'There
was a belief in a land of everlasting youth and peace, beautiful beyond
conception. Always inhabited by fairies, and called by various names; Tir na
n-Og (Teornanogue), the 'Land of the (ever) Youthful people, I-Breasail or
I-Brazil the 'Land of Bresal: Tir na mBeo (Tir-nam-Yo The 'Land of the (ever)
living; Mag-Mell (Moy-Mell) the 'Plain of Pleasures' (for which Ten-mhagh Tir
Trogaighi pron. Ten-mhagh Trogaighi. (pron.
Tenvah-trogee) was another name. Mag-Mon 'Plain of sports'; Tir-Tairnghi the
'Land and Promise' ; and Tir na
Sorcha the 'Land of Light'.
Sometimes is deep down under the sea or a lake or well.
Sometimes it is described as situated far out in the Western Ocean.
Sometimes it was in a hollow shee or fairy hill. Perhaps it would be more
correct to say that there were many such happy lands situated in these various
places. The inhabitants were the side (shee) or fairies who were immortal, and
who lived in perfect peace is a perpetual round of sensuous, but harmless and
sinless pleasures. In nearly all the old accounts of this happy land, the
absence of wickedness is expressly mentioned. The man from Tir-Tairnghi tells
Cormac that it was 'a land where there is nought save truth, and there is
neither age, nor decay, nor gloom, nor sadness, nor envy, nor jealousy, nor
hatred, nor haughtiness. The absence of sin, and of such like characteristics,
are of course additions by Christian scribes.
In ancient Irish romantic tales we find many descriptions of this pagan heaven, bearing a general resemblance to each other.
0 Befind it thou come with me. To a wonderful land that is
mine, Where the hair is like the blossom of the golden sobarche.Where the tender
body is as fair as snow. There shall be neither grief nor care; White are the
teeth, black the eyebrows, Pleasant to the eyes the number of our host, On every
cheek is the hue of the foxglove, Crimson of the plin is each brake, Delightful
to the eye the blackbirds eggs, Though pleasant to behold are the plains of
Inishfail (Ireland) Rarely would't thou think of them after frequenting the
Great Plain. Though intoxicating thou deemest the ales of Inishfail, more
intoxicating are the ales and the great land. The wonderful land - the land I
speak of, where youth never grows to old age. Warm sweet streams traverse the
land the choicest of mead and of wine handsome people without blemish,
conception without sin, without stain. We see everyone on every side, and no one
seeth us; the cloud of Adam has caused this concealment of us from them.
0 Lady, if thou comest to my valiant people, A diadem of gold shall be on thy
head, flesh of swine, all fresh, banquets of new milk and ale, shall thou have
with me there, 0 Befind.
'Delightful is the land beyond all dreams, fairer than aught thine eyes have
ever seen, there all the year the fruit is on tree,
and all the year the bloom is on the flower. There with wild honey drip the
forest trees, the stores of mead and wine shall never fail. Nor pain nor
sickness knows the dweller there. Death and decay came him never more, the feast
shall cloy not, nor the dance shall tire, nor music cease forever through the
hall.
The gold and jewels of the Land of Youth outshine all splendours ever dreamed of
man. The name Tir Tairngiri is often found,
not only in the Tales, but in Legends of the Saints; where St. Brendan has been
praying for some secure, delightful land, remote from the haunts of men. And an
angel said to him: 'Arise. 0 Brendan, for God hath given to thee what than hast
sought - Tir Tairngire. After this the angel directs him how to find it; and it
was in search of this promised happy land that Brendan went to his celebrated
voyage.
The name Tir-Tairngiri is a translation of the Scriptural name of the'Land of Promise'. It is of great antiquity, for it is found in the eighth and ninth century glosses of Zeuss; but the idea and the land itself is derived from the pagan legend of the happy fairyland. This pagan heaven legend did not escape the notice of Giraldus Cambrensis. He tells the story of the Phantom Island as he calls it, off the western coast, and how, on one occasion when it appeared, some men rowed out towards it, and shot a fiery arrow against it, which fixed it.
To this day the legend remains as vivid as ever. The happy land then was the abode of the spiritual and immortal fairy tale, but it was not for human beings, except a few individuals who were brought there by the fairies.
We
know from Caesar, Diodorus Siculus, and other classical writers, that the
ancient tales the Celts taught, as one of their tenets, that the soul was
immortal: and that after death it passed from one human body to another. And
this appears as applied to all human beings, but in Irish literature I cannot
see anything to warrant the conclusion the pagan Irish believed that the souls
of all men were immortal.
"One
other vision I will tell because it bears on things the ancients taught us.
Where I saw this I will not say. There was a hall vaster than any cathedral,
with pillars that seemed built out of living and trembling opal, or from some
starry substances which shone with every colour, the colours of eve and dawn. A
golden air glowed in this place and right between the pillars were thrones which
faded, glow by glow, to the end of the vast hall. On them sat the Divine kings.
They were fire-crested. I saw the crest of the dragon on one, and there was
another plumed with brilliant fires that jetted forth like feathers and flame.
They sat shining and star like, mute as statues, more colourful than Egyptian
images of their Gods, and at the end of the hall was a higher throne on which
sat one greater than the rest. Alight like the sun glowed behind him. Below on
the floor of the hall lay a dark figure as it were in trance, and two of the
Divine Kings made motions with their hands about its overhead and body. I saw
where their hands waved how sparkles of fire like the flashing of jewels broke
out. There rose out of that dark body a figure as tall, as glorious, as shining
as those seated on the thrones. As he awoke to the hall he became aware of his
divine king and how lifted he up his hands in greetings. He had returned from
his pilgrimage through darkness. But now an initiate, a master in the heavenly
guild. While he gazed on them the tail golden figures from their thrones leaped
up, they too with hands uplifted in greeting and they passed from me and faded
swiftly in the great glory behind the throne. (excerpt from the Writings of AE)
The Gauls taught that the spirits of those who died were rewarded
or punished in the otherworld for their conduct in this.
A few individuals became immortal in Fairyland, and some few lived on after
death, appearing as other men, or in the shapes of animals. In this connection
it is necessary to notice one Christian record, a remarkable expression in
Trechan's Life of St. Patrick, written in the seventh century. The pagan King
Laegaire rejecting the teaching of St. Patrick, and expressing a determination
to be buried, standing up, armed in his grave, is made to say to the saint. 'For
the pagans are accustomed to be buried armed, with their weapons ready, face to
face to the day Erdathe among the magi (druids), i.e. day of judgment.
This would seem to imply that the druids had a judgment which
again would indirectly imply that they held the doctrine of the immortality of
the soul. But this is an isolated statement. A few individuals are brought by
fairies to the happy other world. Thus, in Adamnan's Vision though the Celtic
otherworld has become 'the land of Saints', its primal character is clearly
discernible: to reach it a sea voyage is necessary, and it is a land in which
there is no pride, falsehood, envy, disease or death, 'wherein is delight of
every goodness. In it there are singing birds'.
Among ourselves the doctrine may seem a strange
one, though among the great nations of antiquity, among the Egyptians, the
Indians, Greeks, and Celts- it was taught in the Mysteries and Priestly Schools.
The time passed there as obscurely and pleasantly that a whole century appeared
only the length of a year or so.
Once a person got to Fairy Land he could never return, except, indeed, on a
short visit, always in a boat or horseback,
merely to take a look at his native land; but if once he touched his mother
earth, the spell of youth and immortality was broken, and he immediately felt
the consequences.
Ossian, son of Finn, after his 300 years sojourn in Tir-na-nogue which he
thought only three years ... in trying to lift a great stone, overbalanced
himself, and had to sleep on the ground, where he instantly became a withered,
bony, feeble old man, while his fairy steed galloped off and never returned.
In some tales, however, mortals who are detained
in the shee are represented as thoroughly miserable; Dian, who had been a young
noble on earth among the Fena, comes to see Cailte out of the Fairy mound at
Mullaghsher...beside Ballyshannon. Cailte asked how it fares with him, on which
Dian replies that though of food and raiment there was in abundance, yet he
would rather be the lowest or most despised drudge among the servants of the
Fena, than be the prince that he was in Fairyland. The foregoing observations
regarding the pagan Irish notion of immortality after death apply in great
measure to their ideas of metempsychosis. In our romantic life route there are
legends of the rebirth of human beings. Thus Cuchulain lain was a reincarnation
of the De Danann hero -god. Lug of the long arms.
Fintan, the nephew of Parthalon, survives the deluge, and lived in the shapes of
various animals successively for many ages.
Numerous stories of this kind are found in Irish romance.
'And when the world that we call the other world
is become as open to the eyes as this world-in the veils that we call our own,
one must either see too much, or one must be content to shroud his eyes and see
only as others see: "Peace be with you, good warriors", he said. "Michael put
his gaze at her. It was no woman now he saw nor ever a Bandia (goddess), but a
power or dominion, he thought. She had her feet far down among the roots of the
sky on a night of frost. 'Are you death? 'Michael sobbed, his knees shaking with
the awe that was on him. I am older than Death," she said. Her voice was beyond
and above and below; but it put him in mind of a low wind in the dark. "And the
words that he heard were somewhat as these words, but remembered dimly they
were, as in a dream:
I am she who loveth loneliness
And Solitude is my breath.
I have the resurrection of the dead as my food.
And the dead rise as a vapour
And I breathe it as mist
As mist that is licked up of the wind.
I am she who stands at the pools:
I stand at the meeting of roads.
The little roads of the world
And the dark roads of life and death.
My lover is Immortality
For I am Queen
Queen of all things on earth and in the sea
And in the white palaces of the stars
Built on the dark walls of time
Above the Abyss".
…..
That was many months ago. There is no one on the Island now; no sheep even, for
the pastures are changed.
When the wild geese flew north this year, the soul of Murlo Maclan went with
them. Or if he did not go with them he went
where Monann promises him he should go. For who can doubt it was Mananaan, in
the body or vision, he the living prince of the waters, the son of the most
ancient God, who, created as with snow-white canna with a blueness in it, a 4
foot circuit with cold curling flame. "Sometimes she is seen as the Washer of
the Ford, chanting the seisbhais, the Death-Dirge, as she washes the shroud of
him who sees her; and sometimes she may suddenly grow great and terrible and
inhabit darkness and the end is come. Sometimes she is seen as the Nigheag Cheag
a Chroim, the little washer of sorrow, perhaps singing low while she steps the
stones of a ford, or moves along the dim banks where the dew is white on sorrel
and meadowsweet,
a leanaig cheag bhaisna lamh, her little shroud of death is her hand, the keen
of sorrow in her mouth for him or her whose death is near. I heard once of a
meeting with the Woman of Tears told "When high upon Donnusk Water he stopped;
to see the stones of the weir, he said; though he knew the stones, and that the
water was shallow, and was aflow below them at that.
He thought it was myself at first, 'Is it you, John? He said in the whisper that
he thought would be the strong voice. He saw then it wasn't me; no, nor any man;
but a woman, or a girl stooping over the water. "Calasaidh; he called, his voice
failing like a splashing stone. 'Will that be you Cairstruic?' he called again,
but lower, and he looked behind him when he had spoken.
"Then he saw the woman or the girl look round. He has not heard her singing
before, but heard it now. By that sorrowful lamentation, low and sweet foreby,
and by the tears that glistened white on the grey face, he knew it was the
Nigheach Cheag a Chroim.
