[393] Cf. Le Cycle Myth. Irl., pp. 336-43; O’Curry, Manners and Customs iii. 175; L. U., 133a-134b; and Voy. of Bran, i. 52.
[394] Voy. of Bran, i. 44-5; from The Conception of Mongan.
[395] Meyer’s version, Voy. of Bran, i. 73-4.
[396] Cf. Voy. of Bran, i. 137.
[397] Voy. of Bran, i. 22-8, quatrains 48-59, &c.
[398] In L. U.; cf. Le Cycle Myth. Irl., pp. 311-22; and Voy. of Bran, ii. 47-53.
[399] In the Irish conception of re-birth there is no change of sex: Lug is re-born as a boy, in Cuchulainn; Finn as Mongan; Etain as a girl. But it seems that Etain as a mortal had no consciousness of her previous divine existence, while Cuchulainn and Mongan knew their non-human origin and pre-existence.
[400] Some time after this, according to one part of the tale, Eochaid stormed Midir’s fairy palace—for the purpose localized in Ireland—and won Etain back, but the fairies cast a curse on his race for this, and Conaire, his grandson, fell a victim to it. Such a recovering of Etain by Eochaid may vaguely suggest a re-birth of Etain, through the power exerted by Eochaid, who, being a king, is to be regarded in his non-human nature as one of the Tuatha De Danann himself, like Midir his rival.
[401] Cf. The Gilla decair, in Silva Gadelica, pp. 300-3.
[402] Cf. Voy. of Bran, ii. 76 ff. The Christian scribe’s version fills up the space between Tuan’s death and re-birth by making him pass eighty years as a stag, twenty as a wild boar, one hundred as an eagle, and twenty as a salmon (ib., p. 79). In this particular example, the uninitiated scribe (evidently having failed to grasp an important aspect of the re-birth doctrine as this was esoterically explained in the Mysteries, namely, that between death and re-birth, while the conscious Ego is resident in the Otherworld, the physical atoms of the discarded human body may transmigrate through various plant and animal bodies) appears to set forth as Celtic an erroneous doctrine of the transmigration of the conscious Ego itself (see p. [513 n.]). In other texts, for example in the song which Amairgen (considered the Gaelic equivalent or even original of the Brythonic Taliessin) sang as he, with the conquering Sons of Mil, set foot on Ireland, there are similar transformations, attributed to certain heroes like Taliessin (see the Mabinogion) and Tuan mac Cairill during their disembodied states after death and until re-birth. But these transformations seem to echo poetically, and often rationally, a very mystical Celtic pantheism, in which Man, regarded as having evolved upwards through all forms and conditions of existence, is at one with all creation:—