rather I will say, here in this world he changed his life.’ If we consider Arthur’s passing and expected return, as many do, in a purely mythological aspect, we must think of him for the time as a sun-god, and yet even then cannot escape altogether from the re-birth idea; for, as a study of ancient Egyptian mythology shows, there is still the same set of relations.[408] There are the sun-symbols always made use of to set forth the doctrine of re-birth, be it Egyptian, Indian, Mexican, or Celtic:—the death of a mortal like the passing of Arthur is represented by the sun-set on the horizon between the visible world here and the invisible world beyond the Western Ocean, and the re-birth is the sunrise of a new day.
Non-Celtic Parallels
As a non-Celtic parallel to what has preceded concerning the Otherworld of the Celts and their Doctrine of Re-birth, we offer the second of the Stories of the High-priests of Memphis, as published by Mr. F. L. Griffith from ancient manuscripts.[409] It is a history of Si-Osiri (the son of Osiris), whose father was Setme Khamuas. This wonderful divine son when still a child took his human father on a journey to see Amenti, the Otherworld of the Dead; and when twelve years of age he was wiser than the wisest of the scribes and unequalled in magic. At this period in his life there arrived in Egypt an Ethiopian magician who came with the object of humbling the kingdom; but Si-Osiri read what was in the unopened letter of the stranger, and knew that its bearer was the reincarnation of ‘Hor the son of the Negress’, the most formidable of the three Ethiopian magicians who fifteen hundred years before had waged war with the magicians of Egypt. At that time the Egyptian Hor, the son of Pa-neshe, had defeated the great magician of Ethiopia in the final struggle between White and Black Magic which took place in the presence of the Pharaoh.[410] And ‘Hor the son of the Negress’ had agreed not to return to Egypt again for fifteen hundred years. But now the time was elapsed, and, unmasking the character of the messenger, Si-Osiri destroyed him with magical fire. After this, Si-Osiri revealed himself as the reincarnation of Hor the son of Pa-neshe, and declared that Osiris had permitted him to return to earth to destroy the powerful hereditary enemy of Egypt. When the revelation was made, Si-Osiri ‘passed away as a shade’, going back again, even as the Celtic Arthur, into the realm invisible from which he came.
As in ancient Ireland, where many kings or great heroes were regarded as direct incarnations or reincarnations of gods or divine beings from the Otherworld, so in Egypt the Pharaohs were thought to be gods in human bodies, sent by Osiris to rule the Children of the Sun.[411] In Mexico and Peru there was a similar belief.[412] In the Indian Mahâbhârata, Râma and Krishna are at once gods and men.[413] The celebrated philosophical poem known as the Bhagavadgîtâ also asserts Krishna’s descent from the gods; and the same view is again enforced and extended in the Hari-vansa and especially in the Bhâgavata Purâna.[413] The Indian Laws of Manu say that ‘even an infant king must not be despised from an idea that he is a mere mortal; for he is a great deity in human form’.[414] In ancient Greece it was a common opinion that Zeus was reincarnated from age to age in the great national heroes. ‘Alexander the Great was regarded not merely as the son of Zeus, but as Zeus himself.’ And other great Greeks were regarded as gods while living on earth, like Lycurgus the Spartan law-giver, who after his death was worshipped as one of the divine ones.[415]
Among the great philosophers, the ancient doctrine of re-birth was a personal conviction: Buddha related very many of his previous reincarnations, according to the Gâtakamâlâ; Pythagoras is said to have gone to the temple of Here and recognized there an ancient shield which he had carried in a previous life when he was Euphorbus, a Homeric hero.[416] From what Plato, in his Meno, quoted from an old poet, it seems very probable that there may be some sort of relationship between legends mentioning the Rites of Proserpine, like the legend of Aeneas in Virgil, and certain of the Irish Otherworld and Re-birth legends among the Gaels, as we have already suggested:—‘For from whomsoever Persephone hath accepted the atonement of ancient woe, their souls she sendeth up once more to the upper sun in the ninth year. From these grow up glorious kings and men of swift strength, and men surpassing in poetical skill; and for all future time they are called holy heroes among men.’ Among modern philosophers and poets in Europe and America the same ideas find their echo: Wordsworth in his Ode to Immortality definitely inculcates pre-existence; Emerson in his Threnody, and Tennyson in his De Profundis, seem committed to the re-birth doctrine, and Walt Whitman in his Leaves of Grass without doubt accepted it as true. Certain German philosophers, too, appear to hold views in harmony with what is also the Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth, e. g. Schopenhauer, in The World as Will and Idea, J. G. Fichte, in The Destiny of Man, and Herder, in Dialogues on Metempsychosis. The Emperor of Japan is still the Divine Child of the Sun, the head of the Order of the Rising Sun, and is always regarded by his subjects as the incarnation of a great being. The Great Lama of Thibet is believed to reincarnate immediately after death.[417] William II of Germany seems to echo, perhaps unconsciously, the same doctrine when he claims to be ruling by divine right.[418]
That the Celtic Doctrine of Re-birth is a direct and complete confirmation of the Psychological Theory of the nature and origin of the belief in fairies is self-evident. Could it be shown to be scientifically plausible in itself, as well-educated Celts consider it to be—and much evidence to be derived from a study of states of consciousness, e. g. dreams, somnambulism, trance, crystal-gazing, changed personality, subconsciousness, and so forth, indicates that it might be shown to be so—it would effectively prove the theory. Fairies would then be beings of the Otherworld who can enter the human plane of life by submitting to the natural process of birth in a physical body, and would correspond to the Alcheringa ancestors of the Arunta. In [chapter xii] following, such a proof of the theory is attempted.